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7 episodes with affiliate income
13 episodes with affiliate income
2 episodes with affiliate income
2 episodes with affiliate income
This episode is #3 of 4 episodes in our Affiliate Income series! I love affiliate income and in Part 3 of the series I chat about having your own affiliate program.
This episode is #2 of 4 episodes in our Affiliate Income series! I love affiliate income and in Part 2 of the series I am talking about some important things to know about being an affiliate!
This episode is the 1st of 4 episodes in our Affiliate Income series! I love affiliate income and in Part 1 of the series I am talking about the power of affiliates... and why you should have affiliate income as one of your income streams.
Today we're sharing some easy financial wins for you to be able to save more money, unlock some amazing perks, and gain greater control over your finances and your time.AMEX My Favorite Things Honeybook Weddings For Real Episode 259 - 5 Tips So Taxes Don't Keep You Up at Night, with CPA Tatiana PodelWeddings For Real Episode 241 - Double Your Revenue, Not Your Work: A Guide to Affiliate Income, with Kendra Swalls---Today's episode is brought to you by The Planner's Vault. The doors are currently closed for The Planner's Vault, but join the wait list now so you can be the first to know when the doors re-open.Weddings for Real on Social Media:Instagram: @weddingsforrealFacebook: @weddingsforrealtwitter: @weddingsforrealHosted by Megan Gillikin, Weddings for Real is presented by The Planner's Vault, and is produced by Earfluence. ----Podcast Production or Podcast Guesting Services - https://www.earfluence.com/wfr
Send us a Text Message.Is making money from recommending other peoples goods or services ethical? This is affiliate marketing—a topic often seen as a double-edged sword for healthcare professionals. Some even question whether it's legal!If you know me you'll know that I love alternative ways to earn money whilst helping people and so in this episode i'll show you how can you incorporate affiliate marketing into your practice without compromising your integrity? Key TakeawaysUnderstanding Affiliate Marketing: Learn what affiliate marketing is and how it can be a legitimate business model for healthcare professionals.Benefits for All: Discover the mutual benefits for clients, businesses, and yourself when done correctly.Maintaining Integrity: Emphasise the importance of sincerity and integrity when recommending products to ensure you're genuinely helping your clients.Legal Compliance: Familiarise yourself with the legalities, including the necessity of disclosure and the regulations set by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and other relevant bodies.Starting Out: Practical steps to begin affiliate marketing, from identifying potential affiliate programmes to integrating affiliate links into your content.Ethical Considerations: How to avoid conflicts of interest and ensure your recommendations are based on sound knowledge and experience.Professional Standards: The importance of adhering to your professional body's standards and guidelines to remain compliant and trustworthy.Links referred to in this episode:The advertising standards authority (ASA) ad codes – written by the committee of advertising practice (CAP) https://www.asa.org.uk/codes-and-rulings/advertising-codes.htmlNutrition And Health Claims: Guidance To Compliance With Regulation (EC) 1924/2006 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nutrition-and-health-claims-guidance-to-compliance-with-regulation-ec-1924-2006-on-nutrition-and-health-claims-made-on-foodsJoin the ConversationGot questions about affiliate marketing or topics you'd like me to cover? Text the show - click the link at the top of the show notes!Subscribe & Share: Don't forget to subscribe to "Beyond the Clinic" and share this episode with your colleagues and friends who might find it helpful. Website: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dietitiansinbusiness/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dietitiansinbusinessFacebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/beyondtheclinicbusinessYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondTheClinicPodcast The Master Plan - Discover the 22 steps you need to take (in the right order) to build a successful business so you can earn enough to live the freedom lifestyle you dream of. https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/master-plan
What do you automatically think of when I mention “monetizing a podcast”? If you're like most people, your mind automatically goes to sponsors and advertisers. And while sponsors is a legitimate way to monetize a podcast, it is actually the hardest way to monetize a podcast. So today, I'm going to give you some much more attainable ways to monetize your podcast.Let me give you some better options for making money from your podcast. Some of these options will not earn enough to live off by itself to start, however, as part of a multi-pronged approach to building different revenue streams of income from your podcast, over time they can add up to significant income:Affiliate Income - takes a little bit of work to set up, but once you start putting out content with your affiliate links, you are building a web of your affiliate links on every piece of content and every post, so over time your affiliate income grows. If you want to learn more about affiliate marketing, you'll want to check out this video I made specifically about affiliate marketing.Merchandise - for many podcasts, this is the first way they earn money. They create a t-shirt, mug or bumper sticker that relates to their show and tell their friends how they can buy it. Most podcasters use print on demand services, like Printify, or Custom Ink. While profit margins are a bit lower per item with these companies, you don't have to stockpile inventory or ship products out yourself.Paid Communities or Memberships - This method has recurring income built into the model, and in my opinion, it is the best way to build full time income for the future. There are many different options for this income model from Patreon type subscriptions to ad free podcast feeds and everything in between, and even if you already have courses or programs, they can be turned into a recurring revenue model.Courses - Whether these are low ticket or high ticket, courses can be used to bring in significant monthly revenue. The problem with courses is that you have to constantly be in launch mode in order to get significant traffic to your course. There are websites like Udemy, or Teachable, where you can put your courses and get traffic directly from the platform, in addition to driving your own traffic there.Coaching - You can easily fill your coaching calendar with clients from your podcast, if that's what you desire. When it comes to coaching, I'd recommend only starting group coaching programs where you are coaching 1 to many, vs 1:1. Based on my experience in coaching podcasters, many people are locked into 1:1 interactions in their private practice, and they are hoping their podcast will help them earn more income from the 1 to many option. You never want to create a revenue stream that you really don't enjoy and want to support. So if you are already feeling burned out from your practice, or your day job, then 1:1 coaching is probably going to further drain you emotionally. So, I'd recommend building out lower touch group coaching programs, if you want to expand your coaching services. Sponsorship - Last on my list of ways to monetize your podcast is getting sponsors. Let me be clear, I manage ads and ad campaigns for some of the biggest podcasts on Apple, so I am not anti-sponsor. And sponsors can be a part of your overall revenue strategy, but most often I see podcasters getting taken advantage of by sponsor relationships, and often sponsors will play on our ignorance. Let me also give you a word of caution here…if you are going down the route of taking on sponsors, please make sure you are utilizing the dynamic ad insertion features that are built into many podcast hosting companies. Without doing this, you are giving away your value in perpetuity and that is terrible for you. I'll do an entire episode later on...
In this episode, we dive into the world of affiliate marketing with Juda Rutenberg, exploring ways to boost your income. Episode 167 reveals how Archer Affiliates works with Amazon, how to connect your Archer Affiliate links with your Amazon tag, how to use these links in emails and on SocialRu, and the special features available on Archer's dashboard.LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:Smart Influencer SOP & Team ManagerCooking with KeywordsTrueRanker********************************DISCLAIMER: This audio and description may contain affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of our recommended products, we may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. This helps support our show and allows us to continue to provide you with valuable content. Thank you for your support!********************************FULL SHOW NOTES: https://thesmartinfluencer.com/how-to-skyrocket-your-affiliate-income/JOIN OUR COMMUNITY:https://www.facebook.com/groups/214681812013517https://www.instagram.com/thesmartinfluencer/All Business. No Boundaries.Welcome to All Business. No Boundaries., a collection of supply chain stories by DHL...Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the show
Want to know how I've tripled my affiliate income over the last year without being sleazy, spammy, or scammy? Today, I'm sharing all about how I've started sharing more about the products and tools I am using in my own business, what my affiliate income strategy is, and which programs I'm an affiliate for that make me the most money! Episode Highlights: What's affiliate marketing? Why I was initially resistant to making affiliate income and the mindset hurdle I overcame to start promoting other people's products How you can start building affiliate marketing income (even with a smaller audience) Five strategies that helped me TRIPLE my affiliate income this year (my affiliate income grew 200% last year) The top 5 affiliates that generate the most passive income for my business Links mentioned in this episode: Get the full show notes at: https://marakucirek.com/39 Connect with Mara on Instagram: https://marakucirek.com/instagram My Riverside landing page: https://marakucirek.com/riverside-coupon-code Ubersuggest for keyword research: https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/ Thrivecart: https://marakucirek.com/thrivecart Flodesk: https://marakucirek.com/flodesk
Interested in learning powerful Amazon affiliate marketing tips and tricks? Well, you're in luck, as in this episode of The Profitable Travel Blogger Podcast, we'll be going over how to make money as an Amazon affiliate - creative strategies included! By the end of this episode, you'll understand: Why you should join the Amazon Associates affiliate program How to create an effective affiliate marketing content strategy Amazon affiliate best practices for seeing success Advanced strategies for increasing your Amazon affiliate income as a blogger Mistakes to avoid if you want to see success with the Amazon affiliate program And more! In short, you'll snag loads of ideas for monetizing your blog with Amazon affiliate products! FREE BONUS: Grab access to my free Travel Blogger Resource Library: https://jessieonajourney.com/free-blogging-printables/ It includes 55+ blogging resources all meant to help you grow your traffic, community, and income faster and with less overwhelm. Snag workshops, tutorials, workbooks, cheat sheets, Trello boards, workflows, and more! TOOLS MENTIONED: Visit this link for a list of my favorite blogging tools, resources, and discounts - including tools mentioned in the episode: https://jessieonajourney.com/tools/ LTK Affiliate Program: https://www.shopltk.com/ CONNECT WITH ALEX: Website: https://www.travelfashiongirl.com Women's Travel Fest: https://womenstravelfest.com/ Compass Rose Packing Cubes: https://amzn.to/3rg9tdo LET'S CONNECT: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jessieonajourney/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jessieonajourney/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/JessonaJourney TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jessieonajourney YouTube (travel): https://www.youtube.com/@jessieonajourney/featured YouTube (blogging): https://www.youtube.com/@makemoneytravelblogging Travel Creator Community Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bloggrowthposse
Have you ever heard of affiliate income, and how it can boost your financial situation as a musician and/or teacher? I am fortunate today to introduce you to Dr. Tonya Lawson who happens to be an expert in this very topic. We'll be diving into details into how to use your website properly, together with social media, to generate income. Topics Include: · How passive income can create stability for free-lance/independent musicians and music teachers · What is affiliate income? Is it possible for musicians to earn it? Where do I sign up? · What is SEO? Why do musicians need to know what it is? · Blog posts are not what they once were · Tips on working smarter, not harder when using social media and websites for marketing and affiliate income · Advice for new musicians https://tonyalawson.com/ https://tonyalawson.com/creative-seo/ https://frostedlens.com/musicians-vs-the-world
In this week's First $1,000 segment, we hear from a frequent camper who begins making YouTube videos to show off gear and tips. This turns into a regular income stream as viewers make purchases. Side Hustle School features a new episode EVERY DAY, featuring detailed case studies of people who earn extra money without quitting their job. This year, the show includes free guided lessons and listener Q&A several days each week. Show notes: SideHustleSchool.com Email: team@sidehustleschool.com Be on the show: SideHustleSchool.com/questions Connect on Twitter: @chrisguillebeau Connect on Instagram: @193countries Visit Chris's main site: ChrisGuillebeau.com If you're enjoying the show, please pass it along! It's free and has been published every single day since January 1, 2017. We're also very grateful for your five-star ratings—it shows that people are listening and looking forward to new episodes.
JFDI with The Two Lauras | For Freelance Social Media Managers
Affiliate marketing has helped us generate thousands and thousands of pounds of additional income. So in this episode, we're sharing how YOU can do that too! Mentioned in this episode:Thrivecart, the all-in-one payment processing system we use for our business - thetwolauras.com/thrivecartSearchie - the course and membership site hosting service we use and love - thetwolauras.com/searchieOur main website thetwolauras.comOur membership for freelance social media managers, The Inner Hub® thetwolauras.com/inner-hubAvailable wherever you get your podcasts.Listen with captions and a transcript at podcast.thetwolauras.comListen on Apple PodcastsListen on SpotifyMentioned in this episode:This episode is sponsored by Agorapulse.Stay organized, save time, and easily manage your social media with Agorapulse's inbox, publishing, reporting, monitoring, and team collaboration tools. Over 31,000 social media managers use Agorapulse every day, and you can take an extended 2-month free trial at thetwolauras.com/agorapulse Get an extended 2 month trial on Agorapulse
You're in a high-stress industry, your weekends are gold, and nobody's got time for filler content or fluff. That's why today's topic is super relevant - we're diving into affiliate income. Yep, we're talking about ways to diversify your income streams without doubling your workload. By the end of this episode, you'll have a toolbox filled with ideas to not only elevate your client's experience but also add a new revenue stream. And the best part is, you can do this without sacrificing another weekend. So if you've been trying to figure out how to increase the numbers in your bank account without increasing the number of 14-hour Saturdays, tune in!Kendra Swalls | Podcast | Instagram | Income Streams Free Guide(01:50) Introducing Kendra Swalls(03:23) "Look at what it is that you are currently doing in your business that could be applied in some other way"(06:56) Bringing Affiliate Income to Your Business(14:30) Building a My Favorite Things page(19:10) Affiliate links for honeymoon, travel, and bougie airport lounges(22:00) Creating blog posts featuring affiliates(25:00) Love/hate with Amazon(34:00) Reaching out directly to brands(43:50) How do you put an affiliate strategy together?---Today's episode is brought to you by The Planner's Vault. The doors are currently closed for The Planner's Vault, but join the wait list now so you can be the first to know when the doors re-open.Weddings for Real on Social Media:Instagram: @weddingsforrealFacebook: @weddingsforrealtwitter: @weddingsforrealHosted by Megan Gillikin, Weddings for Real is presented by The Planner's Vault, and is produced by Earfluence. -----Enji, marketing experts your wedding business
In Episode #61 of BusyBee Refinishing with MelDidItHerself, I bring you another BusyBees in Business Strategy Session! Today I'm talking to Jen from Made With Her Hands about ways to bring additional streams of revenue into her furniture refinishing business through affiliate partnerships and collaborations with brands. We discuss what affiliate programs are and how to get involved with them, creating a media kit, and getting yourself seen by brands. I also caution against some common email scam tells that you may receive in your inbox looking for collaborations, and legal jargon to familiarize yourself with in sponsorship contracts. If you have ever wondered: How do I partner with brands as a furniture refinisher? How can I become an affiliate with my favourite brands? What do I do to get a brand collaboration? How do I put together a media kit to get sponsorships? Which brands have affiliate programs? What are tips for figuring out if inbound collaborations are scams? Then this episode is for you! Links mentioned in this episode: Sign up for a BusyBees in Business Strategy Session to join me on the podcast to talk through a barrier/challenge you've been experiencing refinishing furniture or starting up a side hustle/business selling your painted and refinished furniture! Other links you may be interested in: Check out my coaching/consultation services to start or supercharge your furniture painting and refinishing business, or find out how to start a podcast of your own! Provides support and accountability to help you make and complete a plan of action to reach your goals. Want to get weekly furniture flipping inspo and tips right to your inbox? Sign up for the Friday Furniture Focus newsletter here Ready to tackle your first furniture flip!? Grab the No BS Guide To Your First Furniture Makeover now and get to flipping. Use code BUSYBEE for 20% off for a limited time! Want to snag some Surf Prep Sanding* or Fusion Mineral Paint* products for your furniture makeover for 10% off? See my curated Amazon Storefront* with all the furniture flipping essentials for your project? Click here! Grab your free copy of the Guide and Checklist For Starting Your Official Furniture Refinishing Business Record an audio clip through my SpeakPipe Link shouting out your favourite episode of BusyBee Refinishing with MelDidItHerself, and don't forget to shout out your socials so we can follow along on your furniture refinishing journey! Are you loving the Busybee Refinishing with MelDidItHerself podcast? Let the world know by leaving a rating on whatever platform you're listening on, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts letting me know what you're loving, or what you've learned that you're going to take back into your work - this will help more busybees like us discover this community and join us every week to gush about all things furniture refinishing. Can't get enough MelDidItHerself? Check out my Instagram, YouTube and TikTok for more furniture refinishing, painting, DIY and lifestyle content to tide you over until next week's episode. Email Mel@MelDidItHerself.ca for sponsorships, or just to say hey! *this means this is an affiliate code where I make a small commission when you use my link, and you save money on your order! It's a great way to support me and my small business when you're buying products you already intended on getting – thanks in advance if you use it :)
I'm so excited to bring ECP back for a brand-new season! In this episode, I share how I've spent the last 5 years building online income streams and how I'm now making six figures a year from freelance writing, online courses, and affiliates.Actions:Claim your 30-day free trial with Semrush!Get my FREE 19-page guide to learn how I make $5,000+ a month from freelance writing & scalable income streamsShownotes:Episode #42 (Season 1) with Louise Croft - Digital Nomad Making 5-Figures Passive Income Each MonthBook by my girlfriend: Your Dream For MeJames Sinclair's YouTube ChannelEmail me: scott@entrepreneurscanparty.com
Welcome back to another Niche Website Builders Podcast! In this episode, our host James de Lacey talks to Jesse Lakes, the CEO and Co-Founder of GeniusLink. Genius Link is an affiliate marketing software that helps affiliate marketers improve their conversions. You can use this tool to give customers multiple options for the same product, improving trust. Jesse also talks about what you shouldn't do with Amazon Affiliate Marketing, provides case studies from his past and how he improved his affiliate conversions throughout the last 20 years. Jesse's Links: https://twitter.com/JesseLakes https://geniuslink.com/
What is Affiliate Income and how do you create it? Official Podcast Page https://www.steveryan.com/podcast Blog - https://www.steveryan.com/blog Community Chat - https://www.steveryan.com/community Resources & Tools that May Help You - https://www.steveryan.com/resources Podcast YouTube Page - https://www.youtube.com/firedupfreedom Other YouTube Channels to Check Out and Subscribe To 24/7 Meditation Music - https://www.youtube.com/meditationrest Steve Ryan Official YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/steveryanonline The Abundant Lion (Self Improvement & Business Strategies) - https://www.youtube.com/theabundantlion Freedom Coin - https://www.youtube.com/freedomcoinclub NFTs - https://www.youtube.com/nftsforfreedom
It's still the 2nd biggest search engine in the history of the internet. So if you are not using youtube as part of your lead gen or affiliate business then you will always be leaving money on the table.
Your affiliate income is bigger than you. It's time for change: https://makemoneyonlinepodcast.com/income (This is an affiliate link. If you click through and make a purchase, I'll earn a commission, at no additional cost to you) I also offer Affiliate Marketing Expert Coaching Sessions because I want you to succeed and to design your dream life: http://makemoneyonlinepodcast.com/expert
Want to try AG1 yourself and take ownership over your health this year? Athletic Greens will give you a FREE 1 year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D AND 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase when you use our link: athleticgreens.com/CTCCheck out all the ways Basecamp can increase your business' productivity when you sign up for a free trial at www.basecamp.com/CTC ! Imagine if your ability to perform the core function in your business suddenly became impossible due to an illness. That's exactly what happened to our guest, Lady Kellsie Moore, a top video presence coach for entrepreneurs and speaker whose TMJ-D diagnosis prevented her from being able to speak for an entire year. In today's case study, Kellsie shares her YouTube content strategy that kept working in the background even when she physically couldn't work, allowing her business to still bring in $45,000 of revenue completely passively. If you want to emergency proof your own business with evergreen content, keep listening.Connect with Kellsie:Free gift to share! "3 Keys To Unlocking Your Magic On-Camera": https://www.kellsiemoore.com/opt-in-53b3f1eb-4bd2-4a7e-a2cf-db7ed3f13fe4Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kellsie_mooreYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/c/kellsiemooreFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/bemarvelousyouPinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/LadyKellsieMoore/_created/Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/kellsie-moore Imdb: https://www.imdb.me/kellsiemooreWeb: www.kellsiemoore.comLinks mentioned in this episode:https://ellenyin.com/kajabi99If you enjoyed today's episode, please:Sign up for our text notifications at ellenyin.com/superfan so you can be the first to know when a new case study has dropped!Post a screenshot & key takeaway on your IG story and tag me @missellenyin & @cubicletoceo so I can repost you.Leave a positive review or rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.Subscribe for new episodes every Monday. Want to hear all the ins and outs of what is happening in our business? Check out all our previous quarterly income reports at https://ellenyin.com/incomereport !
Here's a fun fact: We nearly DOUBLED our affiliate income in the last year as a company which was a huge increase for us! This didn't happen accidentally and it also isn't an overnight success story. This was an intentional focus for us as a company, specifically when it was clear that the world wasn't just going back to normal anytime soon. If you're just starting with affiliate marketing work OR if you've been at it for a while and can't seem to crack the code to bringing in income with it… I want to share exactly how we doubled my affiliate income with five tangible tips to try so that you can expand this income opportunity within your own brand. ORDER MY FIRST BOOK: howareyoureallybook.com GOAL DIGGER FB COMMUNITY: https://www.facebook.com/groups/goaldiggerpodcast/ GOAL DIGGER INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/goaldiggerpodcast/ GOAL DIGGER SHOWNOTES: jennakutcherblog.com/doubled
In this episode, we get creative about: Affiliate Income! What is it, how do you get started, and what is the average commission? How success looks like doing LESS! How to market your affiliate links! Resources + Links: Follow David on Instagram | @davidalandodge Find more resources & David's podcast! discountpropertyinvestor.com Check out these books mentioned in the episode: Who Not How by Dan Sullivan Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown Tag us on Instagram with a takeaway from this episode! Follow Jesse on Instagram | @thejessemills Learn more ways to create cash flow on Jesse's website https://www.thejessemills.com/home Subscribe to The Creative Cash Flow Show Show Notes: If you had over $19,000 per month in passive income, what would that mean for your time freedom? Welcome to the very first episode of The Creative Cash Flow Show! I couldn't think of a better guest to kick this off with than friend, Real Estate Investor, fellow podcast host and Entrepreneur, David Dodge! Having built $19,000+ in affiliate income, David is here to peel back the curtain on all things affiliate marketing! We're diving into how to genuinely partner and share products and services you work with, so that everybody involved WINS! Tune in for tips on how to create an affiliate partnership, how to market your affiliate links, and what the average affiliate commission is! Of course, as real estate investors we chat about the 90+ rentals David owns, and other ways we get creative with our own cash flow! Thanks again for joining me on this first episode! Please subscribe! I can't wait to see the next level of financial and time freedom you create for yourself! 01:15 What is the goal that most people have beyond financial freedom? 04:30 What is affiliate income? 09:15 How do you find the products and services you do affiliate marketing for? 11:00 How much passive income do you earn from your affiliate partnerships and rental properties? 15:00 Ways affiliate marketing benefits both you and the customer that uses your link or code. 18:20 How much do you spend on the companies you have affiliate links for?23:15 The easy way to market your affiliate links. 26:00 Benefits of affiliate marketing vs Real Estate investing. 27:00 What is the average affiliate commission? 31:40 Ways to offer value to the people you teach through affiliate marketing. 37:00 Tips for creating affiliate marketing as a passive income stream. 43:30 What does success look like to you? 48:00 How to create time freedom for yourself, and help others through sales. 50:00 What are you reading, listening to, and watching right now? 57:30 How can we learn more about affiliate marketing, investing and connect with you?
