Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I am doing in 2016 has already changed from the original plans I had in January. Here is an update on some old project from 2015 and what I am doing now in 2016.

Hey, and welcome back to Instructions Not Included, the podcast where you follow me, Ryan McLean, as I try and create a decent living online.

If you followed any of the episodes for 2015, basically, 2015 was all about On Property. Creating, growing and eventually getting to the point where On Property was quite successful, but wasn’t going to be the runaway success that we wanted.

I’ve done one episode for 2016 already, but I through I’d do another episode and just update you guys and update myself on what’s been happening. You may remember from 2015, if you listened to those episodes, I created a website called dreamydad.com where I talked about night terrors in children.

I created a bunch of videos around night terrors and a solution that I linked to on Amazon on how to solve them, which is called the Lully, which is a vibrating disc that goes under your kid’d bed. It’s a solution I’ve used myself. It’s basically the only solution for this problem out there.

Well, an update for that is it’s had a total of 352 views on Youtube.

It’s had a total of 15 visitors to the website and it’s made a total of $0.02. So given that I probably invested $50-$100 into this website, we can basically say that this is a flop. And Dreamy Dad, I will leave it up and see how it goes, but I probably won’t renew the domain next year and I’ll probably leave the Youtube videos up there just to help people out. But in terms of making money, Dreamy Dad, definitely a flop.

Pelt, as well, P-E-L-T dot C-O was a site that I created to talk about how to do particular things online, like how to run an evergreen launch funnel, how to setup a membership site. I went through and I created a bunch of episodes for that.

It has done better than Dreamy Dad, but it hasn’t been the business that I had hoped it would be. I think back when I was looking at moving on from On Property, moving on to an educational website, that being Pelt, I was hoping that Pelt would be the be all and end all of my business.

I would start with teaching online stuff and then I would move on to other areas and it would basically be like Lynda, which is just a site where there’s so many different courses on there. It would be like that, but it would be free and I make money through affiliate deals and that didn’t turn out as expected.

I think I’ve made over $100 in affiliate commissions through that site and I am making some money in terms of Youtube ad revenue as well. I think I checked it yesterday and this moth so far, it’s made $4.15. So definitely better than the $0.02 that Dreamy Dad made.

I invested less money into this. I have invested some transcriptions into the episodes and things like that. I think I’ve got $20 a month that’s recurring subscription as well, like a recurring affiliate commission as well, so hopefully that will continue and we’ll get more of those, but Pelt has been put on the back burner for now as I ran out of things to talk about. And I just wasn’t excited enough to do reviews of every internet service out there, every hosting company to do comparisons and all that sort of stuff.

It was something that I was interested in when I was creating courses how to start a membership site, how to create an evergreen launch funnel.

That was exciting, but when I looked at the keyword data and looked at what am I going to need to do to make this site successful, I was going to have to create a lot of content that just wasn’t going to be very interesting for me, so it’s there. I may re-approach it, but it’s kind of just on the back burner at the moment. We’ll make a little in affiliate commission and some ad revenue, but nothing major.

PodcastFast, I did plan at one stage to create a new series on how to create a podcast because a lot has changed since I created the last series about a year or 18 months ago. So I wanted to do an updated version of that, but just haven’t got around to doing it. So that’s all my list of things to do this year.

When it comes to On Property, that has been a journey and quite an exciting one recently. I had been umming and ahhing about selling On Property versus keeping it on autopilot.

Basically, I approached a friend of mine who’s in the industry and said, “Hey, look, here’s where my head space is at. Think of selling On Property, not 100% sure. Would you want it?” and that led us down a whole path in terms of conversations, in terms of talking about partnering with each other and talking about him acquiring On Property and acquiring me to work for his business.

We had a lot of back and forth discussion. I really had to dig deep and really come to terms with what do I want for my business? What do I want from my life? In the end, what we’ve decided on or, I guess, what I decided on because it wasn’t his first choice. I decided that I couldn’t sell it and go and work for someone else. I wanted to be the captain of my own ship and run my own thing and that’s just something in me that wants to do that and so I’ve decided moving forward, I’m keeping On Property.

I’m not going to sell it, but I have decided to partner with this person and to basically turn On Property into a lead generation tool for them. So I’ll be de-focusing a lot of my own products. They’ll still be there, but I won’t be putting a lot of focus on them in terms of marketing and I’ll spending more of my focus on marketing this person and their service.

So, On Property, we’re moving forward doing that. Hopefully, this gives us an opportunity to – I found that one of the hardest things about On Property was that a lot of my time was being spent doing customer service and I didn’t like that. I wasn’t passionate about that. I love creating free content. I love the aspect that I’m helping people to not get stung, helping people to make good decisions.

I loved that aspect, but I was just getting bogged down in customer service. Bugs for my products that needed to be created, all this sort of stuff. And so, this seemed like a great opportunity for me to market someone else’s business, help them grow their business. But at the same time, I can stop focusing on customer service and focus on what I do best, which is creating great free content.

You know, building an audience, building a community, all of that sort of stuff. So I’m pretty excited about this and I’ll talk more about it in a few episode, but On Property, it’s not on autopilot anymore, so I will be updating it probably about 3 times a week. So I’m looking at putting about 2 days a week’s work into On Property. And then, I’m also building out a new niche site, which will hopefully be one of many this year.

I did state in a previous episode that I wanted my income, which is now 95% or more comes from On Property. I would like 50% to be coming from On Property by the end of the year. So 2 days a week, I’ll be focusing on On Property. 3 days a week, I’ll be focusing on different things. Partly on this new niche site, party on things like this – Instructions Not Included – and maybe some other niche sites down the track.

I found a niche that I’m very interested in that I’m not going to reveal to you guys, but I’m excited about it and I’m going to work that and see how it goes. So far, I’ve had 10 or 20 people visit my site. So nothing special is happening there at the moment, but as I build it out, I will give you guys periodic updates as to how things are going. I’m looking at building out a whole bunch of different niche sites to try and build up the income and I guess diversify my income.

That is where I’m at, at the moment. Dreamy Dad, dead and a dud. Pelt, on the back burner, not really doing anything, just leaving it there, but it is creating a little bit of passive income. So that’s nice, it’s great to get that ad revenue. Views do look to be growing on Youtube as well. So hopefully that will improve and continue to become better. Podcastfast, I would like to create a new series for that when I get around to it. On Property.

I’ll be building a lot of new content and marketing someone else’s services as the primary revenue source there. And I’m looking at creating a new niche site as well.

So things are evolving in 2016. Already, I’ve changed tack from what I thought I was going to do at the start of the year and I’m looking at different things and I’m sure that by the time we get to the end of the year, I would have changed 5 or 6 times again. I’m just trying many different things to see what works. Hopefully, we’ll get there and by the end of the year, we’ll look back and we’ll see that this has been a great year.

I hope that you continue to work on your business. You don’t give up that when things don’t go your way or things don’t work out perfectly, you just keep striving along. Because that’s what I do, I just keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. Oh, let’s try this. That didn’t work, try something else. That didn’t work, try something else. That didn’t work. Oh, that worked okay, but we need to try something else and just goes on and on until, hopefully, we’ll achieve the success that we want.

Look, I’m pretty happy with my life, pretty happy with the way things are turning out and I’m happy to keep working at this.

I hope you guys go and work on your business. Be encouraged that it’s not going to be perfect every time, but that’s the best thing about online business, is you get a lot of different go’s. And one of the things I love about On Property is I have an audience of over 100,000 people a month come to that website and so I can try something.

If it doesn’t work, then I can try something else. And I’ll keep trying until I hit on something that resonates with the market and then, basically, I can run with that. Alright, guys, that’s it, Ryan out. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2015 is done and dusted. I now have 2016 to look forward to with new business ideas and On Property running on autopilot.

