Now I like planning – its so much more fun than doing. I’m quite good at planning too -just ask anyone who has been travelling with me. But business planning is a whole different game – I know the theory:
- Decide what the end is – say $1,000,000 in round figure and by when.
- Work out where you are now – that’s easy just done the taxes
- Work out how to get from 2 to 1
Hmm yeah oops – 3 is kinda the problem in my experience. This blog started as my attempt of at least an online diary of my journey of 100 sites – but got re-named when I figured I was the ONLY person who ever searched for that keyword LOL.I thought that might be close enough to a business plan – I may have been wrong …
Last month I wrote about making $1500 from Adsense and Affiliates this month its pretty much the same – slightly different winners and losers but generally, overall add up to about the same figure. I’m actually fairly happy with that – August is usually a very slow month online and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see my earnings drop, Also this month I was focused on building stuff which will make money in the future – not right now.
Making an income that was real rather than just a joke made me even more determined to plan B – what if I suddenly was the only income earner in the house? What if we move again and my partner can’t get/doesn’t want a job? Plan B has been SEO consulting to small business. I wasn’t going to do it seriously until we moved back to New Zealand – a real-world business needs contacts and I don’t have them here, and yes I know you can do this all online but my potential clients don’t know that!
I must admit though that SEO consulting has some downsides for me:
- you have to do a lot of education with clients – and a lot of definition of roles – no I don’t do flash development or even adwords I do SEO!
- you have to get dressed in the morning
Frankly the second one is the real issue! I thought for a while I might like the human contact – but I came to my senses and remembered that business meetings are not human contact!
So I wanted another Plan B – I way to raise quick cash with a bit more certainity than developing niche sites and better paid than writing articles.
So after some thought and a whole lot more reading I think I am going into the site flipping business. I will build sites, do some other magic stuff to them (SEO) and sell them for a healthy profit. It fits well with my passive income – because if they don’t sell they will probably just sit around and make me money anyways!
If any of your are into real estate investing you will understand the concept of site flipping – a property flipper will usually buy a run-down house, do it up and sell it for a profit. Website flipping is similar – but without the downside risk of mortgages!
Why do I want a plan B anyway? After all my little ugly sites make me money while I sleep right ? Yes they do – but if I needed an extra $5000 tomorrow they wouldn’t be able to deliver on that! Websites typically seem to sell for up to 10 times monthly earnings – so if I had a site making $500 a month – there’s my $5000 . At the moment if we needed that sort of cash we’d use my partner’s income or borrow it – because of our excellent credit – again because one of us has a real job. Flipping sites seems to be the obvious adjunct income for me while I build the passive income empire.
By the way I still seem to have some of you confused about why making a few dollars of passive income is totally exciting to me – much more exciting than earning $1000 in a real job. Check out John’s description of why passive income is the best of all possible incomes to have – his story the same as my story – I was delighted in early June to have hit $100 in Adesnse for the month by the 10th – my partner’s reaction was – *shrug* – in July he was delighted that I made 6 times that in Adsense, in August he was asking me how it was going on a weekly basis! So if you have trouble convincing people – don’t worry they will understand when youstart making the cash!