After coming off my very successful first month of being unemployed I was expecting things to go just as well if not better in my second month. It was much better but only if you don’t use dollars earned as the barometer of success.
I had determined that when I was going to walk away from my day job, I promised that I would not take any trips for the first 6 months. The reasoning is I would have a good measure of how much I could earn each month before incurring any major expenses.
The last thing I wanted to do was to get over my head in debt by incurring major expenses. Well it only took about 5 weeks for the desire for safety to go out the window and take off on my first travel trip in July.
If you know anything about you, you know that I LOVE to travel. I enjoy the experiences of seeing new places, cultures, food and ways of living. That is why I am working on membership in the Traveler’s Century Club whose membership is open to anyone that has been to 100 countries. I am only at 66 countries.
In July I was able to go on an adventure filled 6 day trip with my mother and younger sister to the north east part of the United States. Actually we visited 13 states and DC in 6 days while traveling almost 1,800 miles. For me being able to pack up and leave and go traveling with my family whenever I want is the barometer that I use for success and for that reason July was very successful.
Learning New Skills
In my mind the best way to be successful online is to continuously adapt and learn new skills. You can then apply those new skills to generate new income streams.
For the past couple of months I have been learning Facebook ads. I have successfully used it to promote affiliate products, drive traffic to my website and build an email list.
After seeing ads from other companies in my newsfeed, I decided to apply my new found knowledge of Facebook ads to something I know very well – Amazon Affiliate.
Lately with the changes in Google it has become harder and harder to get websites that promote Amazon products ranking. That has cut into my income stream that I have received from Amazon.
By combining Facebook Ads with Amazon affiliate I was able to generate a new income stream for myself.
Promoting Amazon with Facebook Ads
I recently saw ads from companies like Wayfair advertising outdoor patio furniture and hot tubs. This started me thinking that I could do the same thing.
So the first thing I thought about was these 2 questions:
Which sex is more likely to go shopping?
What one item would they buy when they go shopping
My answers to the questions were Female and Shoes (followed closely by purses). Let me know if you had a different answer that this.
So I went to Amazon’s website and started searching for women’s shoes. I only selected shoes that had a 4 star rating or higher and were priced over $100.
I took the images of 8 different shoes and put them in a Facebook Ad. I then ran the ad to women aged 34-44 that were married and college educated. I then ran multiple ads and hit only women meeting this criteria in Miami, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
The ad send them directly to Amazon when they clicked on it. When someone purchases I get a commissions. After much testing I found that I found success with simple ads that showed multiple products and a buy now button. No other text on the ad. Here is an ad that I ran for Women’s Purses.
I have only been running these ads for a few weeks but I have had some great success even with the 24 hour cookie that Amazon provides.
In July I earned $648.28 from promoting Amazon through Facebook Ads.
Book Royalties
I keep saying each and every month and I am going to have to repeat it again this month: this is the most hands off method of earning income each month.
Each month I do absolutely zero work on promoting my books on Amazon yet they continue to sell each and every month.
In July I earned 47.71 in Book Royalties from Amazon.
Contractor Work
I spent several days helping out again at my old employer Aaron’s Inc. I was the primary person responsible for putting new training courses into our Learning Management System (LMS).
It requires you to be technical to manage the LMS and none of my co-workers have a technical bent. So with the development of several new courses they called me to help install these courses.
They also had some account courses that needed to be updated so they were removing all the current account courses from all the learning plans. We have a separate learning plan for every position in our retail stores, corporate, franchise, national support center, and service centers.
So for several days I went through and pulled out these courses from current lesson plans and installed new courses.
I don’t mind helping out when they need it.
In July I earned $281.25 from contractor work with my former employer.
AdSense
I will make this short and sweet. I earn adsense on several of my website with the most prominent website being my iHvacZone.
The only time that I check on my AdSense earnings is each month when completing my monthly online income report.
In July 2014 I earned $5.91 from AdSense.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads is my current sandbox of knowledge. I am learning many different ways to promote different items on Facebook.
I started making money online with affiliate marketing. I would promote somebody else’s product in return for getting a commission every time I produced a sale.
So I took my strength and applied it to Facebook Ads initially. If you missed it check out my post showing step by step how I used Facebook Ads to promote affiliate products.
The next evolution in my playing in the sandbox was to build an email list. Once you build an email list then you can start to monetize your list. I have a post showing how I created a much targeted list using Facebook ads.