Well, 2015 is done. I am signing off for the day the 24th of December which is my last working day for the year and then having two weeks off because we got Christmas obviously and then I’m heading down to Sydney for the new year and taking some time off. We will be back around the 5th of January or something like that.

I just want to do a quick end of year update as well as talk about what is happening in 2016 or what I hope to achieve in 2016.

Because really it’s a lot like a blank flight for me in 2016 in terms of what I’m doing with the new business Pelt and closing off or just letting On Property sits on autopilot. Over the last couple of weeks since I did my last update I got rid of the evergreen launch funnel in On Property which wasn’t working this time around.

Approximately 1000 people went through that funnel and one person signed up making me $300. Therefore obviously it wasn’t working the way it used to work where I had 100 people go through a week and I would make four to six grand a month.

I don’t know what’s happening there. I don’t know why it wasn’t working this time around but it’s the same funnel. Everything is the same but it just definitely wasn’t working. What I’ve done is I’ve changed my pricing. I’ve changed again but it’s very similar. At On Property Plus it’s $299 a year for everything, now it’s $99 a year for just the property listings.

I have migrated everything over from plus.onproperty.com.au over to onproperty.com.au. I moved the membership site over there. Next year I’ll move all the members across.

Therefore new members will sign up to onproperty.com.au and all members will still have access to plus.onproperty.com.au. I haven’t migrated members over yet so it is something I need to do in 2016. Also I’ve set up a process so that when we list a daily property which is something members get access to – my virtual assistant is absolutely awesome – she will go in and create a censor listing which will go out to the public for free. Therefore the public can see some stats on the properties that I’m finding.

They can see the price range of the property, the rental yield, the estimated cash flow, they can see a blurred image but then they can click where they want to get access. So the goal is that I’m probably not going to be creating much content for On Property in 2016 and so this will be daily updates to the blog but it will just be those censored property listing every day.

The aim is that people come to the site, they will see all of these censored listings they want to get access to and see the real addresses of these properties. When they do that then they can sign up and they can pay to have access.

Hopefully it works and hopefully it’s a good marketing strategy but we’ll see in 2016. But really if it does work then On Property could effectively run on autopilot maybe working one to two hours a week on it which would really free up my time to explore other ideas.

I really need On Property to be making at least $1,000 a month in profit to be worth it. Otherwise it’s just not worth having that service at all and I could just basically cut expenses to the bone for On Property and just have it as a basic website, cheap hosting, put advertising on it and then just run it like that and at least then I’m paying hosting.

I might be paying ten bucks a month or I’ll go with Arvixe which I really like. You can check this out by going to pelt.co\hosting which is my affiliate link for Arvixe. I could set them up for Arvixe for $3.40 a month for On Property and then basically a lot of the work that Dittie is doing wouldn’t need to be done so I’d get her doing other things.

Therefore On Property would basically cost me $3.40 a month to run and I could make money in advertising through that. I could probably make $500 to $1000 a month in advertising if I completely cut costs and just I guess gave up on On Property.

However I’m not ready to throw in the towel yet. I am putting it I guess in idle – putting it in cruise control and I’m going to give it a couple months while I work on other stuff. And then probably I’ll come back to it with fresh eyes or just see how things go. It’s definitely something that I want to come back to in the future especially when I start investing in property myself.

I’m just not 100% sure what to do with it at the moment. I have been tossing around ideas of potentially selling it to someone else in the industry but I don’t want to do that at the moment. It is not something that I’m looking to do but definitely something that could be on the cards in the future in a year or so. We’ll see how things go and we’ll see what’s happening.

I really don’t know what’s happening with On Property but I feel like I achieved what I wanted to achieve in the space. I am reaching a great deal of people. I’m helping a great deal of people and I just don’t know where to take it from here.

I do know that I want to start an educational company and I do know that I want that to be pelt.co and so I have started creating videos over there. I’ve created 18 videos now for that site. I would like to do a video a day for next year for that site and create a lot of courses as well. So far I’ve done a course on how to create a membership site, how to create a video and how to set up WordPress.

I’ve got a couple of other videos on there as well and on YouTube. I think I’m getting about 70 or probably 50 to 80 views a day for my videos over there. I’ve got seven subscribers so far – not massive but slowly building that up. I’m even considering consolidating Podcast Fast into pelt.co because I’ve got a membership course over at Podcast Fast.

I am considering that but I’m not 100% sure what I’m going to do there. Maybe I’ll just leave Podcast Fast but I’ll also do a series on how to start a podcast as a part of pelt.co.

Next year pelt.co will be my main focus and I’ll be creating a lot of courses and a lot of training videos on how to do things. The goal is to make money through affiliate marketing with that therefore when I say how to set up WordPress I recommend hosting and I recommend Arvixe.

When I’m talking about setting up a membership site or we’re talking about setting up an evergreen launch funnel I can recommend ConvertKit which is my email marketing software. There is a whole bunch of things I’ll be trying to teach people how to do and then I will recommend different things.

I can recommend how to do those things using a tool, recommend the tool and hopefully get some commissions from that. And who knows I may launch it as a podcast as well but I’m not 100% sure at the moment what I’m going to be doing with that. That’s going to be my plan next year.

I am worried that it’s going to take me six months for the income from Pelt to really grow and become significant enough that it can support me. While I’ve moved on from On Property that income from Pelt definitely isn’t where I need to be. There might be a limbo for six months or so while On Property is kind of stagnant and while pelt.co is growing but we’ll really just have to wait and see.

At On Property the sales have died off in the last couple of months as we’ve previously discussed but I’m not sure if that’s going to continue. I’m not sure that’s just an end-of-year thing. It might be seasonal and then coming into next year in January-February-March I might have good sales.

I really don’t know what the future holds but I’m excited for 2016 – excited to create and to run Pelt and to create some really helpful training videos out there for people and some courses as well. So I’ll keep you updated on that in the new year. I will be brainstorming.

I will be thinking about my businesses, praying about my businesses over this two-week break hoping to get clarity for what I want to do in 2016. And then hopefully I can start 2016 with a bang and just create something awesome.

Hopefully too when I’m doing this review at the end of next year I’ll be really excited about where my business is, the passive income that I have generated and the lifestyle that I have for me and my family. At the moment I am just not earning enough and still having to work quite a lot and I don’t have the lifestyle that I want. Hopefully in a year’s time we can look back and we can have made some serious progress towards that.

I am not expecting to be completely financially free of rich or anything like that but hopefully I’ll be in a less precarious, less stressful position and not starting afresh in 2017. However, we’ll have to wait and see.

Thanks so much to everyone who has been listening this year. Thank you to Snappy Checkout who has been sponsoring this podcast as an affiliate link. You can go to ryanmclane.net/snappy to check out Snappy Checkout which is the best payment processor out there. I use them for all my products on all my websites and I absolutely love it. You can collect recurring payments, you can sell products and you can do nearly everything with Snappy Checkout.

Go to ryanmclane.net/snappy to check that out. Thanks Snappy Checkout and thanks to the team over there for helping me out and I absolutely love all of you guys who have been listening. I wish you the most merry Christmas and I wish you a happy new year. Hopefully we can move on to bigger and better things in 2016.

Until next time guys, if you want instructions go and buy something furniture.

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This feels like the 1,000th time I have had a new approach to marketing On Property. But here we go for another round.

Hey guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. I just wanted to record an episode to talk about what I’ve been going through in On Property over the last couple of weeks and to flush it out for you guys.

However it’s really for myself to look back on and to say okay here’s where I was at a point in my business where things weren’t going well, here’s the way I was feeling, here are the things that I did. And then hopefully I can look back on this in a year and I can see how I turned it around. It’s actually interesting I started Instructions Not Included about a year ago.

