My Previous Attempts At Online Business
I am currently writing this blog as my main online business. I am choosing to not write exclusively in a single niche or even a cluster of niches. I am just writing about what I want to write about in the moment. I write about what interests me. My aim in this is to attract readers who have overlapping interests with me. I believe that if I write enough articles that I will attract a large enough audience to build a sustainable business.
I have read that, especially in online businesses, a key to success is persistence. Whatever it is you are doing online, you have to do a lot of it and for a long time. You cannot just pump out five videos or posts in a week and expect success. You've got to put out work regularly for months or years. And sticking with a business for months or years is difficult if you are not interested in the kind of content you are producing. You have to pick a subject you care about so that you can actually stick with it.
I wrote a few articles on a couple blogs before this one. One blog had 11 articles and the other had 6. My thinking behind each of these blogs was to pick a niche which had products to sell and to focus on creating content in that niche so I could sell those products.
The problem was that I didn't have any passion at all for the niches. I struggled to motivate myself to create the articles. I felt no joy when I was writing them. And because I wasn't having any fun, I quickly gave up. The sites might have ended up successful, but I didn't keep with it, so they never went anywhere. And because I was dedicated to creating content exclusively in those niches, I wasn't free to branch out to topics that I was interested in at any given moment.
With this blog I have given myself total freedom to write about anything that I want to. I don't try to push myself to write about stuff I don't want to. I try to have fun expressing myself through my writing. It is my hobby now. And because I enjoy it and can switch up the topic constantly, I am actually able to stick with it and do the work long term. And because I have been working on perseverance, I believe that this venture will work out and be financially successful.
In addition to the previous two blogs I wrote, I have tried to make money a couple other ways, and I wanted to share those projects with you in this blog post. While I am no longer actively working on these side hustles, they are still up and running, and if you engage with them, I might make money. And if it seems like my audience really enjoys something I've previously worked on and it is suddenly making me money, I will devote more time and energy into reviving that project.
My YouTube Channel
I created a YouTube channel under the name Funfare Digital Painting. I had seen that a trend in videos was speed painting and painting videos for kids. The videos were very basic. Just a black line coloring book style picture that would get painted in. Lots of the videos out there were aimed at young children and so the images were simple and kid friendly.
But I also really liked speed painting videos that were aimed more at adults. Those tended to be very detailed paintings of difficult to paint subjects like people, buildings, or fantasy scenes. In those videos, instead of painting in line drawings, they were actually painted from scratch, building up the subject as they went.
I had a copy of Adobe Photoshop on my computer and I had screen recording software, so I figured that I could make some digital painting videos and hopefully make money from the YouTube ad revenue. I knew that as much as I'd like to be, I was nowhere near talented enough an artist to do the freeform painting videos aimed at adults. I only had the skills to make basic line drawings and to color them in. So that is what I did. While the primary audience was going to be bored children, I thought they might also be interesting as a soothing thing for adults to zone out on or destress and meditate with.
I would draw something in bold black lines, then I would color them in. In one video I tried to switch it up by painting using textures rather than plain colors. Its a little hard to explain in words, but you can see what I mean in the video below.
I would make all the videos in real speed, then I would speed them up using a time lapse to make them actual speed painting videos.
For each video, I released both the real speed version and the sped up time lapse version.
I used a graphic pen and tablet device that I plugged into my computer with a USB cable in order to make the drawings. The one I used was the Bamboo Fun Pen and Tablet by Wacom.
In total I made 5 drawing videos, each with a slow and fast version, so I posted 10 videos in total. They have, to this point, gained 100 total views. I had a ton of fun making these videos, and if I had no other obligations in life, I would probably still be making these videos for fun. I, unfortunately, do have other obligations on my time and I need to have my online activities make money, so I gave this one up.
The videos didn't attract many viewers, and the videos each took a very long time to make. There might have been some way to reduce the amount of time video editing took, but it didn't seem worth it to me to invest the time to find out. I could tell that it was unsustainable to be spending that much time on so little output.
These are videos I am pretty proud of, and I would love it if you would give them a watch.
My Amazon Book Products
While reading about ways to make money online and create passive income systems, I came across the idea to sell ebooks and print on demand books through the Amazon bookstore and Amazon Kindle store.
