My January 2014 Online Income Report

You know how you are going to have a great year? You achieve great things in the first 30 days of the year. That momentum will guarantee that I will have a very successful 2014.

New Year New Beginnings

At the end of 2013 I planted some seeds that I wanted to reap in 2014. I started work on my new website MyEdesia to sell meal plans. The website is now built and I am reaching out to five chefs to partner with them on creating the meal plans.

I want to start my own podcast interviewing successful Internet Marketers. I attended NAMS convention in Atlanta and secured commitments from almost 20 highly successful Internet Marketers for me to interview them.

My map website has finished development. The development took longer than expected but that is not unusual for development projects. My programmer is on the other side of the world and he works while I sleep. I woke up this morning to find that he has installed the code on my website last night. Now just some tweaking and connecting to PayPal and this website will be live and making money.

At the end of 2013 I purchased almost every course that was being sold on Facebook marketing. I have spent the past 60 days reading and watching videos and the re-reading and re-watching every video. I started to implement what I learned and was able to pocket over $150 in less than a week of effort.

Finally I plowed head first into solo ads as a reseller and was able to earn over $200 in just 10 days but then things veered off course which I will talk about below.

So here is a breakdown of my first month of the new year for my January 2014 Online Income Report.

Affiliate Marketing

This gets to lead this month because it is my bread and butter. This is clearly the tactic that I am most familiar with and have the most experience. I am excited because some of the new products that I have been promoting are seeing their very first commissions coming in.

In 3^rd quarter of 2013 I created a website to promote the product SafeRide4Kids. My website Car Seat Travel Vest was built to promote this product. I got my very first sale and commission check for $12.50 from promoting this product.

I have also been promoting stand up paddle boards on multiple free websites like WordPress, Blogger, Squidoo and others. I got a very nice commission check this month for over $170 for promoting these products.

All the hard work is paying off nicely which is a great way to start off 2014. In January 2014 I earned $2,041.35 from affiliate marketing.

Product Sales

My very successful Amazon Affiliate Bible (xxx link) continues to make sales each and every month for me.

Every so often someone that promoted it in the past will send another email to their list resulting in more sales. It is nice to check your email and get one that said you made money – without doing any work!

If you don’t have your own products then you should definitely consider creating one.

In January 2014 I earned $189.74 in sales of my own products.

AdSense

As part of Pat Flynn’s Niche Site Duel 2.0 I created my iHVACzone website. I created articles promoting the hvac industry.

I hired someone to find all of the websites that contain information for each state on certification and requirements for HVAC contractors. I added a map that contained links to all of this information.

I added a job board so people can find jobs in the HVAC industry in their state.

As part of my monetization strategy for this website I added AdSense. Each month the amount that I have earned from AdSense has grown.

In January 2014 I earned $17.68 from AdSense.

Solo Ads

I have definitely spent quite a bit of time learning about solo ads. I have built my own solo ad list. I just have not spent the time necessary to really grow this area of my business.

If you want to learn more about solo ads then check out my post where I got the number one tip from 11 successful solo ad sellers.

Recently I signed up to be a solo ad reseller. The benefit is that I could start making money immediately from solo ads without having to incur the cost and time to build my own list.

During the first 10 days of 2014 I worked very hard on my solo ad business. ON my best day I sold 4 solo ads. I sold at least one solo ad every single day!

I had a perfect reputation score of 100 on SoloChecker. This allowed my ads to be listed first and that was generating the bulk of my sales.

Then I had a problem with Solo Master Pro (xx link). I had 3 ads running at the same time. The first ad didn’t see its first clicks delivered until 72 hours later. The other 2 ads that were posted the very next day experienced the same problem.

After 4 days the first ad still didn’t have all of his clicks delivered so I did the right thing and just refunded the buyer. I ended up losing money on this order.

Since the other two ads seemed to be destined with the same fate of not getting their clicks delivered in a reasonable timeframe, I went out and purchased a solo ad from someone that I trusted to deliver clicks to both of my ads.

Both ads ended up getting over 150 clicks on a 100 click solo ad. That was the combination of the clicks I did get from Solo Master Pro and from the solo ad that I purchased myself.

Unfortunately one of these buyers left a very poor review on SoloChecker. As a result my reputation dropped from 100 to 80 as a result of the review and refund of another order.

Now all of the sudden my ads were no longer listed first on SoloChecker. Now I was like the 9^th or 10^th ad listed. As a result my orders completely evaporated.

Since then I have not done anything else with solo ads for the rest of the month. Eventually I might revisit this but I have enough on my plate right now to keep me busy.

