I think we’ve worked out partially what we want our lives to look like in 3 years and I might even have a plan to get there.
Hey and welcome to Instructions Not Included, the series about me, Ryan McLean, as I try and make a decent living online. In this episode, I’m going to talk a little bit about where I think we want to be in 3 years’ time because I’ve got some clarity around that. As well as becoming a content business.
If you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you know I’m constantly changing strategies and so, this may be just another one of those changes or it may be a new direction moving forward.
First, let’s talk about where we want to be in 3 years’ time. I talked to you in the previous episode about looking at my business in terms of where I want to be in 3 years’ time and designing my business so that I can achieve those things in 3 years’ time.
I see so many people starting businesses not thinking about the future and basically finding themselves trapped in the future because their business isn’t designed to give them the life that they want.
For example, Ben the buyer’s agent, he makes a great deal of money. He has a really solid income from his business. However, his business is very reliant on him, very reliant on a lot of client interaction. If he wanted to work less or didn’t want to be a buyer’s agent anymore, in order to get himself out of the business, he would need to hire sales people.
He would need to hire people to manage clients. It would just be very difficult because then he’d be managing those people, which is still a job in and of itself. So in terms of his business, it isn’t really a business where it can just be managed and he can go and do what he wants.
He does have a rental agency on the side that I think he partnered with his mom in order to start that. And that, he doesn’t have to do a lot in because his mom runs it. So he started a business, he’s not the only person in it.
Someone else is running it and he basically doesn’t have to play a large day-to-day role in it. So that’s 2 examples of 2 different types of businesses that generate different outcomes for you. Really, you need to think at the start; okay, what business do I want?
Anyway, to get to the point, I talked about thinking about where I want to be in 3 years and trying to design a business around that. Well, something that me and my wife have always been inspired about is kind of this tiny house living, traveling in a caravan or a motorhome – even thinking back to 4 or 5 years ago, when I used to work for Alpha Pharm, a large pharmaceutical company, we always talked about getting a caravan.
Potentially doing some travel around Australia. Even quitting my job to do it or maybe just getting a caravan and doing weeks away in it. So, we’ve been talking about this for 4 or 5 years and it’s gone through a lot of different phases – from caravans to tiny houses.
Now, we’re kind of on the vein of it’d be awesome to get a camper van that could be my second car rather than having the little second car that I have. Sell that, have the camper van as our second family car. But have it so that it could seat 5 people, so we could all fit in it. And also, sleep 5 people and then we could do trips away, just for the weekend or something like that.
We’re not going to live out of a camper van with 5 of us. That would probably just be insane. But that idea of being able to get away whenever you want is something that is really important to us and something that we definitely want to work towards.
I’m thinking with my business in the future, I definitely want to me more hands off. My ideal business, I would be able to take basically a week’s holiday every single month would be my goal so I could work for 3 weeks and then have a week off and do something fun with the family.
We home school my daughter. We may be sending my son to school next year, so that might change things. But we basically have the freedom and the potential, if we decide to home school our kids, to be traveling whenever we want because we can just still do school while we travel. That’s pretty cool. Basically, I’m thinking about that and I was talking – no, I wasn’t talking, I was writing down. I was talking to myself.
I was writing down in my notepad the sort of things that would make a perfect website or perfect business for me.
The perfect website in terms of – this will lead into me talking about my content strategy – is something where I can create content for the website and I can help people through the content that I create. It’ll be a website that would generate no incoming emails for me to deal with, so no customer interaction, basically, there. A third party website or I’d recommend third party products would be the ideal. So things like Amazon affiliate sites, AdSense websites. Sites where you recommend other information products and stuff like that.
Ideally, you would just be an information hub and then you’d go ahead and recommend people to other places. So, in a perfect world, that’s my perfect site because it’s something that I can work on building and I can create content when I want, but it’s something that I don’t need to actively manage so it gives me the freedom to go away when I want.
It’s not really going to affect my website. Whereas, at the moment, in 2 days, we’re heading off to Sydney for a week. I’m going to have to keep monitoring my emails for things related to On Property. Maybe new customers, maybe customer issues, etc., etc.
Basically, in a perfect world, I’d be rid of that and I just have these probably niche websites that I would run on the side and build those up over time. In a perfect world, I’d also have websites where I could pay writers to help me write content for those sites so I wouldn’t be doing it all myself and it wouldn’t be all built on me. Because at the moment, in terms of my content empire, all the websites that I have, it’s all built on me and the content that I create. So in a perfect world, I would have websites where I could hire people to write for me and that would be a viable option.
