TOPIC: TJ's Journal to Making Ca$h

October I surpassed 1k in profit for the first time. November I hope to at least surpass 2k.

Profit: $1,083.72 - 3 Coaching calls, 10 course sales, $120.13 from Amazon supplement affiliate links.
Revenue: $1,263.42
Expenses: $179.70

I spent $140.70 on FB advertising to test out if I should rename my product based on click through rates.

86 Email Sign Ups (a few imported from a pop up when someone leaves page)


8,051 Sessions from GA



The increase primarily came from more of a belief in myself. Have had so many testimonials and people thanking me that it is becoming a no-brainer to tell people to sign up for my course. I got a few sales just from telling people over email to sign up for my course, as they are really doing themselves a disfavor to not sign up.

For the ones that ask me for it for free, it is funny, because I have actually given it to a few people for free in the past (not to mention my course is dirt cheap anyways). The people who got for free, did nothing and are still where they are. I have also realized that charging for something gives people BETTER results.

One thing I noticed with coaching, is so far, I haven't really had anyone do coaching for more than 3 weeks. After 3 weeks, they typically feel better and feel they don't need me anymore.

November should be a good month. My product will be revamped a bit and better. I have a podcast or two I am appearing in for an interview. I am giving a public speech at a library downtown in the city I live in and will record it.

I also have gotten back to basics and realized I wasn't implementing a lot of things I learned back in my car sales days. When I get a course sale, I don't celebrate anymore. I realize that it is the *beginning* of a transaction. Once someone buys my product, the relationship begins, and it is my job to nurture that relationship. Giving customers a great experience and actually changing their lives is what will create future wealth.

A few people that have bought my course I've hopped on the phone for 10 minutes to personally thank them and give them some quick advice. Another guy that bought my course I hand wrote a letter and mailed it to him. Imagine how you'd feel if you bought a random product online and the guy send you a handwritten note?

I've been treating it a lot more like a real business and I'm guessing the sky's the limit from here.

dude awesome!!

how did the fb ad go? did u pay for clicks or impressions?

I'm thinking of doing one soon.

In the past, I did conversions to my email list.

This time, I just did clicks to measure people's interest in the title. I just wanted to see what product name more people would actually click on. Similar to how Tim Ferriss named his 4-hour work week book with Google Ads.

I don't know why you would pay for impressions, but I'm not a facebook marketing pro.

Here are the exact results.

Good job TJ, your site is really taking off. To take things up notch you should start thinking about doing some off-page SEO to your site.

dominatedepression.com/natural-calm-magn...owder-honest-review/ ranks nr 9 in the SERPs for the keyword "natural calm reviews" which gets 1000 monthly searches. Reach spot nr 1. and you'll get 50% of that traffic. Review type keywords convert very nicely so a 5% conversion rate is probably even low, but that means 25 sales each month, just from that keyword. This is without taking into account all the long tailed variations. Unfortunately it's a physical product with a low commission but it's easy to rank for.

One thing tho, you have to make your call to action at the bottom clearer. and it can't be both "buy the product" and "sign up for my email list".

dominatedepression.com/jarrow-formulas-5-htp-reviews/ ranks spot nr 10 for "best 5 htp brand" which gets 260 monthly searches. "best" type keywords are awesome as well. With all the long tailed variations you're probably looking at another 500-1000 MS of highly converting traffic.

You should download pretty links (plugin) and put your affiliate links through it, so you get a nice site.com/link instead of a long ass link which people hate. Looks better in both your visitors eyes and googles.

One last thing - I'm not entirely sure about this as I'm not an amazon affiliate, but I believe you can't use their star rating system on your site. I know a few who got their contract cancelled because of this, and it's pretty damn hard to get it back. Something I think you should talk with your affiliate manager about.

Hey Dann,

Thanks for the heads up on using pictures from Amazon. I'll double check that to make sure nothing bad happens. Also, thanks for the heads up on the call to action at the bottom being clearer.

What does making the affiliate links shorter do? People usually just click the link, and unless they have firefox and hover over the link so they can see where it is going, all they are going to see is an Amazon link anyways.

Other thing is, I don't want to make all my money off Amazon affiliate. The money is too low. I actually just do product reviews for things I KNOW work, and aren't BS. I just throw in the affiliate link to get a little extra money from it.

As you can see, hardly any of my income comes from Amazon. Why would I try to maximize that small amount of money, where I don't have much control?

