Years ago, I quit a job that was paying me $135,000 per year. A job that was totally stable and had great benefits like a 401k and complete medical and dental coverage. A job that I had spent six years in school for getting a master's degree.
Fast forward to today, I work from home doing what I love, building and selling websites for a living, and I earn much more in a month than I did in a whole year at the old job.
But here's the kicker. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, and I probably could've gotten here in half the time. So in this video, I'm gonna walk you through my journey so you don't have to make the same mistakes that I did. I'm gonna specifically point out everything I did wrong and what I eventually learned was the right way to run an online business.
And if you're an online business entrepreneur trying to hit your stride, this video is for you. But before we get rolling, could I ask for a little smash to the Like button? The simple press to the Like button does a lot to help my channel, so I really appreciate your help in that department. Let's get started.
So for university, I went to the University of California, San Diego, to study electrical engineering, and then after I graduated, I did what any good electrical engineer would do. I got a job as one, working for a Silicon Valley startup company and eventually making about $135,000 per year.
But the truth of the whole situation, even though that sounds all fine and dandy, is I was working 12-hour days, not counting the commute just to get to the office and back. Now let me explain a little bit about the business that I was working for. We were a software company and we provided software that allowed different businesses like Intel and Qualcomm, Broadcom, all these big tech startup companies to manufacture and build microchips.
So it was very common that we'd have an onsite office at one of our customer sites where we could work and support them directly. Well, my particular no-window office was right smack in the middle of all the other engineers that are super stressed out working there 12-hour days and they're trying to dump as much work as possible on the vendor who they're paying anyways.
In our particular area of engineering, it was very common in the politics to have your meetings, invite in the vendor, show off in front of your boss by literally giving a verbal beat down to the vendor in order to show off and gain more standing within your own company.
So here I am working my 12-hour days, getting freaking owned every second of the way and dreading every part of it. Needless to say, it started to wear down on me, and one of my friends happened to notice me struggling, and he handed me a very special book to him. That book was called "The 4-Hour Workweek," and guess what I did with it.
I threw that away. I was so indoctrinated in the whole path of going to university, working hard in a company, and working your way up the social ladder that it couldn't possibly imagine that there was another way of doing things that really required four hours of work per week. It was insulting, but eventually, after going after work and really, really hating my life, eventually, I picked up that book again and started to give it a read.
And a couple of the major themes that I found in the book were one, the internet is a great place to make money and two, there's this thing called WordPress, where anyone can just make a website as long as you understand the complexities of let's say Microsoft Word.
So a buddy of mine, a guy named Robert Rock who actually owns Rank Club right now, started to brainstorm and started to study this "4-Hour Workweek" and tried to think of different kinds of online businesses or websites or blogs that we can make to earn money.
I have no idea how we thought of this, but we decided to make a website called caveday.com, which was basically just a blog about the stupid we did on the weekends. Stuff like getting super drunk at clubs and being hung over the next day and figuring out how to survive.
We made stupid posts like the worst thing to do in hungover or the Burning Man hangover survival guide. I have no idea how it happened, but we ended up monetizing it by selling banner ads to hangover drink companies and stuff like that. We even tried monetizing it by throwing up some Amazon affiliate stuffs like breathalyzers but they never sold.
The problem with this site is there was just no keyword volume whatsoever on any of the stuff we were writing about. We didn't even know what keyword research was. We were just blogging and writing because somehow we heard somewhere that that's what you should be doing.
So here's lesson number one, blogging about your passions is great but it doesn't matter at all if no one is searching for what you're writing about. You got to be super intentional about your keyword research, especially if you're doing anything like SEO. So the website completely failed, never made more than maybe $500 a month or something like that.
Was I discouraged? You know, not really. I had come from a completely rat race mentality and I never thought I was gonna hit it out of the park on the first try. Hitting out of the park on the first try is for people like Tim Ferriss, geniuses like that. So it became more about, how can it be a little bit more like Tim? Where is caveday.com now? Guys, it's not even registered. That's how useless of a job we did for it. No one even repurposed it and used it for anything else, it's not even a PBN.
So the name of the game right now is how to be a little bit more like Tim Ferriss. I ended up digging in more into the "4-Hour Workweek," and I ended up joining a meetup.com group that was actually studying and meeting together, discussing the "4-Hour Workweek" and holding accountability for each other to see their projects through.
At the time, everybody in the "4-Hour Workweek" meetup was doing something called The 30 Day Challenge. The 30 Day Challenge was something that came out by a marketer named Ed Dale, and was a pretty cool concept for an SEO course.
Basically what they would do is every day, they would email you a new step in the process of ranking and monetizing an affiliate website. So the first day they'll tell you to register a domain name, second day you're gonna set up hosting and step-by-step and then by the end of the 30 days, you should have hopefully made a dollar online, awesome concept.
But the most awesome thing about this course was that for me, it had keyword research which is exactly what I needed at the time. So we'd use a software called Market Samurai in order to find low-hanging fruit keywords in terms of competition so we could rank and eventually monetize them.
0 Comments