Summary
- I went from being in debt to achieving financial success through determination and strategic moves over seven years.
- Building good daily habits was the first step in turning my life around.
- I taught myself practical skills, like resume writing and obtaining Google certifications, which helped me land my first real job at 28, with a salary of $42,000 a year.
- Interpersonal skills are crucial for professional growth. I improved these skills and used them to advance to higher positions quickly.
- Job hopping can be more beneficial than sticking around for minimal annual raises—especially early in your career.
- Sometimes a change of scenery can jolt you out of stagnation. I moved states and it led to earning $92,000 a year in a tech job.
- I battled imposter syndrome, but realized that stepping out of my comfort zone helped me grow.
- Financial planning is key. Saving money helps, but making deliberate decisions can make a bigger difference.
- Making bold moves, like quitting a full-time job to focus on a personal project, can pay off. In my case, it built my blog's revenue to $200,000 in the first year.
- Be willing to put in extra effort—working 90-hour weeks on my job and blog was a significant part of my success.
- Sometimes, changing your environment can give fresh perspectives. Traveling the world opened my eyes to new opportunities.
- Consistency and leveraging time and effort effectively will help create a sustainable income.
- Having a solid strategy from day one is crucial for making money online.
- Personal branding and leveraging different content platforms can significantly increase visibility and profitability.
- You don't need a gigantic audience to be successful. Small, engaged audiences can be highly lucrative if you have the right monetization strategies.
- You can't do it all alone. Having a business partner can provide valuable support and division of responsibilities.
- Passive income alone isn't fulfilling; continued engagement and purposeful challenges are key to long-term satisfaction.
- Though financial freedom is great, remember that happiness doesn't solely depend on income. Enjoy the journey, not just the destination.
- It's vital to stay flexible and ready to adapt or pivot if needed, based on changes in the environment or personal desires.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest implementing good daily habits first. Start with simple things like waking up early and organizing your day. Improving small habits can lead to big changes over time. Being consistent is key.
A good way of developing new skills is to use free resources online. Platforms like Google offer free certifications, which are valuable for boosting your resume. Learning to write a strong resume can make a big difference when job hunting.
Improving interpersonal skills is crucial. Practice active listening and empathy. These skills will help you build stronger relationships and advance professionally.
Consider job hopping early in your career. It can lead to better opportunities and salary increases instead of waiting for annual raises. If your current role stagnates your progress, don't be afraid of change, even if it means moving to a new location.
Financial planning is important. Focus on deliberate decisions rather than just saving bits here and there. Try creating a simple budget and tracking your expenses to see where you can cut back or invest better.
If you're interested in blogging or online income, start small. Write helpful articles and engage with readers. Remember, consistent content creation and building a personal brand can help grow your following and income.
Lastly, embrace flexibility. Be ready to adapt or pivot if things aren't working out as planned. Trying new experiences, like traveling, can open your eyes to fresh opportunities and perspectives.
Remember, happiness doesn't come from money alone. Enjoy the journey and be grateful for the present while keeping your goals in sight.
Quotes by Author
"You have to always, you know, this whole thing becomes a snowball effect of authority and leverage in your life."
"You have to try, you have to really just go after it for yourself."
"It's fun for 3 to 6 months or a year, especially if you travel around and you do all that, but then you're like, now what?"
"The higher the higher up I go in marketing or any of this stuff, I'm just going to be reporting to someone higher up than me."
"You should have a monetization strategy from day one."
