For those of you that are unfamiliar with Easy Video Player, it’s basically a piece of software that allows you to easily embed videos on your websites and add marketing tools to them such as buy buttons and opt-in forms. It was a ground-breaking tool for marketers when it was released a couple of years ago.

With the release of Easy Video Suite, Josh has taken video marketing to an entirely new level. The new software actually allows you to record videos, edit videos, convert videos to web-ready format, upload videos, create full pages around the videos, and embed marketing tools. It does so much more as well but you’ll have to listen to the interview to really understand the scope of this program.

Enjoy the interview. To get more details and sneak peeks in to Easy Video Suite, check out my preview site at EasyVideoSuite.net.

Click Here To Read The Transcripts From This Interview

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m creating my income reports for October, November, and December all at the same time because I fell behind on creating them. I’ll give the full update of what’s been going on in my business in December’s income report, including an explanation of how I more than double my income starting in December.

Some Quick Disclaimers:

In the spirit of full transparency… I must make a couple of notes about the following income reports.

The numbers that I’m sharing are before any refunds. Some of the products that were sold have 30-60 day refund periods. Seeing as I can’t know who will and won’t refund, refunds are not accounted for.

On the products that I created, the numbers are AFTER affiliates have been paid. These are the net that I collected after I made sure all affiliates received their cut.

The links to the products that I mention in the report below are my affiliate links. So if you click a link to find out more about it and decide to purchase, I will, in most cases, receive a small commission on it. This, in no way, effects the cost of the products mentioned.

Finally, there is some income that I am NOT including in this report. I have a second business with Josh Bartlett called The Elite Marketing Foundation. Seeing as this business is a 50/50 partnership, I opted not to share income from this business due to the fact that it would also give insight in to some of Josh’s earnings. Therefore, that aspect of my business will remain out of my reports.

This report is income from the products that I create, the income generating blogs that I have around the net, book publishing, and the iphone applications that I’ve begun to dable in. (I like to test a lot of business models to figure out what works for me and what doesn’t)

I’ll start by giving a breakdown of the income and then finish with some explanation as to why some of the numbers are the way they are.

The Income Report – November 2012

• Income From My Products:
  • The WordPress Classroom $5,121.26
  • Total (From My Products)   $5,121.26

• Income From Affiliate Products:
  • Video Traffic Academy $1,399.67
  • Easy Video Player $176.72
  • Hostgator $150.00
  • Aweber $51.60
  • Safe Swaps $45.00
  • Complete Traffic Domination (WSO) $41.61
  • CreateSpace $40.00
  • Membersnap $16.67
  • Mascot Creator Toolkit (WSO) $15.00
  • Artisteer $12.49
  • Kindle Publishing Made Easy (WSO) $1.80
  • Total (Affiliate Products) $1,950.56

• Income From Application Company
  • AdMob (Ads) $1.58
  • iAds $0.39
  • Total (iPhone Apps) $1.97

• Income From Publishing Company
  • CreateSpace Sales $1,271.74
  • Kindle Book Sales $1,137.62
  • iBooks Book Sales $47.60
  • Amazon Affiliate Commissions $45.13
  • Total (Publishing) $2,502.09

• Total Income $9,575.88

Some Explanation

As I mentioned above, I’m going to rapidly post my income reports through December… (I’m pre-publishing this post to December 15th, which is when I should have actually made the post).

I’ll go in to a lot more detail in my December 2012 report.

One thing that has surprised me since I’ve started publishing books is that after a little bit of time, my Kindle book sales start to dwindle without much promotion. I need to do some sort of little promotion to boost sales again so that my Kindle books don’t disappear in to Amazon obscurity. It’s really not that surprising I guess. New books are coming on Amazon every single day, many in my niches. It only makes sense that if I don’t constantly find new ways to get eyeballs on them, the competition will my bury my titles.

