Why My First Business Was Failing & How I Fixed It

I started my first blog way back in 2010 and published a post every day for the first 50 days.

I was stoked. I thought I knew what I was doing.

But I had one big problem.

I had almost no traffic to my website. (And I had no clue how to get any.)

Around the end of those 50 days of publishing daily, a blogger I followed named Corbett Barr launched a course and community called Traffic School, to help bloggers gain more traffic to their website.

Now, this course was $500 and I wasn’t making any money from my website yet, so investing in learning from someone else who could help me accomplish what I wanted was definitely a risk. My day job was funding my hobby business at this point.

But if I didn’t commit then to signing up, taking the course seriously, and learning from an expert I might still be stuck working in a cubicle.

Through the program I learned how to actually get people to come to your website, how to build relationships with other bloggers, and publish guest posts on bigger websites. (Remember, this was 2011. The Internet, competition, and audience growth was different.)

In that program I met new friends, started a mastermind group, and my influence online started to grow from what I was learning and implementing.

Fast forward a few months later and I actually started working as a contractor for Corbett part-time for six weeks. Then he hired me full-time, which enabled me to quit my job at Boeing, just weeks after getting married.

We went on to work together for over 3 years, during which I helped launch Fizzle.co and I learned how to actually run a successful small business online.

Now, I’m not trying to say that if you buy one of my courses or sign up for my Freelance Filmmaker Accelerator Program your life is guaranteed to change forever (or that I’m going to hire you). That’s not the point I’m trying to make.

What I’m trying to convey is if you commit financially, sometimes that helps give you enough of a push mentality to make something finally happen. 

I’ve seen it with my wife when she invested in expensive cameras and lenses, which made her start to act more like the professional wedding photographers who were using the same equipment.

It’s the same strategy behind investing in a personal trainer to hold you accountable and get your butt to actually show up at the gym each week and put in a good work out.

If you’re on the fence about joining, I just wanted to share what it has been like for me to take some risks and invest in myself and my business over the last 8 years.

I’ve never regretted investing in learning from someone who has done what I want to do.

The doors for my Freelance Filmmaker Accelerator Program are closing in a few hours, tonight at Midnight Pacific.

Hope to see you inside.