Finally, I realized that Google ads wouldn’t work for me. I will never make my dream of $10000 a month come true in such a way.
It was painful, but the bitterest truth is better than the sweetest lies.
Yet again, I started to search for a new idea to achieve my goal.
I tried so many different things: selling affiliate products on Amazon and ClickBank – none of them worked. Perhaps, because I was not interested in the product, but in the money.
After I had given up hope, I suddenly received an email from an unknown. They offered me to become the affiliate seller for their online course. The course was on personal development. WOW, this time, I was really interested in the product.
I agreed to try. They offered me a reward of 20% per sale. The cost of the course was $70. So, I would receive $14 per sale. That’s not much, but that was amazing compared to the $1 a day in ads.
I put the ads for the course on my website. The ads lead to the author’s sale page. My responsibility was to send traffic to that page.
First day – 1 order! Wow! But I have not received any money. They explained that after the order is made, they confirm this order, then they send a DVD course by mail. They pay cash on delivery. And only after they received the money they would pay me the commission. It could take up to 1,5 months to receive my commission.
I accepted the deal. If it were a scam, I wouldn’t lose anything, only time.
The second day – one more order. The third day – one order. In general, I had 1 order a day. Somedays, 2 orders, some none of them.
At the end of the second month, I got more than $100 in commissions. That was amazing! And still, more money was to come because the orders were paid each day.
By the end of the third month, I received $200. By the end of the fourth month – $300!
The money was coming in! It was a big success. My personal development hobby earned me money!!!
In addition to the $1000 a month I’ve earned at my main job, $300 on my hobby was great.
The most important thing was that I believed I could earn $1000 a month and quit my job.
Another thing I strongly believe in was my course would be much better! If they could sell this course for $70, I could do the same.
I decided to write my own course
The most important secrets to success
I started to write a book. I’ve written 10-15 pages and then asked myself: “What are you writing about? What is the title of your book?”
Momentarily the idea popped into my mind: “I want to write about the most important secret to success.”
But what was the most important secret of success? I had no answer. Instead of being upset about having no response, I experienced uplifting feelings and joy. It was fascinating to write a book and get the answer for myself.
At the beginning of my personal development career, I wanted to become successful. I explored success, how to achieve success, the success mindset, and everything connected to success.
So I decided to write about success. I read the 15 pages I have written – they were out of the topic. So I deleted them and started from scratch.
The words came from my fingers so quickly that I could not realize what I was writing about. I was in some energetic flow. I typed so rapidly and so passionately. The first time I experienced the condition in which I wrote the things I hadn’t known before.
My most important secret to success was to have your own dream you passionately want to achieve. Many people consider a house, a flat, a car, or other material wealth as a dream. It’s not a dream. It is a material representation of the dream. In the book, I wrote about how to distinguish a real dream from the fake one.
The dream is a feeling of passion. Even when you don’t have it yet, you think about it, and you’re over the moon. The dream is a feeling, not a material thing. It’s a big illusion that material things will make you happy. You’ll become happy when you’re passionate about something. And here is the most challenging part – go through the noise of other people’s thoughts, aims, and dreams and find your personal ones.
In 3 months, I wrote the whole book!
Few words about how I was writing the book. I lived with my parents. Our flat had 3 rooms: in one lived the grandfather, in the second – the parents and mine were the smallest. But the problem was that there were very cold in my room. The temperature could fall to 10 degrees in the winter and 15 degrees in early spring.
So, I decided to write a book in the parent’s room. They were watching TV, and I was sitting in the headphones and listening to trance music. I sat on the chair, half a turn from the TV, and looked at my monitor.
While writing a book, my mind attacked me with negative thoughts like: “you’re 20 years old. How come you’re writing a book? You didn’t have any experience! You’re not successful, how could you write about success? Books are written by wise, experienced, and successful men with white beards. And who are you? You’re nobody with no experience in life. You want to become successful, but you’re a failure right now.
All the way I was writing a book, I had that inner battle with my mind. I so badly wanted to achieve the success that I finished a book despite the instant flow of negative thoughts in my head.
I was ready to do whatever it took to gain the freedom
Selling my book
The course was ready. Now it was time to sell it.
