See all the Shopify store income reports here.
Maybe you’ve been wanting to start a store, but don’t know where to start or what platform to choose.
Maybe you’re scared to start a store because you don’t know how you’ll possibly be able to drive traffic to it.
Maybe you already have a store and can’t understand why you’re not making anything but chump change in it.
Maybe you’ve spent some time on your store and seen only crickets in traffic.
Maybe you’ve tried other platforms like Etsy, ebay, Amazon, Creative Market, the list goes on and on and have seen a little bit of money, but know there’s more out there for you.
Whatever your situation is, you’re in the right place! Opening up my own Shopify store, very quickly changed my entire life, and while I’m not promising massive amounts of money your very first month, what I AM saying is that most people don’t realize the POWER having your own Shopify store has.
Before Shopify I was working 80-120 hours a week (not a typo, I basically didn’t sleep) for almost 5 years! After being able to create passive income online, I’m now only having to work 20-30 hours a week!
Today, I’m going to be sharing how I make passive income online with Shopify (store income report for July 2018).
How to Earn Passive Income Online with Shopify – $474,653 (July 2018)
Most of you know that I’ve been selling on ebay for over 20 years now. Back before they were even CALLED ebay. 🙂 I was just a teen back then, but really realized the power of selling things online. It was a whole new world for me. An exciting world.
But there are several things I’ve always LOATHED about selling online.
- I HATE to ship products.
- I hate keeping track of inventory.
- I hate keeping everything perfectly organized to sell.
- I hate not being able to find something right as it sells.
- I hate following someone else’s rules.
- I hate when they CHANGE said rules and I have to go back through all my ads and completely redo all of them to comply.
- I hate feeling like I have no ownership over the store. Like I’m powerless.
- I hate not having the capability of making certain sales the way I want them to be, instead of working with the basic tools they give me.
- I hate being at the MERCY of a customer who does something shady and leaves bad feedback and everyone thinks it’s ME who has done something bad. Or competitors who leave negative feedback to ruin you (yep, it’s happened!)
So, while there’s a lot of good things about selling on a platform like eBay or Etsy, there are also a lot of bad things you MUST accept in order to sell on someone else’s “turf.”
I sold on Amazon, I’ve sold on Creative Market, I’ve sold on ebay, I’ve sold on a membership site, I’ve sold on a stock photo site, and I’ve sold on Shopify.
For me, out of all the options I’ve tried, Shopify is, HANDS DOWN, the best way to go.
Income total for July 2018 (Shopify stores only; doesn’t include blog/misc. income) – $474,653
- Printables store – $448,422
- Stock Photo store – $26,231
Traffic total (to my Shopify stores only) for July 2018 – 14,481
- Printables store – 11,721 in traffic
- Stock Photo store – 2,760 in traffic
Which leads me to some huge news!
My first Shopify store (printables) is SO stinkin’ successful, this month, I opened up a secondary Shopify store on July 1, 2018 (stock photos)! There were a couple reasons behind my opening a second store…
The first is that I really LOVE taking pictures. Whenever I’m swayed, I just point and shoot random stuff all the time. I love to capture beauty. Up until now, I’ve just kept the photos on my desktop, helping no one.
What is the point of doing something if no one can benefit from it?! So, I went into this, thinking that if I make no profits what-so-ever, it’s okay, as long as I’m helping others. After all, isn’t that what life is about?!?! Helping others, serving, loving, caring for others, trying to make their lives easier.
Another reason I wanted to start a second store is because I felt like some people were going to say, “Well, that’s all fine and dandy you made $52,060 from your first store your first month on Shopify, but it’s a fluke. You’re just a one-hit wonder. You can’t do this again. It was just a one time deal.”
I know there are some out there thinking it, even if no one’s voiced it, so I wanted to take the most saturated topic online (well, not really, but pretty dang saturated!) and try my hand at it in a Shopify store. I also wanted to start out NOT pitching it to my email list at first, because, I know there are some out there thinking, “Well, she just makes all her money from her email list. I can’t do that too because I don’t HAVE an email list.”
So, there were some things I wanted to prove right off the bat.
BEFORE I officially pitched to my own email list, I had already made $16,509!!! And after all was said and done, I made a whopping $26,231 my first month selling stock photography on Shopify, something that, once posted on the Shopify site, is passive income online.
I feel like I proved those thoughts wrong pretty successfully. YOU CAN absolutely make money without an email list and secondly, my success is not a fluke. I can replicate it in an over-saturated market place with absolutely NO credentials. Meaning, I’m not really seen as an authority in the stock photography space yet.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with my initial results. 🙂
Stats per product:
This is my favorite part of researching analytics. Figuring out which products sell (or get downloaded for free) the most. Stuff like this tells me EXACTLY what to create more of in my store and what to stop creating, so it’s something I gauge very heavily.
If you have the $79/month Shopify plan, which I do, you’ll get FANtastic analytics reports that will give you all this information broken down by product. I then go into my newsletter (I have ConvertKit and love them) and compare the two in order to get conversion rates.
Because I was busy setting up a new store and creating products for that (as of Aug 1, I now have 28 products listed!), I didn’t create a new product for my printables store. I felt like it would be too much for me, so I promoted a seasonal binder this month as a freebie to my email list: the Travel Binder.
