Thread: Took The Plunge

Welcome aboard Steve.

WOW Congrats man that is amazing.

A true testament to what reading the Millionaire Fastlane can help you accomplish.

Man, I'm glad you came to this forum! You've got to tell us more! What's your online business? What was your day job?

Welcome to the forum! That must be a pretty proud day, the day when you can finally quit your job and work on your business full-time. A lot of us are envious.

Hey guys,

Thanks for the replies.

My 'normal' job - I was a junior graphic designer back around 97/98. The agency i worked in specialised in branding and print. No one had any digital (New Media back then!) experience and as i was the junior got lumped with making web pages... lucky for me the whole internet thing exploded and i ended up the only person in the company able to do that kind of work (right place, right time!).

Fast forward to 4 weeks ago i was Digital Art Director to a well known branding/digital agency based in Asia. I have been very lucky to pick up many skills such as UX, css/html, design, seo and social media etc - all of which have truly enabled me to do what i am now doing.

I reached a point where i had consistently for 4 months made triple my day job and i had several months of savings in case of emergencies. That is when i decided to jump.

My business - my niche is music production. My hobby if you can call it that was Djing which i started back around 99 which ended up with me running events and eventually getting into producing my own music. I don't want to give too much away but i saw a gap in the market around 2010 which i set about filling.

I now have 2 websites (if you don't mind i would rather not share the links) that teach various aspects of music production. I have outsourced pretty much everything on the site including the content generation and creation of the products i sell. The only aspects i still do is customer service (i think this is the key to the sites success - particularly personally responding to every email the sites get within 24hours) and managing advertising of the websites - i just started adwords and i'm looking into print ads.

The first site has around 20,000 subscribers and growing with around 3000 uniques a day. I monetized this site with selling video products. I only recently started with adwords - most of the traffic has come from a few forums i post on and i rank on page 1 (usually 1 spot) for most of the keywords in my niche.

I have a second site which is pretty much a copy of site one based around a similar product to site 1 - this launched 6 weeks ago and i have just over 1000 subscribers now - video product number 1 is going out next week.

Site number 1 takes around 1 to 2 hours a day to manage, although i spend quite of time messing around visualoptimizer and split testing lots of different things on landing pages etc. Actually i should mention that split testing is another thing that has increased profits dramatically - particularly around copy (headlines in particular)

The secret i have found on my sites is - Give away lots of amazing and free content - do not cover your site in ads or constantly sound like your trying to sell. I only sell once anyone subscribes and even then it's a very soft sell. I only hit them with a proper sales email whenever there is a new product release. Other than that all the really get is a mail with great knowledge.

A great quote i read somewhere was - Stop looking to make money. Help people and you will make all the money you ever need.

And i think that this has truly been the secret to the success of the websites.



So what's next?

Middle of May i have a 3rd website going live that will follow the same model as 1 and 2.

My involvement really now (outwith the customer service) - is building the sites (actually i use manageWP and just clone them now - takes about 2 hours to set up and skin a new site) and then i find someone from my community who is an expert in the chosen sub niche to generate content for a fee. Once i have found someone reliable to start generating daily content i find someone to create video products on the sub niche and then i add this product to the sites auto responder and for sale on the site.

By this point (estimated from working on site 2 this takes around 6 weeks) i can walk away and set up the next site leaving the person i hired in charge of content generation on the site. ManageWP allows me to update and maintain the sites from one platform.

My plan is to knock one out like this every 6 weeks. The beauty of each site is it's specific sub niche which all fall under one general niche - so i can cross pollinate all subscribers to the other sites.

Eventually I will also outsource the customer service and once i get the advertising funnel nailed I'll automate that somehow.

I also have a couple of mobile apps and Wordpress plugins i'm working on which i hope to create new passive revenue streams.

Any questions - just shout!

I like this guy.