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.

I’m starting to think that maybe I made a big mistake trying to do so much video. Should I just have been doing audio instead?

I’ve just driven home after listening to the StartUp Podcast on the way home as well as some Invisibilia which is a pretty cool podcast and it got me thinking as to the medium in which I present the information that I give.

The way that I like to learn is I love listening to things. I love listening to podcasts in the car. I love listening to podcasts while I work.

If you look at my habits on YouTube a lot of the stuff that I like to consume are talks where you can watch the people talking but you don’t really need to in order to get the information across. It got me started to thinking.

I decided to invest more in video because I know that largely that is a big way that the internet is going to go and that’s a big way that people are going to be consuming information in the future.

However, on questioning myself as to whether that is the right decision because I’m not as good at video and I feel like I could potentially be a lot better with audio only than I could be with video and audio.

Therefore I’m actually exploring the idea of doing a lot less video and instead focusing on audio but making it better, making it more engaging because when I’m doing video I’ve got to think about so much more. It’s definitely not as natural to me. My editing skills are not there.

I don’t really have the passion to edit things in a good way like someone like Casey Neistat who is a famous YouTube vlogger. He does these amazing edits of his daily vlog and that’s something that I’m just not interested in. But when I listen to the StartUp podcast, when I listen to well-produced audio content it really gets my juices flowing, it really gets me inspired.

Therefore I’m not sure whether I’ve made a big mistake. Say that I made a mistake obviously it’s going to be good to create video content and good to get that sort of exposure. It’s good to try that.  And it also created audio content for me as well so I haven’t lost anything in doing it.

However, if I want to put pursue some sort of passion project that is not just to make money but something that I could do to try and have an impact, try and push my skills to the next level then I feel like maybe it’s going to be an audio. Maybe audio is going to be my thing maybe it’s not going to be video after all.

It’s kind of annoying I guess to just go through this process and to say well actually I’m pretty passionate about audio. And even though there may not be as big an audience in audio as there is in video if I can do audio well then chances are I am going to reach more people through audio that I am through doing videos that just aren’t that good.

So this is something I’ll continue to think about, something I’ll continue to explore moving forward because there are some video things I still want to do. I tried streaming for the first time today so I play a game called super smash brothers melee I want to become top eight in Queensland within the next six months. Currently I’ll kind of top 20 and so that means I probably need to do about an hour practice a day – the goal that I set for myself. And I thought you know what I might just stream while I do that practice.

That’s a video that I’d probably still like to keep doing. There are a lot of great reasons to do video in different scenarios. However I’m just thinking if there’s something that I wanted to do that will really push my skills and that would really force me to create something high quality then audio would probably be it. So I’ll keep thinking about that.

I’ll keep you guys updated and if I ever release anything that is audio content that is going to be top quality I’ll be sure to let you guys know.

It is quarter past eleven and I’ve just pulled in home from being out playing Melee all night. Sometimes inspiration and insights just hit you at the weirdest times.

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

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.

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I want to push the creativity of the content I create, that means Instructions Not Included is becoming a vlog also!

Hi, and welcome to the very first video episode of Instructions Not Included, the series about me Ryan McLean as I try and make a decent living online.

This isn’t the very first video that I released. I have done interviews in the past, however, this is the first vlog style video where I’ll be giving you an insight into my business. In this episode we are going to look through my office space.

We’re are going to look at the new potential office space that I’m looking at moving into in my house. And we are also going to be talking about business staff in the future in general because I have been thinking about this a great deal. That is what is in store today for Instructions Not Included.

If you are listening to the podcast, absolutely love my podcast. If you want to watch this video go to ryanmclean.net/youtube and that will bring you to the Instructions Not Included YouTube channel where you can see this episode.

I’m going to flip the camera around and show you my current office space. This is the current office space at the moment. It’s nothing too glamorous at all. We have a space out there and this is actually my bedroom. You can see my bed there and stuff like that.

This corner here is where I film so you’ve got my background there – that’s the Super Smash Brothers logo which is one of my websites that I do and here is my desk. I also have over here — just so you know it I’m not drinking beer out of these, I actually use these as water bottles so I’m non alcoholic. I’m not drinking at work. I also have this TV and a Wii u which you can see there for my Super Smash Brothers set up. We have to play on these old TVs. Basically, this is the space at the moment.