Full Transcript
this is the story of how I went from negative $17,000 to making over $14 million online now at 26 I was broke miserable working at a pizza place making $9 an hour drowning in debt drinking every night and living in my parents' basement but now over the last 6 years so from 2019 to 2024 I've made over $14 million online in a bunch of different ways so this is going to be kind of more of a raw reality type of video i've got some fancy notes here on oldfashioned paper i'm going to cover each year exactly what I did the struggles that I had and it could be good for any creator out there you know you're feeling stuck you can't get past 10K a month or you're just getting started so I hope you find this interesting let's get into it so if we go back 11 years I was 26 years old i was making $9 an hour or $13,500 a year working about 30 hours a week at a pizza place i was basically lost at this point in my life so I had graduated college it took me 6 years i got failed a bunch of classes got kicked out got let back in to Michigan State finally graduated after six years and then I moved back in with my parents and I was completely overwhelmed and lost with what I wanted to do with my life i saw all these people making tons of money the idea of even owning a house or even a nice condo was just completely out of reach so I worked at this pizza place before that even and it was about three years of working at this place and I always felt you know it was near my hometown and I'm like really I'm the guy that's just going to work at the pizza place and I that's what I thought my future was going to be and I kind of accepted it and I was drinking a lot i was drinking to cope and I was just really miserable a lot of the time and over the course of time I kind of just got sick and tired of being sick and tired so I stopped drinking i got my together i actually formed decent habits so that was step one for me was actually just getting over my early 20s forming decent enough habits to wake up before 11:00 a.m or 12:00 p.m every day and then the skills I learned over that were well I had no skills i had no internships or anything like that or connections so I ended up just teaching myself like resume writing and then I did a bunch of Google certifications so I did Google Adwords Google Analytics maybe Facebook i just did a bunch of certification classes i padded my resume i did work for a few clients aka the pizza place I was working at and then I got one other client which was a friend I knew to allow me to do a little bit of marketing for them put all that on the resume and got my first real job and that was when I was 28 years old so at 28 I got my first real job i was making $42,000 a year and I was hired as an SEO specialist for a small little company in Plymouth Michigan i didn't know anything about SEO i remember my boss was telling me to code in this stuff or that and we were working on a lot of small little website projects and I was just adding random keywords into posts and I didn't really know what I was doing but I ended up doing pay-per-click advertising for that company doing that a lot and then I really realized that and so much money is made through interpersonal skills so it's not about being the guy that is the ultimate expert at a topic the more money you make in your life is based on interpersonal relationship skills that you build so I found I was I actually became pretty good at that you know a lot of my life I didn't fit in when I was a little kid I didn't fit in i was put in the smart kid class i was removed from my peers and I I just wanted my whole high school life i realized looking back I just wanted to fit in like most kids do and that led me to you know partying in high school partying in college drinking too much and being lost until I was finally you know 26 to 28 years old when I got my stuff together and I realized that a lot of that stuff that I dealt with in my past was just issues that I didn't have to deal with anymore so I actually became pretty good at like office politics so that's basically I realized too that companies don't care about you right like you have a job you have a certain amount of PTO and other than that it is what it is right i wasn't beholdened to some job so what I did is I ended up getting promoted two times at that same company i worked there for like two and a half years so by the time I was 30 I then switched jobs so I was an SEO specialist and I became a pay-per-click man senior pay-per-click specialist i made that up myself and then I was a digital marketing manager so we were doing website projects WordPress stuff for like small $5,000 websites and I had three people reporting to me and then I realized I went from 42,000 to 50,000 with a promotion to 62,000 so it's pretty fast in a matter of 2 years and then I kind of realized there's no way I'm going to be stuck at this amount for a couple more years unless I jump ship so I ended up switching jobs so at 30 I was making $70,000 a year and I moved to my second job which was an e-commerce marketing manager so we worked for a company pretty popular company that does massage products they have products at Target Walmart and all that stuff but we were managing their e-commerce website itself so that's where I learned you know email marketing affiliate marketing basic stuff we were using Magento e-commerce related things that one I didn't really love that job the big lesson I learned though is job hopping is better than a 3 to 5% raise you know every year just look around and you have to be your own advocate especially early on in your career you have to do the grunt work that maybe you don't want to do but you have to always you know this whole thing becomes a snowball effect of authority and leverage in your life the only reason I made money and I'm sitting where I am now is because I've really just been my own advocate and used leverage and started trying to build these relationships and better myself over time so for example it's like you do something good at your job hey boss talk with your boss and say you know hey I've been working on these projects it made this