Want to learn how to find your ideal audience?

As a business owner, you need to be able to find the people who are waiting for you to arrive, offer your content, product, or service, and immediately say, “Yes, I want it”. Not because you are pushing them with sleazy tactics but because they genuinely believe you can help them.

I use what I’ve learned through my years of experience to find readers for my blog posts, listeners for my audio lessons, viewers for my videos, and buyers for my products and services.

If you want to be able to find your ideal audience in an ethical and effective way, you are in the right place.

My work has been featured in:

Who is Jonathan Nunez and how does he know his stuff?

You did what?

I remember the day like it was yesterday. I was 7 years old and was looking at my aunt as she was cooking. She’s standing next to this old black stove, the slow vivid fire is melting wax on a silver pan. There’s a sweet fragrance of cinnamon running through the air and I can feel a sense of curiosity arise within me. It’s alluring and exciting.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

She looks away from the stove for long enough to see me and says, “I’m making candles”.

She turns around and takes a white ball of candlewick. I stand idle as she takes the wick and cuts a 15-cm piece. It had a distinct red line spiraling through the whole thing. She takes the piece of wick and makes a knot on one end. Then she pauses “…”

She raises her head and looks around as if she’s looking for something.

“What is it?” I said.

“I can’t find the molds” she replied.

She looks under the counter and takes a bag with some aluminum molds. She opens the bag and takes a lunar shaped mold, after that, she takes a piece of the wick and makes it go through the base of the mold sealing it.

Then she picks up the pan and pours some of the wax in the metallic mold. I smile because I already know what I want to do next…

That’s how I learned how to make candles.

Soon after that, I was making my own candles and I used to sell them door to door. I would knock on people’s doors and offer my not so pretty candles. The funny thing is that many people didn’t believe I had made them myself.

Maybe it was because of my young age but every time I had something like that happen to me I would always share the process I used to create them.

I used to feel so excited when telling my story and it would always put a big smile on my face. My enthusiasm was contagious and people bought from me. I loved it.

Little did I know what I was doing was content marketing and storytelling.

I never want to feel that way again

The month was March and the date of “El Carnaval” was approaching. If you are not familiar with Veracruz’s “Carnaval”, think of a seemingly endless parade with allegorical cars and many people dancing to the rhythm of salsa, reggaeton, among other types of music.

My family used to live right in front of the boulevard so every year we would see the parade as it passed by. It was a lot of fun and it was a good opportunity to make some money.

We never went without and I’m thankful for that, we just thought it was going to be a nice experience. Little did I know it was going to become one of the defining moments in my life.

My mother made these three-floor sandwiches with premium ingredients (the same ones we would eat in our daily lives) to sell.

We were selling them for $50.00 MX. pesos which were about $5.00 USD at the time. To put it in perspective, you could have bought a regular sandwich for about $20.00 MX. pesos ($2.00 USD). Because of that, our sandwiches ended up being expensive. Nevertheless, we were selling them.

A few minutes go by and a lady and her husband were walking down the street pushing what looked like a hot dog cart. It smelled wonderful. It turns out they were selling pancakes.

They stop right in front of us, like 5 meters away from us, and start selling them. After a few minutes, the lady looks up from the cart and sees us. Then she leaned over to her husband and told him something. I’m guessing it was something like “I’ll be back.”

She starts walking towards us and asks, “How much are the sandwiches?”

“$50.00 Pesos”, my mother replies.

I will never forget it. As soon as the lady heard the price she opened her eyes wide as if she was shocked (which probably she was). Then she started moving her head left and right, left and right, saying “No, no, no, no” as she turned and walked away.

I was dumbfounded, I had never seen anyone react like that and something inside of me just broke. I could feel my heartache and a moment later tears started rolling down my face.

“What’s wrong?” my mother asked.

“The lady”, I said. “She was hungry and wanted a sandwich but couldn’t afford it.”

My mother looked at me in the eye and said, “You have a big heart.” Then she gave me a sandwich and told me to give it to her.

I extend my arms and take it. Then I started walking towards her and I say, “Excuse me” to get her attention.