Let’s go for a walk to check out the new office space – what’s going to be the new space. So we go out of my room and we are going to head downstairs. Oh my gosh – let’s just stop quickly – they love this saying, “All you need is less”. It’s definitely about less rather than more – simplifying life.  This is going to be the new office space. It’s not much at the moment but it’s going to be exciting.  It’s actually my garage.  Let’s go ahead and flip this light on.

Where you can see all that stuff in the background that curtain is actually going to hang up on the roof and will block all of that out. This is actually a huge space so if I go into the corner you can see quite a large space here. I think it is four metres by two and a half metres or something like that. I’ve got a window here so I’m not just in a garage in the dark. That carpet we are going to put across the whole floor. That’s 20 bucks so I’m going to buy five of them and spend $100.

The floor will be carpeted and I’ve got rubber mats down as well for underneath that. This is therefore going to be the office space. The desk is going to be where you see the window over there. So I’ll have my desk there with my computer, maybe with my TV set up as well. And then I’ve got so much room so ideally we are going to have this wall as my backdrop so we may put up some black boards across there. We may put up a green screen or who knows but there is more than enough space in here.

I should probably hide that old water heater as well.  There is more than enough space in here to do a proper lighting set up and to be able to be able to film with good lighting and to just improve the quality of all of the series that I do.

One of the big things that I was thinking about today is where do I want to be in three years time and what do I want to be doing in three years time. One of the things that I was thinking about too is that I don’t want to be sitting at my desk every day nine hours a day or whatever it is that I’m doing in three years time. I’d still love to be interviewing people.

I would love to be creating more dynamic, more interesting content, definitely all stuff on video. I would also love to be travelling with the family and be able to be mobile. That would be a huge thing for me. I’d love to travel but with the family to do family stuff. I would love to travel for Smash Brothers work as well and for the content that I create. That would be absolutely awesome.

I’ve been thinking about that, thinking about the future, watching some vloggers and stuff on YouTube, getting inspired by them. I do not want to start a vlog but I want to get better at editing. I want to get better at story-telling. And that’s definitely something that I’ll be exploring into the future.

I’m therefore looking at getting this better space, getting a decent camera setup, better microphones set up and all of that sort of stuff so I can create better content. I’ll also be looking at shifting away from the very basic talking head content that I have towards higher production value, better storytelling sort of stuff. I’m probably not going to do that with Instructions Not Included because this doesn’t make me any money and it’s more just a documentation of who I am and what I do.

I’m just going to go to the kitchen and get a drink or get something to eat.  Yes I’m excited for the next few years. I need to think about what do I want to do, who do I want to be, what sort of stuff do I want to be working on because truthfully if I’m honest with myself I’m bored. I’m bored of my business. I’m bored of creating content. I can sit there and I can create videos, I can drive traffic, I can generate revenue. It’s like it’s all laid out for me.

The plan for the next three years to get the income that I want it is all there, it’s all mapped out for me. All I have to do is to put in the work. I’m creative person. I like pushing them all. I want to improve myself and just doing the same thing every day for the next three years sounds like death to me. So we’re going to get creative, we’re going to try and do some new things. Some may work and some may not but I’m going to try and put more of myself, more of my creativity into what I do.

That is kind of my plans at the moment. This battery pack for my phone – I absolutely love this thing by the way. My phone just dies so easily — look, we’ve got some cookies. I’m going to munch on some cookies and I’m going to edit this video. Hopefully that won’t take too long. And then I’m going to continue to think about where I want to be in three to five years time but I’m definitely thinking that I don’t want to be stuck at my desk nine hours a day just creating talking head videos.

I want to be doing something creative. I want to be out about in the world. I want to boost my confidence in terms of speaking and vlogging in public and stuff like that and I just want to create really engaging content. I’m getting better as a public speaker. I’m getting better at storytelling but I still have so far to go.

That is it from me. You’ve seen my office space which is just an office in my bedroom. You’ve seen the new space which will hopefully be set up in the next week. I’m just waiting on some internet stuff because the Wi-Fi is really bad in there so I’ve got what is called a D-link which connects to Internet into that room. I have an Ethernet cable into my computer cables for Internet.

