Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

Through demotivation came inspiration and I’ve decided that I will now only work on things that inspire me, otherwise I won’t work.

I’m going to call this one The Inspiration Episode because Out of Demotivation was the last episode. If you haven’t listened to that go back and listen to the demotivation episode. I actually got some inspiration from talking to my wife after recording that episode.

In the Demotivation episode I spoke about how I spent the whole day in the box which is what my office is now called and just couldn’t think of what I should be working on. And so I basically achieved nothing that day because I didn’t know what to work on.

I make enough money; I’ve got multiple businesses; there’s so much opportunity and things to work on, I just wasn’t motivated to work on anything and nothing seems like a big enough challenge for me. So that was where I was at.

And I spoke to my wife about it and the clarity kind of came. It was like, “Well, do you really think you’re going to find your motivation? Do you really think you’re going to find your inspiration sitting inside a box all day which is your office?” And I was like, “Well, no of course not, that’s not who I am.”

And I also spoke to my friend Ross the same day and we were talking about it and he was like, “Well you’ve got the van.

You’re going travelling in the van in a couple of months. Why don’t you just put that front and center and just go through the mundane writing articles for your niche sites, creating content for On Property and just go through the motions knowing that in a few months’ time you’re going to move in the van and hopefully that’ll change things.” And I said to him, “I can’t do that.

I can’t do mundane. I can’t just go through the motions.” And while that can be a negative sometimes because I don’t do the work I know I should do to achieve the results that I know the work would bring it can be a massive negative. It’s also been a huge positive in my life because I won’t  do something that’s boring.

I’ll seek out the new. I’ll seek out the innovative. I’ll learn. And through learning so much I’ve had so many breakthroughs and achievements in business that I feel like I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I kind of like that about myself and that I can’t just do the mundane thing.

I was actually listening to a podcast and it was a swimming coach talking about mastery. He was talking about the same problem about how we can’t just go through the mundane and do it and the fact that things are boring and aren’t challenging that’s more difficult than the actual work. And I’m exactly in the same place. So I said to him, “I can’t do that.” And he was like, “I can, that’s just what I do to get through things sometimes.” And I was like, “Okay, well I can’t do that.” So to get to my point, the realization I came to was: a) I am not going to find my inspiration in the Box; b) I’m not just going to sit down and do mundane things which would be in the box as well. That left me with c and it’s just that I’m not going to work unless I feel inspired to work.

Therefore my business is at a point where it’s basically on autopilot and making me enough money to get by. In fact once we move into the van our expenses will go down so we’ll be in an even better position than we are now. So if my business is making this much and really my focus and motivation has been that I want to generate some more passive income that’s going to protect us from the future.

That would be great but as we know I don’t work well in mundane things. So instead of doing that, how that I take this time to not work unless I feel absolutely motivated to work. That’s what I’m going to do so there’s no pressure on myself to work. I can take the whole week off if I want but what I found is that’s not going to happen because I always find some motivation of little things that I want to do and achieve during the day so generally I’ll work a bit.

I also spoke to my wife about Melee. I play this game, if you’re not familiar with it it’s called Super Smash Brothers Melee. It’s a game that came out on the Nintendo GameCube but it’s actually got a competitive tournaments scene mainly in the US. That’s something that I feel like I want to pursue.

I’d like to be top 100 in the world. That is like my ultimate goal that I don’t tell many people about but I’d love to do that. But that requires a fair amount of practice and so I spoke to my wife about it and she said to me, “Well, why don’t you just spend some time do a bit more practice on that.” She was like, “Because when you do that you’re happy or you’re a better dad around us when you’re pursuing things that you love.”

That made sense to me and or course I would absolutely love to do that. So I’m at the point now where when I feel inspired to work I’m going to work on what inspires me. And I always know that I’m motivated by challenge. And so if we get to the point where we’re not making enough money anymore then I can just challenge myself and I’ll go back to work because that’s the challenge to try and make some money.

Therefore if we find that we’re not making enough then I can just go back to work and that’s going to find because I’ll be challenged. I’ll have a goal to try and make enough money again and it’ll be fine.

That’s where I’m at, at the moment in terms of inspiration – I’m only going to work when I’m inspired to and otherwise I’m not going to work.

That’s it for me today guys. Until next time if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

Today I am completely demotivated. I feel like I don’t have any work that inspires or challenges me.

Pretend On Property didn’t exist and I was starting from scratch. Would I enter the property space again or sell similar products? The answer is surprising.

Hey guys and welcome to another episode of Instructions Not Included with me, Ryan McLean, as I try and make a decent living online. Now, I am driving at the moment, heading from the Gold Coast to the Sunshine Coast, which is about a 2-hour drive.

I’m going up there to meet with and to spend some time with Ben Everingham who’s my buyer’s agent of choice that I am very closely partnered with. So we’re going to be hanging out, setting up some systems together, doing some videos for the On Property website and stuff like that. So it’s going to be a good day.

I’ve got a drive ahead of me and so I thought I would take the time to record an episode for you guys because it has been a while since I’ve given an update on what’s happening with my business and how I’m moving things forward.

First, let’s talk about On Property. So I’ve been asking myself the question, “If I was starting from scratch, would I start a property website again?” and I’ve also been asking myself the questions, “If I was a brand new start-up and I was deciding to get into the property space, what would I do to be able to generate X amount of income per year?” and I changed the figure based on how I’m feeling or the answer that I want to get.

So I say, if I am starting a brand new start-up today, pretend that On Property doesn’t exist and I want to earn $100,000 a year from this business – that’s the goal of the start-up. What would I do to generate that? Would I go down the path of property tools in which I’m selling low-cost software for property investors? Would I go down the path of selling educational courses? Would I go down the path of being a lead generation tool for people like Ben the buyer’s agent and potentially other people as well? Or would I go down the path of selling my own courses and things like that? I mean, would I go down the path of my membership site where I am showing people properties and things like that?

They’re like the 4 kind of options that I have because it’s what I’ve done. It’s the space that I know. And also, when I look at the property field, I can’t think of anything else that I would want to do because there’s a lot money to be made as a buyer’s agent or there’s a lot of money to be made marketing new build properties because they have huge commissions for them. But in terms of marketing properties, they’re generally overpriced – the new build properties. In terms of being a buyer’s agent, that’s a lot of work that I don’t want to do.

