Young Entrepreneur Blog

Hello,

My name is Dean and I am 24 years old and I write at DeanHunt.com

I was asked to share my tips and general musings here at retiredat21.com and I jumped at the chance.

So where do I start?

I am 24 years old and have been a web entrepreneur for almost five years. To be fair, I only really got into this as a way of making money three years ago when I moved from the UK to Madrid (Spain).

I came to Spain and only spoke a few words of Spanish, so I knew that if I was going to do anything other than bar work for the first two years, I had to find a job that didn’t require me to speak fluent Spanish. When I did look for jobs in Madrid I was amazed at how low the salaries are here. I don’t have the updated average wage details, but if you earn more than 1000 euros ( $1300 ) per month, then you are doing pretty well.

When I arrived here I owned only one site, it was a forum with approx 400 members. I remember pumping loads of my time into the site and not really making any money. In December of 2004 I decided to e-mail approx 50 of the largest companies in my industry and I asked them if they were interested in advertising on my forum.

Incredibly I got some interest, and I managed to get a nice monthly prize for a forum competition and a 3 month ad deal worth around $1300.

I remember thinking that it was incredible that I had technically just made the equivilent of a months wages just from sending a few e-mails. I also learnt some valuable lessons from that experience.

So I decided that I was going to create another website, but this time I was going to focus more on a website that I could make a living from. I had literally hundreds of ideas, many of which I started and never finished. One in particular cost me $1000 in development fees and it was really a cutting edge idea, but my requests grew and grew each day until eventaully the devlopers just handed over the project and said they couldn’t do anymore without extra funding.

In April of 2005 I launched a news portal for the same industry as my forum. It started slowly, and I worked hard trying to find writers to contribute. I remember trying very hard trying to tempt writers to write in exchange for a % of future profits, but none were interested.

The site didn’t really take off as I expected, but around 9 months after launch I started to see huge increases in my search engine rankings. I was really interested in SEO, and had been reading as much as I could for at least 12 months prior to this point, so I was fully aware that my site had just come out of the sandbox, it was a great feeling. My traffic literally increased by 1000% overnight.

I had gone from getting a couple of hundreds visitors on a good day, to a couple of thousand per day on average.

I signed up to aweber.com and started to build an opt-in list. Despite making a few errors I managed to get over 5,000 subscribers in a space of 5 months.

From there I launched a few more sites and I tried everything including: white label programs, affiliate programs, content syndication, and I even had a dabble with blackhat SEO.

Most importantly I always treated it like an education. I would spend 3 or 4 hours per day on my sites, but 5 or 6 hours per day reading forums, ebooks, testing new techniques, learning new skills etc….

I really feel that the best way to learn anything is to do it! Imagine if you were to take someone who has never driven a car before, now let them watch racing videos on Youtube for 12 months, then let them read hundreds of books on how to drive car, then let them sit in the passenger seat of a car for a few hours. Then, put them in the driving seat of the car and I guarantee you that they will not be able to drive the car.

You can read as much as you want, but unless you get your hands dirty you are never going to really get to grips with a new skill.

In 1999 I spent two years at a sports college studying to be a pro golfer, I lived on campus and studied golf studies and business management for two years. We studied everything from how to manage a golf course, to how to keep your business accounts in order. Due to a knee injury my golfing career was cut short, but I went to work at American Golf Discount Store for a year to get some experience in retail. I will never forget how after two years in an expensive college studying golf and business studies, it took me almost a full week to learn how to use the till correctly. This either proves that reading books is not an effective way to learn a new skill, or it proves that I am very stupid.
Anyway, in October of last year I had a nice little network of websites and was making a decent living online. However, I was looking for a fresh challenge, so I sold my entire network for a nice sum of money, and looked for the next challenge.

I considered taking 6 months to learn new skills, I also had numerous ideas for websites, but I now work for a large company where I do numerous different tasks on a daily basis.

One of the main tasks is to purchase existing websites with the aim of promoting them and then selling them for a profit. I believe the new buzzword for this is “site flipping”. For the first time in 3 years I am no longer my own boss, which has it’s disadvantages, but I really feel focused at the moment, and I am really excited to see what the future holds.

This post is a lot longer than I had expected, so I will quickly fill in the gaps…..

I left American Golf after 10 months and got a job as a retail manager for a major high street brand. I was the first ever teenage manager (19 years old), and I fired one of my staff after only a few weeks as manager. It meant that I had to grow up very quickly, and I managed to increase sales by 36% within my first few months on the job.

What are my tips to anyone who wants to become a young entrepreneur? I would say that patience is a key. Don’t expect to make millions straight away, read as many forums as you can and then put that knowledge to practice to cement your new skills.

Also, don’t be afraid of the competition! I have done well in the third largest industry on the internet. Some say it is the most competitive and difficult industry on the net, but I did very well from it. My philosophy is to see the positive side of competition. If you have 1 billion sites in your niche then that is 1 billion opportunities. Network with the other owners, they don’t bite.

Finally, I would say that it is important to think outside the box. We are in a time where the novelty factor is very useful, so being different is no longer a negative thing.

Adios and good luck.

Dean

*Dean writes at DeanHunt.com