It sounds crazy to me but apparently it’s going to work so I’m waiting on that. After that we’re going to buy the carpet and then I can go ahead and move in.  Hopefully by the start of next week, worst-case scenario end of next week I will be in the garage as the office and with a bit of luck that will just give me more room and more freedom to create better content.

I hope that you are moving things forward in your business. My business is unique because I generate enough income to live. Now, I’m trying to think about where do I want to be three to five years time, what I want to be doing and how could I push the boundaries of what I’m currently doing at the moment. So you go out there, work on your business and push your boundaries.

Until next time if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

With my business performing well at the moment my mind is freed up to think about what I should be doing now to set myself up to have the life I want in 3-5 years time.

Hey and welcome to Instructions not Included. This series is about me, Ryan McLean, as I try and make a decent living online.

In this episode, I want to talk about actually planning for where you’re going to be in 3, 4 maybe 5 years’ time because that’s exactly what I’m doing at the moment.

I’m trying to put in the work and trying to put in the plan, the system in place so that in 3 years’ time, I can do what I want to do.

Generally, for me, it’s really hard to plan forward more than 12 months because when you’re running your own business, when you’ve got 3 children under the age of 7, things change pretty quickly.

Me and my wife, our friends call us gypsies because we move so much. We’ve relocated to different cities 3 times. We’ve moved house 14 times in the last 7 years.

So planning ahead can be really difficult for us when it’s more than 12 months into the future. Generally, we only live in a house for 12 months, if we’re lucky.

But what I have been thinking is like, we have started homeschooling our daughter who is 6, she’s in Grade 1. We enjoy it.

We have a lot of reasons for doing that. Thinking of starting a website on homeschooling where I’ll discuss those, but I won’t waste your time here. But basically, in my mind, anyway, I’ll talk about it in a different episode if people are interested. So, we’re homeschooling our daughter. Our son, who is 4 is in what’s called pre-prep.

Here, where he does 3 days a week and then they start prep or like, kindergarten next year. And so, we’re talking about, is he going to go to kindergarten? Is he going to do homeschool? What do we think we’re going to do? He’s happy at school, but then, he wants to do homeschool because his sister does homeschool. I don’t know.

We don’t really know what’s going to happen. But then, fast forward 3 years, and our youngest who is currently 1 to 1.5, he will be 4 to 4.5 and we will be making these decisions again for him.

So fast forward 3 to 4 years, there is the possibility that we could be homeschooling 3 children if that’s the route we decide to take. Now, we haven’t decided to take that route yet so we’re not sure. But we kind of need to prepare for that and I am currently doing the majority of the homeschooling.

The responsibility is on me. So I spending the mornings doing school with my daughter and then come to work. If we were to add one more child to homeschool, I can foresee it being a lot more difficult than it is. I may need to drop my work hours. You know, things may change.

Basically I’m at the point in my business now where the business is quite successful. onproperty.com.au is quite successful. It makes decent revenue in terms of my own products. Then, there’s revenue on top of that in terms of recommending a buyer’s agent. It’s one of the biggest property blogs in the country.

It’s got a big presence in terms of podcasting and in terms of YouTube that is just continually growing, which I think will be the future. Anyway, that’s ticking along and doing well. But given the Australian property market, it may continue to do well for another 10 years or it may not be a stable source of income in the future. We’re just not 100% sure about that.

So I’m trying to think now while I’ve got stability of income, spending a couple of days a week doing On Property. That frees me up, I’ve got a couple of days a week to do some other things. It frees me up to think, “Okay, 3 years or 4 days down the track, let’s just imagine that I am stepping back from work a bit.

I am doing more homeschool. Hopefully, we’re travelling as a family – that’s something I would really love to do. What do I want my life to look like? What do I want my income to be coming from?” all that sort of stuff.

They’re the kind of questions that I’m asking myself now. Because I don’t have to ask, “Where is the next paycheck is coming from? How are we going to survive the next month? What do I need to do to make that happen?” I can begin to ask, “Okay, in 3 years’ time, what sort of revenue streams do I want to have in my business? What sort of flexibility do I want to have?”

The ultimate thing for me is to generate as much semi-passive income as possible. I do make money from a bunch of different sites. On Property makes the lion’s share – 90%+ of my income. But I do get advertising income, I do have affiliate income from other sites like my public speaking site, podcasting site.

