What It Felt Like When My Business Exploded By 800% Overnight
I hit a target that I was laser focused on, 6 months ahead of time. And I outdid it by a lot! I should have been happy, right? But that’s far from describing what I was going through.
Business can be emotionally baffling.
Background
In late December 2010, I decided to focus on financial freedom.
To have a smarter, more defined goal, I wanted to get to a point of making $100/day or $3000/month from my online businesses.
The date to hit that goal was June 2012, when I planned to move to South America.
Fast-forward a few months.
By August 2011 I was halfway to my goal. I managed to get to a consistent $1500/month from my sites while having to do or pay very little to maintain them. That income level stayed stable during September and October.
So, come November 2011 I decided to push a little bit towards my goal again.
It seemed like starting off with a venture that would produce another $500 a month would be the right idea. My new goal was to get to have a $2000 month in December 2011.
I decided to go after a big new search term in Google.
It had 10 times more searches than anything I ever ranked in the first page – which also meant more competition. But I figured that I don’t have to beat everyone.
According to my guesstimations, if I could rank my site at the bottom of page 1 of Google results (e.g. position 8, 9 or 10) I would make $500 a month selling affiliate products to my visitors.
With that in mind, I created a new site and launched it on the 8th of November 2011 with a blast of links.
10 days later the website showed up in Google for the first time. (SEO was a lot easier back then…)
I expected that getting to the top of the first page (and even into the first page at all) would be hard.
But to my utter surprise, the first time it showed up in Google, it was ranking as the number 1 result!
I still remember that day, that 18th of November 2011.
Many more people were searching for that keyword, and the new website was flooded with the kind of traffic I never saw before.
About once every 30 minutes, I would get an e-mail. “You’ve made an affiliate sale.”
I earned $20. Then $30. Then another $20. And so on. The deluge of e-mails didn’t stop. I couldn’t believe it. I was used to getting e-mails like that once every day or two.
I kept updating my affiliate control panel to see the total earnings for the day. It kept going up… And eventually, as the day finished in the US pacific timezone, I had made over $400.
Wait. WTF? I made over $400 in a day?
My goal was to hitting $100/day – 8 months later!
Stage 1 – Shock
I was totally not ready for that quantum leap in earnings. I was making 8 times more on my websites that day than I did the day before.
By the nature of SEO the way I understood it back then, those income levels would remain stable for a while.
This entire thing happened on a weekend. I was reeling from all of it and didn’t really know what to do with myself.
I didn’t know who to tell and who not to tell. I didn’t want to jinx it! I also didn’t want to tell someone who wouldn’t understand. I think most people didn’t understand how impactful that day was anyway.
One person who I did tell was my girlfriend. She was away in Sydney, so I couldn’t tell her in person.
The phone call went a little bit like this:
Me: “Babe! I made $400 yesterday from my websites because of that new website I built last week!”
Her: “Oh that’s wonderful! $400 is a bit of money isn’t it… You can buy a new phone or a camera with that!”
Me: “No… It’s more than that. I made $400 yesterday, and I will again today, and tomorrow. If I’m right and this thing keeps going, my websites make me more than my full time job, and I’m about to hit my first overall 5-figure month!”
All of this was happening really quickly. I spent a bit of time outdoors allowing myself to think.
One place I ended up was a popular Al Fresco café on Chapel Street in Melbourne. It was Saturday, and the place was very busy. The waiters were taking coffee and breakfast orders and serving them to the clientele.
As I was watching them it suddenly hit me.
I wasn’t trading my time for money anymore. This is a popular topic in business thinking. You make more money when your business sells more, rather than when you work more hours.
I remember sitting there and literally twiddling my thumbs, the definition of doing nothing.
I was looking at the staff in the café working busting their ass and thinking to myself – “My business is making me money right now! Enough money to live on! That’s magical!”
Step 2 – Paranoia
This new milestone was amazing, but there was a lot more at stake.
Before, I was making a nice side income without too much risk. Now I was considering making a full time income online. I had to keep this thing going!
I started getting paranoid. I had never ever made so much money before in my life. I’ve failed a lot of ventures before and my brain kept showing me ways how this wasn’t going to work.
One obvious failure scenario was for my website to stop ranking in Google.
If Google decided my websites didn’t belong in the results page, I would stop getting traffic.
Even dropping from position 1 to position 2 meant a huge difference in the number of daily visitors.
So, during the first week after the site started ranking, I spent about 50% of what it earned trying to reinforce its position 1 ranking.
Another scenario I kept thinking about was that, perhaps, I wouldn’t get paid.
I made a 60% affiliate commission on every purchase. But realistically, at that moment, my $400 was nothing but numbers on a computer screen.
The vendor’s policy was to pay affiliates on the 1st of every month, for sales made 2 months earlier.
That meant that I would get paid in January for all the money I made in November.
If the seller was going to pay me – that is.
This was a big sum of money – thousands and thousands of dollars. I kept thinking to myself, if my vendor decided not to pay me, I would have no recourse. They could just keep all the money and get away with it!
At the same time, every day throughout November and December, I was sending more traffic to the vendor’s sales page, making more imaginary money.
Eventually, I got paid on time on the 1st of January, after spending a lot of my savings during that waiting period. Google kept my websites on top for a long while and I slowly came to terms with the new income level I found myself in.
This kind of stuff, and other ways my business could fail, kept me up at night regularly though.
From conversations with fellow entrepreneurs, business paranoia seems like a common experience. It was not something I expected to feel when I hit my goal!
Stage 3 – Awww yeah!
Making money is nice. But it didn’t change my lifestyle much. I was still driving my 1989 beast, still living in the same house, still going to work. I wasn’t going to quit until I knew everything was solid.
But after a while, I decided it was time to pull the trigger. I was more than able to support my $3000/month goal for a long time coming.
The moment I booked my ticket to South America was when it all clicked. Making this income online really allowed me a freedom unlike what I’ve ever had before.
“When are you coming back?” asked me the travel agent.
“I don’t know. Right now, I’m not even planning to come back.” I said.
This was really going to happen.