Back in the early 2000’s I was looking for a lifestyle business. I had read books like Tim Ferris’s Four Hour Work Week. But I was still struggling to make a living juggling low paid crappy jobs! I trained to be a stuntman (see my about me page) and had passed my qualifications in 2002. After that I just waited for the phone to ring, which admittedly was a mistake, looking back! But it was also a lesson too.
The phone didn’t ring and I was juggling jobs as a taxi driver, working on building sites and trying to find a way to earn online since then! Work as a stunt performer did materialise however, but it wasn’t until 2 years after qualifying to the British Stunt register. This was me on my first stunt job – working on a film called Enduring Love doubling Rhys Ifans. Checkout my IMDB page here.
Lifestyle Business – Struggles
After my first stunt job I expected the phone to start ringing off the hook! (Since I was so good at hanging from a hot air balloon!) Of course it didn’t! So it was back to driving taxis. I had also found work using some of my stunt qualifications teaching trampolining, rock climbing and martial arts. But it was never enough to pay the bills let alone get ahead! The stunt work served to bail me out of debt rather than launch me into the life I was expecting, and work only came along sporadically. Often months or even years would pass by while I was doing other things, other than stunt work. As the saying goes, life is what happens while your planning something else!
By the time I was in my late 30’s I realised I had been waiting far too long. I had tried numerous online endeavours including a number of eBay strategies, Forex marketing and blogging. But I was massively stuck and still found myself picking up low paid work, driving HGV’s and struggling to make ends meet. I saw myself as a failure and no amount of working low paid jobs would get me out of it. Damn!
I quit a number of jobs including the HGV driving which wasn’t getting me anywhere, and I was falling into a downwards spiral of doom and gloom.
Lifestyle Business – The Law Of Attraction
I knew I couldn’t carry on as I was and things had to change. But no amount of “struggle” and “hustle” was working for me. I decided I needed to stop what I was doing and look at the way I was operating. Something told me to re-watch The Secret – you have probably heard of the film called The Secret by Rhonda Byrne?
It’s a film about the Law Of Attraction which, whether you believe it or not made a massive difference for me. In simple terms the law of attraction states that “thoughts become things”. When you focus on all the things wrong with your life, guess what, you create more of that!
I realised that was what I was doing. I was depressed and desperate and kept thinking about the things which were going wrong in my life. Relationships, crappy jobs, no money, debt, and on and on it went! I became fascinated with the law of attraction and started looking for more books on this topic. Here’s a bunch of books I found in pdf format. Books like:
- Think and Grow Rich – Napoleon Hill
- Working with The Law – Raymond Holliwell
- The Science Of Getting Rich – Wallace Wattles
- The Strangest Secret – Earl Nightingale
- Etc.
Lifestyle Business – A Spot Of Luck
Shortly after my spree of self study, things started picking up work-wise. I got a call for a job on a few films one after another. This carried on for a while but I came to realise that working away wasn’t good for my relationship, which abruptly ended while I was away in Tenerife. What should have been a great time, working in a foreign country was actually pretty stressful! I came home with broken elbows and a broken relationship!
The huge amount of work I’d put into becoming a stunt performer was finally paying off, but everything else was falling apart! My bank account hadn’t looked as good, but I knew I couldn’t count on getting more work so I paid off a few debts and hardly spent a thing, for fear of another dry spell.
Commuting 🙁
In was while I was driving up and down the M1 (the main motorway in the UK from north to south), I realised I was miserable, even though my dream of becoming a stuntman had been realised. I was chasing the money but my life was a series of “have to’s” one after another. I had no relationship and all my time was spent working or getting to work.
It was around this time I started looking to the internet for a means of earning a living.
Lifestyle Business – eBay
After studying Forex for some time I realised I didn’t have the money to trade with, or perhaps the necessary patience to wait for trades to line up so I could jump in. So I ditched the Forex and looked to eBay as a means to make an income from home. I found an ebook which promised a strategy to earn from eBay and bought it. After studying the strategy I tried it out a few times and it actually worked.
The strategy was to find misspelled listings which were as a result not getting found by those who would otherwise had been putting bids in. You may have even heard of this strategy yourself. There’s a few websites set up for misspell searches on eBay. The basic idea is to buy items from eBay which aren’t getting found because they are either misspelled or otherwise badly listed.
