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From Couch To King: How I Went From Dead Broke To Making $67,000 In 90 Days

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Posted 6th April 2014 at 10:57 AM by StanHyeck

From Couch To King
How I went from dead broke to making over $67,000 per month in just 90 days

And exactly how to make it happen for yourself

By Stan Hyeck
© 2014 twsmind.com all rights reserved


You Don’t Know It Yet But Your Life Is About To Change

This is a repost of my free report that I give away on my site Traffic Generation Secrets

This book has been over a year in the writing. That’s because I wasn’t sure I really wanted to do it. I’ve never wanted to be a famous “guru”, never wanted to speak on stage.

I just wanted to quietly make money.

However, I have become so sick and tired of the absolute garbage that I can’t keep quiet anymore.

Look, it isn’t possible to “make money with the click of a button.”

There isn’t any “traffic generation software” that actually works.

If you want to make money, you have to do some work. If you want traffic then you have to go get it.

Through the course of this book I’m going to show you exactly how I went from literally absolutely broke, over two million in debt, living on a friend’s couch and absolutely destitute ... to making a lot of money fast.

The cover of this book is one of the very few times I’ll talk about specific amounts. The reason is simple, I don’t want this to be yet another over-hyped thing with tons of false promises.

One thing that I’ve learned is that different people have different goals, different work ethics, and so on. I don’t know you, don’t know how hard you’ll work or any of that. Therefore I have no idea if you’ll actually make money doing anything I talk about.

Since I can’t promise that you will (or will not) make anything specific I’m going to leave the “income proof” and all that other nonsense to the snake oil salesmen.

What I’m about to share with you worked for me … mostly using free computers in a library and often I was limited to just 57 minutes of use per day.

Why 57 minutes? The computers in the library were very old and slow. From the time I logged on until I could actually use it ate up 3 minutes of the 1 hour I could use one each day.

Sometimes however I got to use one of the library’s laptops if they weren’t already booked for that day in which case I got a computer for much of the 14 hours the library was open.

Honestly however that happened maybe only a handful of times until I made enough to buy my own laptop.

All of that is a long way of saying that I’m going to tell you what worked for me, how I accomplished what I did, and hopefully allow you to do the same thing. In fact, the simple fact that you’re reading this at all means you have a computer. I didn’t even have a computer of my own when I started which means you already have an advantage that I didn’t


You Have To Understand Where I Was
I was a “dotcommer” during the golden age of the dot com startup in the late 1990s


What I mean by that is that I did a very specific type of programming for websites during the height of the “dotcom gold rush” in the late 90s.

Because my expertise was very specific and something very few people possessed, I contracted out to three, sometimes as many as 6 different major websites. I made a lot of money. I also spent a lot too.

So in 2000 when the dotcom bubble burst and literally every single one of my clients either went out of business or went from more cash than they could spend to struggling to keep the doors open, I suddenly had no clients.

But I wasn’t worried. I was a computer programmer, surely I would get a job right? In fact I was so unconcerned about it that I took six months and travelled around the world … and spent every penny that I had.

When I came back to the US it almost seemed like a different country!


The six months off had every potential employer wondering … and I am not kidding … if my skills were still current. I was only gone for six months but apparently it was long enough.

I went from making well over $200,000 per year to making zero.

And let me say this again … I was totally broke. I had spent everything I had during my six month sabbatical.

So in 2001 I finally allowed the banks to take my house and my cars following the 9/11 bombings and got a cheapy apartment in a pretty bad part of town and a beater of a car.

You see since I had spent all of my cash I was living off credit cards and that meant I had to live as cheaply as I could.

As 2003 hit with only little contract programming work here and there I decided I had to make a change. Instead of continuing to look for a job, I decided I was going to make money with a website myself. Afterall, I was an internet programming expert, surely I could make money with a website right?

