{"id":20,"date":"2020-07-15T14:14:27","date_gmt":"2020-07-15T14:14:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/salarydistribution.com\/2020\/07\/15\/my-first-3000-month-with-my-ecommerce-brand\/"},"modified":"2020-07-15T14:14:27","modified_gmt":"2020-07-15T14:14:27","slug":"my-first-3000-month-with-my-ecommerce-brand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/salarydistribution.com\/affiliate-marketing\/2020\/07\/15\/my-first-3000-month-with-my-ecommerce-brand\/","title":{"rendered":"My First $3,000 Month With My Ecommerce Brand"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Can you believe it\u2019s been a YEAR <\/strong>since my last blog update?<\/p>\n

I have no idea how many of you will even read this, so I\u2019ll just start out by saying helloooooooo to anyone reading this post. <\/p>\n

\u2026..all three of you! LOL!!<\/p>\n

Before I jump in, let me touch on some personal things. Many of you have continued to reach out and ask about my dad since I\u2019ve been gone. I appreciate you for that.<\/p>\n

Not only is my dad doing well, but he\u2019s back to traveling the world!<\/p>\n

I took my family to Jamaica earlier this year to celebrate family and good health. A few months later, my parents went to Australia, and my mom joked that my dad walked her all over the continent. ? <\/p>\n

What a blessing considering he couldn\u2019t walk at all for nearly 3 months in 2018. And if you saw him walk, you\u2019d never know he broke both of his ankles when he passed out. There\u2019s no visible limp whatsoever!<\/p>\n

Biz Updates<\/h2>\n

If you had told me 3 years ago that I would be making a good portion of my income from my own digital art, I would have laughed!<\/p>\n

It all started with the Merch By Amazon program.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve earned nearly $150,000 in royalties selling digital art on Amazon alone. That doesn\u2019t include any additional royalties from other sites and niche shops on Spreadshirt, TeePublic, Etsy, RedBubble and more.<\/p>\n

I have a handful of shops on different niches, and a few with some random topics. My niche shops always, always outperform the random ones.<\/p>\n

In Summer, 2018, I realized Merch By Amazon (MBA) was getting more competitive, and I knew that the glory days would be coming to an end sooner than later.<\/p>\n

I wanted to diversify and focus on one niche.<\/p>\n

So instead of doing all this random keyword stuff, I took a keyword\/niche that I had discovered on Amazon the previous year and began building a shop for that audience. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s not a niche I am all that passionate about, but the low demand really got my attention. Plus, I was already selling in this space on Amazon. So I figured I could dominate this market by increasing my volume of designs<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I opened up a free RedBubble shop, and it was super slow going in the first few months. I\u2019m talking about $5 monthly earnings. Yikes!<\/p>\n

Slowly but surely, things began to pick up. I now have sales everyday.<\/p>\n

I chose RedBubble because I didn\u2019t have a following in this niche, and I knew they already had a lot of organic traffic. Plus, they offer tons of products and are constantly adding them.<\/p>\n

In September of this year, I hit my first $3,000 month<\/strong> with this brand alone.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to note that $3,000 in one month is not just coming from shop sales. I began licensing certain designs to people who want to print and sell them on their local shops. <\/p>\n

This was never the plan, but people kept reaching out to me and asking about licensing and custom work. <\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t want other people selling the same designs I was selling, so I decline some requests. However, if someone needs something completely different then I will create the image and charge a licensing fee. The price depends on how they plan to use it.<\/p>\n

I setup a simple landing page on my domain where people can order a license with PayPal. So that added another income stream I wasn\u2019t expecting. <\/p>\n

I was very lucky that I found a niche that was completely underserved from an ecommerce standpoint. These people are elated that someone is actually devoting unique designs and a single shop to their niche. That has been key!<\/p>\n

If you want to learn more about exactly how I chose the keyword and built the ecommerce brand from scratch, you can read the story over on Passive Shirt Profits<\/a>. I wrote it in June, just after my first $2,000 month.<\/p>\n

Why I Abandoned This Blog\u2026 Again.<\/h2>\n

My overall goal was to come back here from time to time and share website marketing lessons that I\u2019ve gained from running Passive Shirt Profits.<\/p>\n

But to be brutally honest, I\u2019m making more money from my own art than I am teaching what I\u2019m doing. So there hasn\u2019t been all that much to share to this audience with regards to marketing.<\/p>\n

After all, most of you signed up because you want to make money from a website, but I\u2019m actually doing a lot WITHOUT<\/strong> a website believe it or not.<\/p>\n

Now, I did setup a site to promote the shop, but it\u2019s really just a landing page. I have a couple of pages and the license fee order form.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s Next?<\/h2>\n

As I discussed in a recent video<\/a>, I\u2019ve spent the better part of the last two years improving my software knowledge (Illustrator, especially.) <\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s time to go back to my roots of website building and marketing \u2014 especially now that I\u2019m focusing on a single brand.<\/p>\n

In 2020, I\u2019m going to put more energy into actually building the site up so it can act as another way to drive traffic to the shop. In other words, it\u2019s time to build some more link juice!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wow\u2026.link juice! I just realized I haven\u2019t used THAT<\/strong> phrase in a long time!<\/p>\n

I was pleased to see that one of my pages is now ranked 4th on Google for its desired keyword on such a small site. Good ole\u2019 Google! I have to say, it does<\/strong> still let you play in the long-tail keyword game.<\/p>\n

Long gone are the days where you could pick a fairly competitive keyword and start ranking a site quickly. I plan on using long tail keywords as the focus of the content to drive additional traffic.<\/p>\n

And when I say long-tail, I mean LOOOOONG <\/strong>tail. The keyword I\u2019m ranking for is about 6 keywords long. Nevertheless, it\u2019s still used according to the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So the majority of the sales are coming from free, organic traffic on RedBubble, but I want that to change. You KNOW<\/strong> how much I hate relying on one source of traffic. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s one of the reasons I haven\u2019t shared the niche. I\u2019m very protective of it, and I\u2019ve had to deal with enough theft of my ideas WITHOUT<\/strong> even using my name on this brand and sharing it. So I don\u2019t even want to think about the copycats that would surface if I revealed it.<\/p>\n

Maybe once I have a steady traffic source that is not relying so much on free traffic, I can start sharing more. That would also help with teaching because people can actually SEE <\/strong>what I\u2019m doing.<\/p>\n

I did branch out and start using Pinterest last year to promote my shop designs. So that has helped me diversify traffic a bit. <\/p>\n

I love Pinterest because it can bring so much traffic for a long period of time. You don\u2019t get that same traction with Instagram or Twitter.<\/p>\n

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