from the outside the road to success always seems so easy right people say yeah he already has a successful business what does he know like what kind of problems does he have but the reality is that it’s never like I want to go from here to there and it’s easy now it’s actually not easy at all there’s a lot of hurdles in the way a lot of bumps in the road and that’s why I think it’s important to stress out or to sort of point out the five biggest lessons that I’ve learned over the last 15 years as an online entrepreneur that got me from zero to where I am today so just in case we haven’t met before my name is Willie cry and I’m an online entrepreneur from the Netherlands as you can probably tell by my terrible accent I apologize for that but I’ve been working online for over a decade now as an online entrepreneur and over during that time I’ve started various businesses I’ve sold various businesses and we acquire tens of thousands of customers worldwide to online marketing now I don’t want this to be about me I wanted this to be about you I want to show you how you can grow your business so let’s just let’s just dive into it first let me tell you a quick story of how I got started online so I was 16 years old it was back in 2002 which in online terms is like ages ago right and this is actually a funny story at least a lot of people seem to like this story anyway so I was 16 years old 2002 it was and at that time the movie the matrix was super popular here and in that movie every character had the wrong pair of sunglasses right and being a 16 year old boy I wanted to have one of those as well but here in the Netherlands there were nowhere to be found so I went looking online and I found it a company in the United States which for me was the other side of the world right I actually sold those sunglasses so I figured hey if they’re not being sold here in the Netherlands but they are in the US then maybe there are other people like me who want to have those who want to have those sunglasses so let’s let’s try to sell them right now I was 16 years old like I said so I didn’t have any money so I couldn’t just say well I’m going to buy those sunglasses and then I’m going to sell them online or sell them anywhere because I didn’t have the money to actually buy them right so what I did was I put up an ad online and I told people like hey you can you can buy these sunglass or me you’ll you’ll have to pay me first then after a while I’ll had like a month of order periods then after at the end of the month I’ll do an order in the US then left I have to wait two months in order for the sunglasses to go back to me because of the shipment time by sea and then after those two months I’ll set I’ll send you your sunglasses so they’ll have to put their trust with me the future has send me their money and then wait for like three months before they would get their sunglass back now the thing is that I was expecting to sell a couple of sunglasses so I would maybe have my sunglasses for free right now what actually happened is that we actually did 17th or I say we I mean me and my parents I did actually 17,000 euros worth of sunglasses of sunglasses that are six euros each so the whole house was filled with sunglasses which was sad which is another story actually so we sold 17,000 euros worth of sunglasses being a 16 year old kid and what while I was selling these all of this up I didn’t even tell my parents yet right so at some point I need to say my parents hey listen like I I just received 17,000 euros worth of sunglasses and we need to say I need to send that over to the US in order you know hoping that I will then get a box of sunglasses back instead of a box filled with stones for example now at this point online shopping wasn’t a thing yet like it wasn’t big especially for my parents who are pretty much old fashioned they were both farmers I live I used to live in the countryside so they were not happy but being there also entrepreneurs so they supported me and they said alright sure we’ll do it you know we’re gonna wire that money and we’re just gonna put the trust there and if it’s if this goes out so be it we’ll just have a lever go for it and everything went right everything went really well and at the end I learned tons tons of lessons I didn’t make any money out of any profit out of it because of something I did not foresee that’s once again another story but the most important thing is that and that’s the minute the main lesson I want to share with this story is that you gotta solve a problem like if your business doesn’t solve a problem you’re making it’s too hard for yourself like the I I found I stumbled on the problem that people wanted to have these sunglasses but there were nowhere to be found in that land so by getting them to the Netherlands I solved a problem that’s really the first lesson that I want to give a gift to you make sure your business solves real problems so for the following years I kept doing e-commerce by importing all kinds of products from all over the world and selling them here in the Netherlands and I realized that my passion wasn’t really with making all those packages or with the customer support or all of that but my passion really was with online marketing so I started looking online to see what I can do with that like right and I stumbled upon Google Adsense and a whole new world opened up for me I mean you can actually make money if people click on your ad well apparently yeah so what I said what I started doing a lot was I started a lot I started creating a lot of websites and I started to ranking them in Google right it was doing a lot of SEO and all I did was on those websites were filled with Google Adsense banners and it went really really well I