I think we’ve worked out partially what we want our lives to look like in 3 years and I might even have a plan to get there.
Hey and welcome to Instructions Not Included, the series about me, Ryan McLean, as I try and make a decent living online. In this episode, I’m going to talk a little bit about where I think we want to be in 3 years’ time because I’ve got some clarity around that. As well as becoming a content business.
If you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you know I’m constantly changing strategies and so, this may be just another one of those changes or it may be a new direction moving forward.
First, let’s talk about where we want to be in 3 years’ time. I talked to you in the previous episode about looking at my business in terms of where I want to be in 3 years’ time and designing my business so that I can achieve those things in 3 years’ time.
I see so many people starting businesses not thinking about the future and basically finding themselves trapped in the future because their business isn’t designed to give them the life that they want.
For example, Ben the buyer’s agent, he makes a great deal of money. He has a really solid income from his business. However, his business is very reliant on him, very reliant on a lot of client interaction. If he wanted to work less or didn’t want to be a buyer’s agent anymore, in order to get himself out of the business, he would need to hire sales people.
He would need to hire people to manage clients. It would just be very difficult because then he’d be managing those people, which is still a job in and of itself. So in terms of his business, it isn’t really a business where it can just be managed and he can go and do what he wants.
He does have a rental agency on the side that I think he partnered with his mom in order to start that. And that, he doesn’t have to do a lot in because his mom runs it. So he started a business, he’s not the only person in it.
Someone else is running it and he basically doesn’t have to play a large day-to-day role in it. So that’s 2 examples of 2 different types of businesses that generate different outcomes for you. Really, you need to think at the start; okay, what business do I want?
Anyway, to get to the point, I talked about thinking about where I want to be in 3 years and trying to design a business around that. Well, something that me and my wife have always been inspired about is kind of this tiny house living, traveling in a caravan or a motorhome – even thinking back to 4 or 5 years ago, when I used to work for Alpha Pharm, a large pharmaceutical company, we always talked about getting a caravan.
Potentially doing some travel around Australia. Even quitting my job to do it or maybe just getting a caravan and doing weeks away in it. So, we’ve been talking about this for 4 or 5 years and it’s gone through a lot of different phases – from caravans to tiny houses.
Now, we’re kind of on the vein of it’d be awesome to get a camper van that could be my second car rather than having the little second car that I have. Sell that, have the camper van as our second family car. But have it so that it could seat 5 people, so we could all fit in it. And also, sleep 5 people and then we could do trips away, just for the weekend or something like that.
We’re not going to live out of a camper van with 5 of us. That would probably just be insane. But that idea of being able to get away whenever you want is something that is really important to us and something that we definitely want to work towards.
I’m thinking with my business in the future, I definitely want to me more hands off. My ideal business, I would be able to take basically a week’s holiday every single month would be my goal so I could work for 3 weeks and then have a week off and do something fun with the family.
We home school my daughter. We may be sending my son to school next year, so that might change things. But we basically have the freedom and the potential, if we decide to home school our kids, to be traveling whenever we want because we can just still do school while we travel. That’s pretty cool. Basically, I’m thinking about that and I was talking – no, I wasn’t talking, I was writing down. I was talking to myself.
I was writing down in my notepad the sort of things that would make a perfect website or perfect business for me.
The perfect website in terms of – this will lead into me talking about my content strategy – is something where I can create content for the website and I can help people through the content that I create. It’ll be a website that would generate no incoming emails for me to deal with, so no customer interaction, basically, there. A third party website or I’d recommend third party products would be the ideal. So things like Amazon affiliate sites, AdSense websites. Sites where you recommend other information products and stuff like that.
Ideally, you would just be an information hub and then you’d go ahead and recommend people to other places. So, in a perfect world, that’s my perfect site because it’s something that I can work on building and I can create content when I want, but it’s something that I don’t need to actively manage so it gives me the freedom to go away when I want.
It’s not really going to affect my website. Whereas, at the moment, in 2 days, we’re heading off to Sydney for a week. I’m going to have to keep monitoring my emails for things related to On Property. Maybe new customers, maybe customer issues, etc., etc.
