by Jim Harmer
Although I was constantly under stress at school, and Emily was exhausted from taking care of the baby all day, we were generally quite happy. We spent evenings watching our little son learn how to walk, pushing him on swings, sitting on the beach, and fishing until sunset.
The situation was not easy on Emily either. She’s from a very small town in Idaho and had always lived near family. Now, she was in a strange place without a friend or family member to support her. She had no money and spent all day, every day with our baby, going to parks and taking him to the library. She was emotionally drained yet had to be the one to keep us positive as I focused on law school.
We had no extra money. When I say we had no extra money, some of you may have the wrong idea. Some people say they are poor but have a smartphone, a reliable car, and have seen the inside of a restaurant at some point in the last 30 days. We were the other kind of poor. Not a true third-world-country type of poverty, but the kind where you don’t fit into the society around you. I’ll explain this type of poor with an example. There was a city about 30 minutes away from where we lived—a really neat little beach town that we always wanted to visit. We only went once in two years. Why? Because it was too expensive to drive 30 minutes if we didn’t need to go there. During law school, we ate at restaurants about five times in three years, and each of those was when the vendors at school gave us a gift card.
To provide for our family, I applied to the adult education program put on by Collier County Parks and Recreation. There, I could teach photography classes at night at the local high school to a class of mostly retirees. In the application for the job, I had nothing to put under the “experience” line since, quite frankly, I didn’t really have any experience in photography other than my nights on the beach. Yet Tay Baker, who surely doesn’t remember me, approved my application and said he’d let me try it out. He’ll likely never know how his decision to give me a chance at teaching that photography class once a week would change the course of my life.
On Tuesday nights at 8 p.m., I taught my class of 20-30 people about the basics of photography. I was hardly an expert. I just shared the information I’d learned over the last year and a half of being a hobbyist photographer. The members of the class were good to me and seemed to enjoy the class.
Every six weeks, I’d get a new group of students. After three or four sessions of my course, I realized I was answering the same questions over and over. I’d explain aperture, ISO, and shutter speed, and then six weeks later, I had a new group of students whom I had to teach the same thing.
That’s when I decided to start ImprovePhotography.com. The blog began as a way to communicate with my class. I would write tutorials there, and when someone asked a question I’d answered previously, I could direct them to the article.
I honestly can’t say if I created the site to merely communicate with my class, or if I also wondered if I could build traffic on that site and turn it into a business. If I did think about how I could build it up, it was a dream I didn’t quite dare communicate to anyone.
Those long nights at the dollar store had become useful. From the podcasts I’d listened to while working there, I had learned about WordPress, how to write for the web, plugins, and SEO (search engine optimization). All of it came out naturally when I started my website—despite the fact that I was really just communicating with the couple dozen students in my class.
I installed software that allowed me to see a map on the back end of my website. It displayed an orange dot on a world map every time someone visited my site in real time. I could see when someone accessed my site, and approximately where in the world they were.
My first blog posts were bad in a way you can probably imagine from a 24-year-old, first-time blogger who had only purchased his first real camera a few months previous. Yet I focused on sharing the things I’d learned so far and tried to be helpful to the people in my photography night class in Florida. When they asked what an aperture was, I would write an answer on the site so I wouldn’t have to explain the concept to a later class.
While I am a capable writer, writing is not one of my gifts. I was never talented in creative writing or developing stories. However, I found the process of writing blog posts refreshingly easy. I had always been able to explain things simply to people, and I wrote the words I would have spoken. Blogging didn’t require rigid grammatical rules or structured writing forms like the writing I had to do during college.
I published a few articles each week on my blog but was mostly focused on the potential of building a local audience of photographers to whom I could sell photography workshops outside of class.
Yet, every few days, I saw an orange dot appear on the map, showing that someone from around the world had visited one of my site’s pages. Initially, all of those dots came from Naples, Florida, where I lived. They began to spread. Something about the map captivated me. I stared at that map like most people stare at a TV. I’d squint at both of my netbook’s pixels and, sure enough, every few hours, a new dot would pop up.
After a couple months, the dots began to come more regularly, and from all around the world. Google had found my site and was starting to show my little disaster of a blog to more people. I’d have to wait 15 or 20 minutes sometimes before another dot would appear, but it brought a sense of fascination.
A New Obsession Beyond Photography
I remember seeing one week that 100 people had visited the site. Given that I only had 20 students, it was an electrifying discovery. I began to make writing on the website a daily exercise and readjusted my focus to writing for the world at large and not just the students in my class.
It only took a few months before I saw orange dots popping up quickly—from all over the globe. At this point, I didn’t have a strategy. I didn’t know the first thing about SEO, link building, or how to drive traffic to a site. I had no idea how to do keyword research to find out what articles would bring the most traffic to the site, or what type of article would rank better on search engines. That felt like a limitation at the time, but looking back now with years more experience, I was actually doing more right than wrong.
