martinos74

The Week I Quit my Job and Booked a Flight to Thailand!

31st July 2017 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Yes, so I’ve finally done it… after 10 years of slaving away in the same company I’ve finally bitten the bullet and handed my notice in.

I’ve got a great job working in a Digital Agency in the centre of London, where I get to work with great brands and talented people, so you might well be asking:

Why would you do such a crazy thing?

Well, to be honest there are a number of reasons:

Time

As hard as I have tried over the past 18 months I have found it increasingly difficult to dedicate time and effort to the things that I care about the most at the moment such as really cracking how I can make money online and start to live a location independent lifestyle.

The job I work in is really fast paced and often stressful, so by the time I get home from work I am pretty exhausted and find it hard to motivate myself to work on my side businesses.
I usually don’t get home until about 7pm, so by the time I get some food there is very little of the day and my brain energy left to focus on other things, so I just haven’t been dedicating the necessary hours to my other income streams.

On a positive note, however, it has meant that I have had to find ways to keep things ticking along with a minimal investment of my time, such as hiring a Virtual Assistant and a bunch of writers.

Motivation

I think whatever you do in life that after a while you get bored of it and want to move on and get some more excitement. As soon as you have mastered something, then it doesn’t become challenging anymore.

For me I feel the same way about Project Management and the job I’m working in. To be honest it never really excited me and was more of a means to an end than anything else, but now I am coasting and find it hard to really get engaged in what I’m doing.

I think this is partly to do with the industry that I am in, because we’re not exactly saving lives, or doing anything good for the world, but are just creating poxy websites for companies and brands who think they are a lot more important than they actually are.

Everything is so critical and important to most of our clients when actually I am finding it very, very hard to give a funk!

In the world that I work in most people only stay in their job for a max of a couple of years, so after working for 10 years in one company I’m starting to feel like a bit of a freak and it’s time to move on.

I could go on, and tell you about some of the characters that I am working with, because it’s getting more and more Nathan Barley every day, but I better leave it there or I’ll probably have a heart attack!

Opportunity

We only get a limited time on this planet and I really am starting to believe that you need to make the most of it. I could easily hang on in my existing job and keep doing the same old stuff every day, like millions of people around the world, but somehow that’s just not going to satisfy me.

I’ve travelled all over the world and now, more than ever, am I more curious about what’s out there and what opportunities lie ahead of me…. It’s so freaking exciting!!!

Seriously, there is so much that we can do and achieve in this world that we really shouldn’t limit our dreams by a desk and a computer.

Unfortunately though, Mr Opportunity doesn’t usually just come up to your door and ask you to be let in, you usually need to be out looking for him, so for this reason I’m moving on.

So, What you Going to Do?

Well, I’ve booked a flight and me and my girl are heading to Thailand for 3 months at the end of September.

We haven’t really nailed down a plan yet but the idea is that we have a couple of weeks chilling out then head up to Chiang Mai to check it out and see if it is really the Digital Nomad haven that it’s cracked up to be.

This first trip, is more of a tester to see if we can crack a few nuts in one trip:

Can we find a place that we’d like to go back to and work from in the future?
Can we build up our businesses sufficiently within 3 months to support us in the future?
Will we enjoy working whilst we are travelling and living in another country?
How will we find spending 24 hours a day together?
Is this lifestyle really as good as it seems in our minds at the moment?

I think 3 months, should be a good enough timeframe for us to figure some of these things out and determine if this is something we want to pursue in the future.

So, Why Chiang Mai?

My impressions at the moment are that it is a fairly busy city, which retains a rural feel to it and has a reputation of a place where young(ish) people go to bootstrap their online businesses.

From my side I think Chiang Mai on paper ticks the boxes from 2 main angles:

The Lifestyle

By all accounts, the food in Chiang Mai is meant to be out of this world and because it is so cheap to live there you can carve out a really cool lifestyle that you might not be able to or want to have back home.

I’m looking forward to try and lead a healthy lifestyle, eating well, taking plenty of exercise and getting a great balance between working and leisure.
I’m also really interested in developing some new skills and habits whilst we’re away. I constantly hear about the benefits of mindfulness and meditation, but my mind is on London time here, so that has no room in my life.

I’d also love to workout regularly and try some Muay Thai, which may even have a positive effect on my terribly low kicks in Capoeira!

