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How she went from struggling blogger to $10K/month 💪
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
From Struggling Blogger To $10K/Month
Making $1000's in Profits With POD
$0 to $27K in 1 Year From a Remote Island
$3K/Month Selling Digital Backdrops for Photographers
$6K/Month Business Within a Week of Launching
Latest Momentos
Can You Start Freelancing With No Job Experience?
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From Struggling Blogger To $10K/Month
Aisha Preece is the founder of Out and Beyond, which she describes as…
A site dedicated to discover ways to make and save more money and explore different location-independent lifestyles that you can earn money from.
As of this 2022 interview, Aisha was earning $10K+/month from her site 🤑
How she got started…
After working in banking for 8 years, I caught myself looking out the window.. wishing I was somewhere else… I googled ways to make an extra income and discovered I could be paid to edit documents.
So, in my free time after work and during lunch, I would edit university documents for professors.
This was my first taste of working online and it was incredibly addictive.
So Aisha didn't start out as a blogger. Her first taste of making money online was straightforward freelance work.
That's something I see all the time: freelancing as a reliable stepping stone to bigger things 📈
How Aisha eventually got into blogging…
I set up my first blog in 2017 and I did absolutely nothing with it because I got stuck in analysis paralysis. As many of us do.
But…
Towards the end of 2019, unfortunately my best friend passed away overnight and that really kind of shook me… tomorrow's never guaranteed, but we think we have so much time to chase our dreams.
Then…
At the end of 2020, I finally learned SEO… and my first site went from 7,000 page views to nearly a hundred thousand pages in seven months…
And finally 2022 was when it all came together. And my first site finally now earns me over $10,000 a month.
Aisha's site is monetized display ads, her own courses, workshops and affiliate offers 💰
From her About page…
I now run 6 monetised websites, and a team of writers and create digital courses on side hustles and blogging.
💬 Encouraging last words from Aisha…
The fact that I learned all this despite being allergic to technology is a sign that you can MOST DEFINITELY, do the same!
I finally replaced my full-time banking income and I work less hours, where I want, when I want!
If I had to break down Aisha's story into a blueprint, it would look like this 👇
Freelance first
Build that up to replace your job income
Start working on a higher level business on the side
Keep learning new skills
Persist through the ups and downs
Eventually break through
🔎 blogging, display ads | permalink
Making $1000's in Profits With POD
Today's email is brought to you by Low Hanging System 🥳
That's a highly-rated print-on-demand (POD) course by Rachel Rofé.
With a print-on-demand business, you provide the graphics that will be put on t-shirts, mugs, etc. You then sell those products on sites like Esty, Amazon, and eBay 🛍️
When someone buys, a fulfillment service prints your design onto the product, then ships it directly to the customer.
💬 Here's what one student told us about Low Hanging System…
I was unfamiliar with POD or making any money online before this course, and after eight months of consistently implementing the training I’ve been making a few thousand in profits…
It does take time and effort to implement the training, but so far I’m on track to make more money with this system than I have with my college degree.
Read more student reviews here, or check out the free intro training 👈
$0 to $27K in 1 Year From a Remote Island
Julien Collet is the founder of Scheduled.so, a tool that lets you schedule LinkedIn posts from Notion.
In a recent post, Julien shares that he launched the app "in August 2023" and took it from €0 to €25k ($27K) in revenue in one year 💰
I'm pretty sure though that he wrote 2023 as a typo. Seems he actually launched the app in August 2022, judging by…
His website looking pretty much the same last January
The @scheduled_so account on X being around since Dec 2022
😕 Julien's previous attempt to build an app didn't go so well…
Two months before launching Scheduled, I started Split, a Buffer copycat… I introduced this first app to a handful of friends, but they all asked the same question: "How is it better than X?”...
After two months, I trashed it and started using Buffer.
💡 While using Buffer, he came up with the idea for Scheduled…
I'm a fan of Notion for centralizing and organizing my content ideas. I used Buffer solely to schedule and publish on LinkedIn, but found myself repeatedly copying and pasting...
Eventually, I had to maintain content in Notion and Buffer…
Maintaining content on two platforms and the long-term switching between them was frustrating. It was a mental load I wanted to eliminate.
This became the first problem that led me to use my product.
Today, in developing my product, I stick to this principle. I identify repetitive habits or time-wasting activities.
A common problem isn't always obvious, yet there are many.
Julien got traction by offering a lifetime deal (LTD) on the app…
LTDs are often underestimated compared to the pursuit of MRR [Monthly Recurring Revenue].
Without an established fan community, it's challenging for a first product to become profitable with MRR quickly.
LTDs were a great way for me to generate cash, build a fan base, and sustain the first year.
In my first year, 70% of the €25k revenue came from LTDs.
That works out to about €17,500 ($19,000) 🤑
Utilizing no-code tools helped Julien build fast…
No-code was a great way to simplify the workload in the long run…
Initially, 70% of Scheduled's backend was managed by n8n [a Zapier alternative]...
The major effort is in building the right workflow. Once it's running, the maintenance cost is very low.
To end with, he says…
In a saturated market, differentiation captures attention and makes people curious. If the first people you talk to ask, "How is it different from X?" you're not different enough.
Funnily enough, while researching this story I came across a similar product called Notion Social that's making $750/month.
And we previously featured a Notion plugin that’s making $8,400/month.
So it seems there are plenty of opportunities to build tools for or on top of Notion 👍
One more thing about Julien: he describes himself as "a French solopreneur based in Reunion Island" 🇷🇪
That's a volcanic island in the Indian Ocean, between Madagascar and Mauritius, with a population of ~800,000.