I think I started in December of 2015. So for it to have been a year since I started this podcast is quite amazing. And to think of the things that I’ve tried in those 12 months is quite significant. To think of the success that I’ve had maybe not as significant but I’ve tried a lot of things and I’ve learned a lot and I feel a lot more knowledgeable and I feel like I can take on the world more.

And even though things haven’t necessarily gone my way and I haven’t got everything right I am very grateful for the year that I’ve had in business, the things that I’ve learned and the position that I’m currently in to move forward with my business.

Let’s just talk about where we are with On Property. I talked about in a previous episode how I came to the realization within myself and with my wife. I did the data – I went digging through all of the data – What’s my retention rate for On Property Plus? How long are people staying? I discovered that 90% of people are leaving within a year.

Therefore what I thought was a sticky and a recurring product actually really isn’t because people are gone within a year and I’m not necessarily bringing in a lot of people to replace that. In fact, my customer base has actually decreased in 12 months but my revenue had slightly increased because of the increase in pricing that I had.

So I was kind of going backwards or being very stagnant in my business and so I came to the realization that On Property Plus isn’t going to make money in the way that I thought. It isn’t going to make the amount of money than I thought it was going to make and as a result I really need to rethink this and go back to the drawing board.

What we went back to was the original evergreen launch strategy that I had done with On Property Plus in the past. I was going to redo that and launch it again through an evergreen launch funnel basically using the exact funnel that I used about six months ago. I think it was back in May that I started it and it ran for about four months. Well I’m unhappy to say that it’s been three weeks – now is the fourth week and I’ve had over a thousand people through that evergreen launch funnel and I’ve had one sale of $300.00.

The evergreen launch funnel – I don’t know why it’s not working – I don’t know why the people aren’t as targeted – I don’t know what the go is but definitely it hasn’t been performing as well as it previously performed in the past. What I thought could get me potentially to my goals or get me a decent passive income out of On Property is probably not going to work.

Therefore that means back to the drawing board again. I went through an entire week where I was thinking about this and came to a conclusion and an idea and then actually scrap that idea yesterday. My idea was I could potentially Crowdfund On Property because I do believe that there is an opportunity in this space to provide non conflict of interest advice and education around investing in property.

And I thought some people might be passionate enough to get behind that and to support that because they want someone who is going to give them the information that’s not skewed towards the overpriced properties that are selling or whatever.

So I got on that bandwagon and I was going down that path thinking okay this could be good if I reach maybe $6,000 a month in crowdfunding then I can release all of my products for free. But the problem that I came to in the end was the people that are having success with crowdfunding – and by success we’re talking $10,000 to $20,000 a month and have absolutely massive followings.

We’re talking millions of views on every video that they have on YouTube, millions of subscribers or hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Compared to me you might get 400 views a day on YouTube – 10,000 views a month or that sort of thing.

It probably just wasn’t going to be viable for me to do it because so few people would actually put up money for effectively no reason or for the ability to crowdfund this that I just didn’t have the scale or I didn’t think that I had the scale to actually make this achievable.

I therefore went down the path of crowdfunding thinking about it a lot and ended up coming up with the fact that I’m probably not going to be able to crowdfund this because I really just don’t have the volume of people to make this successful. I was then back to square one again thinking, “Oh my goodness what am I going to do? How am I going to turn this business around?”

Basically I have been focusing a lot on my new business which is teaching people educational videos. That’s over at www.pelt.co so you can go and check that out. That is about teaching people how to set up a membership site, how to set up an evergreen launch funnel, a bunch of WordPress staff.

Mostly I will start with internet stuff because I can market referral programs, affiliate programs and make commissions there but eventually I’ll move into broader education for Pelt. I’ve been spending more time on that and really talking to my wife about it. We are thinking that On Property we want to tick away but we’re not going to heavily invest in it.

So we want it to provide us with enough money to get by until Pelt takes over and starts to make the bulk of our income which is where we want to be eventually as a company.

I have a whole bunch of ideas thinking around about what different things I could do. The idea that I finally settled on that I’m creating a sales page for and launching it this week was that I was going to basically roll everything into one again like I’ve been doing and really simplify things in terms of my website.

What I’m going to do as a marketing strategy is take the properties that I’m listing inside my membership site and I’m going to put them on my free site onproperty.com.au. I’m going to put them on the free site but I’m going to have them censored so the images will be blurred, there’ll be some information about it like price range, rental yield, potential cash flow of the property but it will be very limited.

Therefore people won’t be able to understand where this property is or what is the address of this property unless they remember. So the goal is that each post that I put out because I’m already going out and finding a property every single day and that’s daily content for the website and the goal is that people will then be able to peruse these properties and then it will encourage them to become members of On Property to get access to the properties.

That’s what I’m going to be doing. I’m going to launch the sales page. I’m creating it now so it will probably take me maybe two or three days to finish that.

I then need to set up a new process and some educational training videos for my virtual assistant so she can take things from my membership site and create the free content as well. However, the goal is really that the free property listings are a way to drive people to the members’ area.

I was thinking about it and I was thinking when I had previously looked at properties in the past there was a site that used to do a similar sort of thing called Cash Flow Capital and I used to look at it and they would share property listings but they wouldn’t share the addresses and then you would have to sign up and become a member in order to get access to those addresses.

I saw this and I thought that is actually a much better way to do it. And it just makes a lot more sense because people then see the properties and they create curiosity in them so they get interested and want to know about the property. I don’t even have to explain what On Property is to them necessarily. I just have to go ahead and give them access to the stuff. That’s where I am at the moment.

I just arrived at Melee so I’m going to go in and play a bit. Thanks for listening. I just wanted to get that off my chest to understand where I’ve been, the ideas that I’ve gone through and where I’m at the moment. I will be dropping the price to $99 a year but then I will be having a higher tier pricing so it will $99 a year just for the properties which I think is super affordable and then $249 will be the complete package.

They will get access to properties, they will get access to courses, they will get access to the FaceBook group, they will get access to the calculator and other stuff as well. Hopefully a large portion of people will go for the $249 but even if they would just go for the $99 I’m fine with that as well. That’s my pricing structure at the moment. I was thinking about adding a middle-tier but I’m not sure whether I’m going to do that at the moment so I’ll see how it goes down the track.

If at 99 bucks a year I can get 200 members that’s 20 grand a year and that will at least pay my expenses for my business and give me a little bit of profit as well and allow me to focus on building up Pelt. So hopefully it works. I’ll keep you guys updated obviously.

Until next time, if you want instructions on buy some furniture

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Times are changing as I embark on a new business idea with the goal of $75,000-$100,000 in semi-passive income.

The times – they are changing. Hey guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. The times are changing for me because I’m working on a new business while On Property is kind of ticking away and I’m still thinking about what to do with that.

I just want to discuss where am I, how I’m feeling and what I’m thinking about my business moving forward.

This week I’ve been working pretty solidly on creating videos for my new website which is pelt.co so www.pelt.co, you can go ahead and check it out.

I’m going to be creating a bunch of instructional videos over there on how to do things – just videos to help people. The series that I’ve been working on at the moment is how to set up a membership site with zero coding.

So I’m showing people from the very beginning having absolutely nothing online how do you go ahead and set up a membership site that you can sell a subscription to.

I take people through that entire process. It is a 12 part series over there and I’m happy to say that I have nine parts done and dusted and I’ve also recorded part 10 and part 11 which I just need to edit. Therefore that series is almost finished. I’m excited to get that out and to have that series out.

The next series I’ll be working on directly after I finish that is how to create an evergreen launch funnel. The same sequence and the same things that I’ve been doing for On Property Plus to market that I’m going to teach people behind the scenes how do you actually create that and run that in your business.

Again, the plan – if you guys didn’t know, the plan to make money from this is to make money through the tools that I recommend for these products. For example, for a membership site you need domain name, you need hosting, you need membership software, you need a sales page software like lead pages.