I bought everything I could get my hands on as it related to making money online. I mean everything. I borrowed some money from just about everyone I knew, opened an office, hired some staff, and made a go at being an internet start up.

Over the next three years I ran up two million one hundred and thirty seven thousand dollars worth of debt. Yes, $2,137,000 that I owed other people … including just about every member of my family.

As 2007 hit I was in really bad shape. The stress was quite literally killing me and I was now well beyond broke.

Nothing that I had tried over the previous three years had made more than token amounts of money. A few thousand here and there, but nothing sustainable, nothing long lasting.

So I laid off the staff, closed the office … but continued chasing the dream. I mean I had seen several people rise to prominence and wealth over the previous several years so why couldn’t I do it? So I continued buying various internet marketing products. Continued getting sucked into one launch hysteria after another.

Another two years later I had tapped out every single source of credit I had … including family. I was so broke that I got evicted out of that crappy apartment because I couldn’t pay the rent and it was only $500.

I had been trying for 9 long years to make money and all I had to show for it was being homeless.

A friend and his girlfriend, thankfully, allowed me to stay on their couch and even paid for the storage unit to hold what few possessions I had left and helped me move my stuff into it.

Because I felt like such a loser I went and pawned my computer and my phone for at least a little cash so that I could give them some kind of money for taking me in and so that I could buy my own food. All I could afford were ramen noodles and eggs.

Kind of depressing isn’t it.

9 years? 9 years and I couldn’t make it? And I was a programmer for crying out loud!

With all my technical skill and ability, if I couldn’t do it, is it really even possible for anyone else?

The answer to that is yes. Yes you can do it.


In fact, it’s time for the story to start getting better.

That night my friend, his girlfriend, and I were sitting down at the TV and she asked a question that seriously changed everything for me.

“You have a lot of internet stuff. Seems it’s almost everything you own,” she said obviously picking her words carefully.

“My goal of starting my own website has obviously been a huge failure,” I answered sadly.

“Well those people sold you stuff, how did they do it?”

That was really sort of the question wasn’t it!

I mean think about it for a moment.

With the exception of possibly WSOs (if you don’t know what that is don’t worry about it) how have the “big dogs” of the internet been making money … since like … ever?

Think for a minute about every single big product launch you’ve ever heard about.

How did you first hear about it?

How is it most heavily promoted?

“I guess what I’m saying,” she said continuing. “Why don’t you just do whatever they did. After you get a job. You need a job because living on our couch isn’t going to work for any of us for very long.”

So I hauled my sorry but down to Walmart the next day to apply. Never heard back from them. It seemed not even Walmart would hire me.

Neither would McDonalds, or anywhere else. I couldn’t even get a job flipping burgers! It was seriously unbelievable. However this was 2009 and the country was still in the middle of the great global financial collapse and almost no one was hiring for anything at the time.

So after two weeks of being turned down (or most often just ignored) even at fast food places I did something I’m not proud of to this day.

I lied.

I told my friends one day that I was going to go out and continue putting in applications and trying to get a job.

Instead I went to the library.

I didn’t have a computer or even a mobile phone.

What I had, was an idea. An Idea that I had been stewing over since my friend’s girlfriend had asked me that question two weeks previous.

The Million Dollar Piece Of Printer Paper


So like I said, I go to the library and ask for a piece of printer paper.

At the top I wrote “Anatomy Of The Business Model Used By Million Dollar Gurus.”

Now … get ready because this is going to blow you away … here’s what I wrote:
  1. Simple landing page, hooked to an autoresponder, offers something for giving an email address.
  2. Drive traffic to the landing page
  3. Sell things to the list

That was it. I stared at the piece of paper for several long moments with my heart literally racing. It couldn’t really be that simple could it?

There has to be more to it than that right?

The truth is that there really isn’t anything else. That really is it. It really is just that simple.

Now you have to remember something, I was broke. I mean I literally had no money. None. Nothing. If it weren’t for my friend and his girlfriend I would have been out on the street not even have been able to feed myself by that point.

