An update.. 7 months in

[Feenz]

Hi All

I thought I'd post an update for your general interest, for those who are starting out and want to read about other people doing the same, and in order to once more seek any pointers from any of you that have been there and done it.

So.. December last year, I read The 4 Hour Work Week, and was inspired to get on with it.

I spent at least 2 months, messing about with nothing, trying to find the "best idea", and saying to myself things like "this one would be perfect, if it wasn't for x, y, z".

In the end, I realised I was losing so much time and energy by avoiding getting started, so took the plunge and wrote an ebook on a subject I'm very familiar with, but which is EXCEPTIONALLY niche.

A niche within a niche, within a niche, so to speak. (apologies that I'm not going to share URLs or specifics here, due to seeing someone's muse being ripped off on here, as well as some of my own graphics from one of mine).

The ebook took about 3 solid days (spread out over a week) to write, and I tested a sales page while I was writing it, and just launched it, having decided that $47 was the best price point, from the testing (I tested everything from $27 to $67).

I didn't have loads of data, but I knew the ebook was never going to make me million of pounds anyway, and saw it more as an experiment / practice run.

I got my first proper order within 2 days of launching it (which was pretty exciting), and in the first month it sold about 20 copies. Sadly, I spent almost as much on google adwords as I received in sales, so it wasn't great, but at least it wasn't a disaster.

I then backed off the adwords, and since then have been spending very little, and have sold another 20 or so copies. I didn't sell a single copy last month, but sold one 2 days ago. It hasn't changed the world, but it proved to me that it can work.

I then started another muse, which was a PHP website script I wrote for membership sites, which has a wizard installer, and an admin panel.

It took about a week to write it, and has gone on sale with different modules, ranging from a base price of £27, up to about £120 for the full package.

The first one sold within about 2 hours of the adwords going live. As you can imagine I was pretty excited. I then sold another about 2 days later.. then it dried up and I got one more about a month later. Mind you, two of these were for the full package and one was for about $60, so it was better than a kick in the teeth for a totally unoptimised sales page.

About a week ago, I found the time (amongst my other workload) to revamp the sales page a bit, and am going to tweak the adwords settings tomorrow, as I feel this has a decent chance to expand into scripts for all sorts of things to help website owners build parts of their sites more easily.

At the same time, I have started up two other less muse like businesses, which have taken up a lot of my time (to get off the ground). One of them is an automotive parts business which sells exhausts, of our own design, and manufactured in china. While I've been sourcing the products, I have the website in test mode, and it is theoretically making in the region of $200 a day in profit, with very little optimisation, and very little advertising, so I am very excited about this.

The products won't be here for at least another 2 - 3 months, but I am going to structure everything as muse like as possible, by getting the fulfillment automated, etc.

At the same time, I've started another small venture running small events, and have autsourced most of the hard work, although its taking up huge amounts of my time currently, and will do for about another 6 months, after which I think i'll have it fairly automated. This, however, is profitable now, and makes in the region of $1,000 a month.

Again, nothing here to set the world alight, but I'm going for the "lots of small things all add up!" approach.

-

Now.. while the two ventures that look most profitable are more within my confort zone in that they're more "real world", I am convinced that both of them are / will be more successful because of the learning and experience of setting up my other two muses.

In all honesty, I still find it all a bit "black magic", and really hope that one day I'll break out of the stumbling block I have, and work out how to effectively use adwords properly, and write decent sales copy, etc as the idea of setting up a new muse a week (ebook, script download, audio download, etc, etc) and each one making $100 - $200 a month with little or no maintenance sounds like utopia to me.

But I am yet to see the light at the end of the tunnel, in fact, I feel I'm only just inside the tunnel!!

As always, any advice / comments are MORE than welcome. And any comments from anyone who has gone through the same challenges I'm going trough would be great to hear!

Cheers!