I’ve got a site about online marketing. I’ve got a site about Super Smash Brothers Melee. I’ve got this personal podcast as well, which doesn’t really make any money at the moment. And then I’ve got a software tool that is associated with On Property as well.

I’ve got another niche site. I’m thinking starting another one. And so, I’ve got a few sources of income and they all kind of add up a little bit. But the great thing is, like with the public speaking site, I haven’t touched that in probably 3 years now – 2 to 3 years. That’s something I want to start re-investing in. But that still makes money today, which is just absolutely amazing.

I’m just going to go ahead and check my Google AdSense in terms of YouTube as well as in terms of the website – in terms of how much money that website is making. Because that’s something I want to scale up. I want to create a lot more content for that. And so, let’s go ahead and have a look. I have not used this site in quite a long time. There it is. I’m actually going to change the brand name back to Public Speaking Power.

I decided to change it to outspoken.co, but they never did anything with it. So I think I’m going to change it back to Public Speaking Power. Wow! I have 711 subscribers and I’ve got 36 videos on there. So, not too many videos. I just got to login to a whole bunch of different stuff so bear with me for a minute. Let’s go ahead and sign in.

So in terms of revenue from YouTube, we’re looking at $10 a month. Not much, but that pays for 2-3 coffees a months. Actually, I pay about $3 per coffee, so a coffee a week it pays for. And then let’s go ahead and look at the performance reports for the website. Common reports, websites. Okay. Not last 7 days, let’s go last month. We’ll look at that. In terms of that revenue, we’re looking at above $60. So we’re looking all up about $50-$100 a month.

I’d love to take that up to $100-$200 a month. And then, as well, work on other stuff and build them up. Even if I had 10 different things making $100 a month, but that is super passive. That’s just a baseline income that could pay my bills if we needed to travel. Do you know what I mean?

That’s what I’m trying to think about in terms of the next 3 years. How can I build up these things? Change this from $50-$100 a month to $100-$200 and then do that multiple times and do that for a couple of different sites. Last month, let’s do this month. So this month’s tracking very similar, but I do have a niche site that is now generating probably $10 a month. So, yeah, I’m building up that sort of stuff.

So it’s kind of going back to what I was doing years ago in terms of content creation and niche sites and stuff like that and I come back to this. But I guess, I just want to take the things that have been working, build them up. And then opportunities kind of come out of that.

So with On Property, for a long time, it was just advertising. Then, I had my own products. Then, this agreement with Ben came up and I’m making more money now through that agreement than I’ve probably made through advertising in the history of the website. As you grow bigger, as you become more noticeable, as you build up in the community, these opportunities come out of it. And so, I’m hoping that as I build up these other sites, opportunities will come out of those as well.

At the moment, I am focusing on maintaining On Property, keeping that source of income. But as well, building up my passive income and doing work now that’s probably not going to pay off any time soon. But they will hopefully pay off in 3 years. And so we can look back on this in episode 500 in 3 or 5 years’ time of Instructions not Included.

I’ll be travelling and I’ll have these passive income sites on the side and I’ll be doing what I really enjoy, which is creating content.

Hopefully, this will work. I wish you the best in your business. I hope that you’re not just thinking about today, but you’re thinking about 3 to 5 years down the track as well. That is it for me. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

This week was a pretty normal week business related, but unfortunately a broken arm made life difficult.

Hi and welcome back to Instructions Not Included, the series where you follow and track me Ryan McLean as I try and make a decent living online.

This week has been a very interesting week. On Saturday we had an absolutely great morning as a family. We all went rock climbing together – well, the kids rock climbed.

I belayed them which means that I stood at the bottom and held the rope making sure that they didn’t fall and plummet to their death, but we had an absolutely great time. My son won a medal for the best effort for the day.

However, when he got home he then rolled off the couch which is like half a meter off the ground and he broke his arm. He broke two bones in his arm straight after we got home. So he then proceeded to spend the next two days at hospital with my wife.

It took a day before they could get him into surgery and to reset his arm. It didn’t need any screws or bolts or anything like that, just reset it and it’s in the cast. Therefore all is good there but this definitely threw us for a six for the weekend in terms of ‘family time’.

