The Internet Marketing dream is to go full time online so that you can work from anywhere and still make money.
Think it’s easy?
Think it’s hard?
Well this is my story of exactly how I went in 4 and a half years from a full time job to a full time Internet Marketer online from home.
(Be warned, this is not pretty and this is not fancy this is exactly how I did over the 4 and a half years)
How it all started
In November 2007 I quit a very good job working for an offshore company in my local area. I did one trip away for 3 weeks and during that time we were stuck along side in harbor because of bad weather so I used this time to do a lot of thinking about the type of Job I really wanted and the type of lifestyle that I really wanted.
I wanted to do something where I was in complete control of my future in terms of the money I made and the work that I did so upon me getting back home after this first trip with this company I handed my notice in and quit.
Quite a few people were very shocked that I had given up such a good job and this opportunity so quickly but I knew it was for the best for the long term.
Within a couple of weeks of me quitting this company (this was around the end of Novemeber 2007) I went out and purchased my first ever laptop computer. Over the next couple of weeks I started to browse the Internet on a daily basis and I quickly got bombarded with all these “make money online ” banners and adverts. All this got me thinking that maybe there was a way that you could create an income from your actual computer.
One of the first things I ended up getting into was online Poker as I heard that if you were fairly good you could make some nice profits playing online.
I ended up playing online poker about 8 hours a day trying to make a bit of money.
Boy was it hard to make money out of it.
I wasn’t the best poker player but I did learn very fast so I kept playing for about 3 – 4 weeks having some good days where I made around £10 – £30 but then other days I would lose £10 – £30 so I wasn’t really getting anywhere and quickly realized that this wasn’t a very sensible or stable way of making money online so I moved on.
I needed something which I could focus on for the long term which was a lot more stable.
I then started to browse youtube. I typed in “how to make money online” and all of that stuff and watched tonnes of videos of people claiming they knew the “secret” to making money online etc.
I ended up buying into some of these programs and buying products to learn more.
Looking back now I cringe at the thought of some of the things I bought into but I guess that’s just the way it is and how I learned and now I’m here to tell the tail and pass on things to you so that you don’t end up wasting as much time as I did on some of these stupid things.
A lot of the stuff that I bought into were business opportunities and MLM programs and to be totally honest they were all a lot of complete crap but I don’t regret doing them because I learned a lot over the few months of browsing youtube but my my bank balance did suffer a bit of a blow 
The Last Job I Ever Have
Around March 2008 I started a Job again doing building work as I still needed an income so I could live and I soon realized that making a full time income online wasn’t going to happen very soon.
In case you don’t know I went to college to study carpentry quite a few years previous so my trade is carpentry and someone approached me and asked if I would help out doing some landscape and building work so this is what I did. I thought I would stay doing this building work for as long as I can until I am making enough online to cover what I was making in my Job (which wasn’t much at all around £800 per month) (around $1200 USD)
I knew I could of been making a lot more in other Jobs but this was a fairly relaxed environment which really made up for the lack of pay because this meant I could then heavily focus on my online business without having to think much about doing my normal Job and being totally committed to it.
This was important because as you can imagine when you only get a few hours sleep you are not exactly the most productive at work the next day 
So on I went working in my full time Job from 8 am till 6 pm Mon – Friday then hit the gym 3 – 4 times per week after work then to come home to then work online from around 8 – 9pm till sometimes 1, 2 and even 3am in the morning before getting up again at 7:30 ready for my daytime job again.
The weekends were great as I could focus all my efforts online as I rarely worked them in my Job.
This is what I did while I was trying to build my online income at the same time.
The story continues……………….
The Huge Turning Point
During the time that I was searching youtube and buying into some of these programs and opportunities around March 2008 there was a Huge turning point.
I still remember the day like it was yesterday because it was one of the best days of my life.
No I didn’t make $1000 in one day, I didn’t even make $100 in one day.
In fact I only made $20 and that money went straight to my paypal account.
I had actually made money online….Coooooooool!!
For me this was proof that I could actually make money online I just had to scale things up more and get better at what I was doing.
I made my first $20 online with Internet marketing in March 2008.
For the next 4 – 5 months I actually did pretty well and started to make $100 – $400 per week. I was using youtube to market my current program and to drive traffic and the result was I started to do ok and make a bit of money.
But this didn’t happen for long.
I was on track for my first $150 – $200 day and was reaaaally excited until…
Boooom!
Youtube deleted all of my channels from youtube.
So…with one push of a button my entire online income went to a big fat $0
This was when I had to seriously re-think my strategies and work on something a bit more stable and reliable.
This all happened around October 2008 and this was when I started looking for other options so I started doing CPA. This was not your normal cpa though. The site I used was cpalead.com where you get paid for people completing surveys. I built some small sites and then drove traffic to the sites from seo, social bookmarking sites and also places like hubpages and squidoo and also a bit of youtube now and again.
The way I used to make money was I used to leverage big sporting events like UFC and the Super Bowl and then drive massive traffic to my sites and get people to fill out surveys.
