November & December Income Report – Shiny Object Syndrome

*Edited 1/2/2014* I made some more money, I suppose I should have waited to post this!

I’ve decided to create a combined income report for November and December. Even though it’s currently the 20^th I don’t know how much more income will be coming in with the holidays coming up and me most likely being away from the computer.

I have a lot to update you with as I’ve been working on a lot. Probably far too much in fact for someone who still has a full time job. I had a total of 2 and 1/2 weeks off from my full time job in December so this gave me a lot of time to work on these projects.

I thought I’d list each of my current happenings out as projects and talk about each and what I’m currently doing with them. These months have not particularly been the best for me but I’m still moving forward with my business ventures and not giving up by any means.

*Please note I do include various affiliate links in this post, if you decide to purchase any of the products mentioned I’d really appreciate you going through my link!

Project 1 – Blueprint Entrepreneur

In November I worked a TON on a guest blog post and magazine article for the Blueprint Entrepreneur magazine. I spent probably over 15+ hours between creating an outline of questions, doing my interview with Ramsay Taplin and creating a monster guest post I got published:

How To Guest Blog The Right Way With Ramsay Taplin

Navid loved this post so much we spent about 3 hours on a Skype call last week brainstorming names and e-mailing people to create a follow up round-up post:

32 Experts Share Their Best Guest Blogging Tips

Navid did most of this post himself but I did connect him with a few of the folks on the list.

Writing for the magazine has been my biggest source of income online but also in my opinion the most frustrating, I’ve always thought my writing was pretty good but now that I’m writing for a magazine on iTunes I’m realizing how many revisions I need to make to the content I create. This has taken up MANY hours of my time and sometimes I’d spend entire nights after work just re-editing an entire article to make more changes.

Despite being able to get it done, it’s killing my time to work on my show and some of these other projects that won’t necessarily require more time. Thankfully in the future I’m now going to be doing JUST the interviews and working on the outline with questions for each interview. The outlines usually take me 30-45 minutes. The content for each interview will be written by someone else who writes for Blueprint Entrepreneur.

I’m just not sure how much I’ll be getting paid now since most of my time was devoted to the actual articles, either way I’d rather focus on other things with this time.

Project 2 – Guest Blogging Kindle Book with Navid Moazzez

Navid thought it would be a good idea to potentially go 50/50 by combining the content from my guest post / magazine article and his round up post to create an epic eBook we could have published on the Kindle platform. This has not really “started” but the content is there and it would be simple once we figure out how to get content published on Kindle. This is new to me and I’m not sure how or when we will go about this.

Project 3 – The Ultimate Guide To Reaching Out To Online Entrepreneurs – WSO To Kindle Book

A couple months ago I released an eBook as a product on the Warrior Forum, spending $40 and only making 1 sale at $7 this was pretty much an epic failure. I thought about taking the content and publishing it as a Kindle eBook for $3 on the Amazon store. Michael Young, one of my fans and followers of my show has gladly offered to help me by giving me tips for improving the book and even suggested having a few of my interviews transcribed and added as content within the book. Currently I’m doing this with my Pat Flynn’s interview and Andrew Warner’s through a gig on oDesk and I hope to have most of this done by the end of January if not sooner.

Project 4 – Arbitrage Logo Design Using Arbitrage Underdog, Craigslist & Fiverr

I used the Arbitrage Underdog software to find a logo design gig on Craigslist a couple months ago, I probably WILL NOT be doing this form of arbitrage again because of the hassles that have come from just this one logo I’ve been working on.

Initially I had a logo done for a company that stated if they picked my logo from many others who were working on logos for them they would pay me for it so I took a risk paying for a $5 gig not knowing if they would pick me.

They ended up picking me but I had to go back in forth with a somewhat slow to respond Fiverr seller to finally get the logo revised how the client wanted it. Other problem questions come up such as “What font did you use?” that I couldn’t answer without waiting maybe 2-3 days for a response. Finally the company asked for a PSD editable version of the logo so they could make some revisions, I had to pay the Fiverr seller $40 for this totaling $45 invested without seeing any payment. As of writing this the customer promised a payment of $75 on the 19^th and today is the 20^th. For a ton of hassle and a mere $20 profit doing “logo creation arbitrage” I most likely will never attempt this again through Craigslist & Fiverr.

*Edit 1/2/2014* I got paid for this gig, I was paid $75 and it cost me $45 so I made $30 but overall I probably wouldn’t bother with this again.

