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Progress in August

1st September 2017 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

So my theory in last month’s article was that if I publish my goals and let others know about them then I’m a lot more likely to succeed, so how has that worked out???

checkAdd 10 articles to my affiliate site – I managed to publish over 10 articles on my site, and am starting to use the new Thrive Architect plugin, which is a big improvement on the old Thrive Content Builder
checkSet Up Amazon Affiliate Account – This was pretty easy to do and I ended up starting accounts in the UK, US and Canada as well as publishing my first full affiliate review article and use the Easy Azon plugin to generate the Amazon links. Not expecting any traffic or income from this for a while, and as long as I make 1 sale in the first 180 days then Amazon won’t close my account!Complete content plan for niche website – Well, I haven’t really completed this task, but what I did do was outsource research on KGR content and had someone search 15,000 keywords in my niche to find at least 200 easy to rank keywords, which I’m going to drip feed into my writers over the next few months.
checkBrief writers for 15 more articles – In the end I only briefed one of my writers in to do another 5 articles as I was waiting on the keyword research content to come back
checkComplete content plan for niche website – Well, I haven’t really completed this task, but what I did do was outsource research on KGR content and had someone search 15,000 keywords in my niche to find at least 200 easy to rank keywords, which I’m going to drip feed into my writers over the next few months.
checkReach 2000 products in my eBay store – Unfortunately this was a bit of a fail and I am only up to 1700 products. I purged a load of products from www.splashandrelax.co.uk from my store, because they are quite simply shit and always display products even when they’re out of stock. On top of this my Virtual Assistant has been struggling a bit to get the listings done, so I had to have a chat with her and try to push her a bit more. In fact to try and motivate her I’ve asked if she knows anyone else she can train to do her job, so she can take on more of a role like a Store Manager, which might be more interesting for her… still awaiting her reply!

Needless to say I didn’t even look at my stretch goals this month with all of this going on and also getting distracted with the Merch by Amazon shiny object!

Goals for September

September is a massssssive month for me. Not only will I be leaving my job that I’ve been in for the last 10 years, but I’ll be heading off to Thailand with my lovely lady and renting my flat out. At the moment, I’m not 100% sure who it is going to pan out, but my rough plan is to relax on the islands for a couple of weeks, then head to Chiang Mai to see if I can get involved in some of the entrepreneurial action up there. Realistically I’ll only start having time to focus on my business streams from October so Im going to keep next month’s goals relatively simple:

Add 10 more articles to the niche site
Brief 10 more articles for my writers including 2 affiliate articles
Push to get 2500 eBay listings
STRETCH GOAL: This one I’m not really sure about, because of the amount of time it will take up and take me away from my other goals, but I really want to take the Low Hanging System course and start to get things set up there whilst I wait for my Merch by Amazon approval

Interesting times ahead….

What is the One Thing that will Make You Successful?

5th August 2017 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

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.

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!

January Update

28th January 2017 By martinos74 2 Comments

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?

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