Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

#74 I’ve Got A Lot Of Fun Projects I’m Working On

iniartworksmallBusiness is going well at the moment and I am having a lot of fun working on some new projects.

Business is doing quite well and I am having a lot of fun again in my business, which is exciting. I have a lot of little projects that I am working on but I guess one of the things that I need to work on is managing my time that I am getting more stuff done and getting high-value things done.

Hi, I am Ryan from Instructions Not Included, a podcast about me and my journey to make a decent living online. Since the last update which was when? When was the last update? Let me check.

It was the 21st of March 2016 so about 2 weeks ago. What has changed in that time? Well, last week on Wednesday, I went up to the Sunshine Coast to meet with my friend and buyer’s agent Ben Everingham, who runs a great business up there. We went up there to talk about our partnership.

We have a referral partnership with each other and so we went to talk about that, talked about all the terms and conditions to draw up a contract with him to give us both some security there so that was great. And then we ran a webinar together that night. Now, when I thought about running a webinar, I thought ‘we do not really need to do it.

It is kind of a waste of time. What is the point?’ But we decided to go ahead. Ben was really keen to do it and I was like ‘yeah, alright. Sounds good.’ And I had seen one of the webinars that he ran before and I thought ‘yeah. This is good fit for my audience so let us go ahead and do this.’

Anyway, we organized it. I thought I might be pushing it to get 200, maybe 300 registrants from the webinar and I have a list of about 15,000 people and maybe get less than a hundred to turn up.

I think the last webinar I ran by myself I had 14 people show up to webinar so that was pretty devastating so maybe that is why I have not ran webinars in the past. And I also ran one with a lady who does renovation courses and for that one; I think we had about 60 people turn up for the webinar. So, I was not super confident with this one however, I had worked out how to do one-click webinar registration which was so valuable in the end. I did that through LeadPages or LeadLinks.

If you want to check out Leadpages and if you want to do that yourself, you can go to my affiliate link pelt.co/LP for LeadPages or you can go to Leadpages.com; I really do not mind. But yeah, I was able to do one-click registrations so send out an email, if they are interested in the webinar they click the button and it automatically registers them for the webinar.

So we had over 500 people, 530 people registered for the webinar, which was massive. We ran the webinar at night and just before the webinar I realized that Ben had a cap of 100 people on the webinar but he said, “Look, it should be fine. I ran it in the past and a hundred people cap means nothing. They will let us go over; it is fine.” And so I was like ‘yeah, alright. Do I think we will get more than a hundred? I am not 100% sure.’ Well, lo and behold one minute past after the webinar started, we started getting all of these notifications of people not being able to access the webinar because it was full so massive fail on our behalf and I think we had over 90% of people stay until the end of the webinar.

And even we did half an hour of question and answers, we had over 80% of people stay until the end of that, which was crazy. Definitely next time, we will be upping the limit from 100 to – I think the next tier up is 500, and then a lot of people really liked the webinar. They thought it was awesome and then a lot of people signed up for a free strategy session with Ben, the buyer’s agent.

They will go on that free strategy session; if they decide to use his services then I will get a referral fee for that. So that is the business purpose behind the webinar and in all, we have over 70 people interested in free strategy sessions, 35 of which came from the webinar night itself and then another 35 came from a thank-you page after they have  registered for the webinar as well as an email after the webinar. The bulk of them in the webinar or before the webinar, huge response there so Ben sent me a text today and he was like, “Yeah, looks like I have a busy week,” and he just had so many free strategy sessions that he was running with people and consultations to hopefully get some clients. Yeah, that was massive and we had a great month in terms of sales so revenue is not something I have to worry about this month.

I am probably going to nearly run out of money by the end of this month, so it is the 4th of April at the moment. Looking at my runway, I might, might just scrape through until the end of April where I should get quite a large payment – 2 large payments from 2 different sources actually, which should then extend my runway to about 3 to 4 months. And then if I have another good month, that should extend it again but obviously the more I earn – now I am pushing into having to pay a decent amount of tax so a lot of that may go into tax bills.

I am not 100% sure so I will probably save it and I will look like I will have heaps of runway and then we may get to the end of the financial year, which is the end of June here in Australia and I may need to spend all of that in tax and my runway may go down against so I am not 100% sure.

In terms of On Property, things are going really great. I have also been working on a new website for the game that I am really impassioned about called Super Smash Brothers Melee so I started kind of documenting my journey there; not too dissimilar from this podcast where I am talking about my business journey. There I am talking about my journey as a competitive Smash player. This is a game that is going in popularity. It was a game that was released on GameCube back in 2001. If you are not familiar with it, it is my outlet.

I absolutely love it. I am really passionate about it and so I thought ‘you know what, I am going to start a podcast, start a YouTube channel documenting my journey so you can see through it, documenting the things that I am learning but it also gives me the opportunity to interview some great people in the industry.’ I want to improve my interviewing skills and get better at that and there is the potential to make some sort of passive income from this. Maybe minor passive income in terms of ad revenue and things like that. If we build it up large enough, I could potentially launch a membership site. I think I said in the first episode that I recorded that I had no plans to make money with it, but that is not entirely true.