I think since starting, the most impressive surprise has been the fact that, despite Kindle sales slowing with little to no promotion, CreateSpace, physical book sales continue to grow each and every month without much effort on my part. Simply by just making sure my Kindle book and my Physical book are linked in the Amazon marketplace, I’m seeing sales numbers increase month after month. I was not expecting that at all. In fact, as of writing this, my physical book sales for the month of November are actually outselling my Kindle books. I’ve got 21 books on Kindle now and only 4 on CreateSpace…

Bottom line is that if you’re in to publishing at all on Kindle, you can’t ignore the income potential of taking the book to CreateSpace as well. It costs you absolutely nothing to do it and can be done with just a few simple tweaks to the Kindle version.

What follows is my guidelines to double the income of your existing books using CreateSpace…

Step 1: Sign Up For CreateSpace

It does not cost anything to have an account with them or to publish with them. They basically take a small percentage of book sales once you’re up and running. So, other than ordering copies of books for your own collection, there’s no out-of-pocket cost to you, whatsoever. So, if nothing else, create an account with CreateSpace today and start getting familiar with their site.

Step 2: Format Your Kindle Book For Print

I was going to write up a long tutorial post like I did about formatting for Kindle. However, I decided to create a quick video on the process instead. Check it out below:

Step 3: Create An Eye-Catching Cover

You probably already have a cover for your Kindle version of the book. You can actually use that if you want. However, for CreateSpace, you will need a front cover, back cover, and spine for the book to look correct. Personally, I always outsource this. Places like 99 Designs and oDesk have great people capable of making print book covers. You give them the concept and they will give you a cover.

I’ve heard some people recommend getting book covers over at Fiverr… In my experience, you get what you pay for there. The covers have always been junk and I’ve never ended up using any of them. If you’ve worked with someone at Fiverr that’s done some awesome cover art for you, feel free to share in the comments but I’ve yet to experience a designer worth much over there.

Recently, since I’ve been doing so many books myself, I hired someone on to my staff for the sole purpose of making book covers. If you’re interested in working with me on a book cover for print, I’m more than willing to help you knock out the perfect cover. Just jump over to my Services Page.

CreateSpace does allow you to create covers for free on their site. Most of them are pretty cheesy looking but they’d probably be ok for some non-fiction niches.

Here’s some examples of the better looking book covers that are free from CreateSpace…

Here’s a few examples of covers that I had outsourced…

As you can see, spending a little bit of money on a cover makes a HUGE difference in your book’s credibility.

When people see the “ready made” book covers that are made available by CreateSpace, they probably aren’t going to take your book seriously. When people look at the books that I publish, they rarely realize that they weren’t actually published by a major publishing company…

Step 4: Add Your Book In To CreateSpace

Here’s another quick video tutorial of the exact process to get your book in to CreateSpace. It’s really simple. Just follow along to the video:

Step 5: Link Your CreateSpace Book To Your Existing Kindle Book

Technically this step is supposed to be done for you by CreateSpace. I’ve had a couple books where they automatically linked after a day or two and a couple books where they never linked. If this happens, simply log in to your KDP account and submit a support ticket. Tell them the ASIN number of your Kindle book and the ISBN number of your print book and they will make sure to link them for you.

This is a super important step because linking the two books together ensures that any sales that have been happening on your Kindle book continue to flow through to your print book. If they aren’t linked together any existing traffic going to the Kindle version won’t see that there’s a print version available as well.

Step 6: Profit

That’s really all there is to it. Following this simple tutorial will take you all of an hour (plus the time to get a cover made properly). Once you’re done, you can expect the income coming in from the Kindle book to double. In my experience, if a book is making $50/month on Kindle, then adding it to CreateSpace will add an additional $50/month to your book income. If you have a book making $1,000 per month on Kindle, adding it to CreateSpace will add an additional $1,000 per month.

That’s just from my own personal experience and I obviously can’t guarantee similar results but, heck, it sure doesn’t hurt to give it a shot.

