Michal Stawicki's Blog, page 16

Goals for 2017 Revisited

It’s the beginning of the New Year, a time for revisiting my goals for 2017. Let’s dive straight into it.

#1 Prayer

I wanted to put prayer first in my life. I almost succeeded. I prayed more consistently. I even added one more prayer into my daily schedule.

I see the clear connection between my renewed focus on prayer and how many good things happened in 2017. For some of them, I’ve been praying for 15 years.

Verily, put God in first place and everything will fall into the right place.

Of course, it wasn’t without flaws. I didn’t stick to my prayers exactly as I should have. More times than I care to count, I fell asleep with unfinished prayer in my mind.

On the other hand, at the end of the year, I learned something I yearned to achieve for a few years: I can give a specific intention to a specific daily action of mine. This makes me mindfully prayful during the day. In my record day, I could connect about 30-40 intentions to my everyday actions.

Overall, I’m mildly pleased with my performance and consistency. This goal wasn’t a disaster, like most of my goals tend to be.

#2 Quality Time with Family

Well, disaster is a good label for this goal. My plan minimum was to spend at least one hour a week of quality time with each of my family members.

I feel shame when I type those words, but this is the harsh truth: I wasn’t able to do even that much.

Yes, there were some weeks when I spent more than an hour with each of my kids and my wife, but they were few and far between. And I failed to reach this goal at least a dozen weeks in a year (if not more).

The one good thing I can say about this goal is that I tracked it quite diligently. I’m sure that without tracking I would have blown it even more frequently. There were plenty of weeks when I had a look on my wall calendar on the Sunday afternoon and noticed: “Heck, I didn’t spend an hour with two of my kids!”

If not for tracking, this goal would be a full-blown disaster, not just a small catastrophe it was.

#3 Growing My Email List

At the beginning of 2017, about 400 of my subscribers were regularly opening my email broadcasts.

Well, I didn’t do much to increase that number. In fact, I made just a couple of feeble attempts to discover different opportunities to grow my email list. For example, I used NoiseTrade platform. This experiment didn’t end with success and at the beginning of the year I was in a pitiful mental state, so I didn’t pursue any new venues.

In the 2017 goal-setting post, I said I discovered a platform that nicely grows an author’s email list, InstaFreebie, but I didn’t pursue even this venue.

Fortunately for me, I was invited to a few giveaways organized by other authors, and InstaFreebie picked a few of my books and featured them on their blog. Thus I got over 2,000 subscribers from that source in 2017.

Well, the churn-out rate was also quite huge, so this increased number of subscribers converted to only about 50% increase in my open rates. At the end of 2017, about 600 people were regularly opening my email broadcasts.

The 50% increase may sound impressive, but it’s not. If I would have diligently leveraged the InstaFreebie platform, the increase would have been measured in thousands of percent. When you know what you are doing, the progress should be rapid.

One example to give you a clue how hopelessly I wasted this opportunity: at the beginning of 2014, I had 47 subscribers. I had built that list since July 2013. It took me almost half a year to reach that number. On 29th of December, 2017, I got 72 subscribers from InstaFreebie, because one of my least successful books was featured on their blog.

I have also a couple of nice surprises in regard to this goal. I think 2017 was the first year when I got more subscribers via my blog than via my books. Even if the advantage was on the books side, it was by a slim margin. For years, my blog was like an abandoned ghost town, but thanks to my activity on Quora and Medium, plenty of folks were checking out who I was, visiting my blog. In 2017, I installed two additional sign-up forms on popular subpages of my blog, and from that source alone I got 66 subscribers.

Another nice thing was using a dedicated lead magnet in my blog post. I almost never do this, because with my traffic I don’t think it’s worth the effort. And I got seven new subscribers from this post! Then I republished it on Medium and got another two dozen subscribers. Cool beans!

Overall, those were very good results for my half-assed efforts. Frankly, I feel I didn’t deserve them.

#4 Coaching

Almost identically like with growing my email list, I did almost nothing and pulled out decent results.

I love Coach.me. This platform allows you to be discovered by clients, under one tiny condition: you are a good coach. Their ranking system is based on data: the number of interactions you have with your clients on a daily basis, how long they stick with you – and most importantly – how often they mark their daily steps as done. If you are a good coach, you will get exposure on Coach.me.

Getting the certificate was enough for me to be prominently featured on their website.

The main coaching page of Coach.me

At the beginning of May, I was featured also in their email broadcast and I got a few new clients back then. A couple of them stayed with me for a few months.

I also gave three or four phone consultations, relatively expensive (comparing to the standard monthly CM coaching) and it was about 300% increase to the previous year.

For almost the whole year, I had 10+ paying clients.

Overall, I’m very pleased with what happened to my coaching practice.

Currently, coaching generates about 14% of our household income. It’s a great result for something I didn’t put much of my effort to. The only thing I did, besides getting the certificate, was creating a landing page on my blog and putting the link to it in my books. However, I could track only a single phone consultation from this source.

