$100 a Day Challenge: Tracking My Progress to Financial Freedom – Entry #1

Today is Monday, August 12, 2024 and I’ve been wanting to start this thread/series for a few weeks now and decided that today is Monday and it’s time to get started. If you read the title of the post, “$100 a Day Challenge: Tracking My Progress to Financial Freedom“, it is pretty obvious that my goal is to earn $100 per day IN PROFIT. I’ve been working on this for a while now with different ventures but decided it was time to buckle down and document my progress for a couple reasons:

1. Hold myself accountable.
2. Track my progress for anyone that wants to attempt to do the same thing.
3. I need to do this!!

My Background

I have been trying to make extra money online for several years now with different ventures. What I have learned is that it isn’t as easy as just watching some Youtube videos, doing what the ‘gurus’ tell you to do and you will get instant success. The truth is that making a second income online is super hard and takes a lot of effort, time and most importantly, consistency. I’m really good at starting projects, but sticking to just one or two (or three) projects has been hard.

I have Shopify, Etsy and WordPress experience. I’ve built several Shopify stores and recently just built my first WordPress/Woocommerce store. I feel like I have good understanding of what it takes to build a website, but getting converting traffic is really the hard part. I’ve developed a couple ideas on how it should be done, but now it’s really a matter of putting it into practice and finding some consistent success.

Several websites I built in the past are:

TacticalKnifeSupply.com – a Shopify e-commerce store based on selling knives. I found a knife distributor and thought I could sell knives online. Selling knives brought on it’s own challenges – the biggest being a lot of credit card processors (ie Shopify) don’t like to get involved with ‘weapons’ or dangerous items. I was able to figure out a solution but ran into another problem. Margins are super tight on knives – there’s so much competition that people are selling on quantity and making pennies on the dollar. I loved the business idea…but couldn’t justify the tight margins. I did receive several phone calls AFTER I shut the store down…so who knows…it might have had a chance.

Myhashtagshirt.com – this was Print on Demand (POD) store that I started with simple hashtags printed on shirts. i just couldn’t drive enough conversions on Shopify/Etsy to keep the store going and it wasn’t that exciting. BUT…I probably should have kept at this one because it was simple to design the shirts and I probably would have found a design that would have sold pretty well. I’ve been thinking about putting more hashtag shirts/mugs back up on CoffeeMugsandHats.com.

Total Transparency

I am going to be 100% transparent with what I am doing to get to my goals of $100 per day (remember, each time I say $100/day – I mean $100 in profit). This means I am going to be showing you the websites I am using to get to $100/day and the tactics that I hope will drive converting traffic to the websites.

Any money earned via the websites and their respective channels will count towards the goal of $100 per day. What this really means is that in a nutshell, if I get any income from ad revenue, affiliate links, direct sales and any other income directly from my businesses, it counts towards my goal.

Current Websites I Am Working On:

Below is a list of my current websites and their respective social media accounts. I’ll update their follower/subscriber count at the end of each month so that we can track any growth and if that impacts earnings.

1. TheBikeRacer.com (WordPress)
2. HoveringHelicopter.com (WordPress)
3. CoffeeMugsandHats.com (Shopify)
4. CoffeeMugsandHats.com (Etsy)
5. CloudSeedingtheSky.com (WordPress)
6. TheFoundationisCracking.com (WordPress)
7. TerraCascadeOutdoors.com (Coming Soon – I have an idea for this website that I will share soon.)
8. Finditandbuyit.com (Coming Soon – Maybe)

Social Media Links

Youtube

1. TheBikeRacer (139 Subscribers)
2. HoveringHelicopter (1 Subscriber)
3. Coffeemugsandhats (3 Subscribers)
4. Cloudseedingthesky (1 Subscriber)
5. TheFoundationisCracking (5 Subscribers)
6. Finditandbuyit (1 Subscriber)

Twitter

1. Mike Byrd (169 Followers)
2. Hovering Helicopter (712 Followers)
3. Coffee Mugs and Hats (10 Followers)
4. Cloud Seeding the Sky (14 Followers)
5. The Foundation is Cracking (251 Followers)
6. Find It and Buy It (258 Followers)

Instagram

1. The Bike Racer (516 Followers)
2. Hovering Helicopter (7 Followers)
3. Coffee Mugs and Hats (152 Followers)
4. Cloud Seeding the Sky (0 Followers)
5. The Foundation is Cracking (0 Followers)
6. Find it and Buy It (1 Follower)

Facebook

1. The Bike Racer (218 Followers)
2. Hovering Helicopter (2,917 Followers)
3. Coffee Mugs and Hats (18 Followers)
4. The Foundation is Cracking (2 Followers)
5. Find it and Buy It (76 Followers)

Rumble – (Rumble really needs to work on their interface)

1. The Bike Racer Videos (0 Followers)
2. Hovering Helicopter (0 Followers)

Pinterest

1. Coffee Mugs and Hats (8 Followers)

Social Media Review

Wow…this has been a great exercise in seeing where I stand with websites and social media. Writing this down has been an eye opener to realize how much I have going on and maybe a good reason I get paralysis by analysis. I do think having all of this documented is going to help me get and stay more organized. At a minimum, I can refer to this list for a quick link reminding me where to go when I need to find one of my social media platforms.

