I’m Zineddine and here is how I got here

My full name is Zineddine Boukhelif and my story starts in 2019, I had just graduated from high school. I live in Qatar and attended a school with a British curriculum (IGCSE’s). I had only applied to one University, unlike all the other kids that had 10+ approval letters, and to my surprise, I got rejected. So there I was, living in a single bedroom apartment with my family, with not a clue about what I was doing with life.

I have always been obsessed with productivity, I would do whatever it takes in my power to avoid having a zero-sum day. A zero-sum day is a day where you make absolutely no progress towards your goals. It was during this period, that I started to give up on life. I knew I needed to do something to get my life on track. At the time, I had no exposure to the ability to make money online. I needed to make money one way or another to be able to survive. Here in Qatar, as an expatriate teen, there are no employment opportunities. This started my journey into looking for other ways to build an income.

During this period, making money online seemed like a scam to me. For all I knew the only people making money online were those spammy banner ads of what seemed to be gurus sitting on their piles of cash and Lamborghini’s. I knew about the stock market and heard of day trading before. I started doing my research and concluded that it is not a form of stable, passive income. After all, I was going to be a university student, I couldn’t partake in anything full-time. After that conclusion, I had to look elsewhere, leading me to dropshipping.

Whilst I still firmly believe in dropshipping, my journey with it is very saddening. I have sprung up 3 different dropshipping stores. In the November of 2019, I launched my first ever dropshipping store was successful – for about a week. I had gotten hit with a Facebook Advertising ban, and trust me, coming back from that is near impossible. I had made about $100 in profit with that store, but the ban deeply shattered me, there was nothing I could do. The ban had adversely affected my second store, which I couldn’t even attempt to launch. I had put such a high proportion of my time and money into these projects, which makes me sad to this day, but I have learned so much in the process. My third dropshipping store was supposed to launch this year (2022) through TikTok advertising. But because of TikTok’s regional targeting policies, I found myself again, making a store that I couldn’t market. Now I still am confident that dropshipping works, if you are from a first-world country, you will not experience all the agonizing restrictions that I had to face, and I encourage you to have a jab at it.

Going back to 2019, as I was learning about dropshipping, I found out about Instagram theme pages. I started 4 different Instagram theme pages which I still own to this day. This was a little bit more successful as I had built a large audience. But I just did not put more effort into it as the potential income that it could make me was just not enough. They also came at the wrong time as I was about to start university and would not have the time to manage all of the pages I owned, and I was too broke to pay for someone to manage them.

In 2020, after the March crash was in every news headline, I decided to get back into the stock market. In August, I bought my first book; The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. This book held so much value in terms of how to invest your money. During this period, I had some change left which I poured into oil investments, which turned out to be a great success – I managed to get 80% returns in one year. To put that in comparison, the average yearly returns in the stock market are 7 to 10 percent. But, my success with the stock market did not fulfill me, as I was making 80% on just the pennies that I had invested, thus I had to make some real money so that I could make big returns.

This led me to where I am today, I recently had a jab at affiliate marketing through ClickBank and Digistore24 with no success. And now I am both a University student and blogging at the same time All these failures had taught me so much in terms of digital media marketing and social media strategy. I have learned how to make conversions through paid and organic sources, grow social media accounts, and website development. I am determined that I will be successful and I am sure that all these struggles will b worth it in the end. I hope I’ll be able to share my journey with all my readers and give you all the insights into everything that I have learned through these 3 years.