Basically, in a perfect world, I’d be rid of that and I just have these probably niche websites that I would run on the side and build those up over time. In a perfect world, I’d also have websites where I could pay writers to help me write content for those sites so I wouldn’t be doing it all myself and it wouldn’t be all built on me. Because at the moment, in terms of my content empire, all the websites that I have, it’s all built on me and the content that I create. So in a perfect world, I would have websites where I could hire people to write for me and that would be a viable option.
Thinking 3 years into the future, and this leads me into the content strategy and things like that, is the business that I would like to have is a very hands off business, but it’s something that makes sense in terms of I can continually build this because I continually add in content and the more content I add, the more money I can make, which can pay for more content. So it kind of got this perpetual machine feel to it. However, there wouldn’t be ongoing management, which is a thing that I want to get away from.
Now, looking at my current situation and where I am now, I’m definitely not there yet. I don’t own enough money to be able to take a week off every 3 weeks. Firstly, we couldn’t afford the holidays. Secondly, I need to be working in order to generate enough money because I just need to kind of make things happen. So I’ve still got a bit of a ways to go to get to where I want to be.
At the moment, and I think I talked about it in the previous episode, On Property kind of generates around $40,000 a year through my own products and $40,000 a year through recommending Ben the buyer’s agent. I would really like to see that continue. I have made some changes to my products so On Property is no longer a yearly recurring subscription.
It’s just a one-off payment of $299. Property Tools is now a one-off payment of $99 and you get 12 months access. I’ve moved from a membership model, which I feel like wasn’t necessarily working for me to a one-off sales model, which I’m hoping will have less friction and, therefore, be able to generate more consistent sales for me – things that I can predict. It sounds strange to move away from a membership model where you think will be more predictive to a single sales model.
However, when I look at generating $30,000 a year or $40,000, I look at really, I need to get 2 sales per month for On Property. No, not 2 sales per month, 2 sales per week. So that’d be 100 sales in a year or $300, that’s $30,000. And then I have Property Tools on the side as well as eBooks and courses that will kind of make up the extra $10,000. So, $40,000 would be covered there if I can get 2 sales per week.
So I have changed On Property from a blog that also has products into On Property is now this membership and I also have a blog to help market the membership site. That change has just taken place – haven’t had any sales yet. It will take time to work out; is this having an impact that I want and is it going to generate the income that I want? In terms of recommending people to Ben, we’ve got a lot of great strategies. We worked together on Friday.
We got a lot of great strategies to send people to him. Basically, we’re in this situation at the moment where I can send him more leads than he can deal with. And so, we’re just working on how to communicate better with each other so that I can deliver him the amount of people that he needs and that he can handle and help while maximizing the return on investment for both of us. So, not sending him too many people like we did with the webinar a couple of months ago, where he had 100 strategy session requests.
That’s an hour of his time each, so even if he works full time for 2.5 weeks just to make strategy sessions, 40-hour weeks, we would get through those 100 people.
It will take him 2.5 weeks, that’s doing nothing else. So 100 people is not really viable. And so, we’re working on strategies to basically maximize the quality of people that are coming through so he can work with less people but they have a better chance of converting into a sale. And then also, just managing it so that he’s getting just enough – not too little, not too many. And so, we’re working on the communication there.
Hopefully, in a perfect world, $40,000 from him would be great. And then, I’d also like to build up my content website. This is things like Public Speaking Power. This is things like my niche website. I’ve got an audio book website. I’ve got a website about podcasting. Each of these makes a little bit of money. I think Public Speaking Power makes $50 a month or something like that. The goal for these sites were basically to build them up where they could maybe make $20,000 a year within the next 12 months. And so, we’ve got $80,000 coming from On Property, but then we’ve got $20,000 coming from these niche websites.
The goal towards as we get to the 3-year mark, would basically be to have a sustainable income coming from websites that don’t require email assistance, don’t require ongoing customer support, that sort of stuff. So 3 years’ time down the track, that’s the goal. So I’ll be creating a lot of blogs, a lot of audio, a lot of reviews, all of this sort of stuff so that I can make affiliate commissions, be diversified in the affiliate things that I recommend. So I’ll have lots of different income streams coming through. And so, they’re more protected and also, that it’s more passive.
