Month 5 Income Report - Shifting to a Long-Term Mindset

Hey there!

This is Zach, and in this newsletter, I share a monthly update on how my full-time solopreneurship journey is going.

I’m at the end of month 5, and I’ve started to make some financial investments in the growth of my business and taken on a longer-term vision for what I’m building.

All that said—I still don’t have super tangible results to show for it.

Let’s dive in.

Revenue tracker

Below is my current revenue. The improvements here are marginal, but I saw some promising trends in my Amazon Affiliate revenue and golf training course sales—two things I’ve been actively working to improve.

Also… This is the first issue where the bars go up each month. We’ll take a win where we can get one 😆 

As of June 2023, this revenue is primarily broken into 2 separate businesses.

1. The DIY Golfer - a golf niche site

2. Zach Gollwitzer YouTube - a coding tutorials channel

Here’s a detailed look at how the overall business has done:

A few notable highlights:

• I spent some time cleaning up my Quickbooks account this month, so there are some small restatements from the prior month—namely a golf product that I purchased for $600 that I will be doing a video review on.

• As you can see, the “Supplies / COGS” section has been a significant expense the last two months. I’m finally getting into the text/video product reviews for my golf site in hopes to increase my affiliate revenue and capture some SEO opportunities.

What went well

While this month was still absolutely brutal mentally, it was the first month where I felt a complete vision coming together.

Here’s what went well:

My mindset has evolved

Two things have improved:

1. I’ve become more long-term focused

2. I’m getting better at handling the daily self-doubt

Going into this, I wanted things to happen instantly. I wanted to grow my revenue without making financial investments or developing long-term relationships.

I’ve realized that this is not just a 12-month, “win or lose” game. Growing a business and making the right decisions early on requires at least a 2-5 year horizon.

I’ve heard these pieces of advice a MILLION times by now, but I’m starting to truly digest what they mean:

1. Build long-term relationships

2. Stay in the game long enough to win

3. Be obnoxiously consistent with your message

4. Re-invest in your business

5. Collaborate and help others win

You can learn these lessons from a book or a podcast. But you can’t internalize them until you’ve felt the pain associated with ignoring them.

Improvements in Affiliate Revenue

I now send a weekly newsletter for my golf niche site that usually has 1-3 affiliate links in it.

Additionally, I have spent a lot of time optimizing the mobile and desktop reading experience on my site to increase conversion rates and recommend relevant products to readers.

While I haven’t actually produced a lot of new affiliate content, with just these optimizations, I’ve started to earn >$200 per month with Amazon affiliates alone—a very promising trend.

Better conversion rates on my sales page (finally)

If you remember from last month, I spent a lot of time rewriting my sales page. Well… After analyzing the CrazyEgg data, I reshuffled things, came up with a new pricing structure, and… It seemed to work! I sold 6 courses (including a $349 premium course) for a 2.2% conversion rate (276 unique visitors), which is up from ~1% the prior month.

What went poorly

I’m SOOO far away from the goal still

We’re at the end of month 5.

By now, I thought I would have a TON more tangible results to boast about.

But I don’t.

And it sucks. Really really bad.

While I’m getting better at handling the daily self-doubt, the more months that pass without substantial revenue growth, the more it seems to hurt.

My hope is that I see a “snowball” effect with the revenue, but considering golf season is ending soon, I’m preparing for a long winter.

I kinda got de-railed…

In the “What I shipped” section below, you’ll come to learn that I spent 130+ hours on a migration from my Git-based CMS to Sanity.

Why?

Because after doing all the SEO keyword research this month and planning out my content, I realized that with my current workflows, I had ZERO CHANCE of pumping out content at the rate I needed to.

When I first started this journey, I converted The DIY Golfer site to a Git-based CMS for simplicity and cost savings.

I wanted something simple because I didn’t plan on working on The DIY Golfer… At all.

But after evaluating the opportunity a bit more, I realized there was a ton of potential value in this asset and as you’ve seen in these newsletters, I’ve been exclusively working on this niche site for the past 3 months and plan on doing the same indefinitely into the future.

One could argue this migration wasn’t 100% necessary, but I think it will pay off big in the long-term. I put it off as long as I could, but caved this month and spent 3 weeks on it.

I sure hope it pays off.

What I shipped

This is mostly a therapy section for me—read it at your own peril. At this early stage, revenue and public praise are simply… Not reassuring. At all. The only thing I’m hanging onto at this point is the hard work I’ve put in.

For the second month in a row, almost 100% of my work was for The DIY Golfer brand. I put in 204 laser-focused hours and shipped the following:

1. Got about 80% through a massive migration from my Git-based CMS to Sanity CMS + Site redesign (130 hours) - this isn’t launched yet, but here’s a sneak peak

2. I re-wrote my “Break 90 in 90 Days” Course Sales Page for the 6th… 7th… 8th?? Time (5 hours) - see above for details

3. Published 3 YouTube videos to the golf channel (11 hours)

4. Published 4 newsletters (8 hours)

5. Got accepted to Amazon Influencer program and setup my initial storefront

6. Did a TON of SEO research and built out a 6-month content calendar and publishing schedule for The DIY Golfer (10 hours)

7. Wrote the beginner’s guide to golf, golf terms, and a 3,000-word review that I still haven’t published. I think I wrote like… 20,000 words in a 4-day period (no AI involved)

Recap, looking forward

During the first 5 months of this journey, I have roughly spent my time on the following things:

• Local Golf Spot (1 ½ months)

• Reviving The DIY Golfer (1/2 month)

• Growing The DIY Golfer (3 months)

My plan is to continue pushing forward with The DIY Golfer for the next month and I should have some organic SEO growth to share in next month’s issue 🤞 

See ya then!

Zach

My Links

• Twitter

• YouTube

• Website

• Golf site