How I Made $325,785.19 Online in One Year with Passive Income!
https://www.johnnyfd.com/2017/01/how-i-made-32578519-online-in-one-year.html
In the past year I've learned more about money, business, and success than my entire life prior. My goal for writing this post is to pass the insights that has helped me go from making less than $1,000 a month for years and years to almost making that per day. Even at my highest paid career out of college I was never able to break the $48,000 a year mark, and that was working full time as an account executive for a giant corporation.
I'm really going to try and give you everything including the good, bad, ups and downs as I think it's important to see the whole picture if you want to achieve the same type of success. I've been super fortunate to of had the right mentors, business partners and jump on the right opportunities to make me a success today and I want to give back. So here it is, this is exactly how I made over $300,000 in a year and everything I've learned along the way, that will hopefully help you be able to achieve the same. Here it is, lessons learned, tips, tricks and strategies that helped me make over a quarter of a million dollars last year in take home profit while traveling the world to 17 countries and doing everything on a laptop.
I'm not going to spend too much time breaking down the exact sources of the income as I already went over it in detail in my december income report but I'm here to tell you that the actual sources don't matter as much as the mindset and the "why" behind it, which is the real key to making over $100,000 a year from your online business. If you don't understand that yet, go ahead and just read the income reports and take it from there. But if you really want to have the best chance at joining the $300,000 a year club, keep reading and take these next few sections to heart.
Most people look at the "what" and assume that's that. "He makes it from the orange category, I'll do that."
People who are slightly more advanced look at the how and try to get into the same types of business or replicate their success backwards. "Oh he uses these tools, I'll just copy that." These people will never get to the top 3% earners as they will be fighting for the bottom 30%.
Here is a link to all of my income reports just in case you are new to my blog and haven't been following the journey.
But the truth is even though you may make a okay amount of money doing that, you'll always be behind chasing for your slice of leftover pie instead along with everyone else instead of being able to create your own and having the whole thing to yourself.
But since it's an easy visual way to start, below are the main categories of the "What" I made money from last year. Not listed here is my "other" category that I sometimes include in my income reports which was profit from taking coaching calls at $1,595.53 total for the year and the money I made from investments which totaled $2,290.51 last year.
This is why there isn't a "too long, didn't read" section in this or any of my blog posts. But I do take the time to make graphics to make it easy to understand and visually see.
Finding out what, who, where, and when is important. But understanding why is the real key.
Learning how to make money with an online business isn't actually that hard. There is so much free and paid information out there yet some people are hugely successful while others continue to fail or stay broke. Here's the reason why it took me until now to start seeing real success and why it started skyrocketing in the past 2 years.
From when I got my first job at 15, up until just a few years ago, I was cursed with having the sca mentality. I wanted things to be guaranteed, easy or otherwise preset. I would rather take a guaranteed hourly or yearly salary position instead of one where I could either get $0 or grow my income exponentially. Even with business, it was more appealing to me to try take a pie of someone else's pie than to learn how to bake my own. Now that I'm successful, I have plenty of people who have been now trying to do the same to me. I've had people try to copy my dropshipping stores, come into my niche, or use my name and reputation to get some free traffic to their site. But even though I'm sure some of them made a few bucks, 99% of them failed and are still broke and 100% of them are secretly miserable and alone.
The simple truth is you need to add real value to the world to get paid for it in return. Life and business is simple economics. In 2016 I provided $325,785.19 worth of value to the world and was paid back accordingly. That was done in a combination of the knowledge and experience I shared in the form of books people brought, to the physical goods they ordered from my stores, to selling the store itself. It also included the value I provided showing others how to either get started or scale up their own businesses. A good example is my book Life Changes Quick, you can read the review below for an example of what creating value in exchange for money looks like.
You get paid what you're worth. If the value you bring is worth $0, you'll get paid accordingly.
Here's a secret that I've never publically stated but want to share. My mind now thinks in multiples, and that is the real secret on how I went from making $48,000 a year at my highest to $325,785 last year. When I had a corporate job, I knew that for me to increase my income I had to either get a raise, or a promotion but even then it'll take a long time to double my salary, yet alone multiple it by 670%. When I wrote my first book detailing how I managed to live cheaply in Thailand and do what I loved all day which included scuba diving and training as a Muay Thai fighter in 12 Weeks in Thailand I knew that for me to go from making $400 a month from that book to something high enough to sustain myself I'd need to either write two more books or I'd have to create a new stream of income.
My second business was starting my first drop shipping store, which brought in an average of $2,000-$4,000 a month depending on the season and the month. At that point, I could have been content as I was now making more than enough to continue living cheaply in Thailand. I wanted to update my book on living cheap with a second edition or a follow up, but I didn't have the time or incentive to sit down and write an entire second book with the hopes to make an additional $200 a month. It just didn't make financial sense as adding a 5% multiplier to my income wasn't worth the effort especially when I could have used that time to create a second dropshipping store like I ended up doing with Larissa. Or something else that could potentially have a 150% or higher income gain.
