Can you build a blog in 2 weeks?

Of course.

Before I get into any detail, a blog is probably the quickest business to get started, but one that takes a long, long time to actually monetise.

So, whilst you can build a blog in 2 weeks (easily), I would say the timeline before you can start to call it a ‘business’ will be more like 2–3 years (and that’s with daily, quality posts, consistent marketing effort, and further development).

So don’t think blogging is the route to a quick, profitable online business.

It is definitely not!

But if you’re willing to dedicate a lot of time, effort, and a little money towards it, and you can commit to doing this over a long period of time, for little to no pay – then things can start to build momentum.

As with almost all businesses with low barriers to entry – the space is highly saturated, and therefore highly competitive.

This creates an ‘invisible’ barrier – one that allows you to get started, easily building your blog in 2 weeks, but makes it extremely difficult to turn it into a viable business.

Only those that commit a huge level of energy, consistency, and time to doing it will succeed.

Even then, if those successful bloggers could have sat down at the outset of starting their blog, and rationally assessed the level of time and energy that it would take before it started making any money, perhaps they may have reconsidered taking it on!

The takeaway from this (slightly depressing) reality is – make sure you start blogging about something you have a real passion for. Choose your topic carefully.

Is it something that motivates you?

Is it something that you have a thirst to learn more about?

Is it something you can dedicate most of your spare time to?

So, if you can find a topic you can dedicate yourself to – you’re ready to get started.

The best way to build an independent blog is to use WordPress – buy some cheap shared hosting, choose and buy your domain name, install WordPress (most hosting providers offer 1-click install), setup your DNS (so your hosting points to your domain), build a blog identity/logo (Fiverr is a good marketplace for this), implement a theme on your blog (Envato/theme forest is a good marketplace if you have a little money to spend on a premium theme) customise it, build the basic framework of the site (area for posts, widgets, header and footer, menus, other pages – about, contact, faq and so on), then get posting!

You’ll probably be able to build your blog in 2 weeks, or much less if you can dedicate full days to it.

And keep posting, consistently, for the foreseeable future.

To boost your chances with SEO, use Yoast (a popular SEO plugin for WordPress), to make sure you optimise all your posts around a chosen keyword term. And network with other blogs/complimentary websites, to share your posts with them and ask them if they can link to them in some way from their own sites – this will boost off-site SEO triggers, especially if you attain links from popular sites with good domain authority (news sites are good for this – so if you can attain any press coverage, this will help).

Make sure you setup social profiles too (Insta, FB, Twitter, as a minimum), and continually share any new posts or relevant information on here. Build your followings and awareness across these platforms as much as you can (we use a simple follow/unfollow service from Big Red Social for most of our businesses).

Then rinse and repeat. Research, post, share. Research, post, share.

Once you have attained a good level of traffic, you can start to look at methods of monetisation such as ads, affiliate links, and complimentary products/services. I wouldn’t bother even thinking about this stuff until you’ve got the traffic though. Gaining good traffic is the biggest challenge bloggers face – monetising traffic, once you have it, is the easy part.

Good luck!

PS If you need a more in-depth step-by-step guide for getting started with a WordPress site, I have a Udemy course Fasttrack Entrepreneur that takes people through every single stage of the process (plus covers the other essentials when setting up an online business)

Assuming you already know the nature of the business you want to start online (ecommerce, import/export, affiliate, blogging, software, an app, and so on), the first step is to understand your strengths/weaknesses.

This will determine the direction you take when you start your online business.

Do you have any developer skills – even a basic level of knowledge such as how to build and operate a WordPress/Woocommerce site?

If you do, great, you can build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) yourself.

If you don’t, do you have enough money to employ a developer to build the website/app/software that your online business will require?

If you do, great, you can employ someone to build an MVP for you.

If you have neither of the above, you’re going to need to either save some money, or learn how to develop your own website (and if you are starting completely from scratch, with zero prior knowledge, then a WordPress website will definitely be the way to go).

So, at this point you should know which of the above options you need to take to get started.

Now you need to build your MVP, as mentioned earlier.

Your MVP will be the most basic reduction of your business/product/service that you can offer in the marketplace.

Basically, take your idea, remove all the bells and whistles, and concentrate on building the most basic, core offering for your intended audience.

This is the platform that you will use to test market response and reception.