I think that I am doing it for fun because it is something that I am passionate about anyway, something that I spend a lot of time thinking about anyway and so I might as well do this. It would be great to document my journey and hopefully down the track it will be small income generator that I can add to my portfolio of income generators, so I have been working on that.

A niche site that I created a while back has done alright. I think it has made about $30 last month and traffic has gone up from about 5 visitors a day to 30 or 40 visitors per day. Now I need to get my ass into gear and work on that again. My focus will be On Property still I have to focus on that. After the big payments that come through when I have a decent amount of runway, I am actually going to close my membership site to that so I do not need to run that anymore.

I do not need to worry about new members or anything like that. Basically, I will be putting all my eggs in one basket, which I do not know whether it is a wise thing to do or not but I will be doing that and going full in with Ben as almost my only source of income from On Property – will be recommending people to him. Time will tell if that is a good decision. I am confident in him; I am confident in our relationship and our partnership and I want to pursue that so we will go after that.

It puts more risk on the table but I still have my platform and so at the end of the day if things do fall over, I will be starting from scratch in terms of product and things like that but at least I will still have my platform to work from and my audience and things like that. Obviously, when I think that is going to happen in the future…but yeah.

So, that is where I am at at the moment. I want to create more and more content across more and more different sites and so I am working on doing that. I put on another transcriber who I found through Fibr, which has gotten really bad lately. I definitely do not recommend going through Fibr anymore. So I brought her over onto my team. She is going to be working for me on an ongoing basis hopefully.

I just need to iron that out. And yeah, things are going really well. I hope that your business is growing. And in tomorrow’s episode, I have an interview with a guy who has done a podcast similar to me, sharing his journey, things that he is going through and building up his business, learnings that he is taking away so go ahead. Go into iTunes and search for Zero to Four Million with Tom Hunt I think it is, and you will see his podcast over there.

I will interview him and release that tomorrow which is really exciting. I did that interview with him this morning. That was a great interview, to talk to someone who is sharing their journey just like me; talk about business and basically just hang out. That was a lot of fun.

I am having a lot of fun in my business. I am not 100% sure where the direction is moving forward but I am confident in terms of the money that I am currently making and I am playing around to try and make money in other niches at the moment as well as maintaining On Property.

So, that is where I am at. I am going to close it off for today because it is starting to get late. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for listening and until next time. If you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

 


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#71 Old Project Updates Plus A New Project

iniartworksmallWhat I am doing in 2016 has already changed from the original plans I had in January. Here is an update on some old project from 2015 and what I am doing now in 2016.

Hey, and welcome back to Instructions Not Included, the podcast where you follow me, Ryan McLean, as I try and create a decent living online.

If you followed any of the episodes for 2015, basically, 2015 was all about On Property. Creating, growing and eventually getting to the point where On Property was quite successful, but wasn’t going to be the runaway success that we wanted.

I’ve done one episode for 2016 already, but I through I’d do another episode and just update you guys and update myself on what’s been happening. You may remember from 2015, if you listened to those episodes, I created a website called dreamydad.com where I talked about night terrors in children.

I created a bunch of videos around night terrors and a solution that I linked to on Amazon on how to solve them, which is called the Lully, which is a vibrating disc that goes under your kid’d bed. It’s a solution I’ve used myself. It’s basically the only solution for this problem out there.

Well, an update for that is it’s had a total of 352 views on Youtube.

It’s had a total of 15 visitors to the website and it’s made a total of $0.02. So given that I probably invested $50-$100 into this website, we can basically say that this is a flop. And Dreamy Dad, I will leave it up and see how it goes, but I probably won’t renew the domain next year and I’ll probably leave the Youtube videos up there just to help people out. But in terms of making money, Dreamy Dad, definitely a flop.

Pelt, as well, P-E-L-T dot C-O was a site that I created to talk about how to do particular things online, like how to run an evergreen launch funnel, how to setup a membership site. I went through and I created a bunch of episodes for that.

It has done better than Dreamy Dad, but it hasn’t been the business that I had hoped it would be. I think back when I was looking at moving on from On Property, moving on to an educational website, that being Pelt, I was hoping that Pelt would be the be all and end all of my business.

I would start with teaching online stuff and then I would move on to other areas and it would basically be like Lynda, which is just a site where there’s so many different courses on there. It would be like that, but it would be free and I make money through affiliate deals and that didn’t turn out as expected.

I think I’ve made over $100 in affiliate commissions through that site and I am making some money in terms of Youtube ad revenue as well. I think I checked it yesterday and this moth so far, it’s made $4.15. So definitely better than the $0.02 that Dreamy Dad made.

I invested less money into this. I have invested some transcriptions into the episodes and things like that. I think I’ve got $20 a month that’s recurring subscription as well, like a recurring affiliate commission as well, so hopefully that will continue and we’ll get more of those, but Pelt has been put on the back burner for now as I ran out of things to talk about. And I just wasn’t excited enough to do reviews of every internet service out there, every hosting company to do comparisons and all that sort of stuff.

It was something that I was interested in when I was creating courses how to start a membership site, how to create an evergreen launch funnel.

