The Entrepreneur Ride Along Podcast - Online Business and Niche Site Ideas for Entrepreneurs

2021 was my best year yet, with total revenue of $167,051 for the year.

In this episode, I am providing a breakdown of my blog income report. This is a breakdown of the revenue, expenses, and profit from my niche websites. I will give you some insight behind the scenes into what I am doing with each of my niche websites, detailing what happened during the last year, and how I plan to continue scaling.

This income report is for the year 2021, my year-end 2021 income report. 

For a full list of my income reports, see my blog income reports archived here: https://theentrepreneurridealong.com/incomereports

And if this sparks some ideas for you, or encourages you to go out and start an online business for yourself, I encourage you to start today. If you just need some ideas, go ahead and download my five website ideas (the businesses I would start if I had more time): https://theentrepreneurridealong.com/nichedownload/

Enjoy!

In this episode of The Entrepreneur Ride Along Podcast, we learn how to start writing a sales page from scratch, without using any templates. This is the exact technique used by the world’s greatest copywriters.

In today’s episode, we are joined by Karthik Vijayakumar of designyourthinking.com. Karthik is a professional copywriter and solopreneur. Karthik has mastered the art of writing sales copy and creating a sales page from scratch. Today, he teaches us how to get started with five simple steps.

Karthik is a master at sales page creation. He is the copywriter that designed and wrote the copy for my sales page.

I’m excited to bring you this conversation with Karthik so you can improve your conversion and begin selling your products and services!

Be sure to download Karthik’s checklist bundle that he put together special for listeners of The Entrepreneur Ride Along podcast at: designyourthinking.com/jake

From this podcast:

• Karthik’s special download (checklist) for this episode
• Design Your Thinking
• Launch Plan Podcast
• The Entrepreneur Ride Along Membership

I just sold one of my websites for $95,000. Today, I will tell you all about how to sell a website, how I flipped my website for $95,000, and I will give you a review of Empire Flippers (the broker I used to sell my business).

The business is the "Pomsky Owners Association". A business I started in 2017 as a website to practice my SEO. The website has grown substantially over the past few years, averaging over $2,000 in monthly profit. Through Empire Flippers, I was able to get a 55x multiple of monthly earnings, which put the valuation of my business just under $95,000. 

I learned a lot along the way selling this business. I first started the process of selling this business on April 27th 2021. I didn't officially list the website for sale until July 6th 2021. I didn't sell the business until August 14th 2021, and I didn't get paid for the sale until December 28th 2021. It's a LONG process, and I messed up quite a bit along the way (which slowed up the process). I talk all about that in today's episode including what to expect when selling your business, the expenses you can expect for broker fees and taxes, and all the behind the scenes in flipping a website.

In today's episode I'm going breakdown why I sold my business, share the lessons I learned, and show you how to sell a website on Empire Flippers using my business as a case study.

Download the "how to sell a website" step-by-step case study (coming soon)

Resources Mentioned:

• "How to sell a website" step-by-step case study (coming soon)
• Entrepreneur Ride Along Intro 
• About Pomsky Owners Association (Podcast)
• Empire Flippers
• Flippa
• Motion Invest
• Step One Book
• Ask Pat 2.0 Feature

Book marketing is new to me. I'm learning a lot!

In today's episode, I share what's working, and what's not, when marketing my book Step One. 

Step One: The Surprisingly Simple Process To Research, Validate, And Choose The Perfect Online Business launched in September of 2021. The launch went great, I sold over 120 copies in the first month and hit #1 in the new release category for eCommerce.

But things have slowed down since. Sales are still coming in, but it is a lot slower without the buzz of the launch.

Today, I talk through what I am doing to keep the sales rolling in now that the launch period is over.

You can checkout Step One here: //steponebook.com/

Update time! If you listened to Episode 29 of The Entrepreneur Ride Along Podcast, you heard all about my business AssociatePI and the struggles it has faced this year.

I am turning this business around in 2022.

In today's episode I talk all about my plan, my strategies, and thoughts going into the next year to scale this business back to an $8,000 - $10,000 per month online business.

You can checkout the updates I made to my sales page below, in the quick vide recorded showing the before and after results.

For the first time EVER, I ran a Black Friday promotion on my insurance education business.

From Friday through Monday, just four days, I sold over 25 online courses and generated OVER $6,000 in revenue. 

The promotion took me less than one hour to put together. Which means I made $6,000 in revenue from one hour of work.