mean I’m not a big fan of sharing numbers as some people do that’s fine I just I’m not a big fan of it but if like even in today’s standards I was doing really really well I went I like I was on the king of the world plus at least that’s how I felt and at some point boom like my adsense account got shut down because apparently you can only have three Adsense banners I had like five or six on every page which is me being selling my own mistake but I went from doing really well to absolutely zero literally overnight so I started thinking like first I started crying but after I started thinking what can I do and I realized that having you know I was relying just in Google Adsense so I figured I’m gonna do affiliate marketing not the kind of info marketing products or anything like that but like real tangible products or in the Netherlands like like holidays or mobile phones or mortgages or anything like that so instead of focusing on Google Adsense being my monetization strategy I had a bunch of affiliate networks so I idea was like if one of them stops or one of them you know doesn’t want me anymore or one of them goes bankrupt or whatever no problem at all so you think I was safe right well guess what like 99% pretty much all my traffic at this point I stopped doing SEO and I started doing a lot of Google AdWords so 99% of my it was from Google AdWords guess what boom there was a new quality score update and basically long story short all my traffic dried up literally overnight again so I was once again back to square one and I was once again I was doing really really well but like this took me a couple years were copied years after the Adsense incident so who doing really well back to zero literally overnight once again round two so that really taught me a really really important lesson I think maybe even one of the most important ones is that never rely on one source or one thing in your business always have a backup no matter whether it’s a traffic source your service your email company whatever it is always have a backup in place never rely on one source for any part of your business so when the advert slab happened I was fully focused on getting my master degrees on marketing management so I decided to first finish what I started first get my degree and then start a new business from scratch so that’s what I did so after half a year when I got my degree I said to myself hey I’m going to a new environment and I gave myself six months to start a new business from scratch so I went to Sydney in Australia which by the way is my favorite city of all I love to travel love meeting new people but that’s another story so went to Sydney Australia are higher than office in downtown city centre and I said to myself hey I’m gonna start a new goal a new business and I have the goal of getting X amount of dollars every single month so it was really just about how much money would I make right and I had like an exact figure in my mind that I that I wanted to hit so I went there I read full of energy new in new new environment new new everything and I had the experience right I started various businesses in the past which were really successful so I can do this right I I’m gonna crush it and so I started working and one man one man one month went by two three four and I went nowhere and I don’t mean nowhere as in I’m not hating my goals no no where as in not a single dollar made like not at all so I was I was I was to be honest I like I was in an awesome country but I was feeling down and I was feeling desperate and I had no idea what to do so I’m not sure why but at some point III started a side project which wasn’t focused on making any money at all I was doing a lot of Facebook marketing at the time at least learning about it and I realized there was a there was a gap in the marketplace so I heard someone from our desk to build me a plugin which was called WordPress for Facebook at the time so I gave it away for free just enter your email address and that’s it here it is you just go download it and after a while like this was a side project it was not like this wasn’t not business for me right it was just like something for from outside the stuff that I was doing to make money so I gave the blogging away for free people started opting into my email list and after a while I started looking at the numbers I’m like hey there’s a couple thousand people who signed up to download this free plugin Wow maybe I should do something with that so I hired the same guy again and he built me wordpress for facebook Pro which was like a better even better version and this was but this was around the end like literally at the end of the six-month period that I gave myself and still I had nothing to show for it nothing nothing went how I was hoping it would go so I remember it was this last week in the office early glitcher the last week I hired the office because right after the weekend I would fly back home to the Netherlands and the last week I went crazy because I wanted to finish that plugin and on the sales page and all of that that week so I can send that out to that email list and I had no idea how to sell something by email right I just so I’ve been just been working working working and that last Friday Friday night we were going with some friends we would have like a goodbye party you know I’m goodbye party and all of that with a barbecue and olz style and just before I closed down my laptop I was done like the sales page were already everything was done I press send I literally press sent on the email to let all those people who opted in before letting them know hey here’s here’s the pro version of what you downloaded first you know here you had the free version here’s a pro version and you can