Living A Wealthy Life

1333 – What does that number mean?

For me it is a goal, a goal for financial independence.

I have multiple niche sites, totally around 100 articles. These 100 articles are currently making me around $300/month in adsense revenue.

If I maintained the same income per article that I have at the moment then 1,333 articles would generate around $4,000/month. This would be enough money to sustain me and my family.

How Long Will This Take?

1 post per day – 3 years 5 months (age 29) – This is my current posting schedule.

10 posts per week – 2 years 4 months (age 27…almost 28)

2 posts per day – 1 year 8 months (age 27)

3 posts per day – 1 year 2 months (age 26)

Sure I would love to post 3 posts per day but I have a day job! Also, each post costs an average of $7.50 to create (transcription services) thus posting 3 times a day would cost me $675/month. Money which I do not have.

The Difference Between A Lofty Goal and A Business Plan

That is what I was going to title this post. I am acutely aware that I currently do not have a business plan…and I wish I did.

All I have are some very rough figures based on probably not the most effective source of income.

April 2013 Earnings

In April I earned

~$250.00 in Adsense income

~ $30 in book sales

~ $800 in membership site subscriptions

As you can see Adsense is not my only source of income, nor is it my largest.

If 100 articles were able to drive enough traffic to make me $1,000/month then the figures would look very different.

Articles required = 400

1 post per day – 10 months

10 posts per week – 7 months

2 posts per day – 5 months

3 posts per day – 3.5 months

Obviously this is completely unrealistic, but it is good to play with the figures.

So Am I Creating A Business Plan?

At this stage…no

I don’t have the traffic yet where I feel like I can create a business plan and grow my business in any other way than creating more articles.

Plus I am onto something that is winning and I can see that if I continue creating great content my income could continue to grow.

1,333 might not end up being the magic number…it could be 3,333…but as long as I am moving in the right direction. Plus an extra couple of grand each month isn’t to be scoffed at.

The Hardest Part

The hardest part is finding the time to grow an online business. I work full time and have a wife and 2 kids.

If I had a year of savings I am almost positive I could achieve my goals within 12 months…but I don’t. So I work on my business before I go to work in the morning and after work at night. I work on it on weekends whenever I have down time.

I am basically working 2 full time jobs. Can I keep this up for 3 years and 5 months?

Probably not. I need to start working smarter, not harder.

Next Steps

I basically want to ramp up my productive time. I am recording audio podcasts of around 5-10 minutes and then sending them off to a transcription service.

Then I am spending about 30 minutes taking the transcription and turning it into a blog post. This is the 30 minutes I need to get back and I will be looking to outsource this in the near future.

Because if I could take that 30 minutes for each blog post and instead record more podcasts I could probably create 3 times as much content in the same amount of time.

Then maybe I could create 3 posts per day.

I recently started a brand new niche site. I am making videos, podcasts and blog posts for this site to get traffic.

The biggest thing I did was I took a high traffic page from a website that was generating no money and moved it to this brand new niche site. Overnight my traffic for this site was high and I started earning some Adsense revenue.

But that isn’t what’s crazy.

Last night (about 11pm) I set up a sales page for a membership site on this niche site. I didn’t think anyone would go there so I set the “Add to Cart” button to just redirect to my home page.

A WISE DECISION
However, I put a tracker on this link so I could see if anyone was clicking it.

My thoughts were “If people start clicking I will go to the effort of setting up an actual PayPal sales option”.

Just 12 hours later (on a site with 0 community and 0 email subscribers) I have already had 2 people click through.

Tonight I will set up an actual shopping cart and see if I can launch a membership site from scratch.

In the one of the latest Empire Flippers Podcast they coined a phrase for websites called “The Mendoza Line”.

It is a phrase taken from baseball. Mendoza was a short stop who consistently failed at the plate. Always hitting just under .200

“The Mendoza Line” was used as a benchmark at which a player was not worth hiring for the major leagues despite his defensive skills.

For Niche sites the boys at Empire Flippers stated that a website really needs to have at least 40 posts before it crosses that Mendoza line.

I am going to take this concept and run with it for my latest niche site on public speaking.

