Fuck You Money is the level of security you need, in order for you to be able to tell anyone to ‘fuck you’ without it having a direct impact on your earning potential or what you want to do in life.
Granted, this rule is never absolute – there will always be people who you can’t, or indeed don’t want to, tell to ‘fuck you’.
Close friends and family should probably be excluded from this rule (with a few exceptions, depending on the circumstances) along with the taxman, police officers, and judges – but the premise remains firm.
Ultimate freedom is the ability to wake up every morning and tell the World to ‘fuck you’ – you’re doing what you want that day, and every day thereafter, and there’s nothing and noone that can stop you from doing that.
It’s probably explained best by John Goodman in the film ‘The gambler’:
As eloquent as ever.
Why work all the hours god sends, for big money, a big house, a garage full of fancy cars, when you’re still in a position where you HAVE to answer to someone, whether it be your boss, the bank manager, customers, clients, a regulatory body, whatever.
You’re still in a position where, if you don’t turn in to work, if you consistently avoid their calls, if you miss a meeting, or if you outright tell that important someone to ‘fuck you’ – your World as you know it will come tumbling down.
You have no power, you’re a puppet to someone else, maybe several people – and they ultimately still control your destiny.
To me, money in this scenario is worthless (unless you are investing it in something that can eventually earn you freedom from your current position of powerlessness). And be careful here, because a lot of ‘investments’ you make, can still rob you of the ultimate reward in life – freedom.
Money is only useful insofar as it can create freedom.
Despite what a lot of people may think, money is not the ultimate goal. Money is a facilitator to the ultimate goal.
Even seemingly wholly materialistic goals, like earning enough money to buy a Lamborghini, is based around freedom – the freedom to be able to buy a Lamborghini, should you wish.
This is freedom most people will never feel.
And by the way, if you’re ever fortunate enough to gain this freedom of choice – please choose to NOT buy the Lamborghini. Or I strongly suspect your feeling of freedom will be short-lived, as the payments, the depreciation, the fuel, the maintenance, the insurance, the fact you’ll still be stuck in that same traffic jam the guy in the Ford Fiesta is stuck in, the unwanted attention and jealousy, will soon bring about buyer’s remorse.
So what amount of money is ‘Fuck You Money’?
It’s not actually as much as you might think.
See freedom and income are not in any way relative to one another – you don’t need a great deal of income to achieve absolute freedom in your life.
Ask the top CEOs in the World how free their lives are – with constant scrutiny from the media, the public, boards of Directors, shareholders, and other stakeholders – and I guarantee, relative to the income they receive – even though it may be in the millions – they are earning less freedom per dollar or pound earned than most people.
Earning big bucks isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.
Unless you’re earning big bucks in ‘fuck you’ money.
But here’s the great thing – the exchange value from regular currency to GB’FUCKYOU’P is extraordinary – if you engineer your life, your income, and your responsibilities properly, each GB’FUCKYOU’P can be worth 10, 20, even 100 times more than any regular GBP you earn.
How much ‘fuck you money’ you need depends on you, and your personal goals and needs at this point in time – and ensuring you see these clearly.
I’m talking re-assessing every single outgoing you have – that car you have on finance, those big mortgage repayments, all those gifts you buy on special occasions like Christmas, those designer clothes you wear, all that alcohol you drink (just to damage your health and feel shitty the following day), the cigarettes you smoke, right down to the god-damn toilet paper you use. Assess every £ you are regularly spending, and whether it’s contributing towards earning your freedom, or whether it’s actually keeping you trapped.
And here’s the biggest key to releasing your freedom – leave your ego and your ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’ mentality at the door.
Do you think you’re really driving around in that fancy car, wearing those designer jeans, living in that obscenely huge house that’s well beyond necessity, purely for your own satisfaction, and it’s not in any way related to how you like to see yourself being perceived by others?
Fuck off. Get real.
Don’t live life for other people, and certainly don’t trade freedom to feed your ego. If it’s not absolutely necessary, or aligned with your own goals (peer pressure, competition, and ego aside), don’t do it. Don’t trade your hard earned GBP for all this bullshit, convert it to GB’FUCKYOU’P instead.
‘Fuck You’ is the only currency I want to be dealing in – because it’s the only currency that buys freedom. If I’m getting paid in anything but GB’FUCKYOU’P I’m channelling as much of that regular currency into something that will eventually be, or is, generating GB’FUCKYOU’P.
So what is ‘Fuck You Money’ and how can I earn some?
For me, the epitome of Fuck You Money is passive income.
In other words, income you earn each day whether you choose to get out of bed, or not.
Once you’ve done the above, and removed any outgoing that isn’t directed towards achieving your own goals, you should be directing every GBP saved in doing this exercise, into passive income sources that can in-turn supply you with ‘Fuck You Money’ – the holy grail.
I have a ‘passive income challenge‘ going on right now, and that article will help you to understand what passive income is, and provide some ideas for how you can start to generate your own passive income.
I’ll soon be posting an update on my progress with the passive income challenges that I set for myself, and I have some very interesting results to show – so stay tuned to my blog for this.
Here’s my 3rd and final episode for my Mindset Mastery mini series of videos – this one focusing on how to create a mindset that allows you to build wealth sustainably.
This one ties into that lesson a little, in terms of a need to understand the system we work within (and naturally that includes our interaction with others).
However, this lesson is more focused on the actual system, capitalism.
And how you can understand and work with this system to ensure that any wealth you create, is also sustainable wealth.
The system works against you, not for you
Taxes, inflation, and the simple fact that everything costs money, mean it’s extremely difficult to earn a high income, hold on to a good portion of that income, and invest it in something where the gains aren’t going to be completely offset in years to come by the effect of inflation.
Understanding, appreciating, and then successfully navigating these realities when building wealth sustainably, are essential to your success.
So, let’s start with taxes
To get rich, you need to earn more – right?
Well, the more you earn, the more you pay (assuming you’re just a highly-paid employee and not the director of your own business, where you have a little more manoeuvrability here).
And not just in respect of paying more as a result of taxation %age being relative to the amount you earn.