That meant that I had to figure out a way to create a landing page and drive traffic to it without spending any money. Not only that, I had to do it pretty darn fast too.

Getting It Done


At this point I do want to make one thing clear.

I was motivated. My life had been pure hell for the last 9 years and I was done with it. I was sick of being broke, sick of being a burden on friends and family, sick of being a failure. I wanted this so bad I could taste it.

And seriously I was pretty ticked off too. I mean I had spend obscene amounts of money on various internet marketing products and home study courses and membership sites; and when it came right down to it, where the rubber meets the road, the whole thing was 3 steps simple!

It didn’t require 9 hours of videos with 3 binders full of crap in a home study course that weighed 7 pounds. It didn’t require some membership site with 200 hours of videos and a support forum.

Everything that I had bought, all the total B.S. that I had been fed about how to make it online and this was all there was to it:
  1. Simple landing page
  2. Drive traffic to the landing page
  3. Sell to the list

That was it.

It was simple and I knew it. And I was angry about it. Why couldn’t anyone have told me this when I had money and means to really do something with it?

However I realized that moaning about it wasn’t going to solve anything. I had to deal with the situation as it was. I couldn’t get web hosting. I couldn’t pay for traffic. I didn’t have the time to spend to create a full blown product.

Because I was focused on money, I started with the last step and tackled that problem first.

So next to step three I put:
Affiliate Marketing

I mean there are a ton of products out there. Thanks to clickbank with many of them I get the lionshare of the profits. I can make 75% and the product and everything is already done.

With affiliate marketing I didn’t need to create a product or need my own website (I still “sort of” had one but we’ll get to that in a bit)

Next, traffic. Again, I was dead broke without a dime to my name. So I had to get traffic without spending money. That automatically took out PPC and those kinds of things.

So next to step two I put:
Forum Marketing

Now “forum marketing” didn’t mean that I went to a forum and started trying to sell junk; but we’ll get to that later.

Last but not least was the “simple landing page” that I needed for step one.

And to be honest for that one I was stuck. No money. How was I going to pay for an autoresponder service?

I got a library card and used it to log on to one of the computers and did a search. “free autoresponder” is what I looked up. Amazingly I had quite a few options. But the one I liked the most was only sort of free.

Next to step one I put:
GetResponse

Seems that GetResponse offered a free month of their autoresponder (something they still do to this day).

The other services that were free were all reduced functionality in some way. GetResponse however gives you free access to everything they offer for the entire month. Aweber does this also but it’s a $1 trial and like I said, I didn’t even have that much (and incidentally I have remained loyal to GetResponse to this day because of their free 30 days when I was starting out).

At this point there was only two more details:
  1. What market was I going to go after
  2. What was I going to offer in the autoresponder for someone to give me their email

Because I had spent such an obscene amount of money on various internet marketing products I considered entering the IM/make money online. The problem however was that I wasn’t excited about the prospect of simply selling people crap because they would buy it the way so many people had done to me.

Not only but at that point in my life my self esteem was pretty low. Going into a market where I might have to somehow prove that I knew what I was talking about … nope. That wasn’t going to happen.

In fact, I made a decision to not do any of this under my real name. My self esteem was just too low.

So I dug around on clickbank and found a fitness product where they would generate a PDF ebook that already was filled with my affiliate links.

So I went after that one. I grabbed my copy of the book, configured GetResponse so that the first email would give the ebook, and I just attached it to the email.

Then I created a “webform” using GetResponse tools and selected the option for them to host it.

The problem is that the long URL wasn’t really that great. So I used TinyURL to shorten it.

Next I signed up to every forum for that market I could find … and then my hour was up.

I spent the rest of the day going around putting in more applications.

However, maybe it was a change in my attitude or something (I can still remember that first day … I knew this was going to work) but I got a job at a customer support center working the phones.

