I am Roy, a Money Chaser...
That seems to start the conversation at AA meetings so why not here? I guess admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery, right?
I've been a chronic "money chaser" and I didn't even really understand that until I read MJ's book. I've easily spent over $20,000 on internet crap, courses, coaching... you name it. And here's what I have to show for it:
- Created a couple hundred Adsense sites (years ago) and made a approximately $2,000 a month for 6 or 7 months and then Google changed their ranking algorithm and it all went away in a matter of months. Here, I added no value for anybody.
- I created and sold an inexpensive script that worked with another cloaking script so that Blackhat guys could show Google one page for ranking purposes and then deliver a different page to the actual user. Here, I made a few bucks, but again added no real value for anybody.
- I'm a data warehousing guy so I thought I could use that skill set to make a few bucks on the side. So I created a data product that combined census data with real estate pricing data and sold it for $120 or so per file. Here I actually added some value, but quit after 6 months or so because it was boring as hell.
- A few years ago I hired an Internet Mareketing coach who I worked with for 3 months. During that time I created a video product about how to grow Orchids in your home. I outsourced the video stuff to an Orchid enthusiast and sold the end product on-line. Here, I actually added a little value and made a few thousand dollars, but I decided that the market wasn't big enough so dropped it.
- 13 years ago my daughter got into riding horses competitivly. I wanted to make a few bucks on the side to support her "horse habit", so while doing research, I found a website that listed "horses for sale" and based on what I saw, it looked like the site was making close to $1M a year. I wrote up a design document and had a database driven website created to compete with that site. Here I actually added a little value for people, but I shut it down after a few of my customers let me know that fake buyers were trying to scam them (the horse sellers) on my site. My site made about $400-$500 a month but I shut it down because of the scam issue. [As an aside, my daughter actually met two guys that were the nephews of the site owner mentioned above. She actually WAS making close to $1M a year. What a dumbass I am.]
There are probably more things that I've done, but I think you get the picture by now.
So... why am I telling you this? Because after my last failure I promised myself and my wife that I would quit IM/Business stuff and just focus on my job of being a Business Analyst for IT stuff.
The only problem is... I CAN'T quit. I feel like I'm just waiting and I don't even know what the hell I'm waiting for. It's almost like I'm just waiting to get old and die and that's bullshit.
So again, why am I telling you this? Because I'm going to try it again, but this time I'm going to do it completely differently. Instead of chasing money, I'm going to let the market tell me what they need and I'm going to try to fix real problems and provide real value.
I'll add to this thread tomorrow, but I've already chosen a niche. I'm going to use cold emails to hopefully warm a few of these potential customers up and then talk to them by phone or in person to dive deep into what there issues are. The email part is mostly automated as I don't have a lot of time because of my job.
I'll provide more details about the email part tomorrow.
That seems to start the conversation at AA meetings so why not here? I guess admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery, right?
I've been a chronic "money chaser" and I didn't even really understand that until I read MJ's book. I've easily spent over $20,000 on internet crap, courses, coaching... you name it. And here's what I have to show for it:
- Created a couple hundred Adsense sites (years ago) and made a approximately $2,000 a month for 6 or 7 months and then Google changed their ranking algorithm and it all went away in a matter of months. Here, I added no value for anybody.
- I created and sold an inexpensive script that worked with another cloaking script so that Blackhat guys could show Google one page for ranking purposes and then deliver a different page to the actual user. Here, I made a few bucks, but again added no real value for anybody.
- I'm a data warehousing guy so I thought I could use that skill set to make a few bucks on the side. So I created a data product that combined census data with real estate pricing data and sold it for $120 or so per file. Here I actually added some value, but quit after 6 months or so because it was boring as hell.
- A few years ago I hired an Internet Mareketing coach who I worked with for 3 months. During that time I created a video product about how to grow Orchids in your home. I outsourced the video stuff to an Orchid enthusiast and sold the end product on-line. Here, I actually added a little value and made a few thousand dollars, but I decided that the market wasn't big enough so dropped it.
- 13 years ago my daughter got into riding horses competitivly. I wanted to make a few bucks on the side to support her "horse habit", so while doing research, I found a website that listed "horses for sale" and based on what I saw, it looked like the site was making close to $1M a year. I wrote up a design document and had a database driven website created to compete with that site. Here I actually added a little value for people, but I shut it down after a few of my customers let me know that fake buyers were trying to scam them (the horse sellers) on my site. My site made about $400-$500 a month but I shut it down because of the scam issue. [As an aside, my daughter actually met two guys that were the nephews of the site owner mentioned above. She actually WAS making close to $1M a year. What a dumbass I am.]
There are probably more things that I've done, but I think you get the picture by now.
So... why am I telling you this? Because after my last failure I promised myself and my wife that I would quit IM/Business stuff and just focus on my job of being a Business Analyst for IT stuff.
The only problem is... I CAN'T quit. I feel like I'm just waiting and I don't even know what the hell I'm waiting for. It's almost like I'm just waiting to get old and die and that's bullshit.
So again, why am I telling you this? Because I'm going to try it again, but this time I'm going to do it completely differently. Instead of chasing money, I'm going to let the market tell me what they need and I'm going to try to fix real problems and provide real value.
I'll add to this thread tomorrow, but I've already chosen a niche. I'm going to use cold emails to hopefully warm a few of these potential customers up and then talk to them by phone or in person to dive deep into what there issues are. The email part is mostly automated as I don't have a lot of time because of my job.
I'll provide more details about the email part tomorrow.
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