How Long Did It Take To Hit Your First $1,000 Month?

I'll bite.

For the first year online I was promoting baby strollers and natural remedies. The process was to build out keyword rich websites and rank them in the search engines. What a bloody waste of time. Rarely reached 1k a month - and worked my lil Irish ass off.

Packed it in. Got into network marketing. Started promoting high ticket products... and had my first 1k a day in less than a week.

That's when I realised 2 things.

1) SEO is complete B.S
2) There are better ways to make money.

Night Night. It's midnight here. When I don't get my beauty sleep, I wake up as a narky fecker in the morning.

All the best.

I started in 2008, and didn't make $1,000+ in a month until my fifth month (and made very little altogether, before that). But I did make about another $2,000, as well as that "first $1,000", in that fifth month, too.

I was at college (in my second year), but still managed to work about 30 hours per week on my IM business.

I made a huge number of mistakes, when I started. If there was a way to get things wrong, I found it. I found ways to get things wrong that other people haven't even heard of. The whole sorry and embarrassing tale of my first 3-4 months is right here: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post8532320

Almost everything, really. But if you want one concise, succinct answer ... there are a few hundred threads in this forum with titles similar to "What's The One Thing You'd Do Differently If You Were Starting Again Tomorrow?". Take a look through a small sample of them, and you'll find that one of the things they all have in common is that they're full of replies from long-established, successful Warriors almost all of whom give the same answer: the thing they'd do differently, with what they know now but didn't know when they started, is "start to build a list on day 1". There are reasons for that, and they're very good and very valid reasons - and that will do for my "concise, succinct answer", too.

(I also agree with Retsced's comment about SEO in the post above, and it's even more true now than it was when he and I both independently realized it, back whenever that was.)

First month I made -$400 or so.

For the next 6 months I made about $7-9k per month, but it was from Android apps and I kind of got lucky.

Then I got cocky and started making <$1k a month again. Then I got lazy and stopped working hard for a while and made nothing.

About 2 years after that I finally got back up to $3k+ per month from internet marketing itself - which was 2 years ago.

If I could change anything from back then, I'd be smarter with my Android apps, make more when it was an open market, etc. Internet marketing wise I wouldn't have bought any products, I would have just done the dumb system that works. Looking for the 'new thing' is what was keeping me on the negative side probably.

(Technically most of my months were positive in ROI thanks to copywriting and article writing, but that doesn't seem the same as internet marketing so I didn't include it...)

Can't remember all the details but it took about 6 months to hit $1000. Everyone is different but the process is almost the same -

Try, fail, try again, fail again --> finally success, more success, even more success --> product saturation, income decline --> frustration --> soul searching --> re-invent yourself --> income recover.

It is like a never ending cycle.

I started caring about internet marketing in the beginning of 2006.

My first $1000 per month delayed a lot because I was selling my own (unknown) products; around three years. However, the first $1000 didn't mean that from that day and on I started making $1000 every month... I had many adventures.

In the beginning I was working around six hours per day online, everyday.

I had an offline store while I was studying internet marketing, and while I was building my websites and creating my products.

If I knew how long, how difficult, and how expensive everything would be I wouldn't be as self-confident as I was in the beginning. I was too naïve.

If I would begin again I would study internet marketing very well before creating whatever, and I would use free platforms to learn and test many things. I would be a regular student at the WF, and save a lot of money. I spent a fortune online before learning internet marketing.

Like 2 years -- sort of -- I'm talking just passive income, not selling services, because that doesn't really count as much.

Luckily it only took me 1 month!

If we're counting selling services here, I managed to make just under $2k in my first month. I'd put together a business plan that aimed to get me to that figure within a year, so obviously I was over the moon.

The trouble was, I was immediately stuck in the time for money trap and found it difficult to get any further. For the next year, I hovered around that figure and never made much more than $3k, and that was working all the hours I could.

The turning point was finding a mentor who helped me to look at my business in a different way and tap into other income streams. I'm by no means a millionaire, but I'm finding my way out the time for money trap and finding ways to expand.

Though I'm tempted to say that I'd have found a mentor earlier, I learned a lot during that year, and I'm not really sure that I'd change too much. We all make mistakes and take the wrong routes from time to time when working online, but there are valuable lessons along the way.

It would seem that the challenge of consistency in earnings runs as a theme through this thread, and other similar threads I've read.....with waxing and waning earnings. Such has been my experience. Sometimes markets are only viable for a season--as a seasonally fitting allegory, go ask the guy down the street who runs a Christmas tree farm. Because of the nature of the business, it's likely he does little to no business throughout the year, but, then, earnings could sky rocket to many thousands of dollars at the height of the season in November and December.

Soon after, interest and, subsequently earnings, subside.

When I launched my eBook, I managed to do several thousand in sales in a matter of 1-2 days. The eBook business model, quite honestly, is awesome. Because of such a low barrier to entry (an eBook cover designed for a few bucks, and a few bucks for an automated delivery system like eJunkie, and pure sweat equity to actually write the thing), many many people are trying to do the same. Competition, in even the most remote niches, has skyrocketed lately.

I could do it again, but there really is ALOT that goes into a "launch". My experience was akin to something like orchestrating a massive military invasion...lol