I recommend those and if people go through my links then they go ahead or I go ahead and get an affiliate commission. It doesn’t cost them anymore but if they find it useful and they go through my affiliate links then I’ll make a commission through that.

I believe that it’s going to work because it has worked with Podcast Fast already and I’ve made over $700US dollars or over $1,000 Australian since I launched that which was under a year ago. Even if each video series made me $1,000 and I could create one every week – that’s optimistic – but then within a year that’s 50 grand a year, within two years that’s 100 grand a year.

So my ultimate goal is three to five years down the track to be able to generate enough income online – somewhere between $75,000 to $100,000 profits. To generate that much income online with not having to work fully to upkeep everything – working a bit yes, working to grow my business yes, but I’m not being stuck in the day-to-day drudgery of the business.

That is the goal so that my family and I can do what we want. We can home school if we want. We can travel if we want. We can keep doing what we want to build the business out if we want. I’m really excited because I’m working now on what I really had envisioned for my company which is an educational company that is creating videos and creating education to help empower people.

I’m starting with things that I know how to do, like membership sites, evergreen launch funnels and things that I know I can get affiliate commissions for. So that’s where I’ll start and then obviously I’ll move on from there into different niches and things like that as well. I’m super excited for this opportunity, super excited to grow this business.

I’m still ticking away with on property, still maintaining that, doing interviews every now and then, maintaining the membership site. I did have about 400 people go through the funnel this week and absolutely no sales. I don’t know what the go is with that – it closes tomorrow so I’ll see if I get any sales on the closing. But I definitely need to look into that because I feel like I should have got at least one sale from all those people.

I don’t know what’s going wrong. I don’t know if it’s just the season because we’re going into December which is my slowest month. I really don’t know what’s going on. I will stick at it but it’s hard to sit back and to watch and to just not be able to do anything to drive sales forward and just have to wait and then analyze it and see how you can do it better. So it’s painful to watch, it’s painful to not have those sales for On Property coming through.

I’ve got a few more sales from Ben which should definitely keep me afloat. I’m hoping that On Property sales mix with sales from Ben will keep me afloat until my new business picks up.

I also needed to think about how I can grow this new business faster so it doesn’t take me two years like it took with On Property. I’m actually going to be using a similar strategy to what I did with On Property in that I’m going to be releasing daily content and so I’m going to pump out a lot of content to try and grow my site and to grow the videos as quickly as possible. One of the problems that I have is what I call the Google lag.

Often when you release content it will take five or six months before Google recognizes that yes this is good content I’m going to go ahead and rank it. With On Property I had kind of got past that hurdle because I’ve been around for so long because Google trusts me and because I’ve got great content already and great stats already when I release new content I would automatically get viewers. I would automatically get people watching it and it would automatically rank for the keywords that I was going after.

Therefore with On Property I got to a point where it was quite easy and now I’m starting from scratch again so I need to work out how am I going to accelerate the process – I mean ranking for some of these things.

My strategy at the moment is I’m going to be doing these video series like we discussed but I’m also going to do a bunch of little videos just on one particular problem – solving one particular problem and solving it well. I’ll therefore create a bunch of small videos and the goal is those small videos are so specific that they rank a lot quicker than the series do but that people really like them, people enjoy them, people come back to them that I get some good stats in Google’s eyes and in YouTube’s eyes.

And then hopefully that will have a residual effect on my other videos as well. So that is the plan. That is basically it at the moment – create a lot of content and then create some specific content that’s going to rank well for small terms that get less traffic but that really solve that problem and really do it well. I’m hoping that that will speed things up. I don’t have any other strategy to speed things up at the moment so we’ll just see how it goes.

We’ll keep ticking along. I really only started tracking my YouTube a couple of days ago and I got a total of seven views across my entire channel. I have uploaded eight videos a few days ago and so I’m not expecting traction for quite some time.

Dreamy Dad as well, that hasn’t taken off quickly so that might be six months before we see any traction on that. That’s just not getting any views and I haven’t made any affiliate sales through that either. So really, On Property is keeping me alive and I still need to focus on that but I am very excited about this new business and creating this educational content and hopefully building that up over time.

I was talking to my wife about it last night and we were saying it’s a bummer to realize that what we thought we were creating (we spent two years creating On Property) wasn’t going to be I guess the money maker – wasn’t going to be the business that we had thought it was going to be or that we had envisaged and it’s just hard to realize that you spent two years and you didn’t get to where you wanted to be.

But we’ve learned a lot and we’re going to start again and hopefully this new thing that we’re starting is going to achieve those things. But who knows, I might look back in two years and say this business I started as well wasn’t the ticket.

Let me just leave you with one thought and that came from Robert Kiyosaki. I talked about how nine out of ten businesses fail within the first five years or whatever the statistics is, it doesn’t really matter, a lot of businesses fail. However, when people used to throw that statistics at Robert Kiyosaki they would say, “How can you recommend that people start a business when nine out of ten businesses fail?” He would say, “Well I know the statistics – nine out of ten businesses failed but I only actually need one business to succeed in order to be successful so I need to plan to start ten businesses in order to be successful.”

I think he started three before he achieved great success. Therefore he beats the odds. I’ll leave you with that thought that you may need to start ten businesses in order to get to the one that is successful. And that’s kind of the experience that I’m going through at the moment where I’m moving on and trying a new business and hoping that this will be successful.

I only need one to succeed. I don’t need them all to succeed in order to be successful. On Property has been successful enough. It got me to where I am today but it’s not going to get me to where I want to be and so that’s why my focus is shifting.

I wish you guys all the best in your business. Until next time if you want instructions go and buy some furniture

Since I realised my current business strategy wasn’t working I have created a new strategy that I will be testing.

Hey Guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. I wanted to give you an update on my strategy of my business moving forward.

I last recorded and episode a little over a week ago how I made the realization that my business wasn’t actually viable the way I was approaching it and I needed to make some major changes to my business and to my business model. And so, I wanted to give you guys a bit of an update on where I’m at with that and some of the plans I have moving forward. So, if you haven’t listened to the previous episode, go back and listen to that so you can see the realization that I had.

But basically, the way that I was looking at it, I thought I was running a sticky membership site where people would recur over and over again, but what I’ve discovered was that 90% of people were leaving within the first year.

So basically, ever single year, I’m starting from scratch with new members.

So what has that affected? Well, it’s affected the way that I sell On Property Plus. I now think of it more as a single one-time product than I do as a recurring membership subscription. So I’ve gone back to selling it through an evergreen sales funnel. So people come into the funnel, they get some free videos and then the door’s open for them for a limited time – for 5 days.

They get special links for that and they get 5 days to act and to purchase. Otherwise, it then closes for them and they can’t access it anymore. So it adds scarcity to the situation to help get people over the line and it’s actually real scarcity because they only get that only opportunity for that set period of time and if they don’t take action, then they can’t actually sign up after that. I’m also considering doing a couple of major launches throughout the year, but I haven’t taken any action on that.

A bit of an update there. My first cohort is going through this week of I think it was around 60 people or something like that. It opened the doors yesterday. I’ve already had one sale of $300. So that is a positive outlook for me seeing as I can already see that it’s working. I haven’t had annual sale in like 2 months. So to get an annual sale on the first day that doors opened was very exciting and I think it’s next week from the tracking that I looked at, we’ve got over 300 people going through the launch sequence next week.

These people aren’t as targeted, so we’re really going to have to track that and see how things go, but it’s going to be really interesting to see if this is going to be viable. If I can achieve my goals through this. So that’s set up – that’s really good.

I’ve also gone deep into the tracking. And so, what I’m going to be doing is tracking what freebie people signed up for. And then, I can track based on what people signed up for, how likely are they to convert into a sale. So I can estimate; okay, someone who signs up for the new build checklist, they’re, on average, worth $1 per user. Someone who signs up for the free properties checklist, on average, they’re worth $6 a user. So then I can focus on creating free content that attracts the right people. So that’s the idea behind it. So I’ve got about 5 or 6 things that I’m tracking there.

