Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 



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