mikelawry
Registered Member
- May 22, 2018
- 80
- 39
Ok I'm going to try to squeeze out as much detail as possible and try to provide some value while detailing my shortcomings and future expectations. Too much for you? Jump down to that TL;DR!
Before this I worked sales like a dog. I mean days where I made 400 calls mostly listening to auto dialers and getting banged on by Karen the gatekeeper. Something inside me is saying fuck working that hard for anybody else. The commissions are great sure but IMO it's a lot of work to only get paid on it once while the company continues to eat off of my labor. Door to door in a blizzard for a big corporation? Did it. 10 hour days plus coming in on weekends to cold call? Did it. Actually got my start by knocking doors in my own neighborhood and shoveling snow in the winter as a kid. Don't get me wrong, I love sales! Inside or outside doesn't matter to me. You think trolling on social media is fun? Man try and see if you can troll people in real life just for lols. I'll always view sales as a way a man can earn good money just by being a decent human.
So when I joined BHW 2 years ago I didn't know shit about IM and I've learned a lot through here, reddit, books and other various sources. I haven't bought any of the course that teach you how to make money since they all seem scammy. Guys making money by teaching you how to make money. I'll pass. What I did have on my side was a tiny bit of html knowledge from junior high school and lynda.com. I'm sure you all know they have tons of content. Maybe you can even find a torrrent or file hosted with all their content. For me I used my good ol' library card. We're fortunate enough to have free access to the site by logging in with just our library info. You would do well to check out your own local library and see what they have to offer you. Some people call this resourceful but for me the library was one of my hideouts as a teen. I even fired up a MUD game recently but I'll spare you the details on that lol.
Armed with those tutorials I learned some CSS and started messing with Wordpress again. Realizing how fast and easy that platform is I launched my first niche site. Worked on that for a few months while working the day sales job. The first site was decent for a while. Music niche with a buying guide and affiliate links to amazon. I generated traffic through social media mostly twitter and IG. I didn't buy followers or boost any posts. Just plain ol' follow/unfollow, posting my content and reposting / liking others in my niche. Literally reposting music magazines and other musicians I was surprised that people would still follow my pages even though they could just go follow those pages themselves. I don't really get why that works but I'll continue to use it to my benefit. This enabled me to get my first couple of sales on Amazon within the grace period.
A friend of mine is a creative and offered me commissions if I could get him work. He's high price but is in the right location so I said sure I'd give it a shot. For this second site I actually paid for cli ck fun nels which I regret a little. Maye it works maybe it doesn't but I just think I wasn't ready for it at the time. Maybe I'm still not. It has a ton of features but I don't see myself paying for their package again. Same deal here, spammed IG with other peoples content (linking back to them) I grew another page to over 2500 followers. This didn't materialize any commissions but I don't consider this a major loss just part of the learning process. Sure I spent a lot more on this fail than on the previous site but the knowledge gained was more valuable.
Needless to say my sales numbers at work started to drop. Neglecting your job and coding during work hours is probably not the right thing to do but I knew I wanted out. While being a newb to IM I was in a rough spot. Don't want to sell for a company mandating me to knock doors until 9pm (yes, I got chewed out for waking up the baby)... Can't live off dreams either so I stayed at the job and let my site get dated. Since I had a decent job I was able to outsource most of the content writing. What a headache! You truly get what you pay for. Try to cheap out and you'll get garbage articles that I felt were worse than my own almost illiterate writing. Then again spending a ton doesn't guarantee you anything either. There's some people out there charging high prices and delivering fluff. I wanted the best of both worlds. To have my cake and eat it too some would say. So obviously I did the next best thing. Started writing articles my damn self. They're not great but if I can train myself to be a better writer then I can train others to write better for me.
Alrighty then let's fast forward a bit through the job and personal life drama. Back and determined to build a profitable site I set out on the digital marketing trend. This project tanked hard and while a part of me wants to blame google and EAT I know it's just my laziness and lack of getting it done. This niche is different to the previous 2 where I had some slight success. I tried to get this going on FB butthen the boycotts started there and blah blah blah (more excuses.)
So where are we now? I still want to own a digital marketing company. I think its geared toward my skill set perfectly. I love being able to help others get on the web and showcase their products or services to the masses. However I think it's time for another niche site until that gets some more traction. I was reading here somebody said that instead of picking a niche and trying to build and audience around it. Why not build an audience first then monetize that audience. What? That's brilliant! So back I go delving into the depths of twitter nonsense just tweeting about the things I'm into like its my personal twitter. My thoughts for this are to just do what I've done previously and see which of my hobbies people like to hear my thoughts on the most. The porn spamming type stuff is also tempting but then I cant tell anybody I know about it IRL and I love talking to people IRL.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk and I hope you learned something useful. If not please feel free to drop a complaint in the complaint box.
