It’s OK you saying how wonderful it is to have a location free lifestyle, but *exactly* how do we do it?

Fair enough, that sounds like a challenge! So ….

1. Learn about the industry

The first thing is just to learn how to market online, what sort of business to open and all the technical stuff.

We don’t get taught about it in school, so you’ve just got to put in the hours to learn it like anything else.

Don’t have the time?  Skip TV/web for an hour a day.  Believe me, it’s worth it.

Where to find the info? Beware of those super courses with hefty price tags.  I’ve spent thousands of dollars on these things and to be honest whilst some of them are quite good-ish, most of them just re-hash stuff you can find for free.

So I’d recommend saving your cash and just investing your time instead.

And where to look?

Well there’s just one site I’d recommend.  It’s run by a part time minister called Darren who just gives really good stuff away for free.  (Partly because he actually makes his money doing other things rather than making his money telling other people how to make money online).  I actually bought a course through his affiliate link this year which would netted him $1000.   What did he do with it?  He gave it away to charity.

So the site you are looking for is: Problogger.net

Yes there is far too much on there.  And yes it will take you ages to read through it all.  But not more than a full season of your favourite TV show. Again, it’s worth it.  ”Buy it, read it, do it” as we say. Except of course it’s free, you don’t need to buy it.

(If you also have access to a local library I’d also recommend reading through Think and Grow Rich &  Rich Dad, Poor Dad)

2. What about the start up capital?

Once you’ve learnt all the theory about starting an online business, it’s time to get started on actually making the business.

Again I often hear

But it takes lots of capital to start a business.  Where do I get the start up money?

Well, 20 years ago you would have been right.  If you wanted to start up a taxi firm or a printing company you needed capital and lots of it.

But one of the amazing thing about capitalism these days, whether you love it or hate it,  it’s that you need hardly any money to start a good business.

Shall I tell you how you can get all the money you’ll need to start up?

Drinks.

Yep, drinks.

For just one month give up your favourite tipple. Whether it’s coffee, pop/soda, or alcohol just switch to tap water for one month.  And I can guarantee that in that time you’ll have enough money to start up.  Because really you don’t need much money at all.  All you need is the passion and a website.  Plus the will power to spend the next 30 days learning about how to start a business.

That’s it.

Again it’s all about your world view and whether you really see yourself being location free whilst working online.

If it’s just a “that would be nice” thing, it will be like the Ferrari that you’d like but never get.  Which is fair enough.

Instead make it a definite plan. Make it a part of yourself.  Make your spare time into “learning and doing” time.

There’s every reason in the world you can do this.

It’s nothing hard, it’s just how the world works these days, and I’m surrounded by people doing this all the time.

If you want to be like in the videos on the site, or sunbathing in Japan as I was this afternoon, chuck the TV, check out the sites, down the drinks and get started!

Good luck.

P.S. And if you’re so pressed for time you never watch TV or browse the web, check out my latest video coming soon.

Of course when they first came out that was what had us all excited, a laptop replacement. But being unable to update HTML websites, design flash or edit video sort of made it so I never carried it around with me until now.

But once you get over the fact that you do need and carry both, the iPad and a laptop, the iPad’s strengths shine out much more.

Autocorrect spelling is fantastic. Touching a picture to move it is great. Email is easier to sort and handle (with no gmail failing to sync). Copying text to Pages is infinitely better than Word, no more pages jumping off when you paste in one line or weird fonts appearing when you paste across. Plus everything looks so much nicer than Word!

Presentations are much better with just one small device to carry and you know that the battery meter is accurate and it won’t die or freeze part way through. That type of confidence is priceless.

Everyone can see the screen in meetings and everyone can reach out to touch it and suggest changes and new ideas.

Somethings are slower, like changing between apps, but the time spent waiting on laptops for them to think about doing something when you click more than makes up for it. It also took me a while, whilst writing this actually, to figure out that you need to use two fingers to scroll the text edit window in WordPress. And as I said before there are plenty of big things you just can’t do.

Backup of data is a concern as is the fact that a full iPad takes up a whole chunk of your laptop’s disk when you sync to iTunes!

But overall as more and more tasks get apps to cover them then I can seen me spending even more time working on the iPad. It is so, so nice not having to search for a power outlet or keep the screen on dim just to save power. Instant on and off is amazing. Apps start up exactly where you left them with no lost data or “oh no!” cries if you clicked “x” before saving. Plus it looks and feels nice, like you really are in charge of a spaceship, and the buttons do things when you hit them instead of just whirring the hard drive.