Thinking 3 years into the future, and this leads me into the content strategy and things like that, is the business that I would like to have is a very hands off business, but it’s something that makes sense in terms of I can continually build this because I continually add in content and the more content I add, the more money I can make, which can pay for more content. So it kind of got this perpetual machine feel to it. However, there wouldn’t be ongoing management, which is a thing that I want to get away from.
Now, looking at my current situation and where I am now, I’m definitely not there yet. I don’t own enough money to be able to take a week off every 3 weeks. Firstly, we couldn’t afford the holidays. Secondly, I need to be working in order to generate enough money because I just need to kind of make things happen. So I’ve still got a bit of a ways to go to get to where I want to be.
At the moment, and I think I talked about it in the previous episode, On Property kind of generates around $40,000 a year through my own products and $40,000 a year through recommending Ben the buyer’s agent. I would really like to see that continue. I have made some changes to my products so On Property is no longer a yearly recurring subscription.
It’s just a one-off payment of $299. Property Tools is now a one-off payment of $99 and you get 12 months access. I’ve moved from a membership model, which I feel like wasn’t necessarily working for me to a one-off sales model, which I’m hoping will have less friction and, therefore, be able to generate more consistent sales for me – things that I can predict. It sounds strange to move away from a membership model where you think will be more predictive to a single sales model.
However, when I look at generating $30,000 a year or $40,000, I look at really, I need to get 2 sales per month for On Property. No, not 2 sales per month, 2 sales per week. So that’d be 100 sales in a year or $300, that’s $30,000. And then I have Property Tools on the side as well as eBooks and courses that will kind of make up the extra $10,000. So, $40,000 would be covered there if I can get 2 sales per week.
So I have changed On Property from a blog that also has products into On Property is now this membership and I also have a blog to help market the membership site. That change has just taken place – haven’t had any sales yet. It will take time to work out; is this having an impact that I want and is it going to generate the income that I want? In terms of recommending people to Ben, we’ve got a lot of great strategies. We worked together on Friday.
We got a lot of great strategies to send people to him. Basically, we’re in this situation at the moment where I can send him more leads than he can deal with. And so, we’re just working on how to communicate better with each other so that I can deliver him the amount of people that he needs and that he can handle and help while maximizing the return on investment for both of us. So, not sending him too many people like we did with the webinar a couple of months ago, where he had 100 strategy session requests.
That’s an hour of his time each, so even if he works full time for 2.5 weeks just to make strategy sessions, 40-hour weeks, we would get through those 100 people.
It will take him 2.5 weeks, that’s doing nothing else. So 100 people is not really viable. And so, we’re working on strategies to basically maximize the quality of people that are coming through so he can work with less people but they have a better chance of converting into a sale. And then also, just managing it so that he’s getting just enough – not too little, not too many. And so, we’re working on the communication there.
Hopefully, in a perfect world, $40,000 from him would be great. And then, I’d also like to build up my content website. This is things like Public Speaking Power. This is things like my niche website. I’ve got an audio book website. I’ve got a website about podcasting. Each of these makes a little bit of money. I think Public Speaking Power makes $50 a month or something like that. The goal for these sites were basically to build them up where they could maybe make $20,000 a year within the next 12 months. And so, we’ve got $80,000 coming from On Property, but then we’ve got $20,000 coming from these niche websites.
The goal towards as we get to the 3-year mark, would basically be to have a sustainable income coming from websites that don’t require email assistance, don’t require ongoing customer support, that sort of stuff. So 3 years’ time down the track, that’s the goal. So I’ll be creating a lot of blogs, a lot of audio, a lot of reviews, all of this sort of stuff so that I can make affiliate commissions, be diversified in the affiliate things that I recommend. So I’ll have lots of different income streams coming through. And so, they’re more protected and also, that it’s more passive.
That’s kind of where I want to be in 3 years’ time as well as the strategy for getting there. At the moment, On Property is still my biggest website, so that needs to play an important role in it. But overtime, I would love to see these new sites do even better. That way, we could even change the strategy for On Property and just recommend Ben or go the advertising route or do whatever we want with it. We’ve got the potential there to do what we want with On Property if we have other income sources.
So that’s where I’m at in my business. That’s my goal for the next 3 years. I hope that you’ll follow me for the next 3 years and see how this happens. And hopefully, in 3 years’ time, I will have the camper van, we’ll be going on weekend trips. I’ll be having a week off every 4 weeks and I’ll be living the life that I want. We’ll see how it goes.