I thought that it would be easy. If my subscribers bought the course I promoted, they would surely buy my course. They read so many articles that they would want to have my course.
Sometime in mid-April, I put my course on the website. Rubbing my hands, I was waiting for the orders. First day – none, second day – none, the third day – 1. I got 2 orders in the first week, but none were paid.
My course was electronic only. No physical disc or whatever. I considered that as an advantage because people could receive it immediately.
The following week 2 more orders, and none of the 4 were paid.
Something was wrong. Too few orders in comparison to the affiliate course and nothing was paid.
In total, I got 8 orders for the first month and no money from my course. But still, I continued having orders and payments on the affiliate course.
I racked my brain, wondering why people were not paying for my course.
When you have a question, the answer will come. That happened to me. I was searching the internet, and once I found myself on the webpage with the heading “How the author of 7 ebooks are making $1000 a month?”
I continued reading and understood that it was a sales page promoting the live event in Kyiv. My intuition clearly told me, “you have to be there.” But my mind warns me, “it’s too expensive,” and “where would you live in Kyiv?”. The real reason for all these negative thoughts was fear! I was afraid. I’m an introvert, and here was a live event where I should show up!
I get used to listening to my inner voice. If it says “do it,” despite the fear, stress, and negative feelings, I’ll do it!
I registered for that event. In the evening I told my mum about it and asked for help with the place to stay for 1 night. Even with reluctance, my mum supported all my decisions.
That live event changed my online business forever.
The most life-changing moment was during the break when I approached the author of 7 electronic books and asked him: “I’ve completed the e-course, there were some orders, but none of them are paid. What was I missing?”
His answer was simple: “Do you use a cash-on-delivery payment method?”
I replied: “No. I didn’t have a physical copy of the course. It’s electronic only.”
He insisted on doing it. That’s the game changer.
The second super important thing I decided to implement in my business – was an email autoresponder. During that event, the first time I came across the idea of email marketing.
The idea was quite simple – you gather your readers’ emails and then communicate with people over email messages.
That was a great idea. I could send my readers new articles straight to their inboxes!
When I came home, I started implementing those ideas into my business.
Implementing email marketing was easy and fun. I struggled with making a physical copy of my course and setting up the cash on delivery.
I lived in Lviv, Ukraine. My readers were mainly from Russia. So, I needed to find somebody who would print the physical copy of my course, send it to my customers by post, accept cash in Russia, and then send money to me in Ukraine.
But, firstly, I had to create a design for my course. That time I did everything myself because hiring people was very stressful.
Of course, I did the design. It was poor, but still, it was mine.
I’ve found the man in Moscow who agreed to send my courses by post, accept money and send it to me.
It took me 3 months to prepare everything for post delivery. And finally, in September 2009, I was ready.
I remember the day I sent the email promoting my course, saying you could order a physical version and pay upon delivery.
That was the 20th of September, and my friend and I visited the car exhibition. We watched all those great cars, but I had only one thought in mind if there were some orders. I was pretty nervous.
When I came home, I ran to the computer to check the inbox. That was the key moment – I’ve got 6 orders!!! Wow, 6 orders in 5 hours – amazing!
I’ve resent those orders to the man in Moscow, asking him to print 6 discs and send them to the customers.
There were some problems with the delay in shipment. He was busy with his job; he had some urgent matters, family problems, etc. He delayed the shipment all the time.
But the biggest problem I faced was receiving less money than I expected from him. He counted some additional expenses and lied to us on a few orders saying they were returned, but in reality, they were paid.
He cheated on us so much. He stoled probably 10-20% on average.
So my new venture was not much more profitable than selling affiliate courses. Only then I understood they were paying me only 20%. When I asked for more money, instead of 40 and even 30%, they gave me 25%. I was pissed off! I sold more than 100 courses and got a rise of only 5%.
When I encountered this, I realized how much the expenses were there.
I was very disappointed with the man in Moscow, so I decided to replace him.
After a few days of heavy research, I was recommended a guy living in Ural specializing in sending courses by post. I contacted him, and we made a deal.
They worked very responsibly. He sent me the reports every day. He was fair, and it seemed like he was determined to have a long-term relationship.
Since then, everything went fine. I had a piece in mind, and the process of delivering the course and receiving money was set up.
