Getting started in the great big world

In 1993 I graduated college with a BA in Psychology. I wish at the time someone had mentioned how little this would do for my life other than give me four years to party and make really stupid choices ~ but alas. Here I was in the world. I worked jobs in the mental health field and moved from upstate NY to NYC (where I lived in 3 of the 5 boroughs the last one being Brooklyn) While in Brooklyn I worked on an assertive community treatment team where we went out into the worst parts of Brooklyn bringing treatment to the homes of seriously and persistently mentally ill people.

It was a scary job on a lot of levels, NYC was getting to my soul, and my personal life fell apart so I ended up moving back to Kansas where all my family lives.  When I got here in 1998 I stayed in the mental health field and worked for a couple local mental health facilities and finally ended up as a manager of a short term crisis home. While I enjoyed helping people recover from mental illness I did not like having a JOB.

The itch hits to make my own money

In 2000 or 2001 and I’d say I started thinking about how I could get out of working for someone else. I found network marketing. I joined a company I believed in and started making cold calls for 4 hours a day before I went to work at 3pm.  I did ok with that. I built a small team, was making some money, but dang did I hate making those cold calls.

At some point I started playing around on Myspace and realized I could find contacts for my business while I was online. It was like the doors opened up and my mind was filled with ideas. I helped people learn how to use Myspace for their network marketing business. I shared what I knew with anyone who was willing to listen, and I jumped from company to company trying to find something that would work for what I was trying to do.

My first taste of success!

During this time I made a Squidoo lens about how to do this myspace stuff. I was using a friend adder software to add friends to my account and talked about it in that lens. Low and behold I made a sale!  OMG. Money without recruiting. That’s what I was talking about. I started learning and learning all I could about how to do affiliate marketing. I made a lot of lenses on Squidoo ~ most of them completely tanked because I had yet to learn anything about keyword research. But some of them took off and that kept me encouraged.

About 6 weeks before Hanna was due I quit my job. I just couldn’t take it anymore. The stress was killing me and I had had more than enough. It was time to sink or swim. In May 2006 my daughter was born. She was/is a very high maintenance kid. I kept doing what I could to make money online. Knowing there was still a piece I was missing.

You need to get a J-O-B

I was making a couple hundred dollars a month at this point, but nothing to write home over and this kept up for a year or so. When Hanna was around 1 my hubby and I had the “you need to go get a job” talk. That didn’t go over very well. I had no intention of getting a job. I knew I was missing something because I was “working” and “working” all day long online.

It was about that time that someone I admired and respected opened up a one on one coaching program. It was expensive but I figured it would pay for itself if I could just figure out the missing piece. Turns out the missing piece was keyword research. who knew?

I learned how to do good keyword research during the coaching program and I built 12 adsense sites during those 6 weeks. The sites got sandboxed and sat there doing nothing forever. I felt completely gipped and I was ready to give up. I was however, pretty excited that I learned a process for doing keyword research.

My first product is born

I put together an ebook of the process I was using to do keyword research for  my adsense sites and my first product was born. I set up a sales page which wasn’t perfect, and I wrote myself but worked. I ran quite a few WSOs for the product and that worked quite well. Keyword Research Revealed has done quite well over the years and I think people have found it helpful. It really is a great way to do research for adsense sites, but it’s pretty specific to building those kind of sites.

I pretty soon realized that adsense sites were not my cup of tea, and began applying the knowledge I’d gained from my coaching to other endeavors. About this time (I think  ~ it’s all kind of hazy these days lol) I found PotPieGirl and was seriously doing lenses. I was getting questions from people who couldnt’ figure out the little details  in One Week Marketing.  There are always little details that product writers just can’t put in the product or it would be a million pages long. But I realized there was a market for the little details.

