Here it is! My report number 0 - part 2! My first part of report (it was posted here) got too long so I decided to split it into two parts. As most of you already know, this report won't be about my income, as I have just started my online business. You will need to wait until end of March to get any earnings numbers. Anyway I hope it will be interesting for you and I would very appreciate your feedback in the comments. So let's start my report.
In my online business I am going to benefit from two sources of income. Website flipping and stock photography. I will tell you how have I prepared for the start of my one person "company". Let's begin from the stock photography.
Currently I have submitted to iStockphoto and got accepted 420 stock photos. Such amount of photos may generate nice part of passive income. About monthly benefits I will inform you at the end of the month. My total investment to equipment used to make this photos was:
- Digital SLR Camera - Canon EOS400D - about $500
- Flash Canon SPEEDLITE 580EX II - about $400
- Lens Tamron 28-75 F2.8 - about $400
- 2 x Studio lights with softboxes - another $400
- Corel Paint Shop PRO X - $99
Total cost until now (I do not count computer equipment) was $1799,-
I can get per one photo download (each file can be downloaded unlimited number of times) a commission that can vary from about $0.20 to $8.00 + some extended licenses that are from $20 to few hundreds bucks (very rare).
What about website flipping? As a cost I can count my VPS server fee at KnownHost (most reliable host I have ever used) that is $30. I do not buy websites like for now so I do not count this cost. All websites I am going to flip I have build from scratch so it is only about additional $8 for each domain name at NameCheap. When I sell websites there are a fees for listing and sale on flippa (it may vary from $40 to $100) - where I "get rid" of my websites. For each website (it depends on traffic, money it makes or potential to make money) I can get anything from $200 to $1000. Currently I have 4 operating websites (3 complete with traffic from 100 uniques to 10000 uniques per month and 1 website under development). More I will be able to tell you next month...
Moreover I think I can still can make a few bucks from adsense and affiliate links on my all of these websites.
What is the money I want to make? In my day job I got around $1000 - taxes = $750 (it is not bad for this part of Poland). It is the amount I want to beat. I think that cost involved to stock photography should return in a 3-4 moths...
And what are your opinions? Would $1000 be the money that could make you leave your day job? Do you think that I took a right way for my desired $1000 income...? All feedback is welcome and very desired. So... Please make you comments now :-)
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Honestly, from talking to several pro’s, I don’t think stock photography is a very profitable activity. You need a HUGE collection of images and I’ve read that it only starts providing a decent income over the course of several years.
More profitable photographic activities seem to be: weddings (the one event everyone wants recorded), baby/family portraits or commercial stuff (things like photographing office buildings for annual reports). These are going to give you a much better return than stock libraries.
Hello Jamie. I am not sure how profitable is making photos from weddings, baby/family portraits etc as I have not been doing it. But I know that if you find your niche in the stock photography you can make quite a nice money (I know personally people that are living from it). Moreover it can be totally passive source of income – making photos per order on weddings and similar is paid per work you are doing monthly…
$1000 is not hard to beat at all. I used to work on rent a coder back in the day and I made $2000 easily with two weeks of dedicated work.
I would suggest also building some easy web based tools that does something for which there is a clear market – for example making a picture polaroid, or diagnosing some disease. You will make some amount of money every day. See my post about this: http://blog.cubeofm.com/how-to-become-rich-even-if-nobody-is-followin
Alternatively, just go for shareware software. It’s really really easy to make $500 a day on a piece of software if you are willing to do the manual labour of keeping it updated across the download sites.
thanks Max for really valuable comment – I will read you article and consider using some of your excellent tips
Best of luck to you! If I can make one suggestion: move up the value chain from affiliate and site flipper. (Moving up the value chain means you offer more complicated and valuable services of the level of the people who were previously buying your services. For example, right now you’re doing something fairly unsophisticated — making “websites” — on the behalf of affiliates who are not very sophisticated. One step up the value chain is making websites for yourself and being an affiliate. Another possible step after that is selling whatever the affiliate is marketing, for yourself. It is not unusual on the Internet to have chains which go half a dozen or a dozen stages deep, and your competitive position gets better for each stage you climb out of.)
The kind of people who buy websites for less than $1,000 are disproportionately going to be very, very difficult clients for you to work with. If you’re capable of operating a website in a commercial or semi-commercial niche, just go ahead and do that — you’ll make far more money and won’t have to spend time grinding out more websites to flip every month.
This requires transitioning your focus from “I make websites!” to “I have a business which happens to be based on the Internet.” That has been a rather jarring transition for a lot of newer SEOs and software developers I’ve known in my day. Best of luck with it.
Incidentally, just because you are from Eastern Europe does not mean you need to charge your customers cheap prices. Charge based on the value you provide them. You are able to live on probably a third of what I can, but if you and I are able to do the same thing for some American customer (who is an ocean away from either of us), then we’re able to charge the same amount of money. You can just enjoy it three times as much.
Wow… Really amazing comment patio. Thank you for it. You are right about chains. But like for now just building websites is a thing I know best. On each website I build I learn more and next website I am building is getting more traffic and better SEO in shorter times. I will be trying to make money on being an affiliate and maybe sell my own stuff sooner or later. But like for now I make really little on my websites this way. Not enough to make a living from it. When I sell website I get quite big flow of the money that is ok. If I will learn enough I will be keeping the best websites for myself. But I just starting my business and still need money for a living. If you follow my blog I will be telling about it (flipping to affiliate earnings) more in my future reports. Thanks again for a great comment.