This is just a brief overview of how I was able to escape the “rat race” at 40 years old and start my own online business with almost no capital investment. This isn’t meant to be a guide on how to do the same, but if you like what you read and how I make my money, then it will certainly put you on the right path. Feel free to join my FaceBook group and follow my YouTube channel if you’d like to reach out to me and join my community.
Ok, let’s get to it!
How I quit my day job and started my own online business
I’m going to pretty much tell this in the form of a timeline, going back about 5 years or so. No need to get into my life story.
I was working in marketing
From about 2010-2015 I was working as a delivery driver full-time, and making websites for clients on the side. I usually ended up with a few mid-sized website deals each year which were a nice supplement to my meager income.
I had gone back to school later in life and gotten an associate’s degree in Web Technology. Pretty much the most general website design degree you could get, but I was starting from scratch. So skipping through that, I got that degree but learned a lot outside of the classwork. Things like WordPress, which became my comfort zone. I used it for everything.
Skip to 2015, I landed a job in a marketing agency as the web guy. They let me give myself my own title (professional I know), I chose “Web Developer” because it sounded important to me at the time. I was pretty much a webmaster and just jack of all trades when it came to WordPress, SEO, and anything web related. It was fine, I learned anything I didn’t know as I went.
Time went on for several years and I was happy for the most part.
Learned about affiliate marketing
In mid 2018 I think I was starting to become a bit unhappy at my job, and I got turned down on a request for a raise. So naturally I explored my options. During this exploration period I can across some videos on YouTube about making money with niche websites via affiliate marketing. Primarily with something called the Amazon Associates program.
You basically build a website about a topic of your choosing, publish a bunch of blog posts to the site, and link out to Amazing products using your own special links. When someone buys something from one of your links, you get a commission from it. It sounded really interesting.
The hardest part would be to get traffic to the site. I was already familiar with building websites and SEO, so I knew it wasn’t easy. After doing research on the topic and watching videos from several channels like Income School, Niche Pursuits, Niche Site Project, and Fat Stacks Blog, I was ready to start.
Created my first niche website
I started my first niche website. I chose what I thought was the perfect niche and a good domain name. I started doing keyword research and writing my own articles. I was on my way.
I knew I was supposed to focus on this one site and put everything I had into it, but that’s not how it went.
I was starting up new sites frequently. Sometimes 2-3 new sites every month. This is something I don’t recommend for new bloggers, but I can’t go back now.
So I was working my full-time job and building all these niche blogs and adding tons of content to them during the first 3 months or so of this journey. I had made $0 from my efforts, and I had put in so much.
I was frantically checking my Amazon Associates account every morning to see if I had made a sale the previous day, sometimes multiple times in a day. Of course there was a brief moment of disappointment followed by me remembering that “it’s ok, this is how it goes”.
One morning though, I woke up to see that I had earned a few cents from one of the links. I don’t recall the exact amount, but I want to say it was like 77 cents. That tiny amount lit a fire under me. I had seen my validation that it did in fact work, so I was invigorated and I kept pushing forward.
A lot of time went by
I would say that a full year had gone by before I had hit any kind of meaningful goal. Right around the 1 year mark of me cranking out all of these blog posts on these niche websites, I had finally hit the mark of $300 in one month’s time.
That was almost enough to pay my car payment, so it was really a big deal. Then some more time went by, and that monthly amount kept growing. Then it started REALLY growing.
By the time I had been blogging for 18 months, my websites had brought in about $3300. That was such an amazing milestone for me. Now I just glossed over a ton of things there and I apologize, but I’m trying to give a high overview of how everything happened.
I saw the potential
I was steadily making over $3k/mo. It was not that much less than I was making at day job. Up until this point I had always thought of the blogs as a side hustle, some passive income that would supplement my salary at my day job.
I eventually realized though that if things kept going the way they were, I’d be making much more from the websites than my job would every want to pay me. Not only that, but I could potentially become a bottleneck for my own growing business.
Why would I work at a job that’s paying me less than my own business is? A business that I can scale over the coming year if I have the free time to dedicate to it. There are advantages to having a corporate job with benefits and a salary, and I considered these over the next few weeks and months.
I made a decision
I eventually came to the decision that I was going to make an exit from the company I had been working at for the last 5 years. The pay wasn’t what I wanted, there had been layoffs recently so I wasn’t feeling secure anyway, and I just generally was tired of having a boss.
I decided that once I hit a certain figure in income from the blogs that I would put in my notice and step away to focus on my new business. So I went to work everyday and bided my time. All the while working on the side hustle, that was soon to be the full-time hustle, in my spare time
It was finally time to exit
Right after Christmas of 2020, I made the decision that it was time. The holiday season, December in particular, was very lucrative (at the time) and I exceeded the monetary goal I was hoping to hit by a couple of thousand dollars.
I put in my notice before the New Year and my last day was on January 15 2021. Since then I’ve officially formed my LLC/S-Corp, hired an accountant to help me with my books, and have been learning about being a business owner.
All the while continue to do what puts money in the bank, publish content to these niche blogs.
How things are going 4 months later
As I write this it’s almost exactly 4 months since my last day. The last 3 months in a row have been record earnings and traffic, this month will be no different. As I mentioned, I’ve had to learn a lot of things that I never had to worry about before as an employee.
Things are going great though. I expect to earn more money this year than I ever would have at my day job, and I expect next year to be even better.
Recent developments
Just a couple of recent developments:
- I was just accepted to Adthrive, a premium ad management company that helps maximize ad revenue for your website.
- I recently had a 5 figure month in earnings, which has long been a goal of mine.
Future goals
I plan to continue growing my business based on my current plan for the foreseeable future. I’ll adapt and overcome changes in the publishing landscape as I need to but for now, what I’m doing is working.
Having said that, I’m still going to keep my foot on the gas pedal in terms of churning out content. A couple goals I’d love to hit in the next 12-24 months are:
- 1 mil page views/mo (all sites combined)
- $30k/month revenue
Summary
So that’s about it. This has been an almost 3 year journey from the time I created my first online business, until now. I’m very thankful for what I’ve been able to achieve and hope that others are able to reach their goals as well!
Thanks for reading.