Length: About 700 Words
Read Time: 2-3 minutes
Content: AWESOME, duh.

Greetings Steppers!

Today, a perfect business idea. QUICK! Can you think of a product that has no production cost, weighs nothing, takes up very little space, can be delivered around the world with almost zero shipping costs, and once you’ve sold it to one customer… you still HAVE it in inventory to sell to others?

In case you haven’t figured it out yet… the product is INFORMATION.  In this blog post, and the posts for each day this week, I will walk you through the Shoestring Steps of how I developed an information product that has generated well over $1M (that’s one plus SIX zeroes after it) in sales.

Birth of an Information Product: Solve Your OWN Problem

Oh, by the way… sorry for the “radio silence” for the last couple of days. My wife and I celebrated our fifth anniversary over the weekend.  So I didn’t do any posts for Shoestring101 then or for several days previously. BUT..! I think you’ll be happy to learn what I have to teach you this week 

SO… let’s wind back the clock to 1998. I became very interested, as a lot of folks did at that time, in online trading. With discount brokers popping up left and right, and “day trading” becoming a profession that many people were talking about… I went to a seminar that taught how to trade stocks and options from your home computer.

I was starstruck by the fella presenting the seminar… a guy that incidentally happens to be in JAIL now… but at the time I thought that everything he said was gold. I started trading the stock market as a lot of folks do: with little or no understanding of RISK, and nothing but great expectations for how much it was possible to earn.

“Long” story “short” (sorry, couldn’t resist making a pun out of trading jargon)… I lost it all. I totally lost my entire life savings in one bad trade.

Now I knew that all that money didn’t just evaporate. It went somewhere else because of my behavior. I wondered what I would have to do to be on the other side of that transaction, be the one that the money flowed TO instead? Stunned, I ran through all the steps I had taken that set me up for the big fall. Then, I decided that if I ever got the cash together again, I would do the exact opposite.

Know what? I ended up creating a trading system that was highly conservative… keeping risks down to as little as four or five percent of one’s invested capital… but leaving the upside open in case of a big run up.

Proof is in the Pudding

IN late 2002 I began trading my system… taking healthy gains when I was right about a stock, but keeping losses down to a minimum whenever I was wrong. Which was often  But what came out of this experience was a fascinating revelation:

In a time when every trader was looking to be RIGHT more often… buying sophisticated charting software to try and predict market’s movements… I had proven it was possible to actually be wrong more often than right… but STILL make money.

Here’s Shoestring101 Step ONE: Get OFF Your ASS. And get off it I did.

How My Information Product was Born

As a newly divorced dad, I had a lot of time on my hands in the evenings. So I blogged about my system every day. It kept me sane.  And my audience grew and grew as they looked over my virtual shoulder, seeing how I managed my trading account.

After seeing me rack up big wins with up and comers like EBAY, YHOO, and AMZN… while not exposing myself to the big losses that other stocks I picked that WEREN’T winners… a number of folks began to ask if I had written a book.

Can you guess what happened next? 

Okay Steppers… today was Step One: Get OFF Your ASS. This week I will take you through all Five Steps to Five Figures and show you how I turned this little information product into a business that grosses five figures every month.

See you tomorrow! Until then…

Keep Stepping!

Kurt