Fruits of Labor

This is for all of you who know you want to achieve some kind of success working on your own and have your own business. No matter how long you’ve been thinking about it or trying, what I share here is relevant to you.

First, the Failures

I’ve been trying to achieve online success since 2004. My first project was called ComputerGamesNow.com. I did it for about 6 months before throwing in the towel and giving up – just as the site was starting to break even.

I did a LOT of hard work for it – I figured out how to make an entire e-commerce site by myself and work with a supplier to ship computer games. I hired a designer to make a nice site design and learned to do Google Adwords pay per click to drive traffic to the site.

But I threw it all away just as the site was starting to break even…

Does that make sense to you? Looking back, it doesn’t make sense to me. I had a working system going on that was starting to get to the point where it was going to make money. I learned pay per click marketing, figured out how to hook into a merchant account online, and really had a good thing going. But I threw it all away.

I’ve failed to get significant traffic to websites with a number of websites since then. Never have I gotten more than a couple hundred visitors a day.

Now One Is Starting To Gain Momentum

For 7 years, I’ve tried and failed. Part of it has been my lack of passion and desire. I quit my own business, ComputerGamesNow.com because I was afraid of the success and responsibility. That fear is gone now. My twin brother have been hard at work on a website for about a year now and it’s getting about 700 visitors a day now.

YouReview is our website. We’ve always talked about how nice it would be to really know where the best businesses, such as dentists, lawyers, restaurants, and more are without having to search extensively online. We also were disappointed with the current method of crowd sourcing many large review/aggregate sites use. Generally outsiders who write reviews and content are not paid at all.

We didn’t like this, so we created a website that lets people put their own Google Adsense in for reviews (yes, this is ok with Googles policies). We also let people put in a full link to an Amazon affiliate URL when reviewing a product. This lets people have a chance to earn income for their work.

The site is still in its infancy. We’re not sure how BIG it will get. There are plenty of review sites in the marketplace today, such as yelp.com and buzzillions.com. Yelp is the gold standard right now. But we think the gold standard could use some work. So we’re working on this website, just the two of us. And we’ll keep at it and see just how far the rabbit hole goes with it :)

It Will Take Time

I’ve always thought that true success takes time. I’m realizing now that it might take DECADES. At least for most of us mere mortals. Some people seem to only take months or a few years. Too bad we can’t all be that quick. Just give yourself time and daily progress and I believe you can make a success out of whatever you put your mind to.