Nathan Hangen

Guest Post Friday: You Can Go Your Own Way

A couple of years ago, I found myself unemployed due to downsizing in the the company I worked for where I was the Sales Manager. The owner of the company decided he didn’t need me and decided to let me go.

It was actually his idea that I start my own company and become his competition! So, that is exactly what I did. We remained good friends and looked at each other as colleagues, not competition.

When I started my small contracting business, I wasn’t scared or nervous because I had owned other businesses in the past. The difference was, my other businesses dealt with B2B sales/contracting, and this one was going to deal with homeowners and real estate agents more than other contractors/businesses.

Get A Blog

That is exactly what a good friend of mine suggested. Get a blog, write about your industry, products, and projects you are working on and have completed. After spending a couple of weeks looking at all my competition and there online presence, I decided he was right. I didn’t know anything about blogging, I didn’t know anything about social media, and I didn’t know anything about WordPress.

I paid a designer $1500 to design my first site/blog. This was the best advertising money I ever spent, and I haven’t turned back since. I essentially took a brand new business and a brand new website to the top of my local searches in less than 3 months. After that point, 100% of my business came from that website.

Easy Money

There is no easy money online, you might be tired of hearing that, but if you ask any successful online marketer they will tell you about countless hours testing ideas, countless hours researching, and countless days and nights on a computer. In that first 3 months, I spent 16+ hours a day working without making any money. I came close to giving up several times, as I am sure many of the A-List bloggers we all look to for ways to “make it big”. I didn’t give up though, I kept going and made an offline business work for me online.

Social Media

I was in an industry that didn’t even know what social media was, but I did. I signed up for every social networking site I could find. Some say I wasted a lot of time on it, but I look at it as research. I found a few that actually worked for me. The main two were Twitter and LinkedIn. I lived in a high tech city (Raleigh NC) where IBM, Sun MicroSystems and many other tech companies were. This meant that there was no shortage of what I called “tech-heads” in the area.

I followed everyone I could find in my area using search on Twitter to find people locally. To my surprise, when I went to Tweet-ups, BloggerBashes, and other meets locally, these people remembered who I was. They were impressed that I was “taking a low-tech industry to high-tech levels”. I had a few articles written about me by a couple of prominent people in social media (which did nothing except make me feel good about what I was doing).

Essentially, those connections remembered me every time a neighbor or a friend mentioned needing the kind of work I did. So, don’t let anyone tell you that your industry doesn’t fit into Twitter or other social media.

E-Commerce

In October 2009, I sold my websites (I ended up building several) and contracting business, mostly due to the housing crisis. I had toyed around with the idea that I wanted to sell the products I had been installing and have them shipped directly to customers across the country. One of my manufacterers I was already working with actually suggested it to me. I found a couple more manufacturers to work with me, and next thing I knew I had well over a thousand products to choose from.

Long story short, I built a site and in less than 4mos, that site is my main source of income. Sounds easy right? Again, I spent day and night sitting in front of my computer, and I still do.

More Than One Way To Skin A Cat

The point of this article is to let you know, you don’t have to copy anyone else to make a living marketing online. I was a fence contractor and took my experience and knowledge to the Internet. I now sell fence products, I have them shipped to my customers all across the country. You don’t have to be an affiliate marketer, you don’t have to have an AdSense site, and you don’t have to build membership sites or write e-books to make a living online. Yes, there are people doing great using those techniques, what I am saying isn’t that you can’t do that but that you should look closely at what you are good at and what you enjoy.

Use your experience and credibility you have built up in whatever business you have been involved in, trust me when I say this, you have a better chance of success and you will most likely have more passion for your work.

Keith is a passionate blogger that writes at Hot Blog Tips where he writes about blog tips, using his experience over the last 2yrs to try and help other bloggers. You can find him on Twitter most anytime.

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