If you still don't understand what a multiplier is, here's the simple breakdown before we continue.
Looking at the chalkboard example above, you can see how things can potentially multiply. By me simply writing a book and charging $9.99 for it, I could potentially make an extra $200 a month or so which would increase my total income by around 10%. By starting a second drop shipping store, I could potentially make another $2,000 or so a month which would multiply my income by 200%.
But neither the real secret on how I increased my income by over 1,500% is something that I shared in my second book Life Changes Quick. I talked about it in detail in in chapter 7 of the book entitled "Traveling Like a Boss and Sharing it with Others."
The secret to multiplying your income is by doing something both scalable and the effects compounding. By me writing a second book, the direct income may only be a 10% increase in my total income. By me starting a second ecommerce store, the effect may 1.5x my income or potentially double it, but it isn't scalable from there. The only way to scale an ecommerce store to make you a millionaire is by bringing more people in. Huge million dollar dropshipping stores such as Wayfair or Hayneedle also have giant staff requirements with Wayfair currently at 2,353 employees and Hayneedle having close to 1,000 full time workers.
Instead of hiring more employees which is something I didn't want to deal with or manage, I decided to scale my income by both partnering with others to start their own stores or teaching people how I did it so they can start one on their own. By being a provider of information instead of being the actual one starting the store myself, it breaks the barrier of limiting myself to one or two that I could manage myself. This allows me to potentially help thousands of people by guiding them to start their own. I knew that by taking the time to write the second book, it would inspire others and give them the blueprint on how to start themselves which would in turn grow my blog, podcast, newsletter, and subscriber reach, something which is infinitely scalable.
Watch this video where I breakdown what I actually mean by all of this.
A lot of people had questions from this post so here's an update:
Q: Are those total revenue/sales numbers? How much was your net profit?
A: The $325,785 was net profit but didn't include living or travel expenses. My total revenue/sales including sales from my dropshipping stores would have made that number closer to $1 Million which would have sounded more awesome but would have been misleading.
Q: Why do you have such a cheap looking microphone and cheap clothes if you're that rich?
A: The mic I'm using is an Audio Technica ATR-2100 and is actually one of the best USB mics out there. The only reason why it looks so beat up is because I travel so much and abuse it. But aside from that, I'm more focused on bootstrapping my earnings into savings and investments and becoming truly wealthy instead of just looking the part online.
Q: What did you do with the $325,000 you made this year?
A: Aside from taxes which we all have to pay, a lot of it went to travel expenses as I visited 17 counties in 2016, but the rest of it went to investments. Below is one of my accounts where I keep alot of my money. If you want to know more, listen to Episode 09 of Invest Like a Boss where I break down everything I invest in.
I hope everyone the best of luck with your businesses! If you have any questions you'd like answered, feel free to ask below!
I'm really going to try and give you everything including the good, bad, ups and downs as I think it's important to see the whole picture if you want to achieve the same type of success. I've been super fortunate to of had the right mentors, business partners and jump on the right opportunities to make me a success today and I want to give back. So here it is, this is exactly how I made over $300,000 in a year and everything I've learned along the way, that will hopefully help you be able to achieve the same. Here it is, lessons learned, tips, tricks and strategies that helped me make over a quarter of a million dollars last year in take home profit while traveling the world to 17 countries and doing everything on a laptop.
What, Where, How
I'm not going to spend too much time breaking down the exact sources of the income as I already went over it in detail in my december income report but I'm here to tell you that the actual sources don't matter as much as the mindset and the "why" behind it, which is the real key to making over $100,000 a year from your online business. If you don't understand that yet, go ahead and just read the income reports and take it from there. But if you really want to have the best chance at joining the $300,000 a year club, keep reading and take these next few sections to heart.
Most people look at the "what" and assume that's that. "He makes it from the orange category, I'll do that."
People who are slightly more advanced look at the how and try to get into the same types of business or replicate their success backwards. "Oh he uses these tools, I'll just copy that." These people will never get to the top 3% earners as they will be fighting for the bottom 30%.
Here is a link to all of my income reports just in case you are new to my blog and haven't been following the journey.
The Whole Pie
But the truth is even though you may make a okay amount of money doing that, you'll always be behind chasing for your slice of leftover pie instead along with everyone else instead of being able to create your own and having the whole thing to yourself.
But since it's an easy visual way to start, below are the main categories of the "What" I made money from last year. Not listed here is my "other" category that I sometimes include in my income reports which was profit from taking coaching calls at $1,595.53 total for the year and the money I made from investments which totaled $2,290.51 last year.
