Recently, a reader commented on a post I wrote called “How I Built and Sold a Blog Valued at Over $200 a Post.”

I read this post when it came out 5 months ago, but reading it now I realize that I’m in a different place mentally and feel as though I had never read it to begin with.

For example, I was totally floored by your plan of write out 10-20 headlines, record a shit-ton of audio, schedule it out for 3 months. HOLY CRAP! I’m doing this.

I couldn’t help but think of NerdFitness.com when reading the tips on this. Main question: how to get fit. Steve’s approach: every nerdy thing he can write about to drive that point home.

I know the stuff I’m passionate about but trying to figure out what the commercial problem is seems to be my weakness.

What tips do you have (or where can you point me) regarding how to clearly identify the topic that you apply the “should I start a blog” questions to?

How does one get a good sense for what is commercial? It’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot this week. Recently, I put out an open call to review blog concepts in the following format:

What problem do you solve? / From what fresh angle do you solve it from?

I would write back “win” or “lose” depending on what I thought were their chances of basic commercial success. By “basic commercial success” I’d say a blog concept capable of generating 40K+ of personal income for the owner within the first 2-3 years.

I’ve received well over 50 email inquires, probably close to 100. There were a few winners, but the vast majority of the concepts I received were dead on arrival. People who are passionate about writing, blogging, creativity, and personal freedom aren’t necessarily interested in being business hustlers. The good news: this business stuff doesn’t need to be that tough.

I’m incredibly bullish on the opportunity for online publishers. There has never been a better time to start a blog or a micro-publishing business. Don’t take my word for it, Rob Walling said it himself.

From the 50+ emails that I reviewed, there were a few common problems.

Problem: not sure who is making money and how.

It was common that the prospective blogger would suggest a concept similar to a mildly popular blog. If for modesty or lack of confidence, they’d suggest that they’d take a similar approach with less ambitious content, at least to start. People thought they couldn’t produce certain types of expert content without having an audience. Unless you are going to write about building audiences (please don’t), or making money online (please don’t), this shouldn’t be a problem.

I would suggest to all aspiring bloggers to take precedent case analysis seriously. Ask online publishers: how much money do you make? I’m serious. Before I get in to any market, my first step is to figure out how much the players are pulling down. If they won’t tell you, do your best to reverse engineer it. If some blogger is pulling in 15K off a huge audience built up over 3 years of relentless publishing, I would focus on learning from their example rather than copying it.

Problem: relying heavily on “cult of personality” business models. 

For years social web marketers have been preaching this idea of “you need to become the trusted expert” and that seems to have been translated into “get tons of attention by any means possible.” Bloggers are better off writing as if they would never be recognized. Let your content speak for itself. Focus on building products, services, and posts that are truly useful to people. Any fame status you get on top of that will be gravy. Fame built on the delivery of successful products that people love is more sustainable than endless ‘look at me’ hype-cycles.

If you already have a ton of credibility because of previous accomplishments, this sort of thinking might not apply to you.

Having a commercial conversation isn’t any harder than having the “audience/authority” conversation– it’s just a different type. Here’s an example of how to have a more commercial type of conversation:

4 basics elements of a “buy now” blog.

The way to get good at identifying commercial opportunities is to start framing them up on a regular basis. It’s been well established that blogs aren’t products in and of themselves, but excellent marketing channels to products. Forget about ads and affiliate links, that stuff isn’t going get you there. You’ll want to start doing the product math on day one. Anytime a potential blog topic comes across your desk, immediately start breaking down the potential products you could sell on such a blog.

1. Have a clear value proposition.

This is the part we’ve already discussed– focus in on exactly what problem do you solve and from what fresh perspective you solve it. For these points I’ll use my old Outsourcing to the Philippines blog as an example, as well as our new site Tropical Work Force, which I believe could easily make a dedicated individual a full time living if they wanted to.

What problem do you solve? / What fresh angle do you solve it from?

• OutsourcetothePhilippines.com – How do I find low cost virtual employees for my business? / By moving your business to the Philippines or hiring VAs from there.
• TropicalWorkForce.com – How do I learn how to be a location independent entrepreneur? and How do I get passionate, dedicated team members and interns affordably? / By connecting with other entrepreneurial types who believe in the mentorship/apprentice model of learning. 

2. Identify an expensive product you can sell from day one.

If I quit my job, will I be able to make enough money from my internet business? If I go to a good law school, will I make a lot of money? If I relocate to Thailand to set up niche sites, will I ever be successful?

The way I answer these questions is by seeking out scripts. What have I heard about people who move to Thailand? What about those folks who go to law school?

Most of my life, I relied on hand-me-down scripts from TV, reference books, and friends and family– ya know, they saw a TV show, or heard the newscaster, or talked to so and so at the party.

Life scripts that had predictable, good outcomes seemed miserable. “Work this job for 20 years.” “Go to law school and be a lawyer.” The life scripts that seemed more tolerable had dismal outcomes. “Write music and hustle for a record deal.” “Write your book but don’t think you’ll make money from it.” “Be a teacher but never get paid.” And so on.

I was struck by this thought as I was reading Megan’s wonderful blog. She spent a year meeting with 52 strangers (52 cups of coffee) who she identified as successful:

“I realized… nobody’s life went according to plan… [that understanding] leaves you with two choices: let the fear of the unknown overwhelm you or embrace the uncertainty…” [source]

And it’s difficult to imagine that Megan could have gone on such a journey without the blogosphere. It’s the same quest each of us can go on right now. We are a few clicks away from a story that that could change the way we live.

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I can still remember one script, offerred to me by a blogger, that changed the direction of my life. To understand how their message effected me, I need to warp you back to 2008.

I spent a big part of that year in Vietnam. It was the first time I was an expat, and it was one of the best years of my life. I helped set up an office and official company. I visited remote tin mines. I hired two software developers. I participated in one of the world’s great eating cultures. I rode my motorbike through the Mekong delta and into Cambodia. I lived out of hotels for weeks at a time.

I had no job or alarm clock– and neither did any of my friends. We spent our days building opportunities and relationships. I had found my ideal lifestyle. 

View from my apartment in Saigon.

Then in late 2008, the American economy took a huge hit, and along with it, the small stipend from investors that justified our little offshore operation. With no real opportunities in hand that didn’t require a wheelbarrow of cash, I headed back to San Diego to talk things over with Ian.

Things were tight. We had just enough cash at the end of the month to pay Ian, and our newly hired sales representative. We had every penny invested in growing the company. Under these conditions, there was no way I could justify my nascent travel habit.

And so I settled in to what would be the most miserable and frustrating few months of my (short!) entrepreneurial career. 2009 was probably the most emotionally challenging year in my career. Everything was moving slower than my expectations. I was having difficulty imagining making any significant money from our business. I was having second thoughts on how I was spending my time. If our company wasn’t growing, why spend my time on it?

*  *  *

Riding my motorbike in the central highlands of Vietnam.

In the evenings, my routine was to load up my iPhone with a bunch of podcasts and take a long walk. On April 5th, 2009 one of my favorite podcasts off all time, Internet Business Mastery (which I listened to obsessively– thanks Sterling and Jay!), featured a guy named John Jonas.

John had a message, and he sold it hard. He said: “Everything you know about outsourcing is dead wrong.”

What he said hit me. I’m sure Mr. Jonas didn’t know this, but I had just gotten ripped off by some jerk developer on Craiglist, had been paying too much for a few mediocre developers in Vietnam (who could barely speak English!), and to top it all off, I had recently pulled the plug on a disastrous 20K software debacle I contracted on Elance to an Indian development firm.

I knew we needed a great group of people to join us in order to grow, but the cash wasn’t there.

“The Philippines is the best place in the world to hire full time English speaking staff to grow your business.” 

You probably know the key reasons John would have cited. The great English. The enthusiasm Filipinos had for remote work positions. And all sorts of other things that can be true about Filipinos.

And then he said something like:

“In the Philippines you can hire a full time, college educated, English speaking employee for $300 a month.” 

And that’s about when it clicked. I could do that.

When I got home, I turned on my computer and started looking for our first English speaking employee for $300 a month. A few months later, I booked a ticket to the Philippines, a country I knew nothing about.

*  *  *

Here’s an email I found on my computer, dated two months after I heard the podcast:

To: Rob [omitted] ::: From: Dan Andrews ::: Date: Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 1:12 PM

Rob– Wanted to check in and see what’s new… I’m still plugging away at a bunch of websites. I’m going to start recording a podcast starting tomorrow. I’m really excited about that– just a way to get thoughts out and reflect in a positive way without surfing the net or something dumb. Also, I hired a full time virtual assistant and an employee here in California. I’m not sure how its going to work out…

Turns out the Philippines is the true hotspot now for tech outsourcing… I’ve got three guys there testing on a variety of projects and I’m going to be pulling together an office to launch a shit ton of websites. How’s Cebu City sound to you?

September.

xoDan

*  *  *

A Map of DCers in South East Asia. All the Bali Pegs are Stacked on Top of Each Other! Thailand and the Philippines are Busy

A few months after moving to the Philippines, I bought OutsourcetothePhilippines. The blog was simple. My goal was to share what I was learning about the opportunities for business and adventure in the Philippines.

Thanks to the blog, every month I met more and more of you stepping off the plane.

I couldn’t find anyone else like me in the country, save for Chris Ducker and a few others. At the time, I would have sworn to you that I was the only western internet marketer in the Philippines under 30 years old (I would have been wrong!).

I’m sure Chris Ducker, myself, and a handful of other bloggers have helped bring a bunch of high quality entrepreneurial jobs to the Philippines. No question we’ve seen seen an influx of talented Western entrepreneurs. I couldn’t take a guess at the number, but I’m proud of what’s going on, and I think we’ve made a positive impact.

*  *  *

I’ve always believed many of the most action-oriented among you found us first through the outsourcing blog. That makes sense. Busy entrepreneurs are looking for real answers.

Simple blogs, written from experience, can inspire people to move their families, hire 100′s of people, and change their life script forever.

In this case, some guy said “everything you know about outsourcing is wrong… and I know what you can do about it.”

And he was right.

Cheers,

Dan

PS, I own Twitter.
PPS, if you’d like to sign up for my private mailing list, just put your email address in to the form below:

Today I received an email from reader Chad:

I read your Q&A post. Thanks for taking the time to really think about our questions and giving us your honest answers. If you’re taking in suggestions for your next blog post, I have one for you. There are so many SEO tips from so-called “experts” and pretty much all of them talk like theirs is the most effective way. I don’t know who to believe anymore! Since I trust you, what are some SEO techniques you used that worked? Thanks and great job Dan! Your content means a lot to aspiring entrepreneurs like myself. - Chad - TuringanDesigns.com

Thanks Chad. Although nobody really thinks I know what I’m talking about when it comes to SEO (for good reason!), it has played a central role in my business for the last 4 years. I currently have 2 smart guys who work for us full time doing SEO and SEM. That’s the best qualification I’ve got. Even if my approaches are sub-par, they are creating a return on investment.

