SIR THORNEY

Recently I’ve been dipping my toe in multiple projects & ideas. Some with monetary value, others without. I’ve counted 7, all with their own little “lesson” with what you can take away from my experience.

⌚️ Affiliate Marketing Watches

When a reputable watch brand offered me the opportunity to make money per sale & provide a discount to others, I had to take it. I setup a simple pay-per-click ad with a low cost-per-click to advertise the affiliate link. Over the last 3 months I’ve averaged £130 per month in profit, spending around 30-60 minutes per month maintaining the adverts.

Lesson learnt: Even if the reward seems small for an affiliate programme, at least test the waters to see if it’s something that can easily run in the background whilst making a passive amount.

🪑 My Furniture Brand

My furniture brand has had a rocky road which I will breakdown for my readers in the future. I’m taking the brand’s progression slow to minimise costs & mistakes, each month introducing new products with low advertising costs to see what the reception is. If they’re ROI positive they stay, if not they get dropped.

Lesson learnt: Even if there’s a gap in the market with very little competition but lots of interest, consumers may not want to pay a premium for the niche.

💒 A Wedding RSVP Website

My sister is getting married this year. Over 100 people were invited to the ceremony so I created a website to help her collect the RSVPs. This website then turned the RSVPs into an Excel spreadsheet she could provide to caterers for food & allergy information, use to organise tables, & more. I’ll do a full breakdown in a future blog post when she’s 100% done with the website.

Lesson learnt: When people can respond in a million ways (text, phonecall, letter, email, social media messages, face-to-face & more) having a solution to streamline communication can be a blessing.

📊 Our Digital Marketing Agency

My brother & I have been running our digit marketing agency together for just over 6 years now. It’s my primary source of income, & something I still enjoy (for the most part) everyday. We mostly focus on lead generation for all manner of industries. One recent industry I’ve had to dive into include “onsite paint spraying”.

Lesson learnt: You never know what each industry’s marketing will require. A solution for a similar industry will not necessarily work for another.

🍻 Pub Reviewing Website

Last year I started a pub reviewing website with a few of my friends. Then covid happened before we could do any reviews. Each month we now review a different local pub on various criteria. The website is actually one of the most attractive I’ve designed, which is kind of funny.

Lesson learnt: Doing silly projects with friends sometimes gives you a reason to keep in touch regularly & stay connected even in tough times.

👨🏻‍💻 A Micro-SMMA

After seeing how much others were charging for very simple social media management services we decided to make something charged much more fairly, starting from £20 per month. This is yet to be launched, but I’m hoping it will be another valuable arm to our agency.

Lesson learnt: Making your services more accessible is sometimes more valuable than a bigger profit margin.

✏️ This Blog

After years of blogging without monetisation, I decided to see if I could generate advertising revenue using WordPress Ads. I placed them on specific articles, & began doing PPC ads to those articles at the lowest cost-per-click (1-3p). Slowly over months the cost-per-mille (amount paid per 1,000 views) grew & grew, almost hitting a point where the blog became profitable. And then WordPress Ads suddenly stopped paying for the views… So I recently pulled the adverts.

With than in mind I also changed the website’s design to help my productivity on here.

Lesson learnt: Cut-out middle men when possible to reduce the likelihood of losing revenue or being left without payment for your services.