What I did today

Overall, a productive day. However, it was largely driven by the fact I invested some money.

Let me throw a question at you: If I could offer you 34% return, would you take it? Most people would say yes.

That ROI is exactly the ROI  you see on Amazon affiliate sites.

Let’s look at the math.

Let’s say a site makes $1,000/month in Affiliate commission. Since the site is an Amazon Affiliate, it can be sold at Empire Flippers for roughly ~35X month income, or in this case, $35,000.

But, remember, the site makes $1,000/month or $12,000/year.

Said differently, you spent $35,000 on an asset that makes $12,000/year. If you do 12/35, that’s the  34% return I mentioned above.

To ask again: would you take that ROI? My guess is no.

Here’s why: most people don’t know how to manage an affiliate site.

The unfortunate reality is that a TON of “gurus” have flooded the internet with stories about how affiliate marketing is easy and it’s a no-cost business to start.

Both of those points are true….to an extent.

Spinning up a website will cost less than $100. Writing articles is also not difficult. If you can pass a high school English/Writing class, then you can write an effective affiliate article.

BUT, what the guru’s don’t tell you is you need one more ingredient to make those affiliate sites work. That ingredient is time and effort. You need hundreds of articles per website to make money. If you write them yourself, and you spend a few hours a day writing them, it will still take you a year for your site to make $1,000/month.

So, let’s recap:

• The ROI is great
• Most people don’t know how to manage an affiliate site
• It takes forever to get to just $1,000/month

Let’s throw one more wrinkle in there.

These sites are dependant on Amazon. If Amazon decides to turn off their affiliate marketing scheme, which they could do at any point, then all of your work is for nothing.

And make no mistake: Amazon will do this at some point. The big question is when.

So, in my mind, if you spend a year or two slowly writing content, you’re wasting a year to slowly build the sites because the “Amazon Shut off date” is inevitable….and now closer.

And, the ROI of these sites is  high.

So, here’s my thought: spend money now to grow these sites. For me, that’s content.

I spend $450 yesterday to buy ~20,000 words of content. In my mind, that trade-off is worth it when you think about the shut-off date coming.

Building 20 sites up very quickly to  ~$2,000/month means $40,000 in monthly income. That’s huge. But, that’s also ~$1,400,000 if I sell the sites.

That $1.4M would buy $7M in real estate.  That real estate cannot be shut off my Amazon.

To  rehash:

• Spend money to quickly build up Affiliate sites
• Milk the cash  flow from them to build up more sites and buy real estate in the process
• Sell them all to buy real estate

It’s the path to $10K/day at 30.

Wake up & sleep:

Lots of sleep today to balance out the absolutely crappy night of sleep the night before. I went to sleep at 10:50 and woke up at 8:56 for 9 hours and 21 minutes of sleep.

Exercise

I went for it on the exercise. My Whoop says  I burned north of 600 calories with an average heart rate in the  150’s. I did nearly 800 jump squats, 500 pushups, 30 minutes of abs.

Diet

Chicken and rice for dinner, standard coffee to start the day. It was good diet day.

My Day Job

Saturday-no day job. I’m still expecting to get laid off.

Investment real estate

Standard scrolls, nothing great on the market.

Since income properties still generate income through rent, I’d expect to not see a lot of properties hit the market during this virus time. If your property does hit the market during this time, I’m assuming you’re desperate to sell and I’m going to offer you a bottom-barrel price to buy it from you.

Kindle

No action here today.

Amazon Affiliate Websites

I ordered a lot of content, as discussed, and published ~4,000 words.

On track day overall.

Consulting

I had a quick-hitting one day project for $750.

I have a VA I  love who I’ve worked with for nearly a year. I  had him do a lot of the heavy lifting and I handled the rest, packaging it up!

Family

Lots of time with my beautiful, amazing fiancee and a phone call with my parents!

What I made today

Job: $170

Rental Income: $33

UpWork: $0

KDP: $4

Consulting: $750

Medium: $1

Amazon Affiliate sites (2 sites): $0

Youtube: $0

Total: $958

Today’s pro-rated amount of monthly expenses

Expenses: $250

Once I pay off my debt, I’ll break out expenses into a line by line as well.

Today’s Income

Made $708

My plan for tomorrow

Tomorrow is:

• Publishing content
• eBook categories
• Any follow-ups from the quick-hitting consulting gig

About the Author & The $0-$10K/Day Case Study

Dean’s goal is to create $10,000/day in passive income through entrepreneurship. Too many people write “success porn” that skates over the struggles many face in entrepreneurship

The hope is that this series of posts will inspire someone else out there to make their entrepreneurship dreams happen.

Dean Woods is currently an executive by day and a bootstrapped micro-startup CEO by night. Prior to working in startups, Dean was a management consultant. Dean graduated with honors from The Wharton School.