Category: Day Job Exit Strategy
How to Avoid A Mental Breakdown From Working At Home
Do you remember what happened to Jack Torrance when he tried to ‘work from home’ in The Shining?
Jack thought a little peace and quiet would be nice. What better way to finish his writing than to migrate to a remote hotel with nothing but time and his rocking shadow to fill the void? Unfortunately, that particular ‘home’ turned out to be harbouring some sinister spirits.
Believe it or not, Internet Marketers and Jack Torrance have something in common. No, not haunted mansions. But rather, we have to deal with the psychological effect of isolation. We have to win the battle that goes on inside our heads.
Disconnecting from the world and working from home is some people’s idea of paradise. Well, if you’re not careful, it could turn in to your idea of Hell. And before you know it…
Well shit, Sherlock. I guess that 9-5 doesn’t look so bad, after all.
We Are All Creatures of Habit
From the age of about 5, we are indoctrinated with a system of routines. A system that – for many people – lasts all the way through to retirement.
There are 8760 hours in a year, and not many people have the power and responsibility to decide how they spend every last one of them.
I’ve spoken to many Internet Marketers like myself, and a recurring theme is the difficulty in striking a work-life-play balance.
Even though I had less freedom, I look back on my stint working for a London agency as one of the easiest times of my life. The days and weeks were laid out for me. You turn up at 9am, leave the office at 6pm, and whatever hours left in the day are yours to spunk however you see fit. There was a beautiful simplicity to life, albeit a restricting schedule that often left me chewing a large Mocha to get through the mornings.
I won’t lie. Working from home will always be my preferred arrangement. But it comes at the price of isolation. Do you ever feel that the rest of the world is racing on by without you?
The effect was magnified during my 8 months living in Thailand. There were periods of mild depression where I felt so isolated from other 24 year olds that I lost complete direction and control over my life. I came back to London thinking it would reignite me somehow. I was excited just to be able to communicate in English with whoever was serving me coffee. It was a luxury. But now having settled back in to the suburbs, the same restlessness has returned with a vengeance.
I come from the small town of Ruislip in North West London. It’s a nice town, but it rarely sets my pulse racing. The last time I got excited was when Boris Johnson rolled up outside Budgens seeking London Mayoral votes. You know you’ve got problems when the presence of Boris makes your day.
Despite being just 40 minutes from the hub of Central London, life here is slow. It’s really slow. There are times where I forget that human life exists outside my window, until I hear the trundle of a granny mowing down the street on her scooter. Then I realise, Jesus Christ, if she doesn’t slow down, some poor sod is about to get his arse extinguished by her four wheeled killing machine. That’s when I feel alive.
From my home office window, on a particularly exciting day, I may glimpse next-door’s cat getting in to a fight with a pigeon. But that’s about it. There are times where for all of the freedom and comfort that comes from working at home, I do question my future sanity. I’m 24 years old and most of my conversation throughout the day comes from two extremely lively dogs barking at me for food. Is this really all there is to Internet Marketing?
I think a lot of want-to-be-work-at-homers underestimate how quickly total freedom can spiral in to a blur of inactivity. There are times where ‘rudderless ship’ has summed me up perfectly.
Working from home creates a huge vacancy of time. Pretending that such a void can be filled with work, television and coffee is quite possibly one of the biggest lifestyle fuck-ups you can make.
Everybody needs to feel alive socially, and much of the natural gravitation behind that pursuit is stripped away when you decide to work from home. You have to make the effort, on a personal level, to ensure that your sense of camaraderie and belonging doesn’t dissipate from the moment you leave the office for the final time. Working at home is not the answer to anybody’s true sense of paradise. It’s just a contributing factor.
When you have more hours at your disposal than everybody else, you need to find more ways to pass the idle time. You need hobbies and social routines. Activities that snap you away from your screen and inject purpose beyond making money from so-and-so.
A day built around wealth generation is completely wasted when you think about it. Why aren’t you enjoying what you already have? I’ve had to answer that question many times for myself and it represents my biggest struggle of the last 3 years.
We are all creatures of habit. For most of us, those habits are defined through systems that are implemented from childhood. But when you step outside the system, isolation and poor planning can unleash a truly ugly creature.
Recommended This Week:
-
Don’t forget to subscribe to the FinchBlogs RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter.
Dear Internet, Print Me Some Money
Internet Marketing is littered with enough false promises to make your eyes water. Ever since the turn of the millennium when Internet stocks created fortunes and lost them twice as fast, our industry has been riddled with high expectations, a circumspect grounding in reality, and far too much bullshit to keep a tab on.
