Earned some passive income yesterday!

I'm so excited to share that we earned some passive income yesterday! We made sales from the Etsy shop that sells digital printable files, and we also made our first Redbubble sale!

This is so exciting! It's so hard to focus on executing these businesses because I keep getting new ideas so I've been praying for help on that. And I am still grateful for the success!

Back to creating WordPress templates

So now that I've graduated, I can get back to creating WordPress templates! My goal is to use the remaining free listings in the Etsy shop so I can move on to creating other digital products. 

My plan was to create templates for multi-page sites. But what's been selling for me is the single page templates so I'm going to stick with that for now. The bonus is that single page templates take way less time to create than multi-page templates. So off to work I go!

Creating a WordPress theme is hard work!

Part of my digital products business plan was to offer WordPress themes. I'm about 90% done creating my first theme. I'm testing it with sample data form WordPress.org as well as WooCommerce, and let me tell you: creating WordPress themes is no joke.

I didn't even start from scratch! I decided to customize a starter theme. If I had to code everything from a blank screen, I probably would've scrapped the project because it would've been too time consuming.

I should be done soon though and I can't wait to offer it to the world. So excited!

Additional digital download business ideas

I started opened a store to sell SVG downloads, and I'm also planning to open a store that sells Instagram template downloads.

The SVG business had to be paused so I can finish executing the websites templates business.

But I should have all three up and running by the end of this year.

The website template business made a sale!

Last week I discovered that my website template business made a sale! Someone bought a one page WordPress template from my Etsy shop. So that made me very excited, and I wanted to list more templates, and use up my free listings, and so on.

But I forget that creating templates takes time. And a few things happened since the last time I created a template: I've started graduate school, my laptop died and I had to buy a new one, the new one didn't work out so I had to get another one. And I never saved a list of everything I use in my workflow. So I've had to restart in a sense. And restarting has been exhausting.

But I am so grateful for the sale. Making the first sale in any venture is always the biggest hurdle to get over. And I'm getting closer to my goal of having a stream of income that can be mostly hands-free.

One of my goals for today is to create another website template and get it uploaded to Etsy. And I'll save everything in a Google Doc this time.

How should I fix the website I'm using for Pinterest?

My Pinterest business is based on an autoblog that creates posts with affiliate links every day. The posts have Pinterest sharing buttons so I can just click to share the post to Pinterest. The item photo, item title and affiliate link are automatically included in the pin. However, I noticed that my website doesn't have an item description. It only has a photo, item name and link to buy or add to a watchlist. So the user would have to click a buy link just to get details on the item. I haven't received any clicks yet and I think that's part of the reason. My blog posts need to include item descriptions.

In order to display descriptions, I'd have to use the API. I could code it myself and have to recreate the website in the process. I could also use a WordPress plugin. But all the plugins I've researched haven't been updated in two years! I'm afraid to invest in software that hasn't been updated in so long.

Or I could leave it as is and hope that quantity will beat quality.

I need to figure this out soon!

I've fallen behind on my WordPress template creation schedule

And I have a plan, but let me explain first...

I had to admit to myself that my Javascript skills sucked and I needed to improve them ASAP to be considered a legit web developer. I found a few good tutorials and now I'm kinda obsessed with Javascript. I'm dreaming up all kinds of apps to create with it. So that took up some time.

I'm also starting a Master's degree program on March 1st and wanted to research as much as I could about it before I got started. I spent A LOT of time researching student experiences and taking notes on how I want to accelerate the program. Then I came across a post by a student that said to enjoy any freetime before starting the program because I pretty much won't have any once it begins. And I remembered that I have a goal of getting templates uploaded. So...

I'll be porting existing HTML designs to WordPress. I started with PSD files but it's been getting harder to find PSD that include images. And while I won't always use the free images included, it's good to have them for an idea of the "look" the template should have. 

The quickest way to get this done will be to download the all the HTML templates I want to port first. I've created a folder for my downloads business that contains three additional folders to categorize the projects: Active, Future Projects, and Completed. As I complete a project I'll move it from the Active Folder to the Completed folder. Future projects contains all the HTML designs I've downloaded ahead of time.

I've downloaded three HTML designs so far, only 20 to go.

