#dan henry

Dan Henry started working as a pizza delivery boy at age 16.

Fed up with "trudging through six feet of snow, up six flights of stairs to get a $2 tip," he set his sights on something more, and spent two years learning everything he could about running an online business.

"I would read these stories, like '18-year-old kid started an office chair site and makes $1 million,' and I was just like, 'I want to be one of those guys.' I just decided," he told Business Insider. "When I launched my first site, I was making $30,000 a month in profit 14 months later."

When Google changed its algorithms and his earnings started to slow, he switched paths to brick-and-mortar businesses, reviving two local bars through Facebook ads and flipping them for a profit.

Today, having secured six-figure annual profits, the 30-year-old has turned his attention to helping others achieve their own entrepreneurial success through private coaching and courses.

When asked what he wishes he'd known when he was first starting out in 2009, he narrows it down to two points:

You can sell without a website

While he has a website for people who want to learn, the majority of his business comes through sales funnels. A sales funnel is a multi-step system to convert leads into customers, and doesn't always (or even usually) begin with direct traffic to a website. "I wish I would have known that you don't need a website to make sales," Henry said. "I wish I would have used funnels more than a site, and I wish I would have used Facebook ads a lot earlier."

It's never too soon to start putting yourself out there

Dan Henry, Digital Millionaire Secrets

Tomorrow, we dive into the strategy of creating offers.

This is covered in Digital Millionaire Secrets, but it’s something I heard about a year ago.

I struggled thinking of myself as an expert in anything except how to fail spectacularly at life. 

I mean, I went from being homeless at 17 to spending $130k in college for 4 degrees (concurrently in 4 years) to getting addicted to drugs and alcohol to being pregnant and homeless (albeit off drugs and alcohol) to being a single mom to having another kid and failing at yet another relationship. And the list continues. 

If someone wanted to know how to screw up their life and do so splendidly, I was the person to ask. 

So, when people reassured me that I was, in fact, an expert in content writing, I scoffed. 

All I could see were all the other people who knew more about it than I did. They had more success backing them up. They had more commas and zeroes in their bank account. They had common household names. 

So who was I to come out of nowhere claiming experthood? 

But someone made it really simple. 

Think of a skill on a scale of 1-10. 

The household names? They’re probably at an 9+ on the scale. They know their shit inside and out and have been doing it for decades. 

He then asked me where I thought I fell on the 1-10 scale, and I said around 3-4. (He then called bullshit and told me that I was closer to a 6 in brand building and content writing, so we’ll go with a 5 for an average. To be fair, this person is about a 9 in brand building, so he’d know.) 

He reminded me that there are people out there right now who don’t even know what a brand message is, much less how to construct one and create content from it. They’re at a 0-1. 

To them, I’m an expert, and I can help them get to that next level. 

I can’t get them to a level 10 in expertise, but I can get them to a 3 or 4. I can get them very real, measurable results.

And the same goes for you. You have expertise in some area of your life. You might not be world class (yet), but you know how to do stuff better than other people know how to do the thing. 

What you need to figure out is: 

1.) What are you good at?

2.) What do you like doing? 

3.) What do you know that other people are desperate to learn?

Make a Venn diagram if it helps you, but the stuff in the middle, that’s the stuff you want to focus on.