How Plan To Make $1-3K/monthly With EdgeofDavid.com

When I started blogging here back in 2010 my goal was to become a professional blogger making a full time income.

I know, I'm an idiot.

I straight up failed (obviously) because I was giving life advice as goofy, out of shape 26-year-old living in Connecticut who had just quit his job and was working one-off jobs at Robert Half Account Temps to make ends meet while figuring out his next move.

Not exactly an inspirational life, but I now see how risky that was and how that risk and pain is required for serious change. I eventually went abroad to Thailand to teach English and during that time I built my content marketing business over a few years.

I wasted a lot of time on this site back then to be honest because I didn't understand content marketing, SEO and how my blog would even make money in the first place.

But it was a necessary learning experience about content marketing, business and finding your thing.

Edge of David as my creative outlet

So after 2 years or so of blogging here, I was able to get this site to about 150 visitors a day, making roughly $50-80 a month from ads and around $100-300 from affiliate marketing.

This was great because I eventually went abroad and worked at a government school in Thailand as a broke English teacher making 33,000 Baht a month, roughly $850-1000 a month given the exchange rate.

This was enough to cover my expenses but not save, so an extra 150-300 USD flowing into my life made a huge difference.

However, anyone how knows me knows that no way was I content with being some English teacher. This is why I made my popular "teacher trap" video because too many guys get comfortable scrapping by, drinking a big LEO (a cheap beer in Thailand) every night and dating some lo-so farm girl they think is a 10, but eveyone else sees as a 4.

It genuinely pissed me off when I would go to Bangkok (I lived in Ratchaburi at the time) and not have the funds to go to a nice rooftop bar, always having to worry about how much things cost, having to leave Bangkok on Sunday night for a 3 hour van ride back to Ratchaburi and meeting guys who were living the life I wanted - a life of freedom and self-sovereignty.

I didn't give up

I kept trying different things and was ok with acknowledging that all the time and effort I had put into edgeofdavid.com was a learning experience but if I had kept at it, it would become a waste of time.

I had to accept that despite starting in 2010, I was starting over from scratch with a new project. That's a painful realization because time is valuable and you want things to grow, but failure is part of the process like all the clichés state.

So I decided that going forward, I'll always keep this brand as a personal thing. As I live abroad, travel and was growing a business I just needed a place to create. I even started my vlog for the same reason. I wanted to figure out video content.

In the back of my mind I did think that maybe vlogging would be my thing. But like edgeofdavid.com the EOD vlog never took off.

I'm actually thankful it didn't because I love, absolutely love my current business model of making educational tutorials, helping people with their digital products, websites, online stores etc.

My work is truly remote and I'm glad I'm not stuck creating travel content and always having to go somewhere to make a video.

The vlog however like the blog did teach me how to make videos which proved essential for my main business.

Funny how things work out.

Now I want this brand to make money

So let me break down the income and how I plan to do it with this website and how to make money blogging in general if you're curious.

Make quick and easy topical videos with an action camera.

My YouTube channel for this brand is monetized, depending on the views I get I make anywhere from $1 to $8 a day. More in the range of $1 to be honest. So ad revenue is not really a primary monetization option for me.

I also enjoy making topical videos instead of vlogs. They have the potential for more staying power (that means getting consistent views from search and recommendations) which means more ad revenue and people watching.

I really don't have the gift for gab or the personality to carry a vlog so topical vids make way more sense. I want to use my action camera (I bought a DJI Nano) instead of my iPhone because I like having a dedicated device for this sort of thing.

From YouTube promote my Ghost newsletter website.

I'll promote my Ghost powered blog/newsletter website. I would like to grow my subscriber base here, currently my open rate is 40-50% which is not bad. YouTube is one way to grow my newsletter. The other way is from organic search content as my emails I also publish as blog posts and those do get search traffic from Google and AI.

Promote my KDP books, get reviews, publish more KDP books.

My Thai friend Tip makes around $1200 a month from her KDP books. I enjoy writing so I want to do something similar which is why I published a few KDP titles of my own.

So far the sales are meh.

New books with no reviews don't rank well or get pushed by the algo. On top of that I have a small audience and my books are not super focused on a keyword. I just really wanted to write because I wanted to write. Like my Bitcoin book. Just a passion project I wanted to create.

As the newsletter and traffic to the site grows, I'm curious if I'll make more sales from having a low ticket offer in the form of a KDP book.

Part of me thinks I should just price them at $9.99 and sell them as a PDF with a traditional sales page, but Tip showed me that once your books are ranking you'll make sales everyday without doing any marketing which really appeals to me.

Move Expat Escape to Thrive Cart, develop sales page with Carrd.

I'm proud of Expat Escape but I would like it to be it's own stand-a-lone thing and not tied to EdgeofDavid.com. So for that I'm going to move it (all the videos and written content) over to Thrive Cart. I can also use Thrive Cart if I decide to pivot from Amazon KDP.

Thrive Cart is a shopping cart platform that costs a one time fee of around $500 USD. You get the ability to host digital products and create beautiful, high converting checkout pages with bump offers.

Carrd is a one page website builder that works really well for creating sales pages.

Bring back a low ticket $5 subscription offer for my site.

I deleted my paid subscription offer on my blog where I kept private, members only blog posts so I could instead offer Expat Escape.

I'm glad I did this because I learned that this was a mistake. People will subscribe to your newsletter if the price point is low. So instead of having a Patreon, I'll just again create a low ticket subscription offer here.

Run display ads on Edge of David

Right now my site is getting around 150-200 daily visitors. It's an 80/20 rule with all the traffic going to a few blog posts, so perhaps it it might make sense to run ads on the higher traffic content that does not have a clear offer?

With any ad network, you want to look at your website from a holistic approach and run ads on the pieces of content where it makes sense. Content, where it makes sense is where there is no clear affiliate offer, or offer for your email list or product.

Affiliate marketing

I'm still surprised after 10 years people have no idea what affiliate marketing is. You can sign up as an affiliate for companies and promote their product and service.

If people click your link and purchase, you get a commission. With the right traffic source and content, this can scale up to tens of thousands of dollars a month.

The catch?

You need the right traffic and content, which is not easy, as everyone is going after lucrative keywords because that is where the money is.

You'll also need a lot of content ranking well for many transactional keywords where people are searching for help or advice on a purchase decisions or they need help learning how to do something.

Most people are lazy however and won't stick it out. They will create create five videos for YouTube or start a blog and write 6 blog posts and then you guessed it, quit.

I don't mind this reality because this work is the actual barrier to entry to keep lazy, stupid people at bay.

Affiliate marketing is an excellent revenue stream for this site. With sending out emails and linking to various products and services that are a good fit, it's simply a matter of creating more affiliate focused content.

Like in my Gemini credit card review post which I published a few years ago. Funny because every financial YouTuber is now pushing this card even though it's been available for years.

Keep the main thing, the main thing

With all that said, it's important to keep the main thing, the main thing. Edge of David is a fun side thing, but it does not pull its weight enough to spend a ton of time on.

My goal this year is to get a bunch of digital products done and get to a point where I create videos and a once a week email here.