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How I Accidentally Made $10,843.00 Additional Income from a Facebook Group

I know, I know, I know. Clickbaity title, right? I study copywriting. Sue me.

The following is the story about how I accidentally made $10,843.00 extra income from a Facebook group all about pop music.

Too Much On Your Plate?

Here’s the truth about me… I’m all over the place. I grew up being told that creative ADD and a need to understand everything was a weakness. Today I am aware that it is by far my greatest asset. This “flaw” is what makes me who I am. Part of this creative ADD is that I have my hands in multiple things at once.

Whether it is income projects, music, books I’m reading, or whatever else has my interest/obsession that week.

Here are a few things that I have sitting on my plate and my whiteboard:

  • WebRocket (my web design and social media management company with my girlfriend)
  • All Out Leads (a new business venture cold emailing prospects to sell leads to their business)
  • Digital Recording School (my online recording school website and book that I wrote)
  • Tom Camp Media (this website)
  • The Profit of Failure (Podcast I’ve been working on)
  • Financial Partnership (a partnership for another new business venture I’m working on)
  • Various other endeavors

Now, this is a lot of shit. Too much shit? Probably. Especially, because it takes multiple facets to do these things right. Fortunately, I partner up with talented hard working people that always help to see the goals and visions into fruition.

But this is too much. I’ve started to trim it down, assess what I can do quickly for the highest amount of money while also figuring out what I bring the most amount of value to. Then outsourcing the rest. Do you have a similar looking list of things that you’re working on? Then it might be time to try this…

Do A Self-Audit

I realized recently that I needed to do more to figure out what needs to be outsourced, what I’m wasting time on, what isn’t paying me dividends and to examine my sales relationships. So I did a self-audit to try to clear some way for some more clarity. My father always gave me great advice…

“No amount of money would ever buy you a second of time.”
Howard Stark

Okay, that wasn’t my dad. That was Tony Stark’s.

Tony, we miss you 3000.

What is a self-audit? It is where I took the last year of my businesses and set up a CRM (customer relationship management software) to house my customer data, pipelines, and other details. I loaded up all of my previous sales information for the year.

What I saw shocked me. I started tracking where my work was coming from and seeing how much time was spent on certain customers. Hindsight is always 20/20. So I was able to see that $500 deal took tons of customer relationship management wasn’t worth shit in the end. And that high ROI customer that I made $10,000 from only took 30 hours of work is the perfect target customer (because they’re happy with the value provided, too).

My Curse

One of my curses is that I tend to overthink everything. Absolute perfection in everything that I try to do and I enter into analysis paralysis. This was the case with this website (that I’ve been wanting to launch for years).

Part of that is that I joined a Facebook group to market. The goal was to join the group, invite some of them to join mastermind group calls that we were doing last March, and eventually market products once Digital Recording School was fully launched.

Instead what happened was that I didn’t market. I didn’t share a webinar, a sales page, or anything of the sort. Why? Because I wasn’t ready, yet.

Authenticity Sells

I found that the more time I spent in the group, the more I started liking it. I would notice someone asking a question about songwriting or promoting their band, something I struggled with and had extensive experience within my early 20’s. Without thinking twice I would just offer to hop on a phone call.

And the phone calls were natural because I wasn’t selling band promotion or songwriting products. Aside from there being no money in it, it just wasn’t my primary goal.

Before I knew it, I was getting people interested in all kinds of services. I had someone who wanted me to mentor him. I’ve never done a mentorship program before, but I had a course and had a solid foundation of marketing. What was supposed to just be a call to help him turned into a paid gig and 3-month mentorship. One that frankly I probably gained as much from as he did!

Then I started getting a few random website build projects, a consulting client who offered to pay hourly for marketing tips, and even some random studio editing work.

Mind you, this was all while “not marketing.”

Meanwhile, I was gearing up for big marketing campaigns in my other businesses. A push with the proper hashtags, content research, SEO plans, and a marketing plan that was huge.

Side Money

Doing my audit in Pipedrive was when I realized that I made $10,843.00 from this Facebook group. I barely knew that I was making money from this source because I wasn’t tracking those leads. They felt more like friend gigs than your typical customer acquisition. Bonus income that wasn’t “part of the plan.”

Remember how I said hindsight is always 20/20… Looking back I realize that the best marketing that you can ever do is just authentically being yourself and providing value. It is really that simple. It is all about relationships.

Why This Matters To You

I want to leave you with just three tips.

Tip #1: set up a CRM in your business.

Why the hell I’ve waited this long is beyond me. Setting up systems before you expand is much smarter than doing what I did.

Tip #2: be authentically you while providing value.

Now did I use a clickbait title to get you into this article? Sure. I’m a marketing guy, what do you expect? But you won’t get an inauthentic version of it. An inauthentic version would be how you can make $10,843.00 without working by joining my MLM selling vegan pig fat protein bars made from unicorn milk.

Make sure what you’re giving your end customer is worth the right amount of value to them. It makes all the difference in the world.

Tip #3: stop overthinking

And the last tip is to let your guard down, relax, and stop trying so hard. Because when you do you might find that people like you and you accidentally make some extra cash as a byproduct of it.

What are you doing to market yourself today?

STOP LOSING

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