Michelle Schroeder-Gardner of Making Sense of Cents tells you why you need to grow your affiliate income Episode 549: Why You Need To Grow Your Affiliate Income by Michelle Schroeder-Gardner of Making Sense of Cents Michelle Schroeder-Gardner created Making Sense of Cents in order to help improve her own finances. With diligence, she was able to pay off $38,000 in student debt in 7 months, kept track of progress, and helped readers along the way. She's currently touring North America and living out of an RV. You can learn more about her and see her monthly income reports at MakingSenseOfCents.com. The original post is located here: https://www.makingsenseofcents.com/2016/06/affiliate-marketing-income.html If you want consumers to talk about your brand and think about you when they're making purchases, influencer marketing could be perfect for you. #Paid helps you get started with creator marketing and creator whitelisting. Go to Hashtagpaid.com/osd to get $500 off your first campaign. Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalStartUpDaily Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Michelle Schroeder-Gardner of Making Sense of Cents tells you why you need to grow your affiliate income Episode 549: Why You Need To Grow Your Affiliate Income by Michelle Schroeder-Gardner of Making Sense of Cents Michelle Schroeder-Gardner created Making Sense of Cents in order to help improve her own finances. With diligence, she was able to pay off $38,000 in student debt in 7 months, kept track of progress, and helped readers along the way. She's currently touring North America and living out of an RV. You can learn more about her and see her monthly income reports at MakingSenseOfCents.com. The original post is located here: https://www.makingsenseofcents.com/2016/06/affiliate-marketing-income.html If you want consumers to talk about your brand and think about you when they're making purchases, influencer marketing could be perfect for you. #Paid helps you get started with creator marketing and creator whitelisting. Go to Hashtagpaid.com/osd to get $500 off your first campaign. Visit Me Online at OLDPodcast.com Interested in advertising on the show? Visit https://www.advertisecast.com/OptimalStartUpDaily Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What a fun episode this one was. The way we met was cool. Past guest Ron Douglas introduced Paul and I after one of my other close friends said "Brad you gotta know Paul." He sure didn't disappoint. What you'll get inside this episode is a fun journey of ups and downs...and then back "up" big time. Paul's timeless advice in this episode delivered with a funny demeanor was a lot of fun. If you're someone who sells stuff...whether as an affiliate or a business owner...the principles in this episode will serve you well. Enjoy!
Here are some of the easy ways to 5x your income from Affiliate marketing and affiliate blogs.You can reach out to me on https://seosingh.in/.Newsletter: https://seosingh.substack.com/.Dropping daily Content Marketing tips on: .Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ishmeet2/ .. https://www.facebook.com/seosinghshow/.https://twitter.com/tweeetkaran.Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seosinghshow/.Video Version of Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/c/SeoSinghShowHandmade Store: https://thehandmade.store/products/leather-garment-duffle
You're signed up for the affiliate programs and have shared links a few times, but you're not making any sales. Sound familiar? Then hit play because this episode will help you create a strategy so you start making money and *bonus* forming relationships with brands for future partnerships! Head to thrivetogether.blog/podcast for the show notes! If you're looking for a blogging community, then join us over on Facebook! bit.ly/thriveonfacebook
Welcome to another action-packed episode of the Strategy Hour Podcast! Our guest today is Meg Clark, the owner and founder of Clapping Dog Media, where she is the master of growing organic traffic. Using a combination of data, proven techniques, and years of experience, she attracts web visitors that not only stick around, but turn into paying customers. Simply put, she connects the dots of data to get your business found!During this conversation, we pick her brain about structuring your content to work for YOU and actually make you money! Get your notebook out because, today, Meg shares plenty of actionable strategies to help you do just that. Listeners will learn powerful SEO hacks to make your content worthwhile and convert to actual dollar bills, the secret to making Google happy even after changing your niche or what your business offers, and the most surprising thing we learned about traffic and what we're doing about it. We can't wait to see how her strategies help to transform your business! Thank you for listening! Please subscribe, rate and review The Strategy Hour Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. For show notes go to thestrategyhour.com. To download the transcript of this episode head to: thestrategyhour.com.
With Rick Magennis By now most of us are familiar with the concept of affiliate marketing. It is basically being paid to promote a product or service using your own network and influence. And yes, you do have influence being paid to promote something that you actually like to people who trust your recommendations is a pretty cool gig and many of the programs and products that you already use and love offer affiliate programs. Rick Magennis has been an affiliate marketing guru for nearly a decade, with most of that time managing affiliate programs for other brands. He believes in growing sales the right way for his clients. And Rick is the president and founder of Bearcat Media Media an affiliate marketing agency. They’re all about driving the right results for each client. He has recently run a whole event dedicated to affiliate management best practices for brands called affiliate management Expo. I am really looking forward to this conversation with Rick today and I think you’re about to learn a whole lot about affiliate marketing, whether you are running an affiliate marketing program yourself for your business, or if you’re thinking about being an affiliate as an individual. So let’s get started. In this episode, Rick talks about: How starting out as an affiliate inspired Rick to be the affiliate marketing expert that he is today. 2:04What is an affiliate marketer and how do you make money being one? 4:31Basic steps to getting started as an affiliate marketer. 6:58Protecting your own credibility by – promoting products and services that you actually stand behind. 8:53Getting started using affiliate marketing in your own business. 11:07Determining the right amount of commission for referrals. 13:09Affiliate management software to help you get off the ground and running. 16:14Affiliate marketing strategy, the do’s and don’ts. 21:44Quality over quantity, finding the best affiliates for the job and setting them up for success. 23:47The ethics of affiliate marking and how to implement ethical practices. 28:57 I love that we focused on the idea of promoting products that you truly use and love. Affiliate marketing has gotten a bad rap lately and there are a million examples of people using unethical practices to make a sale. You can tell when someone isn’t being sincere in their promotion and it certainly doesn’t help build the trust factor… run far away from those folks. But if you really do love something, earning a nice tip for sharing it is a great way to make a passive income. I know I trust people in my networks for recommendations over cold and undirected advertisements. Start today by making a list of products or services that you already use and see if they currently offer a program that you can join. When it is time to start your own affiliate marketing program in your business, be sure that your affiliates first of all truly love what you’re selling. And second of all, and this one is important. You want to double ensure that your affiliates values align with your values. Because remember, they are an extension of you and your brand. Honesty is the best policy here. Until next time workshop warrior. Thank you so much for spending part of your day with me today. I just love hanging out. So let’s do it again next week. Bye for now. Connect with Rick: Website: https://affiliateprogrammanagement.co/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-magennis/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bearcatmediaSEO/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bearcatmediallc/ Mentioned in this episode The Rick Magennis Podcast Affiliate marketing software: ShareASale, CJ Affiliate, Shopify, WooCommerce, Affiliatly What you need to know to start and affiliate program – Blog A note from our sponsors: So you bought a fancy camera or you’re thinking about buying one because it’s clear to you that there is no shortage of beautiful moments or things in your life that you’d like to capture beautifully, but the record scratches because all the dials and buttons and settings are standing between you and your life in stunning photos. Well, my friend I have just the fix the Ultimate Photography Starter Kit. This free resource includes a recommended equipment list, quick start checklist, and a beginner’s guide to creating natural poses and candid moments to give you the confidence you need to dust off that fancy camera and start documenting your moments so they can last forever. The Ultimate Photography Starter kit is completely free and It is everything you need to get started. So grab yours today at Kellylawson.ca/starterkit. That’s Kellylawson.ca/starterkit. And I can’t wait to see your framers in my scroll. – If you're looking to elevate your business or brand photos using your smartphone or any other photo-taking device, I don't want you to miss out on my most downloaded free resource. The results people are getting from this guide are crazy, some say I should be charging actual money for it. But for now, I don’t want to because I want everyone to get the beautiful photography results that they deserve. No more blurry, dark, dull, yellowish, shadow-y embarrassing photos for you! It's so much easier to get a beautiful photo than you probably think. Simply visit kellylawson.ca/freeguide to download your free photography guide and start taking better photos for your business TODAY. Click here for the transcribed version of this podcast.
DIY Money | Personal Finance, Budgeting, Debt, Savings, Investing
On this episode of DIY Money, Quint and Daniel talk about passive and affiliate income.
In this episode, Odi Productions shares how he was able to 10x his business in less than a year thanks to high ticket affiliate sales. Then Kit Fach and Odi share how to start high ticket affiliate marketing, where the commissions can range from $100 to $1,000 per SALE.- Want 1 on 1 mentorship with Odi? Apply for a call: https://odiproductions.com/passive-income-lifestyle/?utm_source=podcast&utm_content=6.16.21- Interested in Done for You SEO services? Let's chat: https://form.typeform.com/to/yRuGIEqp
Hey girl, hey! In today's episode I am walking you through how to make affiliate revenue part of your business model. I explain how I made $4K last month by using simple affiliate marketing strategies. I will take you through 4 steps of ramping up your own affiliate revenue stream. If you've been wanting to expand your options, this is a perfect way to serve your avatar in new, exciting ways that still support your niche. It also allows you to keep them in your pipeline while offering new, unique offers once in a while. Basically, affiliate revenue is a win-win! Enjoy. Stef Sign up to be a Stefanie Gass Course Affiliate at: https://stefaniegass.thrivecart.com/clarifyyourcalling/partner/ Learn about Stef, Snag Free Gifts, and Find out More at: https://stefaniegass.com Stuck on what you do and who you serve? Need clarity on your niche? My FREE WORKSHOP will help you get clear. Instant access at: http://getclarity.gr8.com Wanna work together, friend!? Here to help you start and scale a God-centered business: Step 1: Get Clarity on Your God-Led Calling: http://clarifyyourcallingcourse.com Step 2: Grow an Organic, Evergreen Audience using Podcasting: http://podcastprouniversity.com Step 3: Monetize & Scale your Podcast using courses and coaching: http://podcasttoprofitmastermind.com Courses and masterminds not your thing? Snag a private session with Stef. support@stefaniegass.com Laugh at Stef's stories on IG! Share & Tag her at @StefanieGass
Backstage Income | Behind the Scenes to Marketing & Growing Your Business
Get Started with my ADULT AFFILIATE CRASH COURSE: https://togetherwecam.com/courses/adult-cams-crash-course/ Get our software: http://dashboard.togetherwecam.com/ ViceTemple Hosting w/Discount on $10 Plan: https://bit.ly/vicetempletwc Get LOVENSE discounts: https://bit.ly/lovense20 Watch our Full guide on How to become a Cam Girl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1561hDmZiCE Affiliate Links Start now with LiveJasmin/BIMBIM Affiliate: http://bit.ly/livejasmintwc Start now on Bongacams: https://bit.ly/bongamodelstwc Start now with Chaturbate Affiliate: http://bit.ly/chaturbatemodeltwc Start now with Camsoda Affiliate: http://bit.ly/camsodaModel CAM MODEL LINKS Start now with LiveJasmin/BIMBIM Affiliate: https://bit.ly/awetwc2020 Start now on Bongacams: https://bit.ly/bongacashtwc Start now with Chaturbate Affiliate: https://bit.ly/earnwithchaturbate Start now with Camsoda Affiliate: https://bit.ly/camwebtwc Start now with Stripchat Affiliate: http://bit.ly/stripmodeltwc ABOUT US: Together We Cam is a website and channel all about helping both Cam Girls and Adult Affiliate Marketers get the information that they need on how to make money in the industry. It can be hard to find this up to date information and so we ensure that it's here in bitesize, easy to understand formats. Our background is as online entrepreneurs, software engineers and affiliate marketing with a combined 30 years of experience allowing us to be at the forefront of the information that you will need to succeed. Be sure to subscribe for weekly videos on how to make money as a Cam girl or Adult Affiliate. ►Where to follow Together We Cam: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/togetherwecam/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/togetherwecam/ Twitter:https://twitter.com/together_cam Website: https://togetherwecam.com/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/togetherwecam Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/groups/togetherwecam #ChaturbateTokens #CamGirl #PassiveIncome
Affiliate marketing can be feast or famine, but it doesn't have to be. Derek and Galel go over several key things that affiliates need to keep in mind when they are choosing the right offers, strategizing their businesses, and formulating their future plans. In this episode of The Affiliate Report, learn the specific things that you can implement today in order to build more stability into your affiliate marketing business.
When you consider your blog to be your business - or if you want to earn a living by blogging, you need to understand that quite a large part of blogging is selling a certain product or enticing people to click your links to make a purchase or to know more. Additionally, many bloggers - especially the ones in the travel industry, also sell services and products. This is where copywriting comes in. Copywriting differs from blog writing in the way that copywriting is often more geared to a commercial outcome. Copywriting is a mix of creativity, human knowledge and applying proven formulas. Formulas that have been used countless times over the years and have emerged as winners time and again. In order to help you get more sales through your affiliate links, to help you sell your products and services on your blog, I share 3 of the most popular copywriting formulas, so that you can also apply them to your websit e, e-mail and social posts. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/lieze-neven4/message
In 2020 I had to pivot and pivot FAST I had seen the recession in 2007-2008 and that was devastatingly traumatic for me. This time though I had researched a lot on affiliate income and even started dabbling in it in Jan 2020, making a few hundred dollars here and there But then the Pandemic hit and I had to act quickly These are the 3 steps that brought me from a few hundred dollars of unpredictable income to nearly $6500 in six months time with almost DAILY inbox money showing up. Most of that is actually residual and will repeat After studying many of the greats of traditional business and network marketing, I was blown away as to why I didn't do this sooner! Here are a link to my resources: https://loiskoffi.com/resources/ And, if you want to become an affiliate for me, please sign up here at https://gcug5sx9.pages.infusionsoft.net/ Contact me for a FREE assessment as to whether or not affiliate marketing is for you!
In a perfect world, our business would blow up in the first 2 days and we’ll never have to worry about money again.Ha.But I honestly do think, in our heart of hearts, we hope it will be true.What usually happens is we’re at month 6, 12 or 24...and still not generating enough revue to offset our expenses. Definitely not enough to enjoy life in any, way, shape or form.But what if it didn’t have to be that way?In today’s podcast, I’m going to break down how to build an affiliate revenue stream that can pay for your virtual assistant, ad spend or even a new vehicle!Today's Topics:Decide On Your Affiliate ProductBuild A FunnelAdvertise The FunnelKeep Track Of ThingsTo recap, adding an affiliate income stream to your business is extremely cost effective. And, if you focus on treating it as another leg of your business, you will see amazing results.I highly recommend taking my How To Build Your Membership In An Hour Masterclass so you can see my affiliate funnel in action!! Take the class here.
This week, we’re mining for gold. We’re talking about bright spots that you utilize to maximize your author income. And these things are all things that you can do TODAY to make more money long-term. I call them untapped opportunities because most authors don’t bother with them because they’re considered small potatoes. But they’re not, actually. The first tip in this week's series is affiliate income. Check out Scrivener for Windows: http://www.authorlevelup.com/scrivenerwindows (PAID LINK) Check out Scrivener for Mac: http://www.authorlevelup.com/scrivenermac (PAID LINK) Check out Learn Scrivener Fast with Joseph Michael: http://www.authorlevelup.com/learnscrivenerfast (PAID LINK) Write like the top 1% of authors with my FREE Writing Craft Playbook: http://www.authorlevelup.com/fanclub Listen to past episodes: http://www.authorlevelup.com/flash Watch my YouTube channel for writers: http://www.youtube.com/authorlevelup Read my books for writers: http://www.authorlevelup.com/books Check out my fiction: http://www.michaellaronn.com and http://www.mlmcknight.com
Welcome to our Summer Fun series. Where for the next 4 weeks. I'm going to be re-airing some of our best Inbox Besties episodes from the archives. We'll be back with new shows on Sept. 9th, 2020 **This episode originally aired in 2018** Updates: Please note the price of the Email Marketing Fairy is NOT going up. It's now set at the current price I was talking about way back in 2018. Also we mention GDPR just coming into effective - which clearly happened two years ago Resources: Resources: Email Marketing Fairy Ebook - www.katedoster.com/email-marketing-fairy Share A Sale Affiliate (Affiliate network - lots of services use this to host they’ll affiliate program through this ) www.katedoster.com/shareasale Get a free month of Smarterqueue -https://www.katedoster.com/Smarterqueue The review post I get a boat load of affiliate income sales from: https://www.katedoster.com/smarterqueue-review-meetedgar-vs-smarterqueue/ Using Quizzes For Affiliate Sales: https://www.katedoster.com/thrive-quiz Yoast SEO plugin Siteground Hosting: https://www.katedoster.com/siteground My Resource Page: https://www.katedoster.com/life-savers/ Free 30 day trail of Convertkit https://www.katedoster.com/ck Affiliate Pins Breakdown from Pinterest: https://newsroom.pinterest.com/en-gb/post/affiliate-link-guide-to-pinterest Divi Builder - https://www.katedoster.com/divi
There are some companies which give you recurring affiliate income. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/booksintamil/support
Are you familiar with affiliate marketing? It's one of my favorite ways to earn passive income online. In this episode, I thought I'd give you a peek at the passive income strategies that are actually working in my business today. We'll go over: My top 3 affiliate income streams How much money I've earned from each Why they've been so successful Things I've tried that have NOT been successful How you can start affiliate income streams in your business Want more guidance on affiliate marketing (+ 5 other passive income streams?) Register for the 2020 LIVE round of my Make Money Blogging course. The 1st lesson will be released this Wednesday, May 20th. Register by the 25th to nab the current low price. (Then it's going up by $200!) Looking for more tips and a community of like-minded peers? Join The Unconventional RD Facebook Community on Facebook. Find the show notes for this episode at: www.theunconventionalrd.com/episode020 Need help setting up your website? Join my FREE "How to Start a Website" tutorial.
The Affiliate Guy with Matt McWilliams: Marketing Tips, Affiliate Management, & More
There’s a single page on my site that makes more than $100,000 a year. It's all completely passive affiliate income. Want to know what it is? Then keep listening because I’m gonna tell you all about it in this episode. LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Resources Page: mattmcwilliams.com/resourcespage My Toolbox Page: mattmcwilliams.com/toolbox My Recommended Reading Page: mattmcwilliams.com/books MeetEdgar Social Media Management Tool: mattmcwilliams.com/edgar
After Live Q&A's on a few social media channels such as Instagram (https://beforethemillions.com/instagram) , I decided to pop open a bottle of wine and answer some of your most pressing questions about real estate and business here in 2020. We covered many topics such as extra income sources during these uncertain times, government relief programs, virtual wholesaling, 2020 market predictions, book recommendations and so much more. Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: Fundrise: Real estate investor crowdfunding (https://beforethemillions.com/fundrise) Propstream: All in One investor tool (https://beforethemillions.com/deal) Stimulus Check (https://irs.gov) Small Business Administration (https://sba.gov) Lifestyle Notary (Loan Signing Agent) (lifestylenotary.com) BTM Episode 151 with Neal Bawa (https://beforethemillions.com/episode151) Motivated Seller Method (https://beforethemillions.com/msm) Top 10 Book List (https://beforethemillions.com/resources) Audible Trial (https://beforethemillions.com/book) BTM Workshop (1 on 1 Coaching) (https://beforethemillions.com/workshop) BTM Mastermind (https://beforethemillions.com/mastermind) ***BTM LIVE Webinar*** (4.23.20 @ 1pm CST) (https://beforethemillions.com/webinar)
Guest Erin Trafford: Digital Content Strategist If making passive income from your content is a revenue stream you'd like to add for yourself and your business, listen up. Today, I'm talking with award-winning broadcaster and digital content specialist, Erin Trafford. Erin is a wife, mom, and animal lover, who also happens to run a six-figure online business while working from home only three days a week. Erin started her journey as a broadcast journalist hosting a morning show where she was basically given the keys to the place. It was there that she learned if you want to be successful, it's all about how your content resonates with people. After 16 years on air working in both radio and TV, she realized that she didn't want to be part of the machine anymore and started her first business, DIY Passion. That business has since almost come to run itself and she now also run serintrafford.com where she helps business owners build their content empires. Today's episode is jam-packed with amazing info and insights. Here is a sneak peek of what Erin and I cover: What running a content company looks likeHaving a blend of passive and active incomeRoadblocks Erin dealt with in the early stages of her businessDealing with negative comments and negative self-thoughtsErin's best tips and tidbits for listenersGetting over the two most common fears related to content creationGetting into affiliate marketingAdvice for getting eyeballs on your contentThe power of PinterestOne thing you can do right now to start building your content empire How much is your content worth? Take Erin's quiz to find out! https://www.erintrafford.com/take-the-quiz Erin’s FREE Trello Planner: https://www.erintrafford.com/downloads Connect with Erin https://www.erintrafford.com/ Instagram (shoot her a DM with your personal question!) https://www.instagram.com/its.erintrafford Check out today's sponsors! Save 10% on Sheertex pantyhose with code KELLYSLAWSON10: https://kellylawson.ca/sheertex Save $40 on your first box with HelloFresh: https://kellylawson.ca/hellofresh Save 15% on your new TONIC site with code KELLYLAWSON https://kellylawson.ca/tonicsite Learn what's in Kelly's capsule this season: https://kellylawson.ca/mystyle
How I Had My Best Freelance Writing Month Ever If you can cultivate and develop your writing skills, you can get paid very, very well as a writer. When I quit my nine to five, I had a goal to make $11,000 in one month. I was able to surpass that goal in September 2019, and make over $20,000 in a month. Here is how I did that: 1. Easy Webinar Client- $4,653 2. Golf Writing Client – $1,155 3. Golf Writing Client – $352 4. Financial Advisor Client – $320 5. Entrepreneur Client – $13,410 6. Affiliate Income on Medium– $160 What I Got Paid to Write There is a variety of content that you can get paid to write! During my best month of freelance writing, it was all these pieces of content writing that led to success: Blog Post Writing E-Books Podcast Scripts Online Course Modules Website Copy Speech Writing Where to Find New Writing Jobs Freelance writing is easy to scale, but you must continually pitch new clients. Here are a variety of ways I have found writing clients: 1. Upwork 2. Writing Job Boards (Pro Blogger, etc.) 3. Cold Pitching 4. LinkedIn 5. Instagram There are a variety of ways to make money writing, a variety of topics that people will pay you to write about and multiple ways to find clients. Freelance writing is the best way to make money writing online. Ready to start your freelance writing career today? Enroll in Freelance to 5K (my signature writing course) for only $97 today! Learn more at www.freelanceto5k.com Want a Freelance mentor? If you are ready to take the next step and launch your freelance writing career, I would love to help you build momentum! I still have a few spots left in my coaching program, fill out an application to learn more 1/1 coaching. Learn more at inspireyoursuccess.com/coach
In this episode Katie shares about how you can make money through affiliate marketing. She shares her experiences and provides recommendations and ideas for getting started. Resources: (*) Marks an affiliate link Make Money Blogging Course* The Unconventional RD Business Bootcamp*
I got Wesley again on the show to talk about increasing your revenue as an affiliate partner. If you run a blog with a sizeable audience, I talked to Wesley about tactics to boost earnings as an affiliate in the short and long term. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/remote-marketing/message
In Monday Marketing Madness Episode 7 We talk about How To Double Your Affiliate Income Using Pinterest. Using blogs as a platform for your affiliate marketing is the best way to get more sales and build your assets at the same time. With each Social Media platform, you use this is also the best way to build leads by driving that traffic to your blog either to give them some how-to info or to give something away such as an ebook, training, or some type of other content that they are looking for. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Links to things we mentioned in previous Monday Marketing Podcasts... Grab your free copy of my top 100 spam words to avoid in 2020 at http://mondaymarketingmadness.com/esw Get updates when we upload a new episode. Sign up for that list here: http://mondaymarketingmadness.com/emailme/ Automation Secrets Product: http://automationsecrets.net --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ronnie-rokk-smith/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ronnie-rokk-smith/support