TL;Dr: A wise man once said, "he who sleeps with itchy ass, wakes up with smelly finger". Peace and good luck to you all!
Before this I worked sales like a dog. I mean days where I made 400 calls mostly listening to auto dialers and getting banged on by Karen the gatekeeper. Something inside me is saying fuck working that hard for anybody else. The commissions are great sure but IMO it's a lot of work to only get paid on it once while the company continues to eat off of my labor. Door to door in a blizzard for a big corporation? Did it. 10 hour days plus coming in on weekends to cold call? Did it. Actually got my start by knocking doors in my own neighborhood and shoveling snow in the winter as a kid. Don't get me wrong, I love sales! Inside or outside doesn't matter to me. You think trolling on social media is fun? Man try and see if you can troll people in real life just for lols. I'll always view sales as a way a man can earn good money just by being a decent human.
So when I joined BHW 2 years ago I didn't know shit about IM and I've learned a lot through here, reddit, books and other various sources. I haven't bought any of the course that teach you how to make money since they all seem scammy. Guys making money by teaching you how to make money. I'll pass. What I did have on my side was a tiny bit of html knowledge from junior high school and lynda.com. I'm sure you all know they have tons of content. Maybe you can even find a torrrent or file hosted with all their content. For me I used my good ol' library card. We're fortunate enough to have free access to the site by logging in with just our library info. You would do well to check out your own local library and see what they have to offer you. Some people call this resourceful but for me the library was one of my hideouts as a teen. I even fired up a MUD game recently but I'll spare you the details on that lol.
Armed with those tutorials I learned some CSS and started messing with Wordpress again. Realizing how fast and easy that platform is I launched my first niche site. Worked on that for a few months while working the day sales job. The first site was decent for a while. Music niche with a buying guide and affiliate links to amazon. I generated traffic through social media mostly twitter and IG. I didn't buy followers or boost any posts. Just plain ol' follow/unfollow, posting my content and reposting / liking others in my niche. Literally reposting music magazines and other musicians I was surprised that people would still follow my pages even though they could just go follow those pages themselves. I don't really get why that works but I'll continue to use it to my benefit. This enabled me to get my first couple of sales on Amazon within the grace period.
A friend of mine is a creative and offered me commissions if I could get him work. He's high price but is in the right location so I said sure I'd give it a shot. For this second site I actually paid for cli ck fun nels which I regret a little. Maye it works maybe it doesn't but I just think I wasn't ready for it at the time. Maybe I'm still not. It has a ton of features but I don't see myself paying for their package again. Same deal here, spammed IG with other peoples content (linking back to them) I grew another page to over 2500 followers. This didn't materialize any commissions but I don't consider this a major loss just part of the learning process. Sure I spent a lot more on this fail than on the previous site but the knowledge gained was more valuable.
Needless to say my sales numbers at work started to drop. Neglecting your job and coding during work hours is probably not the right thing to do but I knew I wanted out. While being a newb to IM I was in a rough spot. Don't want to sell for a company mandating me to knock doors until 9pm (yes, I got chewed out for waking up the baby)... Can't live off dreams either so I stayed at the job and let my site get dated. Since I had a decent job I was able to outsource most of the content writing. What a headache! You truly get what you pay for. Try to cheap out and you'll get garbage articles that I felt were worse than my own almost illiterate writing. Then again spending a ton doesn't guarantee you anything either. There's some people out there charging high prices and delivering fluff. I wanted the best of both worlds. To have my cake and eat it too some would say. So obviously I did the next best thing. Started writing articles my damn self. They're not great but if I can train myself to be a better writer then I can train others to write better for me.
Alrighty then let's fast forward a bit through the job and personal life drama. Back and determined to build a profitable site I set out on the digital marketing trend. This project tanked hard and while a part of me wants to blame google and EAT I know it's just my laziness and lack of getting it done. This niche is different to the previous 2 where I had some slight success. I tried to get this going on FB but
So where are we now? I still want to own a digital marketing company. I think its geared toward my skill set perfectly. I love being able to help others get on the web and showcase their products or services to the masses. However I think it's time for another niche site until that gets some more traction. I was reading here somebody said that instead of picking a niche and trying to build and audience around it. Why not build an audience first then monetize that audience. What? That's brilliant! So back I go delving into the depths of twitter nonsense just tweeting about the things I'm into like its my personal twitter. My thoughts for this are to just do what I've done previously and see which of my hobbies people like to hear my thoughts on the most. The porn spamming type stuff is also tempting but then I cant tell anybody I know about it IRL and I love talking to people IRL.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk and I hope you learned something useful. If not please feel free to drop a complaint in the complaint box.
TL;Dr: A wise man once said, "he who sleeps with itchy ass, wakes up with smelly finger". Peace and good luck to you all!