Project 5 – Assistance With Selling A Website using Arbitrage Underdog

Several months ago I used Arbitrage Underdog to find a gig and work with someone to help them sell a website for $8000. You can read more about this in my interview with Tom E. here. I originally thought I’d be profiting $640 for this, as I was promised 8% of the $8000 sale price. The customer who paid for the site only gave the client I worked with $2000 as an initial deposit which yielded me $160.

Currently the customer is stating he is not getting many leads from the site and cannot currently pay for the remaining $6000 all at once. Last week I received a call from the client I worked with to sell the site telling me this and that our customer may potentially continue to pay in small amounts.

Luckily the owner of the site has been very good about communication with me and has been very fair about holding up my end of the profit. I’m not betting on earning anymore from this but all in all I still made out pretty good without putting a ton of work into this.

*Edit 1/2/2014* I am told the seller of the site is going to be receiving more funds for this so I should make some more money from this in January

Project 6 – Simple Novice Profits Course

I have talked about this briefly in past posts but wanted to explain this in more detail in today’s report. Back in September I watched an interview on the Mike From Maine show about an interesting course where you can profit using a form of arbitrage with SEO services. I liked the idea behind the course so much I connected with the owner and purchased the product for $10. We then began a 50/50 partnership to re-create his course and turn it into a huge membership site with tons of videos, PDF’s and great content all for arbitrage tactics surrounding SEO services.

We launched the product finally in November, with neither of us really having any JV partners or knowledge of ways to get eyes on the product beyond the Warrior Forum Special Offer Section. This turned into a lot of time and money on my part with currently little return. Because Vinny created the course and all of the content we agreed to have me front the initial $100 in ad costs while we split all additional profits 50/50. This yielded me $26 in profit but between my Facebook ad spend and the thread creation costs I’ve lost over $80.

It’s a bit depressing all in all as I’ve spent well over 50-60+ hours if not more on Skype calls with Vinny and designing the membership site and I have actually currently lost both my time and around $80+ from advertising the membership site. I recently re-designed the home page with Vinny’s original sales page and turned it into a sales page using Leadpages. I then went through a course called Facebook Dynamo to learn all about Facebook ads. I am still learning how to do them properly without blowing all of my money. So far I have learned a TON, but am being cautious.

Today I received a promo to try Yahoo ads with a $25 free credit so I am attempting this before going back to Facebook ads, we have done some testing by sending users to a free report landing page. The Free report explains the product and encourages them to pay for the full product by just providing the tip of the iceberg for what we have to offer in the membership area.

I’m by no means giving up on this product as I know there is a TON of value in it’s contents, it’s a matter of getting more traffic to it.

Project 7 – Six Figure Alliance Training

This was my big expense the past couple of months. Since I had some success with Arbitrage Underdog and have now been following Tom E for over a year he is one of the few marketers I REALLY pay attention to when I see his email land in my inbox. He learned how to create and promote AU by going through a coaching program called Six Figure Alliance, run by a big name internet marketer named Kenster. Tom sent out in email in November mentioning that anyone who signed up with him for SFA through his affiliate link would get access to this course that only opens up twice a year. They would also get access to Tom’s next product Piggyback Payday that he was working on which he spoke very highly of during our interview.

I thought to myself that everyone and their mom is creating products these days to profit online, why not jump in and learn for myself?

I knew I was missing something big after attempting to profit with Simple Novice Profits. I’ve currently gone through about 2 weeks of the total 6 week training. So far the course is one of the best I’ve ever paid for, it’s very straight forward and is full of useful information. My problem has been dedicating time to it. My goal is to spend a lot more time with the course in the next few months doing as much as possible and then using what I learn to possibly re-launch Simple Novice Profits.

Project 8 – PiggyBack Payday and the creation of RecentGamingNews.com – Auto-pilot Income?

As a follow up to joining SFA, last week I received a beta copy from Tom to try out his new plugin for WordPress. It’s quite literally different from any other IM product out there today as it could potentially bring in auto-pilot income.

While dabbling around earlier this year I read up on CPA marketing, basically signing up for a few affiliate networks that involve using ads to earn profits. An example might be using a landing page to win a free iPhone or Ipad, maybe a Dunkin Donuts gift card. If someone enters an e-mail on my landing page using my link I’d earn anywhere in the range of say $0.75 cents to a couple dollars. I easily got accepted months ago into a network called Affiliaxe. I made some money months ago using a forum tactic I tested (I won’t be sharing this tactic today) but never continued doing much with CPA and decided I was already doing WAY too many other things.