I lost a lot of sleep in terms of stressing about it and basically I had a pretty rough week recovering from that.

In terms of work, not as much work got done this way as there was not as much time to spend on work. My brain hasn’t been as engaged as I would have liked. However I did get quite a few things done because before the broken arm incident I did have a lot of interviews lined up for the week.

I had some On Property interviews and I had some interviews for my site melee.com which is a site about the game that I play Super Smash Brothers Melee. I had some of those interviews so at least I’m still productive and still able to get content out the door this week even though I wasn’t really feeling peppy. I was kind of feeling tired and stuff like that.

I had some of those interviews so at least I’m still productive and still able to get content out the door this week even though I wasn’t really feeling peppy. I was kind of feeling tired and stuff like that.

Melee.co has now started so let’s go ahead and check out YouTube and see how it’s going. The easiest reach tweet I have ever gotten is tweeting out that the interview with this person has gone live. You kind of tag them in the tweet and then they just go ahead and re-tweet it because obviously they’re featured in the interview. Therefore in terms of getting

Therefore in terms of getting exposure that way it has been very easy. But the people that I have been interviewing aren’t the biggest people in the industry and in terms of getting thousands of views that’s not really happening. Let’s go ahead – I’m going to go into the analytics of my YouTube account and just see where we’re at.

First let’s go to the video manager and just see how many views we’ve got. We got 55 views on one video and 22 on another which isn’t massive but it’s better than the zero views that my other videos have all gotten – less than 10, less than 5 views. So if we go to the analytics I guess this will be the true test to see how people are actually watching and enjoying these interviews for a long period of time because the interviews themselves go for about an hour if not over an hour.

We can see that I’ve got in the analytics 41 views on one of the smash stories. A total watch time of 400 minutes so for 40 that’s a hundred minutes. Is that right? If 40 people watched it for 400 minutes and they are watching it for 10 minutes each, therefore on average people are watching it for 10 minutes. That means some people are going to be watching it longer and some people aren’t going to be watching it at all but people are watching it and so I am happy.

We can see that I’ve got in the analytics 41 views on one of the smash stories. A total watch time of 400 minutes so for 40 that’s a hundred minutes. Is that right? If 40 people watched it for 400 minutes and they are watching it for 10 minutes each, therefore on average people are watching it for 10 minutes. That means some people are going to be watching it longer and some people aren’t going to be watching it at all but people are watching it and so I am happy.

In terms of revenue let’s just say it’s on ten cents. That’s not much revenue coming from this at the moment. I’ve got a few more as I’ve done three more recordings and these need to go out and that will generate more which over time will generate more revenue as I get more and more people onto the show. So this is going to be a long term thing. This is a passion project and eventually it could generate a nice little passive income on the side but it doesn’t generate anything super serious.

This is a passion project and eventually it could generate a nice little passive income on the side but it doesn’t generate anything super serious.

In terms of On Property, that has been going well. I’m just going to go to YouTube and check out On Property as well. We’re hitting record-breaking figures in terms of traffic for this site so both the site and YouTube are definitely improving. I remember back when I was getting 300 views a day for On Property; however it’s now consistently most of the time over 600 views a day. It is still not massive in terms of the viewership compared to the blog however it is very popular and I have had some episodes that are starting to do quite well in terms of generating both traffic and revenue as well.

It is still not massive in terms of the viewership compared to the blog however it is very popular and I have had some episodes that are starting to do quite well in terms of generating both traffic and revenue as well.

So even though the bulk of my income comes from my own products and comes from Ben I’ve still made – looking at last month almost $100 in ad revenue for the month which isn’t much given that I make $5,000 to $10,000 a month in terms of other stuff. But every little bit counts. On Property has been going well. Melee.co is going well.

There is nothing really massive to report in terms of making strides in my business or anything like that but I’m just continuing to work away on it. Today I had a situation where I just wasn’t feeling it. I was just kind of sitting here staring blankly at my computer and decided to have a shower – a nice long hot shower and get a coffee. That really resets my mind and allowed me to do this recording today. I’m then going to go on and do more recordings for On Property as well as for Melee.

