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Teespring Review: Make Money Designing Custom T-Shirts

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Teespring Review - Make Money Designing Custom T-Shirts

Teespring Review: Make Money Designing Custom T-Shirts

This is the second time I ever tried Teespring, but my first time writing a Teespring Review. As a designer, this is a fun way to earn extra money by designing fun tee shirts and other gear. You essentially design funny/clever t-shirts and then market them to be sold.

What is Teespring?

Teespring is a legit website where you can design custom tee shirts and other apparel such as hoodies, socks, mugs etc. using their proprietary online design software. Once you create a custom design, you can share a link with your friends who can buy your t-shirt design directly on Teespring. The money, printing and shipping are all handled by Teespring.

The difference between Teespring and other custom t-shirt design places is the shirts aren’t actually made until you have a minimum order.

This way you don’t have to buy a bunch of shirts you’re not sure will sell or not. Thus filling your garage full of crappy shirts. All you do is create the design and TeeSpring handles all the orders, payments and shipping once a minimum amount of shirts are sold. Then you as the designer get a small profit off the orders sold.

Is Teespring Legit?

Absolutely! We’ve personally used Teespring and found numerous positive reviews about the company. They’ve been around for years and built up a solid reputation. Even Forbes mentioned them as a great way to make money by selling well-made t-shirts and other gear.

Yes, Teespring Pays You!

The biggest bonus to Teespring (and why I wanted to write this Teespring Review) is that once you get the minimum amount of orders. You as the designer get a cut of the profits for creating the design!

Teespring handles all the heavy work (collecting money, printing, shipping), but since you are the one that created the shirt design and marketed it, you get a portion of the money made. Of course, Teespring takes their share, but you get yours too.

It’s a unique sidehuslte if you’re a creative type that can create some clever t-shirts and market them.

How Does Teespring work?

Head over to Teespring and hit “Start Designing”. It’ll ask you to create an account with them. It’s just the basic name, email, and password. They don’t ask for any payment information when your first setting up an account or first creating a shirt design.

You’ll then be asked to “Pick Your Canvas”. They have a number of options since they originally started. You can create unique/clever designs on a wide variety of items including:

  • Canvas Prints
  • Beach Towels
  • Phone Cases
  • Wall Tapestry
  • Posters (12″x24″) & (24″x36″)
  • Flags
  • Indoor Pillows
  • Socks
  • Apparel
  • Stickers
  • Tote Bags
  • Mugs

I am going to focus on t-shirts for this Teespring Review since that’s what they’re famous for.

I select apparel. This takes you immediately to their online design software where you can create a completely unique t-shirt design from scratch.

It’s a bit intimidating, I just created a basic word print design (I find inspiration from Amazon’s funny shirts). I obviously didn’t get too crazy, but you have a lot of options for what you can do including uploading your own custom designs.

I was impressed with the variety in Teespring’s online software program, it really was impressive. It’ll work great for beginners if you don’t have your own design software like Adobe Illustrator. This is what their online software looks like.

Once you finish a design, Teespring will let you set the price for how much you want to sell the shirt for. You could set the price for $50 per shirt if you’d like. It may be more than people want to buy a shirt for, but it’s up to you.

You’ll start off with Teespring’s recommended sell price.

In addition to what you set the price at, Teespring will show you how much of a profit you’ll make based on the number of shirts and the selling price. So simple economics, the higher price you set and the more you sell, the more profit you’ll make. In the Teespring Review example below, if 7 shirts are purchased, I would make $70 or $7 per shirt if I sell for $23.99.

After you set the price, you will create a profile on your new shirt design. This is what people will see when they view your shirt on Teespring.

  • T-Shirt Title
  • Profile
  • Custom URL

Take some time with this. Giving your campaign/shirt description a clever description can really help sell shirts to people on the fence.

If you want to check out the t-shirt design I did for this Teespring Review, go to Teespring.com/i-am-a-blogger-teeshirt where you’ll have the option to buy. It’s very basic. I like to set the bar low for you to create your own amazing shirt design!

That’s it. Now anyone can see your shirt and buy it. The biggest thing from here is sending the link to your friends, post on your blog or share with your social network to buy the new shirt.

A popular strategy I’ve seen, create a clever t-shirt idea for a specific niche of people. For instance, the famous “Don’t worry I’m a ______” tagline. To give an example, I’ve seen “Don’t worry I’m a Nurse” and people created specific facebook ads for people who listed their occupation as “Nurse”. I believe it’s been really successful.

Teespring Review Pros

  • You only have to create the design, Teespring will handle the creating/paying/shipping info on their end. This is a huge space saver from the days you had to store tee shirt inventory in your garage.
  • You get paid per t-shirt. You can set your own price for your designs and that profit goes to you. So if you LOVE creating tee shirts, you can make quite a bit of money.
  • Their design software is pretty easy to use.
  • If you’re organizing shirts for a large group, you can create the shirts on Teespring and have everyone pay on their own via the link you send. Way less chaos.

 

 

Teespring Review Cons

  • Even if you create the best t-shirt design ever, you have to market it completely on your own. Meaning you have to email it to all your friends or create Facebook ads to drive traffic to Teespring’s website for people to buy your t-shirt. You’re basically selling Teespring’s t-shirts for them.
  • You’re limited on the amount of space you can design on the front/back of the shirt. This makes it easier for Teespring to print onto shirts, but prohibits super creative designs that take up the entire shirt. So no sleeve designs or anything like that.

Teespring Review Conclusions

I like the idea of Teespring. It allows you to quickly create a custom t-shirt design to share with all your friends for them to buy. However, it doesn’t seem to be set up for a permanent side hustle. There are a lot of better/easier ways to earn more money.

