How I Make Money From Home – My Journey – The Pitfalls & Challenges

Let me tell you how I get started with my online business.

The journey that I undertook to make money from home.

First of all, I would like to say that it WASN’T easy… There was WAY TOO much learning curve that I had to go through.

Somewhere in the year 1998, I was studying in a local polytechnic majoring in Business IT. I stumbled upon a website that had my eyes fixed like a glue.

It was Allen Says’ Internet Marketing Warriors! (Unfortunately the sales copy is no longer being used) Allen had a sales copy that was so powerful in my opinion… so powerful that I read it from beginning till the end.

It was a simple one. He wasn’t using the copy writing formula from great copywriters like Micheal Fortin or softwares like Push Button Letters from Marlon Sanders.

But the sales copy consists of mainly a few important elements:

• Bullets & Benefits (TONS of benefits… like as though there’s nothing else except for these)

• Extremely High Perceived Value

• Members’ Testimonials

• Positive Mindset

Basically that’s all that there is.

• And that was the sales copy that made me frantically search for ways on how to make a purchase online

• That was the sales copy that diverted much of my attention away from my studies at that point of time (Yucks!! Don’t do this please…:-)

• That was the sales copy that made me willing to wait in a long queue to apply for a debit card from a local bank.

• That was the sales copy that get me started into Internet marketing…

But guess what.. …After joining the membership site, I faced the similar problem which MOST newbies encounter when trying to make money from home:

INFORMATION OVERLOAD!!

There’s simply too much information that I didn’t know where and how to get started. The only thing that I understood at that point of time is to promote the membership site which will earn me a cool $30 commissions for every sale.

So I started looking out for classified ads (This is the wrong way folks!) There were so much promises of high returns from these advertisers.

Do you know why?

Because they claimed that they had tens & thousands of subscribers. So I was thinking that since there are thousands of subscribers who will be seeing my offer, I will definitely get many sales easily… (yeah right!!). That’s how most newbies think. But…

• I know nothing about open rates…
• I know nothing about conversion rates.
• I know nothing about email deliverability issues.
• I know nothing about loyalty of readers.

All I know was if they have 30,000 subscribers, ALL 30,000 of them will open and read my offer in their inbox.

Sounds familiar?

You see, this is the exact same problem everyone will face if they do not have the right guidance & mentor. A mentoring coaching program may cost you thousands of dollars but believe me (I’m speaking from experience), mentoring will help you build your online business the fastest way you can ever imagine…

Not like me who took almost 6 years to break even..

Because I didn’t have the right mentor and guidance.

I learnt blindly from trial and error.

So folks, especially newbies out there… …When you want to start your marketing journey to make money from home, make sure you follow the right guidance from the right people. Stick to just one PROVEN method and focus on it. You will be able to find success in the shortest possible time.

Ok now back to my story…

So what I did afterwards (after despair and sadness overtook my soul for losing so much money) was to develop a membership site like Allen Says’ Warrior Group.

Hey why not?

I was under the assumption that the more products I have in a membership site, the better will it be… (Is it so?)

So I started purchasing resale licenses to many products and I did spend around $8,000 just for this.

[quote]One of my biggest mistakes was I spent TOO MUCH TIME building my product and NOT focusing on building a list & generating traffic.[/quote]

I wanted to make my product PERFECT! So most of my time was devoted to product creation (and I didn’t even know if people are going to buy)

I charged $297 for the package. The first few weeks, many sales started to pour in.. Wow! I thought I’m going to be rich in no time and be able to make money from home for the rest of my life. But after a few days, one after another, my customers started asking for refunds. They said they’ve tried so hard but couldn’t get them to work.

Well of course it won’t work! Because they’re reselling what I’ve sold them… and if you don’t have the knowledge about marketing, and on how to market online effectively, then there’s no point spending so much money to obtain resell rights products. Just after a few weeks later, people have started to resell the products at much lower price..

So it was a disaster for me! 🙁

I was forced to lower my price to just $50 cuz that’s the price range that many people were selling. In the end, the products became almost worthless because they could be found almost everywhere on the internet at low prices… these products have saturated in the market.

This is the first lesson I learned… never to offer Internet marketing products that come with resell rights with the hopes of making a long-term killing.

It could only last for a while but once the products have been circulated widely at low prices, the profits could nowhere to be seen.

In fact, I also lost a lot of customers’ trust because they felt that they were fooled and deceived into believing that these products will make them rich.. just be reselling the same products over and over again.

So I was wrong.. 🙁

…Apart from these, I also spent a lot of time and money trying to learn all the technical stuff. I used to spend at least $25 to get just one CGI script installed. And I bought so many scripts but I couldn’t use all of them effectively.

I hired programmers to do this and that… …But my business wasn’t running as good as I wanted it to be. My dream of making money from home doesn’t seem to work out well. I spent most of time on “perfecting” my product.

This was the stupidest mistake I have ever done. Mind you… at that time there wasn’t any “marketing automation system” yet. Now there are plenty of them. So there is a lot of learning to do.

My Internet marketing journey is far from over and I simply can’t afford to write more details about it here. There are more failures than successes during my “early years”..

But what I can say is this:

Internet Marketing WORKS!! …as long as you have the burning desire to succeed, motivated and follow the EXACT SIMILAR PROVEN models from successful people. Don’t re-invent the wheel.. and you’ll be fine.

You’ll be on your way to making money from home.

BUT you really have no choice but to work hard and to learn the basic technical stuff of running a computer, websites, and other technical stuff (of course unless you can afford to hire professionals to do all the work for you)

That’s all for now… Thank you for reading and I wish you all the best in embarking your Internet Marketing journey!!

To Your Online Success!
Zai Adi