First post - My journey so far as a new entrepreneur

Hey how's it going y'all! I came across this forum while I was doing a search about eJunkie. I like that I've found a place where people discuss IM like this.

I've decided to take the plunge into self-employment in May of 2012, which is when I quit my job as a well-paid engineer. It's been a year and a half almost now, and I love it!

I left with a plan such that I could still afford to pay my mortgage and all other bills through renting my spare bedrooms to my friends and playing weekend gigs with my band. However, I knew I couldn't just do that forever, so I figured that I'd spend my free time during the days learning about how to start my own internet business.

In order to learn, I bought a product, which I'm sure many of you have heard about - "Getting Rich With eBooks" (this is not a sales attempt, and I'm not an affiliate of them). It was an expensive program, but I knew that I wanted to make a living through writing somehow whether it be freelance writing, blogging or something similar. His catchy marketing video was good enough to convince this newly-self employed guy to take out his wallet and fork over $497.

I knew that if I was going to spend that kind of money, then I would undoubtedly be committed to at least try it. Well, it resulted in me creating my own website, writing 2 full eBooks and 1 very short eBook which I offer for free for the purpose of building a mailing list. Those were all of the things that the course taught me to do. Since I initially built my website, I have also written a good deal of free content through about 30 or more blog posts and some videos.

It may appear that I was very productive since buying the eBooks course, but honestly I wasn't very productive at all! In fact, once the books were completed and I had a bunch of content for my website and also had my books listed on Amazon; I pretty much just let everything sit there with absolutely no drive to actually want to make SALES. I knew that people weren't just going to magically find my site, and then I'd suddenly start making tons of money. But I just had no drive to really want to market my website. In the beginning, I forced myself to do some self-promoting because that's what the course said that I should do, and I even sold a few books here and there. But I really had no drive or passion to REALLY put in the required effort to actually get my name out there.

Well, fast forward about a year later to today. I don't know what exactly it is, but I have been DETERMINED to figure out a way to earn $1500 per month in passive income. That's the amount I receive each month from my roommates' rent payments, but I want to eventually get to the point where I can live alone again. Therefore I want to be able to make $1500/month through other means (and I'm not going to get a job either ).

I now have the DRIVE that I know is necessary to succeed. Since I've gotten this amazing boost of motivation, which happened about 2 months ago, I've already created 2 more eBooks. I am going to create a third one this week as well. My plan was not just to write 3 more eBooks just so I would have three more products to sell. Rather, I had an idea for a nice little "package deal" where someone could buy either just one of my eBooks for a set price or buy the entire package of all 5 of them. All of them are related to one another, so a "package" of all 5 is actually a nice little "product" that I have that is even better than just a single eBook.

Anyway, as soon as this final eBook is done, my "product" which is a 5 eBook package will be complete. Thank god, because writing the actual content, then editing it over and over by myself is quite a tedious process. However, I'm almost finished finally, and I'm actually really looking forward to the whole other side of the IM process which is actually attempting to make sales.

My plan is as follows:

- Install a shopping cart into my website so I can have all 5 of my books available as well as the whole package of 5. I was using Aweber before to have it autodeliver a password that takes the customer to a password-protected download page on my website. I thought that seemed way too complicated, so I figured that I'd just shovel out the $5/month for eJunkie to get an actual shopping cart.

- Upload all of my books not only to Amazon, but also Barnes and Nobles and iTunes as well

- Make my website as awesome as possible by adding tons of free content including lots of blog posts and videos

- Promote the hell out of my website every single day using social networking, blog commenting, forum signatures, fiverr, YouTube, article writing, etc...

- Maybe even make one of my new "full" eBooks free just so I can build my list up faster

- Once I have a nice "following", then start doing some affiliate marketing and further advertising on my website

So that's my plan thus far. I have the "product creation" part down...well as far as just creating a few eBooks that is. But I know that if I'm going to take this IM thing seriously and really work towards achieving my $1500/month passive income goal, then I will really need to focus on making sales, building a list, and gaining traffic.

I intend to make a few more purchases as well, but I'm not 100% sure yet:

1.) SBI (Site Build It!) - I'm thinking about purchasing this so I can learn the ropes of how to build a niche website. I think my website is kind of a niche website, but I know that SBI will teach me more about the concept of "finding a market prior to creating a product". I created my eBooks and website based on passion, without really searching for a market prior to doing all the work. I can work on an SBI niche site concurrently, no problem! However, I'm not 100% sure if I'm going to make this purchase just yet. Thoughts?

2.) Market Samurai - This is so I can begin to conduct my own keyword searches so I can attempt to get my website ranked higher on Google by writing content specifically for popular keywords. Thoughts?

Anyway, sorry for the long post guys. I'm just really excited to achieve my goal. I've been an employee for my entire life, and I'm extremely excited to prove to myself and all of my doubters that I can create a life in which passive income covers all of my expenses. I'm not looking to get rich. I'm just looking to having my bills covered without needing to work.

Thoughts, feedback, suggestions...

Thanks everyone!