Today I want to talk about vigilance. The vigilance you need to have as an online business owner if you plan to be successful.
The truth is, if you run an online business, you have to be open to new opportunities to grow your business. Sometimes you may even need to change or tweak your business entirely to take advantage of those new opportunities.
The following is a true story about how a 2am email totally changed the course of my business and life. It shows how powerful the internet is and how you are always one piece away from solving the jigsaw puzzle.
Let me get started…
I’m a night owl and I love staying up late.
Even though I do it less these days, I am usually super focused and productive from 10pm through 3am. I have no idea why my mind works this way but it just does.
It’s probably because I have spent 15 years working on online businesses and in the beginning, I did it part time every day AFTER I was done with my day job.
About 10 years ago I was running a high traffic technology blog that I had built and monetized myself.
I was getting about 30,000 unique visitors a day and was still struggling to find the right mix of goods and services to sell to this endless wave of eyeballs coming to my site.
The site was awesome because all my traffic was 100% organic and I had no advertising costs.
The site was making a good deal of money but my gut told me that I could make more. A lot more.
For months and months, I did research on different forms of monetization and tried different ad networks but I couldn’t seem to make that much more.
Then one night, at 2am, I got an email from a vendor in Europe who sold a very specific software product that they swore was extremely profitable if I sold to my audience.
They offered me a 40% affiliate fee if I joined their program so ON A WHIM, I joined their program and installed the ad code that morning.
Here’s the fun part:
That vendor and their product made me between $150 to $400 EVERY DAY for the next 5 years. On autopilot. With very little maintenance. Every day.
Here’s the moral of the story.
Never settle, trust your gut and keep looking. The cool thing about this business is that it’s really all about finding missing pieces to the puzzle.
We got tired of manual html, WordPress came along.
We got tired of making crappy landing pages, Leadpages and Thrive Themes came along.
There’s always a solution for your problem on the web, you just have to be vigilant and pay attention.
I have asked myself why I paid attention to that email that night and why I didn’t just send it to junk mail.
I think the reason for that is, I really kept myself open to new opportunities and that literally made me several hundred thousand dollars.
Bottom line people, keep your eyes open and test as many new things as possible.