Once you create the t-shirt design, it takes A LOT of effort and marketing dollars to get those shirts to sell. So unless you have a particular network of people who are willing to buy a specific t-shirt, I wouldn’t recommend this as a permanent side hustle.

Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment with Ads to Increase Your Revenue

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This is a guest post by Arina Thoggy, a blogger with BlurbpointMedia, a deals and discount provider. She is passionate about technology, social media and digital marketing. In addition, Arina also supports non-profit agencies that provide health-care solutions to handicapped and disabled people.

When it comes to online businesses and smart marketing strategies, there has been a rise of many newer and smarter technologies over these years. Among them, if I consider something of a modern genre, then it would be ad mediation. Well, isn’t it helping the business-owners abundantly to earn maximum profit from their websites? It is such a unique and interesting process which act as an intermediate between the businessmen and the networks that they use to serve ad space.

Now, my main aim behind coming up with this article is to enlighten you about how you, as a website owner, can increase your revenue while advertising with Ad networks.
And, here’s what I would like to convey to you.

Just have a look!

The first thing that comes into this scenario is:

Where should you place the ads on your website?

Fortunately, there are a few options available for you:

  • You can place the ads just above the folds as such ads usually perform better because it doesn’t need the audience to scroll the page to get a glimpse of them.
  • Next, identify the layouts of your home page and internal pages. If you see that they are different then you can opt for placing the ads in the bottom half of internal pages which are richer in contents and people love to scroll down these pages to read the content up to the end.
  • Gather the idea from the Ad networks that which kind of contents are trending currently. It might be the videos or other lively forums, and sometimes the text contents. So, whatever might be the scenario, make sure that you are placing your ads in the proximity of such buzzing contents of your blog or website.

Determine the right ad sizes

Just determine the right kind of layout for your website and then try the best sizes and ad combinations depending on the same. Moreover, it would be excellent if you experiment with different standard sizes for banners and the specific rich media formats because if you do so then advertisers will be able to get an access to your business and even ad networks could effectively work with your website.

Go for a variety of pricing models

When it comes to various publishers then most of them like to work on a CPM basis. You might even sometimes want to test the performance of some specific campaigns on the basis of a CPC or CPA model for such campaigns which can directly target your website’s visitors. With the help of an Ad network, you will get the leniency to work with any of your desired pricing models among the aforementioned ones in an effective way.

Check out the Income Reports on Wallet Squirrel to see how much Ad Revenue Andrew has earned over the last couple years.

Choose to work with the perfect ad network

You might be familiar with working on the basis of Google Adsense (Wallet Squirrel uses this) but remember that this Ad network is entirely based on contextual advertising. So, if you think that your website is not text-heavy then there is no point of using this ad network as it will be completely irrelevant and finally end up not increasing your revenue.

In such a scenario, if you want to opt for the best one then the display ad network will be an excellent alternative. So, it is the best option for you if you don’t want to entirely rely on the conventional ad networks and rather choose the smart formats which could let you earn huge profit.

Read ahead!

  • A perfect ad network for you will target the exact advertisers who can display the most relevant ads to your visitors and thus the tendency of your visitors to perform better will increase.
  • If you choose the right ad network for your business then it will provide you a 100% fulfillment of advertising spots.
  • The most valuable reports from ad networks can really help you to understand how your business is going on. May it be an idea about the type of advertisers that do wonders for your site, the ad sizes on your pages that you can either keep or exclude depending upon your performance, or how does the revenues of your site vary in different languages and regions, you’ll get to know everything from such reports.

Final Thoughts

So, don’t wait anymore! Just act smart, make the best use of ad networks, experiment with different kind of strategies, measure results, and finally analyze the same to skyrocket your future business revenues.

How Much Do Uber Drivers Make? Here’s What Drivers Say

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If you're considering driving for Uber, it's one of the easiest ways to make money. We've considered it here on Wallet Squirrel, but first we wanted to ask around how much do Uber drivers make? As you'll see below, as an Uber driver you can work whenever you feel and make money per ride. However as an Uber driver, you are a freelancer in the eyes of the company and all costs of gas, insurance, accidents, wear & tear and taxes are your burden to pay. So in our examples, we note how much these Uber drivers make and include whether that's before or after expenses. #MakeExtraMoney #Uber #RideShare #Driving If you’re considering driving for Uber, it’s one of the easiest ways to make money. We’ve considered it here on Wallet Squirrel, but first we wanted to ask around how much do Uber drivers make?

As you’ll see below, as an Uber driver you can work whenever you feel and make money per ride. However, you are a freelancer in the eyes of the company and all costs of gas, insurance, accidents, wear & tear and taxes are your burden to pay. So in our examples, we note how much these Uber drivers make and include whether that’s before or after expenses.

Examples of How Much Do Uber Drivers Make

Mr. Money Mustache – $7 per Hour (after gas, insurance & waiting around)

Mr. Money Mustache did a great Uber driver experiment and shared his results after driving people around Boulder, Colorado for a while. He stressed the importance of driving costs and importantly your time. He was surprised with how much waiting around there was waiting for pick up requests, he noted how waiting around doing nothing affected his profit per hour. This profit per hour would be a lot lower if he didn’t receive tips, that is where most of this money came from, not the driving. You should consider this when trying Uber.

RideShareGuy – $15.68 per hour (before gas, expenses, etc.)

Harry who hosts the RideShareGuy, a blog centered around the ride-sharing economy, has been a big advocate of ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft hence the blog “RideShareGuy”. In 2017 he did a survey of 1,150 Uber/Lyft drivers on his website. He asked them a range of questions including how much do Uber drivers make and discovered on average, drivers made $15.68 per hour driving with Uber. If your curious, he found Lyft drivers made $17.50 per hour.