She looked at me with a puzzled look on her face. I stretch my arms in her direction while holding the sandwich and say, “It’s for you.”

She takes it with a face that clearly showed she didn’t understand what was going on. After that, I turned around and walked away. As I walked, I started to feel better, I felt like I had done what was right.

I loved it and it was a lot of fun

When I was a kid I was introduced to this anime about a card game called Yu-Gi-Oh. It was new and interesting so I decided to watch it.

When I turned 16, I started playing more heavily. I must have spent over $2,000 USD in cards but that was OK because I loved the game and I was making money from it.

When I got cards I didn’t want or need I would sell them. That’s how I fueled my hobby’s spending.

And that’s exactly when I saw an opportunity. I could get cheaper cards in a different city or get them online and sell them at a higher price where I lived. All thanks to the magic of Facebook messenger and FedEx. 😀

They shut me down…

The year was 2012, I had been going to college as usual but I didn’t have a lot of money, so I couldn’t buy the things I wanted. I wasn’t lacking anything but I wanted to get more cash somehow.

At the time I had been hooked on playing Pokemon on my 3DS. I was breeding Pokemon for competitive play and I thought I could make some money on the side by selling those Pokemon.

I thought, “If I can find people who want to get a competitive Pokemon but don’t want to spend hours and hours breeding the perfect one, I can do it for them.”

There was only one problem, though.

Where can I find these people?

After doing some research, I found a couple of websites where I could sell them.

Mercado Libre (Mexico’s eBay) and eBay.

I quickly created an account on both websites and figured out how to create a sales page, what Pokemons were selling for and how much I could be making on each platform.

I came to the following conclusion:

On Mercado Libre, I could’ve sold my Pokemon in bundles of 20 – 50 Pokemon for about $2.50 USD each. But on eBay, I could sell each Pokemon for about $2.99 USD.

Meaning my potential revenue would have been from $59.80 to $149.50 USD on eBay and $2.50 USD on Mercado Libre (for selling the same amount of product).

After that, it was an easy decision to make.

Everything was going well. I was making some money playing a game I loved and more importantly, I didn’t consider it work. It was my hobby.

But then I received a message from eBay that completely changed everything.

It read something like this:

Too risky?

What does that even mean?

I replied to their message to find out what that meant but didn’t get a satisfactory answer, it was the typical corporate message that said a lot but avoided the main topic.

What bothered me was the fact that I never had any problems with any of my clients and my score was perfect (you can see it in the picture below) but no matter what I did or said, it was all over.

In my 3 months of business on eBay, I made $670.73 USD in profit. My transaction fees were 4.5% so I made $640.55 USD in net profit. You can see my transaction history on eBay by clicking here.

My eBay journey came to an abrupt end but I’m thankful because I learned a lot about customer service, pricing and time management.

Thank you, eBay. 🙂

What are my values and beliefs?

• Always be honest. Even when you feel like it’s better or more profitable to lie.
• Admit you don’t know what you don’t know when someone asks you a question.
• If someone disagrees with you, make sure to keep an open mind and practice tolerance. Just because they have a different opinion doesn’t mean they are right or wrong. It’s just different.
• Doing what’s right is always the right thing to do. It’s a little abstract but by implementing all that’s written here, it becomes easier to identify what the right thing to do is.
• Don’t talk about other people unless you have something nice to say.
• If there’s something you feel you want to share with the world, test it first to make sure it works and only then teach it to others.
• Don’t wait for others to take action towards something that’s valuable. Practice leadership every day of your life and show others the way.
• If there are people you can help with your set of values, beliefs, and skillset, help as many as you can but don’t neglect yourself.
• When you don’t know what to do next; relax, prioritize, and execute.

Summary

I believe in always being honest, admitting I don’t know what I don’t know, practicing tolerance every day of my life, not talking about others unless I have something nice to say and leading by example. I’m a follower of Jesus, entrepreneur, marketer, and gamer.

The purpose of this blog is to help business owners find their ideal reader, listener, viewer, and/or customer so that they don’t have to struggle to make ends meet.

All I say and do is a reflection of who I am, what I’ve been through and what I believe.