Category Archives: Income Generation Methods

Can you build a side hustle that takes just a few hours a month and uses only free tools? Surprisingly, the answer is yes, and here’s how one enterprising new marketer did it.

Sherry earned her first dollar two weeks after she started, and a year later she is earning approximately $2,300 a month. She’s also the first to admit that if she would invest more time in her business, she would likely be earning more money. But still, $2300 a month for just a few hours of work isn’t bad.

Here’s what Sherry did, and as you read this, see if you can notice the one thing she DIDN’T do that would easily double or triple her income.

1: She went to Clickbank and spent an hour deciding what program she wanted to promote first. She also could have gone to JVZoo, Digitstore24, CJ Affiliate or any other low-barrier-to-entry affiliate network she chose.

In choosing her first product, she thought about what was important to her, what her interests were and what she loves to talk about.

She settled on marketing programs because that’s where her interests lie, and for her first affiliate product she ironically chose a course on how to do affiliate marketing. This allowed her to promote something she was deeply interested in while also adding to her affiliate knowledge by taking the course.

In this case she was able to get the course for free by connecting to the product creator. But keep in mind most product creators won’t give out their product for free unless you can prove you’ve got some experience at affiliate marketing. Then again, it never hurts to ask if you’re sincere.

2: She built a free landing page by going to sites.google.com. She kept the page simple and clean with a very clear call to action that took visitors to the affiliate sales page.

3: She went to ChatGPT to generate content ideas. She wanted ideas to make YouTube videos that were all about how to do affiliate marketing.

Then for each of these ideas, she continued to query ChatGPT as well as doing her own research to create video outlines.

4: She then recorded videos for YouTube, making one video for each topic. She followed a detailed outline rather than a script so that she could sound natural. And she continued to record and post these videos at the rate of 3 or 4 per month.

For each video she pasted her landing page link on the first comment so that her viewers could click the link, and at the end of each video she asked viewers to find and click the link.

She also did plenty of research on how best to optimize her videos to get traffic from YouTube.

5: In addition to the videos, Sherry made posts on Pinterest and Instagram. She did this by going to Canva and using the Pinterest template to make eye-catching visuals targeted to people who wanted to learn affiliate marketing. Again, these were linked to her landing page.

She posted on social media about trendy topics such as new affiliate programs and news, and always used one of her visuals to grab interest and get the click.

And that’s it! Her efforts drove visitors to her landing page, who were then directed to click the link to go to the affiliate sales page. Now then, did you notice what Sherry did NOT do that could have greatly increased her income?

Sherry didn’t capture the email addresses. While she did use the landing page to monitor where her traffic was coming from, all she had on that page was a headline and bullet point list with a button that sent people to the sales page. It works for her and she does make sales.

But I would have instead created an irresistible free lead magnet and given that away on my landing page, directing traffic to the offer only after they signed up for my freebie and corresponding newsletter.

Of course, that is more work because you’ve got to create a lead magnet and write emails, but it’s also far more profitable in the long run to build a list that you can continue to send offers to.

You’ll notice that all of the tools Sherry used were 100% free, so her only investment was her time. And she readily admits her first few videos weren’t all that good. But like anything else, practice allows you to improve, and her income is steadily rising over time.

Oh yes, and she’s creating a dynamite lead magnet so she can start building her list, too.

This isn’t anything unique because I know of at least 3 people personally (including me) who are currently doing this.

But it works really well, and if it works who cares if it’s unique, has pink spots or drives a Fiat?

AND and there’s room for many more people to get in on the action too

The technique is simply this:

It involves an initial outlay of usually a few thousand dollars to buy sites that other people are selling on Flippa.com

I expect to pay between $2,000 and $4,000 for the sites that I buy.

I expect each site to bring me a residual monthly income of $500 – $1000 depending on the site and how much I paid for it

To give you an example, one site I just lost out on (was outbid and missed the end of the auction) was based in the diet niche.

It sold for around $4,000, was bringing constant monthly revenue of around $900, mostly from an existing ebook (the ebook was part of the sale), Adsense ads on the site and Clickbank ads.

It was getting over 12,000 unique visitors a month and was three years old so the traffic and monthly income was well established.

It also came with around 3,000 followers from associated Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter accounts that came with the sale.

There wasn’t a mailing list included with this particular site but I especially look for sites that DO have mailing lists because they’re very profitable for me because of my existing business set-up.

It was a good deal at 4k because if the monthly income averaged out at $900 a month as it was currently doing I would have more than doubled my investment in 12 months.

So in essence the site would then have paid for itself and I could either continue to take the monthly revenue of to flip it for a lump sum

You might wonder why someone would sell a site making $900 a month for $4,000?

Well me too I but I no longer make the mistake of trying to work out their reasons. I do my due diligence and if the site stacks I’ll buy it.

For all I know the person might have financial problems or need the money for another investment or just might be bloody bored of running the thing.

It only needed a few hours’ work in ‘upkeep’ but that can be easily outsourced.

So you can see why I was pissed off that I lost out on that one – someone got a bargain.

A friend of mine – the 3k income in the headline –  recently bought a site aimed at potential writers (I’ve got one of those too actually) and is currently making around $3,000 a month in revenue from a site that cost him $4500 several months back.

It was making around $600 a month when he bought it but he tweaked it, changed the ads and got an SEO person on board (cost him $250) but it was well worth it

In fact I can’t stress enough that the most profitable skill you can have when buying and developing websites is to look at what they’re lacking.

If the SEO needs work (ask an expert for an appraisal) then getting a pro on the job will increase the revenue

If the ads need to be more targeted then work on that, or if any lists or Facebook page that comes with the site (a lot do these days) isn’t being monetized enough then work on that aspect.

In my experience there’s usually something you can do to increase the revenue you get from any site.

If you have some seed money, buying sites that bring residual income is a really good way to build an online business.

I highly recommend it, although it takes some balls the first time you spend four figures on binary code

And if it doesn’t work out you can usually resell it and make your money back on the sale