May 2013 Income Report

The end of May was the half way point that I set for reaching my goal of earning $250/day so I can quit my day job. I have made tremendous strides in accomplishing this goal and I am proud to report that I am just $39/day short of reaching my goal. During May I made some strategic decisions that will guarantee that I will reach my goal.

Second Most Productive Month in 2013

Even though I was not able to work on my online business for more than 15% of the month, I was able to create my second most productive month this year. I took off for 5 days to go on a learning cruise to the Bahamas. Despite missing out on the days to work on my online business, I was able to learn some new material and confirm that I definitely need to attend an advance training class next year. The other bonus was that I was able to learn something new which was unexpected and it has the potential to make me between $10 and $25 per day.

During the month of May I was able to generate online income from 5 different sources. Here is the breakdown of my online income for May 2013.

Squidoo

My one lens is still generating a small amount of income for me without me doing any time of work on it. My lens is on container vegetable gardening. My lens is moving up in ranking in Squidoo and it is now ranked #798 in Home & Garden and 8,431 overall in Squidoo! If you have not visited my lens please stop by and like it and leave a comment.

During May my lens brought in $14.03 in commissions. Most of this amount is commissions from Squidoo for having a high-ranking lens. Somebody actually purchased 2 items from Amazon as a result of clicking on my lens so I was able to also generate Amazon commissions. Squidoo actually splits the Amazon commission with you.

I would never have imagined being able to generate this income with absolutely zero work. I do know that when I quit my day job I will create one or two new lens every month. If I am able to get $10/month from a lens and create 2 a month, then in a year I will have 25 lens earning $250/month. Now most people might snicker at such a small amount of money but it comes out to almost $10/day of income with ZERO work involved in maintaining that income. Plus you never want to put all of your eggs in one basket so earning an extra $10/day is nothing to turn your back on.

Affiliate Marketing

This is clearly my bread and butter method of earning money online. It is the one method that I started with initially and it is the one that I have spent the most time in cultivating. There are a couple of products that I promote on a monthly basis. I have added a new affiliate program last month  and I got my first commissions check from this new program. It was only for $1.50 but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

During the month of May I saw one of the products I promote drop from the #1 position in Google to #2. I am not sure what is the stats that shows how much traffic goes to #1 instead of #2 but I can tell you that my commission from this affiliate program dropped tremendously. Without this drop I probably would have earned another $200 or $300 from this one affiliate program.

In a previous post I talked about the Ultimate Success Formula and this month I clearly followed it step by step to recover. I evaluated what went wrong and what I need to get back to #1 ranking in Google. I hired a new SEO company and tasked them with bumping me back up to #1 in Google. In about a month or two months I will see their results. I expect it will be positive as they move me back to #1 in Google. The lesson learned is that you have to spend time to manage ALL PIECES of your business and not just the one that you are currently building!

Despite my setbacks I was able to earn $2,809.34 in affiliate marketing income in May.

Product Sales

One of the best ways of controlling your online income is to produce your own products and sell them. Actually it is better to find affiliates that will promote your product in exchange for a percentage of the purchase price. I believe in leaving enough meat on the bone so that my affiliates will have a nice profit from promoting my products. I give then 60% commissions on my products that sell for $17.

I was approached by a well know internet marketer that promoted my product to his email list. In a matter a few days I made $478.94 in commissions from the sale of my product. Note that is only my 40% of the purchase price and the internet marketer made much more than that in exchange for sending out one email .

Pay Per Lead

This is a new method that I use to make money online. I got involved with PPL as a result of building my solo ad business. When someone leaves my squeeze page I redirect them to a PPL program. If they signup for the PPL program then I get a commission. Even though the person did not optin to my email list on my squeeze page, I am still able to generate a commission from that person through the PPL program.

My solo ad list has grown from 2,000 subscribers to right at 3,500 subscribers. My goal is to be at 5,000 subscribers by the end of the month. Since my list has grown almost 1,500 subscribers in 12 days then I should have no problem in adding another 1,500 subscribers in the remaining 18 days of the month.

I want to grow the list to 10,000 subscribers by end of July and be generating me $100/day at that point. I have used an unorthodox method of reaching this goal and I will share my strategy in a future blog post.

The Pay Per Lead program paid me $30.30 in May. This was a $1/day which is a good start for my second month in using this method to make money online.

 Book Royalties

Publishing a book on Amazon in paperback or Kindle or both formats is just the gift that keeps on giving. I have done absolutely NOTHING to promote my books on Amazon since I published them over a year ago. I just get an email once a month from Kindle and another one from CreateSpace telling me how much they are depositing into my bank account for book royalties. I love getting these emails.