My work has revolved around the Internet for my entire professional career. I advanced from designing websites, to assembling the code behind them, to selling ad space on them. Along the way, I’ve developed a keen eye for spotting opportunities on other websites. From primitive arbitrage, to site flipping opportunities, to abusing loopholes in ways that the webmaster never intended.
I’ve seen many moneymaking strategies crash and burn, whilst others have evolved with time. SEO, for example, requires a conservative and professional approach in 2012, with an ever-increasing number of bullets to dodge. It used to be easy. Why? Because nobody else was doing it.
Fast forward to 2008. Affiliate marketing had become perhaps the greatest wealth generator for idiots the digital landscape has ever known. Life was so simple. Find an offer to promote, upload an ad to Facebook, wait for approval, and bank the rich returns. Inevitably, the rest of the world caught on. And here we are now. Prices have never been higher, and so the degree of creativity necessary to succeed has risen. Thousands of novices want to become affiliate marketers, and yet the task gets harder with every passing day. They’re 4 years late to the party.
Affiliate marketers who made their millions in the big boom have been fast-tracked as experts on a subject that has detoured dramatically from its original path. Novices may look up to those experts, but the painted picture from the top is rarely anything but smoke and mirrors.
Nature has a time-honoured method of punishing good moneymaking strategies once they reach the public domain. If the strategy becomes common knowledge, or too exposed to unskilled buffoons, any benefit to be gained from the opportunity is lost. Of course, the strategy lives on in the imagination of the baying crowd. Many will happily pay to hear about the next magic button, the next get rich quick scheme, blissfully ignorant to the reality. As soon as lucrative information becomes public knowledge, it loses its value.
As an Internet Marketer, I see this happening time and time again. Legitimate moneymaking opportunities are born, profited from, and then swiftly rendered useless as a ‘guru’ leaks the techniques to the masses.
These gurus are rarely true exponents of the techniques they talk about. They are poorly skilled at making money with genuine enterprise, so they choose to sell the concept instead. Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. Their decision to teach ruins the opportunity for the true exponents, and it creates a glorious pipe dream for everybody else. Market law dictates that when a lucrative strategy becomes too easy and too popular, it fails.
In the stock market, wise investors know that a bull market is riddled with danger when Average Joe can be seen throwing his money at it – especially if he’s offering the same ‘hot tips’ to his neighbours and friends.
The same applies to just about every ‘easy’ strategy in Internet Marketing. Unless you’re the innovator, the strategy is guaranteed to be anything but easy by the time you’ve read about it in a PDF.
99% of information products are bullshit on this basis. The grander the promises, the further detached from reality they become.
One of the golden rules you have to ask before considering any information product is simply, “Why is the author giving this information away?”
The bizopp market is constructed around some of the most illogical consumer decisions of all time.
If you honestly believe that a multi-millionaire is going to give you access to the blueprints of his success for $19.95, you’ve lost your bloody marbles. Why do people not ask “Why?”
1. Why would a millionaire need to sell his blueprints?
2. How effective can those blueprints be if they’re on sale for $19.95?
3. If he really wanted to give back to help others, why charge at all?
Honestly, there are no exceptions. You will not find a single moneymaking strategy in the world that ticks all three boxes of easy, sustainable and profitable.
There are easy and profitable strategies… but they don’t last, and often require leaving your integrity at the door. If you’re an affiliate marketer, slinging acai berries to half of America was easy and profitable. But sustainable? Not with an FTC lawsuit wedged firmly up your arse.
Likewise, you’ll find plenty of easy and sustainable strategies… although I haven’t yet seen one that made anybody rich. Extreme couponing is an easy and sustainable strategy, but only if you value your time at close to nothing. Maybe a nuclear blast will bring profitability to your giant stash of Frosted Flakes, but failing that; good luck.
And then there’s the smart choice: profitable and sustainable strategies… the blueprint of all great businesses. Average Joe might not like to hear it, sitting at home in his underpants with $19.95 to invest, but these strategies are several galaxies detached from being easy. They require the creation of real-world value. And there you’ll find the only blueprint of wealth generation with a proven track record: adding value to the world.
If you can’t create value for somebody, somewhere; you don’t deserve your early retirement. That’s a contrasting view with the many ‘magic button’ infomercials; those that prosper when your sense of entitlement grows. They insist that success is your God given right; that the world is doing you wrong if it fails to deliver a Pina Colada on a crystal sandy beach.
Whatever your personal beliefs, or your own sense of entitlement, the market will not change. Anything that you can buy for $19.95 is readily available for the rest of the world to buy too. If you intend to become richer than the market average, you have to do more with the information than most of your neighbours and friends. Or better yet, blaze a completely new trail for others to copy.
