by Jim Harmer
I had saved up and paid cash for the boat, and it was well within our means, but I still felt sick about spending that much money on a boat. As I drove it home with my new truck, I looked in the rearview mirror and I swear it sneered at me with a look that said, “You’re such a sucker. You’ve wasted your money on me and you’re gonna go broke some day and regret ever having bought me.” Remember the upper limit problem? It was rearing its ugly head. The day I put my boat into the lake for the first time, I bought a new .com domain where I’d share everything I’d learned about boating during my months of research. My goal was to earn as much from this blog as I’d spent on my boat—in effect making my boat free.
I looked back on my Google search history for all of the searches I’d made about boats as I researched my purchase, and then I wrote on my blog the answers that I’d learned. I was not a boating expert by any means—just an amateur sharing his newly gained insights.
I had many self-doubts as I worked on this site. Yes, I had built one successful site and flipped another site, but this was only my second time building a site from scratch. I wasn’t sure if I could figure out how to get the traffic, or if people would like reading a blog from a newbie’s perspective. Many times I wondered if I was just wasting my time.
I designed a day to achieve my goal. I would simply wake up each morning and before I was allowed to do any other work on my main site, I would spend 90 minutes writing a new blog post on the boating website. I wrote 35 articles over the course of six weeks and left the site to organically grow on search.
It generally takes Google about eight months to show articles from a new website high enough on its search engine rankings that people will find them, so nothing was really happening on this new site. I’ve come to refer to this phase of working on a goal as the “ghost town” phase, because it feels like you are the only person in a ghost town. You can go into the town square and shout as loud as you want, yet no crowd gathers. “Um … hello? Is anyone here? I made a blog. Wanna come see it?” That’s kind of what it’s like to start a new business or achieve any goal. No one notices your work for a long time.
One of the most difficult mental barricades to achieving a goal is pushing through the ghost town phase. No one can see a physical difference in you after you’ve only been running for a week. No one loves your paintings after only a few lessons. No one recognizes you as a good basketball player after you go shoot hoops three times in a week. The ghost town is the phase where you are left alone with hard work, little perceived progress, and no indicators of what those continued 90% actions could eventually help you achieve.
About a year later, I checked back on the boating website to find it booming. Those 35 articles were bringing in over 30,000 pageviews per month, and the site earned as much as $4,000 per month. My focused 90% actions had worked. They simply needed time to rank well on search engines.
I had spent only a few weeks writing the 35 articles on the boating website, and it was bringing in thousands of dollars per month now. The site earned money from Amazon’s affiliate program. I mentioned boating products that I liked, and people who read my articles would sometimes click on my link to Amazon to buy the product. When they did, I would get about 4% of the sale. Anyone can sign up for Amazon’s affiliate program, and anyone can start a blog to drive traffic there.
Our family really enjoyed our “free” boat. We spent many summer days motoring around the deep-green mirror reflections of Anderson Ranch Reservoir. Emily and the kids also spent many days freezing their buns off while I fished for Kokanee salmon early and late in the season. We eventually decided that the warm boating season in Idaho was simply too short, and we sold the boat to trade it for an RV.
I sold the boating site for $74,000. Given the sale price and what the site had earned to that point, I earned three times more from the blog than I’d spent on that beautiful boat.
If my love for internet business hasn’t come through yet, I’ll just make it clear right here: I am in love with my work.
We bought a new Harmer Family Camping Machine with the purchase of a great travel trailer from the money we’d received from selling the boat. Although we didn’t spend any extra money, I still hated writing the check to buy our camper. So, I registered a new site—CamperReport.com.
As I began this new blog, I became very intentional about my approach to writing the content. I had learned a tremendous amount about how to get traffic to a website quickly, and I decided to create a formalized, step-by-step process for building these passive income websites to ensure I was only focusing on the actions that drove 90% of the result at first. I took what I’d learned from the boating site and laid out a plan to create this new site in less than two months and eventually have the site earn several thousand dollars a month.
The ghost town phase of a goal is only difficult for those who haven’t spent time there before. Yes, it was still difficult for me to write blog posts to thin air. No one was reading my blog posts when I started, and sometimes I would doubt that it would work again, but since I had now already successfully built three online businesses, it became easier.
For someone who has never seen their abdominal muscles in their entire life, it can be difficult to believe they are even in there. For someone who has never seen an A on a paper, it can be difficult to believe you could ever finish college. For someone like me, who can’t cook anything other than cereal and toast, it can be difficult to believe you could become a great chef.
I created the content for Camper Report over a period of about 60 days. I wrote 35 articles—the same as I’d done on the boating site. This time, however, I learned that I could tweak the order in which I wrote the posts to bring in traffic more quickly. I wrote shorter posts on more niche topics at first so they could rank for keywords with almost no competition on Google. Later, I focused on keywords that received more searches and were more sought after by other bloggers with larger sites.