So for the first time in about six weeks I’m actually quite enjoying working in Starbucks (with the exception of a 3 day workshop on a beautiful tropical island I’ve been living in the city since I got back from New Zealand!)

Lets just see now if I can ever do a full days work without having to boot up my laptop at all!

A lot of the videos I took for this site are using an old Casio video camera, which was nice.

But for my main Youtube channel this year I upgraded to a Panasonic GH1 I’ve since gone on to have over 13 million views, which isn’t all due to the camera, but I’m sure it has helped at lot!

The camera is amazing –  and gives videos the very cool “movie look” where the foreground is focussed but the background is  blurred.      I do get asked a lot about it, so if you do anything on Youtube (or just as a Christmas present!)  then I’d highly recommend it.

The picture here is the black one, but I went with the red one, which looks really cool.

It’s taken me a little while to use it, but here’s one of the first videos I took with it:

If you’ve ever made, or I guess even watched, a video on Youtube there is now a huge opportunity for you to make money online with Youtube.

You don’t need 10 million views on your main channel like I do, all you need is a video camera, know how to set up a Youtube account and an idea of how videos come across on Youtube.

Then it’s really simple:

Just offer to make videos for local companies, hotels, restaurants etc.

That’s it.  It’s really simple!

How it works…

The key is that most business owners are far too busy to even know what Youtube does, let along know how to set up a channel and upload videos.  If you have that knowledge it can be invaluable for them. And anything that makes them money they will be happy to pay for! Customers love video and really seeing a product or service before they buy.  Plus Youtube is now the second biggest search engine in the world.   All this makes it something that every business needs, but not everyone knows how to do.  Until you come along that is!

How I started…

Although “local internet marketing” has become a bit of a boom, I only started this by accident.  Last year I was staying at a friend’s resort in Thailand.   And I wanted to put up a video on my Youtube channel to show my blog readers where I was staying.  Here it is: Samui Accommodation.

But it had an unintended side effect.  When I went back this year they were saying how many more customers they’d had because people had seen the video on Youtube when deciding where to stay.  It brought them trust and showed the customers exactly what they were getting.  They were very happy.  So was I.

Hmmm… so I had another go with another friend’s hotel (as you can tell I pretty much live in hotels), this time setting up a whole new channel for them: New Zealand Accommodation.

And I’ve also set up channels and made videos for lots of other places.

Youtube is still young, so this probably won’t work in a few years time, so get your skates on now!

Things to be careful of…..

These are some of the hints and tips I’ve learnt (usually the hard way!)

1. Brevity: Keep the videos short. People switch off after a minute or so.

2. Honesty: Do it in one cut.  It makes editing easier and shows the real thing, you didn’t just cut out any bad things as you can see everything!

3. Be authentic:  If it’s a commercial channel for a business, that’s cool.  But don’t put ads on a personal channel.  I found this out the hard, and ironic, way as one of the videos I wasn’t paid to do was for New Zealand Wine. As we weren’t doing it as a commercial project I thought it would be a cool video just to put on my personal channel (New Zealand wine is great!), but everyone thought it was an ad and hated it!  Don’t mix business and pleasure I guess!

3. Fun:  Smile and have fun with it!

There are also plenty of other tips and “secret sauces” to making this work well, but I think I’ll keep those to myself for the moment! ; )

But if you have a camera, can get people to smile and talk well then have a go, it’s a great way to get paid and you also end up with lots of fringe benefits, we got given free T-shirts, Bungy Jumps, Jet Boat rides and all sorts of other things if we filmed them and let them use the clips on Youtube!

Whenever I tell people about the Location Free Lifestyle, invariably if they are working they’ll say “I have no time to travel.”

I have no time

My answers to that is….  ”Really?  I have 24 hours in a day, do you have less than me? ”

Wellm we all have the same amount of time each day, it’s how we choose to use it.  What do you choose, the 2 hour commute and 8 hours behind a city desk each day?  Or spend the 8 hours working by the beach with zero communute time – that you can then use to go swimming in the sea?

As we’ve seen in the other posts it does take time to set these things up.  But your time is your own, and you’ve only got a century or so left so make the most of it!

So why work?

And at the same time when I talkt to people who spend all their time travelling they always say “why work at all?”

Many, many people spend almost their entire time travelling around the world.  They work a bit, save some money then head off.   They’re not just beach bum hippies, but all sorts of people including ex accountants bankers and lawyers.  They often say, why not just travel instead of working in different places?