There are a bunch of reasons why SEO talk is confusing. It’s tough to isolate variables and duplicate conditions on the web. I often find legit experts having to speculate about the cause of ranking changes. Even at the top level there is no shortage of shoulder shrugging.

I don’t read much about SEO anymore so I can’t suggest many good resources. The best way to learn is to have a live site that you are trying to rank. If you don’t have a site you are trying to rank, don’t bother learning SEO. Once you get a site and identify a product, make sure they are worth ranking for (love the product and make sure it’s expensive!), because it’s probably going to take you a while.

You should know that I don’t play in any premium niches. I’ve never attempted to rank for weight loss, make money online, gambling, or similar. My knowledge is ranking for middle-competition industrial and consumer niches.

In the list below, I was careful to only discuss approaches that have actually made us money. My tactics might not be cutting edge, “correct,” or even applicable to your business. They just worked, and hopefully you can learn something from that.

1) Not starting niche businesses on SEO opportunities.

I hear a surprising amont of people, both in blogs and in person, talk about starting a business based on keyword research alone. I have no doubt it works on occasion, but I wouldn’t adopt this strategy. Take the opposite approach– identify a compelling product or service that you feel you can sell, and then search for clever ways to get exposure for it in the search engines. This way is more likely to succeed in my experience. Product conception first, keyword research second.

If you find yourself drawn to identifying profitable, undervalued, or underserved key term markets, you should consider building a business that does that alone (see: AdsenseFlippers.com). SEO is a long term battle fought on many fronts. You’ll want a compelling reason to keep at it.

I have never selected to get in to a business solely because it was an attractive key term market. We’ve always had some other reason to be in the marketplace. Generally, we’ve thought that we could provide better products or services. We have, however, disqualified many business opportunities due to intense search competition.

2) Knowing the basics well and working hard.

I often point people to SEOMoz’s guide for beginners. There’s a bunch of basic concepts you need to have a handle on. You don’t want to be lost when people are tossing around “PR,” “SEPRs,” “301s,” “SEM,” “anchor text,” and “orphan pages.” If you know the fundamentals, and you work a lot, you’ll find winners.

Try focusing on the aspects of SEO work that you excel at. Dave Huss is great at analytics, so he focuses a lot of energy on buying traffic to test potential key term markets. David Hehenberger excels at site technology and infrastructure. He builds sites fast and can scale whole networks in a few weeks. I was always good at generating content, so I would focus on viral startegies and long-tail spreadfire approaches. No need to do it all, there’s plenty of opportunities where your talents are.

3) Buying links.

Buying links works really well. It’s also dangerous. All the more reason to love it! People have been telling me this for years and we never got in to it. It’s tough to get up to speed because people don’t want to talk about it much. I don’t blame them. There is a lot of risk here.

In the past we only bought links in benign ways– like paying people to write a bunch of articles and then posting them to useless directories.

The hard part of buying links is figuring out how and where to buy them from, and managing your risk when you do so. You probably don’t want to take one of your more established sites and start pumping a bunch of paid links towards it. I’m just learning about buying links and I don’t want to get in too much hot water by saying stuff that could hurt others. If you want to know more or you do this stuff, best to join us in the private forums or email me.

4) Creating sticky content for big sites.

Back in the day, Ian and I made a PDF guide with some really cool photos, lots of jokes, and useful information for a huge blog in the auto industry. When they published our PDF guide, it ended up getting re-blogged over 40 times. Those links from years ago continue to prop up some of our money generating sites.

5) Create tons of content and a huge site footprint.

A few years ago I took a site that was getting 400 unique visitors a month, and scaled it up to 10,000 monthly uniques in about a year. It wasn’t an interesting topic either. I took a look at my business partner’s assets. They had a great portfolio of proprietary photography. I think they had about 1000+ unique images.

I decided we’d take a spreadfire approach. Our site would have a huge footprint and pick up traffic from a broad range of searches. I made sure we used a site platform that scaled well– in this case Drupal. I was looking to diversify the photos and text descriptions to as many 3-4 word key phrases as possible. I didn’t bother to do research, there were too many. I just came up with phrases off the top of my head.

I often used the same photo 3-4 times, sometimes slightly alter it (crop, etc), and change the header tags, IMG tags, and body text. Within a few months a site that had 25 pages had 1500. The resulting traffic was easily worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the company. I also made sure I put up new content on our sites weekly going forward, something Google continues to reward.

Another thing– on your money pages, all things being equal, the more content the merrier. Put 2,000+ word articles on the pages you want to rank. Make them awesome. Link to the best stuff. Have great pictures, research, and clear copy. It works!

6) Avoiding SEO guys and building in-house competence.

Those are the guys who are confusing you. I’m all about hiring SEO services. Supremacy SEO, Build my Rank, SEOMoz premium, and many others– I’ve probably bought, used, and benefitted from over 40 premium SEO services and tools (a post for another day!).

It’s important that the understanding of how your products get noticed by the market is knowledge that is baked into the fabric of your company. It’s even more important because the knowledge you pick up via your SEO efforts should define your product roadmap. If you let it to the consultants, they are less likely to make those kinds of critical connections.

7) Focusing on the non-organic parts of the search results.

If you take a look above the fold at many SERPs these days, you’ll see images, videos, Adwords, maps, products, and pretty much anything but organic rankings. We spend a ton of our energy trying to show up there. Going for #1 is great, but when you are getting started, go for everything. Get aggressive about Youtube videos, Google product feeds, Adwords (be careful!), Google Maps, Places, and anything else you can get your hands on.

We have a handful of sites that make good money that don’t show up anywhere on the first page of Google. They make money because we’ve got good products, good on-site content, and a ton of hustle. Someday we’ll get to the first page (maybe with the help of some experts!), and when we do, it’ll all be gravy.

Cheers,

Dan

PS, if you’d like to get on my private mailing list, just put your email address in the form below.

We are accepting applications for an internship at our house in Bali until January 30th.

This weekend I asked the readers on the TMBA mailing list if I could help them out with any business questions. To those of you who asked the questions below, I’m happy to continue the discussion with further resources, links, and perspectives in the public comments. The answers provided are my preliminary thoughts on each issue. Since there were so many questions, I had to work fast. I would love to go more in-depth with those of you who are interested.

For those of you curious about the mailing list, I send out 1 or 2 emails a week. They are generally short. If you’d like to join us you can put your email address in the sidebar. As a bonus for signing up, you’ll get a download link for our first 50 podcasts.

To all the new readers: our best business advice is in the Lifestyle Business Podcast. So far we’ve recorded 87 shows. 108 people have said “5 stars!” on our iTunes reviews page. We release new episodes Thursday mornings, 8AM, EST.

Since this post is long, I’ve started with a word cluster that highlights some of the topics. I answered all of the questions like I know what I’m talking about, even though sometimes I just don’t. Take it or leave it! My only internationally recognized certification is a California state driver’s license.

Hong Kong incorporations ::: cheap ways to buy backlinks ::: how to beat analysis paralysis ::: why you should fire your SEO guy ::: how to start paid-for communities ::: what to do about extreme school debt ::: how to chose products for your e-commerce store ::: our favorite competitive research tools ::: outsourcing in the Philippines ::: how to be a freelancer like a boss ::: my sex life ::: the future of humanity ::: and more…

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Getting lost in Luzon, Philippines.

How easy will it be to find people who read, write, and speak English fluently in the Philippines? I’m looking for people to help me write content for my sites. – Elle

The Philippines is the second largest English speaking country in the world– around 100 million English speakers. The Philippines is also a poor place. There aren’t a lot of great opportunities for the constant flow of new graduates. If you are looking for content writers, the Philippines is a good place to start. As your quality needs go up, so will the costs. Finding high quality, researched content in the Philippines is harder than getting it from expats or travelers who want to sustain their living overseas. I order all of my content (about $800 dollars a month) through expats I’ve found on the TropicalWorkForce.com board under “services.”

Filipino workers, in general, have quality problems that can be difficult to deal with if you aren’t in-country, or if your protocols aren’t extremely detailed. There are tons of exceptions to this– I have 2 full-time Filipinos on my staff and they are amazing (hey guys!). I’m sure even my Filipino team members would agree that finding workers who consistently take initiative can be difficult. I know a lot of entrepreneurs who moved to the Philippines to hire content writers and ended up hiring contractors instead. Forget about the Philippines– anywhere in the world it’s difficult to put somebody in a chair and ask them to write SEO content for 8 hours everyday. Consider buying content in bulk from contractors or Odesk, Fiverr, or TropicalWorkForce. If you want to set up a shop with a bunch of agents at a low price, the Philippines is still probably the best place int the world to do it.

Recently I have finished college and started my own business (I have an Online Marketing Agency). But, I’m not living the four hour work week. I’m working 10+ hours a day and I’m not satisfied with my income for that much work at all. I’m still trying to figure out what to do and how to live FHWW in Bali – J.

It sounds like you are living the 4 hour work week lifestyle exactly! It often goes unnoticed that the book starts with our hero, Mr. Ferriss, stressed out to the point of breakdown.

At the time, Tim was reportedly running a business that generated 40K a month. How would one duplicate such a feat? Working 12 hours a day might not be a bad strategy. Serve your clients for 10 hours, and then with the extra two start “productizing” the most valuable part of your service. Do your clients love your SEO protocol? Make it a product. When you start making 2K a month, take 1K of it and hire somebody. Live with them in a cheap house in Bali or Northern Thailand and make it happen. That’s my 4HWW dream.

If you are interested in many things in life for example, entrepreneurship, online marketing, sport, personal development, communication, meditation, health, and you are passionate about all these topics, should you blog about all of them, or would it be smarter to write specific content for specific audience? What is the most valuable knowledge to have these days? - Marko Kvesic

The most valuable skill set is being able to create results– you could also say “affecting change.” Popular approaches to creating results are writing code, making investments, building companies, writing, and speaking well. I see big opportunities in the coming decade in software development skills (especially for mobile platforms), expatriate services, offshore incorporations, wealth management, human longevity, health by data, and genetics. In the next 10 years a lot of the mysticism that surrounds ‘whats good for you’ will be replaced by data. See QuantifiedSelf.com as an example.

Most important of all– you need to chose something to do. Last year I was recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on outsourcing to the Philippines. There were 100′s of people who knew more than me, but I was telling the story and so I got the recognition. I didn’t do anything special but invest my time in something I thought was going to be big. If you are just starting and writing about “stuff in my brain” you are diluting your message, and hurting your chances of making a substantial difference for people.

