Today I deleted websites that actually made me money. Why would I do that? Because I want to focus on the websites that make most of my money.
Hey guys. Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. Today, I had a horribly unproductive day. My mind was just not in it; it was all over the place. But I did make a big decision today about really focusing on the websites that I have.
What I did was I looked at – I had a couple of small sites one’s called InspiringAudioBooks.com another was called TiredAndSleepy.com. There was another one called YourEnergyDrinks.com and these were making probably collectively around about $1,000 a year, maybe, if you could count that much.
But I just felt like they were sucking up my energy and distracting me and there was always maintenance issues or they’d get hacked or something like that. It’s just a real pain in the butt to have these websites that I don’t actually want.
I’d always imagined that one day I would go and work on these websites and build them up or one day I would sell them for a few thousand dollars or something like that. But I was looking at it and combined they’re making maybe $100 per month.
Which means that they would sell for – actually, it wasn’t even $100 per month, I don’t think. Anyway, they would sell for like $2,000 all up, if I could be bothered to do that.
So, what I decided to do was just basically delete them. It sounds crazy to delete $100 per month from your life but they were just distracting me and causing me to lose focus and I’m making $5,000 a month from On Property, it varies from month to month.
When you’re making so much money from one site and other sites that are making combined $100 a month are taking away your focus. Then, it makes a lot of sense to really focus on just one website.
Another thing that I’m super excited about today is – tomorrow, I’m actually going to my first Super Smash Brothers Melee Tournament. Super Smash Brothers Melee is a GameCube game that was released in 2001. It’s a fighting game but it’s a very popular game and there’s a big scene behind this game.
People play competitively to win money and stuff like that. I’ve been really into this game for the last 4 months or so, ever since I found out that this was a competitive game.
I used to love Super Smash Brothers as a kid. When I was in High School, I used to play with one of my friends on 64 and bought myself a GameCube after I found out that Melee was actually the competitive version of this game. I’ve been playing that, loving that and then found out that there’s a tournament up in Brisbane, about an hour from my house. So, I’m heading out there, I’m going to be playing GameCube all day tomorrow.
So, I’m pretty excited about that. I play as Princess Peach, is my character. Random fact but, yeah.
So, I spent part of today trying to work out, how can I actually play this on my computer? Because there’s a Netplay version where you can play people from all over the world, like you’d play Call of Duty or any other game online. You can connect and you can play Melee against other players online. But, oh my freaking gosh! It’s just been so hard to try and work this out.
I think I’ve got a solution now but I’ve got to download this program called Xcode that’s 2.6 Gigabytes. So, that’s going to take ages to download, like, all night for me.
I’ve got the program but I can’t connect my controller to the computer even though I’ve got an adapter. It’s not programmed for the computer so you’ve got to hack it. No wonder there’s not a lot of people playing this online.
It’s really hard to work this out. I do actually own Melee.co. So, I’ve been thinking about starting up a channel or something like that to help people with the issues that I’ve been having and to help the scene to get it more competitive and easier to play and stuff like that.
So, that’s something that I’m pondering but, again, I don’t want to spread my focus. I think one of the good things about Instructions Not Included is I’m doing it, it’s a fun thing, I’m not trying to make money from it.
Whereas, with these other sites, I was. If I was to start any more sites like Melee.co or something like that, it would just be for fun with no intention to make money. If it grew an audience and made money, at the end of the day, then happy days. But I just need to consider it in my own mind that it is just for fun.
What else have I done today? I also am moving over PublicSpeakingPower.com. As you guys know, I changed the name to Teach Speaking and I talked about another domain, which I bought which is Outspoken.co. I’m actually going to change the brand name to Outspoken Co or Outspoken.co.
That’s kind of the update there. I’ve just been migrating that across today but I haven’t fully completed that. So, yeah, pretty useless day for me. But you can’t have a win every single day of your life. I do my best. I do my best, I do my best that’s a song that I could sing.
Alright guys. I’m just rambling. It’s Friday afternoon. As you can see, I have freaking lost my mind. I don’t know what is going on or what I’m doing. So, until next time. If you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.
Hey guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. Today, I just want to quickly, real quickly talk about being more me. Which is a decision that I’ve made over the last couple of weeks.
I went from corporate life, earning 6 figures a year as a pharmaceutical representative wearing a suit everyday – well, most of the suit. I didn’t have to wear the jacket. But just that, full time, everything, every single day going to visit pharmacies. Which definitely felt a little out of sorts for me.
I’m a pretty cruisey guy; family guy sort of thing. So, being in a suit – I can handle it. It was alright but it didn’t really feel like me. And then I went into business for myself. With On Property, which is a property investing website or information about property investing, I make a lot of videos.
I used to always make the videos, I would wear a suit jacket or I would wear a shirt – a collared shirt that I used to wear as a pharmaceutical representative. I had stripped down a bit from the full shirt and tie and everything. I’d be wearing shorts and this suit but it still felt a bit out of sorts. I felt like I needed to do it in order to have a personality. Like, in order to be trusted in the space.