That’s kind of where I want to be in 3 years’ time as well as the strategy for getting there. At the moment, On Property is still my biggest website, so that needs to play an important role in it. But overtime, I would love to see these new sites do even better. That way, we could even change the strategy for On Property and just recommend Ben or go the advertising route or do whatever we want with it. We’ve got the potential there to do what we want with On Property if we have other income sources.
So that’s where I’m at in my business. That’s my goal for the next 3 years. I hope that you’ll follow me for the next 3 years and see how this happens. And hopefully, in 3 years’ time, I will have the camper van, we’ll be going on weekend trips. I’ll be having a week off every 4 weeks and I’ll be living the life that I want. We’ll see how it goes.
Life never works out as planned, but we’re going to try for it and see what happens. That’s it for me and my business. Go ahead and work on your business and just remember; design a business that’s going to give you the lifestyle that you want, rather than just creating a business and hoping that the lifestyle will come in the future because you might create this perpetual machine because as businesses get bigger, they feed on themselves and they require so much more.
Just be careful when you’re starting out. Design a business that’s going to give you the life that you want. That’s it for me. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.
2015 is done and dusted. I now have 2016 to look forward to with new business ideas and On Property running on autopilot.
Well, 2015 is done. I am signing off for the day the 24th of December which is my last working day for the year and then having two weeks off because we got Christmas obviously and then I’m heading down to Sydney for the new year and taking some time off. We will be back around the 5th of January or something like that.
I just want to do a quick end of year update as well as talk about what is happening in 2016 or what I hope to achieve in 2016.
Because really it’s a lot like a blank flight for me in 2016 in terms of what I’m doing with the new business Pelt and closing off or just letting On Property sits on autopilot. Over the last couple of weeks since I did my last update I got rid of the evergreen launch funnel in On Property which wasn’t working this time around.
Approximately 1000 people went through that funnel and one person signed up making me $300. Therefore obviously it wasn’t working the way it used to work where I had 100 people go through a week and I would make four to six grand a month.
I don’t know what’s happening there. I don’t know why it wasn’t working this time around but it’s the same funnel. Everything is the same but it just definitely wasn’t working. What I’ve done is I’ve changed my pricing. I’ve changed again but it’s very similar. At On Property Plus it’s $299 a year for everything, now it’s $99 a year for just the property listings.
I have migrated everything over from plus.onproperty.com.au over to onproperty.com.au. I moved the membership site over there. Next year I’ll move all the members across.
Therefore new members will sign up to onproperty.com.au and all members will still have access to plus.onproperty.com.au. I haven’t migrated members over yet so it is something I need to do in 2016. Also I’ve set up a process so that when we list a daily property which is something members get access to – my virtual assistant is absolutely awesome – she will go in and create a censor listing which will go out to the public for free. Therefore the public can see some stats on the properties that I’m finding.
They can see the price range of the property, the rental yield, the estimated cash flow, they can see a blurred image but then they can click where they want to get access. So the goal is that I’m probably not going to be creating much content for On Property in 2016 and so this will be daily updates to the blog but it will just be those censored property listing every day.
The aim is that people come to the site, they will see all of these censored listings they want to get access to and see the real addresses of these properties. When they do that then they can sign up and they can pay to have access.
Hopefully it works and hopefully it’s a good marketing strategy but we’ll see in 2016. But really if it does work then On Property could effectively run on autopilot maybe working one to two hours a week on it which would really free up my time to explore other ideas.
I really need On Property to be making at least $1,000 a month in profit to be worth it. Otherwise it’s just not worth having that service at all and I could just basically cut expenses to the bone for On Property and just have it as a basic website, cheap hosting, put advertising on it and then just run it like that and at least then I’m paying hosting.
I might be paying ten bucks a month or I’ll go with Arvixe which I really like. You can check this out by going to pelt.co\hosting which is my affiliate link for Arvixe. I could set them up for Arvixe for $3.40 a month for On Property and then basically a lot of the work that Dittie is doing wouldn’t need to be done so I’d get her doing other things.