If you enjoyed this post and want more like it, please let me know by “Liking” it, “Tweeting” it, and leaving a comment. Anything you can do to let me know that you enjoyed this is greatly appreciated!

I can’t wait to have a discussion on this topic with you in the comments below!

Now go get your books on CreateSpace!

This income report as well as November’s is going to be quick and to the point. I fell way behind on creating these reports because I got caught up in some projects. So I’ll be posting October, November, and December all within a couple days of each other. I’ll post the big update about what I’ve been working on in December’s income report, including details about a new venture that has literally doubled my income starting December 2012…

More details on all of that in December’s report. For now, here’s my monthly accountability / income report for October…

Some Quick Disclaimers:

In the spirit of full transparency… I must make a couple of notes about the following income reports.

The numbers that I’m sharing are before any refunds. Some of the products that were sold have 30-60 day refund periods. Seeing as I can’t know who will and won’t refund, refunds are not accounted for.

On the products that I created, the numbers are AFTER affiliates have been paid. These are the net that I collected after I made sure all affiliates received their cut.

The links to the products that I mention in the report below are my affiliate links. So if you click a link to find out more about it and decide to purchase, I will, in most cases, receive a small commission on it. This, in no way, effects the cost of the products mentioned.

Finally, there is some income that I am NOT including in this report. I have a second business with Josh Bartlett called The Elite Marketing Foundation. Seeing as this business is a 50/50 partnership, I opted not to share income from this business due to the fact that it would also give insight in to some of Josh’s earnings. Therefore, that aspect of my business will remain out of my reports.

This report is income from the products that I create, the income generating blogs that I have around the net, book publishing, and the iphone applications that I’ve begun to dable in. (I like to test a lot of business models to figure out what works for me and what doesn’t)

I’ll start by giving a breakdown of the income and then finish with some explanation as to why some of the numbers are the way they are.

The Income Report – October 2012

• Income From My Products:
  • The WordPress Classroom $6,580.35
  • Beyond The Hype $7.97 (This business model is changing)
  • Total (From My Products)   $6,588.32

• Income From Affiliate Products:
  • Easy Video Player $82.94
  • Market Samurai 60.96
  • Aweber $45.90
  • CreateSpace $24.00
  • WP Lapdance $19.95
  • Membersnap $16.67
  • Kindle Publishing Made Easy (WSO) $1.81
  • Total (Affiliate Products) $252.23

• Income From Application Company
  • AdMob (Ads) $1.74
  • iAds $0.24
  • Total (iPhone Apps) $1.98

• Income From Publishing Company
  • Kindle Book Sales $1,245.47
  • CreateSpace Sales $1,110.85
  • iBooks Book Sales $115.50
  • Amazon Affiliate Commissions $9.59
  • Total (Publishing) $2,481.41

• Adsense $0 (I received an email stating my Adsense account was close) :-/

• Total Income $9,323.94

Some Explanation

As I mentioned above, I’m going to rapidly post my income reports for October through December… (I’m pre-publishing this post to November 15th, which is when I should have actually made the post).

Josh Bartlett and I are changing our business model for Beyond The Hype. More details about that real soon.

I received an email from Google stating that my AdSense account was in violation. I have no idea what for and all attempts to contact Google have been a failure. Oh well… I guess I lost a $20/month income stream. I’m going to continue to try to work with them to get it back online but, as of right now, I don’t have an Adsense account.

More details about my business in the future income reports.

Watch out for those in the coming weeks. They are going to be some pretty epic posts (in my ever-so-humble opinion).

So here’s what’s going on with me…

There are some very good reasons that this post and my last post are a bit spread out…

The main reason being that I finally moved in to my house! I moved about an hour north of San Diego to a town called Murrieta. I managed to purchase a house that is literally 3x the size of my previous house and a brand new build for less than what I sold my old house for down in San Diego. Dealing with the move has taken up nearly ALL of my time.

