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- She earns $5000/month from this personal finance blog 💰
She earns $5000/month from this personal finance blog 💰
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
$5000/Month From Her Personal Finance Blog
Cutting Edge SEO Training
$200,000+ Per Year Sticker Business
6000 Followers, $1000s Per Deal
How To Make $100K Selling a $100 Product
His Automation Empire Earns $200,000 Per Year
$18,375/Month White Noise Podcast
Latest Momentos
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$5000/Month From Her Personal Finance Blog
Sara Conklin is the founder of Frozen Pennies, a personal finance blog where she teaches people how to save money, get out of debt, and live a frugal life 👌
She started the blog in 2018 in her mid-40's, initially as a way to document "a self-imposed spending freeze where, for a year, she spent only on the things she needed."
Sara shared in a recent interview….
Right now, I’m bringing in about $5000 per month between Mediavine, my products, a little bit from affiliate income, and YouTube revenue. The majority comes from Mediavine, and YouTube is right behind that…
I aim to double that by the end of this year through traffic and selling my financial products (including a book).
Sara works on her business full-time, putting in 8-10 hours on weekdays and more time on weekends. Her site gets ~60,000 pageviews per month, with 100,000+ pageviews in peak months 📈
At first, the blog was just a bit of fun for Sara, but after ~18 months she started to get serious and learned SEO by "taking all the SEO courses" 🤓
That seems to have paid off, as she writes…
SEO is my number one strategy for getting traffic.
Sounds like Pinterest is also big for her business…
Many are wondering if Pinterest is still worth it. I genuinely believe it is. It's different from 2019 [...] but it still works.
Ultimately, Sara aims to make more money from selling her own products 👇
Everything I do is a marketing tool to get people on my list. SEO, Pinterest, YouTube, and blog posts are all marketing tools for my list…
I email my list twice a week with valuable tips and tricks. Then I just started emailing every three weeks with a special flash sale. It's going well so far.
She has ~6,000 newsletter subscribers 💌 and manages the business with the help of a VA and a Pinterest manager.
Sara’s advice for aspiring bloggers…
This is not a get-rich-quick scheme; it takes years to make a decent living...
If you want to blog as a hobby, that's really great, and I love that for you.
But if you want to make money, then treat it like a business. And don’t expect millions to roll in for the first 3 to 5 years.
Cutting Edge SEO Training
Today's email is brought to you by SEO Blueprint 👈
That's high-level SEO training that only opens once or twice a year.
It's run by Glen Allsopp, the guy responsible for such epic content as…
If I could only learn SEO from one person in the world, it'd be Glen. Not only is he incredibly knowledgeable and hard-working, but he's also super ethical. (Read through the last article above to see what I mean.)
If you'd like to learn SEO from someone like that, check out SEO Blueprint 👀
The doors are open for the next 5 days or so.
Oh, and see here for a list of updates to the training, including recent AI-focused additions 🤖
$200,000+ Per Year Sticker Business
Mim Jenkinson never expected her love of stickers to turn into a business.
In a recent interview, Mim shares how she has built her sticker business to "multiple six figures a year" 🤑
Mim's journey into stickers began in 2015 after being diagnosed with breast cancer, when she had to leave her consulting job to undergo treatment. (Thankfully, she made a full recovery.)
She explains…
I wanted something to do to take my mind off things. I wanted something just for me, a creative outlet…
I started using stickers in my planner and that was something that I was really, really enjoying. But I always wondered how people actually made them.
Mim started teaching herself how to make stickers and soon started selling them on Etsy 📦
Eventually she transitioned to digital…
I was printing [the stickers] and sending them to customers globally. It was the most fun for a few years until I moved it to be a 100% digital product business.
So now I create the file and still get to experience the joy of designing the stickers, but I provide my customers with the files they just print and cut them at home.
That made her business much more scalable and profitable, since it's way easier and cheaper to "deliver" a digital product than a physical product 😎
Over time, Mim also began to teach…
Customers started asking me how I was making the stickers so I put together an online course to be able to teach them.
Then they started asking me how I was selling them… so I expanded my online course to be able to teach them how to start their own sticker empire.
Mim offers these courses via her site.
And she can charge a lot more for those than she can for actual stickers 💰
Pretty cool how her business has evolved, and a good reminder that your own business could look much different down the line.
6000 Followers, $1000s Per Deal
🗂 From the archive, published January 2022…
With such a small audience, Laur is considered a “nano influencer,” but she’s still been able to land brand deals with big-name companies…
“When she posts social media content that’s sponsored by brands like Lululemon and SeatGeek, she charges anywhere from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars per deal, based on the number of deliverables” (source)
Business Insider shares the 9-page media kit Laur uses to get brand sponsorships. That article is behind a paywall, but you can get a sneaky look at all the pages via this Google Image search 😉
In another paywalled article, Business Insider reports:
[Laur’s] YouTube starting rates are between $300 and $500 for sponsorship.
How To Make $100K Selling a $100 Product
Daniel Vassallo was a software engineer who turned to entrepreneurship in 2019 and learned how to market his products along the way.
We've featured him in the newsletter a couple of times before 👇
Daniel recently shared on Twitter…
A 12 step marketing crash course for non-marketers
This part in particular stood out to me…
Once you find an opportunity you'd like to pursue, you should set a payoff expectation. Example: you plan to bring a particular project to market with the expectation of making $100K within 12mo.
You should have a viable hypothesis of how that expectation can be realized.
Example: to make $100K selling a $100 product, you need 1,000 customers. To get 1,000 customers at 1% conversion you need 100K visits on your landing page. To get 100K visits you need to spend X on ads. And so on.
If you can't convince yourself you have a viable and profitable hypothesis, you need to adjust your payoff expectation, or pick another opportunity.
You don't have an obligation to pursue every opportunity you encounter.
The common alternative to Daniel's approach is "build it and they will come"... which rarely works out well 😕
Consider setting a payoff expectation for your next project.
It'll force you to think through your marketing plan and expose any weaknesses or assumptions before you invest a ton of time and energy.