Therefore On Property would basically cost me $3.40 a month to run and I could make money in advertising through that. I could probably make $500 to $1000 a month in advertising if I completely cut costs and just I guess gave up on On Property.
However I’m not ready to throw in the towel yet. I am putting it I guess in idle – putting it in cruise control and I’m going to give it a couple months while I work on other stuff. And then probably I’ll come back to it with fresh eyes or just see how things go. It’s definitely something that I want to come back to in the future especially when I start investing in property myself.
I’m just not 100% sure what to do with it at the moment. I have been tossing around ideas of potentially selling it to someone else in the industry but I don’t want to do that at the moment. It is not something that I’m looking to do but definitely something that could be on the cards in the future in a year or so. We’ll see how things go and we’ll see what’s happening.
I really don’t know what’s happening with On Property but I feel like I achieved what I wanted to achieve in the space. I am reaching a great deal of people. I’m helping a great deal of people and I just don’t know where to take it from here.
I do know that I want to start an educational company and I do know that I want that to be pelt.co and so I have started creating videos over there. I’ve created 18 videos now for that site. I would like to do a video a day for next year for that site and create a lot of courses as well. So far I’ve done a course on how to create a membership site, how to create a video and how to set up WordPress.
I’ve got a couple of other videos on there as well and on YouTube. I think I’m getting about 70 or probably 50 to 80 views a day for my videos over there. I’ve got seven subscribers so far – not massive but slowly building that up. I’m even considering consolidating Podcast Fast into pelt.co because I’ve got a membership course over at Podcast Fast.
I am considering that but I’m not 100% sure what I’m going to do there. Maybe I’ll just leave Podcast Fast but I’ll also do a series on how to start a podcast as a part of pelt.co.
Next year pelt.co will be my main focus and I’ll be creating a lot of courses and a lot of training videos on how to do things. The goal is to make money through affiliate marketing with that therefore when I say how to set up WordPress I recommend hosting and I recommend Arvixe.
When I’m talking about setting up a membership site or we’re talking about setting up an evergreen launch funnel I can recommend ConvertKit which is my email marketing software. There is a whole bunch of things I’ll be trying to teach people how to do and then I will recommend different things.
I can recommend how to do those things using a tool, recommend the tool and hopefully get some commissions from that. And who knows I may launch it as a podcast as well but I’m not 100% sure at the moment what I’m going to be doing with that. That’s going to be my plan next year.
I am worried that it’s going to take me six months for the income from Pelt to really grow and become significant enough that it can support me. While I’ve moved on from On Property that income from Pelt definitely isn’t where I need to be. There might be a limbo for six months or so while On Property is kind of stagnant and while pelt.co is growing but we’ll really just have to wait and see.
At On Property the sales have died off in the last couple of months as we’ve previously discussed but I’m not sure if that’s going to continue. I’m not sure that’s just an end-of-year thing. It might be seasonal and then coming into next year in January-February-March I might have good sales.
I really don’t know what the future holds but I’m excited for 2016 – excited to create and to run Pelt and to create some really helpful training videos out there for people and some courses as well. So I’ll keep you updated on that in the new year. I will be brainstorming.
I will be thinking about my businesses, praying about my businesses over this two-week break hoping to get clarity for what I want to do in 2016. And then hopefully I can start 2016 with a bang and just create something awesome.
Hopefully too when I’m doing this review at the end of next year I’ll be really excited about where my business is, the passive income that I have generated and the lifestyle that I have for me and my family. At the moment I am just not earning enough and still having to work quite a lot and I don’t have the lifestyle that I want. Hopefully in a year’s time we can look back and we can have made some serious progress towards that.
I am not expecting to be completely financially free of rich or anything like that but hopefully I’ll be in a less precarious, less stressful position and not starting afresh in 2017. However, we’ll have to wait and see.