I’m having trouble coming up with a niche market and how to structure my business. I think the endless possibilities has me stymied.  Do you have any suggestions on how to narrow things down? I would like for someone to just tell me what business would be good and how I should structure it. - Scott

Do you currently have a job? If so, your employer has already identified some role in which you provide a ton of value to a marketplace. Is there something better or complimentary you could provide to your marketplace?

If your response is “but I hate my job!” quit it and find a better one. If you can’t get a job you enjoy, with somebody you respect, you probably can’t start a successful business. The former is way easier than the latter.

I have a vague ambition of setting out on my own but am having some trouble distilling all of the available advice and information into a comprehensive plan of action.  My question is, what specific skills do you consider absolutely invaluable to the fledgling online entrepreneur?  If you were me (rudderless 26 year-old, but thinks he can hack it), what are the first things you would teach yourself? - John

“Vague ambition” is where I’d start. That won’t work. You can’t lead people, build businesses, and compel customers if you don’t even know why you care yourself. If you don’t care, they won’t care. Guaranteed.

You need the eye of the tiger. The eye of the tiger is the feeling you get on mile 7 of a 10 mile run– when you are running faster than you were on mile 2. The eye of the tiger is desire strong enough to overcome petty, niggling fears.

Get good at moving around the web– really fast– for 10 hours a day. Develop a huge tolerance for long work days. Get good at making decisions on limited information. Do immense amounts of stuff. Once you’ve got something up on the web, you’ll have specific problems you’ll need to solve. You just need one website that has a “buy-now” button on it. Once you have that you’ll stop asking “what skills do I need” and start asking “how do I get more people to click on this damn button.” That’s a much better question to ask. People will start giving you concrete feedback rather than a line off self help stuff about the eye of the tiger!

I have the opportunity in April to 1) Take 9-weeks out in Asia & work on info products (like this one I’m working on), 2) Take 9-weeks out in Asia & work on specs / designs for an AirPlay stereo system project I’d like to launch (potentially go to Shenzen to work with manufacturers, source parts), 3) Open an office for my Dad’s company (based in the UK) in Atlanta (where I now live) – this would essentially be a franchise reporting to the UK office. Which one would you choose? - Liam

For me it would be A. Easy call. Live in Asia and work on info products? Super fun. I’d be careful though. Your chances of success and excitement are hugely important to your analysis. Option A, for example, could be the most difficult to succeed with. People seem to suck at doing information products well. On the surface option C seems to be a surer bet because you’d be leveraging a successful model. It sounds like a drag, but I don’t know. I’d chose A because I like to write, read, and live in Asia. I also don’t care about making money, or being a poor loser who can’t even afford a plane ticket home. Who would want one!?

I noticed in your “14 things” post a few days back that Ian is “cold calling customers” for your ventures. Is there a process for that? I know: pick up the damn phone and call! I can do that. What I don’t know is who / what / where / how. Other than just picking up the phone and babbling. - Todd (& Chad)

Pick up a copy of Chet Holme’s Ultimate Sales Machine– it’s universality adored by entrepreneurs. There’s a lot of strategies we’ve used to pull together target lists in the past, but most of them boil down to this: go out and find an ideal traget by surfing the web or identifying a call sequence. How do you do it? Do you find the email convention at a company? Are you searching for PDFs on their public servers? (you can do this by doing a SITE:theirdomain.com search) of their website?  Are you just scraping the contact email address at the bottom of certain kinds of websites?

Once you’ve proven a process for identifying a lead, document it in detail. Then run off to Elance.com with your process, and hire somebody at a base rate to bring you a set # of leads. Try to negotiate the price per lead, not a per-hour rate.

The best way to get information about your market is to start calling up anyone involved in the industry. Your competition, your targets, people who you think might be interested–  anybody. When you get them on the horn, ask for their advice. Tell them you are new and just learning the basics of the industry. What would they suggest? What problems do they need solved? Take a genuine interest in their ideas and you’ll be blown away at how nobody else is. If you aren’t yet sure what your competitive advantage is going to be in your marketplace, start out with “listening” and “caring.”

Although the premier destination in the world for English speaking call center agents, the best stuff in the Philippines doesn't have anything to do with outsourcing.

I’m having some difficulty finding a good company to outsource the design portion of website construction to. That is a company that could do all the photoshop/css portion of my business for me. How do you go about finding good companies to cheaply do this kind of work? – Ben

Design is overrated for small bootstrapped start-ups. Don’t worry about rocking some really basic stuff like a premium WordPress theme, or a text logo generated in a word processor. Once you get some cash flowing you can invest it in design.

If you want one-off type of design work, find some great websites you adore and check the footer for a design studio or email the owner for the contact information of the designer.

Unless you are consistently pumping out new designs, it’s tough to lower your costs when working with a quality designer. You are better off checking out services like 99Designs.com or Elogocontest.com where you can crowdsource your design projects to a large group of designers for a few hundred bucks.

I have a product called my Dog Stinks Odor Eliminator spray. My store is hosted at Volusion.com, but I am thinking of moving it over to Amazon so that I can put the products on Amazon.com and possibly use their fulfillment services down the road. My challenge is that Amazon says that I need UPC codes for my products and it looks like about a $2,400 investment for 4 UPC codes for my 2 products in 2 different sizes. Do you think the move to Amazon is a wise one? I am doing it in hopes of more traffic. Is there a work around on this UPC code issue or am I relegated to buying a code from the one provider on the planet lucky enough to get the monopoly gig for providing UPC codes ( how do I get that gig?) - Chris

I wouldn’t move your entire business on to the Amazon platform. My experience is purely anecdotal. Everyone I know who joined Amazon (2 people) didn’t succeed, and the people I know trying to out-maneuver them (me and many others) seem to still be in the game. That’s terribly unscientific, but why not just test a new store out there rather than moving your whole operation to their platform?

Regarding UPC codes, I’m not sure where you are getting that cost figure. We’ve bought them as low as $10 bucks a pop. A little Googling should find a decent re-seller of UPC codes.

I don’t know anything about Volusion.com, but if you are having some issues there check out Shopify.com. I use it and it’s great.

You might also think about your product choice. If you need huge traffic to make money, it could be a bad product choice altogether. It might make sense to start sourcing more expensive products in the same category. If you need huge distribution to make your business feasible, it’s probably better to talk to online re-sellers of pet products than to Amazon. If you can’t get traction from them, a move to Amazon isn’t likely to have a bigger impact.

Generalize or specialize? Should I go very deep in one tiny niche, or should I try to do a little of everything and keep my options open? - Peter

First off, these aren’t mutually exclusive options. The #1 problem people face in niche selection is not specializing enough. People flinch when they are about to commit to being an “Adwords consultant for e-commerce store owners” and instead become an “online marketing consultant.” Sure, there are technically more opportunities for an “online marketing consultant” but they are more expensive to find and convert.

That’s why broad branding only works for people with huge bankrolls, credibility, or audiences. If you made a million by the time you were 25, go ahead and teach people how to do the same and ‘escape the 9 to 5!’ But if you haven’t, go ahead and make that million by helping Russian e-commerce store owners who have budgets of over 10K a month make more money by optimizing their Adwords accounts.

I stumbled on this this knowledge. Developing hard goods products for focused industrial niches forced me to be go niche. I learned how much easier it was to sell to people when I was working in a super focused niche relative to our consumer products that were designed to appeal to everyone.

I know you advocate creating a community and creating insane value via products, membership site, etc for that community. How do you pick the community that you would get in? Passion? Keywords and untapped niche? How do you progress without knowing it’s going to 95% succeed? (I’m often in analysis paralysis). -Matt

The key is to invert your ratio: do something that you’d do if I told you the chances were 95% that you’d fail.

A mix passion and market opportunity is best, but sometimes taking an advanced skill set to places where there aren’t a lot of other marketers is huge. Passion for starting and growing a great businesses is usually the best one to cultivate.

So far, I’ve chosen communities based on what I want to learn about. Scalable location independent businesses, outsourcing in the Philippines, and offshore corporations.

Talking shop with other internet entrepreneurs in Bali.

I am coming to Bali next month, I would like to say hello to you and your friends, are you guys there? - Zorika

Sweet! Be sure to email me when you get here. I’m planning on visiting Vietnam and the Philippines in February, but I’ll be in Bali a bit too. I’m sure there will be many others here too. It’s a fun scene!

I’m in Law school right now, and will be graduating with some pretty serious debt. Let’s say I wanted to build a business, law practice, or consulting firm that allows me to live a lifestyle like yours. Is it possible for me to do so without having a rich family or whatnot to pay off my loans and allow me to start fresh and unencumbered by student loan debt, or will I have to wait until it’s all paid off? Let’s say for argument’s sake that my loan payments will be $2K a month for 10 years. - James 

Not having rich parents is probably a blessing. In my case, it’s provided me with an extraordinary amount of motivation to succeed. You are in a much tougher spot than many people, but it’ll just force you to play smarter. Any way you can differ those loans go for it. If you must take a job, don’t spend any money. Think seriously about your net income and not your top line salary. I’m sure there are plenty of highly paid lawyers in NYC who net less than 5K a year. That’s not going to work for you. The first step to living this lifestyle is to start thinking about net income.

You’ve got an amazing skill set. I’ve long thought that professionally focused membership communities have a lot of potential. Let’s say you start a membership website around the idea of US patents and trademark law. Finding quality information on legalities is a huge pain point for business owners. Getting a “real” lawyer on the phone can cost my company thousands. What if you had a private community for entrepreneurs who could get answers from you or your team within 72 hours?

If they need to call you, they send $100 bucks and get 45 minutes on the phone with you. Charge $50 bucks a month per member. To cover your school loan bills, plus give you 2K to live, you only need to find 80 people who are interested in such a community. For this type of product, you might find that annual memberships work better. You could say that for $397 you get annual access to the community. Once customers join you can provide them with up-sells and premium services that could increase you profit per customer.

Maybe you’ll offer researched reports at a decent price insider your group. You could run affiliate deals with other partners who provide services– for example doing prior art research reports. You’d probably want to publish 2-3 awesome articles, podcasts, or videos a week that help to solve entrepreneur’s patent issues.

That’s just one idea. I’ve got 100′s, and if you become an entrepreneur you’ll have them too.

Can you do it? Of course you can. I’ve known enough people who got through law school to know that running an internet-based business is probably easier by comparison. But they are different skill sets. One is about following rules, and the other is about breaking them. The last time you listened to people who told you the way things were supposed to go, you ended up with 100K in debt. I know the next piece of advice from them is: work for the next 20 years paying that off, save well, and you’ll be able to afford something better. It’s not crazy-talk, but it’s a radically different script.

Talk to a bunch of 50 year old lawyers, and then a bunch of entrepreneurs who have been running their own business for the last 20. Decide which crowd you vibe with more, and jump right in. Don’t be intimidated by the business world. If you can get out of law school alive, you can probably figure out how to make a couple bucks from a small business.

