As I write this post, I feel like today is a fresh start for many reasons! To begin with, it’s the first day of 2010 and of course a new decade. Secondly, Internet marketing is evolving again as the pioneers hand the torch to a new generation that are refining and creating new techniques. Thirdly, it’s the day I officially start this blog.
Does that mean I’m new to blogging? Well, not really…
I actually started my first online journal back in 1997 in the good old days of Geocities. I setup an initial page, wrote some thoughts down that were relevant at the time, added a hit counter then sat back eagerly waiting for the stats to clock up. Something happened though, well technically something didn’t happen, nobody visited my page (and my hits only increased when I refreshed the page in Netscape).
This triggered something in my thought process though and I dearly wanted to figure out how I could get people to my page. My intrigue in markup languages, user interface design, website traffic and search engines was lit. Looking back, playing around with Geocities was actually the start of my long and prosperous career as a professional website designer. As of now, I’ve been designing and building websites for 13 years and I still love the medium as much as I did back then. What really gets me excited though is the commercial side of the Internet rather than just the structural aspects.
Fast forward to the present day and I feel like I’ve evolved more in the past 12 months than the previous 12 years. Why? Well because I now have this absolutely insatiable appetite for knowledge that FAR surpasses my early interests in simple static websites and online visitors. What started with blink text and javascript image reflections expanded to search engine optimising (SEO), online advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) and cost-per-action (CPA) campaigns, list building, relationship marketing, traffic generation and much more.
After more than a decade of helping business owners, corporations, city councils and government agencies around the globe… I’ve now focussed all my energy and action onto growing my own business. It’s time to evolve from an Internet consultant that increases traffic and revenue for other people, into an Internet marketer that increases my own traffic and revenue.
The first commercial website I ever built for a client probably would have earned me a few hundred dollars. These days I average around $150,000 per website (yes one hundred and fifty grand). That much money for a website might sound like a crazy amount, but I witness guys who are consulting in my niche for millions of dollars per year so it’s all relative to where you are at. I’ve almost reached the limit of what is possible when working on an hourly basis for clients. I’ve pushed that limit by working more hours per day and also increased my hourly rate to a tad more than people are comfortable paying, but there is a ceiling there that I can’t push through. I don’t want to push that ceiling though, I want to crash through it like a rocket and soar to heights I never previously thought were possible! I really do mean that, it’s not BS or bravado.
So if I only have a certain amount of available hours in a week, and a cap on the amount I can charge per hour, how do I increase my earning potential? Well I came up with 2 answers to that… either I expand my operation to have people working for me, or I create ‘widgets’ that earn me money while I sleep.
I decided to do both….
CloudSail, my Internet consulting company, now consists of a team of solid people that manage the development and maintenance of client projects. This expansion free’s up much of my day-to-day time and allows me to focus on managing clients and sourcing new contracts.
eNicholas Media, is now the main focus for me as I grow my stable of ecommerce websites, information products, affiliate campaigns and online applications that generate passive income for me every hour of the day. This is the vehicle that will take me from my glass ceiling perception of the world as worker bee… to a limitless, fruitful lifestyle that is full of freedom and experiences.
So pull up a chair, get comfy, bookmark this website and subscribe to my RSS feed as I share my thoughts, advice, discoveries and lessons with you.
Oh and for the record, I want to thank Yanik Silver for getting me started on this journey, Frank Kern for teaching me what works, and Stephen Pierce for showing me what is possible. One day I hope to eclipse your achievements and share as much knowledge with the IM community as you already have over the past decade. You guys rock!
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