Share Your Offline Success Story!

EDIT : Sorry for the length, this post includes most of the details from the last 3 months I have been into internet marketing. Hope you enjoy it anyway

I would love to this to become a big thread full of everyones offline success. Anything and everything related to your success offline goes here!

Being a relative newbie here, I love reading the exact, specific steps people have taken to reap a massive reward in their lives. I will share my first (and sole success so far) in offline IM again, just because yeah, I am still kind of reeling from it (in context to my financial history, it's a massive step for me).

But don't forget; this thread is about you guys! I want everyone to share their personal success story with offline IM

Here's mine, with more detail about myself :

So I have always felt a bit lost in the shadow of my old man. He built a business from the ground up over the last 30 years and today is quite a wealthy guy. But there was something about the way he carried himself and his beliefs about money that always made me somewhat fearful about 'hard work'.

He used to go on about how 'money is precious and rare' and that only with 'real hard work' will you ever 'make it in this world'. He used to tell me about he couldn't sleep at night worrying about money etc etc.

So I took all this on and formed a pretty bad belief : 'Well, I guess it's just not worth worrying about money, if it causes all this stress and takes all this hard work, I'll just do the bare minimum to get by and live a fun, happy life'. You can see how this belief would lead me down a pretty bad path...

Growing up, I only took the 'easy' casual jobs. My resume includes video game retail, paintball referee, mobile phone retail and working for my Dad in the Summer. I quickly discovered that sure, these jobs weren't 'hard', just BORING (as fun as they might look on paper, $20 an hour for shoveling game discs into drawers 4-8 hours at a time isn't fun).

Eventually, I quit all these retail jobs and my Dad didn't have enough room for me in his factory. I found myself living off his dime, and the governments, while slowly getting more depressed.

I know my situation is nowhere near as bad as others (my Dad helped me out alot even though I didn't deserve it), but it still wore me down. Eventually though, I found this forum and had my first glimpse into how to actually make good money!

I was amazed particularly by the claims being made on the offline forum. After seeing people super excited about making $30 a month on their 'niche sites', I was shocked to read about people making $500+ sales making a simple template website for local businesses blew me away.

I thought to myself 'Wait, I know about sales, I worked in retail. I know about making nice graphics, I studied graphic design. All I need to do is find a way to make websites and sell them to local businesses and I could be making more in one sale than an entire week working a McJob!'

PHASE 1 - How I Learnt To Make Websites

My first major hurdle to selling websites to local businesses was simple : How was I going to make websites? I didn't know HTML or coding of any kind. Then I learnt about Wordpress.

I jumped into wordpress and tried some templates and things out, but I just didn't like it. I really liked having great customization over my graphic design tools, and wordpress was too slow (loading up every webpage to edit it) and constricted for my liking. I wanted to express myself (as all artists do haha), so I kept searching.

I tried quite a few programs, from XSitePro to Xara until I found my absolute JOY of a program : Serif Webplus X5. I could not BELIEVE the features in this program...Just check out this video :
So, with my software ready, I needed clients! This is where my cold calling came about...

PHASE 2 - How I Found My First Client

I was more than a little intimidated about selling a website to a client. I had never done it before, and I was very new to even building a website. But I knew it was all pretty straightforward to some degree, so I just jumped in.

I pulled out last years Yellow pages and just started searching through it for advertisements that didn't have websites listed. I found a couple interesting facts :

- I found that calling mobile numbers was 1000% more successful than normal numbers, obviously because you get straight to the decision maker without the worry of a secretary or receptionist.

- Most business owners want to hear you out if you offer something interesting about their niche to them within the first minute or so. I usually tell them a specific market samurai stat, such as searches for their keyword per month to peak their interest.

Finally, after about 40 cold calls, I booked a meeting with a local painter. I was super nervous, but just used my retail skills to be confident and charismatic during the meeting. Finally, I confirmed his interest and he wired through the first payment that day. I had done it!

This was my first massive success in offline internet marketing. The timeline from hearing about internet marketing to selling my first site was probably 3 to 4 months. But don't let that deter you if you are new, I floundered around for a long time with different strategies until I settled on offline.

I realise this post has become MASSIVE and I don't mind if you do not have the patience to read my entire story, but if you did, thanks! Hope you got something out of it.

Please share you story with everyone so we can all get inspired!