The People

I’ve stated learning Thai, and want to have at least a basic vocabulary that I can use over there to impress the locals, or at least show an intention of goodwill! I’m also really keen to learn more about the Thai culture and way of life, as the last time I went (20 years ago), that wasn’t top of my agenda to be honest.

The other side of thing is I want to learn from the huge community of young entrepreneurs who are setting up online businesses from Chiang Mai. This is the place where everyone is practising the things I’ve been listening to podcasts and reading blogs about for the past 18 months, so it would be great to surround myself with these influences and really see how my knowledge can explode.

There’s so much for me to learn and it just feels like this is the right time and the right place to do it, but hey, who knows, what the future will bring?

So what’s the worst that can happen?

Chiang Mai won’t Fly!

I don’t know why though, but I have this irrational fear that they will just be a bunch of dicks in Chiang Mai and I won’t really warm to the place. I’d prefer not to be in a big City for my time away and I know from past experiences that you really need to give a place at least a month before you really get a feel for its vibe and to meet a good number of people.

Travel vs Working

There’s going to be a struggle in my head as well between whether I should be treating this time as a holiday or more for travelling and experiencing new things. I’d really prefer to be going out travelling, but I see this trip more of an enabler for a future lifestyle, so I just hope I can stick to these plans.

Shiny Object Syndrome

If I do end up meeting a lot of people when I’m away my head is going to be swilling with ideas for new things that I can do and new ways to make money online. I have to remember that first of all I need to focus on mastering the monetisation of my niche website and building up my eBay business and try and put all the new shiny things to one side so I can look at these in the future.

Homecoming

We’re coming home a couple of days before Christmas into the cold, dark, rainy English winter! I think the first week or so will be fine, but then we’re going to have to find new jobs (unless of course our businesses have really taken off!)

For me, I will have to head off into the freelance Project Management market, which I don’t particularly want to do and my girlfriend has found it particularly hard to find anything decent in London.

Carpe Diem

‘Seize the Day’ is all I can think of to finish this off. Yes, there are risks, but the rewards are massive as well. If all goes well we will be able to create a lifestyle which most people can only dream of and we’re already well on the way to achieving that goal.

Surely, that’s worth rolling the dice isn’t it?

Niche Site Motivation – Time to Step it Up!

9th June 2017 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

I first started looking into Niche websites over a year ago and since then I set one site up on my own and bought another one from the guys at Human Proof Designs.

So how has this worked out?

Avoid Boring Niches

Well, the first niche was a really dull niche and very hard to write articles about so I have kind of left that to fester after scraping about 10 articles together that didn’t rank at all well. I found it really frustrating as there were loads of low competition keywords, but my site got no traction at all so I lost encouragement. However, I’ve looked at the site again and have a couple of new angles I will take to build the site out in the future and link to Amazon affiliate products, but for now, I’ve put this site on hold.

Follow Your Passions

The second site, which I bought, is actually in a sports niche, which I really am interested in. I bought a premium site from Human Proof Designs, which came with about 15 articles pre-written, a list of keywords and a fully set up Word Press site, so it saves you a lot of the hassle of getting up and running.

Of course I spent a lot of time faffing around with the theme and have finally got the site looking how I want it to. Honestly, this isn’t the most important thing that you should be doing when you start a site, but I find that if your site looks good, you’ll be a lot more encouraged to work on it.

The downside with ordering a pre-made side was that you’re not setting the overall tone and direction of the site so have no real control over the initial content. This was a bit of a gamble, which backfired as the content, which was delivered originally was poorly written. Thankfully when I pointed this out, they rewrote all of the content for me, which improved it vastly, however, it still wasn’t anything like I wanted it to be, so I set about re-writing a lot of the articles and creating my own.

Because my ebay dropshipping side business is ticking along quite nicely and I only need to spend a few hours a week on this at the moment, I’ve decided to dedicate more time to building out the niche site over the next few months, so that I have a good body of content (and hopefully some backlinks) in place, before I quit my job and head out to Thailand for 3 months.

This change of emphasis coincided nicely with the following…

Niche Site Training

Dom from Human Proof Designs has just started an over the shoulder case study, where you can follow his videos week by week as he builds out 2 different sites. His goal is to build these sites up to make $10,000 – check out the course here.

One site is a ready made site, and the other site is a ready made site, which has aged for at least 6 months so it’s out of the Google sandbox.

