6 Months in Business - How Am I Doing?
On the 21st September 2007 I worked my last day as an employee and I started my online business full time. It’s been a bumpy ride since then full of unexpected events. In this post I’ll recall the highlights of my first 6 months online, check in with how I am doing, and project forward for the next six months.
How I Started Out
I’ve already written a series of posts about my background, the last year of my career, how I went from software to Internet marketing, and the dreams & plans I had back then so I won’t repeat all that here.
I knew I wanted to quit my day job and make a living online but I didn’t know how to go about it and I didn’t have the confidence to quit. Then in August 2007 I embarked on something called the Thirty Day Challenge run by Ed Dale and that changed my life! I failed at the challenge - I never made any money but doing that challenge taught me enough to convince me that I could succeed. Three weeks later I resigned.
My Initial Plans
At the time I was heavily into software development. That was my background, it was my job, it was my passion and I wrote in one of those early posts that my overall goal was to make a living developing software and that ultimately I would like to develop a cool and geeky mmorpg which is a Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Game of which I am a big fan.
However I didn’t want to dive into it right away so I decided to do some Internet Marketing as a way of bringing in some money ‘quickly’. Oh how naive I was! All I really knew at that time was what I had learned in the 30DC so I imagined myself building sites in various niches and making money via affiliate marketing. Six months on I still have not managed to achieve this!
My First Project
Initially I played around with a niche that I had been working on as part of the 30DC - playdough of all things! I never made a penny out of it and it never even got any traffic. However within a couple of weeks I got the idea that if I was going to go to all this effort to promote some affiliate product, wouldn’t it be better to go after a high paying commission rather than just a couple of dollars?
Off the back of the 30DC I had joined The Immediate Edge which is Ed Dale & Dan Raine’s paid membership site. One of the things I really liked about it was the project based approach that Dan took. He’d take a subject such as Infroducts and make a project out of it then he’d blog about all the details of that project. I liked the idea so much that I stole it and the High Paying Niche Experiment was born.
That project failed pretty miserably but I still use the project based approach now and I always think in terms of projects as it helps keep me focused in my work.
Breaking Away From the 30DC
A lot of my early posts were about 30DC stuff and a lot of my early readers were other challengers but I knew I had to break away from that if I was going to achieve any long term success. During September I tried hard to blog daily whilst I was still working out the notice period in my day job and I managed to put together a few posts that did fairly well.
In my first month in business I spent more time blogging than anything else. This was good in one way because I put out a lot of good content, much of it did well in social media such as StumbleUpon and I began to see some real growth in my readership.
The downside was that I wasn’t earning any money. Somewhere along the way I got introduced to Article Marketing and I began to knock up some software that could help me with it so my second project was born - the Article Masher project. As you can see from the project page, I only ever got as far as the introduction, ouch! However, that one is still marked as being on hold because I do intend to revive that but not quite yet…
The Twitter Guide
The one idea that I had from the 30DC that I actually followed through with successfully was to write a guide to Twitter. As soon as I started using Twitter and saw the way others were using it I could see its potential and I could also see where so many other people were going wrong.
I put a lot of effort into my guide and it was a massive success, doubling my RSS readership, gaining me a ton of traffic and inbound links. Basically, it put me on the map and is probably the best thing I have done for this blog to date.
Incidentally, if you are still skeptical about Twitter check out my profile - I have 700 followers now. I’m considering releasing a new version of the Twitter guide getting rid of personal and fluffy stuff like cute apps and focus it purely on marketing. Let me know if you think that would be a good idea. I would probably charge for that version :p
Then The Walls Came Crashing Down
After I released the Twitter Guide I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. My niche sites had failed, I couldn’t seem to get the enthusiasm up to continue working on the Article Masher and I was starting to feel a bit lost. I knew that things were not working out as I had planned and I wrote a post about the need to be flexible.
To be honest it’s probably just as well I didn’t have any major projects on the go at the time because two days later my partner of 10 years broke up with me and my world as I knew it ended overnight. If you look through the posts towards the end of November and the beginning of December you’ll see that I had no focus at all - I was totally winging it just trying to post anything I could muster just to keep up appearances.
By the middle of December I couldn’t take it any more and I unloaded my personal problems onto the blog in a very personal post. What happened next was pretty amazing - all the pain that I was feeling lifted the instant that I published that post. The very next day somebody new came into my life and we have now been together for 3 months and I am very happy. I just sold my half of my house to my ex-partner and we are getting along as friends just fine now.
