In January I made $371, according to Stripe.*

*It seems like Stripe can be a little bit inaccurate since it always gives me the total sales number including sales that later got refunded. I had one or two instances where people got charged twice for some reason, so I had to roll back the second charge. There were also a couple people who wanted to pay me via PayPal, so those two things roughly cancel each other out.

Here’s my income for the 6 months Angular on Rails has been making money:

– August 2016: $868
– September 2016: $1053
– October 2016: $1580
– November 2016: $871
– December 2016: $428
– January 2017: $371

You can see a clear downward pattern. Why has revenue gone down? I think the simplest answer is that I haven’t really done anything to make it go up.

Let me talk about what I’ve done since January 1st. Keep in mind that I’m writing this on February 23rd.

A little after January 1st I offered a free training program. I sent out an email to my list of about 1200 subscribers and gave them a link to apply. To my great surprise, over 110 people applied for the free training. That’s almost a 10% conversion rate. Insane.

I told my subscribers that I would choose 20 students in order to keep the class size down, and that’s what I did. I think only about 16 students were able to join because there were time zone challenges. The format was a once-weekly 90-minute webinar. If I remember correctly, almost all of them attended the first session, but only 5 or 6 of the students stuck with it through the end.

I attribute the attrition to the facts that a) it was a free program and b) I had some really serious technical issues during the first session and had to push the whole program back a week.

Anyway, the class went reasonably okay. I plan to do it again. Next time, I plan to provide the students with videos that they can consume on their own time. The “live” time will be more of an office hours type thing as opposed to me just lecturing, which has very little benefit over a video. I’m very glad that I did this free training program before I tried to offer a paid one. I don’t think people would have been very happy if they had paid $X00 for the program I delivered this time.

Another thing I did recently was to pay for a book cover redesign. Here’s the original cover:

And here’s the new cover:

I got the original off of Fiverr for $15 (IIRC) and the new one off of 99designs for around $550. (I think I overpaid but I’m happy with the end result.)

So, not much of the stuff I’ve done so far in 2017 is stuff that really directly drives sales.

Here’s what I think I need to do next. I have a $39 ebook that converts at a decent rate. Nobody right now is buying my $89 or my $299 product. I think the thing I need to do next is get my $89 product selling.

One obstacle is that I believe my $89 product to be outdated and kinda sucky. It’s hard to persuade people to buy a product I don’t really think they should buy. So I need to refresh the product. Second, I need to do a better job of presenting the $89 product on the sales page. If you give me $89, what exactly do you get? Right now the answer isn’t very clear. I need to make it more clear.

Once the product is refreshed and I make it better-presented on the sales page, I plan to re-launch the $89 product. When I originally launched the video package in October 2016, I made about $1600 that month, and at the time I had about 900 subscribers. Now I have closer to 1400 subscribers, so I think I can expect some pretty good launch sales.

I’m teaching an Angular 2 class in Bulgaria in two weeks and I need all the time I can get between now and then to prepare. I plan to do the $89 product refresh and relaunch when I get back. I’m giving myself about two weeks to do it. My deadline for relaunch is 3/23.