The Essay Network: How I Built a Million Dollar Online Business Selling Essays

By Michael Thompson

This book gives a detailed account of how I built an automated online service-based business that sells custom essay writing services. In my eight years at it, the business has done nearly $2 million in revenue. It gives an inside-look at my back-story, specifically the ups and downs that come along with building and growing a business. Readers will benefit from hearing about my experiences and the lessons I learned along the way, and they can apply these to their own pursuits of entrepreneurship. The philosophy that has served as the basis for my business over the years is that we must seek money for the sake of time, and for this reason I sought to automate everything while also creating location-independence. I continually prioritized time over money because that is the essence of lifestyle design. This book can be used as a blueprint for how to create an automated online business and how to live rich.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483565590

Michael Thompson

Michael Thompson is the cofounder—along with his wife, Robin—of Zoweh. Based in Durham, North Carolina, the organization serves as a guide for the hearts of men, women, and marriages as they experience the transforming love of God. Thompson is also the author of Search and Rescue, The Heart of a Warrior, and other books. He and his wife have three grown daughters and one “son-in-love.”

Book preview

Conclusion

Introduction

The business that serves as the subject of this book is one that I never would have imagined building, but at the same time, it is uniquely perfect for me as it reflects me in so many ways. This book is a story about my experience building The Essay Network Inc., a company that provides the world’s best custom essays.

I have been involved in the custom essay writing business since 2006 – first as a freelance writer, and until recently, as a proprietor. The last ten years have been tough, rewarding, and so much fun. Over the course of the past decade, I built a (almost) completely automated online business that does tens of thousands of dollars in revenue every month, which has allowed me the freedom to spend my time however I want. But it hasn’t always been like this. My entrepreneurial journey has been long, with many obstacles along the way. This book gives the back-story of how I went from starting a company with nothing, to doing nearly $2 million in sales just over seven years.

I have written this book for many reasons. To begin with, I love to express myself through writing; that is how I got into this business in the first place. More importantly though, I love entrepreneurship, and I love reading about how other people have done it, so I have written about my journey as an entrepreneur so others can read how I did it. I have created my own four-hour work week, and I want to share the lessons I have learned on my journey of building a business from nothing and moving it to almost full automation. We often see the successes of others, but we rarely see the back-story. This book is my attempt to share my own back-story in hopes that it can provide lessons and inspiration for others who are trying to accomplish the same result. I do not have all the answers, but my story shows how I really just set out to keep failing as many times as I needed until I got it right. The more we fail, the more we learn, and learning is what makes us successful.

To get where you want to go, you first need to know where that is. Most people don’t actually set goals, meaning that they don’t actually have an objective for where they want to go and what they want to achieve. These people have limiting beliefs and feel that success is only for other people, and therefore they never even bother to try. When I was younger and just beginning my business, my objective was to create financial freedom with passive income so that money would not be an oppressive force in my life. Since then though, I have re-focused my goal around lifestyle design. This represents a further shift I have taken toward understanding the relationship between money and time. Money is not what we really seek; time is what we really seek, and money is simply the tool we use to create that time. This is the essence of lifestyle design.

After ten years in this industry, I recently exited my business, and the time is right for me to share my story. I have been at it long enough that others can benefit from the trials, tribulations, and successes that I have experienced. I exited my business for good terms, and now I have a good opportunity to take a creative shift in my career, and this book is one of the first steps I am taking. With mental bandwidth opened up, I am excited about using the experiences and lessons of my first start-up to continue to create value for myself and others, while also continuing to pursue lifestyle design. My story shows the long and complicated route I took to build what is now a very clean and simple business. The path to success is never straight, but if you start you will adapt as needed along the way, and ultimately, you will get where you want to be.

A few words about my business

I have been involved in the niche custom essay industry for about a decade, and I have had to explain myself more times than I can count. The service my company provides is writing custom essays based on a client’s instructions. The product is to be used only as a research aid for those that need, and can pay for, the assistance.

The most common question I get is: Is that legal? Of course my business is legal, why wouldn’t it be? Anybody who has a problem with what my company does hasn’t really taken the time to think their position through. It is just an emotional response. Because of this wonderful niche industry, I have had the privilege and pleasure of being able to write in excess of two thousand essays over the years. This experience has completely shaped who I am today. I am now much richer spiritually, intellectually, and emotionally because of all the ideas I have come across and the words I have produced. I also get to continually give this experience to the writers who work for me – I am paying them to learn. In addition to providing a lot of full- and part-time jobs to some great people, I have helped the economy in the many ways that business