When I first started I spent 3 - 4 years just dabbling in things, still working a full-time job. I bounced from one thing to another like crazy and never focused on anything. in those 3 - 4 years I probably made a total of like $500 online.. and I am sure I spent more money on software and courses than that so it was not profit.
I finally started to make some real money when I decided to focus all of my attention on e-commerce in 2013, at this point I also decided that you really have to spend money to make money, and that I was sick of trading my time for all Free traffic methods so I learned how to run FB ads.. My first successful E-commerce store did about 700k (Revenue Not Profit) in 5 months and I spent about 220K on Facebook ads.
Let me tell you I thought I was a baller and on top of the world. turns out I had no idea how to run a real business. I decided right away that I did not want my customers to have to wait for 2 - 3 weeks to receive their order so I leased a warehouse, hired employees and order a bunch of stock in bulk. this was my biggest mistake, it was very costly and at the end of the day I was such a terrible manager and we kept getting so far behind that it was taking 2 - 3 weeks for people to get their orders anyways and it was costing me much more than to just have them drop ship it.
This company ended up failing, I solely relied on my winning products and never focused on what was going to be next after the product stopped selling. and eventually, I could not make my ads profitable anymore. And I had no idea what I was going to do I had employees that I had to pay, back orders to ship, warehouse lease and bills to pay. It was the worst time of my life... My back was up against the wall and I did not know what to do, I literally wanted to hide from the world because I knew I failed and did not want to have to face it.
I ended up getting out of my lease on the warehouse, I had to let all of my employees go and I got so far behind on my bills that I almost lost my house.
Luckily while I was doing well in E-commerce I managed to build a decent sized email list from webinars I did along with some free cheat sheets I handed out here and there I think the list was about 7k people. So I created a case study of my entire store and how I was success with it. I sold this case study for $27 to my email list and posted it in the Facebook group that I built.
I ended up making about 20k in about a week and this was enough to get me caught up on my bills and gave me some money to get some other things going. And at this point, I realized that my email list would buy things from me. This was something I completely ignored before because I was focused on my ecom stores and was just helping people out for free on Facebook and doing free training webinars. So I started doing some affiliate marketing with different shopify apps, themes, product research software you name it. And that did pretty well for me I was making on average about 8 - 12k/month and it was profit I had not overhead or products to deliver so I really liked it. But I did have one major flaw, I could not grow this easily because I was no longer doing ecommerce and did not have any fancy stats to show or anything to gain trust and more leverage.
So I decided to start doing e-commerce again, I had some business PTSD and really did not want to put myself in a bad situation again, but I knew if I wanted to grow my affiliate marketing business I needed to grow my list and gain the trust of people. So I launched a few more stores but I had a really hard time fully dedicating myself to it because of my past failures holding me back.
But one day a friend of mine contacted me and said hey, I just met this person that has an awesome product that sells very well on T.v (Infomercial product) and they are looking for someone who knows how to sell on Facebook so they can start selling online as well, are you interested? and I said, of course, get me on the phone with them. So I talked to them they explained that T.v was not very profitable anymore and they were looking to explore other avenues to sell their product.
So I explained to them how Facebook worked, my background, the whole nine. They hired me on the spot and gave me a pretty decent marketing budget about (50K) to get started with. They created professional videos, we created awesome landing pages and funnels and we got rolling. and I got them to agree to pay me 10% of the revenue that I generated for them.
This was a great deal for me because I did not have to pull any money out of my own pocket and I was able to do things the right way instead of doing them cheaply like I used to.
In the first 6 months, I generated 1.2 million in sales for them, my cut was about 120k. The owner of the company approached me and said look, everyone in our industry wants to be able to sell online and none of them have any clue how to get started. If we work out a licensing deal with these companies can you sell the products online? And I obviously explained to them that not every product that sells well on T.v will sell well online but we can definitely test them and see.
So I went with the owner and traveled around the country to different trade shows, and inventors summits, and we talked to companies and I explained to them that I ran sold products online and how we did it I showed them our sales numbers along with our ad spend and got them interested in our products.
This was the turning point in my career.
Me and the owner of the company I was working for formed a new licensing company and are 50/50 partners.
And what we do now find awesome products, buy them wholesale from the companies that have no idea how to sell online and sell them through Facebook/IG.
The business has definitely had it's ups and downs and still has a long ways to go but long story short I went full circle and ended back up in e-commerce. and now I run an average of 5 - 10 different products at a time and each product usually generate 50 - 200k in revenue per month.
We have also launched several of our own products and been pretty successful.
But to answer the thread question, "How much have you made online" I have generated over 40 Million in Revenue online, actual profit to date is closer to about 2.5 million.
My journey online is approaching a decade, and I still don't have everything figured out... I have failed more times than I can count, if you are not willing to have your face drug through the mud and get your teeth kicked in a few times then being your own boss might not be for you. I have seen 10,000's of people come and go in this industry since I started. And the truth is. It is hard, Yes you might find some things that make you a few bucks here and there. But if you want to make life-changing money and truly become your own boss. You are going to have to build a real business and constantly keep innovating and stay ahead of the curve.
Ok, I am done ranting lol... I was only planning on writing a paragraph, and I lost track of time haha.
I hope this inspires someone reading this, don't be afraid to adapt and don't pass on opportunities most of them only present them self once.
Anyways here are a couple screenshots just because I know you guys will start asking if I don't post...