I love creating content. I want to be an education company, not a one-on-one sort of consultancy-type model. So they’re kind of out of the question and so, it just leaves me with kind of the strategies that I’m already using. And so, I just kind of think, “Okay, well, starting from scratch, what would I do?” So, property tools would be out of the question because I looked at the data, it started about a year ago, it’s probably made me about somewhere between $6,000-$10,000 in the space of a year.

Now, that’s not too bad as a little side income, which is what property tools is. But if I was starting a start-up, would I go after that cash flow calculator sort of market? No, I wouldn’t because it’s not going to generate me enough money. I can’t market and scale that at all.

Then, I look at the courses that I created. Okay, I started creating courses about a year ago as well and they’ve made even less money. They sell for about $100 a piece and they’ve made about $3,000 or $3,000-$4,000, something like that. So they’re not really a viable option either because they just don’t sell in enough volume and I have decent volume on my website. We’re talking over 100,000 people a month come to visit my website, which is quite high for an Australian property blog.

You have to remember, Australia only has about a bit over 20 million people, compared to America which has over 300 million people. So you’re talking about a much smaller market. In terms of courses, not something I’d pursue because you really do need to sell the high value courses. You’re talking $2,500 to $6,000 courses in order to make significant money in this industry.

So that leaves me with that lead generation and it leaves me with m membership where I am finding and sharing with people positive cash flow properties. And so, I looked at the revenue for both of those and from Ben, the revenue was roughly around $40,000 in the last 12 months and from my membership site, the revenue was roughly around I think it was $60,000 to maybe $80,000.

I didn’t do hard figures in the last 2 years, so kind of about $40,000 per year each. Though, I know those figures are wrong because I didn’t make $80,000 in the last financial year. So, I don’t know what’s messed up there or what calculations I’m doing wrong, but the takeaway from it is that they’re basically even.

And I was also thinking, well, they kind of serve 2 separate audiences. So my audience in terms of On Property or the product that I sell – the membership site, is really for DIY investors. People who want to go out there, find the properties, research the areas. They want to learn how to do it themselves. And my membership site is great for that. I show them properties, but I don’t help them negotiate, I don’t make decisions for them.

I provide them with the courses that they need to learn how to do different things. I provide them with the cash flow tool as well, so they can go ahead and use that to analyze properties and things like that. So I kind of give them a kit that they need to become a DIY investor in terms of positive cash flow property. But then, Ben’s offering is very different because these are people who don’t want to be DIY. These are people who want someone to hold their hand.

They want someone to lead them, someone to help them. And so, that’s a different market segment, I guess you would say, a different type of customer. And so, it kind of works perfectly that those 2 would be aligned with each other – that I’ve got this audience of general property investors. A portion of them will want to be DIY, which will be my membership site. A portion of them will want the helping hand, which will be recommending people to Ben.

So I guess the answer that I came to when I thought about if I was to start from scratch, what strategy would I take? And it would probably the dual fold strategy in terms of marketing my membership site as well as marketing Ben’s service for people who don’t want to be DIY. So that made me think, “Okay, let’s try and re-vamp On Property.

Let’s try and again bring it back to this membership site concept.” and I was thinking, originally, “Okay, people just want the properties. Maybe I should strip the membership site away and just sell people the properties again.” which is a path that I’ve taken in the past and it kind of works.

I don’t really know, I haven’t tested it enough, but people are happy to sign up just for the properties. But then, I was talking with my wife, Kelly, about it and talking about the different products that I have, talking through all of this. And she made me realize that the properties themselves aren’t just what people need. So people want the properties, yes, that’s probably what most people are paying for. But then, people also want the calculator so that they can calculate those properties or so that they can calculate their own properties.

They also want the courses so that they can learn how to be a better and more confident investor. So, rather than seeing my membership site as all these different things, like you’ve got property listings, you’ve got tools, you’ve got courses, I see my membership site now as one complete package that helps people invest in positive cash flow properties if they want to do it themselves.

Every little bit forms an entire solution to help people find positive cash flow properties and if I only shared the properties with them and I didn’t provide the tools, then I wouldn’t be providing that complete package for people and they wouldn’t be getting everything they need in order to succeed. So it made me realize that, okay, probably not best to break it all up, but probably best to leave it as a membership website.

We also talked about subscription versus on-off payments. We were talking about the comparison between Netflix, you’re paying, in Australia, it’s like $8-$12 a month for Netflix. You’re like, “Yeah, I’m happy to pay that subscription.” Easy to sign up for that because it’s so cheap. You hardly even notice it and you can cancel any time. So when you’re making that decision, it’s not a big decision that you have to make. However, when you’re signing up for something like On Property membership and you’re talking about $300 per year, the thought that goes through people’s minds is very different to that. So they’re thinking, “This is quite a large commitment that I’m making, $300.

I need to think about whether I can afford this now as well as whether I can afford this in 12 months’ time.” So the question is, would it be better to sell it as $300 per year and just get less people, but get them as subscribers or would it be better to sell it as a one-off payment of $300 and then, they just get 12 months access. And at the end of 12 months, they’re not re-charged, but they’ll obviously have an opportunity to sign up again if they want to. And after some discussion, I’ve decided to at least test the fact that it’s just $300, it’s a one-time payment.

And I put myself in the mindset when I’m making business decisions and things like that, if I’m signing up for a subscription that’s a yearly thing, I need to think about that. I need to think about, “Will I be using this product in a year’s time?” I remember there was a product, Countdown Monkey, that was $79 per year. And when I signed up for that, I had to think, “Okay, will I be using this in 1 year’s time or not?” And then, you’ve got to schedule in time to cancel it if you want, so it is a much bigger decision.

Whereas, when there’s software that I purchased, like once I purchased the SEO Yoast Plugin for videos, right, and I think that was the same price. Like $79 or something like that and it came with 12 months of free updates and support. Then, after 12 months, you don’t get any more updates. So it’s in equivalent the same sort of thing that I’m going through and I was like, “Yup, okay. I can purchase that.

