I want to share with you my master plan. Why I do what I do and what my end goal is.
How I live my life.
My goal has always been the same. I am a great believer of that you ‘work to live’ and DO NOT ‘live to work’. Unfortunately as we progress through school and eventually end up at work it sometimes becomes hard to imagine not working, and thus life becomes work and we slip into the mindset of ‘living to work’.
This is not a post about life goals, but I just want to share how I approach things.
I have a wife and a daughter and I want to spend as much time as physically possible with them. I don’t want to get up and go to work and then spend all day at work only to come home when my daughter is going to bed. So what happens now is that I get up with my daughter, I spend 1hr to 2hrs in the morning with her playing and eating. I then come to my co-working space for around 9am and work here until around 11:30am.
I then head home again to see (and eat with) my wife and daughter until around 1:30pm, and then I come back to my co-working space and work until around 4pm. I head home again to spend another 3hrs or so with my family until my daughter goes to sleep. I then normally eat and watch TV with my wife for the rest of the evening. Weekends are 100% family time too, definitely no work.
For me even this is not enough time with my family and ideally I’d spend much more time at home with them, but unfortunately I do need to do some work and earn some money.
How I earn my money.
So hopefully you can see that for me it is not all about the money, as long as I earn enough to live then I am happy. I am lucky enough to be at a level now that I can spend a fair amount of time with my family. I do this by earning 100% of my income online via affiliate websites, my ECommerce (Amazon) business, and one or two other online projects that I work on.
The main thing with all of my online businesses are that they essentially run themselves after the initial setup phase. I need to maintain things and do some work, hence why I come to my co-working space each week day, but really they do not take that much maintenance and the majority of my work is to grow these online properties and also to establish new ones.
Affiliate websites.
I run around 10 to 15 websites, a lot of these generate money by promoting other peoples products and earning commissions when sales are made. These are called affiliate websites.
If you’re interested in starting out online and earning some money then I recommend starting with affiliate websites.
I run a course showing people how to do this, but I also have some free videos all about it. In one of my free videos I set up a brand new Amazon affiliate website from scratch and this website now attracts 100 people per day and made £120+ in March 2016 alone. Not bad for something I just setup from scratch.
Along with my affiliate websites I have some other websites that make money through lead generation and advertising, but essentially they work the same way as the affiliate websites but instead of flowing people through to other companies websites to buy something they collect email leads or show advertising.
Physical product sales.
My other major project/business is my physical products brand that is currently selling 100% on Amazon.co.uk. I started this last year and it is currently turning over around £3000 to £4000 a month. Around 30% to 40% of this is profit, so lets say £1000 to £1600 profit per month.
This new physical products business is selling just one product [at the time of writing – April 2016]. I have recently raised the sale price of this product to slow sales because I am waiting for new stock to be manufactured and shipped, which is good and bad in equal measures.
One day last month I sold 25 units at a price of £12.99, which is £325 worth of product with a profit of around £120. I bumped the price to £16.99 and sold 6 units the next day because I needed to slow sales to avoid running out of stock. So things are going well and I am very pleased with this business.
My short-term goal is to get to £10,000 turnover per month with at least £3000 profit. Once I reach this level I will look to get extra cash into the business to accelerate profits. My next major goal is £1000,000 per year [look out for dedicated posts about this soon]. This is a huge jump but a realistic target.
If I can maintain 25 sales per day at £12.99 per unit this will get me very cost to my £10,000/month target. However, to increase my chances I have four new products in production to take my product range to five. If my new products sell 2 or 3 units per day I should easily reach this £10,000/month level. I’ll update you on this.
I have an immediate decision to make with my new products (plus re-stocking of my initial product). Normally I ship by sea from China to the UK Amazon warehouses, but this takes about a month. My other option is to use air freight. This will cut delivery time to about one week, saving me three weeks in transit. I does however cost over twice as much to ship by air compared to by sea.
Since my stock levels are running low I am almost certain I will use air freight this time, but I will re-order more products almost immediately so I can ship the next batch.
Online courses.
My third main focus is my course that shows people how to set up their own affiliate website. The course is up and running and people are following it. If you are one of these people thank you and remember to use the Community to get help and advice.
Click here to learn more about this course.
To promote this course I am using Google Adwords, Google’s advertising platform. I have used Adwords before and it was an expensive lesson, but his time I researched a lot before I got into it so I could optimise what I did as much as possible. There is of course still a lot that you learn on the job [spending your own money] but this time I went into it with my eyes fully open.
I identified keyword phrases that I wanted to target [e.g. ‘how to make an affiliate website’], I set up a campaign within Adwords and some Ad Groups, along with individual Ads. I spent some money and looked at my data. I refined my keywords, Ad Groups, and individual Ads and kept refining them until I was getting better click-through-rates and spending less per click. This is a continuous process and it is ongoing.
I have also improved the landing pages people end up on when they click on one of my ads in Google. I have gone as far as creating several landing pages that are each specifically linked to different adds in an attempt to increase conversions. This seems to be working. A conversion is someone entering their email address and not a paying course sign up.
The final stage in this process is following up with people who enter their email address to see if I can get them interested in the course. Some people are not interested and would rather figure it out themselves, and this is absolutely fine. In fact this is how I got started many years ago. But some people want to follow a proven structured path, and it is these people who will be interested in the course.
So this is my process, and it is early days but those who have taken the course are happy and that is all I can ask.
OK, there you have it. My Master Plan.
Summary.
While I talk about relatively big numbers, remember my major goal with my ECommerce brand is to hit £1000,000 in sales, my primary focus is about living my life and not working all the time. If I only ever earn enough money to live (i.e. pay the bills etc.) but spend lots and lots of time with my family then I’m happy.
Different people have different goals but I think you need to be happy and you need to understand what is important to you.
I just wanted to share more about myself here because this website is about me and what I do. I won’t publish too much personal stuff and most things I post on here will be directly related to my online businesses and doing stuff involving software and the internet. Hopefully you have found this post interesting though.
Have a great day
Neil
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