UPDATE: I tweeted THIS the other day (follow me on Twitter already HERE!), but let me preface this post by answering the question I’ve already gotten emails about: yes, this is 100% true, it does me no good to exaggerate. My business is based on brutal honesty so if I do happen to have a bad month trading or publishing business-wise, you’re gonna know about it.
Thanks again to my valued customers, many of whom are absolute wannabes/degenerates…I’ll help you learn not to be such wannabes/degenerates anymore (seriously, 90%+ of traders lose…again, brutal honesty, I’m not gonna be some fake ass polite trading guru) and to wait for the right trading opportunities (and my instructional DVDs obviously do teach what those ideal trading setups look like too!) and forget this $150k headline figure, I’m far more proud that when I add up all the daily testimonials from TIMalert subscribers, trading profits for the month of May 2009 exceeded $250,000!
After brushing up against the monthly-six-figure-income-barrier not once but twice in the last few months (In April, my blog brought in $88,000+…see details HERE and last December the figure was $83,358…see breakdown HERE), I wasn’t sure if my miniscule visitor traffic to my website TimoySykes.com (3,000 daily visitors, approximately 1,000 of them unique, mailing list of 13,000) would be enough to support anything larger, and despite my stock-market-crushing performance (I’m up 370%+ in the last 18 months, making me the #1 ranked trader/investor out of 25,000+ on Covestor, the only financial site that actually verifies results) my sole marketing strategy for TIMalerts (real-time trade alerts newsletter) and PennyStocking instructional trading DVDs (teach my trading strategy) was to mention them incessantly, along with my customer testimonials like HERE and HERE, which I know are hugely annoying, but boy do they work.
Bragging aside, how did I just DOUBLE my blog’s monthly earnings from the $80,000 range to $153,450 in May 2009?
Here’s the breakdown:
May 2009: $153,450
$29,968 TIMalerts
$85,514 Instructional DVDs
$25,725 Advertising & Affiliates
$11,263 Trading Profits
The secret to my success?
An incredible work ethic. No 4-hour workweek for me, more like 100+ hours/week. My business is hitting on all cylinders so I’ve working my butt off to answer each customer’s questions (1+ hours/day), blog 3x/day (2 hours/day), research (2+ hour/day), create daily watchlists (2 hours/day) make stock trades whenever the ideal setups occur (2 hours/day) all while developing new DVDs/websites/applications that will propel my business in the future (3 hours/day).
Central to my success, the very thing on which my entire business is based, my stock trading has been dead on as my account gained 20%+ in May alone, proving some of the critics wrong that I could only make money in bear markets (nope, I excel in bull markets!) and building on the success I’ve had for the past 18 months and decade (yeah, remember my background)
In order to take the fullest advantage of my trading success, I experimented with special DVD product offers and rebates at first, then actually raised prices late in the month once I saw the kind of people who were beginning to trade (some people shouldn’t be trading as it is risky business), which is good ethics and business-wise).
My TIMalerts subscription business was actually pretty flat month-over-month, the only other thing that made this such a breakout month was some lump affiliate payments from my sponsors and advertisers, which is also helped December 2008’s gains.
So, most of you don’t have stock trading blogs/websites, but the things you can learn from my success are:
1. The best thing you can do to grow your business is be a proven expert in your niche…not because your affiliates, partners or friends say so (in email blasts or in affiliate-linked posts), but because your numbers/customer testimonials speak for themselves.
2. Working hard is not necessarily required, but I sleep better at night knowing that I answer each email/question and am totally transparent. Making money feels great, but it feels even better take pride in your work. I run my business the way I wish all businesses were run with the goal of growing and enriching myself by providing useful/valuable content
3. Don’t for one second listen to any failed blogger/web marketer who says making a ton of money online isn’t possible. Just because they’re too inexperienced/ignorant/incompetent to achieve success doesn’t mean those smarter and more determined aren’t loving and capitalizing on the opportunities out there!
4. Thanks to MD for posting about my breakout month first HERE. Follow IncomeDiary, he has some damn good tips!
Tags: Breakouts, Milestones, Monthly Review