No, the UK Government likes to punish success – so it’s not good enough that you’re paying 20% of £100,000 instead of 20% of £20,000 like the next person (£20,000 instead of £4,000, in real figures).
As you will probably already be aware, once you pass the threshold into the ‘higher earner’ tax bracket, they actually increase the %age of taxation on any amount earned beyond that threshold.
This, for me, just epitomises the fact that the system doesn’t want you to get rich.
It’s not even well-hidden. They are ultimately saying ‘if you work hard and earn more money, we’re going to make it even harder for you to hold onto that extra money’.
The system is constantly trying to level the playing field – they don’t want you to break beyond this and get rich. The system wouldn’t work if everyone got rich – that’s why it’s so damned hard to get rich!
And it’s not just income tax, you’re also having NIC (National Insurance Contributions) shaved off your wage constantly (even worse if you’re a small company director, because you have to shell-out for employer’s NIC contributions alongside your own employee contributions).
Yes, you are able to benefit from these in the future from drawing a state pension. But heck, if I could keep that money right now I could earn way more money from investing it, than letting the government manage it for me, and then drip-feed it back to me if I manage to reach the age they specify for eligibility for state pension.
Again, like I mention in my video, I’m not averse to taxation – it’s absolutely necessary to provide a welfare state and to address market failures (instances where it’s hard to attribute costs directly to individuals, such as the Country’s entire infrastructure and other such things).
But you have to be wise to the types and levels of taxation you are incurring, and ensure that you are set-up in the most tax efficient manner possible.
Otherwise, you’re giving away more money than you should be. Money that could be used to help build your own wealth.
The Effect of Inflation When Trying to Build Wealth Sustainably
This one was a real eye opener for me when I looked into it.
The Bank Of England provide a really useful calculator on their website that allows you to view the average rate of inflation over a set period of time in history.
The Chancellor sets targets for the Governor of the Bank of England re inflation each year (normally around 2%).
But I’d rather look at more realistic, historical inflation performance than ‘estimated’ figures, and over the past 30 years the average rate of inflation has been 3.3% (goes above 5% when you stretch this over the last 50 years).
So, what actually is inflation?
Basically, it’s the average cost rise of all goods and services. From a loaf of bread, to high end goods.
It’s a reflection of the increase in the cost of living each year. And conversely, represents the rate of degradation to your capital each year.
To make money on your capital, you therefore have to be investing in something that delivers more than 3.3% annual return.
This throws out even some of the best ISAs out there, as a potential investment option.
It’s pointless.
You are effectively losing money each year, if your savings are not earning more than 3.3%. Fact.
So, after you’ve been paid for the month, you’ve paid your taxes and NICs on your wage, bought all your essentials (on which, you will often be paying a 20% government surcharge in the form of VAT), and put away that little bit of cash you have left into your low rate savings account, you’re going to be moving backwards thanks to the rate of inflation exceeding your rate of return on savings, or at best, you’ll be standing still.
Everything is engineered against you becoming rich or enabling you to build wealth sustainably.
So what can we do to build wealth sustainably?
I’m no financial advisor, but at the very least you should be doing the following:
Ensuring you only pay the minimum amount of tax you owe, by structuring your tax affairs properly
Cutting back on spending where possible (do you realise how much of your big mortgage payment is going towards pure interest, or on a much more basic level, how much all those morning coffees amount to over the month? – team this with the opportunity cost of investing this money into something that achieves compounding interest, and the loss becomes quite scary)
Ensuring that any capital (cash) is invested in something that delivers an annual return (preferably well) above 3.3%, so that you’re actually accumulating real wealth, not just keeping up with the effect of inflation. Just because you have more capital in your account the following year, doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve made any progress.
And those are my basic ground rules for how to build wealth sustainably.
Without an understanding of these ground rules, and the way the system is engineered, you will no doubt fail to achieve any real growth in your wealth.
A lot of people say they don’t care what other people think of them.
But not many are being that truthful.
Genuinely not caring is quite an art. It takes a lot of de-wiring of established subconscious thinking and a dismantling of the ‘people pleaser’ mindset.
In this post I’m going to explain why it’s important to not care what people think, and how you can genuinely stop caring for good.
So, let’s begin.
Why is it important to know how to not care what people think?
Well, to an extent, it is.
We live in a, mostly, civilised society and it’s important, in the interest of maintaining this civility and mutual respect for one another, that we consider other people’s feelings in what we say and do.
But at the same time, we need to respect our own needs and goals, and not let the opinions and beliefs of others impact these in a negative way.
It’s kind of a balance.
To fully understand how to not care what people think, we need to strip our thinking back to the basic fabric of human nature.
Everyone is selfish
And anything anyone does is ultimately motivated by selfish requirements.
Even the act of giving to charity stems from the selfish gratification we get from the act of giving.
Do you think if it was physically painful, excruciatingly painful, for someone to give to charity, that charities would receive the same level of donations as they do in the absence of this pain?
Or if you still aren’t convinced, let’s strip it back to the ultimate sacrifice – a true test of genuine selflessness. Imagine you need a heart transplant – but it can only come from a completely fit and well, living person.
How many people, in the World, including friends and family, would sacrifice their life to provide you with their heart, so you could continue living?
If you’re lucky, and you have people in your life who genuinely love you to this extent, you might have one, maybe two, close family members (maybe your spouse or parents) that would make this sacrifice.
Out of 7.4 billion people in the entire World.
Everybody is selfish.
And it’s not a bad thing – it’s just human nature. It’s how we’re hard-wired, for survival.
So, everyone starts with this very basic, selfish fabric. A fabric that, alone, would effectively make everyone in the World a completely selfish arsehole.
If it wasn’t for one thing – consciousness.
Consciousness sits above your basic selfish fabric.
And it’s a scale.
Some people have a huge amount of consciousness, actually, to the extent that it’s damaging to their own needs and goals.
Other people have little to no consciousness, to the point they have near zero empathy or consideration for others – these are the selfish arseholes.
It’s damaging to be on either extreme of this scale.
If you’re too selfish, too self-consumed, too inconsiderate, it can hurt your ability to foster meaningful relationships and reach true life fulfilment.
