March was a month of continued positive trends: more paid reviews, less (actually zero) unpaid full reviews, more free digital products, and more products in total.   The 27 total products (almost all just pictures posted to social media) destroyed the previous high, but I did all the “reviews” in less than half the total time over last month.  I am now only spending 1-2 hours per week on this project but totally reaping the rewards.

2017 Goals

My goals remain two-fold with this site and experiment: 1) get free stuff that we can use, and 2) make money advertising and talking about being a social influencer.

• Get $1000 worth of stuff (Tomoson products) – I’ve already accomplished this goal
• Earn $1000 talking about the process – $11.96 on the year so far, up from -$25.83 last month (+$37.79)
• Have a social reach of 25,000 – I’m at 16.1k right now, up from 13.3k last month (+2.8k)

My plan is to make the $1000 through ad venue for the website ($200) and YouTube ($150), getting paid to  review products ($500), and some kind of information product (e.g. ebook, influencer guide = $300).

March Goals (and results)

Continue slowing things down on the Tomoson side (do less reviews) so that I can focus on doing things that make money (paid reviews, YouTube marketing, quality posts).  Here are March goals:

• Complete five campaigns of pictures only products (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter)
• Complete two campaigns with full reviews for PAID products ($30)
• Write February 2017 Progress and Income report
• Create “How to get 5k followers on Twitter” blog post
• Create “Getting Started with Tomoson” blog post and YouTube video
• Website: 500 page view or $2.50 in ad revenue, 1 newsletter subscriber
• YouTube: 500 views or $1.50 in ad revenue, 42 subscribers
• Repurpose “How to get 5k” Instagram and Twitter blog posts as a PDF to use as a lead magnet for the email newsletter
• Write table of contents for “How to become a social influencer” book

Tomoson Results

Summary. In March I continued to “review” a ton of products (27), but only did three full reviews (that included blog posts and YouTube videos), and those were paid.  By only posting pictures to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram I was able to capitalize on my batching method (see last month’s progress report) and cut my total time spent on the project in half.  I spent less than ten total hours this month but made $55.00 in paid reviews, received 27 products worth $750, and got $6 in digital products from Amazon.  So on the review side of things, things went really really well.  What I didn’t do was blog about the process and market the blog and YouTube channel.

*Plus $6.00 in digital products from Amazon for no-rush shipping

March 2017 (Month 4) Results

Summary: I continue to get better at gaming Tomoson.  In March I got paid $36.69 and received $760.24 worth of stuff for just 27 “reviews” that took less than ten total hours for the month.  I don’t need so much stuff, so I’m hoping to do less reviews but get more paid reviews.  I will also write more about becoming a social influencer.

What Worked

Picture-only Reviews for non-paid.  I started to figure this out in February but fully implemented it in March, with great success.  When I apply for normal stuff now (not high-end tech stuff, but everything else) I unselect the blog and YouTube options and select the Twitter and Instagram options (my highest social reach categories).  I am probably getting passed over for several things because of this, but I still got accepted for more than twenty products in March that only required me to take pictures and post them to social media.  By batching all my pictures and posts on one day I can do this in about 5 minutes per product.

Extend timeframe.  I also have played around with editing the timeframe for completing each review.  The default is 10 days but I have found that I can change that to 17 days and I’m still getting accepted for reviews.  By extending the time frame I can afford to wait for “no-rush” shipping (see below) and can hold onto products longer to better batch my reviews.  This takes away the stress of needing to rush to get a review done and is more efficient.  I may choose to extend the timeline even further in the future.

Extend shipping timeframe.  By extending the timeframe it became less important to use Prime’s two-day shipping.  So I started selecting “no-rush” shipping, which typically takes 5-7 days.  By making this selection I became eligible for a $1 Amazon credit for digital products each time.  I accrued $6 last month (I didn’t used no-rush exclusively), which meant I could purchase a digital movie for FREE (yay for more free stuff!).  You can also get music and software with the credits.

What didn’t Work

Getting a listing removed from Tomoson.  Tomoson has a few policies that I don’t like… like they won’t remove a campaign posting until you have completed that posting.  That’s normally a great policy, but it becomes annoying if the company you are working with isn’t cooperating.  For example, I was accepted for a cool massage ball roller during my first month doing reviews (December 2016).  The problem is that while I was accepted for the campaign they never shipped me the product to review.  As a non-shipped item the completion ticker never started, so I wasn’t penalized for not completing the review, but I was stuck with an unshipped product in my Tomoson dashboard.  This was super annoying to me so I messaged the company asking them to remove me from the campaign.  I never heard back so after a couple more messages I went ahead and contacted Tomoson support and asked them to remove me from the campaign.  They explained their non-removal policy and I was stuck with the unshipped product in my cue.  After a few more unanswered messaged to the company (seven total messages) I realized I could clear it out by simply “reviewing” the product.  So I took a stock image and stamped “stinker” across it and posted it to social media.  I also wrote a short blog post and did a short YouTube video explaining that the company wouldn’t respond to my inquiries and linked to those posts from Tomoson.  It did the trick and with the reviews “completed” it was removed from my dashboard and placed in the completed category.   

New Goals (March 2017)

I want to continue slowing things down on the Tomoson side (do less reviews) so that I can focus on doing things that make money (paid reviews, YouTube marketing, quality blog posts).  Here are my April goals:

• Complete five campaigns of pictures only products (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter)
• Complete two campaigns with full reviews for PAID products ($30 minimum)
• Write March 2017 Progress and Income report
• Create “How to get 5k followers on Twitter” blog post
• Create “Getting Started with Tomoson” blog post
• Website: 500 page view or $2.50 in ad revenue, 1 newsletter subscriber
• YouTube: 500 views or $1.50 in ad revenue, 45 subscribers
• Repurpose “How to get 5k” Instagram and Twitter blog posts as a PDF to use as a lead magnet for the email newsletter
• Revise table of contents for “How to become a social influencer” book