Nicole Munoz

In June of 2009 our family will have been living in the beautiful city of Puebla, Mexico for the last 8 years. Why would we choose to live in a 3rd world country? How did someone with no business background get involved in internet marketing a SEO Expert? Most importantly, why would anyone be crazy enough to have six kids?! Read on!

I am Nicole Munoz, It all began on a trip to Mexico when I was 19 years old. For one year I had already been telling anyone that would listen that I was going to go to Mexico to work as a missionary. Hoping that I would change my mind, my parents sent me to work with a missionary in Mexico City for one month the summer between my freshman and sophmore year of Bible college. Undaunted by the poverty in the little villages and the pollution in the largest city in the world, my decision to one day return became firmer instead of weaker. Upon graduation from Bible college I was offered a teaching job in California. There I taught in a one room school house type setting with about 22 students from grades 1 to 6 for almost three years. During my second year of teaching I met my husband, a Bible college graduate also looking to go to Mexico to start a church! In June of 1999 we were married and immediately went to the small town of Iguala, Guerrero to work with a national pastor for 6 months. After working for six months and learning Spanish more or less by complete immersion, we returned to the states and spent the next year raising funds to go to Mexico. In 2001, 3 months after our first child was born, we packed up a trailer and headed down to the city of Puebla, Mexico to start a church. When we first arrived in the city of Puebla, it was a lonely and overwhelming experience. We did not know anyone in the city, we had no friends to call to invite to dinner, and we did not even know where to start! Puebla at that time was the 4th largest city in the country of Mexico. Today it is the 3rd largest. We immediately rented a small storefront and began the work of starting a church! For the first year, we did not see a lot of results. We were not expecting immediate success, but were definitely looking for something!

One year later with a small group of 10, we changed the location of the church and had a new "Grand Opening". We had 32 people on that first Sunday and were so very thankful for each and every one! Little did we know that within 5 years we would be purchasing our very own building and have an active church of around 120 people each Sunday. While we were working on building our church, our little family was growing as well! I soon found myself expecting my second child and that was when my internet marketing adventure really began! During our first year in Mexico, my husband decided to teach himself html to build a website. This was before Blogs so you can imagine! He built a little site called www.reachingpuebla.com so that we could communicate our work to friends and family in the states. I soon also became active in a ladies only forum where most of the members were pastor's wives and missionary wives. I soon found that most of them had their own websites so I convinced my husband to teach me html so I could build my own site. The site www.baptistmom.com was born. One day while searching ebay.com for some preschool material for my soon to be 2 year old, I stumbled across a link that said something to the effect of "Learn how to earn money online!" The link sent me to a sales letter page for an ebook about how to start a yahoo store. The author of the ebook was Andy Jenkins and his ebook has evolved to a video program you can find here: http://www.yahoo-store-builder.com/. At the time the ebook had a price of about $50 and to us, that was A LOT of money. We were happily making ends meet but never had anything extra left over at the end of the month. My husband graciously gave me the money to buy the ebook for my new "hobby", not knowing that a new journey was about to begin! The book was well written and included step by step instructions about what to do to start a new business. I soon learned that if I was going to do things correctly, I was going to have to get a business license, reseller's permit, merchant account, business bank account, and a TIN.

At the time, most things could not still be done online. Opening the business bank account was one of them. We were planning a trip to the states a few months later so I started the research part of finding out what I wanted to sell and got as much paperwork ready as I could before our trip. It was a slow process for me. Since I could not immediately get started, I used the time to really research what I thought would be a good market. Finally, in October of 2003 we were able to take a trip to the states and finish all of the paperwork needed for starting a new business. My husband loaned me $300 to make the opening deposit in the bank but that was the last time he had to give me money for my new hobby! Returning to Puebla, I began to build my first ecommerce store. I had chosen a market that I knew nothing about, but one I thought would be profitable based on my research. Within a week of officially launching the new store, sales started coming in! My initial goal was to earn an extra $50 per month as "mad money" so I could buy some extra things we needed around the house. Little did we know, that goal was soon to be surpassed. From the profits of the store I began to purchase other software programs and ebooks that Andy Jenkins recommended. I followed his tips and advice and soon we were selling about 4-6 thousand dollars per month! Soon after, I received an email from Andy Jenkins telling me about this crazy successful guy named Brad Fallon. Turns out that Brad Fallon had also purchased the same ebook I had, but due to his background in search engine optimization he was able to get his site to show up in the top 10 results of Google and have some pretty wild results. Andy and Brad got together and made a set of disks called Stomping the Search Engines. After much, much, much deliberation, I got the okay from my husband to purchase. Three hundred dollars was by far the most money we had ever spent online for a single purchase! After receiving the disks I immediately got to work in implementing the again step by step instructions of how to be successful. Within 3 months of receiving the disks, the little ecommerce site grossing 4K per month, started to have 20-25K in monthly sales. That was when things really started to get crazy! I won't bore you with the details, but soon after we moved from using only dropshippers to actually stocking the merchandise. We hired a company to take care of distribution for us while I handled the day to day stuff such as answering the phones, sending emails, processing orders and so on. I quickly realized that I could not do everything and began to hire part time help to work out of my home to work on the site while I was busy taking care of babies 2 and 3, a house, husband, and a church!

In October of 2006, Brad and Andy started a new membership site called 2026 Stompernet! At the time of the initial launch I was expecting twin babies to be born (which they were on September 29th) so I could not justify signing up for a monthly membership I knew I was not going to have time to keep up with! When I got a second invite in January from one of the new faculty members as I was on his private email list, I still had to deliberate about spending THAT much money! Since all the success had come so far from following Brad and Andy's step by steps, I decided that there was no risk as far as IF the content would be helpful. The only question was IF I had enough time to implement the strategies. Fast forward two years. At the time of this writing in October of 2008, we have now purchased a building for our church, built a home in Puebla, have 12 part time and full time employees in Mexico and 18 part and full time employees in the Philippines. I have trained an excellent project manager to manage ALL of the day to day stuff so that the only thing I HAVE to work on, is the stuff I WANT to work on. Baby 6 is due to arrive any day now and we couldn't be happier! Most importantly, we have been able to fulfill our work as missionaries and begin an active, healthy church without having to continually go back to the states to raise more funds. Most missionaries spend 4 years on the mission field, and then spend 1 year traveling around the US trying to increase their support level so that they can return to their work. After almost 7 years we had not taken the traditional year off, so we decided to pack up our kids and take a quick 3-4 months to travel in the US. Our goal was to visit churches and inspire a vision in the young people for service to God. Our trip to the US for 4 months was profitable in many ways. Have you ever been on a long car trip with your kids? Have you ever been on a 4 month car trip with 5 kids and a pregnant wife! My poor husband! Needless to say, we had many excellent bonding opportunities with our kids! And MANY stops and McDonalds play places! We drove from Puebla, Mexico to Texas. From Texas to California. From California all the way over to the East Coast. Then all the way back to the West Coast before heading back through Texas to come back to Puebla. Was it fun? Yes! Do I want to do it again any time soon? No! Maybe in another 3-4 years when the kids are all a little bit older! During our trip they were 7, 6, 4, and the two 1 year old twins. In any case, I hope you enjoy visiting my site! I wanted to create a website where I could put my musings as an internet marketer but still keep my identity as a mom first! My goals for the next two years include making the businesses I run even more hands off so I can focus more time on the church.