Hello and congratulations on taking the first steps towards creating your own profitable website. In this video, I want to talk to you about my story, where I came from, and how I got to where I am now.

Just a few years ago, I was working at the Apple Store and I wasn’t happy. The hours were erratic, I wasn’t making enough money to live on my own, and my managers dismissed my ideas about how we could improve the customer experience in the store.

After a while of being frustrated, I came to the realization that it wasn’t their fault — I just wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing. And so I decided to leave.

In 2013, I left my job as an Apple Tech to start a small web design company with the goal of helping local businesses increase their presence online. I knew that if I was going to show local businesses what I could do for them, I’d have to create a website of my own — something simple that I could put on a business card. At this point, I didn’t know much about blogging and didn’t realize how much value they could provide to people.

I realized that I’d need to have at least one blog post on my website, so one morning I wrote an article titled, “Why Does My iPhone Battery Die So Fast?”. When I worked at Apple, this was the one question people asked me the most and I had really become an expert on the topic. After finishing the article, I forgot about it and started working with local businesses like I had originally planned to do.

At the time, things were going okay — I didn’t feel stuck at a job I hated anymore, but I was still living at home with my parents and not making very much money. Then, the unthinkable happened:

I was watching Jeopardy with my dad and decided to check Google Analytics, just for fun. I was amazed to see that 26 people we on my website at the same time. As I turned to show my dad, we watched that number rise to 76, then to over a hundred in just a matter of minutes. The next day, over 1000 people were on my website at the same time. Over the next 5 days, FIVE MILLION people from all over the world visited my website and read my article about iPhone batteries that I had written over breakfast 6 months earlier.

Without even realizing it, for the six months between when I wrote the article and when it went viral, I had taken all the technical steps to that were necessary to build a website that could handle 10,000 people simultaneously, all on a nine dollar a month hosting plan.

I made $10,000 that week, and if I had known what I know now about Google AdSense, it would have been at least $50,000. All this was the result of one single Facebook share from one person in Texas who I will never meet or be able to thank for the amazing gift they gave me.

I want to pass that gift on to you. You’ve already taken the first steps towards building your own profitable website by signing up for our BlogWinners course and starting the first chapter.

As you continue to go through this course, my team and I will coach you every step of the way, showing you what it takes to write a successful blog post, how to get found and rank well on Google, how to set up a successful website with all the tools you’ll need, and how to do it all without spending a single dollar on advertising.

David Payette tells you about his journey from an Apple Tech to a successful website and business owner.