Thanks so much to everyone who has been listening this year. Thank you to Snappy Checkout who has been sponsoring this podcast as an affiliate link. You can go to ryanmclane.net/snappy to check out Snappy Checkout which is the best payment processor out there. I use them for all my products on all my websites and I absolutely love it. You can collect recurring payments, you can sell products and you can do nearly everything with Snappy Checkout.
Go to ryanmclane.net/snappy to check that out. Thanks Snappy Checkout and thanks to the team over there for helping me out and I absolutely love all of you guys who have been listening. I wish you the most merry Christmas and I wish you a happy new year. Hopefully we can move on to bigger and better things in 2016.
Until next time guys, if you want instructions go and buy something furniture.
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This feels like the 1,000th time I have had a new approach to marketing On Property. But here we go for another round.
Hey guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. I just wanted to record an episode to talk about what I’ve been going through in On Property over the last couple of weeks and to flush it out for you guys.
However it’s really for myself to look back on and to say okay here’s where I was at a point in my business where things weren’t going well, here’s the way I was feeling, here are the things that I did. And then hopefully I can look back on this in a year and I can see how I turned it around. It’s actually interesting I started Instructions Not Included about a year ago.
I think I started in December of 2015. So for it to have been a year since I started this podcast is quite amazing. And to think of the things that I’ve tried in those 12 months is quite significant. To think of the success that I’ve had maybe not as significant but I’ve tried a lot of things and I’ve learned a lot and I feel a lot more knowledgeable and I feel like I can take on the world more.
And even though things haven’t necessarily gone my way and I haven’t got everything right I am very grateful for the year that I’ve had in business, the things that I’ve learned and the position that I’m currently in to move forward with my business.
Let’s just talk about where we are with On Property. I talked about in a previous episode how I came to the realization within myself and with my wife. I did the data – I went digging through all of the data – What’s my retention rate for On Property Plus? How long are people staying? I discovered that 90% of people are leaving within a year.
Therefore what I thought was a sticky and a recurring product actually really isn’t because people are gone within a year and I’m not necessarily bringing in a lot of people to replace that. In fact, my customer base has actually decreased in 12 months but my revenue had slightly increased because of the increase in pricing that I had.
So I was kind of going backwards or being very stagnant in my business and so I came to the realization that On Property Plus isn’t going to make money in the way that I thought. It isn’t going to make the amount of money than I thought it was going to make and as a result I really need to rethink this and go back to the drawing board.
What we went back to was the original evergreen launch strategy that I had done with On Property Plus in the past. I was going to redo that and launch it again through an evergreen launch funnel basically using the exact funnel that I used about six months ago. I think it was back in May that I started it and it ran for about four months. Well I’m unhappy to say that it’s been three weeks – now is the fourth week and I’ve had over a thousand people through that evergreen launch funnel and I’ve had one sale of $300.00.
The evergreen launch funnel – I don’t know why it’s not working – I don’t know why the people aren’t as targeted – I don’t know what the go is but definitely it hasn’t been performing as well as it previously performed in the past. What I thought could get me potentially to my goals or get me a decent passive income out of On Property is probably not going to work.
Therefore that means back to the drawing board again. I went through an entire week where I was thinking about this and came to a conclusion and an idea and then actually scrap that idea yesterday. My idea was I could potentially Crowdfund On Property because I do believe that there is an opportunity in this space to provide non conflict of interest advice and education around investing in property.
And I thought some people might be passionate enough to get behind that and to support that because they want someone who is going to give them the information that’s not skewed towards the overpriced properties that are selling or whatever.
So I got on that bandwagon and I was going down that path thinking okay this could be good if I reach maybe $6,000 a month in crowdfunding then I can release all of my products for free. But the problem that I came to in the end was the people that are having success with crowdfunding – and by success we’re talking $10,000 to $20,000 a month and have absolutely massive followings.
We’re talking millions of views on every video that they have on YouTube, millions of subscribers or hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Compared to me you might get 400 views a day on YouTube – 10,000 views a month or that sort of thing.
It probably just wasn’t going to be viable for me to do it because so few people would actually put up money for effectively no reason or for the ability to crowdfund this that I just didn’t have the scale or I didn’t think that I had the scale to actually make this achievable.