I kind of actually made the decision over the last couple of weeks that I’m not going to do that anymore. Which seems a bit odd on the outset, I probably should just put up with it and wear a shirt so that I look a bit more respectable and don’t look like some young hooligan or something like that. But I just really felt like I wanted my personality to come through stronger.
I wanted to have a stronger personality when I’m on-camera; be a bit more flamboyant; be a bit more out there and be able to be crazy and do silly things on-camera and I felt like that was kind of stifling my creativity.
I know it seems silly, the clothes you wear stifling your creativity. But I don’t know, it made me really feel like that. And so, I’ve made that decision. So, the last few videos that I’ve done, I’ve just been wearing t-shirts. I’ve been doing interviews with people for On Property and again I’m just wearing t-shirts.
It was actually pretty funny because there’s another guy that I work with, Ben Everingham, he’s from PumpedOnProperty.com and we have a close relationship together. I used to do interviews with him, I’d be wearing a shirt, he’d be wearing a shirt and then today, we’re doing an interview and he was wearing a hoodie and I’m wearing a t-shirt. We’re these two really young-looking guys, not dressed up at all, talking about property.
I just enjoyed it so much more. I just felt so much more like myself and I really actually like that image that we’re presenting. The kind of young radicals; not so in the industry that we’re controlled by the industry and we’re just trying to help people and do our thing. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. So, that’s my thoughts on today.
Today, I didn’t do a lot productively. I just a couple of interviews with Ben and then edited some interviews and that’s about it. So, in terms of business growth, nothing major. I just wanted to share my thoughts on that – on just being you. And I’ve really tried to, in the episodes that I do, just be more out there, just be more energised, be more myself. Because I’m at the point – and Ben keeps saying it to me, he’s saying it so many times that I’m starting to believe it – I’m probably within the top 5 most influential people in the property space at the moment. Like, that most influential property websites on the net and it’s run by me.
So, I’m having this huge influence over people. Like I was saying in yesterday’s episode, like that moral issue that I’m dealing with. I just need to be me. I just need to me, people come to me for the information. Some people won’t trust me because I’m too young or I’m not wearing a shirt. But hopefully, the people who stick around and find the content enjoyable, will enjoy my enthusiasm for the topic and just me being myself.
That’s where I’m at. Hope you guys are having a great day today. I hope you’re moving forward in your business. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some flipping furniture. Furniture. IKEA, check it out. They’ve got instructions.
Actually, I made some IKEA furniture the other day. It was pretty awesome, actually. I have a couch which we bought like 6 months ago, the seams started to tear on it. So, we emailed IKEA a few weeks ago, really bad customer service via email. But then my wife found a live chat for IKEA so she live chatted them. And then, 2 days later, delivery truck arrives, new couch. Brand new couch.
New spanking couch. But in boxes. So we gave our old couch to them and we got a brand new one and I had to build it. Their instructions were pretty good. I was pretty impressed with the IKEA instructions using just pictures. No words in the instructions at all. So, I’m pretty impressed that they can do that without any words. I don’t know why I was talking about that. If you’re having problems with IKEA furniture and it’s within warranty, live chat. Don’t email, live chat, guys. Alright. Until next time, peace out.
Hey guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. Today, I came across a very interesting problem that I haven’t really come across before.
I was actually interviewing someone and had to stop the interview halfway through. And then, we got into a quite interesting discussion.
The reason I had to stop the interview was – I run a website, OnProperty.com.au, which is about investing in property in Australia and I was interviewing a company that does crowdsource real estate investing.
So, basically, you’re investing in a syndicate. We were talking about it and then I talked about, “Well, how do you guys make money?” The way that they make money is actually something that, I guess, I would say I fundamentally disagree with it.
It has just caused the industry to be really dodgy and a lot of people to get sold bad investments. Basically, the way that they were paid was they would receive money from the developer who was building a property in order to sell that property.
They’re selling this property to investors. Crowd-funding, so they’re selling one property to 50 or 100 investors but they’re actually getting paid by the person who’s making the property and selling the property and so I find it’s a very big conflict of interest.
When you’re saying, “Well, this is an investment to invest in” but I’m actually getting paid to sell the property, I’m the sales person of this investment. Because of the fact that commissions are discretionary, they could be 1%, 2%, 5% or they could be $5,000, $20,000, $40,000, $80,000. It’s just completely discretionary and the way that it’s disclosed is generally in the contract which people don’t actually see.
It’s somewhere in the fine print. So, I have a big issue with this because friends of mine have been screwed over by property investing companies. There’s just so many bad things going on in the industry.
I was actually in the position where we’re halfway through the interview and I find out that this is how they make money. I actually had to say to the guy, who was super nice and I think he’s definitely got the right motives, probably going to be quite successful. But I just disagree with it and that’s my stance. So, nothing against him or his company. I’m not saying they’re doing anything wrong. But yeah, I had to say halfway through the interview, “Look, sorry.