#5 Contributing

I contributed quite a lot in 2017, but not exactly where I anticipated at the beginning of the year.

I somehow maintained my pace on Quora. I published 216 new answers (well, about 10% of them were old answers given to new questions that were very similar to old ones). I got 2,100 new followers and over 615,000 views for my answers.



I’ve seen the biggest success on Medium. Around April, I finally discovered a way to get traction there: publications. Once I put a foot in the door, my articles there got much more views. Currently, I have over 3,000 followers there and am top writer in self-improvement and productivity categories. And I am a writer in a dozen publications. My articles on Medium get about 10x more views than visits on my blog.

I gave a few podcast interviews; however, almost always they were not in effect of my effort, but rather podcast hosts contacting me in the first place.

With all the things I juggled, at the end of the year I had very little time for contributing. Particularly, formatting posts, looking for and adding royalty-free photos to my posts is time consuming.

At the beginning of November, I joined Jeff Goins’ 30-day challenge to write and publish something every day. I had been writing anyway, but thanks to this challenge, I was diligent in publishing my content on Quora and Medium. It immediately showed in the number of views and followers. Consistency is a big advantage if you want to get better results faster.

Overall, I got very good results for the amount of work I put into this goal. Writing has never been a problem for me; chiseling and publishing my content is another story.

#6 Publishing

I published zero books in 2017. That was the first year since 2013, when I started my writing career without a new book.

I did only two things in regard to this goal, both of them late into the year.

a) My co-author pushed me to write another 99-stories book, this time about habits. I helped her to collect several stories, but because of my lack of focus, this project was only half-baked at the end of the year.

b) I announced to my subscribers that I would compile my Quora answers into a book about habits. I didn’t provide any deadlines, so this project didn’t go further than creating a book’s outline.

Overall, this was the last priority and it clearly showed in 2017.

A lot of things happened in 2017 that weren’t included in my list of goals from January. Most of them were not even on my radar at the beginning of 2017. I attribute it partly to my general goal-less approach to life. I’m not rigid and obsessed about my goals. I’m open to anything that is in accordance with my personal mission statement.

In part, it was simply how the life functions. We, puny human beings, cannot predict the future even 12 months ahead. I also attribute a big part of those changes to God’s intervention in my life, because I was focused on my prayers this year.

OK, a few examples of the events and projects outside of my list of goals:

1. I created a new venture from scratch.

If you follow my income reports, you know I contacted an author in May and started advertising his book on Amazon in June. We immediately had impressive success, so I chased more authors and invited them to use my services as advertiser on Amazon.

So in January, such a venture didn’t even cross my mind. In fact, for years I was adamant to NOT provide any services for authors. I’ve seen so many marketing gimmicks that provided little results for big bucks, and I didn’t want to be connoted with them. Luckily, advertising on Amazon can be very different from those shady ‘marketing’ services. My ads either work or they don’t. If they don’t, I return money to an author. If they work, an author shares profit from ads with me. It’s as simple and as honest as that. If my clients get results, I’m paid. If they paid great results, I’m paid handsomely.

In July, I got the first payment from my client. Since then, AMS advertising venture experienced a rapid growth. At the end of 2017, I had 11 clients and advertised my 11 books plus 40 books of my clients.



Not too bad for something that wasn’t on my radar, huh? Do you know what’s best about this venture? I resurrect dead books. This is like magic, it’s something unheard of in the industry.

Before I had used Amazon ads, the story went like this: if your book is dead, you’d better start writing another one, because no one can overcome death of a book. Case closed.

Amazon ads is the only tool that can truly bring a book back to life. Sometimes it is a half-life, when a book sells only several copies a month, but it’s still infinitely better than the alternative – no sales at all. I have about two dozen such “zombies” under my belt, including a few books of my own.

The best are, of course, success stories, when a book went from a few copies a month to a few hundred copies a month. This happened with the books I’ve been advertising several times already. I have an immense pleasure in making valuable books come alive.

2. I’m in the ISI mastermind.

ISI stands for Iron Sharpens Iron. It’s a mastermind run by my mentor, Aaron Walker. In September, he announced that he closes The Community that I had been part of for over two years. He offered me in exchange a spot in his mastermind, and he gave me the first month for free. That was a no-brainer decision. I only had no idea how I would afford $615 a month after the first month.

I spoke with my wife about this and she said: “OK. You can do it, if you think it will be worth your money.” Two days later, she asked: “But is this a one-time or recurring fee?” She gave her consent, because she thought it was a one-time fee.

This is how I joined ISI. At that time, I was also a member of another paid mastermind, and it was unexpectedly dissolved. I mean, I was in that group almost two years and suddenly, my friend who ran the mastermind, decided that he no longer can focus on so many things and shut down the mastermind. That was $265 a month toward the ISI fee.