I therefore went down the path of crowdfunding thinking about it a lot and ended up coming up with the fact that I’m probably not going to be able to crowdfund this because I really just don’t have the volume of people to make this successful. I was then back to square one again thinking, “Oh my goodness what am I going to do? How am I going to turn this business around?”
Basically I have been focusing a lot on my new business which is teaching people educational videos. That’s over at www.pelt.co so you can go and check that out. That is about teaching people how to set up a membership site, how to set up an evergreen launch funnel, a bunch of WordPress staff.
Mostly I will start with internet stuff because I can market referral programs, affiliate programs and make commissions there but eventually I’ll move into broader education for Pelt. I’ve been spending more time on that and really talking to my wife about it. We are thinking that On Property we want to tick away but we’re not going to heavily invest in it.
So we want it to provide us with enough money to get by until Pelt takes over and starts to make the bulk of our income which is where we want to be eventually as a company.
I have a whole bunch of ideas thinking around about what different things I could do. The idea that I finally settled on that I’m creating a sales page for and launching it this week was that I was going to basically roll everything into one again like I’ve been doing and really simplify things in terms of my website.
What I’m going to do as a marketing strategy is take the properties that I’m listing inside my membership site and I’m going to put them on my free site onproperty.com.au. I’m going to put them on the free site but I’m going to have them censored so the images will be blurred, there’ll be some information about it like price range, rental yield, potential cash flow of the property but it will be very limited.
Therefore people won’t be able to understand where this property is or what is the address of this property unless they remember. So the goal is that each post that I put out because I’m already going out and finding a property every single day and that’s daily content for the website and the goal is that people will then be able to peruse these properties and then it will encourage them to become members of On Property to get access to the properties.
That’s what I’m going to be doing. I’m going to launch the sales page. I’m creating it now so it will probably take me maybe two or three days to finish that.
I then need to set up a new process and some educational training videos for my virtual assistant so she can take things from my membership site and create the free content as well. However, the goal is really that the free property listings are a way to drive people to the members’ area.
I was thinking about it and I was thinking when I had previously looked at properties in the past there was a site that used to do a similar sort of thing called Cash Flow Capital and I used to look at it and they would share property listings but they wouldn’t share the addresses and then you would have to sign up and become a member in order to get access to those addresses.
I saw this and I thought that is actually a much better way to do it. And it just makes a lot more sense because people then see the properties and they create curiosity in them so they get interested and want to know about the property. I don’t even have to explain what On Property is to them necessarily. I just have to go ahead and give them access to the stuff. That’s where I am at the moment.
I just arrived at Melee so I’m going to go in and play a bit. Thanks for listening. I just wanted to get that off my chest to understand where I’ve been, the ideas that I’ve gone through and where I’m at the moment. I will be dropping the price to $99 a year but then I will be having a higher tier pricing so it will $99 a year just for the properties which I think is super affordable and then $249 will be the complete package.
They will get access to properties, they will get access to courses, they will get access to the FaceBook group, they will get access to the calculator and other stuff as well. Hopefully a large portion of people will go for the $249 but even if they would just go for the $99 I’m fine with that as well. That’s my pricing structure at the moment. I was thinking about adding a middle-tier but I’m not sure whether I’m going to do that at the moment so I’ll see how it goes down the track.
If at 99 bucks a year I can get 200 members that’s 20 grand a year and that will at least pay my expenses for my business and give me a little bit of profit as well and allow me to focus on building up Pelt. So hopefully it works. I’ll keep you guys updated obviously.
Until next time, if you want instructions on buy some furniture
After feeling like I had no idea how to move forward I have decided to refocus in on my niche of investing in positive cash flow properties.
I think I have worked out the solution to my problem. I am not 100% sure that I have worked out the solution, but at least I’ve got something to go with now. So if you have listened to the last episode or if you haven’t, go back and listen to it.
Basically, I am struggling at the moment because revenue has decreased in my business and I don’t know what I did wrong, and I don’t know what to do. So it has been laying very heavily on my mind as to what exactly I need to do to get myself out of this rut and to transform my business, get my business healthy again and keep it going.