I still got a bit of work to do to setup the tracking in full for that, but I’ve got a little bit of it going, which is good.

What else are we at? Okay, Property Tools is just ticking away. No changes there at the moment. I don’t have any plans for that, but basically, On Property is going on autopilot. I did get another commission from Ben. But, yeah, On Property, in terms of content, in terms of marketing, it’s going basically on autopilot.

I’m going to collect some of that data and based on what the data tells me, that will drive what sort of content I create in the future because I want to create the right content that attracts people who are likely to buy from my product. So I’ll scale that up slowly through content marketing, but I just want to focus on the right content for me and for the product that I’m selling. And then, hopefully, I can just fund that with On Property Plus as well as commissions from Ben.

So that’s On Property out of the way. That was the big thing that we had to deal with last week was that it wasn’t viable and now we’re in a situation where we believe it’s going to be viable moving forward. It’s not going to be a homerun success. It’s not going to be the future of my business, but hey, it can tick along in the background. It can generate enough revenue to keep us going and for me to pursue other things.

Now, let’s talk about what I am doing and the plans that I have moving forward. When I started working for myself full time, when I quit my 6-figure income job to work for myself full time, I had big dreams about what I wanted to do with my business and the kind of thing that I wanted to create. When I was talking to my wife about our whole situation, she said to me, “Go back to the place where you last felt like God was saying to you, ‘Yes, this is what you’re meant to do.’ where you last felt like you were on track to create what you wanted to create.” Going back, the last thing where I was absolutely like, “Yes.

I’m really passionate about this.” was when I was thinking about creating an education company for adults, basically. What I want to do is help teach people basically any form of education that’s going to help them improve their lives in some way. I want to be a part of that. I always wanted to create really practical education things that they can use to apply to improve their lives.

So going back, that’s kind of the last time I was really happy – the last time I was really passionate. And so I went back to that and I thought, “Okay, let’s just say On Property ticks away and we’re going to survive. I’m not going to have to go back to work for myself, how do I want to move forward with my business?” The problem with On Property, you know On Property was great. Creating your own products is a great way to make money, but there’s a lot of maintenance in creating your own products.

There’s a lot of effort that goes into creating your own products, which takes away from creating free content to market those products. And then, once you launch them and sell them, obviously, there’s ongoing support and maintenance for that. And so, I was thinking, if I want to build a large, scalable company, I need to think about things other than my own products. There’s definitely going to be some situations where I will create my own products, but if I want to go broad, I need to think of a business strategy that is going to work better.

Something that was really cool was I created this mini course on how to start a podcast fast. So I talk through it, it was really practical, step-by-step guide on how to create a podcast. And I just created that, I put it on Youtube.

I put it on my website, podcastfast.com and basically set it up. And I had big plans for the site to launch my own products, but I never got around to it. But anyway, that course has been viewed thousands and thousands of times by people and it’s made me over $1000 Australian in referrals to a web host which I recommend, Arvix. Basically, people go through the tutorial. Part of the tutorial is here’s how you setup a website for your podcast and here’s a host that I recommend, it’s Arvix, and I got a coupon code.

A special coupon code that gets them 20% off, but then also that’s an affiliate link, an affiliate code and so it’s get tracked to me and I make money every time someone signs up. So over the course of how ever long it’s been since I launched that – I would have to go back into the Instructions not Included archives to work out when I launched that, but it’s made about $1,000 for me.

I feel really great about it because I was able to put out free content, really help people and then, obviously, there’s the financial reward of the $1,000 that I’ve received. And so, I thought, “Okay, well, this is a business model that I’ve kind of micro tested and kind of proven to work. Maybe I can take this idea and I can take it to other things that I know how to do.” And again, my wife was really encouraging me to go down this route.

She’s been talking about it for months. For me to create videos, to create podcast, to create lessons on the things that I know how to do. Things like how to create a website and stuff like that. But I never wanted to be in the make-money-online niche. I have been in that in the past when I wasn’t making any money online. I don’t want to be one of those make-money-online gurus and have the majority of my income come from me telling people how to make money. I was really put off by that for a long time.

But then I thought about this podcastfast series that I did and I thought, “You know what I could do, I could create series that showed people practically how to do some of the things that I do.” So rather than saying to people, “Here’s how to make money online.” I can say to people, “Okay, you want to make money online in X way, here’s how to go about setting that up.” The same approach I’ve taken for On Property.

I don’t own any property so I can’t say to people, “Here’s the best way to invest. Look at me, I’ve invested, I’m so successful.” I say, “Okay, you want to invest in positive cash flow property, here’s how to find them. I’ll teach you how to find them or provide services for you on how to find them.” So I’m telling them they should invest this way. I’m not saying I’m successful. I’m just saying I know how to find positive cash flow properties and so, here, I’m going to help you.

I like to relate it to the gold rush. I am someone who’s selling pans to the people who are coming to the gold rush. So I’m not selling a course on how to become rich through the gold rush. But what I’m doing is I’ve got a shop where I’m just providing people with pans or with Levi jeans that they can buy that’s going to help them when they’re out there panning for gold. So rather than saying, “Here’s how you should pan for gold.” People are like, “I’m coming here to pan for gold.” and I’m like, “Well, here’s a pan.” or “Here’s some jeans to keep you warm while you’re panning for gold.”

The first course that I’m going to be creating is how to create a membership site with zero coding. So how can you setup a membership site and sell your membership site without touching a line of code at all? And so, this will be a mini-series.

It ended up being broken into 12 parts and it’ll walk people through exactly how to setup a membership site that they can go ahead and sell. Start from the very beginning, about buying a domain name, getting a hosting, all of that sort of stuff. And I have a couple of affiliate products in there that I’m recommending – domain name, hosting and LeadPages as well and WishList member. So I think I’ve got 4 affiliate products that I recommend as part of how to create this membership site with zero coding.

The goal is this is the same as podcastfast – to put it out, to create this awesome, epic mini-series that just walks people through exactly how to do it and then the goal is to create affiliate income through that, through the products and services that I recommend.

I also have plans for how to create an evergreen launch sequence. Maybe some stuff on email marketing. Maybe that’s all I’ve got – the membership site and the evergreen launch sequence are kind of the two that I’m mulling over at the moment. I’ll do the membership site one. Move on to the evergreen one and then, hopefully I’ve come up with another idea for something I can create after that. So that’s what I’m up to. That’s my strategy at the moment. Get On Property ticking away and then use my time to create these educational videos that I’m giving away for free. And then, the business model is that there’ll be some affiliate income through that.

That’s where I’m at at the moment. That’s where my business is at. All of these lessons will be hosted on my website, Pelt. So I’ve got pelt.co and so that’s a brand name that I’m going with. Originally, I wanted to make it stand for something like, “Personal Education Life Transformation” or “Personal Education Learning and Tools” or “Learning and Training” or something like that. But in the end, I’ve gone with Pelt – Learn Faster. That’s my tagline at the moment. I don’t think it’s awesome, but I think it’s good enough for now.

So all of these tutorials, you guys can find. Just go to pelt.co and you’ll be able to find them all over there. Yeah, I’m really excited for this. I’m really excited to create these really helpful mini-series for people. I think it’s going to help a lot of people and I think it’s also a potential for me to create the passive income that I want to have the live that I want in 3-5 years where I can travel with my family and have the freedom and flexibility to do a whole variety of things. Some of these stuff that I recommend will be one-time payments and I’ll get a fee, like with hosting. But then, some of it is recurring as well, so the email marketing stuff I’ll recommend will be recurring.

I’ll also recommend Snappy Checkout to receive payments, so that’ll be recurring. So if you need to receive payments for any of your products, there is no better solution. This is my shameless plug for Snappy Checkout, I’m affiliate for. Go ahead, check it out. Go to pelto.co/sc for Snappy Checkout and you can go ahead and check that out. It’s absolutely my favourite way to collect payments.