This plugin basically allows you to pull content from other sites RSS feeds and automatically publish it to your blog, what’s even more crazy about this is the content published also can be auto syndicated to multiple other social sites like Twitter, Livejournal, Friendfeed, Facebook, Blogger, Tumblr etc. The content is published on your blog as a “spun” article. This basically is taking the content and replacing synonyms with other words to make the content appear unique to the search engines, slightly Black Hat but even big name SEO guys like Rob Fore do this.

I decided to go after the gaming niche and create RecentGamingNews.com, I chose this based on a possibly easier to rank term “Recent Gaming News” with enough content. I pull content from 10 different gaming RSS feeds, twice a day 10 articles are published totaling up to 20 articles per day!

When a user clicks on a news story they actually stay on my site but the link re-directs them to the full story, say on IGN or Gamespot. After about 20 seconds I can have a pop up appear with one of these offers of my choice. I am using an offer from the game World Of Tanks which is very targeted and appealing to people who might be reading gaming news. If someone signs up I earn a couple bucks. I also use 3 gaming offers as side bar ads on my site through widgets. It took me about 5-6 hours to setup the site with WordPress, Analytics, Social Accounts etc. but it is now running on total autopilot.

As time goes on Google will index my content and I suspect I will see all sorts of traffic randomly coming in from the social networks and Google Organic traffic. I will provide an update in 5-6 weeks. They are also planning to add Social ADR support giving them the capability to syndicate with over 40 social networking sites!

Project 9 – HeadrestDVDPlayer.org Amazon Niche Site

This was the first site I started under my Bluehost account, it has made me a very small amount of Amazon commissions but I am no longer currently working on it. It won’t be included in this report but between time, spent and attempting to sell it on Flippa I have lost a lot of money on this site.

*Edit 1/2/2014* I actually made a $500 sale from this site last week yielding me a $20 commission! I might re-consider having articles written for it.

Project 10 – SkullClothing.net Amazon Niche Site

This was a project to help me sort of work with my girlfriend on a fun project together while we bring in some side income.

In October Matt Allen from DumbPassiveIncome.com went ahead and did keyword research on my niche site without me even asking (Thanks Matt) he then offered me the research for a huge discount of $37. Matt offered me the last “discount” price now charging $100 for this service. Based on the information he provided I followed his outsourcing guide and hired someone he recommended on oDesk to write 10 articles for the site.

They wrote them more or less exceeding my expectations for only $20, each article averages about 600 words and required mostly only minor editing. I am currently in the process of publishing them.

I asked for help on the Warrior Forum and got TONS of suggestions on how to improve this site.

I also paid for a Fiverr gig that promised organic traffic from a specific keyword, according to Google Analytics it’s actually working and sending me as many as 50 visitors per day from the term ‘skull clothing’! I just can’t say I’ve made any sales from the traffic or not.

Click here to learn more about Matt’s Keyword Research Service.

Project 11 – MetalcoreKingdom.com and the creation of a Podcast.

This is a heavy metal music video site I’ve been running now for over a year, it’s basically a site built out of passion for music with no real intent of making an income. I do try to spend a few minutes on it once a week though adding music videos. Many pages do have an Amazon affiliate widget with a music player but I don’t see enough traffic to earn with this.

I previously wrote about a joint venture partnership I had using a Facebook fan page but the owner has hardly helped me the past 6+ months so I decided to take away the their fan page promotion from the site and just promote my own fan page. I also added a pop up incentive to get more fans.

A few weeks back I thought it would be cool to create a podcast featuring my own thoughts and take on current bands while also playing music during a podcast episode. I spent a Saturday working on this and ended up getting it approved on Stitcher but not iTunes due to Copyright issues. I love the idea of the podcast for this site but I realized with all these things I have going on I just don’t have the time and most likely won’t see much if any profit from doing this even though music is a huge passion of mine.

This project will be on the back burner for a while as I just add music videos and let traffic come organically through Google as it has for the last year or so.

Project 12 – Interview with HubSpot about how I use WordPress

Using Arbitrage Underdog I found a company looking for info on how companies use their WordPress sites, it happened to lead to an interview with Hubspot. They basically showed me an Alpha plugin called Leadin that captures data about where visitors go on your site after they submit an inquiry through a contact form. They sent me a $30 Amazon gift card for helping them and spending an hour of time with them and gave me FREE access to the Alpha plugin for testing!

Project 13 – Selling Woman’s purses on eBay

In September I invested $500 with a lifelong friend who has been having a lot of success buying woman’s purses in bulk and then selling them on eBay. After several months Anthony was able to return $613 to me yielding me $113 in profit based on the $500 he was able to use towards the bulk purchase of these purses. Pretty easy money with a high return on investment.