Life never works out as planned, but we’re going to try for it and see what happens. That’s it for me and my business. Go ahead and work on your business and just remember; design a business that’s going to give you the lifestyle that you want, rather than just creating a business and hoping that the lifestyle will come in the future because you might create this perpetual machine because as businesses get bigger, they feed on themselves and they require so much more.
Just be careful when you’re starting out. Design a business that’s going to give you the life that you want. That’s it for me. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.
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.
After feeling like I had no idea how to move forward I have decided to refocus in on my niche of investing in positive cash flow properties.
I think I have worked out the solution to my problem. I am not 100% sure that I have worked out the solution, but at least I’ve got something to go with now. So if you have listened to the last episode or if you haven’t, go back and listen to it.
Basically, I am struggling at the moment because revenue has decreased in my business and I don’t know what I did wrong, and I don’t know what to do. So it has been laying very heavily on my mind as to what exactly I need to do to get myself out of this rut and to transform my business, get my business healthy again and keep it going.
On the bright side, I have spoken to Ben and he was saying that there are some good leads coming through his buyers’ agency. so in terms of cash flow I don’t think I have anything to stress about. But in terms of the longevity of my business that’s what I have been stressing about and I don’t really have a solution.
And then I was just thinking about it and thinking about it, talking to my wife about it, thinking about it some more and I came to the realization that I used to be the positive cash flow guy and everything I would talk about on my site would all be around investing in positive cash flow property. And then the issued that I had was that I had kind of tapped out that market in terms of organic traffic, in terms of search engine traffic and SEO because only so many things you can write about how to find positive cash flow property which is really the problem that I solved.
And so what I then did was I started to create content that was just about general property investing. So, I expanded my niche.
But I think the mistake that I made is that I should have still remain the positive cash flow guy and still focus on that niche but my free content is just more general in nature in order to reach a larger audience. So what I did and the mistake that I think I’ve made is I went from the positive cash flow guy to the property guy.
And being a property guy in a space of thousands of property advisors, buyers, agents, property marketers – all of these sorts of people, I’m just one in a sea of thousands. And so I think the mistake that I made and again I could be wrong on this and I could need to change my mind, but the mistake that I have made is I’ve gotten away from my core message which is investing in positive cash flow property and helping people invest in positive cash flow property.
And so I was thinking about my products. I was thinking about my offerings. And the way that I came upon – I guess, this discovery that I had lost my niche was I was wondering with this problem – Is it a product problem?” “Do my products suck and I need all new products? Is it a pricing problem? So my products are overpriced or under-priced or just not priced correctly? Or is it a marketing problem and I’m not marketing my products correctly? And I do feel like it’s a marketing problem – that I’m not marketing my products correctly. Because I’ve got a lot of people that signed up for my services and my products and are happy with them.
Therefore, I’m pretty sure that it’s not the products. I’m pretty sure it’s not the pricing. I’m pretty sure that it is nothing. So I’m thinking along this train of thought and then came up with I guess the idea that I’d lost my niche.
As a result, I was rethinking through my products and what I have to offer and how I can position them and I only got back to being the positive cash flow guy or on On Property to be all about finding positive cash flow property. So what I’ll have is On Property listings which I’ll probably might even change the name to Positive Cash Flow Listings just to make it more obvious. I’m not 100% sure about that but I have the listing so that’s a service that I hope you will find real positive cash flow properties.
I’m going to merge my courses into one which I’m going to call Positive Cash Flow Boot Camp. This will be a three-part course. Therefore, the three courses that are selling as individual units will now become one boot camp. And I really feel like when you say boot camp it makes you think about an intensive something that you go through. You can chew on the content quickly. You build up the skills quickly. To me, that’s exactly what a boot camp is. Therefore, to take the three products that I have, packaged them together into positive cash flow boot camp I can show people how to find positive cash flow properties, how to research an area and also how to evaluate individual properties. So I’m confident with that.
Also, property tools I think I may need to put – not on the back burner but just not a huge focus on my site. Nevertheless, there are property tools I’ll be marketing as tools to help you invest in positive cash flow properties. So I’ve got all of that same sort of products – a tiny bit of repackaging with the boot camp, but basically the same. I’m just changing the marketing around it and changing my focus back to my original niche which is helping people find positive cash flow properties.
