Living The 2-Hour Workday: What Is A Travel Buffer & How Can You Create One
Towards the end of my trip around the world in 2008 I started to lose interest in seeing the typical tourist spots, even if the destinations were exotic countries or ancient monuments from cultures long passed.
After visiting many amazing buildings and sites in cities like Edinburgh, London, Brussels, Paris, Rome and Athens, I was feeling a little tired. Not to discount the wonders of human history, I was just missing home and seeing building after building was losing its magic.
I had plans to visit Egypt on the way home, but I decided to skip it as I didn’t want the pyramids to be “just another monument”, so I put them on the list of places to visit in the future when I recharge my travel batteries.
This is going to sound strange and perhaps small minded, but towards the end of my trip, especially in my last European stop Athens, one of the remaining motivations I had left to visit the sites was to simply say “I had been there” and capture a photo of the experience.
Throughout this time I was thinking about what I wanted to work on next. My focus was turning towards the concept of the 4-hour workweek, or my spin on it, the 2-hour workday (this to distance myself from Mr. Ferriss – Hi Tim! – and avoid copyright infringement and because I like working a couple of hours a day).
Regardless of what you call it, clearly there is huge interest in the lifestyle I lead, especially when you can travel and earn great money at the same time. The idea of coming back from 8 months of travel with more money in your bank account than you left with is so appealing as a concept, I just knew I wanted to tap into that idea and help more people experience it.
The idea for a new training program started to germinate. I still wanted to visit ancient monuments to snap my photo, so I’d have lots of proof of all the places I had visited for the product I was thinking about creating next. The current design of this blog, with rotating travel photos at the top, is very much in line with this idea.
As you can see, it was hard for me to put the Internet marketer’s hat down, even while visiting amazing places around the world.
Travel Without The Financial Headache
A Day In The Life Of An Internet Entrepreneur 2009 Edition
Back in August of 2005 I wrote an article that outlined what a typical day in my life was like. I linked to the post in my about page as I see it as a subject people are very interested in – what’s it like to live each day when you make money from the Internet?
You can read the original article here – A Day in the Life of an Internet Entrepreneur (August 2005)
I wrote that article after just over half a year of blogging and it represented what my life was like at the time. Now, four years later, things have changed and it’s time to update what a typical day in my life is like in August of 2009.
My Business Is Different
At the time I wrote the original day in the life piece, my main business and income source was BetterEdit.com, a proofreading service I started and built up over several years.
One of the major roles I performed to maintain the business was controlling the email communication system, connecting each proofreading project with an editor and providing customer support. This role was literally the main “work” in my life back then, taking several hours per day on average.
I eliminated the email management role when I hired an assistant, my good friend Angela, who to this day is still in charge of the day-to-day operations of BetterEdit and is also admin manager for my current business too. If you’ve ever sent me an email, chances are you have communicated with her.
I still have to deal with email of course, but the time pressure is no longer there and I only deal with emails that are about things only I can deal with. About 80% of my email is filtered away by Angela, meaning I never see it. She either responds with the appropriate template we have set up, or answers using her knowledge of my business and her supreme customer service skills.
If you want to know more about the systems we use to handle customer service, you can read the articles here
In 2007 I sold BetterEdit, leaving me to focus just on my blogging and information publishing enterprises. I also sold off all my non-blogging related websites, narrowing my focus to the aspects of my business I really wanted to grow.
I Don’t Do The Same Things Anymore
How To Make Money Teaching People How To Make Money
Teaching how to “make money online” is one of the most lucrative niches to be in as an Internet marketer, however most people who attempt to profit from this niche do not.
Some people consider making money by teaching how to make money essentially a scam. I mean if you know a system of how to make money, why not just use that system rather than sell it? That smells fishy right? Umm, no, I find that logic quite silly. Why not make money using your system AND teaching it.
So, why can a small minority of people earn big in the Internet marketing industry and the majority fail miserably? Is the make money online niche only full of scammers or those who just got lucky?
As someone who has been making money in this niche for years – and I’ve certainly climbed the ladder over time – I’m in a pretty good position to explain the subtle elements that people new to Internet marketing won’t see.
Where Most People Go Wrong
Let’s start with some common mistakes that people make when attempting to profit from teaching others how to make money…
How To Work Less and Earn More By Leveraging The Synergy Between People And Technology
Several years ago when I was managing BetterEdit, my proofreading company that I sold in 2007, I was knee deep learning from Rich Schefren, taking his Business Growth System course.