One thing that’s important to note about me is that, when I write blog posts, I spend hours and hours on the post. Sometimes I have several days in to a single post. I’m constantly writing and re-writing until I have the post that I feel that I really set out to create. So finding the time to put hours in to blog posts has been very difficult.

However, now I’m in the house, I’ve got my new office set up and I’ve got probably the fastest internet I’ve ever seen in my life (Here’s Proof). So I’m ready to get back in the swing of things.

My wife and I also have our first baby on the way. Although this isn’t something that takes up a lot of my time yet, I do have to take on some extra chores that Alana’s not really capable of doing herself right now. This pulls me away a bit too.

To top it all off, Amazon was late with their reporting for last month. I actually didn’t get my Amazon numbers back in until just a couple of days ago. So I couldn’t create my income report accurately until I had those numbers.

But now that everything is in order, let’s get started…

Some Quick Disclaimers:

In the spirit of full transparency… I must make a couple of notes about the following income reports.

The numbers that I’m sharing are before any refunds. Some of the products that were sold have 30-60 day refund periods. Seeing as I can’t know who will and won’t refund, refunds are not accounted for.

On the products that I created, the numbers are AFTER affiliates have been paid. These are the net that I collected after I made sure all affiliates received their cut.

The links to the products that I mention in the report below are my affiliate links. So if you click a link to find out more about it and decide to purchase, I will, in most cases, receive a small commission on it. This, in no way, effects the cost of the products mentioned.

Finally, there is some income that I am NOT including in this report. I have a second business with Josh Bartlett called The Elite Marketing Foundation. Seeing as this business is a 50/50 partnership, I opted not to share income from this business due to the fact that it would also give insight in to some of Josh’s earnings. Therefore, that aspect of my business will remain out of my reports.

This report is income from the products that I create, the income generating blogs that I have around the net, book publishing, and the iphone applications that I’ve begun to dable in. (I like to test a lot of business models to figure out what works for me and what doesn’t)

I’ll start by giving a breakdown of the income and then finish with some explanation as to why some of the numbers are the way they are.

The Income Report – September 2012

• Income From My Products:
  • The WordPress Classroom  $5,605.21
  • Total (From My Products)   $5,605.21

• Income From Affiliate Products:
  • Easy Video Player $193.67
  • Buzzinar (WSO) $184.18
  • LeadRocket (WSO) $112.32
  • Hostgator $100.00
  • Aweber $91.20
  • Complete Traffic Domination (WSO) $81.43
  • CreateSpace $48.00
  • Max Blog Press $23.36
  • Optin Skin $21.24
  • WP Lapdance $19.95
  • Membersnap $16.67
  • Mascot Creator Toolkit (WSO) $15.00
  • WP Banner Buster (WSO) 10.57
  • Kindle Publishing Made Easy (WSO) $3.62
  • Total (Affiliate Products) $921.21

• Income From Application Company
  • AdMob (Ads) $2.06
  • iAds $0.22
  • Total (iPhone Apps) $2.28

• Income From Publishing Company
  • Kindle Book Sales $1,804.29
  • CreateSpace Sales $746.05
  • iBooks Book Sales $153.30
  • Amazon Affiliate Commissions $58.46
  • Total (Publishing) $2,762.10

• Adsense $24.76

• Total Income $9,315.56

Some Explanations

The month of September saw a bit of a slowdown in sales for The WordPress Classroom. I was actually about $1,000 shy of matching what I had done the previous month with the Classroom. I believe the slowdown is mostly due to the fact that I’ve been preparing the new site. Sales slowed down because people were holding off to get in once the new site went live. I also slowed down the amount of promotion that I typically do for the site. I usually like to mail the list about The WordPress Classroom 1 to 2 times per week to encourage sales. However, while I was in development of the new site, I put all of my focus on the development and somewhat slipped on the marketing efforts. So far, for the month of October, sales are getting back up to their normal numbers again. This makes sense because the new site is now live.

