Loony Larry
Newbie
- Jan 17, 2012
- 22
- 15
After a few years of hanging out on BHW and having a few start ups at IM that failed I finally made my first real sale.
A little about myself first;
I have owned a small local service business with 5 employees, for over 10 years. At one point I had 10 employees but the economy took a dive and really hurt us bad. The truth is that after shop rent, payroll, taxes, car insurance, workers comp insurance, general liability insurance, gas, supplies etc. I really have never made very much money. I make a good living but I am not rich by any stretch of the imagination. My hope is to cash out by selling the business someday. We'll see if that ever happens or not.
Over the years I built a website for my small local business. I built the site in 2005 and slowly added to it. I still add content to it to this day. I also set up a FB account and Twitter. I have several hundred followers/likes and a lot of them are paying customers who just want to keep up with any specials or offers that we give out. This website and the social media that I have linked have helped my business to have gross sales of about $150K yearly. The website is actually ranked on the first page of Google and Google Places for quite a few keywords that are related to my business locally. I learned how to target these keywords right here at BHW and I have made a decent living because of it! In the old days before I set up the website I would spend hundreds of dollars a month advertising in the local Yellow Pages and Newspaper. Now I spend very little on advertising all thanks to BHW.
But as I said earlier I really don't make very much after all of the expenses. So I decided to try my hand at IM. Well as you all know it takes a lot of time and energy to make money at IM. I found it VERY hard to find the time to do this when I am already working a minimum of 50 hours per week running a business. That's not to mention that I have a wife and school age child.
So what did I do? I tried a few BH methods that were quite frankly a little shall we say "shady". Nothing illegal and NO SCAMS but at the end of the day not only did I not make much money, maybe $10 or so, but I didn't feel very good about myself doing it.
So I decided to build a website. An EMD site and I started trying to drive traffic to it. I researched my niche and built the site with Wordpress. Then I spent nights and weekends setting up web 2.0's and writing and spinning articles and finally after 6 months or so I made NOTHING!
That's OK though I decided to try something else. So I built another website and started trying to sell Amazon products. I began writing lot's of articles and driving traffic to my site via Twitter. I was really proud of it. The site was quite large and I actually had some daily traffic coming in. After months of work and many, many hours I made a grand total of $.02!! That's right two whole cents LOL! To say this was discouraging would be a bit of an understatement.
Then it dawned on me. Rather than trying to make all of these websites that make me no money why not just use the web design skills I've acquired over the years to design websites for small business owners like myself! The only website that I have ever designed that earned money was the one I made for my small local service business.
So I built another website. This time I made a nice WP site about my new web design business. Then I started posting ads to a large classified site (most of you know the site but I'm not sure that I can mention it here at BHW). After several inquiries and after only about a week I made my first sale. I am currently designing a small ecommerce site for a client for $700! I collected the first $350 down and am in the process of building it now.
The best part is that I don't have to pay out so much of my hard earned money in expenses. I get to keep it!! Now I just need to scale it up! I already have experience managing employees so at some point I will definitely be expanding but not until the time is right.
Keep trying but most importantly STOP PLANNING and START WORKING!! It's the only way you're ever going to make it in ANY business.
Thank you Black Hat World!
--Loony Larry
A little about myself first;
I have owned a small local service business with 5 employees, for over 10 years. At one point I had 10 employees but the economy took a dive and really hurt us bad. The truth is that after shop rent, payroll, taxes, car insurance, workers comp insurance, general liability insurance, gas, supplies etc. I really have never made very much money. I make a good living but I am not rich by any stretch of the imagination. My hope is to cash out by selling the business someday. We'll see if that ever happens or not.
Over the years I built a website for my small local business. I built the site in 2005 and slowly added to it. I still add content to it to this day. I also set up a FB account and Twitter. I have several hundred followers/likes and a lot of them are paying customers who just want to keep up with any specials or offers that we give out. This website and the social media that I have linked have helped my business to have gross sales of about $150K yearly. The website is actually ranked on the first page of Google and Google Places for quite a few keywords that are related to my business locally. I learned how to target these keywords right here at BHW and I have made a decent living because of it! In the old days before I set up the website I would spend hundreds of dollars a month advertising in the local Yellow Pages and Newspaper. Now I spend very little on advertising all thanks to BHW.
But as I said earlier I really don't make very much after all of the expenses. So I decided to try my hand at IM. Well as you all know it takes a lot of time and energy to make money at IM. I found it VERY hard to find the time to do this when I am already working a minimum of 50 hours per week running a business. That's not to mention that I have a wife and school age child.
So what did I do? I tried a few BH methods that were quite frankly a little shall we say "shady". Nothing illegal and NO SCAMS but at the end of the day not only did I not make much money, maybe $10 or so, but I didn't feel very good about myself doing it.
So I decided to build a website. An EMD site and I started trying to drive traffic to it. I researched my niche and built the site with Wordpress. Then I spent nights and weekends setting up web 2.0's and writing and spinning articles and finally after 6 months or so I made NOTHING!
That's OK though I decided to try something else. So I built another website and started trying to sell Amazon products. I began writing lot's of articles and driving traffic to my site via Twitter. I was really proud of it. The site was quite large and I actually had some daily traffic coming in. After months of work and many, many hours I made a grand total of $.02!! That's right two whole cents LOL! To say this was discouraging would be a bit of an understatement.
Then it dawned on me. Rather than trying to make all of these websites that make me no money why not just use the web design skills I've acquired over the years to design websites for small business owners like myself! The only website that I have ever designed that earned money was the one I made for my small local service business.
So I built another website. This time I made a nice WP site about my new web design business. Then I started posting ads to a large classified site (most of you know the site but I'm not sure that I can mention it here at BHW). After several inquiries and after only about a week I made my first sale. I am currently designing a small ecommerce site for a client for $700! I collected the first $350 down and am in the process of building it now.
The best part is that I don't have to pay out so much of my hard earned money in expenses. I get to keep it!! Now I just need to scale it up! I already have experience managing employees so at some point I will definitely be expanding but not until the time is right.
Keep trying but most importantly STOP PLANNING and START WORKING!! It's the only way you're ever going to make it in ANY business.
Thank you Black Hat World!
--Loony Larry