buy it right if you want so I set hit Send and then I was taking some stuff from from for my for my desk and put it in my back and I looked at my laptop and I was Bing Bing Bing or the scam and I was like super excited and I mean like I let that night I went out went out my friends to celebrate you know the last last last night together because I was coming back home after and that night or I was checking my phone I made more than that half a year combined in total so I was just I was amazed and that really taught me a super valuable lesson that said you should always lead with give value first and then reap the rewards after that don’t just try to make money don’t go for a monetary goal because money is non so you shouldn’t just focus on making money because that’s insane focus on giving value giving value first and then the rest will follow and that’s really the biggest lesson I learned from that like all the things I did just to make more money didn’t work and as soon as I started providing value just give value away for free that’s when everything changed so that’s really the big lesson that I want to share with this one so after I got back home I treated that part of the business that the Peregrine’s selling business as my core business and I was working on that for a couple of years until I got an email from this company that I never even heard of before but they were an investment company basically and they wanted to buy the whole company they want to buy it all and I have sold various smaller companies in the past but not never something like this not never something like this big right so there was a lot of thinking a lot of consideration a lot of and going back and forth and was a long stressful process actually but at the end of the day we made a deal when they bought the whole company right so including the same that the staff same people the whole product everything in the business was theirs except for my time basically and after a couple months I kept checking them and I kept checking how they were doing because it still felt like my baby right even though it was theirs but it felt like my baby and I was looking at hey how are they doing and everything went south like at the same team same product like an awesome product what went wrong what what happened and I started talking to some of our previous customers who were now their customers and they they told me that their custom spurred support sucks excuse my friends but they did not treat their customers with the respect they deserve right and that really reminded me of a really valuable lesson is that you should always treat your customers with the respect they deserve and you really care about your product the same way as you care about yourself basically if you really care about your customers and they feel that they know it then it’s one of the easiest way to stand out people remind that people love a good customer support and people love you know being treated fairly so whatever you do really care about your customers and you’ll stand out right away so all of this have it a few years ago and once again I was able to start a new business from scratch and this time though I didn’t want to spend a couple of years building it to get to the same point where I used to be and so I knew I have to change something right and up to this point already I always hired people for the things that I couldn’t do myself so I hired developers on a project basis I hired graphic designers on a project basis but that was about it like everything I could do myself I just do myself because I lo I’ve always been this control freak like I want to do it this way my way right and at this point it was time for me to let that go basically so I started hiring more people to grow the company to help me grow the company faster than I could do on my own and that really like before when I started doing that it was super scary like I told him to do this and they did it their own way and not my way and I was like god no you should do it differently and so there was definitely some things that I needed to learn in that process but again in the end of the day like I could have never grown my business this far or my like never ever it’s like right now for example or our business is like 15 at 15 people’s law 15 people on a full-time basis plus various people on a project or like freelance basis and like I’m super grateful from a team like they’re the best and they do things much better than I can and yeah like I would have never been able to grow the business this big without those people so this is like the fifth big lesson that I want to share with you is don’t try to do it yourself get people to help you out so there you have it the five things that helped me grow my business to where it is today make sure to solve problems never ever rely on just one thing in your business give away value first then reap the rewards care about your customers don’t try to do it all by yourself I hope this helps and I hope it inspires you if you’ve been following me for then you know that usually I sent out the actionable advice right the nitty-gritty when I marketing to help you grow your business now this time though I really wanted to focus on these five critical elements because I can tell you everything I know about driving traffic I mean we we’ve sent millions and millions and millions of people through our photos using pretty much every traffic source there is available right but I can I can show and teach you all of that but it wouldn’t matter if you don’t have these five critical elements in place in your business and that’s why I’m really sharing this video here for you today so once again I hope it helps and I hope you have an awesome day chest bye bye