Rich launched that program on the back of his most successful report to date, the Internet Business Manifesto, which featured the now famous flow chart of what an Internet entrepreneur is supposed to do if he or she wants to succeed online. If you haven’t read the Manifesto, I strongly recommend you do so as soon as possible, it’s still one of the most crucial reports on Internet marketing as an entrepreneur ever written.
After reading the Manifesto it was clear I needed to make some changes, so I joined Rich’s coaching program and began going through it. The premise of what Rich teaches is the idea that no person can realistically ever get to the point where their business looks after them, rather than they look after their business, if you do everything by yourself. Rich took this idea a lot further than just outsourcing, and sees business as a machine that can be completely automated.
At that point in time BetterEdit was doing well and I did have Angela, my admin/customer service person looking after most of the day to day emailing for the business, which is the main workload to keep it going. This was great, but as a result of thinking so much about automation and studying Rich’s course, I was interested in possibly using technology to further systematize the operations and gain more leverage.
Using Software To Automate
BetterEdit has a very simple job flow process. A client submits a paper and makes payment, the admin person assigns the job and forwards the document to an editor. The editor completes the job and returns to the document to both the admin and the client. Various emails flow back and forth if there are problems, but generally that’s the basic process.
One of the key weaknesses of the system I had was no affiliate program. I saw huge potential if I could find a way to pay a commission out to websites that referred jobs to the business. Besides manually tracking things, which would be a nightmare, I just couldn’t do it.
The answer to the affiliate issue was to create some kind of software that would handle the job process, including payments, so we could automatically track affiliate referrals and credit commissions for jobs completed.
I had to be careful because between paying editors and admin, the margin on jobs wasn’t massive. This wasn’t like an information product where I could pay out 50% commissions, I’d have to be careful. This was another reason where I saw software as a help as it could reduce the amount of work admin did, meaning I could incentivize affiliates with a higher commission.
With a software system in place, including an affiliate program, I could get out there and recruit an army of websites to refer customers to my business. I liked this idea because by then I was getting pretty tired of heading out to campuses to put up posters to promote the service, although I was starting to outsource this job too (my mind was constantly thinking about how I could work less without reducing my income).
Realizing Your Concept Can Be Tough
It was clear that software could be the automation answer, so I scheduled a meeting with a local development firm and sat down with them to talk about my plan.
Are You Demonstrating Enough Proof?
If you’ve been reading my blog over the last few months you’ve seen me publish quite a few successful case study podcasts with my coaching students. Stories like Alborz Fallah the million dollar blogger, Leigh Peele making $4,500 a month in the fat loss niche (and recently another $11K in a relaunch), Miami Mitch attracting thousands of readers to his college football blog and Leslie the freebie guy who made $31K last year in the freebies market while still working a full time job as a teacher.
I love case studies as learning tools, and podcast interviews make great blog content, so I’d publish these regardless of whether the people involved are students of mine or not (most of my podcast archives are full of successful people who are not my students), however it makes smart business sense for me to showcase my best members because they offer the most powerful demonstration of proof I can present.
Proof, in my opinion, is the single most persuasive element of any marketing campaign, especially if you are an information publisher. I think it’s safe to say that most top Internet marketers agree with me simply by how they market their own products. There hasn’t been a single sales page or launch process that doesn’t involve people talking about how successful they became after studying the information the product offers.
Proof is so prevalent as a marketing hook today, that many successful launches are hinged on the back of just one success story. The power of the story – and the proof demonstrated within – is enough to convince hundreds and even thousands of people to purchase the product. If you don’t understand this and use proof to your advantage with your own marketing campaigns, you’re making a huge mistake.
Why Proof Works
There’s a very clear reason why proof is a powerful marketing tool. When making a purchasing decision, some of the big concerns a customer has is whether what is on offer is a scam, or won’t work for someone like them, or is more hype than substance. Regardless of the objection, proof is the best psychology we have to destroy it when it comes to purchasing decisions.
I don’t really need to explain this to you, you already understand and experience proof. Most of the new product buying decisions you make today, especially online, occur usually because you have some kind of proof that it’s a good product. The proof may simply be a friend or trusted expert recommendation, like for example me talking about how amazing AWeber has been for my business and showing how I use it to build profitable email lists.
What Kind Of Proof Do You Need?
Proof comes in many shapes and forms. It can be something simple, like a text testimonial from a previous customer, or even just a comment left to a blog post. You can take it further by recording a video interview, or doing full blown case study podcasts as I do.
In general there are two kinds of proof that are prevalent in most information product marketing campaigns, they are –
