I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart and I have always known, unmistakably, that when I grew up I wanted to own my own business. The most common question people would ask me when I said that was “Doing what?”.
I never really knew how to answer this. While it’s true that I didn’t have a clue what kind of business I wanted to run, I didn’t really feel like it mattered. Judging from the various enterprising schemes I ran as a kid, I could have ended up doing just about anything. Fortunately, I haven’t ended up as a Pokemon card distributor or a DVD pirate.
For those who don’t know, I’ve been playing around a lot with internet marketing techniques as a way to make money from various websites I own (this being one of them). I’ve had a lot of failed attempt and thousands of hours or work have yielded little results. Until now that is.
The way I look at it, the thousands of “wasted” hours weren’t really wasted at all. They were necessary, in fact, to learn. This always reminds me of the story of a man in the USA who made a special chicken recipe. He had to close his own restaurant so this man took his recipe to other local restaurants and offered them the chance to license his recipe. He wanted a percentage of the revenue from all the chicken which the restaurant would sell. He was laughed out of the door.
Not being one to give up, the man took his recipe to the next restaurant and again was told “No”. Again, and again he was told “No”, until he had been to every restaurant in town. Convinced his idea was worthwhile, he went to the next town seeking to strike a deal. This continued again and again until he had visited over 1,000 restaurants with each of them tell him “No”. The man learned from each refusal and gradually began to improve his approach to each successive restaurant he visited.
Then, after 1010 rejected deals, someone said Yes! The man and went on to become very wealth and there is a high chance you have eaten the chicken from this recipe. For you see, this man was Colonel Harland Sanders – founder of KFC.
I spent the last 3 months of 2009 failing at every turn with my websites. Slowly but surely, I started learning more and more. At the end of 2009, this was the most difficult time for me as I knew the venture I tried to make work had failed. Nobody remotely believed I could build a business from my websites. There was a lot of a logical argument in what everyone was telling me. To be honest, it really didn’t matter in the end since I knew in my heart of hearts that this would one day be successful. Perhaps I hadn’t failed enough yet.
In Summer of 2010, a friend and I started a new venture and began developing our website. It started ranking very well in Google’s search results for various terms. We manipulated these results using a process known as Search Engine Optimization. Ironically, this was the very industry the site it centred around.
Two weeks ago, we began a deal with another company to re-sell their services on our site. This moved us from budget suppliers of SEO to high-end suppliers with contracts costing around $600 per month. Within 2 weeks, we had our first customer. Seeing this money come into my account was pretty damned awesome and despite a few initial hiccups, everything is now going smoothly. Big shout out to my friend Ritchie for helping me out with Paypal on this.
So there you have it, the secret of success. In fact it’s not really a secret it’s just doing, failing, learning and most importantly doing again!
When this deal went through, it gave me a massive mental boost as it effectively confirmed what I already knew – I was right and all the naysayes were wrong. The champion mentality would have ignored these people in the first place. That is going to be a lot easier to do now.
Onwards and upwards.
Well it took me almost a week to get this post up. Low and behold, less than 24 hours after I publish the post, we get another client.