It was good news, but the training class didn’t start for 3 weeks. However it was another boost to my mood. It felt as if my life was finally moving forward again. It also served to show my friend that I really was out trying to make things happen and get a job.

I’m going to spare you the day-by-day at this point.


What I did was put a tiny little tag line (that I got from the affiliate site) that linked to the lead capture page on GetResponse and I put that as part of my signature for all of the forums. I also added a bunch of messages into the autoresponder that I got from the people selling the product.

From there I looked for every question I could find on the forums, especially new questions as they came in.

BUT WAIT

Let me explain something. I was (still am) a computer geek. I didn’t (more on this one in a second) really know anything about exercise, dieting, fitness or anything.

Really, I knew nothing about it. (Now I know a lot about it, but back then it was a different story)

The reason I looked for questions is because I figured that I could simply research the question and just provide the answer out of my research.

Which is exactly what I did.

I would research the daylights out of any question someone asked and I would simply report what I found.

I would even say, “look, I really don’t know much about the subject, but here’s what I found that should answer your question …”

Now honestly for the first week it didn’t do much. I got a few subscribers but that was it. However I knew that each subscriber was likely at some point or another to turn into a customer because I had a huge number of products I could sell. In fact, I loaded up the autoresponder with more messages from even more products (more on this in a bit too).

Anyway, I did this across something like 8 different forums every single day each of the 6 days a week the library was open.

At the end of the first month I had generated something like $3,000 in sales. Now in 2009 clickbank was a little slow to pay. In other words the sales I had made that month I wouldn’t see until the end of the following month.

While that was disheartening one thing was obvious … my one hour per day of work had already made me more money than the phone job was going to pay. So I didn’t go.

I basically told them thanks but I wasn’t interested after all and I never went to the class or started working the phones.

Not only that, but because I had spent so much time researching the answers to so many fitness questions I got so that I really knew what I was talking about. I was turning into a bonafide fitness expert.

Further, because I could only use the computer for an hour a day, I then spent time in the library reading everything they had on the subjects of exercise, dieting, fitness, and so on.

As things rolled into the second month, it got so that when I answered a question other long time posters on the forum would sometimes answer, “listen to him, he really knows his stuff.”

In other words, I was rapidly becoming somewhat known as an expert in the market, at least on the forums. The reason for that was simple, I gave to the communities honestly, genuinely, and openly. Never, not once to this day, have I told someone “check out the link in my signature” or told someone in a post they should check out my web site or anything like that. 100% of the traffic came from people clicking on the link to my website in my signature.

That, combined with a rapidly growing number of posts also meant that the link in my signature was getting clicked more often, I was getting more sign ups, and making a lot more money.

By the end of month 2, clickbank had sent me the check for the 3 grand and I had made another $20,000 on top of it for the current month.

And then I got sick.

I ran a nasty fever for three days. I probably should have gone to the hospital but there was no way I was going to blow the first money I’d had in my hands in what felt like forever on medical bills.

During that three days something occurred to me that would change the way I do things and change the focus on what and how I sell.

Because my income was totally wrapped up in forum marketing, not being able to be on the forums meant I was going to make less money.

Because of my previous 9 years of hell it seriously made me feel almost like I was going to panic.

As soon as my fever had broke I went to the store and used some of the $3,000 and bought the cheapest laptop Walmart sold, then I went to the library.

I was on a mission.

The first thing I did was look around for people that sold monthly autobilling stuff (in 2009 Clickbank didn’t have that ability yet). I totally dropped selling clickbank products in favor of selling other people’s stuff who would pay me a monthly commission.

Then, I wouldn’t just send one message about it and move on to something else.

I hand crafted my own emails. I poured every ounce of internet marketing knowledge I had into them.

I sold the products across 6 to as many as 9 messages.

Now let me be clear about something. You can’t just beat on your list. You can’t just send one sales message after another. Well, you can but it will drive your readership and click through rates into the floor and then you don’t make any money.