much like ask for the promotion you know show it based on data perform different actions like that so make big moves so I was stuck at that job i was making 70,000 a year which was great i mean these at this time when I was making 42,000 I was just living in Ann Arbor Michigan with my brother we shared an apartment rent was like 1,400 a month i remember thinking to myself you know so we were splitting that so 700 a month i remember thinking to myself I'm like if I just have like $2,000 at the start of the month I'm good i'm good on bills and it's kind of funny cuz I remember thinking that like and I really enjoyed that phase of my life you know there's nothing wrong with making different amounts of money i remember I lived kind of in this shitty apartment but it was by a river kind of near downtown and I could like go for runs around the river and all this stuff and it was pretty simple time in my life and I remember there were some months where I didn't have enough money so like I sold my PS3 at the time or my PS I think it was PS4 maybe I don't know S3 probably but I sold it for cash and I was like you know I didn't have a lot of money at the end of the month I had no money it was you know gone i actually was in debt i had student loans so the negative $17,000 was student loans and credit card debt and I wasn't getting out of that you know I had more debt than I was making each month i would take home at $42,000 a year i was taking home you know $2,400 a month I think so it's not a whole lot but I stretched it out and it worked so I did that for a while and then I made 70,000 a year right at this next job when I was 30 and that was a little bit more but still you know I was able to afford a little bit of a nicer apartment but I still wasn't saving any money this was actually prime i think this was the year that like Bitcoin went up to 15,000 so I was I was big into crypto so I would take like two grand put it into crypto and hope to make 10 or hope to make 12 there's a few times it actually kind of worked i remember there was like I put in 3,000 and then John McAfee tweets something and then it goes up to six and I sold it i felt like I was just making so much money but it was really like you know a few thousand here and there and really that's when I kind of realized I needed to make a big change because I'd worked at this company for this e-commerce company for about 9 months maybe and I'm like this is I feel stagnant the job is boring i got to make a big move and I actually went to a float tank so one of those sensory deprivation tanks where you're laying in lukewarm water you can't see hear feel anything and it's really good for meditation and I sat there for like 90 minutes I think and you kind of hear stuff and you start seeing things a little bit when you're in there and it's really deep meditation it's good for thinking and I'm like I got to get out of Michigan i've been here my whole life it's time to make a big move so why not do it so I started applying for different jobs in New York LA Texas i winded up getting a job in Austin Texas so I remember I had to go through five Zoom interviews to get this job and I almost didn't do it because I had to do an assignment that I completely made up you know I was going to be an affiliate manager was the role so it was $92,000 a year which was a huge jump for me and I had to do a create an affiliate program with slides and spreadsheets and all this send that in and then do five interviews somehow I got the job and I knew not much at all about affiliate marketing to be honest i Googled some stuff i put a presentation together i guess it halfway made sense so by 31 years old I was making $92,000 a year at a tech job in Austin Texas i was still 17,000 at this point because I was basically not saving any money at this point nothing so what I realized there is it's good to make big moves i think you should move out of state at least once in your life you know really experience that when you're just by yourself if you have the opportunity a lot of people don't or they get married young or they just they're stuck for whatever reason and that's fine too but I think if you move out of state at least one time in your life it's it's a good thing so at this job I was an affiliate manager and I learned you know a lot of these affiliates so I was managing 4,000 affiliates for the software company I worked for and I was seeing these individual blogs and websites making 10,000 a month 5,000 a month up to $100,000 a month just from our one affiliate program i was like "This is insane." So I saw that I was learning a lot i had a lot of imposttor syndrome i remember going into meetings and being like it was a new city they handed me a Mac for the first time and I had always used Outlook and Microsoft before then at my job so I was like I don't even know how to use a Mac now it's all that I use but I it's like there's a lot of uncomfortability if that's a word around these new experiences getting out of your comfort zone and I remember sitting in a meeting and they're talking about MQLs and SQLs and all these different terms and acronyms and I felt like they were speaking another language and I was going to get called on and I was going to get found out so I had complete imposter syndrome at this job at first right that's always any new job you're going to feel that way I think and then I kind of figured it out and then I started managing it and things were going all right and then it got a little easier got a little easier at this point in my life though you know I was 30 again i was 31 making 92 grand a year my apartment was in downtown Austin so it was like at that time it was like 2,000 a month 21,00 now it would be like 4,000 a month for the same apartment onebedroom i wasn't saving any money again maybe five I got it you know I I probably I didn't pay down any of my debt really but I probably had about $7,000 in the bank so I could say by this stage I was still probably around the negative $17,000 number and at this job I worked really hard i ended up working on a getting another promotion to affiliate marketing dire or digital marketing