July 23rd, 2024
The following was taken form an interview conducted with a millionaire who was homeless while looking for ways to pay off his $12,000 debt and looking for something that would get him back to living a normal life. He was not even looking to be a millionaire, he just wanted to have a place to live and occasional hot food and regular showers.
It’s amazing what humans can accomplish once they accept that “business or financial failure is not the end of the process. It is part of the process towards success. The only real failure is when you quit trying”.
This story is about Mark Anastasi.
Mark Anastasi: I use to be an unemployed security guard with $12,000 of debt, no assets or possessions, no money, no place to live, and no hope back in 2004.
What Mark did have, was an interest in the Internet and online potential. Sometimes it was like a dreamland, a place to get away from harsh reality of life and just hide and dream about things that could be. The dream was so delicious, but kept one thing alive: HOPE.
Hope is a powerful thing. It makes one think and act towards a goal.
It makes you focus on what can be and bot bogged down with, what is!
Mark Anastasi: The Internet allowed me to connect to millions of people, throughout the U.S. and even around the world which made me think that I can offer them products for sale and if they buy, I make money and get myself out of my current situation. I applied marketing strategies everybody talked about, mastered my own list of do’s and don’t, and my business took off like a rocket.
Mark’s story is more common that you may think. Many people who “believed” in themselves and were willing to try-and-fail until they try-and-succeed, took similar steps in the right path, ignoring initial failures as the path towards success. This is absolutely not an isolated situation and many people who start online businesses eventually succeed if they keep trying and find a path through the maze. In good times, bad times, during recession, even during pandemics, there is a lot of money to be made. Because people will always needs things, and hence products, and services.
Mark Anastasi: First thing I tried was what I had read about online. I wrote a 70-page ebook on alternative therapies and uploaded it to online e-commerce download platform. I charged $67 per download. I was driving traffic to my website by spending $15 a day on Google Adwords, those days it was a lot cheaper than today. But even today there are places you can find where you get traffic just as cheap and as effective as Google use to be. For instance, you can get cheap traffic from social media network ads.
There are many methods available even today that would be just as revenue producing as Mark tried when he started. There are even more digital informational product today than ever before, may be 1000 fold since Mark started back in 2004. The trick is simple: find what people need (often through trial-and-error) and then promote as much as you can.
Mark Anastasi: I peaked in 2007 with $462,000 in ebook sales that year, and from that I made another 26 ebooks. Affiliates drove traffic to my websites and they made 50% of each sale, but it was completely on autopilot and all 27 ebooks were 27 streams of passive income for me. Once you write and promote an ebook, then it is done and don’t need any more work.
But everyone is always asking for marketing strategies and techniques or methods for campaigning and bringing traffic to your website, which is expensive. How did Mark do it with such low budget?
Mark Anastasi: Here’s my strategies that worked for me, I never had much money to invest like others that have a cash injection of $100,000 or $500,000 into their business, so I had do everything on a shoestring.
1. Pay-per-click ads and pay-per-post and blog posts, blog ads, and posting in YouTube!
2. Social Media ads
3. List building and email marketing
4. Online advertising for cheap (like $250/mo)
5. Buying leads, email lists that were high-quality (that’s the key), and buying websites
There are too many ways to make money online to describe in one interview. These methods still work today, and will continue to work for years to come. The real point is: create and offer valuable content to people.
What is valuable content?
Valuable content is content that makes people’s live better, more comfortable, more profitable, quicker and easier to implement and adopt business ideas or marketing strategies, and god content always educates your customers for a better decision making process, whatever industry it may be in.
This is what people want.
Mark Anastasi: This is what YOU want, as YOU read about this interview, on this blog. Ideally, I also like to inspire people. Inspiration is the energy behind trying and working hard.
It is the “trying” that eventually gets you to all your dreams. Without “trying”, there is no success.
Mark Anastasi: There are many different strategies. You can try them, make perfect the ones you like, and become as expert implementing them. The strategies that worked best for me were email marketing, list-building, selling ebooks, and webinars. Behind everything I did, there was a lot of researching, trial-and-error, and sharing new content to see what people like and want.
Everyone can build a successful business. It won’t happen overnight, it takes time, energy, and effort. But if you hang in there long-enough and keep trying, you have as good of a chance as anyone else to make it and even make it very big and become a millionaire just like any other self-made millionaire.
All self-made millionaires do go through essentially the same business-building process. Keep trying until success happens. Never, never, never, never give up.
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