Picking Up the Pieces
However, the split changed me permanently. Work lost a lot of its meaning for me and I spent a huge amount of time with my new partner. I wanted to work, I had to work to learn a living but I felt as though I had lost my purpose.
There was one tiny glimpse of salvation. On the weekend of the split I knew that if I was going to make it through the weekend I had to occupy myself in some way so I decided to write an ebook and that happened to be my WordPress ebook. I managed to write the bulk of it in one sitting but it wasn’t until January that I finally got around to promoting it - this gave me something to do.
Once this was done I felt better but still didn’t really have any work focus and I still wasn’t spending much time working. The posts throughout February were ok but I still wasn’t really doing very much.
A New Mindset, a New Beginning
What did change in February is that I made some money! When I added up my sales stats for January I was astounded to find that I had made $1387 which was a huge leap from the previous month. This changed everything. Suddenly I knew I had the ability to make money and this changed my mindset.
I began thinking about this business as a business rather than just as a random blog. I realised that by focusing on real, solid projects not only would I be likely to earn more revenue from them but I would also be able to be a much better blogger also because I would have real projects to blog about - I could relay real experiences, real results and so on.
I began to think about my business in terms of assets and began to brainstorm the kinds of assets that I could build. By the end of February I had decided on several new projects that I was going to work on ad for the first time in months I felt as though I had a clear focus for my business and began to really believe that I can make a full time living from this gig.
Whatever Happened to Developing Software?
In my last podcast where I announced those projects I admitted that I still had not got around to developing any kind of software and I said that I was going to create a project based around games programming. Guess what? I’ve still not started it yet…
This has been niggling at me for months. One day recently I sat down and decided to just brainstorm what was going on with my own feelings. I like developing software but it can also be a royal pain in the butt when you get a bug that takes you all day to solve! To be perfectly honest, I’m not a great programmer, I’m probably not even a good one. I’m very slow at it and I’m not somebody who can just whip something up really quickly.
The idea of trying to make money developing software was really stressing me out. But what was also stressing me out was the idea of losing my skills if I didn’t keep them up. This has happened to me before. So I played a “what if” game with myself. What if I did no programming for an entire year? What if I had to learn my skills from scratch over again?
Suddenly I realised that it wouldn’t be so bad. See programming is a very fast moving industry and languages, technologies and techniques change all the time. What is current now will not be current a year from now. My C# 2.0 skills won’t do me much good if I want to do C# 3.0 and so on. I realised that it didn’t matter if I took a break, even if it was a really long break because whenever I decided to pick it up again I’d have to start over anyway.
So I just let myself off the hook and as soon as I did that I felt a sense of relief. Funnily enough just last week I did happen to whip up a quick piece of software to help me do something for my post about CSS Galleries so the basic skills are still there but I can rest now and just concentrate on IM safe in the knowledge that all the programming books I’ll ever need will be there waiting for me when I am ready to start again.
Looking Forward to the Next Six Months
So now that I know that software is not part of my immediate future I can concentrate on my IM project. Sometimes I make myself laugh at the speed at which I change my plans. Just one month ago I was talking about doing an eBay project, starting a niche site and a newsletter for this blog. Then I got an idea for a StumbleUpon course and all of those ideas just went flying out of the window!
Ok not quite, once I have got AWeber setup for my email course that would be a very good time to start my newsletter but other than that I am not starting any other projects until my StumbleUpon course is finished. And not only that but in that time I’ve also had ideas for other products that I want to create.
What I now know about myself is that I get new ideas all the time. Sometimes I incubate them for a while and other times I just jump on them immediately and drop my other plans like a hot potato. This will not change - that’s just me, that’s how I work. I don’t plan months into the future. I stockpile all my ideas, I review them all the time, add new ones and ditch old ones.
I couldn’t possibly say what I’ll be doing over the next six months. I would like to think that I build a profitable niche site, start a popular newsletter and release products that give me a big pay day but who knows? All I know right now is that I love my work, I am so pleased I quit my day job and I am happier now than I have been in years.
Thanks to everybody who reads this blogs, comments here, sends me free stuff (I’m looking for a copy of the new Product Launch Formula if anyone wants to give me a free review copy JEFF!), links to me, and generally just makes my life enjoyable and this blog successful. I would not be here writing this if it wasn’t for all of you.
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Vicky
March 21, 2008
So far so good, Caroline. I see great things in your future. :}
Vicky’s last blog post..Guest Posting