Camper Report grew significantly faster than the boating site with this tweak to the recipe. I worked to formulate the perfect recipe for creating sites in a short period of time that could earn passive income. I also added a YouTube channel to Camper Report to push people to the blog. I only recorded 10 videos, but some of those videos received hundreds of thousands of views and really launched the site quickly.
Now that Camper Report has had time to grow organically on search engine rankings, it gets over 300,000 pageviews per month and brings in about $10,000 per month. That’s incredible, considering the very small amount of time that was invested to get the site up and running initially.
Not only was my portfolio of new websites growing, but I was able to maintain them well by growing a small team to help me. I had created a rinse-and-repeat formula for creating successful online businesses on YouTube and in blogs.
I felt compelled to share with other people how they could provide for their families by creating online businesses. I had worked with so many friends over the years who gave up on themselves during the ghost town phase of creating online businesses, and it discouraged me that no one was taking advantage of what could be done.
I can’t count the number of times I stayed up late sitting at the dining room table with friends who were struggling financially—explaining to them everything I’d learned about internet marketing and how they could create a business of their own.
No matter how excited they were at our first meeting, and no matter how many times they assured me they were going to be the one who would actually follow through, they all ended up quitting. A decent website needs a significant initial batch of content on it before it can be left to passively grow. Too small of a website won’t give Google enough reason to pay attention to it because it will have fewer lines in the water gathering traffic and links to the site. I saw dozens of people write 5 or 10 articles and then they let the ghost town phase kill their project. If only they could have believed in themselves—they were so very close to success.
I
decided to share the process I’d created online. I registered a new website where I would share my recipe—IncomeSchool.com. I created the site and did what I had always done. I wrote an article a day, answering the questions I had asked when I first started blogging. The site grew to modest success with a few thousand in earnings, but it wasn’t big enough to get excited about yet. I didn’t want to abandon the site, but I needed to focus my attention elsewhere in my business.
Emily and I spent many hours talking about what to do. My time was undoubtedly better spent by simply working on my other sites, in terms of ROI, but I felt compelled to work on Income School and build it up to help other people.
I can’t remember how, but the name of someone who could help popped into my head. Ricky Kesler. Ricky was my best friend in high school. We had chased the same girls, played the same sports, and basically spent every second together for four years. We even worked the same part-time job at a musical instrument repair shop where, on your first day, one of the women who owned the shop would body-slam a tuba onto the cement and ask you to fix it, in order to teach you the trade.
Ricky was an MBA student at a top school at the time, which I thought would be a good fit for the subject matter of the site—teaching people how to start an internet business. We had connected sporadically since high school but life was busy and we hadn’t kept up. When we both lived in different cities in Brazil for two years as full-time missionaries, I once mailed him a dead cockroach as a joke. Oh, and during the height of the anthrax scare, I mailed him a few tablespoons of wheat flour. Other than that, we didn’t have much contact. Yet, as soon as I thought of him I knew he was the person I should be working with on Income School. He has always been smart as a whip and someone with whom I got along very well. I guess once you’ve fixed a body-slammed tuba together and mailed dead cockroaches to each other, you’re bonded for life.
I called Ricky and spent some time catching up, and then told him about the spot I was in. I had a site that was growing slowly but had enough traction that it shouldn’t be ignored and left to die. He was immediately on board and began writing on the site. We created Income School LLC and split the baby 50/50.
Our blog posts on internet marketing weren’t performing well on Google because the topic was very competitive, so we decided to create a podcast. Week after week, we recorded episodes and desperately tried to grow an audience, but the show never grew past a few thousand downloads per episode. We were feeling discouraged in the ghost town phase of the site. We just couldn’t make the business grow.
Next, we tried making a YouTube channel. Week after week, it proved to be the same battle as we had with the podcast. We just couldn’t get enough traction to grow the site.
We became frustrated with trying to teach people our recipe for building online businesses, so we eventually decided to just make our own websites as had worked in the past. We decided we’d sell Income School, which was earning a few thousand per month, but not enough to get us excited about it.
We went through weeks of paperwork and then called our business broker to help us sell the site. I was at a family reunion at the time, so we had a three-way call as I stepped onto the deck of the cabin where we were staying. Because of a technicality in the way the site’s valuation was done, we wouldn’t get as much for the business as we’d hoped. Right there on the call, Ricky and I decided we would walk away from the deal and continue to build Income School.
As soon as I hung up the phone, I had an overwhelming feeling that I had just dodged a bullet. I knew the thought came from one much older and wiser than any of us in the world, because it brought with it a knowledge I didn’t have. I knew right then that Income School would eventually become something very important to me. Selling it would have been disastrous.
