Hey everyone. Welcome to today's video.
And today we're going to be looking at income for 2020 from a
combination of the sales of KDP,
no content and low content books on Amazon.
And also from this YouTube channel. Now,
the reason I'm doing this is not to tell you how well the business did in 2020,
but to give you guys some idea of what's possible when starting
out in creating an online business and also for those that are already
publishing books to see what's possible and what you can
easily achieve with sort of consistent work.
And also what I'm going to do is give you a general timeframe of
how long it took me to get to this present situation.
And when it comes to things like YouTube, I think you'll be quite surprised.
Now, 2020 has been an unusual year to say the least and has been
a difficult year for a lot of people,
but for many who have online businesses, it's actually been quite a good year.
And that's because the buying patterns of people have changed
significantly due to the whole lockdown house,
arresting more and more people have become converts
to purchasing online. As a consequence,
a lot of people have found sales, whether you've got a YouTube channel,
a Shopify store you're selling on Amazon eBay,
or any other sort of online store,
the sales of all of those have actually increased.
So now is a pretty good time to get in if you're
on the fence about starting an online business. So hopefully this video will,
wi ll get you moving in the right direction and give you some motivation to get
started. And as I say, if you have already started to really push through ,
get those books published, or even start a YouTube channel.
So how are we going to break this down is I'll quickly go through the sales from
this channel and how you can earn money from YouTube channel.
And then we'll look at the KDP books.
So we'll go over to YouTube and see how much this channel earned in 2020.
And as we can see here, the dollar amount is
$8,330 and 32 cents. Now this income comes from YouTube ads.
There are a number of ways you can make money from a YouTube channel,
the commonest being ads, affiliate sales,
product sales, selling courses, which comes under the product sales really,
and also sponsorships.
Now this figure is from ads alone.
And those are the ads that you normally see at the beginning of videos or during
a video where you get the option to skip the ads. If you so wish.
Now this channel got monetized at the beginning of may.
It was actually May the first. So this is income.
This is ad income over the last eight months.
And that has slowly increased over that period of time.
And December the income from ads was a roundabout the,
just under the $1,500 Mark. So that's pretty good.
Now when it comes to product sales, as I said, a lot of people sell courses,
or products that they've created. And from this channel,
you can see that I have this shop here and it's where I sell things like
keywords, which are essential to getting your books found on, on Amazon.
There's also some free resources on there, like lined paper, music,
manuscript paper,
and some also some keywords there which are up for free.
So if you're interested in that sort of thing and getting your books ranked on
Amazon, then go and check that out.
Now the income from the Gumroad shop in 2020 was
$4,042 and 31 cents.
Now I get approximately 62% of that.
And that figure came to $2,506 and 23 cents,
which I'm very pleased about. Now, also on this channel,
if you have a look in the description,
there's some links to products that I use. Now,
these products are keyword research tools,
which I use to get the keywords,
to rank my books on Amazon and make those sales and
also, graphics packages mainly on Creative Fabrica,
which sell fantastic interiors and graphics that you can use to create the
covers of your books. Now, in 2020,
my total income from affiliate sales was
$6,134 and 38 cents.
And again,
income from these affiliate sales and the product sales started to
come in around about June last year.
So the income from that has been over approximately 6 to7 months. Now,
what I also want to do is mention another
type of product sale that I did have, and that was from Merch,
selling things like hoodies,
t-shirts pop sockets on merch by Amazon and the income from that whilst
$271 and 28 cents.
Now I haven't produced any t-shirts or anything like that.
Any Merch since beginning of 2018.
So that income is pure passive income. Now with YouTube,
is it passive I'd call it probably sort of semi-passive you've got to
really keep feeding the beast by producing regular videos.
Otherwise views just drop gradually over time.
And obviously the income from a channel would also drop.
So it's not pure passive income. You've still got to keep putting in that work.
Now quickly show you on this graph that we've got here,
which shows the YouTube income,
how that's sort of increased quite quickly until we get to about September
and has then leveled off.
Same for the affiliate income that sort of went up and then
sort of dipped and then went back up again.
That's just due to patterns in people's buying and product sales have been
pretty consistent.
Now the overall income from this channel in 2020 was
$17,323 and 92 cents.
So that's income that I've had over the last eight months,
which I think you probably would agree is, is pretty good. I mean,
you're starting from scratch. I mean,
I started publishing videos at the start of the year.
I set myself a challenge of producing a video a day,
which I found pretty quickly was, was virtually impossible. Well,
impossible for me. What it got me into though,
was that habit of creating a video regularly.
Then at the beginning of February,
I decided to create videos on KDP
publishing. So really to niche down.
And that's when the views started to come in.
That's when the subscriber numbers started coming. And so since that time,
the subscriber numbers have gone up to about 15,000.
I think it's currently around about 15 and a half thousand.
So that's not bad I think over 11 months.
I know some channels can, you know,
get hundreds of thousands of subscribers during that time,
but pretty pleased with that.
And I think it's brought in a pretty good income over that time.