If you’re too selfless, too bothered by other people’s opinions and beliefs, you will constantly be distracted or dissuaded from pursuing your own needs and goals – for fear of upsetting someone, or being wrong, making mistakes.
So, it’s important to find a healthy position on this scale – one that provides you with enough ignorance towards the opinions and comments of others to allow you to ultimately do what you want in life – and not what others want you to do.
But also one that provides enough consciousness to be respectful to others and not to become a self-interested prick.
So, what’s the solution to finding this Utopian balance?
How to not care what people think, but still have a reasonable level of consciousness to maintain meaningful relationships and interaction with others.
Well, I wrote this to help people that are easily influenced by others – so I’m going to show you how to move from the selfless end of the spectrum, back to the centre.
If you think you’re suffering because you’re too far towards the selfish end of the consciousness spectrum, you really just need to teach yourself to be more conscious of others, and to actively try to be respectful, not rude.
So, for the selfless ones – here’s how to re-align. Back into the realm of not giving a shit.
Being an entrepreneur from a very young age, I’ve experienced a mountain of opinions (good and bad), resistance, and instances where others have tried to enforce their own goals on me – and I’ve had to push back in order to stay on-course to my own goals, and this is the method I use to do this.
This is going to be quite abstract, because so many people have so many different motivations and goals. I want the solution to apply no matter what your passion.
It boils down to what you want in life.
Here’s an activity.
Build a path, mentally, to where you want to be in life. What do you have to go through to get there?
Now start walking that path in your mind.
Now, imagine other people’s opinions and views of you as being the wind – blowing as you walk this path towards your life’s goals and desires.
You can either let this wind blow you off course, or you can line your path with windbreakers – mental windbreakers – blinkers, if you will. And not let these opinions distract you or distort your vision towards your goals.
See, opinions are the subjective thoughts of others.
It doesn’t matter if an expert in your particular field expresses their opinion of you – it’s still subjective. A figment of that individual’s imagination.
A figment, influenced by literally thousands of variables – their historical experiences, their own objectives and motivations (often conflicting with your own – read between those lines), and their mood at the time of expressing their opinion.
Opinions are actually more a reflection of the individual offering them, than it is a reflection of the person they are directed towards.
Don’t let anyone distract you or prevent you from walking your path.
Know what you want out of life, and don’t compromise that for anyone.
It’s the ultimate way how to not care what people think.
And that, is the ultimate recipe for a living a fulfilling, wholesome life.
There are a ton of passive income ideas for UK citizens – but which one generates the most income?
Well, first of all, we need to understand the true meaning of a passive income.
A passive income is an income that is generated without your ongoing involvement. In other words, unlike paid employment or managing a trading business, you don’t have to make a trade-off of your time in order to generate passive income.
It ticks along in the background and generates you the same amount of money, whether you decide to spend the day working, or spend it laid in bed.
Sounds great, right?
Well, it really is the holy grail – to earn money without having to make an ongoing effort to keep earning it.
But it’s not the easiest income stream to create.
In fact, it’s pretty darn difficult.
I’ve spent the past couple of years testing different passive income techniques, from niche sites, to investing, to Youtube videos, to online courses, to automated trading businesses.
And my success rate?
Pretty poor.
Although I will state at this point that my time is still consumed by our trading businesses and my approach to creating passive side incomes is very cut-throat.
I will not, and can not, pile more time and effort into these passive income attempts once they are initially created and launched. For me, it just goes against the concept – if you have to continually push something in order to make it work, it’s no longer passive. You have just created a job for yourself.
If it doesn’t work from the outset – I leave it alone.
It really is the opposite of what I feel is necessary to succeed in any other business. It’s the totally lazy approach, and the notion that you’ll see success right from the off.
If you were starting a regular trading business, or anything else for that matter, I’d be advising you the opposite –
‘Hey, keep your head up. Things never work out right away, you have to keep on consistently working hard, sometimes for decades, to see the results you want to see’.
But this is just why a passive income is so difficult to achieve – by its very nature, it goes against the requisites of (what I believe, at least) make for a successful business.
And it’s also the same reason this ‘holy grail’ maintains my interest – I have to crack it. It’s against all standard business advice and practice, and that just makes me want it even more (because, let’s be honest, the entrepreneurial struggle sucks – it really does).
I know it can be done, and I have some indicators of what may be a successful route if explored further.
My niche site pizzaovenhub.com that I created just over a year ago, still generates a measly £5 per month in advertising revenue.
The most views I’ve ever had on a Youtube video was 700,000 or so, and the copyright wasn’t owned by me so I couldn’t monetise it (I researched, after Youtube take their cut, you earn an average of around £1,000 per million views). Videos on which I own the copyright to, have up to 2,500 views at best.
My Udemy course ‘Fast Track Entrepreneur’, although it has a great number of students and reviews, hasn’t generated that much income after Udemy fees and promotional discounts (around £2,000 over the past 2 years).
And when it comes to investing, I’m really playing the long-game with this – using a lending platform called Funding Circle to earn a steady but respectable 7.2% net yield, and consistently pumping as much spare cash I have into this platform on a monthly basis.
The effect of compound interest (earning interest on interest payments) is easily felt with Funding Circle because they have an auto-reinvest and auto-bid function, so over time, this should become more and more impactful in generating a passive income. But that’s going to be way down the line. I’m talking a couple of decades away. So that one’s a slow burner – kind of like my plan E.
The most success I’ve seen thus far has been with automating processes in my existing trading businesses, but this kind of feels a little superfluous to share with readers on my blog because these businesses I have already spent up to a decade building, and reinvested hundreds of thousands of pounds in their infrastructure.
They’ve consumed a mountain of time, blood, sweat, tears, and cold hard cash to even get to the point where automation is a possibility.
I’m not putting anyone off going down this route – heck, thus far, I can’t really advocate anything less than a ‘bust-your-balls’ amount of effort to make something work to the point where you can support yourself with a half reasonable income. This is all I know. Right now, I don’t have the answer on how to ‘get rich quick’ with minimal effort – I wish I did.
But that’s kind of the point of this blog post.
I’m not giving up.
I want the holy grail of a healthy, sustainable, totally passive income – and I won’t stop until I find it.
