With two very good months in a row, I have finally decided to pull the trigger and on Friday April 19, 2014 I gave my notice at work. May 30th will be my last day I will every work for somebody else. Starting June 1st I will be permanently unemployed until the day I die.
In the past two months I have earned more online than I earned in THREE months in my day job. In simple terms that means I spent 82 hours to earn my online income for the past two months. It took me 502 hours working in my day job to match the same amount of income.
Learning Facebook Ads
For the past month or two I have been learning Facebook Ads. In fact I took my last 4 days of vacation I had left from my job and spent them in front of my computer learning Facebook Ads.
I started with learning how to do custom audiences. You use the Facebook Graph Search to find people that match your target audience.
For example I created a t-shirt promoting being a University of Alabama fan even though I live in Georgia. How could an avid Georgia fan like myself promote a Alabama shirt? Simple, my younger sister’s husband went to Alabama and since he is a good guy I decided to create this shirt because I live in Georgia.
Here is my t-shirt design
I go to Facebook Graph Search and I search for “people who attended University of alabama”. Once I get the results I narrow this down again by selecting “lives in Georgia”. Boom! I now have the perfect audience for my t-shirt.
The next step is to “scrape” the UIDs for everyone in my custom audience. Joe Troyer created a free Facebook scraper that would download the UIDs. You can get it here.
It just takes time to download several thousand UIDs. During my four days off from work I was downloading almost 50 different custom audiences for design ideas that I have for t-shirts. It was taking so much time that I pulled out my Mac Laptop and had it running non-stop for two days scraping custom audiences for me.
Now that I have my target audience and my t-shirt design, all I need to do is to create a Facebook Ad to market to this audience. Here is the ad that I ran on Facebook.
As you can see from the above ad I show shirts for Alabama Fans living in three different states. Actually I ended up creating shirts for Alabama fans living in Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and South Carolina. Actually created shirts for Florida fans, Georgia fans and Alabama Fans living in Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama and South Carolina.
As you can see that is a huge number of t-shirt designs, facebook ad designs, scraping the custom audiences and running the actual ad.
But as I mentioned I had my last 4 days of vacation from my job plus a Saturday and a Sunday for a grand total of 6 days of doing nothing but this for about 12 hours a day.
Some of my t-shirts were successful meaning that I sold at least 10 t-shirts on Teespring. Some failed to reach their mark.
Not only was I promoting t-shirts on Teespring, I was also creating ads to promote affiliate products. I am going to have a step by step guide to how I quickly made over $70 in less than 48 hours by running ads to an affiliate promotion. So stay tuned for this future post.
Also be sure to check out my previous posts on 3 mistakes I made with Facebook ads and 5 lessons learned.
I am starting to get better at Facebook Ads. It is easily to calculate up the profit you earned from selling of t0-shirts and affiliate products. Then you have to subtract out the amount that you spent on ads to get your net profit.
In March 2014 I earned $1,498.93 from Facebook Ads.
Affiliate Marketing
If you don’t have a product of your own then affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to get started making money online. Affiliate marketing is nothing more than promoting somebody else’s product in exchange for a commission for each sale.
You can promote products through your own website, Squidoo, YouTube videos, SlideShare presentations, article marketing or even Facebook Ads.
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from getting started today by promoting somebody else’s product.
I am an affiliate for a wide range of products including kids travel vests, stand up paddle boards and Rogue Fitness.
I have previously talked about being an affiliate for DragonDoor. Less than two weeks ago DragonDoor ran a 72 hour promotion where they were selling all their kettlebells at 40% off.
I created a Facebook Ad and ran it for 48 hours (I missed the first day of the sale) promoting that you can purchase a kettlebell for 40% off. In a future post I will show you step by step what I did in that 48 hours to earn over $70 promoting DragonDoor.
There are many different ways you can promote somebody else’s product. You just have to be creative and work hard at your promotion.
If you don’t know what you might want to promote, then check out my previous post showing my 3 most profitable (and 3 least profitable) Amazon affiliate niches.