I know it’s going to be good for 12 months.” And then, the service didn’t actually end up working for me. It didn’t end up being what I needed. And so, when 12 months came around, I didn’t renew. But the decision to sign up with Yoast versus the decision to sign up with Countdown Monkey was so much easier because you’re just doing a one-off payment, there’s no commitment. And so, I’m hoping that by changing On Property from an annual subscription or a monthly subscription to a one-off payment with 12 months access, that I will gain more members.

I also wanted to change On Property from being a blog that also sell products into a product that also has a blog. So, the membership site is going to be more heavily featured. I’ve created a new sales page which will go on the homepage. And then, the blog will be kind of separate link that people need to click on.

Most people come to the individual pages through the blog, anyway, and return customers are there, but they’re not huge. And so, basically, I wanted people to think On Property – that means positive cash flow properties. So if I want to find positive cash flow properties, I go to On Property. Not, I go to On Property and it’s this property blog/video/podcast and, “Oh, look, they have products as well. Maybe I’ll check them out.”

I want it to be like, okay, this is what On Property is. All the marketing that we do is to support this and that’s to support the membership site. And then, obviously, there’s going to be huge marketing opportunities for recommending Ben through the email list, through the podcast, through the videos, through a whole different variety of sources that we’ve been talking about. It doesn’t distract away from the offering that I’m bringing because there’s so many people who aren’t interested in my offering that may be interested in getting the one-on-one help.

That’s kind of my new strategy for On Property moving forward. If I had the question in mind; Okay, if I wanted to start On Property today or start a property website today with the goal of making $100,000 per year in revenue… Then, it seems feasible now that my membership site could generate half of that. My referrals to Ben could generate the other half of that. And so, combined, they would make $100,000 together. Whereas, individually, I don’t think I could make $100,000 from either of those things. So, that’s cool. I feel like I’ve kind of got clarity on On Property again.

I’ve got some work to do to bring that to the point that I want it, but I’m very excited. And so, a takeaway for you guys with this is to really get rid of the idea of what you have now. So I’ve already built this thing, I’ve already got this traffic. For me, I’ve already got On Property that’s generating. Over 100,000 people a month are coming to that website.

That’s a pretty valuable asset, but if you just strip that all away and say, “Okay, if I was to start today, would I build the same thing or what would I build if I was to start today?” And so, I think doing the same activity for your business could be helpful for you because you can say, okay, get rid of that ‘sunk cost bias’ they call it because I’ve already sunk so much time or so much money into this, I need to keep going with it. Get rid of that and imagine yourself starting from scratch again. Starting brand new from scratch, what would I do?

That’s really helped to get me clarity and hopefully, it helps you give you clarity as well. In terms of other side projects, I was thinking of building on publicspeakingpower.com. I’ve kind of decided against that just because it’s not generating enough revenue and I don’t think it will. My niche website is doing pretty well. I think it made about $100 last month.

It’s probably on-target to make somewhere between $100 and $200 this month. So in terms of that niche website, that’s doing well. And there’s some other niche websites that I want to start as well. So rather than focusing on trying to grow Public Speaking Power into some big website, which is never going to make a lot of money, I’ll just leave it there. It makes like $50 a  month and it pays for itself, so I’ll just leave it there doing its thing and I’ll focus on On Property and I’ll focus on other niche websites that I’m starting as well.

My wife keeps encouraging me to start a review site to review all the things that I love to talk about. Things like microphones and phones and whatever it is I’m buying at the time, you know, tripods, adapters, all these sorts of things. Just a random website where I can talk about different marketing things, different software that’s just product reviews and so, I think I’m going to do that. I kind of did with pelt.co and I kind of do it with pelt.co, but Pelt is, I’ve realized, such a dumb name and it’s taken me so long to realize that.

I always knew Pelt was a dumb name, but I thought if I could make something big enough and exciting enough, then it would take on a life of its own. Just like Google has, but I think, really, at the end of the day, Pelt’s just a dumb name and I probably should’ve never created a website with that name. Oh, well, but anyway, so I’m think of starting a website. Something like Ryan’s reviews or reviewed by Ryan or something like that. There is a Youtube channel called Lachlan Likes A Thing, where this guy does really great reviews on headphones.

I’m not sure if that’s still running, but that sort of concept – that it’s just me, I like this thing. You’re coming because it’s my reviews. It’s not something that I’m going to scale into this big business like The Sweehome or The Wirecutter or something like that. It’s just me reviewing products in my own way. That’s something that’s on the cards, but I haven’t started at the moment.

That’s it for me today, guys. I think I have babbled enough and talked enough. I’ve talked about On Property and what I’m doing with that. I talked about also focusing on niche websites and really just leaving Public Speaking Power there. And I’ve also talked about creating a review site as well. And so, that’s where I’m at in my business. I’m still on the drive. I’ve just got less than 2 hours to go now because I’ve been talking to you guys for about 15 minutes. It’s going to be a good day on the Sunshine Coast.

It’s pretty sunny weather. Nice and warm up here for winter in Australia. It’s going to be a good day that I think we can create some good content with Ben and I think we’re going to strengthen our partnership and hopefully generate a lot of business as a result of this time that we’re spending together.

Hopefully, we’ll get either some coffee or some beer or both because I love coffee and I love beer. So, maybe coffee in the morning when I get there and maybe beer before I go in the arvo. Not too many because I still want to be able to drive. No drink driving, that is a terrible thing. I would never do that. So, yeah. So that’s where I’m at today. I wish you the best of luck in your business and until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

There is a lot of talk about the Australian property market crashing, would that take my business with it and what can I do to help my audience (and stay in business) if that did happen?

Hi guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included, the show where I talk about me and my journey to making a decent income online. There’s a lot of different aspects of that I talk about and today I want to chat a little bit about what would happen if my market completely crashed.

If this is your first time tuning in then you may not know but I run a mildly successful website called onproperty.com.au which is an Australian property investing website.

I do a lot of general information, I do a lot of interviews on there and I make money through selling access to my membership site where I find certain types of properties as well as recommending people and referral fees for recommending people to a buyer’s agent who is a friend of mine.

