Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

#70 Welcome Back To 2016

iniartworksmallThe first episode of 2016 and my new site has already made over $50 in income.

Hey, and welcome back to Instructions Not Included where you follow me as I try and generate a decent income online. And let me tell you, it’s not as easy as I would have hoped. I have been trying to do this for a number of years – basically, since 2006.

I discovered it when I was 18 years old and been trying to do it. I’ve been working full time online for the last 2 years now and still haven’t quite made it, I wouldn’t say. So I’m earning enough that I don’t need to go back to work, which is great, but we would always like to be in a better position. So, welcome back.

It feels like forever since I did my latest post and a lot has been happening.

December was a pretty tight month for me. December tends to be my worst month of the year. The property market in Australia doesn’t dry up, but people lose interest in investing property over the month of December with Christmas and New Years and Holidays and everything happening.

There’s just not a whole lot of action in people researching and thinking about investing in Australia. So, cash flow did get very, very tight in December, early January. We’re talking I basically had a week or less than a week left of income before I was going to run out of money and need to pull from savings.

This is because I pay myself every single week. So the business is always profitable every month, but it doesn’t necessarily pay what I need in order to support my family. So I got to the point where I was basically a couple of days from running out of money, but cash flow has since improved and we’ve sold a lot of memberships to our membership site.

We’ve had some commissions come through so all is good. So we’ve got months of income in the bank now so that should be fine.

One of the things that I tried that failed last year was trying my evergreen launch funnel sequence again, which worked great back in May, June, July of last year. But when I re-did it, I had over 1,000 people go through it. Usually, we’re talking anywhere between $5 and $10 per email subscriber, I was making in this launch funnel. All of a sudden, I had over 1,000 people go through it and I think I did one sale of about $300. So it wasn’t doing very well, wasn’t generating the income that I needed and so, I shifted gears again.

I re-marketed my product, setup a sales page without a sales video and setup 2 tiers – one property only and one a full membership for $300 a year and property only was $99 per year. Sales of that have been going good and going fairly steady and hopefully, they continue into the future. So that is good.

I have also started another site called pelt.co where I’m doing a lot of education videos around how to do certain things in internet marketing, like how to setup an evergreen launch funnel or how to create a membership site. And that’s going to be my big project of 2016. So I look forward to working on that more and sharing more details with you guys on that.

I started working on that the very end of November and a couple of days ago, we got our first income from that – an affiliate sale that was worth about US$40 and then we got another affiliate sale that was worth about US$9. All off, in the first 2 months, it’s made US$50, which isn’t stellar, isn’t going to fund my lifestyle, but hey, progress is progress and any income is better than no income at all, so I’m happy with that.

Also, I’m going back and learning about how to build niche websites. So I’ve been following Spencer over at nichepursuits.com and so I’m following the Niche Site Project 3 and re-looking at that and looking at apply the things that I learn to existing sites that I have or even potentially launch new sites into the future. I’ll give you guys updates on that as they go around and as they happen.

I did spend a day or two creating one article that was almost 3,000 words in length to target a specific keyword that was low competition and I think it just had 70 views a month or 70 searches per month. Within 1 day, I was ranked within the top 120. Within 2 or 3 days, I was ranked in the top 40 in the Google search results, but I kind of hovered in the top 40 for that last 5 days or something like that. And so, this is quite low competition and a lot of the people ranking in the top, they’re good websites, but they’re not targeting that keyword, not answering that question.

I really want to rank for this so I did some stuff today to drive some links back to it. I created a Youtube video, which will also go out as a podcast on Soundcloud. Both of those will link back to the website.

I did some internal linking on my website as well and I am thinking about doing some Pinterest post or social media marketing to link back to the site as well just to give it a little bit of juice, a little bit of love and hopefully push it into the rankings a little bit faster. I also adjusted it so it had less affiliate links in there. I think I had about 20 affiliate links going out, which sounds like a lot, but it was one image and one link per item that I listed.

There was 10 items in total, which equaled 20 links. I basically removed the links from the images except for the top 2 recommendations because I figured they’re the ones that’ll be clicked on the most. So, I’ve got 12 links now instead of 20 links going out. Also did an external link in the post to a reputable source and so I’m trying some on-page SEO as well as some minor, very minor back linking – very minor white hat back linking. Linking from Youtube back to the post, etc. And so, we’ll see if that can boost rankings and if we get into the top 10, I will definitely record an episode and let you guys know about it.

Writing a second article now on the same website also targeting a low search volume. I think it was about 40 searches per month, but low competition as well. So we’ll try and rank for that one and both of these searches are trying to make money through Amazon associates or Amazon affiliates. So linking people over to Amazon and basically getting them to purchase over there. We’ll see how we go.

I would like to make a little bit of extra income from Amazon. I would like to diversify my income away from On Property. I think my goal is really to get On Property earning 50% of my income by the end of the year and earning 50% of my income from other sources – 50% or more. Whereas, at the moment, it’s more like 95%-98% of my income comes from On Property, so we want to change that.

That is my quick update of what I’ve been doing in the last couple of months. I hope that your business has been going well. Go out there, work on it. Even if it takes you 7-10 years like it’s taking me, know that in the end, it’s going to be worth it. So, that’s it, Ryan out. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.



One response to “#70 Welcome Back To 2016”

  1. Hi, You sound interesting. I found you looking for “public speakers”. I signed up here because I would like to know what you are trying to do and what is the “property” you are talking about. Do you have anywhere an introduction? Please let me find where can I find it, I would appreciate it. Thanks. Joanne Basecki jbasecki@gmail.com

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