Why did I decide to start a website? My personal story

Do you feel your life needs a change? Looking for financial freedom and more time with your family? Is your head buzzing with ideas how to make passive income at home? Do you need start your own business but not sure how? Wondering how to start a website and make money? Are your fingers tinkling to create something new and exciting and share your wisdom with the world?

I hear you. I felt this way a short time ago. The world around us is changing so fast, we can’t really be sure that what we know today will stay there for a long time. To survive, we need to adjust ourselves to a new reality in the job market, technology, and social connections. Everybody’s choice is different.

Let me tell you my own story that brought me to launch this website.

What my life looks like?

I live in the NYC area, where the cost of living is high, but finding a decent paying job is quite easy, given my background in Finance and Informational Technology.

We are a dual income family. Both I and my husband work full time and earn sound salaries. We plan our budget, buy bulk amounts of food items, cook at home and do everything required to manage our finances carefully. Our careers are stable, with slight wage raises from year to year. Sounds not bad, right? I know that this is a dream for many other people until something happens.

Last year our property taxes went 50% up. It’s $8,000 more. Just like that. I was really upset, as it meant we need to figure out where to cut our expenses to pay for it. Should we give up our summer vacation? Cancel children’s classes? Move to suburbs and spend 3 hours a day on the commute to the office?

The tax raise just reminded me how fragile our balance is. School tuition goes up every year, the city raises the taxes, and gas prices are climbing. Inflation is coming again.

It dawned on me that, as in my favorite book “Alice in Wonderland”, WE NEED TO RUN REALLY FAST JUST TO STAY IN THE SAME PLACE. We do our best to please the boss, to get to the next corporate level, to bring home another thousand dollars. And then… somehow this hard-earned money is gone to pay for all these small everyday things, nothing fancy. Rent, taxes, bread, milk, school. Just to maintain the same lifestyle we have (which is a bit boring, if I dare to admit).

Sounds familiar?

It happens to a vast majority of the employees. Your career growth hits some kind of glass ceiling and your salary reaches a plateau, barely keeping up with the inflation. Very often it happens at the same time when you have kids and want to give them everything in the world that they deserve.

Once you are a parent, your time with the family becomes precious. You are not willing to spend evenings and weekends at the office anymore. Your children are more important than your boss.

I have three kids, from 3 to 7 years old. Every day, I get to see them for 1 hour in the morning and 2 hours in the evening. Barely enough to feed them, give a bath and put to bed. One on one time with each child? No way to find any time for it during the busy week.

And what about the adults? We also need time for our own health and sanity, for our relationship as a couple.

I’m not talking about any rainy day scenarios, like what if one of us loses the job for any reason. Our whole regular stable life can collapse as a house of cards.

Essentially, the tax raise urged me to reflect on our lifestyle and the role money and time play in it. Can we buy more time? How can we get more money to afford it? Where do I start?

 

My search for the right place to start

Usually, I start by googling and reading. I like to have a lot of information before I decide to act.

I read several posts about different ways to make money from home. You know, this type of posts suggesting you can do a garage sale, take online surveys and walk someone’s dog and make $1000 per year! Laugh at me, if you will – I even tried Amazon Mechanical Turk for a while. Did you hear about it? It is a website where you can do some tasks on your computer and get paid. The typical tasks are transcribing grocery receipts, entering data from business cards or taking short surveys. The payments are from $0.01 to $1. Let’s say you spend 10 min for very generous payment of $1. This is just $6 per hour. I tried this for several weeks, earned a jaw-dropping amount of $100 and stopped. It was clear that the most I can make this way is pizza money, but it wouldn’t help me to pay for taxes or family vacation.

Probably, Facebook has a magic capability to read our minds! Suddenly, a new type of ads started to appear in my feed. Various types of online business opportunities triggered my curiosity and I started to take some free webinars to explore them.

The first webinar promised to show me how to create an online business in 15 min. The idea was to create a funnel and send automated emails with articles, trying to sell digital products to subscribers. It was interesting, but I didn’t see any real unique value in this. And I had no idea how to get people to subscribe.

The second webinar, by a woman named Alison, was about e-commerce. It was exciting to see her high school age daughter buying 100 iPhone cases from Ali Express for $88 and selling them for $8.99 apiece. After selling about 36 of these cases, she made an astonishing profit of $20. I was impressed, but couldn’t see myself packing 100 envelops a week and running to UPS every other day. At the end of the webinar, Alison proposed to buy her course for about $2,000. She was super nice to offer me 6 payments plan, though.

