Going From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be

Yesterday I did the webinar on how to make cool professional charts in Microsoft Excel. It was my first webinar and it went very well. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. There were a couple of seconds when the audio was lost, but it was due to my internet connection. I was live streaming the training to the 19 who showed up out of the 92 people who registered. They could see in real time what I was doing and hear my voice. And I answered their questions. It was a great experience for me and I can't wait to conduct another webinar.

Today, I'll be talking on how you go from where you are to where you want to be.

image: funsporting.com

About three years ago, I was struggling to get freelance jobs and a secondary source of income. I had been blogging for 3 years then but my blog wasn't generating any income. I was getting about $1 per month. Nothing I tried worked. I looked back at my life to figure out what I have done before that worked that I could do again. During my NYSC I had freelanced as a private Mathematics tutor. While in the University I had contributed poems and articles to an international family magazine for a small money in return. So I called my graphics designer friend and told him to make me beautiful business cards that show me as a Mathematics Tutor. He made me very expensive and beautiful cards. I shared the cards at Mega Plaza, VI and other places on the Island. I got some interested parents who were pleasantly surprised that I teach only Mathematics and by the high quality cards I use. But I couldn't manage it with my day job. Then I put together samples of my best writing, printed them at the rate of N200/page and used an expensive courier (FedEx) to mail them with a personalized pitch letter to Punch, The Nation, ThisDay and Vanguard. I had called and researched whom to address the letters to. I got no reply.

Then I looked online for what people were doing online to make money with little creative efforts. It was around the time YNaija was getting very popular. So I said to myself, "Here is a website that is simply copying articles from newspapers and other sites around the web, and they are doing great. I have been killing myself to come up with creative unique articles and seeing little result. I am going to start a new blog and post news articles from Punch, ThisDay, The Nation and Vanguard." And that I did. I started http://nigeriadaily.blogspot.com/ and in less than a month I was getting more than double the traffic on my three year old blog. By the second month it was making me an impressive sum of money. I started a facebook page, www.facebook.com/nigeriadaily, and a twitter account, http://twitter.com/nigeriadaiily,  to complement the blog. The results were great and by far better than what my three year old blog was producing. But I wasn't happy. I hated the fact that I was only doing this for the money it would generate for me. Even though I had sorted out the copyright issue by posting only part of the news article and putting a ...continue reading  that linked back to the original article, I still felt like I was doing something wrong. So in the third month I stopped. I deleted all the posts and left only the original research posts I had once put up on the blog. I lost the monthly revenue it would have kept generating for me and I gave up trying to make money from blogging.

But out of the ashes of that failed venture something remarkable arose. I had left the Facebook and Twitter pages, hooked them directly to Punch, The Nation, ThisDay and Vanguard websites. So I was freely promoting their posts and sending traffic directly to their websites. The same newspapers that ignore me and my expensive pitch. It was saddening. I stopped checking the Facebook and Twitter page. Then one day I went on the Facebook page and was surprised to see over 600 people had liked it. A page I wasn't actively managing. They were even leaving me thank you messages and asking that I share more news articles with them. So I went on the Twitter one too and saw that it had also grown all by itself. 

Today, I now have more freelance/consulting jobs than I can handle. The Twitter account has over 12,800 followers and I use it to promote my training and blog subscription. 

I am not close to where I want to be yet, but I have learnt that when going from where I am to where I want to be, it doesn't matter how much things I do wrong or how hopeless things seem or how many doors get slammed in my face. It doesn't even matter if the steps I take don't look big enough. All that matters is to keep doing something in the direction of my goal.