My Internet Success Story - Part 3

Launching Out on My Own

I partnered up with a buddy of mine who was a graphic designer. From the very first we went after projects that gave us ownership and the possibility to make money beyond just fees for services.

Next to working the hourly grind, I hate nothing more than working service fee businesses. After battling for a couple of years to make it work, we decided to shut it down.

We had been building some amazing looking web sites for our customers. The only problem was that though they were E-Commerce related, we weren’t doing any actual transactions.

Something in the process was missing. Our wonderful sites revolved around these incredible ideas that we were sure would catch on and catch the Internet by storm.

But NOBODY wanted anything that we were selling…neither from us nor from our clients. We were crashing and burning at every turn!!

I just couldn’t understand what was going on. As a web designer I was always taught to create classy websites with quick and to the point text on them. Wisdom was that the average Internet viewer would only hang around for 10 seconds or so.

Well, our visitors were jetting out in 5 seconds or less. Bert Ingley, web design professional, was drowning in my own misconceptions.

Laying Out the Fleece

My wife and I were living in a house that we could not afford with our two children. Things were rough! We were fighting every week just to find money for groceries. We were so close to quitting and flushing the whole idea of business ownership down the toilet.

This is where the awesome support of my wife, Teresa, came into play. She knew me better than I did. She knew that I would be miserable in a 9-5 and as much as she wanted the security she honestly believed that she shouldn’t press this on me.

We were convinced that I was destined to be a business owner so we stuck our own fleece out there. We made a deal that unless I received $2000 that week, we were going to pack it in and I was going to go out and get a job.

Tuesday came. Wednesday came. Thursday came. Friday morning came. The mail was late on Friday. Finally at 5PM Friday an unexpected tax return check for just over $2000 showed up at our door.

We were so mad!! I was so ready to pack it in and go back to the 9-5 world, but the good Lord had other plans for me it seemed.

I dusted myself off and went back to work.

My Quest for Something That Worked

I fired up my computer and began the search for an Internet program that worked. A colleague of mine had the belief that you had to have at least $100,000 to launch a successful web business.

Well, I didn’t have $1000, much less 10 times that amount to get going. I knew that there had to be a way out there to get things done without going into the poor house or giving most of my business to an investment banker.

For the longest time I was incredibly disappointed by what I saw available on the ‘net. There was scam after scam with snake oil salesmen promising instant Internet millions.

I was smart enough to know that this was a total crock. The problem was that everybody was teaching you how to make money teaching people how to make money on the Internet.

Think about this for a moment. There really wasn’t a product that had any teeth in it. Everything was based around getting other people to buy the dream of Internet riches, but nobody was really doing anything.

Then another course caught my eye. The writer of the course had developed an incredibly successful business online from his passion for cars. He was a car buff and had developed an everything you need to know about buying or leasing a new car guide.

He had sold over $1,000,000 online and now was teaching these same strategies to others who wanted to make money online.

I was immediately struck by this novel concept. Here was a guy teaching people how to make money on the Internet selling what they wanted to sell, not just a how-to course on how to make money selling his how-to make money products.

I immediately ordered the course and stuck it up on the shelf to gather dust. Sound familiar? I’ve met scores of people that buy courses for this or that subject and they just end up on the shelf, unused and unopened.

I went back to doing things my way for a little while, then finally gave up and pulled the course down from the shelf.