Archive for $1 Million per year
Online Income – November 2009
Posted by: | CommentsWell I was all set to report a disappointing November income because the sales of Learn and Master Guitar had decreased and I’ve been focusing on add new beginner videos lessons to my Online Guitar Coaching site (which is a membership site).
However, when I checked one of my affiliate sites for membership sites I found that I had made $407.71 in November! I haven’t added any affiliate links to Ryan Deiss’ site recently so it could be from an older blog post or sidebar link. But actually, Ryan does a lot of ‘back-end selling’ where he sells lower priced items to get people into his funnel, then upsells them later. Some of the products are recurring so I might have to try marketing them some more!
Another thing to note is that for the Learn and Master guitar affiliate sales I didn’t do anything new this month. So the existing YouTube videos and blog posts are still working for me (and should for a long time to come). So you put in the work and hopefully over time you get the rewards off of the single effort.
So we have:
$313.22 my guitar product/membership sales
$9.98 back pain site
$37.94 adsense you tube videos
$407.71 Ryan Deiss continuity products
$1.89 amazon affiliate sales (guitar books, ets)
$19.80 share a sale Learn and Master (they have 2 different affiliate products)
$29.10 Wishlist Products (membership site plugin for wordpress)
$1 Sponsored Tweet! (advertiser paid me to do a tweet about Microsoft!)
So the grand total in November 2009 was……..$820.64 there’s been no money spent on advertising these affiliate programs…just sweat equity! This is a new record, yahoo!!!!
Online Income – Case Study October 2009
Posted by: | CommentsIn the month of October, I accepted a part-time work from home IT contract. Unfortunately, while I made a good chunk of change from this, I didn’t put as much effort into my websites.
The results were $398.99 for the month of October, so about $200 less than the last couple months, mostly due to less sales of Learn and Master Guitar.
This came from $57.89 from Google Adsense (YouTube video ads) and $341.10, mostly from guitar lesson related sales (Metal Method, Learn and Master Guitar and my own guitar lesson products from Online Guitar Coaching. No sales from Amazon and internet marketing materials (Ryan Deiss was minimal as I did nothing to promote them).
On the positive side, other than making WAY more on my IT contract (5 figures for about 5-6 week of half day work), I got re-inspired to add some new continuity programs – these will be some fixed-length modular courses (eg. Blues guitar level 1) that might last for 6 months as a membership program. Others will be ongoing such as a live video streaming guitar lesson each month, Guitar lick of the month, Song of the month (where I transcribe and analyze a guitar song and/or solo).
So I’ll be testing some new product offerings and seeing which ones are more popular. I’ve also focused on creating and expanding a Facebook fan page – and getting people to sign up by offering them a free live guitar lesson.
Another cool tool is the Wibiya toolbar that you can find at the guitar coaching site I mentioned -shows up at the bottom and I hope it increases the Facebook fans and I can also send them notifications on new webinars, sales, offerings, etc. Lots of exciting cool stuff happening!
How I Made $604.39 Online in August 2009
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve been extremely frustrated doing internet marketing, not seeing results, trying lots of things and having nothing working. I’ve tried Google adsense, affiliate products, creating my own products, membership site, etc in the past and had pitiful results. I want to make this a success so badly, but often doubt myself and am discouraged by lack of results each month.
I haven’t got a lot of support for this venture over the years and have spent many years doing day jobs that I absolutely hated. I’ve been very inconsistent over the past few years until recently when I’ve been ‘between contracts’. I’ve been off work since november and have spent most of my time working on my sites, while I burn through my savings.
My wife Bonnie asked me to add up my sales for this month of August so I went into paypal, google adsense and various affiliate networks. I was happily surprised to see some half decent sales.
The breakdown is as follows:
-my guitar lesson online courses and membership site $286.27
-2 guitar lesson affiliate products $215.38
-internet marketing affiliate products – $29.16
-google adsense – $73.57
For the guitar lesson affiliate products I’ve done a video review using my webcam and posted on youtube and other video sites using TubeMogul (free).
For internet marketing affiliate products I put links within my blog posts and in the sidebar of my blog on membership sites.
For Google adsense I have 50+ videos on guitar lessons at Youtube.
For the guitar lesson site, I created a membership site at $19/month using WordPress and the Wishlist member plugin. I also took some of the content and made a few other products at $29 (Canon Rock Video Lesson) and $97 (Fretboard Blueprint) for instant access to the videos.
I’ve just used WordPress and organic search results, no PPC. I’ve used market samurai a little for keyword research but not for ads or articles. I use Google reader and google alerts to get posts in my niche, then I post these articles or write my own on my blog. I haven’t done many articles recently for EzineArticles (free).