Life’s too short to keep on trading time for money – my time is worth more than any amount of money. So to me, this is the only option. I have to find the answer.
Based on my own experiences of limited success with generating a passive income thus far, I’m going to lay down 5 different passive income ideas that I believe have the best chance of succeeding.
Then I’m going to start from scratch with each one, with a small figure – £100 startup capital for each of the 5 ideas. So it’s easily replicable for you guys reading this post.
And let me just reiterate at this point – when I say these are passive income ideas. I mean passive . . . for a lifetime.
Even the passive income king, Pat Flynn (Smart Passive Income), isn’t really earning all of his income in a truly passive fashion – he has to constantly maintain his blog, his podcast, attend talks and media events. If you took a look at his daily schedule, I’m pretty sure it’s still rammed.
True, if Pat stepped back completely and retired right now, even after his blog becomes a dust-covered relic, he would probably still earn a respectable (truly passive) income for the rest of his days – but this guy has now become a Passive Income god!
He’s a true success story in the field of passive income and online business. An idol.
But not necessarily (as I’ve found) someone who you can easily follow in the footsteps of.
Successes on the scale of Pat’s are outliers. Very rare. Very hard to replicate.
What I want to offer is an entirely replicable solution, by anyone.
Will it take you to the heights of $150,000 per month in passive income like Pat Flynn? Probably not.
But it will be this:
Totally, 100% replicable by anyone reading this right now (with at least £100 to spare)
Totally passive once established
‘Passively compoundable’ – yes, I just made that up – in other words, the income from them does not erode as time passes, it grows (without further time investment required) *Disclaimer: this, of course, only extends as far as the lifespan of the technology or platform you are using*
It will (eventually) provide enough passive income to live on (modestly, at least)
In a nutshell, it brings the crazy, seemingly unobtainable notion of earning an income for doing nothing, back into the reach of the masses.
These are realistic, pragmatic approaches to generating passive income that will, one day, generate you enough income to live on.
I’ll be documenting my own progress regularly with these 5 different passive income ideas for UK residents, so you can see how my own efforts are performing and which one of the 5 ideas is outperforming the rest.
So, here goes:
Create Youtube Videos
If you develop a popular Youtube channel, the income can be huge. It really is one of the most lucrative passive income ideas for UK individuals.
Just check this one out:
I know. What the frig did I just watch?
But this lady generated over $3m a year in advertising revenue from her toy review videos.
You read that right – over $3m!
Seems toy reviews, kids cartoon videos, and gaming walkthroughs/commentating are the highest earners.
Provided you outsource the actual video production aspect, it can be 90% passive right from the outset.
I’ve taken to Upwork to launch a new project for someone to create me a kids cartoon video for £100, and, since it won’t cost me any extra and gives me an opportunity to approach this trial from 2 angles, I’ll be creating some other videos reviewing some toys.
Bear in-mind what i mentioned earlier regarding my income research on Youtube – on average it takes around 1 million video views to earn £1,000 after Youtube’s fees. So to achieve a respectable passive income in this field, you need to be hitting millions of views, not thousands.
These are big numbers, so research is going to be key to success here – understanding demand for certain content, and the Youtube SEO algorithms are going to be critical steps to take before even mapping out the specifics of the videos.
But just looking at the top-earners on Youtube gives you an indication of where the most demand lies – it just requires some thought on how you fit into these categories and don’t try to tackle the established players head-on here, because you’ll just be drowned-out of the rankings.
2. Become a Udemy Instructor
In all honesty, this one doesn’t excite me as much as the Youtube venture – the numbers are much more modest (typically instructors are earning between £0-1,000 per month – I was on the lower end of this spectrum with my first course, at around £100 per month), the audience (and therefore earning potential) is much smaller, and the platform is fairly saturated in most spaces (although the same could be said for Youtube).
But having said that, if you choose an ‘evergreen’ course subject ie something that isn’t a passing craze, and also one with a good balance of demand and lack of established competition, you can create a course that will dominate a niche category and generate a healthy passive income for years to come.
With me already being a Udemy instructor, this will be my second attempt at creating a course.
I already spent around £100 on the recording equipment, editing software, and backdrop, so i can’t spend any more on this one in order to keep the project on-budget.
I already have an idea of the niche I want to tackle having done some basic preliminary research, and will share more in future posts.
Perhaps the easiest one to set-up in terms of time invested, and the most predictable in terms of annual return.
Plus, this one sticks strictly to the rule of producing ‘passively compounding’ income – when you set the ‘autobid’ rule within your Funding Circle account, the system will automatically allocate your funds to various businesses and spread your lending risk, plus it will feed back any capital repayments and interest payments straight back into lending.
This means, you won’t be able to draw an income from this right away, but it does mean that your £100 starting capital will grow naturally and in the most predictable way of all these passive income ideas for UK residents.
For me, this method really hits the nail on the head when it comes to the definition of a truly passive income idea for UK people – the only downside is the time it takes to build a reasonable income from it (assuming you don’t have £500,000 or so of starting capital to throw at it).
In fact, the returns are so predictable, we can take the average annual return and work out exactly how much the investment will be worth in, say, 30 years.
The Calculator Site have a really handy compound interest calculator to make this really simple.
With just £100 starting capital, and no additional payments, at an average annual interest rate of 7.2% net, your total portfolio would be worth £861.54 in 30 years’ time.
Pretty depressing, right?
Absolutely.
There is a ‘breaking point’ when it comes to long-term investing like this, and it really happens around £150k – this is when your investment really starts to gather speed.
So unless you can start with this figure as your initial deposit (in which case, after 30 years you would have a portfolio worth almost £1.3m), then you really have to make regular monthly deposits to supplement your returns – at least until you reach this ‘breaking point’ where your investment can snowball into some more meaningful figures during your lifetime.
Making a £100 initial deposit, and £400 monthly deposits thereafter for 30 years, provides you with a total portfolio worth of £511k (and a half reasonable annual income thereafter of £35k). And if you can hold out doing this for just 10 more years, that becomes £1.19m (and a healthier annual income thereafter of £77k).
