This is how I went from being a broke janitor who scrubbed toilets for living, to earning 6 figures in passive income online.
Mick Meaney here, and today I want to share my story so you can see the truth of what actually goes into building a successful Internet business. And so you can see that if I can do it, then anyone can.
But let me tell you, it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes years of grind, years of repetition, and years of providing value to people – without asking for anything in return.
If you’re ok with that, then maybe you have what it takes to build your own passive income business.
Despite what you may have been told, making passive income is anything but easy – at least in the beginning.
It’s going to take between 6 and 18 months to get traction.
I didn’t know that when I first started, way back in 1998. It was during the dot com bubble, and it felt like hundreds of people were becoming instant millionaires.
All while I was stuck in a dead end job that I hated. I so desperately wanted to fire my boss and get rid of my alarm clock.
But more than that, I worried about what people thought of me. I wondered if they thought I was a failure. Or if I was a bad provider.
But you see, while I was grateful to have a job, I knew I was capable of more than just scrubbing toilets.
Even in 1998, it was obvious that the Internet would create life-changing opportunities.
But there were no tutorials, no guides, no courses.
The closest thing we had was a website called WebMonkey from HotWired. It wasn’t updated very often and only provided basic introduction to topics.
I had to figure out most of it through trial and error.
And it was difficult.
But I stuck with it. Macromedia Flash was my weapon of choice.
Sure, in recent years Flash gets a bad rap, but in 1998 it was unlike anything we’d seen before. I knew there would be enormous demand for Flash websites.
And I was almost right.
For a short while everyone wanted a Flash website. I believed it would become standard web design practice once high speed Internet arrived.
And after a couple of years of teaching myself HTML and SEO, I somehow managed to get a career in digital marketing, working for the UK’s largest B2B Internet company as their Flash designer.
Finally, I had a decent salary and I could move to a better neighborhood.
Working in the corporate environment was en eye-opener.
But I still had a boss, and an alarm clock. I wanted my freedom.
The fact is, I didn’t attempt to go full time with my own website until 2004. Six years after I took my first steps on this journey.
And even then, I was barely surviving. Money was tight, but I did have my freedom at least.
I’d chosen a niche that I felt passionate about, it was a counter-culture blog. And I put every waking hour into building that website.
And then one day I realised, it’s all about the traffic.
I know it sounds obvious today, but at the time it was like everything clicked into place.
If you don’t have traffic, then you don’t have a business. So I made it my mission to get as much traffic as I could, from as many sources as I could.
It took three years of experimenting to really figure it out. And by that point, my little website was getting around four million hits a month.
Almost a decade after I started, I was finally in a position where I wanted to be. My competitors were reaching out to me, people that I’d always looked up to. Doors were opening. New opportunities were emerging.
Life seemed pretty good, and I started toying with the idea of teaching others how to get similar results, and hopefully save them from the same years of struggle that I went through.
So in 2010 I registered the domain name profitcopilot.com, and then did nothing with it for years and years and years. I had imposter syndrome but eventually I got over it, and started sharing what I’d learnt from my 20 years in digital marketing.
And now I’m feeling confident enough to step out from under a brand, and create content under my own name.
And let me tell you something I’ve realised. It’s not about the quantity of traffic, it’s about the quality.
I have found that you don’t need lots of traffic, you just need the right traffic. So I’m going to share my six figure journey with you, as I make passive income online, just by attracting the right type of traffic with inbound marketing.
It’s a diary of what life is like as an Internet entrepreneur.
I’m also going to show you behind the scenes, as I build new businesses. You’ll see the process from start to finish.
And I want to pay special attention to the mental health side of entrepreneurship. Basically the stuff that nobody wants to talk about, because it’s not glamorous.
You’re going to see the ugly side of entrepreneurship. The truth is often ugly.
I’m going to document my day, as soon as I wake up in the morning. You’ll see how I create content, the equipment I use, how I make products, the marketing that goes into selling them.
You’ll see everything, warts and all.
So if that sounds good to you, subscribe to my newsletter and drop me an email telling me what you want to see most in the series.