I know there are plenty of shyster gurus out there in the internet marketing space that only send an email when they’re selling something; But it’s stupid.

So while I was selling a product, I made sure that every single message I sent had value in it.

In other words I wouldn’t just say, “here’s a product” and give a link.

Instead I took my knowledge and I gave a little of it in the emails and tied what I talked about into the product itself.

Then I did something that I never see anyone do … allow me to explain.

It’s an autoresponder.

I get to see what messages are going out and when.

That means that I can go to message one and tease what’s going to be in message two and tease in message two what’s going to be in message three … and so on.

I can get people looking forward to each and every message that’s going to go out and because of that my open rates skyrocketed. And because of that my sales did also.

Not only that, but I now had my own laptop and that meant that I could spend from the time the library opened until it closed working. Instead of working only 1 hour a day six days a week now I could work 14 hours a day (well, the library was only open 4 hours on Saturdays but you get what I’m saying).

So what happened with all of this is that I went from making one sale one time to focusing on making sales of products that I would make money every month.

Yes, it’s also true that the commission percentage was lower but I didn’t care. I didn’t want my income to drop to zero just because I got sick or if I wanted to take a vacation or something.

But thanks to the fact that I could now work quite a few more hours I also generated a lot more traffic.

Instead of only doing forum marketing, I also did a lot of guest blogging and writing ezine articles.

I also dug around and found other products that paid out lots of money on a monthly basis (different markets) and started promoting those products using forum marketing, guest blogging, and ezine articles as well and doing the other things I had learned with GetResponse.

In every single new market that I entered, I created an entirely new “personae” complete with its own name.

In other words, while I had started this whole thing by creating a pseudonym because I had self esteem issues, now I did it to keep “separation” between each market.

I didn’t want to walk into a new market, have someone do a google search and see that I was selling stuff in tons of other markets and be able to bash me for it.

Anyway, my income rocketed to what I talked about on the title. $67,000 … but this time it was all on monthly autobill stuff and now I also had the $20,000 in my hand from the last month’s sales on clickbank.

I gave my friend 3 grand for rent and food (obviously way more than a couch is worth) … as a way of saying “thanks for helping me out”. Then I went out to rent my own place.

That actually didn’t go over so well.

I had an eviction on my record only three months previous and I had no “real” job. The people renting the house would just look at me like I was a lunatic when I said I had my own internet marketing company.

“Is that like network marketing that pyramid stuff,” one landlord asked me.

So I had to stay with my friends for another month.

During that time I set up a fancy corporation and when my next checks started rolling in I got myself some already furnished “corporate housing” that I prepaid for the entire year so I wouldn’t have to worry about rent.

I also shifted from doing only free methods of traffic generation to doing primarily paid traffic (now that I had money, I could get traffic without requiring so much of my time). Then I went and added four more markets that I was promoting stuff in as well.

Income shot up again.

Then a month later I backed up and started making my own products (and entire product funnels) in each of the markets that I was already in. I had money and resources now and that meant I could get my own domains and websites going.

And I let my market tell me what it wanted me to make. I simply took a look at my stats, saw what kinds of products sold the best, and created my own huge product funnel that was really a combination of my best selling products into a single thing … plus with my own knowledge and know-how thrown in from all the research I had been doing.

My income took a huge leap up when I did that.

TIME FOR A LITTLE REALITY


Like I said, I was extraordinarily motivated.

Not only that, but because I had spent several hundred thousand on various internet marketing how-to products over the previous 9 years I already knew a lot about how to sell.

Further, but because of my background in web programming it meant that in the fourth month when I created my own products, I knew how to create websites and how to tie in payment processing.

I also already knew about the right way to put together product funnels with one click upsells, downsells, forced continuity, and so on.

In other words, I had a lot of knowledge and skill going into it.

That said, lets talk about how you can make this happen for yourself as fast as physically possible.