To me this illustrates the importance of two things with this passive income technique – starting early, and pumping as much spare cash into it as you can possibly afford (especially in the early days). Because the bigger the portfolio, the bigger the returns, the bigger effect that compound interest starts to have. It really is a snowball effect.
4. Trade Cryptocurrencies
More speculative than Funding Circle investing, but with a higher risk/reward profile, is cryptocurrency trading.
Another passive income idea for UK individuals.
RIght now, things have cooled off substantially, and we appear to be in a slow and steady decline right now.
But that’s not to say you shouldn’t step in – in fact, this is probably the perfect time to get involved.
There’s a mountain of opinions when it comes to crypto investing – with billionaires and successful investors divided in their views.
The ones who have a negative opinion of investing in crypto are claiming it to be the biggest ‘bubble’ of all time.
My view is quite simple – the success or failure of an investment in this sort of market is dictated by timing. Get in at the right time, and get out at the right time, and you’ll do extremely well. Do the opposite, and you’ll do extremely badly.
Understanding and predicting these timings is the hard/impossible part – but due to the volatile nature of crypto prices, there exists huge opportunity to make very abnormal returns on your capital, far more than you could earn in any conventional investment.
And true, the reverse could also be said – there exists huge risk in losing all of your capital.
And there lies the risk-reward profile.
Now, this can be as involving or as passive as you make it. You could buy your £100 of crypto and literally sit on it, or you can try to anticipate and catch the peaks and troughs.
With historical returns on crypto hitting 4,000% in just one year, there exists the potential to turn your £100 into £4k within 12 months. But similarly, the market could literally crash overnight and you lose it all.
For me, looking at those numbers, the risk profile seems very controlled in relation to the potential upside.
5. Digital Products
My background and expertise lies in ecommerce, so I’m keen to put this to work – I just don’t want to create another inventory-holding business as this isn’t passive, and it’s pretty difficult to eke a good income from dropshipping alone nowadays.
So my attention in this regard is switched to digital products – they are infinitely scalable and easily automated.
I’m not 100% sure which direction to take this one just yet – I just know I would like to steer clear of the ‘app’ world. To me it just appears very over-saturated, with an app out there for every conceivable requirement.
I’m sure there will still be gaps in this space, so feel free to explore this in your own experiments – but the level of research required to find the right gap appears too burdensome to me.
The same can be said for the digital information space – there’s just so much amazing free content available on the net now, that it’s pretty difficult to sell information-based products.
Instead, I’ll be researching and exploring the gaming, software, and online tool spaces to try to find a gap.
My aim will be to outsource development to a competent developer via Upwork, and get them to create a very basic MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Something that does the job, and can be taken to market to assess initial demand, and can be built upon if initial response from the market is positive.
I’ll provide updates as I go along with this.
So there you have it! There are my 5 top passive income ideas for UK residents.
I’ll be updating you on my progress with each of these as time goes by, including income reports and more detail on how I get things going.
Please feel free to share your own thoughts and passive income ideas for UK people in the comments below, I’d love to hear them.
2 warehouse moves, 2 new businesses, and a beautiful baby boy later – I’m back to my blog!
The Edley household is pretty hectic with 2 little ones running riot (or rather 1 running riot, the other one just causes a riot in his nappy for now).
We absolutely love it though, and wouldn’t change it for the World – it’s such an exciting time watching them grow, and being an entrepreneur gives the freedom to enjoy as much time as possible with them and my gorgeous Wife Grace.
Another amazing milestone was also passed in my absence from the blog, we’ve now surpassed over 3,000 students on my Fast Track Entrepreneur Udemy course, from over 120 countries, and it’s hitting 4.5 out of 5 stars on the reviews.
I’m just so pleased that I’ve been able to help so many people across the World to start and grow their own online businesses.
I have other courses in development, but with so many other projects ongoing, I haven’t been able to get them finished and launched.
So in the meantime, I’m focusing my video efforts around a new mini series of ‘Mindset Mastery’ videos – short informal insights into how I view business opportunities, risk, fear, failure, and my approach to life in general.
They are the philosophies that guide me in what I do, and I’m really going to enjoy sharing them with you – hopefully they help you in some way too.
Here’s the first of a series of ‘Mindset Mastery’ videos I’ll be producing. This one is around using the awareness of death as a driving force to take risks and live with purpose.
Since I joined Udemy last year, something I’ve noticed a demand for is people wanting to know what the best free udemy courses for entrepreneurs are.
One common trait displayed by most successful entrepreneurs and CEOs is that of constant learning – whether that be reading, taking courses, watching videos, or listening to podcasts – so it’s no surprise that people want to know what the best udemy courses are for learning how to become a better entrepreneur and business owner.
Udemy is one of the best platforms for peer-to-peer learning and development, and when it comes to entrepreneurship, this is by far the best way to learn – from other entrepreneurs’ experiences, successes, and failures.
There are no effective academic textbooks, University courses, or theory-based explanations on how to make it as a successful entrepreneur.
Business is an art, not a science. So what works in theory, very rarely works in practice.
That’s why peer-to-peer, evidence-based, and experience-based education is one of the best approaches for entrepreneurs to learn effectively – and Udemy is perfectly geared for this.
So, I’ve taken the time to sift through all entrepreneurship and business related courses on Udemy to bring you a list of the top 10 best free Udemy courses for Entrepreneurs to learn from.
Jack brings a very motivating vibe to his videos, and a wealth of experience – he’s also been fortunate enough to spend quite a bit of time around Richard Branson and other high profile entrepreneurs and shares what he has learnt from them also in his course.
This course is great for entrepreneurs who feel they aren’t quite reaching their full potential, or for people looking to adopt the mindset and start their journey as an entrepreneur.
It’s very much mindset-oriented, more so than being about practical application, so is great for re-aligning your mind for success and mentally preparing yourself for the challenges that entrepreneurs face so that you can overcome these in your own journey.
A great one for anyone looking to start an online business and that doesn’t have the financial resources or connections to use external programming talent to get started.
This course is designed for complete beginners, so absolutely no prior experience of coding or computers is necessary – it will guide you through the basics of HTML and CSS and all you’ll need is a computer, a web browser, and a simple code editor like Textpad.