In the fourth month into ISI, I was finally able to get out of it enough to cover the fee. Most probably, I will stay in this mastermind for good.

At the beginning of 2017, I didn’t envision it at all.

3. My wife changed her mind.

My spouse admits her errors very reluctantly; like never. Especially, if those errors concern her husband. I tease her mercilessly about her email from 2013, where she stated that my books are rubbish and I should quit this stupid writing hobby and find a better job. Add some invectives and cussing, and you will have the full picture.

Fifty Third Income Report – August 2017 ($1458.57)

Are you curious about a half-year delay? I explained it in my first income report.

I charged my batteries in July, so in August 2017 I doubled down with my efforts. As usual, I was chasing many rabbits at the same time.

Writing

I wrote quite a lot and finished the month with almost 35,000 words. The usual stuff – Quora answers, Medium articles, income reports, blog posts, book reviews and some materials for my websites.

Writing, of course, is only part of the process. My workload was bigger with all the proofreading, correcting, formatting and publishing involved in making my writings eligible for English-speaking audience.

Networking & Prospecting

With my mental batteries full, and more peace at home once my wife decided to quit her job, I finally was able to connect more. I reached out to many guys in the Community and was more active in my mastermind. I was also active in Brian Meeks’ FB group about AMS advertising.

And I chased prospects for Amazon ads. Thanks to my “long” history in self-publishing groups (the whole whooping 4 years), I quickly made a list of more than a dozen authors who could’ve used my services and started contacting them.

Small Projects

In one of my mastermind calls my friend urged me to finally create some kind of funnel from my books to my coaching services. He was right. I had a good excuse not to do it, when I had been selling 200 copies a month. But in August 2017 my sales had been around 1,000 copies a month since December 2016. That was 1,000 potential leads to my coaching services a month that I had kept ignoring.

I got busy with creating a webpage on my blog where I could direct my readers. I did all “design” work myself (design is in quotation marks, because of my non-existent design skills). Obviously, I needed to ponder, write, proofread and format all the text for the page.

In Pat’s First Kindle book group on FB I’ve heard about Fiberead, a platform for crowd-translating/ publishing books. I created an account on this platform and uploaded three of my books.

Lesson:

Now, almost four months after tackling those projects I still haven’t seen immediate payoff from those activities. Two of my books are in the final stage of preparation for releasing on the Chinese market via Fiberead. So, four months down the road I don’t see a single dime of return on my time investment.

The same goes with advertising my coaching services at the end of my books. This very afternoon I’m going to have the first call with client from this source. It took me about a month before I uploaded new versions of manuscripts on Amazon and CreateSpace.

By the way, this was a good occasion for me to finally make an inventory of the manuscripts uploaded on Amazon. It took me a few days to recognize which book has which version on Amazon. I consider it an immediate benefit

99 Habit Success Stories

Ludvig

Ludvig started meditating around five years ago and saw some great results. Then after about a year and a half he added power napping into his daily schedule, for around ten minutes at a time, sometimes multiple times a day. After this he noticed a big difference in his life, which manifested itself in two ways:

he was able to work in spurts with intense focus, which was followed up by a period of rest and recuperation making him able to repeat the cycle;
he was able to keep his focus more consistently throughout the day.

Meditation helped Ludvig to ignore the unnecessary and irrelevant things in his life so that he could better focus on the task at hand.

Since then, he also began writing down his “daily lessons” every night. This took less than ten minutes (usually around five minutes), but he found it extremely helpful.

It’s a good habit because it forces him to think about what he’s learned every day. He firmly believes that if you’re able to accumulate many of these small positive habits then they’ll all add up to big things! Just taking a few minutes out of his day to practice these habits has made Ludvig more productive, focussed, rested and therefore successful.

Nowadays, Ludvig Sunström is an entrepreneur and author (he published Breaking Out of Homeostasis in December 2017). Together with European Hedge Fund Manager of the Decade, Mikael Syding, he hosts the popular Swedish business podcast “25 Minuter,” which has been ranked #1 on iTunes several times. His content has been read and listened to by millions of people. His blog is at www.StartGainingMomentum.com

Friedrich Schiller

Eighteenth century German Friedrich Schiller was a man of many professions. Most notably, Schiller was a poet, though he was also a philosopher, historian, playwright, and a physician as well. Schiller is one of the most famous and respected members of Germany’s literary elite to this day, and was close friends with Goethe, another leading German writer.

Though Schiller’s family was often poor (his father was a doctor who often demanded no payment), he had a happy childhood. In later life he married and had children, and by all accounts had a productive and satisfied life, not at all the biography of a tortured artist. He is, however, known to have had one very strange habit.

Schiller’s secret to success was inspiration. He could only work when he was inspired. This seems logical, but Schiller’s method for becoming inspired was perhaps less orthodox. He could only write when he was surrounded by the odor of rotting pears.

