Do you have no money but you have a ton of willpower and you want to start an online business from scratch. Okay listen, kid, you’re fricking crazy if you don’t have any money and you’re looking to start an online business, but I’m going to go over how it is possible and how we can do that. In this video, I have a couple of things I’ll be going over on this board showing you the step by step process that I would go about if I had nothing and I want to start an online business, start making some money.

Hey, I’m John Crestani and way back when I actually started my business from scratch as well. This was back in college. I had just read this book, the four hour work week and I was like, this is what I want to do. I want to start an online business. I want to travel the world. I want to make lots of money, have tons of fun experiences, but if I was in your position today, now I make over $500,000 per month in my business and you can look up stories about me on Forbes and whatever, but I’m going to go through in this video just being super real with you. If I was starting from zero, here’s how I would go about things. So hopefully this helps. If you like this video or if you have any questions, make sure to like it and ask your questions in the comments. But I’m going to just go to blast through these five things right here.

So the first thing I would do is quantify your time and quantify the amount of money that you are willing to invest. Write it down. Seriously get real about this because can you spend two hours a day creating your online business and how much can you invest? Can you invest a thousand dollars $2,000 $10,000 because this is real talk. It’s going to determine what sort of business you can start. If you have only $5,000 and you want to start an Amazon business, see you later. It’s not going to work out. If you aren’t willing to spend a lot of time, let’s say two hours a week, you’re not going to be able to start a social media consulting business or coaching business. It’s not going to work out. So you need to be real and literally like really quantify this. Write it down. This is how many hours I have. This is how much money I have to invest in creating a business here.

Next thing I would say is to know your strengths and your weaknesses. So if one of your weaknesses is you hate talking to people, okay, you hate doing customer service, you hate pitching clients are doing sales. Starting a social media agency is not going to be your thing. You may have watched a Webinar from Sam Ovens or you may have subscribed to Tai Lopez videos and you find him funny. Both of those guys recommend you start a social media marketing agency, but if that’s your weakness is you don’t want to talk to people, that’s going to be a business for you. That’s not going to be a business. You’re going to survive and you’re not going to be able to handle it. Don’t play to your weaknesses, never play to your weaknesses. There’s a ton of types of businesses you can start and it doesn’t make sense to play to your weaknesses.

Now for instance, if you are good at empathy and graphic design or maybe you’re good at like copywriting and writing really like funny, interesting things. If that’s your strength, affiliate marketing might be for you because, affiliate marketing, a lot of what you’re doing there is writing ads and,, getting ads that are catchy that make people want to engage and buy products. So if you can do that, then that will be a great place for you to be. Now if you are just allergic to money and you are very bad at working for yourself, you have no focus and you can’t even motivate yourself to really focus in on a business.

If you’re just not a self-motivated person, that’s fine. Go out there and be a freelancer find project-based or task-based work on upwork.com something like that, but know your strengths and know your weaknesses, write them down and at for instance. Another one is Amazon. If you’re good at project management and accounting, that’s great for Amazon businesses. Okay? Or business development is great for sourcing products on Amazon, but no, these things. Be aware of them because each different type of online business I’ve been naming a few has different qualities like qualities of the people who succeed in them.

Now l stands for learning; Learn about the different business models that are out there. There are a lot of different ways to make money online. You could start an ad agency, could be an affiliate marketer and write ads. You could start a social media marketing agency.

You could do consulting or coaching. There’s a whole wide range of things you can do, freelancing, etc. To learn about the different business models subscribe to channels such as, mine, I talk about different business models, subscribe to other peoples channels, learn about what business models that are out there, but when you decide on one focus on it and really go deep in that one thing. Okay, when you’re learning, test the waters. But when you’re ready, go deep. But keep in mind there’s a learning phase and then there’s are going deep phase. ‘D’ stands for diary and I don’t mean actually write a diary in like some (fool -fool) stuff and like a life journal. I go, we go. Sue said to do and go from broke up with me. No, what a diary means is I’m talking about basically no and measure your KPIs.

If Your Business is affiliate marketing, for instance, the only way you’re going to make money is if you’re launching ads out there to the public and seeing what people think of your ads. So what you’d want to do is you’d want to make sure that you’re launching five ad campaigns a week, keep an excel spreadsheet of it or keep an actual note pad and write down when you launch an ad campaign. If you’re trying to start a social media marketing agency, keep tabs of how many people you reached out to that day to actually become clients. Let’s say you got to reach out to 25 people a day to grow your business. Make sure you’re reaching out to 25 people every day, but quantify yourself. Don’t be flimsy. Just because you’re working for yourself doesn’t mean you can’t measure it. You have to measure yourself.