This was really great timing and I’ve been following exactly what he has been doing with his site for the past 4 weeks. For me this is a great way to learn as you can see exactly what he does, the reasons he is doing this and I figured that if I follow exactly what he does and I don’t succeed then at least I tried!

So what have we looked at so far?

The importance of getting a good base of links from comments
Creating a press release
The magical Keyword Golden Ratio
How to find forum keywords
How to structure your content hierarchy

If you want to know more about these techniques then check out my latest post on How to Get Free Instant Traffic to Your Site

New Team Member

The next thing that I’ve done is brought my 11 year old nephew on board the writing team and he’s written about 10 articles for me in my chosen niche!!! This is a great exercise, as I can teach him how to write properly, use a website, and his articles give the site a new angle.

On top of this, it’s great encouragement and motivation for me to work on the site.

The downside to this is that he has already quit 3 times in protest against things like getting a cooler username, but I’m sure we’ll work through the details!

Outsourcing

I’ve done some good keyword research and have a bunch of articles that I need to get written soon. I’m really tied with this one because I want to write them myself but, this is just going to take too much time so I’m going to have to find a writer to do this for me.

I think what I’ll probably do is get a writer to write the articles that I’m not particularly interested in such as product reviews so I can focus on the informational articles instead.

The only trouble is… how can I find a good quality writer?

I’ve got a few ideas on how I want to go about this, but I’ll save this for another update.

How to Get Instant Traffic to your Niche Site – 3 Unbeatable Tips

9th June 2017 By martinos74 4 Comments

You’ve finally chosen your niche and you’re ready to go and take action, but how can you really turn the dial and make rapid progress when you start?

The thing about working on niche websites is that you usually don’t get to see the benefits of your work for at least 6 months and usually not for over a year or potentially even longer. This is one of the main reasons why people give up, as they just can’t correlate the effort they are putting in with any type of reward, and in today’s ‘instant’ society, that’s just not good enough!

The good news is that I’ve found 3 shortcuts for you that will help you create a really solid base for your niche site and start to bring you your first traffic within weeks, if not days.

I’ve learned a lot of this from the training over at Human Proof Designs, so I’d definitely recommend signing up with their monthly membership, where you have access to over the shoulder video training as Dom builds out a couple of Niche sites, week by week.

For now, however, lets focus on these 3 massive tips:

Tip #1 – Blog Commenting

Now, you’ve probably heard that blog commenting is an old hat way of getting links and traffic to your site, and to a large extent that is still true. However, personally I still think this has massive benefit…

Firstly, you are building up a relationship with other blogs, who you may want to work with and outreach to at a later date.
Secondly, you are diversifying your link profile, so that it looks more natural to Mr Google.
Thirdly, you’ll probably get a tiny bit of traffic coming from the sites, where you left your comments

My advice would be write really detailed comments and if possible ask questions, rather than just saying something like “I really like your blog!” as this will give you a much greater chance of getting your blog published.

Make sure that you are commenting on blogs that are either in your own niche or in a related niche, so for example if you had a niche site promoting juicers, then you could comment on other blogs in the whole wider health niche.

The other thing that you want to do is make sure that the blogs have been updated fairly recently, as it would be a bit strange commenting on a blog that had its last comment in 2012.

How do you find blogs to comment on?

Well, you can either use a tool such as dropmylink.com but I found that a bit hit and miss.

Instead I would add the following search criteria into Google : ‘Search term + “Leave a Reply“‘ so you would enter ‘Juicing + “Leave a Reply”‘

If you then goto ‘Tools’ you can select the time frame that the comments would be from:

I wouldn’t overdo this, but really think it’s a good way to start to get a bit of traction on your site.

Most of the links that you will get will be nofollow links, however, if you can get some dofollow links that would be a bonus.

Tip #2 – The Keyword Golden Ratio

This really is a gem of a tip, which was developed by Doug Cunnington over at Niche Site Project, which focuses on finding long tail keywords that are really low competition, which means you’ll be able to rank for a lot of them relatively easily.

So what’s the secret to this magical potion?

