Friends, family, well-wishers…
A lot has changed.
In 2018 when I started this side hustle, sure, I had dreams of this happening. But I don’t know if I ever pictured myself getting here.
When I quit my stable $78K/year job last July, I certainly didn’t think I’d get here so soon.
Things didn’t start off all that great after I quit.
In August 2020, I only made $1,800 (about half of what I needed to survive).
But if you know anything about me, you know, I had been saving up for a while in anticipation of a slow start.
I knew I needed about $2,800 to cover my basic expenses and about $4,000 if I wanted to live a semi-comfortable life and continue contributing to my long-term savings.
In my master financial plan, I anticipated it taking about a year to get to that level and I was okay with it.
Wow…
I was wrong.
Before I did anything right, I did something massively wrong.
I had committed to taking this business very seriously. And according to the research and beliefs I held at the time, that meant spending money on advertising.
On September 30th, 2020, I launched my big online course, Job Search Institute, and I was determined to sell that with a perfectly designed sales funnel.
The plan was this:
1. Use Facebook Ads to drive random people who didn’t know me to a quiz I created
2. Use the Quiz to help people find out what was wrong with their resume
3. Use those Quiz Results to sell people on taking Job Search Institute to fix their resume, etc
There were a few problems with this…
- Random people who you don’t know will not buy anything from you online
- Facebook Ads were costing me about $900/month (a huge chunk of my income)
- I was panicked by how much money was flying out of my account every day
Then something changed… Then everything changed…
I had been dabbling with the idea of posting on TikTok to promote myself as a resume writer.
My first couple videos were total flops because…
I thought that TikTok videos had to be funny / quirky, and I came up with what I thought was a solid comedic skit about job searching:
It got 300 views and I got… slightly discouraged.
A month or so later, toward the end of October, I decided to try TikTok again and this time, just talk to the camera and give some genuine job searching advice.
And my life has not been the same since.
That first successful video garnered 250,000 views and about 2,000 new followers in a week.
Needless to say, I started creating TikTok content at a furious pace.
Within a month, I was up to about 15,000 followers and now, 6 months after that first successful video, I have over 127,000 Followers!
Here’s where it gets really cool
Unlike the random people who were taking the Quiz that I paid Facebook to show them, these TikTok followers were actually getting to know me and trust me through my videos.
And then they started asking me for help.
So I posted my courses and services and everything on my TikTok profile and suddenly, the clients and course sales were rolling in… literally every day!
By December, I had surpassed the salary I was making at my old job…
Then in January, I made $10,531 (I had never made more than about $6,000 in a month before).
In February, I made $9,160,
In March, I made $14,218
And in April, I made $13,256
Here’s a breakdown of what that March income looked like:
Resume / Cover Letter / LinkedIn Services: $9,601.05
Interview / Job Search Coaching: $2,013.52
Selling Resume & Cover Letter Templates: $1,418.81
Video Course Sales: $1,184.64
And since then, I have added 2 more sources of income:
Influencer Marketing: Brands have started to reach out to me to ask me to talk about their products on my TikTok videos which is really cool!
Entrepreneurial Coaching: I now have clients who I am helping to building service / coaching-based businesses just like me. Speaking of which…
My Next Big Venture
I’m not 100% sure where this is going yet. I’m leaning toward creating a course and expanding on the 1-on-1 entrepreneurship coaching that I’ve been doing. I just know I want to share my path to success because it is very replicable!
To Learn More…
If you want to see how I found success and/or you’re interested in learning how you can do the same for yourself (which you absolutely can), I’d highly encourage you to check out my latest FREE e-book!