Book sales continued to climb in the month of September. What revenue I lost in the WordPress Classroom, I made up for from book sales. Kindle book sales stayed pretty consistant with the previous month. What surprised me the most was the exponential growth I saw in the sales of the physical book on CreateSpace. Physical book sales jumped from about $100 total in the month of August to almost $750 in the month of September… and October looks to be on pace to have an even better month. If you’re not using CreateSpace to increase the amount of sales your getting on your books, start now. There’s basically no extra cost to you and it could potentially double your book revenue.

You will also notice that my affiliate commissions are up this month over the previous month. A lot of this income has come from WSOs that I’ve promoted… I’ve mentioned this before and I’ll mention it again. I hate MOST WSOs. I think most are rehashed or slapped together junk. I created a site to review WSOs over at GoodWSOs.com, not because I like WSOs, but because I think most are crap and I wanted to create a trusted resource where people can learn about the few diamonds that pop up from time to time. Even if you go to the site now, you’ll notice that there’s still not a lot of reviews on there. This isn’t because I’ve stopped looking for good WSOs… It’s because I haven’t been able to find any recently that are worthy of making the site… Anyway, the WSOs that I did list on GoodWSOs.com created a good few hundred extra dollars for the month. I can’t complain because the main goal wasn’t to make a ton of money from it. It was to cut through the crap and help point out the stuff that deserves to be noticed.

I also generated $48 last month from my blog post about The Best Investment I Ever Made. In this post, I discuss how I look at book publishing as a long term investment strategy. I also heavily encourage the use of CreateSpace to help further monetize your writing. The $48 from CreateSpace came solely from writing that blog post. I intend to dig deeper on how to use CreateSpace in a future post.

What to expect coming up…

October has been a very strange month for me so far. I’ve been dealing with this move almost entirely by myself. My wife does what she can but I’ve had to handle most of the heavy lifting while moving and dealing with the various trades coming through to do work on the house. It’s really pulled me away from the business a lot. Luckily, I’ve set myself up with many various passive income streams that keep things moving a bit. The book publishing business, specifically, has really been surprising with its ability to keep generating income without me lifting another finger to keep things going. Amazon’s sales machine has kicked in and the books just keep moving.

I also officially opened up the new WordPress Classroom site this month. It’s technically in beta at the moment and I’ve invited several beta testers in to help make sure everything is running smoothly. However, it is open to the public. Since the opening, sales have started to move in an upward trend again. Keep an eye out for more details on that site because I’ve been working hard on putting together new training courses as well as custom plugins just for members of the site. Those will slowly be rolling out over the next several weeks.

Book Deal Hunter, the site that I created to help spread the word about free books on Amazon is almost entirely being run by Alana now. She is the one posting new books and keeping everyone updated on Facebook. It’s slowly growing and we’re constantly getting a steady stream of book submissions. It’s not really generating much income yet. However, this site is more of a “long play”. We’d like to build it up and then decide some monetization strategies once we’ve got a good following. It’s definitely on its way though.

Josh Bartlett and I have begun “re-envisioning” Beyond The Hype. The concept is changing a bit but we are more excited about this project than we’ve ever been. I don’t want to reveal exactly what the concept is yet but I will tell you that it’s going to be something that no one else is doing and that members will have a chance to get personal access to some of the biggest names and smartest minds in the online business world. It’s really exciting!

I’ve also began to offer services to people looking for “done-for-you” solutions. If you look in the top menu of this site, you will see a new “Services” tab. I’ve got an awesome team and I will personally work with people to help them generate the website, book, or whatever else they are looking to do. This is something brand new that I will be offering starting this month. Use the contact form on the services page if you are interested in receiving a quote on any sort of service. I’ll do service requests on a first come, first serve basis. Click here to view the services offered.

Anyway, that’s it for this month’s report. Things are getting really exciting with both The WordPress Classroom and Beyond The Hype. I can’t wait to see how the income reports reflect all these new changes.

I’d love to hear your feedback, comments, and questions below. Don’t forget to “Like” this post and leave a comment.