How I went from desperate marketing nerd to beginning consultant

As an affiliate I started selling computer software and educational courses for commission using paid ads while continuing to ghostwrite for myself. Except I wrote to sell affiliate products this time.

One of my earliest successes was a blog I ranked in the search engines for certain keyword search terms. I optimized the website and it started getting traffic. Then I recommended affiliate products and the sales started trickling in. It was only making about $50 to $100 a month at first. Nothing to write home about.

One day instead of recommending products I got the bright idea to give away information about how to solve a problem instead. A big problem I knew visitors were experiencing. I asked for their email in exchange and to my surprise they actually signed up. 

So I started sending free reports, articles and followed up with emails promoting affiliate products while my traffic started to grow. Slowly profits grew from $100 a month, to $300 a month, to $500 a month, and eventually capped out at about $1,000 a month. 

It was around this point I stopped writing for the website because I just couldn’t stand it anymore. It was driving me crazy. My interest in the topic had faded and I felt like I was just writing the same things over and over again. 

Looking back now, I guess I was too dumb or freaked out about getting caught running this embarrassing website under a pen name to hire freelancers to write everything and respond to all the emails.

So I stopped working on it and moved onto other things. I just let the website make whatever it made per month. It lasted about six months and started to decline. Eventually it died off and I didn’t care. The subscribers were always sending me emails asking the same questions, and my attitude back then was, “Didn’t you read the article?” 

I was over it. There was only one problem. The income!

Running From The “Spotlight”

Next I decided to launch my own information product, except it was in the marketing community because I was always posting in internet marketing forums back then. I used to write about online marketing a lot in those days. 

On the rare occasion I go back and read some of my stuff I cringe. It’s weird how much people can change. I was a real bonehead sometimes!

Anyway I made the product, sales page and sales video in 48 hours using copywriting formulas I’d learned. It was about how to create your own info product using a formula I’d learned ghostwriting and it took off like a damn rocket. At least for me at the time.

At one point I was making $238 a day which was very needed for me at the time. Then one of my customers came along and promoted me to their email list and I ended up making about $4,000. It felt like it happened overnight. That opened my eyes. 

Then another one of my customers came along and offered to buy a license to my product. I had heard of licensing once before when it came to running marketing campaigns as a consultant for others, but I still didn’t really understand all the different ways you could use licensing at the time so I was a little confused.

Turns out he simply wanted to pay to borrow the rights to my product so he could send it to all of his customers as a bonus for buying his product. Well, that made sense to me so I agreed to sell him a license to borrow rights to my product for a one-time fee. 

It was the first time I’d made $2,000 from one sale in less than 48 hours, except for the one time I stumbled into selling hurricane impact windows door to door (badly, I might add) so that was pretty cool. You can license products too, huh? I thought.

The problem was that the attention got to be too much for me to handle at the time. I wasn’t ready for it. People starting asking me questions I didn’t have the answer to. I didn’t like the spotlight, whatever little bit I had, and it freaked me out.

So I stopped working on it and went back to my regular life. Things died off and everything went back to normal. But a seed of something greater had been planted. I was restless to find something that worked for me.

This went on for quite some time. I failed in seven businesses and all of them started off pretty much the same. I would get them going, start to feel uncomfortable, pull the plug, and then go out and get a nice familiar job. I had something like 27 different jobs in total. As you might imagine, this took it’s toll on me psychologically.

I blamed all sorts of things for this. It wasn’t the right time, the right product, the right economy, it was my parents fault, etc. 

Finally, after I failed to get a sliding glass door repair business off the ground where I was getting a 300% return on my advertising using free recorded messages in local community newsletters, I had a nervous breakdown. The ads were working, but I didn’t want to go all in. This time the common denominator was too obvious to ignore and I had an epiphany. All of my failures had one thing in common: Me. 

That’s when I realized that if I wanted something new, I had to change.

A Leopard Never Changes It Spots

Shortly after that the whole world shut down, and after two years I couldn’t take it anymore. Living below my potential was one thing, but being locked down at the same time was another. So I started looking at things differently than I did before. I dug out an old marketing seminar I first watched over 13 years ago that had information on it I’d always wanted to put into action but never felt confident enough to do it.

During this seminar a marketer named Bob explained his approach for helping other companies increase their sales that he and his students were using that paid really well, even if you didn’t have your own product or a traditional service. 

People without much marketing experience were putting his strategies into action with great results and that’s what hooked me in the first place. And there was no need to be in the spotlight, or so I thought at the time. And as it turns out, I’ve learned the hard way that almost nothing is as easy as I initially think it will be at first.

So I got on Bob’s list and he was selling many of his programs for as much as $5,750 and charging $17,500 to work with him one-on-one for a year. $17,500 sure seemed like a lot of money and I couldn’t justify it. Hell, I didn’t have it. But thanks to the magic of credit, eventually I bit the bullet and bought some of his mid-tier programs. 

I went through everything over and over again with and asked lots of questions and got myself trained on how to implement it. It was actually pretty simple, but not easy.

Step 1: Buy the rights to effective marketing campaigns or create your own through trial, error, and investing lots of time, money, energy, etc. Step 2: License or loan your best campaigns to businesses and help them implement them successfully for a portion of the profit you generate for them. And I decided to take it seriously this time.

Trying Something New

As I explain on my home page, I’ve collected several campaigns now and have invested in in-depth training and ongoing support to use them. Now that I feel more confident that I can deliver results (and be more a real person and that it won’t kill me), I’m looking for my first new client to start building out my experience. You can read about the very real results these campaigns have already produced on my home page.

Just for a quick example, one initial campaign converts customers and subscribers into new sales at rates as high as 40% to 70% of regular sales, sometimes even more. It takes 5 to 8 days to implement fully and can be run quarterly, monthly (or even weekly in some cases with a few tweaks) turning it into a significant long-term business asset.

After making sure it’s a good fit, I can explain exactly how it would work in your business in about 15 minutes, and why there’s never any cost or risk to do this. If you’re not against having a conversation to see if we can implement something like this together, feel free to send me an email or connect with me on LinkedIn and let’s talk.

Thanks for reading!