If this is received well, you can proceed to flesh-out your offering some more, directed by immediate feedback and data from your actual market.

If it’s not received well, you need to build a more appropriate MVP, one that is better suited to your audience.

This is the basic, very high-level premise of starting an online business with minimal financial risk, and doing so in a manner that will allow you to adapt to market requirements and conditions.

I’ve been involved in numerous start-ups where months were spent (wasted) in tedious theoretical planning, using so-called market data and research – only to find, upon launch, that the offering didn’t fit properly with the market demands, and had to be either scrapped or thoroughly re-worked.

The sooner you can get something out to the marketplace in which you intend to operate, with minimal financial investment, the sooner you can properly and thoroughly understand the market needs and demands, and adapt accordingly.

Let the market shape you. Don’t try to enforce what you think is right, on the market.

I know this is very high-level stuff – but it’s generalised to cover a whole plethora of online businesses.

If you need more specific advice, feel free to drop me a message, or check out my step-by-step business startup course Fast Track Entrepreneur on Udemy.

Best of luck!

How can small online business owners avoid their ideas being stolen?

Ultimately, you cannot.

Yes, there are NDAs that you can have people sign before you share an idea, there are patents for original concepts and plans, and there are trademarks for brands and identities.

Whether any of these are truly enforceable, especially when you’re a cash-strapped startup, is another question.

If a big corporation hears about your great idea, and thinks it would work for them, chances are, they’ll do their research, see that you aren’t in a viable position to defend your ownership rights, and steal it – knowing you don’t have the resources to enforce anything on them legally.

So with that being said, your focus should not be on protecting your idea – it should be on implementing it.

Ideas are just ideas, and often it’s the way they are implemented and followed-through that makes them a success or not.

I’ve never wasted time with NDAs (aside from their uselessness – usually they attempt to enforce too many restrictions and can be a real stumbling block if you’re looking to seek investment). Share your idea, but protect your plans for how you will implement your idea in the marketplace.

I know of several businesses that I’ve either founded or been involved with where differentiation in the implementation of the idea, rather than the unique idea itself, are what allowed us to compete effectively with the big players in each industry.

You have to accept the fact that if you have a good idea, people will try to copy it. No matter what protection you have in-place to stop them. They will try.

Use your agility as a small business to your advantage, run with your idea faster than larger competitors could run with it (while they’re having meetings about strategy and whether the idea would be accepted by their board of Directors, you can be out in the marketplace selling the idea, interacting with customers, and building your brand in this space), carve-out first-mover advantage for yourself in the marketplace, and implement the idea in a unique, effective manner.

I hope that answers your question, How can small online business owners avoid their ideas being stolen?

Good luck!

Will a bank give a small business startup a loan without seeing their business plan?

The short answer is, no. Unfortunately.

And it’s nothing to do with not having a business plan – banks just don’t tend to be that helpful when it comes to seed funding or very early-stage business finance.

You can have the most refined, most detailed, most researched, foolproof plan, including some amazing (yet realistic) financial projections, and it won’t make any difference.

Banks tend to follow a very strict eligibility criteria for business loans, and even when the business has been trading profitably for several years, if it doesn’t have sufficient equity in select assets (mainly property), they’ll award you the loan you request, but they’ll require a personal guarantee from you or another guarantor. This pretty much negates any protection that a limited company entity is designed to offer – since they’ll pursue you personally if the business defaults on the loan.

So the picture doesn’t even look that rosy when you’ve been in-business for quite some time.

Basically, running a small business successfully is extremely difficult – hence the 60% failure rate in the first 3 years of trading (in the UK, at least) – and banks are all too aware of this. They’ve witnessed too many businesses default on their loans – and bad debt is bad news when it comes to generating returns on their capital.

For this reason, they look for surety when it comes to lending eligibility – not plans and promises.

They know, if you own a property (or a sizeable chunk of equity in a property) and you fail to repay your loan by the original means of payment (successful business trading), they can repossess that asset, dispose of it, and recover sufficient capital to negate the bad debt you have presented them with.

You may find that some ‘startup’ or ‘new business’ current accounts come with the offer of an unsecured loan or overdraft – but you’ll also find the amount of funding offered through these means to be meagre.

We once opened a Barclays business account for one of our startups, since it came with the promise of unsecured funding – which we later discovered to be just £1,000.