👉 3-minute video to give you a feel for it.
What a place to build a business.
🗂 $3K/Month Selling Digital Backdrops for Photographers
From the archive, published May 2023…
Check out this DigitalArtscapeFinds on Etsy 👈
That store launched in February and sells digital backdrops that photographers can use as backgrounds for people they photograph.
In a 9-minute video, Mark on Business reveals that the store did $6,870 in revenue in its first 2 months 📈
(Looks like Mark is using something like EverBee to see analytics for any Etsy store.)
Mark goes on to show how you can create similar backdrops yourself using Midjourney to do 90% of the work.
It all sounds great in theory, but remember there are 2 parts to every business…
Creating the product / delivering the service
Getting customers / clients
Mark mainly shows you how to do the first part, which is great, but I'd argue that the second part is usually the hardest 😕
A few months back, Mark set up his own Etsy store selling digital templates. He's been sharing his progress on YouTube, and showed a few weeks back that he'd earned $300 after 2 months.
That's actually a great result, IMO, and if Mark keeps going I could see that store earning him $1000's per month eventually 🤞
But it goes to show that it's not simply a matter of uploading a bunch of digital products to Etsy and waiting for the big bucks to roll in.
I'm not sure what DigitalArtscapeFinds did to earn $6,870 in only 2 months.
Maybe they have some marketing tricks up their sleeve, maybe they're running paid ads, or maybe they just got lucky and Etsy started featuring their products somehow.
Their success shows what's possible, but don't assume it's easy to replicate.
$6K/Month Business Within a Week of Launching
Ash M, who goes by PersuasionProf on social media is the co-founder of Repurpose Pie, a tool that lets you “convert your tweets to videos automatically” 👀
In a recent interview, she shares…
We are at $75,000 annual recurring revenue (a bit over $6000 monthly recurring revenue) and we got there within a week of launching.
The market already existed. People were already paying a ton of money to [virtual assistants] for it. All we had to do was build the software and let people know about it.
She adds…
My co-founder and a good friend has a huge following on Twitter (LifeMathMoney, 380K+ followers) and his blog. He’s one of the biggest anonymous accounts in the X content creation space and I met him through my copywriting consulting firm.
So yes, they had a big audience to launch to, which surely helped.
But worth noting that Ash herself doesn't have a big audience; she was able to partner with someone who does 😎
Ash says the idea for Repurpose Pie came about when…
[LifeMathMoney] wanted to grow on other platforms to get more reach and protect himself from a social media ban… While Twitter (X) is a great place to grow, social media companies can ban you at any time…
He found that it was extremely time-consuming to write, manage multiple businesses, AND create 3 - 5 videos for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube every single day.
So…
He hired a video editor to take his tweets and turn them into videos.
The video editor:
– Took his tweets
– Added a cool background,
– Used text-to-speech AI to generate a voiceover
– Added trending music to the videos.
Within a few weeks, his TikTok account hit 10,000 followers! The simple tweet-videos worked and he now had more reach than before.
But LifeMathMoney was paying the video editor $500/month for that service, and figured there should be a better/cheaper way to do it 🤔
He discussed this with Ash and another co-founder…
The idea was - that instead of paying VAs so much money… we could build something that lets people autogenerate beautiful videos and have it be posted automatically.
So they built and launched Repurpose Pie 🚀
Ash shares another way they found customers 👇
I reached out to 100+ Twitter/X influencers and pitched the idea to them.
Here is my exact pitch:
Hey there. I'm founding a new Saas - Repurpose Pie that takes tweets, turns them into videos, and posts them on Instagram/TikTok/YouTube automatically
This way, Twitter creators can repurpose their tweets and use them to grow on video-first platforms without any extra effort.
Here are a few samples for you:
[attached samples]…
Would you be interested?
She adds…
The response was tremendous (50% paid on the spot, 10% asked for an annual plan almost immediately).
👍 Ash's advice for anyone building products…
Build an MVP [Minimum Viable Product] and get paying customers BEFORE you spend months developing the application. You need to validate the idea before you commit a lot of time and resources to something. Cold outreach is perfect for this. DM or email people about your product and give them a steep early user discount.
Latest Momentos
My latest batch of personal ramblings is here if you fancy a look 👀
From January 27th…
Someone complaining that we don't explain every acronym in the newsletter. Sure, we could do a better job there, but if you can't take it upon yourself to google words or acronyms you don't understand, I'd bet heavily against you ever building a successful business.
🗂 Can You Start Freelancing With No Job Experience?
From the archive, published April 2023…
I often recommend freelancing as the best way (for most people) to start earning a living online 🧑🏼💻
And the easiest way to start freelancing is to leverage the skills you used in your last job.
For example, my last job was as a web designer for a university.
When I quit and started working for myself, freelance web design became my bread and butter for many years 🥪
But what if you don't have job experience? What if you're self-taught and don't have any references or job history to show prospective clients you know your stuff?
Someone asked that very question on Reddit recently and got some good responses 💬
I like this advice…
I've been doing freelancing for almost 8 years now. I never had an office job. In freelancing, your skills matter more than your past experience. Most people who hire freelancers care about their work more than experience. If you can do what they ask you to do, they won't have any problem hiring you.
[...] charge a bit less than the market rates in the beginning. Focus on projects more than money. Many people are against this advice but this worked for me. Once I started getting orders and had some portfolio, I started increasing my prices slowly.
Also, a good way to land your first clients and start building a portfolio is via The Billboard Method that I outline in this article/video 👈
🔎 freelancing | 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. Interested in the print-on-demand business model?
Then check out this free intro training 👈 from the highly-rated Low Hanging System.
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