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$190K per year selling e-paper templates 🤯
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
$190K Per Year Selling ePaper Templates
Built & Sold a Website for $89,300 in 2 Years
Perfect Side Project Has Earned Him $399,109
$114K/Year Listerine Mouthwash Royalties
3 Beliefs That Hold You Back From Business Success
His AI Language Learning App: $9K/Month in 16 Months
$16K/Month From 2 Websites
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$190K Per Year Selling ePaper Templates
Check out ePaperTemplates, an Etsy store that provides "functional templates for ePaper tablets."
They design and sell templates – eg. daily planners, to-do lists, calendars – for devices like reMarkable, Amazon Kindle Scribe, BOOX Note, and Supernote 😎
Per a recent profile by Capital Friday…
Shop started in 2020. Sold 64,000 units at an average price of $9 USD. So around $190k per year in revenue… For a digital product. Fulfilled by Etsy.
And here’s the interesting part. There’s only 24 items in the shop. Not 2,000 designs that can be put on a shirt or pillow. Now that’s a side hustle!
Could there be room for competitors in this niche? 🤔
Capital Friday found at least one other store that's gaining traction…
[AFearlessVenture] started five months ago and has almost 600 sales with 19 files. The dream is still alive.
If you’re trying to do this make sure to have a starting marketing budget and put around 20% of revenue into Etsy ads to build momentum.
🧐 A quick search on YouTube can teach you how to build these templates yourself.
First step though would be to research and find out what kind of templates people are searching for, and which ePaper tablets are worth building for.
Built & Sold a Website for $89,300 in 2 Years
Today's email is brought to you by Income School's Project 24 🤩
That's a highly-rated course to help you build a successful blog.
You can check out 30+ student reviews of Project 24 on my site.
Here's what one student had to say…
Following the teachings, I built a website in 1-2 years that sold for $89,300 after all expenses related to the sale and was making $3000+/mo in profit.
… The course material is good and precisely what beginner bloggers need to start producing a moderate income on their own.
Project 24 is now more affordable than ever, having recently introduced a $30/month payment plan 👍
Perfect Side Project Has Earned Him $399,109
Peter Askew is the guy behind RanchWork, a ranching job board that makes $7,400/month 🤑
He recently tweeted…
can't find a project to build?
go build a niche, boutique job board, and dote on that community like it was your god-child.
Alongside that he shared a screenshot of a Google search for "welding jobs" 👀
Sites like LinkedIn and Indeed show up atop those search results because there is no specialized job board for that kind of work.
💬 Peter adds…
results like this tell me one thing: google WANTS to rank something better. ANYTHING. but no one has built it.
the profit-margins of a job board trump every project I've ever run.
job boards can be built by non-coders. if you're a coder, even better.
job boards can be built by solo builders.
they are the perfect side project, or better yet, (eventual) full-time job. you're helping people find new, better jobs. What beats that?
He's right: job boards can be built easily, using a platform like JobKit (free but they take a 10% cut of your earnings) or Job Boardly (paid).
For example, it took me only 10 minutes to build this demo job board for welding jobs with JobKit 💪
Of course the hard part is getting traffic.
A comment on Peter's tweet….
Indeed and LinkedIn are very hard to outrank.
And Peter's reply…
people said the same thing to me when I started building RanchWork.
🚀 He launched RanchWork in 2014 and has been at it ever since, steadily growing the annual revenue over the years…
$399,109.44
that's how much RanchWork․com has generated over these past 10 years.
oh - that's right, I shouldn't have built it, cause they told me to focus on "one project” 🤔
Sounds like he only spends a few hours a week on it, so it's a nice and profitable side hustle.
To start your own job, Peter recommends…
go window shop niches on Indeed, pick one that seems interesting with lots of search volume & activity, buy a good-enough .com, and get to work.
there is so much opportunity in this niche, I sometimes go 🍌🍌🍌 cause I can't build it all.
🗂 $114K/Year Listerine Mouthwash Royalties
From the archive, published May 2022…
Check out RoyaltyExchange.com 👈
It’s a marketplace where you can buy and sell royalty rights.
The highest listing on there right now is for Listerine Mouthwash Royalties. That pays out $114,253 per year, and the listed price is $1,795,000.
Buy it for that price, and you’d earn your investment back in about 16 years. After that, seems like it’d be $114K per year passive income 🤑
3 more listings on there that caught my eye…
Music In The Award-Winning “Shrek” Film Franchise: $78,190 last 12 months’ earnings, $925,000 list price.
Cold Case + More – TV and Film Cues: $63,032 last 12 months, $746,795 list price.
Bad Company Sound Recording Royalties: $33,352 last 12 months, $525,000 list price.
3 Beliefs That Hold You Back From Business Success
A recent video by Chris Do about limiting beliefs and how to overcome them.
Chris shares 3 common limiting beliefs that can hold you back from building a successful business 👇
Exceptional: that will probably work for some people, but it won’t work for me.
Procrastinator: I can probably do this, but not today.
Perfectionist: I need a perfect plan and proof before I get started.
He says in the video…
the biggest fundamental change that you're going to have in your life isn't necessarily to change what you're going to say or do.