I actually can’t go ahead with this interview and I can’t publish this because I’ve made a personal decision not to share or recommend companies that make money in this way.”
The reason that I’ve made that decision is because I can’t see these companies’ financials, I can’t control any aspect of it. The reason that I struggle with it is the fact that it’s discretionary. They could be doing a great job and charging a low fee today but then tomorrow they could up their fee significantly.
Customers wouldn’t really know and customers could be overpaying for properties. And so, I get really stressed out about that and I get stressed out about the audience that I have and the need to, I guess in a way, try and help them and try and protect them. But then I feel like, should I really be protecting them? They’re adults; they’re making their own decisions.
Who am I to limit their access to information if they want to learn about this stuff? And so, there’s that moral dilemma there – of I only want to present things which I actually think is probably going to be good but then I never know. And so, who am I to say this is good and this is able to be viewed by the public and this isn’t?
The truth is, I don’t control all the information. So, obviously, these companies can market in different ways. But I do have a large audience, there’s thousands of people everyday coming and following my site. There’s 10,000 people subscribed to my email list. So, it’s a big audience and we’re talking about money and it’s a big weight on my shoulders.
I guess that’s a slight moral dilemma that I haven’t fully dealt with. I believe in one thing but should I actually impose that upon my readers and my listeners and not share with them and silence information that I disagree with? I guess that’s part of the power of being a media company and one of the hard decisions you have to make. You have to decide morally what you want to share and what you don’t. I guess that’s something that I’m just coming to terms with.
I’ve never been halfway through an interview and then have to cancel it because I disagreed with the way they made money and didn’t want to share that with my audience. So, yeah, that’s where I’m at today. It was quite and emotional thing because after I had said that – that was about 20 minutes into the interview – we then went on without talking for about 40 minutes where he tried to, I guess, convince me that I should recommend his services and convince me that it wasn’t a conflict of interest and all of this sort of stuff.
I don’t know, I just think if you need to convince someone that it’s not a conflict of interest, it probably is a conflict of interest. If you actually need to sit down and fully convince someone it’s not a conflict of interest because of X, Y, Z, even though it looks like a conflict of interest, that’s pretty scary to me.
I just try and be super transparent with my sites. With On Property, I’m a teaching company; I make money through selling access to my membership site, through selling eBooks, through selling courses. Whenever I refer someone on to my buyer’s agent, which is Ben from a site called Pumped On Property, I always tell people, “I get a referral fee if you end up going through him.
So, just so you know, I’m recommending him but I get a referral fee. So, take my recommendation with a grain of salt.” And people appreciate that and they still go through him anyway and I still get referral fees anyway. But I try and be transparent, I try and disclose that and I’m hoping to be more and more transparent into the future.
I’m definitely thinking about being more transparent to how much money I make. Because, that way, if you’re transparent and if people aren’t okay with it, they can say something.
I don’t know. That’s just the moral dilemma I’m dealing with as a media company and my beliefs that you should be transparent, not have conflicts of interest and –
I don’t know. What do you guys think? What do you think? Should I share things that I disagree with because people have a right to access this information or should I leave it up to the companies that are doing this to market themselves and to provide that information to people? I have no idea.
I would absolutely love your comments on this. What episode is this? I’m just trying to find out which one. Okay, so this is episode number – I don’t know. Hold on, bear with me one second. I’m just going to get the episode number so you guys can go and leave comments on the blog. Alright, so, 21st of July was episode 28. 29, 30, 31. Okay, so this is episode number 2. So, go to ryanmclean.net/32 or 3-2 and leave comments on this.
What do you think, should I be sharing this information even though I disagree with it because people have a right to access this information or should I leave it up to the company? Would love to get your feedback, ryanmclean.net/32 or you can email me, ryan@ryanmclean.net.
Until next time. If you want instructions, go and buy some furniture. As you can see, I’m doing this with no instructions. Is there a moral guideline for this? I don’t know. I don’t think there is. Yes. Not as many instructions running a business as there is making furniture. Alright, peace out guys.
Hey guys!
Ryan here from Instructions Not Included and I have missed a couple of days because I was working and I forgot to record.
So if you are hanging out for that sort of stuff and I do not even know at this point of time if I have any audience at all because what I am doing is creating these and publishing them 6 weeks in the future. But if there is anyone hanging out for that I do apologize.
I try to record every day that I work but I do not get around to doing it every single day.
So I am back on Monday. I think last time I spoke to you guys I was super pumped about creating eBooks and doing that sort of thing. And what I did, I finished the 30-day Property Journey which I think I told you guys about. And then I started scouring through my blog to see if there was any blog post or a series of blog posts that I could compile into an eBook and I found one, 15 Ways to Improve an Underperforming Property.
It was a 20 minute video that I did so it is about 3,500 words and so I converted that into an eBook and got that up on Amazon within a day.
