A lot has happened this past month. I’m now going onto my 7th month as a self employed entrepreneur. I’ve unfortunately had more failures in February than I would have liked.
Failures (aka learning experiences!)
A failed product launch
I launched a product with Paul James called Affiliate Profit Loophole at the beginning of the month. I did the actual product creation and Paul helped get most of the sales page and funnel created for the actual launch. I’m not sure if it was the topic, possibly too much mystery or simply just something not a lot of people were interested in.
The course is all about earning affiliate commissions by recommending products within free and paid online courses. I’ve made quite a bit over the past year just recommending solutions I mentioned inside of my online courses.
It didn’t perform anywhere to near as good as the 1k Freelance Challenge course or our Pay It Forward method course. We made about 70 sales which in comparison the other launches did around 500 sales. Between the both of us we made just about $700 total on this which is pretty poor for a launch.
I think one thing I’ve learned is that we likely need to put some more weight on affiliate support for future launches. The other thing is that it’s likely most of our lists are made up of people interested in SEO courses and services due to the types of products both of us have launched in the past.
Client SEO
I admit I have been much more focused on product creation and affiliate marketing vs. bringing on more clients.
Is the money awesome? Yes, it’s one of the best ways to make extra income online and it’s also got huge potential for a real business model. I suppose my mind just isn’t in it. I’ve been trying out different outsourced providers to handle 100% of the work while I handle 100% of the communication.
After coming out of another agency for 8 months straight dealing with 20+ clients daily I just lost a lot of motivation here. I don’t have a desire to build a big company or team around digital marketing services. I’d much rather have 4-5 good clients that I can keep long term and use as a way to bring in some extra income each month.
Despite this, the types of businesses I’m finding myself working with are very hit or miss which is another reason this business model can be a tough one. I likely need to up my game with communication if I want to keep some of these clients around.
I had 2 really good clients leave this past month not due to my performance but the 1st because of running out of funds for the project and the 2nd due to losing a Dr. at the office and not needing the extra call volume.
I also lost my biggest client at $1000/month due to outsourcing with someone new that in my opinion did a bad job at communicating what was going on reporting wise. This was someone mind you I thought would be the best outsourced partner out there (I won’t name them) but ultimately it just didn’t work out. Luckily I was able to get a refund for the last month of work but it was still a big loss to have the client decide to leave.
Within a couple of days I was able to get back on UpWork and already have 2 new clients that may be coming on board next week. You can take my free course to learn how I did this vs chasing people down with cold emails or cold calling.
Shiny Objects & Focus
I somehow find myself on more email lists these days trying to sell me something new. A lot of these programs also look very promising while most of them have big $2k+ price tags. I managed to pull through and avoid trying anything new. Following my story you will understand how difficult it can be to ignore “the next big thing”. I realize I have everything I need, I just need to spend more time working on the things that are working for me.
I even decided to follow a method from a course I got a review copy from from. More or less wasted $40 using junk traffic to earn income through ads and the method didn’t work as advertised. This is the kind of stuff I need to stop wasting time on.
I’ve been a bit all over the place but that I’ve done starting into March is following the Mastery Journal by John Lee Dumas. This is already helping me structure my days a lot better and focus on specific tasks through out the day.
Skillshare Changes
Skillshare completely changed how they pay out students starting this year. More or less I get paid based on every minute watched of my courses and I had about 11k~ minutes watched in January. I made about $650~ from this and another $100 from 10 student referrals. The money obviously is still nice but what discouraged me so much was I actually put a lot of time into some short mini classes and my income does not seem to be increasing over there.
The minutes paid out is equal to about 5 cents per minute vs. them previously paying out based on premium students enrolling in my classes. I’m still going to publish some classes there but likely won’t make it a big focus moving forward like I was the last 5+ months.
Wins This Past Month
Product Reviews
I’ve started reviewing products on my blog which is something I mostly just enjoy doing. Of course I’d like for every product review to make me some affiliate commissions but I feel as though my current audience may not be ready to see all different kinds of products in different niches.
My thought here was to do at least a few a week and they will over time become nice little evergreen reviews and I’ll be getting some free products a long the way. I was given an enterprise copy of Interact which normally would likely cost over $3000/year to use. This is one of the perks I love about reviewing products.
I’ve got a pretty good process down now for doing my reviews, It’s just a matter of if this is something I should be focusing my time on or not.
My New Software With Paul
I’ve been spending a ton of time on a new software tool with Paul James and it’s now 99% complete. A lot of time this month went into me QA’ing the software and constantly giving the developer new updates on what features and bug fixes needed to be implemented.
I’m going to leave this a mystery for now but hopefully this will be ready by mid-March and we will be doing a webinar to present this live to a big audience. I’m excited to see how it does and I hope it can help a lot of people. Keep an eye out for the webinar announcement.
Partnership For My Affiliate Sites
I formed a new partnership for helping me get one of my affiliate sites off the ground. This has been going really well so far and we are also in the process of building out a system for outsourced link building. I am excited about this because I can also use this link building for new SEO clients which I know will benefit them a great deal long term. I think having a bit more control here for both my niche sites and clients will ultimately have better long term results.
Moving Into March
Right now I’m spending a lot of time trying to get this software project wrapped up by finishing the sales page, webinar slides and more. I’ve also decided I might try starting to scale a small Facebook ad at around $5/day to see if I can get more people into my free UpWork course.
*Note – Some links in this post are affiliate links. If you buy any of the products mentioned I will earn a commission and I greatly appreciate it. Be sure to also checkout my review posts as many of the products include bonuses from me personally.
Let’s Dive In Shall We?
Income:
Konker Sales – $13.14
Thrive Themes Affiliate – $45.00
FatJoe.co Guest Post Publishing – $30
Guest Post – $30
Scopeleads (Checkout my Review) – $258
Udemy – $1677.93
Amazing.com – $417.63
Skillshare – $724.61
StackCommerce – $429.93
Drip Core Webinar – $300
51 Blocks Referrals – $100
Online Course Mastery Blueprint Webinar – $768
Affiliate Profit Loophole – $342.87
Refund From SEO Outsourcer – $500
Leadz.io (Checkout my Review) – $37
Review Wizard (Checkout my Review) – $13.50
Client SEO – $800
Amazon Affiliates – $97.86
Secret Method (Not focusing on this but It’s making me money and I’m keeping it hidden for now) – $103.98
Total Income: $6689.45
Spent:
Google Drive -$1.99
Affiliate Udemy Payout (Partner Helped Me Promote My Courses) -$676.94
ConvertPlayer -$39.00
SEO Outsourcing -$400
Payment To Paul For FB Ads / Software Costs -$119.12
Thrive Quiz Builder (Checkout my Review) -$49
UpWork Account -$10
10kHits -$39
TubeBuddy -$4.50
GoDaddy Website Renewal -$15.17
Convertkit -$49
Total Spent: -$1403.72
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