Something that a lot of people have started talking about lately is the potential for an Australian property bubble, an Australian subprime crisis, the big shark, whatever you want to call it there’s a lot of people out there who are now starting to say that the Australian market is a way of a price that it’s got similar markets to what the Japanese market had before it crashed, what the Irish market had before it crashed.

And then there are a lot of people out there who are protecting the crash of the Australian Property market.

This is all speculation at the moment so I don’t know if it’s going to happen. I’m doing research, getting in contact with people, trying to line up interviews so we can talk about this more and understand it more.

I definitely don’t understand this topic enough to say yes the market is overpriced and it’s going to crash.

I recently did a video on just talking about the Australian property bubble and it was me reading through a few articles talking about what I think about it and just kind of talking about it. That video has gone gangbusters as it has done better than almost any other video that I have in that short amount of time.

It’s my number one video for the last 28 days so I’m just going to go into my stats now as I talk to you guys and check this out. It has done way better than I expected it to do. It is just a little video that I created – nothing really serious but it has done a lot of use.

But this is something that I need to think about, it is something that my buyer’s agent friend Ben needs to think about, something that I guess everyone in this industry needs to think about.

What happens if this is true and it is a property bubble? How is that going to affect my business? For me more importantly I’m thinking about well how’s that going to affect the people that follow me and how can I help them? I want to understand this so the people who follow me – my audience I can give them the best insight the best advice as quickly as possible before all of this stuff happens.

If I look at views last 28 days then this has had almost over 2,000 views and it’s about 1,000 views ahead of my second most popular video.

I’m just trying to work out when I actually uploaded it because I don’t even think it’s been out for 28 days. It’s only been out for half of the month and it’s already got almost double the number of views as my second most watched video.

So that’s pretty crazy in terms of lifetime views it’s probably not going to be up there. Because I got videos that have had 12,000 views and stuff like that. But it’s getting out there like within probably two months it’ll be in the top 10 of my most viewed videos ever.

However, this is just something that I need to start thinking about, “What happens if the market crashes?” And this is the really interesting perspective on me, Ryan. Because a lot of business people might be saying, “If market crashes how am I going to protect my business?” Whereas I am so passionate about this topic, I’m so passionate about my community, about the people that I’m helping my thought process goes like this – “If the market crashes yes that’s probably going to affect my business.

I’ll probably be able to scrape through and survive but I’m not too worried about that.

But I think about if the market crashes how is that going to affect my audience and what can I do now to prepare them for this so that they can make money they can exceed if and when the market crashes.”

I think so many people approach business that if this happens how we’re going to protect our business. And I’m thinking about I don’t care about my business, I care about the people who follow me, I care about the legacy that I have, how can I help the people that follow me. And if that means it’s going to affect my business then so be it but I want to help those people.

Therefore that’s something that I’m dealing with at the moment, trying to think about at the moment. Is it something that I think is going to happen in the next year? No, I don’t think it’s going to happen in the next year. But is it something that will probably happen in the future? There’s definitely a possibility out there that this could happen in the future.

I’m not a hundred percent sure how this is going to go down but I definitely wanted to chat about it, put it down in the podcast as part of my documented history that this is something that I’m thinking about, this is something that I want to help my community with and this is something that I think if I start talking about this, start warning people.

Not really warning people but making them aware of it and helping them by saying if this happens here are some things you can do. Then I think that this is the best long-term strategy for my business because that’s going to give me the reputation that I need moving forward.

If I don’t want to exit this market in the next year, if I want to be in this market for the next 5-10 years then my reputation and what I say today matters. Therefore I want to say the best thing with the best knowledge that I have to help my people now no matter how it affects my business. And that’s just the truth of it.

I am trying to be of high integrity as possible with my business and seriously help people. I think in the long run that’s going to be the best decision that I can make.

That is something that I need to think about and as I’m thinking about that as I’m talking about it now I do think this means that other parts of my business I will need to focus on like other niches and things like that. I’ve got other niches like public speaking and I’ve got a niche site that I started.

I also want to start a podcast on home-schooling just for fun. But I definitely need to start thinking about other revenue streams from other websites. This is great because I have been thinking of just spending a couple days a week on On Property anyway as it only really needs a couple of weeks of my time.

I’m working with my virtual assistant to take over more of the admin tasks for On Property so there will be less of those for me to worry about. Therefore I’ll spend more time creating content for the site and then creating content for other websites as well.

I’m getting really passionate about video, about audio and less so about writing so I just think that that’s the future.

I look at my own web habits and I just see myself doing a lot more searching on YouTube rather than on Google now and so YouTube is really my first search engine now and Google is becoming my second search engine except for specific topics where I don’t think I’m going to find the answer on YouTube then I might go to Google. But I’m doing probably more searching on YouTube than on Google or if anything it’s very close to 50/50.

I’m focusing on video a lot and I’ve just invested in a lighting kit and so I spent about $150 or a bit less on a three-point lighting kit. I’ve invested in that and eventually if I can build up enough buffer in my business I will also invest in a DSLR camera and some better audio equipment but that’s potentially down the line and I’m not 100% sure.

That’s where I’m at, at the moment. There could be a market crash in the future, in the near to medium future, probably not next week, probably not in the next year but probably within five years or something. It would-would be a good chance of this sort of thing happening – not a good chance – good chance is the wrong word – there is a chance that this could happen.

It is just something I need to think about, something I need to start preparing for because if it does happen I’m not ready to go back to work for someone else and with the large majority of my income coming from one website I do want to spread that out and spread my risk.

I think I talked about in the last episode but the strategy that I’m moving towards I’m calling it phase two of my business because I’m kind of out of survival phase is that I want security – I want to build up security of income, passivity of income and then I want to improve my production quality and get more production out the door and more videos and things like that. So I’m working on those things – security of income, passivity of income, I should probably add to that diversity of income as well as it is something that I want to work towards.

I’m having a great time in my business. I am doing very well financially but I’m well aware that the world doesn’t stay the same that the world changes, that tomorrow my circumstances could change and I’m trying the best to think about and prepare for that. So you will hear more from me about this topic as I think about it, mull it over and take actions towards it.

I wish you the absolutely the best in your business. Go out there, make a splash in the world, be integrit, help people like I’m trying to help people. And if you want instructions you know what to do – go and buy some furniture.