My main goal is to maximize people buying my course/and or signing up for coaching, as that both moves people forward in fixing depression and brings me the most income.

The amazon thing is a side gig simply to pay for website hosting, email software, etc. bills.

TJGoodLooking wrote: Hey Dann,

Thanks for the heads up on using pictures from Amazon. I'll double check that to make sure nothing bad happens. Also, thanks for the heads up on the call to action at the bottom being clearer.

What does making the affiliate links shorter do? People usually just click the link, and unless they have firefox and hover over the link so they can see where it is going, all they are going to see is an Amazon link anyways.

Other thing is, I don't want to make all my money off Amazon affiliate. The money is too low. I actually just do product reviews for things I KNOW work, and aren't BS. I just throw in the affiliate link to get a little extra money from it.

As you can see, hardly any of my income comes from Amazon. Why would I try to maximize that small amount of money, where I don't have much control?

My main goal is to maximize people buying my course/and or signing up for coaching, as that both moves people forward in fixing depression and brings me the most income.

The amazon thing is a side gig simply to pay for website hosting, email software, etc. bills.

Using pretty links or some similar plug in will allow you to manage all links at one place, so if you gotta change one for whatever reason you can do it through the admin area. Another reason is that a regular link like that is do-follow and will pass link juice OUT of your site, and while this is ok sometimes, you don't want to do it it with your affiliate links. Last reason is that people do hover over the link, and a long one seems spammy. A custom link looks clean and will tell people exactly what they're clicking on.

Why would you try to maximize your money from affiliate sells? I'm sorry, I must have had you mistaken for an opportunist TJ!

Ranking the top spot for those keywords I found in 20 seconds could not only bring you more money, but also additional traffic to the rest of your site, even possibly followers. If they buy the product from you, and it works really well, who are they going to credit?

Even if it the cost of doing SEO on your site equals the income from the products you're still getting links to your site, thus boosting every page, making the whole thing more authoritative in googles eyes.

You have a lot of keywords ranking on 2nd and 3rd page, with few low quality links going to the site. If you don't want to focus on affiliate sales, SEo should still be something you spend time and money on. Getting some of those 1500 MS keywords up on first page would give you so much organic traffic and severely increase your income from the site.

Just a thought

That is some good information. I wish I knew more about SEO . I have no idea how you are even looking up all that info about my site.

I'm guessing by off-page SEO, you are talking about getting other high authority websites and blogs to link to me?

What would be better use of my time as far as ROI goes, getting my SEO better? Or learning paid traffic and scaling rapidly from that?

Thanks for your feedback and ideas.

TJGoodLooking wrote: That is some good information. I wish I knew more about SEO . I have no idea how you are even looking up all that info about my site.

I'm guessing by off-page SEO, you are talking about getting other high authority websites and blogs to link to me?

What would be better use of my time as far as ROI goes, getting my SEO better? Or learning paid traffic and scaling rapidly from that?

Thanks for your feedback and ideas.

I'm using a tool name Semrush, it looks up a shitton of information about any ulr you put in it. I use it to spy on my competitors, the keywords they're ranking for, the backlinks they got and such.

SEO is a tricky bitch, the basics are pretty easy to understand but in order to use specific methods you kinda need to have tried them before. There's no right or wrong with SEO, the only thing that matters is what works and the only way you can figure that out is to experiment yourself which makes it extremely difficult for beginners. Experience is everything. And yes, by off page SEO I mean getting quality links.

I absolutely think getting some SEO done on your site will boost your ROI TJ, but with that being said content is king, and adding new content constantly will never, ever be a waste of time. It's possible to create your own links manually, but that requires you to learn a whole new game, and while I'm certain you'd be able to it would take a lot of time, not to mention experimenting.

Like I've said before your site has great potential, but it sounds like you're still not satisfied with your product and the copy for it. If I were in your shoes (with little SEO knowledge) I'd probably perfect the above points while spitting out content every week, growing your email list and following. When you feel you're ready play the SEO-trumph card it'll take your income from "nice" to "great". Imagine tripling or quadrupling the amount of visitors your site gets every month and you'll see what I mean.

On the topic of paid traffic, PPC is not my strong suit, I work mainly with organic traffic (as it is now), but I take it you want to drive traffic to your squeeze page?

To summarize - getting SEO done would be a great investment, but you have to decide whether or not you want to learn it yourself or if you want to outsource it. The latter produces the best results, but also costs money and you may not feel confident in that kind of investment just yet. Spending another 3 months or so on perfecting your product, copy and squeeze page while creating quality content will still benefit your site greatly.