It integrates with Paypal or Stripe so they can pay credit card or Paypal. Their fees are really low. I was just actually looking at their fees and it’s 2% or $0.50, whichever is lower. So I worked it out – if you have a product over $25, the most you will pay is $0.50. That’s where it becomes $0.50. I sell a product for $300, right? If I went to somewhere like Gumroad, they charge 5%. So, on top of Stripe, which is 2.9%, I’m paying an extra 2.1% if I go with Gumroad. Let’s just call it 2% to make it easy. So on a $300 product, an extra 2% is $6 for me.

If I sell 10 a month, that’s $60 a month. If I sell 100 a year, that’s $600 a year if I go with Gumroad. If I go with Snappy Checkout, then I’m paying $0.50 rather than $6 on that $300 product. So it’s no-brainer that I would use Snappy Checkout. And also, their checkout, I really it because it looks really professional. It looks really trustworthy. And also, they don’t require people’s shipping addresses. Often, you’ve got this checkouts and people need to put in their shipping addresses to buy an electronic product and I think that lowers conversions and so less people checkout.

You can tell, I use it for all of my products. I absolutely love it. Please go and check it out through my affiliate link, I’d really appreciate it. Go to pelt.co/sc for Snappy Checkout and sign up for an account today.

So that’s where I’m at in my business. Not planning on doing Instructions Not Included episodes daily at the moment because I just don’t have enough to keep updated, but I’ll probably keep them going about once a week or just whenever I feel the urge to say something to you guys. So I hope that you are moving your business forward. I hope that you’re learning from my mistakes. And if you want instructions, you know what to do – go and buy some furniture.

Today I realised the business I have been focusing on and try to grow for the last 2 years may not actually be a viable business.

In the last episode, I talked about how I had lost my niche, but it was actually a lot worse than that and my business was in a way worse situation than that. And it’s still kind of is in a really bad situation. That’s what I’m going to be talking about in today’s episode of Instructions Not Included.

How I came to understand that my business wasn’t in fact viable and wasn’t going to help me achieve my goals and then what I’m doing to kind of get myself out of that hole and to convert my business into something that is actually going to help me achieve my goals. Because, obviously, we’re in business, we’re in online marketing for a reason.

We want to generate a certain amount of revenue, a certain amount of income and live a certain type of lifestyle. And so, for me, I guess the ultimate goal for me is to earn about $100,000 in revenue or $75,000 a year in take home profit that I can live off, but then I also have the caveat that I want the majority of that income to be semi-passive income.

So I don’t want to be doing a lot of work in order to generate that income. For example, I could do consulting and work with local businesses.

I could do client work and setup websites for people, but that could generate me and help me achieve the $100,000 a year, but I’ll be working full time in order to achieve that. However, I’ve got stuff like my membership site, like Property Tools, like On Property Plus that requires little upkeep and little maintenance and that’s the sort of income that I want to create.
Alright, so let me take you on the journey that I went on to discover that my business wasn’t viable. And then, let’s talk about the steps we’re taking to turn that around. I think this is going to be a very important episode for me.

It’s a very important episode for a lot of people to actually do this stuff first and understand what you’re doing in your business so you don’t go 2 years like I did before you realise, “Hang on, the path I’m going down probably isn’t actually viable.” Okay, I worked on Sunday because my wife was away on Friday and I took care of the kids. So I took a day off Friday and I worked on Sunday. And what I did on Sunday was that I went through the past history of my membership site, so I’ve got two.

I had On Property Plus where I find positive cash flow properties for people. And then I’ve got Property Tools which is a calculator to help people calculate whether or not a property is going to be positive cash flow. So On Property Plus goes back about 18 months. Property Tools goes back about 5 or 6 months.

So I looked at those and focused mostly on On Property Plus, which I had changed the name to On Property Listings, but it’s going back to On Property Plus, we’ll get to that in a second. Basically, I went through my stats, all the way back for 18 months.

I looked at it and I realised that in the space of 12 months, in terms of monthly members to On Property Plus, I’ve gone backwards. So in the last 12 months where I think my business is growing, traffic on the website is growing, monthly subscribers to my main membership site, my main source of income, have gone backwards by 4 customers. And my income had gone up a little bit by about $270 or $280 or something like that. So imagine, in 12 months, working in your business for 12 months and you grow your income by $280 a month or $3,000 a year, is basically what I was looking at.

So what I realised when I looked back was that in the course of the year, 90% of monthly members left the service. And so, basically, every single year, I’m starting from scratch. Every single month, I’m starting from scratch to get new members and to get revenue coming in.

In terms of the goals that I had, I’m likely to achieve that. We’ll get to that in a sec. I also looked at annual subscribers and this was a little bit better, but only 30% of those stay around when it comes time to renew their membership.

I didn’t have as much data on annual members because, obviously, it takes longer for them to churn. But from what I can see, about 30% of annual members renew their subscription a further year. And so, with this knowledge in hand, I was really realising that even though I have a subscription business, not many people are staying around. And so, I can’t just focus on getting new customers and my business is going to grow as a result of that. Basically, each year, I need to get all brand new customers for my service. So that was the first realisation.

The next thing that I did after having this realisation was I went back to modelling my products. And so, I looked at the income that I wanted to generate and I’m looking at, “Okay, based on different price points, how could I generate this income?” Let me just bring it up on my computer so we can talk through this together and it’ll make a lot of sense to you. I’m just going to log on to my spreadsheet. Basically, what I decided was that for On Property Plus, I wanted it to achieve $60,000 per year.

I figured Property Tools will probably make anywhere between $5,000 and $15,000 a year. Then there’s extra affiliate stuff like my affiliate deal with Ben and then extra sites and stuff like that on the side as well. I just thought $60,000 for On Property Plus is the goal that I’m going for.

Let me bring up my modelling page. I was looking at all different price points. So recently, I had raised the price from $300 a year to $480 per year. I was looking at, “Okay, how many sales would I need in order to achieve my goal of $60,000?” remembering that the majority of people are actually leaving every single year. And so, I was looking at my goal of $60,000 and at my previous price point of $300, I would need 17 new subscribers a month to achieve that goal. And when I looked back over my statistics, my best month was 17 in the one month. Most of the months were more like 7, 8, 2, 13.

It went up and down, but my average was about 7 or 7.5 and I needed 17 every single month in order to achieve my goal because people are leaving every year. So I’m looking at this and I’m like, I haven’t had a new annual subscriber in the last 2 months at the current price, which is $480 and I’ve had a few monthly members, but they’re going away every year. So I’ve decided, I really want to focus on annual subscribers.

I think that’s the easiest way to achieve my goal and so I was looking at different price points. At $100, I would need 50 new subscribers per month. At $200, I would need 25; At $300, I would need 17; At $400, I would need 13 and at $500, I would need 10 new subscribers per month. And so, I was looking at this range, I thought, the most achievable is the $200 to $300 range. $100 is too cheap, I need too many. Between $200 and $300 or 17 and 25, is something that I could probably aim for. Really, I was thinking about this and I’m like, “Yeah, I can’t achieve this. This business isn’t going to achieve the goals that I thought it was going to achieve.”

I realised that as my website traffic was growing, the income wasn’t growing with it. And so, I can’t just focus on growing web traffic in order to get more sales. There is one saving grace for me, though. And that’s the fact that looking at my data, about 30% of annual members re-subscribe. This means that my goal of 17 per month can drop down to 12 per month if 30% of people stay. So, 12 per month is more achievable – it’s only 5 off my regular goal. So what I eventually came to and I had a long discussion with my wife. We’re talking through what are we going to do? What should we look at? There was a few conclusions that I came to

. The first was that On Property Plus isn’t going to be the runaway success that I had hoped it would be – that would eventually generate over $100,000 a year by itself. That’s just probably not going to happen. So that was the first big realisation.