TLDR;
If you want to be successful, you need to take the time read, fully comprehend then most importantly take action on what you learned. I wish that someone would have shared the knowledge contained in this blog post with me when I was getting started.This is why there isn't a "too long, didn't read" section in this or any of my blog posts. But I do take the time to make graphics to make it easy to understand and visually see.
Finding out what, who, where, and when is important. But understanding why is the real key.
Total profit from each online income source for 2016 |
The Why, The Key
Learning how to make money with an online business isn't actually that hard. There is so much free and paid information out there yet some people are hugely successful while others continue to fail or stay broke. Here's the reason why it took me until now to start seeing real success and why it started skyrocketing in the past 2 years.
From when I got my first job at 15, up until just a few years ago, I was cursed with having the sca mentality. I wanted things to be guaranteed, easy or otherwise preset. I would rather take a guaranteed hourly or yearly salary position instead of one where I could either get $0 or grow my income exponentially. Even with business, it was more appealing to me to try take a pie of someone else's pie than to learn how to bake my own. Now that I'm successful, I have plenty of people who have been now trying to do the same to me. I've had people try to copy my dropshipping stores, come into my niche, or use my name and reputation to get some free traffic to their site. But even though I'm sure some of them made a few bucks, 99% of them failed and are still broke and 100% of them are secretly miserable and alone.
The simple truth is you need to add real value to the world to get paid for it in return. Life and business is simple economics. In 2016 I provided $325,785.19 worth of value to the world and was paid back accordingly. That was done in a combination of the knowledge and experience I shared in the form of books people brought, to the physical goods they ordered from my stores, to selling the store itself. It also included the value I provided showing others how to either get started or scale up their own businesses. A good example is my book Life Changes Quick, you can read the review below for an example of what creating value in exchange for money looks like.
You get paid what you're worth. If the value you bring is worth $0, you'll get paid accordingly.
An example of how a product provides the value it charges. |
Multipliers are Powerful
Here's a secret that I've never publically stated but want to share. My mind now thinks in multiples, and that is the real secret on how I went from making $48,000 a year at my highest to $325,785 last year. When I had a corporate job, I knew that for me to increase my income I had to either get a raise, or a promotion but even then it'll take a long time to double my salary, yet alone multiple it by 670%. When I wrote my first book detailing how I managed to live cheaply in Thailand and do what I loved all day which included scuba diving and training as a Muay Thai fighter in 12 Weeks in Thailand I knew that for me to go from making $400 a month from that book to something high enough to sustain myself I'd need to either write two more books or I'd have to create a new stream of income.
My second business was starting my first drop shipping store, which brought in an average of $2,000-$4,000 a month depending on the season and the month. At that point, I could have been content as I was now making more than enough to continue living cheaply in Thailand. I wanted to update my book on living cheap with a second edition or a follow up, but I didn't have the time or incentive to sit down and write an entire second book with the hopes to make an additional $200 a month. It just didn't make financial sense as adding a 5% multiplier to my income wasn't worth the effort especially when I could have used that time to create a second dropshipping store like I ended up doing with Larissa. Or something else that could potentially have a 150% or higher income gain.
If you still don't understand what a multiplier is, here's the simple breakdown before we continue.
How to 15X Your Income
Looking at the chalkboard example above, you can see how things can potentially multiply. By me simply writing a book and charging $9.99 for it, I could potentially make an extra $200 a month or so which would increase my total income by around 10%. By starting a second drop shipping store, I could potentially make another $2,000 or so a month which would multiply my income by 200%.
But neither the real secret on how I increased my income by over 1,500% is something that I shared in my second book Life Changes Quick. I talked about it in detail in in chapter 7 of the book entitled "Traveling Like a Boss and Sharing it with Others."
The secret to multiplying your income is by doing something both scalable and the effects compounding. By me writing a second book, the direct income may only be a 10% increase in my total income. By me starting a second ecommerce store, the effect may 1.5x my income or potentially double it, but it isn't scalable from there. The only way to scale an ecommerce store to make you a millionaire is by bringing more people in. Huge million dollar dropshipping stores such as Wayfair or Hayneedle also have giant staff requirements with Wayfair currently at 2,353 employees and Hayneedle having close to 1,000 full time workers.
Instead of hiring more employees which is something I didn't want to deal with or manage, I decided to scale my income by both partnering with others to start their own stores or teaching people how I did it so they can start one on their own. By being a provider of information instead of being the actual one starting the store myself, it breaks the barrier of limiting myself to one or two that I could manage myself. This allows me to potentially help thousands of people by guiding them to start their own. I knew that by taking the time to write the second book, it would inspire others and give them the blueprint on how to start themselves which would in turn grow my blog, podcast, newsletter, and subscriber reach, something which is infinitely scalable.