Now in terms of sales from the eBooks that launched I have had no sales in the last week or whatever, ever since I launched them which was probably Friday when I really got them all online. I have not seen any sales through Kindle at all for those sort of things. And I am not too worried about that, it is very niche topic and so to expect to get sales every single day from a book that I just launched from an author that nobody knows about on a topic that not a lot of people care about.
I am probably not expecting that. What I am hoping for is that over time people will buy the books and it will just create a small passive income stream to supplement my other business income.
What I would love is just to diversify my income a little bit so it is not all coming from one membership site but there is this eBooks and I have a couple of different membership sites or software tools. By having that diversification it allows me, I guess, to be more financially stable and so that way if for any reason one thing goes away then I have other things to cover that up.
Today, I did some emails and then I did a couple of videos for On Property and what is interesting is I got a notepad 6 or something months ago and I went through every page on the notepad and I wrote a property question on every single page. I just answered 2 of those in videos today so I created 2 videos. But I am going through this and look, for On Property I am getting like 2,000 visitors a day to my website, 1,500 to 2,000, which is pretty good for the Australian property industry. And I am looking through these questions and a lot of them I already ranked pretty high for them when you type it on Google like the one What is the 11-second Rule? which I am ranked first for.
Anyway, I am going through this and is there any point actually answering these questions and actually creating this content because I am already maxing out the attention that I get from these sorts of topics. I guess I have been questioning today what is the future of On Property and should I be focusing on creating more content at all or should I just be focusing on creating products and selling products and monetizing the audience that I have. That is a question that I do not have an answer to.
One thing that I was thinking, I have a software program called Property Tools which I sell for $5 a month or $50 per year. And then I have On Property Plus which is my premium membership website which is like $300 a year. But Property Tools I launched about 2 months ago and I have 50 members and On Property Plus I launched over a year ago and I have about 130 or 140 members.
Property Tools definitely has the potential to be bigger in terms of the number of customers, in terms of the revenue that it generates. Obviously I need to get a lot of customers in order to generate significant revenue. Like in order to generate $60,000 per year, I would need a thousand customers. And at the growth rate I am on at the moment, which is only about 20 new signups per month, assuming that no one ever unsubscribes, which let us face it, a lot of people are going to unsubscribe. It will take something like 5 years to get to a thousand, 4 or 5 years or something to get to a thousand people.
So not really achievable for that but I do still think that there is a good possibility for Property Tools to make good money so something that I was thinking about over the course of the weekend was how can I make Property Tools more prominent on my website and how can I sell more memberships to Property Tools because a lot of people are signing up. People are not necessarily email subscribers. They are not getting it through the email. They are just seeing it on my site and signing up so the barrier to entry is low because obviously it is cheap, serving a need for people and so I would like to market that more.
And so some of the ideas I came up with, obviously I could create more content and then I could market Property Tools within that content. I could add it into my email subscribers but I have done a couple of emails about it with not a lot of conversions. It is really something that I guess people have the need and they sign up because they have the need for it. I am actually not 100% sure but one idea that I did have was basically go through my old content and the content that gets a lot of traffic I look at ways that I could incorporate advertising property tools into that.
Let me just see if I can find the page that I did this on. Here we go. So I looked at the top posts. The top 19 posts, now I have over about 500 posts or something like that on my site which in the last 30 days I have about 70,000 page views and the top 19 pages actually acquired 38% of the page views that I have.
So what I am considering, which is thousands and thousands obviously – 26,000 or more page views, is going through these articles, these videos that I have created and actually putting in some marketing for Property Tools in there inside the content. And at the bottom of the content, recommending Property Tools more heavily just to try and get people across.
So that is something that I am exploring. I will let you guys know how it goes. But today as I was going through these questions and trying to create videos, I am just finding myself stuck because a lot of the content I have already created and I feel like I do not really want to do it again. So should I move on to a different topic like my public speaking site? What am I to do? And I do not have any answer to that question yet.
In terms of public speaking, as you guys know I changed the name from Public Speaking Power to Teach Speaking. And I am actually considering re-branding again. I got the website Outspoken.co and I thought that is a pretty cool name. Maybe I could name it Outspoken and Teach Speaking could just be the product for teachers, helping them to teach students public speaking. So Outspoken.co would be the brand name and then teach Speaking would be the product. So that is something I am mulling over.
I am not 100% sure if it is just a silly name, not very good or if it is actually going to be awesome. So I will keep you guys updated on that.
That is it for me today. That is my update from Instructions Not Included, from this Monday. And my room is very messy and I need to clean it. But hey, the life of an internet entrepreneur.
Okay guys, until next time. If you want instructions go and buy some furniture.
Hi guys!
Ryan here from Instructions Not Included and I just want to let you know that I finished my eBook today.
It took just about 2 days in order to get that finished. In terms of the cover for the book, I have actually gone ahead and created a cover myself using a program called Canva, c-a-n-v-a.
