How to Monetize Your Website with Apps and eBooks (6-Figure Income)

So what’s the truth about making money online? It’s hard to know sometimes, with so many, almost, mythical promises available. Fortunately, at Solo Build It! we have real people with real results who are willing to share their whole journey, so that you can learn. In this interview, Luke Barber shares how he and his wife, Hollie, now earn over $100,000 U.S a year from their online business, HomeSpeechHome.com.

To put Luke and Hollie’s online business into context, they provide materials to support parents and teachers, providing speech therapy around the world. They attract between 100 and 150,000 visitors a month using free traffic from the search engines.

How they do that is covered in part one of our conversation, and you can access that particular interview by clicking the link that’s appearing in the top corner of your video right now.

Still here? Terrific, let’s get going. Luke and Hollie deliver a range of products, including E-books, reading cards and apps. But like many people beginning in the online business world, they took advantage of the free services from Amazon and AdSense to deliver income.

Here’s how it worked out for them. – AdSense was my primary source of income the first couple years, but it was only a couple thousand dollars. So, I was constantly looking for something else, right? Because a couple thousand dollars a year wasn’t going to cut it. – And Amazon or other affiliates, did you ever explore that journey?

– I did, yeah. I had some Amazon links. I thought that was a natural one, too, for us because therapists use lots of different products in therapy, toys and books and all these kinds of things. And we wrote content about them, and we got good looks at ’em and things, but I think primarily therapists buy things through their school districts, and so they’ll just go down the street to whatever store is closest and buy what they’re going to buy.

So, I’ve made a little bit off of Amazon Affiliate.

I’ve made probably 10 times more with AdSense to be honest. So, I haven’t really done more with it. – The developments of their online business were founded on the rock-solid education and technical support provided by Solo Build It! We’ll be looking at how it all came together to build their online business right after this. – I would say that the education side of SBI! has been worth its weight in gold. I mean, it’s been what has helped me to build traffic and build pretty much my own cash machine that I can rely on pretty much anytime I need it. Without the education, you’re just another site. (lively music) My salary as a speech therapist was pretty low, was in the 40 to $45,000 range. I still had students loans I was paying off on my loan, and we had a house.

We had moved, and we had a house we were renting, and that was right before the 2008 crash. So yeah, I was determined to make it work come heck or high water. – Apart from creating quality content that the search engines really love, almost from the beginning, Luke and Hollie created free E-books that they gave away. – Yeah, I had a number of ’em on my site that I was giving away, and the odd thing was is that I didn’t even realize why that was important at first. I just thought, I took one of our products, and I took a little piece out of it, and I gave that away, and people liked it, and it was something that I could tweet about on social media, and it was all just, “What can I give away free to make people like me, “and like our site, and use our site, “and refer people to our site?” – But was that helping you make any money? – No, no, it just drove traffic.

– You will recall from the beginning of this interview that Luke and Hollie’s plan to make money online was not going as well as they would have liked. They were developing really good traffic, attracting between 10 and 20,000 visits a month, and were successfully selling their own products, E-books. However, the amount of space that AdSense and Amazon were taking up on the site was not worth the return, couple thousand dollars a year, that they were getting.

Something had to change. A new product had to be created that would really make a difference to their financial wellbeing. The answer was apps. It wasn’t an entirely new idea, because Luke and Hollie had already created a free app that they were giving away. But one that provided enough value that they could sell, that was another thing all together.

– About three years into it was when I had really been studying my data. I mean, I looked at Google analytics every day, I kid you not, for three years.

Everyday, how many people have I had on my site? How many people, how many people today? How many people yesterday?

How many pages are they looking at? Just all this stuff, and when I started diving deeper into the analytics was when I was realizing how much this certain type of content, the word lists on my site, were getting a hit. And then when I delved deeper into it, it was showing that half of our traffic to 75% of our traffic was accessing these word lists from Apple devices, from iPads, iPhones, that sort of thing, and so it made me, just it clicked, and I went, “Okay, this is what we need to do.” I didn’t know how to do it, but I just thought, I had other apps that I had used that were similar as far as just being content-based and things of that nature.