MIT Study – $3.37 per hour (after gas, insurance & waiting around)

MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research did a survey of more than 1,100 Uber and Lyft drivers on how much they were paid by the ride-sharing companies as well as their expenses such as insurance and repairs. This study was heavily criticized by Uber arguing the questions weren’t worded fairly causing MIT to take down the study, but here are the main points. Researchers found that a median driver generates $0.59 per mile of driving but it costs them $0.30 per mile to drive.

Stanford Study – $21.07 per hour (before gas, expenses, etc.)

A Stanford study focused on the gender earnings gap in the gig economy estimated an Uber driver’s gross hourly earnings at $21.07 before expenses. They even dug down into Uber’s payment formula and discovered Uber drivers are paid $1.70 as a base fare PLUS $0.20 per minute PLUS $0.95 per mile. While they estimated a driver’s expenses at $0.32 per mile.

For example a 2 mile &, 15 minutes trip could earn the driver $6.60 and cost the driver $0.64 in expenses. A real total of $5.95 for that ride.

SherpaShare Study – $11.33-$12.95 per hour (before gas, expenses, etc.)

SherpaShare did a 2015 study on Uber and Lyft drivers. They created an awesome graphic (below) and made a few assumptions from the data. In the larger cities where there is more frequent Surge time (fewer drivers & more requests = 30% price increase), drivers made significantly more. However, each city has different averages. Depending on where you live may determine if you should take advantage of being an Uber driver or not.

2015 SherpaShare Study on How much do Uber and Lyft Drivers Earn Per Trip

Source: http://www.sherpashareblog.com/2015/07/what-uber-lyft-drivers-earn-per-trip/

Cities with massive demand like New York had an insane $29.34 per hour for Uber drivers while smaller cities like Nashville had $10.14. If you live somewhere like Fargo, North Dakota, you may have a difficult time making any decent money.

Buzzfeed Study – $10.89 (after gas, insurance & waiting around)

Buzzfeed somehow gained a copy of internal Uber calculations to discover how much do Uber drivers make in three major US markets – Denver Detroit & Houston. It was important to them to include expenses into their calculations and found drivers in these markets earned less than an average $13.5 per hour after expenses.

For example, the average driver in Detroit earns $12.70 per hour or $8.77 per hour after expenses. Uber drivers in Houston earned on average $14.18 per hour or $10.75 per hour after expenses. Denver Uber drivers appeared to earn the most of the three major US markets, Denver Uber drivers earned $16.89 per hour or $13.17 per hour after expenses.

Buzzfeed - How Much Do Uber Drivers Make in Detroit

Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/internal-uber-driver-pay-numbers?utm_term=.wcw78n4QN6#.mpxrRl8dkO

Formula for How Much Do Uber Drivers Make Per Ride

If you’re curious how much you could make, use this formula. The Stanford study above shared their formula for how much do Uber drivers make. Based on this formula, Uber really encourages long trips through heavy expected traffic for drivers to make the most money. The Uber Pay Formula is as follows:

Pay Formula for How Much Do Uber Drivers Make

You may notice that this is considerably lower than any taxi fare you’ve ever received. There’s a reason for that, the Uber Pay formula is heavily advantaged for Uber Riders. Meaning Uber is highly cost competitive with taxi drivers so people choose Uber over traditional taxis, giving Uber drivers more driving opportunities at the cost of more money per ride.

Lastly, the biggest variable in the formula for how much do Uber drivers make is TIPS. Tips are not a constant factor in Uber rides so I didn’t include them in the Uber Pay Formula but they’re the single biggest reason some Uber drivers make more money. Next time you’re riding in an Uber, look around and notice the bottles of water and snacks offered by your Uber driver to entice a bigger tip.

If You’re Considering Uber, Make More Money by:

  • Driving isn’t that lucrative, you’ll honestly make more money using your Uber Referral Code and having your friends to sign up for Uber.
  • Receive tips for being nice and unique. Since your Uber fare won’t make you much money. You may receive tips from your passenger after a pleasant trip for having a bottle of water on hand or playing their favorite song.
  • Use an extremely fuel-efficient vehicle. Uber requests you use a car made in the last 10 years (they inspect it), so ideally a 2009 Toyota Prius was suggested by Mr. Money Mustache as the ideal car for lower insurance and high MPG range.
  • TRY to get longer trips in traffic to make the most money based on this formula ($1.70 base fee + $0.20 per minute +$0.95 per mile). Unfortunately Uber doesn’t tell you the destination until you pick up your passengers so you won’t know the distance or traffic.
  • Go out during “Surge” pricing. You’ll see a 30% increase in fees during these times and Uber will show you where Surge pricing is before you accept the ride.

Conclusion To How Much Do Uber Drivers Make

We’ve found Uber drivers make around average $10 per hour after all their expenses and, in most cases, Lyft will make you a bit more. If you put this in context, this is the same average wage for McDonald’s.

If you’re an Uber Driver please leave in the comments below how much you make per hour, we’d love to hear from you!

It may not be one of the most profitable ways to make money, but there’s a certain freedom and enjoyment knowing you’re the boss and working whenever you choose. Would you consider driving for Uber for this freedom?

How I Started An Amazon Affiliate Website To Start Making Money

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How I Started an Amazon Affiliate Website to Start Making Money

Recently I’ve committed to building an epic Amazon Affiliate Website in a new competition we’re calling the Epic Niche Site Battle. A contest over a year to see who can build a better niche website. The competition started January 1st, 2018 and this is the entire outline of how I plan to create an awesome Amazon Affiliate Website under $300.

Step 1 – Find a Niche

What do I want my website to do or sell? Do I want to be an entertainment website where people go to be happy and find cool stuff, or do I want to be an authority website where people visit to learn words of wisdom from someone who knows more than them? Or do I want to create another blog that shares silly stories?

There are a lot of choices here, but I wanted to do an entertainment website. I like being fun and frankly if it’s going to be another website to manage. I NEED this to be fun!