Even if you’re looking to employ a developer to get your online business up-and-running, this course is great for gaining a basic understanding of programming so you can understand what your developer is talking about, and ensure they aren’t pulling the wool over your eyes!
As the title suggests, this is a very product/service design oriented course – so perfect for those who don’t already have a product/service or those who are stuck finding a place to start their entrepreneurial journey.
The course will help ensure that you understand your target market needs and demands thoroughly before you even start thinking about a product/service launch – so you will have a strong market for your business once it launches.
Great for those entrepreneurs looking for passive sources of income, rather than a more involving, time-consuming business.
Mike Omar specialises in building small businesses and niche sites that generate income on auto-pilot, so he’s the perfect person to learn from when it comes to building this type of business.
From the basics of building your own WordPress website, through to making $1,000+ per niche site through SEO and other online marketing techniques. This course covers everything in an easy to follow, step-by-step format.
This was a cool course I found whilst doing my research on the best free Udemy courses for entrepreneurs – one geared towards kids!
I spent a lot of time in local Primary schools a couple of years back promoting enterprise and entrepreneurship amongst young children and it was an awesome experience – it’s great to work with this age group because they have such wild ideas and think anything is possible.
This makes it a great environment to let ideas flourish without being stifled by fear or experience of previous failures – plus its great fun for the kids too!
So this course is perfect for planting the entrepreneurship seed at a young age, and for making children aware that this is an option for them as they grow older.
As the author name suggests, this is an Academic-backed course, and one geared more for the US than any other Country, but if you are an entrepreneur based in the US who is scratching their head about the more formal side of starting-up a business (legalities and such) then this course gives the perfect introduction to setting-up.
With over 78,000 enrolled students, this is a super popular course, with some great ratings – so don’t just take my word for it, this is a perfect course for those entrepreneurs looking to get started without a great deal of financial or other resources to hand.
With some interesting real-life case studies, this course is engaging and very informative – a definite must-have in your entrepreneur course inventory.
A great course to save money on solicitor fees by filing your own trademark – but only if you’re based in the US (if you’re UK based, check out my number 1 course below – this covers trademark registration in the UK instead).
Every business that is gaining a good level of traction should be seriously considering registering a trademark for their brand – so that they are protected legally from copycat organisations.
This course covers the process involved in gaining that protection, but without incurring extortionate legal fees in the process.
Yes, shameless plug here – and not strictly a free course, but if you follow the link above you’ll get this course for just $10.
My very own Udemy course on entrepreneurship is designed in a step-by-step format, from idea generation, to creating a WordPress website, to the practical steps involved in incorporating a company, to marketing your products/services effectively online, to how you can automate and delegate processes in your business.
In an actionable format, I talk you through each and every single step involved in setting up a successful, profitable online business – just as though I’m sat at the side of you, each day, for 4 weeks, until you finally have a fully operating and income-generating business.
And there you have it!
My full list of the best free Udemy courses on entrepreneurship – dive in, get learning, and take action.
*NOTE: The courses listed above were available free on Udemy at the time of writing, but this may have changed since.
I was recently asked on Quora ‘Why would I start a business if I only have a 5% chance of succeeding’
My answer?
If there was only a 0.00001% chance of succeeding, I’d still give it a shot, and aim to be in the 0.00001%.
Why?
Because not trying guarantees a 0% chance of success.
At least when you try, there is a chance.
What’s more, if you’re persistent enough in your efforts and consistent enough with your work ethic, you can flip that 5% statistic to look rather encouraging.
Rather than saying 95% of start-ups fail, which, in all fairness, sounds pretty grim, we could say, when you are starting-up, provided you are prepared, after failure, to get back up and try again up to 20 times, you are guaranteed to experience success.
100% guaranteed to enjoy success!
All you have to be prepared to do is get back up from failure up to 20 times over, and you’ll guarantee success.
Now that sounds too positive, right? Too optimistic?
Well, it’s fact.
And it’s based on the same 95% failure statistic for start-ups. It’s just a different way of looking at it.
If only 5% of all start-ups succeed, then statistically speaking, if you are involved in 20 start-ups, you should experience success in at least one of them.
Now okay, it might not work quite like that in practice – it’s like the 1 in 3 people will get cancer statistic. It doesn’t mean that 3 healthy, clean-living, non-smokers in a room will experience the same cancer statistics as 3 unhealthy drinkers, smokers, and drug abusers stood in a room. It’s an average. An indication.
But if you’re going to give enough weight to the 95% failure statistic as to prevent you from ever taking a risk or starting your own business, then you should lend the same amount of weight to my perspective on this statistic, that if you are prepared to try 20 times, you WILL succeed. Guaranteed.
My point?
Don’t let facts, figures and statistics ever deter you from taking risks and following your dreams.
You either flip the stats to show you how many times you have to endure failure in order to guarantee success, and then gear-up accordingly, or you simply say f@#k the stats, and do it anyway.
Stats are an average, and averages account for slack. They account for those half-arsers, those part-time entrepreneurs who just want to be in the ‘start-up’ club, and aren’t really conditioned for what it takes to succeed – which is, ultimately, to endure failure and to keep getting back up until you do succeed.
So, let me ask you – are you average? Are you part of the slack? Or do you truly have what it takes to succeed?
Because if you do, and if you are prepared to endure failure up to 20 times over and still keep trying, then let me tell you, that 5% margin for success widens to 100%.
So f@#k what the stats say. Stats are for average Joes, the one attempt wonders, the people without the drive and determination to make their own statistics.
Ordinary stats don’t apply to extraordinary people.
Ignore the stats, ignore the nay-sayers, and ignore the stigma of failure.
Failure is a learning experience like no other. It’s a process of strengthening, adaptation, and growth.
It’s also often the number one precursor for success. So if you’ve failed before, don’t stop now, things are just about to get exciting for you!
Over the years I’ve had my fair share of success and failure, and my online business course ‘Fast Track Entrepreneur’ is designed to lend my experiences to you, so you can navigate the common pitfalls entrepreneurs face, and to maximise your chances of start-up success.