And I said, “I can totally make this “into a really easy to use app, “and people will just love it,” and so that’s kinda what started that.

– Let’s go back to your survival thing which we talked about right at the beginning of the interview. You’re taking a big leap here. – (laughs) Yeah. I spent about $2,000 on this app to have it developed. I did all the work myself other than the programming, and I say myself, but I mean Hollie and I. Whenever I say myself, pretty much Hollie was in there as well, so just know that. But we did all the work ourselves, we sent it out to a developer and had it done. But at the same time, because I had looked at the data and done the research, I wasn’t concerned. I mean, other people, when I told them what I was doing, they were like, “Wow, you’re going to spend a bit of money on this,” and I said, “Yeah, but” I said, “I’m not concerned “that it’s going to work because I have the traffic.

“I know that it’s something people “are using a ton on my site. “So, if they have it in app format, it only makes sense.” So, I wasn’t really that concerned. It didn’t really seem like that big of a risk to me. Whereas other people kinda were worried for me. (chuckles) – So what’s the monetization strategy with the app then, how does that work?

– Okay, so basically once we got the app done, we put it for sale on the App Store. The first year we had it on the App Store, we sold it for $10. The way the App Store monetization works is that Apple takes 70, sorry, 30% of whatever you make. So in my case, I had it on the App Store for $10. For every sale that I made, I made seven, and then they just direct deposit my proceeds into my bank account.

But I knew Apple was a really solid, obviously, a solid company. They’re almost a trillion dollar company, so that wasn’t even a question. And like I said, the data told the story, so I didn’t have to worry about that, but. – So has the app been successful, and have you got anymore? – Oh yeah, it was the primary reason why I was able to quit my job was that app.

There were some iterations that took place that improved upon it, but yeah, it’s been very successful for sure. And since that app, we developed about six more as well, and so those are still on the App Store. You can find them right now, and they sell every day, because, again, I have traffic to my site. So I have my own advertising platform. – Unlike an E-book, apps have to be constantly updated, both technically and with content quite often.

Despite the success, something had to change. The costs had to change and also the way the product was sold. – The app has kind of evolved into a subscription model now. Before, we were just selling it for $10, then I upgraded it, may have put a bunch more content into it, and then we started selling it for 50, and it did well with that. But then I also realized that I had to be updating the app all the time, and that cost anywhere from 50 to $100 an hour until I partnered up with somebody.

And so, until that point, I’m making all these sales, and it was great, but then come the end of the month, the money’s spent. It’s put in savings, or the rent is paid or whatever, mortgage is paid, and so I realized that it wasn’t going to be sustainable as a one-time purchase. And so that’s when I partnered with my developer, and I said, “Hey, let’s turn this into a subscription “where people have to keep paying for it every month, “and we’ll keep adding stuff to it.”That way it keeps it interesting.” And so, our goal or our mission is to become the Netflix of speech therapy apps, where it just has tons and tons of content in it that it keeps people coming back for a really low price.

– As well as the apps, you also have traditional products, if you’d like, PDFs that you sell. What part of the marketing mix, if you’d like, do they offer, do they contribute to your income? – My digital products probably make me 40 to 50% of my additional revenue. The apps make probably 50 to 60.

It kinda fluctuates a little bit, but the apps do about 50 to 60, and my digital products make 40 to 50, just depends on the month, but they’re a very important part of my monetization for sure.

– The other important point is to really make it clear that you and Hollie are building an asset here. You’re not creating just an income with a job, which 30% just disappears from taxation. – Yeah, that was something that we really appreciate is that we own it, that the site belongs to us, and yeah, it’s our asset, and it’s making us money. We’re only growing it more and more and more and getting better known as the years go on, and I think that was something that I wanted too was I got tired of making everybody else money.

(laughs) Or I’ve always wanted to, and I believe Hollie’s in there with me too is that we kinda do things on our own. We want to build our own thing. We don’t winna just be making other people money. – And doesn’t that sound like a pretty good plan? All made possible by tying your creative idea and passion together with Solo Build It!’s rock-solid education and support.

Suddenly, your online idea can become an online business that works.  Thank you for watching.
https://www.easycash4ads.com/default2.aspx?ref=yoseskba64z