This is a guest post on “Making Tons Of Cash From A Whole Lotta Littles” by Steven Wagenheim. His site is: http://www.mysecretarticles.com
This is going to be a fairly long post, so grab yourself a brew, sit back and relax.
Over the years that I’ve been marketing online, and more specifically, over the years I’ve been successful doing it, I’ve noticed that many fellow marketers seem to be under the impression that to make a substantial income online, they have to come up with some killer be all and end all product or membership site and crank out an ungodly number of them each month.
This is certainly a doable process, and many here will tell you that their main income comes from a big selling product or service, but it’s not the only way to make a living online.
I make a very nice living on a regular basis. I have many months where I am in 5 figures for the month.
What might surprise people is that the money doesn’t come from one source. As a matter of fact, I don’t have any one particular source that brings me in more than $2,500 a month by itself.
Here is a breakdown of all the little irons of have floating around the Internet.
First, there is my very small affiliate marketing niche. I don’t promote a lot of products that aren’t my own, but I do have a few things that I do believe in and so I do actively promote them. My total income from all these affiliate products is about $1,500 a month. Now if all I did was affiliate marketing, that would be my entire income for the month.
Next, I have my first product that I ever created myself. That product is now exactly a year and a half old so it doesn’t make as many sales monthly as it used to. Still, I manage to make about $1,500 a month with that product. All it takes is about 30 sales a month, or one measly sale a day to pull that off.
Then, I have my second product that I ever created. It is only about 6 months old but doesn’t sell very well at all. Fortunately, because it is a higher end product, only 20 sales a month makes me close to $2,000 a month from it.
Then, I have my membership sites that I promote. I don’t really do a lot with these, but altogether I make about $1,000 a month from these.
Then I have my individual “cheapo” products. You know, the $7 ebooks, short reports, etc. They may be cheap in price but they are not cheap in content. I take a lot of pride in giving away a lot of value for very little. I have about 10 of these things floating around the Internet and try to come out with at least 1 new one each month. My monthly income from these ranges from $2,000 to $4,000 a month.
So my average monthly income, if you add all of this up…
Affiliate Products – $1,500
First Main Product – $1,500
Second Main Product – $2,000
Membership Sites – $1,000
Cheapo Products – $3,000 (on average)
Total – $9,000
My total advertising expenses for the month are under $300
I don’t do a lot of advertising. Truth is, I’m too lazy when it comes to advertising. I’d rather just create as much different content as I can and do as little promotion as I can for each. That way, I make enough from each little stream to keep the lights on and not drive myself crazy with the dull details of promotion.
Yes, I know that if I promoted more I could make more. But I’d rather have more new product out there that people haven’t seen than just pour more money into advertising stuff that’s been around for a while. My 2 main products, I spend exactly $0 on advertising expenses. Truth is, all my advertising expense goes towards my affiliate products because they are harder to sell.
Why?
Because I’m not the only one selling them, which is why I concentrate mostly on my own products. What few affiliates I have, and trust me they are few, bring me in a nice additional income. And they have an easy time doing it because they have no competition. My Clickbank gravity for both products is somewhere around 2 or 3 last I checked.
Point is, from doing a whole lot of little things, I am making more than enough to keep me happy.
Am I rich? No. Are there people making more than me? I should hope so. But I guarantee that they’re working a lot harder than me too, or they’re doing a ton of outsourcing, of which I do very little. My total outsourcing expenses monthly are about $50. But that $50 saves me about 24 hours of work.
There will be a number of people at this forum who will say that this business “plan” is so backwards, messed up, stupid, or whatever they want to call it, that it’s a miracle that I make any money at all. They’ll tell you that this is absolutely NOT the way to run a business, that you need to focus on ONE thing, create your funnel for it and so on and so on.
Well, like I said, you certainly can do things the “right” way. I’m not knocking it. And while you may agree with the “experts” that my business plan is cockeyed, I am living proof that you can make a decent living doing this.
And the great thing about it is, you don’t get bored. You’re doing so many different little things it’s just not possible to get bored.
No, this may not be for everybody. May not be for anybody but me. But it does work. I’ve got Camtasia videos up the wazoo that prove it works. My Clickbank videos alone look like the who’s who of Internet marketing. I’ve yet to seen screen prints on all those sales pages that have as many different sale amounts as mine. The reason is simple. These people are making all their money from selling one product. And like I said, there’s nothing wrong with that.
But then what happens when that one product goes south for the duration?
I just don’t like to put all my eggs in one basket.
Anyway, I don’t know if anybody got anything from any of this. I hope so. This post is intended to serve as an inspiration to those who think that the be successful you have to create some super duper product and get 6 JV partners to promote it for you.
There ARE other ways to make a nice living online.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Nick:
Please tell Steven “thanks” for the down to earth and informative article.
It does a body good to hear someone talk about the real world, and I say Yeah for him. Apparently, Steven has a wonderful view of reality and I couldn’t agree with him more. It is a wonderful thing when you read a post that doesn’t promise $100,000 per month.
This blog is my favorite place to visit, and I try to stop by daily…..the reason is Nick you and your guest writers ROCK!
Best Regards,
Peggy
Nick,
I have to agree with you, …we all have our own ways of doing things. i took alot of your advice and still do, along with others info and make a master cheat sheet, but I wanted to put my two cents worth in. I agree with your traffic tips 100%. i look forward to seeing your newsletter all the time.
My routine is to find ONE good niche every week. Even if I don’t have time to do anything with it. I document traffic amounts and competition thru Adwords Keyword tool, and if I think its a winner, I go to Squidoo and reserve 3-5 lens sites with MY Keywords, like I did with my site here. Then I do the same for HubPages. Then I spend $7.00 and register my own domain name. Again, just to seal my keywords in the market. I am leery of anything that is free and there is NO guarantee that some morning you will wake up and find your Squidoo page closed down because of some accusation that you are spamming or not being a good person with the RULES!
After the past 4 months, I have 12 websites and only 4 actually making money, but I am talking small money, under $100 a week. I write an article every week to Ezine Articles, and 20 others and submit them, so that I get rated for MY keywords, even if there is just ONE article making up my new domain page, it gets ranked slowly, like buiding up a bank account, one penny at a time.
What I am trying to say is that you have SO much to do this way, that you get overwhelmed easily, so i think a good idea would be for YOU to take ONE issue from your blog and concentrate on a Newbie niche setup, then you can list the affilite sites or tools that you use and people can use this as a template on what to do, but without a big course spanning weeks and membership fees and everything else, just the basics. I do all of this with my Article Rewriting site and you’d be surprised if I go away for a week and come back after submitting an article before I leave. I will check stats and find out that over 100 people have come to my site and maybe 4 have signed up and used or purchased some of my tools to start their business. It works and like you say, its FREE Article organic Traffic
We were all newbies at one time and i think people like to read your newsletters as I do, but many readers still aks me, what does this mean and what is Article Spinning, or a word that they have not heard yet. Today I published an article on getting indexed in Google in 18 minutes using articles. I think it will get more traffic, so we all have to learn and do things the way that works best for us first.
I will always read your tips and I will always be ready in this business to learn something new, so keep us the excellent work
JB
Thank you Peggy. I appreciate your kind words.
Thanks John!
Wow $9,000 it’s great Nick. As newbie I try to join some affiliate but till now I just got $9