As strange as it might seem, Schiller’s habit certainly worked, as his books are still sold in their thousands to this day.

Those are just a couple of 99 stories that will be included in the book titled “99 Habit Success Stories.” I work on it with Jeannie Ingraham and it will be released at the beginning of 2018. Stay tuned.

The post 99 Habit Success Stories appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Fifty Second Income Report – July 2017 ($1,157.78)

Are you curious about a half-year delay? I explained it in my first income report.

I exported my kids to Ireland, so July 2017 was a honeymoon for me and my wife. We had some extended time without kids in the past (during those times, we also exported kids to grandparents), but this time my wife worked much less. She already gave her notice and didn’t care about performance bonuses and other such nonsense.

I came back to Poland on 1st of July, Saturday. The next weekend, we visited my wife’s family in her home town. In that town we studied together in high school, it’s where we met. My first church community was there, and I visited them at the mass. It was great to see them after 20 years. We visited also two families with whom I lived when I was in high school. That was a great time.

The next week we traveled to Bulgaria. We spent there a week. We had no idea that for the first three days, the weather was awful. Comparing to Poland, it was wonderful. We discovered what a nice Bulgarian weather was in the last three days of vacation. My wife loved everything about the trip. Sunbathing at the beach is her favorite pastime. I missed a reliable Internet connection.

Habits that Will Make You a Millionaire – Part III of 3

A few days ago I shared another three habits that will make you a millionaire. Today it’s time for the last three.

7. Frugality.

Live below your means. It seems so simple, yet it’s not easy. You cannot become a millionaire if you spend more than you earn. Period. It’s against the law of math and against the laws of nature.

My wife quit her job a month ago. I also downsized my day job income, and I took a big financial commitment joining an expensive mastermind (the fee is as high as my monthly mortgage payment). We still have means to support ourselves, but this situation literally freaks me out.

It doesn’t freak out most people. And that’s why most people are NOT millionaires. They are fine with financing their vacation trips or car purchases by creditors.

You cannot accumulate money if you spend it faster than it’s coming. You can earn 10 million dollars, but you still won’t be a millionaire if you spend it all and then borrow some more to satisfy your expensive tastes.

Live below your means. It’s simple.

8. Build Routines.

Successful people recognize the importance of habits. James Altucher is the only successful person I know who argues against habits… and he still practices them, but calls those disciplines differently.

Fifty First Income Report – June 2017 ($252.33)

Are you curious about a half-year delay? I explained it in my first income report.

June 2016 was incredibly significant in my life and in my business. But I had no idea about this at that time. It was also full of frenzied activity. I looked back at my journal and, once again, I was amazed how much energy I expelled.

KDP Rocket

The first significant event took place on the 1st of June. I bought from Dave Chesson a tool for mining keywords from Amazon.

I did that only because of my habit of commenting on blogs. To comment, I obviously needed to read the post. One of the latest posts on Kindlepreneur was about a new feature in Dave’s Rocket: mining keywords specifically for AMS ad campaigns.

I wish I could honestly tell you that I was so bright that I immediately grasped the great potential of the tool.

Well, I wasn’t. I dimly sensed that it might have been a game changer for me. Researching keywords on Amazon was the most absorbing part of advertising my books on Amazon.

The second part of the reason behind the purchase was that I personally knew Dave. I was sure he wouldn’t produce a botch. So I bought the KDP Rocket.

KDP Rocket’s Results

Thanks to the tool, in June 2017, I created 297 ad campaigns for my books. Those campaigns earned me $325 net within two months of their lives. I then reused those keywords for another pack of ads, and they provided additional $340 in profits in the next 2.5 months. I envision they will earn me about eighteen hundred dollars in the next year.

June’s keywords made two great sets of keywords that I used practically for every book I ever advertised for other authors. That way they earned me even MORE bucks!

And I paid for this tool a meager 97 dollars!

Oh yes, that was significant.

Buck Books Promo

On 8th of June, I ran my first Buck Books promo since the launch of Directed by Purpose in September 2016. Between those two, the only promotion I did was Black Friday – Cyber Monday promo of all of my books.

My main marketing vehicle in that period were Amazon ads. And they did a splendid job. September – June period was the best in my business ever.

Anyway, the promo went pretty well. I mobilized a few authors, and they gave me their hand (and their email lists). Each book sold over 40 copies, and I recuperated the cost of promo at the very same day – a story unheard of in the realm of promo sites. Each of my books landed below #10,000 bestseller rank in the Kindle store and at the first page of the bestseller’s categories.

It was nice, and I felt like a proper author.

Second Significant Event

On 8th of June I also did one more thing: I created the first Amazon ad campaign for someone other than me. Actually, I did that for Pete Smith and his sole book, Dare to Matter.