Specifically, I chose to niche down to a fun, witty and entertaining website on Holidays. I like holidays because people spend money (or at least expected to spend money) during these times of the year. So I’m going to create an entertainment website based on the traditional things people buy for the holidays. Cool right!

Cost – $0 to think of cool niche ideas.

Step 2 – Find a Clever Domain Name

This part takes time, give yourself plenty of time, like 3 months to come up with a clever domain name for your website. Usually, you want your website/business name or purpose to be reflected in the domain name. You want this to be memorable, easy to type, shorter is better and capable of building a brand around.

I spent 3 months thinking about a domain name. Yes, the Epic Niche Site Battle started 10 days ago, but I could still think of my website beforehand. To think about my holiday website, I came up with over 237 different domain names, slowly fine-tuning them, and emphasizing keywords that made sense to my brand. Those 237 domain names were just the ones that were available when I researched them on GoDaddy.com, there were hundreds more I tried that were unavailable. I went a little insane finding the right domain name.

This is how I felt…..

Eventually, I find a domain name that I absolutely loved! This is personally important to me because if I don’t like it, I won’t be motivated to work on it every week. If you’re not passionate about something, you WILL quit halfway through when the going gets tough. I don’t plan to quit.

Cost – $12 Domain Name + $12 Domain Privacy
*Always buy domain privacy, otherwise you’ll get calls/emails daily from companies trying to sell your new website different services. It’s like telemarketers on steroids.

Step 3 – Create A Fun Logo

This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I’m a graphic kind of guy and I NEED an awesome logo to rally behind. Honestly, I started to think about how the website logo will look when researching domain names. I wanted to create more than just a name in a silly font, I want to create a whole brand.

Once I had my domain name chosen, I started to research different creative logos on websites like Logopond.com and in Google Search Images. I typed in my keywords and compared what other company logos looked like. I started from there and fine-tuned until I had something that looked different, creative, but familiar.

I had about 5 pages of tiny thumbnail logos sketched out.

I needed and created something that looked professional. I used Adobe Illustrator to create it myself, but you could hire a freelance graphic designer off Upwork.com of Fiverr.com. It just depends how much money you want to spend. I personally hate spending money, so the more I can do myself, the better.

Cost – $0 if you do it yourself, I did.

Step 4 – Claim Your Social Platforms

Right before I create a website, I go through and start claiming all my social media platforms for the new company name. Chances are that if your domain name is unique enough, it should be available. If not, at least a similar enough name should be.

I’m currently going through and claiming a Gmail account for my new company (people trust Gmail), along with a Facebook Page, Pinterest Page, Instagram, and Twitter Profile. I’m doing this now so I at least have all of these claimed in the digital world.

I will use the graphic I created for my logo, as the profile photo for the new social media accounts. =P

You may not need/use all of these in the beginning, but having them for safekeeping is a nice reassurance moving forward.

Cost – $0 for the basic accounts.

Step 5 – Set Up Your Initial Website

I personally use WordPress for all my websites. It’s frankly easy to use, flexible and I like the simplicity. This new website will also be on WordPress. Most websites are.

Setting up a website is easier than you think. I personally use Bluehost (you can use whoever you want) to set up all my websites because they have a 1-click button that sets up a WordPress website for you, if that’s scary, here is a detailed post on how to start a blog written for some friends. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions. We’re happy to help!

Full disclosure, I use Bluehost for all my websites. I’m a big fan. If you want to learn more or use Bluehost, I would LOVE if you used my Bluehost Affiliate Code to check it out. It really means a lot to us!

Cost – $202.32 for 2 years of Bluehost hosting.

*You can absolutely do only 1 year, but there is a better discount the longer you go. I also paid for the Site Backup Pro (in case I accidentally delete something) and SiteLock Security (in case my website gets hacked). Overall $202.32 for two years is pretty awesome! If your website hasn’t made that back in 2 years, we should chat.

Step 6 – Find The Right WordPress Theme

So I went to the same place I buy all my WordPress themes (Themeforest) and searched their hundreds of demo WordPress Themes to find the right one that made sense for my Amazon Affiliate Website. This is the style and look your website will have. I needed a clean looking blog (it’s great for SEO) and I needed a warm looking homepage. I found something flexible and looked professional after a couple hours searching.

I’m a big fan of websites that look professional. If your website looks like it was made by a 5th grader, it will be instantly judged and people will feel uncomfortable. Take the time to give your website a nice look upfront and it will pay dividends for the success of your website. WordPress themes are a great way to give your Amazon Affiliate Website a professional look for a cheap price tag.

All you do with your WordPress Theme is hit “Upload Theme” once you create your WordPress website. It’ll then give you the look and feel of what you saw in the demo theme from Themeforest.

Cost – $60 for a WordPress theme from Themeforest.

Step 7 – Add these WordPress Plugins to Improve your site

There is an infinite number of plugins you can add to your site, but the more you do, the slower your site can run and Google hates slow sites, read Adam’s experience here with decreasing website load times. Here are 6 free plug-ins I add to all of my WordPress Amazon Affiliate Websites to keep them fast, looking good and efficient.

  • Akismet Anti-Spam – Frankly getting spammy comments suck and make your website look crappy. Akismet is one of the most popular plugins to protect your Amazon Affiliate Website from spam. Or turn comments completely off to eliminate spam if you don’t want a comment section.
  • Compress JPEG & PNG Images – This is a plugin we use to automatically reduce the file size of our images. Having smaller file sizes keep your website load times quicker since the web pages don’t have as much to download.
  • Google XML Sitemaps – This helps Google bookmark your website. The plugin does everything automatically. It basically creates a roadmap for Google’s crawl bots to quickly index your site.
  • WP Fastest Cache – Cache plugins help your website load faster and this is one of the best. We’ve tried a couple different cache plugins, but keep coming back to this one.
  • Yoast SEO – One of the most popular free SEO plugins. This will tell you how well your page/post is optimized to be search friendly. I live by this plugin!

