April 2013 Income Report

April 8th was my 51st birthday. When I was young I always dreamed that I would be able to retire from the ratrace by the time I was 50 years old. So turning 51 was a very, very difficult day because I knew that I had let my life long dream slip away. That was enough to give me motivation to work my butt off during the entire month to make sure that I am not still working in the ratrace by the time my 52nd birthday rolls around. That hard work has paid off as I earned 26% more online than I took home in my day job.

Multiple Streams on Income

If you read my March 2013 Income Report you know that I have 3 financial goals that I want to accomplish in 2013. The first goal was to earn $100 per day for 3 consecutive months. I accomplished this goal at the end of March. The next goal was to earn more online that I took home in my day job. I realize that the only way to reach this second goal is to have multiple streams of income. These different streams of income will contribute to my online monthly income. If you have enough streams making enough money then you can reach your goal of earning more than you do in your day job.

For April I was very aggressive in getting new streams on income started and producing income. The new streams of income were Squidoo, new affiliate programs and solo ads. That may sound like quite a bit to attack in one month and you would probably be right. I gave up an hour every morning before I ever left for work for all 22 work days during the month. In addition I spent at least one hour every evening after work for an additional 22 hours. Over the four weekends I put in a total of 58 hours of work during the 8 days. All total I worked 102 hours during the month on my online business.

The reason I worked so hard on my online business is I have a goal and a deadline in which to accomplish that goal. I want to earn at least $200/day (preferably $250/day) by August 31st. If I reach that goal then I have the opportunity to decide if I want to get up in the mornings and go to work for someone else or stay home and work for myself. You have to admit that this goal has a big enough WHY that drives me to spend the time that I do on my online business.

Here are the different streams of income that produced income for me in April 2013.

Book Royalties

I had every intention of working on my next book but that was sidetracked during this month. Instead I just sat back and cashed the check for the royalties for my existing books. When I am able to spend time working on my new book then I will be able to add royalties from this book to my online income. So for the month of April I just occasionally checked my online income from book royalties from Kindle and CreateSpace. For April I earned $82.50 from book royalties.

Squidoo

I have been half-ass playing with Squidoo and making lenses. I learned about Squidoo from Erica Stone. I purchased one of Erica’s products called Extreme Reviewer about writing good quality content for websites promoting Amazon as an affiliate. It was one quality product. Later she came out with another product on making money with Squidoo. I purchased it and started to create a few lens. Now any time Erica comes out with a new product I purchase it because I know it is going to be a quality product. I never actively focused on my Squidoo lens. Well recently here I decided to use Squidoo to create some lenses to promote Amazon products but with a twist. As a result I earned $4.94 in April from Squidoo.
You can check out my Squidoo lenses Container Vegetable Gardens, Crossfit Garage Gyms and Best Folding Baby Strollers. Of course I would not mind if you decide to like my Squidoo lenses, share them on Facebook, tweet them, Google+ or pin them on Pinterest. Please leave a comment to let me know you stopped by to read them.

New Affiliate Programs

In my “7 Step Process For Affiliate Marketing Promotions” post, I shared that I recently signed up for 2 new affiliate programs. These 2 programs are DragonDoor and Rogue Fitness. The above Squidoo lens is something I put together to promote Rogue Fitness. I am getting quite a few clicks from the Squidoo lens but I have made my first commission check from Dragon Door. During the month of April I earned $10.49 in Commissions.

Solo Ads

I am combining product sales of my product in this category. Let me explain why. For the past month I have been working on learning the solo ad business with the goal of earning $100/day from it. The first step in the solo ad business is to build a list so that you can start selling solo ads that are emailed to your list. To get people to sign up to your list you create a squeeze page which offers them a free report. To get the free report they must give you their email address to be added to your list.
After they have opted into your list you could just take them to a page where they can download their free report. Instead what I chose to do was to direct them to an OTO page where they could purchase my Amazon Affiliate Bible product. As a result of doing this I sold 33 copies of my Amazon Affiliate Bible at $17 each and made $561.
In addition to this amount people purchased products that I recommended and reviewed inside my Amazon Affiliate Bible for which I also earned a commission. This produced an additional $29.91 in commissions.
The third stream of income I produced from solo ads was recommending a Pay Per Lead program. When a person reached the download page for their free product, I included a link to a PPL program that I signed up as an affiliate. I labeled this as an “Unannounced Bonus” on the download page. I get paid every time someone signs up for the PPL program. I only joined this program in the last 10 days of the month. I am glad that I joined because I was able to add an additional $12 to my online total for April.
All total the solo ads category produced $602.91 for the month of April. Just a side note, my goal for solo ads is to reach the point where I am earning $100/day. For the month of April I averaged $20.09/day from solo ads. That puts me 20% of the way toward my goal!

Affiliate Marketing

This category covers all the affiliate marketing programs that I am part of already. That is why I broke out my two new affiliate marketing programs above. My current affiliate marketing programs are the bread and butter of my online income today. With that said I am proud to announce that I earned $3,231.91 from Affiliate Marketing in April.

April Grand Total

$602.91 Solo Ads
$4.94 Squidoo
$10.49 New Affiliate programs
$82.50 Book Royalties
$3,231.91 Affiliate marketing
———-
$3,932.75

Financial Goal #2 Status

At the beginning of this post I mentioned my 3 financial goals that I have for 2013. They build upon each other and I have to complete one before working on the next goal. I have already accomplished my initial goal of earning $100/day online for 3 consecutive months at the end of March. You can check out my monthly income reports to see how I accomplished this.
My next goal was to earn more online that I earn in my day job. I am proud to say that in April I crushed this goal. I only take home $3,100 each month from my day job. In April I earned 26.8% MORE online that I earned from my day job. Even though I lost out on my goal of retiring by age of 50, April did have some redemption in that I earned more than my day job.
My last and final goal is to earn $250/day by August 31st. In April I averaged $131.09/day. I am 52% of the way toward reaching this goal.

Next Steps

I will be writing some new posts about what I have learned about solo ads. I will include a spreadsheet of everyone that I have purchased solo ads from and the results that I received. I have also produced a new squeeze page that is converting at an unbelievable 60%. I will be sharing a link to it so you can see what I am doing. I will also be sharing some hints and tips on using Aweber for your solo ads business that I have learned this past month. Be on the lookout over the next two weeks for these posts that will offer some first hand insight on the solo ad business that I had to learn the hard way.

Erica Stone

Someone asked me about the products from Erica Stone that I recommend. I have purchased all 8 of the following products. You can check them out if you want. NOTE: these are affiliate links so, if you buy, I receive a commission. I am just listing them in response to a question recevied from a reader.