12 Months to Freedom

It’s true. It really is a lot of work! Reading all this crap about people who make hundreds of thousands of dollars by only working 10 hours a week (or whatever) is just not true! There is a lot of work involved to set up an run an internet based business. And I’m having a hard time keeping up. I’m sure that after a year or two, once everything is automated, and I have the cash flow to get some outsourcing on the technical aspects of th business, then I can get away with working four hours a day - if it’s that successful. I expect it to be. But that’s goign to take time!

Right now I have my product ready for my next sales page. But I’m running into a lot of difficulties. My motherboard crashed on my computer at home, so I’ve been without internet for a week. In fact, I’m not using my home computer now…. I haven’t been able to get that working, either. I have a technician coming on the weekend to help get things going.

On the bright side, I did sell another copy of my incorporation manual (available here). I put up an article about incorporating, and the next day I got a sale. I think there’s a relationship there. I need to do a lot more article marketing, since I have barely scratched the surface of that one. Oh, Jeff, thanks for the “long tail” keywords advice. It took me a while to figure out what you meant with that, but once I did, I realised that I already knew the concept, just not the label. You seem to really know your stuff. I hope you succeed to the extreme in this! Just watch your spelling and grammar in your writing - I did notice a few of those errors. It takes away from your credibility, especially if you use article writing.

It’s funny, I actually make more money from my articles than from my products! I’m hoping that will change, since the articles are a lot of work to make any decent money from. And it’s constant, since the articles quickly become dated. At least in my niches there is a lot of direct demand. I suppose there always will be, especially for the financial products. Yes, my latest product is a budget workbook/program and an eBook to go along with it. I’m thinking of doing a scaled-down version fo the eBook to give away for marketing purposes. I think that will help a lot!

Right now my biggest obstacle is time. REALLY. I can barely manage to keep up with my daily living, let alone get things going for this business. But I am determined, and I will get it working! I expect to have y product page up on Christmas day, tested and working, so that people can buy and download the spreadsheet. I only hope that I have the right concept for this product. I also intend to sell ti quite a bit throguh others. Jeff, email me about that, okay?

I’m also planning on using a couple of free sites to help market my products. Squidoo is one of those. I have a rather interesting concept on how to get some decent leads through that and some other sites. Hopefully that will boost things quite a bit. One thing at a time. I think this spreadsheet has a lot of potential, and it’s easy enough for anybody to use. And then anyone can learn to manage their own personal budget and home finances using a tool that I designed. I know that I use it, and it has saved me from making mistakes in the past - I’d be lost without such a thing, in fact. And that’s what gave me the idea to search this niche and see if it was viable to develop a more complete product for others to use. This is a really big niche, that I think isn’t served very well. So, I plan to fill that gap right away! I have the expertise (hey, I do have an MBA and have worked in managing finances for 10 years now). You can’t get better expertise than that!

Now all I need is some more time…

And a few more places to sell my products…

I’m open for ideas, and would love to hear what people think about getting a spreadsheet or program that would help them to manage their personal home budget, as well as some tips, advice, and instructions on how to better manage their finances. I’m also thining of including some time management worksheets, just for their usefulness. Kind of as a bonus for anyone who wants this stuff. Any comments?

The hardest part about doing something like what I’m trying to do is to keep motivated. I’ve come up with a time-management tool like nothing I’ve ever seen or heard of before that is truly amazing… Maybe I’ll release it someday - or put it into a book or some such. But I’ve also found that this really helps my motivation. At least now I’m actually getting more done. It’s hard to motivate myself, even still.

I always want to spend more time with my kids, more time for myself (I basically have none - no love life, barely speaking with my friends, and can barely get enough time just to shop for groceries). I keep up with my martial arts, since I have committed to that so much, as well as the work I do. But it’s hard to motivate myself beyond that at times. I think part of that is that seeing the end is so ephemeral. It’s like there’s nothing certain and I can’t be sure that it’s there. But this is really the only business I can afford to do. If I expand on being an accountant, then I will have to sell my time, 1 hour for X dollars. Repeat. Repeat.. With this business there is another level.

As with any writing, it can be done once, then sold many times. You can keep getting paid for the work, even months after you’ve done it. The latest product I have, which I’m supposed to have up by Wednesday if my time line goes out as I wish it to, is actually an eBook and spreadsheet. The book is somewhat simple, but the spreadsheet is very complex (although it may not seem it on the surface - all the programming, etc. is hidden from the user).  I spent a lot of time on it and researched the competition and the niche fairly well, I think. The biggest direct competitor I could find has had over $4 million in sales in 12 years from his spreadsheet alone. Now that’s pretty amazing I think. That’s well over $300,000 per year. And if he only keeps half of that, then he’s making a lot more than I am now! And he could be doing several other projects besides this one (he is doing at least two others). And my spreadsheet is better than his.