November wasn't my best month in terms of money.

Profit: $650.77 - 1 Coaching call, 5 course sales, $163.05 from Amazon supplement affiliate links.
Revenue: $691.82
Expenses: $41.05

I didn't do any FB advertising at all. I am having a hard time figuring out tracking using things like Mixpanel so I have no idea if the advertising is actually bringing in more revenue, but every month I've done FB ads I've made more money. I'm guessing that the targeted traffic is worth way more than organic traffic, and learning paid traffic and getting my funnel correct might actually be what I should be focusing my time on.



9,344 sessions from GA


Was a very odd month. To be 100% honest, I was working a lot on personal things such as healing some of my own stuff at home, seeing my family, digging deeper into myself, etc.

I got a lot of emails from people that said my site changed their life.

I made a lot of connections. One person said they would be willing to improve my website because they believed in my message.

I gave a speech that many people loved. I got multiple emails about it.

I stopped several people from committing suicide.

I just didn't have my income up to par.

I finally did finish my VSL, and trying to figure out how to host it on the internet. For some reason I can't get flowplayer to work so that I can use a magic buy button during the video. I think that once I post that, change the name of my course, and get my messaging more clear that income will go up. I was also working on my product and it is going to be much better.

Anyways, although my income suffered, here is one email that I got:

Yesterday night, after I prayed before I was gonna really end of life. I was gonna open my condo window and jumped from the 13th floor.

But at that critical moment, ( I saw the youtube recommended videos on my youtube front page, and the word ''depression'' caught my attention and happened to be curious enough to click on one of your DominateDepression videos... and then I kept listening to what you were saying on all of your videos about conquering depression without meds...

Your words penetrated my heart and it finally made me feel like SOMEONE out there ACTUALLY UNDERSTOOD what it felt like to have this heavy depressing feeling all the time. The things and experiences you had openly shared in your videos had literally saved my life from yesterday night. THANK YOU SO MUCH for your openness and honesty in all of your videos.

And that's why we do this TJ- to be financially independent and be able to do whatever the fuck we want. I'm so happy for you that you're having this success, and it'll only get better. Awesome you're helping all these people as well in the process.

I don't know a lot about facebook ads but it's definitely a viable option. So is getting paid traffic, but that requires a specific landing page. I see you already have GA so why aren't you hooked up to webmaster tools man? It's one of the best tools out there for us, and it'll tell you what you're ranking for organically very specifically.

That's how I do it - upload content, fire links at it, wait a few months and check webmaster tools. With this information you know what does well in the search engine, and you can plan accordingly (improve the content ranking, fire more links at it, etc.). Don't take any shots in the dark you don't have to TJ.

TJ:

Just a couple of random things...

First, I don't know who or what site you have used for Facebook advertising in the past, but I suggest you check out a company called AdRoll . I am working with them through a customer of mine and it might be something that will work well for you. In terms of tracking sales/income via your site, they have a small snippet of code that can be added to your Wordpress site that will do all of that for you.

Second, I know about FlowPlayer but have never used it. I can tell you that if you are looking for a video player that allows you to add buy buttons and whatnot to your videos, than you should really check out Simple Video Pro . It is not free, but it is tremendously powerful. All of my sales pages use this plugin. In addition to being very powerful, they have great technical support too. I highly recommend it.

Lastly, I don't know how you are setting up your VSL or how many times in the future you are going to do things like that (meaning, other VSLs, more tradition long form sales pages, etc.), but check out a program called InstaBuilder. I use this and Simple Video Pro on all of my sales pages/offers. It is really very, very flexible. VSLs, Optin Page, Squeeze Pages, Landing Pages...really about anything. I am using the original version which they have closed off as being for sale because their new v2.0 is coming out on December 9th. I am anxiously looking forward to that release and will be picking it up for sure. You can see some of the features here: InstaBuilder 2.0 .

Hopefully, some of this is useful to you.

Thanks for the responses Dann and meijin. I currently have webmaster tools, just not sure quite how to use it. I will look into it more deeply.

Thanks meijin, I'll check out simple video pro and InstaBuilder. I'm guessing Simple Video Pro should allow me to have a buy button appear at a certain spot on the video?

I've heard AMAZING things about AdRoll. Unfortunately, I signed up for them and they said they couldn't use ads for my site since it dealt with depression. I might have to find a different retargeting service.