I also wanted to record this episode quickly because I’ve listened to something and I don’t want to forget it. I was listening to The Fizzle Podcast which is great. It’s an awesome bunch of guys over there at Fizzle and they were talking about finding your true voice and there were two things that they’ve talked about in the podcast episodes. It’s episodes one and two of that podcast if you want to go check it out. But two things that they talked about that resonated with me around this topic of finding your voice, finding your niche – all of this sort of stuff. And one thing that really resonated with me that was really cool was when they were talking about choosing the niche or choosing the market that you go into.
Often we talk about passion. We talk about our calling. We talk about all of this sort of stuff and that can just be so overwhelming. I know I’ve been overwhelmed at times thinking about, “Am I passionate enough about this market, about this business to pursue it for the next five or 10 years? Am I passionate enough? Do I feel like God is calling me to work in this business?” And I have really struggled with that.
But reframing it – they reframed it as, “Is this something you care about?” And by reframing it to building a business around things that I care about just makes it so much easier. Do I care about the property market and helping people invest in property? Absolutely. But then I also care about helping parents with night terrors and I care about a whole bunch of other things and I could add those into my business.
So by changing the language to what we’re passionate about, to what we care about has really inspired me in terms of choosing my niche, feeling comfortable with it. Even though it may not be my biggest passion in the world or my biggest calling in the world, it’s something that I care about, it’s something in an area that I want to have an impact and so that’s important.
And they also talked about finding your own voice and a lot of them have gone through this passage – I guess you would call it, of starting with very generic content or copying someone else that they had seen, some guru in the market or something like that and just not getting a lot of traction. But then, they found their own voice, start putting their personality into things and then things really took off. And they interviewed one of the guys – the guy who started a [inaudible7:28] fitness.
He was saying he was writing five articles a week for nine months and he got no traction or generic articles. And then what he decided to do was to move back to two articles a week but to really inject who he was – really inject his new newness and his passion and family guy references and style was references into his blog post and that’s when things started really taking off for him.
So when it comes to finding my voice, I guess what I want to do is find what is my voice, what makes me different in the property market. Because I’m not just a property guy, as I think if I’m just going to be a property guy then there’re other guys who are better. I therefore need to find my specific angle; my specific voice and I’ll be trying out a whole bunch of things. I’ll be trying out how to podcast. I’ll be trying out high quality videos with more editing. I’ll be trying out longer podcast episodes potentially when I’m doing rants and going on rants and things like that. What I’m going to do is try a whole bunch of things to see what resonates with me, what resonates with my audience and to try and find, I guess the voice that I want to have in the market.
So I was feeling very stuck. I’m feeling a lot less stuck now. I’m passionate to get back to work tomorrow. I took Friday off so I’m going to be working on Sunday and I’m passionate to get back to redo my homepage to focus on positive cash flow property. I’m also excited too I guess, to redo my products, to put a much larger emphasis on finding and investing in positive cash flow properties and then moving forward into the free content things I’ll be creating.
Then I will be looking to find my voice, trying a few things and I guess, injecting up as much of whom I am into things. And so that may be like so much about these references. That may be my new newness that I have. That may be just me being quirky or whatever. I’m not 100% sure yet but I’ll go ahead and I’ll give it a try.
There were emails that I sent out and I’ll just give you a quick update. I did make four new sales for property tools so I got four new members for that. I think I got three new annual members, one monthly. So that was good. However, that was four emails sent out to like a database of 10,000 people. So it’s definitely not a massive conversion to make $155 on a database of 10,000 people over four emails.
Actually, as I’m recording this I just got a new customer – let’s open this up and see if it’s from property tools. That takes it from four to five. Actually, they have spent $99 so they must have bought a course – “How To Find Positive Cash Flow Properties Course.” As I said, I will be selling them individually again so take that $155 up to $255.
All of the way that I receive my payments and stuff, I use a product called Snappy Checkout which I have an affiliate relationship with which you guys can check out. They’re sponsoring this podcast in a way because they are an affiliate deal. They are something that I absolutely love and recommend. I’m looking to do a whole bunch of videos around how to use them and some of the cool things you can do with Snappy check out now that I’ve got this affiliate thing. So that’s another thing that I care about -helping people sell their products and helping people do things well. I think Snappy Checkout is an awesome tool and that’s something that I’ll consider creating some episodes about, some tutorials about.
So you can check out Snappy Checkout – just go to www.pelt.co/checkout and you can go straight through to see that product. It’s absolutely awesome and will help you sell your products or subscriptions, memberships, all that good sort of stuff. So go ahead www.pelt.co/checkout and I’ll get a small affiliate commission if you end up using them.
