Failure Required

I’ve always asked myself, “Why blog?”, and the truth is I still don’t know the full answer to that. I wanted to start this simply to share my story as I go through the process of trying to build an income online. I thought two things: 1. I am more likely to stay on top of things by keeping this blog and documenting my journey. 2. Hopefully, when I do become successful in my goal, someone may actually come across this one day and get value from reading it and maybe even replicate it for themselves. I plan to share the things I have learned from my years past and the new things I learn along this journey.

I have always had an infatuation with earning an income or really any sort of money online. I have chased this for a long time. For years I have tried the hot new thing or new trend with making money online. What I would end up doing is starting something and never see it through. The return was never fast enough and life would get in my way. I would never give myself the time or the discipline to just sit down for a few hours a day and stick to the path I was on. Had I done that with any of the things I tried I probably wouldn’t be writing this now. That is the first lesson I want to discuss in the next post, for now lets go on the journey.

Affiliate marketing was huge in the early days of my online venture. Everywhere I looked I saw someone making $10,000, $20,000, even $100,000 a month with affiliate marketing. I was a young and dumb kid but I still had my doubts about this level of wealth. But the kid in me thought “but what if.” What if these people are actually making this kind of money? How can I get even a sliver of that? At the age I was at, $1000 a month would’ve been a ton. I found this site, I don’t even know if it exists anymore, called Wealthy Affiliate. I convinced my mom to pay the $50 a month fee for at least one month. “There are people making $10,000 a month mom I can pay you back just watch.” She gave me the money. For the first month I studied and I studied and I worked and I worked. I created a blog, just like I am now. I posted my blog to reddit and facebook, getting myself banned left and right for posting links. I followed the program but wanted that $10,000 now. So much so that I stopped writing and stopped the program before the second month even started. Online net worth: -$50.

Next I would discover drop shipping. “You mean I can sell products that I don’t even have to pay for or stock myself?” This sounded like a dream come true. Sell someone else’s product for more than what they would charge me? Easy. Ironically, at the time I didn’t see the similarity to affiliate marketing that this had. No audience, no sell. For this I went the free route. YouTube tutorials. This was my ticket to financial freedom. Or so I thought. I created a free Shopify store. Found products on AliExpress to sell. Marked them up. Had an entire webpage full of products ready to launch. I decided I was going to spend a few dollars to even run a Facebook ad with what I believed to be a winning product. The portable jump starter battery pack. Years before these were really popular and seen everywhere. I created the ad and hit run. A few hours later I went to see how it was doing. Bright red letters showed me “Ad violates terms of service.” Dang. No ads for this or on this account ever again. I was so defeated I scrapped it all. Canceled my Shopify store. Deleted my facebook page. Went on to search for the next thing.

Not too long after this I ran into print on demand. Print on demand is where you create a design for a product like a t-shirt, coffee mug, can cooler, etc. and you upload the design to the product on a print on demand website. You then list this product for sale somewhere people will shop. I chose Etsy and I chose can coolers. At the time, AI was brand new and image generation was big. I knew that if I tried hard enough I could create AI art to sell. The big trend at the time was flowers. Specifically water color flower patterns. I learned how to create these patterns with AI and drafted up 6 different patterns with different colors for can coolers and posted them to my Etsy shop. I then decided to run ads through Etsy. At a monstrous rate of $1 per day. I kept like this for maybe two weeks then it happened. “Mary has sent you a message.” I quickly go on my phone and read the message. “Is this for a standard 12 oz can?” I instantly replied, “Yes Mary, this can cooler will fit a standard 12 oz can.” A few minutes later boom. “An order has been placed by Mary.” My first sale. My heart was racing. $11 on a flower can cooler. Wow. How much profit you ask? $2. That night I designed 10 more and posted them. I didn’t sell anymore and ended my ad campaign after a whopping $7 spent, not including the $3 I spent on listing the products. After all this, total online net worth: -$52 and more heartbreak.