How did you finally get disciplined to start working all day at this stuff. What is the mental process you work through to make yourself kill it everyday. For whatever reason it’s my biggest hang up. - Nate

Most of the people in my age group might be watching TV right now, or maybe checking out a movie at the theater. Why not ask yourself what’s something cool you could do that would help people out? Instead of going to the movies tonight, I sent out an email to you and now I’m trying to do something positive.

When you see your actions making a real difference you get inspired to do more.

The best way to get the feedback loop going is to start small. Many people feel powerless because they’ve got jobs at a big company and it seems like all their good work just gets tossed into oblivion. Start working for somebody to whom your work would matter. You can find people like that at places like TropicalWorkForce.com.

Find an accountability partner. You should call them for 1 hour on Friday afternoons. Tell then what you did and didn’t accomplish, and what you are going to do in the next week.

Overbook yourself. Even though I should be analyzing spreadsheets right now, I’m writing to you. And I hope it helps a little. You can do the same, and that’s basically what businesses do– gather a bunch of resources together in the hopes of helping people get the things they want.

We have several niche sites (to capture e-mails through giving away free information and later selling affiliate products). 1) What are the most up to date tools that you can use to accurately track what back links have been found by the google crawlers? 2) Where do you get the most bang for your buck in back link purchases? (quickest increase in google rank with the least cost?) - Stokely - It would be great if you could give a back link to use house flip. [<-- great hustle!]

SERPFox is our favorite tool to track search engine rankings. We’re currently using Raven Tools for backlink analysis. Raven tools combines backlink data from the two best data sources: SEOmoz and Majestic SEO. Everything has been a little messed up lately due to Yahoo getting rid of Yahoo Site Explorer.

The biggest bang for your buck with with link purchases will come from private link networks (email me for more details if you read this). I bring it up to the broader blog audience to say that these types of arrangements do exist, they are highly effective, and it’s important to keep them somewhat private. That’s obvious in terms of discretion, but it’s also important in terms of volume. If I were to publish where I was getting my most effective links, they would become less valuable. If you want to do your own research, one of the best public places to start is on WickedFire forums. Our own private forum is particularly strong in this area. If you are interested in this kind of stuff, you’ll probably make your money back there in 1 hour or less.

I visited Singapore for the first time last month. I enjoyed it way more than I thought I would, especially the food.

You mentioned the possibility to set up a business in Hong Kong or Singapore. Could you describe the process behind and some resources? - Patrick

Why Hong Kong? (a few readers asked this question…. you can also check out this post.) No corporate taxes, you can be very aggressive about what you expense, and there is a world-class banking system in place.

I have some experience with Hong Kong and it couldn’t be easier to get started. Call Jumpstart to get things rolling. You’ll need to travel to HK to get things set up. I’d recommend finding a place to stay on Airbnb.com, you can find a good place in a central location for $50 a night.

Once you have the company documents in hand, bring them to a bank of your choice (make an appointment beforehand) to get a business account set up.

Keep a few things in mind: getting a credit card in HK isn’t like in the US, you’ll need to put up collateral funds in order to qualify. You’ll also need to identify an accountant to help you process your annual audit. You’ll want to make sure that you apply as a business who “doesn’t do business in Hong Kong” in order to qualify for the 0% corporate tax rate. Obviously it won’t be possible to do this if you plan on doing business in HK, but it is possible to split up transactions on your audit papers, e.g. 80% of business outside of HK, 20% of business inside of HK and so on. Finally, if you are an American citizen, you’ll need to make sure the IRS knows about all of this, and that you are paying income taxes on the income you earn from your Hong Kong operation.

I’m looking to set up an e-commerce store using Shopify. I’m still looking for ‘that product’ to get me going. I’ve been doing a lot of brainstorming about my passions in life (mostly sport) and how I can combine them with a product that I’d order from AliBaba. Any other good brainstorming tips you and your crew could suggest? - Mustafa

I wouldn’t over-value your passion for the product, especially if you don’t plan to develop your own. You’ll need to be passionate about marketing, SEO, and the process of building a business– not necessarily rawhide baseball mitts. Passion for the product is generally more important in information type businesses. It’s true that e-commerce models are blending with content type businesses for marketing purposes (both Google and customers want content!) so it couldn’t hurt.

Here’s some physical product selection rules of thumb:

• Choose an expensive product, ideally over $100 bucks.
• Go super niche. New stores are cheap to build. When you hit something that works you can throw all your juice behind it.
• Make sure other people in your niche are making money before you get involved.
• Try to compete with people or industries that aren’t forward thinking.
• Compete with specific companies, people, or products. This will help focus your efforts and value proposition.
• Call competitors and pose as a customer. Get a quote. See how good they are. Ask yourself if you think you can beat them.
• Don’t limit yourself to Alibaba searches, look around the broader web as well. Think about products that would work well as compliments to a blog type business as well. If your content gets traction, surely your products will.

I own a  business called Jarkarta Airport Transfer. As you can see, we provide car rental & transportation services in Jakarta. Our vision for the business is an e-commerce platform at our book now page for visitors arriving at Jakarta to have a fuss free and easy process of booking transportation. I have hired SEO help for about 6 months so far. However, I find that my traffic has pretty much been stagnant. Can you advice on how I can grow my business in working towards the vision of an e-commerce platform? -Yvonne

First off, go ahead and fire your SEO guy. 95% of SEO guys deserve to be fired. If you are relying on more traffic to grow your business, it’s important that you understand the fundamental character of your web visitors. If any SEO really understood that, they’d just take your business. That’s the fundamental knowledge that you’ll build your business on.

Second, your “book now” page is much better than your primary landing page. From your front page, it’s unclear what you do. I’m assuming your conversion rates are low. (Make sure you know them for each source of traffic!). Frame up the problem more clearly on your landing page. Sick of waiting in the taxi line at CGK? We’ll pick you up and get you and your family to your final destination safely– starting at $25 USD. 

There are too many options on the website. Put the blog link at the bottom of your site just for SEO purposes. Nobody looking to solve the problems you solve wants to read a blog. They want a menu bar that solves specific problems. I’d probably focus on a few tabs that focus on your most important key terms and products. Some examples could be: “vans to any destination in Java,” “personal limo in Jakarta”, or “private tours of Jakarta.”

Once you get the sales funnel improved on the website (try watching people use your wesbite who have never used it before) then I’d start seeking affiliates. Both online and off. Are there people who would benefit from providing your care service as an add on?

I’ve been working as a freelance developer for about 8 months now, and as you know it takes lot of time to make some active income through that (I’m a webdeveloper/flashdeveloper). In addition to the time I put into those active freelance projects I also want to start building on something that could lead to a more automated passive workflow. Do you have any experience on automating (if it’s possible) freelance webdevelopment work in some way, or is it better to aim for building some other kind of online service to accomplish this? - André 

If you have a website that advertises your freelance services with any less than 3 “buy-now” buttons you are leaving it on the table. I’d identify the types of services your customers ask for the most and put an instant price on them. That’s cash flow baby! Look at Ava who used to provide custom quotes for each video intro she built. Forget that! $300 bucks buy now! If your prospects want extras, they can hit the contact button right below that button.

I’ve seen two recent examples of this working amazingly on our job board TropialWorkForce. One was a copywriter who, instead of saying “I do copywriting,” said “I’ll write 100 BMR articles for 2 bucks an article.” Orders starting flowing. Same with Ava’s video intro example. Check this out….

If you are reading this post in a reader, click here to see the video. Here’s more info on how to get your own video introduction here. I didn’t even have to send my logo to Ava to get this done!

One thing I’ve worked with flash freelancers on is turning PDF catalogs into interractive online experiences. 30 pages starting at $500 to $1K, or similar depending on your target market. You could write a blog post called “how to turn your PDFs onto awesome interractive online content” and put a buy-now button on there!

The biggest mental hurdle here is understanding that your productized versions aren’t going to work for everyone. I’ve noticed that some freelancers are so used to discussing projects at length that they forget people want simple solutions to their problems. The whole point of hiring a freelancers is not having to do any work. Any and all discussion is interpreted as wasted time and money.

Better to solve problems without talk to a smaller group of people than be able to solve anyone’s problem after a 1-hour consultation. It’s the differnece between a highly hands-on sales process vs. a magnetic and hands-off approaches to finding clients.

I run several businesses from SEO, marketing, website sales, hockey jerseys, electronic hardware, and a porn site. Which business are you running that seems to have the best forecast of income? - Colin

That’s like answering “how many people did you sleep with last year.” No doubt interesting, but irrelevant to you, the audience, and it can only get me in hot water. No hard feelings! If we ever meet I’ll happily share with you, but I’d prefer not to commit it to writing.

The character of the stuff that has the most potential is digital, residual, highly-focused, serves a huge market, provides highly legible results, and can be delivered instantly. My first product like this will be related to SEO and will be launched inside our membership group in a month. I’ll bring it up on the blog this year sometime.

Building great lifestyle businesses and 'being happy' are often unrelated pursuits. I'm lucky because I love to work.

Marketing and industry seem largely driven by insecurity. Most of the shit we buy, we don’t need. But we buy because it makes us feel good. If we already felt good, we wouldn’t feel the need to buy it. How do you see business and entrepreneurship changing? If the human race was to collectively give up the need for “ego food” (sports cars, shiny shoes, ostentatious clothes, etc) and focus on only those things we needed, what would happen to business? Would it disappear overnight? Or is this a utopian ideal that will never be realized? The idea is that as people become more “enlightened”, the less they need most of what people sell. We need good food, clean water, shelter, and good friends. Beyond that, not much. – John

Most of my favorite things in life the world did not need, and neither did I. Wikipedia. Coffee shops. Porsche 911′s (933 model). Hemingway novels. iPhones. Go carts. Green tea. Chocolate eclairs. Fried duck. Sierra Nevada pale ale. WordPress.

You’ll probably enjoy reading What Technology Wants way more than anything I could say here. It’s one of my favorite books. If you read it, let’s get on Skype to discuss it.

Why not make what you’d like to see more of it in the world? If that’s iPhones, god bless you. Same if that’s novels. Or creating better ideas about religion. Who is it that said ‘be the change you’d like to see?’ I like that. But don’t just recycle, for example. If you are really passionate about it, go ahead and make it easy and exciting for others to do so as well.

I’m curious to know your thoughts on incubators? - Brendan

You might be interested in a post I wrote called “Why We Haven’t Started a Lifestyle Business Incubator.” There were also a lot of smart comments on that one. I don’t know anyone in the start-up scene so I can’t comment, but they sound wonderful to me. I’m all about fostering community, mentorship, and better investment opportunities. I’m excited about stuff like Microconf, accountability partners, our private forum, being an intern, or anything that get’s you in contact with other people doing the types of things you care about and want to do more of.