Magic Happens on a Saturday Morning

One Saturday morning I was talking with a friend in instant messenger. We were talking about random stuff and out popped the idea for LearnItStepbyStep.com. A site where we break down the entire process of OWM into little tiny steps that make it easy for everyone to take action on the product they bought.We also made it possible for people to ask questions on each step. It’s those little questions that can really bring your whole process to a stand still, and being able to get an answer (quickly and specifically) to those questions can make all the difference! (We talked to PotPieGirl and had her complete blessing on the project don’t worry:)

It was a whirlwind once the idea was out there. We created the membership site, created the content, wrote the sales page and launched in only a couple weeks. it really was crazy. The response was quite good, and people seemed to enjoy the way we broke down the steps. We opened up a coaching program to go with it to help people with their specific projects. The coaching area became pretty overwhelming so we took that off the table, but we still run learnit as of today. It’s pretty much on autopilot at this time ~ we just answer questions when they come up, but because the questions people have asked from the beginning are there, most of the usual questions are already answered on the site.

In the background I continued to do affiliate marketing with Squidoo, and niche sites, and other smaller projects came and went. Oh and those little adsense sites I built a while back started making money! Not a ton, but some, and along with that came the understanding that things online take time. I had gone into the coaching program thinking I’d come out in 6 weeks with money in the bank and passively coming to the bank every month. HA! Not so much! Maybe 6 months to a year later that money started coming in.  However,  with the money from those sites, the membership site and other projects I’d been working on, no longer was my husband pressuring me to get a job which was great.

Jackie gets burnt out

Once Learnit was up and running without a ton of daily attention I really felt burnt out. I wanted to get out of the IM niche. I decided I’d had enough of the weird stuff and attitudes that can happen in the internet marketing niche and I joined Blog Mastermind and decided to build an authority blog on a topic totally unrelated to internet marketing.

While I was working on that blog last year I continued to build lenses, and I continued to buy products I thought would help me make more money online. I finally hit a good plan for building lenses focusing on selling specific products. I decided to give away a free report about how I was doing that. I posted it on this  much neglected  site and then let Potpiegirl know about it as well.

She loved it and told her readers about it as well. It was a hit. Many many people  downloaded the free report. Then they started asking questions. I came back to this blog with a completely different mindset. I was no longer trying to sell anything. I was trying to build up a readership so I could find some blog sponsors.

Jackie gets a mental makeover and the whole thing changes!

It’s amazing the difference this new mindset made. Not only in how I felt doing what I was doing, but in the blog itself. People started coming to the blog ~ and coming back! I began to truly build a community and I loved it. I was having fun and enjoying my work. The more I enjoyed it the more the money started coming in. It was great. I really appreciated the ability to not have to sell something in every post, or every time I sent out an email.What I realized was whether or not I find sponsors for this blog I can still make money from giving people the information they need. (and that was HUGE for me)

Now I know my blog and my email list is really different from how most people do it, and really different from how most people teach you how to do it. But… it’s working for me. I’m reaching my goals, both business and monetary. I’m helping people. I’m having a BLAST watching people make their first dollars online and I’m having fun helping people navigate this tricky business of internet marketing. If I wanted to hate my work everyday I’d just go get a JOB. It seems to me if I’m working from home and working for myself I should at least enjoy doing it.

So how much are you really making?

I’m not going to tell you I’m making 10K a month ~ I’m not ( but I’m getting there).  I am making more than I was making when I was working and commuting for 10 hours of my day at my job (actually using the degree I’m still paying for). I am making enough to cover our bills with plenty left over for us to do fun things when we want. I’m still building my business, and as time goes on everything builds on itself.

So that’s my story ~ that’s how I got here. I have this big problem where the days tend to blur together, and then the years blurred together so when I look back to tell the story it is a little hard to remember just how it all happened, but it did happen. I could have given up at any point in this journey. It would have been easier to go back to work when Hanna was 1. I would have had a steady paycheck, and my husband would have been off my back about the “crazy make money online stuff”, but I would have hated it. I would have been miserable. So I kept on working at it. Hours and hours and hours I put in, from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed I was online trying to make it work.

Did you ever want to give up?

There were times when I felt awful ~ like even though I was home with Hanna I wasn’t really “here” with her. But I knew one day it would pay off. I figured out that it was better that I was available to her ~ I didn’t necessarily need to be entertaining her 24 hours a day. It came down to the fact I refused to let someone else raise my daughter, so I fought through it, and here I am now.

While I still have a lot of work to do every day (since I haven’t managed to give up enough control to outsource lol) I do have the ability to take time off, take a day off when something comes up. I have the flexibility to do it my way. (and I love that).

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