Look for Keywords that have less than 250 searches per month
Find out how many search results in Google have the exact search term in the title – Do this by using the following criteria: “allintitle: searchterm“
Divide the #of exact search terms in the title by #searches
If this number is less than 0.25 then you are in business and if it is less than 0.5 then it’s worth targeting as well

If you don’t have any Keyword Finding Software such as SECockpit then you can use the free Google extension ‘Keywords Everywhere‘ to find search volume

Example: ‘best apple juicer’

Has a search volume of 40 per month and looking at the below screenshot has 1,020 results with this keyword in the title

1020/40 = 25.5 so this is clearly not a good keyword to target using this technique

However, if you searched for ‘best juicer for apple cider’ this has only 10 searches per month and only 7 exact matches, so has a KGR value of 0.7 – this still isn’t great, but you get the idea.

The downside with this approach is that you’ll need to do a lot of manual work to plug the keywords into Google, however, the results are well worth it.

What do I do with the KGR Keywords? Once you have found a bunch of these keywords, then all you need to do is write an article of 600 – 1,000 words and maybe include a video and you’ll find that you’ll go straight to the top of the rankings for this keyword, as well as a bunch of other keywords that you might not even have though of before.

What is this so great? Well, within a very short space of time you’ll see visitors coming to your site from these search terms, and that really is encouragement in a bottle right away!!!

Tip #3 – Finding Forum Keywords

Last, but not least of our killer tips today is a technique where we will help you find keywords where forums are ranking on the first page in Google.

Why is this important? Well, a forum really is an easy target in the search results and something that you can easily beat with a half decent article.

To this you’ll need to

Find a list of forums that are in your niche, which you can do with a simple Google search with ‘keyword + “forum”‘
Get access to Semrush.com. Usually, this is a really expensive tool, however, if you do a quick search online you’ll usually find places where you can get a free 30 day trial and can use this time to do all your intense keyword research
Add the URL of the forum into Semrush.com and see the list of keywords that it is ranking for
Use the advanced filter to filter down the keywords so that they are on the first page of Google and have the word ‘forum’ in the URL like this:

BOOM, there’s a list of great keywords that you can easily target and get instant traffic with.

To make this even better, use this in combination with Tip #2 to find a sure way of getting traffic to your site easily, whilst your site is still in the sandbox

Summary

If you use these 3 techniques then for sure you’ll be attracting visitors to your site in no time at all, and if you are clever with your keyword research this will be traffic, which is related to your niche and will potentially lead to sales further down the line!

12 Killer Tips from 9 Months of eBay Dropshipping

8th May 2017 By martinos74 7 Comments

I’ve been practising eBay dropshipping now for nearly a year so I thought it was time to look back and give you a bit of a progress update and reflective look at what I have achieved and some of the ups and downs from David Wu’s dropshipping technique.

If you haven’t heard about this before I explain the technique here and you can sign up to the course directly here.

Be sure to read all the way to the end of the article as the last tip is a bit of a gem and will save you hours on your listings.

I’ve now really expanded my eBay store and now have over 1000 products in my shop, so thought this as a great juncture to bring you my top tips:

1 – Manual vs Automated Listing Tools

Initially I started listing all of the products myself, which was a necessary evil to learn how to correctly format your listings and really understand the inner workings of the system.

This is incredibly time consuming as this takes about 10 minutes to create a decent listing, however, this is definitely worthwhile.

I then went to Upwork and decided to hire someone to do this task for me to free me up to more interesting tasks where I could add more value.

After a while my Virtual Assistant persuaded me to try out an automated eBay listing tool called Hydralister, where you input the URL of the product, and the software automatically pulls in the products images and attributes. This also gives you the opportunity to bulk list items, so dramatically reduces the amount of time needed to create a listing.

This was great news for my Virtual Assistant as I was paying them per listing, however, what I found was that the quality of the listings were a lot inferior to creating manual lisitings.

You really need to check each listing to make sure it pulled in the correct information, which is often as time-consuming as creating the listing manually in the first place.

In the end I found another Virtual Assistant from the Philippines on Upwork, and she is simply amazing. She can create listings really quickly, her attention to detail is excellent and her eBay listings are of great quality.

2 – Use SKUgrid to Track Stock Levels

One really useful tool that I’ve adopted as part of my business is SKUgrid, which easily allows you to track product prices and stock levels from your product source.

It’s simple to set up and all you need to do is add the source URL of your product, add the percentage markup that you want on each item and it will automatically update the prices on your eBay listing if they change on the product source and will move items in and out of stock on your eBay store as well.