On the bright side, I have spoken to Ben and he was saying that there are some good leads coming through his buyers’ agency. so in terms of cash flow I don’t think I have anything to stress about. But in terms of the longevity of my business that’s what I have been stressing about and I don’t really have a solution.
And then I was just thinking about it and thinking about it, talking to my wife about it, thinking about it some more and I came to the realization that I used to be the positive cash flow guy and everything I would talk about on my site would all be around investing in positive cash flow property. And then the issued that I had was that I had kind of tapped out that market in terms of organic traffic, in terms of search engine traffic and SEO because only so many things you can write about how to find positive cash flow property which is really the problem that I solved.
And so what I then did was I started to create content that was just about general property investing. So, I expanded my niche.
But I think the mistake that I made is that I should have still remain the positive cash flow guy and still focus on that niche but my free content is just more general in nature in order to reach a larger audience. So what I did and the mistake that I think I’ve made is I went from the positive cash flow guy to the property guy.
And being a property guy in a space of thousands of property advisors, buyers, agents, property marketers – all of these sorts of people, I’m just one in a sea of thousands. And so I think the mistake that I made and again I could be wrong on this and I could need to change my mind, but the mistake that I have made is I’ve gotten away from my core message which is investing in positive cash flow property and helping people invest in positive cash flow property.
And so I was thinking about my products. I was thinking about my offerings. And the way that I came upon – I guess, this discovery that I had lost my niche was I was wondering with this problem – Is it a product problem?” “Do my products suck and I need all new products? Is it a pricing problem? So my products are overpriced or under-priced or just not priced correctly? Or is it a marketing problem and I’m not marketing my products correctly? And I do feel like it’s a marketing problem – that I’m not marketing my products correctly. Because I’ve got a lot of people that signed up for my services and my products and are happy with them.
Therefore, I’m pretty sure that it’s not the products. I’m pretty sure it’s not the pricing. I’m pretty sure that it is nothing. So I’m thinking along this train of thought and then came up with I guess the idea that I’d lost my niche.
As a result, I was rethinking through my products and what I have to offer and how I can position them and I only got back to being the positive cash flow guy or on On Property to be all about finding positive cash flow property. So what I’ll have is On Property listings which I’ll probably might even change the name to Positive Cash Flow Listings just to make it more obvious. I’m not 100% sure about that but I have the listing so that’s a service that I hope you will find real positive cash flow properties.
I’m going to merge my courses into one which I’m going to call Positive Cash Flow Boot Camp. This will be a three-part course. Therefore, the three courses that are selling as individual units will now become one boot camp. And I really feel like when you say boot camp it makes you think about an intensive something that you go through. You can chew on the content quickly. You build up the skills quickly. To me, that’s exactly what a boot camp is. Therefore, to take the three products that I have, packaged them together into positive cash flow boot camp I can show people how to find positive cash flow properties, how to research an area and also how to evaluate individual properties. So I’m confident with that.
Also, property tools I think I may need to put – not on the back burner but just not a huge focus on my site. Nevertheless, there are property tools I’ll be marketing as tools to help you invest in positive cash flow properties. So I’ve got all of that same sort of products – a tiny bit of repackaging with the boot camp, but basically the same. I’m just changing the marketing around it and changing my focus back to my original niche which is helping people find positive cash flow properties.
I also wanted to record this episode quickly because I’ve listened to something and I don’t want to forget it. I was listening to The Fizzle Podcast which is great. It’s an awesome bunch of guys over there at Fizzle and they were talking about finding your true voice and there were two things that they’ve talked about in the podcast episodes. It’s episodes one and two of that podcast if you want to go check it out. But two things that they talked about that resonated with me around this topic of finding your voice, finding your niche – all of this sort of stuff. And one thing that really resonated with me that was really cool was when they were talking about choosing the niche or choosing the market that you go into.
Often we talk about passion. We talk about our calling. We talk about all of this sort of stuff and that can just be so overwhelming. I know I’ve been overwhelmed at times thinking about, “Am I passionate enough about this market, about this business to pursue it for the next five or 10 years? Am I passionate enough? Do I feel like God is calling me to work in this business?” And I have really struggled with that.