I’m now in the process of thinking about legals (my business will involve photography. There’s a lot in the detail there it seems– logos, website design, etc. How much polish and effort should you put in before you launch? Should you spend months nutting out the legal contracts, perfecting the website design or just get it out there rough and ready and then make incremental improvements? I think the answer will lie in the middle there but do you lean one way more than the other? - Matt

For legal stuff I’ll generally do a couple of Google searches to make sure nobody is using similar stuff. Then I’ll do a quick search of registered trademarks in the US at USPTO.gov. That’s worth checking out for anyone who wants to market their product to the US market. If it looks like you are in the clear, I’d just go. You can even start putting a little “TM” next to your product names if you want.

I lean heavily towards rough and ready. Start hustling. Start making sales. Cash flow will start to justify it’s own protection. As you scale, you can start looking at ways to protect yourself more. Why protect something that doesn’t exist? Sure there are other approaches, especially for people who “know” it’s going to be big. If you know, you know. If you don’t, get rolling. It’s often the case that the disaster scenarios that upstarts are trying to prevent– like somebody completely stealing their idea–are some of the best things that could happen to them.

All that said– do not build a business around somebody else’s trademark unless you know what you are doing. “Knowing what you are doing” could be a short term SEO or affiliate scheme. I’ve got a handful of sad business stories I could share off the top of my head. Example: “4 Hour Work Week Training Sessions” is an obvious no go.

My graphic and web design business is only about 18 months old and has been doing really well. About 80% of my work comes from one client, 15% comes from a second, and the remaining 5% comes from people contacting me through my contact form. The problem is that I am traveling the world currently and have to balance my time between work and fun/sightseeing/transport time without internet. My goal is to build this into a full-time job by the time I return to States in about 9 months, but am struggling with keeping up with all the work and not missing out on some once in a lifetime opportunities. Do you have any advice for how to balance the two? - Griffin Stewart - Web Design and Custom eBook Templates

I followed some of your links and I’m really impressed by your work. It’s a small thing, but I’d change the words you use. Instead of saying you are looking to build a ”full time job” I’d say “small business.” If I were you, I probably wouldn’t see hanging out in Korea for the next 9 months as the biggest opportunity. Imagine being able to sightsee anytime, anywhere, forever. It could be wrong to say these are “once in a lifetime experiences.” If you are successful in creating a business, you could sustain the lifestyle for the rest of your life.

I’m doing the quick math on that first relationship. If 80% of your work comes from one company, and it’s not quite a living, and it’s preventing you from having personal time (i.e., it’s a lot of work), then you aren’t getting compensated enough. That’s not to say it’s a bad gig, you just need to re-frame that relationship.

You have a great skill set, one that is probably better used to earn you a meaningful equity partnership than freelancing. At some point you’ve got to put in the time to get that kind of thing off the ground. Similar to my advice to the freelancer above, you need to start poaching parts of your process and services and productizing them.

In my ever evolving world as a serial entrepreneur I’m always looking for new ventures. I’m wondering what you believe the best trends/fields/verticals are for sustainable or automatic income are over the next decade? – Justin

Real estate. Genetics. Longevity. Expatriates and globalization. Cosmetic neurology. Semantic web. Micro-communities and publishing. I think micro-publishing is just getting started. Think about how poorly publications like Forbes and INC– some of the most respected in the world– serve many sub-niches in their target audience.

The only sustainable thing I know about is your ability to work hard and work smart. That’s poached advice from some guy I know who has a giant pile of money. When I asked him what his most important piece of advice was, he said: “when you make your first chunk of money, don’t spend it!”

Former Tropical Work Force interns hanging in the Philippines.

I was listening to LBP #87 today and I’m ready to start trying to use some of the marketing tactics that you and Ian discuss. We are ready to start making a concerted effort to market our services and I am excited about hiring someone to work on that in a location independent capacity. We are ready to throw $1,000 a month at this and wee what happens. I’m not much of a web guy, I still see my value as the guy on the phone hustling up deals. What should I be looking for in a webmaster? – Matthew K.

It’s really tough to hire for things you don’t understand, especially at $1000 bucks a month. You are going to find a lot of people on the TWF boards that have a demonstrated track record at creating compelling content for audiences, but don’t expect them to be the creative engine.

Ask yourself what is compelling about what you do? What kinds of problems is your target market looking to solve? Can you solve them in a unique and fresh way? If you don’t answer these questions before you invest in a team member, you probably won’t see dramatic progress. You don’t need to be web savvy, but you will need to be content savvy. You’ll need to have ideas about guides, podcasts, articles, checklists, infographics, videos, walk-throughs, interviews, or similar that are utterly compelling to your market. I know you have these ideas. Start listing them out, creating them, and getting them to your people. Combine that with your hustle muscle and it’s dynamite baby.

How much time do you invest in an idea before you pivot or go to a new idea? – David

I rarely hear this question from entrepreneurs who have products. Once you’ve got stuff in the marketplace, it’s a lot easier to make judgements about what to double down on and what to drop. Get a buy now button on your product site as soon as possible. If it’s your first venture, get a buy now button on your site no longer than 8 weeks after conception. 4 weeks if you can. Get that button up there and start testing. You’ll know pretty quick whether or not your product is going to fly. Also, at that point it becomes a much more productive conversation. The questions become: can I find enough traffic to make a living at these conversion rates? Can I improve my conversion rates? Is there something about my value proposition that isn’t clear to my audience? And so on.

Another way to approach this: don’t take huge time risks at the beginning of your business. This idea reminds me of a beautiful book about the software industry: Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software. Wonderful book. I’m not sure that addresses your question too well, but man that book is awesome!

I’ve been running a web design company for 5 and a half years and have made an effort to focus on new sites as the main service. Given cheap overseas labour, increasingly sophisticated DIY tools and a general move to mobile is the ‘web dead?’ and as such and should we focus on other services like SEO / perhaps mobile development as well / instead of continuing to pursue new websites? - Dan – check out Dan’s web design studio. 

Haha, I know you know more about this than me. You know web development is only going to get more important. I do think you’ll need to evolve your hands-on services from basic web design to more advanced stuff. The key will be to productize your web development offerings. Finding sweet niches in your client base, say, bloggers, and then delivering them with premium service bundles and products. Reserve your time for mobile development, high-end conversion analysis and design, or similar.

The best way to ship heavy products when drop-shipping or using fulfillment houses. Obviously lighter products are better, but for heavier products, any tips on keeping costs down? - Tristan

You got two options: 1) aggressively seek knock-down solutions to improve the density of your shipments. For many of our products, we send very detail assembly instructions to help ease the pain of assembly. 2) Send them on a pallet. Freight shipments are often cheaper than people think, and there is a hidden benefit. If you are sending a big item on a pallet, you can toss an bunch of extra stuff on there for free! Offer that in the backend of your site and your average invoice will increase.

Hong Kong is a beautiful and safe place to hang out and have fun, a gateway to China, and a great place to do business.

I’d love your insight on when it’s necessary/smart to incorporate? I’ve been running AccentHelp.com as a sole proprietor since 2006. I have no employees, but I do contract out a lot of work (mainly through Elance) and pay royalties to co-creators. What do you see as the determining factor(s) to changing my status. -Jim Johnson - AccentHelp.com

That’s a challenging question for me, I’m still confused by a lot of this stuff (who isn’t!). From what I know, if you are running a simple business, you might not see too many tax advantages to setting up a S or C corp unless you started to invest a lot of your energy in learning about smart corporate finance. Might not be a good investment for a solely owned lifestyle business. My understanding is that LLCs can provide you with some degree of legal protection from people seeking damages from either your business or you.

Given how easy and cheap LLCs are in most states, it’s something I’d do relatively early in the process. Wealth diversification and protection is fundamental practice of the wealthy, so it make sense to start having these types of conversations as soon as possible, even if it were the case that your business is just getting started. I’d see if you can get some free consulations from local accountants to test if they are the type of people who can help clarify your finances and protect your assets. Our accountant is relatively inexpensive and awesome.

LLC or not, any excuse to sit down with somebody who knows a lot about business finance for 5-10 hours a year is a great way to spend your time.

I am starting a new business and it’s in a very popular niche, I am trying to put my own twist on that niche. I need some advice on finding a manufacturer that will be able to make my product for as low cost as possible. How do you recommend that I go about finding an overseas wholesaler that could help me with my product launch? Thank you for your help and I look forward to your response. – George 

That’s a really tough question to answer, but let me take a stab at an implied issue here. If you are getting in to a busy space, you shouldn’t be competing on price. It’s a race to the bottom, and especially in a cash flow inventory business, it’s the quickest way to end up in the red. Try brainstorming the ways you could be successful if you had a significantly more expensive product that your competition.

With regards to finding quality manufacturers, there aren’t any shortcuts there that I know of. All the more reason to go ahead and do it if you see an opportunity. Lazy internet marketers won’t bother competing with you!

I run a local SEO biz and I’m getting great results for high paying clients, but these clients are also super busy. Every time I’ve asked for referrals, they are like “absolutely! no problem, we’ll put together a list for you!” This has happened like 3 times and they just never take the time to give me contact info or send an email of my behalf because they are so busy. Any tips on how I can expedite this and actually get these referrals rolling? - San Antonio SEO - Ryan

What a great question, I’ve faced this challenge in a few of my companies. I think making a process for absolutely delighting your customers is the most sustainable approach. In general, I don’t think it works well to offer little incentives for referrals, but of course there are plenty of exceptions.

I can understand why your clients aren’t getting back to you. It kinda sucks to get emails from people who you pay money to that are asking for stuff.

In the case of a local SEO business, I’d institute a policy that you get on the horn with each client once a month to go over a really simple, results focused report. Brendan Tully, a small business SEO consultant, once reported in our forum that when he started doing this, sales and customer retention shot up. Brenden developed deeper relationships with his clients– and I’m sure they started to look to him as a trusted partner in the future of what they were doing. In that frame, it’s a lot easier to make requests.

How do you go about creating high ticket (ie. $400 – $600) info products? And how do you evaluate what the price should be? – Naomi

Two ways, give tons of your time, and help to solve ambitious problems. Knowing your stuff and having credibility is absolutely critical with information products. It’s not hard to demonstrate your track record online. If you don’t, it’ll be much harder to charge a premium. If you don’t have a strong track record, you’ll need to have a huge reach, and even in that case, you’ll be hurting the long term sustainability of your audience. They’ll start to suffer fatigue at your vague product offerings that are really expensive. Sometimes it works, but I don’t think that’s a sustainable business model.