This means that your prices remain as competitive as possible and means that you no longer have to send fiddly emails to customers making up excuses as to why your product has run out of stock. In the past I found this extremely frustrating as in one minute I was excited about making a sale and the next I would be annoyed as the product was out of stock.

You also run the risk of receiving negative feedback if this happens too often, and I’m sure cancelling a lot of orders doesn’t look good either.

The only downside with SKUgrid, is that if you are adding your listings manually then you have to manually add them into SKUgrid and you are also limited by the suppliers that the software supports.

I’ll give a full review of SKUgrid in due course, however, if you have a few hundred listings already, I highly recommend you switching.

3 – Automate Your System

With a Virtual Assistant and the use of SKUgrid, I’ve really limited the amount of work that I need to put in to a few hours a week, where I am processing orders, responding to customer service enquiries and sourcing new products for my VA

4 – list Items that are not available within the Global Shipping Programme

About 70% of my sales come from UK customers, so I think it is absolutely worth listing products that don’t qualify for GSP, and in fact because other dropshippers may not be doing this, it gives you more chance to rank your product highly.

It’s often difficult to know if a product qualifies for the GSP before you list it, so I just let my VA list batches of products for me, then I check and see which products don’t qualify from them.

If they don’t qualify then I try not to add many more products in that category, as overall I still think its better to list products for the Global Shipping Programme simply because you have a broader reach.

5 – Add Seasonal Items

When I didn’t have an automated stock/repricing tool, I stayed away from adding seasonal items as they would quickly go out of stock, however, now that my system is more automated I think it pays to start looking at the seasons and understanding what is going to be hot soon.

Ideally you’ll have a list of products ready a month in advance so your VA can get these up on eBay.

For example, think about adding Outdoor Games and Barbeque equipment in May, just before the summer rush starts to hit

6 – Check your Sources

Having a solid, reliable supplier really is key to success and it’s quite easy to tell which suppliers will be good to work with from a few simple emails.

First of all, you want to check out the supplier to see if they have the credentials needed for your eBay business model ie do they send invoices, do they ship to the GSP.

To help this I use the email below:

Hi There,

I really love the range of products that you offer and want to buy some of your products for a friend of mine. I just wanted to know if you have the possibility of a Guest Checkout or something like this, where you wouldn’t include a copy of the invoice with the dispatch?

Is this a possibility, or could you send the invoice to me electronically as I will be paying for the product?

Can you also let me know if you’re happy to ship to freight forwarding addresses?

One final question is whether you provide a tracking number when your deliveries are dispatched?

Looking forward to hear from you soon,

Thanks,Martin

Send this to the customer service contacts for each of the suppliers just from how quickly they respond to you and how professional their replies are you’ll get a good initial impression of if you want to work with them or not.

When you’ve found a few suppliers that you think you can work with, add about 20 of their products to your eBay account and test what their sales process is like.

You could reduce the markup that you are asking to increases the likelihood of selling a product, or even better you could buy a product from them and then ask for a return.

This is a great test as you’ll find out what the packaging is like, if they send automated emails to you with tracking numbers, how quickly they dispatch the products and also how easy it is to make a return with them.

This is crucial information that you must find out before you start adding hundreds of products from one supplier.

Some suppliers also have a tendency to change products quite quickly, which I would avoid as well, as you’ll have a smaller window of opportunity to sell your product before it goes out of stock.

7 – January and February Suck

Yes, be prepared that some months of the year will be better than others and January / February simply suck.

I had by far my worse months ever, at the same time that I was trying to build up the store, which was really discouraging.

However, if you keep the faith and keep on listing then your sales will recover.

8 – Diversify with Other Business Ideas

If eBay dropshipping is your only income or you want this to become your main source of income then you should be aware that at any moment this business could disappear.

You could receive negative ratings, which is a quick way to lose sales.
eBay could review your account and even though you are making money for them, they don’t look so favourably on dropshippers so could quite easily close your account.
Paypal could close your account as well. For example, this month they froze my account for a couple of weeks due to a fraudulent payment, which was nothing to do with me, but showed how fragile this business model is

Remember, the market and the business could change very quickly, for example both eBay and Paypal have increased their fees recently, which decreases the chunk of the pie that you can take.

As digital entrepreneurs we need to be able to adapt to change quickly and there are usually ways around obstacles, however, you should also be prepared for the fact that this business can quickly disappear as well.

