Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

#64 I’ve Lost My Niche

iniartworksmallAfter 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.



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