JANE'S STORY
by: Cary Christian

Everyone knew Jane was smart even when she was a small child. True to expectations, Jane excelled in school and later in college, and in line with her well-known compassion and empathy for children, Jane accepted a job with the school system teaching third graders in her home town.

Jane worked wonders with her kids. She was one of the most innovative teachers that had ever taught in her school district. She supplemented her teaching by writing specialized stories for her kids to add life and reality to the texts she taught from. She organized outings for the kids so they could see and feel firsthand the things they were learning about. She created games for them to play that reinforced their lessons and made them easier to remember. She was named teacher of the year in just her second year of teaching.

Jane got married that year to her old high school sweetheart. Soon, they were expecting a child of their own. Five years later, they had three children in all and decided that was enough.

After ten years of marriage, Jane's husband left her and the kids. It was a terrible time in Jane's life, and seriously rough on her children. They didn't see much of their father anymore, and he provided little in the way of support for them. All of a sudden, Jane's teaching salary just didn't seem to go very far. Her and her children were struggling, and Jane just couldn't see how she would ever be able to afford college for them, and this was something that was of extreme importance to her.

Jane found the Internet that year. She read about people making thousands of dollars a month selling online and thought this just might be the answer to her problems. Some people were even making millions online! This could be good!

Jane joined several affiliate programs she thought looked decent. Not having much money to spare, she found and used every fr^e marketing program in the book to market her programs. She figured out pretty early on that using the canned ads and banners the programs offered was a dead end since she saw them everywhere she looked, so she put her skills in innovation to work and developed her own marketing materials. She worked hard at it, but never seemed to be able to earn more than a couple hundred dollars a month at best.

After months of struggling, learning and seemingly doing everything right, she came to the conclusion that this just wasn't going to produce enough money to pay for her children's' college educations. Despair began to set in because she was so certain this course of action held the answer to her needs.

Jane made the same mistake so many new marketers make. Business opportunity programs usually represent the first Internet businesses people see when they begin considering making money online, and too often, they are lead to believe this is the ONLY way a normal person can make money online.

Jane didn't stop to realize that she had the skills and training necessary to serve a tremendous market that is nowhere near as overcrowded as the business opportunity market is. Parents will do almost anything for their children and are willing to spend large amounts of money for anything that will help them get ahead in school and in life. Jane had both the particular skills and the credentials to develop products for this market.

In a moment of epiphany, Jane recognized this fact.

Jane got her own domain name and website. She took ideas she had used with her own third-grade class and created several interactive books and games for children that could be purchased from her site. She loaded up her site with valuable content that was relevant to her target market and submitted her site to all the search engines she could submit to for free and to the Open Directory.

Jane joined every online forum devoted to children that she could find. By participating in these forums she gathered information on additional products she could create to fill needs that were being regularly expressed inside the forums. Because of her expertise in teaching children, she contributed much of value to the forum discussions. And with every post she made in every forum, there was her signature file after her name advertising her website and her products.

Sales grew and Jane started using some of the profits on the pay-per-click engines and advertising in parenting-related ezines. This paid advertising gave her a quick and immediate boost in sales so she continued investing a portion of her profits every month in paid advertising. In just six months she found herself making $5,000 per month in profit.

The irony of it all is that setting up her own website and developing and marketing her own products actually cost her less than what it had cost her to participate in business opportunity programs that had not worked for her.

Does this story remind you of yourself? What special skills, knowledge and abilities do you have that could be used to create profitable and sought after products? Please don't say "none" because I know that's not true. Dig deep and find them. Your fortune lies in what you already know and love.

Copyright (c) 2003