An eBay Business
I thought that eBay was the answer to working for myself in a manner which was stress free! The strategy did work and I stuck to it for some time. You can read about it in this article. I had tried other eBay strategies before too, mainly they involved buying and selling, but this one was the best one.
Other eBay strategies involved buying large volume of stock and holding it, selling items individually through a single listing. But at the time I couldn’t afford to compete with the heavy eBay lifters who were selling at such low prices and obviously had to buy huge amounts to make a profit with them.
Lifestyle Business – eBook Sales
After working with the eBay strategy for several months, I realised that it wasn’t going to work over the long term. It took too long to scour eBay for misspelled items and then to catch a bargain. Then I had to re-list them and wait the required time to sell. Queue at the post office to get the weighed and send them off.
All in all this was pretty time consuming and I only came out with a tiny profit. While I was working on this strategy, I was also juggling a number of jobs. I knew the answer had to be in automation, and I though back to the ebook which taught me the strategy for buying and selling on eBay in the first place. The ebook was a digital downloadable pdf document which I bought off eBay itself.
Automated Sales!
The transaction struck me as so simple and it was completely hands free. I knew this had to be the key to a lifestyle business which could keep working while I was off doing other things.
I pictured myself sitting on the beach, earning lots of money from selling downloadable products over and over on complete autopilot! So I wrote an ebook about how to be a stuntman and tried to sell it from a website. No sales! Despite being able to upload the pdf and create a sales page with a Paypal link, there was no traffic to my website. I didn’t make a single sale!
But I knew automation was the way to go so I persevered and bought a few of those online courses. You’ve probably seen some of them. “Make money online” and that kind of thing! I just wanted to know how to get traffic to my website so I could sell my ebook! Making money from a website, I thought, had to be the best way to make money. After all, once the work was done once, I could sit back and enjoy life finally, right!?
Lifestyle Business – Affiliate Marketing
After joining an online course, for which I paid around $100, I soon learned that there was a better way to earn money from a website. My ebook would sell for maybe $10. But although I could keep 100% of my profit from my own product, other people’s products offered much more value. Affiliate marketing was the business model I discovered. With affiliate marketing you can earn 40% of the cost of an item. The course I bought initially sold for $100. So my ebook sale would make me $10 but if I sold the course I had just bought myself, I would earn $40!
A Better Strategy
I quickly ditched the ebook idea and focused on learning affiliate marketing. The guy who sold me one of the first courses I took was called Peter Lexis. He had a few videos explaining the strategy he used to generate traffic and make sales. So I copied his stuff and actually started making sales. I was running paid advertising on Google Adwords, sending traffic to a landing page and collecting emails. Then my series of follow up emails would result in a number of sales, one after another. I thought I had finally “made it” and was ready to start increasing my marketing budget and scale up my business.
Then disaster struck and my Adwords account got shut down. Apparently I had committed some error bad by selling this money making course. I couldn’t get my account back and so diverted my path to another traffic generating strategy: blogging.
Blogging
Since my Adwords account got banned I figured that the obvious solution was to carry on in another direction and blogging seemed like a good alternative to paid marketing. Peter’s course eventually disappeared but I had learned a lot from his teachings. I was able to send visitors to a landing page, collect their emails and deliver a product, all on complete autopilot. It was disappointing to get my advertising account shut down, but I wasn’t going to quit! I did try and get it back up, but at the time, Google were adamant that I wasn’t going to do so!
I found a guy called Shaun Smith who sold me his course. This guy was more of a content strategist and recommended using Google Adsense to monetise a website. With Google Adsense, you place advertising code on your site which is converted into suitable adverts which relate to your content.
Adsense Pays Peanuts!
The main trouble with Adsense is that it pays peanuts. You only earn a tiny proportion of the advertisers payment for a click on their adverts.
So even after several months of following this new “guru” that I’d found, I was still making next to nothing. Although seeing some money come in from the internet was pretty valuable for my belief at the time.
