Hi to everyone,
My names Iain, originally from the UK now living 40kms west of Toronto (current ip is Orlando ...) my story begins with putting up a classified ads site back in 1999 which I then broke down into individual sites for listing property, used cars, dating. I ran them for free whilst others were charging and the sites got popular. My day job was maintaining large mail processing machines for the banks and when there was nothing happening I worked the sites. Seo was easy back then and I put out a lot of sites ... Too many to handle really!
Back then bandwidth was high and they were costing quite a bit month on month yet I still had no plan on how I could make money. Then 2002 Google Adsense came along at the same time I got in with some financial houses and was generating leads for loans, mortgages, credit cards etc. all of a sudden money was coming in pretty fast which was a little overwhelming at first but I got over it. I kept the day job and we decided to move to Canada on a work permit in 2004.
Canada's great sometimes too much of a nanny state but would not change it. I kept the day which was only a 3 day week 12.5 hour shifts and applied for residency. The plan was to apply for residency and quit to run the websites. Along the way I was buying more sites from site point/flippa in various niches but still not really running it as seriously as I should. In the back of my mind I was worried about all my eggs in googles basket, but carried on.
April 2008 our residency came through and in September 2008 I quit the day job. This was as the recession came into the UK and US, bang the financial leads we're not wanted, Adsense advertisers were no longer targeted to the sites revenue plummeted from those areas. I got into sponsoring Wordpress Themes along the way to the panda update this helped but the designer made such great themes they were out there on a lot of sites. This hit my weightless niches and conveyancing (property lawyers for buying and selling) sites which I held a lot of good front page locations. No longer page 1 it was page 3 or 6...
That was it I hated the internet had no interest decided I needed to get a real job where I knew I could bring money in every day to feed no guessing... I'd joked with buddy about setting up window cleaning with him as a way to tap into the 5,000 homes on our subdivision so I did ... for a while, then I realized its a seasonal thing up here. I even conquered my fear of heights through this, it's now a respect. I am still trying to determine what I want to do and since 2011 added screen repair, gutter cleaning and gutter guard, started installing retractable screens last year but dropped them after too many issues from the manufacturer. Dryer vent cleaning, installing re-routing is where I am at now, it's a niche that's hard to break into as door knocking they always think they are ok, even when their neighbors had a dryer fire they still think they are ok!
This winter (as it's quieter) determined to create a direct mail piece that gets results I started reading David Ogilvy's confessions of an advertising man, cashvertising. Now trying to get a co-op mailer together for local businesses to advertise on and mine too! This will (if the retailers wake up from this harsh winter we have up here ) allow me to advertise my business for free, profit from the mailer and hopefully repeat the postcard.
Along the research for copywriting on the warrior forum I stumbled upon this book and bought the kindle version, now ordered the real book.
I know that everything I do now is me physically going out to work, something I prefer but Im not getting any younger and need to get something setup and working 24/7 365 just like the good old days. My wife's at home so the busier I keep her the better
.
That's really all I have to offer right now I appreciate this forum there's a lot of great info here and some great members. I hope I never waffled on for too long
My names Iain, originally from the UK now living 40kms west of Toronto (current ip is Orlando ...) my story begins with putting up a classified ads site back in 1999 which I then broke down into individual sites for listing property, used cars, dating. I ran them for free whilst others were charging and the sites got popular. My day job was maintaining large mail processing machines for the banks and when there was nothing happening I worked the sites. Seo was easy back then and I put out a lot of sites ... Too many to handle really!
Back then bandwidth was high and they were costing quite a bit month on month yet I still had no plan on how I could make money. Then 2002 Google Adsense came along at the same time I got in with some financial houses and was generating leads for loans, mortgages, credit cards etc. all of a sudden money was coming in pretty fast which was a little overwhelming at first but I got over it. I kept the day job and we decided to move to Canada on a work permit in 2004.
Canada's great sometimes too much of a nanny state but would not change it. I kept the day which was only a 3 day week 12.5 hour shifts and applied for residency. The plan was to apply for residency and quit to run the websites. Along the way I was buying more sites from site point/flippa in various niches but still not really running it as seriously as I should. In the back of my mind I was worried about all my eggs in googles basket, but carried on.
April 2008 our residency came through and in September 2008 I quit the day job. This was as the recession came into the UK and US, bang the financial leads we're not wanted, Adsense advertisers were no longer targeted to the sites revenue plummeted from those areas. I got into sponsoring Wordpress Themes along the way to the panda update this helped but the designer made such great themes they were out there on a lot of sites. This hit my weightless niches and conveyancing (property lawyers for buying and selling) sites which I held a lot of good front page locations. No longer page 1 it was page 3 or 6...
That was it I hated the internet had no interest decided I needed to get a real job where I knew I could bring money in every day to feed no guessing... I'd joked with buddy about setting up window cleaning with him as a way to tap into the 5,000 homes on our subdivision so I did ... for a while, then I realized its a seasonal thing up here. I even conquered my fear of heights through this, it's now a respect. I am still trying to determine what I want to do and since 2011 added screen repair, gutter cleaning and gutter guard, started installing retractable screens last year but dropped them after too many issues from the manufacturer. Dryer vent cleaning, installing re-routing is where I am at now, it's a niche that's hard to break into as door knocking they always think they are ok, even when their neighbors had a dryer fire they still think they are ok!
This winter (as it's quieter) determined to create a direct mail piece that gets results I started reading David Ogilvy's confessions of an advertising man, cashvertising. Now trying to get a co-op mailer together for local businesses to advertise on and mine too! This will (if the retailers wake up from this harsh winter we have up here ) allow me to advertise my business for free, profit from the mailer and hopefully repeat the postcard.
Along the research for copywriting on the warrior forum I stumbled upon this book and bought the kindle version, now ordered the real book.
I know that everything I do now is me physically going out to work, something I prefer but Im not getting any younger and need to get something setup and working 24/7 365 just like the good old days. My wife's at home so the busier I keep her the better
. That's really all I have to offer right now I appreciate this forum there's a lot of great info here and some great members. I hope I never waffled on for too long
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