Recommended This Week:
- Don’t forget to subscribe to the FinchBlogs RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter.
Retire At 21, Feel Like An Idiot At 22
Dear Trusty Employees,
It is with great sadness that I announce my impending departure from our Company. I have decided to retire from all business so that I can put my feet up in the leafy suburbs, desperately attempting to convince myself that there’s more to life than work.
I’m sure you will have many questions. Why now? Why so young?
Please accept my decision. It shows that I’ve achieved more than you in a shorter space of time.
I am greatly looking forward to tackling the next challenge in my life: puberty.
Yours truly,
Young Retired Dipshit
Many people consider retirement the reward for a lifetime of turmoil. It’s the bucket of gold at the end of the rainbow. The day of reckoning when we can say “I’ve done my bit“, and stop worrying about surviving from one pay cheque to the next.
The Internet age has spawned a generation of online entrepreneurs who are capable of retiring in their 20s. Does Mark Zuckerberg need to worry about his financial future? I suppose he does if he likes to keep track of his billions.
Even though Zuckerberg can retire, I’m positive he won’t. And there’s good reason for that sentiment.
The next step after retirement is death.
Who would want to retire in their 20s? The idea gets bounced around with prestige and glamour. There are websites dedicated to the ambition of retiring young, but I shudder to imagine how somebody capable of assembling the finances so young would react to the transition of pottering around a garden and writing Christmas cards in September.
It’s a paradox if ever I heard one.
When you have nothing left to work for, you have nothing left to live for. Anybody who believes otherwise might as well go hang out with Macaulay Culkin. Smoke some pot, watch Home Alone 2 and revel in your own waste of potential.
Time and time again, I have friends cross-examining me on the nature of my work. In their eyes, I’m retired. I make money online, which is as good as twatting around on Facebook while the dollar bills grow in my fridge, right? They’re wrong.
Even though I work in comfort, there’s rarely a second in the day where work isn’t close to my thoughts. It follows me around like an infection that just won’t shake, so why don’t I learn to forget about work and switch off? It’s simple. I don’t see work as a bad thing.
If you take a human being and strip him of his desire to work towards a goal, what do you have left? An empty shell that’s retired and ready for death. There isn’t much of the person left over.
Work doesn’t have to be employment as you and I know it. It can be charity-based volunteering, or even just a commitment to stay busy. However, the retirement yearned for at unhappy office cubicles is no more than a desire to believe the grass is greener on the other side. It rarely is, and retirement is seldom the experience you crave.
What you really desire is work that you can believe in. You want to spend energy completing tasks where you give half a shit about the end result. Who doesn’t? This is the great illusion of retirement. Giving up a mundane chore isn’t going to fill the void in your life. That void exists because you haven’t felt the passion to get out of bed at 8am out of choice.
If financial independence was all we longed for, millionaires would be happy and averagely paid employees would be jumping from office blocks. Happiness is not a flexible hours agreement, or retirement altogether. It’s the desire to get out of bed. To do something with your plain existence and convince yourself that retirement would only get in the way of all the things you have left to prove.
If that means changing career, go right ahead. We spend a third of our lifetimes at work, or thinking about it, so it makes zero sense to be working for the wrong reasons. The day you wake up and don’t feel an urge to work towards a goal, that’s when you have problems. That’s when retirement will become the death of you.
Recommended This Week:
- Help Finch grow. Subscribe to my new FinchBlogs RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter. Merci beaucoup!
What’s Your Day Job Exit Strategy?
Are you ready to give up your day job? As appealing as a life on the backyard patio may seem, it can actually turn in to a downward spiral of depression and desperation.
Bold words. Now, I’m not trying to scaremonger the masses from wanting to quit their day jobs, but I do think you should think twice about your true motives before calling it quits. A day job, despite being the unglamorous cousin of entrepreneurism, brings security, stability and routine in to your life.
From my experience, people love to talk down the idea of routine in their lives. Many just-turned entrepreneurs will react with real spite when you ask them what they think of a Monday to Friday day job in somebody else’s company. Maybe it’s the burning need to stay consistent with their own life choices, but I believe that time will shine a light on the objectivity of those choices.
Many entrepreneurs later realise that the grass was indeed much greener on the other side. They see that being parked in an office cubicle ready to go by 9am is actually a much lighter burden than the self-inflicted misery of running an unsuccessful business and scratching around the bank to make ends meet.
It’s over 2 years since I worked my last day in Central London. I was a web developer, charged with pretty comfortable tasks and blessed with reasonably decent prospects. I was the youngest person in the agency where I worked, and probably the least likely to quit and start my own business.