Cost – $0 for all of these plugins.

Step 8 – Create Your Initial Pages

I want my website to be easily manageable, so I’m going to initially set up my Amazon Affiliate Website to be pretty simple. I’m having essentially 3 pages.

These pages are:

  • Homepage where I’ll sell products
  • Blog to write engaging SEO posts
  • About Me/Contact Page

I thought about separating the About Me and Contact Page, but they essentially are the same thing, I’ll have a contact form on my About Me page. In my head, the website is more manageable with 3 different pages (plus future blog posts).

I’m currently setting up these 3 pages and loading the homepage with products to sell for the upcoming holiday. Once these 3 pages are done, you’re website is almost done.

Cost – $0, just takes time.

Step 9 – Write AWESOME Blog Posts (4-5 for Launch)

In most cases, your website will be found by SEO or Search Engine Optimization blog posts. You’ll likely market your website in other ways, but most times blogs are found on Google, Bing or Yahoo. Here is Wallet Squirrel’s SEO strategy.

This is where the hard work comes! Every one of my blog posts must follow the 5 rules I discovered during my research on 50 Amazon Affiliate Website Examples Making Money in a Niche. There were the 5 important variables when investigating blog posts on these successful Amazon Affiliate Websites.

  1. Use Specific Keywords – The more specific the keyword is, the better it’ll likely rank in Google
  2. Review Posts are Popular – Before someone buys something, they want to know what others think of it. So if I have an opportunity to review something for a post, people may use my review post to click through to the product they’re thinking of buying.
  3. Content Is King – Most successful blog posts that rank well have between 1,500 – 3,000 words.
  4. Mix High & Low Priced Items – Don’t have a blog post with affiliate links to all high priced or all low priced products. Keep a diversity of price ranges and don’t overwhelm the reader with products to buy. Provide honest reviews and recommendations.
  5. Get People to the Amazon Store as Quick as Possible – The goal of an Amazon Affiliate Website is to get people to the store as quick as possible. Amazon does a great job at convincing people to buy their stuff, let them do the work and collect your affiliate commissions.

Lastly, always do your research and NEVER suggest/promote products you dislike or don’t agree with just for money. People will ALWAYS see through that.

I’m trying to create 4-5 awesome blog posts for my initial launch. Don’t worry about publishing these all at once. This just gives Google more time to crawl these pages and bookmark them for future Google Searches. After that, I’ll create a new post weekly or bi-weekly. Honestly whatever feels better with my time constraints. Either way, quality blog posts are better with Amazon Affiliate Websites.

Cost – $0 unless you pay someone else to write articles for you, but I write all my articles myself.

Step 10 – Launch Your Amazon Affiliate Website & Market It

After I finish my 3 website pages and 4-5 blog posts. I’ll be ready to launch my website!

This involves more than making it visible to the world. You need to get people to the website. Here are some ideas on how to promote your website and increase web traffic.

  • If you have an Email List, email them on the new website!
  • Create a social media campaign on your social media accounts about the launch. Add lots of hashtags if you don’t have a large following. Also, share with your friends and family, they’ll be likely to share because most people want you to succeed.
  • Post to Facebook Groups asking them for feedback on your new website. Maybe they’ll have ideas on how to make it better. You may even get a few new followers.
  • Submit the URL of your new Amazon Affiliate Website to different News Aggregators like StumbleUpon.com.
  • Try syndicating some of your blog posts to syndication sites, especially if they’re good posts. This may help you tap new audiences.
  • Create an infographic and share with different graphics platforms like Slideshare, Flikr, and other bloggers.
  • Reach out to Bloggers and/or News outlets if your new website or blog posts match their content.
  • Reach out to companies you mention in your blog posts.

Cost – $0 You don’t have to spend anything on marketing the website if you don’t want to. Find free ways to promote your website before resorting to paying for a press release or PR companies. Don’t ever try to pay for links to your website, Google may penalize you for this.

Step 11 – Repeat Writing New Blog Posts and Marketing

Remember the old shampoo commercials of rinse and repeat? That’s how Amazon Affiliate Websites work. Your goal is to attract as many visitors as possible, help them, and send them onward to Amazon to buy a product.

The more you write new content and market your website, the more visitors you’ll bring in and the more products you’ll sell.

Total Cost to Start an Amazon Affiliate Website – $274.32

Conclusion

I just laid out my entire Amazon Affiliate Website template for you to copy. If you follow this outline and track my progress, you’ll find some success for your new website.

I’m currently in Step 8, setting up my Amazon Affiliate Website now. It’s going really well! I should be at Step 9 or Step 10 by the end of January, having only spent $274.32 total. That should easily be made back in the next couple of months, I’ll continue to track and post my progress!

Leave me a comment on how your website is doing and I’ll continue to leave updates on how the Epic Niche Site Battle is going!

We’re Starting the Epic Niche Site Battle!

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“Let’s do this!” is how I responded to a LinkedIn message from Barnabas of TheDadWallet.com & SerialBoss.com.

Back in May, Barnabas reached out to Wallet Squirrel following up on all our talk about building a niche website. He’s been wanting to do the same thing and he suggested we do something like Pat Flynn’s Niche Site Duel and compete to see who could make the better niche website.

F*#k, I freaked out. This is the first time I’m going against a real blogger and sharing every step of the process. What if my ideas suck?

Although terrified, I REALLY want to do this. I want to build something awesome with everything I’ve learned the last year. So I accepted the challenge of what we’re calling the “Epic Niche Site Battle”!

Niche Site, What Is That?