This week we focus on building passive income through education and training while utilizing affiliate programs as an additional stream of revenue. Francisco Hernandez talks about building his business through the concept of educating other photographers on his techniques while utilizing affiliate programs like Amazon and Adorama. As photographers and business owners, we are continually looking to add streams of revenue and sometimes you have to think outside the box. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1ENgqPt3FajvflmxNIgMqAhttps://www.facebook.com/FJHPhotography/https://www.instagram.com/fjhphoto/?hl=enEquipmentC Stands https://amzn.to/2DoiIvjSony A7R IV https://amzn.to/2L1iePVhttps://adorama.rfvk.net/BJgYqhttps://adorama.rfvk.net/VePjEthecreativeentrepreneur.net ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Welcome to my October 2019 Income Report! Every month I publish an income report to take you behind the scenes of my online business and reveal exactly how much money I make, how much I spend and lessons learned along the way! Important things that happened in October: I intentionally starting reducing my work hours. I did a photo shoot since my last real one was in 2016. I traveled to Colorado for a long weekend to visit my best friend and celebrate her 40th birthday. I hosted another partner webinar with ConvertKit. I recorded 9 podcast guest episodes. I hosted the third 5 Day Freebie Challenge to promote the Website Marketing Lab – and I’ll break down all the stats for you that in this income report too. Notes I found to myself in my planner: “I’m ahead!” “OMG I finally love everything I’m doing in my biz right now, I have butterflies in my chest!” “How can I show like up a boss this week and over-deliver for the 5 Day Freebie Challenge? How can I make this the best experience they’ve ever had from a live challenge?” Review of my goals My target revenue goal is $15,000 a month by March of 2020. My minimum baseline $10,000 a month – $2500 to cover my normal monthly expenses, I set aside $2500 a month for taxes, and pay myself $5,000 a month – two paychecks of $2500 each. Total Revenue: $12,018.50 Affiliate Income: $2027.86 Courses: $7490.64 Done For You & Consulting: $2500 Total Expenses: $2192.83 Out of the ordinary expenses: Facebook Ads to promote “5 Day Freebie Challenge” – $436.78 Annual fee for EasyWebinar – $500 Which means I ran the bare bones of my business for just $1256.05 in October. Good to know in case life hits the fan, and that will also help me meet some of the goals I set at my mastermind retreat, which I’ll talk about a bit later. Get the full breakdown of income, expenses and net profit month by month here. Net Profit: $9825.67 I paid myself $6K of my profit – which I may not have mentioned this in prior income reports, but I’ve actually been paying myself $3000 a paycheck since I think June to repay myself for the Growth University investment. I now have a cushion in the bank where I’m one paycheck and one month’s expenses ahead, and the rest of my profit goes into my tax account – and after I pay taxes every year, what’s left is mine to put back in the business, do something fun, invest, whatever. Biggest Lessons Learned In September, my online courses earned more money than ever before in the history of my business. And then in October, I beat that number by $931. In September, my passive income and courses combined accounted for 76% of my revenue. In October again, passive income and courses combined accounted for exactly 76% percent of my revenue, whereas in previous months it’s never accounted for more than 50%. And I’m so pumped about that…because one of my goals when I joined Growth University was to make enough money from passive income to cover the $2500 monthly consulting gig that I have, planning ahead for when that revenue goes away because it was 25% of my month. And I’m just a few dollars shy of making that happen on the revenue side, but I’m currently totally fine on the expense side because I’ve pared my expenses down so much. Not only have I decreased my expenses, I’ve decreased the amount of time I’m working every week. I mentioned that I made a commitment to my mastermind gals to reduce my work hours, stop working on weekends, vacations and holidays and I truly did put that into practice in October. Here’s how much I worked each week: Week 1: 38 hours, 5.5 of that on the weekend (including my photoshoot). Week 2: 25 hours, Monday – through Thursday morning, then left for Colorado, didn’t work at all there. Week 3: 30.5 hours, started work late mornings, about 6 hours a day, no weekend. Week 4: 41.5 hours, 5 Day Freebie Challenge week, started later in the day, worked every evening and a couple hours on the weekend – all on the Challenge. Total Hours Worked: 135 I went to Colorado for a long weekend and while I brought my laptop with me, I didn’t even open it. For four days it sat untouched in my work bag. This is probably a first in the history of me starting this business that I didn’t open my laptop for that many consecutive days. It wasn’t easy, because I’m a workaholic in recovery, but I was able to do it because I planned ahead. I made a list of all the things I needed – not wanted – needed to get done or scheduled before my trip, scheduled time to get them done, planned time to get my inbox down to zero, put a vacation message on my email and let my students know I’d be offline for a few days. And then I practiced relaxing and unplugging, and I just told myself that what I wanted for the weekend was to be PRESENT. I’m usually distracted. I’m usually working in the mornings while everyone is sleeping… and then they get up and I’m like… “I just gotta finish this one thing…” and I wrap it up… but the damage is already done. My brain is in work mode for the rest of the day. I’m distracted. I’m checking my phone. I’m not fully there. I’m talking about work with my friends who don’t really want to talk about work, and I never feel recharged or relaxed. So this time, I planned ahead to do NOTHING. And it was AMAZING. And I came home relaxed and ready. And I know this might sound lame to those of you who aren’t planners or chronic overworkers, but that mini-trip was a test. Because I’m going on vacation for a week for my 40th birthday in less than 2 weeks at the time of this recording, and I don’t intend to open my laptop for 8 days. I don’t intend to be in any of my Facebook groups for 8 days, or responding to email for 8 days. I feel like I’m finally ready and prepared to take advantage of the life I’ve created…to go on vacation and choose to not work, to practice doing nothing, and to reap the benefits of giving my brain some downtime, and to just be PRESENT with my husband and our friends. Also in October, I ran the 5 Day Freebie Challenge for the third time, which is one of my FAVORITE things to do. I talked about this a little bit last month, I go live in a Facebook group nightly for 5 days, and I teach some core concepts about online marketing and give people action steps to take to get started, and then I give them feedback on their homework and stuff – basically giving them a taste of what it’s like to work with me inside my program. And at the end, I share more about the Website Marketing Lab and how people can continue to work with me after the free live Challenge is over, and then I’d give them a week to enroll, and then I’d close the doors and start walking the new group through the lessons. For the first time, I ran Facebook Ads to promote the Challenge – and I did that as a test. I wanted to see how much they would cost me, how many new signups I got, and how many of those signups actually became customers. So here are all the stats for the 5 Day Freebie Challenge: Total # of Signups: 641 Signups from Facebook Ads: 208 Signups from Email Invitation: 233 Signups from Courses Site: 298 (overlap on signups from email + courses site) Signups from Main Website: 40 Signups from Pep Talks for Side Hustlers Site: 8 Total # of Email Recipients: 600 (bounces, unsubscribes) # of people who joined the Facebook Group: 277 from 10 countries 3.1K likes, comments and reactions. 258 posts 249 Active members # of people who joined the Website Marketing Lab: 19 Conversion Percentage for all signups: 3.2% Conversion Percentage for active participants: 6.9% Total revenue in October from NEW Website Marketing Lab Signups: $4843 (doesn’t include future revenue expected over the next 9-12 months for everyone that opted for a payment plan). So this year, I spent $436 on Facebook ads, and again, I used Claire Pelletreau’s Facebook Ad Spend calculator to figure out my budget and my expected return on investment. I talked to Claire back in episode 231 all about when is the right time to use Facebook Ads in your business so you can go back and listen to that one here. The calculator NAILED IT when it came to my ad spend, the cost of my course, the cost per lead and expected ROI… But here’s the interesting thing about this launch – none of the people that signed up for the 5 Day Freebie Challenge via a Facebook Ad actually joined the program this time around. I mean, I know why… It’s because they don’t know me yet. I haven’t built the know, like and trust factor yet. Our relationship isn’t solidified. I’ll be interested to see if the people that signed up for those ads make a purchase in the future. If I didn’t dig in to my numbers deep enough, I might think that my Facebook Ads were successful. Because I could sit here and tell you that I 10x’d my return on investment for my ad spend… But I didn’t. I spent $436 on Facebook ads and not one of those signups became a customer. My Facebook Ads were successful in terms of growing my list and filling my challenge… So the next Facebook Ads test I’m going to do is run ads to my free content in between launches and see if that brings me my ideal client, and see if those people stick around on my list and eventually become a customer. But they had nothing to do with the results of my launch. I think what made my launch so successful is the relationship I’ve cultivated with my subscribers over time, and the live engagement in my challenge. Just like last month with the Web Designer Academy, I showed up in a Facebook group every night for 5 nights, interacted with everyone in there, shared everything I could share in 60 minutes a day, and answered all their questions and gave feedback on their homework.. I didn’t do a big sales presentation, and I also gave people a chance in every step of the way to opt out of learning more about the Website Marketing Lab. And just like I said with the Web Designer Academy – It’s so much easier to get customers when you’re not trying to sell. And that’s what I teach people to do inside my programs too. And I’m not knocking Facebook Ads at all, but it’s not like they’re magic. I still have to gain the trust of those people. And I’m still going to test out different strategies to see what if anything gets me results… So these Facebook Ad tests that I’ve done the past couple of months, they are just telling me that I’m on the right track. Because you wanna know the strategy that IS bringing me subscribers that turn into customers? Relationships. One of the core strategies I teach me Website Marketing Lab students how to leverage. Yep, building relationships with people that serve the audience I serve, creating opportunities to get in front of their audience and deliver value to them, and in the process getting new subscribers – but these subscribers aren’t coming to me not knowing if they can trust me… because someone they already trust is introducing them to me, I’ve shaved off a big chunk of the time it takes to build that trust vs. people that come in through Facebook Ads. It’s fascinating. And building relationships is free and priceless all at the same time. So that will continue to be my focus throughout the rest of 2019 and 2020 – instead of creating new courses or programs or products, I’ll be creating new relationships. Thanks so much for listening – and I’ll see you right here next week where I’m talking to Sylvie McCracken all about how to create a profitable side hustle as a health care professional. And if you need a website but have no idea how to get started, go to http://www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com and sign up for the 5 Day Website Challenge and learn how to create a website for your side hustle. And if already have a website and you want to learn how to get traffic to it, go to www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com and sign up for my free 6-part mini-course that’ll walk you through how to get started getting targeted traffic to your website.
Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Welcome to my September 2019 Income Report! Every month I publish an income report to take you behind the scenes of my online business and reveal exactly how much money I make, how much I spend and lessons learned along the way! Before we dive in to September’s income report, I want to share an email I got from one of my listeners because she asked a really great question that I thought some of you might also have too, so I wanted to answer it for you here in case you were wondering the same thing. She writes: “I love your income reports, they are so candid & detailed, and I always got a lot of insight from it. I’m a little confused about your August report because: you stopped your 1 on 1 consulting because you prefer the Information business model to focus, as it more scalable & less time consuming but you are selling a course that teach people to be a Web Designer in one of your course (a consultant business model) – that you stops doing it :)) Don’t you think that’s a contradicting message? As a freelance web developer myself, I really know that 1 on 1 consulting work is really time consuming. Do you think I should try to pivot to an information business model too? Thanks! Here’s my response: I LOVE this question SO MUCH, and I’m really glad that you asked. If I were ONLY doing freelance web design, and I didn’t want to do the teaching, training, mentoring and podcasting part of my business, I’d keep taking 1:1 clients all day because I FINALLY figured out how to attract my ideal clients and keep my projects running smoothly. I love my clients, they’re a blast to work with – and because I figured that out and I know how much other web designers STRUGGLE with that, I want to teach them how to do it. I have bigger goals for my business. At first, it was about making a living and being able to quit my day job… and I’ve done that. Now I want to serve WAY more people than I can with 1:1 client work alone – and that’s why I’m stopping 1:1 client work so that I can help more people. It’s not all about being able to make more money with an information model for me. It’s alsp about how many people I can reach and help with an information model. The information model isn’t right for everyone. Some people don’t WANT to create that kind of content and put themselves out there like that. And the 1:1 model isn’t right for everyone because some people need more flexibility in their schedule, etc. So to answer your question – do I think YOU should change to and information model? Only YOU can answer that question. What do you want? What’s going to get you there – bigger paydays with 1:1 web design clients, or the slower growth of an information-model? I think that a blend of both at first is GREAT because they support each other. I hope that helps – and let me know if you have any other questions, I’m an open book!!! So if you guys have any questions, that goes for you too! Reach out, I’m an open book! Okay, let’s dive in to September’s income report. Important things that happened in September: I beta-launched my free “Jumpstart Your Website Traffic” mini-course to my email list. I opened enrollment for my Web Designer Academy. I traveled to Austin for a weekend mastermind retreat with my biz besties. “The thoughts that got you here are going to be the thoughts that keep you from getting to your next goal.” Review of my goals My target revenue goal is $15,000 a month. My minimum baseline is to make around $2500 to cover my normal monthly expenses, I set aside $2500 a month for taxes, I pay myself $5,000 a month and I want to build up a reserve so that I can invest in my team, give myself a raise, have a cushion to cover the ebbs and flows of revenue and eventually cover my husband’s salary. So my minimum baseline is $10,000 a month, and as I mentioned in my income report last month, I want to hit that first $15,000 month by March of 2020. So with that, here’s how much money I made in September of 2019. Total Revenue: $11,824.34 Affiliate Income: $2470.70 Courses: $6559.64 Done For You & Consulting: $2794 Total Expenses: $2482.70 Out of the ordinary expenses: Facebook Ads to promote “How to Start a Freelance Web Design Business Masterclass” – $449 Travel to Lake Austin for Mastermind Retreat – $387 Registration for a conference I’m attending in April: $497 Which means I ran the bare bones of my business for just $1149.70 in September. Good to know in case life hits the fan, and that will also help me meet some of the goals I set at my mastermind retreat, which I’ll talk about a bit later. Get the full breakdown of income, expenses and net profit month by month here. Net Profit: $8,981.64 Biggest Lessons Learned The first thing I noticed when I pulled together my numbers for September is that my online courses earned more money than ever before in the history of my business. My passive income and courses combined accounted for 76% of my revenue this month, whereas in previous months it’s never accounted for more than 50%. And that’s so exciting!!! So I mentioned that I beta-launched my Free Jumpstart Your Website Traffic Mini Course to my email list – so let me explain what that is and why it’s so important to my overall business goals: I have a course called that Website Marketing Lab that teaches people how to market themselves online and get clients. And I only open that course for enrollment a few times a year, and how I promote it is through a live 5 Day Challenge where I go live in a Facebook group nightly for 5 days, and I teach some core concepts about online marketing and give people action steps to take to get started, and then I give them feedback on their homework and stuff – basically giving them a taste of what it’s like to work with me inside my program. And at the end, I share more about the Website Marketing Lab and how people can continue to work with me after the free live Challenge is over, and then I’d give them a week to enroll, and then I’d close the doors and start walking the new group through the lessons. And that’s great, and I love it, but I’d always get people telling me that they missed the training, that they want to enroll but now’s not the right time, or asking me when it’s going to open again because they heard about how awesome it is from a friend in the course – and I’d always have to tell them, “Sorry, it’s gonna be a few months before I open again” and they’re all bummed out because they want to get started NOW. So in working with the team over at Growth University, we came up with the idea of taking the concepts I teach in the live challenge, tweaking them a bit since I’m not there to answer questions and give the feedback like I am during the live challenge and turn it into a mini-course that’s delivered entirely via email – and at the end of the course, I invite people to who want to learn more about working with me to continue to get emails about how they can join the Website Marketing Lab. And then I have the doors to the program always open so that people don’t have to wait for my live challenges to enroll – and I can consistently bring on new students. The other reason that I’m excited about the Free Jumpstart Your Website Traffic Mini Course is that I have a new freebie I can market to help people who ALREADY have a website, and don’t need my Free 5 Day Website Challenge. That opens me up to a whole new group of people that are my ideal client. So I wrote all the content for the course, the sales emails and the sales page in August and September, and then in September I invited my current email list subscribers to sign up for the new course so that I could get a baseline: How many people that signed up for the course joined the Website Marketing Lab? Did people get what they expected out of the free mini course? Why didn’t people buy? And I can use that information to make improvements AND predict my future revenue so that I can start marketing that free mini-course on its own! And I’ll still do a live challenge twice a year because I LOVE doing those, but this way it’s a win-win – people can enroll when the timing is right for them, not me, and I can have income coming in consistently year-round, not just around launch times. The other thing that contributed to my highest-ever course income is my Web Designer Academy. I historically have opened doors to that just once a year in September and we opened again this year. And I’ve always used Facebook Ads to connect with freelance web designers who probably have never heard of me to invite them to a free training – and this year I merged all of the prior free trainings I’ve done for them into a live, 3 part masterclass series, again in a Facebook group, to teach them how to create a successful freelance web design business. At the end of those trainings, I let them know that I’m going to be sharing more information about the Web Designer Academy after the trainings are over… and the crazy thing was, this time, for the first time ever, people were asking me questions about the Web Designer Academy in the Facebook Group, on the live sessions! So this year, I spent $449 on Facebook ads, and I used Claire Pelletreau’s Facebook Ad Spend calculator to figure out my budget and my expected return on investment – and I gotta say, that calculator NAILED IT. I talked to Claire back in episode 231 all about when is the right time to use Facebook Ads in your business so you can go back and listen to that one here. But here’s the interesting thing about this launch – I had the smallest number of people ever sign up for the free training, but I sold more spots in the Web Designer Academy this year in the first 2 days than I did all of last year – and at the time of writing this income report, the launch isn’t over yet. And I think it’s because of the live engagement, seriously. I think it’s because I showed up in a Facebook group for 3 days, interacted with everyone in there, shared everything I could share in 60 minutes a day, and answered all their questions. I didn’t do a big sales presentation, and I also gave people a chance in every step of the way to opt out of learning more about the Web Designer Academy. It’s so much easier to get customers when you’re not trying to sell. And that’s what I teach people to do inside my programs too. And I’m also trying to figure out how I can let people join the Web Designer Academy all year long, and not miss out on the mentorship component – which is why I only open it once a year, because it’s really a year-long mentorship. But there are people who don’t want that, but they want lessons and strategies and templates. So I’m working with my team at Growth University on that too. But it’s gotta be a win-win for both of us, not just a way for me to sell more courses. Okay, so switching gears a little bit here… If you listened to last month’s income report, Episode 252, I shared with you that I decided to stop taking 1:1 web design clients because I spend 80% of my time on them but they only account for 50% of my revenue. In September, I’m currently working on finalizing my last 1:1 project, but I didn’t bring in any revenue from it because we’re between payment cycles. Like I said last month, I know the path forward for me and I just need to keep moving forward. And that takes me back to that quote I’d heard on a podcast all about how “The thoughts that got me here are going to be the thoughts that keep you from getting to your next goal.” For the past several months I’ve been thinking “Just keep doing what you’re doing…” and that was a great thought. It kept me focused and on track to get everything in place so that I could market my courses and grow my scalable revenue streams. But now it’s time for me to switch gears – and I talk about this all the time to students inside my Website Marketing Lab and my Web Designer Academy – it’s time for me to move out of CREATE mode into DO mode. It’s time to start marketing and getting myself out in front of my ideal customers in a bigger way. And that’s why my September mastermind couldn’t have come at a better time. Back in Episode 177, I shared with you how I went to a mastermind retreat in September of 2018 in Austin Texas with 5 strangers who became 5 of my closest friends. Since then we’ve met monthly, hold each other accountable to our goals and communicate daily via a group text and Marco Polo. We got together again this September at a gorgeous AirBNB on Lake Travis in Austin and basically had a three-day business-planning slumber party. Pretty much my dream life. The format we did this year was Friday night, we each recapped our goals from last year, what we accomplished, what we didn’t accomplish and what held us back from our goals. On Saturday, we each had a hot seat where we shared our goals for the next 5 years and what we thought needed to happen to get us there – and then we challenged each other on those goals, like, do they align with our other goals, why do we really want those goals, is that serving us, what’s holding us back from just going for it. And then on Sunday morning, we broke into groups and taught each other – because we all have a strength and skill that someone else in the group can benefit from. Sunday afternoon we had a work day where we knocked out some of those important projects that we knew would get back-burnered the moment we got home. And there was amazing food we cooked together, all planned by one of the girls who is a lifestyle and food blogger, and delicious wine, and great music, some tears and lots of laughs. So I wanted to share with you a couple of the goals that came out of the retreat for me and why I chose those goals so that if you’re thinking about what you want to work on in your side hustle next year, maybe this will give you a few ideas: Goal #1: Double my email list subscribers by September 2020. Why? Because that’s how I market and sell my online courses. I make offers to the people on my email list who have specifically expressed interest in solving the problem that my online courses solve: learning how to build a website, learning how to market themselves online, and learning how to have a successful freelance web design business. And if I want my revenue to grow so that I can hit that $15,000 a month number (and ideally all of that will come from affiliate marketing and courses with no consulting or 1:1 client work), then I need to reach more people. How? Continue doing exactly what I teach my students to do inside my Website Marketing Lab. Stop trying to build followings and relying on algorithms to connect me with my ideal clients online and start building relationships instead. But what I need to do differently than what I’ve been doing is put way more time into that. I’ve been spending a lot of necessary time shoring up my foundation to prepare for that growth, but now it’s time to grow. And that’s why the thought “Just keep doing what you’re doing…” isn’t going to get me to the next level. The thought that’s going to take me to the next level is “It’s time to show up and put myself out there.” Goal #2: Work 40 hours a week, and stop working weekends. Now that I’m not taking 1:1 client work anymore, technically I should have 80% more time… What I used to do was spend Tuesday – Friday on client work, and then Saturday – Monday on my own stuff. And if you’ve listened to this podcast for any amount of time, overworking has been a theme. It started in my side hustle days because I needed to work that much to grow the business outside of my day job. It continued through that first year after I quit my day job because I was so scared of not making enough money to pay the bills. And then it just became a habit, and a convenient excuse for not doing the other things in my life I wanted to do, but that were going to be hard. Like finally losing weight. Or a buffer to escape into when I didn’t want to think about other things. Now that I’m phasing clients out, I have no excuses. And I don’t want my whole life to be about work, even though I love what I do. And I want to see what I’m capable of when I constrain myself to 40 hours a week (I gotta make it a challenge, right?) I talked to two millionaire business owners on this podcast, Bernadette Doyle in Episode 198 and Kelly Roach in Episode 196, both who challenged me to constrain my work hours… And I did, for awhile, but then I ramped right back up. So I set a goal to reduce my work week to 40 hours, to stop working weekends, to take 4 one-week vacations a year and to not work on holidays. And part of my accountable is to tell you guys, on the podcast, of this goal and start reporting hours worked in my income reports. So you’ll start to see those in my income reports starting in October 2019. So overall, I feel like by having clarity in my business on exactly what I help people with, crystal clear goals and a step-by-step plan of action for making happen, I have no doubt I’ll reach those revenue goals… I think my biggest challenge, honestly, is going to be the 40 hour work week and taking more time off. And I want to set a good example for you guys. I don’t want you to think your dream isn’t possible because you can’t work as much as I do. You don’t HAVE to work as much as I do. I don’t have to work as much as I do! So I’ll keep you posted on that. And if you need a website but have no idea how to get started, go to https://www.peptalksforsidehustlers.com/5day and sign up for the 5 Day Website Challenge and learn how to create a website for your side hustle. And if already have a website and you want to learn how to get traffic to it, go to www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com and sign up for my free 6-part mini-course that’ll walk you through how to get started getting targeted traffic to your website.
Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Welcome to my August 2019 Income Report! Every month I publish an income report to take you behind the scenes of my online business and reveal exactly how much money I make, how much I spend and lessons learned along the way! Important things that happened in August I decided to stop taking 1:1 web design clients for at least 6 months, maybe longer. I continued working on my “Jumpstart Your Website Traffic” evergreen course. I released a private member podcast for my Website Marketing Lab Students. I moved all my websites from my good ol’ Bluehost Shared Hosting to their WP Pro Optimize WordPress hosting. I booked a photographer to get new brand photos taken for the first time since 2016! I redesigned my Website Marketing Lab, Web Designer Academy + individual courses dashboards. “The how presents itself once the commitment is made.” Corrine Crabtree Review of my goals My target revenue goal is $15,000 a month. My minimum baseline is to make around $2500 to cover my normal monthly expenses, I set aside $2500 a month for taxes, I pay myself $5,000 a month and I want to build up a reserve so that I can invest in my team, give myself a raise, have a cushion to cover the ebbs and flows of revenue and eventually cover my husband’s salary. So my minimum baseline is $10,000 a month, and as I mentioned in my income report last month, I want to hit that first $15,000 month by March of 2020. So with that, here’s how much money I made in August of 2019. Total Revenue: $12,243.69 Affiliate Income: $2381.30 Courses: $3574.39 Done For You & Consulting: $6288.00 Total Expenses: $1953.78 Get the full breakdown of income, expenses and net profit month by month here. Net Profit: $10,289.91 Biggest Lessons Learned So I’d mentioned in my July income report that I’d cleared my schedule to work on content and that I only kept a few pre-scheduled meetings and blocked my calendar from anything else being scheduled. And let me tell you, it felt like a vacation. Even though I worked every single day, weekends included, it did not feel like work at all. It was invigorating. Because I was making my own schedule, setting my own priorities, and having full control and flexibility over my days. And that’s why I started this business in the first place! If you’ve been around here any amount of time, you know that my business is about 50% scalable income through affiliate revenue and courses, and 50% time-for-money through consulting and 1:1 web design work. And back in February and March, I’d gone through Nathalie Lussier’s AccessAlly advocate training to get certified to be listed on her website as someone approved by their company to build membership sites and online courses for their AccessAlly customers. And that led to a TON of new client inquiries and opportunities to work on some really cool projects… And also a ton of drama in my mind. Because my calendar starting getting booked again with tons of meetings. I started waking up with major anxiety on all the things I had to get done that day. I started working every evening and weekend and saying no to spending time with family and friends because I needed time to get my stuff done. I’d had a few meetings with a potential client with a really big and lucrative project. They had outgrown their current course platform and wanted to move to AccessAlly. And just a side note to those of you who want to build an online course someday… Consider starting on a platform that can grow with you. Plug and play platforms like Teachable and Thinkific are great for your budget when you’re starting out, but know that you’ll pay the piper when it comes time to move because it’s not easy. There’s a LOT of moving pieces involved. Anyway, I had several meetings with this client to understand their needs and fully spec out their project and give them an estimate, and as I was calculating the number of hours it would take me, and then looking at my calendar to see where I’d fit this project in, I realized that in order to get it done in their requested timeline of 2 months one - it just wouldn’t be possible without me bringing on a team and getting them up to speed, two, I would have to press pause on my entire business for 2 months and focus exclusively on this client. And if I didn’t bring in help, I’d need to press pause on my business for 4 months. And deep down in my gut, I didn’t want to do it. But I thought, “You know, I need to still give a proposal, and I just need to put a price on it that would make it worth it to me to do it. And then I just delay my Website Marketing Lab and Web Designer Academy launches, or I can just fit my stuff in on the evenings and weekends.” And in that moment, I realized that I’d made the scalable revenue side of my business my side hustle, and prioritized the instant gratification and relief that comes with getting that first deposit from a client in my bank account. It was the same fear that prevented me from quitting my day job in the first place. Why do I keep telling myself that I want to grow the scalable revenue side of my business, the side that I love, that doesn’t feel like work, that gives me total freedom, and yet my actions are to continue to take on 1:1 clients and treat my stuff as my side hustle? So I made the decision to let this particular client know that I wouldn’t be submitting a proposal because I wouldn’t be able to meet their timeline and give their project the undivided attention it would need to be successful. I updated my sales page for my 1:1 web design package to notify people that I’m not accepting projects until February of 2020 and directed them to my Web Designer Academy Expert Directory. I updated my Acuity Scheduling availability to accept consultations to 1 hour a week (and after a conversation with Rana Rosen in Episode 249, I realized that by doing that, I left the door cracked open JUST a little bit to breaking my commitment to myself. And then I did last week’s interview with Amy Eaton, Episode 251, all about her journey from freelance photographer, trading her time for money to creating a massively successful online course teaching makers how to take photos of their products. It was an amazing interview. We talked about how you have to be crystal clear on what you want, and how we both wanted freedom more than anything else and that’s why we do what we do. And then she said that she made the decision to stop taking clients so that she could focus on growing her scalable revenue, and when she got inquiries, she’d say “I’m not taking any new clients right now…” and to me, those sounded like magical words. I’d never thought of saying them before. Because it still leaves the option open for me to make a different decision should I want to. And then she said something at the end of our interview about how she had to stop playing small. You can go back and listen to it - it was SO GOOD, but in that moment I realized that by continuing to accept 1:1 web design clients so that I didn’t have to feel the fear of maybe not making enough money - I was playing small. By not going all in on the scalable income side of my business and always having one foot in client work and one foot in my courses, I’m keeping myself safe. I’m staying small and not taking any risks. I’ve been crystal clear on what I’ve wanted from the moment I started this business, but I keep cheating on my dream every time I accept a new client project. So in August, I made a decision. I’m not taking any new clients right now. I worked on finishing up the ones I have, and I started sending new inquiries to my Web Designer Academy grads who are listed in my expert directory. And starting in September, I’m focusing exclusively on marketing my Free 5 Day Website Challenge, my free Jumpstart your Website Traffic Mini Course, and opening the doors to my Web Designer Academy twice a year instead of once, and doing consistent promotions for my Website Marketing Lab. It really feels like I quit my day job again. I’m cutting the cord and letting go of that security of the big payday to go all in on marketing myself and growing my audience. And I’m 100% confident that I have the right system, strategies and support in place to do it. So if you want to follow this new chapter of my journey, including all the wins and mistakes I make along the way, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you don’t miss an episode. Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you right here next week with my guest Kim Wensel from the Pattern of Purpose Podcast all about how to pivot to find your purpose. And if you need a website but have no idea how to get started, go to https://www.peptalksforsidehustlers.com/5day and sign up for the 5 Day Website Challenge and learn how to create a website for your side hustle. And if already have a website and you want to learn how to get traffic to it, go to www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com and sign up for my free 6-part mini-course that’ll walk you through how to get started getting targeted traffic to your website.
Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Welcome to my July 2019 Income Report! Every month I publish an income report to take you behind the scenes of my online business and reveal exactly how much money I make, how much I spend and lessons learned along the way! Important things that happened in July I set a goal to complete all course content creation for the rest of 2019. I launched the all-new 2019 Free 5 Day Website Challenge I created a companion workbook for my Free 5 Day Website Challenge. I booked two new clients Review of my goals My target revenue goal is $15,000 a month. My minimum baseline is to make around $2500 to cover my normal monthly expenses, I set aside $2500 a month for taxes, I pay myself $5,000 a month and I want to build up a reserve so that I can invest in my team, give myself a raise, have a cushion to cover the ebbs and flows of revenue and eventually cover my husband’s salary. So my minimum baseline is $10,000 a month, and as I mentioned in my income report last month, I want to hit that first $15,000 month by March of 2020. What I focused on in July So I pretty much cleared my schedule of as many meetings as possible in July so that I could give my undivided attention to creating content. And I had a massive amount of content to create. I recorded nearly 100 modules inside the Free 5 Day Website Challenge with tutorials for two hosting companies, two email service providers and three different themes - plus an entirely new dashboard and design. I wrote a 300-page companion workbook with step by step instructions that’s available for purchase inside the Free 5 Day Website Challenge that my students had been asking me to create FOR YEARS. I recorded the final 6 marketing experiments for my Website Marketing Lab students, and held a live pricing workshop for my Web Designer Academy students because I needed to update that module. I pretty much put the brakes on any meetings except for pre-scheduled client meetings, podcast interviews and web design consultations. And by the 2nd week in July I’d launched my new free 5 Day Website Challenge, and by the 3rd week in July I released the workbook, and the 4th week I spent tying up loose ends on both of those and recording those Website Marketing Lab experiments. Total Revenue: $12,291.81 Affiliate Income: $1,636.70 Courses: $5156.11 Done For You & Consulting: $5499 Total Expenses: $2850.68 Get the full breakdown of income, expenses and net profit month by month here. Net Profit: $9441.13 Biggest Lessons Learned Last month, I said my biggest lesson learned was to keep doing what I’m doing. This month, my biggest lesson learned is that when you listen to what people want and create what they ask for and not what you think they want, that it pays off. The 5 Day Challenge Workbook generated over $2000 in revenue over a weekend. That’s a huge win. And totally worth the hours I put into it. The other lesson I learned is that it’s okay to clear my schedule to work on my own stuff, and that I’m way more productive and efficient when I batch it all together like that. But the final thing I realized is that I’m actually done creating content for awhile. When I first started my business and creating the Free 5 Day Website Challenge, I launched immediately into creating a marketing course called WPOMG (Operation Marketing Genius - because I was trying to play off the BFF theme and be clever) but no one asked for it, and no one bought it. Then I changed it to the BFF Academy and added a few more courses, and I had some sales, but not many and again, it’s because I made what I thought people needed next, not what they wanted. Then I turned that into the Serious Side Hustlers membership, because I was in transition from side hustle to self employed and added a few more modules, and then I finally did a survey and found out that most of my audience didn’t think it was for them and had no idea it was about marketing. I also launched a course called “Websites That Make Money” which teaches people how to monetize from day 1, but there was still something missing because again, I created what I THOUGHT people needed next, not what they had asked for. So last year I did some surveys, and I discovered that what people want to learn is how to market themselves and be found online. And that’s exactly what every single one of my other attempts taught, but I never presented it that way. And that’s how the Website Marketing Lab was born. And THIS TIME, I actually pre-sold it and went through an entire validation process to make sure it had what people wanted to learn, and made it a step-by-step, super actionable course that wasn’t just learning a bunch of stuff and then being left on your own to figure out how to implement. And it’s doing massively well. Students are getting amazing results. And for all that time, I was in constant course creation mode. And you know what I wasn’t doing? Marketing. I talk to my Website Marketing Lab students about going from Research and Planning Mode to Create Mode to Do Mode. Research and planning is when you’re taking all the free trainings and webinars you can get your hands on, and maybe you even buy courses and actually get into them and watch the trainings. It seems like you’re doing a lot, but you’re not getting any results from it because you’re just stuck there. You never move to doing the work or making the thing. Some people move on to making the thing, but that’s where they stop. They build the website, they write all the blog posts, they set up their freebie. But they never “Launch”. They think they have to have all their ducks in a row and then they’ll plan this big “launch” but they have no audience to launch to so they get stuck in confusion and overwhelm and in create mode. Or if you’re like me, you create, create, create but you never do the work to find out if what you’re creating is anywhere close to what you should be creating. You want to skip ahead to the end where the money tree grows so you can feel the relief of everything being okay. That money tree doesn’t exist, by the way. You gotta just move from Create Mode to Do Mode. Stop working on the website, stop working on the blog posts, stop building the course that no one has asked for because you don’t have an audience yet, and start doing the work to build your audience. And Do Mode is really uncomfortable. Because now you have to put yourself out there. You have to share what you’ve created. You have to talk to other people. You worry they might say things like “Who do you think you are to teach me how to build a website? Show me your computer science degree and your extensive portfolio of uber-professional websites for millionaire business owners and MAYBE then I’ll take your free training.” But here’s the secret I’ve learned. Do Mode is where we learn the most. Do Mode is where we learn what we’re made of. It’s where we get to connect with the people we want to serve and find out how we can REALLY help them. It’s where we find out that our worst fears about ourselves either aren’t true, or that if it happens we can handle it. It’s where we stop using the excuse that we don’t have enough time or we’re overwhelmed and we just get to work. And it’s where we feel the fear and do it anyway. And Do Mode is where we get actually feedback from people who are actual potential customers and we can go back into Create Mode armed with real data about what our ideal client needs instead of creating from a place of fear and insecurity and doubt. I finally was in a Create Mode driven by data instead of “that last thing sucked, maybe this will work”. And now it’s time for me to get back into Do Mode and put it all out there. I’m Shannon, I can teach you to build a kickass website and I can show you how to market it too so that you can have whatever it is that you want out of life too. So if you’ve been stuck in research and planning mode for too long, it’s time to get to work and start creating. If you’ve been stuck in create mode, it’s time to give yourself a deadline to move into Do Mode. And if you want someone to hold your hand through all 3 phases, well, I’m your girl. Sign up for my free mini-course, “Jumpstart Your Website Traffic” at www.peptalksforsidehustlers.com/jumpstart So that’s it for my July income report. I’m getting reading to shift into full DO MODE for the rest of the year, so you’ll be seeing a lot of me! And if you or someone you know needs a website for your side hustle but you have no idea how to get started, then sign up for the free 5 Day Website Challenge where I walk you through the whole process step by step. You can sign up at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com
How She Did That : Virtual Assistants | Online Business Managers
In just eleven months, my guest today grew her income from 0 to 6-figures. Brandi Mowles is a Social Media VA turned Facebook Ad and Sales Funnel Strategist. In addition to running the service-based portion of her business, she also helps other service-based businesses scale to 5-figure months, so that they can enjoy the same financial and life freedom that she has.One of the income streams that has contributed to Brandi’s increase in revenue has been through affiliate marketing. She shows us how we can use the tools we already have, and the services we already offer, to bring in consistent, additional revenue through affiliate marketing. We talk about:How she niched down in her own business and took things a step further in diversifying her incomeHow programs she is already using help her generate additional income without feeling sleazy or overly salesyWhat platforms she uses to share about the affiliate programsOne thing you can do this week to start promoting affiliate programs and generating affiliate incomeVisit thelaunchguild.com/podcast for more info! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Welcome to my June 2019 Income Report! Every month I publish an income report to take you behind the scenes of my online business and reveal exactly how much money I make, how much I spend and lessons learned along the way! Important things that happened in June I continued the personal habits that I’ve been working on, like weekly meal prep, daily journaling and planning. I executed 4 Partnerships (Elevate, Rebel Boss + ConvertKit) I pitched no new partners (on purpose!!) I spent one full week on a project for my old employer. I recorded 4 new podcast episodes with some really awesome people. I created a new inbox + Facebook notification management strategy I continued creating the content for the Website Marketing Lab course. I started recording the content for the new Free 5 Day Website Challenge Notes I found to myself in my planner: You are booked out this week. You are booked out this week. Review of my goals When I quit my day job, I had a goal of generating $10,000 a month in revenue so that I could pay myself $5,000, have $2500 for business expenses and $2500 for taxes. Last month I hit my revenue goal, and my expenses were less than $2500 and I was so excited because I want to give myself a raise by the end of this year, and I eventually want to cover my husband’s salary. Not that he’d ever quit his job and come work with me… but hey, you never know! So there are two ways I can do that - increase my revenue, and reduce my expenses. I’m actually working on both, and my goal is to have my first $15,000 month by March of 2020. What I focused on in June So back in May, I’d opened up the doors to my Website Marketing Lab again - it’s my signature course where I teach online business owners how to market themselves and get traffic to their websites and in June, I was continuing to create tech tutorials for the tech library that’s included in the training, and to host my weekly Live Q&A where I work with the student one-on-one to help them focus, overcome obstacles and keep taking action. I also continue to contract with my former employer, which is super fun because I get to spend time with one of my former colleagues who is a blast, and we actually spent about 6 full days together on a Zoom meeting just hammering out a project together. I enjoyed it, but it took a lot of time away from all the things I do in the business, like marketing, partnerships, content creation, client work… So I totally got behind on my inbox, and Facebook notifications from all the groups I managed, and so I spent an afternoon and played what I call the Inbox Game, where I start at the very bottom and work my way up, and I can’t skip around and I have to Do, Dump or Delegate every single task in my inbox - which means if I gotta spend 15 minutes to do whatever task is in that email so I can respond, it gets done right then and there. And I win when I reach inbox zero. So I did, and then I put a system in place with my team member Laura to maintain my inbox. We set up some canned responses she can use to respond to people who ask WordPress questions to direct them to my Facebook group, and we set up colored labels so she could categorize my emails and I could easily see what emails had to-dos in them, needed my response or that she’d already handled, or that were just FYI’s. And then I scheduled from 1PM to 2PM every day to check email and respond to Facebook notifications. And let me tell you, it’s been hard picking up my phone, looking at email and not just quickly replying, but I made a rule for myself because I get sucked into email like some people get sucked into social media… And I think it’s because I have this underlying thought that “there’s money in there” and “people need me” and then down the rabbit hole I go, and before I know it, I’ve spent an hour replying to emails when I should have been working on a client project and now I’ve gotta make that time up after dinner. So that’s been working out really well, and as long as I’m committed to reserving that time every single day, my inbox is manageable. It’s when I don’t get in there for 4 days because I’ve got my head down in a project that it gives me total anxiety. I’ve mentioned to you that I’m in a program called Growth University run by Bryan Harris of GrowthTools (formerly VideoFruit) and one of the things I’m supposed to do is send one pitch a week for a partnership. I intentionally paused that in June and July, because I knew that I would have my head down updating and redesigned the Free 5 Day Website Challenge and completing the final 6 marketing experiments for the Website Marketing Lab. Once those are done - it’s pitch city in this office!! On a personal level, I’d mentioned to you guys a couple of times that I started listening to a podcast called Losing 100 Pounds by Corinne Crabtree back in January and that by May, I’d lost 17 pounds. And for the first time ever it wasn’t a struggle. I’ve done everything Corrine’s said to do on her podcast, and I’ve built some habits like weekly meal prep, planning what I’m going to eat every day before the day starts, and getting all my garbage thoughts out of my head and onto paper and working through them, and at the time I’m recording this, near the end of July, I’m 23 pounds down. So I’m really proud of that, and I finally no longer have to wonder why it is that I’m so on it when it comes to my business but never had it together when it came to my weight. Now I know why that was the case, and I took massive action to fix it, and just like in my business, I won’t stop, and I’ll reach my goal, however long it takes. And even then, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing and leveling up. So I’m telling you that, A) because I’m totally proud of myself and want to toot my own horn, and B) because there is so much life-changing information out there online - for free - and if you just take ACTION on it, you can change your life. That’s exactly why I created my Free 5 Day Website Challenge, because people that take action on that training CHANGE THEIR LIVES and I’m grateful I can contribute to that and repay the universe in a way for all the information I’ve had access to that’s changed my life, like Corinne’s podcast. Okay, enough of the mushiness. Here’s how much money I made and spent in my business in June of 2019: Total Revenue: $9368.71 Affiliate Income: $1913.10 Courses: $2354.00 Done For You & Consulting: $5101.61 Total Expenses: $2163.54 Get the full breakdown of income, expenses and net profit month by month here. Net Profit: $7205.17 Biggest Lessons Learned Honestly, it’s to just keep doing what I’m doing. Keep planning, keep scheduling realistically, keep assessing when the plan breaks down so that I can fix the problems, and just keep showing up. I’ve got big plans for the rest of 2019, and I spent the last week of June and all of July - as you’ll hear in next month’s income report - preparing the groundwork to grow. It’s hard to believe we’re already more than halfway through 2019… where do you want to be by the end of the year? What about by the end of 2020? You totally can do it, and it’s easier than you might think when you get the right systems in place - as I’ve discovered in fitness and in business. Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you right here next week! And if you need a website but have no idea how to get started, go to peptalksforsidehustlers.com/5day and sign up for the 5 Day Website Challenge and learn how to create a website for your side hustle.
I often see questions like, "How can I make as much in freelancing that I do in my corporate job," or "How can I scale my business to 7, 8, or even 10k dollar months?" I'm excited to share this interview with Brandi Mowles on how she grew and scaled her business plus how she uses affiliate income to cover her business expenses each month. We cover how to invest in your business each month, what to consider before buying a skills training, and a whole lot of other inspiring tips. Brandi did not hold back on how she got to where she is! Don't forget to check out my free workshop on How to Become A Work at Home Mom - find it here! And thanks for listening! Check out the show notes for all the links and resources mentioned in today's show. Talk to you soon! SHOW NOTES: www.MicalaQuinn.com/episode60
Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Welcome to my May 2019 Income Report! Every month I publish an income report to take you behind the scenes of my online business and reveal exactly how much money I make, how much I spend and lessons learned along the way! Important Things That Happened in May I kicked off the month with a cold. I continued some personal habits that I’ve been working on, like weekly meal prep, daily journaling and planning. I completed my profile in the AccessAlly Experts Directory (even though I don’t have my full sales page done). I booked one new Done For You client, had a consultation with another, and finished up 2 other Done For You Client Projects. I continued working on my Growth University roadmap to validate my product idea. I ran another 5 Day Freebie Challenge to promote my Website Marketing Lab course. I continued creating the content for the Website Marketing Lab course. I pitched 10 new partnerships, worked on 13 partnerships (with either phone calls or executing the partnership). I accepted applications for my Web Designer Academy Expert Directory. We decided to wait til next year to build our house. Review of Goals So if you’ve been listening to this podcast for awhile, you know that my goal used to always be $10,000 a month so that I could pay myself $5,000 – and then have $2500 for expenses, and $2500 to set aside for taxes. Then I decided to actually do a Dave Ramsey-style budget every month, just like we do in our personal finances, where I project the income that I know for sure is coming in and the expenses that I know for sure are going out – including my 2 $2500 paychecks and taxes, so that I’m much more deliberate about my expenses and that I’m not freaking out at the end of every month, worried about whether I’m gonna have enough cash to pay my paycheck and paying myself late like I had been doing for several months. Because one of the goals that I set back in September of 2018 at the mastermind that I talked about in episode 177 was to cut my expenses down to the bare minimum I needed to run my business and build up an emergency fund – which is totally in alignment with my 2019 words of the year, which are FOCUS and CONSTRAINT. And May is really the first month that I saw the fruits of all of the changes I’ve made so far in 2019. WHAT I FOCUSED ON IN MAY So you may recall from my April income report that I launched my Website Marketing Lab course for the first time back in March. It teaches you how to market your business online and get traffic to your website in authentic and algortihm-proof way. And then in my April Income report, I broke down my launch strategy and results so that you could replicate my strategy in your business. In May, I opened the doors to the Website Marketing Lab again, with the same 5 Day Freebie Challenge where I taught my method for creating a freebie that helps you grow your email list on autopilot, and then at the end, I invited anyone who wanted to continue on with the process of learning how to market that freebie to join the Website Marketing Lab. This time, it took me WAY less time to do the live challenge and the promotion, because I’d already done it once. I had everything already created, and I just had review the list of things I wanted to change after last time, then double-check everything and update dates, prices and links, and do the live trainings. This time it ran May 13 – May 17, and it was a freaking blast and a huge success! I TRIPLED my conversion rate from 5 Day Freebie Challenge signups to Website Marketing Lab customers from my March launch. And I give all of the credit for that to the product validation process that I was taught inside of the Growth University training that I told you guys about in my April Income report. I would have totally missed some key things that led me to adjust my marketing and my pricing. I also give a lot of credit to the work I’ve been doing mentally on pricing after having conversations with some of the guests on Pep Talks for Side Hustlers like Paul Klein in episode 228, and Amanda Gallinger in episode 236 – and a conversation I had with my team member Laura after she attended a one-day workshop with Boss Mom Dana Malstaff. A comment she made to me when we were chatting about pricing gave me a nudge to test a new price point, and then an article I read from Ash Ambirge called Ten Urgent Lessons Women Need to Learn About Making Money (without apology). In May, I also continued working on creating the content for the Website Marketing Lab since I pre-sold it in March and then created the content week by week. When I launched, I was able to give the new students instant access to everything to move at their own pace instead of dripping it out weekly based on necessity rather than choice! And in addition to all of that, I pitched a bunch of new potential partners, fulfilled my end of some partnerships like doing bonus trainings for people like Becca Tracey for her Uncage Your Business Course and Suzanne Proska’s Elevate, Inspire and Build an Empire Summit, and talked to a whole bunch of new guests on Pep Talks for Side Hustlers – which is like, my favorite thing to do. On a personal level, I’d mentioned to you guys that I started listening to a podcast called Losing 100 Pounds by Corinne Crabtree. I’d heard about her on one of Amy Porterfield’s podcasts, started listening to her show and everything just started clicking for me – why I wasn’t doing what I said I wanted to do for the past 20 years when it comes to my weight, how to actually get started doing it, how to build habits, how to build motivation, how to be accountable to myself. In January and February to be 100% honest, I listened to the podcast and loved what I was hearing, but I was just dabbling. I wasn’t really implementing any of the free advice I was loving. Then in March, I started actually taking action and doing what I was being taught, every single day no matter what. By May, I’d built some habits like weekly meal prep, planning what I’m going to eat every day before the day starts, and getting all my garbage thoughts out of my head and onto paper and working through them, and so far I’ve lost 17 pounds from my highest weight, which I logged at the beginning of December last year. So you might be thinking, 17 pounds in 6 months, that’s not super impressive. That’s not like all the weight loss success stories you hear about where someone loses 50 pounds in 6 months. It breaks down to 2.83 pounds a month, or .7 pounds a week… But the most important thing that I have learned throughout this process is that it’s keeping my commitments to myself, creating a daily plan and following through on the plan OR not following through on the plan and diagnosing why I didn’t follow through and what I can do differently next time – those things, not what diet plan I’m on (which I’m not on one) are what is leading to weight loss that actually finally feels EASY and POSSIBLE – and I don’t care how long it takes to reach my goal. You can apply those same principles to growing your business too. What do you need to do to make it happen? Create a realistic plan. You’re not gonna go from working 0 hours a week on your business to working 20. But 1 hour a week from 0? That’s realistic. But it doesn’t feel like it’s enough, does it. So instead you do nothing. That’s what you need to overcome. Doing what is realistic, not what you think you SHOULD do. Then once you actually create the realistic plan, commit to following through on the plan. If you do follow through, why? Why were you successful? If you don’t follow through, why? What do you need to change for next time. It’s working for me in weight loss, so I’m gonna see how it works for me in business. And I mentioned in earlier income reports that last year we bought land with the intention to build a home, and we were pre-approved what we needed to make it happen AND stay in our home, but when it got through underwriting, in order to make it happen we’d need to bring a 30% down payment to closing instead of 20% BECAUSE when you go to get a mortgage and you’re self-employed, the bank will take the average of the last 2 years of your self employment – which for me is 2017 and 2018 – and in 2017 this business was still a side hustle – and it doesn’t matter what I made in my day job since I don’t have that job anymore – and I didn’t make nearly as much as I did in 2018 when I quit my day job – or what I’ll make this year. So instead of cleaning out our bank accounts to make it happen this year, we’re going to wait til February of next year when it’s a sure thing. And I’m totally okay with that – it gives me even more time to stash cash! So with all of that, here’s how much money I made and spent in May of 2019: TOTAL REVENUE: $10,384.80 Affiliate Income: $1571.30 Courses: $4431.50 Done For You & Consulting: $4382 TOTAL EXPENSES: $2274.74 Get the full breakdown of income, expenses and net profit month by month here. NET PROFIT: $8110.06 BIGGEST LESSONS LEARNED Last month, I posted a negative profit of $224.15, which I planned for to give myself a clean slate, so it’s nice that I’m making up for it this month. I’m starting to make up for those paychecks I missed, and at some point this year, I’ll be able to take home more profit or invest in more help so that I’m really, truly focused on those revenue producing activities. I feel like I’ve got all of the pieces in place to start slowly scaling, and to grow into the person I need to become to handle the success that I dream of achieving. I think that’s like, the most important lesson I’ve come to realize overall – is that I’m not going to achieve what I want to achieve if I don’t work on becoming the kind of person who can handle it mentally and has the foundation and systems in place to support it. And now that I’m aware of that, I know exactly what to focus on to grow into that person. Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you right here next week! And if you need a website but have no idea how to get started, go to peptalksforsidehustlers.com/5day and sign up for the 5 Day Website Challenge and learn how to create a website for your side hustle.
Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Welcome to my April Income Report! Every month I publish an income report to take you behind the scenes of my online business and reveal exactly how much money I make, how much I spend and lessons learned along the way! Important Things That Happened in April We kicked off the Website Marketing Lab with a new round of students going through the 8-week program. Later in this episode I’m gonna break down my entire launch strategy for you and give you all the stats and numbers so you can see what that looked like. I started working on my Growth University Roadmap I completed the AccessAlly Advocate training. Review of Goals My goal for the month of April was quite a bit different from my typical goal of making $10,000 in revenue and paying myself $5,000 and setting aside the other $5K for taxes and expenses. And that’s because I made two pretty big investments in the future of my business in the first quarter of 2019: #1 – Becoming an AccessAlly Advocate for Nathalie Lussier’s AccessAlly membership plugin. That’s the online course plugin I use to run my Free 5 Day Website Challenge, my Website Marketing Lab and my Web Designer Academy, and it’s the online course platform that I recommend and implement for some of my clients. So basically I paid $1500 for a certification program, and I went through an 8-week training course to learn the ins and outs of the plugin. I completed the program, I’m waiting for my evaluation and then once I’m certified, I’ll be listed in the directory of AccessAlly experts for their customers who want to hire an expert to set up membership sites. I’m super excited about it because I really love the platform, I’ve seen huge success with it in my own business, and I know I’m uniquely positioned as both a web designer and someone who’s had great success with my own online courses to bring massive value to my clients. So that investment was a total no-brainer, I’m 100% confident that I’ll make it back and then some, but it was a short-term outlay of cash out of my bank account make it happen. #2 – Growth University The second big investment I made was in Growth University, a coaching program run by Bryan Harris from Growth Tools, formerly known as VideoFruit. The cost of the program at the time I enrolled was $5,000, and if you listened to my March income report, you know that I had a conversation with my husband about investing in this program, because it meant that instead of writing myself a full paycheck every month, I’d be shorting it by $1000 a month for 5 months to pay for this program, because my husband was a little iffy on me paying some random guy on the internet $5,000 for training (which cracks me up because my business is that I’m some random girl on the internet that people pay thousands of dollars to for training)! My husband is starting to understand that I do lot more than just build websites for clients I find online… Anyway, I opted for the payment plan option, but halfway through April I thought, I’d really just love to pay this off and be done with it and not drag it out, but if I do that, it means that I’ll have to short myself like a paycheck and a half. So again, I had that conversation with my husband, because really what I’m asking is for our personal bank account to pay for this training without it actually commingling our funds – knowing that I’ll do the work and do what it takes to make back the investment and then some. So we did. I paid off the Growth University investment in April, $4000. So, I think about myself in the early years of my business and my mindset around paying for coaching and training vs. my mindset now, and there’s a huge difference in my thought process – and my results. It’s not “I’m gonna spend money on this course and I hope this works for me, I hope I get the results they are promising…” It’s “I’m gonna spend money on this course, and I’m all in. I’m gonna make time for it, I’m gonna do all the steps and I have no doubt that I’ll get results because I’m not going to stop until I reach the goal I set for myself. And if I get stuck or need help, I’m going to ask for help.” Like, the way I used to think about it, it was like the results were out of my hands. And that’s why I kept thinking that things I was doing weren’t working. I’d try them once and if they weren’t a massive success, I’d declare it a flop and try something totally new. I’d think “That strategy doesn’t work, I gotta try something new.” But that’s totally not true, that’s just how I was thinking about it. And that’s not how I’m thinking about my Growth University Roadmap at all. The results are totally in my control. I’m thinking, “Everything I’ve done to this point has led me here, and my only job is to follow the plan we worked out together, and never stop until I reach my goal.” So you’ll see later on when I share my revenue and expenses that I had a HUGE outlay of expenses this month – something I may have thought about in the past as a risk that may or may not pay off. But now I think about them as a bet on myself, and those pay off for me 100% of the time. And they were planned, and I feel good about my decisions, and I am confident that I’ll reach my goals. What I Focused on in April So you may recall from my March income report that I launched my Website Marketing Lab course, which teaches you how to market your business online and get traffic to your website in authentic and algoritim-proof way. So in this income report I’m gonna break down my launch strategy and results for you so that you can do this yourself in the future. For anyone that’s new to the podcast, I have a free training called the 5 Day Website Challenge which teaches people how to DIY their website – and it teaches EVERYTHING. Like, all of the things that I do for my paying clients, I put that process together in a free training to teach people who are in the beginning stages of starting their business and really shouldn’t be investing in a professionally designed website yet how to do it themselves so they can start marketing themselves and getting clients. So I love web design, but websites are really a means to an end, and my real passion is online marketing, and creating websites that help people market themselves, and I love teaching all of those tactics to people, and showing them how to set up the tech to market themselves, because again, when you’re just starting out, you shouldn’t be hiring people to do this stuff for you because you’re testing out a lot of things, and so many things are going to change and you need that flexibility to be able to set that stuff up and make those changes yourself. So people sign up for my 5 Day Website Challenge, and they really just think of me as the tech girl, you know, their WordPress BFF. And the mistake that I’ve made in the past is to just jump straight from “here’s a free training to teach you how to build your website,” to “want to pay me to learn how to market yourself?” and there’s a disconnect. They either don’t look at me as their go-to marketing person, or they don’t realize that they have to market themselves because they think having a website will automatically bring them traffic. So I needed to do something to bridge that gap, the gap from having a website to actually getting traffic to the website, and the gap from thinking of me as your website person to thinking of me as your online marketing person. So that’s why my whole Website Marketing Lab launch strategy starting out with another free training called 5 Day Freebie Challenge where I taught my method for creating a freebie that helps you grow your email list on autopilot, and then at the end, I invited anyone who wanted to continue on with the process of learning how to market that freebie to join the Website Marketing Lab. So here’s how it worked – and I teach this strategy in depth in the free 5 Day Freebie Challenge – which by the way I’m actually hosting another free 5 Day Freebie Challenge on May 13 if you want to get in on it – just go to www.wp-bff.com/freechallenge or click on the link at the top of the show notes to save your spot. First, I have a bit of an advantage because I already have an email list, and last year I did a survey asking them what their biggest struggle has been when it comes to their business and what they want to learn next – and there were 2 things that kept coming up: how to market myself and how to get traffic. And I know that the answer to how to market yourself and how to get traffic is not what people typically think it is, like search engine optimization or blogging or social media. Those are tactics, not a strategy and I think that’s why people get so frustrated is because they go straight to tactics without having all the right pieces of the strategy. The answer to how to market yourself is building an email list, and the way you build an email list is by giving away valuable free content in exchange for an email address. And the way you get traffic is by sharing that free thing online with an irresistible call to action that makes people want to go to your website and get the free thing. And so I knew that what was going to move people from having a website and not getting traffic to having a website that gets traffic is to teach them how to create the freebie that they need to be able to execute all of the marketing tactics that are supposed to bring you traffic. And I also knew that the freebie is just one part of the overall equation, so I could deliver massive value by teaching them how to do that part for free, and then the natural next step for anyone that wanted to then learn how do all the tactics to actually get that freebie in front of their ideal clients would be to join me in the Website Marketing Lab. And if they didn’t join me, that’s okay too, they walked away learning a ton and they might decide to join the next time around, or tell other people about it. So to put together the free training, I outlined the 5 things people needed to learn to create their freebie, and then I decided I wanted to deliver the training live in a Facebook Group where I could interact with people and answer their questions instead of doing via email or prerecording it. I also created a workbook, because I wasn’t just teaching them concepts, I wanted the training to be really actionable, and I wanted them to walk away with something tangible – because I really wanted them to get a taste of what they’d be doing inside of my paid program. So here are the stats: I had 2500 people on my email list at the time. Starting about a week and a half before the 5 Day Freebie Challenge I sent out an email inviting my list to the free training. I sent three more invitations over the course of a week to anyone that didn’t sign up. I added a HelloBar across the top of my WP+BFFs site and my courses site so that any visitors there would see it and sign up. I totally forgot to put it on my Pep Talks for Side Hustlers website. I posted about it on Instagram a couple of times, and I created a pin on Pinterest about it, and I posted it in my Facebook Group a few times. And I mentioned it on a few podcast intros leading up to the start date. I didn’t run any ads for the training at all. I had 600 people sign up for the free training. So then, when people signed up, they got an email letting them know the details of the Challenge and what to expect, that I’d be sending them a workbook the day before the Challenge, and to join a special Challenge-only Facebook group that I created just for the Challenge. Then I’d go live each night at 7PM, and I’d send out the replay to them the next day if they couldn’t join me live. Out of the 600 that signed up, 350 actually joined the Facebook group, and I had about 40 to 50 people join me live every night, which was SUCH a blast. I taught my concept for 20 minutes or so, and then I spent the last 40 minutes answering questions. And by doing it that way, I learned a ton about what their needs were, and when it came time to invite them to join me in the Website Marketing Lab at the end, it was a natural next step for me to make the offer because I knew I was right on track, I wasn’t doing a hard sell, i didn’t feel like an informercial. Throughout the Challenge I let people know that on the last day I was going to let them know how to continue working with me, so it wasn’t like a bait and switch, and then I talked about the Website Marketing Lab at the end of Day 5, and then I also did a followup email sequence to everyone that signed up letting them know what kind of results they could expect by following the marketing roadmap I created for them inside the Website Marketing Lab. So out of 600 people, I had 8 new people join the program at $297 for the first month, and then $49/month ongoing – and that revenue was actually part of my March income report, it’s the $49 ongoing that you’ll see in this income report. And that’s actually in line with what I was expecting based on the price of the program. And then after it was over, I surveyed everyone who signed up but didn’t purchase and asked them what influenced their decision to NOT buy, and over 95% of respondents said that they wanted the program – and that their decision to NOT buy wasn’t motivated by price, which totally validated that I’m marketing it effectively, and that my price isn’t too high. So the key takeaways here are that when you can do something to provide massive value to your ideal client, but that’s also going to give you tons of insight on whether you’re on the right track or not, that’s always a good use of your time. I’m about to break down the revenue numbers for you in a sec, but I want to point out that when I sold the Website Marketing Lab, I hadn’t created any of the content yet. I did that for a few reasons – one, I’ve created programs before that no one purchased, and it’s a total waste of time. Two, doing a Live Challenge and interacting with the people I was going to offer my course to BEFORE I built it helped me make sure that I was creating exactly what they needed, instead of what I thought they needed. And three, it’s totally keeping me accountable to getting all the course content done, because that’s what I spent all my time on in April, was recording the modules I’d outlined, and setting them up in AccessAlly and releasing them to my students, week by week. And like I said, I’m opening up the program again in May and testing a different pricing structure – with the added bonus for new students that all the content is done so they can work at their own pace! I’m also working on some new techniques to validate the pricing and my offer as part of Growth University so I can get that dialed in – because as those of you that listen to the podcast, I’m always worrying about my pricing. But when your students tell you they can’t believe what they’re getting for the price and that they would have gladly paid more, that’s a sign that you’re on the right track! So with all of that, here’s how much money I made and spent in April of 2019: TOTAL REVENUE: $6529.44 Affiliate Income: $1973.80 Courses: $1891.80 Done For You & Consulting: $2664.64 TOTAL EXPENSES: $6753.60 Get the full breakdown of income, expenses and net profit month by month here. NET PROFIT: -$224.15 BIGGEST LESSONS LEARNED This is the first time I’ve posted a negative profit, but I totally expected it, so it didn’t throw me into a panic like it might have had I not started actually planning out a monthly budget before the month started, Dave Ramsey style. I have an extra $4500 in expenses in April due to Growth University and AccessAlly Advocate training, which I totally planned on and knew I wouldn’t be paying myself for the second half of April – but what I didn’t plan for is a Done For You web design client not paying their invoice on time, which is why I have negative profit in April. I did get that payment, just not until May. So right now, I feel like I have a total clean slate. Everything is paid for, I’ve actually reduced my baseline expenses significantly, which you’ll start to see in my May income report which means I get to take home more profit, or bring in more help or whatever needs to happen as my partnerships start to bear fruit and my email list grows and I get more and more successful students coming out of the Website Marketing Lab and Web Designer Academy, and I start booking more lucrative Done For You projects. So my biggest lesson learned this month – and it’s one that I know I’ve mentioned before but it keeps proving itself to be true – is that how I think, and what I believe about what is possible, is 100% responsible for my results. It’s what drives my action or inaction. It’s not that I signed up for this coaching program or that certification program, it’s that I believe that I will do what it takes to take action on what I learn inside of those programs and that I know I won’t stop until I’ve reached my goal, and that I believe that it’s possible for me. And so if you can start cultivating that belief in yourself too, that you’ll never stop trying until you get what you want, then your success is guaranteed. So if you want to sign up for my next 5 Day Freebie Challenge, even if you’re listening to this months after it was published, head on over to www.wp-bff.com/freechallenge and save your spot in the next one – I’ll teach you everything I can pack into 5 daily lessons about how to create the kind of freebie that helps you market yourself online. And if you need a website but have no idea how to get started, go to peptalksforsidehustlers.com/5day and sign up for the 5 Day Website Challenge and learn how to create a website for your side hustle.
In this special episode of Marketing Mantra, I talk to our podcast's very first guest, Ilya Lyubimov. Ilya is an affiliate manager of the SEMrush Affiliate Program; he's in charge of developing affiliate partnerships and launching new projects. SEMrush is my go-to marketing tool and their affiliate program has been a huge source of side income for me. Ilya has been my affiliate manager for over a year, and he's been one of the most proactive affiliate managers I've had the pleasure of working with. His ideas and recommendations have helped me skyrocket my affiliate income from SEMrush. For more details on my affiliate earnings, click here. In this Q&A session, Ilya shares his views on the latest SEO trends and tells us what's next for SEMrush. He also shares his thoughts on what makes SEMrush so unique and why the company has been able to dominate the SEO software space for so long. He also shares some really cool affiliate marketing tips; so be sure to take notes. Really excited to have Ilya on the show and I hope you find the insights in this episode useful. -=-=-=-=- Resources discussed in this episode: SEMrush - Click here to visit their website 1-month free trial to SEMrush PRO (worth $49.97) - Click here BeRush - SEMrush's affiliate program SEMrush Traffic Analytics - SEMrush's latest traffic analysis tool -=-=-=-=- Follow us on social media: Facebook: facebook.com/99signalsblog Instagram: instagram.com/99signals Twitter: twitter.com/99signalsblog YouTube: youtube.com/c/99signals -=-=-=-=- Visit https://www.99signals.com for more insights on SEO, blogging, and marketing. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sandeep-mallya/message
Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Welcome to my March Income Report! Every month I publish an income report to take you behind the scenes of my online business and reveal exactly how much money I make, how much I spend and lessons learned along the way! My March Goals So in my February Income Report, I talked about how instead of just saying I want to make $10,000 so I can pay myself $5K and have $2500 for taxes and $2500 for expenses and then being frustrated every month when it didn’t pan out that way because it pretty much never does, I decided to plan ahead for a realistic month in detail instead. Just like I’ve been doing for years with our personal budget, Dave Ramsey style. Write down all the known expenses, think about what other expenses might come up based on what I’ve got planned for the month, and then write down all the known income that’s coming in that month and see how it all shakes out. And then I know if I need to do any extra promotion of my products or do some extra outreach to book a new web design client instead of just crossing my fingers and hoping that it all works out! I mean, I wasn’t actually doing that, I had revenue goals and expense targets, but honestly they always left me feeling totally out of control. So I still have revenue goals, and it’s still $10,000 a month now, with the goal to have that up to $15,000 by the end of the year, but now, I feel like I’m in control from the start of the month, and I feel so much more confident. And just like my food plan and my exercise plan, if it’s not on the plan, it can’t just be added willy-nilly. The Shannon that sat down and planned out this month had her reasons why she decided this all ahead of time, and it’s my job to honor that plan. If you want to learn more about this planning mindset, go check out the podcast Losing 100 Pounds with Phit N Phat – even if you’re not into weight loss, seriously, its really really good and you can just take everything she says about weight loss, substitute business or marketing and she’ll blow your mind wide open. What I Focused on in March In March, I kicked off the month speaking at the Thrive Conference for bloggers, which was so amazing. I got to see all the girls in my mastermind again and spend time with them, I got to present on Google Analytics and what metrics to shoot for when monetizing your blog, and I got to meet some of the listeners of my podcast and 5 Day Website Challengers in person, which is always so awesome and humbling every time I meet someone in person who I’ve helped build a website and start a business. Also in March, I launched the latest iteration of my online course, The Website Marketing Lab. I kicked it off with the free 5 Day Freebie Challenge where I taught my method for creating a freebie that helps you grow your email list on autopilot. Then after that 5 Day Challenge I opened up enrollment into the Website Marketing Lab, which teaches how to actually market yourself online in a way that feels authentic, how to find your ideal clients online, get them back to your website and eventually turn them into your best customers. My big focus in March was creating all the content for the 5 Day Freebie Challenge, marketing it and getting as many signups as possible. And I’ll break down my launch strategy for you with all my numbers and results in a future episode. The other thing I focused on in March were the few open Done For You client projects I had open. I shifted around my yoga schedule so that I’d have bigger uninterrupted blocks of time to work on those projects, and I moved as many meetings as possible to start at 3PM or later so that I could have more uninterrupted time during that day to focus on getting that work done as fast as possible. Also, the fruits of my Partnership Accelerator labor were totally paying off in March because I did a TON of guest interviews for this podcast, and you’ll hear those all throughout the month of April! You may have noticed that I’m up to two episodes a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays, because I’ve had so many guests on the show if I spread them out weekly you wouldn’t get to hear from them til June – and they are SO GOOD, you guys, I don’t want you to wait to learn from all of my guests! Finally, I made the decision to continue on with the Growth Tools Team after the Partnership Accelerator, and I made a really big decision to invest in Growth University. And when I say I, I really mean we, because it’s one of those investments that’s more than just a normal online course, and I felt like rose to the level of having a conversation with my husband about it, because it’s very possible that in the short term I might have to pay myself a little less each month to cover it. So of course I took him to his favorite place to get craft beer, and then imagine telling someone who understands what you do for a living on like a very surface level – just like I know what he does for a living but I have no real grasp of the details of it – that you want to pay some guy you met online thousands of dollars to help you grow your business. So I’m answering questions like, “Okay, who is this guy?” “Bryan Harris from VideoFruit.” “How do you know him?” “Well, I heard him a few years ago on a podcast that I listen to with this other guy, Pat Flynn who’s the one that gave me the idea to start this business in the first place? I heard him on Pat’s podcast and I started following him, and taking action on all of his free advice and every single thing he ever recommended worked really well for me. So then I joined his Partnership Accelerator in January and that’s why I’ve been having so many interviews with guests on my podcasts and collaborating with all these people, and they invited me to their coaching program and I really, really think it’s going to be the thing that takes me to the next level.” And then he gives me like a long stare and is like, “I trust you, but I don’t want you to pay for it all up front just in case it turns out to be a scam.” And you guys, in that moment I felt such a wave of relief. Because this is unlike any other business coaching or program I’ve done. So when I enrolled, I had to fill out this like, super comprehensive form telling them everything about me, my business, my customers, my pain points, my goals and my dreams, my numbers, my revenue, and then they went away for a couple weeks and reviewed all of my stuff, and then came back to me with a personalized step-by-step roadmap of all the steps I need to take to reach my goal. Like, I don’t have to guess anymore. I don’t have to wonder if I’m doing the right things anymore. I know exactly what to focus on and where to put my time in order to get where I want to be. And the other really cool thing is that all of my students inside the Website Marketing Lab are getting the benefit of me going through my own process as I lead them through theres. It’s pretty awesome and I’m very excited about it – so I’ll keep you posted in future income reports. Total Revenue: $11,846.18 Affiliate Income: $1815.80 Courses: $5098.00 Done For You & Consulting: $4932.38 Total Expenses: $4714.32 Get the full breakdown of income, expenses and net profit month by month here. Net Profit: $7131.86 Biggest Lessons Learned As I reflect on March, for I think the very first time, my online course revenue exceeded my 1:1 client project revenue, and that, my friends is SUPER exciting. That is totally my plan. I’m not abandoning my 1:1 client work, but I want the majority of my income to be from scalable sources and be consistent, recurring revenue every month that I can count on. And so I think I’m definitely on the right track. And like I mentioned last month how I felt like I was really getting behind, paying myself late and from money that’s really next month’s money to pay paychecks this month, that cash flow is easing up a bit. I’m still working a lot of hours simply because I’ve decided to take on all the client work instead of outsourcing so that I can improve my cash flow, because sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, right? But the difference between now and last year when I burnt myself out overworking is that I’m making time for me. I’m working out every day, I’m getting good sleep, I’m drinking lots of water, I’m planning my healthy meals ahead, I don’t feel super stressed out all the time. The planning method my business coach Vicki Fitch taught me – I feel like it’s finally become second nature. I’m planning ahead, I’m showing up like a boss, I don’t always feel behind and like everything’s on fire, and I have a solid plan and roadmap ahead of me. And we’re only 3 months into 2019! My Website Marketing Lab launch was so much fun, you guys. Instead of doing a webinar, or just doing it all via email, I did a Facebook Challenge where every night for 5 nights I went live in a special facebook group just for this promotion, and I taught something about how to create a shareworthy freebie that helps you grow your email list on autopilot – and the engagement and participation I had in that group was like, mindblowing! It was a total blast. And then after those 5 days, I opened up the cart, continued giving feedback and teaching in the Facebook group and then anyone that wanted to continue with the next steps in the program joined the Website Marketing. It was one of the first programs and promotions, aside from the Web Designer Academy that just felt, right. Like, not everything went right, I messed some things up and whatever, but I felt totally solid in the value I was delivering and that’s in the program. And I’ve honestly always felt a little shaky on that with the other programs I’ve done, I think because I hadn’t framed a clear outcome for my students. And in the Website Marketing Lab we have a clear goal – your first or next 500 email subscribers – with really actionable steps to get you there. I can’t wait to do it again in May! But like I mentioned earlier, I’ll do a whole separate episode for you breaking down my whole launch process. So that’s it for my March income report, and I’ll see you right here next week where I’m talking with Sarah Morgan of XOSarah all about how to experiment your way to success.
Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Welcome to my February Income Report! Every month I publish an income report to take you behind the scenes of my online business and reveal exactly how much money I make, how much I spend and lessons learned along the way! IMPORTANT THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN FEBRUARY I wrapped up Growth Tools’ Partnership Accelerator Program. I finished the migration from Infusionsoft to ConvertKit. I accepted a couple of small projects… I joined the AccessAlly Advocate Program I changed the 5 Day Website Challenge back from free for 30 days only to always free, bundled in the Website Copy Guide with the upgrade & raised the price. I started going live on my Facebook page every week. I booked a ton of guests on Pep Talks for Side Hustlers I booked a speaking gig at the Thrive Conference for Bloggers I took a girls trip to Colorado I announced the Web Designer Academy Expert Directory I started listening to a podcast called Losing 100 Pounds, recommended by Amy Porterfield, and it’s been a total game changer. Notes I found to myself in my planner: You are booked out this week, do not accept any more work. You are killing it this week!!!! You are booked out this week and next week. Do not accept any more work. My plan for vacation: let clients know ahead of time, put up an out-of-office, forward support requests to Laura. You are booked out this week. REVIEW OF MY GOALS Last month, I shared with you my revised income goals, which I’ll recap for you here… But before I do, I want to share with you something that I learned from listening to the Losing 100 Pounds podcast. The host of that podcast, Corrine Crabtree, talks about how the most important skill to develop when it comes to weight loss is doing what you say you’re going to do. And that requires two things: creating a plan, and then following that plan. And what I noticed about myself when I first started listening to her is that I resisted creating a plan for what I would eat and how I would exercise every day. It’s the same thing I did back in the day when my business coach wanted me to plan out my months, weeks and days. I wanted freedom, and felt like planning was stifling my freedom. Same thing with food. I didn’t want to “lose my freedom” But then when I committed to taking my biz coach’s advice and start planning, another interesting thing happened: The plan I created for myself could only happen in a perfect world, with all the stars aligned. I could never, ever accomplish my goals every single day. There’s nothing like never ever being able to reach your goals every single day to make you feel super frustrated all the time and compel you to make decisions that bring you instant relief, whether in business or with food. So as I look back on what I declared to be my January income goals, I see that I created my perfect, stars must be aligned and I must be all powerful to control the universe around me, unattainable plan. Which is: Pay myself first – $5,000 Increase my revenue from Courses & Done for You projects by $2500/month to cover potential end of contract. Build a cushion in my business savings of $10K ($833/month) $2500 Expenses $1500 Taxes Because when I look back at the past year of expenses, I’ve rarely capped them at $2500. Every single month is a little bit different. Increasing my revenue by $2500 a month ain’t gonna happen overnight. And that savings cushion I’d like to build, setting aside $833 a month? It’s already the end of March as I write this income report and it hasn’t happened for the past two months. So from this income report on, instead of creating one, big perfect goal and practicing being frustrated when I don’t hit the target every month, instead, every month I’m going to create a plan for revenue and expenses based on past history and reality. Yes, it’s important for me to pay myself first. And it’s really important for me to pay my quarterly taxes, and pay all of my expenses and never go into debt. But it’s also important for me to practice creating a REALISTIC plan and follow that plan instead of creating a PERFECT plan knowing it’s never gonna happen the moment I close my laptop. So I do have a general revenue goal in the short term of $10,000 a month, and in 12 months I’d like to have that bumped up to $15,000 a month. And I’ll share with you exactly how I plan to accomplish that in future income reports. WHAT I FOCUSED ON IN FEBRUARY I designated February as a List Building Month, and I also focused on completing the Infusionsoft to ConvertKit Migration, and I did LOTS of client work, lots of podcast interviews and lots of pitching. TOTAL REVENUE: $9197.15 Affiliate Income: $1401.70 Courses: $2269.00 Done For You & Consulting: $5,526.45 TOTAL EXPENSES: $3289.57 Get the full breakdown of income, expenses and net profit month by month here. NET PROFIT: $5907.58 BIGGEST LESSONS LEARNED So when I added up all the numbers for February and saw that I made around $9000, it actually surprised me because February just felt really, really tight cash flow wise. Because if you look at the numbers, revenue minus expenses, paying myself first my standard paycheck amount of $2500 twice a month and then setting aside money for taxes, I’m actually just robbing Peter to pay Paul, as my mom would always say when we were growing up and she would sit at the dining room table to do the bills. I totally recognize that I’m paying my paychecks to myself for the prior month when the cash comes in the current month. That, my friends, is not sustainable, and trust me, I see what the future holds if I continue on this path. While I’ve cut some big expenses that weren’t giving me returns, I also totally recognize that I’ve made some investments in my business that take cash out of my pocket in the short term that I expect to get a return on in the future, including two copywriting courses that have been total game-changers for my marketing copy for my paid programs and sales pages and have already given me a return, and the AccessAlly Advocate Program – which is a certification program for Nathalie Lussier’s AccessAlly Membership Site & Online Course plugin, which in my experience is like, hands down the best membership PLATFORM, not just plugin, out there if you’re serious about generating revenue through courses and membership sites. The certification is $1500, and once I complete the certification I’ll be listed in their expert directory as someone certified to build sites with AccessAlly for all her awesome clients that want it done for them – plus I’ve totally got other plans to leverage that certification. So I had to make a decision in February when I booked another 1:1 Done For You project that I was going to do the job myself and not outsource any of the work so that I could keep the fees and stabilize my cash flow. And for a couple of other small projects that I’d taken on, that I mentioned in last month’s income reports, I decided that I needed to just put in the extra hours to finish up the work myself so I could keep the fees and make ends meet. So I’m back up to around 60 hours a week at the moment… and if you recall back in episode 199 with millionaire business owner Bernadette Doyle who challenged me to start tracking my time and to figure out how to work 25 hours a week if I really wanted to work less… I’ll just say this – I’m doing what I need to do at the moment to get where I want to be, and I don’t expect this to be a long-term overwork burnout situation like I found myself in last year…. It’ll be interesting to review this income report in a few months to see how this pans out!! And I expect my cash flow to improve starting in April. Something that was also weighing on my mind in February was getting my taxes done! I had this really unsettling feeling all year that I wasn’t paying enough in quarterly taxes, being that it was my very first year of self-employment combined with all of the tax code changes that were coming into play. So I was really eager to get everything together and do my taxes. We’ve always done our own taxes which when I tell people that they find it alarming or crazy, but fun fact – back in my early 20’s, I sold Mary Kay cosmetics. I was terrible at it, but that’s beside the point. We had the opportunity to get extensive training on bookkeeping and taxes, recordkeeping, keeping business and personal finances separate and filling out our schedule C at tax time and what’s deductible and what’s not… I feel like that education on the administrative side of having your own business was super valuable, and even though network marketing and MLMs are not for me, I’m really grateful for having learned that stuff and its really benefitted me now. So anyway, we did our taxes and I was super relieved to discover that I pretty much hit my quarterly estimates on the nose and I didn’t owe anything more for 2018, and now I’ve got a full year on my own to look at as a benchmark for what I need to set aside in 2019. We’re also building a house. We bought 4 acres in the country last May, and having our taxes done was crucial to figuring out timing of when we can get a construction loan to start building. Another thing about being self-employed is that lenders look at the past two years of business income (not revenue, but what I paid myself after taxes and expenses). For my husband, it’s like, oh, just bring us your last two pay stubs. So I’m not sure that my business income from 2017, when my biz was still a side hustle and I had a TON of expenses paying subcontractors to do things I didn’t have time to do because I was working full time – combined with 2018 is enough to get a construction loan/mortgage. So stay tuned to find out if we’re breaking ground in 2019 or if we’re waiting til 2020. The really exciting thing about February was all the guests that I had the opportunity to interview on this podcast, and those interviews are being released every week on the podcast. I’m talking to so many inspiring entrepreneurs that energize me and keep me excited and engaged and moving forward and have such good advice not just for you guys, but for me too! So that’s been a blast. And finally, I took some time off to spend a long weekend in a cabin with two of my best friends that I’ve known since I was 8 years old – and if you’re keeping track, that means we’ve been friends for 31 years. And each of us brought some of our friends and the six of us just had an awesome time talking, cooking, laughing, and relaxing. Work hard play hard, right? So as I look back a year to how I felt this time in February 2018 vs. now, I think I feel just as determined as ever to continue to grow my business. But it’s different now, one year in. My determination isn’t clouded by fear anymore. It’s backed by confidence. I have a lot of experiences and data from the past year to look at to help me make decisions this year. But most importantly, I believe in myself just as much as I did back when I started my side hustle. I knew from the moment I started that I would make it my full time job. And I did. Maybe not as fast as I wanted to and maybe not the way I thought it would, but I made it happen. And I also know that I’m going to get my cash flow under control, get ahead and meet that next goal. And I’m okay with not knowing exactly how or when. Certainty is a wonderful feeling.
Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Welcome to my January Income Report! Every month I publish an income report to take you behind the scenes of my online business and reveal exactly how much money I make, how much I spend and lessons learned along the way! IMPORTANT THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN JANUARY I started Growth Tools’ Partnership Accelerator Program. I started the migration from Infusionsoft to ConvertKit. I created the Website Copy Guide I completed all the content for my Web Designer Academy I booked two new Done For You clients I continued tracking my time in Toggl Notes I found to myself in my planner: You are fully booked this week. “I have another commitment” *What can I delegate?” *You can handle the busy schedule this week. Hold tight to your mornings and coach yourself through the overwhelm. Make time for self-coaching, Partnership Accelerator, ConvertKit Migration. You are booked out this week. Do not accept any more work. You are booked out this week, do not accept any more work. REVIEW OF MY GOALS Now that I have a year of self-employment behind me, I’m revising my income goals. In 2018, my income goals were: $5000 – Income to cover my old paycheck. $2500 – Expenses $2500 – Taxes In 2019, my income goals are: Pay myself first – $5,000 Increase my revenue from Courses & Done for You projects by $2500/month to cover potential end of contract. Build a cushion in my business savings of $10K ($833/month) $2500 Expenses $1500 Taxes WHAT I FOCUSED ON IN JANUARY I designated January as my Prep and Build month. TOTAL REVENUE: $9811.56 Affiliate Income: $1804.00 Courses: $2760.75 Done For You & Consulting: $5264.81 TOTAL EXPENSES: $4043.80 Get the full breakdown of income, expenses and net profit month by month here. NET PROFIT: $5767.76 BIGGEST LESSONS LEARNED The biggest lesson I learned in January is that you just gotta ask for what you want, focus on delivering value and results, and be totally okay with a no. This came up for me in two ways in January. I mentioned earlier that I joined Bryan Harris’s Partnership Accelerator, which is a 4-week intensive workshop all about finding potential partners and pitching them. I joined it because I’m focusing on growing my email list this year, and collaborations with people who serve a similar audience are one of the best ways to do that. And I’ve known this for quite awhile. But something has been holding me back from doing it – it’s like that resistance I mention back in episode 22, like how I know I need to stick my neck out and do something based on not wanting to do it. And putting my money where my mouth is always works for me. If I pay for something, I’m going to show up and do the work and get over my crap. So that’s what I did. And by the end of 4 weeks, I’d gone from feeling my heart race and my palms sweat before hitting the send button on my first pitch to a potential partner to feeling like I knew the perfect thing to say to get a response and start building a relationship. And from having 0 partnerships because I was scared to ask – to getting 5 yesses, 3-ask-me-laters and 2 non-responses (yet). What I’ve learned about myself is that I can get really wrapped up in being worried about what people think about me. So instead of making it all about me and my self worth, I’m looking at all of this as an experiment. I’m going to try a bunch of things – coming from a place of integrity and delivering value and results first – and analyze the results and see what works and what doesn’t instead of thinking that I’m either amazing or awful depending on the results. The second way being willing to ask for what I want came up for me in January is related to billing for my time for small web design projects. I’m looking at an uncomfortable reality now that I’m tracking my time with Toggl… And when I write uncomfortable, I mean, I’ve got a pit in my stomach and tightness in my chest as I write this. Because I have to admit this to myself, and I’m worried about what you’ll think of me. But here goes… Last month, I mentioned in my income report how small projects didn’t make the cut of services I’m offering. Yet here it is, mid-way through February as I’m writing this income report and my planner is dotted with small projects that I’ve said yes to. All fine and good, but here’s what I discovered after looking at my Toggl time-tracking reports: Example: I spend an hour talking to a potential new client about a project, give them client an estimate of 2 hours to complete the project, send over an invoice, it gets paid and I reserve a spot for the work on my schedule. I spend another hour gathering what I need from the client to work on it and planning the work, and then spend 2 hours working on it. Another hour meeting with the client to review the work, and then another hour of revisions, and another 30 minute meeting to wrap things up. I’ve charged the client for 2 hours for the actual development work, and I’ve spent over 4 times that much on the project. So I’m actually charging only ¼ of my hourly rate – which is less than what I was making at my day job. No wonder I’m so “busy”. And when I outsource any overflow work to subcontractors and pay them, I actually make close to nothing. In January alone – just look at the numbers – they don’t lie. $2369 in the door in Done For You projects, $2099 out the door to subcontractors. Why am I doing this? Why am I not charging for my time? Like, I’m not even trying to and being told no. Here are all the thoughts that go through my head: What if people can’t afford my rates? I feel bad charging that much. All of this is easy for me, it’s like second nature to me, I can’t really charge that much, can I? Shoot, I said it would take 2 hours but I totally didn’t anticipate X, now I have to eat that, don’t I? It’s not their fault I estimated wrong. I don’t have time to do this, but I said yes so I need to outsource it – I’m going to make $0 on this job. Who am I to charge X for this? And this isn’t a new problem for me. This is the exact mindset struggle I had when I first started freelancing, and it pops up for me ALL THE TIME. And for my full web design package? I FINALLY dialed that in and made it profitable. And it took A LOT of mindset work. But there’s still plenty of work for me to do there because I provide a lot of unpaid support after the project is over. And it’s not like my clients balk at paying me – I just don’t ask them to. Why am I afraid to charge for the time I’m actually spending on these projects, not just the development time? And why don’t I value my skillset? Like, if I needed to have surgery, wouldn’t I want the surgery to feel easy and like second-nature to my surgeon? Wouldn’t I want to pay for that level of experience? Yes, I realize I just compared WordPress to surgery, but you know what I mean… Here’s what I know about myself – I will deliver results. No matter what. One of my WordPress colleagues said recently, “I can never leave a mystery unsolved.” And I can’t even describe how much that statement resonated with me. And I also know that with WordPress, there’s almost always a way to solve any business or tech problem. But I’m terrible at estimating the amount of time it will take me. Wait, scratch that. That’s not true. I’m terrible at telling the truth about the amount of time it will take me, because I’m afraid to say those bigger numbers out loud. What if you tell me it’s too much? What if you yell at me? What if we have to NEGOTIATE!!? I tell my Web Designer Academy students: “Think about how long it will take you to do this, and then double it. And that’s what you charge. And then the first time you do it, track your time because you may be totally off, and that’s okay you’ll know for next time.” And then when it comes to my own projects, I don’t take my own advice!! And to be 100% transparent, it’s because I think my hourly rate is too high and if I have to double it then my clients won’t be able to afford me and then they’ll be left hanging. Yeah, like I’m that important. And like I’m the only one in the world that can help them. Ugh. I told you… you might not like me after reading this article. But those are the for-real thoughts that pop into my head! Sometimes I feel like I’m just bad at business. And it’s easier to sell courses and memberships and large packages than have to address this problem. Anyway. This has been a problem for me for over 3 years, and I’ve done nothing about it. Except complain about it in my head. I’ve blamed my old day job. I’ve blamed my clients (I know, ridiculous bc I never gave them the opportunity to pay me more money). I’ve blamed my dog (I mean, she needs walks but dang it I don’t have time I’ve packed my schedule too full). I’ve waffled on whether I want to accept more small projects. I say I’m done – and then I say yes to the next person that asks. Because I like helping people, and I want you to like me. And I want to make money. So how can I solve this problem, once and for all? ***6 Hours Later*** So six hours ago, I actually typed “How can I solve this problem once and for all?” and had to stop writing this income report. I was stuck. Because I didn’t know the answer. I mean, I was really asking myself how can I solve this problem? And I was having a conversation with myself in my head about how I keep doing the same thing over and over and over. Like, do I really want a solution? Or do I want to keep the drama around it and keep being the “victim” of my poor choices and humble-bragging about how I have so much work and too many clients? Gag me with a spoon. (Yes, I grew up in the 80s). And like my business coach always told me, asking myself “how can I” is magical. Because I have the answers – I just need to get past all the drama and listen to myself. The solution has been right in front of my face this whole entire time. And it’s not to “set boundaries” or “start saying no” or any of that other stuff that just doesn’t work for a YES person like me who wants to help everyone. Its my Web Designer Academy graduates. The people who I’ve trained (to do as I say, not as I do – as my mom used to say) to market themselves and provide awesome service to their clients. Who serve a wide variety of niches and a wide variety of price points. Like, there’s a web designer for everyone in there. So how can I solve this problem once and for all? Give my clients a choice. My rate is what it is, my package is what it is, and I bill by the hour, and when you work with me, I’m gonna knock your freaking socks off. But if my schedule is booked out (which as you saw from the notes in my planner, it often is) or you have a specific budget or you need an expert in a certain niche or tool? Then I refer you to my directory of WP+BFF Certified Experts – web designers who have already gone through my 12 week training course, who have invested in their WordPress education, who set their own rates based on their unique goals, and who love serving clients and leaning on each other to solve problems for their clients. It’s a win-win. I get to send clients to the awesome, amazing web designers that have gone through my training program, and I get to help everyone that comes to me, and I get say yes to everyone, and I already feel more confident about my hourly rate. Because I’m really, really good at what I do. Yeah, I said it. It’s uncomfortable to say it, but I’m saying it. So I’m in the early stages of putting that together, and I’m super pumped to debut it to my audience so you’ll have a group of vetted, super skilled web designers to hire for your projects!! So my biggest lesson learned in January is that I just have to ask, that I can still serve people if they say no, that I can always come from a place of integrity and that this really is all one big experiment. The results I get aren’t good or bad – they are just feedback that lets me know what I need to adjust going forward. So what I want you to take away from this pep talk is that all the things you try in your business, all the things you ask people for, I want you to look at those as experiments.
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Julia has a site called TheTravelingTraveler.com, where she provides tips and inspiration for traveling healthcare professionals. It's an amazing niche. She has some great affiliate partners, but she wants to create some different relationships with those partners. How can she diversify her affiliate income from the site? You can definitely hear the lightbulbs going off in this one—stick around! You can also find Julia through her instagram: @TheTravelingTraveler_.In this episode I recommend reading Will It Fly?—a book I wrote about idea validation and testing your ideas before you go all in with them.If you want to be considered for a coaching session, apply via the form at AskPat.com.If you enjoyed today's episode and you love the format of this show and helping other entrepreneurs, can you help me convince others to listen too? All you have to do is leave a quick review and rating on iTunes (and subscribe if you haven't already). That would mean the world to me, so thank you so much!Today’s sponsor is FreshBooks, who make the best financial management software out there. It’s ridiculously easy to use and their interface is highly-visual and super-intuitive. You can actually get an unrestricted, thirty-day trial for free; just go to FreshBooks.com/askpat and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section.
Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Welcome to my December Income Report! Every month I publish an income report to take you behind the scenes of my online business and reveal exactly how much money I make, how much I spend and lessons learned along the way! IMPORTANT THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN DECEMBER. I began tracking my time and limiting my work hours. I was accepted to Bryan Harris of Growth Tools’ Partnership Accelerator Program. I got my laptop repaired. I scheduled my last work day as December 16. We met with a builder to see if he’s a good fit to build on the property we bought back in June. I updating my branding. Notes I found to myself in my planner: REVIEW OF MY GOALS When in quit my day job in January of 2018, I set a goal to generate $10,000 in revenue so that I could pay myself $5,000 a month and set aside the other $5000 for taxes and expenses: $5000 – Income to cover my old paycheck. $2500 – Expenses $2500 – Taxes WHAT I FOCUSED ON IN DECEMBER I had a couple of big goals in December. I really wanted to take time off during the holidays, so I blocked my calendar from December 16 through the first week of January. I told myself I would let my clients know that I was unavailable and to plan accordingly. Part of the reason I wanted to take time off is to simply have some white space between all of holiday get-togethers and travel – but another reason is so that I would have time to do one of my favorite things to do – which is to work on my own business, unencumbered by meetings and appointments. My other big focus was to stay true to my health goals. Continue going to hot yoga three times a week. To avoid overindulging in sweets and comfort food and alcohol that is fun in the moment, but zaps me of my energy and makes me feel terrible, physically and mentally. With those goals in mind, here’s what I made in December of 2018: TOTAL REVENUE: $7627.52 Affiliate Income: $1334.80 Courses: $2661.00 Done For You & Consulting: $3631.72 TOTAL EXPENSES: $3246.84 Get the full breakdown of income, expenses and net profit month by month here. NET PROFIT: $4380.68 BIGGEST LESSONS LEARNED I learned a lot of lessons in December. While I was very successful at not overindulging and still enjoying myself around the holidays, I was not very successful at holding my boundaries when it came to client work. December has always been a slower month revenue-wise, and this year was no exception. December and July are always slow for me. I didn’t promote anything for sale this December because I didn’t want to be available to support it! And it’s just not my style to jump in to all the holiday sales. It’s my goal to take the entire month of December off in the future… I mean, it seems like that last week before Christmas is when everyone is trying to finish everything they never got to throughout the year so that they can actually take time off from work and come back in January with a clean slate. It’s like, the height of the holiday frenzy. So next year, I need to do a much better job of letting my clients know my schedule. I didn’t really tell them this year… I just kinda blocked it on my calendar and put an out-of-office up. And then I still responded to the emergencies. I can’t help myself sometimes… I also still do some consulting for my old day job and they have a big year-end project every year that despite my best efforts always goes to the 11th hour… So if I’m still consulting for them at the end of 2019, there’s no use in fighting that. It happens the exact same way every year. I’m really glad that I not only scheduled the week between Christmas and New Years but also the first week of January off so that I could work on my own stuff. I didn’t hold my boundaries the week of the 16th, but I did for the 2 other weeks I had planned vacation! And it’s not like it was hard because the rest of the country was checked out of work anyway… But you guys, I LOVE working on my own stuff. I get so much joy out of getting to be creative without having a deadline. So I gave my brand a facelift in December, and that’s just saved me so much time in these first few weeks of January already. I had worked with a branding firm back in September of 2017 to help me transition my branding away from WP+BFF and to Shannon Mattern. And I absolutely loved the experience and the end result and I’d recommend my branding company, Braid Creative, all day every day. We did much, much more together than just create a logo, color scheme and fonts to solidify my brand. But what I discovered after awhile was that my branding was very difficult to implement consistently across platforms. Specifically it was a challenge to make it look good vertically for Pinterest and horizontally for my website, and hard to outsources the nuances of making it look good anyone who is not a graphic designer, and the colors were too muted to really stand out online. I had been gathering inspiration and had an idea of the changes I wanted to make, and then one morning, I was just sitting on my couch drinking my morning coffee with no plans, nowhere to be and no one needing anything from me, and the inspiration struck, and as they say, the floodgates opened, and I rebranded. Then I started working on my systems. I’ve overcomplicated my marketing funnels and I don’t need all the bells and whistles I have. They don’t work right half the time anyway. And as I mentioned in my last income report, I’ve decided to move away from Infusionsoft to ConvertKit. Not just to save a few hundred dollars a month, but also because I am committed to simplifying my business in 2019. I waffled on whether I had time to do it myself or if I wanted to oursource it, and at the end of the day I decided to just go for it. I like to make decisions in real time, as I’m solving the problem and setting things up. And then I know what’s available to my clients because I’ve explored all the possibilities. So one day I was inspired to just do it – and I just got lost in time rebuilding all of my email sequences and working on the migration. Which is still in process in the 3rd week of January. I hit a snag with the built-in Infusionsoft importer and I’m working with ConvertKit engineers on it, but getting help has been a slow process. I’m hopeful I’ll get a good result because I want to be able to recommend ConvertKit to you guys – but customer service is so, so important so I hope they step it up. Maybe I’m too nice and patient… Anyway. Another thing I did was make some decisions on whether I’d continue offering some services I’d offered in the past. And I’d been watching Marie Kondo’s show on Netflix and it actually helped me make some decisions. Tracking my time helped me make the decisions. And obviously looking at these income reports also helped me to make some decisions. Does offering this service bring me joy? How much time am I spending on this service? How much do I make on this service? And some services didn’t even come close to making the cut. The WordPress Protection Package didn’t make it. I lose a lot of money on it. Of course I’ll still serve my existing clients and my Done For You Clients, but I won’t be accepting new clients for that service and I removed it from my site. Accepting small projects of under 8 hours didn’t make the cut. Why? Because when tracking my time I discovered that a 2 hour time block actually took 4 hours when I included communication and prep. And a 4 hour time block actually took 6. And while I could build that into the price, those projects are difficult to schedule and take my time away from marketing more lucrative offers and working on partnerships. I know there’s a need out there to help people with smaller projects, so I need to analyze whether it’s worth it for me to build a team to take those on, or just say no. I’m still undecided. And honestly I feel guilt turning away work when I know there are so many web designers out there who are struggling to market themselves and get the work. It’s something I need to work on. As I look back on December and 2018 as a whole, I’m proud of what I accomplished. It’s important to me personally to not have debt other than a mortgage, and I maintained that boundary in my business. It was important to me to pay myself twice a month, and although I was late a few times on my paycheck I still paid myself everything I planned to pay myself. And I think I paid enough in quarterly taxes, but I really have no idea since it’s my first year without a W2. I’m eager to do my taxes so that I can settle up with the IRS if I need to and get a clear baseline for 2019 (and see what I’m able to do to get a construction loan to build a house as a self-employed person). And I’ve taken steps to grow a legit team – but I still have work to do. I keep accepting work and then doing it myself instead of taking the time to delegate and train a team. So I definitely need to work on that. In 2018 I for sure overworked myself, spent my time on non-income producing activities and barely grew my email list or my social media followers. And I still hit my revenue goals. So I’m really excited to see what happens in 2019 when I focus my time on my physical and mental health, list growth, partnerships, income producing activities, simplifying my business, building a team and practicing constraint. Watch out 2019, ready or not, here I come!
Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Welcome to episode 203, my November 2018 Income Report! If you’re new to the podcast, each month I publish an income report to take you behind the scenes of my online business and reveal exactly how much money I make, how much I spend and lessons learned along the way! IMPORTANT THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN NOVEMBER. I interviewed two million-dollar business owners on Pep Talks for Side Hustlers – Episodes 195 & 196 with Kelly Roach and 198 & 199 with Bernadette Doyle. Bernadette Doyle challenged me to start tracking my time and start working 25 hours a week NOW. I ran a final promotion for my membership program, Serious Side Hustlers. I closed my membership program, Serious Side Hustlers. I turned 39, and my husband turned 40. I joined Brooke Castillo’s Self Coaching Scholars. I decided to move to 1 episode of Pep Talks for Side Hustlers per week. I completed the second month of my Web Designer Academy. I made an executive decision to not schedule anything in the evenings. Notes I found to myself in my planner: REVIEW OF MY GOALS When in quit my day job in January of 2018, I set a goal to generate $10,000 in revenue so that I could pay myself $5,000 a month and set aside the other $5000 for taxes and expenses: $5000 – Income to cover my old paycheck. $2500 – Expenses $2500 – Taxes WHAT I FOCUSED ON IN NOVEMBER November is typically just one big celebration in my life. We have tons of friends and family with November birthdays (including me and my husband), and of course Thanksgiving is in November, which is my favorite holiday. Probably because every so often my birthday falls on Thanksgiving which makes it extra special. It starts getting cold here in Ohio in November – which I absolutely love. Just ask my good friend Tyler – he’ll tell you that outerwear is my favorite type of clothing. Give me all the sweaters and jackets and gloves and hats and scarves – and I’m a happy girl! And of course right after Thanksgiving it’s time to decorate for Christmas and start getting into the holiday spirit. So when I was planning out my 2018 around this time last year, I blocked off the week of Thanksgiving for vacation, and the following Thursday – Monday to take a trip to celebrate my husband’s 40th birthday, which has become a tradition with our group of friends that we all take a trip together for our 40th. That’s going to be me in 2019, so if you have any ideas of where I should go in mid-November, head on over to peptalksforsidehustlers.com/203 and leave an idea for me in the comments! So if you listened to my October income report back in episode 201, you’ll recall that my main focus in October was to SLOW DOWN so that I could start taking time out for myself. I started taking a yoga class, I delegated more to my VA and intern and moved from 7 podcasts a week down to three and went from working about 60 hours a week down to 40. Entering November, I started to feel like I was finally, FINALLY creating the freedom that I had so desperately craved when I put this whole crazy plan in motion to start a side hustle and grow it to the point where it could sustain itself and replace my day job income. And then I had a couple of conversations that were transformational. I had the pleasure of talking to two entrepreneurs who have both reached the million dollar mark in their business – Kelly Roach and Bernadette Doyle. And I don’t think it is any coincidence at all that both of them shared the same piece of advice for making more money in your business – which is: Get really clear on what is income-producing in your business and what isn’t. Spend the majority of your work time on income-producing activities. Make sure your team is spending the majority of their time on income-producing activities so that they are generating more revenue for the business than what you’re paying them. Stop doing the things that don’t produce income, especially those things Bernadette called “creative avoidance” like working on your website instead of pitching clients. So I set up the time-tracking app called Toggl that Bernadette recommended, and started tracking all of my time in November. Two more really exciting things that I did in November: One, I enrolled in Brooke Castillo’s Self-Coaching Scholars membership program. I did it on my birthday as a gift to myself – for a few reasons: I’ve been listening to her podcast for the past several weeks and it’s totally helped me change how I think and stop buffering with overeating, overworking and overdrinking. Amy Porterfield recently credited Brooke for the mindset shift she needed to lose 58lbs, and if Amy Porterfield says something’s good, well, you know it’s good. I really, really wanted access to her Stop Overeating masterclass which is a part of the program. There’s an Entrepreneur track in there, which I also really wanted access to. I also applied for and was accepted to Bryan Harris’s Partnership Accelerator beta test group, which is a mentorship to teach you how to land partnerships, podcast spots and guest posts. It starts in January and it supports my goal to explode my email list in 2019. And I added another yoga class to my schedule. This yoga class is at 9am! Like, every day I’m driving there I’m like, I can’t believe I just get to take a yoga class at 9am instead of sitting in rush hour traffic. So that’s what I really focused on in November. Slowing down. Gratitude. And really paying attention to what I’m learning about what it takes to get to the next level. TOTAL REVENUE: $9690.52 Affiliate Income: $2040.80 Courses: $3267.72 Done For You & Consulting: $4382.00 TOTAL EXPENSES: $3399.70 Get the full breakdown of income, expenses and net profit month by month here. NET PROFIT: $6290.82 BIGGEST LESSONS LEARNED So here’s the thing – I’ve had a really hard time all year keeping my expenses down to $2500 a month like I planned. I’m going to make even more adjustments in December for 2019, but when I create my budget I’m just going to be more realistic about my expense budget. I want to get a cushion of at least five grand in the bank, because right now my business is pretty much paycheck to paycheck, like, I’m cleaning out my business bank account every month when it’s time to pay myself, pay off my credit card for last month’s expenses and put money aside for taxes.. I use the Profit First model from the book of the same name by Mike Michalowicz, so I pay myself first. Then taxes. Then expenses. And I also don’t do debt. I put all of my business expenses on my Chase Southwest Rewards credit card so I get all those airline miles, and then I pay it off on the last day off every month. I pay myself on the 15th and the 30th, and I move money to my tax account to pay my quarterlies. So there are about $500 in expenses I could cut every month but… It will require me to totally rebuilding my website and automation platforms, which is a significant time investment for me. I realize that I could save $6K a year by making the move – and there’s my cushion… But I also know that the work would take me at LEAST 4 solid weeks, and I think it would disrupt some of my funnels and result in a lot of customer service requests… Or I could pay my team to do it for me and coach them through it, and create content and tutorials around the experience, and train them on handling those customer service requests. Which would be what like, a real business owner/leader would do instead of doing it all herself… So I’m still him-hawing around about whether or not to make those structural changes… and I know these are the mindset shifts I need to make to grow my revenue. I learned a few really big lessons in November. First, I noticed that it only took 11 months of being on my own for me to freaking chill out and start enjoying myself… But seriously, what I’ve noticed is that it really does take awhile for my mind to get used to change. I can make a decision, but then it takes some time for the action to follow the decision. And then it takes some time to recognize the results and acknowledge them as a result of my action. I know how to pay attention to my thoughts now, and I do think that the changes I want to create will happen faster than in the past. And I’m spending much, much less time working. I’m down to about 25-30 hours. I’ll give you a breakdown on all of that in a future episode. Second, I’m spending 95% of my time on non-income producing activities. Which is why I shouldn’t be the one moving rebuilding my own platforms… I spend a lot of time “working”. And I suspect it’s just another way to avoid uncomfortable emotions, just like overeating and overdrinking. Looking at how I’m spending my time, it’s mind-boggling to me how I’ve managed to produce nearly $10,000 a month in revenue consistently this year. And it’s really exciting. What would be possible for me if I even shifted it to 20%, or even 50%? That’s my plan for 2019. Finally, I learned the most important lesson, I think anyway, in November was while I was decorating my Christmas tree. My husband had gotten our tree out of the basement and set it up in our loft, and we were all excited to listen to Christmas music and decorate it like we normally do together. It’s a prelit tree, and when we turned it on half the lights were burnt out. This happened last year and I had found this tool, this gun thing, online that you can use to test the strands and then you do something to the one that’s burnt out that fixes it. Clearly I have no idea how this thing works. So Floyd was like, on a mission to fix this tree and he spent two evenings obsessed with finding the burnt bulbs before he just got frustrated and gave up. So I’m like, I’m going to do something really nice for him and decorate the tree while he’s at work so he can come home and it’ll just be done, right? So because I was by myself, I decided to start listening to all the Entrepreneur modules inside of Brooke Castillo’s Self-Coaching Scholars, and I’m super excited because like at the end of all of them there’s one called How to Make a Million Dollars – which is a future goal that I have for my business. So as I’m listening, I’m hearing things like: Choose a niche. Give value ahead of time. Grow an email list. Make offers to it. If something doesn’t work the first time, try again. And I thought to myself, wow, I could totally sit here and think, “Thanks for nothing Brooke, tell me something I don’t know. This course was a waste of my time and money.” Which is honestly, is something I may have thought in the past. But instead, I found myself feeling really excited, like “Wow, I have all of the pieces in place. I’m on the right track. I have everything I need. It’s as good as done.” And in the million dollar module, she talked about how you just separate the math from the drama, list out all the reasons why it’s impossible and that becomes your to-do list to make it happen. Which is totally exciting, because then I think things like, “I know there are so many web designers out there that just want to build websites for a living and DON’T want to be freelancers or run their own businesses – what if I could create an amazing company that would give them that opportunity? And I think of how much more I could contribute and how much more value I can give when I’m at a higher level. Again, which brings me back to why I should not be moving my own platforms and why I should empower other people to do it and lead them through the process… Like, start practicing for that leadership role now… So that really goes for you too whether you want to make $100 or a thousand dollars or a million dollars. It’s just math. All the reasons it feels impossible become your to-do list. So I was super excited because not only did I realize that I have everything I need to get to the next level right in front of me, I also finished decorating that dang tree!!! #multitasking So if there’s anything I want you to take away from this episode, it’s this: How are you spending your time? How do you want to be spending your time? And are you making as much money as you want to make? And if not, separate the math from the drama, list out all the reasons why it’s impossible for you to make the money you want to make, and then get to work changing those things. I know you can do it. Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll see you next week! Love you Byeeeeeee!!!
Build a website in just 5 days (even if you're not techie) at www.free5daywebsitechallenge.com Already have a website? Take the Free "Jumpstart Your Website Traffic" marketing mini-course at www.jumpstartyourwebsitetraffic.com Leave a Review! Welcome to episode 201, which is my October Income Report! If you’re new to the podcast, each month I publish an income report to take you behind the scenes of my online business and reveal exactly how much money I make, how much I spend and lessons learned along the way! IMPORTANT THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN OCTOBER I started going to a yoga class twice a week. I onboarded an intern who’s working 15 hours a week with me through December. I brought on a VA for 15 hours a week (my previous support contract was for 16 hours a month). I booked one new Done For You client. Notes I found to myself in my planner: REVIEW OF MY GOALS My goal each month has been to generate $10,000 in revenue because my rough breakdown to replace my old paycheck, cover business expenses and pay taxes is: $5000 – Income to cover my old paycheck. $2500 – Expenses $2500 – Taxes WHAT I FOCUSED ON IN OCTOBER In October, my main focus was to SLOW DOWN so that I could start taking time out for myself. As I mentioned in my September income report, the pace and amount that I had been working became unsustainable. I made a commitment to myself and my mastermind group that I would slow down. That I’d start taking a yoga class. That I’d get more help and start delegating more tasks to them instead of taking care of it myself because it’s faster (and I feel bad asking others to do things for me). I started transitioning things to my VA, and got my intern started on her learning journey by subscribing to my email list as a brand new customer, reviewing all of my content and noting all the things that needed fixed or didn’t make sense. I also started creating the new content for my Web Designer Academy that I had sold the prior month. I’ve done the course before, but I had so much more to add to it and change, that I decided to start from scratch. But instead of killing myself to get it all done at once, I’ve been recording and releasing one module a week. And right from the start, I recorded my process for producing and publishing the module and handed it over to my team so that I only had to do the thing only I can do – create the content. In October I also went from recording 7 podcast episodes down to 3 a week. I also started baking in October, and perfected my process for making an amazingly crusty, beautiful sourdough bread. I went from working about 60 hours a week down to about 40… which I realized I hadn’t actually done since before I started my side hustle back in late 2014… TOTAL REVENUE: $10102.11 Affiliate Income: $1872.39 Courses: $3716 Done For You & Consulting: $4493.72 TOTAL EXPENSES: $3614.62 Get the full breakdown of income, expenses and net profit month by month here. NET PROFIT: $6487.49 BIGGEST LESSONS LEARNED The biggest lesson I learned is that I can work significantly less and still make the same amount of revenue and profit. I also learned that I was covering up my fear with work by creating massive amounts of content and trying to do every single marketing tactic all at the same time instead of focusing on one thing at a time. The results of the survey I told you about in last month’s income report showed that loud and clear. I heard things like “I can’t keep up with all the content you’re putting out.” and I’m confused by all the things you offer because it’s so many things and they are changing all the time” and “I’m behind on the podcast I can’t listen to an episode every single day.” That was my fear. If I just keep producing, everything will be fine. Just keep producing. Keep answering every email. Say yes to everything. The nonstop loop of “I have to do this, I gotta do that…” that leads to stress, poor sleep, overeating, overdrinking and burnout. I found that mindset and pace to be unsustainable, and it took going to another city with 5 strangers and having them all challenge me to tell them how it was serving me for the fog of fear to clear and for me to be able to see what I was doing to myself and my brand. I also had to push past my discomfort at leaning on other people for help, and prioritize delegation above anything else in my business. The mistake I have made in the past with hiring has been bringing on people to do things that didn’t take anything off of my own plate. I gave those people all the things that would never even make it on to my plate. Like, things I wanted to do, but was too busy to do. So those tasks were getting done, but I wasn’t giving myself any relief. And also I set things up so that I was the gatekeeper – if I didn’t delegate piece by piece, there wasn’t anything for them to do, but I got so behind that by the time the work needed to be done, there wasn’t enough time to delegate. I’m not the kind of person that says hey, do this and I need it done by the end of the day. No. I follow the golden rule – do unto others as you would have others do unto you, and if someone was dropped their crap on me at the last minute because they are disorganized, I would not be happy about that. So now, I put delegation first. What process can I delegate? What can I teach and empower my team to do without me next? How can I benefit them. And I gotta tell you – going to this hot yoga class has been a game changer. I haven’t gone to a gym since I quit crossfit to start my business, and there’s nothing like having someone just lead you through a workout. No decisions to be made, no thinking, just show up and do it. And take two whole hours out of my day to drive there, take the class and drive home. And then work from the cute little coffee shop across the street for a couple hours before heading home. I started my side hustle for freedom, flexibility and financial independence. I’ve had access to it this whole entire time, but I feel like I’ve really just started to realize it and take advantage of it truly for the first time in October. I mean, I even started baking homemade bread this month. If you know me in real life, you’d be like what? You don’t bake, and you don’t eat bread. But I was compelled to try it, and I chose sourdough as my first foray into baking – which I find fascinating, because I picked the thing that takes the absolute longest to make. Like, if you’re an instant gratification kind of person, baking bread probably isn’t for you, and baking sourdough bread certainly isn’t. It’s like a 3 day process and you have to get the timing just right otherwise you’ll find yourself up in the middle of the night folding the fermenting dough… One thing I’ve learned from writing these income reports and documenting my journey on the podcast is that when I have a mindset shift or form a new belief, it’s like deciding to bake a loaf of sourdough bread. I can make the decision in an instant, but it takes some time for everything to come together, for those new beliefs and mindset shifts to really start to appear in my life. And knowing that, recognizing that pattern, I can totally be patient and not put so much pressure on myself to have everything be the way I want it to be RIGHT NOW. I can trust that everything’s coming together the way that it should and in due time it will happen. So I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions on my October income report – head on over to www.PepTalksforSideHustlers.com/201 and leave me a comment – and I’ll see you right here next week. Bye!!
Zac was just a kid in high school when he realized how to create his first business online. Over the past 20 years, Zac has built multiple income streams through... Read More --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/technology-equality/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/technology-equality/support
Inksecure: A Legal Podcast Focused on Creating Wealth From the Fine Print
Multiple revenue streams are a key component to building a sustainable business. And one way to create an additional stream of income is through affiliate sales. Addi Ganley started her online journey in 2011 on a whim because she wanted an outlet to share how her family was saving money. What began as a hobby quickly turned into a business and now 6 years later it generates a six-figure income. Addi realized that as her blog was becoming a daily resource for her readers, they began asking her for tools (read - links) to help them. Addi then created a system to monetize the traffic she was getting from various outlets to her affiliate links. I’ve applied some of her methods and teachings to my business, and it has helped me generate affiliate income – so it does work. In this episode, Addi and I talk about how she stumbled into affiliate marketing, how she connected the dots between what her audience was asking for and affiliate links and how she created a system that drove traffic to those links, and how teaches others to do the same. If you want to learn how to monetize your blog without having a product, you want to tune in. Enjoy! You can find out more about this episode and Addi Ganley at artsteele.co/ep34-addiganley.
I am delighted to welcome Internet Marketing Expert Greg Jeffries to the Optimistic Entrepreneur Podcast. Having seen the success Greg was having (he publishes his income reports), I was very keen to get him on to the podcast as a guest to ask him about his marketing strategies. Greg is a very successful internet marketer who is focusing on Affiliate marketing using very focused SEO and Long Tail Keywords. In June 2015 Greg made $1,548.08 In August 2017, just two years later, he made $18,034.23 [In the show reel, I have provided a summary of his earnings over the last two years by affiliate programme so that you can see exactly where he has been making his money and this may help you to decide where to focus your efforts. Incidentally, I have done the same with another internet marketer, Mark Woodward.] There is something seriously smart going on and I wanted to find out more. Greg is very open about his approach and helps us to understand why is affiliate marketing business is so successful. Greg is very much focused on Long Tail SEO for his marketing activities. In particular, Greg focuses on Transactional keywords (intent) and by going after the long tail, he has less competition which greatly improves his organic search results and ranking in Google. Greg has a very systematic approach He understands SEO He identifies niches and acquires domains with niche keywords He creates a niche website He identifies the competitive and profitable keywords associated with that niche using Keyword.io (I also use Market Samurai) He gets his on page SEO right He gets his off page SEO right, particularly with some neat back linking strategies He tracks his progress with Google Analytics He identifies and promotes affiliate products, particularly identifying attractive products in Affiliate networks He builds and cultivates an email list. He scales his content distribution Find Out More About Greg You can find out more about Greg at his site, http://imsource.org - which is a great resource for finding out more about internet marketing and resources you can promote. SEO Affiliate Domination Course If you want to discover Greg's system for SEO Affiliate Domination you can find all his strategies laid out in an easy to follow (I know, I enrolled) course which he has published on Teachable. To Get $100 off this course, download the show reel and in there you will find this exclusive offer for Optimistic Entrepreneurs. You can only access this through the Show Reel because I want this to be for serious students and I do not want this link spammed around the internet. Download The Show Reel - 4 Steps to Affiliate Income I have created a Show Reel for this episode which takes Greg's interview a step further. I share with you the 80+ products and services he promotes as an affiliate along with the total of his earnings from those properties over the last two years. I have done a similar exercise for successful internet marketer Mark Woodward, summarising his earnings in 2017. The Show Reel also takes you through the four key steps you need to follow in order to start generating your own affiliate income, including a detailed explanation of on page SEO. Click here to Get Instant Access to the Show Reel How to Find Keywords I have published Two Blog Posts about how to find Keywords which you can find here: How to Find Keywords Part 1 - https://jbdcolley.com/how-to-find-keywords-part-1 How to Find Keywords Part 2 - https://jbdcolley.com/how-to-find-keywords-part-2
3 Ways to Make More Affiliate Income as Bloggers by Jerry Low Promoting affiliate products is still one of the most effective ways to make money from your blog. Jayson DeMers points to affiliate marketing as an excellent entry-level place to begin monetizing your blog in this Forbes article, because it is easy to implement and free to start up (just taking a bit of your time).
Today's Review suggestion came from a community member, Jake. He wanted to know if anyone had a chance to check out the Niche Post Conversion Strategies guide from Jennifer, better know as PotPieGirl… I was not familiar with the guide, but it sounded like something that could benefit the whole community, so I offered to ... Read more The post Increase Affiliate Income – PotPieGirl Niche Post Conversion Strategies Review appeared first on Niche Site Tools.