My top 5 products
You can see this months’ top 5 products by clicking the links below:
My 30-Day Series
If you are new in your store or it’s not making what you want, carve out the time for it. I created a brand new 30 Days to a Better Shopify Store series that you can check out here. It’s all the tips and tricks that I’m using to crush it in my store and it goes into massive depth of all the ins and outs of what to do, all step by step. I hope you check it out and I hope your store flies!
Ready to start up your OWN Shopify store?
Click here and you can get a 14 day trial FREE! It just might be the best move you ever make. It certainly was for me!
Wow your a master at this awesome. Do you think selling printables a great business as a blogger? Thanks bless you
ABSO-LUUUUUTEEEELLLYYYYY!!!!! 🙂
This is amazing, Sarah!! Question: how are you driving traffic to your Shopify site? Through Pinterest, promotion to blog readers, etc.?
There are a few ways, Jessica, though most of it boils down to my email list and network marketing, two things I will teach in depth (step by step) in an upcoming course I am working on RIGHT NOW, behind the scenes. I’ll cover all of my marketing secrets.
Sarah! It’s Divine from Ladies Make Money online. I want to signup for your waiting list when your course is out! I am going to Persue opening up a Shopify Store!
Regards
Divine
Emailing you the info. now.
Hey Sarah,
Nice work! I’ve been debating for years on opening a printables shop myself because one of my absolute top performing posts is a 10 free office printables post. I get tons of traction on that post on a blog I haven’t updated in 3 years, ha. I’ve been inspired to revive the blog and I love creating printables. I’ve always thought about Etsy but feel like it’s SO saturated. Do you have a landing page setup to sign up for a mailing list for the upcoming course?
See now…in the time you’ve been contemplating it, in one year, I went from 0 to $2.2 MILLION dollars in revenue in my printables store. My dear…let’s go! 🙂 🙂 🙂 Yeah, Etsy is not the best way to go at all; great you see that. For a landing page, I don’t. I want to keep the course purchasers small. I know, seems weird right?! I don’t want to make sales?! HUH??? For me, my personality, I’d rather have a few deep and meaningful relationships than a bunch of superficial ones and that personality trait comes out in everything I do. So for my course, I’ll limit the number of people who can join b/c I want to really go deep and encourage, support, and answer more questions to those people. The FIRST place I’ll announce the course when it comes, is my private FB group b/c those are the people I talk to the most and have those relationships with. It’s a place I share free stuff in exchange for reviews. Next, I’ll mention it to my list. So, the best thing to do is be in the FB group (followed by, getting on any of my email list freebies). Just make sure if you do the FB group route, to answer all pre-questions or it won’t be approved. 🙂 Hope to see you on there and invest in you and your business more. <3
Too true! I definitely let way too much fear and bad excuses get in my way. Especially after launching a pretty successful blog. I just started making excuses like everyone had already said what I had to say, I had too much going on in my personal life, yadda yadda. I couldn’t bring myself to ever deleting all the work I already put into my blog but was always scared to just reappear and start blogging again. I have no idea why!!!
I’m just over it and ready to stop letting myself get in my way! I feel like I stumbled upon this for a reason. It was so happen-stance. I’m on the Savvy Couple’s mailing list and they sent out an email about 18 Full-Time Bloggers Share Their Worst Blogging Mistakes which drew me onto you since your take is “You can’t compare yourself with others at all.” which is SO true. I think I got so hung up in the comparing and feeling inadequate even though I was pretty darn good at figuring out how to drive traffic and engagement to my blog right out of the gate.
You’ll definitely be seeing me around 🙂 Thanks for the quick reply!
Absolutely Sara. {{hugs}} Yeah, definitely don’t compare yourself to anyone else. If what you’re doing is working great, you’re in a really good spot! Keep doing what’s working! <3
Hi Sarah!
I LOVE your blog, its so so helpful!! Quick question for you. What do you recommend as the first social media channel to really plug time into for my new blog? I know Pinterest is all the rage, but is that still true in 2018? I’ve applied to unsuccessfully to many group boards and my progress on it has been really slow. What would you advise as a good social media starting point and any recommendations (courses, blog posts?). Thank you and God bless you abundantly!
Does my answer HAVE to be social media??? If so, I’m probably not the right person to ask. 🙂 I rarely depend on social media for traffic. My top recommendation online would be SEO. 🙂
WOW Sarah!! That’s truly unique advice out here in the blogosphere!! It actually doesn’t have to be social media at all, but its just that everyone seems either overwhelmed by SEO or feels it will take too long. If you don’t mind me asking, it’s 2018 and you’re starting a new blog. How would you go about your SEO strategy? I know this could be a whole post in and of itself!! Thank you so so much for getting back to me on this – You’re truly a gem! x
Glad it was helpful Lisa. <3 SEO doesn't take that long actually. About the same as building any social media. 🙂 Yeah, it's a whole training and something I will get into in the near future, but the first thing I'd start with is by getting the Yoast SEO plug-in (the paid for version) and getting your light green on every post. 🙂
Thanks SO much Sarah, incredibly helpful! I personally look forward to your training. I really do think SEO is the most organic way to grow an audience and to have some control in over the process! Will definitely do the paid version of Yoast. Ah, may God continue to bless you in every area of your life!
Hey , I’m on Etsy for coffee mugs and I’m just starting a printable site Shopify (I’m a designer). I’ll join your FB page
I noticed Lisa asked about Social Media (Pinterest) and you said you do SEO. DOn’t you get traffic from there?
Is there a Yoast-like plugin for Shopify?
I get good traffic from SEO, yes. 🙂 I’m working on that training right now. It’ll be coming soon. 🙂