Business 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.

Today I explore the hedgehog concept from Good To Great and try to work out what I can be the best in the world at.

Today, I want to talk about what I could potentially be the best in the world at.

Hey, I am Ryan from Instructions Not Included and this is a show where I talk about how I am trying to make a decent living online. Just a quick update, we have had a seller month in terms of referrals for Ben the buyer’s agent, my friend who I recommend.

We are looking at potentially cracking $10,000 this month in terms of referrals, so absolutely stoked with that. You may know if you listened to the show for a while that we had huge cash flow issues a while back and hopefully, that is all going to be part of the past as we continue to recommend Ben and his services and work closely with him.

So, that has been really cool. We have not hit that yet and obviously there are still things that can happen between when the sale is made and the waiting period before commissions are paid and things like that.

Anyway, we have been doing well. I got halfway through the month and I have had a great month; I earned enough profit to get by for the month and I was only halfway through.

And so I started thinking about what do you do when you are earning enough money in half a month? What do you do with the other half of the month? Now obviously, you can do things to earn more money or to prepare for the leaner months which we know I have had in the past, but I wanted to think about ‘okay, I know I want to dedicate 2 to 3 days to On Property exclusively and basically smash out On Property in 2 to 3 days and run that site, build that site, maintain that site, all that good stuff.’

What am I going to do with the next 3 days of my time and I was thinking about – you know, the truth is I need to do stuff every day. I do not want to sit around doing nothing, playing games on my phone or something like that. I would love to play Super Smash Brothers Melee every day but I do want to grow my business, I do want to have a positive impact on people’s lives and I am not going to do that through sitting on my ass, just playing games all day.

I need stuff to do every day and so even if On Property always made enough money for me to get by – more than enough, even if I were completely financially free I would still want stuff to do. So the truth is I need stuff to do every day. I have those 2 or 3 days where I need to maintain or grow On Property to make sure that money keeps coming in but I also need to grow some other income streams that are separate from On Property just to hedge out bets against things.

And other thing that I wanted to do is I want to dramatically improve my communication skills. I thought I was a pretty good speaker. I thought things were going pretty well until I went to New Zealand and I tried my hand at commentating some Super Smash Brothers. Now, if you have listened at all, you know I love this game called Super Smash Brothers Melee, which was released in , but I played this as a competitive.

There is a tournament scene that I attend and compete for prize money for a whopping $10 for third place up to $100 for first place for a whole day of gaming. It is not big money in it but I love the competition; I love the game. Anyway, I was over in New Zealand, there was a tournament. I went to the tournament. I got kicked out; I came fifth and so I decided to try my hand at commentating some of the games that were going on. And instantly, I knew I was out of my depth. It was very hard to commentate, very hard to talk about the things happening in the game. Everything was so fast-paced.

I actually spent a lot of the time talking about what players did wrong, which is actually considered quite rude. And the more I think about it, the more I look at commentary that happened; it was pretty bad of me to do. So basically, I failed at commentating – I did a really bad job, and in some cases where I said some offensive things. I did not mean to be offensive but it was just not very nice. And so, that was a big eye-opener to me – that I need to dramatically improve my communication skills if this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

And so, I started thinking about the hedgehog concept in Good To Great, which if you have not  read Good to Great, it is one of the best business books out there. It is up there with The Lean Start Up, with Linchpin by Seth Godin. Good to Great is probably on my top 5, definitely probably – that is not a good statement. It is definitely on my top 5 of the best business books I have ever read. Innovator’s Dilemma is also up there as well, so there, you have 4 books. I cannot think of a 5th that I would absolutely recommend.

Anyway, the hedgehog concept is this combination of 3 areas that define something that you build an excellent business that goes from good to great. And so, these 3 areas: what are you deeply passionate about, what drives your resource in general – how do you make money, and what can you be best in the world at; and by finding the combination of these 3 things, that is the goal to create a really great business. So, I went through this activity looking at these different aspects and what is the middle and combination of these 3 things for me and I am trying to work that out. And so, what are you deeply passionate about?

So, this is actually a myriad of different things. I am deeply passionate about communication skills and public speaking. I am deeply passionate about gaming and Super Smash Brothers Melee. I am deeply passionate about my family. I am deeply passionate about God and Christianity.

I am deeply passionate about helping people, financial freedom, encouraging people to be the best they can be, all of these sorts of stuff. So it is a whole myriad of things that I am deeply passionate about. I am not just passionate about one thing; I am deeply passionate about a lot of different things. I was not off to a great start there.

Next, I looked at what drives my resource engine? What makes me money and what can I survive off? And so my resource engine when I looked at it across all my websites, I make money through advertising.

I make money through affiliate sales so selling affiliate products. I make money through referrals like I refer people to Ben the Buyer’s Agent. And I also make money through my own e-products, things like e-books, courses, membership sites, that sort of stuff. So, my research engine is all kind of standoff my websites but yeah, advertising, affiliate sales, referrals, e-products, all sorts of stuff online.

And then I was thinking what can I be the best in the world at. I just watched a tournament of Melee called Battle of the 5 Gods and my favorite player won the tournament and he is currently ranked number 2 in the world. By the way, he is going, he could definitely be ranked number 1 this year and I thought could I be the best in the world at Super Smash Brothers Melee? Probably not.

Could I be the best in the world at communicating? Probably not, in terms of being a public speaker and up on stage. What could I be the best in the world at? And it came back to something that was in the very first episode of Instructions Not Included, which was when I asked my wife ‘what do I do? What makes me useful online?’ and she says “You have a way of explaining really complicated things and making it easy to understand for people.” So, I take really complicated concepts – things that are hard to understand, and I make them easy to understand for people, and I thought you now what, that is something that I could probably be the best in the world at.

It is making complicated concepts or ideas simple and easy to understand. I remember an example when I was interviewing someone for On Property and she was talking about some concept – the person that I was interviewing, I cannot even remember what it was, but it took quite a long time to explain that and I was then able to narrow down what she said into a succinct sentence.

