TOPIC: TJ's Journal to Making Ca$h

Hey everyone,

I just came back to USA and am sort of all jacked up from culture shock, random shit, family, no sleep, etc. Need to get refocused on making progress. This log will be a way to keep myself accountable.

Where I'm At Now
My site makes about $200-$300 in profit every month. I developed a course to help people overcome depression without medication. First month it was live was February.

I honestly don't put much time into it. This isn't good. I need more focus and accountability. I also got distracted with hunting women down in Asia, especially Vietnam. I became the go-to guy for how to get vietnamese women and I let that consume my life for a good month (nothing theoretically wrong with that)

My conversions from my email list to people buying my product is actually pretty good (I only get about one subscriber per day). I get around 130 visits per day on my site.


What I want to be at with the site
$3,000 a month in passive income.

The main goal now is to get more sign-ups to my email list. 5-10 subscribers per day would theoretically 5x-10x my income, putting me at $3,000 a month.

Next Step
-Figure out content experiments with google so I can start running tests, optimize the top articles on my site that bring in website traffic to get subscribers.

Big Pushing Point:
Do ONE 100% purely focused 90 minute session on the number one thing to grow my business everyday. If I can just do that, I will accomplish more than most people do in an entire day in just 90 minutes (I've done this before).

Problems that may occur:
Moving around too much. I just need to pick a place and live there for at least 6 months. I have been living in different places for the past 9 months.

Good stuff man, this will help make you accountable.

By the way, 1 email optin out of 120-30 uniques? That seems really low, I would make that your main priority at the moment, as it's your highest point of leverage. Get your email sign up conversions doubled at least, (you should be able to get them up to 10-15% minimum) and you've basically just multiplied your income by many many fold without having to write new content, etc, etc, and all the things that's involved with getting more unique visitors.

Also, hit me up, I've got a good traffic course that's relatively new I could share with you for nothing, but yeah, make converting those signups your #1 I'd say

What kind of commission do you get for the products you sell? 200 a month already is pretty cool, I'm curious how it adds up. I really like the design by the way.

Thanks for your comments. The email opt-ins definitely need to be way, way higher. I think my sign up forms come across too "markety".

Someone told me I was letting my passion about the site cloud actually making money. So I needed to "sell" instead of just help people for free all day (which I would do for depression).

I don't make any commissions, I actually created a 6 week course based on the top practitioners and research these days on actually fixing depression, mixed with the fact that I had depression for 11 years. I sell the course. I want to get as many people through it so I can improve it based on feedback and make it one of the best courses people ever take.

And another lesson learned: I've had people buy the course and take it and implement everything. Then one day this girl I knew back home was really depressed and begged me to help her out, so I gave it to her for free. She didn't implement anything.

When you have skin in the game, you get more done.

Cool thread!
Just curious
Why did you move back to the US? Cost of living is significantly higher than SEA.

I came back to San Diego to go to the Conference for Men. It was pretty awesome. Then I was planning on living in California, but the cost was too high and I ran out of floors to sleep on. So I came back to Utah.

I feel a little weird being back which kind of sucks. I miss living outside of USA. I might run away to Guatemala or something and really hustle on my internet business. But part of me wants to "make it" in USA, if that makes sense. It is a more challenging environment, especially socially here.

Working on increasing conversions. Going to pay a web person $300 to change my homepage to look more like SovereignMan.com, have it really easy to have people opt-in to my list.

Got a plugin called Appsticky. When a user goes to exit my site, it asks for their email address. Got a few email addresses off of that so far. However, the app doesn't integrate with any email providers. I have to actually log in to the app on the website to check if anyone subscribed and import them manually.

Makes it slow for the person to receive their first intro email, lowering engagement and open rate.

So far my opt-ins were only one email opt-in a day. this week it is double that, so what I am doing seems to be working.

Going through Running Lean book and starting to schedule interviews with customers and subscribers over Skype to talk to them more face-to-face and make sure my product even solves their biggest problems.

Last month I did $714.16 in profit. 7 course sales, one coaching call, and $30 from amazon.

When I changed my website (payed $300 the other month) my opt-ins even went down. I could use a lot of help here.

AUGUST STATS
Google Analytics:
Sessions
6,236
Pageviews
9,403
Pages / Session
1.51
Avg. Session Duration
00:02:11
Bounce Rate
79.68%
% New Sessions
79.51%

Clicky:
Visitors 5,955
Actions 8,490
Average actions 1.4
Total time 4d 8h
Average time per visit 1m 3s
Bounce rate 84%


SALES AND METRICS
7 Courses Sold
1 Coaching Session
$30 off supplement affiliate links
30 Opt-ins (16 from site, 14 imported from a pop up when someone goes to exit site). This is strange, because in July I had 53 opt-ins.

Theoretically, my emails are amazing (get comments all the time) and the autoresponder sells the course, so if I got like 10 email opt-ins a day my income would probably start to skyrocket.

All my traffic is from search engines, I haven't done any paid advertising since February.

I want to hit $2,000 in profit this month of September.

Sorry, 30 Email optins from that traffic? 6200 unique visitors?

Really low man...

Hmm, maybe I can help, catch me on Skype sometime?

Also mate, you got an affiliate program?

I wouldn't mind doing some testing sending you some traffic, in the future, see how it goes.

If you don't have an affiliate program, def think about getting one setup once you've got a better EPC, etc,
it's the most powerful thing you can do as a vendor

Yeah, the opt-ins were extremely low last month.

I have my product set up on Clickbank. I'm also about to finish making a VSL which should be great and increase my course conversions and attract more affiliates (affiliates love sending people to a "video" that teaches people something)

1. Your landing page is dull and boring, you need more images and another background.
2. Have a big orange button just above the fold with "Click here to get rid of your depression instantly" or whatever it is your product does. A vsl is really powerful as well, above the fold.
3. Throughout the page have several "Buy now" buttons.

Overall solid information, but it needs to be spiced up with more colors and images. Take a look at this landing page 21daysugardetox.com/packages/ for example and compare it to your own.

The "overcome depression" niche is a very competitive one, so you gotta target those long tail keywords if you want any free traffic. Do you use webmaster tools? It'll tell you what keywords are currently bringing in traffic to your site.

If you want more people to join your email list bribe them with something. Write a 15-20 page mini ebook named "The 7 secrets to overcoming depression" (or something along those lines) and offer it in exchange for your visitors email. It would severely increase your opt-in rate.