For a while the idea of making a living online stayed stagnant in my mind. It seemed like an unobtainable goal. I would still see the videos and read the blogs of people being successful doing the same things. More people each day it seemed. Thats when it really hit me one random day. All these people talking about it and showing it off are probably only making money doing exactly that. They didn’t make $40 million drop shipping. They probably make $500 per YouTube video talking about doing it though. That’s a business I refused to get in. I never cared about getting people’s attention or showing off. I wouldn’t care if I made a million dollars and nobody ever knew. But if I can actually help someone do something I did and get a similar or better result than me, that’s when I would do it. Thats what this whole thing is. My journey. Full disclosure as of writing this I am not there yet. No where near. Not even in the same ballpark some would say. But hopefully one of these posts one of these days will say I did this and here’s how you can too.

I went on to join another course in copywriting and thought, “wow this is definitely it.” I had finally found the one. I go through the whole course, practice my copy over and over, I’m posting my work in a discord with others in the space to get feedback, I’m doing all the right steps. Then came the part of the course talking about how to actually earn using copy. Sell your skill to a business in need of it. I thought oh good the easy part. Wrong. The way that was taught in the course was to scrape an email lead site for relevant business owners and their contact information, put this in an excel sheet, use an email program to send a personalized email to each one. I gathered 200 names and businesses, wrote up the perfect email, sent it out. I waited a few hours and checked my email. Nothing. The next morning I followed up. A few hours later I checked again. One response. “I’m not interested and please do not contact me again.” This was at a time when time itself was a hot commodity for me. I was in college, playing a sport, had workouts in the morning, class until after lunch, practice until dinner and homework to do after. This one response was enough for me to accept defeat and call it quits until I had more time. If anyone reading this knows anything about cold outreach, you know 200 is nothing but definitely enough that with good copywriting should warrant at least one response. Total online net worth: $-102.

The next year or so I once again watched and read and learned and learned. Consume consume consume. That’s all I did. Learning with no application. With the introduction of AI to the public with ChatGPT, I thought there’s no way I can’t do it now. This thing has the answer to everything, surely it can tell me what to do to make this dream a reality. Wrong again.

I decided shortly thereafter I would go back to Etsy print on demand and this time try hats. Simplistic one word or phrase hats were all the craze and selling like crazy on Etsy. I decided to give it a go once again. I designed multiple hats. Some similar to popular ones, some following trends of viral content online, some just simply dad hats with the word “dad” on them. I quickly threw the store together and uploaded my designs and once again turned on my whopping $1 ads. About a week later I got an email. “You made a sale on Etsy.” Again, I was ecstatic. Finally this is my ticket to financial freedom. I looked at the receipt. $29. Not bad, where’s it going? Canada. I had the bright idea that people would buy more with free shipping unknowing that Canada’s shipping rates from the US were outrageous. Not to mention the print shop I was using has a first time order digitization fee of $6. All said and done it was $36 to fulfill the order. Great. Another $7 lost. I tried some different things here and there and actually sold 4 more hats each different so each one costing that dreaded $6 fee. After everything this Etsy venture cost me a $15 loss and tons of time. Online net worth: $-117.

That brings me to now. What can I do? I have graduated with no intention to use my degree. I have more time and the knowledge of my other failed ventures. But thats why this is called failure required. You see, failure isn’t something that’s exactly negative all the time. I learned a lot of valuable lessons losing nothing serious. I’m essentially in the same boat I was in before just with more experience and more knowledge. Better life lessons learned and a new mindset on life. I have the confidence now to make this work. I listened to podcasts and read books, understanding every level and aspect of business and how to be successful in creating one. It’s not as complicated as it sounds. Or so I’m told. But ultimately I will fail. It’s inevitable. Failure isn’t just required, it’s encouraged. Without failing, are you even really trying? That’s my goal through my next business venture. Fail as hard and as often as I can. Try so hard that failing seems imminent. Through this failure I will learn and grow. And if it does work, that’s when I will have great success. Next I plan to write about how failing is failing until you quit and quitting should never be an option.