I was able to take all of these concepts that she was explaining in a very complex, very difficult to understand way, and I was able to summarize it into one sentence that would make sense to almost absolutely everyone and that was a moment that I remember where I was like ‘okay, take note of this because I am probably very good at this.’ And so, I was thinking about it and I was thinking I could be the best in the world at taking complicated things, making them simple, and that would combine my passion for communication and getting better at that all the time, which I am deeply passionate about, as well as the other topics that I am deeply passionate about and like to talk about.

So, when I look at this hedgehog concept, what could I be best in the world at that is making complicated concepts simple and understandable. What drives my resource engine is all the advertising, affiliate sales, my own products, etc. and then what am I deeply passionate about is the variety of things. And so I looked at my sprawling business of a bunch of different websites like one on public speaking, one on property investing, one on podcasting, I have this personal one as well, I have some niche websites as well, and I thought ‘you know what, like I am kind of living the hedgehog concept but I just need to refine it slightly.’

So, I am doing what I am the best in the world at which is taking complicated ideas and making them simple for people and I am doing that through the content that I create. And I am creating content about things that I am deeply passionate about and I am driving revenue through advertising, affiliate sales, etc.

And so, I have found out – at least I think, and as you know I change my mind all the time, but I believe that I can run multiple different websites and that I do not need to run just one website because what I want to get the best in the world at is taking complicated ideas and making them simple to understand. I want to do that in the future even when I plan to study psychology and maybe work with kids with autism or stroke victims or things like that in the future.

This is still going to be something I could potentially be the best in the world at so I want to work on that skill. I want to get better at that skill but I can use that skill across a variety of different niches and I do not have to focus just on property and be the best in the world in property investing because I am not deeply passionate about that. I am deeply passionate about helping people across a variety of different topics. So I guess as I say this, what are you deeply passionate about, I am deeply passionate about helping people like helping people to make good decisions and take control of their life and all of that sort of stuff.

I love the idea that I could potentially do this and spread myself across a variety of niches that I can talk about property, I can talk about public speaking, I can talk about business, all these things. But what I am best at is that communicating complex things, making them simple and so I just need to do that more and more every single day as much as possible. And when I look at how I spend my days, I spend a small portion of my day – maybe half an hour to an hour, where I am actually doing that and the rest of my day is spent with busy work and things like that.

So, I am definitely passionate at the moment about setting up systems where I can expand my niche so that I can jump in and jump out of things as I need to, so for example, I would love to be able to jump into PodcastFast at the moment creating a new series there; jump back out.

I would love to jump into Public Speaking Power, create a couple of episodes there and jump out. And because I have a resource engine of advertising, affiliate sales, etc., that fuels that, I can actually do that. So that is what I will be focusing on moving forward for the next week or so is getting a system in place where I can jump in and jump out of niches so that I can take concepts that are difficult to understand, explain them simply, but then I will jump out and move to something else because otherwise, I find that I am just forcing myself to create content.

It is not very good so I want to be able to explore my passions, talk about the thing that is on my mind and that I have been thinking about at the time and obviously continue to drive resources for me.

So with that, I have decided to start a Super Smash Brothers Melee website. I bought the domain Melee.co a while ago and so I am going to set up a website for that. I already created 2 episodes, basically going to document my journey from a failing new player – only played for about a year, hopefully on the way up as I become a better and more professional player.

We can see that progression happening. So, that is something that I could fund potentially get some advertising revenue through that, but you never know. So, that is something that I am starting. I am also working on my other sites as well; continue to work on On Property. But yeah, I am pretty excited where my head is at; I am pretty excited about my business moving forward.

I have found some things to do to fill my time even if On Property makes me enough money. I am absolutely excited about that. I hope that you are excited about your business. I encourage you to go through and do this exercise yourself and to find the combination of the 3 things; again it is what are you deeply passionate about, what drives your resource engine, and what can you be the best in the world at.

It is not easy to understand; it has taken me years to get to the point where I think I have it nailed down and then it may change over time. But it is a worthwhile exercise and one that I found very interesting. So, go out there. Do this exercise. Take some strides in your business and until next time, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

I have had a crazy last couple of weeks with horrible house moving, fraud and bond issues. But luckily business is doing well.

Hey and welcome to episode 72 of Instructions Not Included, with your host, me, Ryan McLean, the guy who is trying to make a decent living online. And wow, have I had an interesting number of weeks. One of the big things that we did in the last few weeks is that we moved house – to a new house. We were renting in an old house.

We were having problems with the agent who weren’t treating us well and we’re about to go through a renovation that the owner was doing we were going to live there through renovation, but they were just treating us so poorly. We were so scared about living through this renovation that we decided to pack up and to leave and we have moved to a much nicer place that is slightly bigger. It has a backyard, has some grass where our other one didn’t.

And so, we decided to move, which is stressful enough in and of itself. Not to mention that on the day of moving, 2 hours before we’re meant to move, I get a call from my removalist saying, “Hey, look, I don’t actually have a truck because my truck is broken.” So I’ve got these random guys that are going to move for you.

These guys rock up like 2 hours late. They take ages to pack all our stuff. We finally get to our new house when the sun has gone down at about 6:30 at night and they can’t get up the driveway.

We were homeless for a night with no furniture. Ended up sleeping at my mother-in-law’s. I had to go out late at night and buy a blow-up mattress so we could stay there because there weren’t enough beds. And then, almost had to pay an extra $600 or $700 the next day. But luckily, thanks to my wife who can get angry, she saved us a lot of money and we ended up getting that second day for free. So moving didn’t cost us heaps, but it was massively painful.

The next day. After we finally get into our house, I get a message from the bank saying, “There’s some strange activity on your card that we believe may be fraudulent.” So then, we enter into this massive saga of how 2 replacement cards that were being sent out to the bank were somehow intercepted, activated, and someone had gone on a $1600 spending spree on our behalf.

The issues dealing with the bank to get this sorted was very difficult. Fast forward another week and I got another replacement card because, obviously, some were compromised, and that has also been intercepted and someone’s gone on a $500 spending spree on my behalf. So, all in all, spent over $2,000 of my money through these stolen cards. Needless to say, we have changed banks and I’m just working through that fraud issue at the moment.