I absolutely appreciate you guys listening. I appreciate you taking the time and letting me vent what I’m feeling and the conclusions that I’ve come to. Hopefully as I get to work this week we’ll start to see some results and we’ll start move things forward.
So until next time if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.
Sickness hit our house hard this week and I’ve had some time off. I was bummed on my business at the start of the week and was a bit bored.
Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. Now I have not been updating in a couple of days because I have not actually worked in a couple of days. I have had 3 sick children, all with fevers and it has been absolutely hectic at our house. No one has been going to school or Kindie. Everyone has been home. I have been sick as well so I guess one of the benefits of having an online business is that I can take that time off and I do not have to tell a boss or anything like that.
And if you would like to answer, it is you guys because you are like, “Ryan, why was there not an episode? What the f man? I have been hanging out for it!” Actually no, if there is anyone listening or hanging out for the episodes because these have not gotten live yet. But I hope you guys are and I hope you are enjoying that.
So anyway, I had a few days off and now back into it. I was actually pretty bummed on my business at the start of the week, as you guys know. If you have been following, I totally go up and down about the business in terms of ideas as well about how I feel about business. And I guess the last little while I have just been again a bit bored with my business because it is not really challenging. I spent so many years.
I spent 7 or 8 years just trying to make this online business thing work, trying to make this viable, trying to make it generate a full-time income, trying to make this work for me. And it is just struggle, struggle, struggle, struggle and then finally now I am at the point where I am making decent revenue like last month I did almost 7 grand in revenue and I am paying for my way of life. I am paying for my family.
We have a bit of savings as well so if the income stops today, it would take us probably 6 months to completely run out of money and enter an oh-my-effing-whoa we just need to work something out. So it is good to have that buffer there and I guess I just have not been challenged that much and so that has been frustrating me because I know that my system works and all I need to do is put more into the system. So if I put more podcast episodes, if I create more products, if I make more email marketing campaigns and just do what I am doing, do, do , do, then it is going to equal more money. More money.
I do not know but something about that is just a bit boring for me. More money, why am I bored about more money? I do not know. It is a bit stupid.
I am very grateful. I am super grateful for what I have but I guess my passion comes out of being challenged, wanting to learn things, wanting to do really difficult tasks, wanting to really grasp something that is difficult to understand and to make it work like the way that my brain works, it is like I do not understand something at all and then I study it, study it and study it and then all of a sudden, finally something clicks and I just see the whole picture and understand the full concept of something.
And so sometimes like I would listen to an audio book and I would have to listen to it 3 or 4 times and I get a little bit out of each one but I might listen to it the fourth time and then I am like, Oh my goodness! I get it now! Okay, that makes so much sense. And all the little bits that I learned, they are great by themselves but when I can tie the whole concept together and understand everything that is just when I become like a powerhouse, when I understand something.
And I think in the last 18 months or 2 years of working on my own as well as the 6 or 7 years that I did part-time or on the side was me really trying to understand how things work, how my business model works and all of a sudden they clicked and I understood it and then I grow bores.
So I guess I am just trying to stir things up a bit, trying to make things a bit more interesting. I am pretty passionate about the property industry and helping people in this industry and making this industry better because there are just so many people wanting to rip people off and one of the things that I am considering doing – I think I have talked about this before, is actually sharing my income, like my revenue and some of my expenses on my website, on onproperty.com.au.
I could share with you guys as well but I just feel like being transparent and being someone who is transparent about how much I earn will just open people’s eyes to the industry and will increase people’s expectations when they deal with other parties, like if they know how much I am making and they might want to know how much is that free property advisor who is actually making $40,000 in commission, how much are they actually making from me? And I feel like being transparent, even if I am not earning that much at this point in time -$7,000 revenue is nice but I think people will understand it is a business and a $7,000 revenue is only like $90,000 a year or something like that, that is nice but that is not massive.
But if it gets to the point where I am earning $20,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 a month to have that transparency there and to say Look, this is what I earn, and if you are not happy with what I earn, totally do not buy my products and just give people that transparency and if people are like, Hang on, you are earning $100,000 a month. Why are you charging this much? To give that transparency to people would be pretty interesting and there could be backlash from it for people.
The only way you make money is not through property, it is through teaching people about property.
