I Started My Business With $800 And Turned It Into Over $1,000,000 -- Here's How I Did It...

Entrepreneurs and small business owners everywhere want to know the secret to a successful business: What made it grow? How did it become successful?...

Louis Allport here, and I started my business with a small investment of $800 and to date it's earned over $1,000,000 in sales (and growing). I'm going to talk through exactly how that happened...

FROM $800 TO +$1,000,000: THE TIMELINE

Just six short years ago, I started my online business with a small personal investment of around $800. (Since I live in Britain, it was actually 600 British pounds.)

I didn't have a huge amount of experience prior to that. However, I understood the basic concepts and had been diligently practicing my copywriting. In one bold step I decided to leave the job I was in, live off my savings, and give this e-business effort a real go. I invested the $800 into web hosting, auto-responder/email-list management service, a payment processing account, and other things vital to having a web presence.

Within three months I had turned that initial investment into a full-time income of around $3,000 a month (before costs). Not a huge amount, but a start...

And over the next couple of years, the business grew somewhat slowly, but at that point things started happening more rapidly, and then -- quite quickly -- my business doubled and continued to grow...

As I look back, the first couple of years laid down the strong foundation that supported future growth and gave me the experience so I knew what to do when that growth happened.

EXACTLY WHAT I DID TO ACHIEVE SEVEN FIGURE SUCCESS

Okay, so you want to know the exact steps I took to hit the million dollar mark?

Affiliate Marketing

Well, a small part of it was through affiliate marketing (probably around 5%). (Affiliate marketing is where you promote other people’s products and services online through a special link. Visitors that click the link and become paying customers earn you a percentage of the sale as a commission.)

That is one way to make money, and I have done quite a bit of affiliate marketing over the years, but it's never been my main focus. What has been my focus is "Information Publishing", which is selling educational products like "How To" information in eBook format, on CDs, DVDs... etc.

Information Publishing: Membership Site

Initially I started a monthly membership site charging $29.95 a month. And what I found worked very well was offering a trial period. I played around with a number of different offers, but after a while stuck with $2.95 for the first 30 days then $29.95 a month until the customer cancelled.

I find that a trial period nearly always works if you are offering anything on recurring billing because it's moving risk away from the customer and onto you. Anything that moves risk away from the customer when making a buying decision is almost guaranteed to increase response. However, with a trial, the quality of the product is vital: If they don't like what they see during the trial, there is no way they are going to choose to remain a customer beyond it!

That membership site was offering exclusive eBook products that members could sell to others. The market the site was selling to was people looking to create extra income streams for their web business.

Information Publishing: Private Label Rights

Now after a couple of years of running the membership site, I also started offering private label rights (where you offer the source files to a product. This offers a lot more flexibility than just "resell rights").

And doing that doubled, if not more than doubled, my income. And that was simply by promoting my newest Private Label Rights offers each month to my email list.

And this is a very important point: All the eBooks that members had reprint rights to linked back to my site (through the affiliate link for that member so they got paid for the traffic). Because of that simple tactic I got a lot of traffic at no cost, and that continues to come in every day for years now -- anything from 100 to 500 visitors a day.

I sent a good percentage of those visitors to a page designed to get their name and email address, in return for some free valuable content. And this very simple tactic grew my email list by 20 to 30 subscribers a day, and as I write this, has built a list around the 15,000 mark (and there have been quite a few un-subscribes over the years, like any email list).

I then followed up on this list with private label rights offers, and that more than doubled my income.

Increase Income By Providing Added Value

Now, after doing this for a while, something became very apparent to me: I had been pricing my private label rights offers too low! Putting prices up is something every business owner wrestles with, since you're never quite sure what will happen when you do. So for new private label rights offers, I put prices up a lot, but I also offered a lot more value.

And this simple fact of charging more, and offering a huge amount of genuine value to justify the price, pulled in over $100,000 a year... from less than 100 customers.

So after doing that for about a year, I did something which I've done a number of times in my business: I took what I was already doing and I leveraged it to bring in a higher income!

I partnered with another marketer to bring my private label rights offer to a wider audience. I had the product and he had the marketing clout. Together, we turned the project that was making me around $100,000 a year, into a project that made over $500,000 in the first twelve months!

HOW TO APPLY THIS TO YOUR BUSINESS

Beginning with that initial $800 (with quite a bit of elbow grease, careful re-investment and cost management), I've turned it into over seven figures in sales without any other outside investment. All re-investment in the business has come from income that the initial seed investment of $800 produced.

So, what can you take away from this brief history of my business?...

 

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