That wouldn’t be that big a deal. $2,000, I’ll get it back eventually, but on top of that, the bond, which we were meant to get back from our real estate agent hasn’t come through yet. And so, that’s another $2,000 out of pocket that we have. Definitely, very interesting situation. Luckily, we’ve got enough savings to get us through all of this, but I do feel sorry for the people who don’t have savings like we do to weather this storm.

If you’re living week by week, month by month, we would definitely be in a very difficult position. Over that couple of weeks, I also did a trip to New Zealand to go to an old friend’s wedding. A guy that I’ve known for many years, who I met at space camp. Super nerdy, but that’s a story for another day. But that was an absolutely awesome trip to go over there.

I also got to attend a Smash Brothers tournament over there. If you’ve been following me for any length of time for the last year, I’ve been into a game called Super Smash Brothers Melee and playing that competitively. So I got to go to a competitive tournament in New Zealand. There was 18 entrants and I came 5th. I was pretty happy with that result, that’s my best result at a tournament ever, so very happy with that.

A lot has been happening with the business as well. Business is going quite well. On Property, I haven’t even looked at the traffic recently. So let’s have a look live on podcast. How well is On Property doing and is it maintaining its traffic levels, which were about 3,000 people a day? So, traffic levels, yeah, seems to be between 2,500 to 3,500 people per day, so traffic levels are going good.

I am focused more heavily on recommending my friend, Ben the buyer’s agent, and that’s going well as well. So we’ve had 5 sales this month and we’re halfway through the month, so that’s a nice income for me and our goal is 7 sales per month, which will put us about $10,000 or so per month for me in terms of revenue and probably 4 times that, so like $40,000 for him per month in terms of revenue from those. Plus, he also has his own customers and his own marketing methods and things like that.

So in terms of On Property, things are going well. In terms of life, in terms of stress and all that sort of stuff, maybe not going as well. But at least I’m not having life to stress about and also having business problems and money problems that I need to stress about. So, no money problems apart from the fraud and not getting my bond back. The business seems to be doing well. Now that we’re in our new place, I really need to again assess where I want to go moving forward.

It’s hard to get back into the swing of things after losing over a week to moving house, the issues we had ,the fraud, the going to New Zealand to come back into it now and to be like, “Okay, what am I going to do? What am I doing?” I have found myself sitting in my computer at times not really 100% sure what I should be doing to move forward in my business.

I created a few videos, but I don’t really have a studio setup where I can film at the moment. I had the perfect corner, perfect wall, perfect lighting – okay, it wasn’t perfect, but it was really good. I had this huge window at my old place. The new house, our bedroom, which is where my office is, so much darker making it so much harder to film. So this is an issue that I need to resolve so that I can go on creating content.

But also, I need to think about what sort of content do I want to create? It’s getting harder and harder to create content for On Property. Interviews, I’m definitely getting better at and they seem to be happening more and more often. I’m not having any problem creating content for interviews, but when I’m doing solo content, which is probably 50% of the content I do, it is a lot harder to find topics to go into that I haven’t covered already.

Because I have done over 350 episodes now. So 350 interviews, that’s easy – talk to a new person every single time – not easy, but easier. But when you’re creating solo content, you’re trying to answer people’s questions, it does get a bit harder. So hats off to Pat Flynn who does the Ask Pat podcast and has done hundreds of episodes there. Hats off to him for doing that. Originally, I thought it was easy, but it does definitely get hard.

So I’m just trying to assess at the moment what do I want to do moving forward. I don’t want to spend all my time on On Property. I do want to spend a couple of days a week doing it, but what I’d love to do is do full, hardcore 2 days a week for On Property, but then be done for the week with On Property. And then have the rest of the week to explore things like the niche site that I’m working on as well as other projects that I’m pondering and maybe interested in.

I do want to begin developing more streams of income and I do want to develop more passive streams of income.

I created a website, pelt.co, where I created a bunch of videos. Let’s go on now to the Youtube channel and I’ll find out how many videos I actually created. It was probably around 20 videos or something like that. So let me go to Pelt, which currently has 65 subscribers. Let’s go to the Creator Studio so I can see my videos. Because I don’t actually know how many videos I created. Okay, I’ve created 32 videos for pelt.co. Some of these videos are short videos of a couple of minutes long.

Some of these are full 12-part series on how to create a membership site, etc. So I’ve got a bunch of videos there – 32 videos. And if I go to the analytics for Pelt, then I can see that these videos are making me, in the last 28 days, somewhere around the $10 mark. So $10 a month, but what I absolutely love about this is because they’re on Youtube, they’re not costing me any money. I don’t need to maintain any websites. There’s absolutely no work that goes in to maintaining this, but I’m getting some passive income from it.

Let’s go to Podcast Fast, which is a series I created on how to start a podcast fast and a bunch of other videos. So let’s see how many videos we have. Again, I’ll go to the Creator Studio and we can see that I have 29 videos. And again, in the last 28 days, around the $10 mark in terms of revenue. Let’s go to Public Speaking Power, which is a site that I haven’t touched in years. Probably 2 years since I added the last content for this one.

I’ve got 36 videos on there and that one is creating a little bit less than the $10 per month. So those 3 things combined, $30 per month Now, that is not going to blow your socks off, but that is $30 per month and if On Property goes the way of the dinosaurs and for one reason or another, ends up crashing, then I’ve got some small amounts of passive income on the side that I’m generating. So I do want to build that up.

I don’t know how I’m going to do it. I am focusing on this niche website, which last month made me probably $10 or something like that. And so, looking to build that up and build up multiple sites.

Basically, my goal was by the end of the year, I wanted On Property to be 50% of my revenue. Now, On Property is growing in terms of revenue, so 50% of that is getting harder and harder, but hopefully, we can at least move it up 10%, 20%, 30% from other sources. So we’ll see how we go by the end of the year.

I am happy to be back at work. I’m happy to be podcasting and talking to you guys. If you have any questions, you can email me, ryan@ryanmclean.net and I will answer them on the air. That will obviously give me content for Instructions Not Included on the days when I’m not feeling super inspired.

That’s it for me for today. I will continue working on my business. I will continue working on my Smash Brothers skills. I will continue moving into my house, getting my studio setup, etc., etc. and I hope that you continue working on your business as well. Things are going well enough.