Clearly when I am able to walk away from my day job I will work on my more books related to real estate investing. I want to create more books that produce a clear passive income stream from Amazon. In May I earned $111.10 in book royalties. My books are generating $3.58/day in income from Amazon.

I have plans to publish 2 more books on Amazon. If they are able to generate the same $3.58/day each then I will be earning over $10/day from Amazon book royalties. These books could generate the income I need to pay for my health insurance premium that I will be forced to buy when I quit my day job. It will be nice to have the peace of mind knowing that I have to do absolutely no work to generate the income necessary to cover my health insurance. Plus my mother will sleep better at night knowing I can afford insurance if I am not working for a company.

Total Online Income for May 2013

As I mentioned before I was not able to work more than 15% of the month because I was on a cruise to the Bahamas. In addition I took a hit with one of my affiliate programs that dropped from #1 to #2 in Google. Even so here is the breakdown of my May 2013 online income.

$2,809.34 Affiliate Marketing

$478.94     Product sales

$30.30       Pay Per Lead Program

$14.03       Squidoo

$111.75      Book Royalties

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$3,444.31  total income for May

 

Quiting the Ratrace

There were 31 days in the month of May. I earned an average of $111.10/day in May. My goal is to earn $250/day by August 31st so I can quit my day job. I gave myself 8 months to accomplish my goal. At the half way point I am at $111.10/day. This is less than half way to my ultimate goal of $250/day.

I am not sweating my current position because I am working with a guy in my solo ad business. He is currently building my list for me from 2k subscribers to 5k subscribers by the end of this month. We are working through the details where he will manage my list where I will earn $100/day from the list and he keeps the rest.

If we get to the point we want by end of July my list will have the potential to earn $200/day. Earlier I talked about my belief of “leave enough meat on the bone for the other person” and when we reach our goal it might work out that he will be earning $100/day just to manage my list for me. So basically it will be about a 50/50 split on the income with him doing the work.

When you add the $100/day from the solo ad business to my $111.10/day that I earned in May then I would be at $211.10/day. That will leave me just $39/day short of reaching my goal and 4 months to get there. I am participating in Niche Site Duel 2.0 that Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income is doing. I have chosen the niche of “hvac training” and estimates show that if I reach #1 in Google then the site would generate $3,414.60 in income. (Estimate came from an SEO company). That would give me the extra $39/day that I am missing plus some extra change. For the next four months you will see me heads down working on my website on hvac training to get it ranked and start to earn income.

Making Strategic Decisions and Taking Action

One of the lessons learned from May is that I need to stop exchanging time for dollars. Most of the people who are making a killing with solo ads spend what looks like 15 hours a day in Facebook groups and Skype groups to sell their solo ads. Someone can post that they are looking to buy a solo ad and the first person that responds gets the business. That is why they spend their time in these groups so they can quickly make these sales.

The challenge for me is that I cannot be on Facebook and Skpe during business hours. So when it comes to building my list myself I lose out on lots of opportunities that go to people who are online. This is frustrating. As a result I partnered up with a guy that does solo ads on a full-time business. I offered to pay him $1k to build my list from 2k subscribers to 5k subscribers in a month. In addition he gets to keep all money he earns from the list while building it. That means if he is selling solo ads then he gets to pocket that money. If someone purchases an OTO after opting to my list then he gets to keep that money. If someone passes on the squeeze page but signs up for the PPL program then he gets to keep that cash.

All in all he is making quite a killing building my list for me during this month. The best strategic decision I made this month was to partner with someone who was more of an expert at list building and let him do what he does best. This gave me free time to build my niche website.

I have to credit my personal life coach for giving me the direction to make this strategic move. Check out this post where I talked about the synergies that allowed me to hire my personal coach. Over our last couple of coaching calls he has taught me the importance of having a team to help you accomplish your goal. We all have our personal strengths and weaknesses. I just hired someone who has a personal strength in an area that I have a personal weakness and as a result it will generate $100/day for me.

Next Steps

I will be working on my niche website on hvac training and building this site. I took today off from work to dedicate to my online business. Today I will be putting together a list of 50 titles for articles to be posted on my new niche website. I will be turning them over to my writer that charges me $6/article or $300 to write all the articles for me. I will give him 45 days to complete the articles. I will post the first 5 articles at the same time. From there I will probably post a new article every 2-3 days.

Once it starts to rank in the top 30 of Google then I will be signing up for multiple affiliate programs and adsense and will put those on the website to monetize it. I will be closely watching the search terms people use to find the website. If people find me using a search term that I don’t have an article for then I will be collecting this and letting my writer write on that term.