I started this blog ultimately to promote my Udemy course that I created – showing you how to start a business from scratch with very little cash to invest.
Over the past couple of days, that course has reached a milestone – it has broken the 1,000 student enrollment mark.
That’s amazing!
Since September 2016, I can say that I have actively helped 1,029 people learn to either start, or grow, their business.
Wow!
Seeing the positive feedback from the people enrolled on my course reinforces the point that real people around the World (the UK, US, Europe, Asia, Russia and more) are watching my course videos and learning from my experiences as an entrepreneur.
That’s one of the best feelings – because that’s what I set out to do, to help people, and to show them that it is possible to start your own business, no matter how little start-up capital you have available.
I’m so pleased the course is helping people, and it’s such a great feeling that, guess what?
I’m launching another course!
This one will be centered around a problem many entrepreneurs face, and how to overcome this problem (no spoilers just yet!).
Plus, I have an exciting collaboration course getting underway soon that will see me partner with an old friend of mine with years and years of experience in computer programming and coding – allowing us to launch courses in other computer-related topics too, a category that is exceptionally popular with students on Udemy.
So, why the blog post?
Well, kind of like I did with my niche site project, I wanted to actually document the process of me developing, building, launching, and promoting my new Udemy course, so that anyone else wanting to teach others about something they’re an expert in, and actually create a revenue stream from doing so, can learn how to create a successful Udemy course.
As it’s a pretty lengthy process to build a course, I’m going to break this down across several posts in the coming weeks (and maybe months) so you get an in-depth view into building a course, in a step-by-step format.
It will follow a path something like:
How to develop a successful/in-demand course topic and concept
How to build your course content and produce quality videos on a budget
How to promote/market your course successfully
In this post, I want to cover the very first steps of starting your own Udemy course – the first bullet point in my list, understanding what topic your course is going to cover, who your audience will be, and ensuring there is sufficient demand in this particular area, and that it isn’t saturated with competition on Udemy.
So, first things first, to understand your course topic, you have to first understand what you know, that others would find value in learning about.
You can’t build a course teaching others how to do something, when you haven’t mastered the course subject yourself. You just cannot ‘wing it’ – if you try, you’ll be lucky if your course even gets approved, and if it does, the reviews will soon display your inexperience, and your course will flop.
Once you understand the broad course subject you’ll follow, based on your knowledge and experience, then you need to understand how you’ll position your course amongst the many other Udemy courses that probably exist in the same niche, and how you ensure you will still have a sizable audience for your course.
Here’s the steps I follow:
Research Your Subject and find a common problem people have within your subject
People who complete Udemy courses don’t receive an official qualification like a diploma, a degree, or even an NVQ – all they receive is a course completion certificate.
Therefore, people rarely use Udemy courses to impress employers or to apply for a job role that requires a specific academic qualification (sorry, you’ll have to go to a proper University to become a brain surgeon).
So, what do they enroll in Udemy courses for?
Usually, self-development or to overcome a problem they have.
So, you need to understand where your course will sit within these two student categories.
Will students for your course be self-motivated, self-developers looking to self-teach themselves a subject and then go out and apply it in the real World?
Or will they be frustrated people, looking for solutions to a particular problem they face?
Once you understand this, you can shape your course topic, title, and modules accordingly to suit.
I have found from experience, unless you’re building a course in a computer/coding related subject, finding a common problem and a way to overcome that problem is the best way to build a course that has strong revenue-generation potential.
Why?
Because these potential students are motivated. They are frustrated, and want to understand how to overcome something. And to do so, they’re often willing to pay.
Visit forums, read reviews of other courses in your field, and get to know what common problems people face in your topic area. Make sure it’s a common issue.
Research the competition
Once you’ve found a common problem in your field of expertise, you need to research the other courses in this area.
If it’s a truly common problem you’ve discovered, it will probably already be covered on Udemy in some shape or form. Your job now is to find how you can still fit your course into the competitive landscape and offer a USP (Unique Selling Point).
Is there a specific or unique angle you can take with your course to differentiate it from the others on Udemy?
Think of things that will really resonate with your target audience. So, if you find that the problem you are focusing on is commonly experienced by a particular sort of person, then gear the course specifically for that target profile – ensure you make this USP clear in your course title too.
Research other courses to ensure you are hitting on a subject area that has sufficient demand to suit your own goals with the course, regarding enrollments or revenue.
Check similar course enrollment rates and ratings – are there some big numbers? If not, it may be back to the drawing board – there can be such a thing as being too niche, and your course will just never be picked-up in search results (even by the specific people you’re targeting) because you’ll not have the enrollment numbers and reviews to rank higher according to Udemy’s search and browse ranking algorithms.
And that pretty much wraps-up my first part of this blog post series – at this point you should have a solid idea of your Udemy course subject and title.
The next steps will follow in future posts – stay posted for these, as I guide you through the entire process of creating your own successful Udemy course.
WordPress tags are more important for seo than you might think.
It’s been a little while since I’ve looked at the analytics for my niche site pizzaovenhub.com and backlink building has been put on the backburner for a little while whilst I focus on completing our new warehouse purchase for Vitalife Group.
However, a little progress has been made in the background – I’ve still been making monthly blog posts for fresh content, social sharing, and a couple of backlinks, and this has, in-turn, led to a little bit of organic traffic.
I always like to see what keywords people search for when they land on my niche site.
I perform a little keyword research before developing any new blog posts using Google’s Keyword Planner in order to focus on higher-traffic, lower-competition terms to boost my chances of gaining more organic search traffic – but it doesn’t always work out as planned.
Sometimes, I start getting ranked for terms I never really planned for. Often, I get more combined traffic to posts from unexpected search terms than I do from the terms I actually optimised my post for.
So, I decided to dig a little deeper to find out what was helping me rank for these particular terms when I hadn’t even necessarily optimised my posts/pages for them.
In my analysis I used the Search Analytics module on my Google Webmaster Tools account to discover what terms I was ranking for, and which ones were delivering the most clicks.
You could use your Analytics account for this instead, but I’ve always found analytics to be pretty useless at providing an understanding of keyword terms that visitors use – I end up with a handful of terms, but the bulk of my traffic shows under ‘not specified’, which isn’t very helpful.
