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Turning her passion for Rome into $16K/month 🍝
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
Turning her Passion for Rome into $16K/Month
The Formula To Profit From Amazon
$14K/Month College Sports Newsletter
How to Earn $63,000 on Instagram
1st Year Affiliate Marketing = Less Money Than Working at McDonalds
Latest Momentos
£391,000 Revenue On Amazon = How Much Profit?
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Turning her Passion for Rome into $16K/Month
Elyssa Bernard is the founder of Romewise, a website for travelers to get the most out of their trips to Rome 🇮🇹
She shared in an interview…
I met my husband traveling, with a backpack, back in 1997. We got married in 1999, and were living in the States… in 2001 we decided to move back to Rome and open a bed and breakfast.
Elyssa writes on her site 👇
I used to sit with all our guests, and talk to them about what they were going to do that day. I'd say, wait a minute, you shouldn't do that, or you should try this restaurant, or you should consider going there, etc.
She wanted to help travelers avoid the mistakes she made on her first visit to Rome.
Over the years of running their B&B and answering guests' questions, Elyssa amassed a ton of insider knowledge about Rome. She realized this information could benefit many more travelers, not just their hotel guests.
So in 2009 she launched Romewise to share her passion and expertise about the city 🚀
The site took off thanks to the helpful, in-depth content.
Elyssa explains…
When we create pages for this website, we pour hours of research, planning, information, photograph curation and writing into it. It usually takes about 2-4 weeks to write one page.
Such effort and diligence has led to over 100,000 organic visitors per month 📈
Elyssa monetizes the site through a mix of display ads, affiliate links for tours and tickets – eg. on this page – and her own ebooks and other products.
Elyssa is a subscriber to this newsletter 👋 and recently told us via email…
I think this year we will be close to grossing just under 200k. We also recently launched florencewise.com and we believe it will turn a profit by the end of the year.
So that's about $16,000 per month, mainly from one website about a popular tourist destination 😎
Reminds me of a couple of other stories we've featured…
I reckon there are plenty more opportunities to create profitable sites like these.
Really, there should be one for every popular tourist destination.
Google around and see if any sites exist for places you're familiar with.
Even if there are, ask yourself: how could I make something even better? 🤔
The Formula To Profit From Amazon
Today's email is brought to you by The Wholesale Formula.
That's a highly-rated Amazon training that's opening its doors again this month. The course creators have apparently done more than $36 million in sales via Amazon 🤑
This week they're running a free webinar…
on this webinar, you're going to discover a 3-step formula that helped 960 folks initially sell over $1,057,143,592 on Amazon. Yes, over a billion dollars!
Even better: those 960 successes had no real "pattern." Their ages, locations and experience levels varied. Most had no previous online successes. Many started part-time. And all did it risk-free.
When you join this webinar, led by one of the top online business trainers in the world, you’ll discover the exact formula to sell on Amazon and see success.
$14K/Month College Sports Newsletter
Matt Brown was recently interviewed on the Send & Grow Podcast 🎙️
Matt was a sports writer at Vox before being laid off in April 2020 due to the pandemic.
📝 With lots of free time on his hands, he decided to start his own newsletter called Extra Points which covers the business side of college sports: media rights, coaching changes, budget analysis, and more.
Matt already had expertise in data analysis and college sports, which allowed him to create a newsletter with unique insights.
Extra Points quickly found an audience, gaining 100 paid subscribers within 48 hours of launch 🚀
Matt attributes his fast start to having an existing following on Twitter and relationships in the industry.
About a year in, Matt found it difficult to manage the day-to-day of producing the newsletter while also trying to grow his audience. That’s when he sold to D1.ticker, a company that covers the latest news in college athletics.
Matt said in the interview…
I was also fortunate because when this started… the business of college athletics was becoming a more important news vertical. Many entities reached out about buying me.
And I talked with several of them and I had a partner with a company called D1.ticker… they are a B2B focused just college sports industry publication.
And so the way that it works now is that I'm a 1099 employee there. I have full editorial control over the newsletter… [and] they share some of the operational expenses in exchange for revenue share.
D1.ticker has a full-time sales person who spends most of his time selling subscription packages for Extra Points. And we share some of the tech costs.
Extra Points now has around 16,000 total subscribers and ~3,000 paid.
The payment plans are $8/month or $75/year. So my conservative estimate is that the newsletter generates over $150,000/year from paid subscribers (after discounts on bulk orders).
And they make another $15,000/year or so from sponsorships and affiliate deals. (Matt says 90% of their income is from paid subs.)
In total, that's about $165,000 a year or $14,000 a month 💰
Matt’s advice for anyone thinking to launch a newsletter…
The mistake [most people make] is not really focusing enough on what differentiates your product.
I think the thing that has made Extra Points successful has been the fact that I write a lot of information that our consumers really can't find anywhere else… whether that is through original reporting, whether that's picking up the phone and getting other analysis…
… If I had decided to make this… "Here's five links with a paragraph of analysis about the sports business world" … I might have a larger audience, but I would definitely not make as much money and… I wouldn't have some of the professional relationships so this wouldn't be as deep.
In other words, Matt didn't just do the easy thing of starting another curated newsletter.
