What's your success story?

^^ true. I guess my point came out wrong.

The focus of my statement was to be more of "doing" and failing/winning is more important then reading forums for advice. Thus the writing of his own success story.

Learning from the mistakes of others is good and all, but only if you have action behind it. I am sure all of us have either spent more time reading then doing, or been paralyzed by analysis.
 


Me really brief

07' - Made like $30k on eBay in my last year of college. Paypal got banned, couldn't get another because they wanted a social security #. Decided I wanted to try to make a career doing something online.
07' - Was searching how to make money online and came across John Chow's blog (seriously). He claimed o be making $10k a month blogging and that caught my attention. From there lead to learning about clickbank, affiliate marketing, eventually Wickedfire
07' - Graduated from Georgia Tech. Applied for jobs at search agencies. Got a nice job helping manage PPC of a Fortune 500 company. Learned a shitload about adwords
08' - Launched campaigns every month with my $500 a month budget. Cooked at home, clipped coupons, only did free shit with my girlfriend, sold almost everything I had, etc. Every cent possible was going towards my campaigns. Finally made something work on Facebook. Started doing $10k a month profit, while I was making like $2500 a month at work.
08' - Went to ASE. Saw all these people my age that were going full-time. I told myself YOLO and quit my job.
08' - Dem Berries. Things really blew up when I went to ad:tech NYC...literally threw money at almost every single traffic source at that conference.
 
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I got a success story for you. Just got back from a rave... Had too much to drink and some illegal stuff that I probably should have turned down.

Induced vomiting twice, had a liter of water, a 1/2lbs burger and two orders of fries and I feel sober like October.

fyeah.jpg


Oh yeah, and to stay on point w/ the OP.

My whole damn life is a success story.

Like a boss.
 
my old boss called me a "worthless human being" the day i told him to fuck off and quit - now i drive past his honda civic in my brand new Mercedes everyday on the way to MY office.
 
Started making websites when I was 14. Sold first one in 2004 for $500, a game review site.

After that decided to get involved in online storage to fill a niche I spotted, sold my first storage site for $2500.. It was growing far too fast, I was 15 and didn't have the faintest clue how to scale it up. It was sold again 6 months later to a social network for mid-6 figs. Probs my biggest business mistake.

When I saw it sell again, saw the new social network basically fuck the site up. Had no non-compete, so started another online storage site and basically stole back all the customers who were getting disgruntled with the original site, as I knew exactly where they were coming from. Just outbid the guys on the traffic sources, and turned out they had let most of the contracts end anyway. (Idiotic, we're talking $300/mo for something in the region of xxK visitors a month.)

Started putting links back to my site in all the sharing links people used with files, and dominated all the search phrases based around file storage for a couple years, until the modern guys (Dropbox, Box, etc..) came on board, and the customer base & traffic sources I had started to shrink due to the decline of Myspace.

Had lost interest in online storage and wasn't really interested in investing into it to change the model and direction, although had plans to focus more on small business storage.. (Accountants, lawyers, etc.. looking to manage files between each other and also clients)

Website was sold last July for a fair sum: Cloud Storage Company CX Raises $5M From Eric Schmidt And Others, Acquires FileDen | TechCrunch and got to have some conversations with some pretty awesome people.. Under NDA for the sale price though.

Article amuses me, CloudExperience had 500k members, we added 3 million to that count, lol.

Now I've strolled more into the content side, focussing on niches I have a passion in, building out a couple lists and building up a new online income stream. Alongside that I'm working on a business locally with my father, selling into independent restaurants, hotels, etc and small retailers.
 
I appreciate the posts, everyone. Thank you!

Believe it or not this post among others are working as yesterday I whipped up (spun) a landing page copy for the first time. Of course, I then figured out that the landing page I spun I can't really use because it's a clickbank product that's not mine personally. So I'm going to create my own product for that.

Meanwhile, I will be cooking up another landing page for the original CB product and see how I can drive traffic to that.

Point is, action is being taken. Thank you.
 