The book ended up coming in at 36,900 words so it is going to cost me just a bit less than $200 (US) in order to get that edited. I have found an editor and I am just waiting for them to send me like a custom project on Fiverr so that I can go ahead and pay them in one lump sum rather than pay them in $5 increments or something like that. So, I have an editor for the book. I have done the title myself to make it a better cover. I have actually put it on Kindle already, put it on Amazon already.
So with this one I have actually decided to go for the $0.99 price on amazon rather than the $2.99 (US) or $3.99 (Australian) which actually bumps you up and gets you a bigger percentage. If you sell it for between $2.99 and $9.99 (US), then you get 70% commission on the sale. And if you sell it for outside of that range, you only get 35%. But I wanted to try the $0.99 just because I have not done it before and it is such a low barrier to entry for people to spend a dollar on a book. And so I have made it $0.99 (US).
I have made it $0.99 (Australian) as well. And so hopefully people on there are considering which book to buy, they will see mine for $0.99 and they will give it a go.
I can always change it at a later date but I just wanted to test this. And I actually want to change The Essential Guide to Buying Your First Property in Australia, which is my other book. I would like to change that to $0.99 as well. What I am hoping is that as I build up this resource of eBooks, they can start to feed off each other so one will cause people, if they like it, to buy another one of my books and I can cross reference the books in there so they can get the links and go ahead and buy them. Yeah, so I am just testing a few things out.
I do think that as I have more titles in Kindle then I am going to get more sales and people will buy multiple versions of my titles. That is something that I am interested in and I am also going to be looking at actually getting this book printed. So after I get it edited I am going to consider doing a print run. I looked into it using the company Create Space which is made by Amazon so you can print on demand, which is pretty cool. So I might just do that and get a book printed and send out to myself just for fun. Or you can do print run so I could do a hundred books and get them printed here.
It is actually pretty cheap. It is $2.50 (US) per book to get it printed. To get it shipped to Australia for a hundred books is like $200 (US). So you are looking about for a hundred books, $450 (US) to get it shipped here and so that is $4.50 (US) per book so about $6 (Australian) per book or something like that. So it is pretty cheap to get them printed but I think Print on Demand is easier and I can just buy one. And if anyone wants to buy it then I can put them through to Amazon and they can buy a Print on Demand version. So that is something I will be looking into this week.
And later in the week I want to get the edited version back and I am going to print it. However if I am doing Print on Demand then I can just put the kind version and in that way just change it once I get the edited version back. Let us do that. I will do that later in the week or report on how that goes and how to set that up because I do not know how to do that. But yeah, I am stoked to have had this finished in just 2 days and have it up already for sale.
It will be approved in 12 hours or something like that, got an editor for it, done the cover. Should have just done the cover myself, I could have saved myself that $52.50 (US) and so you are living it alone for next time. But if this editor is good then I am going to get them to go through and edit my other book The Essential Guide to Buying Your First Property in Australia, which is actually only like 7,000 words. So it is only going to cost me like $45 (US) to get edited.
So that is definitely worth doing because there are so many errors in that. I remember reading through it to create like an audio book version of it and there were just so many errors. I will let you guys know how I go over the course of this. And then next I am going to be focused on a book on saving your deposit, some radical ways that people can save their deposit. I have like an outline of what I want that book to be but it is pretty long and I am not sure I want that book to be that long. I am thinking a shorter book might be better. So I need to assess that and I will do that tomorrow.
It is 7 o’clock at night now. So I am going to call it a day and hang out for a bit and do my thing, have some dinner, all that good stuff.
Alright guys until tomorrow. If you want instructions go and buy some furniture.
Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. So today I have been working on my eBook and I have actually been dedicating all of my time to it today trying not to get distracted.
I have done a couple of emails and stuff like that but I have been working on my eBook, the 30-day Property Journey.
Now, what I did was I have actually tallied how many words it was before I started and I used a tool called Scrivna to write in and so this was really easy to tally all the words because it tallies it by its chapter. So when I started I had 41,088 words. That is how long my eBook was. That is how many words basically I need to go through and edit. And so you may recall if you listened to one of the previous episodes, I want to track how long is this going to take me to get an eBook out and to do this sort of work.
Basically I had 41,000 words. I have been working on it today. I did one chapter yesterday but the rest I have done today. I have finished chapter 11 so I am onto chapter 12 but I am actually almost halfway through because the first chapters had more words in it and I only have about 23,904 words left to edit. I have written the introduction as well and I wrote the How to Read This Book part and I also need to write the conclusion and just a page about more products that I have and recommending people buy my other eBooks and stuff like that.
In one day, working from about 8:00 or 8:30 AM, it is now 1:30 PM so that is about 5 hours. I have been through about 20,000 words so I am about halfway through. Now before I got into this eBook, this was not a raw transcription that I was going through. I have actually already paid someone to go through the transcriptions and convert them into formatted blog posts. So I think because I have that done, it just made that so much more achievable to go through in such a short space of time.