I had no clue how much weight this simple action carried. I just wanted to help Pete, because his awesome book was lost in Amazon’s abyss. It deserved better. And I found the thought appealing that I could be actually paid directly for the value I provide. Our deal was simple: I would have got 25% of any eventual income from sales made via my ads.

The next day, I launched another 8 campaigns for Pete.

A few days later, I got his text:

I was stoked beyond reason. It worked.

And it dawned on me: it was a great business model! I was paid by results. That meant no price tag and negotiations to my services. It also meant no cap on my income. I already advertised my 10 books. Taking 10 or 50 books of other authors would hardly increase my workload. It wasn’t like starting 10 or 50 gigs from scratch. And the earning potential was not limited.

Working with Pete, I discovered that you can write a good book, but still be clueless about marketing a book. At least Pete had some idea about copywriting. But he didn’t know the ins and outs of the Amazon platform like I did.

I was pretty excited thinking about how many great books are dead and neglected. And I could help them resurrect, find more readers, spread their message. Bring them back to life.

The First Failed Attempt

At the beginning of June, Aaron Walker contacted me and asked for help with promoting his book. Having the miraculous resurrection of Dare to Matter fresh in mind, I was eager to help. We exchanged multiple messages preparing his book for ads. View from the Top had the typical weaknesses of a book that wasn’t profiled for Amazon: the description wasn’t properly formatted and didn’t fit the online platform, editorial reviews weren’t properly highlighted and so on.

We worked for a few weeks only to discover that his publisher had NO clue how to start a profile on Amazon Marketing Services. They used some aggregator to get the book on Amazon, and they simply had no access to the tools I had.

This whole project wasted some of our time.

But the first success was firmly planted in my mind. I looked for more authors who could have used some book necromancy.

I also contacted Dave Chesson and explained my idea. He was very receptive, he gave me some great advice and asked me to get back to him when I had a landing page ready for this service, so he could send people to it.

All of those activities took me the whole month.

Life Trivia

In the last week of June, we planned short vacations in Ireland. I drove kids to Wroclaw, where we spent a night in our friends’ home, and then I flew with kids to Ireland and my wife went back home by train.

I needed to do a car checkup before the trip. Nothing went right. I spent practically two days at the car mechanic’s site waiting for my car to be fixed. I needed to take one day off at work because of that.

I remember that, at both times, I did all of my habits there

Habits that Will Make You a Millionaire – Part II of 3

A few days ago I shared the first three habits that will make you a millionaire. Today it’s time for three more.

4. Know Thyself.

“Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves–their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.” — Peter F. Drucker

This is crucial and so often overlooked by people who don’t understand the nature of success. If you think that success comes from a strike of dumb luck, there is no sense in getting to know your talents.



If you are convinced that success comes only to those especially gifted and you compare yourself to them, you don’t look for your unique abilities but for spectacular talents: singing like an angel, playing football like a pro, making investments like a fortuneteller or having the wit of a stage comedian.



And, of course, you don’t have them, so you deem yourself unfit for success. But every single human being is equipped with their own skills, history and talents, and this mishmash makes you unique in the scale of the universe.

Leverage this uniqueness and you can become the best in the world in what you are doing (and be adequately compensated for that). But first you need to get to know yourself.

Meditate, think on paper, brainstorm, draw mind maps or journal every day. Getting to know yourself is a journey that lasts a lifetime.

5. Personal Development.

“Income seldom exceeds personal development.” — Jim Rohn

The most common form of personal development among millionaires is reading books. I’m biased as an author and a lifelong reader, but I think it’s because it is the most efficient form of personal development.

Of course, there are other tools that provide enormous ROI: attending live events, masterminds, and coaching can change your game completely. But reading is the activity that you can do every day and only by yourself. You don’t need to coordinate schedules and agendas of other people to leverage books.



There are very few millionaires who admit that they don’t read personal development material of any kind. One of them is Gary Vaynerchuk. However, this guy is a freak who can draw self-knowledge from personal interactions. His ability to listen to others is legendary, and he built his own development around this skill.

But if you don’t feel you are close to ‘legendary,’ you’d better read books.

6. Maintaining Health.

Like every other habit on this list, health, per se, is not necessary to succeed. It is “only” highly desirable. It’s much easier to become a millionaire when you are full of energy, sleep well, eat well, exercise regularly, do health checkups regularly, etc.

In fact, all the above are very rare together. I know people who sleep well, others who eat healthy and others who regularly visit their doctor. But meeting an individual who does everything from this list? It’s as rare as a unicorn.

Sometimes a health struggle is what makes you successful. My friend Rebecca is dying much faster than most of us. She has a genetic disease, and doctors give her only 5 more years of life. Out of her desperation a drive to success begot, and she became a bestselling self-published author to provide for her family.

Nonetheless, such stories are exceptions, not the rule. Usually, the stronger you are, the more you can accomplish.

In a few days I’ll share another 3 “millionaire habits.”

