💰 Income Report: February 2019

Amazon FBA

Sales: 3,077
Revenue: $52,587.93
Profit: $5,718.76
Gross Margin: 9%
2019 💰 Profit to Date: $11,279.28

Amazon FBA profits were up month over month, even with about $3,000 less revenue generated (keeping in mind that the month of February only has 28 days).

I spend a portion of the month combing through Jungle Scout's Product Database in search of new SKUs to launch, and came up with a list of 6 that looked promising.

After finding suppliers & ordering samples for the 6, I ended up placing orders for just 2 of the products. Sometimes the price just isn't right - if you're not comfortable with the margins, it's OK to move on from a product.

In this case it was easy to move on from them as I had only invested time, but no money. Even the samples were free, as I have a contact that lives in China that I use to help with sourcing & ordering samples units.

(One of the benefits of actually going to China is the opportunity to strengthen your working relationships)

* Me in Tiananmen Square in 2019

Here's a chart of my best selling FBA SKUs in February (product names omitted)

I've basically completely locked down a niche and can rely on it each month for $5,000+ profit. Here's what I did:

• Launched 2 brands in the same niche
• Used Brand Registry on 1 of the 2 (2nd brand is currently being trademarked)
• Sell 14 SKUs in this niche, each with slight variations (1 is a major variant that I no longer stock due to high costs associated)

This way I don't feel like my profits are at risk if a competitor should start spring boarding their way up the organic ranks.

As of writing this, I have 4 of the top 5 organic spots on the primary traffic-driving keywords for the niche.

It's something I learned from doing Amazon Merch for 2+ years - if you find something that works, double, trip, QUADRUPLE down on it!

I own this niche :)

Here's a glimpse into my Campaign Manager ad spend for February:

• Spend: $3,042.89
• Sales: $15,506.01
• ACoS: 19.62%

My advertising cost of sale (ACoS) was nearly 20% which might intimidate some of you, but advertising prices are rising across the board in the eCommerce space, so this is the new norm.

It's also worth a reminder that any sales generated from advertising will still help boost your products organic rank.

Amazon Merch

Sales: 263
Revenue: $5,686.63
Royalty: $1,273.16
Avg. Royalty: $4.84
2019 💰 Profit to Date: $2,221.85

Outside of uploading trends that I come across, I really didn't spend much time on Amazon Merch this month.

I probably uploaded around 50 products over the entire month, and my account had about 3,900 products for sale on average for the duration of February.

The biggest change month over month from January was drastic drop off in returns... I went from 43 returns in January to only 5 in February.

It's not that I was selling crappy shirts, it had more to do with people who received my products as gifts over the holidays that didn't like the look and/or feel don't hesitate to return them since Amazon has the world's best return policy.

My best selling t-shirts were all uploads from months prior related to ex-NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick that said #IMWITHKAP.

Normally I wouldn't share my niches, but someone trademarked it in March and I had to pull all of my products down.

Which makes this a great opportunity to mention that both Merch Titans (my preference) & Merch Informer offer automated trademark checking software that helps protect your Merch account from getting strikes if someone trademarks your design months/years after your initial upload.

I use Merch Titans myself & would recommend you check it out - your Merch account is worth protecting... If you needed any further proof, re-read the previous few sentenced where I mentioned I made $1,273.16 of profit while spending about 20 minutes uploading 50 products over the month.

I should also mention that when you receive an alert that one of your designs was removed for breaking my "Golden Rule" of print on demand (don't infringe...), you should IMMEDIATELY pull all of your designs down from any platforms that it's currently for sale on!

/end Rant about avoiding Trademark infringement.

Anyways, outside of my #IMWITHKAP shirts I sold a mix of evergreens, and upon analyzing my best sellers I noticed that many of them had 5-star reviews placed on them which helps them stand out in the crowded search results on Amazon.

Any shirt of mine that has ANY review I will bump to $19.99.

Dropshipped Print-on-Demand

Sales: 253
Profit: $1,324.52
2019 💰 Profit to Date: $2,464.11

Sales by platform:

There wasn't much of note regarding my print on demand sales in February - pretty much the same old story - Printful hats were selling well on Amazon & Etsy, and Gearbubble coffee mugs on Amazon (which by the way you don't need to use Gearbubble to fulfill... Printful offers 11oz/15oz white mugs and the black mugs are currently in beta).

Join Printful today »

I would use this as an opportunity to remind you guys that all day, every day I am uploading print on demand products to Amazon for sale via my Seller Central account. To do so, you need to:

1. Open a PRO Amazon seller account ($39.99/mo)
2. Obtain a GTIN exemption so that you don't need UPC codes to create new listings on Amazon
3. Open a FREE Printful account & integrate it with Seller Central (easy 1-time process)
4. Push products to Amazon throughout the day using Printful's easy to use, intuitive product wizard

Seriously - it's SO easy to do that I do it for both my Amazon.com & Amazon.co.uk accounts. The $40/mo fee is easy to offset using profits generated from Printful alone, so give it a shot!

The biggest distinction from selling this way (which is know as Fulfilled by Merchant, or "FBM") is that unlike Amazon Merch, these products will ALWAYS be available for sale on Amazon... whereas on Merch if they don't sell within 180 days, the listing is deleted.

• Spend: $378.73 $135.64 MoM
• Revenue: $1,201.44 $455.28 MoM
• ACoS: 31.5% 1.1% MoM
• CPC: $0.12 (avg bid: $0.16) $0.01 MoM
• CTR: 0.96% 0.24%

I averaged 1.2 sales per day on Redbubble, and treated it similar to how I treated Amazon Merch on the month, where I didn't spend much time uploading at all and probably added 50 products or so.

My best selling product on Redbubble were stickers, which I sell at a 125% profit margin (which you can manually configure per product type here). My second best sellers were t-shirts.

I would be uploading more to POD websites, but there are two main reasons why I've slowed down a bit:

1. I can now automate both the design & upload process to the major POD platforms, making manual uploads obsolete
2. I'm working so hard on this website, the accompanying YouTube channel, & FBA/Merch/POD courses

(Keeping in mind, I still work a 9 to 5 job + teach 3 college courses)

"Future me" is going to be extremely happy & grateful for all of the hard work I've been putting in lately.

Google Ads

Earnings: $132.20
Page Views: 255,430
Ad Impressions: 861,049
2019 💰 Profit to Date: $305.54

I run a few popular websites where I collect advertising revenue via Google Ads (formerly Google AdSense). I also collect revenue via direct partnerships with advertisers & from affiliate links, but for times sake, I'm going to omit those deals.

I won't be doing month-to-month write ups here because I don't spend much time maintaining these websites. They started out as passion projects that allowed me to become a better web developer, but today I spend very little time working on them.

Instagram

I also decided to start an Instagram this month, in hopes that one day I can make money on Instagram. We'll see what happens!