I Created My Retirement (At 39)

by Roberto
(Los Angeles)

I just got inspired to day to tell my story (and it will be a long one)...

After being a relationship coach for a few years, I had finally taken the advice of my clients and wrote a book. With high hopes, I began sending off sample chapters. The responses I did get were all along the lines of, "This is great, but who are you?"

Turns out it's almost impossible to get a self-help book printed unless you have a PhD after your name or you attach it to some kind of celebrity. Getting a book published isn't that great of a thing, as it turns out. For an unknown author, the first print run is tiny. They can only sell it for about $15 and you get like a couple bucks out of each sale. If it doesn't sell well enough, then that's it. They own it. No more income.

So in my research, I found out about eBooks. By selling an ebook, you can update it as much as you want, sell it forever, charge up to $50 for it and keep most of the profits. You control your destiny...

OK so now I needed a website. This is how I found SBI.

After reading through a super-old ebook that I found online talking about SBI (from 2001 or something), I signed up immediately! After following the beginning of the action guide, I was essentially told that a dating site was in a market that is soooo super saturated.

But I had written this 300 page book... And I figured I had something unique and could offer something fresh to this massive niche. Besides, have you read any dating advice online? Most of it is REALLY BAD.

The plan was to start a free advice site, grow a following and healthy traffic and then push it all to my book when the time was right. http://www.dating-relationship-advice-for-women.com was born. I'm not going to lie to anyone, I put a ton of work into it. Nothing less would do in this competitive niche.

Each page is several typed pages long and is stuffed with good info (and great keywords... tastefully used). I did the link building. I did the article marketing. I did just everything the action guide told me to. Blogs, Content 2.0, newsletters... And there's so much more still to do!

Beyond any sort of monetary gain, something SBI! provides is hope. I know that in the last three years, I created something that will support me for the rest of my life. I created my retirement (more on that in a moment).

So the site was plugging along. 20 visits a day turned to 50 and then to 100. I was starting to make a small amount of money, but hadn't reached any of the payment thresholds. I'm pretty sure I made zero dollars in my hand that first year. The next year, I got my first big fat check from Clickbank. In 2009 between Clickbank, Adsense, NeverBlue, and Commission Junction, I made a total of around $1800.

I started Feb 2008. By Feb 2009, my traffic was up to 8,,500 uniques for the month and 22000 page views. By Feb 2010, I was enjoying 25,000 uniques and 53,000 page views. I worked my bottom off. But I was actually becoming a force in an overworked niche.

Meanwhile the book languished. I had become much smarter at this in the three years since I stopped writing on it. It was in need of a serious re-edit and at 300 pages, it was perilously too long.

Plus there was probably some fear of failure in there too. My life was happy, but it felt like I had stalled somewhere. In a fit of madness and while actually reading some of my own advice, I decided I needed to make a change. MASSIVE change.

I lived in Seattle and heard on the news this summer that they were expecting another really cold and rainy winter. Within three months, I packed up everything and moved to Hollywood.

Why? I thought it appropriate to move to a place built on the worship of other people who have achieved their dreams and achieve some of my own.

I stayed with friends as I did the home and job search and started to realize that it's nearly impossible to:
1. Get in touch with a real human being in Los Angeles
2. Completely impossible to ever get them to call or email back

At this point I was living off of my SBI.

It wasn't a glamorous lifestyle, but I was covered. I finally decided that I wasn't going to get a job. I was going to finish this book and I was going to retire (I'm 39). It's amazing how much you can accomplish when you're not looking for a job eight hours a day!

It took a month of editing on the book, building a dedicated sales site for the book and programming in the back end. But my book is finally live and for sale! You can see my handy work at http://www.artofirresistible.com. The book got edited down to just over 200 pages and the rest was turned into "bonus books."

The first day it was live, I took the three pages with the most traffic and switched a link on each that used to point to affiliate books and pointed it to my site. I made a sale in the first two hours and woke up the next day to several sales!

Over the last couple weeks, I have been slowly switching underperforming links to the book and doing all kinds of link building for the book site. Right now, I'm getting about 1 to 2 sales per day (some days more, some days none).

Now we get to the title of this post. I don't think that any one of my pages has generated $1000 yet, but there are a couple that are pretty close. And since the SBI! site is growing exponentially, given a long enough time frame, I'm sure that over half of my pages will eventually earn me a thousand dollars each. SBI! and the book are going to allow me to goof off for the rest of my life!

I will say one thing with no doubt in my mind. Had I done this the regular way by just putting up the book sales site, I would have failed because I would have never built in any traffic flow. I would have gotten discouraged and bailed on it like I used to a lot in my life.

Without SBI and taking the slow route, without that understanding that everything you do to add more content and make your site better is like making a deposit into a savings account. This is a magical savings account though because at first it pays very little interest, but after a couple years the interest compounds and compounds at a phenomenal rate.

As of November 2010, the traffic to my free site is 52,000 uniques per month and 320,000 page views. That's more than double in less than a year!

I have to thank you, Ken, and everyone else here for finally smashing that "get rich quick" mentality that we have ingrained in us since birth. I am the zen tortoise! Did you guys know that today, December 8th, it's like 75 degrees here in Hollywood? I'm sitting on my back porch typing this in my robe looking at the Hollywood sign. I'm about to go for a jog along the star walk on Hollywood Boulevard. Then I'm going to go to some museums.

Meanwhile most people in the world are at work, contemplating their exit strategy with no clear idea how to escape and are terrified how they are going to survive their retirement with no savings and a possibility of very little social security. It's 50 degrees and raining in Seattle today...

Any Los Angeles SBIers wanna hang out with me today?

Don't give up.

~Roberto

p.s. I think tomorrow I'm going to research somewhere that I can volunteer...