So then, we’re just looking at, okay, rather than thinking about this as a recurring product, even though I would still sell it as a yearly subscription or monthly subscription. I really need to look at this as one-time sales moreso. And so, realising that, looking back over the data, I did an experiment for a couple of months – I think about 3 or 4 months this year where I turned off On Property Plus. So it wasn’t available to the public, but what would happen was each week, a new cohort of people – and a cohort is just a small group of people, about 100 people, would go through a sales funnel like Jeff Walker talks about.

So they go through 3 free videos then there’s a 4th video, On Property Plus opens for them for 5 days and then it closes. So a bunch of people go through this every week and when I looked at my data, my biggest month was when I was doing this experiment, that was 17. And also, the majority of those months were quite good and quite high in terms of the subscribers that I got.

I’m just wondering if I can find it and show you guys. When we made this change, which was May in 2015. In terms of new customers, we had 15 one month, 17 one month, 8 one month and 6 one month. But then, before that, we’ve had like 7 one month, we had 16 then we had 2, 2, 3. So on average, it seems to be higher.

What I could tell from the previous experiment that I had done is actually this is probably the best way for me to sell On Property – is to close it down, have this evergreen launch funnel where people only get an opportunity to join for about 5 days and after that, the opportunity closes for them.

I can also supplement this maybe twice a year or something like that where I can open it up to the public and do a bonus offer and things like that. Something that I haven’t done in the past, but something that I would definitely explore moving forward now. So if I look at this and I look at 15, 17, 8 and 6, the goal of at least 12, but hopefully 17 per month is probably achievable.

If instead of focusing on more traffic, I actually focus on conversions. Conversions from my website to my email list and then also conversions from the email list into On Property Plus members. So that was the second big thing.

First big thing was we realised that it’s probably not going to be the money-maker that we thought it was. And then, the second big thing was that the best way to sell this is probably through the evergreen launch funnel. So we need to reactivate that and go through the process of reactivating that. Since last time, I’ve moved from Ontraport, where I was previously hosting this to Convert Kit. And to actually run this evergreen launch funnel was a bit harder in Convert Kit.

I had to word out how to do it and maybe I’ll do a tutorial on that in the future. That’s the point right now. It’s that, okay, it’s not going to be the money maker that we thought it was, but if I launch this evergreen launch funnel, then potentially, we can achieve our goal of $60,000 on this product each year. Instead of focusing on new content and driving more traffic to my blog, I’m instead going to focus on conversions. So converting the email subscribers more, getting more people to sign up for my email list and so forth.

So, yeah, we had a big realisation that the plans that I had weren’t moving us in the direction that we thought that we were going to get. I actually thought my saving grace would be Property Tools, which is $5 a month or $50 per year. And then when I looked at that and I’m looking at average churn for that, they say a churn of 5% is good and churn of 2%. Churn is the percentage of customers leaving each month. So churn of 5% is good. Churn of 2% is world class.

My churn, some months it was below 5%, some months it was over 5%, but basically, I think my churn is going to be around 5% or a little bit higher. For me to even achieve $50,000 per year from Property Tools, I would need 1,000 members and if I had 1,000 members, my churn at 5% would be 50 people a month. So that’s 50 people a month that I would need to replace and I’m getting about 10-15 new customers a month. So to go from 10 to 15 to 50 with Property Tools is probably not achievable.

I always thought, that long-term, Property Tools will be my saving grace and that it would be the best long-term generator of cash, but now that I understand churn, I understand that Property Tools will eventually cap it up and it’s going to be probably be nowhere near that $50,000 year example that we just talked about.

So that’s not going to be our saving grace. On Property Plus wasn’t moving where we wanted it to. So this week, I’m just working on converting On Property Listings back to On Property Plus, providing everything that I did previously in the past so people get access to courses, to calculators, to all that sort of stuff. So it’s back to being a membership site, rather than just an email that gets sent out to people. So I’m all the way back to where I started, which was back in September, a few months ago and I basically got the same strategy.

It was really good to realise this stuff, but also really painful to realise it as well. So I definitely recommend that you go through your stats, and then model forward and say, “Okay, how many units do I actually need to sell to achieve my goals and is that actually achievable?” Because for me, it wasn’t really achievable unless I make some drastic changes. And for me, that’s converting to this evergreen launch funnel. And then also focusing on how to increase my conversions as well.

By doing this, by doing the modelling, by understanding that this business probably isn’t going to be what I thought it was, actually gave me some really good action steps that I can take to improve the chances of me generating an above average income from my business.

Another thing that we decided as well is that On Property is probably never going to be the home run success. And so, for me to generate a full time income online above that $100,000 revenue that we talked about, I’m really going to need to start diversifying into other niches. Dreamy Dad was the start of that with talking about night terrors. But that’s probably not going to be a very big site so I need to explore other things that I can do. At the moment, I don’t have any ideas.

I am thinking about doing some tutorials on how to setup a website, how to sell your own products, that sort of stuff and make some money through affiliate commissions, but I haven’t done the research to understand how competitive is this market. Can I compete in this space? Is it even worth doing? At the moment, I’m not 100% sure. I’m just going to try and get On Property set up so that it’s ticking away. And then, I’ll try and find some other niches and see what I can do.
Big realisations this week. Big, big, big changes in my business. Kind of depressing to realise that what I’ve been working on for the last 2 years probably isn’t going to achieve the goals that I have for myself, but at least now I know and I can move forward and try and find a way to achieve my goals. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about, hey? We run our own business, we learn these things and we’re constantly adjusting to try and achieve our goals.

I hope that this encourages you to go and look at your product. Go and look at your business model and to say, well, is this actually going to help me achieve my goals or not? And then see what action you can do to actually move you towards your goals.

I’ll keep you guys updated with how I go moving forward. Different niches I decide to go in, etc. and how my business evolves. I hope this has been interesting. This has been a super important realisation for me. This will be a very important episode for me to look back on and to realise the mistakes that I made and to stay focused on business that will actually move me towards my goal. I hope that encourages you guys.

This episode is sponsored by Snappy Checkout, which is, I think, the best way to collect payments and to deliver your products. To collect payments for your products and I use it on all of my sites. I use it for every product that I sell. It’s got a great backend system to track all your sales and things like that, integrates with Stripe.

It’s really affordable as well. So go to pelt.co/checkout. So pelt.co/checkout to go and have a look at Snappy Checkout today and I definitely think it’s the best way to sell your own products. And I’m working with Mike, the owner there, to actually work on a one-click upgrade. So you sell a product and then they go to an upsell page and then with one click, they can be charged and get access to the upsell. So that’s something that we’re working on together.

Hopefully, we’ll have that together soon and I can start working on some upsells and things as well, which can just add a little bit to my business. So, again, go ahead, check it out. Go to pelt.co/checkout. That’s my affiliate link and it helps support this show and helps support what I think is an absolutely awesome product. So until next time, guys, stay positive.

After feeling like I had no idea how to move forward I have decided to refocus in on my niche of investing in positive cash flow properties.

I think I have worked out the solution to my problem. I am not 100% sure that I have worked out the solution, but at least I’ve got something to go with now. So if you have listened to the last episode or if you haven’t, go back and listen to it.

Basically, I am struggling at the moment because revenue has decreased in my business and I don’t know what I did wrong, and I don’t know what to do. So it has been laying very heavily on my mind as to what exactly I need to do to get myself out of this rut and to transform my business, get my business healthy again and keep it going.

On the bright side, I have spoken to Ben and he was saying that there are some good leads coming through his buyers’ agency. so in terms of cash flow I don’t think I have anything to stress about. But in terms of the longevity of my business that’s what I have been stressing about and I don’t really have a solution.