I don’t have any clear ideas about a pricing forumla. You can start to work out forumlas on a napkin, and then start running it by people you trust (feel free to email me!). If I wanted to meet your range with this very blog, I’d say I could charge $497 for a micro-publishing business class. We’d focus on delivering a full time income vis-a-vis micro-publishing within 24 months. I wouldn’t let people start the program unless they had an approved concept. It would a 4 week intensive starter course (almost full time work for me), with a private community (I’d use Ning for sure!!!), constant support, and then touch up phone calls of the next 3-4 months. We’d offer logos, blog designs, and supply the basic technology so students could focus 100% on content, relationships, and strategy. I’d limit it to 10 people so we could all work together. Yeah, that sounds worth it to me.

The next step for me would be to toss up a basic sales page for the concept and send the smartest people I know to it and ask them what they think. That’s what I love about information products. I think I just made one! If we don’t like that idea, okay, we could pull together 5 more in the next hour. That’s cool. If you’ve got one in mind, don’t hesitate to send me the concept and I’ll let you know what I think.

*  *  *

To anyone who asked the questions above, I’m happy to continue the discussions with further resources, links, and perspectives in the public comments (if I haven’t exhausted you already!).

Finally, I didn’t consciously try this, but in retrospect this post looks a lot in form like a recent great one from one of my favorite bloggers, Karol Gajda. That one is probably better and more focused that this one, I highly recommend it: “Extraordinary Insights Volume 2.” Be sure to re-set your feed settings for Karol since he switched his URL.

Talk soon!

Dan

PS, you can get on my mailing list by putting your email address into the form below:

Summary: I’ve got a spare room at my house in Bali. You can stay with us for free in return for some SEO work we need done. It’s the easiest TMBA internship to apply for ever. It’ll take less than 10 minutes of your time.  It’s a smaller opportunity than we’ve offered in the past, but could still be great for the right person. Email applications are due January 30th.

If internship opportunities with travel-minded entrepreneurs interest you, you should subscribe to the TropicalWorkForce’s RSS feed, mailing list, and twitter account. This year we’ll be sponsoring a bunch of internships there, many of which are more appealing than the opportunities I provide. For example: “Community Manager Needed For a Travel Start-up” was posted less than 48 hours ago by one of the most talented entrepreneurs I’ve ever spoken with. Don’t tell him I said that. His gig is probably more appropriate for most people looking for an internship, so be sure to check it out.

For the entrepreneurs who read this blog, note there are many services posted on the TWF boards. I buy content in bulk from service providers on the TWF boards at prices and quality much better than I can find from normal outsourcers.

*  *  *

It’s been a great week. Elisa Doucette just got here and she’s one of the gang already. She’s pushing things forward at TropicalWorkForce and DynamiteCircle. Of course, my main man David Hehenberger is here as well. This year he’s focusing on private products for DCers and SEO initiatives for our e-commerce stores.

My back of the napkin math says David is the point man on close to half a million dollars in expected growth. Our plan is to do that through SEO, distribution partners, and on-site optimizations. It’s pretty clear– he’s going to need some more help him achieve these goals.

*  *  *

I receive at least 1 offer for free work every week– sometimes more. People email me and say stuff like “hey! I’ll work for you for free…give me a chance!” That’s flattering, but so far I’ve turned them all down. I’m looking to build a team for the long term. My working assumption so far has been that non-paid interns (especially ones not receiving college credit) would burn out pretty quick.

But I got to thinking… there is this spare bedroom just sitting there in my house– in Bali! I thought, what the hell. Why don’t we invite somebody else to the house?

Here’s the rub: I can’t afford to bring another person on to my team. The CEOh-yeah has a number of complex spreadsheets which all say the same thing– don’t spend any more money.  I want to make sure the opportunities that come down the pike this year get distributed to the people who have helped us to get to where we are today. For those reasons, this internship is unpaid and temporary.

The offer:

I have a small bedroom available in our house. You can come live with us rent free. In return for the room, you’ll work for us 2-4 hours on 4 days of the week. We expect that you will move one major task or initiative forward each of those 4 days. The deal is for 90 days. You work 4 mornings a week, you get free rent at the house. Simple as that.

I estimate the rent is about a $500 monthly value. We live in a sweet place in the most happening neighborhood in Bali. You’ll have the opportunity to hang with all of us, see a bunch of other location independent businesses operate, get feedback on your ventures, and all that other good stuff. If you feel you can sustain working for rent only, you can extend the gig for an extra 90 days, or we can help you take your next step in location independent entrepreneurship.

What will you do?

• You’ll work 4 days a week, for 2-4 hours each day. Emphasis on results and helping us move something forward each day.
• You’ll execute the nuts and bolts of cutting edge SEO strategies. I can’t even write about them publically.
• You’ll help generate and edit tons of content for our entire network of sites.
• You’ll see the inner workings of a 7-figure business (hint: it ain’t pretty).
• You’ll assist David with achieving his key objectives.
• You’ll purchase and quality check content from a variety of 3rd party sources.
• You’ll optimize landing pages and improve the content on some of our top earning sites.

What will you get?

• 90 days at the TMBA house here in Seminyak, Bali. We’ve got a huge pool, maid, gardener, and decent WIFI (2 down / 2 up).
• An opportunity to extend for another 90 days if you are doing good work.
• 1 year paid membership to our private online community.
• First dibs on the nice rooms when we travel.
• An opportunity to learn about SEO and biznass.

Before you apply, consider these downsides:

• You are being offered the small room, which is small-ish and has no A/C (but does have fan). You will have no private bathroom, and no personal shower.
• You will have to shower outside, in a cold shower! That will suck! Don’t even try to use David’s shower!
• You will have limited private space in our house.
• You will have to spend you own money to do this. Living in Bali can be expensive if you blow it out at Skygarden every weekend.
• Visa runs can get expensive. If you come on a budget, apply in advance for a social visa.
• SEO work isn’t fun. Tim Conley once remarked “it’s the online equivalent of ditch digging.”
• Some people are probably curious about Bali expenses since this isn’t paid. Off the top of my head, entry level: $400 ; very comfortable: $700 ; ballin’: $1200.

Some stuff about you:

• With limited private space, and showering out in the backyard, it’s not a situation for people who need a lot of creature comforts or private space (I’ll send more detailed information about the living space to finalists).
• You might be a somewhat established entrepreneur or SEO. You might be able to create big results for our web properties in less time than it would take for a beginner. We are willing to adjust the amount of time we are requiring if you can kick start the results we are looking for.
• You might already be in Asia and committed to the lifestyle. Most of us have that “never going home” attitude. This is a great way to keep your travels alive for another 3 months or even longer.

How to apply (only 10-15 minutes of your time):

• EMAILS ARE DUE JAN 30TH, 2012 11AM EST.
• Write 250 to 500 words saying what you are currently up to and why this position is a great fit for you.
• Let us know when you’d like to start, and if you have any questions or caveats about the terms.
• Please suggest one book that you think I should read (thanks!).
• Feel free to link to the stuff you are working on.
• Email your answers to David *at* TropicalWorkForce dot com. Please CC Dan *at* TropicalMBA dot com.
• If we think you’d be a good fit, we’ll give you a ring on Skype.

References:

• House info, house info.

A note from David:

Dear Future TMBAer,

I’m pumped up about you coming out here to work on our SEO and online marketing campaigns with me. We’re in a position to have a huge positive impact on Dan and Ian’s business in 2012.

Without a doubt, some things about this internship are not ‘baller’ (cold showers, some of your work will be boring) but this is a great opportunity for the right person.

If you join us you’ll learn a ton about SEO, e-commerce, and online businesses. You’ll also meet lots of smart online entrepreneurs who stay here in Bali. Meeting and hanging out with successful people is the biggest benefit that I got from my TMBA internship.

Two years ago, getting this internship would have been a game changer for me. I’d encourage you to apply if staying for free in Bali’s best neighborhood, while learning essential online business skills, sounds good to you.

Hope to see you in Bali,
David

PS, I’ll show you a bit around the island if you make it here

If you know anybody who would be interested in this type of thing, I’d appreciate it if you’d email this post to them. Thanks!

Talk soon,

Dan

PS, you can hop on my private mailing list by putting your email address in to the form below:

1851 people have decided to receive the Tropical MBA blog feed. If you don’t yet use RSS feeds, here’s an explanation of how they work. It takes about 2 minutes to set up. If you are a twitter user, I tweet like it’s my job!

What you’ll find below is a bunch of stuff I learned after I started my own business. Had I know this stuff before I started, I’d be in better shape. Your results may vary. A lot of the tone below is like “YOU SHOULD!” Go ahead and give yourself a pass to do the exact opposite. I’m just getting started…

Test the effect of responsiveness in key areas of your business.

I’ve found that the need to respond to an email inquiry reduces by about 25% for every day that I let it sit in my inbox. If I let my email account go for 5 days, I can delete almost everything in it.

In the case of custom quotes, I’ve found that the chances I score deals behaves similarly. If you have a business that relies on quotes, try turning them around in less than 30 minutes and measure the effects. In some cases, I’ve found the effects to be so profound that I began working in extra margin to cover for the mistakes I’d make. Even though I was less competitive on price, I increased my close rate and overall profitability.

I’ve also found a similar effect when people owe me money and with our accounts receivables ledger. I’d say the chances of somebody paying their bills probably decreases by 25% after every 4 week period.

I’m pulling these numbers out of the air. They’ll be different for every business. I’d recommend you play around with this and develop your own rules of thumb.

People are going to be annoyed with you.

I know I piss a lot of you off. I’m sure I occasionally leave conversations and people are like “that guy was a douche.”

If you’ve made a difference in your community, or just made a stack of cash, you are probably pissing a lot of people off. That’s because you’re in the game. You can’t build a road without paving some meadow. You can’t build a team without firing some people. You can’t write a blog without driving people nuts, and you can’t have a point of view without miffing those with the opposite.

Your business, if it’s gonna pay you, will effect a lot of people’s lives– hopefully for the better. In the process of making the world a better place, you are gonna piss people off.

Get used to it.

Once you’ve got your bills covered, start risking your time (not your cash).

When I get my bases covered with a new stream of revenue, I put people or a process in place, and then I start exploring new ideas. At first it was SEO. Then it was traveling and meeting people. Then it became writing and podcasting.

Business owners often feel they need to stick around to hold down the fort. Instead of risking their time, they risk their cash. That often ends badly. Proof of concept is all on you, dear entrepreneur. That’s why Ian is cold calling customers for our new product lines. That’s why I’m starting new blogs. You can’t buy passion and insight.

The #1 example of this muck-up I see? Hiring big money sales “ringers.” Don’t do it.

Employees help you work less.

The promise of employees has always been that you’d have more hassles. More headaches. More to manage. My experience has been the opposite.

The first 24 months after your first invoice will be tough.

Your business doesn’t start when you put up a website, a blog post, or an advertisement against your content. Your business starts when you issue an invoice. Get there as fast as possible. From the moment you issue that first invoice, it’s very possible you’ll feel like it’ll be impossible to make a living from your shitty little product line or fleet of websites.