You don’t know me! I hold my money tight! Anyone trying to sell me something must work very hard to convince me that his product is really worth my money and time. It’s almost impossible! My personal perception of cost-effectiveness is stone solid. As a professional risk manager, I would not spend any substantial amount without a perfectly sound understanding of what I’m going to receive for it.

Another problem is that I don’t want to do something I’m not excited about. Would you want to spend hours copying and pasting ads on Facebook, packing envelops for mailing or chasing your friends to join some MLM scheme? I’d rather prefer learning new skills, sharing my knowledge and helping people to improve their lives. I’m absolutely unable to recommend anything that I personally don’t find awesome and useful.

So I moved to the next webinar, this time from ClickBankUniversity. ClickBank is a platform that brings together digital product sellers and marketers. Recently they also opened a university to teach people how to make money on their platform. The price is $47 per month. Their presentation was too long and I couldn’t get to the point of real benefit, beyond the self-selling and success stories they were pumping into my years.

But I was curious and decided to google ClickBank and check their reviews. Is it a scam or a real thing?

I found a website with a detailed review of ClickBank and several other programs. As a thorough student, I combed the site and absorbed all the information it has to offer. The review of ClickBank was not bad, but the blogger’s Number 1 recommendation for newbies like myself was different and for many good reasons.

The opportunity that got my attention

First of all, I agreed with the opinion that any real online business needs a website. Posting ads on Facebook is not sustainable. It wouldn’t bring you an income stream for years. It wouldn’t build your personal brand. Second, I knew that I’m not willing to deal with any physical products, shipping, and customer service at this point. Therefore, the idea of affiliate marketing appealed to me as the best option. And the recommended platform looked as the great place to start with.

Do you want to know why? These are the main points that caught my eye:

1. The program offers Step by Step detailed training on building online business process for complete newbies like me, without any web related knowledge.
2. Basic membership and training stay free forever, including 2 free websites hosting.
3. Free 7 days trial with many Premium options opened, so you can try them and feel if it’s the place where you want to stay.
4. Ability to choose any topic for your website without an obligation to promote any specific program.
5. Different Support options, as Live Chat, questions on training posts and private messages.

It was enough to for me to understand that if I want to get a better idea of the right direction in my online journey, I have to try this site. So I took an action and started my 7 days trial.

Oh my Gosh! The first days were amazing, although overwhelming. I created my profile, set up my goals and started with the first phase of training. It was easy to follow and after 3 days I had my new website up and running. Well, frankly speaking, it barely had any content except “About me” and Homepage. But it gave me a good idea of how all this works. At the same time, I couldn’t stop reading the posts of the site members, from the success stories and content writing tips to advanced technical training on creating websites. I registered for Friday night’s weekly webinar on choosing a niche and enjoyed it.

Making a commitment to success

After 7 days, it was a decision time. Should I take an advantage of Premium membership and spend $19 for the first month? My answer was “ABSOLUTELY!” I felt like it would be a very fair price for the new knowledge I ALREADY acquired during the free trial, not to speak of what I will learn in the upcoming month. Being a fair person, I don’t expect to get a really great product for free. Someone put a lot of work into this platform and it deserves a reward.

As a Premium member I got the unrestricted access to all the features that this platform has to offer:

• Unlimited amount of training in 12 different classrooms
• Free hosting for 25 websites ( I only had to buy a domain)
• Support of the vibrant successful entrepreneur’s community via Live chat and Private messages
• Keyword research and content writing tool

There is much more to it, but it’s not a right place to elaborate, as I’m just telling you my story.

The next month was not easy as well. I tried to absorb as much information as I could under strict available time constraints. Sometimes I fell a bit lost in technical details and stuck with writing content, but a search on the site and the help of the community pushed me through.

At the end of that first month, I decided to buy the Yearly membership, making a commitment to stick with my goals for a year. I’m not that person with annual gym membership sitting on the couch at his home and watching sports on TV. My internal discipline wouldn’t let me pay for something and not use it.

That’s why you are reading this on my own website. I’m so happy to have you as my reader.

What to know more about the site I’m talking about? Click here for my full review.

Or just Join for Free. There is nothing to lose.

Hope you’ll find some valuable information here that will help you to take care of your personal finances and keep more money in your wallet.

Truly Yours,

Mary

P.S I’d be happy to hear the story of your journey into online business. Please tell it in a comment below.