I learned how to drive traffic from watching the orange dots appear for so many years. I’d write an article, put it out there, and then watch how many dots popped up for people reading the article. I saw, in a very practical sense, what worked. And I quickly learned that I had my best success from the extremely long articles with tons of information. A lot of people think short, easy blog posts are best, but years of running experience shows me the opposite.
The second lesson I learned is that if I wanted to bring people to my website, I had to focus on what they wanted, instead of what I wanted them to know. When you write a textbook, you have a captive audience and can teach whatever you want. When you write a blog post and hope someone will find it, you have to write the answer to the question they type in Google. You have to answer people’s questions.
As the orange dots began to appear with greater regularity, the overall numbers piled up. In April 2011, I had 855 pageviews on the website. While that number is tiny by today’s standards, it was incredibly exciting to me back then.
Instead of picturing 855 pageviews as a very small website, I thought about it differently. There were 20 people in my night class on photography. I was willing to prepare a lesson, drive to the high school, and teach a class to just 20 people. Yet 855 people read what I wrote on my blog! I pictured an auditorium with 855 people in it. If I were asked to give a speech to 855 people, I’d be honored! So why would I have any less enthusiasm for my little blog?
I decided it was time to create a product to sell to the 855 people on my website, something that could be useful and accessed around the world. Just days before I made this decision, Steve Jobs stood on a stage in California and announced the “iPad.” It had been rumored for over a year, and while there were laughs when Steve Jobs gave it the name of a feminine hygiene product, the lines stacked up in front of
stores as millions of people rushed to buy. I was not one of them because I was flat broke. You remember—the other kind of broke. But I was intrigued by what opportunities it would create.
One of the new opportunities was digital books. eBooks were already in existence, but this pushed them to the forefront. I was about to become an author.
I had no experience in internet marketing or writing a book, but the podcasts I listened to kept mentioning ebooks as a new opportunity. So, I got to work. I opened up a Word document and started typing everything I’d learned about photography over the last year and a half. At this point, I was an intermediate photographer. I felt like a charlatan writing a book, but I wanted to share the things I had learned so far, and I realized that if I did not hold myself out to be an expert by my tone in the book, I could make it work.
I set a goal to have my book published in two weeks, from start to finish. The next morning, I awoke before the sun and began typing until it was time for school. As I rode the mile on my bike to the law school, my mind raced with ideas of what I could put into my ebook.
I accomplished little in school for the next two weeks. I sat near the back of the lecture hall and opened my book to a random page and pretended to be taking notes as I filled my outdated netbook with everything I had learned about photography. That strategy worked quite well most of the time, as I was ahead in my studies.
It worked less well in torts. A tort is a non-contract wrongful act that brings about civil liability. Every law student takes torts class in their first year of legal studies. To protect myself from a crushing defamation lawsuit that would certainly ruin me, we’ll call the teacher Professor Jones. She was actually a very nice lady, but in the classroom, she was fierce and by far the smartest person in the room.
All law school courses are taught using the Socratic method. This means that students read the material before class, and then the professor badgers individual students with questions to test their knowledge and deepen their understanding. With some of the professors, this frankly wasn’t an intimidating prospect as they’d throw out softball questions.
In Professor Jones’s class, however, we were all petrified. The woman was an expert at the Socratic method. I swear she spent all night dreaming of ways to make pretentious law students cry the following morning. Some people read the news while eating breakfast; she selected her victims in her head.
There were approximately 80 students in the classroom on the day I started working on my book. I sat on the far right side of the classroom against the wall, which was my first mistake. Never let Professor Jones think you’re afraid.
Still, doing the math, there were 80 students and she’d likely only pick five to grill that day. Math was on my side, so I took a calculated risk.
The class began with a five-minute soliloquy by Professor Jones on the finer points of tort law. Then, it began.
“Mr. Oakey, will you please tell us the facts of Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad?” Excellent, I thought. Now there are 79 students left and only four more people will be grilled. Five percent chance? I’ll take it. I continued tapping out my ebook as poor Mr. Oakey stood and recited the facts of Palsgraf before the executioner.
“Okay … uh … So there is this lady named Helen Palsgraf who is taking her daughters to the beach in 1924. Two guys try to jump on the train in front of Palsgraf and a railroad employee helps the second one to step up. Trouble is that one of them has a suitcase full of fireworks. The fireworks fall and explode, causing the railroad’s heavy metal scale to fall over and hit Ms. Palsgraf. She sues the railroad, arguing that it was negligent in assisting the man to get on the train who then dropped the fireworks.”
They had just gotten through the facts of the case. Next was a rundown of the issue, then the rule of law, and then any dissenting opinions. I had at least another 10 minutes to work on my ebook, as I completely missed out on learning from one of the most famous legal cases of all time. I glanced up just as I saw Professor Jones’s eyes sweep over to mine. I instantly knew I was in for it. I had one of those “I have no idea what’s going on” looks in my eyes, and she could smell blood in the water.
