Business :: Sales & Marketing :: Copywriting :: System :: SUCKS framework :: Training :: Kieran Drew Weekly Newsletter :: The day I made my first internet dollar
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It’s March the 30th, 2022, and I’ve just sent my first-ever sales email.
My heart is trying to smash its way through my ribcage as I stare at Gmail.
5 minutes pass without a notification. After 10, I feel sick. After 20, all I can think is, ‘you look like a f*cking idiot.’
People say making money online is easy. But I’d been writing for 18 months and still hadn’t monetized.
The only notable change was my hairline as I tried to juggle working 6 days a week as a dentist with my dream of becoming a writer.
This email was the final straw. But as I imagined the shame of crawling back to my boss with hat in hand, it happened.
Ding!
I sat for several seconds in stunned silence, then leapt out of my chair and ran up and down my flat, shouting at the top of my lungs in joy.
I ran back to my laptop to double-check it wasn’t some cruel trick of desperate imagination.
But there it was, staring back at me. My first taste of internet money. My girlfriend Jena was at work, but I called her anyway—I needed to break the news before I exploded:
“It’s actually happened. People bought the product.”
I’d never felt so proud.
Now, I know Wil…
One sale doesn’t exactly make you Richard Branson. But the first step of entrepreneurship is the hardest.
It’s less about selling and more about self-belief. I’d been a dentist for almost a decade, and swapping to a creative career felt like a silly pipedream.
But that launch pulled in $5,000.
More importantly, it was the catalyst of a 2-year rollercoaster.
Now, I’m far from an expert entrepreneur.
In fact, you’ll soon see that most of my journey has been a series of fumbles and fails.
But one thing I take seriously is the power of an audience.
Because you can reach the world online. You don’t need anyone’s permission to flick open your laptop and start sharing ideas. And neither do you need a crazy amount of capital or resources to turn those ideas into income.
The internet hasn’t just lowered the barrier of entrepreneurship. It’s torn it down.
And writing is how you take advantage.
But how you grow your audience is much more important than how fast. The internet is full of commodity-creators competing for the same small slice of attention.
If you want to ride the wave of the digital age (instead of drown in it), you have to play a smarter game.
One that's focused on doing meaningful work.
Creating things of real value.
Committing to serving your fans.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll share more about these ideas over the next week.
For now, I'll wrap up with this:
No matter the stage of your entrepreneurial journey, what company you’re trying to build, or what difference you’re trying to make, if you can earn your audience’s trust and attention—the internet is your playground.
Looking forward to speaking more,
Kieran
P.S.
My emails this week will share some of my favourite ideas around building a writing business.
But if you want to skip ahead to the good stuff, you might check out High Impact Writing instead.
This is a blueprint for attracting an engaged audience through social media writing. It’s focused on creating fans for your business, and over 1,850 entrepreneurs now use it.
You can read why here:
Otherwise, I’d love to hear from you. What are you up to online? I reply to every email so feel free to reach out.
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