Welcome to spring 2022! It’s been a while so I thought I’d catch everyone up on what has happened over the past 4 years since I last posted and let you know what I have planned for the future – for both this blog and my business.
As you can see, I’ve done some spring cleanup here on the blog. I deleted a few posts that were outdated or weren’t very helpful and I did a quick redesign of the site. I still have a few more things I want to add so you’ll be seeing some changes over the next few weeks. I have also turned off commenting. I don’t have time to be monitoring comments for spam and replying to everyone. If you have something important you need to tell me, you can contact me using the form on the Contact page.
Business Update
In 2018 and 2019, my income was steadily increasing. My websites were making around $2500 a month in Amazon Affiliate sales and my Amazon Merch account was selling a few shirts each month even though I was only in tier 25. Business was good.
In early 2020, everything changed. Due to a family emergency in March 2020 (more about this below), I didn’t have time to work on my websites. I stopped writing articles and let the sites sit dormant. Still, I was making good money with passive income. That’s the great thing about passive income. You can take a month or two off and still make money. The problem was that 2 months turned into 2 years. I didn’t publish a single article to my websites in 2020 or 2021. Over the course of 2 years, I went from $2500 a month in affiliate income down to $50 a month. I ended up getting on unemployment just to pay my bills. I still have all 27 of my websites but they get virtually no traffic anymore and I’m seeing far more zero sales days than anything.
Merch by Amazon also crashed in spring of 2020. Amazon halted sales and production of shirts for a time and when they ramped back up, my best selling shirts stopped selling. I had managed to get to tier 100 but I didn’t have time to fill my slots. In 2021, I sold a grand total of 10 shirts but I also only uploaded 10 really bad designs. No bueno.
Future Business Goals
Websites – The main goal for my websites are to get the traffic back up and increase my sales on Amazon Affiliates. I’m going to update all articles on all websites to have at least 1500 words each and I’m going to better optimize them for the keyword they were targeting. I’m also going to try doing more internal linking between the articles to see if that helps in getting them to rank higher in Google. Doing these things should help since a majority of articles published are only around 500 words, have no internal or even external linking besides Amazon, and some articles barely mention the keyword they are targeting.
Merch by Amazon – I have high hopes for MBA. Over the last 2 weeks, I designed around 75 t-shirts and uploaded them to my account. My slots are now full and I’m waiting for the next tier up. I have a lifetime total of 55 sales so I’m hoping that’s enough to get tiered up to 500. I’m going to try some various social media advertising to try to get my sales numbers up. While I wait for the next tier up, I’m going to do some research to find more niches and create more designs so I’ll be ready when I get more slots. My long-term goal for Merch is to get to tier 10K and to get access to advertising. I think advertising would really help my sales increase. I would like to make $2500 or more a month on Merch by the end of the year.
Redbubble – I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned Redbubble on here before but it’s a selling platform similar to Merch by Amazon. It allows users to upload their designs to sell on a variety of products such as t-shirts, stickers, coasters, shower curtains and more. I like Redbubble more than MBA because I can upload as many designs as I want, they have more products to put my designs on, the competition isn’t as steep as MBA and they allow you to tag keywords to your designs so people can find them easier. I only have around 30 designs on Redbubble but I get far more sales than on MBA. My goal for Redbubble is to keep adding designs to my shop and I’m hoping to make a few thousand a month there.
KDP – KDP is a publishing platform that allows you to upload books and sell them on Amazon. I’ve seen a lot of YouTube videos where people have success publishing notebooks, diaries, coloring books and other low content books. I would like to start publishing 10-15 books a month and, hopefully, I will be making a few thousand dollars a month by the end of the year.
Diversify – As you can see, I’m relying a ton on Amazon (affiliates, Merch, KDP) for an income. I would also like to find some other passive income opportunities that have nothing to do with Amazon, such as Redbubble, Etsy or Google Adsense. If I could make $1-2k a month on 3 or more different platforms, then I won’t be in as much trouble financially if one or two of them goes down.
Personal Update
The last 4 years have been very rough. In May 2019, my Grandpa T died and in April 2020, my Grandpa G died. Grandpa G celebrated his 100th birthday in March – the day before the Covid lockdown was announced here. He didn’t die from Covid – just old age – and, luckily, the nursing home allowed family to visit him while he was dying as long as they wore proper PPE. Needless to say but we didn’t have a funeral. Two of my aunts were at his burial and live-streamed it.
The worst thing that happened in the past 4 years happened in March 2020. One morning, I woke up to my dog, Remington, screaming in pain and hiding under the bed. I rushed her to the vet who took one look at her and without even examining her, told me that there was nothing she could do and said that I should put her down. Distraught, I took Remy to a 2nd vet who was shocked at what the first vet told me. After x-rays and a blood test, the vet determined that Remy had a slipped disc in her back and had diabetes. The vet thought that she would need back surgery but suggested that I wait a few weeks to see if the disc would heal on it’s own. It took 3 months but it did heal and Remy was back to her spunky self. In December 2020, she suddenly went blind. I took her to an ophthalmologist who said that she had SARDS (Sudden Acquired Retinal Degeneration Syndrome) and there was no cure. It took about a year but she has gotten used to being blind. She’s still a very happy dog and loves to go for walks, sniff in the yard, do tricks for treats and, when she’s in a good mood, play with her toys.
Future Personal Goals
I’m not going to spend a lot of time going over my personal goals since that’s not really the purpose of this vlog. However, I have a few things I would like to accomplish over the next few months. I’m moving next week. I’m currently living in a duplex owned by my parents. My parents live in one side and I live in the other. I love having my own place. It’s amazing. However, my parents don’t like the lack of a garage and the yard is very small. So, my parents decided last month that they wanted to move. Unfortunately, that means I have to move with them. We found a great house with a basement apartment for me to live in, a large yard, a big garage and a separate storage shed. The apartment needs to be renovated so I’ll be living with my parents for a few months. It will suck not having my own space but I’m sure I will love having the extra help with my dog. Taking care of a blind and diabetic dog is a lot of work. She has separation anxiety and needs lots of walks throughout the day to keep her blood sugar low. Having help with this will free up my time to focus on my business and other personal goals.
My main personal goal for the future is to get healthy. I eat way too much sugar and never exercise. Once we move to the new house, I plan on fixing my poor sleep habits, start eating healthier and start working out daily. I’d also like to lose some weight. I’m hoping this success will translate to success in my business and vice versa.
Another goal is to start dating. I have no idea how to date. I haven’t dated since college and, back then, there was no such thing as online dating. It is all a little intimidating to me plus I hate the idea of someone reading your profile and judging you. Yikes! It sounds scary. However, I really want to have kids and a family of my own so I need to just suck it up and get started no matter how absolutely terrifying it is. The clock is ticking!
Conclusion
I hope that gives you an idea of where things are in my life and where things are going. I would love for you to follow along on my journey to financial independence with passive income. I’m going to try to post an income report monthly and I’ll update you regularly on the various ways I make money. I’ll post tips and tricks on how to be successful on the various platforms as well as go into detail about any mistakes I make along the way. The purpose of this blog is to help others become just as successful with passive income as I’m going to be. Let’s take this journey together!
Until next time,