That post will give you an idea of what you can do to be successful with affiliate marketing. If you want to know how I promote an affiliate product check out this post on my 7 step process for promoting any affiliate product.
During March 2014 I earned $2,009.30 through Affiliate Marketing.
Product Sales
The best way to have control over your future is to create your own products. You are 100% in the driver’s seat when you have your own products to sale.
Affiliate marketing will probably always be my bread and butter method of making money online but I learned the hard way that you can lose everything with this method. Check out this post about how I lost my two most profitable affiliate marketing income streams in the same week.
My most successful product is my Amazon Affiliate Bible.
By having your own products then you eliminate the possibility of having an affiliate product being yanked out from underneath you.
In March 2014 I earned $270.00 from the sales of my own products.
Book Royalties
Writing your own book is a great way to create a very passive revenue stream. Especially if you sell your product on Amazon.
Amazon is a master at promoting products and getting people to buy. I could never be more efficient than Amazon at selling so why not let the master do the selling for you?
I have several books that I have written that are being sold on Amazon. They are sold in both print and Kindle formats.
These are books that I wrote several years ago. Even so each and every month I get a royalty check from Amazon for sales of my books.
The best part is that I do nothing to promote these books. Everything is done by Amazon.
In March 2014 I earned $71.22 from book royalties.
Adsense
Last year I created a new website as part of Pat Flynn’s Niche Site Duel 2.0. My website promotes the hvac market.
As part of my strategy in monetizing this website, I placed adsense on it.
For the three months my monthly income from Adsense from this one niche website has increased. For the first time my income in March failed to surpass the previous month’s income.
Regardless it was income that I got with no work done on my part.
In March 2014 I earned $8.30 from Adsense.
Solo Ads
This is an area that I have tried just about every way you can imagine when it comes to making money with solo ads. I am glad that I have put in the time and energy with this income source because I have learned a lot.
If you are not familiar with solo ads then check out this post showing how I got started building my list with solo ads.
I also have a great post about the lessons I have learned first hand from solo ads. Read this and don’t make the same mistakes I made.
I recently talked about making money with solo ads without a list by being a reseller.
I started using a program called Solo Master Pro to sell solo ads using their list. This started off very promising but then I stared having problems.
In a very soon post I will be sharing my updated results from using Solo Master Pro. Just to give you a hint, the review is not going to be positive.
Not giving up on solo ads I decided to pivot and take another tactic. This involved reselling but instead of using Solo Master Pro I started reselling from people that I have purchased solo ads from. This allows me to create my own solo ad program.
In March 2014 I earned $122.75 from Solo Ads.
Teespring
I am creating this new category for this income because technically it does not fall under Facebook Ads even though all my other Teespring campaigns have been using Facebook Ads.
Several people in my family know that I have been promoting and selling t-shirts online. One approached me and said they were planning an event. They had a design for the t-shirt but needed to have them printed.
I worked with my cousin to put the design up on Teespring. Then we turned around and purchased 50 shirts with all shirts to be shipped to one address.
The t-shirts were then sold at the event to attendees. Between the cost of selling the shirt on teespring and the actual price the shirt was sold for at the event, there was a $10 profit per t-shirt.
We ordered 50 shirts. That is a profit of $500. But my cousin and I split the profit 50/50. So just by putting the design up on teespring and then ordering 50 shirts immediately, I made a very quick $250 profit.
All of you attend events during the year. That could be road races, sporting events, church activities or anything else.
Most of these events are small with fewer than 100 people attending. If you know of an upcoming event then contact the organizer and see about offering to print the t-shirts in exchange for a share of the profits.
In March 2014 I earned $250 from Teespring.
My March 2014 Online Income Report
Here is a breakdown of my March 2014 Online Income Report.
$270.00 Product Sales
$2,009.30 Affiliate Marketing
$71.22 Book Royalties
$8.30 Adsense
$122.75 Solo Ads
$1,498.93 Facebook Ads
$250.00 Teespring
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$4,230.50 March 2014 Online Income Report
Let me know how you are doing online. What methods are you using to create your online income?