The anwers to this is “purpose”.  Yes I love being by the beach, seeing amazing things and meeting amazing people.  But at the same time you have to a have a purpose in life.  What do you leave behind and how can you help other people?  Without that it can become tedious and meaningless to just travel around, especially when that’s all you can talk about with people!

Yesterday was great for me to just spend the whole day slobbing around the pool.  But at 3 this morning I woke up wanting to do more, so started work.  If you love your work, and you spend the time finding something that really makes a difference in the world then you really want to do it!

And if you’re going to do that you might as well do it online, with wonderful friends in beautiful and more often than not cheaper, places all around the world!

For example last night was the Michael Jackson memorial.  I happened to be in Japan, which meant it would start at 2AM.   All my friends with regular jobs were having to rush around trying to beg their bosses for the next morning off.  For everyone that was location free, we just worked till midnight (I finished up recording my latest CD – yeah!) then headed off to the bars at 2 o’clock till dawn.   We still do the same amount of work, well maybe a lot more, but if something unmissable crops up, you have the flexibility to be there.

So where do we start making money online?

This is the question I get asked more than anything!  Have a look through the previous posts on this site, especially the ones marked “Make money online”

And one really, really excellent free course I can recommend is the one by Shoemoney.  It’s heavy going, not for the feint hearted, but it has real ideas that do work.   Why is he giving it away for free if it’s so good?  I think it’s so you’ll think about signing up for his website tools when you do start, which is a pretty good deal, you get all the info for free and then get a choice if you want to pay for it later! Sign up here.

This is part two of my China Workshops, see here for part one!

Open or closed?

Many people have no idea how to sell their products, their ideas or themselves. So today I got each person in turn to try and sell me the easiest possible item: chocolate cake!They nearly all failed in the first sentence. They let me say “no”.

As we are bombarded with sales people all the time we’re naturally conditioned to say “no” whenever we are given the chance. So the first person asked “Do you like chocolate cake?” “No, thank you, goodbye”. It took several people before they got why this wasn’t working. Any closed question i.e. one that can be answered with yes or no will always receive a “no”. Try it and see!

Although one girl did try hard by asking “With this chocolate cake you can get any hot girl. Do you want a hot girlfriend?” sadly we’ve all been conditioned to say “no” even though many of us would probably realise later we should have said yes!

So if you do ask any questions.they have to be open questions, i.e. where it’s impossible to say “no” because the language part of our brain won’t let us! What sort of chocolate do you like the best? Which of our gorgeous cakes would you like? How many lessons shall we book today?

Then one girl started down the “it’s very cheap, we have a promotion” track. This never works. The instant reaction is “oh, this mustn’t be good if it’s discounted. I don’t want chocolate cake that no one else wants”. Social proof, if it’s cheap other people mustn’t like it. Therefore I don’t like it.

Cost nor product matter at all!

The first thing is to realise that it doesn’t really matter what the cake is about nor how much it costs. All selling is is the transfer of emotion. Your job as a seller, especially online,  is to get the image of the feeling that the product will bring firmly into the buyer’s mind. They have to see it, experience it, feel what it’s like to have this gorgeous, delicious, moist chocolate cake gently crumbling as you move the fork, passing the soft, fresh cream and the exotic wild strawberry jam layers. They have to imagine the luxurious taste as the first delicate chips of dark, fragrant chocolate caress your tongue. If your mouth is watering now, you want it. You don’t care what the cake is made of or what it costs, you want that feeling now!

It’s the same with anything you buy. You don’t buy a car because you want a car. What you buy is the feeling of freedom.  Starbucks doesn’t sell coffee, they sell the energy and the feeling the ambience creates.

As a salesperson, and that’s what you are,  you have to figure out what you are actually selling. What feeling you are selling. Then using words, images, videos you put the clear emotional image of this feeling in the customer’s head and you’ve made the sale. Every time.

Click here here for part one. ]]> http://www.locationfreelifestyle.com/how-to-sell-anything-to-anybody/feed 0 http://www.locationfreelifestyle.com/lessons-learned-from-my-first-business-aged-13 http://www.locationfreelifestyle.com/lessons-learned-from-my-first-business-aged-13#comments Sat, 25 Apr 2009 02:35:40 +0000 admin http://www.locationfreelifestyle.com/?p=282 As with your next business, my first business started because of a need amongst my friends.  We always used to want to buy the latest computer games but before the internet you had to wait for a month before the magazines like Crash or Amiga Format came out with reviews so you could see if the game you wanted was any good or not.  You could just buy a game without reading a review, but more times than not it would be terrible and you’d wasted your hard earned pocket money.