I had no resentment towards that last job. Unlike many people who email me looking for answers to their own career slash mental breakdowns, I was content and had no reason to detest conventional employment.
However, I was passionate about wanting to run my own business. I developed a golden opportunity to do so in the space of six bat-shit crazy weeks, stumbling head first in to affiliate marketing and barely batting an eyelid as I wrote out my notice in a flurry of activity that still gives me a headache to look back on.
Who builds a sustainable business in six weeks? Inventors, Mark Zuckerberg and the occasional Einstein freakshow that I most certainly was not. I was in no shape or form prepared to start a business, despite harbouring some naive love affair with the idea of calling myself the boss.
Those first six months were a series of trials and tribulations of my own inflicting. I had a Plan A and a lot of newly established spare time, but little else. When my Plan A failed – within the first few days – I was faced with a sink or swim scenario where I needed to redesign a business from scratch or get back in the recession-struck waiting queue for another day job. Thankfully, keyboard sweat and tears paid off and I succeeded in reconstructing a profitable business.
What the entire experience taught me was that running a business, no matter how optimistic you may be, will always challenge you more in every way than the monotonous nature of navigating London Underground and reaching your desk before 9:01 every morning.
The nature of the challenge, or rather the acid test of how many hairs you’ll lose trying to succeed, can be boiled down in to an equation of preparation and then… lots more preparation.
You need a sensible Day Job Exit Strategy (AKA “How to escape the frying pan without burning your arse in the fire”)
You’ll have to forgive me for inflicting yet more misery-guts perspective on the proceedings, but it’s time to get real. Are you REALLY prepared for the challenges ahead? Here are some of the concerns you should be raising with your neocortex.
1. Do I have enough money to survive for 6 months if I’m not making immediate profit?
Entrepreneurs will give you varying answers for how much money is needed in the bank. I think six months of covered outgoings is a safe bet for online ventures, assuming your business plan is worth the paper it’s written on.
2. Who is going to handle my accounts?
The next logical question if, like me, you answer “Err…” to am I fully qualified to handle my accounting? My initial attitude towards taxes was one of complete disregard. I knew I would be expected to pay them, but my assumptions were about as well founded as a poor English bastard buying shorts in July. It’s not always obvious, but when you choose to become your own boss, you lose the accounting safety net of your previous employer.
3. Is my business built on moving ground?
Fads come and go. If your business idea is so niche that it isn’t capable of withstanding a small shift in the market – or the arrival and enhancements of new technologies – then you need to really think long and hard about the sustainability of it all. Don’t obsess over stealing a quick dollar in 2011. Anticipate how your business will meet a market demand for the next several years.
4. Am I mentally equipped to be my own boss?
I don’t mean this in a negative light, but some entrepreneurs are naturally better suited to the role of followers rather than leaders. It makes sense. After all, no economy can survive without willing servants to carry out orders. I think discipline and goal-setting is very important in this regard. To succeed with your own business, you have to hold yourself personally accountable.
Even when other people fuck up, it’s still your fault. Repeat the words, and learn not to take them personally.
As I personally found out, this awakening of responsibility can hit your social life with frightening force. Be prepared for the surreal shifting of priorities as “Thank God It’s Monday” becomes your new catchphrase.
5. Am I escaping a life I don’t enjoy, or creating a life I’ll enjoy more?
This is another hard-hitting question that only a very honest soul can answer. It’s a little like the analysis attached to “Is the glass half-empty or half-full?”
For many people in unhappy day jobs, starting a new business is an unfortunate learning curve that will take you to the realisation that two wrongs do not make a right.
Entrepreneurism is often a misread solution to the career crisis, when simply finding a better job would lead to greater happiness. If you’d do anything to escape your day job, there is always more than one answer to your problem. Starting an entire business is very much a niche solution, and 9 times out of 10, the wrong solution.
Your professional happiness does not hinge on running as far as possible from the office cubicle. It could be as simple as joining a different cubicle across the hall. For others, no cubicle will contain their aspirations. And for these people, starting a business is the only way to handle that burning flame of ambition.
Before you decide if you’re that person, you have to answer some basic home truths. The honest answers will lead you towards a sensible Day Job Exit Strategy. Behind all the glamour of being an entrepreneur, rest assured, it’s a living nightmare for the individual who answers those questions naively.
Recommended This Week:
-
Check out Filthy Rich Mind, a brand new project I’m collaborating on with a couple of other writers in the self-improvement market. It’s a fun project and if you like off-the-wall advice for improving your lifestyle, subscribe here for updates.
-
And, of course, don’t forget to subscribe to this blog too if you haven’t already done so. Love you long time. C’est vrai, c’est vrai.