Watch this video where I breakdown what I actually mean by all of this.
How to Get Started
If you want to start multiplying your income, you need to start with some type of income as 2nd grade math tells us that when you multiply anything by $0 it's still $0. If you're watched the video above, I explain that you don't need follow the exact same footsteps as I did to get started. You simply need to find something that works for you then scale it up from there.
Here's the start here post I wrote when I created my first drop shipping store. But since getting into ecommerce typically takes 2-4 months to start seeing profit and takes a few thousand dollars to get started, I later wrote this post on how to start making money online even if you're broke as I don't want anyone to have an excuse on why they can't do the same.
If you already have at least $2,000 a month in online income coming in and want to be able to scale your business by sharing the tools you used to get to that point, as well as help out others who are just getting started, then check out my Income Boss course. It's where I show you how I did it myself and show you step by step how you can do it as well. If you still have no idea how to get started or what type of business model you want to get into, take a listen to the Travel Like a Boss Podcast. It's completely free, and it's been my way of giving back and sharing knowledge as I've learned along the way.
I hope everyone crushes it in 2017 and scales both your business and your income to join me in the top 3% so we can celebrate together! Here's to an amazing year, as always feel free to leave a comment below to ask questions or just say hello!
Q and A.
A lot of people had questions from this post so here's an update:
Q: Are those total revenue/sales numbers? How much was your net profit?
A: The $325,785 was net profit but didn't include living or travel expenses. My total revenue/sales including sales from my dropshipping stores would have made that number closer to $1 Million which would have sounded more awesome but would have been misleading.
Q: Why do you have such a cheap looking microphone and cheap clothes if you're that rich?
A: The mic I'm using is an Audio Technica ATR-2100 and is actually one of the best USB mics out there. The only reason why it looks so beat up is because I travel so much and abuse it. But aside from that, I'm more focused on bootstrapping my earnings into savings and investments and becoming truly wealthy instead of just looking the part online.
Q: What did you do with the $325,000 you made this year?
A: Aside from taxes which we all have to pay, a lot of it went to travel expenses as I visited 17 counties in 2016, but the rest of it went to investments. Below is one of my accounts where I keep alot of my money. If you want to know more, listen to Episode 09 of Invest Like a Boss where I break down everything I invest in.
I hope everyone the best of luck with your businesses! If you have any questions you'd like answered, feel free to ask below!
Warm Regards,
Johnny FD
Learn something from this post? Get inspired? Do me a favor and share it!
Learn something from this post? Get inspired? Do me a favor and share it!
Love how transparent you are and the eagerness to always help others. As a proud member of Earnest Affiliate I can attest to the wealth of information shared in that very affordable course.
ReplyDeleteYou are much appreciated and Congrats to a great 2016.
Adrien
Hey thanks for taking the time to share that Adrien! Here's to an incredible 2017 for all of us!
DeleteI heard drop shipping was dead ;-)
ReplyDeletehaha, those people think $90,000 isn't a significant amount of money to be made.
DeleteHey Johnny, have you used Oberlo with Shopify to create a dropshipping store?
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think?
Jason
I personally don't dropship from Aliexpress or Chinese suppliers, but spoke on a panel with the co-founder of Oberlo and know that there are a lot of people making a ton of money with that method. It's just not the method I choose I follow as it's not the type of business I want to be in for various reasons.
Deletethey took down your huffingtonpost interview? why bro?
ReplyDeleteNo idea. Shame as it was a good interview with a ton of value in it.
DeleteHow many different programs or products are you an affiliate for?
ReplyDeleteCurrently about 20 different ones.
DeleteJust curious...do you tell your friends and acquaintances what products you sell in your drop shipping businesses?
ReplyDeleteBTW, congrats on everything you've achieved in such a short time frame!
I let my family and close friends see my site and the products I sell, but in general it's not a good idea to tell too many people as there are copy cats out there, that even though those people usually don't have the right mentality to succeed even copying you, it still messes up your ad spend for the first few months while they try to lowball you and then give up. =)
DeleteThanks, Johnny. So when people ask you what you do, what do you say? Sorry for pestering you with questions, but I bought Anton's course and am super excited to be launching my own drop ship business soon, but am not sure what I'm going to tell people if they specifically ask what sort of online business I have. Thank you!
DeleteI just tell them something super generic like "I sell furniture" which pretty much means anything.
DeleteJohnny is your affiliate income from your blog or do you have an affiliate store?
ReplyDeleteYeah this is a great question..???
DeleteHey Dan, I have about 10 different websites that produce the affiliate income. I break them down in the case studies section of my course: http://www.earnestaffiliate.com
Delete10? Is this not a lot of work? To manage and write content to all those sites?
Delete