Circling This Back Around, And Some Good News


First of all, let me give you two pieces of good news that makes all of this much easier to do now than it was when I was trying to do it.

First, clickbank pays out much faster now than they used to. Just hook up a bank account so that they can pay by ACH transfer and you can get paid every week with I think a 3 or 4 week lag. You don’t have to wait almost 60 days like it used to be. You get paid faster and much more often. It’s awesome.

Secondly, clickbank now also does monthly autobilling.

That means finding products where you make money every month is much easier now than it used to be.

You actually get cash in your hands faster and easier and you can do it in a way that makes for money rolling in every month without fail.

So, to circle this back around, what you need to do is this:
  1. Pick a market. Please stay out of the “make money” or “internet marketing” markets. One thing that I have learned over 5 years of doing this is that other markets are much easier to make money in and you can do it much faster.
  2. Dig around on clickbank and see if someone will give you the ebook you need to give away in your autoresponder.
  3. If you don’t already have an autoresponder account, then get one. Again GetResponse is free for 30 days.
  4. Create a list for your market and a webform
  5. Drive traffic to the form
  6. Use the autoresponder/email list to sell stuff.
Once you do this you only have to worry about getting new subscribers. Traffic generation becomes pretty much your only job because you can fill the autoresponder with plenty of content and sales messages so it will do the “selling” for you.

This really is something you set up once and then you’re done, and all you have to do is focus purely on traffic generation.

The idea here is that this is supposed to be simple, it’s supposed to be easy to the point of boring. It shouldn’t take you very long to set up, get started, and making money.

In fact, lets talk for just a minute about giving yourself a big fat short cut so that it can happen even faster for you than it did for me.


Making More Money … Faster


You see, when it comes right down to it, traffic really does equal money.

When you start doing things the way I’ve told you in this book, it doesn’t have to be that complicated.

You set it up, drive traffic, and the autoresponder does the work. So, the more traffic you have going to your lead capture pages, the more people that will be going into your autoresponder, and therefore the more money you make.

Traffic is king.

You can get traffic through free methods like I talked about above, or you can pay for traffic. Free traffic generation is unquestionably slower and takes up a fair bit of your time.

Paid traffic generation can have people flowing to your autoresponder the same day you set it up.

You can do facebook, adwords, banner ads (sometimes called media buying), and so on. Simply monitor how much you’re spending versus how much you’re making. If something is profitable, you scale up the spending and you can literally make as much as you want.

At this point you really should go to http://twsmind.com
and sign up to my list. When you do I’m going to send you content only, no sales message, additions to this report. Like I said, this stuff is pure content and I'm not selling you a ton of crap.

I give you more traffic generation techniques, teach you an extremely important business concept, and a ton of other stuff. Again, no cost, no shenanigans, no beating you with an endless stream of "buy this buy that" crap that other so-called "gurus" do.

http://twsmind.com is the url to check out.
Posted in Special Reports
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Comments

  1. New Comment
    lwjc's Avatar
    Great Story!
    permalink
    Posted 17th April 2014 at 12:48 PM by lwjc lwjc is offline
  2. New Comment
    johndougs's Avatar
    I very much enjoyed your story. Thanks for the many great tips!
    permalink
    Posted 19th April 2014 at 07:07 AM by johndougs johndougs is offline
  3. New Comment
    StanHyeck's Avatar
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by lwjc View Comment
    Great Story!
    Living through it ... not so great
    permalink
    Posted 21st April 2014 at 09:42 AM by StanHyeck StanHyeck is offline
  4. New Comment
    StanHyeck's Avatar
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by johndougs View Comment
    I very much enjoyed your story. Thanks for the many great tips!
    The thing now is you have to DO IT. Don't just go "great tips" and think money will fall from the ceiling. Take action, put the plan into place, make it happen and don't give up till it does.
    permalink
    Posted 21st April 2014 at 09:43 AM by StanHyeck StanHyeck is offline
 


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