[mastererrob]

Feenz,

background: i've had a bunch of successful failures in the past few years...and i just finished listening to the 4hww audiobook. i plan to re-listen two more times before attempting its principles this summer with a friend for yet another try at entrepreneurial freedom. in the past i've failed by never spending more than $100 to test or do research or launch a thing. i do web design freelance and IT support professionally right now, i'm a desk slave at a great company. so thats a smidge about me.

i can't really offer advice, but i do have some comments, and as this is my first post in joining this community i thought i would ask some questions and hop on in.

first...let me take a look at those websites? i'd be glad to offer my professional opinion...if there's anything that structure or design needs fixing i'll spot it out.

otherwise i feel that the muse is the hardest target to hit, just like you said...a bit of black magic. as i'm coming from the tech field as well, i was wondering what you might have used for fuel or inspiration for creating a few products. to me, this is going to be the hardest part...coming up with something that i actually think will be bought. would you ever be interested in brain storming together? i think this is the first REAL step in the badge of 4hww excellence, and the hardest to do. i can wrap my head around a lot of the other principles...constantly 80/20ing my life has been to a degree already part of my lifestyle...the book just catalyzed me to a deeper commitment to it.

almost everything technological mentioned in the book is common knowledge to me. passive income is my dream and a life goal. i've never surrounded myself with others that have the same dream though...and i think here i might finally do that. i hope to chat...if for nothing else than to swap experiences. thanks.

peace!
-robert

[Feenz]

Hi Robert

I'll PM you now.

[officer_dibble]

Just a word of encouragement from me here. I'm a great believer in spreading the risk muse-wise. You never know if something will change to make a single muse irrelevant or even illegal!

Here's a case in point - I had a muse selling Amazon's kindle ebooks. It was doing OK but not brilliant numbers ($20-$30/month but growing fast) - and then Amazon decided to reduce the commission on kindle books from 10% to zero without warning. Fortunately I hadn't invested a huge amount of effort and the learning was useful elsewhere.

Similarly a muse which is only just washing it's face can suddenly get massive overnight if it gets picked up by a popular site like Stumbleupon.

The Internet is a fickle but exciting place.

[Carlos]

Dibble: You do affilliate marketing? It seems more than half the people on this forum do it, but I'm still quite wary of it. It just seems to scream SCAM at me. Let me see if I have this right:
1: find a product on a site like ClickBank that's looking for affiliates
2: Make a site that sells the product
3: Collect commission.

How lucrative and work-intensive have you found this process? Do most of your sites "dry up" after a few weeks/months?

Thanks in advance.

[tomswiftjr]

I'd also be interested in hearing the experiences of folks who have tried affiliate marketing. From reading warriorforum.com and wickedfire.com, it seems really volatile and risky.

[Feenz]

Actually, I would also be interested in real life experiences in affiliate marketing in the oposite direction.

As a learning experience, I launched one of my muse attempts (and ebook) on clickbank. In about 10 weeks its solda grand total of 2 copies, and has about 15 affiliates promoting it.

[Carlos]

Wow, some people suck at selling products haha! At least you aren't paying anything to the non-selling affiliates, right?

[officer_dibble]

Originally Posted by Carlos

Dibble: You do affilliate marketing? It seems more than half the people on this forum do it, but I'm still quite wary of it. It just seems to scream SCAM at me. Let me see if I have this right:
1: find a product on a site like ClickBank that's looking for affiliates
2: Make a site that sells the product
3: Collect commission.

How lucrative and work-intensive have you found this process? Do most of your sites "dry up" after a few weeks/months?

Thanks in advance.

I mostly do affiliate marketing, some adsense, some arbitrage and a few products. I've found affiliate marketing to be the best of the bunch in terms of automated income - although as my example above illustrates it does have its risks even with established retailers like Amazon.

I do really only stick to Amazon and Ebay though as I can't be fussed with trawling clickbank and the like (which often do look scammy). And I've had other well established retailers scam me out of sales. But overall it works well for me as my muses are mostly a hobby and those retailers suit the niches I produce tools and content for.

Most sites do not dry up after a few months (although quite a few never get off the ground in terms of making any money - no matter it is all learning to me). In fact the reverse is often true - they actually get better over time.

I doubt I spend more than a few hours a week on existing sites (although the capital effort varies from 1/2 hour to 50+ hours). My best performing site is completely automated - not even marketing (it relies on word of mouth). I have spent under $150 in total over the past three years setting sites up and make between $500 and $1000+/month out of them.

I think the key to affiliate marketing is adding value. You either have to have great content or great tools for the visitor. I am happy to hear from others who've made other approaches work though.

[Carlos]

Wow, this is very informative stuff, excellent to hear! One other question: where do you recommend starting? Where should I learn how to do this? Just jump on Amazon and click through to affiliate marketting, or is there a book/website that taught you the basics?