In 2005 I was going into my first year of High School.
At the time I wanted to “fit in” and be a part of the cool kids. Not something that really motivates me anymore, but at that time, it did.
I wanted to have a cell phone, I wanted to have the in-style clothes, and I wanted to have money to go out and have a great time with friends.
So I did what was obvious to me & got a job.
I worked at one of the local Mexican restaurants as a busboy cleaning up tables.
And everything was good for a while until one night I had…
An incident with the boss.
I was almost done for the evening and had cleaned up what I had thought was all the tables but I had missed a couple of tables in a semi-hidden corner by the bar.
I grabbed my stuff and was heading out the door when the boss came zooming around the corner red in the face.
“No sir, you’re not leaving until every single table is clean!”
I didn’t realize I had missed a couple of tables and so I apologized and started walking back to clean them up when all of a sudden the boss, we’ll call him “El Jefe” decides he wanted to go on a tirade.
Probably something was going on that day that put him in a bad mood but whatever it was he was taking it out on me.
He started yelling different things at me letting me know that I was this and that and that I was good for nothing and the one that I’ll never forget was…
“People like YOU will always work for people like ME!”
I didn’t quite know how to take that.
Part of me wanted to lash out and attack him, probably fight him or something.
Yet, in that moment the power of those words really flipped a switch inside of me. Right then and there I decided that one day I was going to come back and buy the restaurant from him.
That day I quit my job as a busboy and decided I was going to try my hand at my own business.
I always had an interest in computers and I had learned how to take them apart, put them back together, and get rid of viruses, etc. So I created little business cards that said “Computer Engineer” and listed out the specific services I offered.
I passed the cards out at school and at church until one day, a couple of weeks later, I finally got a call from a lady who wanted me to fix her computer.
I went over to her house, identified the problem, fixed the problem, and was done in under an hour.
She asked me how much she owed me and I wasn’t quite sure what to tell her. I mean I was only making minimum wage back at the restaurant but by this point I had also been listening to Tony Robbins, Jim Rohn, and other sales & personal development “gurus” about charging what you are worth and all different kinds of motivational ideas & concepts lol…
One of those concepts was to charge what you are worth and to do so without fear or hesitation, so I quickly blurted, “just $60”, half expecting she was going to laugh me out of her house.
However, the opposite happened.
She said… “That’s it?”
And that’s when I learned that…
There will always be people who are willing to pay for something you know that they don’t.
I repaired computers for a while but soon found that my income was limited by the number of hours I had available to work. In other words I was simply trading time for money like I would be doing at any regular job.
I didn’t find the solution immediately but it came from my mother telling me one day… “If I had a dime for every time you were sitting at the computer, I’d be rich!”
(You see, if I wasn’t doing homework, working, or hanging out with friends, I was on the computer reading, watching videos, or downloading music)
And so I thought to myself, “you know what, why don’t I find out how to do that?”
So that’s what I did.
In 2006 I typed “How to make money online” into Google and found all sorts of things.
Eventually I stumbled on an article that promised that I could make hundreds of dollars on auto-pilot from my laptop and that I could then be free to do whatever I wanted. Of course that sounded appealing to me so I bought the $500 program.
It turned out to be a business opportunity scheme that wanted me to promote the same program to other people using things like Google Ads and Pop Up Ads.
I ended up not doing that but that was my introduction to the world of digital marketing, driving traffic (getting website visitors), and affiliate marketing (promoting other people’s products for a commission).
However, what intrigued me the most was that someone I didn’t know was able to get me, someone they didn’t know, to take out their wallet and purchase a video course for $500 without even speaking with them.
And they did it with ONE article… An Article That I Now Refer To As a Sales Page…
The idea that you could actually sell something to someone across the globe using just your words on a screen without you having to be there in person was fascinating to me!
I wanted to learn more about how to do THAT.
So, using my obsessiveness to my advantage I went down several rabbit holes.
I bought books on the subject.
I bought courses on the subject.
I even went to seminars on the subject.
One of my favorite seminars was called the Underground 007 seminar in Chicago at the Gaylord hotel. It was run by a guy named Yanik Silver and he gathered well over 300+ people, maybe more, all selling different niche products on the internet with unique approaches.
However, most of them had one common element…
A Sales Page!
At one point or another they all sent their website visitors to a sales page.
A page designed to highlight the reader’s problem, deliver a promise, show proof that the promise is real, and then make a proposition to the reader to purchase your solution to their problem.
Everyone had a different way of doing it and I just soaked it all in.
I was like a sponge!
After that seminar I began writing my own sales pages for affiliate products to gain some experience.
Then, someone I met at that seminar hired me to help them with their marketing.
I wrote a sales page for him and the first one took me about a month to get done because I wanted to get it “perfect”.
Realistically, I should have finished it in a day, but I was more scared that it wouldn’t work so I kept tweaking things until I was happy with it.
Fortunately, it worked!
He started making daily sales from his email list sending traffic to that sales page. He went from making between $5-6,000 a month to a consistent $8,000+ thousand per month.
When he released a second product, I wrote a sales page for it in one night instead of taking a whole month like the first time. It was just me, a cup of coffee, and Microsoft Word (I’ve since switched to Google Docs). That sales page did just under $8,000 revenue in its first week in a promotion to his email list!
Later that year he created a third product just in time for our Christmas promotion to the list. I wrote the sales page for that and it took me a few days but no longer than a week to put it all together. That sales page did $25k in revenue in a 12 day promotion over Christmas and New Year’s eve/day (since then that sales page has done over 1M in sales).
At that point, I knew this is a skill I wanted to continue to develop and have been developing it ever since.
It’s been one of, if not THE most valuable skill I have learned in the last 15 years.
If you have a product you want to sell, then I recommend you try your hand at writing a sales page for it.
Go down the rabbit hole.
You might just be surprised at the results!
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See you next week 🙂
-Eddys Velasquez
P.S. If you want a good starting point, I’ve just completed the BETA version of my second product called “Sales Page Architect”.
It will show you how to write your first (or next) high-converting sales page, step-by-step, even if you feel like you’re no good at sales.
While Sales Page Architect is still in BETA, I’ll also include my first product “W4 Ad Guide” along with your purchase.
Note: If you’ve already purchased the W4 Ad Guide, send me an email and I have a special coupon you can use to get an even better deal on Sales Page Architect for being an existing customer.