Make sure your niche has a product focus – for guitar lessons we have books, DVDs, online courses and even guitar gear (guitars, amps, pedals, etc). Digital cameras is another one. I’ve just created a back pain blog since I’ve suffered with this for 2002 and have a lot of experience with treatments. There are a fair number of products associated with back pain, besides books, such as inversion tables, exercise balls, and other related products.
I post this to encourage those that are discouraged and to mention that this takes time to develop. I hope you will all work at it each day until you reach your goals. This is an emotional roller coaster. I happen to be excited after I just added up the results, but many days it’s discouraging as nothing happens. We can only control what we do – implement the system day after day with consistency.
Will
When Things Don’t Work Out The Way You Expect
Posted by: | CommentsSince I finished my last contract in November (working from home) I haven’t been working on any IT contract. I’ve always enjoyed having time off in between contracts but with the recent decline in my investment portfolio and home value (on paper) I’ve been getting a little stressed. I also had to pay my corporate taxes for the year which was very painful. So I’m feeling much poorer these days. And the wife starts to get on my case to do something. While I’ve been trying to make money online that process isn’t working too well so far.
The one contract I’ve been hoping to get is the one where I can work from home. I’ve already been prequalified via their Request for Qualifications process, but with government budgest decreasing I’m not sure when/if that will happen. So I decided to teach guitar for a while and emailed a couple guitar stores. Turns out one store just lost a full time teacher so I went down for a chat yesterday and got the job. I’ll be teaching about 60 students for starters starting next tuesday.
While the money is much less than I’m used to ($24/hr to start), I’m looking forward to getting into the music scene a bit more. I figure I’ll be able to chat with other musicians, check out guitar gear at the store and find out more about the local scene. I’m hoping to encourage some of the students to join my online coaching program.
The dream is to have an online business, work at home, remove the dependence on hourly pay but until that develops we have to keep doing the normal things everyone does.
Use Elance to Work Remotely
Posted by: | CommentsAs someone who has really fallen in love with working remotely it recently dawned on me to start using sites like Elance.com. In the past I didn’t think to use it because my expertise is in large integration projects using webMethods. As I’ve mentioned before I asked one of my out-of-town clients if I could work remotely after travelling for years to their office. These are usually long projects spanning for 6 months to a year or more. With Elance you can bid on much smaller projects which requires more marketing time (finding projects, submitting proposals, reporting, etc) and these allow you to work remotely. They don’t just have programming jobs, there is video/audio creation, copywriting, sales and marketing and many other categories.
Over the years I’ve built lots of websites and I recently realized that I have a lot of skills to offer clients in the Internet space – from setting up websites and blogs, to adding email autoresponders, shopping carts and membership sites. Not only that my ability to communicately clearly with non-techies is also valuable. Whenever I talk to people who need a website they often spend tens of thousands of dollars and the projects go off the rails due to all the custom coding. The sites I create are easy to update for a non-techie saving them money in the future usually spent to update the site. I’ve also figured out ways to get more traffic by adding Google analytics and seeing which sites and keywords bring the most traffic.
I like to use hosted solutions (also called software as a service) because there are no installs and upgrades required. You just pay a monthly fee to get ready-to-go code which has been fully tested. I use email autoresponders, a content management system and shopping cart systems that are all third party. You just have to copy some html code for the sign up forms and you’re good to go. Then you can focus on adding the content and marketing the site.
Getting back to Elance.com I’ve bid on a few website jobs over the last few days. In general the budgets are fairly low (given by the buyer) and the most common problem is a lack of clear requirements – do they need a header logo? Will they enter the content themselves? Do they know how to add content? How many iterations will there be if they want changes?
Some of this scares me but we’ll see how it goes. My feeling is that over time I will find a few high quality clients that will be the majority of my focus. Just like with webMethods the 80/20 rule applies. 80% of the work and revenue comes from 20% of the clients. Here’s my Elance profile.
Amazon Textbooks
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve recently been adding Amazon associate/affiliate links, an Amazon search bar and an astore to one of my guitar blogs. I was surprised to discover this morning that someone had bought 5 engineering textbooks from Amazon (and third party within amazon) yesterday giving me a commision of $22.09! (New textbooks are currently on sale up to 30% and used books up to 90% until February 14, 2009). And my referral rate was bumped up to 6% (from 4%). Not enough to break the bank but something tangible to report. And these weren’t the guitar links I had provided but still got the commission since the customer bought via my site.