But reframing it – they reframed it as, “Is this something you care about?” And by reframing it to building a business around things that I care about just makes it so much easier. Do I care about the property market and helping people invest in property? Absolutely. But then I also care about helping parents with night terrors and I care about a whole bunch of other things and I could add those into my business.
So by changing the language to what we’re passionate about, to what we care about has really inspired me in terms of choosing my niche, feeling comfortable with it. Even though it may not be my biggest passion in the world or my biggest calling in the world, it’s something that I care about, it’s something in an area that I want to have an impact and so that’s important.
And they also talked about finding your own voice and a lot of them have gone through this passage – I guess you would call it, of starting with very generic content or copying someone else that they had seen, some guru in the market or something like that and just not getting a lot of traction. But then, they found their own voice, start putting their personality into things and then things really took off. And they interviewed one of the guys – the guy who started a [inaudible7:28] fitness.
He was saying he was writing five articles a week for nine months and he got no traction or generic articles. And then what he decided to do was to move back to two articles a week but to really inject who he was – really inject his new newness and his passion and family guy references and style was references into his blog post and that’s when things started really taking off for him.
So when it comes to finding my voice, I guess what I want to do is find what is my voice, what makes me different in the property market. Because I’m not just a property guy, as I think if I’m just going to be a property guy then there’re other guys who are better. I therefore need to find my specific angle; my specific voice and I’ll be trying out a whole bunch of things. I’ll be trying out how to podcast. I’ll be trying out high quality videos with more editing. I’ll be trying out longer podcast episodes potentially when I’m doing rants and going on rants and things like that. What I’m going to do is try a whole bunch of things to see what resonates with me, what resonates with my audience and to try and find, I guess the voice that I want to have in the market.
So I was feeling very stuck. I’m feeling a lot less stuck now. I’m passionate to get back to work tomorrow. I took Friday off so I’m going to be working on Sunday and I’m passionate to get back to redo my homepage to focus on positive cash flow property. I’m also excited too I guess, to redo my products, to put a much larger emphasis on finding and investing in positive cash flow properties and then moving forward into the free content things I’ll be creating.
Then I will be looking to find my voice, trying a few things and I guess, injecting up as much of whom I am into things. And so that may be like so much about these references. That may be my new newness that I have. That may be just me being quirky or whatever. I’m not 100% sure yet but I’ll go ahead and I’ll give it a try.
There were emails that I sent out and I’ll just give you a quick update. I did make four new sales for property tools so I got four new members for that. I think I got three new annual members, one monthly. So that was good. However, that was four emails sent out to like a database of 10,000 people. So it’s definitely not a massive conversion to make $155 on a database of 10,000 people over four emails.
Actually, as I’m recording this I just got a new customer – let’s open this up and see if it’s from property tools. That takes it from four to five. Actually, they have spent $99 so they must have bought a course – “How To Find Positive Cash Flow Properties Course.” As I said, I will be selling them individually again so take that $155 up to $255.
All of the way that I receive my payments and stuff, I use a product called Snappy Checkout which I have an affiliate relationship with which you guys can check out. They’re sponsoring this podcast in a way because they are an affiliate deal. They are something that I absolutely love and recommend. I’m looking to do a whole bunch of videos around how to use them and some of the cool things you can do with Snappy check out now that I’ve got this affiliate thing. So that’s another thing that I care about -helping people sell their products and helping people do things well. I think Snappy Checkout is an awesome tool and that’s something that I’ll consider creating some episodes about, some tutorials about.
So you can check out Snappy Checkout – just go to www.pelt.co/checkout and you can go straight through to see that product. It’s absolutely awesome and will help you sell your products or subscriptions, memberships, all that good sort of stuff. So go ahead www.pelt.co/checkout and I’ll get a small affiliate commission if you end up using them.
I absolutely appreciate you guys listening. I appreciate you taking the time and letting me vent what I’m feeling and the conclusions that I’ve come to. Hopefully as I get to work this week we’ll start to see some results and we’ll start move things forward.
So until next time if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.