The only productive advice I can offer in regards to attaining bank funding at such an early stage of starting a business, is to seek to offer the surety they will be looking for in the arrangement.

Maybe look to attain ‘pre-orders’ from customers for your product or service, something legally binding with your customers that will create an obligation for them to pay a remaining balance upon delivery of the goods/service.

This way, the bank could try to fit this peg in their ‘invoice financing’ hole (typically offered to B2B businesses, where they will fund full invoice amounts and collect the credit-term payment directly from your customer – so you get paid up-front for your orders, but still get to offer credit terms to your customers).

Or beyond this, be prepared to show evidence of some other form of secure income, that would be sufficient to make repayments on the loan if the business fails to.

Go into your meeting with them with the assumption that they will value your business idea/business startup at £0 – so you’ll need to prepare and have some aces up your sleeve to throw their way.

At the end of the day, banks are not imaginative, they are far from entrepreneurial, and have zero vision (they can only see as far as their monthly P+L reports).

Don’t expect them to show the same level of excitement and enthusiasm for your plans as you have.

If you want money from them, you have to adapt to their methods and principles.

The riskiness of startup investment renders the funding avenues at early stages very limited, and very difficult to attain.

If you can find a way to bootstrap your way to a revenue-generating model (think MVP, Minimum Viable Product), then you’ll be in a far better position to access finance for growth from this point onwards.

The takeaway is, try to do the first part on your own.

In my personal experience I’ve learnt you have to start something from nothing, to be able to convince others to risk their capital on your business.

I hope this answers your question – Will a bank give a small business startup a loan without seeing their business plan? And I wish you all the success with your venture.

If you need any help or assistance during the journey, check our my Udemy course Fast Track Entrepreneur.

What would be an example of a cross-sell for my product?

Well, first of all, you’re making me hungry – they sound delicious.

Secondly, let’s first understand the definition of cross-selling (and other variations of boosting customer order value), then we’ll move-on to answering your question, what would be an example of a cross-sell for my product?

Cross-selling is the act of presenting complimentary items (either during the shopping experience or at the point of checkout), that can be purchased along with the primary item(s) that the customer is intending to purchase.

Variations of cross-selling can also be seen as ‘upselling’ and ‘downselling’. These techniques don’t act in quite the same way as cross-selling, since they work on the basis of encouraging the customer to change the primary item they are purchasing, but the underlying goal remains the same (at least for upselling), and that is to boost customer order value (and if possible, net margin on the transaction also).

Here’s a generic example, based on a pod-based coffee machine, of each of these techniques in-turn:

Cross-Selling

Purchasing a pod-coffee machine, and being offered the opportunity to purchase a bundle or ‘starter kit’ of pods along with the machine purchase. Or perhaps some cups/mugs designed to fit under the machine water outlet (there’s nothing more frustrating than having to angle a cup that’s too big for the machine, to try to catch the contents of your coffee!)

Upselling

Being offered the opportunity to upgrade to a larger/faster/more superior model of pod-coffee machine during the checkout process. Perhaps a discount is offered on the superior machine to encourage this, or the main selling points of what makes the machine superior are made clear, to show the customer they could get something even better by spending just a little bit more.

Downselling

This serves quite a different purpose to the above, in that the premise is to ‘save’ the sale – rather than boost order value. So, it serves to generate revenue in situations where you would have otherwise lost it.

For example, a website selling the aforementioned pod-coffee machine may have an ‘exit intent’ popup to grab visitors’ attention before they leave the site. Perhaps they placed a pod-coffee machine in their basket, then decided it was too expensive for them, and went to leave the site.

As soon as the mouse cursor leaves the web window (to reach the X on the browser tab or window), a pop-up shows saying they can get 10% off their first purchase, or perhaps displays a cheaper model of pod-coffee machine to the one that was placed in the customer’s basket.

Back to the sweet rolls . . .

So, taking this back to your question – what would be an example of a cross-sell for my product? Here’s how each technique could work (and I’m giving two examples for each method, since I’m not exactly sure of the environment or premise under which you actually sell your sweet rolls – so there’s an example for online sales, and also an example for store/face-to-face selling):

Cross-selling from sweet rolls

Online

Perhaps you also offer (or can begin to offer) variations of the original product – for instance, ones with currants in, or perhaps iced variations – then you can either bundle a selection of these variation items to be offered as a ‘taster’ experience, or offer multiples of each, to be purchased alongside the original item.