That was exciting, but when I looked at the keyword data and looked at what am I going to need to do to make this site successful, I was going to have to create a lot of content that just wasn’t going to be very interesting for me, so it’s there. I may re-approach it, but it’s kind of just on the back burner at the moment. We’ll make a little in affiliate commission and some ad revenue, but nothing major.

PodcastFast, I did plan at one stage to create a new series on how to create a podcast because a lot has changed since I created the last series about a year or 18 months ago. So I wanted to do an updated version of that, but just haven’t got around to doing it. So that’s all my list of things to do this year.

When it comes to On Property, that has been a journey and quite an exciting one recently. I had been umming and ahhing about selling On Property versus keeping it on autopilot.

Basically, I approached a friend of mine who’s in the industry and said, “Hey, look, here’s where my head space is at. Think of selling On Property, not 100% sure. Would you want it?” and that led us down a whole path in terms of conversations, in terms of talking about partnering with each other and talking about him acquiring On Property and acquiring me to work for his business.

We had a lot of back and forth discussion. I really had to dig deep and really come to terms with what do I want for my business? What do I want from my life? In the end, what we’ve decided on or, I guess, what I decided on because it wasn’t his first choice. I decided that I couldn’t sell it and go and work for someone else. I wanted to be the captain of my own ship and run my own thing and that’s just something in me that wants to do that and so I’ve decided moving forward, I’m keeping On Property.

I’m not going to sell it, but I have decided to partner with this person and to basically turn On Property into a lead generation tool for them. So I’ll be de-focusing a lot of my own products. They’ll still be there, but I won’t be putting a lot of focus on them in terms of marketing and I’ll spending more of my focus on marketing this person and their service.

So, On Property, we’re moving forward doing that. Hopefully, this gives us an opportunity to – I found that one of the hardest things about On Property was that a lot of my time was being spent doing customer service and I didn’t like that. I wasn’t passionate about that. I love creating free content. I love the aspect that I’m helping people to not get stung, helping people to make good decisions.

I loved that aspect, but I was just getting bogged down in customer service. Bugs for my products that needed to be created, all this sort of stuff. And so, this seemed like a great opportunity for me to market someone else’s business, help them grow their business. But at the same time, I can stop focusing on customer service and focus on what I do best, which is creating great free content.

You know, building an audience, building a community, all of that sort of stuff. So I’m pretty excited about this and I’ll talk more about it in a few episode, but On Property, it’s not on autopilot anymore, so I will be updating it probably about 3 times a week. So I’m looking at putting about 2 days a week’s work into On Property. And then, I’m also building out a new niche site, which will hopefully be one of many this year.

I did state in a previous episode that I wanted my income, which is now 95% or more comes from On Property. I would like 50% to be coming from On Property by the end of the year. So 2 days a week, I’ll be focusing on On Property. 3 days a week, I’ll be focusing on different things. Partly on this new niche site, party on things like this – Instructions Not Included – and maybe some other niche sites down the track.

I found a niche that I’m very interested in that I’m not going to reveal to you guys, but I’m excited about it and I’m going to work that and see how it goes. So far, I’ve had 10 or 20 people visit my site. So nothing special is happening there at the moment, but as I build it out, I will give you guys periodic updates as to how things are going. I’m looking at building out a whole bunch of different niche sites to try and build up the income and I guess diversify my income.

That is where I’m at, at the moment. Dreamy Dad, dead and a dud. Pelt, on the back burner, not really doing anything, just leaving it there, but it is creating a little bit of passive income. So that’s nice, it’s great to get that ad revenue. Views do look to be growing on Youtube as well. So hopefully that will improve and continue to become better. Podcastfast, I would like to create a new series for that when I get around to it. On Property.

I’ll be building a lot of new content and marketing someone else’s services as the primary revenue source there. And I’m looking at creating a new niche site as well.

So things are evolving in 2016. Already, I’ve changed tack from what I thought I was going to do at the start of the year and I’m looking at different things and I’m sure that by the time we get to the end of the year, I would have changed 5 or 6 times again. I’m just trying many different things to see what works. Hopefully, we’ll get there and by the end of the year, we’ll look back and we’ll see that this has been a great year.

I hope that you continue to work on your business. You don’t give up that when things don’t go your way or things don’t work out perfectly, you just keep striving along. Because that’s what I do, I just keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. Oh, let’s try this. That didn’t work, try something else. That didn’t work, try something else. That didn’t work. Oh, that worked okay, but we need to try something else and just goes on and on until, hopefully, we’ll achieve the success that we want.

Look, I’m pretty happy with my life, pretty happy with the way things are turning out and I’m happy to keep working at this.

I hope you guys go and work on your business. Be encouraged that it’s not going to be perfect every time, but that’s the best thing about online business, is you get a lot of different go’s. And one of the things I love about On Property is I have an audience of over 100,000 people a month come to that website and so I can try something.

If it doesn’t work, then I can try something else. And I’ll keep trying until I hit on something that resonates with the market and then, basically, I can run with that. Alright, guys, that’s it, Ryan out. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.


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