In an older post, I gave 50 Examples of Amazon Affiliate Websites. Essentially a niche site is a website that caters to a particular narrow group of people with a common interest. For example, people who own large fish tanks could be a particular niche. You could totally have a website about that!

You can also monetize these niche websites and have them make money for you. I’ll admit, that’s my motivation to start this. I’m hoping to build a passive income with this new website and use that money to buy more dividend stocks.

How the Competition Works

Barnabas and I sat down (via Google Hangouts) to lay out how the competition works.

Duration: We are giving each other 1 year to build & grow our niche sites. Starting on January 1st of 2018 we’re starting our site and giving comprehensive reports quarterly on both our blogs (walletsquirrel.com & serialboss.com). We each may add additional posts, but we have to share all of our stats every three months. Whoever has better key metrics at the end of the year wins.

What We’re Competing On: We’re both building niche sites to help us grow our incomes, so making money is key but not the only factor. We are tracking 4 key metrics we both felt were vital to the success of a niche website.

Updates: We’ll share our updates quarterly with January 4th as our first post. Damn that’s soon!

  • First Update – March 29th
  • Second Update – July 5th
  • Third Update – September 7th
  • Last Update – December 6th

Rules: The only rules we came up with were:

  1. No one else can help us. I can’t have my buddy Adam helping me or hire any Virtual Assistants. The same goes for him. It’s just him and I each bootstrapping a website from scratch.
  2. Paid Advertising must be deducted from profits. I don’t plan on using a lot of Paid Advertising since I’m poor and don’t want to spend money, but I may try $50 in Facebook Ads to see/track if it helps.

That’s it. All else is fair to build the ultimate niche website!

Full Transparency: We’re sharing EVERYTHING (good times and bad) except the domain names. We want to be as transparent as possible since we want to help others build niche websites and show how it’s done, but we’ve both heard horror stories of people using similar domain names and stealing traffic from new sites after the keyword research has been done.

I may share my domain name at the end of the competition, once established, but it’s up to Barnabas to share his or not. For now, we’ll call our respective sites the Wallet Squirrel Niche Site and the Serial Boss Niche Site.

My Previous Niche Site Experience

So far my previous niche site experience leaves room for improvement. In the past I’ve built 4 unsuccessful niche websites, but each one got better.

That’s right, I’ve built 4 awful niche sites in the past. It’s time to build something awesome!

Starting when I was 24 I built my first niche site reviewing online universities, it was called Top5OnlineUniversities.com. It was awful because I wrote generic school descriptions and only made money with AdSense. I hated myself for building something so lame. So I quit after a year.

At age 25 I built a website called LanguageMindMaps.com (it’s not up anymore). I wanted to use my graphic design talent to create mind maps of typical conversations in different languages to help people visually learn new languages. It was better looking but I had no way to really monetize it and knew nothing about marketing. It failed because no one was searching for the term language mind maps.

At age 26 I built a deodorant niche website that started doing well for the keyword search, but it lacked ways to monetize the website. Plus I wasn’t exactly thrilled to tell people I had a website on deodorant. So since I wasn’t excited to market it, I lost interest and it died.

At age 27 Adam (of Wallet Squirrel) and I built a Halloween Costume website. This was something that looked cool, had great keyword research and did really well. However, it was just a seasonal website so the rest of the year I lacked interest in maintaining it since it only turned a profit once a year. That lack of motivation destroyed me and I game up. By the time Halloween came around again we didn’t have the keyword strength and lost tons of traffic. It’s slowly been dying.

Now! I plan to build something that’s graphically cool, that I’m excited to share with other people, has awesome keyword strength with a topic I can write about throughout the year. These are the guiding factors for my new niche site.

Strategies

It was pretty funny when we shared our initial strategies, they were very different approaches. So we’ll get to see two common strategies in action.

I wanted to go with a traditional affiliate site where the purpose is to rank high for a particular keyword then get my audience from my niche website to a product as fast as possible. When people use my tracking codes, I get a portion of the sale if they buy anything. So my strategy is to gain traffic through keyword targeting and quickly get them to a product site quickly. The idea being the more people I get to a product site, the more products that will sell.

Barnabas with SerialBoss has a bit different strategy. He plans to make most his income from Google AdSense rather than affiliate sales. So he is focusing on ranking highly in Google in a particular niche and gain revenue through visual AdSense ads.

Overall: I anticipate I may make more money first, but he is playing the long game by trying to become the premier expert in a particular niche field. If he can rank highly for one particular keyword, it’s easier to start expanding into other similar keywords and significantly grow his traffic.

So It Begins

I’m currently in the pregame phase. I’ve built a few niche sites in the past, but none have been overly successful. I really have no idea what I’m going to do. I know I’m going to build an affiliate niche website and it’s going to follow rules I stated above from past lessons learned, but I don’t know exactly what it will be yet. I don’t even have a domain name in mind.

So I’m currently rapidly typing domain names into GoDaddy to see what’s available and sounds good. Rapidly strategizing in my head because on January 1st we’re going fulling speed!

Does anyone want to join?

The main Epic Niche Site Battle is between Barnabas and I, but anyone is welcome to join in. Does anyone want to join us building a completely new niche website in January? Sign up for my email newsletter below to follow the action!

Income Report – October, 2017

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Wahoo, I get both Halloween this week as well as writing my October Income Report. This income report shows a full transparency of everything I made this month from all the side-hustles on Wallet Squirrel. Everything we make, we invest to show that you can create an entire retirement portfolio from just extra ways to earn money.