Time Stamped Show Notes 1:24 – Introduction. 6:00 – Nicole initially thought she couldn’t do affiliate income because she was a therapist and she had to deal with ethical guidelines about how you can’t sell stuff to your therapy clients or customers. But all she had to do was take the first step and find an audience and she found an audience that wasn’t her therapy client and identified one of their problems. At that time, she was connected to many business owners and a couple of years ago she had taken a course that helps you with launching. 6:45 – She got an opportunity to be an affiliate for the course so she signed up for it but she was not sure if she would be able to take advantage of it. But she knew that all you need is an audience with a problem. 7:30 – Nicole says that we shouldn’t try to solve everything, we are not experts in all areas but we can definitely link them to the right resources if we see that something keeps coming up for them. Nicole had an audience of peers who were struggling with launching so she had an audience and she knew their problem and the third step for her was to find a solution that solves the problem and she had the course. 10:53 – You just need to hook up your clients, your customers, your audience or even a different audience because you can be serving consumers as a health coach or a nutritionist, personal trainer, yoga instructor and have those alternate options for them that are helpful to them with struggles that they are currently having in life. 12:06 – When Nicole started out she didn’t really have a list she got an opportunity to sign up as an affiliate and she just shared the link to the webinar online and also she was always available to answer people’s questions about the program and build a relationship which was appreciated by people. 16:09 – Nicole says that one of the few mistakes that people make in affiliate marketing is that they throw random things at their list that makes no sense and you do want to treat it as your own launch and youth can make money this way without having a huge list for sure but a huge list can amplify your success in it so much better if you are choosing the right products or programs or services. 16:43 – You need to be honest in Affiliate marketing and tell people that the link is your affiliate link. 18:20 – One way of selling in affiliate marketing is educating people and letting them know about webinars and then directing them to the tools that are going to make it easier for them. Resources Mentioned You can find Nicole online at NicoleLiloia.com and Nicole has a free gift for the listeners of this podcast which is cheat sheet with seven strategies that you can use to increase your affiliate income. For the free gift visit http://www.authenticaffiliateacademy.com/increaseaffiliateincome
Want to start earning commissions via affiliate marketing? In this episode, Jonathan shares the tips he wished he had known when he first started in affiliate marketing. Regardless of the niche you blog in, you can earn money with affiliate marketing.
The Affiliate Guy with Matt McWilliams: Marketing Tips, Affiliate Management, & More
Today I am going to show you the best way to generate passive affiliate income for your site. I share how to create an awesome resources page that can generate hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars every month. LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Today's episode is brought to you by No Product No Problem, available later this year. If you aren’t on the waiting list go to http://noproductnoproblem.com/enroll - there are 3 free lessons and you can signup for the waiting list. Subscribe in iTunes: http://www.mattmcwilliams/itunes Watch TheAffiliateGuy.TV at http://www.theaffiliateguy.tv How I Currently Make $3,874 a Week Without Creating a Single Product: http://www.mattmcwilliams.com/watch Take our Affiliate Marketing Survey: http://www.mattmcwilliams.com/affsurvey Ask Me a Question here: http://www.asktheaffiliateguy.com/ All our recommended affiliate programs: http://www.mattmcwilliams.com/whatsup Your First 100 Affiliates Report: http://www.mattmcwilliams.com/first100
AskPat 2.0: A Weekly Coaching Call on Online Business, Blogging, Marketing, and Lifestyle Design
Today's question comes from Jorge, who has a question about achieving results from affiliate marketing. How does he start building affiliate income? And how can he connect with the Filipino community specifically with my affiliate marketing? Where can he get results from his affiliate marketing? Are there any specific ways to engage his audience to inspire them in his affiliate income building process? Do you have a question about kickstarting your affiliate income? Record it at http://www.askpat.com/. Today's sponsor is Freshbooks. Go to http://www.freshbooks.com/askpat and enter "Ask Pat" for more information.
Many course creators feel like they're trapped in the “launch to launch” cycle– constantly waiting for the income from their next launch to come in. In this episode, we're joined by Addi Ganley of AddiGanley.com and FrugalFanatic.com for a conversation on escaping this cycle by setting up streams of passive income. We discuss how to master affiliate marketing, the benefits of simplifying your courses and pricing them low, and how you can confidently ask your audience what products they truly want to purchase! Follow Mariah on other platforms:
AskPat 2.0: A Weekly Coaching Call on Online Business, Blogging, Marketing, and Lifestyle Design
Today's question comes from Jon, who is new to affiliate marketing. It is still possible for someone to make the high affiliate income that I currently have? Jon references my income reports: http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/income-reports/. Do you have a question about passive income? Record it at http://www.askpat.com/.
Can a retail store earn income from affiliates? The margins you have in retail can often only be changed by either upping your retail price, or negotiating discounts with your suppliers, so what is there was another way of earning extra revenue in your business, without purchasing products? Wouldn't it be awesome if you could have extra cash coming into your business, without outlaying for products? Imagine if you could offer products and services to your clients that for whatever reason, you can't stock in your store? Well, you can. It's called affiliate income. [Tweet " So what exactly is affiliate income?"] Essentially, it's where your company is paid a referral fee for selling a product or service for another company. Now before you run off thinking pyramid selling, or multi level marketing, that's NOT what affiliate income is about. The key to making this work, without looking all douche bag salesy, is to find products or services that your customers could clearly benefit from, and that you truly believe to be in line with your brand. Let's give a couple of examples, and I tend to find they relate to services, for product based businesses like retail stores. If you own a ladies fashion store, you might find someone who runs a styling course or a makeup course that you think your customers would love. You then advertise this service on social media, in your newsletter, in store - wherever your customers are at with a special link that your supplier will give you. When your customers purchase the item, you are automatically given a referral fee. Perhaps you're a children's store. You could team up with an in-home styling, or parenting workshops. The amount that you get paid is either going to be a set fee, or a percentage of the amount your customer spends with your affiliate. As such, you need to think about how much you could potentially earn, versus how much time and money you will put into advertising your affiliate. Be warned though, you can't just put up a sign and hope for the best. Like any product in your store, the affiliate has to be sold to earn its place in the store. Now you can rotate the offers, to be in line with your monthly editorial calendar, or maybe you just have one thing your customers repeatedly want. Either way, there is the potential to earn significant revenue streams outside of just selling the products in your store. In addition, you're providing a better experience for your customer base, and best of all, are being completely different to your competitors. I'd love to hear what you sell and one product or service that you could investigate right now, that your customers would benefit from. Comment below and have a fab day!
A few weeks ago Rick Marion, a listener of the podcast, asked about affiliate marketing: "I notice you offer a number of affiliate products. Do you have any tips, other than standing behind the affiliate obviously, on how to select affiliates? How to approach affiliates? And would you recommend purchasing a product that you know your audience would use, so that you can in turn offer it as an affiliate to your audience?" In today's episode I share my income figures from affiliate marketing in 2015, and 4 of the criteria I use to decide on who to partner with. Mentioned in Today's Episode: Ray Edwards Kary Oberbrunner Mario Jannatpour's Real Estate Mastery Summit Kevin Monroe (you should download his 5 questions guide!) Kingsley Grant Matt McWilliams (affiliate manager extraordinaire) A Few Tools I've Become Affiliates For: Bluehost (web hosting) LeadPages ConvertKit
I just learned how to generate income as an Affiliate and there is no reason why you can't generate income online, too! #NewClassRising [TweetThis] What often stops some people from taking action to become entrepreneurs and reach the income levels that they want to achieve in online business, is the fact that making money online has not become a reality for them. If this describes you, don't worry. Its absolutely normal. However, in order for that to become a reality, you have to start earning some money online. This often means starting small. On this episode of the podcast, I share with you how I made $73.70 in less than an hour and how you can do the same, as well. Don't forget to checkout the show notes for a step-by-step video showing you how to sign-up to become an affilliate and start earning some income. Show Notes You can find today's show notes at http://NewClassRising.com/085 Hit Me Up Twttr: @Hector_Avellan Get on the the Rising Path! - for community only updates!
AskPat 2.0: A Weekly Coaching Call on Online Business, Blogging, Marketing, and Lifestyle Design
Today’s question comes from Laurence, who wants to be transparent with her affiliate income. When is the right time to start sharing income reports? Laurence’s site is http://learntocodewith.me/. You can see my income reports here: http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/my-income-reports/. You can find Pinch of Yum’s income reports here: http://pinchofyum.com/category/making-money-from-a-food-blog. National Novel Writing Month is http://nanowrimo.org/. Do you have a question about affiliate sales? Record it at http://www.askpat.com/. If you have any ideas, share them with #AskPat299. Thanks to today's sponsor, 99Designs. Go to http://www.99designs.com/pat to get a Power Pack upgrade for free.
As a kid, I loved the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle book series. It featured a magical and resourceful lady who lived with all her children in an upside down house. When money was tight for Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, she would send all of her kids through the house to find hidden treasures. That story stuck with me from the moment I read it. As a kid, I felt ready for any moment when money came up short—I’d just go on a treasure hunt! Does it surprise you to learn that my perspective hasn’t changed, even now that I’m an adult? What's more, I no longer wait for the “running out of money” moment before I set out on a treasure hunt. Not when I have a five-step treasure map that leads me right to the gold. As an entrepreneur, there are going to be times when cash is tight. It’s natural for you to feel the squeeze when you’re just starting out. Even after your business has liftoff, you might feel strapped from time to time. Or maybe you are looking at investing in some kind of new business tool or business opportunity and you need a little cash before you do so. Running your business means living through cycles of financial growth and…dormancy, shall we say? If that’s where you find yourself now, these hidden money opportunities will definitely speak to you. I’m going to reveal five very specific hidden money opportunities that I’ve used in my own business to bring quicker cash flow. The key to a good treasure hunt is knowing you have gold hiding somewhere. And you do! Let’s go on a treasure hunt together, and find the places where your gold is hiding. Opportunity #1: Finish Your Online Training Program You might have an online training program, nearly finished, waiting in your digital library. Maybe you've tinkering with it, fine-tuning the details. Or maybe you just have a growing list of ideas for programs that you know have huge potential…once you finish them. So what are you waiting for? This not-quite-finished training program has money hiding under it. Seth Godin has a great term for this occasion: “Ship it!” It's the online marketing equivalent of Nike’s motivational slogan “Just do it.” Get your program out there. Don’t keep procrastinating under the "it's not finished yet" excuse. Instead, release it as a beta test, and get some feedback from people. As it happens, I’m doing that very thing right now, with a Facebook Ads program I created. Believe me, I understand the temptation to keep tinkering until your program feels ready to join the really “pro” trainings already out there. But that’s not where you need to start, especially if this is your first online training program. Start with something simple; call it your “introductory product.” Include a few videos, transcripts, maybe a PDF of your slide decks, some supporting documents, and that’s it. The point is to get it out there and get some feedback to develop your product, while at the same time creating a little buzz for yourself. If you’re ready to get aggressive about claiming this hidden money, set a completion date to get that online training program. Get it user-ready in 30 days. Take another 30 days after that to promote it. Then release. It doesn’t have to be a perfect or a huge launch. My Experience My business dramatically changed when I finally just got a product out there. It was a program to help authors launch their book online—it had nothing to do with what I ended up becoming known for. I just had some expertise in helping authors in this way, and knew that I had something to offer. I so wish I had released this training sooner! Once I put it out there, I got great feedback, learned a ton about my target audience…and found out that I didn’t love that topic enough to grow in that direction. Releasing that program was a huge help in moving forward with the business I really wanted. You’ll never move forward if you don’t get something out there. And you definitely won’t make any money from a program that’s never offered to the public. Need Help? It’s Free! Maybe you've never attempted to create an online training program. In that case, the “hidden money” doesn’t exist for you…yet. But if you're ready to start developing in this direction, I’ve created a free PDF giveaway that is just what you need. It’s called A Course Creation Starter’s Guide, and it's going to get you moving in the right direction for your program. This freebie is great even for those who are already working on online training programs. If you’re looking for some ways to be a little more efficient in how you deliver this program or how you create it, skip to the section called "The Seven Power Tools." This is something I use with every single online training program I create, and you can easily incorporate it into your existing workflow. EPISODE FREEBIE Get "A Course Creation Starter's Guide" FREE DOWNLOAD Listen to Episode 46 to get all the details on how to make the most of hidden treasure in your business. Opportunity #2: Do a Mini-Promotion and Make an Offer There are three ways you can access this hidden treasure: 1. Create A Webinar If you’re a regular follower of my content, you know about my love affair with webinars. Take it from me—they are a great way to build your business. And contrary to popular belief, creating them is neither overwhelming nor stressful. First, you choose an existing program, product or service and decide what you want to say about it. Spend some time outlining the content, bearing in mind how long you want this webinar to be. (My webinars typically last for about 90 minutes, and the first 45-60 minutes is me presenting my content.) Your goal is to teach participants something they can apply as soon as they walk away…and then offer your program, product or service for sale to anyone who wants a jump start on what you just taught them. Once you’ve determined what your content will be, focus on the way it flows inside your webinar. Get specific and strategic about how you move from content to a sales promotion. You don’t want to just put a bunch of text on a slide. Believe it or not, the kind of images and number of slides you use makes a huge difference in the number of conversions you get from your webinar. For example, 20 to 25 slides for a 60-minute webinar is not nearly enough. People get overloaded easily when there’s too much text on each slide. Overloaded people hit “pause” or start multi-tasking, and wander off. When you lose attention, you lose a lead. For a 60-minute webinar, you want at least 80 slides, each with minimal words on it, plus imagery. Your goal is to use your slides to simply punctuate your point; you don’t want your entire script on the slide. Keep your audience’s attention by constantly switching slides, and using great imagery and lots of it. (Note: avoid cheesy stock photos. There are some great sites out there where you can find really beautiful imagery. BigStockPhoto is my personal go-to.) Another part of creating good flow is aligning your content with your sales offer at the end. You’ll spend 45-60 minutes of your webinar on content; the final 15-20 minutes is when you transition into talking about your program, product, or service and what’s in it for them. A great way to make this transition is open up a Q&A session. For example, I’ll say “For the next 15 minutes I’m going to take some live Q&A,” and I have a few questions (and answers) ready, in case people aren’t jumping forward to ask questions. I also make it worth their while to take action now. I don’t want them to get off the webinar and think about it later. That’s why, in between questions, I’ll say “For the next 15 minutes, if you buy while we are on this webinar, you get this fast-action bonus.” This could be a cheat sheet, a checklist, anything related to what I just taught them. Finally, it is extremely important to follow your webinar with an email series. I typically send out a replay as my first email, linking to the webinar so they can watch it again, and ending with a pitch about the program I’m offering at the end of my webinar. After this, I send a series of three more emails, talking about the benefits of the program, giving case studies, showing them they can’t live without my program or product. See how that works? Believe it or not, this is something you can do within a week, especially if you already have a program or product you want to promote. You can do it all live, or you can do an automated version called “evergreen.” For this, you record the webinar in advance and then let people sign up for different dates and times. My favorite tools for live webinars are GoToWebinar or Google Hangouts. If you want to do an automated webinar, I use Evergreen Business Systems. I’ve also heard good things about Stealth Seminar. Right now, I'm running an ad for a free webinar called "7 Strategies to Get Your Business Up and Running on Facebook" and in it, in addition to offering 45 minutes of highly valuable content, I promote my Facebook 101 program, Jumpstart Your Facebook Marketing." If you want to see my webinar sequence in action, you can sign up for the webinar here. By using Facebook ads to promote it, this webinar is generating an average of $1,500 a day as well as helping me grow a very quality email list. Bottom line: webinars work really well. 2. Create a Live Mini-Training This is something you can truly do next week if you already have a program, product, or service ready. When I say “live” I don’t mean in person; it’s a live event. You “sell tickets,” record yourself doing a live event, then release the recording to buyers. You can do this alone, or with a partner. About a year ago, David Siteman Garland and I collaborated on a two-hour live training. Anyone who bought tickets could attend the event or simply receive the recording, along with a PDF of our slide deck and some support documents (cheat sheets, checklists, etc.). We spent a week creating the event. We both emailed our lists and promoted the training for another week. All told, the event made us about $70,000…all for just a couple weeks of work! 3. Set Up a 30-Day Challenge, Followed By an Offer The best kind of mini promo I know of is the “30-day challenge” variety, where you get people enrolled in a kind of movement with you. They opt in to go on this journey with you for 30 days, and then at the end you promote whatever it is you want to offer. Here are some highly successful examples I know about: Simple Green Smoothies:They do a 30-day challenge for creating a green smoothie every day for 30 days. They run Facebook ads to the challenge. They build up their list like rock stars. At the end, they promote an eBook or some kind of guide for smoothies. Money Love Challenge: My good friend Kate Northrup recently did this…not to sell something, but to start building her list with quality people that truly care about what she is putting out there. She had amazing success, with tons of engagement and a big opportunity to promote at the end. 30-day list-building challenge: My good friend, Natalie Lussier does this regularly. She uses imagery, hashtags, all of the stuff that gets people engaged and active in a way that’s fun for everyone. Opportunity #3: Creating a Four-Part Email Sequence That Leads to an Offer You don't need a big list for this one to work. In fact, it’s better to try this one when your list is still small, because you’re going to get better and better at it as your list grows. These sequences consist of four emails that get sent over a short period of time. Your goal with them is to paint the picture of a challenge you know your audience is facing…the solution to which is, of course, your program. What makes this opportunity so powerful is that people on your list might have already received an opportunity to buy your program, but chose not to. After all, we all buy at different times, for different reasons. So don’t be afraid to put this out in front of people who have already seen your program promotion. This may be the moment when they make the decision. In the first email, you are easing people into the idea that there is a challenge and you have the solution. Get their attention by letting them learn something, and assure them that you are there to offer value. The emails that follow will be a little more aggressive in terms of selling the program—not in a spammy way, but demonstrating the features and benefits of your program. It’s going to help them do X. It’s going to solve problem Y. It’s going to take away stress and overwhelm around Z. Make the email about your audience, and tell the story of what will happen to them when they buy your program. Use case studies and examples, images, and screen shots from inside your program. Don’t be afraid to serve it up—these are not short emails with a link to your sales page. These are meaty emails that paint the picture. The final email is going to be the one that introduces scarcity. You can say that you are running a special promotion with a discount or free bonus when they purchase by a certain date. Make it very time-sensitive: “By Friday, this offer is going away. You are not going to get another opportunity to get this bonus when you purchase.” Click here to download this week's valuable freebie, "A Course Creation Starter's Guide." Opportunity #4: Offering Your Services to Your Audience Caveat: I’m not a huge fan of the service model of business if your goal is to create a more automated system. I am passionate about teaching you how to build a business that does not rely on trading your time for dollars. This is a temporary, special opportunity, offered to a small group on your email list. Choose a special skill or a knowledge base that you have, and create an opportunity to offer your time and services to this select audience for a premium. Again, this is temporary. This is not something that should take over your business and derail all your other projects in the meantime. This is a little bit on the back burner for some quick extra cash. Maybe you are a nutritionist and you can help people make a 30-day meal plan. Maybe you’re great at hacking website-building platforms and can offer your expertise to others. In my first two years of business, I set up an opportunity where I would review others’ Facebook marketing strategy. I would review people’s Facebook pages and profiles, interview them about how they were using Facebook, and about how their program or product came into play. Then I would create a report—I’d made a template for it, so it wouldn’t take me hours and hours. I would create the report to offer you insight in ways you could make your Facebook marketing better, how to brand your Facebook Page in a different way to get a bigger impact, all that good stuff. I knew Facebook so well that this didn’t take tons of time and energy. But it was really valuable to my audience. Taking on just a few of these projects per week provided instant revenue, in the midst of building my online training programs. Just think of your niche and decide what you can offer that help boost revenue for a short time as you get things going. Opportunity #5: Becoming an Affiliate to Somebody Else’s Program or Product I saved this one until the end because you can use it in tandem with Opportunities #1-4. Webinars, 30-day challenges, mini live promos, four-part email sequences…all those can all be used as an affiliate. You’ve heard of this before, I’m sure. But have you actually done it? Have you done it right? I have been an affiliate for many years for different programs and products. For instance, you’ve probably heard me talk about my B-School Bonus. I am a proud member of B-School and I promote it any chance I get because I know it changes lives and businesses. This is a huge part of my affiliate revenue. I am also an affiliate of Lead Pages. They do amazing things and they have changed businesses quickly based on how easy their tool is. But I don’t let it take over my business and I definitely never want it to make more money than my own programs. The idea is to let it complement all of the stuff I am doing on my own. Three tips for smart affiliate marketing: 1. Believe in it. You have to have used the program or product you’re helping to market. You must know that it works, have your own results that you can talk about, and be so excited to sing its praises. You know you’ve made a good affiliate marketing partnership or connection when you tell everybody about it even if you’re not going to get money for it. 2. Build a funnel with your affiliate. Webinars, four-part email sequences, and mini trainings all work for this. For example, if you click here, you’ll find an affiliate promotion that I did a training for. I literally walk you through how to use Lead Pages. For B School, I have an entire B School bonus experience: five bonuses you can’t get anywhere else, including the live two-day event, including a special Facebook ads program, including my new webinar program that’s not even out yet. You only get this stuff in B School when you use my affiliate link. 3. Read this article My good friend, Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income, wrote a post on his blog “Smart Passive Income” called Five Ways to Unbox the Mystery and Increase your Affiliate Income. It’s a really smart strategy for affiliate marketing, especially for those just starting out. Definitely check that out, along with his other great article, How to Stop Hoping and Start Earning. One Final Tip These are all ways for you to find hidden money that can add to your cash flow. But an equally helpful action is to find the hidden places where you are losing cash. I can almost guarantee that you are paying for something right now that is not necessary to your success. We all have been guilty of this. To find the leak and make it stop, spend 20 minutes right now going through your latest credit card statement and checking account statement. Make a quick list of everything you are paying for monthly for your business: apps, tools, subscriptions, etc. Are you using everything you are paying for? If not, stop paying for it. You’ll instantly start saving cash. Voila! Instant money that you can start spending where it will actually work for you. EPISODE FREEBIE Get "A Course Creation Starter's Guide" FREE DOWNLOAD Make sure to listen to the entire episode for more tips and personal insights from my experience in hunting out hidden money opportunities. And don't forget to download this week's valuable freebie, "A Course Creation Starter's Guide" for creating your own online training programs. Click here to download it now.
AskPat 2.0: A Weekly Coaching Call on Online Business, Blogging, Marketing, and Lifestyle Design
Today’s question comes from Bobbie, who wonders how my relationship with Bluehost has grown over the years, and what I’ve done to foster that growth. What a great question! I share my history with Bluehost and how I grew my affiliate income with them. Do you have a question about affiliate income? Record it at http://www.askpat.com/. Today's sponsor is Freshbooks. Go to http://www.GetFreshBooks.com and enter "Ask Pat" for more information.
AskPat 2.0: A Weekly Coaching Call on Online Business, Blogging, Marketing, and Lifestyle Design
Today’s question comes from Kevin, who asks if he can forgo his website and rely on Facebook for his affiliate income. You can bet I have opinions! Kevin’s site is http://soccerpracticevideos.com/. In this episode, I talk about my buddy, Chris Ducker: http://www.chrisducker.com/; Gary Vaynerchuck: http://garyvaynerchuk.com/; and Tim Ferriss: http://fourhourworkweek.com/podcast/. Do you have a question about Facebook? Record it at http://www.askpat.com/. Today's sponsor is Freshbooks. Go to http://www.GetFreshBooks.com and enter "Ask Pat" for more information.
AskPat 2.0: A Weekly Coaching Call on Online Business, Blogging, Marketing, and Lifestyle Design
Cy noticed that my Bluehost affiliate income is really high, and was wondering why. Is my volume really high, or am I doing something differently? Check out my resources page—you need one too! www.smartpassiveincome.com/resources/ Do you have a question about affiliate income? Record it at http://www.askpat.com/. Today's sponsor is Freshbooks. Go to http://www.GetFreshBooks.com and enter "Ask Pat" for more information.
Jason Loves Life Podcast - Helping Your WebComic Live Long and Prosper
The Niche Site Journal Podcast documents the experience of three guys taking brand new niche sites from idea to profitable businesses. Join Jason, Lior, and Dennis as they share their unique processes and insights into the incredible opportunity of building niche websites. In this episode we talk about product creation, affiliate income, exit strategies, and […]
The Niche Site Journal Podcast documents the experience of three guys taking brand new niche sites from idea to profitable businesses. Join Jason, Lior, and Dennis as they share their unique processes and insights into the incredible opportunity of building niche websites. In this episode we talk about product creation, affiliate income, exit strategies, and […]
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