Seasonal variations would work really well in this situation (people love to try new things, especially on special occasions) – halloween-style, Christmas-style, Valentines style sweet buns and so on.

In-store

The most obvious cross-sell, if the rolls are being sold for immediate consumption (such as a cafe/takeaway bakery), would be a drink, and a complimentary food option (kind of like a ‘meal deal’).

Upselling from sweet rolls

This one is easy when it comes to food purchases (or at least, if I was your customer, it would be an easy upsell – since I’m a greedy bugger) – but the most obvious way to upsell on these items would be to offer a ‘large’ or ‘supersize’ variation, for just a few pence (or cents) more.

Make sure that the increase in price is more, relative to the increase in your cost for making a larger item, and you’ll also be boosting your net income, as a %age, from the sale, not just revenue.

You can apply this both to online and in-store sales situations.

Downselling from sweet rolls

Again, fairly easy.

I don’t think sweet rolls are the sort of item that would be genuinely ‘prohibitively expensive’ to most people in the developed World. In other words, it’s an item that’s affordable to almost everyone.

So if someone decides not to purchase one, it’s a question of choice, not of financial restrictions.

It’s not like when a tyre-kicker with £10 to their name, leaves the Ferrari dealership after a test drive. This isn’t a choice for them. It’s a financial restriction.

So, with this in-mind, you should be able to recover sales that would otherwise be lost.

You have to understand WHY the customer is deciding not to purchase your sweet rolls. Perhaps they’ve realised they aren’t hungry right now (in the case of an in-store sale), or maybe they just think they aren’t worth the money.

Online

If your customer is about to leave your site, you could have an exit-intent popup setup that allows them to purchase a miniature ‘tester’ pack of all your sweet roll variations. This way the customer can see how good they are, and decide which one they like the best, before buying multiples of one particular type.

In-store

Maybe have a tasting tray on the counter, or (better still) have someone outside the store giving samples to passers-by – make people hungry, even when they aren’t, by letting them try a little piece of your sweet rolls.

I hope this answers your question – what would be an example of a cross-sell for my product, and you’re able to implement some of the techniques I’ve mentioned here.

Happy baking!

How long does it take for a small business to take off? The truth is, it depends. And it varies, wildly.

First, I need to clearly define what the term ‘take off’ will mean in my answer.

Most people would define a business ‘taking off’ as the point that it becomes financially successful, the point where it starts to scale, the point where it begins to employ staff, diversify its range of products and services, and so on.

Basically, it defines a business that is gathering momentum.

But when a business starts to ‘take off’, it presents new challenges – there’s never a point (until you successfully exit your business) where you should be able to sit back and say ‘my business is a success’.

If it feels like you’re successful and comfortable, whilst you’re still operating your business – you’re not pushing yourself hard enough.

When I reach a goal, I never sit comfortably and enjoy the moment for long, because I’m moving on to what we need to accomplish next. And usually, that next level of accomplishment requires more financial investment, more risk, more effort, and more energy.

When you’re constantly pushing the boundaries of what is possible, you should never be able to sit back and say ‘I’m successful’ or ‘my business has taken off’.

So for simplicity, I’m going to define ‘taking off’ as the point that a business first begins to generate revenue.

Over the years, I’ve started quite a few different businesses, all of which had different timescales from startup to being in a revenue-generating state.

Here’s a list of all the different ventures I’ve started, and how long each one took from concept creation to starting to generate revenue.

1. Cash management online tool website – 2 months
2. Import/online retail business – 43 days
3. Copywriting agency – 24 days
4. Fresh food online retailer – 6 months
5. Ambient food and drink retailer (online) – 4 months (have started several of these, all with a similar timescale)
6. Ambient food and drink retailer (high street) – 1 month (first store was an acquisition, so was able to start faster than usual)
7. Online course sales – 1 month
8. Stem cell storage bank – 9 months
9. Affiliate websites – 3 days
10. Media agency – 14 months
11. Clothing brand – 4 months
12. Paid review website – 2 weeks (acquisition)
13. Discount card concept – over 2 years and still going (expect to be revenue-generating within 3/4 years)
14. Consulting business – 18 months

As you can see, there’s a huge range of diverse businesses that I’ve started, and all of which have very different leadtimes until they started to generate any revenue (or ‘take off’).