2000-2002 Worked for Microsoft ... what I thought was my dream job. Fucking hated the corporate games. I quit, and just like Office Space I started doing manual labor (home inspections) to pay the bills.

2002-2003 Got really interested in Real Estate. Realized I needed $$$ to invest properly. Started buying shit from Liquidation.com and hocking it on eBay. Made some nice coin there.

2003-2004: Ebay/Paypal jacked up their prices to where I couldn't make a nice profit anymore. I looked for other online businesses and found affiliate marketing. Did as much research/learning as I could.

2004-2008: Took a a chance and put $1000 on my credit card and started my first Adwords campaign pimping Government Grant programs (yeah I was whoring this shit out before you even knew it existed.) Fortunately it was a hit, turned my $1000 into $3000 in about a week. My parents gave me a loan for $10k which I paid back in 10 days.

Haven't looked back since. Affiliate marketing is probably the single best and worst thing that has happened to me. I love the freedom it brings but hate the "feast or famine" routine and constant change. Its really easy to go from rich to broke in a short time, but on the flip side its really easy to go from broke to rich in the same amount of time. Its sort of a sick addiction...
 
2003-2004 traded ecurrencies while building houses, paid the bills with the trading for a while.

2004-2006 built a couple affiliate sites, did some small media buys, broke even or lost on these experiments. Didn't really know what I was doing and wrote it off for a while.

2008 started manufacturing a simple product that was something of a cottage industry inside a big vertical. My buddy had just graduated as a graphic designer and was learning php so he built me a flimsy site with e-junkie's fat free cart. Got in at the right time, had some solid search positions with little competition. Didn't know anything about seo, was just ranking well because I'm a good writer and there weren't many others serving the niche. Was making an extra $15-20k for 5-10 hours of work every week on top of 60 hour weeks teaching.

2009 the cottage industry got competitive and I lost traffic so I started learning seo. Fucked some things up at first but got the hang of it quickly.

2010 I was bored with the product I was manufacturing and wanted to move on. Got laid off from teaching that summer, found my way to this gay webmaster forum, started reading between the lines of the evil geniuses here and have been in IM ever since.

2012 Aliens beamed me up into a Mayan pyramid spacecraft and downloaded the perfect landing page into my soul. On December 21 I will merge with the spirit of the marketing matrix and become a ghost in the shell of the tubes transmitting interbutts to the people left behind.
 
I got extremely lucky with FB when I was 14. It was 2010 and fanpages on FB were going crazy.
I kind of understood that the people who put up those “surveys” on their pages made money. One thing led to another and I was signing up to CPAl**d a couple days later.

So now that I kind of had a clue what cpa was, I made a silly fan page (something along the lines of “Like To See The Top 10 Reasons Guys Lie To Girls </3”) and invited all my friends to it.

When I woke up, my page had 40k fans. A day went by and it had 250k fans. I skipped school that day and spent like 5 hours setting up a content locker on my page. Just a minute after I have that bad boy up, I heard the *ching-chang* sound and notice $1.50 in my dashboard. I then quickly made another fanpage (“Like To See The Top 10 Reasons Girls Lie To Guys </3”) and set up a content locker on that aswell.

At that point, I was making ~$5,000/day.... which only lasted for about 4 days. FB deleted both of my pages on the 4th day. I cried myself to sleep that day.

Anyway, so I got a check of $23,000 a month or so later and I had $23,000 in my bank account. I made about $7,000 more in the next 3 months with the apps.

I spent the next year learning about wordpress, affiliate marketing, seo, and just IM in general. Another year went by and I made about $10,000 with little Adsense sites. I was starting to scale up and already making a pretty decent passive income...

… When the Panda hit me. All of my sites gone to shit in just a couple updates.

So yeah, here I am, back to the square one. I’m going to try out PPC after I finish reading Cashvertising. That should work out, hopefully.
 
i was not good at making money but after reading forums,seeing other people got inspired and started making money through multiple methods.I learnt that it is not good to pull all eggs in one basket.I am making $xxxx per month not much but happy with it .going to scale it up
 
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