What We Accomplished in October

Andrew wrote some sweet articles

  • The Perfect Blog Post Image Size to help you share your blog post on social media. We never had a consistent image size for Wallet Squirrel posts, so this article helped create some consistency for a future post. If you see our homepage or social media posts, you’ll see it turned out well.
  • After hearing about a new stock on Motley Fool, I did some research and checked out Brookfield Infrastructure Partners (BIP) to see what they did and analyze their stock for future consideration in my portfolio.
  • Does anyone else get anxious about tipping and judging people based on how well they serve you? I wrote “I Hate Tipping, It Ruins my Budget and Anxiety” because I totally do. I now pay wait staff 20% regardless of the service so I don’t feel like a dick for under-tipping or over tip and break my wallet.

Adam also wrote some great articles

  • He checked out our favorite income bloggers on the web and created the September Income Report Round Up of how much our favorite bloggers made in the month of September
  • Adam frustrated with bad spending habits wrote: “9 Bad Spending Habits that are Killing Your Budget“. I’ll admit I used to be victim to some of these, what about you?
  • Since Amazon is looking for new cities around the US to host their new Amazon headquarters, Adam took a look at Denver as a possibility and how that would affect our cities economy and housing market.

Any favorites?

Income Report – October 2017

We had such a great month last month, so I knew we couldn’t keep it up, but I was still surprised we did so well. We brought in $171.10 in October which is WAY better than our old average of $60 and it wasn’t from any one source. It was a combination of all our different revenue streams that continue to grow. That’s REALLY exciting.

These are all great income sources, but nothing really sticks out as the major money maker. Since all of these are balancing out, maybe it’s time for me to start looking into creating another affiliate marketing website and track its progress on Wallet Squirrel. What do you think?

Here are the sources of income for October.

$50 – Paid link, someone paid me to add a link to an old article. It worked well.
$45.00 – Bluehost Affiliate Income
$21.30 – Robinhood App Affiliate Program
$16.90 – Seeking Alpha Articles
$11.48 – Cashback Credit Card
$10.00 – Dividends
$4.45 – Stock Photography
$4.27 – Wallet Squirrel AdSense
$3.75 – Lending Club
$1.91 – Wallet Squirrel Affiliate Marketing
$1.39 – Interest Checking/Savings Account

Where does that $171.10 go?

A majority of that $171.10 goes toward building a $10 million dollar retirement portfolio of dividend stocks. A few of those dollars are spent to pay for our website services and website goals. Since most of it goes to my retirement portfolio though, I used it to buy more stocks, specifically more positions in Cisco Systems (CSCO) and Realty Income (O).  Wahoo!

Let’s Talk Goals

Did I meet last month’s (October) goals? – Kinda

I was supposed to set up a Pinterest Process, but I think I just created a process on CoSchedule for my Pinterest Boards along with joined a few other boards on Pinterest and Facebook Pinterest Groups. Yes that’s apparently a thing and they are SUPER friendly, try it!

November Goals

It’s a secret, I will share later this month!!!! =)

Get a free share of stock from Robinhood for New Signups & Referrals

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Robinhood App now offers a free share of stock for New Signups & Referrals

Robinhood App the free stock trading app that I’ve used for my portfolio and reviewed last year has a new promotion making some unique headlines. Now for every person you get to sign up with the broker Robinhood, both you and the person who signed up, get a free share of stock.

What Stocks Do You Get?

It appears to be a randomized assortment of stocks from the messages posted on social media. Robinhood states that the stocks range in value from $3 – $150, so you could technically get a share of Apple (AAPL) randomly if you sign up now, or you help a friend signup.

What Are Your Chances of Getting $175?

Depends, how lucky are you? Like REALLY lucky. You have a 1% chance of getting a stock valued at $175. Reading the fine print on their website you’re most likely to get a $2.50-$10 stock.

Here are your chances for a free share of stock when you sign up.

  • 98% of getting a stock valued at $0.50-$10
  • 1% of getting a stock valued at $10-$50
  • 1% of getting a stock valued at $50-$200

Thanks to Social Media, we have an idea what it looks like.

So get all your friends to sign up?

For everyone you get to sign up, both you and your new sign up friend get a free share of stock. All you need to do is use the referral code that Robinhood gives you.

If you’ve been with Robinhood for a while, this is the same referral code you’ve always had. Now there are just perks for you to refer a friend to Robinhood.

Here click on my referral code to see what it looks like. You don’t have to sign up.

Robinhood Referral

However, if you’re someone like Kim Kardashian who can get ONE MILLION people to sign up, you won’t get $1M free shares of stock. You’ll be capped at $500 worth of stocks no matter how many people you refer. Lame I know.

Is this promotion available to anyone with Robinhood?

It started off a few months ago. I was NOT one of the early testers for this. However earlier this week I saw on my Robinhood App that I’m NOW able to this. I’m not sure what changed. If everyone is able to do this now or what (I’m not special). They must have just opened this up to a much wider pool of users.

If you’re curious if this works with your Robinhood referral code. Go to your app and if you can’t find “Free Stocks” in your sub menu. You’re not in the program yet. Maybe send the Robinhood App people a tweet (@RobinhoodApp) and say “Hey, can I join this super cool referral club like @WalletSquirrel”. I’ll retweet for you.

 

Should you feel comfortable referring friends to Robinhood?

If it helps, I refer all my friends to start investing with Robinhood. It’s a great broker to start off with (one I personally use) because there are $0 fees to start buying stocks and all of their securities customers are insured up to $500,000 by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC).

Also keep in mind that Robinhood recently raised $110M in Series C round of fundraising, which they’re valued at $1.3 Billion. Some of the investors working with Robinhood are Google Ventures.

These guys are growing and they have the support of some major players in the game.

This promotion makes Robinhood worth considering

If you’ve ever considered the stock market, you should do some research on Robinhood because not only are you going to get free trades while using their app, you’ll start off with a free share of stock that could be Apple.

This isn’t on our list of ways to make money, but maybe it should be.