So basically I am pretty confident that by the end of the week I will have finished my rough draft of this eBook. Today is Tuesday so ideally I would like to be finished by tomorrow. If I can get half done today what is to say I cannot get half-done tomorrow as well.
And I did look into editors and look into how much they cost. And it is going to cost about $5 per 1,000 words to get edited. So my eBook which is 40,000 words, I am looking at about $200 US dollars to get that eBook proofread and edited which I think is a good investment. This is a long term thing for me, a long term play. Basically everything I do is a long term play. I am focusing 3 years down the track. I want to convert some so I am happy to lose a bit of money.
On the upfront, spend a bit of money on it, a couple hundred bucks on editing. I spent $50 on a title page which I got back and which I really did not like actually. I spent $50 (US) or $52.50 on this title page and it is just really corny, really hypie, not really the image that I want to get across. I am thinking that I may need to either design the title page myself which I really do not want to do because I am not a very good designer or I have to pay someone else to do it and give them more direction. It is not this guy’s fault. I did not give him any direction as to what the eBook should look like. It is just a very generic title cover. It is not the feel that I am going for.
It just looks like a used a used car salesman, starved. So I will need to redo that. So that is $50 down the drain. So I guess the tip for the future is spend $5 on Fiverr, get the eBook cover done and then you can always pay to upgrade to get all of the upgrades. That is what I should have done and look if I have to pay $5 and I have a good eBook cover and then I had to pay the $52.50 again, it would have been so worth it because at this stage I have lost that $52.50. So that is very, very frustrating.
So Tuesday today, Wednesday tomorrow. Let us say I get the eBook finished on Thursday and then provide it to the editors on Thursday. The painful thing is I am using Scrivna to edit which is a great tool to edit and compile it into an eBook but these editors need it in Word format so that I can track the edits that they have done and stuff like this. So I am going to have to convert it into Word and then I would have to get out of Word back into eBook format. So that is going to be frustrating. It might not be that much work, it could probably be an hour or so to convert it back from Word into Scrivna and get it into eBook format ready to go up on Amazon.
And before I sign off for the day, I will be working a couple more hours trying to get more of this eBook done, I really want to get more than halfway through so I have another 2 to 3 chapters if I want to get more than halfway through. But I just want to share with you my Kindle direct publishing revenues that I got over the last 3 months from the book that I did put up there. I put up a book called The Essential Guide to Buying Your First Property in Australia, which is an eBook that I wrote.
I have sold a whole bunch of this eBooks on my website. I probably sold maybe a hundred to 200 at $5 each. I have made maybe a thousand dollars from this eBook. I have decided that I will also put it on Kindle and so I did that sometime in May. I did not even know when I put it up but basically in March I made $23.59. In April I made $10.41 and then in May I made $10.41. So all up I have made about $45 selling it on Kindle. It is very niche.
How to Buy Your First Property in Australia, it is a very niche eBook. Maybe the 30-day Property Journey will do better. Maybe it will do worse. Let us see. I am investing $200, maybe $300 into it, US. Let us just round it up to $500 (Australian) that I will invest into this in total including all the editing, all the work that is going into it. So $500 (Australian) I am investing into it. If it makes the same as this which is like $10 a month, it will take me 50 months, so it is like 4 years to earn my money back.
Actually that sounds pretty bad, does it not? But this is a process that I am trying to work out. Well, is this eBook publishing something that I could do? And maybe I will move away from these niche topics, move into something that is going to be more popular and hopefully I can get some books that will make me some more money and some passive income. It is a fun avenue. I am really enjoying it. And I like the fact that I can create content and I am creating in any way but just do it in such a way that it can convert into this product and by the end of the year I could have 10 products or something, 10 products making $20 a month. It is a nice little kicker.
So we will see how it will go.
Alright guys. That was a bit rambly today. A little bit less direction than I would have liked for the episode but that is how I roll. That is my life and I am going to make things up as I go along and if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.
Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included and not a whole lot to report today.
I felt like today was a bit of a waste. I was kind of poking around. I did 1 interview which is good and which will go up on TeachSpeaking.com. Otherwise it was just a whole bunch of responding to email and doing maintenance stuff, getting stuff uploaded, getting stuff organized, not very exciting.
I was not super happy with today. I did want to get through my eBook and work on that but I really did not touch that today at all. I did work out that we are looking at about 45,000 words for the eBook which is a lot of words to go through.
So I am definitely thinking in the future I am going to be aiming for small eBooks maybe around the 10,000-word mark or something like that which is really about 5 to 10 minute videos. So I really have to start condensing things and it is something to keep in mind for the future. Be it nothing much to report on today so we are back tomorrow for something a little bit more interesting.
Until next time, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.
Okay. I am going to cheat again and I have to.
It is still Friday and this is going to go out on Sunday but that is alright because I have just finished work and I have had a shower and I always do my best thinking in the shower.
