I've left my job and never going back!

harrisondaniel87 wrote:Fantastic story and motivation, well done!

I also recently left a sales position for pastures anew in affiliate marketing as a publisher manager. It's still early, and leaving somewhere that I was comfortable wasn't even close to easy, but I am loving it and am completely sure I have made the right decision.

Would really appreciate to hear what actions you took in marketing yourself / your publications.

Thanks again and well done!

thebigventure wrote:Hey everyone... I had a quick look around but can't really find anyone who used to be around back when I was here (2011-2014).

Anyway, I wanted to briefly write my story and share a thank you to the team here for the success I've had.

I started in this internet marketing game as a 19 year old kid back in 2011 and the first course I ever purchased online was AffiloBlueprint.

I followed it religiously, creating 8 websites, and within 6 months made a few hundred bucks per month. I grew that to a maximum of $1k per month but then with some of the Google Panda / Penguin updates by 2012 it quickly became nothing. I hadn't really structured the sites, content, etc. for long term success.

During that time, and continuing into 2013 I did utilize my network on Affilorama and outside, selling article writing services to other IMers. You could check out my posts to find old threads where I was the #1 article selling service here on the Affilorama Marketplace for a long while!

This was bringing in some money which was great, but eventually I got quite sick of it because most of my customers would be after cheap articles and so my margins were quite slim. At the time I had a solid writing team located in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia that I was outsourcing this work to and then I'd clip the ticket anywhere from 10-20%.

Once I closed this down, I backpacked around the world for a while not really making much money (maybe $40-50 a month) from my niche websites that would still get very very little traffic.

When I came back (in late 2013/early 2014) I used the skills I learned from the previous years of making websites to find local small businesses that advertised in the Yellow Pages and pitched them on why they needed a website. I started to build $250 websites for local businesses!

After about 20 clients, I realised it was a lot more work than I thought, and parked that too. But the great news is I continued to improve my skills around creating value online!

Anyway, with my love for "making money online" in 2014 a mate of mine who used to do a lot of eBay selling while I was doing affiliate marketing emailed me and said he was making 10k a month selling courses on Udemy. And that he was now expanding into self publishing on Amazon.

I quickly learned and self-published my first book on Amazon. I didn't really know too much and didn't consider myself an expert in much except for what I had achieved online. One of these things was running a successful eBay store for 2 years during high school (before my IM days).

So I wrote a book about selling on eBay. It made 2k in 2 months! I was hooked! I then expanded into a topic that's more popular and wrote a second book on budgeting and money (something I had a degree in). This made 4k in 3 months!

Long story short, in 2015 I made $85k online from self publishing! This was also the year I got into full time work as a graduate. Six months in I was very tempted to quit, but had many friends and family telling me not to :-( And I was too afraid to do it. My partner had also moved from the US to Australia, and didn't have a job yet.

So I stayed at the 9-5... this sucked time and energy away from me and that same business now had less of my time and only made $40k online, so I technically "needed" the job still (keep in mind standard of living in Australia is high, our average salary is $81k per year).

Grinding through in 2017 my company laid our team off, and after only being around for 2.5 years I got offered a very small pay out to leave (and 4 other job offers inside the company since I was so young, cheap and great at my job of course). I took the pay out.

That was June 2017. In July 2017 I doubled my publishing income, and in August 2017 I doubled it again.

I am now making $17k per month - expanded things FASTER than ever before, BIGGER than ever before, and I am so happy. I am free. I left the 9-5 and don't plan on EVER going back.

Things are looking so good that my partner has ALSO quit. We have another business we are working on - Bath Box (bathbox.com.au) - and she's on that full time.

Life is great and we are hustling, REALLY hustling.

I wanted to post this to say thank you to everyone here (if the same people are here), the staff, and Mark (if he's around still). I haven't been on here for years because I was out in the world making it happen!

Don't EVER GIVE UP. NEVER. Took my 6 years haha... But it happened and now it's happening bigger and faster than I could have imagined.

And do you know what the craziest thing is? Every little thing I learned from AffiloBlueprint I STILL USE TODAY. Going back to the days I sat down and went through the course, I never would have thought learning about building websites, buying domains, connecting hosting, SEO, etc. would change my life.

Today I am building community websites around each niche that my books are in, as well as email lists (sending affiliate products to the list), and all that good stuff!

So if I could leave you with anything... don't underestimate the value of each little skill you are learning by going on this journey. And even if this journey fails (like mine), there WILL be a way to revive it. You never know when a little thing like building an opt-in page or email list might come in handy! (Not to mention how SUPER valuable it made me to my large corporate company as a 9-5er).

Good luck and stay hustling. It's not IF, but WHEN you succeed.