Even then, the rate of revenue generated from that point onwards varies wildly – some took several more weeks and months to generate another chunk of revenue, others grew rapidly right from the first bit of revenue.

I’ve found that there are generally two reasons why some businesses take noticeably longer than others to reach a revenue-generating state, and they are:

1. It is dependant on the level of infrastructure you require for your MVP (Minimum Viable Product) – which is the most basic state in which your business can provide an offering to the marketplace. Some businesses (like our discount card concept) require masses of infrastructure, customised hardware, and system development to be able to operate even at the simplest level. These are generally the businesses with a greater level of risk attached to them – since you incur a greater cost before you can begin to test market response – but are also ones that, if successful, are hard to replicate and can operate behind some good barriers to entry, which prevent the industry becoming saturated too quickly
2. The time it takes to ‘build trust’ with your intended audience. I’ve found, for example, service-based and brand-centric businesses (especially those centred around ‘advice’ or delivery of a promise), to take longer to build trust. In contrast, a retail business could start-up fast, by selling already-recognised brands, if you can achieve the best price online (whilst still maintaining profitability) – customers will buy. Even if you don’t yet have any reviews or recommendations – you’ll get sales based on recognition of the brand of the item you are selling, and the price-point you are selling it at.

The above should give you some indication of how long it takes for a small business to take off, and how much this is dependant on the type of business you are looking to start.

Quora question: What are the top 10 most profitable businesses in the UK?

My answer:

I won’t reel-off some ideas of what are the top 10 most profitable businesses in the UK, but here’s a simple equation that should help you identify the most profitable businesses/industries to explore.

Here it is:

Demand / Supply = Indicative profitability

So, for example, take operating system software.

Almost everyone in developed countries either owns, or has access to, a computer/laptop/tablet/smartphone. So demand for software that allows these devices to be operated in a user-friendly manner, is very high.

There are limited suppliers in this space. It differs depending on the device, but when it comes to personal computers, there are just 3 major players in the World – Microsoft Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

No surprise then that behind each one of these is a super-rich individual at (or previously at) the helm – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Linus Torvald.

After some quick research (ahem, Googling), it shows there are around 2 billion personal computers in use in the World as of 2019.

So applying this to the formula gives us: 2,000,000,000/3= 666,666,666

The higher the number that this formula produces, the higher the indication of profitability in the business/industry you are examining.

This formula does have its drawbacks and flaws however.

The biggest flaw being that it’s ultimately based on the assumption that the ferocity of competition is reflected in the number of competitors operating in that space.

On the contrary, it could be that an industry only has 2 competing operators, and a potential market of over 1 billion people. But those two operators may be fiercely competitive with one another, with both employing predatory pricing techniques to kill the other off – meaning they are making a loss on each item they sell.

The above formula would still show this space to be a highly profitable area – but it would be far from the truth.

It also ignores potential barriers to entry that are highly likely the cause of an industry having such few competitors – it is not feasible that an industry is abnormally profitable, yet accessible to all (at least not in the long-term – naturally, more competitors would enter the space and push the abnormal profits Southwards as they all fight to win more market share).

And finally, it is also geared towards identifying industries where the basis of profitability is derived from scale, not simply high margins. If you are exploring an industry in which profit is largely made via healthy margins on few, high value sales, then the formula won’t look great (since the demand aspect relies on the size of the marketplace, rather than the ‘value’ of each consumer/customer).

That said, it’s still a good, simple formula to help identify profitable industries at a very high-level, early-stage analysis.

Perhaps you may be well positioned to overcome the barriers to entry that exist, or maybe you use the formula to identify industries that have yet to have been saturated with enough competition to dumb-down profitability to normal levels, and you can act quickly enough to take advantage before this happens.

But the takeaway is, if you’re looking to use this formula to figure out where you should launch your own business, it’s not a great way to begin.

Profit is great and all, but you should really be following your own interests and passions. If you’re starting your business purely for the money, you may be better getting a job. It’s a far easier way to follow the soul-crushing pursuit of more money, than running your own business.

For more sound help in finding inspiration for your own business, see my step-by-step online course Fast Track Entrepreneur.