I originally heard about the concept from a guy named Stefan James who runs Project Life Mastery and sells a course about making Kindle books called Kindle Money Mastery. As he explained it, people would go to the Kindle store looking for solutions to their problems and they would be willing to pay for a book there filled with information that could be found on the internet for free because they trust information from books more than websites. His strategy dealt mostly with non-fiction books that solved people's problems.
I did not want to write non fiction books like that, so I kept looking for more that could be done with this opportunity.
The basic opportunity was that you could create a digital book on your computer for free and upload it to the Amazon Kindle bookstore where it could be found by customers who might buy the book. When they bought your book, you would earn a royalty on the purchase. You would get most of the money, but Amazon would collect some of the sale for facilitating the purchase and listing your book in their marketplace.
They also had a company called CreateSpace (which has since been merged with their Kindle brand "Kindle Direct Publishing" or "KDP", so while the same features are offered, they are no longer differentiated by brand name) which would print books on demand. You would create a book on your computer, then submit the file to CreateSpace. They would list that book for sale on the regular Amazon physical book store, and whenever anyone placed an order for the book, a single copy would be printed to fulfill their specific order. In this way, you would not need to pay to have a huge inventory of stock produced and find a way to warehouse and ship all of those copies. They would handle all printing and shipping of the book. You would never have to pay for the printing of a book, because it was only printed when it was already sold, so the cost of printing just came out of the price of the sale. Again, you would receive some portion of the sale and Amazon (or CreateSpace) would keep a portion.
These two bookselling breakthroughs allowed anyone to become a publisher and to compete with the major publishing houses. Your book would be available right next to their books in the same online store. And the costs to enter the market were not prohibitive, as they have been in the past, but were instead worked into the business model to be totally absorbed by sales. It was a democratization of the book selling and publishing industry.
One awesome benefit to using these tools to self publish a book is that you would end up keeping a larger proportion of all sales than if you were working with a traditional publisher. You would be all on your own to make and market the book, but the story from lots of traditionally published authors is that that is mostly the case for them as well. They are largely responsible for marketing their own books. So there isn't much downside to self publishing, and plenty of upside.
I wanted to make books which were fairly easy and quick to make so that I could build out a back catalog of books as fast as possible. I didn't want to spend 6 months writing one book. I wanted to have a few dozen books in that time.
To accomplish that goal, I decided that I would work on creating adult coloring books (which were extremely popular at the time), journals/diaries, and illustrated children's books.
Super Mandala Coloring Book
I started by making the mandala coloring book. A mandala is just a roughly circular pattern which is reflected across at least a couple axis. I'm not sure if that is the exact mathematical definition, but that is what I understood them to be and how I made mine.
I used a program called Inkspace to make my mandalas. I would create a 1/4 or 1/6 slice of a circle, then doodle interesting patterns within that slice. Then I would copy and paste that slice into the rest of the circle, and I would end up with a very cool looking mandala that could be colored in with crayons of colored pencils as a very soothing activity.
I called my book "Super Mandala Coloring Book". It was a pretty generic name, but I couldn't come up with anything more clever at the time. The book included 12 mandalas - all made by me. This book would be printed and shipped by CreateSpace whenever anyone ordered it. At the time of this writing, I have never sold a copy.
I intended at the time to continue this book into a series. I wanted to release lots of mandala themed coloring books. I also wanted to have more traditional coloring books that were of more recognizable objects and scenes. I did not follow through with any of those plans, and this one book is the only coloring book I made.
Walls Journal
I found a type of book in the Amazon bookstore that seemed perfect for me to make many of quickly. They were journals. They could be used as personal diaries. The insides would be filled with pages that were either grids made of lines or simply dots. There were also regular lined pages, like you would find in any notebook. These grids would be most useful for lists and for doodling. The lined pages would be ideal for writing and journaling. The journals were each 120 pages long.The inside contents of each book/journal would be the same. I only had to make the pages of the book once. The only thing I changed to make future books was the cover design. I would use either Inkscape or Photoshop to make a neat design, add it to the existing book template, and I would have a new title to upload to the Amazon bookstore.
I made a logo that looked a bit like a shark's tooth (though that was totally accidental, I just made an abstract shape). Inside that logo was the title "Walls Journal". Clearly I am not the best at naming things, but it worked well enough to publish something.