Project 14 – HostMyDot WebHosting Partnership

I’m not going to include numbers in this report, I explained this in my last income report so you can learn more about this in that post. Basically I have been given the “run around” on this for now 3 months and have not been paid a dime after investing $2000. The owner of HostMyDot claims he is having issues with Paypal and needs to switch to another payment processor. He has not completely cut off communication with me or anything so I’m not entirely sure where this is going at this point.

If it does not pan out I’m out $2000, the only “good” thing is I do have a written contract regarding this agreement.

*Edit 1/2/2014* I received an e-mail from the owner stating that he will have payments sent out to his investors this month as he is still getting a payment processor setup other than Paypal. I am really hoping this works out otherwise I’m out a lot of money.

Project 15 – Fiverr Gigs For Profit

I saw Mike Thomas made almost $500 extra last month from doing Fiverr Gigs so he made a course about how he did it and sold it for $5. I picked it up and spent some time last week creating gigs but Fiverr has been a pain about accepting my images so this is something I’m going to re-visit in the next week or so.

*Edit 1/2/2014* I am seeing thousands of impressions on a couple gigs I created, hoping to make some profit this month with them.

Project 16 – Voices Of Marketing – My Primary focus

I’ve actually been doing a ton with posting new interviews the past couple weeks. Most of my guests have been from the HARO platform and I still have a lot of people to reach out to at the time of writing this. My initial goal was to maintain 1 interview per week and I’ve not officially hit 50 episodes!

I have 5 new episodes to post I’ve yet work on but will be posting through out the next couple weeks.

I’ve been spending some time in the Podcasters Paradise forums and I’ve even now been interviewed by a couple other podcast show hosts.

I also spent several hours last week trying to get more reviews and rating on iTunes. I’m now up to 36 which looks pretty good compared to a lot of other podcasts I’ve seen out there struggling to break even 10.

The Numbers

Income:

$400 for the magazine article / guest post I did for the Blueprint Entrepreneur Magazine

$160 for assisting with the sale of a website using Arbitrage Underdog (potential to be paid more for this but still up in the air)

$2.50 from Amazon affiliates both through either Headrestdvdplayer.org or skullclothing.net

$13 from Arbitrage Underdog affiliate profits 50/50 split with Vinny Bock

$26 from Simple Novice Profits

$30 Amazon Gift Card for WordPress Interview with HubSpot

$113 from my woman’s purse eBay investment with Anthony

*Edit 1/2/2014*

$30 for logo arbitrage

$20 Amazon commissions

$27 from Arbitrage Underdog Sales

Total $821.50

Spent:

$397 on Six Figure Alliance membership with Kenster

$74 on Leadpages ($37 monthly)

$30 on GetResponse ($15 monthly)

$13 FB Dynamo Membership Course – Learning How To Use Facebook Newsfeed Ads

$100 on Warrior Forum promotion – Sales Thread & Free Report Thread were $40 each, one thread “bump” was split 50/50 with Vinny and this cost me another $20 totaling $100.

$13 for refunding a copy of Simple Novice Profits

$12 on Facebook Ads for Simple Novice Profits

$5 for Fiverr Course from Mike From Maine

$37 for keyword research from Matt Allen for SkullClothing.net – This was a discount price, Matt will now be charging $97 for this service.

$22 on having 10 articles written for SkullClothing.net

$5 Fiverr gig for attempting to get organic traffic on SkullClothing.net

$45 for having a logo done using a Fiverr Gig using Arbitrage (I have not been paid yet, won’t be doing this again)

Total Spent $753

Profit $68.50

Lessons Learned

I actually didn’t realize HOW MUCH I’m doing until I typed this whole report out today. Most of these were ‘one time’ projects. Through out the start of the new year I’ll be getting more focused with my Six Figure Alliance training and promoting Voices Of Marketing more.

I’m not investing into anything major as I already have been scammed numerous times in the past and may currently be dealing with a new one with this HostMyDot agreement.

I’m also not going to be buying any more training courses for a while as I don’t need the distractions, I have so much on my plate as is for someone who already works full time 40 hours a week and has a girlfriend. On top of all this can you believe I’ve watched all of season 1 through 6 of Dexter in about a month with my girlfriend?

It’s all come down to dedicating my time in the right places, these next few months are going to allow me to focus on what’s working and what’s not now that I’ve learned a thing or two.