My next step I talked about above in promoting Amazon products. This allows me to promote Amazon without having to worry about getting a traditional website ranked.
With all these different strategies I am seeing quite a bit of success with Facebook Ads.
Several people have asked me how I learned how to do Facebook Ads. I purchased both of Donald Wilson’s courses FB Architect and FB Ads Cracked Reloaded.
I learned from both courses. Thought the $997 price for FB Ads Cracked Reloaded is out of many people’s price points. I found the course provided many videos that he released prior to the training.
As I have been working with Facebook Ads I refer back to the content in both courses. If you want to learn about Facebook Ads without paying $1k for a course then you should definitely check out the FB Architect course. It only costs $1 initially to get into it and review the content and then you charged I think $97/mth for 2 months after that. But if you want to get into a course for only $1 you should check out this course.
In July I earned $2,407.81 from Facebook Ads.
Solo Ads / Email Marketing
With my work with Facebook Ads I have generated a big email list. This was one of the primary reasons why I just moved all my email lists from Aweber to GetResponse. The simple fact is that GetResponse is cheaper.
Now that I have built up an email list I am starting to monetize that list. Instead of sending them solo ads that people purchase from me I am sending them links to products that I am an affiliate.
With my recent travels in July I mainly neglected sending emails to my list. I had been sending emails to them every 3 days but that fell by the wayside in July.
In July I earned only $430.00 from email marketing.
Product Sales
The best way to control your destiny is to create your own products. There is no better advice I can give to anyone interested in making money online.
My primary product has been my Amazon Affiliate Bible. I have sold almost 800 copies of it since it was launched.
In July I earned $476.00 from the sales of my own products.
Giveaways
I mentioned that I was using Facebook Ads to build an email list. The traditional method of building a list is to give something away in exchange for someone’s email address.
I spent time in putting together a free graphics package as my giveaway. It includes almost 60 Megs of graphics.
If you use Photoshop, I include layered PSD files for you to edit. If you use a different graphics program I include PNG files. So everyone can use the graphics in Graphics Kit.
I then approached several owners of Facebook Groups that they had created for people that had purchased their products. All of these people had products that required the use of graphics in implementing the strategy they provided.
I put together a very cool squeeze page using LeadPages for people to opt-in to get my free Graphics Kit.
By advertising my Graphics Kit in these groups I was able to get over 220 people to my email list.
I created an autoresponder sequence to email the list on a schedule. As a result I ended up earning commission when someone purchased a product that I referenced in the email sequence.
You can get my free Graphics Kit here.
In July I earned $89.10 from Giveaways.
Affiliate Marketing
This is how I got started with making money online. It has the lowest barrier to entry. This is the best way I know of for someone to get started today with making money online.
As you can read above I use Facebook Ads as one method to promote other people’s products.
You do not have to limit yourself to promoting other people’s product that talk about making money online. You can promote other affiliate programs like Amazon and Rogue Fitness.
I recently ran several different ads for Rogue Fitness. Here is one of the ads that I ran.
I ran that ad on Facebook targeting people in high school and college that were into weight lifting. This was a very targeted audience. As a result I ended up getting quite a few sales from this ad. I spent less than $15 on this ad and made almost 8x that in commissions.
You can easily find affiliate programs that pay out 10% or more commissions on CommissionJunction or ShareASale. I am members of over a dozen programs through these two networks and I promote them all.
In July I earned $1,421.06 from Affiliate Marketing
My July 2014 Online Income Report
Compared to June my income in July dropped $2,743.42.
Most people would be very disappointed with that drop in income but I am not. As I mentioned earlier the opportunity to pack up and go on a crazy travel adventure with my family was worth more than the drop in income.
Tony Robbins says it best when describing what success is.
Success is doing what you want to do, when you want, where you want, with whom you want, as much as you want.
~ Tony Robbins
If I was still working at Aaron’s I would have had no vacation time available and would never have been able to make that trip. The fact that I was able to go on that trip is how I define success in July.
Here is the summary of my July 2014 Online Income Report
$648.28 Promoting Amazon with Facebook Ads
$47.71 Book Royalties
$281.25 Contractor Work
$5.91 Adsense
$2,407.81 Facebook Ads
$476.00 Product Sales
$89.10 Giveaways
$430.00 Email Marketing
$1,421.06 Affiliate Marketing
———-
$5,807.12 July 2014 Online Income Report Total