Thinking back on May, I’m still in the building process of building this blog up to something that Google will eventually take notice of. According to Google Analytics this website got about as much traffic in May as it did in April. I need to do better.
My Plans for June
I have a few goals for June. One of those goals is to learn. I’m working on learning Ruby on Rails, Javascript, and creating WordPress templates from Bootstrap.
For Pro Blog Resources, I plan on putting out a couple more resource lists. One will cover laptops and the other, I’m thinking, will cover link tracking software.
Another thing I am going to aim to do is to convert Biz Opp Reviews from a WordPress site to one powered by Ruby on Rails. Essentially, the goal is to create my own CMS (which isn’t that hard to do in Ruby on Rails). My reason for doing that is because I believe it would be a great first production project to do in Ruby on Rails as I don’t believe it would be very difficult to get up and running and is something I could improve on over time as my skills become better and better.
I’m Addicted to Coming Up With Ideas
I’m addicted to coming up with ideas. Which is definitely a good addiction to have. In May I came up with a few new business ideas that I believe could be huge. All-in-all, I have nine ideas that I believe there is a market for and could be very profitable. That said, I still have to do the market research, in-depth.
One of those eight ideas is an idea that I believe could easily be a multi-million dollar business. It would also require some funding to get started. All of my other ideas I could bootstrap myself. So it’s just a matter of deciding which one to do and stick to it. Which means a goal of mine for this month will be to pick at least one of them out.
I will admit, five of my eight ideas involve building a website that will require some programming skills (which is why I’m learning Ruby on Rails, Javascript, Bootstrap, etc…). So the one that I pick might just be the one that I believe would be the easiest one to create (as opposed to the most profitable) since I’m such a newbie.
Podcast Idea
I will let the cat a little bit out of the bag and say that two of my other ideas involve starting a Podcast and Youtube Channel. I’m sure I’d use other platforms such as Soundcloud, Stitcher, and who knows, maybe Periscope. The both ideas focus around passions of mine.
Creating My Own Products vs Affiliate Marketing
As much as I want to have the affiliate success of someone such as Pat Flynn, I know that the best way of creating income to is create your own service or product that people want and are willing to pay for. There’s a great video on Youtube where Pieter Levels talks about building 12 startups in 12 months. This video really helped to solidify my intentions of building my own services and charging for them. He actually downgrades affiliate marketing all-together in this video saying that it doesn’t work. Instead, you need to create your own products.
With that thought in mind, to many people have had way to much success with affiliate marketing for me to not believe that it doesn’t work. Also, until I build out my own products, affiliate marketing will, hopefully, be a great source of income for me.
There was a great strategy I heard from a Podcast I was listening to a couple weeks ago. I think it was either Side Hustle Nation or Niche Pursuits. The guy being interviewed basically laid out the following strategy.
When you see that a product that you are an affiliate marketer for starts selling on your website, it’s time to start thinking about creating your own version of the product and selling it yourself.
Let me give an example. Let’s say I am linking out to the Yeti Rambler on Amazon from one of my blog post. One day, I start to notice that I’m making affiliate sales for this product. I get to a point where I’m selling a few of these per day.
Knowing that I’m selling this item, it’s time to really capitalize on this. So here’s what I do. I create a product very similar to the Yeti. This gets into learning how to work with Alibaba to get this item created in China. Once I have the final product I put it for sale on Amazon and change the link on my blog page that’s sending all that traffic to the Yeti to, instead, point to my product.
Now instead of making a small commission (I believe it’s 4% – 6% with Amazon) I make a profit margin from selling my own product (which is going to be much larger than 6% of the total sale).
What I like about this method is that it minimizes your risk. You’re already selling a similar product. So, ideally, the same amount of sales should come in. Plus you should receive more from organic Amazon search. Not to mention, you can utilize advertising within Amazon to send your product up to the top of the search results.
Putting Network Marketing To the Side
I looked at my end-of-month report for April. In there I noticed I said I was going to help my wife with that venture. Unfortunately, I did not do much to help with that. I’ll be perfectly honest with you. When it comes to network marketing, my wife is much more motivated about it than I am. My passions are in what I’m doing with this blog and all the ideas for websites I am working on making a reality. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in network marketing. But my passions are more in bootstrapping my own businesses from the ground up. To me, there’s more fulfillment in it. So I may try to help this month with building our network marketing business. But I’m not going to take make any promises. I’d rather focus on my passions.
Another Down Month
So I want to push this blog post out. Unfortunately, I had some data put together with numbers on it, but I lost it. I’ll try to update this post next month when I put together my June report. That said, I can tell you that May compared very similar to April.