I am in the shower and I am thinking shivers. If this process can work, if I can create this content that will easily convert into an eBook with not a lot of work – remember I did 30 days of content that I am converting into 1 eBook. How many days of work is that going to take me to convert that into an eBook that I can go out and sell?
30 days of content, will it take me 30 days to create this eBook? No it will not. How many days will it take to create? If I can replicate this then I could do it across my other niches that have a wide impact. Like OnProperty.com.au is a very niche market. I am focusing on investors in Australia, focusing on people who specifically want to invest using 1 niche investment strategy. So it is a very small market that I am going after. So the potential for massive eBook sales on Amazon or anything like that is pretty small.
However if I can use this same approach to create eBooks and to create products for my other sites like Public Speaking Power or if I could do something a bit better for Podcast Fast, that would be pretty exciting. And I was thinking about it. I am thinking what if I created videos and I thought about it and those videos were actually a video cause that I could sell. And so the video becomes a video cause, becomes a paid eBook, becomes free content that drives people to me and then over time, if I am doing this with my content, every piece of content that I create is driving towards creating this product.
If I can do that then I could really scale my business, just myself without having to hire a lot of people because I am taking advantage of the content that I create to drive traffic to my websites and putting out that free content also designed in such a way that it will then be paid for. People pay for convenience. People pay for access to a cause if I can put in worksheets or stuff like that.
So I am thinking about, Okay, I am going to focus on this 30-day property journey eBook. Let us document it. Let us see how long will this actually take me to convert 30 days of content into a usable and sellable eBook, how many days? And can I do that for other topics as well? Can I do that for Public Speaking Power? So right now it is called TeachSpeaking.com. Can I do that? Because if I could, that will really open up a word of niches to me and I could scale my business to a point that I did not think possible before because I am not just focus on I have to create all and all these free content and then create separate paid products which is a big ordeal.
Maybe I can do them both at once and to convert them into eBooks and selling $100-worth of eBooks is not huge. But if I am creating an eBook a month, things start to add up. If you are getting $100 in 90 days per eBook and over time you build up 10 eBooks that is $1000 every 90 days. You can see how it can leverage and how it can scale and how it can work. So it is pretty exciting. I am not one to go after the big thing “I want to make millions of dollars,” but I do want to make passive income.
I love the passive income so I can create the product that I can sell over and over and over again that I do not need to update. That is pretty exciting. And so my head is just spinning after that shower. So I thought I would cheat again, cheating again and would record this.
So thanks for listening. Until tomorrow, now you guys will not even have a break. You are just going through the weekend. Until tomorrow, if you want instructions go and buy some Ikea furniture because Ikea is awesome. Bye.
Okay. So I am going to break the rules a little bit here because actually I want to recall this just on a day that I am actually working so every recording I am talking about what I did that day but I am going to break the rule and today – it is Friday afternoon, it is only 2 hours after I recorded yesterday’s podcast but I am going to post this on Saturday for you guys but I am just pretty excited.
I just want to give you guys an update. I was talking about the 30-day property journey eBook that I wanted to create.
Basically what I have achieved in the last 2 hours – actually I think it is only an hour and a half, I basically finished work for the day but what I achieved is I grabbed all the text from the 30 blog posst and pasted them into Scrivna, which is a tool that I use to create my eBook.
So basically I have a first draft there already. What I need to do now is I need to go through those 30 chapters and I need to just do my best to edit them, add some subtitles in there, take out some stuff that might work for the blog but would not work in an eBook. Some of the blog posts that were videos, they are not going to come across.
I just want to make sure that it all makes sense. I want to go through that and do that. I started on day number 1 but did not get very far through it so I need to go through and do that. And I also have 4 other chapters that I want to add in. So there is an Introduction, there is a How to Use this eBook so people will know how you can go through this 30-day property journey. And I have a conclusion that I want to write and a More Products page where if people like my eBook I can direct them to my other eBook and my other products.
Another thing that I did as well is I went on to Fiverr.com, f-i-v-e-r-r.com and I found an eBook designer on there and I have paid to get an eBook design. Now Fiverr, you can get a whole bunch of stuff for $5 but I have decided, Look, I am going to do this and I think this is going to be pretty serious so I am going to invest. So the person that I chose, I edited a whole bunch of upgrades to my book like if they are going to do full print versions so if I want to get my book printed, I can.
They are going to do a 3D rendering. I am going to get the Photoshop file as well. So I ended up paying about $52.50 in order to get my eBook cover created. So I thought, Look, I am going to create that and spend that money before I have even created the book as a way to kind of push me into finalizing the book.
And I have also found on YouTube where to find editors for my book. I was talking about having no idea how to find an editor and I found this great video by a guy who was saying, Here is how to find editors and he has found them on Fiverr.com again and he just gave me some guidelines saying, Look, do not choose an editor that offers $5 for more than 2,500 words because they are just going to skim through it and make sure you look for people that have high ratings and lots of user ratings and then choose those people.