My first organic sale came from a free blog site (Hubpages.com) after I wrote an article review about some software I had bought called XSitePro. I was ecstatic! It wasn’t the only thing I written and I’d been at it for some time by this point. But this consolidated my view of affiliate marketing – it was far superior to Google Adsense.
It would have taken years to make this amount ($40) from the content I had built through Adsense. I was making $0.14 per week, or something ridiculous through Adsense, although this was mostly because I wasn’t getting enough traffic.
The Power Of A Review
I didn’t realise why my review was such a powerful marketing tactic until much later in my affiliate marketing career. I tried to replicate this sale with so many other tactics but I didn’t manage to repeat it. Hubpages eventually banned my account too! My articles were “low quality” and they had flagged me as a spammer! This was a blow but I didn’t quit! I knew there was a future in affiliate marketing and that if I just stuck it out I would make it pay!
A review is so powerful because it catches the buyer in the last step of the “buying cycle”. Many other of the strategies I had used fell flat, but this one stuck out to me and I always remember it. Another strategy I had tried was to throw up a bunch of websites using keywords in the domain name. This was something I had learned from another course.
Niche Websites – Free Traffic
But at the time, the strategy was working really well. Since they probably sold the course to thousands of would-be affiliate marketers, it probably fell flat soon afterwards. It certainly did for me. The strategy involved buying a keyword domain name, floating a website to the top of Google and selling affiliate products from it.
I built many of these kinds of sites and most of them fell flat. I did make a couple of sales from the organic search results, but this was a while ago now and Google has had a number of algorithm changes since. There’s a tonne more competition too, which means ranking a site is becoming incredibly difficult today.
The Forgiving Nature Of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing became my strategy of choice despite having dabbled with eBay, Adsense, Forex marketing and a couple of other “make money online” strategies. But I struggled for some time, jumping from course to course, and looking for the next best (and easiest) strategy. Of course there was always someone who would sell you an “easier” course. But of course it wasn’t easier, it was just the same!
Another course I did was called the Keyword Academy. This course taught blogging and the use of Adsense to monetise through advertising clicks. There was this whole strategy of research which you had to do before you began, basically to determine whether a keyword was worth going after. Once you found one, you would be writing content for several months, hoping to rank your site on Google and earn $1000 a month from advertising.
But the rules always shifted and many of the courses I took are no longer around today. Google changed their algorithms a number of times and what was once several months of work to rank a site became years!
But affiliate marketing is forgiving and you can always jump back in and start again. After a number of struggles I would often despair at the affiliate marketing “thing” and wonder if I was barking up the wrong tree. The phone would ring and a job would come in and that would give me a much needed break. A week later, or a month later, I would start again.
Lifestyle Business – New Beginnings
Despite working for a long time at affiliate marketing, blogging, and other online strategies, by 2014 I was not really making any money from it. I had tried a few things but I still struggled. Again, I reverted to the film The Secret, and thought about the implications of me creating my own outcomes by the nature of my thinking. Was I creating struggle because I believed life was a struggle?
Did I choose a difficult path? Was it even possible to make a living from affiliate marketing, or any other method and create a lifestyle business which gave me the money to truly life life on my own terms. Perhaps I was afraid of success?
I reminded myself to re-read the books I had found on the law of attraction. I had indeed created some barriers to my own success. What if I was successful online, what then? Would I just swan around in my pyjamas all day. Perhaps I would lose hope having succeeded and accomplished all I had set out to achieve?
Gruber, H. – “And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds left to conquer.” Although technically a misquote: Plutarch says when Alexander wept after a lecture on infinite worlds it was because ‘There are so many worlds, & I have not yet conquered even one’
2014
In 2014 I found an online video of a guy on a pedalo filming on the island of Mauritius talking about online business and how he had created a lifestyle of freedom. He was able to earn money on autopilot, even though he was swanning around on holiday having a great time!
And, yes of course I was sceptical. But something about the video rang true and I knew this guy was genuine. I had bought a bunch of courses from people far less believable than him. He was also a Brit – British! The previous online courses I had bought were all from Americans which didn’t mean they were not genuine, most of them were, but for someone living in the UK, this just seemed closer to home and therefore more trustworthy.