My goal is to attain 40 posts as quickly as possible. I am using James Shramko’s “Own The Racecourse” method to create content quickly by making videos and having them transcribed.

My Step By Step Process

1. Make a video and upload to YouTube
2. Extract MP3 from the video
3. Create blog post with video and MP3 podcast in it and hit publish
4. Get a transcription done using Koemei
5. Paste in the 85% accurate transcription
6. Hit update
7. Go back into the blog post and edit the transcription making it a more valuable article (and so it actually makes sense)

My Focus
So my focus right now is to quickly create 40 videos for my public speaking blog. Then I will be aiming to make another 40 videos on one of my other niche sites which is already getting good traffic.

I am loving the Mendoza line concept. It is really giving me a benchmark to work with and work towards

When you work in a Fortune 500 company with over 22,000 employees worldwide and receive many blanket emails from a “do not reply” address one starts to wonder…

“What would happen if I emailed the CEO of My Company?”

Possible answers:
- Caught in a spam filter
- Deleted by her assistant
- Get a reply from someone on her behalf
- Nothing

This is what happens when you poke the box:

- Employee emails CEO, makes sure email is fairly generic (albeit true) as to avoid getting fired. Just a nice email about how I love the company and find it inspiring
- CEO of entire company emails the MD of Australia asking who is this person that emailed me?
- MD and Head of Sales reply to CEO about this stated person giving (probably) positive reviews
- Story is funny because who has the audacity to email the CEO? Thus a few people find out (I may have told them)
- (Hopefully) no harm done

But wait…

After all that no reply?

{sad face}

Yesterday I wrote that I felt completely stuck. Well in less than 24 hours I have a new idea again and I am completely unstuck.

My problem was that I started with a product I was passionate about. However, it wasn’t right for the market. After 3 “pivots” I feel like a found a product that was right for the market but a product that was 100% wrong for me.

The product wasn’t scalable and it was a service where I would directly be exchanging time for money. It could work well at scale, but I currently don’t have the scale to make it work.

The Product Pivot

The result was a complete pivot away from providing a property finding service (one time fee) to an educational membership site (subscription fee).

I already had this product partially created as I had planned to launch a membership site around 18 months ago but decided against it. So I have launched it as an MVP as is, no extra work required.

Sales pages are up and as soon as I get my first paying customer I will begin frantically working on the product to make it something that I can be proud of.

The Initial Launch

Initial customers are getting it for ridiculously cheap (just $5/month) compared to what I eventually want to charge ($39-$99/month).

The goal is to get some early adopters into the membership site and then craft the extra features of the site based off their feedback and what they want. Eventually improving the product and raising the prices for new members.

No Testing Required
I didn’t test my third product because I knew within 12 hours I wasn’t passionate about it at all. So it was simply live on my website for about 12 hours and then I replaced it with my new offering (which I am testing).

I am now on my 3rd iteration of my product for CashFlow Investor and I am stuck.

Not because the product won’t work (I think it will) but because it isn’t scalable and I am not passionate about it. Each new user will create more work and I don’t think the return on investment will be there for me.

I believe my market wants a low cost way of finding tailored positive cash flow properties.

My solution was a bulk approach to show them multiple random properties in the hopes that one might be suitable or give them insights into how to find positive cash flow properties…but this proved to not be valuable to potential investors.

If I went full scale and indexed all properties on the market and formed relationships with real estate agents to have a steady flow of properties coming in then it could work at scale…but I’m not ready for scale. I need something that works with 1-100 customers.

Maybe the goal should just be to provide a minimum service JUST to get paying customers. Then talk to these customers and find out what they want.

This post is inspired by empire flippers.

Over time I have come to realize that ideas mean very little when building an empire. Ideas are in abundance, execution however is extremely hard to do.

Little did I know a “great idea” I had about 3 years ago will lead me to a new way of thinking about building an empire.

About 3 years ago I had a great idea, to provide a monthly service to potential property investors looking to find and buy positive cash flow property.

I created a sales page and began to market it using Google Adwords. Wanting more traffic to test my idea (and not having enough money) I looked to find free ways to generate traffic. I commented heavily on a property forum and started writing blog posts the get organic traffic from google.