I had built up a handful of businesses from scratch at this point, but still, the ghost town phase of building this new site was crushing. One day I’d feel like we had it in the bag, and the next day I’d feel like we’d never succeed and that we were wasting our time in a market that was too competitive. Trudging through the ghost town phase is by far the hardest barricade to achieving anything.
Without question, the number one reason people fail in internet marketing is because they quit during the ghost town phase and don’t give the project enough time to succeed.
What goals have you given up on, just days before you would have seen enough success to convince you to continue on?
Our YouTube channel seemed to be the answer. We began seeing sales of our online course trickle in, and in the customer survey we saw more and more people saying they found us through our tiny YouTube channel.
New Groundhog Day
We saw YouTube as a way to break through the ghost-town phase on this difficult project, so we changed the groundhog day we had designed. We stopped writing articles, and we designed a day to help us produce YouTube videos consistently, and we groundhogged it.
We finally found the right 90% action to groundhog. The business immediately began to grow.
We also built other sites during this time to refine our recipe for creating an online business. I bought a 50cc dirt bike for my boys and our family was instantly hooked. Nothing stokes a father’s pride quite like seeing his son in dirt biking pads, revving up an engine. If I were Tim Allen, I’d let out a manly grunt right here.
Since we had many sites following our other hobbies, we created DirtBikePlanet.com and built that site to nearly 100,000 pageviews per month and strong earnings. Now, pushing through the ghost town phase of a new site wasn’t at all intimidating since we had been through it so many times before.
Eventually, we took everything we learned and put it into a step-by-step process. Sixty steps to creating passive income online. We called the online course Project 24 because people in the course would have a goal of replacing their current income with money from passive income websites in 24 months. The course has been a massive success with thousands of customers from all around the world.
Most people who get stuck in the ghost town phase of any goal are stuck there because they have failed in other things in the past. Our minds seem to keep score, and if you’ve failed in many things in a row, some people become convinced that they are the ones who cannot succeed.
However cursed you feel, however many times you’ve come up short, however many weaknesses you seem to have that others do not, the truth is there is no scoreboard that fixes your chances the next time you attempt something great. The truth is that when you take on your next project, you are no more likely or less likely to succeed because of the failures of your past.
The only thing that can keep you from getting what you want is the belief that you somehow are destined to fail.
Why do so many people stay in debt their entire adult lives? Because it’s difficult to get excited about skipping a restaurant to save $10 when you have $60,000 in debt. Why do so few people develop a strong relationship with God? Because initially, repentance and change is hard and the rewards of peace and happiness don’t come until after the hard change. It is the ghost town that keeps us from accomplishing the things we most want out of life.
There are essentially three reasons why we quit during the ghost town phase:
1. A belief that we will not achieve the goal despite the work
2. A belief that we don’t belong in that level of achievement as discussed earlier in the book about the anaconda squeeze
3. A belief that the goal is ultimately not worth the effort
Everything you have ever started and not finished likely traces back to one of those three reasons. The work energy formula has been designed specifically to combat those three things.
The first belief that you will not achieve the goal despite the work can pop up in many ways. As the mayor of your “ghost town of a goal,” you make many efforts to improve the town but see no one moving in, so you quit. You lose a few pounds but then go three weeks in a row without losing a pound, so you quit. The work
energy formula combats this problem by identifying only the most essential actions to achieve 90% of the result so that your actions are most directly tied to results, which makes you confident that your approach will reach the goal.
The last belief that the goal is ultimately not worth the effort is another common issue we run into because we are lazy lumps of lard. We see success in dieting until there’s an opportunity to eat out with friends and we weigh the benefit of staying on the diet versus going out with friends. Often, we make short-term decisions and say the goal is not worth it. We convince ourselves it is okay to ruin the plot of our groundhogging because today, more happiness would be won by going out to dinner with friends. Yet we all know that in the long run that dinner will be worth little, but achieving your goal could change the course of your life. When in the ghost town phase, never allow short-term thinking to stop your progress.
Action Step Nine: Identify the Beliefs Your Mind Will Use Against You
All of your objections in the ghost town phase can be categorized into three groups:
1. A belief that you will not achieve the goal despite your work
2. A belief that you don’t belong in that level of achievement
3. A belief that the goal is ultimately not worth the effort
Think through the beliefs in each of those categories and seek to understand how your mind will use them against you. That way, when you’re invited to dinner to break your diet, or you are tired and don’t want to study Spanish one evening, or you are trying to get out of debt but you want to go to Playa Del Carmen, you’ll have a plan and understand how your goal fits into the bigger picture.