How To Build A Diversified Online Business
Diversify, diversify, diversify.
The three coolest words in an Internet Entrepreneur’s vocabulary. But what does it mean in practical terms?
Most entrepreneurs appreciate that with competitive markets and rapidly changing technologies, placing all your profitable eggs in one basket is a risky tactic.
If you don’t want your online business to end in a flood of tears and bitter resentment, then you better learn to diversify and create several avenues of profit. MySpace has shown, quite spectacularly, that it’s possible to fall from grace in 18 months. And you would do well to assume that so can pretty much any profit spinning website in your portfolio.
What Makes a Strong Portfolio of Online Assets?
In no particular order, here are some of my favourite business cornerstones.
Profitable affiliate marketing campaigns
Who would have guessed it? An affiliate marketer recommending affiliate marketing! Stable it is not, but an important staple of my business it will remain.
CPA campaigns provide enormous earning potential, and although short term in nature, can be used to fund investments in to more long term business models. I advertise affiliate offers using various PPV traffic sources, Plentyoffish and Facebook.
Effective affiliate campaigns require only part-time management, making them key contributers to your bottom line, without swallowing up all of your time.
The information resources for Tomorrow’s Next Trend…
Forget about the monetization, and ask yourself, “What is going to be really talked about in 2012?”, then build a website that provides top quality content on that topic. Does anybody remember the crazy market for backgrounds and add-ons when MySpace peaked? These exploded in popularity, and those who were ready to meet the demand, profited immensely.
Predict what is about to become hot, rather than attempting to monetize yesterday’s news, then build a website that delivers outstanding content on the topic. If you do this well, the monetization will take care of itself. Being first matters.
How about a home bizopp site for Greeks? Smell the demand, jump on it.
Having an online store
Drop-shipping and digital download stores are two areas I’ve been exploring closely over the last few months. I have a turnkey download store that produces a steady flow of revenue, and it’s inspired me to look further afield.
One of the great benefits of selling your own products is a conspicuous lack of anal manhandling by Google if you later decide to use their Adwords platform. Yes, owning your own product takes away the title of Internet Middleman, which Google unfortunately associates with Aids and Rabies.
For those with aspirations of something more legitimate than a digital product store, feel free to get utterly lost in the possibilities of drop-shipping. Sites like Alibaba make it possible to purchase, via wholesale, just about any product imaginable, and then sell it on for [sometimes] healthy profits. This is a step away from simple sideways diversification, but worth a look.
The branded blog
You may have noticed my soft spot for blogging. And you may have noticed my particular style of blog branding. I believe that it’s possible to become an authority in your industry, making good money as a blogger, without selling out in the eyes of your readers.
But the formula is murky.
Some bloggers use their platforms too eagerly to push any affiliate product with a commission attached. Others, I feel, are guilty of under-monetizing their blogs. I prefer to ignore writing about products, and instead focus my efforts on establishing relationships of similarity with my readers.
For my Internet Marketing blogs, I like to use humour, sarcasm and an occasionally self-deprecating tone. These are excellent weapons for building bridges of trust with a notoriously cynical market, but they’re not always as effective elsewhere. If you’re going to diversify in to becoming a blogger, step one is to understand your market.
And no, that’s not just some useless Quantcast demographics. But understanding what makes them laugh, what makes them smile, what content are they known to devour, and most importantly, what do they aspire to be? It sounds straightforward, but is often forgotten. The secret to running a popular blog is to know exactly what the “end goal” is for your average reader…and then to position yourself as the lifestyle rainmaker who can deliver that golden egg.
I have developed a collection of popular blogs that rake in $5-10K per month through direct banner buys alone. Many affiliates would laugh at those numbers, but hey – it’s diversified income. Most of my money traditionally comes from affiliate marketing, but if it were to disappear overnight, I make more than enough through publishing crap like this to live comfortably within my means.
The coupon haven
Consumers love coupons. It’s an addiction that has been passed down through generations and is now more exploitable than ever thanks to the reach of the web.
When people ask me what kind of website would make a good first addition to their portfolio, I tell them to go find some niche coupons for products with affiliate programs, then build a website around them. If you’re smart, you’ll do this in such a way that the website doesn’t die with each coupon period that expires.
Your own personal page
Even if you don’t want to become a blogger, I don’t think it’s ever a bad idea to have a personal presence on the web. Some of the most exciting opportunities I’ve had would never have found my inbox if I hadn’t made the decision to promote myself, and what I do, through a personal site.
Obviously, a portfolio is not going to attract money in the diversification sense. But you shouldn’t underestimate the opportunities that can fall your way if you tell the world what you’re good at.
