So it’s been a very LONG 3 months to say the least! Lot’s have been happening for me in 2014 so far in terms of online projects. If you have read my previous income reports you will see that I was working on a TON of stuff all at once and I think I’ve really narrowed my focus down quite a bit to just a few projects at once while I finish up some one time projects such as my Kindle book and Fiverr Product launch.
I have actually been so busy these past few months it’s actually going to be difficult to get an exact number of what I’ve spent and earned between everything I have going on. I’m going to do the best I can to lay it all out in this report though, this will also include some income from the start of May.
The small stuff first:
$209 from Fiverr Income: $268 Total Earned – $35 spent on gigs If you haven’t noticed I have been posting a ton of interviews on my blog, these all come through from a very successful Fiverr gig I setup.
Here are some view stats on this gig, from left to right – impressions, clicks, page views, sales and conversions. This is within the last 30 days! 13k impressions is pretty awesome!
I liked this gig so much I made a product out of it and launched it last month.
$228.15 from Fiverr Untapped: $527.86 Paid to affiliates – 109 sales
$56.62 from Fiverr Untapped One Time Offer – $138.00 paid to affiliates and Vinny Bock – 14 sales
This was really my first “major” product launch. I put some real work into this after going through a course called Six Figure Alliance. I hired someone for $150 to create the sales page, this took a ton of planning and time. I also made tons of modifications to my product before launch. The product basically showed people how to create the Fiverr gig that was doing so well for me.
Overall the experience was cool, I got around 50 new leads from this and hopefully helped some people by creating an informative product. I think the best part about the launch was I finally got to be featured on the Mike From Maine show and I was also invited to join James Knight and Kristie Chiles for their interview show as well.
I actually just about broke even on this launch due to the sales page costs, I think If I were to do another product launch I’d spend a lot more time working on getting affiliates on board with me and get myself on the JV Calenders sooner then I had.
$120.28 from Udemy Product Sales – This was for both my SEO course and Podcasting course. I didn’t promote these at all, this all came from natural Udemy organic traffic.
$50 for selling HeadrestDVDPlayer.org – I sold this site to the owner of OnFair.com, I just had no interest in working on it anymore.
$200 for building PaleoVillage.com – Someone found my Prosociate Amazon affiliate site – SkullClothing.net and asked if I could build them something similar. I spent several weeks building out this site which the owner has since changed. This was a nice commission for building out an easy site.
$11.06 on my Kindle book – Building Authority Relationships Through Online Marketing So I finally launched my book! I did basically 1 day of crazy promotion and got 447 free downloads combined from the 4 day promotion!
Although I have not had tons of reviews pouring in (Only 5 right now) I did make a little money and I had fun writing it. I think I’ll be referencing the book all the time in the future and the people who gave me feedback on it loved it so I know I’m certainly helping people. I obviously didn’t expect to get rich from launching a Kindle book.
Special thanks to Jamie Cheng and Michael Young for helping me edit and format the book.
$30.87 from Amazon Affiliate Income
This has mainly come from SkullClothing.net, my site is actually ranking #1 for the primary keyword ‘skull clothing’ but is not bringing in a ton of revenue. I feel as though Skull Clothing is limited for content beyond just a “Store”.
Writing articles about this stuff is well… boring and difficult. I may hire some folks to write more for the site but wanted to find a niche with more potential.
I decided to focus on another project I can also work on with my girlfriend that would have that potential. I purchased http://www.kittycoaching.com which I picked up for $275, I talked the guy down from $375 and really liked the domain and niche. We have 2 kittens so I thought this would be a great project for Brenda and I to work on together.
I’ve started doing keyword research and having articles written for the site, as the current content is full of PLR content used in various locations online already. I plan to either remove it or reference it somehow on the site. I saw potential to write tons of articles and monetize with both Amazon and a clickbank product for Cat Training so I’m going after it!
The BIG Income!
So here is the exciting part of this report, gotta save the best for last right?
Well last July I interviewed Jon Haver of AuthorityWebsiteIncome.com we spoke here and there over email over the past year but nothing substantial. I featured Jon in one of my epic guest posts about email lists over on Entrepreneur on Fire. Jon saw guest posts I was writing such as this one about guest blogging over on Navid’s blog.
We initially discussed the idea of working on a site where we would write articles about the top email autoresponders, which turned into a bigger conversation of working together of something really big. Jon came up with the idea to partner up on building out a Private Blog Network, an SEO service we could sell to help people rank their sites. You can see the results Jon and our clients had in this post.
We spent over a month planning and discussing all of the details, looking at any obstacles that would get in the way of the project. We ended up basically splitting all profits 50/50. Jon would build the network itself and I’d handle all of the work for the customers. This would include handling emails from customers, having articles written for the sites and making sure everything was going smoothly.
I worked diligently over a month to build LightningRank.com, I’m not going to go into huge detail about the service itself in this post since there is plenty of information on the site itself. In a nutshell we place 100% unique high quality articles on the home page of really high authority sites. Receiving a backlink from sites like these provides a HUGE boost in search engine rankings, it’s great for people looking to rank niche sites monetized with Amazon products or any niche really.