Even with the refund and paying out of pocket for solo ads to make sure my buyers were covered I still made a very nice profit in those 10 days.

My advice if you are working as a solo ad reseller is to make sure you stay on top of everything and when you see clicks not being delivered then raise a stink until they deliver as promised.

In January 2014 I earned $233.50 from solo ads in only 10 days.

Facebook Ads

This is one area that I am very excited about learning about. I have spent some money investing in about five or six different Facebook courses.

There is a lot to learn and so many different ways that you can make money with Facebook. The potential is what excites me.

I started with multiple different methods with Facebook ads. I created a niche Fan Page. Then I ran a small ad to get likes to the Fan Page. Now that I have almost 700 fans I am going to start using this Fan Page as a basis to monetize it.

Another strategy that I used was to sell t-shirts from Teespring. Almost every course covers different methods on how to do this. My first attempt at creating a t-shirt literally fell into my lap.

I am a member of the Unbeatable Mind group. Somebody posted a picture of one of the members holding up a log. I took that picture and turned it into a t-shirt and sold 10 copies. Boom that was my first success with Facebook.

The second thing I did was to promote my mother’s children book “Hattie and the Higgledy Piggledy Hedge”. As a result I was able to get traffic to her website and to make sales from Amazon.

I would love it if you would go over and like her Facebook Fan Page for her book.

Also check out her website at Carol Dolson to see both of her books that she has written. Hattie and the Higgledy Piggledy Hedge was her first book and it won her Georgia Author of the Year Finalist in the Children’s Book category. If you have children then feel free to purchase both of her books from her website.

I just launched another Facebook Ad to sell a unique design t-shirt that I created for the Crossfit Murph workout. If you are not familiar with Crossfit or the Murph workout, it is only run one mile, 100 pull-ups, 200 pushups, 300 squats and run another mile and you do it while wearing a 20 pound weight vest and you have to complete it in less than 70 minutes.

Murph is Lt. Michael P. Murphy who was a Navy SEAL. He was the leader of the team that was killed in the saga where only Marcus Luttrell was the sole survivor. Marcus wrote the book Lone Survivor and it is now a movie. Check out my Murph t-shirt design and feel free to buy one for yourself.

Now I have had some experience at building a new Fan Page, driving traffic to the Fan Page, promoting other people’s product with Facebook and selling t-shirts on Facebook Ads. I am going to be working more on Facebook in the near future.

In 2014 I earned $158.28 from Facebook.

Book Royalties

Yes my books keep selling each and every month on Amazon. This has been a great strategy and I have long talked about writing more books to increase revenue in this arena.

I mentioned earlier that I attended the NAMS conference in Atlanta. While there I met Jeff Herring who speaks about content creation. About 7 years ago I was at another event and Jeff gave away a free copy of his new course on content creation and I won it.

Shortly thereafter I started writing. First I would write for others to make money but later I started writing about topics that I was very familiar with including Real Estate.

Back then ezinearticles website was the go to place to submit content. I started writing about real estate and ended up being one of the top writers on ezinearticles about real estate.

Even though I have not written any new articles on ezinearticles for over 5 years, I am still the #7 writer in Real Estate Investing category and #3 in Real Estate Property Management.

I talked to Jeff and he suggested that I take those hundreds and hundreds of articles that I have written and combine them into a book for real estate investors. I already have the content written so all I need to do is to write the transition from article to article and organize them into chapters.

Be on the lookout for a new book from me on real estate investing and property management where I re-purpose content that I have already created.

In January 2014 I earned $64.22 from book royalties.

January 2014 Online Income Report Summary

Here are the totals for my January 2014 online income report:

$2,041.35  Affiliate Marketing

$189.74  Product Sales

$17.68  Adsense

$233.50  Solo Ads

$64.22  Book Royalties

$2,704.77 January 2014 total online income

Conclusion

My map website is finished finally so I will be spending the next week testing and testing and testing again to make sure everything is working properly. Then I will start building backlinks and get it ranked so it can start generating income each month.

Hopefully I will be able to work out a deal with one or more of the chiefs and have them start creating recipes and meal plans for MyEdesia  website. Once I have the meal plans done then I will be launching this website.

Mostly I will be spending time working on Facebook and learning more and more about making money with that platform.

During my spare time I will be interviewing people for my podcast and working on my real estate property management book.

Oh and don’t forget to like my Mother’s Facebook Fan Page for her book please!

Let me know how the first 30 days of 2014 is going for you.