Making Money Without A Day Job #1

Making Money Without A Day Job #1

Hey everyone, as I mentioned in my introduction post, I want to use my Steemit account as a way to track my successes and failures as an entrepreneur. I also want to share with many of you the various methods that I have and still use to make money outside of a boring old day job.

Today I wanted to share with you one of the most lucrative ways of earning income online. It takes relatively little start up capital, both in terms of money AND time. And with a little dedication it can help you see income like this:

So what exactly is this method?

Creating A Niche eCommerce Website

What I'm talking about here is building and running an eCommerce business. The screenshot you're looking at above is taken from one of the stores that I run. Now granted, that store wasn't built overnight. But it took a relatively small amount of time to get started when you look at the payout that it has given me.

The method is a little in depth and I want to give you guys a full breakdown of making money with eCommerce so I'm going to be making a series of posts rather than just 1 giant wall of text here.

To get started, in this post I'll give a very quick overview of the way that I and many other haves generated 5 figure income per month using this method.

Step 1: Product Research

Before you even get started, it's extremely important to do some research on which products to sell. I've made the mistake before of making a store first, then uploading a bunch of random products and attempting to drive traffic. And guess what? I ended up losing a lot of money. Fortunately, you can easily avoid my mistakes by doing some research beforehand.

Here are the two main methods I use to find good products to sell:

First way:
Find a product that has gone viral on social media. Once you find a viral product, see if you can find it for sale on www.aliexpress.com. If you're able to find it easily, and the product is getting a lot shares and likes on social media, then chances are you can make some money by selling it on your eCommerce website. In fact, this is the exact method I'm using on my latest ecommerce website I created a month ago.

But I have to warn you; not every product is going to make money! The name of the game is testing and lots of it. By being consistent with your testing, you can start finding winning products that will eventually allow you to scale your income quite easily.

Example of a product that's gone viral on Facebook:

Second way:
If you're not into shipping products from china using AliExpress, a spin on this method is doing print on demand items. You can very easily find viral T-Shirts, hoodies, mugs, etc to find ideas for a well selling design. By tweaking, improving, and making your own version of the design, you can then easily sell your own T-Shirts, hoodies, etc. by using one of the numerous print on demand platforms out there.

I plan to make a much more detailed post covering the product research process in depth so be sure to follow me if you're interested in learning more about this.

Step 2: Build Your eCommerce Site

The next step is to actually build a site that will let you post new products and sell them. This might sound overwhelming at first but believe me, it's much easier than it sounds thanks to eCommerce platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce. These platforms allow you to quickly get an e-commerce site up and running without breaking the bank.

My personal recommendation is to use Shopify as it's built from the ground up for eCommerce, it's relatively cheap, comes with super fast hosting, and it's got a lot of support and apps already. You can learn more and get started here: https://www.shopify.com/

You don't need to be very computer literate for this step. Even my nearly 60 year old father was able to create his eCommerce shop within days. If all this sounds a little overwhelming still, feel free to message me. I also provide a service of building eCommerce sites for clients for a relatively low fee.

Step 3: Driving Traffic And Getting Sales

This is easily the hardest part of this entire process. You can have the nicest looking site in the world with the hottest, most viral product ever. But it won't matter at all unless you're able to drive targeted traffic to your site.

I'm going to outline the method I personally use below. Please keep in mind that this is just an overview, and a more detailed post covering the exact method is coming in the future. Be sure to follow me if you're interested in learning more.

My #1 recommendation for driving targeted traffic is through Facebook ads. If you followed step 1 and did product research, you should already have at least a little bit of an idea of who you're trying to sell your products to.

You know how people on Facebook "Like" various pages and interests? Well all that information that people have been giving Facebook for years makes it extremely easy for us to target a specific group of people through advertising. So for example, say I was selling a chewy toy for dogs on my website. It makes sense that I would want to show my advertisements to people that like interests, pages, and behaviors related to dogs.

My first step would be to see what interests, pages, and behaviors are available for targeting in Facebook's ad platform. For example, some interests we can target on Facebook ads are things like:

1. I Love Dogs
2. Dog Lovers
3. Pet Lovers
4. People That Purchase Dog Food
5. People That Purchase Dog Related Items

Example of targetable interests in Facebook's ad platform:

These are all interests, behaviors, and pages that could potentially work very well for advertising my item to.

Once you come up with the interests that you want to target, you're ready to create your ad. Your ad should either use an eye catching image or even better, a video showcasing the product you're selling.

You also want some nice ad copy that tells the reader the benefits of the product and calls on them to buy the product now.

Once you've come up with the targeting for your ad audience and the actual advertising image/video and text, you're ready to start running your ads.

I recommend a daily budget of about $5 USD a day for each ad you're running. That may sound like it can add up quick but all you need is one winning product to start seeing profit. Once you see a winner, it's very easy to scale up to $100 - $1000 income days.

The final most important step here is TESTING!!! You can't just run 2 ads and hope to become rich within 5 minutes. I've run so many different ads to so many different products in my life I honestly couldn't hope to remember them all. The key here is persistence. Remember, all it takes is one winner and it can completely change your income overnight.

Conclusion

Phew! I know that's a lot to take in. But believe me, this is truly one of the easiest ways I've ever encountered to make money outside of a day job.

This post was more of an outline of the entire method. Future posts will cover each of these steps in much more detail. So be sure to follow me if you're interested in learning more about this!

Thanks for reading!