The post Habits that Will Make You a Millionaire – Part II of 3 appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Habits that Will Make You a Millionaire – Part I

All these habits are handy for everyone, which doesn’t change the fact that they will speed up becoming a millionaire specifically for you.

1. Say What You Think and Do What You Say.

Great ideas are a dime a dozen. What differentiates millionaires from the rest of the pack is execution. You can develop a habit of execution not through planning and building multi-million ventures, but by following your own internal resolutions.

Only if you can make your deeds congruent with your decisions and declarations, you will make others to execute.

There is one additional aspect to that: if your integrity shines, you attract the right people. Your leadership takes less of your effort. People don’t second-guess your meaning. If you say “yes,” it means “yes.” This builds trust and make cooperation and teamwork frictionless.

2. Cultivate Your Vision.

You don’t become a millionaire in one day or one week. There are very rare stories of people like Kimra Luna’s who could make a million in the first big launch. Kimra made about a million in something like a week (I don’t recall details). But she had been amassing her experience for years before the launch. It was just the icing on the cake.

Making millions takes time. You need to keep your grand vision in front of your eyes and firmly established in your mind to keep going for years without much visible return.

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. — Robert Louis

I published my first book in 2013. For over three years, I struggled to make it as an author. I had a few good months when I made half of my day job salary or more, but I also had streaks of several months when I earned only a few hundred dollars and had to pay my business expenses from my salary.

(volatile history of my Kindle sales)

That was frustrating and exhausting. But I started every single of my days from my morning routine that included repetition of my personal mission statement, looking at my vision board, and reminding myself why I toil like a madman every single day.

Over a year ago, I finally found a vehicle that kicked my royalties from a few hundred a month to 1-3 thousand a month. I successfully used ads on Amazon for that. My books sell about a thousand copies a month. A few months ago, I started helping other authors to utilize Amazon ads. It became a new branch of my business that grows like crazy.

3. Deep Work.

It is also called focus or concentration. It’s the ability to sit on your butt and work for hours on a single project. This is how things are getting done in the real world.

It needs some clarity and prioritization too. It’s not enough to work hard to succeed. I know plenty of hard workers who stayed poor or are doing fine, but have never been close to a millionaire status.

Studying, reading and writing are good activities to develop this skill/habit.

In a few days I’ll share another 3 “millionaire habits.”

The post Habits that Will Make You a Millionaire – Part I appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Fiftieth Income Report – May 2017 ($1495.64)

Are you curious about a half-year delay? I explained it in my first income report.

May 2017 was… average. Not much out of the ordinary had happened.

I was busy writing Quora answers, importing them to Medium, formatting and submitting to publications. I added the usual batch of income reports and email broadcasts to the mix.

Coaching and Coach.me

At the beginning of May, I was featured on Coach.me’s email broadcast. Coach.me’s staff contacted me in advance and made sure I was available and wanted to get new clients. I was excited; I hoped for an onslaught of new clients. I got only 6 of them, and it appeared that some of them were freebie seekers. They sucked me dry in the first free week (that was my deal with Coach.me) and cancelled.

However, I still got 2 clients that stayed with me for several months. Each client means about $30 more in my monthly income. The best was that it was zero hassle for me; I already was doing it.

A Praise for Coach.me

From time to time, a new coaching platform contacts me and invites me to use their services. Once or twice, I even created an account.

And totally nothing has ever happened. The power of Coach.me lies in the fact that they are doing the marketing for you. If you are a good coach, you will get noticed and you will get featured.

Their system ranks coaches based on their client’s performance, something I hadn’t seen anywhere else.



I did on Coach.me only what I had done on other platforms: I created a coaching profile. 90% of my clients are finding me inside the platform. The fact that I use Coach.me for tracking my personal habits every day only enforces my position on the platform and is another advantage I didn’t see on any other platform.

You can use the application and teach others inside the community. It’s simply awesome.

Amazon Ads

I found enough keywords for three additional campaigns for each of my books. For the sake of this report, I checked their profitability. They earned me about $300 in less than four months, and they are still providing new sales. I guesstimate that my rate per hour spent on creating those ads is north of $80.

And those particular campaigns weren’t especially profitable nor efficient.

A Battle with a Gatekeeper

At the beginning of the month, I discovered a great opportunity to earn decent money with writing. Medium has created their paywall and they paid $500 per article about personal development. I contacted the editor and provided my idea. I even had a draft article ready on Medium.

Initially, the editor gave me a green light. I was stoked! That might have been my way out from my day job! The story hadn’t finished in May, which is one of my complaints, but I will tell it to the end.

I wrote a long and well-researched article. I paid my proofreader to correct it. I applied her corrections. Then I waited about a month, following up a few times. In the end, I got the reply that my writing stinks and it’s not what the editors hoped for.

I fulfilled his every requirement. I spent hours on researching, writing and correcting. He had a look at my material before he gave me the green light.

Yet, in the end, he rejected my article.