I figured that we could write a review “fanzine” ourselves, timed to come out in the gap between issues of the big magazines with much quicker reviews, hence we called it  “PREview” that I sold for 20 pence a copy.

Things actually went quite well, I sold it in the school bookshop (just asked the teacher!) and word of mouth amongst friends.  By the time I wound it up I’d made enough money to buy myself a colour TV!  In those days that was quite a big thing.  Not to mention game companies had started sending me games to review.  I had to send them back though.

But I learned a lot of things in this first business:

Peope will pay for something that will save them money

It’s much easier to sell something where you can give a definite price on how much it saves you.   PREview cost 20p but it could save you wasting a whole 9.99 on a bad game!

Ignore the naysayers

I was selling the magazine at a schoolmate’s dad’s computer shop.  I’m not sure how I managed this, I think I must just have asked.  Anyway as usually happens when somebody starts doing something well the naysayers start getting jealous.   This school mate came in one day shouting to everyone “Ha, we had a customer come in yesterday, he picked up Richard’s fanzine and thought it was free!  He didn’t think it was worth 20p! HA HA!”   Of course all of his mates were lapping this up.  And some of my friends who were working on the magazine got a bit down by it.  But I wasn’t bothered at all.  My feeling was, yeah but other people are buying it at 20p!  That says much more than one person who doesn’t.   You’re never going to be able to please everyone.  Isn’t that the famous Bill Crosby quote?   “I can’t tell you the path to success.  But the path to failure is to try and please all the people all the time”.

Positive people do positive things.

Everyone who has ever done anything in this world was a positive person. Otherwise they wouldn’t have done the things they have!  Ignore the negative people.  Surround yourself with people are are actually getting on and doing things.

Great people talk about ideas.
Average people talk about things
Small people talk about other people.

.

Having said that …

Technology always lets you down

In the beginning the magazine was photocopied.  This was real copy and paste with glue and sellotape and a master copy that looked something from Indiana Jones’ Diary with all the bits taped and stuck on it.  Then I heard about a new way of colour printing.  That sounded cool!  Of course before the internet you couldn’t check things out online, so I asked lots of questions and it seemed legit.  So I started promoting that from next month we’d be in full colour!  I told everyone.  Then I found how how the system works, you have to hand copy over the master using a series of coloured carbon papers!  Oh dear.  But the deadline was too near so I woke up very, very early on the Sunday morning and tried copying out every copy of the magazine.   It certainly looked “different”, I’m sure it would have won an original art competition,  unfortunately you couldn’t read hardly any of it!  That sort of killed things off a bit as going back to black and white after all the hype wasn’t really on.

So,  realise that technology always breaks and always have a back up plan!

Look at every way to create revenue from your product

When I set the price of the magazine I came up with 20p as it simply cost less than this to photocopy.  Always allow a nice profit margin because there will always be extra costs you’ve never dreamed about.  What I didn’t realise is that most magazines, back then at least, didn’t make most of their money from the cover price, but from advertising inside the magazine.   If I had known this I could have gone round local business and sold adverts and made a lot more money.

This is the same with many businesses, they just “leave money on the table”.  For example you could be creating more revenue by adding private advertisers to your site, writing a book, recommending other people’s services, creating a membership site etc. etc.    The content is always the main thing, finding people’s needs and then satisfying them, but if the finances are tight then always keep an eye open for other ways to monetize what you do.   Always read up on the biographies and business info of other people and companies.  Find out how they make money.  If you have a site or small business already, it might just be one simple idea that catapults you into the big revenue league!

It’s never too early or too late

Some of you will be reading this now and your subconscious will be making up excuses as to why you can’t live a location free lifestyle.  It will be things like “Richard started when he was 13, I didn’t so I can’t do it” or “He had a head start before the internet came along, I’m too late now”.   Ignore those.  The best time to start up a business is always now!  Imagine what I could have done with my games previews if I had had the internet.  Well you don’t need to because there are hundreds of sites now making millions of dollars.   Does that mean I should have waited?  No, because I not only made a bit of money (a colour TV is a big thing for a 13 year old even if it is second hand) and helped out my friends (we all saved valuable gaming time by only buying the best games from each others recommendations!)  you learn so much from just starting a business.  Most people fail a couple of times, or more likely things just fizzle out, but that’s where you learn and those are the stepping stones to your much bigger success in the future!  So get started. Now!

