Your IM Career's Trajectory

I started out last year writing articles for others at $10 a pop to cover bills. In my spare time I built a website up to about $1000/mo by July. It was mostly Adsense. Had to sell it to cover a crash/surgery. Now I'm building up a lot more websites, using what's left from the sale of the first one so I can go full time.

Hopefully this time I get to coast a bit after reaching that "critical mass".

I started marketing pay per application credit card affiliate programs some 16 years ago or so. It was easy then. Then I moved into helping to develop web hosting companies where I fronted some money and know how, and other people did the majority of the work.

Scale and leverage is how you get rich. Not by working. Working is how you make some money and start building leverage.

My IM path has mainly been learning and not putting enough of it into action. That's all stopped now though!

I've now begun to put what I've learned into practice and have recently joined Alex Jeffreys Inner Circle. Currently I'm in the middle of creating my first product, which will be launching on the 10th March

Tim

Tim, i was actually on alex`s first list building course back in 2008 lol

i paid $297 for his course there were 500 of us on his course so he had a good payday :-)

500 x $297 :-)

i learned some great stuff but didnt really start to use it untill about 12 months ago when i started properly building a list

with regards to how i started....

oh boy its been a journey

when i first started i did some MLM.... yes i know what a crock of s**t

then got into cpa marketing

then got into cpa lead doing premium content and made some great money from stuff like ufc fights and the super bowl etc

then got into building niche sites in 2009 doing adsense and amazon, been building those sites ever since

created my first adsense and amazon product april 2011

been building a list ever since and also creating and selling niche sites

also recently launched my first list building WSO which was a great success sold over 100+ copies

things ive learned....

do your time, learn the basics and some core skills

once your making some money and getting good results and you have good knowledge create a product and start building a list and a sales funnel

this is how ive got to where i am now, been a tough road but worth it in the end, i wouldnt change it for anything

paul

My path as pretty much been affiliate marketing.
While promoting someone else's product, I am learning and training myself with an assorted set of skills such as PPC, articles, social media, SEO, etc. while driving the traffic to my funnel in a more earn as you learn sort of sense. Eventually of course, I will come up with my own products. But right now, my focus is to learn the skills, apply them and practice them.

While practicing and applying certain strategies, I make money too. But my grand scheme is basically to achieve mastery in various traffic strategies - then outsource them.

I want to systematize my business as much as possible. While I'm completely focused and consumed by one strategy, I outsource the rest that I don't have time for.

Eventually, I will look into a project manager. One who can organize all my traffic channels, so that I only have to deal with the one person, who handles everything.
Only then can I truly call myself, The Boss.

I started writing about 6 years ago and along the way tried a couple of times to step out and create my own products and/or sites. Had a couple of moderate successes here and there but it's really the last 6 months or so I've dug in my heels and started ramping things up with PLR and a handful of affiliate sites. Just launched my first IM product too - so kind of in that "throw everything at the wall" stage, but it's coalescing finally. Not at critical mass yet, but it feels good.

I started by doing Affiliate Marketing but thankfully I've since adjusted that awful business model that I had. I realized after a while that I wasn't getting anyway, sure I was making some cash but was I building a list?? Yes - but for somebody else

That was a big lesson for me - build my own list and things can get a whole lot easier Still relatively early days but I'm very positive about the future now..

My IM career has had three stages so far.

I got started in 2006 when I purchased a 'How To Beat The Fruit Machines' ebook with resell rights on eBay. The purchase was for my friends who always went on fruit machines quite regularly and at a cost of under $5 we thought it was worth a try. Unsurprisingly, it didn't work so none of us managed to make our fortunes by beating the fruit machines.

I then took another look at the ebook and the resell rights. I noticed the seller had an eBay store selling a wide range of ebooks with resell rights. He seemed to be getting lots of positive feedback on a daily basis and selling lots of copies. I had some experience with selling on eBay and I knew a bit of HTML so I decided to give it a try and set up my own ebook store - The Ebook Cavern (which also influenced my choice of Warrior Forum username).

Once I had the eBay store set up and running I came across Jim Cockrum's excellent ebook - The Silent Sales Machine Hiding on eBay. I implemented his ideas, learnt all about creating websites, setting up WordPress blogs, using autoresponder services, promoting affiliate products etc. This was a big stepping stone for me as previously I knew a bit of HTML and a bit about selling on eBay - that was it.

The end result was I set up two websites and a product which linked up to my eBay About Me page. The first website was an IM products review website which reviewed all the products I'd used as I was learning. The second website was for my very first info product - 'How To Set Up A Successful Automated Ebook Business On eBay'.

I started seeing some really good results with the product but then a few months down the line eBay changed the rules around selling digital products on eBay and made it pretty much impossible to automate. As a result I could not longer sell my product and had to close my eBay store. That ended the first stage of my IM career.

Since I'd picked up all these skills which I now couldn't use on eBay, I wanted to apply them elsewhere. I had an interest in health and fitness so thought why not set up a health and fitness website with a newsletter? I did this, got the site online in 2007, monetised it with Adsense and I still have that site running to this day. That was the second stage of my IM career.

Whilst I really enjoyed this business model, I learnt the hard way, after a few years of consistent growth, that you can't really rely on organic traffic and Adsense. It might seem to be all going great one day, then you lose some rankings and suddenly your traffic and income have plummeted. Whilst it's a great source of income, it's too unstable to be relied on 100%.

I decided because of this, I needed something a bit more stable to run alongside this website. I figured since I'd already got pretty good at writing health and fitness content, why not write health and fitness PLR to go alongside it? So relatively recently in December 2011, I set up my health and fitness PLR website which is going great. That was the third stage of my IM career.

Since writing is my strength, I'm planning to eventually create Kindle products as the fourth stage of my IM career. However, I currently don't know a thing about Kindle and have more than enough to be focussing on with my existing sites so it's going to be a while before I give that a try.

It's been a really fun ride so far. Definitely not something I was planning when I purchased that 'How To Beat The Fruit Machines' way back in 2006 but I'm glad I stumbled into IM as a result of my purchase.

Tom