director so it was an internal promotion from within we were trying to hire somebody outside for like 6 months and it was just not quite working so I said "Hey I'm going to try it." So again rounds of interviews doing this and I got the job and at that point I was still 31 i think it was about 9 months into the affiliate manager role and then I was making 120,000 a year so I'm like boom I've made it now you know and it's still though even with that today it was probably I don't know the math on that it's probably somewhere around 7,000 something a month take-home pay so after the $2,000 rent the utilities car payments all of that kind of stuff I was maybe saving a couple grand a month i could save a couple grand a month was I probably not i still was I still was not totally doing it so but at that point I learned a lot about SEO and affiliate marketing those are the two things I learned the most there was a really smart SEO manager named Kevin who taught me a lot of things about SEO like what's actually working at the cutting edge of SEO what would a startup software company do for SEO to rank content on Google so I thought hey I'll try it myself and I I ended up writing some articles on a small blog just named it after myself adamanfroy.com because I'm like I don't know I'll use this as a digital resume maybe someone will see it and I'll be able to get a better job because I wrote some random articles so I was writing lots of random articles on some stuff on like just mindset stuff like human nature what it means to be human uh kind of like personal development articles i was sprinkling in some affiliate marketing articles some affiliate articles like you know best email marketing software best web hosting so I was just all over the map i was doing some link building i was doing all that stuff and I started realizing like I was stressed out of my mind basically is what I realized like I was working 50 plus hours a week at my job and I had a million dollar a month budget for ads so like I had the biggest budget marketing budget of anyone at the company there was probably 500 people at the company and I'd have to go to weekly business reviews talking to the CFO CEO and seeing exactly what we did and why it worked or why it didn't and I remember like just chain smoking cigarettes before that weekly meeting and I was like just stressed out of my mind because it was just it was in this hyperrowth phase it was preipo and it was like we have to hit these 30% growth targets every month and it was just the company was all about revenue but they told they talked like it was just this corporate voodoo culture like oh we play ping pong and we do these fun things and there's beer in the keg and we can hang out and I did enjoy the company don't get me wrong but there was a high level of stress for me someone else probably could have handled it better than I could but I got really stressed out and I'm like I looked at my future and I'm like I'm probably going to have to do this forever the higher the higher up I go in marketing or any of this stuff i'm just going to be reporting to someone higher up than me i can make 150 then 175 then 200 but I'm always going to be reporting to somebody driving to an office all these things so I kind of started by thinking all right I hope my blog works i hope this website works but I have no idea if it will so I started doing consulting so I got a couple of clients under my belt a couple software companies were willing to pay me to do SEO and link building for them so instead of working in an office I could be like I just need if I had like three clients paying me 3,000 a month then I could at least leave my job like if I could make five or 6,000 a month I'll just leave my job so I won't have to go to the office every day so anyways this is really the start of the next phase of my life which was when I was 32 years old so this is 2019 and in 2019 I made $200,000 with my blog year one and that was mainly just consulting a little bit of affiliate if I look at it but it was like 90 something% just consulting revenue doing SEO client services that sounds like a lot but it was like one month would be 10 then I'd have a 15 or 20 and it added up to 200k that year let's stop here for a quick word from Thinkific so if you want to make money this way a simple business selling your knowledge you can do it with Thinkic so you can create market and sell your own offers all from one platform so they'll give you a website your course content your coaching portal and it has built-in payment processing and marketing tools to help you scale your business i've used Thinkific it's what I love about it is just how customizable it is you can design your course to match your brand set your pricing your logo even create memberships bundles things like that plus analytics help you see what's working what's going on so you can scale your business if you are ready to turn your expertise into income make sure to check out Thinkific today not a sponsor just a big fan so when you're ready to get started you can click my special link in the description below they'll give you extended 30-day trial so you can try it completely for free it comes fully recommended by me so I quit my job in July of 2019 and I was able to leave my apartment and travel the world so I'm like screw this i need a break i have my blog there's some affiliate revenue coming in i have some clients i'm just going to leave so I ended up packing my stuff in Austin i put it in my brother's house one of his bedrooms in Michigan and then I flew to I went to Barcelona for every place I went for like three weeks so I went to Barcelona for three weeks then I went to Paris I went to Normandy I went to Italy Ireland Japan Thailand and Australia i think that's it so it was like 6 months and I was all over the world and I transitioned to that and I was working 10 20 hours a week on my website just writing random articles and it was a completely different life before that to make it work when I was working both my full-time job as a digital marketing director and building a blog on the side of that i was working 50 hours