In total I released 4 of these journals. I should have easily released many more than 4 based on how quick and easy they were to create. I thought they looked pretty cool, and I figured I would have been able to sell quite a few of them. At the time of this writing, I have never sold a copy of any of them.
Shapes and Colors - Illustrated Children's Book
The last type of book I wanted to create was an illustrated children's book. I really liked to draw using my Bamboo Fun pen and tablet in Photoshop, and the stories for this sort of book tended to be rather simple and short, and so wouldn't take too long to make.
I figured that I could write up a short story of less than 1000 words, then break that story into pages organized around a drawing that I would do.
My perfectionist side really came out when I was trying to make a children's book. I would start writing a story and decide it wasn't good enough to be read, even by children.
And even when I could decide on a story, I thought the illustrations I did weren't good enough. And on top of that, it turns out that making illustrations that are decent enough to be included in a book take a long time.
Just drawing the pictures for the books would take a long time.
I was really dragging my feet on completing any book, so my wife decided to jump in with a "done is better than perfect" attitude and just complete a book as quickly as she could.
She chose a very simple theme for her book. It was a book of shapes and colors. Each page would have a colored shape, and the text on the page would simply state what the name of the shape was and what color that shape was.
The book only had around 10 pages. And to speed things up even more, she used freely available, royalty-free images of the colored shapes. The images where already created by someone else, so she only had to copy and paste them into the pages of the book. She was able to create the entire book in only about an hour.
She made the whole thing in Microsoft PowerPoint, then exported the slideshow as a PDF. Once she had it made, I ran the PDF through some program offered by Amazon called "Kindle Kids Book Creator" which turns the file we had into the file Amazon uses for their ebooks.
We uploaded it, which didn't take very long.
And, thanks to my wife's help, we had a book up in only a couple hours.
That book, being as simple and quickly made as it was, is the only book that ever sold any copies. I think it has been sold 4 times.
Kindle also has a subscription called Kindle Unlimited which allows readers to pay a flat monthly fee that allows them to read lots of books for free, kind of like borrowing them from a library.
The Shapes and Colors book has been read about a dozen times that way, and while it makes us less money per read than when customers purchase the book, it has sent us a few bucks.
Redbubble
My most recent attempt at generating an income from online business was the cause for me to start this blog. I wanted to use my love for digital painting to create abstract art.
I planned to create works of art, then post them to this blog and write a random short story to go along with them.
There is a company called Redbubble which allows you to upload images which can be printed on to lots of items on demand and those items can be sold through their store and marketplace. They offer all sorts of items, but some example items are blankets, pillow cases, shower curtains, canvas and paper prints, leggings, and notebooks. They are not the only company which offers this sort of service. Another company I had considered is called Society6.
My business model and method of monetization was to share my works of art on this blog, then customers would follow the product links in the posts to the product page in my Redbubble store, and people would buy my products. When my products sold I would receive a portion of the money from the sale. I figured that with enough pages on this blog featuring my art I would be able to sell a decent number of products and make enough money to deem it a worthwhile business.
If you click back to the earliest posts on this blog, you can see what my content originally looked like. The images were not that great. The short stories were too random to be worth anything in an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy which might have attracted an audience.
I did not see any results or traction with that strategy. I have never sold anything through my Redbubble store.
I decided to convert the art blog into my general purpose blog. Instead of pigeon-holing myself into writing about only art, I have now given myself permission to write about anything. And writing about things I find interesting is far more effective in attracting readers through SEO. At this moment, I have only a vague vision of how I might monetize this blog, but I am not worried about that.
All of my previous online business attempts involved me finding a monetization opportunity and trying to build a forced business around it. And they always fizzled out before I found any success because I just wasn't passionate about the business. I have flipped that around for this current blogging project. I am doing strictly what I enjoy, and once I make progress in generating traffic to this blog, I will find a way to monetize that traffic.
I might even return to one of the more artistic businesses I had tried starting before, but they might work once I have an existing audience.
Who knows? The future can hold infinite possibilities.
These were the online businesses I have started. They didn't work out for me. Have you started any businesses online? Were they similar to any I've described here? What results did you get? Let me know in the comments!
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