The idea proved to be plausible but with a 9-5 job and a family to feed I didn’t have the time to pursue it (or the guts). Over the next 3 years I slowly added bits of content and eventually added advertising to the site to make a bit of money. I also started up a couple of other sites on the side also but did very little with them.

In 2012 I started investing some of the advertising money back into creating more content. The traffic to the site grew with little to no extra effort and in February 2013 I had a great month and decided to turn this into something more.

My new business model begins
In February 2013 I had 2 niche websites that were performing quite well in terms of traffic

CashFlowInvestor – The site mentioned above was generating enough traffic to get a check from Google every 2-3 months which I could use to pay for more content for the site.

TiredandSleepy – Was climbing the rankings in Google and despite traffic being triple what it was in January I didn’t even make enough money to cover my yearly domain name costs

The Insight
Here were two sites both delivering traffic. One generated money and one didn’t.

It occurred to me that the two markets were very different and one website had the potential to become great over time and the other would simply generate little to no income.

The Empire Building Model

1. Find a profitable market and get them to your website

I choose a topic that I want to go after (testing keywords in Google’s keyword tool) and create a niche website (5-10 articles) with really awesome content. I write the content myself.

…then I wait (6-12 months)

2. Reinvest profits or shut up shop

If the website starts generating traffic I can then see how much money it is making. If it makes money I reinvest the money into more content for the website which should grow the traffic even more.

If it doesn’t make any money (like TiredandSleepy which has traffic but no income) I just let it sit and die when the domain name expires.

3. Find products for your readers

Over time I get to build up a good base of web traffic from Google that is mostly passive.

I can then begin creating products for this market and testing them by letting my readers know about them and see if they buy the products. If they don’t like the product then try another idea for the same market.

Worst case scenario is I never find a suitable product for them. Even if this happens I am still making a good enough return from advertising to keep growing the content and the income that the site generates.

In Summary

My strategy is:

1. Test a market and find potential customers
2. Get them coming to me passively with no ongoing costs
3. Continually test ideas on this market until I find something that sticks.

Here is my content production goal.

March/April – Post 2 articles per week, get a bit enough backlog so I am 2 months in advance.

May – Write 3 articles per week, again build up the backlog so I have a 2 month buffer

September – Write 5 articles per week (one per weekday). Keep aiming for the 2 month backlog as the new increased posting rate.

December – Earn enough money to have 7 articles per week written for me. One every single day.

December 2014 – Earn enough money to have 3 articles per day written for me and my websites

How much content would it take to earn $5,000/month? It really depends on the site.

I have a website where each blog post makes about $1.50/month.

To make $5,000 I would need to have 3,333 articles on the site (currently I have less than 100).

If I wrote 3 articles/day everyday for a year I would write 1,095 articles per year.

At this rate it would take me 3 years to write enough articles to make $5,000/month.

So currently I am writing about 2 articles per week. At this rate it would take me 32 years to write enough articles to make the targeted $5,000/month.

The moral of the story: Slowly but surely, better to take 32 years to achieve your dream than spend 32 years and end up in the same position you are today.

Recently I tested a new service on one of my websites. I released a paid BETA version to my email subscribers and had a low but acceptable conversion rate (1% conversion from free subscriber into paying customer).

I then put an adjusted service offering on my website and just let it sit there. In 20 days I have just over 100 pageviews and a total of 0 sales.

The basic premise has merit (I proved this in the beta launch) but the service offering needs some tweaking.

My problem is this: I don’t want to wait 20 days to find out if it is working or not. I want faster batch cycles because I want to get something of value up as quickly as possible so I can grow the website.

My solution – I took the sales page from simply being one page on my website (getting about 150 pageviews per month) and I added it to my home page also (700 pageviews per month).

This should give me about 850 pageviews for the month and should only take 4 days to get the 100 pageviews it previously took me 20 days to get.

I have now cut my batch time down by a multiple of 5! Or increased my data set by a multiple of 5 allowing me to make more intelligent decisions.

Now it’s time to just wait for the results or see if I need to change tact again.

What I like about this website is that I have readers (potential customers) constantly coming to the site without me having to do anything. What I can focus on now is making products for my customers…instead of trying to find customers for my products.

Love it