I am happy that income is growing. I am happy that I don’t have to stress about the income, but I do need to work out what am I going to do with my time? If income is covered for me, how am I going to grow it and basically protect myself against the things that may happen in the future? Signing off for today.

I’m Ryan McLean. You can check me out at ryanmclean.net and see all the episodes over there for Instructions Not Included. If you want to get your own website setup, then I do suggest Arvixe as a web host.

They are not the best web host in the world, but they are pretty darn good and they are one of the cheapest web host in the industry. I think I signed up for maybe 2 or 3 years and I pay something around $3.20 per month. So it’s ridiculously cheap and I host about 4 or 5 websites through Arvixe. Go ahead and check them out, go to pelt.co/arvixe and if you use the code, “PELTDISCOUNT”, you’re going to get 20% off your first invoice.

I use Arvixe, I recommend them. They’re not flawless, but they are very good and very cheap. So if you need your website hosted, consider Arvixe. And again, use the code, “PELTDISCOUNT” to get 20% off.

That’s it today for me, guys. I wish you the best in your business and until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

What 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.

The first episode of 2016 and my new site has already made over $50 in income.

Hey, and welcome back to Instructions Not Included where you follow me as I try and generate a decent income online. And let me tell you, it’s not as easy as I would have hoped. I have been trying to do this for a number of years – basically, since 2006.

I discovered it when I was 18 years old and been trying to do it. I’ve been working full time online for the last 2 years now and still haven’t quite made it, I wouldn’t say. So I’m earning enough that I don’t need to go back to work, which is great, but we would always like to be in a better position. So, welcome back.

It feels like forever since I did my latest post and a lot has been happening.

December was a pretty tight month for me. December tends to be my worst month of the year. The property market in Australia doesn’t dry up, but people lose interest in investing property over the month of December with Christmas and New Years and Holidays and everything happening.

There’s just not a whole lot of action in people researching and thinking about investing in Australia. So, cash flow did get very, very tight in December, early January. We’re talking I basically had a week or less than a week left of income before I was going to run out of money and need to pull from savings.

This is because I pay myself every single week. So the business is always profitable every month, but it doesn’t necessarily pay what I need in order to support my family. So I got to the point where I was basically a couple of days from running out of money, but cash flow has since improved and we’ve sold a lot of memberships to our membership site.

We’ve had some commissions come through so all is good. So we’ve got months of income in the bank now so that should be fine.

One of the things that I tried that failed last year was trying my evergreen launch funnel sequence again, which worked great back in May, June, July of last year. But when I re-did it, I had over 1,000 people go through it. Usually, we’re talking anywhere between $5 and $10 per email subscriber, I was making in this launch funnel. All of a sudden, I had over 1,000 people go through it and I think I did one sale of about $300. So it wasn’t doing very well, wasn’t generating the income that I needed and so, I shifted gears again.

I re-marketed my product, setup a sales page without a sales video and setup 2 tiers – one property only and one a full membership for $300 a year and property only was $99 per year. Sales of that have been going good and going fairly steady and hopefully, they continue into the future. So that is good.

I have also started another site called pelt.co where I’m doing a lot of education videos around how to do certain things in internet marketing, like how to setup an evergreen launch funnel or how to create a membership site. And that’s going to be my big project of 2016. So I look forward to working on that more and sharing more details with you guys on that.

I started working on that the very end of November and a couple of days ago, we got our first income from that – an affiliate sale that was worth about US$40 and then we got another affiliate sale that was worth about US$9. All off, in the first 2 months, it’s made US$50, which isn’t stellar, isn’t going to fund my lifestyle, but hey, progress is progress and any income is better than no income at all, so I’m happy with that.

Also, I’m going back and learning about how to build niche websites. So I’ve been following Spencer over at nichepursuits.com and so I’m following the Niche Site Project 3 and re-looking at that and looking at apply the things that I learn to existing sites that I have or even potentially launch new sites into the future. I’ll give you guys updates on that as they go around and as they happen.

I did spend a day or two creating one article that was almost 3,000 words in length to target a specific keyword that was low competition and I think it just had 70 views a month or 70 searches per month. Within 1 day, I was ranked within the top 120. Within 2 or 3 days, I was ranked in the top 40 in the Google search results, but I kind of hovered in the top 40 for that last 5 days or something like that. And so, this is quite low competition and a lot of the people ranking in the top, they’re good websites, but they’re not targeting that keyword, not answering that question.

I really want to rank for this so I did some stuff today to drive some links back to it. I created a Youtube video, which will also go out as a podcast on Soundcloud. Both of those will link back to the website.

I did some internal linking on my website as well and I am thinking about doing some Pinterest post or social media marketing to link back to the site as well just to give it a little bit of juice, a little bit of love and hopefully push it into the rankings a little bit faster. I also adjusted it so it had less affiliate links in there. I think I had about 20 affiliate links going out, which sounds like a lot, but it was one image and one link per item that I listed.

There was 10 items in total, which equaled 20 links. I basically removed the links from the images except for the top 2 recommendations because I figured they’re the ones that’ll be clicked on the most. So, I’ve got 12 links now instead of 20 links going out. Also did an external link in the post to a reputable source and so I’m trying some on-page SEO as well as some minor, very minor back linking – very minor white hat back linking. Linking from Youtube back to the post, etc. And so, we’ll see if that can boost rankings and if we get into the top 10, I will definitely record an episode and let you guys know about it.

Writing a second article now on the same website also targeting a low search volume. I think it was about 40 searches per month, but low competition as well. So we’ll try and rank for that one and both of these searches are trying to make money through Amazon associates or Amazon affiliates. So linking people over to Amazon and basically getting them to purchase over there. We’ll see how we go.

I would like to make a little bit of extra income from Amazon. I would like to diversify my income away from On Property. I think my goal is really to get On Property earning 50% of my income by the end of the year and earning 50% of my income from other sources – 50% or more. Whereas, at the moment, it’s more like 95%-98% of my income comes from On Property, so we want to change that.

That is my quick update of what I’ve been doing in the last couple of months. I hope that your business has been going well. Go out there, work on it. Even if it takes you 7-10 years like it’s taking me, know that in the end, it’s going to be worth it. So, that’s it, Ryan out. 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.