9 – Invest in a Shop

Whilst it was great when I was starting out using free listings on my personal account to list items, there were a lot of downsides. For example, I couldn’t scale as quickly as I wanted and the free listings couldn’t be used as Good til Cancelled listings, which in turn meant I couldn’t use stock tracking tools.Investing in a shop is well worth the investment because:

You’ll get cheaper listing fees
You can add branding to your store and start to build out an identity. This in turn gives buyers more trust that you are a bonafide company and increases your chances of making a sale
You can use categories – Creating a decent taxonomy with well-defined categories and sub-categories will increase your sales as you’ll benefit from cross selling items and if buyers don’t like the product they were originally looking at, they can more easily navigate around your store and find similar products they like
You can create sales – Using the Markdown Manager functionality, I have a look at which products have a large number of people watching them and add a 5 or 10% sale for a few days. If you’re worried about your profit then increase the price before adding the 10% discount so your mark up stays the same! It’s a bit sneaky, but it works
The Seller dashboard is also a lot better if you use a shop and you’ll get a lot of other useful tools and statistics that you can use

10 – Buy a Responsive Theme

In 2017 if your store is not accessible on a handheld device then quite frankly you are crazy. Imagine if you had a queue of people outside of your shop and suddenly you decided to only let half of the queue enter your shop…You wouldn’t do it, right?

So, you don’t have any excuses and if your store is not using a responsive theme, then you’re cutting that queue in half.

You can buy a decent them for as little as $20 and adding this to your site and to your listings is really easy to do and well worth the effort.

11 – Use Good Til Cancelled Listings

Using 30 day listings has the advantage that your listing is featured immediately at the top of search results when it is a new listing and has the advantage of adding a bit of scarcity when your product’s listing is due to expire, however, I have now switched all my listings to Good Till Cancelled for the following reasons:

You keep a sales record of each product sold… When you sell an item it is shown on the listing and usually you’ll find that if you have sold one item, it is a positive signal to buyers that the product is of good quality and will help them choose you over other listings who haven’t previously sold
You get to see the cumulative number of views and people who have been watching your product, which helps you monitor products• You’re more likely to have your product listing ranking well in Google… A lot of visits will come directly from Google to your listing
You don’t need to continually re-list your products
GTC listings are more compatible with stock tracking software like SKUgridOf course, there are pros and cons for each of these options but I think more serious sellers usually prefer to go with Good Til Cancelled listings.

KEY TIP : 12 – Use an EAN / UPC Generator

Trying to source the EAN / UPC for each products is a massive pain in the butt and also quite a time consuming activity.

You’ll often find a number of different EANs available for each product and in some cases none at all. I also find that for products that I have listed with an EAN, eBay will often add a ‘similar products’ carousel underneath your product listing, which shows other people on eBay selling the same products, which are usually going to be a lot cheaper and makes it difficult for you to make a sale.

An EAN number is simply a unique number that is given to identify a product.You will find a lot of services out there where you can buy EANs, however, I don’t think you need to use these at all and can generate them yourselves a lot more easily.I just use the attached spreadsheet and generate all of my own EANs from this list.

A word of caution however, is that eBay is on a bit of a mission to try and categorise products out there so that it makes it easier for you to list and buy in the future.

There is a rumour that in the future you may be penalised if you don’t list your products with the correct EANs, however, until I see more evidence of this I’ll continue to list with my own numbers.

EAN / UPC GENERATOR

Download our EAN / UPC spreadsheet for free here

WHAT ARE YOUR KILLER TIPS?

If you like these tips then please let us know in the comments below or if you have some more killer tips of your own then we’re keen to find out

The Pros and Cons of Working with a Virtual Assistant

20th March 2017 By martinos74 1 Comment

February Stress : The Stress of Starting an Online Business

1st March 2017 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

February told me that building up a business on your own can be an extremely stressful thing to do!

You might think that being able to work on your own, in your own time, from wherever you want would be the dream lifestyle, however, there are always downsides, which can have many faces:

SELF DOUBT

Of course there are plenty of case studies out there of people earning heaps of money from online work, successful blogs, dropshipping empires and various ways to make money, but the truth is, unless they were really lucky, they’ve actually put a lot of work into it…. there really is no golden ticket!