So I have an eBook cover that is getting created. I know where to find an editor and I have basically my first draft of my eBook done in an hour and a half. So I am pretty excited. The rest of the process is probably going to take a little bit longer than an hour and a half but I am pretty pumped to go from Podcast Fast, where it was just meticulous and really hard work now to this eBook which is awesome because this eBook, all of these episodes recorded in podcast format only, so I did not do any videos at all. When you do just podcast it leads itself so much more easily to text because you have no visuals that you need to show. When you are making your video you can rely on visuals.
When you are doing a podcast you have no visuals to rely on and the same with text, if you do not want to have visuals in there it converts across so well. So I am pretty excited that this is going to convert across and I am definitely going to see how this goes and document this over the next week or so however long it takes me to do it. And then I would love to roll this out for I have a couple of other eBooks that I want to get out for On Property, one about How to Save a Deposit. I have some radical ideas on how you can save a deposit for your house quicker. And then also I have an eBook called Up the Rent, talking about how you can increase the rental income of your property to get a positive cash flow.
They are the ones that I have thought awhile but I have not created because it was just going to be too much effort so it is pretty exciting that if this can work and this can be easy, then maybe I can use it on other eBooks as well.
So that is where I am at at the moment. I just want to share that. I was too excited not to record another episode so I thought just before I sign off for the day I am going to record this episode, let you guys know what I accomplished in an hour and a half and how excited I am compared to while I was thinking about the Podcast Fast eBook.
Pretty cool stuff. I hope you guys have an awesome weekend. Until next time, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.
Something you need to be aware of when running a business or doing projects is something that is called sunk cost bias and that is something that I am kind of dealing with the last couple of days.
Sunk cost bias basically means you make rational decision based on the investments that you have made in the past. So rather than saying, Okay, looking from where I am now, what is the best thing I can do to move forward and to move my business forward? You say, Well, I have already invested so much into this certain business idea it seems silly to give up now.
I remembered this happened to me when I was in Bible College. I was doing my third year of Bible College and I was burnt out emotionally, spiritually, physically.
I was getting sick all the time and I got engaged and we really had a big weekend celebrating and that kind of just made me realize, Okay, I should not be doing this. I should not be in Bible College. And I decided to quit right that weekend. I have been thinking about it but not really considering it and I decided, Okay, that is it. I am done. And I quit. And everyone was saying to me, You know, you have already done 3 years.
Is another 4 to 5 months going to be that bad? Why should you not just finish? And that is a good example of sunk cost bias, you think, Okay, I have put so much into this I may just go ahead and finish it even though it is not going to lead into an outcome that I want at all. An example from right now is the Podcast Fast eBook that I have been working on. I have probably spent 1 to 2 weeks on this eBook, on and off working on it; doing the screenshots and stuff like that and I know moving forward it is going to be another week at least. And is it going to make me money? Is it going to be worth it?
When I sit right now and I say, Well, what the best thing I can be doing to move my business forward in terms in terms of creating products and driving my business? That eBook falls pretty low on the scale. But I have this desire to finish it because I am more than halfway through. And that is my sunk cost bias.
I have already invested so much into this eBook that I want to go ahead and get it finished and get it out there. But I have decided not to let that bias take me over and so instead, I am looking at other things and I just have not been getting much sleep lately because I have been looking after my newborn son in the nights. And so my brain does not work as well as I would like for it to work. But what I realized today, for some reason, I do not even know why it came to mind but back in November of last year I just did this 30-day Property Journey – 30 podcast episodes of different things people could do each day to move them forward towards their goal of buying property, to grow their confidence and stuff like that. And I am like, Oh my goodness! This is an eBook! This is a written eBook.
I am pretty sure that it is all formatted as well. I have it in formatted blog posts so either myself went through it and edited it or I had an editor go through and do it. This is 30 chapters that I can just plug in and I have to work out how to hire an editor to go through it and edit this book. But this could potentially be 1 to 2 days of work which probably means 2 to 3 weeks of work to get this out there. But I already have an Australian Property Investing Book on Amazon. People liked that and they might want to buy another one and the 2 could feed off each other whereas if I did a podcasting book that is completely unrelated to property investing and so they are not going to work towards each other.
So it just makes a whole lot of sense to go ahead and create this eBook and get this eBook out there. And so that is what I am going to do. It is Friday afternoon, it is like 1 or 2 o’clock so I do not have much time to work on it this week because I have swimming. I have to leave home around 3:30 so I probably have an hour or 2. But this will all start to work towards and see if I can get this out there and I need to find an editor and work out how do you hire an editor for an eBook and how much does an editor cost because truthfully I have no idea at all.
That is where I am at. I hope you guys are having a great week. I hope you guys are moving forward in your businesses or in your ideas and you are feeling inspired by my journey and the turns that I go through.
Until next week, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.