So can I sell it? I hope so. I believe I can. It’s whether I can sell enough. I’ll put a post and link up to the product once it’s up… Look for it on Wednesday. Hopefully I’ll be motivated and be able to manage my time well enough to complete it by then. Then comes the hard part - all the advertising to get the product seen by enough of the public to make it sell! I know that if I did this program as a one off for an employer, I would probably earn about $1000 in wages for the time I spent on it. I want to make at least 1,000 times that off of this product before it’s obsolete. Wouldn’t it be nice to earn $25,000 an hour?

Of course, that’s not really how much I’d earn from it, because that only accounts for the time spent working on the product, not all the time spent advertising, promoting, and processing the sales, and so forth. But it’s still a nice figure to think about! Even $1000 per hour of product creation would be really nice, don’t you think? If I could earn that in the next six months, then I know I’d really be on my way!

And I would have my dream career started!

The latest things I’m learning about are advertising. There are two things. In is how to actually advertise my sites. The other is how to put advertising on my sites.

So, of course, one of the best ways to advertise my sites is with article marketing. I already know I’m a good writer, and have several articles published in suite101.com. That brings in a very small amount of money each month, which I’ve so far used to pay for my url registrations of my various sites. So I’m not making any money off of that. But I am able to at least get something for all that work! But I also need to put more articles in places like ezinearticles.com, where other people can see my articles and I can get lots of links to my sites.

Advertsiing on my sites is another thing. There’s the most popular form, Google Adwords, but I think that I really need some more traffic for that and want to put it into my sites in such a way that it doesn’t detract from the content. Of course, the best way to get traffic (so it’s said) is to have great content. Well, I’m a little behind in that department. I spent the last seven days working at my day job, and won’t really have a lot of time to deal with doing a lot of writing. Heck, I’m doing this on my lunch break right now!

I’ve also been doing some reading on what the best long term strategies for an online only business are. It seems that the best (or at least most lucrative) in the long term is to have your own products. That’s cool, since I like that kind of creativity. However, that can take a long time to build. The quickest way to get money is through affiliate marketing. This is selling other people’s stuff. So, its kind of like a sales job, only you are 100% responsible for the kind of sales and the marketing strategies you will use in order to sell these products. Most often you have a landing page or link in your site recommending the product that leads to the actual sales page of the person/company that sell the actual product. You get paid a commission on whatever you sell, and that’s that. Oh, you get paid because there’s a code in your link that tells the seller who it is that actually made the sale. It’s kind of like leading someone into the store and getting paid to lead them there. The person in the store is who does the actually selling.

If you sell your own stuff, you have to do it all, but then you can get these affiliates to recommend your product(s). Of course you’ll have to pay them a commission, and these usually range from 25% to 70% of your sales. WOW! I bet that most sales people in the brick and mortar stores would kill for that kind of commission. Of course, they are only people who talk with people who are already pre-qualified. But even those sales people who find their own leads don’t get that kind of percentage. But they are usually dealing in much bigger commissions. A huge commission on an Internet product is anything over $100. And the great majority are a lot less, sometimes as low as $2.

I know I’ve got one product already. I haven’t really done any advertising for that, though, so I’ll have to work on that. And I have another product almost ready that I’ll post on here once it’s ready. And one of those sites is designed to be an affiliate site anyhow, so I really need to improve that! There’s practically nothing on it, so I need to get working on content (and graphics). I hate doing graphics, but people like eye candy. It sure helps sell things better…

Oh, I’ve added my links in my sidebar. So now you can check out my sites and let me know what you think of them. Feedback on how to improve these is always appreciated. I know that a couple of them are really bad right now… Gosh, how I wish I had more time. But that’s part of why I’m doing this, isn’t it?

I’ve had a couple of my friends, people who I actually rarely see, already offer me advice in my quest! I think that’s great! One person did this through responding with a comment that shows his idea to help me. Trés cool! Thanks, Carl. My other friend, Jeff, emailed me some tips, since he has a part-time business on the internet. [Hey Jeff, what's your site? You should put a post on here and link to your site, so I can see what it's about.]  It just goes to show that there are people who are not selfish and care in this world!

