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- She went from $16 to $50 an hour in only 6 months 👩🏻💻
She went from $16 to $50 an hour in only 6 months 👩🏻💻
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
From $16/Hour to $50/Hour in 6 Months
Making 6 Figures, Working From Anywhere
$30K in 30 Days (Give or Take 6 Years)
Self-Talk of a $40 Billion Woman
The Hardest Part About Achieving a Dream
Teaching Math on Pornhub = $270,000 Per Year
Non-Expert Author: $160K Earnings
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From $16/Hour to $50/Hour in 6 Months
Melissa Boutilier was interviewed by Esther Inman about her journey from being a nonprofit manager to earning $50 an hour as a virtual assistant in just a few months 🚀
Melissa's background was in nonprofit management, which she enjoyed but found emotionally draining and high-burnout.
After relocating for a relationship that didn't work out, she struggled to find her footing career-wise 😕
My money situation was getting worse and worse and worse, just because I wasn't making the income I had been making. My expenses were growing and my income was way down. So I started racking up lots of debt.
One thing that didn't help…
I started network marketing… that was a very very very bad decision for me. That actually contributed to my intense debt.
(More about network marketing here)
Eventually Melissa was working 4 jobs just to stay afloat…
I would get up at 6 in the morning. I'd work from 7am until 9pm. [To say it was] really stressful was an understatement.
Melissa's health and relationship began to deteriorate 😔
She hit "rock bottom" when…
She had an unexpected pregnancy at age 39
Her partner left when she was 6 months pregnant
She had "a near-death experience" during childbirth
Wow.
At her low point, Melissa moved back in with her mom and went on disability due to her health issues. When her daughter was 5 months old, she started googling ways to work from home.
After some skeptical research, Melissa took a chance and invested her small savings into a course called 90 Day VA (reviewed here)...
I finished [the course] in three months… I followed everything to a T.
Within two weeks of finishing, she landed her first client at $16/hour 🥳
I was putting myself out there everywhere. I was talking about [my services] on social media, with people in real life, I was doing the Facebook business page, the Instagram page, I was doing lives, I was showing my face.
I was just announcing… I put myself out there everywhere that I could think of.
Melissa's first client was a real estate agent, via a local job board.
$16/hour wasn't a lot but she was happy to get started and gain experience.
And Melissa's business grew quickly from there 📈
My second job was $25 an hour and then my third was $34. And now it's like $50 [an hour] and I'm starting to get into flat rates.
Ultimately that journey from $16 an hour to $50 an hour took six months.
Melissa is still constantly on the lookout for new clients…
I'm at the health food store and I'm getting to know the manager… she's like I'm actually quitting to start my reflexology business… and I said oh I started as a virtual assistant… and then she hired me and I just did her photos and everything for her social media.
There's opportunities everywhere… I think I've turned down six or eight clients now [due to lack of time].
Melissa credits her success to putting herself out there on social media, being open to feedback, working on her mindset, and following the 90 Day VA course closely.
My main takeaway from her story: many people would turn their noses up at a $16/hour job 🙄
But Melissa saw that first gig as a stepping stone to much bigger and better-paying opportunities down the road 💪
Making 6 Figures, Working From Anywhere
Today's email is brought to you by Comprehensive Copywriting Academy.
That's a highly-rated copywriting course by Filthy Rich Writer 🤩
One student told us…
I can honestly say that without the CCA my copywriting business wouldn’t exist. Nicki walks you through everything you need to know, from the nuts and bolts of setting up a business from zero to how to write great copy.
Thanks to her guidance, I’m making six figures and can work from anywhere.
$30K in 30 Days (Give or Take 6 Years)
Marc Louvion tweets 👇
Just crossed $30k in revenue in 30 days.
I used to earn ~$1k a month for 6 years.
It's totally unreal...
This is your story too if you keep shipping, FAST ⚡️
Looks like most of that $30k came from a project called ShipFast which is a code template to help you build software faster.
Marc also tweeted...
13 days ago, ShipFa.st was a folder on my laptop...
Just ship it ⚡️
This reminds me of Daniel Vassallo’s 'sell your sawdust’ tweet.
Sawdust in the digital world can be anything you created as a byproduct of your work.
Marc created a template to ship his own products faster, and it apparently helped him ship 18 products in 18 months 🤯
He kept improving the template over time before deciding to release it as a standalone product.
And while you could argue that Marc has an unfair advantage with 37k followers on Twitter, he notes…
I started less than 2 years ago with 0 followers
Ship fast > inspire > grow an audience
And of course he mentioned that he was earning ~$1k a month for 6 years.
So really it took years of practice to earn that $30k in one month.
Back to the "sell your sawdust" thing, some other examples we've featured in the newsletter…
Have you created something as a side-effect of work… a PDF, Training Video, SOPs?
Could you package that up and sell it online? 🤔
Self-Talk of a $40 Billion Woman
🗂 From the archive, published October 2021…
Melanie Perkins is the co-founder and CEO of Canva. She started the company in Australia 🇦🇺 in 2008 and it’s now valued at $40 billion 💰
Back in 2018, Melanie posted an inspiring write-up of her journey on LinkedIn.
My favorite part is the note she wrote for herself during one of her “deepest darkest moments” back in 2011, when she was in San Francisco trying to find investors and recruit a team…
Mel, you’re extremely tired. You are in a challenging situation, though you can pull through. Nothing bad is really happening, you’re just feeling depressed because you are used to achieving things quickly. It’s a hard environment.