I was just kind of sitting here staring blankly at my computer and decided to have a shower – a nice long hot shower and get a coffee. That really resets my mind and allowed me to do this recording today. I’m then going to go on and do more recordings for On Property as well as for Melee.

That really resets my mind and allowed me to do this recording today. I’m then going to go on and do more recordings for On Property as well as for Melee.

If you’re ever stuck on your business, consider take the timeout, sacrifice a half an hour or whatever go have a nice long shower, get a coffee and hopefully that will help you to focus like it has for me today. There is nothing huge to report but business is going along as usual and if things change then I will let you guys know.

Until next time if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.

This week I have found myself a unique angle to grow Melee.co as well as a potential profit stream.

Hey guys and welcome to another episode of Instructions Not Included, the podcast about me Ryan McLean as I try and make a decent living online. In terms of my online business On Property which is my main source of revenue, it has been going really well.

My partnership with Ben who’s the buyer’s agent and referring people on to them is generating enough profit for me to get by. It is also building up what I like to call a buffer fund. The way I look at my business account is not how much money I have in there but how many weeks of runway that I have.

I know that my own products basically pay for all of my online expenses plus I’ll probably get a little bit of profit from that. So anything in my bank account is basically runway. It’s basically savings that I’m using to live off so I draw a certain portion of money each week.

Back in December you may remember I actually ran out of money and I didn’t have enough to pay myself what I would normally pay myself each week and so I was slightly behind. Luckily I scraped through and was able to get enough money that I didn’t have to draw from savings. But I’ve slowly been growing up a buffer fund and I’ve now got a buffer fund of about 12 weeks so that is about three months.

In Australia it is kind of coming up to tax time in a couple of months. The end of June is the end of our financial year and so a portion of that will need to go towards tax which means I don’t really have three months buffer fund but at least I have enough money to pay my tax bill which is obviously very important.

I have started a new website because that’s what I do called melee.co. This is a domain name I actually bought exactly a year ago. Well, it’s not exactly a year ago but a year ago this month. I bought it because I was getting into Melee. I found it interesting and I thought maybe I’ll do something in this space in the future if I do become passionate about this game like I thought I would. And lo and behold I have become very passionate about this game and I’ve actually found an avenue to build up this website into something that could potentially be substantial enough to generate some profit and to generate some income for me. I’ve done 15 episodes or something like that.

I started back in March and I was just documenting my journey as a Melee player. If you don’t know what I’m talking about – Super Smash Brothers Melee – it’s a fighting game on GameCube that is quite competitive. So basically the biggest tournament got about two hundred thousand people watching the grand finals. I play this game competitively so I started a website about it called melee.co.

Little over a month ago I started documenting my journey as a player but I did know that this wasn’t going to get many people interested in it. This was more just for me to fulfil my desire to create content about something that I love. Therefore I created this and it basically had no views. I can go ahead and check on YouTube for you if you want to know. I’ve had just over 10 views like the last month. Therefore it is not very many views at all on this channel. And look, I expected that.

I thought this would be something that would be great to document and to look back on over the years. And often I find that when I start in a niche and I am not a hundred percent sure what to do I just start with something and see what happens. So I started this YouTube channel. The stuff was going on the website but I didn’t have the website set up properly. I didn’t have my theme set up. I didn’t have it looking nice or anything like that.

But then the other day not that long ago, it was on Friday the 22nd of April – so a little over a week ago I decided that I’m going to take the next steps (something I’ve been thinking about for a short period of time) and actually start to interview pro players.

This is something that I feel there’s a hole in the market as there are a lot of people out there talking about the top 10 players in the world but there’s basically nobody talking about the top 100 players. And so I thought a good approach for me would be to approach those top 100 players, get interviews with them, interview them, share that and then obviously get those players to share with their audience as well. These are players that are just I guess undeserved in terms of people creating content about them and they have some interesting things to add and benefits to add to the community.

I had this idea a few weeks ago but didn’t really do much with it. I got my virtual assistant who is absolutely awesome – I got her to generate me a list of the top 100 players, their names, what character they play, their Twitter accounts, etc, which was quite easy to get from the website that does the top 100 rankings. So she pulled that.

On Friday I just decided that what I was going to do was to just tweet at some pro players and see if they would be interested in interviewing me. Rather than going from the first player working my way down to the second best, the best, etc, I actually kind of went backwards starting at a hundred, working my way up the list towards number one.