The plan over this next year is to continue producing videos,
work on the quality and maybe create
a course sometime in 2021.
Because I know I get a lot of questions about that and a lot of people asking if
I'm going to produce one or if there's one available.
So that's something to look at,
but certainly going to be producing more content, working on,
the quality of the videos. I think it's important, you know,
to keep just improving things as you go along.
So now we come to the KDP books and let's have a
look at income for December. Now, remember when you see this figure,
we've got to take off the spend for ads. So in December,
the income from the sales of books was
$5,671 and 35 cents, which is good.
Sales did start to increase from October onwards,
which is the last quarter or Q4.
And these obviously increased to this level. Now, for some reason,
I can't get up the number of books that were sold in December.
They seem to have changed the platform on the KDP reports
beta so I can't get that exact figure,
but it looks like it's probably around about the 3000 book mark that was,
was sold. Now I mentioned there is ad spent to takeoff,
which was quite large in December,
and that was $1,215 and 70 cents.
That's obviously higher because more people are shopping on Amazon.
So the overall income from KDP in December was
$4,455 and 65 cents.
Now I've had a lot of messages in comments and personal messages from quite a
lot of people telling me how, since they've started this year producing books,
they have experienced pretty decent sales and some have done
really, really well making a few thousand dollars in December.
Now I'll tell you about my timeline in a moment when we come to the total sales
in 2020,
but I'll just quickly show you how the sales progressed over December.
There were pretty consistent. The usual ups and downs,
we have this sudden drop off on the 24th, 25th of December.
That's because Amazon's not sending that many books on those days, but you know,
the, the number of sales per day was probably just under a hundred, again,
pretty pleased about.
So what does that mean for total income in 2020 from KDP book
sales? Well,
this came to a grand total of $33,192 and
47 cents. Again,
which I'm very pleased about.
This is mostly passive income because the timeline for this was I
started in around,
I think it was August 2018 creating these books.
Then I sort of learned the process, created lots of books.
In total I've I think I've got around about 2,400 books on Amazon.
Then I sort of developed a particular style of a book back in June
2019 and created quite a few books from that style
or using that style.
And those books produce or create the most of my income. And in fact,
10 books in that style create the big bulk of the
income. So really from about June onwards,
I'd say was the time that those books
created this amount that you can see today.
Now that doesn't mean you can start on day one,
create the books and expect to make this sort of amount.
A lot of people are actually making more. Again,
I get reports from people who are making, you know,
$7,000 a month selling the these books, which is fantastic.
And I really want you guys to succeed in this,
if this is something you've started to do,
but this income that you see here is actually passive
income.
I didn't produce a huge number of books in 2020,
mainly because I was concentrating more on this YouTube channel.
And the work that goes into YouTube channel was a lot more than I actually
thought it would ever be,
which didn't give me as much time to produce these books.
But the royalties from these books are a passive income.
Most of it has come from work. I did in 2019,
and I always consider passive income to be the gold standard of income.
Now I notice from my books that income did start to
increase in May due to the whole lockdown house
arrest scenario. I don't know what's going to happen going forward.
Hopefully I'd like to see the sales continue to increase,
but what I'm going to do in 2021 is definitely start to produce a lot more
books. As I mentioned in a, in a earlier video,
I am doing this 30 day challenge in January,
where I'm going to be producing a book a day and hopefully
continue that through January. Now,
if you're starting out in this business or you're already in this business,
I think it might be worthwhile doing something like that because it will get you
into that habit of producing books regularly.
Even if you don't produce a book a day,
it's a book every other day or even just one book a week.
I think it's good just to get you into that habit that will then take you
through 2021 and hopefully create more books, create more sales,
create a side income. And even maybe if this is what you want,
create an income that replaces your full-time income.
This is certainly what's happened to me because in total for
2020,
my income was $50,484 and
68 cents. That includes KDP. And that includes YouTube.
And I say most of that has come from the latter half of the year,
sort of from May, June onwards that that's really built up and
this will,
or this has during the last part of the year replaced my full-time
income and hopefully will continue to do so through 2021.
And that was my ultimate goal all along.
So if it is your aim,
then please do continue to make those books really work at it.
Put in the commitment. I know sometimes at the start,
it can be a little bit frustrating,
but you can do it if you persist with it and just commit and commit to improving
the quality of your books. Learning about color theory,
learning about cover design and learning a platform so you can create your own
bespoke interiors. And you know,
there's nothing really to stop you when you hear people saying, Oh, KDP books,
books are dead and they're not accepting books. They're refusing books,
are shutting down accounts. That goes on in every single online business.
I've been hearing stuff like that since I really started trading businesses
online, which was back in 2002 and even
YouTube, Oh, it's too late to create a YouTube channel. It's too saturated.
Too many people do it. You can't, you know, you can't earn any money. Well,
look, here's proof that you can,
you can start from scratch and within a year be making an income.
So that's it.
I hope you enjoyed that if you did give it a thumbs up,
but make sure you do hit this subscribe button and smash that notification bell.
And until next time, goodbye.