Update to WordPress templates business

I paused the WordPress business templates idea because I couldn't figure out how to make the Elementor website files downloadable. I kept experimenting with ways to export an entire site but nothing worked. I paused the business because I couldn't figure out how to get it to work. Which is a really horrible excuse.

Luckily this month I learned that I can export page layouts created with Elementor. There is also a great market for Elementor templates on several platforms. So now I'm re-energized and can create downloadable templates easily. I'm happy because I want to create a business with my web development skills for passive income and this appears to be the perfect fit.

My plan is to list 26 items on Etsy by February 29th.
The schedule to get this done is as follows:
Week of February 10th: 9 listings
Week of February 17th: 9 listings
Week of February 24th: 8 listings

My graduate program starts on March 1st so I want to maximize this freetime. So excited!

Starting the affiliate site I'm solely marketing via Pinterest

I've been wanting to work on affiliate marketing via Pinterest for a while. I earned some affiliate commissions last year and I wasn't even trying. So now that I've completed other projects I wanted to focus on this. Last week I starting pinning affiliate items to Pinterest, only to find out that Pinterest removed the ability for users to edit pins from websites that are not their own. (This is what happens when you put things off and don't keep up with what is happening in the industry LOL). The only two workarounds for this are to either 1) create pins from scratch with my own images, generate an affiliate link, and insert the affiliate link, OR 2) create my own affiliate website and pin from there. I was not about to create every pin from scratch so option #2 it is.

First I setup my Pinterest business account and decided on a niche. The username for the business account is related to the niche. Then I created seven boards with topics that are all related to the niche.

To create the affiliate website, I bought a cheap but keyword-relevant domain name. Had some issues setting up the SSL with my webhosting service but everything is fixed now.

The new theme and plugins are installed (all free). Now I just need to load the blog posts so I can start pinning. I created a new affiliate code for the products I'll be promoting via this new site so tracking all activity will be simple.

The plan is to pin to every board once a day. I'll do it myself at first (I don't have any other sites to promote). If the results are good I'll either start using software or hire someone to do the pinning for me. I start graduate school next month and don't want the work to stop because I have to study. I'll give the business 6 months and decide what the next step will be at that time. I'm so excited

Started two of my Udemy courses this week, and they're already outdated

I bought two Udemy courses while I was in school that I wanted to start as soon as I graduated: one on Bootstrap 4 and one on WordPress theme and plugin development. I bought the Bootstrap course in February 2019, and the WordPress course in December 2019. I finished school in December 2019.

I started both of them this week and am a little disappointed. The Bootstrap 4 course has outdated videos referring to the "alpha" version of Bootstrap 4. To put this in perspective, Bootstrap is currently in version 4.4.1. Which means that I would get better instruction from W3Schools or Youtube, which are free.

The WordPress theme and plugin development course seems to have been updated, because the course files don't match the video modules. I've learned and taken some notes, but I'm not sure if I want to spend more time on something that obviously hasn't been updated in a while.

Learning web development can be so frustrating!

W3.CSS just got on my nerves

One of my goals this year is to have a working knowledge of some CSS frameworks, and W3.CSS is one of them. I'm redoing one of my business sites with it and everything was going great until I tried to apply a color from their "Flat UI" color palette to some text. It doesn't work! It appears that W3.CSS has a limited set of colors that can be applied to text. Any colors other than those found at https://www.w3schools.com/w3css/w3css_references.asp#textcolor have to be applied manually. Which I feel defeats the purpose of using a framework.

I keep thinking about creating an awesome stylesheet that features semantic markup and a professional-looking color scheme that anyone can use. I know I would personally love to be able to link to a stylesheet and have colors applied to all the HTML elements perfectly. I need to work on it.

In the meantime, I need to finish this W3.CSS project so I can move on to a website using Foundation.

I'm offering a SVG file for free

I created a silhouette cut file of the island of Puerto Rico with a Feliz Navidad message. The cut file kit contains SVG, PNG and DXF formats and can be downloaded at at this link

Aaaand another website project is done!

Today I finished an idea I had for helping women make money with their cars. The website is https://ladiesmakemoneydriving.com/ and it provides information on driving for Lyft, Uber and Instacart.

Onto the next!