It’s all about the benjamins, right?
It's everywhere. Big-name high dollar coaches/and online biz experts popping up in your timeline and your inbox about how they uniquely can help you to have your first 4-figure month. Then a 5-figure month. A 6-figure launch. A 7-figure lifestyle.
Just do the math, they say. To make $100,000, just break down how many e-books, online courses and coaching programs you need to sell. Bingo, there’s how you get to that 6-figures.
There’s a key part of the story that's missing. But I’ll get to that later…
First, I want to share with you what I’ve done in my first 6 months of business, how much money I’ve spent, what I’ve spent it on, and how much money I’ve brought in.
Is my story typical? IDK… I just want to share this with you to give you a glimpse of what the first 6 months of this online business thing looks like for me.
Here’s the quick and dirty background on WP*BFF and how it got started:
In May of 2014 I read PUSH by Chalene Johnson. Long story short, that book compelled to start freelancing as a WordPress developer… Um, nope. Not for me.
But I kept listening to Chalene’s podcast and in July 2014 I came up with the idea of Website Essentials Academy to teach WordPress classes online. I had no clue what I was doing, no idea how to promote it. I redesigned the website 3 times – and I was too scared to make videos.
If you build it, they will not come.
Then I discovered the Smart Passive Income podcast which changed everything.
Here’s the gist: give away everything you know. See if the products you love and use have affiliate programs where you get paid for any referrals. Provide awesome value and great customer service, and earn money for referrals. Your visitors win because they get a problem solved, you win because you get paid, and the product wins because they get paid.
I started recording tutorials that are now the Free 5 Day Website Challenge, but I still wasn’t sure what to do with them…
Then in December 2014, I found Brandgasm 101 and found my voice and my brand and finished tutorial videos and my site.
I then decided I needed to figure out “how to build an email list”. I google those exact words and found Nathalie Lussier's 30 Day List Building Challenge and did exactly what she said.
If you’re keeping track, I have earned 0 dollars from online business from July – December 2014.
On January 4, 2015 I had 0 subscribers on my mailing list, and I asked for some list-building advice in her Facebook group, and someone asked me to post a link to my site…On January 5 I had 6 subscribers and had earned $165 in affiliate commissions. That’s a 600% increase in my email list and a 165% increase in sales, I think – I’m bad at math…
(FYI – you don’t actually get commissions in your bank account for 30-60 days after the sale).
By mid-January I was dabbling in Facebook ads, pop-ups, writing guest posts that got lost in the inboxes of the wrong websites, reaching out to successful women who had built their own WordPress sites and requesting interviews from them… I was joining FB groups, posting links to the challenge whenever possible, helping people with their WordPress questions, and helping people in my Facebook group with their 5 Day Challenge questions, buying and working through online courses to help me grow my business.
I also had to change my business name, I’ve tweaked my site eleventy-hundred times (told you I was bad at math.)
Mailing list growth over the past 6 months:
January – 56 total
February – 148 total
March – 333 total
April – 450 total
May – 560 total
June – 650 total
So if you use all the fancy shmancy metrics and percentages you see online marketers use, my list has grown 1060% over the past six months! Go me!! LOL!
Seriously, I’m proud of that growth, I busted my ass to get every single one of you on my list!!
Monthly income over the past 6 months
(note that I didn’t get paid for some affiliate commissions earned in January & Feb until March)
*$72.80 of January’s income was from selling a domain name.
**$660 I made in February had nothing to do with WP*BFF – it’s income from the freelance clients I’ve kept. I made $0 from WP*BFF in February.
***In March, $291 of my sales had nothing to do with WP*BFF, I sold another old domain name.
Breakdown of income directly related to WP*BFF:
Affiliate Commissions: $1286
Online Course Sales: $588
Coaching: $844
Expenses
Facebook Ads, Stuff like Dropbox, Vimeo, Freshbooks, Mailchimp, Acuity Scheduling, OptimizePress and other business tools, and courses that I’ve purchased to help grow my business:
Trust me, this is me doing everything as cheaply as I can do it! The bulk of my expenses are Advertising, Online Services and Professional Services (online courses, other things that I’ll tell you about later…)
Time Spent
At least 4-5 hours a day 3 weekdays and a total of 10 hours on Saturday and Sunday. And this is outside my 40 hour a week day job, just FYI – that’s 650 hours I’ve put into this so far. So I’m currently earning $7.50 an hour, but I’m spending $6 an hour on expenses.
And I’m likely spending lots of time on what people call non-income producing activities – tweaking my website, writing blog posts, helping BFFs out for free in the Facebook group, researching ways to grow my list grow my sales, workshops, etc.
This is NOT passive income, I can tell you that right now! I make WAY more than that at my day job… But I’m not chained to a desk, trading my time for money. I choose to do all of this and I LOVE doing it. It doesn’t feel like work to me, and I eventually want to spend all my time doing it.
What No One Tells You
The average conversion rate for a sale in email marketing is between 1% and 3%. That means if I have 560 people on my email list, and I offer something for sale, only between 5 and 15 people are likely to buy it. What would happen if I offered a lesser freebie and had a ginormous list but my subscribers were less targeted? I don’t know… But I do know that in order to grow my business, I need to spend lots of time building my list.
It takes time to build credibility. There are some players out there that seem to have come out of nowhere or are overnight successes. Don’t compare yourself to them. You have no idea what resources they had at their disposal for explosive growth, how long they’ve been at it and they probably work their ass off.
Money is not everything – but you need to know your numbers. Doing what you love, helping people, hearing from people how much you helped them – that makes me really happy. In April WP*BFF was named one of the 100 Best Sites for Solopreneurs. I couldn’t be more proud!
There’s a difference between paying for actionable information that would take you too long to figure out on your own, and paying for shortcuts to money, or list growth. I feel like I need to take the journey, I need to troubleshoot, I need to waste money on things that don’t work, screw up product launches because it forces me to learn everything I can and become an expert. In my first 6 months I tried a lot of things – and I know what I need and what I don’t need. And that helps me better help you.
Game changers for me that I 100% recommend to you are:
Brandgasm 101 which teaches you copywriting and graphic design, and Hey, Nice Package! which teaches how to create, package and price your services. Totally worth the money and I made back what I spent on both.
Growth promised in percentages can be misleading. Do the math to figure out what that growth would mean to your business TODAY when you're making a decision to purchase a course or program.
You have to put a TON of work in up front to start making money. Anyone that tells you that it will be easy is not being forthcoming.
You must figure out exactly what your monthly business expenses are, how much money you need to make to cover them, and THEN figure out on top of that how much you need to take home (after taxes).
I’ve learned SO MUCH in my first 6 months in business, and I’ve got some super exciting plans for growth!!
I can’t wait to tell you guys all about it – but for now my lips are sealed.
I’ve got my expenses dialed in, I know exactly how much I need to make a month to cover them, exactly how much I need to make a month to get to the point where I can quit my day job.
In a year I’ll be another overnight sensation 🙂
P.S. Thanks to Pat Flynn at Smart Passive Income for the idea and courage to share an income report.