By contrast I first started this “location free lifestyle”  site as something not too serious.  I know people who live like this, and people who want to live like this, and I know anyway can do it, but I also know that most people in rich countries won’t do it.

Today I realised that I might be targeting the wrong people. This site might be more serious than I could have possibly imagined.  Maybe I shouldn’t be aiming at the richest, but the poorest areas in the world.  For this “location free lifestyle”  could be the way out of poverty for millions of people.

Sceptical?  Let me explain, I might be wrong, but then again I might be right…

Why on Earth do the poorest people need the internet?

As I work with schools in some of the poorest areas of places like India, or this month China I always used to get annoyed by millionaire philanthropists from silicon valley going on about the “information gap” about how money should be spent on getting access to the internet for everyone.   Shouldn’t we be spending the money on health care?  On health education? On general education?  On electricity supplies?  Or even the super dream of having clean water?   Surely the last thing these people need is to be able to watch Tom & Jerry cartoons on Youtube?  (Which is what a lot of our kids where doing when we first gave them the internet!)

It’s the “location” part of “location free lifestyle” that’s key

But why are people poor?   When you look at poverty, it’s the economic situation that is the problem,  by definition of the word.   And in many cases that’s because people can’t find jobs where they live,  they have to move to get work.   In China we have people moving hundreds of miles to live illegally in the big cities where they earn low wages and their children don’t get access to free education.   In South America we hear of parents leaving children to go and work in Europe.  The recent controversies with South Asian workers working in Dubai.   In each case it’s because the workers couldn’t find work at home.

Da dah!  Education -> Enterprise

But just a minute, isn’t that was this website is about?  The tagline at the top of the page is “Make money online – live in paradise”   Sometimes in rural areas it really is a paradise, but for most people paradise is their home with their families.   So with a location free lifestyle you do make money online, but the location you choose as being with your family.

So maybe this idea that the poorest need the internet as much as fresh water or safe housing may indeed be true.  Not because of Youtube or mp3s or  online computer games, but because if you do have the internet you can earn a living online.  You don’t need to move and you can stay with and feed your family.

Of course it’s not easy…

Of course there are problems.  It’s nowhere near being “easy”.   But if you don’t have the internet, you can’t do it at all.  If you have online access then at least you have a chance.   It’s not for everyone of course.   Computers are complex and marketing is difficult to understand.  Many of the poorest adults are illiterate and can’t just pick up a book on computing.

But poor people in developing countries aren’t stupid.  They’re some of the most entrepreneurial, enterprising, smart thinking people you can imagine.  You should see some of the amazing money making ideas they come up with.  They’ll come up with crazy things once they are online.  They’re not lazy either.  Kids in the West might complain that McDonald’s is too far to walk to as they sit playing computer games all day, but the kids we teach certainly aren’t scared of hard work.

It doesn’t take long to learn how to make money online, and you can experiment as you go along.  Plus if you are earning US dollars but spending rupees you’ll very quickly lift yourself out of poverty.

It doesn’t even have to be on traditional computers.  In Cambodia we’re using the $100 laptops for education, all linked to the internet with a solar powered charging system.  It would be so easy for these kids to start selling information products online, then their parents and teachers wouldn’t have to work 3 or 4 jobs.   In Africa mobile phones may soon become the way to connect to the internet and they can do just as much as a PC.

Just a dream?

Am I being too idealistic about this?  Of course! And I’ve only just made the connection this evening after watching a story about South American families on French TV (whilst I was in China!).   But what we’ve seen over the last few months is that dreams do come true.   And we’re just starting.  As I said I always thought of this site as an extra, a bonus for the few people who would take up the challenge, or a diary for me to look back on in the future.  But now I’m thinking it could be so much more than this.   I need to concentrate on the “how to” of starting making money online from scratch so that anyone can do it.  If you’re hungry enough.

Everyone’s lives  become richer

Making money online is all about information products, what unique insight, technique, way of thinking can you bring to other people.  There are billions of people who don’t have a way to express themselves like that, but they have so much knowledge.  And I for one can’t wait to see what amazing products they will make and let us all experience.  I’ve seen how the internet can revolutionise education.  Now can it eradicate poverty?

As we say in Japan: Dekiru to omoeba Dekiru.  Or as Mr Obama says it “Yes, we can”.

Be genki,

Richard

www.LocationFreeLifestyle.com