OWAHL 001: How we make a full time income online (our family's story!)

Our Work at Home Life with Jason and Jami: Online Business | Blogging | Working from Home

Welcome to our brand new podcast: Our Work at Home Life with Jason & Jami. Each week we are going to bring you these mini-training sessions with practical hands on resources for growing your own blog or online business! This podcast has been a LONG time coming, and Jason and I are both so excited to kick it off. Today we are going to be sharing a little bit about our story, how we came to work from home full time, and how we make our money.

If you are curious about how it's possible to work from home full time running an online business (and how you can do it too!), then this episode is for you.

Then make sure to head back for our next episode. We are going to be jumping straight into our training sessions when we chat about how to launch your very own digital product.

Our Story

I started my very first blog back in 2009. I fell in love with blogging and then in 2012 I started our main blog, Young Wife's Guide. I had no idea at that time that it would become our family's full time income in just three short years.

The very first thing we made some money on was an eBook on gardening that I sold for $5.95. I was making like $20 here or there and it was SO exciting!! Later that year, I was approached by a friend to put my book in this brand new eBook bundle she was putting together. That year my gardening book was in the first ever Healthy Living Bundle and I made a few hundred dollars! I think this was a turning point for us. We realized that I could actually make a little income from this.

So my goal was to be able to build this up a little bit to have a small side income for when we had kids and I stayed home. Slowly we started working on this blog and building up a bit of side income.

And then in December of 2015, Jason quit his full time job in sales to be able to come home and run our businesses from home.

We've now been running our online businesses full time for over 18 months and I don't think we could ever go back! This business and running it from home has become such a blessing to our family.

How we make money

One of the biggest things that people ask us is how we make an income from home. They hear that we run a blog full time and people assume we must run ads on our blog.

But in reality - we actually don't run ANY outside ads on our blog. So how do we make money? Here's the breakdown (these numbers are approximate):

• 20% of our income comes from affiliate sales & sponsored posts
• 80% of our income comes from selling our own products: digital items, courses, conferences, our academy, etc.

Breakdown of 20%

These are the percentages for 2016. These seem to be holding true for 2017 but there are still a lot of months in the year left, so that could change.

Affiliate Sales

Being an affiliate for companies is a wonderful way to start making a little bit of income. It's easy in some ways because you don't have to have your own products or anything.

Basically you sign up for an affiliate program with some business or product you already love. They give you a special affiliate link which you then share on your blog, social media, etc. Then whenever anyone purchases something through that link, you get a percentage of that sale.

So for Young Wife's Guide (a homemaking blog), that means that I've been an affiliate for natural cleaners, a meal planning website, amazon book recommendations, and more.

Sponsored Posts

I also work with companies on a VERY limited basis to do sponsored posts. What this means is that a company will pay me up front to promote their business or product to my audience.

I do these on a very limited basis and ONLY ever do it for companies that I 100% believe in and would recommend their products anyway. One thing for 2017 we are exploring more is podcast sponsorship for my homemaking podcast: The Homemaking Foundations Podcast.

Breakdown of 80%

We've done a few things in our business life that has made all the difference!! The first thing was starting our online conference 4 years ago, and the second thing was starting an online digital store. Here's some more details:

Homemaking Ministries Store

I've been creating digital products for years. The more products we added, the more we realized that we needed a central "store" for all our products. I DREAMED of having a library where my customers could log in and access everything they've purchased from me under one login.

So we paid for an expensive custom website which ended up not working and eventually landed on using New Kajabi for our store (which is what this website is also now run on). And we are in LOVE. It's not perfect and still has a few minor things we would change, but overall it has everything we need! (And don't worry - we plan on covering Kajabi in depth in the future and breaking down everything we love about itOur Conference

The other thing that has had the most impact is launching our first every online conference in 2014! We had no idea what we were doing, figuring out the technology was a NIGHTMARE, but here we are on our 4th year and still going strong.

Our conference has opened up the door to working with other bloggers and ultimately creating our online academy: My Homemaking Mentor!

The vast majority of our income comes from selling those two products: our annual conference and our academy. The other smaller products help to fill in the gaps. Every $20 here and there really adds up and helps us pay our bills!

Our Next Big Project:

The next big project that we will be turning our attention to is our physical store. We have started an online store with physical products. So far we have t-shirts and Scripture memory cards in the store, but we are slowly working on adding more items to that.

Our goal by the end of the year is to have 15-20 items in the store!! This has been a really fun new adventure into the realm of physical products, shipping, and sending things out.

You can see our store here: Homemaking Ministries Store.

And then make sure to stay tuned next week for episode #2. We are going to be talking about How to launch a digital product - a big picture overview!