Lesson:

That was a straw that broke the camel’s back. I had enough of gatekeepers. In fact, I’ve had enough gatekeepers for the rest of my life. You would have to be very convincing to persuade me to solicit a single article to a magazine, publication or blog.

The exact process happened to me for the second time. In 2013, Firepole Marketing rejected my guest post a few days before publication. I went through a few rounds of edition to comply with their wishes and they told me to back off.

At least they told me something. 80% of the time I pitched my writing, I got no response at all.

So, when it comes to gatekeepers, I don’t care for the whole lot anymore.

Strangely enough, when there are no middlemen between me and my readers – on my blog, Amazon, Quora or Medium -readers engage with my stories. Thousands of people joined my email list, bought my books or followed me on Quora and Medium. I have several hundred positive reviews and testimonials from my readers.

Why would I waste my time on pleasing the editors, when I can please my readers without banging my head against an editor’s gates?

Gatekeepers are from the dinosaurs’ era, when writers needed to beg them to put their words in front of readers.

Nowadays, this is upside down. Now, gatekeepers are desperately looking for writers who can engage readers. Editors are willing to pay them or reward them in other ways. Writers who write good stories are rewarded by Quora with exposure. When you write regularly and readers like you, Quora sends more readers your way.

On Medium, publications reached out to me and invited me on board. Recently, Medium started to invite writers to their “behind the paywall” program. And writers will be compensated based on readers’ engagement.

My 16-year-old son writes fanfiction on Wattpad. His writing is horrible compared with traditional publishers’ standards. I don’t believe he edits his stories at all. Yet, he has a few dozen followers. People are reading his stuff and interacting directly with him.

Dinosaurs died out. Gatekeepers will die out too.

Audiobooks

In May, I prepared two manuscripts for audiobook production. I sent them to Archangel Ink and got quotes. Those productions were costly, both of them summed up to almost a thousand bucks. They drained my investment fund in June.

A Fruitful Call

On the 1st of May, 2017 I called American author, Pete Smith, and gave him some free tips about how to improve his Amazon presence. We chatted for about 30 minutes. I helped him because I was very impressed by his book. I had no agenda in mind.

I had no idea what I had started. Down the road, Pete became the first client of my Amazon ads service. Because our cooperation was so successful, I reached out to other authors and offered them my help with marketing their books. As of now, I run campaigns for 11 other authors.

However, on 1st of May, it was still months ahead and I had no clue what I had started.

New Proofreader

I split ways with my previous proofreader; she definitely wasn’t satisfied with the meager allowances I paid her, and I didn’t blame her. I basically paid her Fiverr’s rates, because that was all I could afford. Or I thought so.

Anyway, I was lucky to have another proofreader at hand. She did a few jobs for me pro bono publico, and I was very happy with our cooperation. I offered her proofreading everything I produce, and she was glad to take the job even with those laughable fees. Well, she did that for free before, so I think it was an improvement for her.

So, in the exact moment I needed a new proofreader, I got one. People call it serendipity. I call it Providence.

Our cooperation is as smooth as possible. She proofread about 150,000 words of my works, and I found only a few cases when she misunderstood my intention. That’s incredible. We understand each other so well, that it seems like magic. She is very accurate and replies promptly to my messages. She took quite a lot of editing workload off my shoulders.

We’ve never met each other. We’ve never even had a phone call. Yet, we work as a well-knit team. How is this possible?

God is good.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €1082.97 ($1191.27)

CreateSpace royalties: €875.72 ($963.29)

Coach.me fees: $370.87

Draft2Digital royalties: $16.35

Audiobooks royalties: $65.66

PWIW personal coaching: $143.85

Affiliate commission for KD Sales Machine course: $38.5

Total: $2789.79

Costs:

$36.9, View From the Top Community fee

$29, Aweber fee

$20, InstaFreebie fee

$20, proofreading

$265, Business on Purpose mastermind

$80.80, royalties split with co-author

$261.62, Amazon ads

$20, RA’s (RA = Real Assistant; my son

Forty Ninth Income Report – April 2017 ($1725.51)

Are you curious about a one-year delay? I explained it in my first income report.

April 2017 was a good month. I finally started to gain momentum on Medium. I had been re-publishing there my Quora answers since August quite consistently with little results. In March 2017 I ramped up my views on that platform to 500 a month. Sheesh!

The only positive thing about this was that my son did most of the work. He imported the answers to Medium, formatted them and copied images from one platform to another. All I needed to do was review, correct if necessary, add tags and hit publish.

In April 2017, I discovered the secret formula for success on Medium: publications. I was accepted as a contributor to Thrive publications. When other editors saw my articles, they approached me and asked for my articles.

I changed my strategy on Medium. My new default began to be submission to a publication before I decided to publish an article under my account. It made the difference. My Medium views in April climbed to 2,700, and they have been climbing ever since.

