After not working on my blogs or online business much in the past couple of months it’s easy to forget the awesome power of creating something from nothing that then earns you money. (To be fair the last couple of months were busy with moving twice, roadtripping across the country, getting engaged, moving to New Zealand…. I’ve been busy!) But I’ve made several hundred dollars this week for doing nothing other than have a sale on one of my products, and this has brought back the awesome feelings that accompany making money on the internet.

Let’s just say, it feels good.

Now that I’m in New Zealand and mostly settled in I’m starting to consider whether or not I want to look for work. My visa limits me to temporary and/or part-time work. The kinds of jobs I could find that fit that description might not be worth as much as me working harder to create more products and more online revenue streams. The “need to find a job” may just be distracting me from the fact that if I wanted to I could focus on generating more income online to the point that it exceeds anything I could make with a part-time job here in New Zealand.

Like I said earlier, I haven’t been focusing on my online stuff much over the last few months. Real life endeavors were too amazing and deserved more attention than work. But now that I’m in a new place with plenty of freedom and time I’m considered my next step. I know truthfully my answer is to continue working on building the online income. I love working for myself. I love calling the shots. I love creating useful products that help other people. I love making something that continues to earn me money long after I’ve stopped working on it. I love everything about creating an online income other than the fact that it is variable and hard to explain to other people.

Earning money online instead of having a traditional job has enabled me to do a lot of really awesome things. I’ve traveled all over the country and moved abroad.  I’ve dabbled in many different areas: product creation, blog design, copywriting. I love that I can do many different things online that allow me to be freer with my time and location.

I’m grateful for the reminder this week that I should continue pursuing this. I’m becoming more and more comfortable with considering my online adventures a business endeavor. The IRS considers me as such so I might as well come to terms with the fact that I am and just relish the awesomeness of earning money online.

One thing I dislike about blogging is trying to make money from it. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the money I make from blogging. It’s opened my eyes to a whole new world where I can create my own income and I can be in control of what I do with my life. But I hate trying to figure out how to make more money or how to change things up when something stops working. This morning I spent time trying to find a new advertising network for a couple of my blogs. I’ve been using Adsense and while that works well I’ve grown tired of the kinds of ads that show up on my sites. Unfortunately almost every good network I’ve looked at is not accepting new bloggers and I’ve been pushed into waiting list limbo.

Another thing I’ve spent my morning doing is trying to get my estimated quarterly taxes paid. I completely forgot about doing this until now, just a few days before it’s due. Unfortunately I’m still waiting on a few things to happen before I am able to make a payment so hopefully it won’t be late but that’s a real possibility. I wish I had learned about/remembered/set up a system long before now to take care of this! It’s amazing how many little things there are to remember and do when you are self-employed that no one tells you about. I need to find a mentor to guide me in navigating the system. Anyone self-employed and want to teach me the ropes?

Basically the things I disliked this morning were administrative tasks. Things not entirely essential to blogging, but important to the business side of blogging. Generally speaking these are the tasks that I enjoy the least and the ones I tend to spend the least amount of time on (which might be why I realized my taxes were due so late).  I’m not a huge fan of these tasks, or much related to the business side besides getting paid.

I may have just needed to rant slightly about those frustrations, but this morning’s lame administrative tasks weren’t all bad. I mean, I applied to be part of something that seems like a really great idea. I made money by selling direct advertising for one of my blogs. I sent off answers to interview questions for an upcoming interview about my awesome health blogging ebook.  All in all it’s been a very good day in the life of a blogger. It’s never going to be perfect days spent writing and doing nothing else – like any job their are less exciting tasks that come along with it. But that’s not enough to dissuade me from continuing down this path.

The Launch

It was actually a very low key launch and I didn’t do much promotion for it other than mentioning it on my blog a few times and sending copies to the people who gave me quotes for it. I didn’t set up an affiliate program, I didn’t send out a million review copies, I didn’t try to make the launch into something huge. I mentioned it on my blog and twitter several times, so my audience knew it was coming finally. I wrote a simple post and an even simpler sales page and just let things be. Since it was my first product and I had no idea what I was doing, I wanted to make sure I didn’t fall flat on my face trying to do a huge launch.

The Sales

In the first two days I sold 29 ebooks and continue to sell about one or two a day now.  At $27 a pop minus fees, you can figure out how much I earned from the initial launch. This however, is without much promotion at all.  I am now going to work on building more links and getting more reviews of the ebook. I would like a steady stream of traffic to the ebook page to get at least a few sales per month indefinitely.

My thoughts on the sales… I think it’s great! My blog isn’t huge. I compared how I did to other bloggers who launched ebooks and released their stats and for what I did I think it’s pretty awesome. I honestly had no idea what to expect regarding sales. My numbers fit the kind of launch I did and while they aren’t mind-blowing, they definitely have encouraged me in the fact that I can sell something of my own creation.

The Mistakes

I know if I had created an affiliate program from the beginning I would have made more sales. That may have translated into more money.  I’m not saying having no affiliate program was a mistake – I don’t think it was because I didn’t want to focus on that this first time. But others have mentioned it as a possible mistake.

My sales page probably isn’t the greatest. I can’t get into the whole internet marketer thing too much, so I went with something simple and my style. It probably could be improved upon and I most likely will change it around for improving future sales.

Not being ready for traffic overload was definitely a mistake. I honestly didn’t think it would be a problem since it was such a low key launch, but my site almost crashed and burned. Apparently all my friends in the niche were cool enough to retweet and link to the ebook’s sales page and the post about it, so I had a ton of traffic hit my site all at once. It ran really slow for a while but thankfully held up with the added traffic. It almost didn’t and I have no idea what I would have done if it hadn’t. I didn’t have a backup plan because it wasn’t something I even considered. I honestly didn’t think it would be like that, but it was my blog’s best traffic day ever.

Thoughts

I mentioned the sales earlier, but I did this project for a number or reasons.

One, of course is money. I need more money and I wanted to have a product I could sell. I didn’t have grand expectations for it but did want to create something that would continually sell each month. I will be happy if I just get a few sales each month to add to all my other income streams.

Second, authority!  In the niche I have my own well defined place, but I wanted to have some sort of authority. Writing an ebook that people appreciate and your peers respect is a nice way to gain that authority. I’m now known as someone who knows about blogging and who can teach others about it. I’m hoping that translates into other opportunities like speaking at niche blogging conferences (well, once I get over the fear of public speaking).

Third, I genuinely wanted to help people. The fact that I charged money for my advice doesn’t mean it wasn’t given out of a desire to help and teach. A lot of people want to have nice blogs but have no idea how to create or run them. I do and I know how to translate all the tech speak into easy to understand instructions. I wanted to help confused bloggers understand things like SEO to help them create better blogs. I accomplished that and I’m really happy with all the positive feedback from people who have learned something and have improved their blogs because of the ebook.

Those are the reasons why I took this project on. It really did start as something small and grow into something much bigger and unexpected. But since I’ve got my first product and first product launch behind me, I’m totally ready to start something new. I will be working to promote this product of course, but I also want to start doing other things.  I’m excited about the possibilities now and can’t wait to start working on the next new project.