“Mr. Harmer, what was the ruling in the case?” Oh, crud. I am Mr. Harmer. I stood up to take my beating. I had read the case, but this was the first time I’d come to class without detailed notes prepared. I flipped open my book in a hurry as I stood up and saw blank margins—not a single note.
“Uh … the issue, in this case, is that it was the fireworks of another passenger that hurt the plaintiff. It wasn’t the railroad employee who did it.”
“Oh, how nice. But I asked what the finding was, not the issue.”
“Well, I … I know the defendant didn’t win. There was a dissent, but I know the plaintiff didn’t recover.”
“How nice. You’ve discovered the holding. Now, why isn’t the railroad responsible?”
“Well, the railroad didn’t light the fireworks. It was the other customer’s fireworks that blew up—not the railroad’s fireworks.”
She wasn’t letting go. “Yes, but the fireworks didn’t hurt the plaintiff. It was the railroad’s scale that tipped over and hurt the plaintiff. So didn’t the railroad cause the harm to the plaintiff?”
“Well, yes … but … ” I madly looked through my empty page in my book searching for the answer “ … I … ”
Professor Jones: “Well, let’s see if there’s someone in the class who actually studied the case … ”
Ouch. She moved on to her next victim, and after a few minutes, the sting of the embarrassment dulled enough that I could turn my attention back to my ebook on the basics of photography. About every other day, this scene would repeat itself. I’d be working my brains out trying to write the book, and every once in a while I’d get a metaphorical punch in the gut by a professor who wanted to remind me that I was still a law student.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Palsgraf didn’t get any money because the harm was not foreseeable. The employee could not have foreseen that, as he helped the customer, another customer could be injured by fireworks that he didn’t know existed. He couldn’t have foreseen that his suitcase would explode and cause a chain reaction of harm to someone else. Palsgraf was out of luck.
Day after day, this embarrassing situation repeated itself as I focused more on writing my ebook than on law school. “Mr. Harmer, what is the eggshell plaintiff rule?” Um …
Think about what was happening: I put my family through hell so I could go to law school. I spent an entire year studying for the exam to get in. I was willing to be the other kind of broke to go to law school. I actually enjoyed law school. Yet there was something about working on the blog that was so fascinating I was perfectly willing to set law school aside for weeks at a time to work on it.
Your work energy is so compelling to your spirit that it is nearly impossible to shut off once you’ve tapped into it.
This is so important to understand that it bears repeating: There is a powerful fountain of motivation inside of you. You have felt it before—even if at fleeting moments throughout your life. It can push you to climb any mountain and destroy any problem in your path.
In the action step for this chapter, you’ll discover what your individual work energy is.
My work energy drove me to write that ebook. I was so committed to the work that I produced an entire 30,000-word book in two weeks, while doing law school full time and also holding two part-time jobs. It didn’t require tremendous self-discipline. I had an itch and my work energy begged me to scratch it. I couldn’t focus on anything else.
After a few days, I figured out how to format my Word document for e-readers, and my book went live. I couldn’t figure out how to make it so that when someone bought it, it would automatically give them the download, so every time I saw a sale I’d just send them an email manually and attach the product.
In the first few days, I sold a couple dozen books. Then, I had an idea. I would call in to Leo Lapo
rte’s Tech Guy Podcast and ask him a question about creating an ebook, and then off-handedly mention that my book was available for sale.
I waited on the phone for over two hours but then all of a sudden, I was talking to the famous Leo Laporte. I had spent two hours on hold practicing exactly how I’d word my question, and as soon as I went live on the air, my blood ran cold and I could barely force the words out of my lips. I stammered through my question—something about PDF permissions—and made sure to mention my book and website. I’m certain that Leo saw right through me and realized I was just trying to get a free ad, but he was extremely gracious about it. He answered my question and allowed me to mention my book. I owe him something because I really needed the little confidence boost I got from mentioning my book on his radio show.
Over the next 45 minutes after mentioning the book on his show, I sold over $300 worth of PDF ebooks. I spent the next two days obsessively refreshing my PayPal account, and every few hours I’d make another sale. They trickled in, but there was a trickle and it was a money trickle. Emily and I were beside ourselves with excitement.
It struck me how writing an entire ebook to earn 300 measly dollars was something I was obsessively passionate about. I loved figuring out the technical hurdles on the computer to make the item for sale, writing the book, finding ways to creatively market the book—everything about it. Yet I earned much more than $300 by working at the dollar store and that was complete drudgery to me.
I’ve often been asked how I built a small business while being a full-time law student, being an intern, and working a part-time job. It really had nothing to do with self-discipline and certainly nothing to do with my time management skills, which were … um … not managed. The truth was that nothing could keep me from building the business. I had stumbled onto work that so perfectly matched my work energy I could not force myself to stop working on it.
