October 2018 Income Report

This is the first EVER report that I’ll post each month documenting my journey to building an online business.

Since I started my online business a few years ago with the launch of my eBook “The Resume is Dead,” I’m going to compile all sales reports from that start date to the present. After this initial report, I’ll be sharing my online income on a monthly basis.

I’ll break it down each month by:

• Overall income by last month, current month and last 12 months

• Major events

• Sources of income

• Key learnings

• What I’ll be working on in the future to grow the business

SOURCES OF INCOME

Over the last 12 months, here’s the official breakdown of my sources of income:

Consulting and Coaching Services: $17,240

Affiliate Sales: $48.26

“The Resume is Dead” Book Sales: $214.73

Total: $17,502.99

Major Events

Over the last few months I’ve spent a lot less time on affiliate and book sales and pivoted towards focusing more energy on building a coaching and consulting practice. The key areas I focused on were content marketing consulting and career coaching (helping people find their dream job).

The reason was that I was getting messages from people on LinkedIn asking for help in these areas so I decided to create a coaching service around it and I started offering it to my subscribers.

Here’s what the process looked like:

First, I would blog or post on a social network (like LinkedIn) about a relevant topic (landing an interview) to my coaching service (landing your dream job).

Here’s a screen shot below:

Then I would offer a compelling CTA (Call to Action) by doing a giveaway. In this case, I would offer a free copy of my #1 Amazon Resumes Bestseller “The Resume is Dead.” Within days I had 548 comments, 120 likes and hundreds of subscribers that likely had a higher interest on that topic. Woohoo!

Once I felt comfortable with the size of my subscriber list (now close to 12,000 people), I began sending emails offering valuable insight to them. For example, I shared a case study of my client David and how he was able to land 12 interviews after going through my coaching program. (see screenshot of email that I sent out below)

Then at the end of every email, I offered to help anyone for 30 minutes with a free phone call and gave them a Calendly link to book it on my calendar.

Because I work in a full time job, I could only offer time slots after 5 PM PST and on the weekend. Here’s an example of how crazy busy one of my weeks got with 1:1 calls (I blocked out the names on the calendar of course!) and an in person seminar I hosted on October 11, 2018.

At the end of the call, I would ask people if I was helpful to them. Everyone I spoke to said yes. Then I would ask them if they were interested in continuing to work together. A few said they would think about it and because they didn’t ask me about the program, I made the assumption they weren’t interested. A lot of them did ask about the details of the program though and I would walk them through it.

Of the 47 people that seemed highly interested, I was able to sign on 13 of them as clients. Usually all it took was a one 30 minute call to make that happen, which was pretty incredible considering my coaching program starts at $3,000!

Also, out of those 47 people, I had pitched a total of $111,090 in coaching services and closed $17,240 for a pipeline to revenue conversion rate of 15.5%. Not too bad, but definitely still tons of room for improvement in terms of messaging, service offering and more.

So what’s next?

• Short term, I’m going to continue offering coaching services for now as helping people 1:1 really helps me better understand their challenges and how I can help

• Medium term, I’m going to continue to write consistently with highly relevant topics to generate sustainable traffic to the website

• Long term, I’m investing a lot into high end camera and lighting equipment so that I can begin building really high quality courses, ideally I can begin to offer programs that combine courses with coaching and courses just by itself

• Here’s a photo of me strategizing with Joe (he’s an expert at the film stuff!) over lunch on how I’m going to build amazing video courses in the future!

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