Keep Going
Despite having bought many online courses before, I knew if I gave up, I’d be back where I was. By this point I was in my late 30’s and still struggling financially. I juggled a number of jobs, HGV driving, teaching kung fu and the occasional stunt job came in now and then. But mostly, I was still doing work I hated, just to nearly make ends meet!
So I jumped on board and started from scratch. I had done some affiliate stuff before, but since I hadn’t really got anywhere, I was determined to let go of any bias or entitlement which would stand in the way of success.
An Online Lifestyle Business Community
I’m so glad I stuck with it because I had found an online business community which would lead to my finally breaking through with affiliate marketing.
But before this could happen, there was work to be done! Even though I’d had some small success with selling affiliate products online, I knew there was a lot more to learn. A lot had happened over the few years I had been struggling to make an income online. I had learned a lot and realised that it wasn’t all plain sailing. At first, when I jumped on my first course, I thought I could just press a few buttons and make money. That is what some of the early courses I took had led me to believe. But I had realised that this, of course, wasn’t the case by now!
Stu & Jay!
I met Stuart Ross and Jay Kubassek, founders of the SFM Digital Business System and online training community. They seemed genuine and were the first course creators and mentors who had actually showed up for their members in all the courses I had taken! I had done a lot of courses by this point. Checkout my article listing some of the courses I had done in the pursuit of earning an income online.
I also met many other members of the community they had built, many of whom had transitioned from full time employment to earning online from what they had learned.
Starting Again
Much of what I thought I had learned was working against me. I learned that being a “busy fool” was something I had been doing already quite well! A “busy fool” is someone who spends a lot of time on the wrong activities. As an affiliate marketer you’re an entrepreneur and therefore responsible for your results, or lack of them. Business isn’t like a job, but I was treating it like a job. I would work only when it suited me, and slack off the rest of the time. I was focused on the wrong activities and had been spending time polishing my websites which got no traffic and made no sales! It was a hard pill to swallow!
A Busy Fool
A busy fool I was but I also fell into the many traps of newbie affiliate marketers. Shiny object syndrome was another and my many courses I had taken was testimony to this. I also promoted many low value affiliate products which paid next to nothing in commissions!
What I came to realise and what I didn’t understand before was that there’s far better products to promote as an affiliate than the ones I was selling, or trying to sell. The same amount of work can earn ten times the amount when you work smart. High ticket products sell for thousands, not hundreds. Digital products pay 40-50% commissions compared to physical ones which pay only 1-11%!
Plus with high value products, it’s easier to profit while using paid marketing. For low value products it’s very difficult to make a profit and pay for advertising. The SFM offer a high ticket business model which contains multiple products with which to earn from. I was promoting low value physical products which made next to nothing in commissions. No wonder I was struggling!
My First High Ticket Sale & Recurring Commissions!
My first high ticket sale came quite quickly after joining the SFM Mentors. Luckily my sponsor (the person who referred me) was quite helpful and ran an advertising co-operative, to help his members. Plus I also was a keen blogger and made a couple of early high value sales from some of my articles.
I thought I’d made it and celebrated by spending it – a rookie mistake! I’ve since learned that top affiliates know to reinvest their revenue in marketing and scale up. But again, there was lots I didn’t know. I had never made a high ticket sale before and it was around $1000 worth of commissions. Before that my highest value commission had been around $40 – since I was selling $100 products. I’d used Clickbank.com and other affiliate marketing sites to source products and for years I never even heard of high ticket affiliate marketing.
Recurring Income From Affiliate Products
I also discovered recurring income affiliate marketing. Recurring income affiliate programs are software and membership products which pay affiliates ongoing income for their referrals. With a good product you can earn commissions potentially for a lifetime. While some customers will drop out after some time, many will stay and this has helped me generate a continual residual income from the sale of memberships and subscription products.
This is one of the main keys of a lifestyle business. With the affiliate marketing model, you can automate the sale of other people’s products online. But with high ticket and recurring income products, you can use paid marketing and scale up to a global audience. When you start generating sales, you earn an ongoing income, not just a one time commission.
With product referrals, all of this can be automated too!
