For me, it started with €0.34.
Hi, I'm Björgvin Benediktsson and I'm the author of You Get What You Give.
I wrote You Get What You Give for any creative freelancer or entrepreneur who wants to quit their job knowing they can make money from their creative skills and grow their side-hustle into a sustainable and profitable six-figure business.
Back in 2009, in the stone-age years of the internet, I had been writing my little audio blog for a few months, publishing what I was learning as an audio engineering student at the SAE Institute campus in Madrid.
On the side, I had enrolled in an “online business” course and one of their income-generating strategies was to earn money from Google ads. This sounded promising to me - so I added some to my site.
Then I waited.
Alone in my dimly lit basement apartment, I refreshed the Google Ads dashboard waiting for the big clicks to come in.
All I got were crickets.
Either that, or the cockroach infestation of my apartment was getting worse.
After what felt like a billion data packets later, somebody clicked an ad on my site and it made me a whopping €0.34!
So I did what any short-term thinking college student would do and I went out on the town to celebrate my online riches, probably spending a hundred times more in food and drinks than I earned in income.
I quickly learned that selling advertising was a losing business strategy if you wanted to run a sustainable business, but the thrill of earning money from your own online asset was a feeling like no other.
I wrote You Get What You Give over a decade later.