When we opened the doors around March 8th to our beta group I was all over the place, I was scrambling to hire people on oDesk to write articles, I was having problems with non-native English speaking writers and just moving data back and forth within spreadsheets. I stayed up some nights until 1am with my girlfriend writing article titles and publishing blog posts, it sucked!
I looked around for several weeks to find an automated solution finally deciding on WP Project Manager for WordPress. This plugin allows me to manage data for each client easily without the headache of a massive spreadsheet full of data. Despite doing this I still struggled and found myself needing to hire a Virtual Assistant. I ended up hiring 3 people from the Philippines, perfect timing for reading Chris Ducker’s book Virtual Freedom!
I ended up creating in depth training guide for the VA’s which worked great, one VA made some serious linking errors so I was hesitant to continue having her work. Another VA did everything as asked within a timely fashion and the last VA was utilizing what’s called “manual time” on oDesk racking up the max amount of available hours. They basically used about 80 hours of time for maybe 20 hours of work, I ended up challenging about 40 of those hours and getting my money back.
I then went back to oDesk looking at other options and found a girl who manages a team of VA’s and writers, this stream lined my process for Lightning Rank substantially. I simply send her the information for each client and her writers will create content for each blog from scratch and her VA will publish the articles.
This setup makes the entire business flow almost entirely outsourced, for Jon he simply builds the sites and profits while I outsource writing and blog publishing. Of course the investment of the network is a whole other story, Jon has spent thousands just to build the network to where it is today.
Since we offer 2 packages and it’s recurring, the profits have been amazing! $75 for 1 and $300 for 5.
Here are the numbers so far as of today, this is the total counts from March 8th to May 7th (3 months):
$1,072.53 for the 1 Post Package – Gross $1,875.02 – $802.49 Paid to Jon with a total of 27 Sales
$4,929.40 for the 5 Post Package – Gross $9,383.02 – $4,053.62 Paid to Jon with a total of 35 sales.
Other Awesome Things That Have Happened For Me
-I got a new full time job and left my 6 year job at Omtool doing tech support. I am now working full time for a company that sells mostly Winter and Summer kids clothing. They have an item that is selling like crazy on Amazon, it made them just over 300k in profits from Amazon over the winter time. It basically is dominating the kids winter glove niche.
I make $19 an hour with them but don’t get health insurance or any benefits, but I was also recently promoted with a “bonus” of earning 5% of all online sales based on a growth percentage. My boss suspects this will equal out to around $5000 per year and will be split into 2 payments. I could potentially scale this if I can help the company sell a hit item on Amazon. I basically spend my days on eBay, Amazon and working with a new Magento based store. I enjoy this job a lot more then my last because it’s very laid back, only around 6-7 employees and I’m learning eCommerce all day. It’s kind of like I go into “work” to do online marketing. Really awesome!
-I got to interview the lead singer of one of my favorite bands of all time! I posted this on my blog Metalcore Kingdom since it does not really fit the niche here.
-I got invited to join Andrew Warner’s TrueMind course for free as an original beta tester. I haven’t dived into the course yet but would like to tackle it within the coming months. To buy the course I believe the cost is over $500! So this was pretty awesome.
-Free SheerSEO basic account for writing this review post.
-Free 1 year subscription for the medium package at ClickMeter.com for publishing this interview – Valued at $396!
-Free listing at Flippa.com for replying to a promotional email.
–This post featuring my interview with John Lee Dumas went live on the Blueprint Entrepreneur blog!
What I spent money on these past few months:
-$40 on Fiverr Untapped sales thread for the Warrior Forum
-$20 for Thread Bump on Warrior Forum
-$150 on sales page for Fiverr Untapped
-$275 on KittyCoaching.com
-$59 on WP Project Manager Pro
-$97 Long Tail Pro
-$45 for 3 months of GetResponse
-$111 for 3 months of LeadPages Subscription
-$47 on Thrive Content Builder with multiple site license (Used to build Lightning Rank)
-$100 on Keyword Research Package from Matt Allen
-$29 Wonder All My Share Software – This let’s me rip videos from YouTube for podcasts
Content for Lightning Rank:
-$183.63 on Virtual Assistants & Article Writing through oDesk
-$862 To Previous Article Writer
-$260 To New Article Writer
Total Earned: $6907.91
Total Spent: $2278.63
Total Income: $4629.28
So granted this is 3 months of income, the majority of it has come from Lightning Rank and it’s growing REALLY fast! I tend to go to sleep and wake up finding Paypal notifications on my phone due to new subscribers of the service. At this point I plan to slow down partially with my Podcast and focus most of my effort on bringing in new clients with Lightning Rank. I’ve officially passed my full time job income with the profits being earned from the SEO service.
Special thanks to Jon Haver for partnering up with me on such a lucrative business opportunity, at the rate we are going in 6 more months the profits will be insane!