When things aren’t going as smoothly as you’d like then you start to think whether you’re doing the right thing. You’ll probably find that most people who you know won’t really understand what you are doing so you can only turn to your digital friends and experiences from others.

The important thing to do is to keep going until you’ve really exhausted all avenues.

Join a mastermind group for support, reach out to Facebook groups and online communities and you’ll generally find a helping hand to point you in the right direction and give you the encouragement you need.

KNOCK BACKS

I was intending to go down to a 4 day week this year, however, my lovely bosses have told me I can’t do this just yet.

Whilst I kind of understand as it’s a busy time at the moment, there will always be some kind of reason not to do this, so it’s really infuriating and that extra day to focus on my business would really be beneficial.

Again, don’t let these things beat you and try to find a way around obstacles instead of blocking you.

For example, this refusal has meant that I am now forcing myself to take an hour’s lunch break to work on my projects, and am not doing any extra hours than needed at work, which frees up some more of my time!

Mistakes

Yes, we all make mistakes in one shape or another and personally when this happens it really pisses me off, makes me feel stupid and also rather angry!

However, a change of mindset is the best thing that is needed here. Give yourself a break and remember that you’re never going to get things right at the first attempt.

What you are actually doing is learning through your mistakes and learning on the job, rather than having someone to give you a guided education.

Making mistakes is actually one of the best things that you can do – as long as you learn from them and implement changes to stop the same mistake happening again.

Overwhelmed

Ever feel like the whole world is on your shoulders and you’re just surrounded by a multitude of problems all fighting for your attention? Well, you won’t be alone.

The more stressed you get, the more all of the little problems decide to jump out and have a surprise party in your head, until there’s just so much going on that your poor little brain can’t cope any more.

In these situations, if you’re in front of your computer then just walk away.

Get outside in the fresh air. Go for a run. Even better stop work altogether for a day or go away for the weekend and come back refreshed.

You’ll find that with a fresh pair of eyes and clearer mindset, how, miraculously, all of those problems that you thought you had, aren’t actually that bad.

The key is trying to keep a level head and tackle those problems one by one so that the whole situation becomes manageable again.

February’s eBAY Focus

This month I paid special attention to building out my eBay store further and completed the following things:

Opened an eBay store
Added a theme to my eBay store
Started using Hydralister to list items
Changed my listings to GTC from 30 day listings
Worked with my Bangladeshi freelancer to increase the listings in my store to over 650

So, what was the net result of all of these efforts?

My sales have plummeted to next to nothing. This is really worrying as I was expecting to be able to organically grow my sales based on the number of listings that I have created.

However, I’m not going to panic yet and put this down to a few reasons:

Jan/Feb is always a slow time for online sales
I added a large number of one type of product to the store, which doesn’t look like a good choice
I added too many high price items to my store. Ideally I think I should only list items between £30 – £100
My Bangladeshi assistant’s listing were particularly poorly formatted
Changing from 30 day to GTC listings may have an initial downturn on results

My plan is to go back to basics in March and focus on creating quality listings instead of quantity. I’m currently looking for a new experienced eBay lister on Upwork and when I find the right person I’ll get them to add a maximum of 10 listings a day so I can check them, provide feedback and have full control on what is happening…. Onwards and Upwards!

eToro SUCKS

The other thing I did this month is close down my eToro account. After a year of having the account open, they decided to take away my £1000 joining bonus (which can’t be withdrawn until you do a certain amount of trades).

I think over the year I’ve actually lost a small amount of money in my eToro account and the thing that irritates me the most is that the % gains that they report for the traders on the platform are usually different to the actual returns that you get back if you start to follow a trader.

Their support told me it is because if a trader adds or removes funds to their account, then this isn’t automatically replicated in your copy trading account, which skews the figures.

To be honest, I didn’t spend too much time looking at this recently and a lot of it was over and above my knowledge level that it felt a little bit like a gamble, so I closed my account.

Maybe if you know what you’re doing then you could make some money from it, but it just felt too much like guesswork to me.

March On

So, March is here, the Cheltenham Festival is just around the corner, spring is coming and hopefully we’ve almost seen the back of winter, so there’s plenty to look forward to!

I’m going to keep faith with the eBay dropshipping technique, will start to build out one of my niche site’s content soon and I’ve just bought some training materials to get into Betfair Sportstrading, which will hopefully be a further future income stream that I can tap into!

However, remember…. Beware the Ides of March!

« Previous Page