You can’t start a business by just being totally free. If you really want to make it as an entrepreneur, know what your KPI’s, key performance indicator, whether that’s reaching out to people, whether that’s writing ads, whether that’s researching and sourcing products on Amazon or whatever that is. Make sure, that metric and you quantified every day or week, whatever that is, to make sure you’re making progress towards that goal. You’ll eventually get better and you’ll optimize things. Your first ads might fail. Your first outreach as a marketing consultant might fail, but you’ll get better over time if you measure yourself and know your numbers.

The last item here is conferences. I actually think conferences are very important for making things real. Every industry has conferences. Affiliate marketing has conferences. Amazon sellers have conferences. ,, consultants are social media agencies have conferences, freelancers have conferences, and these are great places to go.

Meet, mix and mingle. Have a beer if that’s what you’re into. Eat with people, have a coffee, and just learn about real other people’s experiences in the field that you’re interested in going into because that’ll make it real. It’ll give you both the motivation if you see that other people are actually making money in this field, but will also help teach you and give you a network of people to start surrounding yourself with. You are the five people that you surround yourself with, and if you surround yourself with other consultants or other ad agency owners or other coaches or other affiliate marketers, you will become one of them through Osmosis, but you have to surround yourself physically with those people. And I know it sounds weird, but it becomes real.

And I hope this video helps you out. And if you’re interested in learning more about different business models where you can make money online with or just ways that you can quit your job or be a digital nomad, make sure you subscribe to my channel. There should be a button somewhere around here and click that notification bell. You’ll also get by subscribing, you get a free course on affiliate marketing. There are 10 videos in there and I’ll show you the basics of how to get started in affiliate marketing.

Okay, I also have a six-week program, a more intensive program, if that’s something you’re interested. The link is in the description like this video, and if you have any questions or comments for me, make sure to post them down below. I’d love to hear what your thoughts are, and also I’d love to hear which one of these items helped you out the most. Was it knowing to quantify your time and your money? Strengths and weaknesses, learning diary or attending conferences.

Have you ever been frustrated with the entire online marketing journey and wondered if people are really even making any money? I don’t know if you’ve wondered about whether there is actually success at the end of this rainbow for you to bootstrap yourself up from nothing and make millions or just have freedom. Well, I’m going to tell you a few amazing stories of normal people today. Some of these people I’ve actually met and who have, we’re able to take themselves from nothing and make millions of dollars online. And some of these stories are about people who did it for good and some of them are stories about people who did it for ill reasons, but either way, they’re amazing stories. They’re fantastic. I hope you enjoy them.

So online marketing is a really hard journey. I remember when I started, I thought oh, I see these people making lots of money, but can I really do it? Wondered, are these people really real? Now the stories I’m going to tell you, these are people who have been written about, I’ll post links to these people or I’ll have my assistants if they actually post the links this time to their stories. In the description of this video. Now I will be talking about Carlos Cruz, a kid from Guatemala. I’ll be talking about Robert Grin, a guy from Poland. We’ll be talking about Steve Weiss as well as myself. These are all people who have bootstrapped ourselves. I’ll also tell you the stories of two anti-heroes, Jesse Willms and Ross Ulbricht who sort of went to the dark side. Their stories are pretty fantastic and pretty well documented, but interesting nonetheless, but the point of these stories I’m about to tell you is to help you understand this is a real industry.

There are people out there making millions or tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of dollars running their own businesses without any strings attached to any investors or anything like that. They’ve built themselves up from nothing but able to create an amazing business.

Now, the first story I’m going to tell you is if Carlos Cruz, he’s one of my best friends and he’s an affiliate marketer that’s currently doing about $2 million per month. You probably won’t see his name in the press or, in the news. I did find a story about him that I will have my assistants post the link to. He started affiliate marketing back when he was 18 he was in Guatemala. He didn’t speak much English and he wanted badly to be successful. He was an affiliate marketer. What he had done was he had just simply googled one day how to make money online. That’s how it started for him and he went through a few things that didn’t work that didn’t make any money that he says were scams, but a bought a few ebooks, any wasted, some of his, the little money he had, but he kept taking action, I guess.

He got involved an MLM, like a network marketing company. He’s trying to sell his family and his friends just to make some money and everybody thought he was a Weirdo. They didn’t accept him and all he wanted to do was to become successful really badly. I think it was when he was 18 he started posting these little ads on Google and he started making his first money online. But what was funny was he showed it off to all of his family hoping and they’d be proud of him. But the result he was actually met with was that he’s crazy and that it’s not real money that would put other people down and made him even fight harder to make more money and make that more money real now, what I really like about his story is the moment he decided to really go all in was he was sitting in college and the windows along the side of the classroom, they faced the faculty parking lot and he was bored by college.

