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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.
His Automation Empire Earns $200,000 Per Year
Mike Cardona is a solo founder who has built a $200k online business by specializing in automation 🦾
Mike shared in a recent interview…
The majority [of my earnings] came from automation consulting, freelance automation work, and selling an Airtable database. I also earned some money from coaching, digital products, and affiliate niche site (I’m a silent partner).
How he got into consulting…
It was purely by accident.
After selling the Airtable database in Jan ‘22, I started posting more about automation on Twitter and LinkedIn. This led to receiving a lot of DMs on LinkedIn or replies from people in my newsletter. I learned about common pain points and problems and created content around them. This led to inbound requests and DMs.
More info here about the Airtable database that Mike built and sold. It basically allowed you to run a newsletter via Airtable. Mike's asking price was $10K and he eventually sold it for $7K 💰
Mike also mentions that LinkedIn has been his #1 source of clients.
Makes sense: tons of busy professionals hang out there, and they are his target audience 🎯
Mike's approach to LinkedIn…
Share everything you know without fear — clients are busy and would rather hire someone to do it for them
Where do your potential clients spend time online?
What if you shared your expertise on those platforms? 🤔
Including…
Automated social media posting for new blog posts
Automated meeting transcription using AI
Integration of meeting transcripts with project management tools
Backup Content: Automatically backup new posts from your WordPress or Webflow blog to Google Drive or Dropbox.
Social Media Monitoring: Set up alerts for when your brand is mentioned on X, Reddit, or ProductHunt and then add those mentions to a spreadsheet.
I reckon there are tons of businesses out there in various niches that could use help setting up these kinds of automations.
Pick a niche you’re interested in, share tricks and tips as you learn them yourself, and you could end up with a thriving business like Mike 💪
🔎 freelancing | permalink
$18,375/Month White Noise Podcast
🗂 From the archive, published June 2022…
Check out this podcast: Tmsoft’s White Noise Sleep Sounds 😴
Recent episodes include:
Easter Island Waves 9 Hours
Box Fan Sleep Sounds 9 Hours
Rain on Tent Sound 9 Hours
Bloomberg has the scoop on the podcast creator, Todd Moore…
Moore says that his white noise show now gets around 50,000 listens per day… Because Moore doesn’t want to interrupt the calming aura of his show, he opts to include only pre-roll ads. Anchor manages the commercial load and pays Moore $12.25 per thousand listens, which adds up to about $612.50 per day, or around $18,375 per month.
Another white noise podcast – 12 Hour Sound Machines – apparently gets 2x the listens per day 🎧
The Bloomberg article makes it sound like the success of these types of podcasts is mostly luck, with the Spotify algorithm mysteriously promoting some ahead of others.
I guess the takeaway is you never know what will be a hit. You just have to keep taking shots.
🔎 podcasting | permalink
Latest Momentos
My latest batch of personal ramblings is here if you fancy a look 👀
From September 16…
Another legal threat from a course creator. The review went live <48 hours ago and we sent them a link for feedback. The page has had 23 unique visitors so far. Somehow it has already caused "substantial harm" to their business. Didn't realize our reviews were so powerful.
…
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. If you're eager to learn SEO to an extremely high level without selling your soul, check out SEO Blueprint.
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