The Inevitable Slump
After a short lived early success, I rested on my laurels. This was perhaps a mistake I had to make to pick up my game later on. I had become so fearful regarding money; and thoughts of scarcity attract scarcity! Remember the law of attraction books! This was the pattern I was in. Partially this was down to the nature of my stunt jobs, but really it was the way I was thinking about money – as a scarce resource. (Which came first the thinking or the (lack of) work?) Mmm.
Blogging – A Slow Strategy
I had a few months where nothing happened and although I had focused for some time on blogging as a marketing strategy, it wasn’t getting me anywhere! Or so I thought, anyway.
The blogging as it turned out was a “slow burner” and later, during the pandemic, my blog posts had been a source of leads for my email marketing list. In 2020 when everything changed, things suddenly started picking up. I had one of my best ever sales just shortly before, when I sold a $30k product and made around $10k in commissions! It was amazing!
But I wasn’t consistent and this was because I would get a phone call for a stunt job and be away. When I returned back I was dazed and out of the habit. This is partly why it took me so long to get traction. Consistency is key, but in hindsight everyone has 2020 vision. Mmm that phrase has a new meaning now!
Belief
Belief is an important thing in any entrepreneurial endeavour, but especially in affiliate marketing. Without belief, you simply won’t have the necessary motivation to keep going long enough to break through.
With scepticism, and friends and family talking you out of it, it’s so much more difficult still. I went through stages of lack of faith and losing my belief in the affiliate marketing business. When this happens, it’s tough to keep working. Your business is built on belief and if you don’t have it, you won’t have a business. Getting support from an online community is what carried me though and I almost quit more than once. But I didn’t!
With belief anything is possible, without it nothing is. If you don’t believe you can do something you don’t even try.
Henry Ford said: “Whether a man thinks he can or he can’t, he’s right”!
Keeping your belief alive and maintaining your forward momentum is what’s necessary for an online lifestyle business. Most people don’t make it and around 95% of affiliate marketers will quit. Is affiliate marketing hard? Yes, but it does offer something worth working for!
Email Marketing
One of the biggest shifts for me was building an email list and learning email marketing. This is one of the main keys to a lifestyle business. Email marketing is something which can be done from anywhere by anyone. All you need is to learn a good strategy of gathering emails on to your list, and a means of generating an income from selling affiliate products.
An email list can be built from a website or a simple landing page. You can even get free access to an email autoresponder – see free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.
Using an email list works for affiliates because it’s a way to control your own traffic and build relationships with subscribers. From a website, it can be very hard to sell something, especially to someone who only hits your website once. By offering something to your visitors you can get them to subscribe to your email list.
Once on your list, you can continue to give value to subscribers and promote your products for a much longer time scale. You can build trust through emails and you can showcase and explain your products over a much longer time scale than is possible just from a website.
2020
In 2020 I was juggling stunt work, I ran a Wing Chun kung fu school in Leeds, and I was working on the online business. Suddenly my classes were shut down and so was the film industry. Many lost their livelihoods around the world as whole industries were shut down. I threw myself into blogging and emailing my list; which was up to a few thousand subscribers by this point. I also started running Wing Chun Online sessions using Zoom to offer my students.
The online business took off and many people were looking for an alternative income when theirs evaporated or came under threat. I had emails from people some of whom had been on my email list for over two years!
2020 wasn’t a good year in many respects but it changed the landscape for many people. More people realised that working from home is far preferable to commuting and working for a boss!
My partner also started working from home much to my dismay! (and still is today!) We were living in a small terraced back to back house which shared 3 walls with neighbours! It wasn’t a great time being stuck in the house with only 1 living room and a bedroom! But we tried to make the most of it:
Post Lockdown & Lifestyle Business
A lot has changed over the last year for many people and it looks like this climate isn’t set to change any time soon. Who knows what the future will look like? There’s only so much we can control about what is going on “out there” but there’s so much we can control about our own lives. Having an online “lifestyle business” has made this situation so much more bearable for me. I want the same for you if you want it too!
It’s not exactly the lifestyle business I wanted and expected it to be (travelling and lying on a sunny beach), but I’m grateful at least to have created a business I love. That’s meant that I can choose when and where to work on my business and on myself..
So if you’re looking to make some changes, maybe building an online business will be one of them? If so you can start here! Reply to my emails and I’ll get back to you!
Best wishes!
Tim