Recovering from a major depression

Welcome, and thank you for sharing your story. It takes a lot of courage to talk about what you've been through, and it's great to hear that you're feeling better and ready to move forward at your own pace.

Focusing on a low-stress job and exploring new income streams is a solid plan, especially when you're rebuilding confidence and stability. You don't need to know everything right away, what matters is that you're willing to learn, and you already recognize that you pick things up quickly when you're focused. That's a huge advantage.

Wishing you strength and steady progress on your journey. You've already taken a big step just by being here.

Hey, good to see you here and glad you're doing better.
Two years is a long gap but honestly it doesn't matter as much as you think.
The internet marketing world changes so fast that even people who were working
the whole time are basically starting fresh with new stuff anyway.

My advice? Maybe get a simple part-time gig first (even something boring)
while you learn this stuff on the side. Takes the pressure off so you can
actually learn instead of panic-learning because you need money tomorrow.

Hi, for you I believe the right thing to do is set up a positive reinforcement feedback loop. Even with vanity metrics there's a reason to get up if the numbers are moving in the right direction. Without this, the temptation is to go back to bed or watch YouTube and let the hours slip by.

So the first thing to do is figure out what business model you want to use. You're not stuck with this forever, but it's an important choice and having one improves your situation over the totally lost strugglers.

Some IM business models are:

1. be an affiliate, which means bringing in (hopefully) qualified leads to an existing seller of something like a course, or coaching, and you make a % commission when they buy

2. make and sell your own offer. Easiest thing is a recorded course that teaches the buyer how to solve a serious problem they have

3. run your own marketing agency that performs at least one service for a specific kind of client, eg. runs paid ads on facebook for residential roofers, or makes YouTube video content to promote a branded coach's offer.

These are in order of complexity and how many things you have to take care of yourself.

As an affiliate, all you're responsible for is bringing people to that signup or sales page. If it was me doing it, I'd have my own lead capture and qualification system up front, meaning my own email signup page I'm sending people to consistently...and once they get in there, I'm sending them content that either warms them up for the big offer...or demonstrates they aren't a fit, and that lead gets segmented over to a non-buyers list so you don't waste time with them again. After a warm up period, the qualified lead is sent emails giving them several chances (say over a couple of weeks) to "hop" on over to the product creator's sales page. Then maybe a reminder again a month or two later ("Are you still interested in X?").

But you don't have to do all that if you don't want to. You can simply find people who could be a fit and send them on over to the sales page with your affiliate link. Just means you'll need a lot more people to find a buyer.

You could also do what's called Faceless Video, which uses AI voiceover in YouTube videos to attract views and warm up customers. Sometimes these are 30 minute long videos about ghost sightings (think "Top 10" listy types) and the purpose isn't so direct. Instead of trying to send people elsewhere to have them manually sign up for something, the channel owner is trying to create viewership so they can get paid by YouTube running ads to those viewers. The long form content captures their attention, whether it's car chases, fails (people falling over and off things), cat videos, dumb stuff like that ... which I watch as well ... but I have YT Premium so don't see any ads heh heh.

If you're going to make and sell your own course, you'll need a bunch of puzzle pieces like hosting of delivery content, sales page, and a payment processor. You can make these separately but there are also platforms that do most or all of them under one roof. Thinkific (I use), Kajabi, Gumroad. Dan Koe, a well known product creator I follow, recommends Stan dot store as an all-in-one, so I'll mention that one as well.

As a course/coaching program creator, you are still going to have to find, attract, warm up, and sell people into your ecosystem. Something to keep in mind is that it is much easier and cheaper to sell a previous buyer something else you've come up with rather than go out and find another brand new customer.

The agency model is kind of similar, except you hire other people, typically from countries with a lower labor pay rate, to do the work. You still have to do all that customer generation stuff, but delivery of services can be done by freelance contractors. Now I want to be clear that sometimes these people disappear, need managing, etc. etc. though many are very good, so you're not off the hook for effort once the customer is signed and on board. The agency model was sold to people as "put your heels up on the desk and watch others do the work", and that's a lie. It's a lot of work. On the other hand, you really can make something repeatable, growing, and sellable with this model.

There are other business models but those are the main ones that come to mind. It's so important to pick one to know what game you're playing. Most people in here don't know what game they're playing, and drift from month to month from one to the next not only without knowing that they're doing so but that they're going back to 0,0 on the growth curve with every change.

Picking and committing is the secret to going somewhere. Like having a map and picking a destination to get to. You could drive, walk, bike, or fly parts or all of the way there...but you know where you're going. You know the mileage. You know how far you've gone, and how far you have to go.

Key metrics for the affiliate models are Leads attracted per period (day? week? you choose...how many people are you bringing in?), Hops to the offer page (how many are actually going there with some intention to buy?), and of course the Close % (how many people bought?). These will tell you everything you need to know about how well the pieces of your business are doing.

In all cases Cost of Customer Acquisition and Lifetime Customer Value are always important to learn and track. Getting a customer costs you something. If you're using paid ads, that's in there. If you're banging it out as a keyboard warrior, going into facebook groups and DMing people to try and get them into your warm up email sequence, that's a part of CoCA, too. If you can sell more than one thing to your buyers, that'll bump their LTV and that's a great thing because Sale #2's CoCA is low, right?

If you become a digital course creator and seller, you have to find those customers from somewhere, and they'll have a CoCA and an LTV.

Same with the agency model. There's a cost of service delivery that's in this model which isn't present in the other two (the offer creator shoulders that in the affiliate model, and your deliver costs are minimal in the course creator model as you are likely already paying for hosting also used in your lead capture & warm up process). Churn rate, or what % of your clients drop monthly and need to be replaced, is another key metric for agency founders.

My intention here is to give you a baseline to think about. It's dumb to just jump in there and start "doing stuff". Be clear about what your intention is, what you're doing and why it matters.

Your feedback loop needs to be designed to give you a reason to get up in the morning and fight for this. You choose the affiliate model, and your number of leads attracted this week is 4 and you need 15? Better get at it. You got 18 already? Feel good, and now it should be easy to get back at it and add even more.

I've explained on this forum many times how to understand the math that's the backbone of your business. A good discussion of that is here.

On this forum you'll find the better questions you ask the better and more specific the answers can be.

Welcome to WF!

Sorry to hear about your depression. I know a few people that have had similar issues and it can be very tough to get it out of it. Glad you are finding a way.

Any idea on where you want to start? or do you still need to figure that out?