How It All Began - Part 2

In Part 1 of this post, I described my numerous online successes that quickly turned to failures. After the fall of the online poker world, I decided that I had enough of online marketing and stuck to creating websites for small businesses. I used my cookie cutter templates and was able to sustain a living off of charging $100 to $500 per website.

To supplement my income during this period, I started a few niche blogs and sold links and reviews. This supplement started to turn lucrative and soon this was my full time job. I stopped building websites for others altogether and just created and maintained my blogs. This was time consuming, but fun.

Although I was paying the bills, this was not the business that was going to get me rich, so I kept my ears to the ground looking for my next major income opportunity. It cam where I least expected it.

For months a friend of mine was asking me to talk to a buddy of his. His buddy ran a "widget" manufacturing plant about an hour away. I kept putting it off because a) I had no interest in widgets and b) I had given up creating websites for others.

Finally one day I gave in and took the drive to the widget plant. After a 30 minute conversation about widgets, I realized that this was an industry that had potential on the Internet. They wanted to hire me to create their website so they could start selling widgets online, but I was interested in becoming more involved than just being their webmaster.

I held several meetings with them and we came to a handshake agreement. After that, I spilled the beans on my master marketing plan for thir... err our new online company. I could see the scheming in their eyes as I laid out the plans and then, not to my surprise, they told me the next day that they had decided to go it alone.

Thinking that this might occur, I purposely left out key elements of my marketing plan and they failed before they even got started. I was still interested in widgets.

I sought out their competition and made deals with other manufacturers. Within a week I had a product line. I'll get into how I started selling widgets online in my next post.

To be continued...