It was an eye opening experience for me. Now, I will be taking advantage of Black Friday every year going forward!

In today's episode, I'm going to breakdown exactly what I did to run a successful Black Friday promotion. I will take you behind the scenes to talk through my thought process, and breakdown the strategies I used to utilize email marketing to drive $6,000 in revenue in four days.

For reference, this is my sales page for my business AssociatePI where I ran this 40% off Black Friday Promotion.

This is the cadence of emails I sent for my Black Friday Promotion:

• Email #1: Thursday at 2 pm - Early sneak peek of my deal sent to the email list.
• Email #2: Friday at 12:15 am - Introduction to the Black Friday deal with a link to the sales page.
• Email #3: Friday at 7 pm - Reminder email. Reminding my subscribers to take advantage of the Black Friday deal.
• Email #4: Saturday at 7 pm - Informative email with testimonials from students that have had success with my courses.
• Email #5: Sunday at 2 pm - Informative email touching on the value proposition of my courses (pass your exams in less time with less studying).
• Email #6: Monday at 10 am - Talking savings. Letting them know they can save $170 per course, up to $1,360 if they buy all courses. And, for the fist time, mentioning that the deal is 40% off so they can buy my course for just $255 (the course is normally $425).
• Email #7: Monday at 5 pm - Reminder that the deal ends at midnight. I also send more testimonials showing the success that people have in passing their exams with my course.
• Email #8: Monday at 11 pm - Final Reminder. Deal ends in one hour. Give them a final chance to buy now and save 40%.

And that's it!

Just eight emails, that took me no longer than one hour to schedule in ConvertKit, sold 25+ courses and generated over $6,000 in revenue. 

$18,547 is a lot of money.

No one can argue that.

That is how much money I paid in legal fees to dispute a cease and desist against my business AssociatePI, my business selling online courses in the insurance industry.

It was, by far, the biggest mistake of my entrepreneurial career. 

This is a follow up episode to Episode 32 of The Entrepreneur Ride Along Podcast, where we talked about how to protect your online business from legal claims.

Today, I tell you the story behind my $18,547 mistake. How one stupid mistake, stemming from my lack of knowledge and understanding of trademarked terms, cost me $18,547 in legal fees and nearly forced me shut down my business. 

In this episode, I have a conversation with Wesley Henderson. Wesley is the founder of Draftedlegal.com, and an attorney of Henderson & Henderson Attorneys at Law, a law firm he founded with his brother . Wesley is an attorney and entrepreneur.

In today's episode, Wesley talks us through a few simple steps that we can take to legally protect our businesses. These are simple steps that you can take today to protect yourself, and your business, so you can avoid costly lawsuits (and $20,000 in legal fees like me...).

Take this episode seriously. The legal world is not as scary as it seems. Wesley makes it easy for us in today's episode, and gives us three simple task that you can complete this week, for less than $300, to protect our businesses from the bulk of legal issues. 

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Draftedlegal.com
• Wesley's steps to get started
• hhlawsc.com

In this episode, I have a conversation with Steven, the host of The Adventures in Online Business Podcast. We talk all about my entrepreneurial journey, discussing what I have learned over nearly a decade of starting and scaling online businesses. We talk about my book, Step One, and how I learned the methodology taught in the book from my real experience trying to grow my own online businesses.

In this episode, I give a sneak peak of what's inside the book, including three of my personal case studies that are used as examples in Step One.

You can checkout Step One the book at: Steponebook.com

You can see the original recording of this episode here on The Adventures in Online Business Podcast with Steven Foust and Michael Tanner.

In this episode, I break down my book launch process and describe how to launch a non-fiction book. This is the exact process I used to get 120+ sales and 25 five-star reviews in one month. This is the exact process I used for my book Step One.

Step One launched on September 1st 2021. Within the first month (launch month) Step One accomplished the following:

• 120+ sales
• 25 five-star reviews
• #1 new release in the E-commerce category for September
• #1 new release in the Home-Based Business Sales & Selling category for September
• Reached #2 best seller in the E-commerce category
• Ranking for keywords on Amazon such as "online business ideas"

In today's episode, I'm going to show you exactly how I did this. I will give you step-by-step instructions to build a launch team and teach you exactly how to launch a non-fiction book. By the end of this episode, you will know exactly what to do to successfully launch your book.

You can checkout Step One the book at: //steponebook.com/