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!

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!

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!

Almost finished an important step and other passive income stuff

I focused on getting my first downloadable product done last night and realized the install instructions were missing an important step. So I'm finishing that today and will upload to Etsy.

I've also made a few other decisions on my passive income business checklist:

• Decided to change my dropshipping nails store to an affiliate store. Mainly because I don't feel like rewriting titles and descriptions every time new products are added. I also don't feel like processing orders and doing customer service. So I'll be making the switch today as soon as I finish the Etsy upload.
• I scrapped the PLR blogs idea and am sticking with autoblogs fed by RSS feeds. The setup time is less and I'll never have to maintain it.

This is my week off from school until classes start again on Monday. I am determined to get at least two passive income streams started.

To-do list for passive income

It is August 2019 and I still haven't completed any of the steps to get an online passive income stream going. My personality is such that if I don't write something down along with a plan to get it done, it won't get done. This is true whether it is a task for church, school, business or work. When I wrote a plan for my education, I was able to earn the associates, and I'll have earned a Bachelor degree by the end of this year God willing. The same applies for my passive income streams. It isn't done because I haven't written a plan for it.

Last week I initially just wrote an outline, then I wrote out the details to get each item done. One plan I started a few years ago but never completed was a huge set of blogs. I got the idea from warrior forum. The idea was to setup a collection of blogs using free PLR articles and then activate Adsense on them. But of course now that I have a plan and start to execute, I find out that Adsense requires extra file uploads and reviews to be activated. That is extra work I don't want to do and more time waiting for income to start. So I'm pivoting and using Ebay partner network instead. No waiting required. I just have to focus on blogs that can advertise related products available on Ebay. Shouldn't be hard, and no approval or waiting necessary. Yay for progress.

Made another dropshipping sale, and I'm building the web development business

Yesterday I made a dropshipping sale on Bonanza, a platform I totally forgot I signed up for. Just before ebay suspended my selling privileges, I started researching other platforms to sell on and had signed up for a Bonanza account. They offered to crosslist my ebay items for free so I did it and forgot all about Bonanza while in my feelings about not selling on ebay anymore.

Well wouldn't you know it, yesterday I got email and Paypal notifications, and when I logged in noticed it was a sale from Bonanza. So yay for that. I processed the order right away and will be listing new dropship items on there shortly. Just have to put that task on the schedule.

My ideas for growing my web development business include offering web development services, selling downloadable website templates and website graphics. I got the idea for selling downloads after watching some Youtube videos on how to make money on Etsy by selling digital downloads. I researched and saw many sellers offering website templates so I opened a new shop to do the same. I have a few likes already but no sales yet. I'll also be opening a shop to sell other downloads like invitations, resumes, flyers, etc. I have a lot of stuff I've created over the years as well as tools for creating new designs. And this all ties in with reducing physical inventory in our home. Its all coming together. Slowly but surely.