I did ok with it, I was making between $200 – $1400 per month but I was putting in crazy hours, I’m talking 18+ hour days sometimes it was crazy.
This income model wasn’t too bad and you can still use it to make a bit of money however it wasn’t very stable and for the amount of time I was putting in and for the money I was making it wasn’t that good so I moved on…
At this point in my journey I still wasn’t very close to quitting my day job and going full time from home because I needed a much more stable income model.
I was making money online but nothing that I could really rely on to pay the bills so on I went searching for something better……
Niche Marketing was Born
I continued to do cpa lead and a bit of youtube marketing plus some other little strategies with clickbank for the rest of 2008 and well into 2009 and then in October 2009 I decided to start building mini niche sites as I saw so many people that were doing well with it.
Although the niche site business model wasn’t quite as stable and air tight as I would of liked I felt like it was a bit more stable than putting all my eggs into the youtube basket and a lot less work than my cpa lead model so this is what I did.
I created my first html niche site around cosmetic surgery in November 2009 and I will admit it was pretty awful however it did actually make money lol
That particular site was based around adsense and that’s why I did it around cosmetic surgery because the cost per clicks were very good.
I even used a html editor to create my first website because I didn’t even know wordpress at the time. That was the first and last time that I would ever use a html editor to create a website. It was a complete nightmare. Far too technical.
Around the same sort of time in November I also decided to join a membership site which at the time was called “wordpress goldmine” but the name has since been changed to “Income Igniter”
At the time it was a fantastic place to go and hang out as a niche marketer that build niche and affiliate mini sites because most of the content was centered around this type of income model. As far as I know I am still a member there and the site has changed a fair bit over the last few years to include more general Internet Marketing information as appose to just niche site stuff.
I really do appreciate all of the help I got from some of the members in there because when I first got into building niche sites I was pretty useless with wordpress.
From around November 2009 I focused heavily on building niche site after niche site after adsense site, after amazon site after clickbank site, sharing all of my success and results in the forum and so did many of the other successful members of the forum. After around 6 months of hitting things really hard with link building, seo and creating wordpress sites I started to get some decent results.
I had my first $40 day.
That was mostly adsense with a bit of amazon and clickbank.
From there I went on to have my first $70 day a few weeks later.
Around Christmas 2010 I had hit my first $100 per day online. This was a huge milestone for me. In fact they were all huge milestones, my first $20, $30, $50 per day etc
It was Christmas 2010 and things were going well.
I was still working in my day Job making money while making some online too.
At the start of 2011 I remember going to the bank and looking at the payment which I had just been paid from google for adsense and it was just over £1200 which is around $2000 in USD.
That £1200 was quite a few hundred pounds more than I was making in my day job and over the next 10 months of 2011 I kept getting monthly checks from not only google adsense but amazon and clickbank as well.
From January 2010 to October 2011 I did pretty well with niche sites as I had learned a lot over the previous 18 months of doing them so things were finally coming together and I was seeing some half decent results and making money.
I don’t go to that forum anymore as my business has changed and I have progressed onto more profitable and stable income models but as of right now the forum is still active with members in there.
Enough was Enough
It was now around November 2011 and I decided to do something which many people thought I was crazy for doing.
I sold up.
Yep, I sold all of my niche sites that had taken me hundreds of hours to build, optimize and rank in google.
In November 2011 I had around 15 niche/affiliate sites and about 6 of them were making money monthly and two of them being my biggest money earners making between $200 – $400 per month.
I sold 7 of the sites and made just over $8k in pure profit.
I was extremely happy with that amount and I knew I had made a good decision.
So why did I sell up?
Well a few reasons really.
Firstly there were a lot of people around that time getting hit by some big google updates and I didn’t want to be in that situation so I decided to get out while I still could. None of my sites actually got hit but I still thought this was a good time to get out.
Not only was I a little concerned about the google updates but I wanted more reliable and stable income models.
Do you remember what I told you about youtube earlier?
Well I certainly didn’t want a repeat of that and because I was basically back in the same situation as I was with youtube I knew it was time to make a fresh start.
It was time to finally create my own products and start building a list. After all this was all I kept being told when I used to read blogs and emails. You must build a list. You must build a list.
So off I went.
The List Building Train
It was now January 2012 and I have just cashed out of the google game for around $8k and it was time to start building a list and selling my own products.
In January 2012 I started creating my first product which was a video course on how to build profitable niche sites. I then had my first product of around 14 videos. I then gave away the first 6 videos for free to build my list and then sold the remaining videos as the main product.
I then had a cool little free course to give away to build my list and cool little product to sell as well. All I had to do now was send traffic to my squeeze page and build my list. This is what I did over the next 8 weeks. I went out and purchased lots of solo ads and at the same time use a handful of effective free traffic methods.
Things were going very well and I was making sales and making money
I wasn’t making boat loads of money but the difference was this income model or stream would not suddenly get taken down.
I was onto something and remember thinking this could be the answer to actually going full time from home
At the start of 2012 I still hung around the income igniter forum on the odd occasion telling others what I was doing with building a list and selling my own product and the questions started to very quickly roll in.
