I really started to hate my calendar… But the more I ignored it, the more it haunted me later.
To this day I use a method that I developed out of sheer necessity.
I had a meticulously planned out schedule. There was basically no room for recreation…
A few weeks in, I had to decide where I want to specialize in. The most useful seemed to me was online marketing.
The idea of working for yourself and where and when you want was the most tempting to me.
I found a great help in my sister and she encouraged me.
After a few weeks, I found a guy that made sense to me to follow him. He had a big tribe and a logical and repeatable method that I could see working for me.
So I built my first pages. At the height, there were around 25 pages I owned.
The angle was to get them listed high on Google’s first search result page.
And I actually got a few pages on page one. The Pages were very simple and in hindsight shallow and uninteresting.
They were just build to siphon off search engine traffic and offer the visitor a canned solution.
Building them was fun for me. At the technical stuff, I always speed up quickly. So I enjoyed the progress I made there.
Oh, the content… putting words on the pages was a whole other topic.
After some time, I had a strange feeling about the method. But I didn’t know better and just thought I needed to push through, because I didn’t had any success at all.
I made a deal with my sister that I do the building and she creates the content… That went on for a few weeks and nothing happened.
One day my first check was in the mail! $82 felt like a fortune and we were happy about our minor success.
We doubled down, and the pages felt, and you looked better.
Also, we got some help with the content for a few bucks a pop.
The following month, the check was still $82, but another offer paid commission, a whopping $472.
When we invested in the big course from my online marketing teacher.
In our situation, a big decision, with the business still running poorly this was a substantial investment for us.
There were a bunch of tools and apps included. This was like Christmas for me, just experimenting with them.
We made two blogs, one for my future online business and one for my sister. Putting in countless hours to learn the tool and rebuilding the sites with them.
And we received another check with a little less than $100.
So I bought the next course from my internet teacher. This was a membership and there was now a ton of stuff at my fingertips.
The big issue still was to create good content.
This time it was up to me, because my sister had enough to do with her stuff and my material didn’t interest her at all.
Good… I dived in a bit…
And then started to just build more and more lifeless pages again…
Struggling with putting something, not even meaningful, on the pages…
Had a few minor successes with a theme site that had an offer from a major online retailer on it.
Still the sites were just shallow offer pages that didn’t perform at all.
Until one day… I was tracking the ranking of my pages on Google…
Still having the chills in my bones, thinking back to this day.
It felt like ages as I went through the five stages of grief.