Oh yeah, that is my situation. So I think I am going to do that. I think a lot of people will say to me Why are you doing that? Because I know a lot of people in the internet marketing space do it and people feel like they do it to show, Okay, they are teaching about internet marketing. How to make money online. It is their proof of how much money they make. But then there are these people, like Justin and Joe from EmpireFlippers.com, they put up their revenue reports but they are not teaching people how to make money online, they are brokering websites.
So they definitely do not need to do that but it is just interesting to look at their things, and because of them doing that I engage with them and I am going to do an interview with Justin and we are going to talk about monetization strategies of podcasting. The fact that they do that opens doors for them. The fact that they are so transparent in their business may make some people want to compete with them. But for most people like myself, it makes me trust them. It makes me really grateful to them.
It makes me want to work with them and help them in whatever way I can just because they have that transparency and that trust there and I just want to see them to be great people. You know, they did over a half million dollars in revenue last month and I am not sitting there and say, Whoa, why are they charging 15% in brokering fees? Like this is ridiculous, they are making too much money. I am like, Good on you! Go and smash it! Like you are offering so much value, good on you. So yeah, I guess I will give you guys feedback on how that goes.
I was speaking to Ben who is a buyer’s agent that I partner with and I was telling him about these plans because he pay me a referral fee and that was going to be in there and he was just like dude, I do not care. You are transparent about getting a referral fee from me. Anyway, so it is no big issue. He was like then you do not need to do it. And he was kind of encouraging me out of it because thinking there is no point. And I totally understand that. There is no point.
There is no reason but I feel in me, there is some point. There is some reason. And I just should do it and then after I do it I find the point is, what the reason is. And so that is kind of cool. I did an interview today for podcastfast.com, edited a bunch of things, did another video for On Property, and so I have done a bit today. And I have done pretty well.
I did terrible, for those of you who wanted an update of my super smash bros tournament because you who is listening to this is not passionate about Super Smash Bros may…, right? Okay. For those of you who do not care about this, you can tune off now because there is no more start up stuff for this episode. But in my Super Smash Bros tournament, totally annihilated. Lost every game, lost every set, did not win one game at all. I play as Peach, Princess Peach, she is the best. Lost completely. But then I played a bunch of friendlies, I bought a couple of those and I feel like I got so much better.
I am really excited to go to my next one which probably will not be for another 2 months or something like that. But that was really fun. I bought new CIT TV, like one of those TVs with a big backs because apparently you have to play on those because otherwise there is lag on the HD TVs between when you actually input your control and what actually happens on screen.
So you need a super old TV to go with my super old game cubes. I bought one of those and it will actually arrive in a couple of days so I can practice properly in a tournament-like scenario, and I have met a few cool people as well, someone in Gold Coast, someone in Brisbane, who hopefully I can meet up with some nights and practice with them and get better. So stay updated for my next tournament in a couple of months because I do plan on winning not just some games bot some sets as well. So there is a lot of practice to go in until then.
All right guys! That is it for me today. Until next time, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.
Today is a brand new financial year which is pretty exciting for my business. This financial year I want to earn enough money to buy a house.
Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. And today is the first of July which in Australia means a brand new financial year which is pretty exciting for my business. This financial year I want to earn enough money so that at the end of this financial year I can go and get a loan and purchase a house.
For Instructions Not Included, I am going to change the format. The other format was just too overwhelming. I was trying to make it too high quality. So I have decided rather than trying to do these long episodes with music and stuff like that, I am just going to record little tidbits every single day, 1 to 2 minutes and just talk about my day and talk about what is happening. If you guys are interested you can follow that journey and you can learn what I am learning. You will learn about my business and what I am doing in my business as the days progress.
So today, not a super exciting day in terms of business, my son was sick so I spent the morning taking care of him. Then I am going out for coffee with a fellow entrepreneur which should be pretty exciting. I always love having those conversations and then this afternoon I probably will just be working on the podcast plus eBook that I am working on at the moment. When I get that complete that will go into the Kindle store and hopefully start making some passive income from me there.
So welcome to the new format of Instructions Not Included in this brand new financial year. I will talk more about my goals and what I am trying to achieve in a future episode. For now, I just want to say thank you so much for tuning in and this is going to be an exciting journey.
I am excited to share my journey and to share what I am thinking and you follow this, I am thinking that at the end of the year, once I have done a full year, I could always hire someone and get them to go through and make some professional episodes out of these.
So we will see how we will go. But in this stage it will just be small recordings, no editing at all. I will just record it on my phone using a little plug-in microphone and I hope that you guys follow along and that you enjoy it.
So until tomorrow and remember, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.