A collection of mailing lists
They say the money is in the list, and although that statement is being challenged by the arrival of fan pages and enormous Twatter followings, I believe it still rings true. Mailing lists are fantastic assets to have. The ability to land effortlessly in the inbox of 50000 potential customers at the snap of your fingers should not be discounted.
I like to use Facebook and PPV sources to build highly targeted mailing lists that can be sold various products. For a brilliant illustration of how this works, get your IMGrind on and read this.
Understand there are Internet Gazillionaires who make money through no other means than by mailing the hell out of some very large lists. Contrary to popular belief, those lists do not last forever, especially if you’re the kind of prick who buys them from the unsolicited scrapheap. However, put to the right use, mailing lists can deliver lots of return customers and cross-selling opportunities.
The acquisition of good products
As perfectionists, we sometimes doubt what others are capable of achieving. One of the best ways to diversify an online business is to invest in somebody else’s good work. You can’t give 110% of your attention to every brainfart that occupies the mind… but somebody else can.
Stable businesses make a habit of innovating and investing in equal measures. While I enjoy the creative thrill of building websites from scratch, it makes just as much business sense to buy websites and digital products straight off the shelf if the standard is high. You might want to avoid marketplaces like Flippa which are about as buyer-friendly as a fist in the balls for your money back.
I recommend buying re-sellable digital products, or privately seeking out under-monetized blogs for the best chance of adding a nice juicy investment to your portfolio. If you can monetize better than 95% of other webmasters, you can have an absolute field day profiting from their hard work.
What Are The Areas I Don’t Like Diversifying In To?
Are there any projects to avoid? This is likely to provoke an angry response from those who dedicate their careers to the work I’m about to mention, and with good reason. Entrepreneurs are driven by different motives with different objectives. But for me personally, the areas I don’t like diversifying in to include…
Anything driven solely by SEO. I can’t control it, therefore I don’t pretend to understand it. SEO is an afterthought for all of my projects. If you build it, they will come. Only a complete bumberclart wastes his time trying to compensate for Google’s next move.
Web design and programming. I have the skills from my background as a programmer, but it’s far too time consuming to “diversify” in to client work. And it’s not so much a diversification, but rather a complete veering from the racetrack. In short, client based programming work can suck a donkey chode. I always get the shivers when friends or family contact me asking for a “quick website built”. And that’s without the duty of actually being paid for it.
Web hosting services. They will consume your entire working day, unless they’re entirely modularised and outsourced. I’ve seen many examples on Flippa of small web hosting services boasting respectable profits, but when you factor in that time is money, those profits suddenly start to look very small. Committing to be somebody else’s 99.9% uptime bitch would push me to insanity.
Customer subscription services. You will find that once again, unless you outsource everything, another service will usually beat you to the market by dedicating 100% of it’s time and doing a better job. A good example of such a subscription service is the pay-to-access forum. Many of these forums are emerging (PPV Playbook, IMGrind…), and it’s tough to knock the earning potential when you look at the numbers. 500 members paying $60/month is a healthy $30000/month in revenue.
However, forums are also notorious time-vacuums. Unless you can dedicate significant time to them everyday, they will never blossom in to healthy communities. Even once they’re established, you still need to engage and interact on a daily basis. This is perfect if the forum is your primary business. But as a diversification strategy? Be prepared to double your current workload, or get eaten by the competition.
Niches I know nothing about. If I can’t understand what I’m selling, I have no hope of guessing my customer’s next move. I’ve made the mistake far too often of developing websites on niche topics that I don’t “get”, and although I can motivate myself for the build phase, they often sit derelict after the site is launched.
Whatever You Do, Do It Well
It goes without saying that diversifying a business is irrelevant if you do a half-arsed job of it. We can go back to the MySpace example as a prime example of this. The examples above are merely my own professional choices, based on my own skillset and the talents of those I work with. You may have a very different vision.
As long as the vision is clear, and the planning is sound, diversification can only ever be a good thing.
Recommended This Week:
-
If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine. Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny
- Help! Subscribe to my new FinchBlogs RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter.
Man, Laptop And World: How To Travel Efficiently
Over the last seven months, I feel like I’ve spent more time logging in to hotel Wifi systems than I have in my own office. When you make the decision to travel, whilst working on the move, efficiency becomes a major issue. How can you get the most out of your time, while severing many of those hours in pursuit of greater thrills?
I recommend travelling to anybody who has the chance. If your business is self-managed, it makes little sense to constrain your time and freedom to a single city, especially if you already know that city inside out. Many people cite the influence of outside factors for not being able to travel.