He was daydreaming. He’s just looking out the window and he started looking at the actual cars in the parking lot and what he noticed was they were all cheap cars. They were Toyota’s, Honda’s, etc. And he thought to himself, he said, if I want to make money, why am I learning from people who drive Toyota’s or Honda’s and he ruminated on that for a little bit and what he did the day he quit college. He literally, that day he just stood up and he just walked out and he didn’t give any explanation and he said that was it. He made his decision right there. When he put those two and two together, he said, these are not the people I should be learning from. I need to go find some successful people to learn from. And what he did was he actually emailed the guy who he had bought this ebook from and asked him, he said, can I move to Chicago where you live and do whatever you want?

I’ll do it for free. I just need food. He was making a little bit of money online at the time. He said I’ll pay for my own place. I’ll pay for my own stuff. I just want you to tell me what to do. He moved out to Chicago. He didn’t live with the guy. The guy just said, just do the same stuff I’m doing in my book and do these things. Didn’t have very much direction, but he took a chance and he moved to America and by the time he was 21 he was a millionaire. He was living in the Hollywood hills. He was living with other young 20 something-year-old millionaires, day traders and club promoters and whatnot. He became a DJ as well, just for fun. And currently, he’s running a big business. He has over 30 employees. He does $2 million a month and is very successful. So that’s Carlos’s story.

So the next stories I’m going to tell a little bit faster, and you can look up the articles, which the stories are written in, but you can look up my story. For instance, it’s written about in Forbes. I won’t go on about that. You’ve met me, but basically, I started marketing young. I was a medical Guinea pig. I was one of those people that was a test subject from Merck Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson. I did that to try to fund my Internet business, which I was trying to make work. I did over 20 jobs before the age of 21 so I’ve done it all. And I wanted to make this work desperately. They didn’t have friends for years. I didn’t have girlfriends for years. I didn’t go out to bars. I didn’t socialize for years. I sacrificed a lot to make stuff happen early. I’m not naturally talented in anything other than I’d say running or soccer.

Now, Robert Grin is another amazing story. He runs a company that has a valuation of $1 billion. He’s from Poland and he also bootstrapped himself. All of these stories, nobody here came from money or had money invested in their companies. They all bootstrap themselves to the top. Robert Grin has an amazing, just the fact that he was able to create one of the largest companies in Poland right now. He started with affiliate marketing as well, and he turned it into a software company and became very successful.

Now, the two anti-hero stories are actually the most interesting because anti-heroes are always just the most fascinating people and those stories are of Jesse Williams who made hundreds of millions of dollars selling health supplements online. This is in the two thousands he started making money when he was 13 years old selling fake copies of Windows software and he moved from scam to scam, but he didn’t get caught by the government until he had made hundreds of millions of dollars. He had private jets and he was still only the age of 25 really interesting story. He’s called the dark lord of the Internet. You can look up his story. I’m going to post the link in the description and his story is fascinating or you can just Google dark lord of the Internet it’s insane.

The final story I’ll tell you about is actually probably the most fantastic and it’s of Ross Ulbricht also called dread pirate Roberts was his internet pseudonym and key made over $1.2 billion on the Internet, I believe over a hundred million dollars personally in commissions. He’s responsible for basically ordering assassinations on people and he ran the biggest online illegal drug selling emporia, around. He used bitcoin. It was one of the first market places where you could use bitcoin to buy and sell products. He’s a programmer by trade, but he created a drug market and it was a completely anonymous way.

He was able to create the organization and create the ability to do this was actually a work of art. It took years for the government to crack down on him and they were trying desperately for years to find a way to get this guy who’s completely anonymous using completely anonymous currency. It’s a crazy story. His market was called the Silk Road. I’m named after obviously the real Silk Road and there’s an article on him on Wired. At one point he actually started ordering assassinations of people who were trying to find him out to who was investigating him. He ordered anonymous assassinations from the hell’s angels and paying for these assassinations in bitcoin. I don’t recommend you go to the dark side of the Internet, but some of these stories I do recommend you read these two stories because they’re very fascinating and interesting people who populate this area.

I hope you found these stories interesting. If you want to see more about Carlos Cruz for instance, I do have some videos with him on my channel. Just make sure you subscribe and you can go to my homepage. There is a playlist called The Art of Copywriting where Carlos talks about how to use ads to persuade people to do what he wants.

Now if you’re interested in seeing more videos about how you can actually create success online, just make sure you subscribe. I come out with a daily video and hit that notification icon also, and if you enjoyed the stories that I told about successful Internet marketers who came from nothing and who made a lot of money, leave a comment. This isn’t my typical video format, but I would like to know from your perspective if you enjoyed it, just let me know and I can show more of this or I can do some mixture. Well, put more stories within the rest of my videos. Look forward to seeing you soon in my next videos. And here’s to your success.