How To Build Your Online Business Chapter 1 How I Got Started

I'm going to show you all kinds of cool stuff, and I'm going to tell you the story of how I got started, show you the different tools that I started with, what I'm using now. And it's really a neat deal. I have a lot of fun doing this. Five years ago, I never dreamed I'd be doing what I'm doing today. And I want to tell you the story, not to bore you to death, but so you get an idea of how this all evolved. I've done a lot of different jobs over my life, had several different professions, and in 2008, I bought a helicopter. This is my second business. That was my second business. Prior to that, I owned a towing service for about 10 years, and I got into heavy duty trucks. So I had a lot of equipment that was very expensive to operate. Lots of breakdowns, high insurance, high maintenance with the semis and the trucks. And then I did it again with the helicopter. And I could tell you that I'm gonna be completely honest, I had pretty good credit when I bought the helicopter. And after four years of trying to operate it, I was desperately broke at the end because I was trying to keep the business going. I drained my savings, drained my retirement, sold off property, did everything that I could to try to keep it going until it just got to be too much. And in the end, I got an offer on the aircraft, and I didn't want to take it because I wanted to try to keep going. And I realized now it was the best thing I ever did. So to get to the online part of it, while I still own the aircraft, I was operating my own helicopter company, and I was flying helicopter EMS for an EMS base. While I'm working there, a new pilot comes in and. And his name was Nick Logan, and Nick was a helicopter pilot like me, and also an Internet marketer on the side. And pretty quickly we become friends and start talking. And I hear him in the other room talking about marketing, and I asked him about it. I said, hey, do you help little companies like me? You know, one guy, one aircraft, do you help us? Guys like us market? And he said, absolutely, that's what I do. And he said, if you're not blogging, doing videos on social media, you're falling behind the game. And this was in 2010. Prior to that, I was the guy that didn't like technology. I couldn't understand why anybody would want a laptop or why you needed a laptop. Not alone an iPad or a smartphone. I was totally not into the tech stuff or computer Stuff. So Nick convinces me to get a blog and he sells me the blog along with about, I think 10 hours of training. And he was together with a group of four other guys and they sold you the blog and the series of videos to help you get started. And he loaned me this little camera right here, flip video camera. And I made my first video with this camera sitting in my trailer broke, trying to figure out how to survive with this camera sitting on top of a cereal box. And I took this video down a few years ago because it was on YouTube and it was so horrible that I just couldn't take it. So my latest blog post is I own a helicopter and I live in a trailer. And it's just, it's a point of what we go through to live out our dream and our love for helicopters. And what I'm really getting at is some of the hardships that you're going to endure along the way, particularly going through the training and, and getting your first start is kind of where I'm really going. So stop by our new blog@fwhihelicopters.com and check it out and let's talk about it. So looking back, one of the first no nos is don't have your whole entire head in the camera. I learned that in some other training that we'll talk about later. So my point is, what I've done online all started with this little tiny flip video camera that was borrowed. I started with nothing, started making some videos, and now I make my living online. So back to the story. I start blogging, I start doing these silly videos and I went through the training and just did what they told me. You know, for the blog they're telling you how to do videos and giving you all these tips. And I just got started with it and I started blogging, doing all this stuff, trying to market my helicopter business on the side. And pretty quickly, even though I wasn't very confident at it, I got hooked on it and I really started to enjoy it. So I'm trying to market my helicopter business again as going down the tubes. I'm supporting it with my full time job. It's draining all my money there too. Towards the end of owning that aircraft, I started an online helicopter ground school, which Nick Logan was the one that suggested that to me. After I started doing the blogging and the videos, he said, you should start an online ground school and base it on your notebook. So I did that, started the online ground school, based it on my notebook, launched that March 1st of 2012 and now over three years later, I have over 400 paid customers worldwide. I have 1400 free members at this point, meaning they've come in, they look at the training, they have a sample that they can look at, and some of them come back and buy a week later. The longest I've had is a guy that took a test drive, looked at my training and he came back and bought two years, two months later. The proof in drawing the people, in giving them content to look at and an opportunity to buy when they're ready, is really an awesome thing. The online ground school gets going and I'm about to the end of the helicopter thing and I'm driving to work one night to the airport to fly with a gentleman. And I'm driving to the airport and I'm thinking, well, I got like 60 bucks on one card and $40 on my other card and I'm thinking fuel is going to be about 150 bucks. And I'm like, how am I going to pay for this tonight? And I'm thinking, well, I can ask the customer to pay for the fuel and I'll reimburse him later or credit to his account or whatever. Now about that time, my phone goes off. So I'd been online selling a few months. I sell my package online for 297 was the price at that time. And I'm all excited, thinking, wow, you know, I just made money driving down the road going to the airport. So a few minutes later it dawns on me, this money that I just made from selling my knowledge online is now going to go into the fuel tank of the helicopter. So that was pretty much at the end when I'm struggling. A short time later I get an offer on the aircraft. And that was the big thing that just really made me realize the power of selling information online. And the other thing that I'm really proud of is it's not like it's some shady thing or you're just, you know, making money hand over fist just for know, throwing out some videos. It's not the case. I'm actually helping people. I interact with my customers. I'm always adding and building more training and giving them lots of value. And in turn, the feedback that I get is incredible. You know, the feedback from somebody you've helped that's happy with your services and tell you they don't, that you don't even charge enough. That's a pretty incredible feeling. So as I continue on to build the online training and, and it's very slow in the beginning this is not an overnight success. I'm not saying you're gonna just throw up some content, start making money immediately. I had a lot of time and effort in building this, but the beauty is for a very small investment compared to the other two businesses I've had. When you look at the dollar per dollar, it's just absolutely incredible. You know, those are what we call brick and mortar businesses where you have a storefront and you have offices and you have equipment and really high expenses. The expenses that I have with this business, the online business, is very, very minimal. So as I've been doing this online endeavor, I have published two books. One book here, Helicopter Checkride, which has an Amazon bestseller status that I got 12 hours after I launched it. And since then I've taken that notebook that I told you about, this beat up old notebook that started all this training. I converted it into an Amazon book as well. And the beauty is publishing books is way more easy than you might think. It's very easy to do. I'm going to walk you through exactly how I've done that. The beautiful thing is once you do the work and you get the book out there, Amazon takes care of it. They take care of the orders, they take care of the shipping. You don't house anything, you don't do anything. You let Amazon sell the book, make the book, ship the book, and you every month get a check at the end of the month. So hopefully that sheds a little light on kind of what I've done, where I've came from and why I am excited about online businesses. And I still enjoy flying, I still enjoy teaching and instructing, but I also enjoy the online part of it. The creation process, building a product and shipping it to people all over the world is an incredible thing. I have a whole system set up with computers and a server. I got all kinds of gadgetry to show you, and I'll show you the DVD process. And it's all very obtainable. Most of this equipment is not very expensive. And the other beautiful thing is you can start with virtually no money. I started with a little camera that was given to me to use and I think he wanted like 30 bucks for it or something at the time. I'm not sure if I even paid him, but he never asked for it back. But here's the little camera that started it all. And you can shoot your videos with your iPhone, your iPad, you can buy a nice Canon camera. The technology now has gotten so cheap and easy to use. Microphones are cheap. Everything that you need is a very, very small investment, considering the roi, or return on investment, we call it, is a beautiful thing. So I hope you're excited, hope you're ready to get going. The next video. I'm just going to kind of start from scratch and, and start walking you through how I've created and how I operate my online business. And I'm going to tell you the story.