In 2002, I was a 20-year-old college student in India, living with my parents and working on building my first online business.
This was a time when Google didn’t yet exist, WordPress hadn’t been invented, and blogging wasn’t even a word. We handcoded our websites and if you wanted to make a change in your website design or code, you had to do each page individually. I had a website with 100+ pages. Yeah, fun.
Anyway, I was new to the writing scene, the business scene, basically the grown-up work-for-a-living scene. And it was in this environment that I found a pretty pricey e-book (I think it was about $97) that promised to teach the basics of online business and how to make your website profitable. I was sold. This was something I was already doing and something I wanted to do, so I immediately asked my parents if they’d help pay for it. We weren’t rich by any means and $97 back then was a stretch, even for my parents. But my mum said yes and we were all set.
That evening, as I sat at my computer ready to pay for this e-book, one of our neighbors came over to hang out with my mother. This neighbor divided her time between the US and India, spending six months in our neighborhood in New Delhi and the remaining months of the year in her home in California. My mum told the neighbor about our impending purchase and she shot the idea down immediately. “It’s definitely fake,” she told my mother. “Don’t pay for these things online. You’ll get ripped off. This whole Internet business thing is a scam.”
The order was cancelled. I didn’t get my e-book.
But the product wasn’t fake and Internet business was certainly not a scam. That guy who sold the information back then for $97 still teaches online business and charges $1,000+ per hour for his expertise. And I’ve now joined the online entrepreneur community Fizzle, for $35 a month. (So far, I’m utterly in love with it.)
It has taken me ten years to learn the lessons that I could have learned from that $97 product. Likewise, since I had very little money when I first started my writing career, I traded time for learning, that is, I soaked up all the free stuff so that I wouldn’t have to pay for the expensive books and courses that promised to fast track my career. But I did pay, and I know now that I paid the higher price, because I paid in time and lost income.
There is no dearth of free information on the Internet. In fact, I firmly believe that just by going to The International Freelancer, you can pick up pretty much everything you need in order to have a successful freelancing career. But that’s about 600 posts and while some of them will answer your specific questions, maybe the one thing that could have made the difference in your career is the one thing I haven’t talked about. Or you could take our courses and learn in 30 to 90 days, not only the best of the material posted on my blog but also so much more that I haven’t talked about. And personal feedback to top it all up.
Listen, I understand the meaning of bootstrapping. I’m bootstrapping it right now because we went into massive debt in order to move our family to the UK and every penny and pound is precious to me at the moment. Even though I started my first business at age 20 and am quite familiar with how to make one profitable, the world has changed since I shut shop back in 2006 and there are things I wish I could learn now that would speed up my current learning curve. I’m putting aside money every single day because you know, I don’t want to spend the next ten years learning from free content when I could just as easily buy something that will help move my career forward today. I made that mistake with my freelancing. It was an expensive one and I intend never to have to make it again.
I’m not saying you have to buy my courses but I AM saying that you need to invest in your education. If you’re short on cash, buy books instead of courses, buy e-books instead of books. But shell out the cash for the products that will help you earn several times their cost, that will help you move forward in your career, that will shorten the learning curve.
Because if you don’t?
You’ll have paid anyway. And you’ll have paid the higher price.