Amazon Ads

I observed a decline in my sales from January to February, and from February to March. It was a trend I didn’t like.

April was also busy with creating new ads. I created over 100 of them. Before you gasp with admiration, try to keep in mind that once I research a set of keywords, I use it 10 times for ten different books. That’s the unfair advantage of having multiple books out there.

Those ads got over 44 million impressions, and over 18,000 clicks since I created them. They cost me almost $700 to run for half a year.

In the past six months, the ads from April 2017 provided about 354% ROI, and approximately 17 hundred bucks of income (with Amazon ads, everything is “approximately,” their reporting truly sucks).

Isn’t it wonderful? I wrote my books a few years ago, and those ads were the vehicles that transmitted them to new readers. I did the job once and gained 17 hundred dollars. That’s as close to the passive income model as I’ve ever got.

Free Books Experiment

In April 2017, I made another experiment. I created 9 new ads for my two permafree books. I run ads for one of them for a month, and for another for one week.

The ads of free books got almost 2.5 million impressions, and 1530 clicks. I estimate that about every other click ended up as a download of a free book. I ended up with paying less than 6 cents per download of my free book. Economically, it didn’t make much sense. However, if every single person who downloaded my books would have read them, I would have gladly paid such a price.

By the way, performance of ads for free books seriously impeaches the pricing of most promo sites for authors. Getting 100 free downloads should cost about $6. The fees are often much higher, and the results questionable at best.

Change of Process

Because of the number of new ads, I needed to change the way I’ve been tracking their results. Till April, I used a very labor-intensive process: I did two print screens of the AMS dashboard, sent them to my son, and he transcribed data from print screens into a Google sheet. That way, I had a very granular data.

But you know what? I had no time to analyze them!

I quit the concept of tracking the single ad’s performance. In April 2017, I “discovered” the data export button in the dashboard, and taught my son how to import data from CSV to Excel correctly. Then he needed just to copy them into a Google sheet. That accelerated the process tenfold.

Dare to Matter

That month, I read an awesome book, Dare to Matter, and liked it very much. One time, I visited the book’s page on Amazon and noticed its pitiful rank, somewhere around the half a million mark.

This was so very wrong! Why was such a good book ranked so very low? Yes, the author could’ve changed a thing here and there. The description could’ve been more compelling, and there were no editorial reviews featured. But overall, the packaging wasn’t overly awful and the content was great.

I contacted the author, Pete Smith. If I recall correctly, I first sent him a Tweet, then wrote a review, because he asked for it, and finally I offered my help in improving the book’s performance on Amazon. We scheduled the call for the 1st of May.

A Podcast Interview

A host of Kick’n It with Daree contacted me. She read my book about creating a personal mission statement and wanted to interview me. I agreed. In fact, I read her email in the morning and we did the interview in the evening, because it was the best time for us both in the next couple of weeks.

Such events are the aftereffect of publishing a book. I would have never met Daree otherwise.

Working Hard & Playing Hard

In April 2017, there was Easter. As usual, I took a couple of days off work before the holidays to attend all the celebrations. I spent more time with my family. I found in my journal entries about going with my wife to a theatre and to a cinema with kids. I took my daughter to an all-night Passover celebration.

In the last weekend of April, I went with my eldest son for a fantasy convention. We spent there three days. I met the guys from a distant part of Poland with whom I played my favorite card game several years ago.

I took my laptop with me and did all my business activities at the hotel or at the convention: writing, checking on my coaching clients, publishing on Quora, etc.

But I also played the card game for several hours every day.

InstaFreebie Giveaway

Raza Imam organized a very successful giveaway on InstaFreebie platform in April 2017. It was almost zero effort for me. I’ve already had a book on InstaFreebie; I needed only to create a giveaway with several clicks. I also created a dedicated email list in MailChimp for the giveaway.

Of course, I wrote a broadcast to my email list about the giveaway, but I was writing broadcasts every week, so it made little difference.

The results were spectacular. The Art of Persistence was downloaded several hundred times. What is more, it got the attention of InstaFreebie, and their staff offered to include my book in their next blog blast. So I extended the giveaway life on the platform for another week, and the book got a few hundred more downloads.

I ended up with 1,192 new subscribers, which almost doubled the size of my list.

Every author who is not on InstaFreebie misses out big time!

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €1181.25 ($1299.37)

CreateSpace royalties: €1017.02 ($1118.72)

Coach.me fees: $334.64

Draft2Digital royalties: $10.32

Audiobooks royalties: $22.82

PWIW personal coaching: $143.85

Affiliate commission for KD Sales Machine course: $38.5

NoiseTrade tip: $3.45

Total: $2971.67

Costs:

$36.9, View From the Top Community fee

$29, Aweber fee

$20, InstaFreebie fee

$265, Business on Purpose mastermind

$96.96, royalties split with co-author

$722.3, Amazon ads

$76, RA’s (RA = Real Assistant; my son