a week at my day job and another probably 40 hours a week on my blog so it was nights and weekends for seven straight months so there was no freedom i had broken up with my girlfriend at the time and I was like I need a distraction and sometimes that level of what I'm calling in the lesson here is sometimes it requires a spirit testing sacrifice if you want to really change your life you're not going to do it by testing the waters a little bit with a side business for a couple hours a week it's not going to happen if you can if you're willing to make a spirit testing sacrifice that can help so a lot of people really never make that sacrifice and that's okay i've worked with a ton of people that like they work they go to the job they make 50 or $60,000 a year they don't take their work home they get a lot of time off they spend time with their family that's totally okay too i have a weird chip on my shoulder and a weird brain that is overstimulated a lot and thinks a lot so you know I try to calm down and I have spirituality i go to AA meetings all these different things but it you know there's always luck timing a lot of different things in all this stuff but you have to try you have to really just go after it for yourself so ultimately I traveled around a lot and then CO hit so right before COVID hit I came back home cuz I'm like I'm going to come to Michigan and then I'm I moved back covid hit and I was just bored out of my mind literally the blog was growing fast so in 2020 I was 33 and the blog made $800,000 that year mainly affiliate so I killed off the consulting cuz I had a bunch of a couple affiliate articles that really took off for any naysayers that have never seen my channel before like you can see like over time I made 1.4 million just from partner stack alone and paid commissions and then impact is just one other network of 400,000 so 800K was in 2020 and one a lot of that was these really these good articles that I wrote and I found like really interesting niches in like podcast hosting online course platforms webinar software these keywords where I wrote these articles and started ranking between number one and number three on Google for the whole year uh I ranked for them for like three or four years and they paid recurring affiliate commissions so they would grow and every as long as the customer remained a customer I would get paid so the blog did 800k in 2020 and believe it or not I got extremely bored i traveled around i did everything i saw a lot of stuff i moved back home and then COVID hit and I was just sitting at home i was working 5 hours a week probably on my blog i had an assistant doing a lot of link building outreach stuff i had a writer writing stuff for me and I was just sitting there i was like "This is interesting." I learned that I never want to retire because it's fun for 3 to 6 months or a year especially if you travel around and you do all that but then you're like now what right there's different phases of life i got that lesson that was a good one early lesson is if you're dreaming of someday you can totally do that right now you know you can take that trip you can just be in the moment you don't have to think that one day things are going to get better that's something that I struggled with a lot in my life but that year we did 800K and passive in there as a lesson I learned is passive income is not the answer to life i did learn a lot about Google ranking how that works how to monetize through affiliate marketing and all of that but I got bored so at 34 in 2021 my blog made $1.5 million and that was through affiliate ads and courses so in November of 2020 I talked with my business partner i met I met Colin many of you don't know Colin colin is my business partner with this entire YouTube channel course business that we run education stuff and I met him in literally almost 5 years ago now so in 2020 and we talked about hey like you built one of the fastest growing revenue blogs I've ever seen how do we you know help more people do this how do we teach it so we ended up spending seven months going through beta testing with different students and a live course every week we would do one week and then we finally refined the offer we launched it in June of 2021 and I think it made $280 something thousand at launch because through my blog I was basically collecting people's email addresses but I wasn't selling anything so I was just building trust sending a free email series over 7 days and I got like 40,000 people in the email list so at launch we did a good amount of money and that was increasing the revenue there on the blog so that was what I consider blog revenue we didn't really do much on YouTube yet at that point and one important lesson there that I liked is you can't really do it alone so like it's actually fun having a business partner involved and yes you split the profit in certain things my blog I own 100% of and then the YouTube education side of the business I own 50% of because we have now 10 you know people behind the scenes working coaching doing lots of stuff there all right so then in 2022 I was 35 years old we made $4.5 million and that was through again the blog affiliate ads and courses and YouTube so it's all about kind of expanding the personal brand over time i remember when I had a blog I used to think YouTube views don't matter it's all about Google traffic and I like and I didn't even have a YouTube channel so now I'm like actually YouTube views can be just as valuable actually a lot more valuable than blog traffic because you get to talk to people directly i mean I was not good at YouTube i didn't want to do YouTube i remember telling my wife I'm like I'm going to start you i kind of felt weird about it i'm like I'm going to start a YouTube channel she's like oo and I'm like I remember uh being horrible on video i'm still working on it you know I'm more of an introverted person i built a blog because I like being behind the scenes i like I just like working on my computer i can go anywhere youtube ties me down sometimes to a location where I have to shoot things that I don't totally like compared to blogging