Perhaps I haven’t set something up properly on my Analytics account – if anyone knows any more about this, please drop me a comment below.
Anyway, in my Google Webmaster account, it really drills down the terms that my organic traffic is using in an accurate manner, so I used the list of keywords this showed me, and looked into each one in-turn to find out why I was ranking for terms that I hadn’t optimised for.
And here’s the 3 key points I found:
1. They were very low to moderate volume terms
I found that these terms were probably ignored by me during my initial keyword research because they were showing on the Google Keyword Planner at between 10 and 260 searches per month.
I normally aim to focus on keywords with over 500 searches per month.
Some were even showing Medium to High competition, which would have deterred me further from optimising and focusing on these terms in my posts.
2.They were mostly product-oriented terms
Most of the unplanned rankings were from product-oriented search terms – such as brand names for pizza ovens and specific models of pizza oven.
My top keyword for organic clicks is ‘Igneus Pizza Oven’ followed by ‘Gozney Oven’ – both of which were featured in blog posts on my niche site, but the posts were not optimised for these terms (they didn’t feature in the URL, header, or any other H or alt tag on the page).
3. The ranked posts were mostly via tag URLs
All top 5 of my organic search terms were ranked on the basis of their tag URL.
For instance, on ‘Igneus Pizza Oven’, my niche site is ranked 5th on the following URL: http://pizzaovenhub.com/index.php/tag/igneus-pizza-oven/
Rather than the primary URL for the content which is: http://pizzaovenhub.com/index.php/2016/11/01/pizza-oven-of-the-month-november/
For me, this just highlights the importance of using tags in your posts. If I hadn’t added the tag ‘igneus pizza oven’ to this post, it wouldn’t rank anywhere near as well for this term, and I’d have missed out on all the traffic this has brought the site.
Tags not only help with on-site navigation and user-searching, they drop these words on a separate URL, which is optimised for those keywords, and uses them as the page title also (see below).
Using tags is effectively like quickly and easily creating a completely separate, optimised page for the keywords in your tag.
That’s ultimately why, I believe, I’m getting a lot of traffic from non-optimised keywords – because I have inadvertently optimised the posts/pages for them by simply throwing some tags in there.
I’ll update you all in a few more months with an earnings and traffic report for my niche site – but for now I just wanted to share this finding with you.
The lessons you can draw from this post to help you with SEO?
Always use plentiful tags in your WordPress posts
Don’t ignore lower volume keyword terms
Don’t pay too much attention to the ‘competition’ metric on the Google Keyword Planner (this relates to Adwords competition only, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the competitiveness of the organic environment for your keyword)
Pay close attention to brand and product names
Use long-tail tags that will catch the more obscure and specific search terms. Short-term, single word tags have very little impact in my experience
If you have anything further to share about the importance of using tags on your WordPress site, please share in the comments below.
If you’re into bodybuilding, or know someone who is, you’ll have invariably heard the phrases ‘bulking’ and ‘cutting’ before.
For those that don’t know, bulking is the phase bodybuilders go through when they are attempting to pile on more mass during ‘off-season’.
Cutting, on the other hand, is the process of dieting that bodybuilders go through to strip their body of excess fat and water so they look as ripped as possible on-stage.
By now, you may be thinking, this is a business blog – why are you talking about bodybuilding?
Well, strangely, there are very similar parallels between the two.
Cut away the intricacies, and strip them both back to basics – business and bodybuilding – and you ultimately have a situation where you are trying to build something. Be it your body, or your business.
And in building something, you inevitably face phases whereby you focus on growth, and also phases where you strip things back a little.
No business can continue to grow infinitely and uninterrupted, and no growth cycle is ever as smooth as it looks from the outside.
There are mistakes, strategic changes, recruitment drives, employment cuts, investment, and divestment – until the business reaches its optimal performance.
A businesses’ bulking cycle could be seen as the process of investment – through recruitment drives, property purchases, business infrastructure, more stock, and so on.
But, as with bodybuilding, you cannot go through a bulking cycle (regardless of how clean you eat or how hard you train) and not also gain some amount of fat and water retention. It is impossible.
In the case of a business, the ‘fat’ could be seen as overstaffing in certain areas, overstock on certain product lines that don’t sell that fast, excess/unused office or warehouse space, and so on.
These are the natural (and inevitable) side-effects of growth – it’s impossible to maintain perfection during a growth cycle. You WILL gain some unwanted by-products from the growth process – it’s precisely why bodybuilders go through the bulking and cutting cycle. If it was possible to maintain competition physique whilst gaining more mass in a bulking cycle, then these cycles wouldn’t exist – bodybuilders would just constantly ‘bulk’.
So, then comes the ‘cut’.
When the dust has settled during a growth phase, and the business can be analysed in the areas of profitability and efficiency, the business leaders will then go through a phase of stripping any unnecessary ‘fat’ from within the business.
They’ll cut staff, refine their stock holding and discount/discontinue slow-moving lines, they’ll re-organise processes to gain more efficiency, and they may even dispose of unwanted or unprofitable assets within the business.
Until, down the line, the business has retained much of the revenue it gained through the growth cycle, and has now stripped down to show a healthy profit on that turnover following the ‘cut’.
Just like a bodybuilder, following a cut, would look to maintain most of the lean muscle mass they gained during a bulking cycle, but have stripped away any excess fat and water during the cut – achieving an optimal physique for competition.
All businesses go through these cycles over time in order to ultimately achieve profitable growth – and it takes a careful balance and strategic management to perform successfully.
Focus too much on the growth phase of your business and you’ll have a high-revenue organisation that struggles to turn a profit (or even worse, makes a loss) or that turns a profit but struggles with cash.
Alternatively, focus too much on the profit aspect of your business (and be fearful of reinvesting for future growth), and you’ll see little to no growth in your business over time, and your profit will stagnate.
As a business owner/manager, you have to go through these cycles in order to progress, but you also have to be mindful of the downside associated with not achieving an optimal balance between the two.
What stage are you currently in with your business? Bulk or Cut? Please share your business growth story in the comments below.