How to Sell Stuff on Ebay – Tips and Tricks to Selling on Ebay

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How to Sell Stuff on Ebay – Tips and Tricks to Selling on Ebay

Over the last couple of months I have been trying to get rid of items the pose as distractions from my goals. You might have read about it in my Self Improvement – Get Rid of Your Distractions Right Now series. Here I talk about selling items that distract me from my ultimate goals. These items include an extra TV my wife and I do not need, a Xbox One, couple extra laptops, some games, and my old Nikon camera. As you might recall in my latest article on getting rid of distractions I had sold only one item for $100. Well, over the last couple of weeks I have been able to sell a two more items to warrant an article to be written on how to sell stuff on Ebay. Overall, I have made just over $500 from these items which will go directly to help pay our car loan off.

Let’s Get Started

Let’s get the basics out of the way so we can learn how to sell stuff on Ebay. To get started you will want to make sure you have an Ebay account. If you do not, sign up for a new account. If you do, head over there now to sign in.

You will also want to hunt around your home to find some items to sell on Ebay. This can be anything from a football to a fancy golf club set. I recommend only selling items on Ebay that will be easy to ship. For example, I will not be selling that extra 42 inch TV on Ebay. That would be too difficult to package and get to the buyer in one piece. Unless I saved the original box, but who does that? Instead I will sell the TV locally on Craigslist. For any help on selling your stuff on Craigslist check out Andrew’s How to Sell Something on Craigslist and Make Money article.

Price Comparison

Before I decide to post I like to explore Ebay, searching for similar items to see what they are selling for. As you are posting, Ebay will help out with pricing but I like to do the beforehand research for my data points. The more you know about your competition the better you can price or add incentives to make the sale happen.

I search for similiar keywords for what I am selling. Not only do I try to compare apples to apples. I also try to compare similar products that are different such as brand new, older/newer models, and so on. I usually make some mental notes on what the trends are but write down some notes if it helps you. During this search I am looking for several different items.

  1. What is the trending price?
  2. What are people offering for shipping?
  3. Where is there a gap for me to make my item more marketable?

When I am selling something on Ebay, I am not looking to make the most money by squeezing every dollar out of the buyer. I am looking to selling my item quick and get some extra money. This might cost me $10 to $20 on either the products cost or in shipping but it is worth it to me to sell quicker.

Taking Photos

I am pretty picky with this tip on how to sell stuff on Ebay, but you know I love taking photos. Taking good photos of your product is crucial to know “how to sell stuff on Ebay”. Photos of the items you’re selling helps the buyer gain trust in you. If they do not trust you, they will not buy from you.

Here is what I do. Grab the item I am selling and put it in a well lit room, I want the buyer to be able to see everything about the product. I hate the Ebay images taken of a black item in a dark room. I cannot inspect any details to see if it has any dents or scratches. Okay, rant over.

When putting my item in the bright room I do not just place it anywhere. I put it on a large, flat area that is clean and clutter free. Potential buyers do not need to be focusing on my dirty underwear in the corner of the photo. From here, I grab my phone. That is right, you do not need a big fancy camera to take these photos. Camera phones can work really well. I then snap some shots of every angle of my product. If it has any dents or marks, I make sure to be upfront of those in the photos. This also helps gain more trust from the buyer. If you’re upfront about the dents, they’ll believe you’re upfront with them about everything about the item.

Overall, taking photos is not that tough and they do not have to be super fancy, as you can see in my example below. Worry about composition, lighting, and allowing the photo to inform your potential buyer because a photograph really does speak a million words. This is why you should be thorough with them.

Even though these photos are rough they still tell the story of the condition for the Xbox One.

Even though these photos are rough they still tell the story of the condition for the Xbox One.

Writing Your Description

Not only should you be thorough with your photos but you should also write an excellent description. This allows you to explain the product, what comes with it, and what is wrong with it. Do not skimp on the details. Just like with the photos, the more you share the more the potential buyer will trust you.

Personally, I like to make the descriptions as personal as possible. This makes it sound like the buyer is dealing with a real person rather than someone just trying to make an extra buck off of them. In the description, I like to tell a story about an experience with the product that gives more details about it. With my camera, I was able to share where it has been and provide some images it has captured at those destinations.

Shipping

Shipping is the most annoying part of how to sell stuff on Ebay for me. I really do not like it at all but Ebay has made it a lot easier over the years. You can select whether the buyer pays for the shipping or if you will include it within the selling price. I have done both. If I feel like the product is in a competitive market then I will throw in the shipping to be more appealing to a potential buyer.

Lately, based on my price comparison research, I decided to have the buyer pay for shipping. With Ebay’s interface, it’ll walk me through how to properly price the shipping costs. I usually just go with the recommended pricing which has worked out well for me.

Shipping made easy so you can sell your stuff on Ebay.

Shipping made easy so you can sell your stuff on Ebay.

After the Sale

Here is when I want to communicate promptly with the buyer. This does not have to be much, but a quick thank you and status update on when I will get the item shipped out. I have noticed that I get higher reviews when I communicate with the buyer quickly. Of course, with higher reviews the more trust you gain from other potential buyers.

I also make sure that I ship the item very quickly. Ebay gives us three business days but I try to get it shipped the next day. The buyer will be more satisfied with their experience. You can either go through Ebay to print the shipping label or go to a shipping center yourself. I recommend using Ebay’s service if you have a printer. This will save you money and time by not waiting in line at your local post office.

Now Go Sell Your Stuff on Ebay!

Ebay is the classic eCommerce site for anyone to sell a product. Because it has become so big over the years it can be a little intimidating to post an item on the site. That is why it is best to take these tips to learn how to sell stuff on Ebay. Hopefully, these tips make your experience a bit easier and less intimidating.

For other side hustle ideas check out our list of different Ways to Earn More Money. Andrew and I are always looking for new ways to earn extra income. This list consists of many different side hustles that we have tried ourselves.