The evolution of my training

In 2011, after making my first online withdrawal $330, I decided I’ll make this online light shine bright to me and other Kenyans. I’d just scored enough clients to earn me $600+ in my second month of online work, so I quickly quit my Sh. 15k per month job and focused on online work.

True to the thought (and hard work plus God’s blessings), I soon made my $600 and was later to get to $1,800 by my 6th month of writing.

Since there were other talented Kenyan writers who were struggling financially, I decided to start training and hiring guys. Here’s what I did:

FREE TRAINING PLUS HIRING SUCCESSFUL TRAINEES

I trained guys for free, including close friends and family. This involved sending them to a Google Drive folder that had instructions, samples and a test job.

If you passed the test you got hired!

Once I got 15 writers, I couldn’t hire/train anyone else since our team’s full capacity was 75 articles per day (so 5 articles daily for each writer).

I stopped training for many months to focus on delivering pure gold to clients. I also grew other active/passive income streams.

But there were still many talented Kenyans who needed to be trained on freelance writing, so I went on to…

BLOGGING TO GET EVEN MORE PEOPLE INVOLVED

I put my all into starting a blog that would show people the way. Hoping to one day have so many Kenyans earning online. At first I took sooo much time blogging, and it felt STUPENDOUS.

People could now freely share my info to others at the click of a button! Dream come true!

Till I realized that there was an audience that wanted to pay something small to get in-depth training and mentorship. In 2013, I decided to go to…

IN-DEPTH ONLINE AND OFFLINE TRAINING

I organized a series of online and offline trainings for guys. Even had many seminars in town where many right here in this group attended.

The blog continued giving people free guides on how to make it in different fields. Seminars and my writing course gave people extra mentorship and training at a fee.

Back then, my online writing course was just Sh. 500! Offline was Sh. 700 per hour. Seminars would range from Sh. 500-1,000 per person.

As my clients-base and trainee-base grew, I could no longer continue with offline stuff.

Imagine having 10 clients and 30 trainees! Already my home was a popular meeting point since it was filled with trainees, guys from church, guys from a mental health NGO, my writers, some local clients etc.

Also some very bad things happened that limited my ability to do some things.

I had no choice but to now do…

PURELY ONLINE TRAINING

This was God-sent. Miraculous! At first it seemed hard to stop having those offline seminars and constantly having a full-house of visitors.

But there’s one thing I’d already learnt in the many many online businesses I’d done over the years. SCALABILITY. I realized that in this business offline stuff has limited scalability. Also, to be honest, my purely online trainees were doing almost 10 times better than my offline trainees.

Let’s face it: this job is all online. Clients are online, work is online, payment is online.

Suddenly, I had so much time to grow my client-base and my knowledge. I could do more courses myself to become an even better writer and trainer.

When charging 500-1000 bob for training while being too busy out there hosting or going to meet people, my top trainees were earning between 50k and 100k per month.

When dedicated to growing my purely online skills and training, my top trainees are now earning between 100k and 200k+. I still get enough time for personal growth and taking care of my family.

The best thing with online stuff is I have all these people and robots doing things on the background. We’re a whole fantastic team composed of me as the trainer, some assistants when I’m busy, content assessors who ensure your samples are awesome etc.

As my schedule gets tighter, and my skills grow, I raise the training fees. My writing course went from Sh. 500 to Sh. 997 to Sh. 1,500 to Sh. 2,000. It now goes for Sh. 3,000 but not for long. The price will go up soon.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FREE STUFF?

It’s still there!

I started Facebook groups like Awesome Transcribers in Kenya, Remarkable Freelance Writers in Africa and Savvy Internet Marketers where guys would do self-mentorship, making the growth of the Kenyan online workers faster. These groups led to the emergence of so many awesome trainers!

I still write insightful blog posts but I’ve taken that up a notch! Meaning I sometimes invite people earning way over $2,000 per month as writers to come and share their wisdom.

I started my free, email-based mini-course for writers back in 2016. If you’re not receiving my emails, click here to subscribe.