There was one person that I was trying to get on the show that kind of inspired me to start this and kind of inspired the idea of interviewing pro players. I thought I would get him on first as an honour to him so I contacted him through a whole bunch of different methods and he just never responded. So I thought I was going to reach out to these pro players. The chance that they would respond was probably going to be pretty slim to none. So I would contact maybe like a bunch of them and see what the feedback was.

I contacted 13 players thinking maybe one or two would respond to me and lo and behold I had a massive response. And think about this – I was tweeting at these people so I had 140 characters to work with. Not a lot and even less when you take into fact that I had to be at them on Twitter – 130 characters or something like that.

So far I’ve already done two interviews. I’ve got five more lined up. All of the 13 people that I got in contact with I was able to organize seven interviews so that’s more than 50%. I thought I’d get one or two but I got seven and so I’m kind of overwhelmed with how many interviews I need to do. There are quite a lot but it’s good to say this is the response I’m sort of getting and in future I’ll probably contact less people at a time just because the response has been so good and it has been hard to schedule things given the time zone differences between me and these pro players who live in America.

Therefore my avenue is that I’m going to interview pro players. I’ve already done two. Basically we talk about their back story, what got them into the game, how do they practice, how do they get better, what they see for the future and just having a conversation with them about the game. I’ll be contacting them, interviewing them and then I’ll be sharing that through YouTube, the podcast and also on the website. I might even publish it to Twitter.

I’m not actually sure if you can do that or not but everyone who plays this game really connect with each other on Twitter. So that’s something that I need to consider as well. And then hopefully we’ll get the flow-on effect of these players who have been interviewed. As they’ve been featured they would want to share it with their audience and as a result we’ll get some flow-on from that. We’ll see how it goes. This is the avenue that I’m going down to grow my audience.

Also, in terms of profiting from this because this is unique content and because I’m not using copyrighted material, etc, I can make money through YouTube advertising. Therefore this isn’t going to be something that makes me $100,000 per year. However, this is something that I enjoy doing, something that I’m passionate about and the great thing about YouTube is that it’s fairly passive income once it is set up and once we got the episodes there it kind of generates income.

And while I’ve got income coming in from On Property, generating external income, generating more passive income, separating my income just from one side and generating multiple streams of income is a big goal of mine. So if I can do it in this niche that I’m passionate about even if it becomes like $100 a month or something like that I don’t need it to be thousands of dollars but it’s an extra source of revenue for me and it’s something that I’m passionate about.

It may change in the future and I may have product ideas or things like that. I’m not a hundred percent sure but I’m excited about this. I’m having a lot of fun interviewing these players. I’m having a lot of fun creating this new revenue stream.

The niche website that I started has started picking up and getting decent traffic. That’s something I need to work out – how I am going to focus on this niche website as well. I kind of need to get my head around how am I going to run so many different websites because at the moment all my focus is on running On Property or running melee.co but I want to be able to improve all of my websites. I therefore kind of need to get a process down where that becomes easy and I haven’t really worked that out yet. That is something that I’m working towards.

Also, another thing that I wanted to say was I’m doing kind of like an experiment with melee.co.  In a lot of cases a lot of websites, a lot of businesses they try to interview the best people in a space because once you get the best person or the most well-known person it becomes easier to get everyone else.

In the property space, now that I’ve interviewed Steve McKnight it’s easier to get other people. In the Melee space if I interview top players like Armada, Hungrybox, Mango etc, it would then lend their credibility to me to get other players. But I’m interested to see if I do it the other way around – if I interview lower-end players, first of the top 100 if that will I guess encouraged top players to be interviewed by me because I have already interviewed all these other players who aren’t as good as you or aren’t as ranked highly as you maybe I should interview you as well. I wonder how that will go.

I’ll see how it goes because this is an experiment for me but it could be a good approach. At least in this particular space in order to work my way up to the better players and to get them to say yes. I would say, “Look I’ve interviewed all of these people who are lower than you on the rankings but I haven’t interview you yet so maybe I should interview you.”  Again, it’s an experiment. We’ll see what happens.

That’s it from me today guys. That’s what I’ve been working on this week. I hope that you’re having a great week working on your business. 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.