so I like kind of the behindthe-scenes stuff a little bit more i know a lot of people watching this believe the same thing they're like you know I never would do YouTube and most of the videos that I create talking about YouTube people don't click on as much because the subscribers are more interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff which is fine but it's just becoming harder and harder now to do that uh you have to kind of put yourself out there as a personal brand these days but yeah we we we launched the course in 2021 and then we really like we launched the YouTube channel but we weren't making like evergreen sales so there's an evergreen sales engine behind YouTube education type businesses you want to get views to then get people to click the link in the description to then get them into an email list to get them to buy something or just book a call with you or whatever your funnel is we didn't figure it out for a couple months there was two months like June we did great July we didn't do like anything august was slow and then we finally kind of figured it out 3 to 6 months later like how it actually works what emails to send copywriting psychology VSSLs video sales letters all of those things that you have to kind of figure out over time sales pages all of those different things so eventually it worked and then at 36 2023 we did 5.7 million so again if we look back at the numbers it went from 2019 was 200K 800K 1.5 4.5 5.7 and again it was just more of the same with both courses coaching low ticket high ticket just expanding and doing all that we could so there's blog articles being written YouTube videos being published coaches behind the scenes coaching salespeople doing sales all of those different things and uh the biggest month we had ever in the business was August of 2023 we did $800,000 in revenue i don't really remember the profit on that it was probably around 600 or 700,000 so you can really really high profit margin business so yeah really it's about time and consistency and leverage right the more leverage you have you're just slowly creating content putting it out in the world and it's kind of the snowball effect of authority but it takes a long time so it's all about condensing time so it's really about how can I look at my future and say "All right if I'm making 50,000 a year right now and how much am I saving how much am I investing for retirement?" If it's $1,000 a month that'd be 20% well I don't know the math but let's just say it's $1,000 a month that's 12,000 a year it's going to take you 50 years of working to make enough money in this environment with housing prices the way they are and inflation and all of that to actually retire so I would start thinking like what's the digital backup plan what's the thing that I can build that I can actually make a lot more money on and I can actually advocate for myself it's all about the economy of the individual the authority economy putting simple content out there teaching stuff building communities and really just building your own brand and when you think about making money online there's only like three ways to make money online you either sell a product like e-commerce right sell a physical product or a digital product an info product a course you sell someone else's product affiliate marketing or services like an agency so a lot of it's based on your personality what you actually want to do and then just letting time compound so when I look back when I was 26 my net worth was $17,000 and now it's millions of dollars i'm not ultra rich i'm not It's not over 10 million there's some articles about me adam for a net worth it's 12 million no it's not you know it's not that much i'm a millionaire i'm not a billionaire you know but it's a good lifestyle business where I can take time off i'm shooting this video right now on March 29th and in April I'm not really going to be working a whole lot so that's nice especially with a wife and kid so it's really what we did I think a lot better than anyone else the you know the exceptional part of the story is more like we didn't have any ads so we ran a we made total of 14.7 million in revenue 10.6 6 million in profit over the course of time with a 72% profit margin no ads all organic which is kind of rare i don't know of really anyone that does that other than like some of the more giant channels that just have millions of followers we did it with a small audience so what that teaches me is that you don't need a huge audience you just need the right backend systems the right monetization strategies from the beginning that's kind of the hard part a lot of people that start blogs they do it based on a hobby and then they're like I'll figure out how to make money with it later or I'm going to do a YouTube channel but I'll figure out I'll get ads you know join the partner program and I'll figure out how to monetize it later you should have a if you really want to make money with it you should have a monetization strategy from day one and a lot of people get stuck too so it's I get it it's you have family responsibilities you've got a lot going on life gets lifey as they say things happen and it takes a backseat it's a lot it's easy for that to happen there is an aspect of luck and timing and internet magic that kind of happens sometimes people get into a into the right time with the right offer the right content and it works and it works easily for like 3 to 5 years and then maybe it doesn't and it slows down and then maybe it's time to readjust or pivot and that's where personal branding is really important you know I started my YouTube channel in 2021 because I knew having a blog by itself is kind of risky like if I had just a couple articles making all my money and I had a mortgage I would be looking at those articles on Google every day to make sure they're still ranking it's not a life I want to live right it seems too stressful so YouTube was a hedge against that high ticket coaching and you know getting into things that we're getting to in the future is a hedge against YouTube and that so it's all about expansion over the course of time