How I Made My First Dollar Online

“The 4-Hour Work Week” sparked my interest in making money online.

The book helped describe a fantasy I hadn’t even conceived before – building online assets that work to make you money, and give you total freedom. That sounded sweet.

So when I heard about the 30-Day Challenge, I was excited. Taught by Australian online guru Ed Dale, it promised to take you through the journey of making your first dollar online, in one month.

Best of all, the lessons were free!

The 30-day challenge

The challenge initially consisted of building a website and getting it to appear in the top 10 results for a specific Google search.

The 30DC also taught various ways to make money from these people now finding the site through Google. Cool.

I chose to try and rank a site for “sleep eye mask”.

There were a few reasons for that:

• I sleep with a sleeping mask every night. I figured I could write some content about it.
• From the data I could see, enough people were looking for it every month. A few hundred if I remember correctly.
• Also, there weren’t too many other websites about sleep masks. The low competition meant I had a chance to rank high in Google without much effort.

I followed the plan for the 30 days throughout the month of September 2008.

I wrote more articles about sleeping masks than I ever thought I’d be capable of. “Different things you can do with a sleeping mask”… Yes. I wrote that.

I did whatever they recommended to get the site ranking in Google, which mostly consisted of building other mini sites and linking them to my site, as well as optimizing some HTML tags on my own site.

After about 30 days, website was indeed ranking in the first page of results for sleeping mask related keywords.

Through my tracking software suite, I could see that I had visitors visiting my site! It was only a trickle, less than 10 a day, but still. Awesome.

Monetization FAIL

I planned to monetize my visitors by sending them to an amazon product page, which featured a great sleeping mask, called “The Sleep Master”.
On my website, I reviewed the Sleep Master and wrote about why it was worth its $15 price tag.

The link to the Sleep Master page on amazon was a special link called an affiliate link. This link told Amazon that the visitor came from my website. And when one of my visitors bought the Sleep Master, I would get %4 of the revenue of the sale.

It was a solid plan. Here was a website about sleeping masks, found and visited by people searching “sleep eye mask”. Surely these people were interested in sleep masks and some would probably want to buy one. Right?

Well, something wasn’t working out.

Despite getting visitors to my site, no one ever bought anything. I would check my amazon affiliate statistics once a week. Week after week, it always showed $0 in sales.

My self-doubts raised their ugly head. I guess this was another failed project, I thought. Maybe I wasn’t cut for this online business stuff.

I decided I should forget about it.

But I couldn’t.

I kept on checking those empty tables week in and week out, always disappointed.

It felt the same as opening my fridge over and over when I’m hungry, even though I know it’s empty.

There was never going to be a chocolate cake inside.

Are you also attempting to learn more about cocaine and sleep? Learn about the causes of the sleep disturbance brought on by cocaine, the science behind it, and how to help a loved one who is addicted to the drug.

Breakthrough

But one time, instead of looking at my amazon stats, I went to my website itself.

I wanted to read the review again. Maybe I didn’t recommend the mask strongly enough?

As I read through it, I clicked the affiliate link to the amazon page.

It was broke.

For all these months, visitors arrived at my site, read my review and wanted to buy my mask, but they couldn’t. I quickly fixed it.

The following day, I made my first sale online. Someone bought the Sleep Master!

It’s hard to find the exact date now, but I know it was February 2009. It was the only sale that month.

My %4 was worth $0.88. So I almost my first dollar online that month! I crossed the actual $1 mark in earnings the following month.

As months passed, my website started climbing the Google ranks and getting more visitors.More visitors meant more people clicked on my affiliate link, and more ended up buying stuff from Amazon.

It went on to make me $15 a month on average in 2010.

Conclusion

Making my first buck online took a lot more than the 30 days I thought it would. It took 6 months.

I was close to giving up on it a few times, and I’m very happy I didn’t.

Because the moment I saw that first sale, I crossed an invisible barrier of disbelief and doubts.

And so, when I committed to focus on my financial freedom in early 2011, the success of this little online project provided me with the belief that I could do it.

I had already made money online. Now it was time to make more of it.

Such is the power of small wins.