And eco clothing is not all – we’ve been busy!

My posts here are turning out to be bi-Annual – but there’s justification for it 🙂

Here’s a quick update on what we’ve been up to with Vitalife Group and other stuff!

In the Summer, I posted about our land purchase in Devon and our investment in some limited edition cigars.

Well, the former didn’t quite work out as planned (opposition to planning put a spanner in the works, and we’re back on the search for another, more suitable, plot – if you know of anyone selling a piece of agricultural land, please drop me an email).

Such is the nature of brand new concepts, ideas, and startup businesses – they don’t always work out in the way that you initially plan.

But what I can guarantee is that this concept WILL be tested – it’s just a case of when and where. Once I have an idea, I HAVE to run with it and test it in the real World.

It will not simply be laid to rest because of an early obstacle.

We’ll adapt and we’ll progress, as we always do.

The latter (limited edition Cohiba investment) is working out fine, and the retail market price per case has already doubled from what we paid. We’ll be looking to sell these on in late 2020 when the investment has matured a little more.

In the meantime, we’ve been growing and managing our trading businesses Vitalife Health, Vitalife Vend, Love Health Hate Waste, and our brand new venture Vitalife Threads.

Vitalife Threads, as the name suggests, is our new clothing business – specialising in eco clothing made from 100% organic cotton, made with 100% renewable wind energy, and produced without the use of any toxic or animal-tested inks or other materials.

People often ask why we decide to start the new businesses that we start, and it mostly boils down to solving a problem.

There’s no grandiose, profit-driven, exit-strategised masterplan. Heck, I’ve no idea where most of our businesses are heading – but I do know that they are all contributing, in some form, to positive change.

Whether it be making genuinely healthy, dietary-specific foods, drinks, and natural supplements more accessible and widely available, saving perfectly good food and drink from going to landfill, making healthy options available in retail environments that are mostly monopolised by unhealthy options, or, in the case of Vitalife Threads, trying to help turn the tide on fast fashion, and reducing the impact that fast fashion has on the environment.

They all have positive disruption at their heart – attempting to encourage positive change.

We established Vitalife Threads in partnership with one of the leading eco clothing manufacturers and printers in the World – they have even developed a fully closed-loop solution to fashion whereby when items of clothing reach the end of their useful life, they can be returned for a store credit. Upon return, the items get shredded and remanufactured back into items of clothing (marketed as post-consumer recycled lines).

There’s no escaping the fact that cotton is a massively resource-intensive crop – requiring copious water, and in the case of non-organic cotton, pesticides. So finding a partner that offered a closed-loop solution to fashion was imperative to us – we see this as a solution to both the landfill problems, and the environmental impact of cotton production and the fashion industry as a whole.

Team this with the fact that only wind-power is used to manufacture these post-consumer recycled items of clothing, and you have a product with bare minimum environmental impact – and one that looks and feels just as good as one manufactured from 100% virgin material.

It’s the way, we feel, that all fashion and clothing businesses should operate. But the vast majority do not.

So our plan is to encourage the uptake of these methods by the behemoths of the fashion industry – through leading by example.

If we can prove the concept of a closed-loop solution to fashion, and eco clothing as a whole, works commercially, then we’ll be helping to instigate wider-scale, positive change in this industry.

This is ultimately our goal with this business.

Plus, we’ve been hard at work developing our first revenue-generating part of Wight Pass (our Isle of Wight tourist and resident discount concept) – but we have to keep information on this under-wraps for now. More to come upon launch.

2019 also saw a fair few consulting projects for myself – which were all super-interesting to work on, and I thank all of my clients for getting me on-board to help forge growth and solve problems in their own businesses.

Team all of this with spending as much time as possible with my beautiful Wife Grace, and our two (crazy, but adorable) little kids (one 5 years and the other 20 months old), makes it clear why I only manage to update my blog up to 3 times max per year!

Come early 2020 I’ll also be re-launching an updated, extended version of my first Udemy course ‘Fast Track Entrepreneur’ (which has had great Worldwide enrollment rates since launch in 2016 – providing assistance to people wanting to start their own business in over 120 Countries, translated in over 30 languages, and to over 3,170 students), and launching a number of other courses designed to give a more in-depth look at, and guide through, each aspect of this overview course.