not quitting staying consistent creating simple content and teaching people so really it was going from negative $17,000 the first five years of that from basically 2013 2014 to 2019 it was the same that was my working the five basically the five years I had a real job that was it i worked a real job after the pizza place for about five years got promoted about five times and then left worked for myself for the last five plus years now which is actually kind of crazy to think about but the second five years is when we made the second six years sorry the first six years pretty much my income stayed the same or my my net worth stayed the same the next six years from 2019 to 202 end of 2024 is when we made 14.7 million 10.6 in profit and then some of that again a lot of videos and people will say well I made $14.7 million it's like yeah that's topline revenue 10.6 was profit which is actually you know pretty crazy we averaged that's an average of $174,38 over a month for 5 years straight so there's ups and downs or like the lowest months are around 20 to 30K the highest month you had was 800 you know you average it out because the internet's crazy like that but did I take home 10.6 myself no i had a business partner for a good portion of that so you pair it down even if we were to say cut it in half to five and then there's you know business uh life expenses you know mortgage just living expenses food utilities all of that stuff so you can make an estimate on that so yeah it's it's a good lifestyle business to have it's we've really found ways to scale that like a startup so that's the whole thing i blog like a startup create a YouTube channel like a startup how do you create content in a simple niche simple videos how do you scale past 10 to 20K a month because a lot of creators get stuck most beginners get stuck at zero i was there for 12 years i learned about passive income in 2018 i didn't make a dollar until 2019 so there's that whole thing of someone else is doing it how am I supposed to be able to do it right and I've been there i remember reading the 4-hour work week Smart Passive Income podcast i followed these small blogs back in like 2007 2008 and I'm like I need to start I want to start something for myself i don't know what it is you just have to stay consistent create good helpful content help people and then monetize it by selling your own products affiliate marketing can be a part of it but that's getting a little bit harder today than it was 5 years ago so and then also you know there's just tweaks that there's a lot of things to learn but there's just little tweaks so like you look at it and it's like well I have to learn YouTube or content i have to learn how to capture leads send emails do sales maybe create an offer what's my mechanism of my offer how do I price it how do I collect payment how do I even use QuickBooks that was the lesson I had learned how do I do taxes i've gone through some horrible accountants until I found one I liked lot wasted a lot of money on that made a lot of mistakes i've been in stressful situations in my business or maybe life was more stressful with all this income than it was when I was making less so the the the key thing here is there's a couple things one if you're stuck at 10 to 20k you know we can help you scale and usually it's just a few tweaks if you're already there it like tweaking really the backend system so both how to get views how to get how to build an audience but it's usually if you can tweak the leads and sales mechanism with copywriting in the right things or the right VSSL the right offer the right hook the right pricing it doesn't require a ton of sales to make a lot of money you can coach and charge clients a good amount of money but the second thing is I want this channel to be a reminder that you don't have to be a millionaire to be happy ultimately I've been happy at any type of price income whatever in my life and you know a lot of people dream of someday if I only make it if I only get this thing to work then I'll be happy when really you can be happy today so that's something that a lot of not a lot of people talk about you know there's been some there's burnout when it comes to YouTube and the content hamster wheel as I call it you keep creating videos people keep commenting you're putting yourself out there and it can be somewhat challenging i'm not complaining by any means but I just want you to know like literally you can be happy today if you just you know go for a run enjoy your day don't think that by making all this more money it's going to make you happier cuz yes of course it will in certain ways it will remove stress from your life to not have to worry about high bills and how am I going to pay this month's mortgage obviously I'm not saying that what I'm saying is like a lot of people miss out on today by thinking that they're going to be happier by making this money in the future so I want this to be a realistic view of going from where I went $17,000 a bunch of student loans i remember paying off my student loans in Australia when I was traveling i just chucked the last 7K payment off i was like "Oo that's cool." But then making the money to 14 over 6 years you think you know you see these internet sensational stories and it's like no there was a lot of time it took a lot of learning in a career a lot of failures basically failing college working like 10 years of failure before there was a little window of of opportunity or something like that so hope you found the video useful kind of a raw reality type of video i like making these from time to time just to give you a little view into what it's like what I've been thinking about how you could potentially do it yourself so if you're interested in learning more you want if you have a course or coaching business and you want to scale it to the next level go from five figures to six make some tweaks make some changes I can help you with that click the link below like the video hopefully you liked it ask any questions that you have uh comment with anything i'll do my best to answer subscribe to the channel and I will see you in the next
