I did a long post yesterday about the life cycle of my original online real estate business, Home Sale News.

Writing the post turned out to be therapeutic for me.

It was a little bitter-sweet for me to dive into the story of that venture that I invested so much personal time and energy into, that had some modicum of success, but which never really took off like I thought it would.

I never cracked the code.

I was so near, yet so far away.

Inception

It’s funny looking back. This is the absolute truth – when I started I figured if I got a lot of email subscribers, I would figure out later how to make money from them. I figured getting the email subscribers would be the hard part.

Well, I succeed amazingly well on the first half of the plan and ended up with 15,000 subscribers to newsletters that only targeted metro Phoenix. Truly amazing!

So, I guess I kind of cracked the first part of the code – at least temporarily, anyway – but I never cracked the code for the second half of the equation. I never figured out how to make money from all those email inboxes I was getting into.

Sure, my online presence generated a lot of business for me but every real estate agent was doing tons of business back then.

To be honest, I thought that Home Sale News generated a surprisingly small amount of business considering the number of subscribers and the huge amount of work I put into creating and maintaining the 124 weekly email newsletters.

I thought if thousands of people saw my name in their inbox every week that some of them would call me when they needed a real estate agent. It didn’t happen.

It turned out, in fact, that most of my real estate clients came to me from my website alone, they didn’t even subscribe to my e-newsletters!

Pretty Damn Cool!

Now, a day after writing the post, I’m really glad I decided to take a chance and write a TMI post (like this one).

Last night walking around the neighborhood, looking back on writing the post and the whole crazy Home Sale News adventure from first inception to virtual memorial, I thought;

“Wow, I did some really cool stuff!

15,000 subscribers! Crazy!

And then I had 60 websites? Totally crazy!

And TOTALLY FRIGGIN COOL!”

That was a fun walk.

Onward!

Thanks for the free therapy session!

Leave your comments and insights below.