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I recently stumbled on this forum and was rather surprised at the amount of great advice and level of discussion. I figured I would start of my journey here by adding value and sharing with you my experience over the years with running an online business.
A little background first. I just recently turned 30 and have been at this online-money-making thing since I was 20 years old. It wasn't till I was 27 when I was able to make my first breakthrough and quit my 9-5 slowlane job. I had many attempts and failures before that time and somewhere in the middle I went through a burn-out phase where I completely shut out anything work related. My brain couldn't even process a single industry buzz word (I would seriously feel sick).
I was out for 9 months before I could get myself to work again. I was so broke I was considering buying a van to sleep in. It never came to that and I was, slowly but surely, able to get back on my feet. I say this because I don't want anyone thinking making money at this be-your-own-boss thing is easy and if you find yourself failing over and over then know that you're one more try away from hitting a home run so don't give up and keep at it. Fail quickly and most importantly learn from your failures, adjust your strategies accordingly and try again. I can't stress enough how important it is to identify WHY you "failed" before moving on to the next thing. Don't get discouraged and know that the master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.
Anyways, back to the point of this thread. This year I'm on par to make 500k and I consider it a major failure. Obviously failure is relative. So why is it a failure? Seems like a good chunk of change. Well, it would be if I didn't make 1.2 million in profit the year before (2015). That's more than a 50% drop in income within 1 year. If I was a CEO of a company and posted numbers like that I would likely get fired.
So what happened? What on earth would cause such a drastic drop in income? I could blame it on how my primary sales channel introduced new policies that made it more difficult to advertise and sell my products but the truth of the matter is that I got complacent and failed to properly diversify my sources of traffic. Fortunately I had a list I was building and a website that sustained the major loss of a sales channel so I didn't go straight to zero.
In hindsight I could have done much more and I put in a weak effort because things were going good. I got lazy. I had 3 years of consecutive growth and that made me over confident. Thinking back, I lost my drive and hunger. I spent too much time buying stuff and not enough time securing future growth. I knew the potential for loss was there but I ignored it and for that I had a year where I lost more than 50% of my income.
Don't get me wrong. I'm still very happy making what I make but that's not the point. The point is this could have been avoided. I could have mitigated my losses but the hunger that got me there had subsided and I wasn't hustling anymore. I was coasting.
The lesson I want to share here is don't get complacent, don't lose the hunger regardless of your income and, most importantly, live well below your means. Reward yourself but don't go overboard. I bought a Porsche for $130,000 and that was stupid (in hindsight). No, it didn't bankrupt me because it was still within my means but it was mostly a dumb buy. Making a million dollars isn't a lot after taxes. it's easy to spend it all very quickly if you think your business is bullet proof when it really isn't. So don't make the mistakes I made, regardless of where you are on the totem pole of income.
I'm happy to have found this forum. It has been a while since I've seen a hungry and motivated crowd that is striving for more than just the average life. I hope to learn from the folks on here and I hope my post adds a little bit of value to some of you out there.
Cheers.
A little background first. I just recently turned 30 and have been at this online-money-making thing since I was 20 years old. It wasn't till I was 27 when I was able to make my first breakthrough and quit my 9-5 slowlane job. I had many attempts and failures before that time and somewhere in the middle I went through a burn-out phase where I completely shut out anything work related. My brain couldn't even process a single industry buzz word (I would seriously feel sick).
I was out for 9 months before I could get myself to work again. I was so broke I was considering buying a van to sleep in. It never came to that and I was, slowly but surely, able to get back on my feet. I say this because I don't want anyone thinking making money at this be-your-own-boss thing is easy and if you find yourself failing over and over then know that you're one more try away from hitting a home run so don't give up and keep at it. Fail quickly and most importantly learn from your failures, adjust your strategies accordingly and try again. I can't stress enough how important it is to identify WHY you "failed" before moving on to the next thing. Don't get discouraged and know that the master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.
Anyways, back to the point of this thread. This year I'm on par to make 500k and I consider it a major failure. Obviously failure is relative. So why is it a failure? Seems like a good chunk of change. Well, it would be if I didn't make 1.2 million in profit the year before (2015). That's more than a 50% drop in income within 1 year. If I was a CEO of a company and posted numbers like that I would likely get fired.
So what happened? What on earth would cause such a drastic drop in income? I could blame it on how my primary sales channel introduced new policies that made it more difficult to advertise and sell my products but the truth of the matter is that I got complacent and failed to properly diversify my sources of traffic. Fortunately I had a list I was building and a website that sustained the major loss of a sales channel so I didn't go straight to zero.
In hindsight I could have done much more and I put in a weak effort because things were going good. I got lazy. I had 3 years of consecutive growth and that made me over confident. Thinking back, I lost my drive and hunger. I spent too much time buying stuff and not enough time securing future growth. I knew the potential for loss was there but I ignored it and for that I had a year where I lost more than 50% of my income.
Don't get me wrong. I'm still very happy making what I make but that's not the point. The point is this could have been avoided. I could have mitigated my losses but the hunger that got me there had subsided and I wasn't hustling anymore. I was coasting.
The lesson I want to share here is don't get complacent, don't lose the hunger regardless of your income and, most importantly, live well below your means. Reward yourself but don't go overboard. I bought a Porsche for $130,000 and that was stupid (in hindsight). No, it didn't bankrupt me because it was still within my means but it was mostly a dumb buy. Making a million dollars isn't a lot after taxes. it's easy to spend it all very quickly if you think your business is bullet proof when it really isn't. So don't make the mistakes I made, regardless of where you are on the totem pole of income.
I'm happy to have found this forum. It has been a while since I've seen a hungry and motivated crowd that is striving for more than just the average life. I hope to learn from the folks on here and I hope my post adds a little bit of value to some of you out there.
Cheers.
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