Magic Carpet Riding On The Web
Viruses Don’t Last Forever
Being at the right place at the right time can set a path of success underneath you that lasts for years. It happened to me three times in my entrepreneurial endeavors. I didn’t understand the serendipidous magical carpet ride that doesn’t last forever even though my trip lasted for well over a decade.
My main goal when starting online back in 1998 was to make money at home so I could stay home with my two children. That was my desperate desire and it came about after trying more than one at-home business venture.
Many businesses claimed to be “at-home” businesses but when it came to really making money, I needed to be with clients and closing them and that wasn’t going on in my house. I needed to be out in the field getting business if I wanted cash flow.
I thought about my own mother who had a dream of being able to stay at home with her children but was never able to because she was the sole supporter of me and my brother. I guess I was living out her dream in a way by chasing my desire of having a business run from home.
All businesses require an investment of some sort. After braving getting a loan for one of the businesses, investing in thousands of dollars worth of inventory and working late hours in the evening in areas that I wouldn’t send my enemies, I knew I had to figure something out.
How could I find a business that was truly out of the house? I’m a salesperson since day one. I’m driven by the opportunity for unlimited income. Sales usually mean leaving the house and I needed to end that routine if I was going to be able to reach my dream of being with my daughters all the time and raise them with my values, ideas, morals and other concepts I felt were correct and necessary for life skills and functioning healthfully in society.
Being an entrepreneur since birth means I’ve tried so many businesses over the years I’ve lost count. For a good 19 years I had been solid, but prior to that I was constantly on shaky ground, living many times on faith and a dream. Dreams are really important to remember when you’re an entrepreneur. I kept thinking… thinking about what I could sell out of the house and I decided it would be information after reading a mail order book I found in the classified ads. I needed to create and sell an information product. In 1997, I had a friend who had a website and was making some good money selling something. If I could get a website going somehow and get my information published that would be the ticket.
There was so much to do. Back then there was a lot of free info online but real experts sold information at a premium. I made a huge investment at the time of $397 and bought an internet marketing package that showed step by step how to make money online with a website. But what would I sell? What would be my topic for the information product? How would I ever pull this one off? No one, I mean almost no one was even using email back then outside of an office. I was frequenting mastermind groups and think tanks which were 90% men and they kept telling me to start a “generic” website and to avoid any type of targeted message. After all, we were on the WWW, and we needed to be generic to appeal to everyone! Hahahahaa, I am laughing at this now!
I wanted to have a portal for women teaching them how to be healthy and lose weight. I was warned against doing such a thing! I decided to leave the group and set out on my own.
I went against the grain of the small group of individuals that were online making money in the late 90’s. That was a small group so I was breaking off from a tiny group of trailblazers! I decided to target women and write a book on how to lose weight after pregnancy. I gathered every health book I could find and started pulling out the best from each one and wove a plan together that was easy to follow, step by step.
It was easing to get number one positions back in the day because there was almost no competition. I worked the search engines consistently and landed the number one position in Hot Bot, Alta Vista and Yahoo for the keywords “diet” and “diets”. I literally built an email list of over 20,000 targeted, perfect customers in three weeks. After three weeks lost the number one position and over time I got buried at the bottom of the page, then on the second page and third page and all the tactics I was using to gain the number one position no longer worked. I gave up on working the engines so feverishly as I saw huge companies online spending big money staking their claims in the online space. I was a little site all alone and could not compete for even a second.
Over the years the email list has grown and lost subscribers but I’ve never had that kind of rush of people signing up so rapidly like back in the day. That’s what viral is, it’s a mass of people rushing to sign up or buy your stuff. It’s like the people who camp out and line up for days to get a piece of technology or the latest toy. It’s a one time KAPOW! that literally creates a business out of thin air. It’s a bit fleeting, like beauty can be… so appreciate it and buckle up because sometimes the ride can be wild and last a good, long time!