For months during our first 2 years I was scouting out other opportunities. No way, I thought, were we ever going to make any money. In business, 24 months isn’t a lot of time. But in my mind, when I was working all day long and stressing out about bills, it was tough to keep that in perspective.

I think the best defense against burning out in this case is not minding being broke and sticking to your mission. (In my case that was to run my own company). Minding being broke is probably #1 reason people pack up the tent and get a job.

Networking is a multiplier.

If you’ve got nothing (0), there is no multiplier that helps. Even meeting Donald Trump won’t lead to anything if you don’t have a business under your belt. We often talk about the concept of ‘getting to the table.’ The path to the table is paved with the work, and the way to consistently get invited there is through the work. The most surefire way to have a great network is to do great work. So ditch the networking events, and stay in and build something people want to hear about over a few cocktails.

It’s not an interesting source of income or until you can hire somebody to develop it.

I love the metaphor of ‘conversations’ for business. If your ebook business, or other ‘passive income’ generating site/application, etc doesn’t have somebody interacting with market forces, making adjustments, launching tweaks, putting out new content etc, your income will slowly die. Yeah that sounds right. I think I can say that again. Your income will die. That’s why the ‘passive’ income holy grail for me is finding online businesses that make enough cash flow to put somebody in charge of them. The good news is that somebody smart, flexible, and passionate about online business might only cost you $1000 bucks a month.

Don’t start a software company if you don’t develop software.

Make an exception at your own risk.

Way back in 2007, I read “Getting Real” by the guys at 37 Signals and thought I’ve got a great software idea. 20K+ later I had a huge bundle of shit software and a not-so-happy investor. I was a competent manufacturer trying to start a software company. Worse, I didn’t even have the basic sense to start learning the software language my entire company would be founded on. I was smart enough to not throw any more good money after bad. After the 20K debacle, I closed up shop and started a manufacturing business.

Your accountant does not know about offshore entities.

If you haven’t talked to an accountant lately, you should. It’s cheaper than you think (couple hundred bucks a month) and it’s a wonderful exercise to talk to a third party about your finances.

Unfortunately for us traveling types, your local accountant probably won’t know anything about opportunities to start offshore companies or trusts. They’ll probably even dissuade you from seeking international diversification. My accountant is a really smart guy, but basically clams up when I ask a simple question like “should I be working to develop some of these business entities in other countries?”

A few reasons seem clear: 1) they’d lose any business clients take offshore and 2) they could get themselves in hot water by suggesting stuff that violates rules. One of the key roles of your accountant is to ensure your financial reporting complies with the law. Since there is still a lot of legal overlap and grey area when you start to consider overseas incoproations, international diversification is more about interpretation and creativity than reporting and compliance.

If your local accountant knows nothing about offshore stuff, who does? In my experience, pretty much only people who have offshore stuff going on themselves. That’s a relatively small group of people who aren’t exactly available regularly for free consulting. My advice is to experiment with this stuff and have some fun with it. It’s a lot of fun and as long as you never hide a source of income from the IRS (which is a crime), you aren’t putting your business at risk.

Your logo does not matter.

Back in the day Ian and I used to run off and get a logo developed the moment we had a new business concept. Now we even have a full time designer to indulge our logo dalliances. Having sweet logos is cool, but I can assure you, it doesn’t fucking matter. Also, you can change your logo anytime. Nobody cares.

Money is a bad for motivation, but great for measuring and setting perspectives.

You might have heard that when you offer cash as a reward for intellectual tasks, performance decreases. It’s also good taste for entrepreneurs to say “I don’t care about the money.” I think that’s the right instinct. Although Ian and I are aggressive and consistent about setting clear revenue goals, it isn’t really the money that drives us day to day. Charging for stuff is probably the best way to figure out if people care about what you are doing, but it’s no reason to wake up in the morning.

This week we set a revenue goal for 2012. The number helps our organization measure overall health, impact, and growth– but the primary impact is in expanding our perpectives. If last year I wrote as a person who runs a million dollar business, what would it look like to write as somebody who is doubling that? How does such a person think differently? If I’m the sales manager in such an organization, what do my responsibilities look like this year if the total volume of orders doubles?

I’m not really sure what the lesson is here. There’s something…

Cash behaves like water.

The reason they call cash “liquid” is that it’ll seep out the cracks. Business money doesn’t work like the money in your wallet. It flows around from customers, employees, services– you name it. If you want to keep cash in your business, you’ll need to define exactly how it’s going to be earned. I still don’t really understand this stuff. I know this though– if you don’t define how much cash you plan to have at the end of the month, chances are, it’ll find it’s way into some crack (or “investment”) you didn’t know about.

Buy an Apple computer. It won’t take you long to learn the software.

Unless you are neck deep in HUGE excel spreadsheets or playing some massive online multi-player game thing (you aren’t), you should get a Mac. Try one of those slick Macbook airs. Both the OS and hardware are significantly better than the PC experience. You spent a huge percentage of your waking hours on a computer, and you should stop messing around with subpar stuff. You’ll learn mac software in less than an hour.

Your niche isn’t a niche. It’s a freakin’ industry.

That thing you are calling a niche? It’s not a niche. It’s too big. It’s vague. It’s general. It won’t work.

Here’s the format:

[The specific problem I solve.] [The unique point of view I solve it from.]

That’s it. That last one is important. I think.

Talk soon,

Dan

PS, if you’d like to get on my private mailing list just put your email address in to the form:

1807 souls have decided to receive the Tropical MBA blog feed. Thanks! That’s how I read stuff too. If you don’t yet use Google Reader to read blogs, here’s an explanation of how it works. It takes about 2 minutes to set up. If you are a twitter user, I almost always tweet about new posts a few times.

In 2011 I helped generate over $30,000 in profits for our company by writing blog posts. If you think of my blogging efforts as an independent business, I’m tracking nicely with the 1000 day rule. Our blogging income came from:

• Subscriptions to our private forum.
• A consulting product that included a phone call, an ebook, and follow-up emails.
• Affiliate commissions for products that I recommended to readers.
• The sale of one of our blogs.

I’m not mentioning our profits to gloat (or to get made fun of by the ballers), but with the hope that you can get a good idea of how my ideas may or may not apply to you. Also, I want to assure you that I’m not full of shit.

When I was growing up, I knew I wanted a job that allowed me to read and write a lot, but all the career scripts were like: “trying to be a writer is about the most risky thing you can try to be. There are like 400 people who make a living writing books in the US. The rest are poor, desolate, and estranged from their families.”

A popular alterative was to be a professor. They said: “you can be a college professor. You’ll get the freedom to read and write with a lot of your time, and you’ll get paid okay. Since it’s such an awesome job, you’ll compete with 1000′s for every available position. If you are lucky enough to be hired by Eastern Iowa University, you’d better hang around for 10-15 years and earn tenure before you do anything crazy.”

Really? Jeeze. Sounds awful.

For anyone who wants to make a living from reading and writing, I’d like to offer a new script. It’s never been easier to make a living from your writing.

Trying to do it isn’t particularly risky, either. It’s a career choice. You can make the decision to do it if you want.  Here’s how…

*  *  *

It’s okay to make money from your writing.

If you want the opportunity to write and read for the rest of your life, your first priority needs to be making a living from it. If you refuse to prioritize money making, you’ll cripple your chances of a lifetime of doing the type of work you love. Simple enough, but writers often refuse to do it.

When people say they want to be a “writer,” they often mean something like:

Wri ter    [rahy-ter]   noun.     1) a person who wakes up every morning and does whatever the hell they want. 2) a person who follows the rules of no man. 

If you can wake up every morning and do whatever the hell you want, by all means, go for it. It rarely works.

Until you’ve got some cash flowing, you ought to be addressing other people’s concerns. Be a servant.

Why most blogs are dead on arrival.

Here are some blog topics that are dead on arrival:

• Follow my make money online journey.
• My self-help insights.
• My thoughts!
• Follow me as I travel the world.
• Watch me lose weight and tell you what I learn.
• Anything general.

Examples of how dead on arrival topics can be resuscitated.

• My make money online journey.
• Try: How to find a great online niche? By running concrete experiments with the top software tools (why not give away free niche ideas too?!). 
• My self-help insights.
• Try: How can I get more work done? By experimenting with Nootropics and natural foods with similar properties. 
• My thoughts!
• Try: Your questions! Write me an email on a specific topic I know about and I’ll get back to you in less than 24 hours. 
• Follow me as I travel the world.
• Try: How can I live comfortably overseas for a long term? By investing in beach front property in South America.
• Watch me lose weight and tell you what I learn.
• Try: How can I improve my skin complexion? By experimenting with a plant based diet.

Don’t these types of topics compromise my potential to be creative?

The most common objection to this approach is that people can’t imagine writing about expat real estate or some other boring topic every day. In the case of blogging or micro-publishing, some fear of commitment is probably a good sign. Try it out anyway. Some structure and constraint can do wonders for your creativity.

When Chris Ducker bought OutsourcetothePhilippines.com from me, he commented: “about 75% of these posts could have been on your personal blog.” And he was right. But those general posts that could have been on my personal blog had a market value of over $200 bucks a pop because they supported a brand that solved problems people were willing to spend money on.

Those topics are great for people with businesses, but what about writers with no business experience?

The days of writing until your are blue in the face and waiting for a publisher to come along are over. That means your blog will need to turn in to a business at some point. If your goal is to replace your primary income, you’d be better off starting a business, but writers are a stubborn group! Even if you start with just the writing, you’ll eventually need to build a product, offer phone calls, start a membership site, publish an ebook, or put ads against your posts. That’s cool. It’ll be a nice break from all the reading, writing, and research. If you chose your niche wisely, you don’t necessarily need to have an end game in mind.

As an example, I’m starting a new blog this month about offshore incorporations for entrepreneurs. Somebody asked me today “what’s your first product going to be?” My answer was that I have no idea. I’m not worried about that at all. The topic is a winner and monetization will be a no-brainer. A product will emerge pretty quickly when I start interacting with the first batch of dedicated readers.

Spice up your nuts and bolts approach with a mission.

The guys from AdsenseFlippers.com are always super modest most about what they do. “We aren’t really passionate about building niche sites” they often say. I feel ya guys– you’ll hear the same thing from tax guys and cat furniture guys. But Joe and Justin are selling their mission short. The sites they build give people a chance to buy into the internet lifestyle by getting control of legitimate, profit-generating websites. That’s amazing! For all the shitbag shiesters and bullshit six-figure training courses, the guys at AdsenseFlippers.com offer people the opportunity to purchase 100% legit, passive income generating websites. The customers can leverage all of Joe and Justin’s hard work and expertise, and get started with their own internet business today. How many online coaches can compete with that?