Because of the amount of questions I was getting and interest I had around what I was doing I decided to release a WSO which stands for warrior forum special offer. It’s a great place for getting yourself out there selling IM information products.
I had no idea what I was doing really but I took the plunge anyway.
I released that WSO in March 2012 called Avalanche List Building.
As this was my first WSO I had no idea what I was doing but I still pushed on and thought “well we have to learn somehow right”
I saw other marketers doing WSO’S and doing hundreds of copies and some doing barely 10 copies.
I thought to myself if I could just sell 100 copies that would be brilliant.
Well it didn’t happen.
No.
Way better than what I had expected
In fact it went on to sell over 100 copies just in the first week.
Over the next few weeks it sold tonnes more.
4 weeks later and it had sold almost 400 copies and making me some nice money at the same time and while building me a list of new customers.
Super Cooool Huh!!
Nothing Was Stopping Me Now
I went on in 2012 to create and launch 3 more WSO’s and making some very good money at the same time. I also continued to build my list with free traffic and from solo ads which built my email list even bigger.
One of the other things that I did in my business during 2012 was to expand my sales funnel because when I was building my email list I was limiting myself as to how much profit I could make from each lead that joins my list because I initially only had one main product to sell.
So during 2012 I also worked heavily on creating extra products into my sales funnel which shot my profits through the roof when I built my list with solo ads.
2012 was a fantastic year and a year that I shall remember for a very long time mostly because of what happens next…
Time to Hang Up the Work Boots and Go for It
The month was around October 2012 and this was my chance to either sink or swim.
This is my best chance and possibly my only chance to really go full time online.
So I took the plunge.
I stopped my building work and threw in the towel.
I wasn’t making 10′s of thousands hell no.
I was making between $1000 – $2500 per month but I knew that this income was a lot more reliable than all the other income models that I had used previously.
The money I was making came from a few different places.
1. My own products
2. Affiliate promotions I did to my list on the odd occassion
3. WSO’s that I had released
4. The odd affiliate sale from this blog
I was a lot more confident that I was on the road to actually building “a business” which I was in total control over and not just an “income model” that I had absolutely no control over.
So this was what I did. I quit my full time Job around October 2012 and that was that.
I was now a full time Internet Marketer woohoo!!
After 4 years of working in that job then going home to work on my online business and spending insane hours trying to make this “Internet marketing ” stuff work I had finally cracked it to the point that I had quit my job.
I was very proud of myself and things were looking very promising.
This wasn’t a time to party though and relax as I had a lot of things to do as I wanted to increase my income and get to the next level where I was making $5k+ per month online.
The Year it All Came Together
2013 was a very interesting year as I started it as full marketer online so the pressure was on because I really did not want to have to go back to a full time job. That was not really an option
I released more new products, more wso’s, created a brand new premium video course which took me many months and at the same time still building my email list.
During 2013 I also got wso of the day 3 times which was fantastic. The first one I got in May 2013 which did over 1000 sales in just 8 days. Incredible.
I also created my membership site http://PaulNichollsMembership.com in September 2012 and then worked hard to build in through out 2013. It went really well and I was making between $600 – $1500 per month just from my membership site in 2013.
Another thing I started to do was I started working closely with some of my subscribers and customers as I realized that a lot of them were really struggling with certain things.
And lastly, I started working with local businesses back in November 2012 and creating some more sites in 2013 as well. They are wordpress sites that I create for their business. I then charge a monthly amount for hosting it too. This is something which I don’t spend too much time on but it is an extra income stream.
All in all 2013 was a very good year.
In case you want to know where my income now comes from so that you know the type of business that you need to set up if you want to work from home as well.
My own products in my sales funnel
Membership site
WSO’s that are live
1 on 1 coaching
Offline customers that I create wordpress sites for and also some monthly income from them for hosting
Affiliate promotions to my lists
At the time of writing this post it’s now April 2014 and I have been full time online working from home for just over 18 months and it’s been really good fun with some ups and downs.
Well that’s pretty much it.
That is my story as to how I started online and I went on to go full time online.
It’s not fancy, it’s not pretty and it has been very painful at times but it’s certainly worth it in the end.
One of the things that you will notice though on this journey is I only started to get somewhere and see good results when I had a sales funnel in place and I started to build my list.
That part is the secret or in fact it’s not really a secret just a lot more sensible to do rather than waste your time on things that you have hardly no control over.
I will be releasing a brand new video series in the next week or so called “Sales Funnel Commando” which covers exactly how to create high converting sales funnels that you can use when building your email list.
This new video series will cover lots of different sales funnels that you can use depending on what your level is and whether you own your own products of you are an affiliate.
Everything I show in these videos will help you to make more sales and money when building your list with any free traffic or paid traffic method and especially solo ads. What I show you in these videos is exactly how I have set my own sales funnels up which I use as a full time marketer from home.
If you would like to join the early bird list so you get notified the moment it is ready:
===>> click here to join the early bird list
I really hope you enjoyed this post and I hope you can take away lots of things that will help you to going full time online as an Internet Marketer.
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