It’s been a busy few weeks with the festive season and lots of things to focus on so I wanted to give a bit of an update on where I’ve got to with my plans to become a digital nomad and develop passive income streams.
I’ve got so many projects ongoing at the moment that it’s really hard to focus on one thing and dedicate the time that I need to these projects so I’ve decided to focus on one main thing in the short term, and put my other projects on hold for the moment.
The idea that I want to dedicate more of my time to moving forward is:
eBay Dropshipping
If you’re not sure what this then you can read all about it in this article that I wrote recently or you can go and check out David Wu’s course on Udemy
Over the last couple of months I’ve made the following progress:
– Built out my store to have 500+ products listed
– Switched to a business account and set up an actual eBay store
– Hired an experienced eBay lister on Upwork
– Added my products to SKUgrid.com (an automatic price/stock tracker)
– Investigated the use of Hydraliser (an semi-automated eBay listing tool)
The great thing about this business model is the more products that I add to the store, the more profits I make and when you get to a certain threshold you can hand this over to a VA to fully automate the process. I completed David Vu’s VA Training course, which shows you the easy steps to do this.
To be honest the guy that I have found in Bangladesh can list lots of products really quickly, but his attention to detail is terrible and he isn’t very good at optimisation of titles. Still, at 30c per product listing I shouldn’t expect too much.
My store has been going for 6 months now and have 100% feedback with over 100 items now. I haven’t tracked my earnings that well but I think I’ve probably made about £1000 so far over these 6 months.
My plan now, is to really build out the store as much as possible. I will probably upgrade the store to the next level so that listings only cost me 4p in eBay fees.
I’m going to give Hydralister a try out and then expand my store to 1500 items fairly quickly and then have a bit of a pause to gauge how much additional work this will cause me ie customer enquiries, returns etc.
I’m only making about 15% of the sale price on each item, however, if you are selling 10 items a day, that quickly adds up to a decent side income, and definitely something that could sustain you whilst travelling.
Niche Websites
Trying to build out 3 websites (including this one) is just unfeasible from a time perspective. I’m going to keep this one going, but I’m going to leave the other Service based website alone for a while. It’s only got 10 articles on the site, and I have a great plan how I can build this out in the future, but for now I’m leaving it well alone.
The other website that I bought from Human Proof Designs is now live. To be honest they’ve done a good job of setting up the base level content and site, however, there is a lot of work to do to get it up to the standard that I would like. Again, I’ve developed a great content plan for this site, and can’t wait to get building it out in the future. I think for this site in the Sports Niche, I may even try to automate the whole content creation process in the future and use it as a test site.
For www.mylifestyledream.com I have lots of ideas for content again, but I’m just struggling for time. I’ve added some affiliate links for Oddsmonkey, which are bringing in a few bucks each month, but nothing huge at the moment. In the long term matched betting and betting related products look like something worth promoting and fit well with my blog at the moment.
Matched Betting
I’m still regularly matched betting, which continues to bring in a decent side income and the best thing about this is that all earnings are tax free!!!
My latest favourite thing to do is place No Lay Accumulators. This is a technique where the Oddsmonkey software finds matches for you that have a good chance of coming in. The theory is that you don’t need to lay these bets, and over a longer period of time you will profit from these accumulators.
Over the past 3 months I’ve placed over 65 Accas, and have made £850 from this. Well, it seems to be working at the moment and as it only takes a couple of minutes per Acca, so this is a great use of time.
On top of this I managed to get a payout of £200 from an extra place race where I dutched the whole field using this technique
Through the Oddsmonkey forum I’ve also found a unique way to ensure that you can extract a minimum of 80% (ADD LINK) from each bet using doubles and triples.
On the downside I finally lost my Bet365 account and even worse, they stake restricted me, which means I can’t even use the Eachway matcher on this account any more!!! I think it was because on one Saturday I placed bets on every race of their Channel 4/1 offer, and ended up winning a couple of races.
I’m itching to start learning about Betfair trading as another potential revenue stream that doesn’t rely on having accounts with the scumbag bookies, but am putting this on the backburner again as this requires a huge amount of time to get your head into.
If you’re not sure exactly what matched betting is about then you’ll find most of the answers in my Guide for Beginners
The 4 Day Working Week is here
So, you’re probably bored of me bleating on about not having enough time, so I’ve decided to do something about this and have requested that I go down to a 4 day working week, so I can focus on setting up these other revenue streams and start to build my business up with more gusto.
Upsizing
The final change that I’ve decided to do is to sell my flat and try to upsize. Now, according to all the advice in the best seller ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’, a property is a liability and not an asset as it is constantly costing you money.
However, in this case I slightly disagree. My plan is to upscale to a 2 bedroom flat and take on a bigger mortgage in this period of ridiculously low interest rates, which I will lock in for 5 – 10 years. I plan to be travelling for 3 – 6 months of every year and whilst I am away will be renting out my property. The bigger the place, the bigger the mortgage I need, but the bigger the rental income and profit I will be making, which in my mind, makes this an asset as well!
So, exciting times are ahead, and I’m hoping this extra time is really going to set me on my way and accelerate the growth of these businesses over the next few months, so I can finally quit my job in September and head off into the sunshine!!!
Anyway, enough about me, what about you? If you’ve been killing it online recently, or are having issues getting started then we’d be keen to here from you in the comments below. What are you doing to make money online in 2017?
Hi
With regards to renting out your property while you travel, two points to perhaps consider:
1) you need to let your mortgage provider know as the residential mortgage (the mortgage you are planning to fix at low interest rate for 5-10 years) will need to be switched to a buy-to-let mortgage, which are generally at higher interest rates.
2) Your normal home (ie building and contents) insurance will not be valid should something happen to your property while you are away, eg flood, fire, damage to furniture etc. You need landlord insurance to cover properties that have tenants.
Hi Weenie,
Thanks for your comments and you make some great points. I checked with my mortgage provider the first time I did this and as long as this is only a few months a year, then they didn’t need me to convert my mortgage.
I don’t have contents insurance at the moment anyway, but will check about buildings insurance as that could be a disaster!
Thanks for the tips,
Martin