“The wife won’t let me…”
“The kids are too much work…”
“I’m tied in to a rental contract…”
Admittedly, those with less ties than myself have more problems to solve before they can take off around the world, but none of the factors are hammer blows to the idea. They just take a greater leap of faith and/or commitment to overcome.
If you’re stuck between indecision and lack of information, here are a few pointers I’ve picked up along the way:
1. Travel as lightly as possible.
If you are a notorious hoarder of junk, traveling is an excellent excuse to throw out the crap that’s being cluttering your garage for so long. When I moved to Thailand, I completely overestimated how many clothes I would need, and indeed what type of clothes I would need. Sticky heat-trapping shirts barely cool enough for the English winter? Definitely not going to be needed in Bangkok. Did I bring them anyway? Of course I did.
It’s tempting to fit a lifetime’s accumulation of crap in to your suitcase, but ask yourself one question. Is this so important that I can’t buy a replacement while I’m away? The answer to most items will be no. Traveling light makes moving around much easier, not to mention saving you many many pesos in excess baggage charges.
2. Hotel Wifi has a recurring tendency to suck balls.
I’ve learnt that if I don’t do research beforehand, fate will typically conspire to hand me a shitty hotel Internet connection. Working from a laptop instead of a dual screen Mac took some adjusting. Working from a laptop on 56K dial-up speeds merited a full blooded sucker punch to the balls. If you’re staying in a hotel, make sure the Wifi is good and included free of charge. Or risk paying £30 for a few hours of patchy usage at somewhere like Novotel Rim Pae. Screw you, Novotel.
3. Don’t stay in flash, rich, luxurious hotels.
Wifi is worth investing in if you’re running a business from your laptop. But I’ve never understood the craze behind booking hotels for $500/night. Ultimately, a bed is a bed. Unless you plan on doing something other than sleeping in it, why pay through the nose for something that rarely gives you a true taste of the place you’re visiting? Overpaying is considered by many to be a macho display of ballin’. Invariably, traveling with set requirements of the pampered existence you need to get to sleep at night defeats the bloody purpose of traveling at all.
4. Learn the language.
My biggest regret as I move on from Thailand. It’s difficult to truly appreciate a culture if the standard conversation leaves you scratching your head and whipping up Rosetta Stone on the smartphone. Learning a few basic phrases is a must, while learning conversational basics will give you a much better understanding of what’s happening around you. Not to mention, a whole new world of local prices become accessible once you display a better grasp of the native vocab than a regular tourist.
5. Dropbox.
Dropbox is the new rage. Okay, to most people, it’s yesterday’s new rage. I was slow to jump on the bandwagon, but I’m glad that I did. By using Dropbox, you can afford to pull a Tim Ferriss. Sod off the face of the Earth completely, leave your laptop behind and restrict work to bursts of activity in an Internet Cafe just outside the Angolan Jungle. Dropbox gives you access to your important files anywhere, synchronizing them across devices and affording you the title of Digital Nomad.
6. Use time differences to your advantage.
Initially, I was concerned about the time difference when I first moved to Asia. Companies and reps based in the UK, Canada and America would still be asleep while I was busy with work. What if I needed to talk to them? It didn’t take long for me to figure that this was a great blessing in disguise. Zero distractions and zero interruptions. By the time those in America had woken up and replied to my emails, I would be happily relaxing and unwinding in the sun.
7. Have back-up support in place.
When you’re traveling, even with laptop in tow, it brings peace of mind to have somebody ready and waiting to act on any emergencies. I hired a Virtual Assistant from EasyOutsource.com, which is by far my favourite place to recruit cheap but talented labour.
You can have all your mundane tasks handled by a full-time VA for as little as $250/month, although I would recommend you invest a little more for quality’s sake. It’s also better to hire a combined workforce rather than a single employee. An individual is just as prone to “sick days” at inconvenient times as you were back in the day job. Hiring a team removes this worry.
8. Reduce any unwanted papermail before leaving.
In the UK, I use the Royal Mail’s redirection service to have my post sent to family while I’m away. If it’s important, I’ll have them send it on for me. This costs £8/month for domestic redirection and up to £30/month to have mail routed overseas. It’s a good idea to deselect paper statements from your online credit and store card accounts. Who needs to be reminded of yesterday’s vanity purchases, anyway?
For tax purposes, I have any important documents from HRMC sent to my Thai based address. This is easy to do by updating your current profile after receiving the Government Gateway ID. For everything else, I don’t stress. If it’s important, I’m sure the sender will find a better way of contacting me.