I’m always up for suggestions and help in this quest of mine. I know it might seem silly to some people, and others might think I’m insane… “Stick to the job!” I hear. “Work hard, and you’ll get ahead.” Well, that depends on how far you want to go. I doubt I’m going to be CEO of this company, and getting into another right away is a tough call. At least at that level. So, to get that kind of position, one has to start thier own company. And isn’t that what I’m doing? I honestly believe that once it starts to bring in some money I will be able to do as owners of other companies do - hire people to do the easy work and the things I’m not great at (like web design) and make more money from the tough stuff myself.

But that takes time. It certainly isn’t going to happen this month. And I don’t expect it to happen until after at least a year. Until then, I’ll keep plugging at this and getting things done in my spare time, while I work for someone else. At the moment I’m most concerned about making enough from this endeavour to keep my house and start to pay down my debts… $1500 a month would be enough! (After taxes and expenses, of course.)

So, if you have any ideas, feedback, or input into this, I welcome them! Just post them here or email me…

Well, I make about $10-$15 per month at the moment. So I need to up this by about 100 times! I’ve started trying something new to see if it does any good. I put up a couple of lenses on Squidoo. I wonder if this works, and have some hope. It’s like an affiliate thing, where I build a site full of information for no cost to myself. Any money that is made on there through links, Amazon sales, or whatever, I get 50% of. Seems fair enough. They also give 5% to charity, and the rest they keep. They put up this great engine, have a couple of full time moderators, and the rest of the world contributes the useful content. There are a lot of interesting pages on there. Of course, as with any kind of site that is open to anyone to contribute there is also a lot of junk. But that’s okay. Sometimes the junk is entertaining, too.

I still haven’t gotten a couple of the things I really want to get done started. I want to get up the publishing site, and I need to really improve findarussianbride. The graphics on it are terrible, and it needs a lot more content. As well, it isn’t really getting any traffic. I’m not too worried about that at the moment, since I’d like to improve it at least to the point where it looks respectable before it gets a lot of traffic. It’s not going to be my primary focus, I have decided. I realise that my real passions lie in the areas of personal improvement, fitness, and health.

The next site that I build is going to be “Kill Your Fat“. This is going to be a membership site where I use my fitness and health expertise to assist people in getting healthier. I want to help them with their motivation, give them the proper health advice that will lead to better, fitter lives. I need to really build that site a lot, though, before I get the whole thing advertised. The concept is going to be a site where there are several articles on how to get healthier, eat right, and exercise properly. As well, the members’ area will offer more specific advice, meal plans, specific tips, and individualized programs for the members. It’s a good concept, and what I plan on offering people is something that I’d actually pay for myself. I know this will be a lot of work, but I’m willing to do that, and to even build a major business around it. Wish me luck!

Hey, if anyone reading this has any ideas to help me, I appreciate it. And any comments on the site here will help me to learn, too!

So, what’s your input?

It’s honestly tough find the time to keep up with this. I am about a month behind my original goals. It takes a lot of discipline, effort, and organization. Of course, my extremely busy life isn’t usual at all in this world. I honestly don’t know anyone else who has as busy a schedule as I do. Yes, I still do my self-employment business of doing people’s taxes on the side. This makes things a little slower for me, since I still have to keep up with that work. Amazing, eh? Well, it’s 11:30 at night, my time, and I have to be up at 6:00 am. I can do this! It’s tough, but it will get done (it has to).

So what’s happened lately?

I’ve started looking at this whole thing in the way of trying to figure out what will be the best way to earn money on the internet. I’m going to continue with Find a Russian Bride, of course. The site, I expect will actually bring in a few dollars each month, once I get it going. There’s a lot of work to be done there. I need to get some graphics up-to-date on that site, since it currently sucks in that regard. Of course, I also have to add a lot of content. Isn’t content king on the internet?

As well, I have been seriously examining the things that I desire doing to make myself happy.
I enjoy helping people a lot. I’m really good at fitness and health. In fact, I’ve been teaching people that for years through my martial arts school. So, I’m looking at a way to get something going in that respect. I hope to get the site up and running before the end of November. The concept is a membership site where I will help people with personal plans and coaching to help them meet their own personal fitness goals. I think that in the long run that site will be a big seller. But it has to be done right and I have to make sure I give more than I ever have before to my clients. It’s going to be great! I’ll keep you posted on that!

What do you think? AM I too diverse and not focused enough? Should I build one site and get it making a few hundred a month before I even think about another? Or am I on the right path?