There is no doubt you will succeed and you will find the team you need, get the investment you need and build the company you have always wanted. You have chosen to put yourself in a challenging situation. If it wasn’t challenging you wouldn’t feel as satisfied when you get to the end goal.
That’s a beautiful example of positive and encouraging self-talk, the type of thing you’d like to hear from a wise and caring friend when you’re feeling down 🥰
If you were to write an encouraging note for yourself today, what would it say?
The Hardest Part About Achieving a Dream
When building a business, it can be tough to deal with the lack of certainty.
Does your idea have legs?
Will people actually pay for your product or service?
Can you afford to hire help?
But you might take solace in Alex Hormozi's words from a recent video 👇
The lack of certainty is actually what makes it worth it.
If you knew that you were going to succeed, it wouldn’t be worth doing to begin with.
The fact that you are uncertain when you start is what makes it worthwhile.
The fallacy of being in the pursuit is the worry that it won’t amount to anything… because who you were becoming is the thing that you are amounting to, in real time every day.
In other words, you don’t have to be perfect, and you don't have to arrive at some ideal destination to make the journey worthwhile.
You are learning and growing with every hour and every day you put into that journey, and that's amazing in itself 🥳
Related, words from a book called The Third Door by Alex Banayan…
Many times the hardest part about achieving a dream isn’t actually achieving it—it’s stepping through your fear of the unknown when you don’t have a plan… nobody achieves a dream from the comfort of certainty.
So, as an entrepreneur, your only real choice is to embrace uncertainty.
Teaching Math on Pornhub = $270,000 Per Year
Chang Hsu is a math tutor from Taiwan 🇹🇼 who has gained a large online following for posting calculus lessons on the adult website Pornhub.
He goes by the username changhsumath666 on Pornhub, and began uploading educational videos to the site in 2020.
He also started a YouTube channel around the same time and uploads similar videos there 👀
His unorthodox strategy came out of desperation, when Chang found himself $35,000 in debt. He apparently had a profitable tutoring business but his own staff turned against him…
They took all my students… so my cram school suddenly lost all its income and could no longer operate.
Chang was unable to pay off his creditors, and he was having a really tough time before deciding to teach online.
But competing with the barrage of tutorial videos on YouTube and other platforms proved challenging.
💡 That's when Chang had the idea to stand out from the crowded online education market by posting his lessons on Pornhub…
I asked myself where to find my target students, say college boys, and the answer popped out: adult video platforms.
The contrast of a nerdy math teacher on a porn site made Chang’s videos stand out big time ⚡️
News coverage of his story brought even more attention, with features in international media and an appearance on Pornhub's Instagram.
Chang would use clickbait titles containing naughty keywords to get his videos to show up in searches 🙈
As a result, his calculus lectures have amassed nearly 3 million views and 13,000 subscribers on Pornhub.
One news site reported…
Attracting unlikely students, Chang Hsu saw unprecedented traffic to his teaching material as more students purchased the courses on his websites.
In the end, Chang Hsu earned almost $270,000 a year via paid calculus classes on various platforms, helping him earn enough money to sustain a more decent living, and pay off his debts.
Chang was planning to move away from the site that made him famous…
The original intention behind putting my videos on Pornhub was to get everyone's attention. And now that I have what I need to take off, I can manage to tutor without being on Pornhub.
Although I checked and he still publishes few videos per week on there 😅
Anyway, by putting his videos "in the most jarring place," Chang was exploiting the contrast principle.
Some other examples of that in business…
Sales people will often use the contrast effect by showing you a poor quality product alongside the one that they want you to buy.
They might also show you a wonderful product that is way beyond your reach. When you compare your ideal purchase with this, you are then likely to re-evaluate it upwards. Then when you look at a range of products, you will chose higher up the scale than you might otherwise have done.
They will also sell you add-ons. For example when you buy an expensive car, the optional extras seem very cheap in comparison.
How could you use the contrast principle to boost your business? 🤔
Non-Expert Author: $160K Earnings
🗂 From the archive, published May 2022…
Greg Lim writes…
In about six years, I have sold over 40,000 books and earned over $160,000 (income) from selling non-fiction books on Amazon
That works out to an average of ~$2200 per month over the six years 😎
Greg has achieved that despite holding down a full-time job in church ministry, being a father of three, and not considering himself an expert on the topics he writes about.
His most profitable book: Beginning Node.js, Express & MongoDB
before writing the book, I did not have experience in that… I did have previous experience with older server-side technologies, but not Node…. So I read the top three selling books on Node, went through the top few online courses on Node, and compiled all that content into my very own compact book (which makes me know more than 90% of people already).
And because I was learning as I was writing, I didn’t have to worry about sounding overly advanced with jargon as I wrote from a beginner’s perspective.
Unlike many other examples I’ve highlighted of successful authors, Greg doesn’t seem to have leveraged a big audience of his own to drive initial sales.
Instead, he identified trending topics to write about – more about this in his article – and apparently relied on Amazon customers finding his book via search 🔎
If you love research and writing – and have plenty of patience – you could probably emulate Greg’s success in many other niches.
Thanks to Fardeen Khan for helping me write and research today's newsletter.
Hasta la próxima, rock on with your legendary self 💪
Niall Doherty – Canillo, Andorra
eBiz Facts (follow on twitter)
P.S. Today's email is brought to you by Filthy Rich Writer's highly-rated Comprehensive Copywriting Academy. Read our review or check out their free training for more info 😎
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