How I Made Money Online

Let’s forget the time I worked in the police from 1988 to 2000. Let’s also forget the crappy jobs I had in IT.

2002 – Broke and afraid and with a family to support I start my first business. Selling IT training courses run on the weekend. I go on some marketing and sales courses and start selling out courses making more in a weekend than I did working for a month for Cisco systems in the UK. I get all my leads from putting adverts on eBay. I also get a friend to design a website for me using Dreamweaver.

Cory Rudl’s Home Study System.

2003 – I hear about a guy called Cory Rudl who is the worlds first internet entrepreneur and a millionaire. He is selling a set of workbooks showing you how to make money on the web. I buy the course, follow the lessons and create my first info product. A home study IT training course which sells for $697.

I start making around $3,000 extra per month in sales. It is still selling 9 years later. How’s that for working once but getting paid for years!

2004 – I decide to create an e-book helping students solve an IT problem for exams and interviews. Subnetting Secrets is sold on pdf and I create some videos to go with it using a program called Camtasia.

It sells around $31,000 over the next few years. I spend time learning how to use shopping carts, auto responders and product creation tools.

2005 – I start another company focusing purely on products for sale on the internet. Reality Press Ltd. is registered as a publishing company. I start finding products for sale which come with resale rights. One is a mind reading course. It costs me $7 and makes over $5,000 via a one page sales website.

2006 – I find a members only website, the first I’ve ever seen in fact. It teaches product creation. I join it and see that I can create an online Cisco training portal. www.howtonetwork.net launches a few months later. It makes $1000 in its first month and then grows to $20,000 per month.

2008– I sell my IT company and take six months off to work out what I want to do next. Reality Press is making a great

Getting married in the beach in Australia

monthly profit. I travel to Australia, around Europe, Canada and the USA.

2010 – I create several books which I then upload to Amazon Kindle. I hire lots of writers and programmers to create software and books for me.

2011 – Some of my Kindle books hit the best seller lists for Amazon. I’m making around $5,000 per month on Kindle books. I test some online training websites to resell some of my stuff. Udemy.com now sells around seven courses for me and host all the content.

2012 – I emigrate to Australia. My dream has come true. I’m making around $30,000 per month online via my membership sites, Kindle books and online products. I’m writing full time and creating a brand new members only IT training site. I’m also working on lots of cool stuff including this site and the book to go with it.

2013 – I put all my efforts into building and then launching www.howtonetwork.com which teaches people how to pass their IT exams via streaming videos. It’s really hard work for many months but launches and quickly grows to 1000 subscribers.

2014 – Working on growing my websites and spending a lot of time studying more cool internet stuff including traffic, YouTube marketing and social media.

How I Did It

Always be learning stuff. Either attend seminars, read blogs, look at what the winners are doing. I’ve met some really cool people and they’ve given me tips and advice which has really made a big difference to my income and the way I do business online.

Me at work!

Always follow your passion. If you hate something you will quit, fast. If you don’t make much money doing it, at least you will have fun. Do stuff which is fun and helps other people and charge people money for products or members only stuff.

Create membership sites, e-books, webinars and most of all, grow a big e-mail list. If you have no list then you have nobody to sell your stuff to when you have stuff to sell.

Create some low priced, medium and high priced products so people can choose something to match your budget. If you can, create a membership site so people can pay you monthly and you can create a predictable cashflow.

Outsource the boring, time consuming stuff such as order fulfilment and e-mail enquiries. Send written procedures on how to do it anlong with photos or videos and store the training on a secure website for your virtual assistant (VA).

One of my Kindle bestsellers.

Write some books and put them onto Amazon Kindle. Concentrate of books which solve problems for people. They need only be 50 or so pages and sell them for a few bucks. Add your URL into the book and bring people back to your site so they can sign up to your newsletter and buy more stuff from you.