By focusing on specific solutions to people’s problems, look what is coming down the pike for them. 3000 + subscribers since March? Heck yeah. Offering life-changing opportunities to young entrepreneurs? You bet. World travel and the drop of a hat? Sure. I’m sure they can barely handle the opportunities coming their way.

A solution based approach like “how can we maximize adsense site generation next year?” evolves in to a mission: “how can we empower more people to begin their own internet businesses by taking over quality, vetted online assets?” 

The same approach can apply to all of the “boring” examples above.

Rules of thumb.

• Commit to writing 1000 words a day.
• Research, interview, and hustle up the best content. Refuse to post stuff that isn’t unique. If it’s been said before, link to it.
• Consider investing money in your experiences. Writers, after all, need something to write about. If that means traveling to a country to cover events or individuals, consider it start-up cash.
• Don’t read how to blog blogs. Connect with the people who care about your content and ask them what they need (try to intuit what they need as well). Get it to them via your writing or contacts.

I love blogging. If you think I can help you, I’m happy to.

Just email me and ask if you’ve got a winner or loser on your hands. Please limit inquiries to new concepts or pivots for existing blogs. It’s tougher to discuss blogs with a lot of history. Go ahead and comment or shoot me an email. I’ll let you know if I would invest in your concept. I’m not an expert, but it’s good to get a second set of eyes on stuff, especially if you relate to my approach.

Cheers,

Dan

PS, I recently read a few books about writing that I enjoyed. Here’s the links: King, Hemmingway, Strunk & White. Also see: Advanced Tips for Writers, and “Seeking Density”

PPS, if you’d like to get on my private mailing list, just put your email address in to the form below. As a thank you, you’ll get access to our first 50 podcast episodes.

“Then there is the most dangerous risk of all– the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.” — Randy Komisar, The Monk and the Riddle

Vague social pressure– social inertia– was a problem for me in my 20′s. I found it difficult to identify the things I wanted to spend my time on. Instead, I’d often go with the flow and be disappointed that me and my group of friends weren’t ‘doing more.’ Not cool!

I’m mostly over this now. I have clearer ideas on how I want to spend my time, and I don’t mind expressing my priorities to others.

Although pretty rare in the normal population, protecting time is common amongst people committed to their work and art. It’s rare to meet people like this, and I treasure every time I meet or read about somebody who gets energy from their work.

Stephen King, who has managed to write a lot of books, wrote that he wakes up everyday and works until he puts 2,000 words to paper. With very few exceptions, he’s done this every single day. He’s set up his environment and relationships to support his routine.

Ernest Hemingway, who also wrote a lot of books, hired a large man to stand outside the gate of his Key West home. The man used to say to visitors, who were hoping to meet the famous writer, “I’m mista Hemingway!” 

Steve Jobs, who is famous for putting the sum total of human knowledge into your pocket, is famous for calling vendors, co-workers, and journalists at any hour of any day. Anytime, it seems, was a good time to be changing the world.

99% of people aren’t entrepreneurs. 99% of people don’t write novels. 99% of people don’t have a mission. 99% of people have different ideas on how time ought to be spent.

The cliche goes that nobody has ever been on their deathbed saying: “I wish I would have worked more.” And I’m sure that’s true if they were doing something just for the money.

But imagine if somebody’s work was their passion, their energy, their life and mission. But instead they sat around at bars. Or they got a job they hated. Or they went back to school to get a degree they didn’t need. Or they got guilt-tripped into an overbearing community group. Or they picked up the phone every time and said “yes.”

“I wish I would have worked more” might be exactly what they’d say.

Cheers,

Dan

PS, check out Stephen Fry: “the work is more fun than the fun.”

PPS, if you’d like to get on my private mailing list, just put your email address in to the form below:

Happy new year! Tomorrow I’m heading to Singapore to explore the city for a week. If you are there, I’d love to meet you for lunch.

When meeting new people, I’ve found it’s useful and fun to have a small inventory of conversation topics that are fun for everyone to participate in. This week, I’ve stumbled on to an oddly captivating topic with my old friends and new acquaintances. It’s led to hour-long arguments, Youtube research, silly business ideas, and grown men pantomiming deadly fights on the streets of New York.

We are trying to answer the question: in a fight to the death with an equally matched opponent, would you choose a bat or a knife?

Your decision might say something about who you are. Or not. Either way, all of my friends will be reading your replies.

Here are the rules:

• Your opponent will be randomly selected from your peer group (age, gender, weight, basic background) etc.
• The bat is a wood standard Louisville Slugger.
• The knife is 12-14″ bowie knife. The blade length is roughly 60% of that.
• You will start 14 ft. away from each other.
• The fight will take place on a dry, grassy field.
• The fight is to the death.

vs.

Bat or knife? One word comments are cool! I’m looking for a tally. I’ve got a bunch of ideas on this, but I don’t want to influence the count.

Try this one out with your friends and let me know where it goes. Make sure you’ve got some time, and perhaps a wiffle ball bat and a paper towel roll, if you are the scientific type

Cheers from the USA,

Dan

PS, you can download that Bruce Lee wallpaper here. 

Shitbags, I forgot to do a 2011 wrap-up. Ah well, here it is: nearly 8,000 unique souls come to this website monthly via our mailing list (2,000+ people), my twitter account (8376 followers), and by subscribing to our RSS feed (1697 subscribers… check out what is RSS and how does it work?). 240 established location independent entrepreneurs have joined us in our private forums. Also, 1,000′s of entrepreneurs download our podcast every week.

Vistors to the Tropical MBA website are generally people who are building businesses capable of transforming their lives and those of their families, employees, and communities. I know for sure because I’ve met well over 100 of you in person (3 today!), and I’m not shy on Skype. For me, that’s the best part of all of this.

In 2012, I’d like to improve the quality of our writing and podcasts. I believe that’s the best way for us to be involved in higher quality projects. I often say “I want to be at the table when interesting projects go down.” I’m pretty sure the path to the “table” is paved with the work. So that’s what 2012 is going to be about for me.

As always, if you have ideas for how we could improve our blogs, I’d love to hear from you. Speaking of blogs…

People often ask me for advice on how to build an effective social media brand, which is funny given how all this started. Some folks, who have listened to our first year of podcasts, have said: “man, it’s inspiring to hear you sound like shit…” 

Yes, we all start out sounding like shit. That’s good to keep in mind. Here’s some other stuff I mention:

1. Sound like shit for a while.
2. Know what the hell you are talking about.
3. Have and demonstrate a track record.
4. Love it.

I say man, if you don’t like writing, don’t bother.

Also, here’s a new one: don’t focus on helping beginners.

A lot of internet marketers think it’s a great idea to teach beginners how to do stuff. This idea always gets a lot of steam because anyone can teach a beginner. Sweet! Anyone can make money on the webs by teaching beginners basic stuff.

better than 98% of how to blog blogs

To understand why marketing to beginners sucks, first let me share with you what I mean when I say “market.” As in, that’s a good market.

Market = a quantifiable cash flow.

• “Cat owners”  = not a market.
• “Cat furniture”= quantifiable cash flow. 
• “Beginner internet marketers” = not a market.
• “Premium email marketing services” & “blog set up training programs,” = quantifiable cash flows.

It’s a useful distinction.

Especially if you are just getting started, it doesn’t make sense to convince people to start a website. Instead, you want to offer optimization and add-on services to people who’ve already made the decision to have one. You want to tap in to established cash flows, not create them.

This kind of thinking is important when you are identifying how to approach new niches.

3 Niche identification rules I learned the hard way.

1. The broader your market the more difficult and expensive it is to find customers. “Cat furniture” is an awful market because it’s so difficult to identify customers. At the beginning I was thinking, anybody could buy my product!!! Awesome-sauce. No. Not awesome. What I didn’t understand at the time is that there is a real cost associated with every eyeball you get on your stuff. If everyone could potentially buy your product, your acquisition (or conversion) costs will be through the roof.
2. Only go after markets that have demonstrated cash flows. Your goal shouldn’t be to convince people that they need to do something they don’t already do. You can do that when you are rich. You want to find an established, legible cash flow, and improve it. That’s it.
3. Get good at precedent case analysis.  Get super honest with yourself and capabilities. When you are considering tapping in to a cash flow, ask yourself if you can duplicate, dispense with, or improve all the key resources that the curent players are bringing to the market. You aren’t free from this if you are a blogger or information marketer.

In order to have a business that caters to beginners, you’d need the following:

• A sustainable funnel of new prospects (because beginners will be harder to retain).
• Incredible scale (because beginners will spend less money, and won’t go for higher value services).

And the punchline is, of course, that they are both generally expensive to create.

I’m not saying that you can’t make money teaching beginners stuff. I’m saying that that success script is over represented in the blogosphere for obvious reasons. All things being equal you’d be better to focus on non-beginners in any market, because they have already established legible, quantifiable cash flows.

Speaking of being over-represented in the blogosphere, I think there’s a lot of internet marketing dogmas that aren’t always as effective as advertised:

“You need an affiliate program.”

The best affiliates are happy customers. The best referrals go to people who would be great additions to the community.

One prominent internet marketer told me I was “just being silly” for not having an affiliate program on one of our products. “You are just leaving money on the table.” My thought was simply this: “If I had an affiliate program, how could prospective members know if somebody was suggesting they join the community for money or because they really thought it would be a good fit for me?”

Simple shit eh?

Also: having an affiliate program would lower the quality of people that become customers. It would encourage those with affiliate accounts to suggest your product to anyone, and not people who would really benefit from it. If you are building a platform instead of a product, this could hurt the quality of your offering, thus hurting your “best” affiliates– happy customers.

“Traffic is king…”

I’ve seen blogs with large communities fail to get paid products off the ground (I’m sure you’ve seen the same). Chops are more important than reach. Your readers will have an opinion about you and your content that they aren’t telling you about. That’s what I call ‘chops.’ Some blogs become like water cooler blogs– sorta like getting in the friend zone in dating.

How to develop chops and trusting readers that will buy stuff from you? Develop a relentless focus on achieving and demonstrating results, no matter how small.

“Launch, launch, launch.”

Internet marketing “launch” mindset can often keep bloggers and marketers focused on the first 4-8 weeks of their new business. There is no question that launch mindset is effective, but you need to couple it with long term thinking. I encourage you to step back and ask yourself what your 2-3 year vision is going to be.

Where do you hope your community will be in 2-3 years?

Launch mindset can convince you that “all the money is to be made in the launch.” Constantly creating resource-sucking events is a tough way to sustain a business. By building something more focused on cash flows (like a membership platform or subscription service) you are more likely to have a solid cash foundation to build something bigger.

Hope you have a great weekend and holiday! Would love to hear from you if I can help in any way.

Cheers,

Dan

PS, if you’d like to read some related articles, check out these:

• Ancient Rivers of Money
• Penelope Trunk Calls Bullshit