9. Tell your bank and credit card issuers where you’re traveling.
Very important and the source of much frustration while I’ve been attempting to use ATMs overseas. Fraud detectors are sent in to a frenzy if you withdraw £500 from a Cambodian street market. Your bank will routinely cancel payments and refuse to process ATM withdrawals if you don’t make it clear over the phone that you will be traveling to a particular region on a certain date.
For this reason alone, I chose to open an HSBC Advance account before moving to Asia. They have a strong presence abroad and it’s reassuring to be able to walk in to a branch that knows your name if you have any problems.
Recommended This Week:
-
If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine. Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny
- Help a virginal Finch. Subscribe to my new FinchBlogs RSS feed. And if you don’t already follow me, add FinchSells to your Twitter.
The Entrepreneur’s Survival Instinct: Got It?
Running an online business works in stages. Those stages are typically bemusement, survival and once in a blue moon, the luxury of thriving.
The majority of enterpreneurs are stuck in survival mode. Not because surviving is any easier than winding up bemused, but because most people give up not long after bemusement sets in.
So that leaves the rest of us. Surviving or thriving. What is it for you?
Many people believe their online businesses are thriving, but in reality, they are prospering on the edge of a cliff. Just one stiff breeze from falling in to the oblivion. It’s difficult to determine what distinguishes thriving from surviving, but in my opinion, the ability to take several setbacks in your stride is a decisive factor.
I know many affiliate marketers who are producing profits of five figures on a monthly basis, but I stop short of calling them thrivers. Why? Because they’re surviving in a marginal market. Their methods are the business equivalent of whoring out a one trick pony. If the products they sell change, or the advertisement methods they use disintegrate, it’s very difficult to recover. Such is the pain in the arse that follows any middleman in a volatile industry.
This isn’t to knock affiliate marketers (I am one), but to get to the bottom of the most important quality in a successful online entrepreneur – the ability to survive, at all costs, in rapidly changing markets.
We have to adapt to new methods of generating income, or fall by the wayside as yesterday’s dotcom optimists.
If you are based solely online, you are running a fluid business. By doing away with the brick and mortar, your rent becomes the price of staying aware of how the online space is changing – and how you can affect it.
I remember hating web programming because I resented the endless evolving technologies attached to the craft. Learn one language and I’d find it out of date, or the poorer cousin of a brand new language. In reality, all online businesses are prisoners to the chains of technology. The quicker technology develops, the more proactive you have to be to stay on top of your competition.
For that reason, I always say that it’s wise to build a business on flexible foundations. You don’t want to be so rooted in what you offer that the evolution of technologies predates you before you’ve even started. There’s simply no good in forming a belief system that Money Making Method X will always work, when Money Making Method Y is already the next hot shit.
Adapting to new technology is one requirement for survival, and it could also be linked to the second requirement: Never get lazy.
For the same reason that a World Champion boxer one day finds it difficult to hang with a younger, hungrier opponent, you too have to deal with your own motivations if you want to stay on top. Can you hear that sound? That is the sound of a thousand keyboards being mashed by would-be entrepreneurs all around the world. Everybody wants a slice of the online riches pie, and just because you’ve had a taste, doesn’t mean you have a right to the next bite.
Dealing with laziness and those mornings where the brain just doesn’t want to cooperate are fundamental to enjoying lasting success.
I think the difference between a successful entrepreneur and a persistent failboat is not the output when they’re both hyped and happy to work. The difference shows in the output when direct motivation is hard to come by.
The people I see thriving with the most successful online businesses do not work in bursts. We all love the rush of a sudden motivational kick up the arse to get some work done, but these kicks cannot help you every day. If it takes reading a blog post, or tearing through a self-help book, to spur you in to action, then you are prone to working in bursts.
We can all achieve excellence when we’re motivated and at the height of our games. But retaining that burning motivation as success arrives can be a difficult trait to master. But you must succeed. There are plenty of other entrepreneurs waiting to fill your spot if you don’t match them for work ethic.
Personally, my favourite method for combating laziness is to engage in projects where money isn’t my sole motivation. It’s the only way I can ensure that when money arrives, I won’t relent and consider my job done. Surround yourself in enough reasons to go that extra mile and laziness should never be a problem.
Listen to Bill Gates:
“I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one.”
This type of commitment – besides being practically unhealthy – simply isn’t possible if money is your only driving force.
Recommended This Week:
-
Check out Filthy Rich Mind, a brand new project I’m collaborating on with a couple of other writers in the self-improvement market. It’s a fun project and if you like off-the-wall advice for improving your lifestyle, subscribe here for updates.
-
And, of course, don’t forget to subscribe to this blog too if you haven’t already done so. Love you long time. C’est vrai, c’est vrai.
Recommended Posts