From 5 To 6 Figures: How My Pivot Paid Off

GUEST POST WRITTEN BY
Abdullahi Muhammed

I am a writer, entrepreneur and the CEO of Oxygenmat.

When I launched my first blog in 2012(www.naijawriterscoach.com) I had no business intent and absolutely no idea I would someday earn from it. I’d won some writing contests, and friends kept asking me for writing tips and information on writing contests they could enter. Naija Writers’ Coach was my response.

Within 18 months, it grew pretty fast and had over 30,000 email subscribers.

While growing that number, I started doing freelance writing, affiliate marketing, consulting and selling my book, Vertical Writing. And lo, the money started rolling in. Not huge sums but $100 a week is big when your account balance is zero.

In 2014, I hit a plateau and couldn’t grow past $1,500 per month. My earnings for some months even stood at three figures. I tried paid adverts, guest posted on some Nigerian blogs and even launched three free mini-courses to attract paying clients. Nothing worked.

I knew I needed to do something else. I just didn’t know what. Then one day, it struck me that I was in a market with poor Internet adoption, where many people seemed to have low disposable income and some apathy for creative works.

Was I just silly and aiming too high? One voice told me I was not. After all, I was following dozens of U.S. bloggers and I knew how they were killing it. Some of them without pushing out as much content as I was. So my dream wasn’t outrageous. It’s a modest dream – one that maybe deserves to come true.

But would it? I got thinking. Could I get better and more regular pay to help more people if I targeted a global market?

I had to try it to find out but, first, I needed some validation. I did research and found that markets like the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia were spending much more and seemed to be more interested in creative works, so the chances of making more money and having more impact there were good.

I decided to shift focus to the global market. The only problem was that I wasn’t a native English speaker. Would anyone read my content or hire me?

I decided I had to try anyways, so I started my second blog(www.howtostartablogonline.net) I also decided to keep maintaining my first blog, in case the experiment fails. And guess what? My second blog didn’t fetch me a dime for over six months. Instead, I was investing time, effort and at least $500 on it every month.

Later on, I started writing for free for some popular blogs so I could get my name out there, establish my expertise and credibility, and probably get some clients. And luckily, it worked.

Nearly one year after starting that second blog, I was making over $5,000 per month from freelance writing, consulting and affiliate marketing. Soon, I was getting more projects than I could handle alone, and so I launched my company, Oxygenmat Ltd,(www.oxygenmat.net) which has hit six figures in its first year.

Changing my target market was a game changer. These are three lessons I learned from the process.

1. When you hit a ceiling, you need a new game plan

How did I know? Because I’ve been there. And because that’s what Groupon, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and Paypal did. They were struggling, and then they tweaked one thing (or maybe two) and ran home victorious. Pivoting my business to a different, better market was my new game plan.

If you feel your business is in that situation, perhaps you need to pivot. That could mean changing your product, customer segment, revenue model, partners or something else. But there’s no Google Maps to tell you which direction to go or what to change. It’s up to you to figure it out.

2. Trust your guts but trust the numbers more

Don’t radically change your business’ direction without doing some research and seeing what the numbers say. I didn’t think the global market would be better for me; the numbers said so.

Granted, experimenting without an assurance of success is part of entrepreneurship. But if you could learn from available stats, why choose to only learn from the hard teacher called experience? Why leap in the dark if you could go with a lamp?

3. Hold on to what’s good while chasing after what’s better

Because, what if what’s better doesn’t work out well? You want to avoid having to go broke or start again from zero. My second blog didn’t fetch me a cent in the initial six months after I started it but the first blog continued to pay the bills and finance the growth of the second blog.

In the middle of 2014, my business seemed to have hit the ceiling. But I didn’t have to move mountains to go from low five figures to six figures. All it took me was one simple tweak and the door to more opportunities was flung open.

www.forbes.com/sites/under30network/2016/06/07/from-5-6-figures-how-my-pivot-paid-off

An advert.

Motivating

So after I saw this thread I was joyful because I felt it was a good thing that a Nigerian blogger is featured on Forbes...so I told my italian friend of mine who i met online who works at the information research department of Forbes about this news and she said she was not aware of such..op pls post the correct link so I can show her,she is a doubting Thomas..

I'm the said Nigerian writer published on Forbes. I think the OP posted a wrong link. The correct one is http://www.forbes.com/sites/under30network/2016/06/07/from-5-to-6-figures-how-my-pivot-paid-off/#6c19a19756d5

OP, I don't know you but thanks so much for sharing the news

doyinisaac:
So after I saw this thread I was joyful because I felt it was a good thing that a Nigerian blogger is featured on Forbes...so I told my italian friend of mine who i met online who works at the information research department of Forbes about this news and she said she was not aware of such,so after hearing that statement I came back to this thread and clicked the link the op posted and the link was invalid...smh...the op is lying....