There are a ton of those nowadays. And while they can add some value, Matt's approach of offering original insights and analysis clearly has more potential 😎
How to Earn $63,000 on Instagram
🗂 From the archive, published May 2020…
According to the NYT, this is how one social media marketing agency (Social Stance) does it:
They find a popular influencer on Instagram
They offer that influencer $5000 to give away to their followers
To enter the giveaway, followers are instructed to follow ~70 other Instagram accounts
Social Stance charges $900 for a slot on the follow list
For that particular campaign, Social Stance spent $5000 and earned about $63,000 🤑
Pretty genius in a way, since nobody seems to lose out: the influencer looks generous, one of their followers gets $5k, those 70 accounts get lots of exposure, and Social Stance makes a very nice profit.
But the NYT also reports that Facebook (ie. Instagram’s daddy) may put a stop to this kind of thing soon:
A Facebook company spokesperson said that many cash giveaways could be in violation of the company’s community guidelines. “This isn’t the kind of experience we want to create on Instagram,” the spokesperson said by email. Additionally, according to Robert Freund, an attorney who offers a legal training course for influencers, many of these cash giveaways could violate state sweepstakes laws.
1st Year Affiliate Marketing = Less Money Than Working at McDonalds
💬 Gael Breton tweets….
We surveyed over 2,200 affiliates in the biggest industry survey EVER!
See all the results of the study here.
Gael highlights one of the key findings 👇
How much do affiliates make?
The average is $8,038 / month
But in your first year you probably will make less than a job at McDonald's at $636 / month average.
Only those who stick to it tend to make 5 figures / month or more.
That holds true for all higher-level businesses, IMO.
You should expect to earn very little from them in the first year or two.
Only if you stick with it and put in lots of work up front do you stand a chance of eventually earning significant passive income 🤑
Even in my own journey with eBiz Facts, I worked my ass off but didn't earn much money in the first year or so.
Almost a year after I started, my business expenses for one month amounted to $2210 while my affiliate income was only $192 😱
(I actually worked at a McDonald's many years ago, and they definitely paid me more than that.)
But, by the same month the following year, my hard work had really started to pay off…
$16,699 affiliate income
$5,326 expenses (including a new laptop)
🥳
Back to Gael's insights from that survey…
Who makes more money?
Affiliates who pick niches based on market research or affiliates who pick niches based on interests
Answer: Affiliates who pick niches based on market research.
BUT early on, niches based on interests outperforms.
I'd add that ideally you'd pick a niche that checks both boxes…
✅ You're interested in it
✅ It's supported by market research
Again, that's what I did with eBiz Facts.
I had a strong interest in my niche, but I still did a ton of market research upfront to make sure it had good earning potential before committing to it.
That said, I'm often surprised by super-niche projects that earn good money online.
For example…
I never thought there would be a market for any of those, but it goes to show that you can earn a living doing pretty much anything online if you combine large doses of passion and patience.
As I always say though, if your goal is to earn a living online within weeks rather than years, you best start with freelancing or a remote job 👍
Latest Momentos
My latest batch of personal ramblings is here if you fancy a look 👀
From September 13th…
I've had driving licenses in Ireland and the USA. Pass this test today, and I'll have one in Andorra. But right now at the test center I'm busy calculating: a country of 80,000 people and 8 different driving schools in attendance = not a great business to be in.
£391,000 Revenue On Amazon = How Much Profit?
🗂 From the archive, published February 2023…
Every now and then I'll search on YouTube for realistic success stories of online entrepreneurs.
The trick to finding them is to skip the videos with millions of views and flashy thumbnails, and avoid any channel with 50,000+ subscribers 🙈
What I'm hoping to find are gems like this: My Amazon FBA PROFITS Revealed! | Amazon FBA 2022 Income Report
As of this writing, that video has only 6800 views and the channel only has 8200 subscribers 😍
It's a video by Janson Smith, who apparently started selling on Amazon in the UK back in 2017.
He starts off by saying…
If you've searched on YouTube for anything to do with Amazon FBA, you can almost guarantee that you'll have come across countless videos from people that all say they've made 100,000's selling on Amazon, and they've done it all in a single month.
What they often won't reveal though is that the big figure that they're talking about is revenue and not profit.
Janson goes on to reveal his numbers selling multiple products on Amazon in Q2 of last year…
Revenue = £391,000 ($472K)
Expenses = £348,000 ($420K)
Profit = £43,000 ($52K)
Profit Margin = 13%
That works out to an average monthly profit of £14,333 ($17.3K) in the quarter 💰
Though Jason says in the video that his profits were increasing steadily, with almost half of that £43K coming in the final month of Q2.
Most impressive of all though is that Amazon FBA is still a side hustle for Jason, something he does in his spare time.
What products does he sell on Amazon?
He doesn't share that info, which is understandable given how competitive Amazon is. I've heard many stories of once-profitable products withering due to increased competition.
🔎 amazon fba | permalink
Thanks to Fardeen Khan for helping me write and research today's newsletter.
Hasta la próxima, rock on with your legendary self 💪
Niall Doherty – Canillo, Andorra
eBiz Facts (follow on twitter)
P.S. Remember to sign up for that free webinar mentioned above: The Formula To Profit From Amazon 👈
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