Financial Baselines

I need a financial baseline to start from and enable me to track my progress and I work towards the $100 per day goal. Since I’m starting my documentation in August 2024, I figured I’d pull my sales numbers from July 2024 and use this as my baseline.

Month	# Orders	Etsy	Shopify	Total Profit	Ads Profit	Daily Profit
July 2024	10	10	0	$55.84	$0.12	$1.80

I think the table is pretty self explanatory. I’ll keep adding to this table as the months progress. I created an excel spreadsheet to track my orders and track my profit per order. One thing I find frustrating using POD companies and Etsy is tracking individual sales to track profits. I only have base memberships and maybe if you pay extra for the upgraded memberships (ie Shopify) you could download your sales and make it a lot easier.

Website Traffic Baselines

I also need to track website traffic to see if we can increase traffic to my websites which will hopefully lead to more conversions and more profit. To start, I’m going to list each website and the traffic Google Analytics (Does any hate G4 as much as I do?) and Bing is tracking. I don’t have all the sites set up on Bing yet, but will try to do so over the coming months for a comparison. Bing tracks Impressions and clicks. I am sure I’ll be adjusting the traffic reporting over the next several months.

Website	Month	Google Users	Google Sessions	Google Search Clicks	Bing Impressions	Bing Clicks
TheBikeRacer.com	July 2024	78	82	9	88	1

Website	Month	Google Users	Google Sessions	Google Search Clicks	Bing Impressions	Bing Clicks
HoveringHelicopter.com	July 2024	664	693	0	12.3K	72

Website	Month	Google Users	Google Sessions	Google Search Clicks	Bing Impressions	Bing Clicks
CoffeeMugandHats.com	July 2024	161	161	13	314	0

Website	Month	Google Users	Google Sessions	Google Search Clicks	Bing Impressions	Bing Clicks
CloudSeedingtheSky.com	July 2024				29	0

Website	Month	Google Users	Google Sessions	Google Search Clicks	Bing Impressions	Bing Clicks
TheFoundationisCracking.com	July 2024	6	6	0	19	2

Moving Forward – Goals

As you can see, none of my sites are getting much traffic, my Youtube channels aren’t anywhere near getting monetized, and the only ads I’m able to show on my sites are Microsoft Ads. Maybe I can eventually get enough traffic to get approved by Adsense or Mediavine? Time will tell.

So moving forward, I’m hoping to document the work on I do on my websites and social media accounts to drive traffic and conversions. Hopefully the journey will be fruitful and we can all learn how to make $100 per day!

Unique Situation/Motivation

Over the course of a couple years, I’ve made over 200 sales on my Etsy store. But it’s been slow going. With that being said, I started Cloudseedingthesky.com a couple months ago. The reason I started it was that I’ve been watching the sky a lot and noticed the trails left behind Airplanes seemed to last longer in longer on certain days. I had a little knowledge of Cloud Seeding so I did some keyword research and found out that Cloud Seeding is a high search volume/low competition keyword. I stuck the keyword into ChatGPT looking for a good URL and it came up with CloudSeedingtheSky.com and it was available.

But the real reason I’m telling you about Cloudseedingthesky.com is that I created a logo , a couple t-shirts and coffee mugs about Cloudseeding and Chemtrails. Nothing crazy, but it was to test my Woocommerce site and to learn how it integrated with Printful and Gooten. I ordered a couple test shirts and went on vacation to Colorado.

I wore my ‘Just Say No To Chemtrails‘ and the ‘Cloud Seeding the Sky | Exposing the Truth‘ t-shirts and was stopped several times by total strangers asking me about my shirts. It turns out that a lot of folks are very concerned about what the government is doing in our skies. They all had stories about little towns that have been poisoned by barium and how Vail is using lasers to increase snow fall! All of these folks were familiar with Chemtrails and very concerned about what the government is doing ‘behind the scenes’.

So the point is that I’m really excited about the prospect of CloudSeedingtheSky.com being a successful website AND e-commerce store. It’s the first time I have had someone – a total stranger- walk up to me and talk about the shirt I was wearing!

Plans for the Rest of August

I took some time to right down some notes on what I want to work on for the rest of August. I hoping that by writing down some goals will help me stay on task. These are things that I want/need to do that I’ve been thinking about for a while now. Below is a list of what I wrote down:

1. Fix CloudseedingtheSky’s homepage – improve “Shop” section
2. Add Images to TBR Blog Post $100/Day
   • Add paragraph about CSTS shirts and why I am focusing on it. – DONE
3. Update product images on Coffee Mugs and Hats (Etsy too). Add videos
4. Continue creating Youtube Shorts on TheFoundationisCracking Youtube Channel
5. Create Blog Posts:
   • Cloud Seeding Website
   • The Foundatin is Cracking
6. Re-evaluate Coffee Mugs and Hats from an SEO perspective. The website needs a ton more traffic.
   • SEO
   • Products/Images
   • New Designs
7. Create spreadsheet to Track content progress to keep count of: (Reason: All for Quick Monthly Reporting)
   • Videos
   • Blog Posts
   • Social Media Posts
   • New Products
8. Create Longer Videos for The Foundation is Cracking Youtube Channel.

Conclusion

I hope you will join me on this adventure. I hope you and an I will learn something.

Be sure to sign up for The Bike Racer’s newsletter. I’ll let you know when I post an update.