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!!!!

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!

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

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.

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.

Other things Amazon offers is mp3 sales and putting links in videos. So I’ve added some product links right in my video (that talks about the guitar product) and a few cds/mp3s that are my current favorites. Some of the guitar products are bigger ticket items providing larger commissions. I will have to get a lot more traffic to get the numbers I was hoping for.

No luck on the Overnight Membership site or Continuity Blueprint although I haven’t done much to market it yet. Those bigger ticket items would provide much more revenue than the Amazon sales. But the Amazon sales have actually occurred which is a crucial point to note.

One of my members asked for a refund of his annual membership on my guitar coaching site – ouch that hurt!

I just saw on the news that because of the 2010 Winter Olympics games being held in Vancouver, BC, there are a ton of jobs there in various industries – trades, public relations, etc. So it’s not all bad news! I prefer to think of the positive – will all the layoffs, maybe some of those people will try to get an online business going!

$1,000,000 per year Scenario

$160,000 ‘offline’ IT consulting (integration) – my existing consulting work – planning to get remote work contract

$90/hour x 1800 hours (reduced from 2000 hours)

$270,000 ‘online’ consulting (web sites, email autoresponders, shopping carts, membership sites) – this is new (could have been doing this for years!). People I’ve talked to recently are spending way too much to get a website and they can’t make their own edits)

20 sites * $5,000 (membership site consulting) = $100,000

50 sites * $1000 (website, autoresponder and shopping cart consulting) = $50,000

50 * $200/month maintenance x 12 months = $120,000

That leave $570,000 for online sales (assuming no advertising costs):

3 sales a day (average) low ticket item ~ 1000 * $97 = $97,000 (eg. Overnight Membership Site, Teach Online, Teach Music Online)

2 sales a day (average) high ticket item ~ 730 * $497 = $362,810 (eg. Ryan Deiss’ Continuity Blueprint)

Online Guitar Coaching – my guitar lesson membership site

100 * $19/month * 12 months = $22,800

Amazon and other affiliate programs

100 products x 1 sale per day (average) x $2.40 average commission/sale = $87,600

Total ~ $1,000,000

Wow there’s a lot of work to do!

Marketing Plan

Offline consulting – bid on contracts, network with my contacts, regularly approached by placement firms

Online consulting – inform my network, video screencasts and webinars (youtube and other video sites), email capture form with free report on imedia-ventures.com and membershipschool.com with regular follow-ups, blogging, social media

Internet Sales – search engine optimization, blogging, video screencasts, social media posts, email capture forms and regular follow-ups, joint ventures, get advice/help from those who have been there, provide useful comments on blogs and forums, publicity (helpareporter.com)

How You Can Help

Provide constructive criticism of the plan, provide encouragement in my blog posts, mention my services/products to your network, put me in contact with people who can help make this a reality, hire my services/buy some products, joint venture with me, link to my sites/blogs, or be an affiliate (help sell and make commissions) of  my guitar coaching program. Thanks in advance!

Why I am Doing This

To provide huge value to people, to help my family financially, for the challenge, to get my juices flowing again, to overcome mental limitations, to show the doubters, to give more to animal charities, and to work remotely.

Note to the Naysayers:

This isn’t all about making money for the sake of having money or being greedy.  If I win, other people don’t lose. If you think money is evil, or you have to be poor to be happy, please run away from this site quickly! There’s enough negativity out there, I really don’t need to hear any more.

Wish me luck!