And then I was just thinking about it and thinking about it, talking to my wife about it, thinking about it some more and I came to the realization that I used to be the positive cash flow guy and everything I would talk about on my site would all be around investing in positive cash flow property. And then the issued that I had was that I had kind of tapped out that market in terms of organic traffic, in terms of search engine traffic and SEO because only so many things you can write about how to find positive cash flow property which is really the problem that I solved.

And so what I then did was I started to create content that was just about general property investing. So, I expanded my niche.

But I think the mistake that I made is that I should have still remain the positive cash flow guy and still focus on that niche but my free content is just more general in nature in order to reach a larger audience. So what I did and the mistake that I think I’ve made is I went from the positive cash flow guy to the property guy.

And being a property guy in a space of thousands of property advisors, buyers, agents, property marketers – all of these sorts of people, I’m just one in a sea of thousands. And so I think the mistake that I made and again I could be wrong on this and I could need to change my mind, but the mistake that I have made is I’ve gotten away from my core message which is investing in positive cash flow property and helping people invest in positive cash flow property.

And so I was thinking about my products. I was thinking about my offerings. And the way that I came upon – I guess, this discovery that I had lost my niche was I was wondering with this problem – Is it a product problem?” “Do my products suck and I need all new products? Is it a pricing problem? So my products are overpriced or under-priced or just not priced correctly? Or is it a marketing problem and I’m not marketing my products correctly? And I do feel like it’s a marketing problem – that I’m not marketing my products correctly.  Because I’ve got a lot of people that signed up for my services and my products and are happy with them.

Therefore, I’m pretty sure that it’s not the products. I’m pretty sure it’s not the pricing. I’m pretty sure that it is nothing. So I’m thinking along this train of thought and then came up with I guess the idea that I’d lost my niche.

As a result, I was rethinking through my products and what I have to offer and how I can position them and I only got back to being the positive cash flow guy or on On Property to be all about finding positive cash flow property. So what I’ll have is On Property listings which I’ll probably might even change the name to Positive Cash Flow Listings just to make it more obvious. I’m not 100% sure about that but I have the listing so that’s a service that I hope you will find real positive cash flow properties.

I’m going to merge my courses into one which I’m going to call Positive Cash Flow Boot Camp. This will be a three-part course. Therefore, the three courses that are selling as individual units will now become one boot camp. And I really feel like when you say boot camp it makes you think about an intensive something that you go through. You can chew on the content quickly. You build up the skills quickly. To me, that’s exactly what a boot camp is. Therefore, to take the three products that I have, packaged them together into positive cash flow boot camp I can show people how to find positive cash flow properties, how to research an area and also how to evaluate individual properties. So I’m confident with that.

Also, property tools I think I may need to put – not on the back burner but just not a huge focus on my site.  Nevertheless, there are property tools I’ll be marketing as tools to help you invest in positive cash flow properties. So I’ve got all of that same sort of products – a tiny bit of repackaging with the boot camp, but basically the same. I’m just changing the marketing around it and changing my focus back to my original niche which is helping people find positive cash flow properties.

I also wanted to record this episode quickly because I’ve listened to something and I don’t want to forget it. I was listening to The Fizzle Podcast which is great. It’s an awesome bunch of guys over there at Fizzle and they were talking about finding your true voice and there were two things that they’ve talked about in the podcast episodes. It’s episodes one and two of that podcast if you want to go check it out. But two things that they talked about that resonated with me around this topic of finding your voice, finding your niche – all of this sort of stuff. And one thing that really resonated with me that was really cool was when they were talking about choosing the niche or choosing the market that you go into.

Often we talk about passion. We talk about our calling. We talk about all of this sort of stuff and that can just be so overwhelming. I know I’ve been overwhelmed at times thinking about, “Am I passionate enough about this market, about this business to pursue it for the next five or 10 years? Am I passionate  enough? Do I feel like God is calling me to work in this business?” And I have really struggled with that.

But reframing it – they reframed it as, “Is this something you care about?” And by reframing it to building a business around things that I care about just makes it so much easier. Do I care about the property market and helping people invest in property? Absolutely. But then I also care about helping parents with night terrors and I care about a whole bunch of other things and I could add those into my business.

So by changing the language to what we’re passionate about, to what we care about has really inspired me in terms of choosing my niche, feeling comfortable with it. Even though it may not be my biggest passion in the world or my biggest calling in the world, it’s something that I care about, it’s something in an area that I want to have an impact and so that’s important.

And they also talked about finding your own voice and a lot of them have gone through this passage – I guess you would call it, of starting with very generic content or copying someone else that they had seen, some guru in the market or something like that and just not getting a lot of traction. But then, they found their own voice, start putting their personality into things and then things really took off. And they interviewed one of the guys – the guy who started a [inaudible7:28] fitness.

He was saying he was writing five articles a week for nine months and he got no traction or generic articles. And then what he decided to do was to move back to two articles a week but to really inject who he was – really inject his new newness and his passion and family guy references and style was references into his blog post and that’s when things started really taking off for him.

So when it comes to finding my voice, I guess what I want to do is find what is my voice, what makes me different in the property market. Because I’m not just a property guy, as I think if I’m just going to be a property guy then there’re other guys who are better. I therefore need to find my specific angle; my specific voice and I’ll be trying out a whole bunch of things. I’ll be trying out how to podcast. I’ll be trying out high quality videos with more editing. I’ll be trying out longer podcast episodes potentially when I’m doing rants and going on rants and things like that.  What I’m going to do is try a whole bunch of things to see what resonates with me, what resonates with my audience and to try and find, I guess the voice that I want to have in the market.

So I was feeling very stuck. I’m feeling a lot less stuck now. I’m passionate to get back to work tomorrow. I took Friday off so I’m going to be working on Sunday and I’m passionate to get back to redo my homepage to focus on positive cash flow property. I’m also excited too I guess, to redo my products, to put a much larger emphasis on finding and investing in positive cash flow properties and then moving forward into the free content things I’ll be creating.

Then I will be looking to find my voice, trying a few things and I guess, injecting up as much of whom I am into things. And so that may be like so much about these references. That may be my new newness that I have. That may be just me being quirky or whatever. I’m not 100% sure yet but I’ll go ahead and I’ll give it a try.

There were emails that I sent out and I’ll just give you a quick update. I did make four new sales for property tools so I got four new members for that. I think I got three new annual members, one monthly. So that was good. However, that was four emails sent out to like a database of 10,000 people. So it’s definitely not a massive conversion to make $155 on a database of 10,000 people over four emails.

Actually, as I’m recording this I just got a new customer – let’s open this up and see if it’s from property tools. That takes it from four to five. Actually, they have spent $99 so they must have bought a course – “How To Find Positive Cash Flow Properties Course.” As I said, I will be selling them individually again so take that $155 up to $255.

All of the way that I receive my payments and stuff, I use a product called Snappy Checkout which I have an affiliate relationship with which you guys can check out. They’re sponsoring this podcast in a way because they are an affiliate deal. They are something that I absolutely love and recommend. I’m looking to do a whole bunch of videos around how to use them and some of the cool things you can do with Snappy check out now that I’ve got this affiliate thing. So that’s another thing that I care about -helping people sell their products and helping people do things well. I think Snappy Checkout is an awesome tool and that’s something that I’ll consider creating some episodes about, some tutorials about.

So you can check out Snappy Checkout – just go to www.pelt.co/checkout  and you can go straight through to see that product. It’s absolutely awesome and will help you sell your products or subscriptions, memberships, all that good sort of stuff. So go ahead www.pelt.co/checkout  and I’ll get a small affiliate commission if you end up using them.

I absolutely appreciate you guys listening. I appreciate you taking the time and letting me vent what I’m feeling and the conclusions that I’ve come to. Hopefully as I get to work this week we’ll start to see some results and we’ll start move things forward.

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