Instead, it's changing…
… what you believe to be true and what you believe you're capable of doing.
💬 But it's not like ALL you need to do is believe in yourself…
I'm not here to sell you shortcuts.
I'm not here to tell you about life hacks about how you don't have to have any skill.
You have to have skill.
You have to put in your 10,000 hours of deliberate, intentional practice at working on your craft.
Once you've done that, you'll find out that doing another 10,000 hours of practicing your craft will only create incremental improvements in your financial well-being.
He continues…
If you've decided enough is enough, and you don't want this thing that you keep getting, then the first step is to say, "Okay, I've tried it my way for months, years, or decades. It's not working for me. I want to try something else."
You have to be open to this thing, and the thing that you're going to hear is going to challenge your core fundamental beliefs. It has to; otherwise, it's not worth pursuing.
It has to be such a radical idea that it feels like a slap in the face, and it's something that challenges your perception of reality and the rules of life.
This is why so few people are able to make the kind of progress that they need to make in their life to improve their standing because they hear an idea that's foreign, that challenges their belief systems, and they systematically just reject and push it away.
Have you come across an idea like that recently?
An idea that you instinctively dismiss for some reason?
Might be worth revisiting and exploring more deeply 🧐
Could be that the idea itself is a good one, but pursuing it would push you out of your comfort zone, and so you'd rather avoid it.
But beyond your comfort zone is where all the growth happens 📈
His AI Language Learning App: $9K/Month in 16 Months
Fabien Snauwaert is the founder of Gliglish, which he describes as…
a new way to learn languages by speaking with AI.
You just speak into your mic and enjoy a conversation with a language teacher. Or you can roleplay a real-life situation, like buying a croissant at the bakery.
📝 In a recent interview, Fabien revealed…
It's been exactly 16 months and revenue is now at €8K [almost $9K per month].
But this isn't his first rodeo…
I dropped out of college to play video games. Then I got a low-paying IT job and started working on an ebook on the side. Revenue was then between 30 and 500 bucks per month, for about 5 years.
After that…
I created a few books and courses and was able to go full time. But things got really interesting once I created a webapp for people to learn English. It made over €560K in total revenue… but that's over the course of 9 years.
€560K over 9 years = €62K / $68K per year 💰
Here's that app: Click & Speak
Fabien's description of it (source)…
Learn the top 5,000 words in American English, with the correct pronunciation and grammar, through meaningful sentences you will remember.
(I wonder if you could build the same app but for another language? 🤔)
Fabien has taught himself to code along the way…
I was making HTML pages when I was 16, with a bit of vanilla JavaScript. And then I just learned everything on the go. Got a question? Google it. Or now ChatGPT/Cursor it.
How he built Gliglish…
Took me two days to get a basic prototype. It didn't really work but was enough to get a sense that it could. Then it took me 37 days to make it work…
I launched like an idiot 2 days before Christmas, because I was broke af.
I have a newsletter for French people learning English. I always use it to launch products. It's my financial safety net.
Looks like this is his newsletter, with 49k subscribers.
Fabien has obviously been building up that audience for years and it's like a secret weapon for him now when releasing a new product 💪
However, when he launched Gliglish…
People were enthusiastic about it, but the product didn't work so well just yet. I was clear I was still working on it though. It made only €615 in the first 30 days, so not exactly a homerun.
He kept trying…
Got zero sale when I launched on Product Hunt. I'd been agonizing the launch, and all this effort and worry was for nothing.
We've featured lots of stories in this newsletter where Product Hunt worked a treat. Which goes to show that you never know what will work. You have to keep trying different things until something hits 🎯
And that's what Fabien did…
People started talking about Gliglish once I posted on HackerNews. I was #2 on the site for a split second.
Then I started getting traffic from AI directories and people into AI on TikTok & Instagram and that's when things started going viral.
Which has led him to $9K in monthly revenue, with plenty of room to grow 📈
Fabien's advice for others…
Iterate more… It took me 17 years to ship 9 products, it's a mistake. If I'd iterated faster (instead of dragging too long on/between projects) I'd have gotten to the nice results faster.
🗂 $16K/Month From 2 Websites
From the archive, published April 2022…
Hilary Erickson is a former nurse who started and runs two websites…
Pulling Curls, about pregnancy and home life.
The Pregnancy Nurse, also about pregnancy.
In a recent profile she reveals that she earned $193,000 combined from the sites last year 🤑
58% of the revenue comes from Hilary’s own courses and ebooks, most notably her Online Prenatal Class for Couples. 28% comes from display ads and 14% from affiliate marketing.
It’s taken many years for Hilary to build up that revenue. Back in 2015 she earned little more than $2000/month via her online business.
Her monetization strategy has evolved over time…
At first, I made a good amount with sponsored posts and, later affiliate and ad income. However, now the majority is made through courses.
That’s a common evolution for authority sites: start off monetizing with some combination of display ads and affiliate offers, with an eye to eventually creating and selling your own products.
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. Be sure to check out Project 24, a highly-rated blogging course that's now available for only $30/month 🤩
See my editorial review and 30+ student reviews here.
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