I hope you all had positive experiences to take from 2019 and are making progress in whatever areas of your life that you have been focusing on.

Let’s make 2020 even more positive and productive!

Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.

And some limited edition Cohibas.

Because that’s how we roll.

In my last post I covered the 5 passive income ideas I was following in order to see which brought the most success.

These were:

1. Create YouTube videos
2. Become a Udemy instructor
3. Become a lender on Funding Circle
4. Trade cryptocurrencies
5. Create a digital product

And here’s a quick rundown of where I’m at with each right now.

1. Create YouTube videos

Although I ditched this as a passive income source in my last post, I have uploaded a few more review videos for our business Vitalife Health – they don’t get huge viewing figures, but they do get views that tend to convert, so it’s an interesting promotional avenue for this business going forwards.

It just doesn’t work for me as a passive income source – largely because in order to make money (if you don’t already have a trading business to promote), you typically have to put out regular content, and that means regular filming (and editing, if you intend to do this yourself), which ultimately means this isn’t passive.

2. Become a Udemy Instructor

Since I was already a Udemy instructor when the passive income challenge began, I set myself the challenge of creating my second course on Udemy – which I did, successfully: ‘Boost Productivity: An Entrepreneur’s Guide’

I now have just under 6,000 students across both of my courses, and a Worldwide enrolment map that looks a bit like this:

Mr Worldwide!

Yeh, not quite.

My second course still needs to pick-up a little in order to match the regular passive earning momentum that my first course now has – they are collectively drawing-in around $220 per month right now.

I may launch a third course later this year, depending how busy I become with other projects.

3. Become a lender on Funding Circle

Now, this is the area that has experienced the most significant change most recently – and one that prompted the seemingly random purchases I mentioned above (I’ll explain a little more later in this post).

Since April 2019, our returns on this platform dipped drastically due to a tranche of bad debts hitting us all at once – meaning our annual returns dipped from an already-depressed 5.2% down to a meagre 3.7%.

As I mentioned in an earlier post (Mindset Mastery: Episode 3 – How to Build Wealth Sustainably) the average rate of inflation over the past 30 years has been 3.3%. So on this basis, my money in Funding Circle was now making me just 0.4% in real terms.

Ultimately, it reached a point where the risk to my capital, and the opportunity cost of other things I could be doing with that capital, far outweighed the gains of leaving it in Funding Circle.

So I sold a chunk of our loans, and we bought some land – which, if we achieve what we want to achieve with it, should deliver anything between 15-30% annual returns. Which is far stronger than the ‘good’ returns we saw with Funding Circle in the first year, of 7.2%.

This might sound like I’ve gone 360 degrees on the whole Funding Circle investing idea – but I haven’t. If nothing else, it’s still a good short-term investment vehicle to hold funds in whilst you accumulate enough capital to do something with a greater risk/reward profile – and I’ll still be continuing to invest monthly into the platform.

Bad debts are just part and parcel of lending to small businesses – being involved in this area (small business) from a management perspective for over 15 years allows me to accept this fact perhaps better than most – and I’m certain our dip to 3.7% is just temporary.

With greater attention paid to the businesses in which we invest, and time to allow things to settle, we’ll be back to more acceptable return level for our remaining funds by the end of the year.

4. Trade cryptocurrencies

I believe Bitcoin, and the other leading crypto assets, are still massively overvalued right now, and I sense a further, steep, correction on the horizon.

So for these reasons, I think I’m stepping out of this space for good now – I do have longer term plans that incorporate cryptocurrency and I’m massively excited about the prospects and opportunities it presents, but my speculative currency-trading hat is firmly on the peg.

5. Create a digital product

My digital product was a collection of niche e-commerce sites – of which I ended-up building 3.

One in DIY products, one in pet products, and the other in the jewellery space.

If you want to know more about the process I went through to set these up, see my post Passive Income Ideas Challenge Update.

They were all working out great, generating consistent passive income using my cost-effective promotional strategy and affiliate monetisation – then the hosting company I was using (who I won’t name here as I know it wasn’t their fault, given the number of resources I was using), suspended my account.

It was shared hosting, and each of the 3 niche sites were offering upwards of 40,000 lines, so the databases were pretty vast!

I switched over to a dedicated server, to overcome the suspension, but the cost of doing this rendered the whole operation loss-making each month.

I still think this is something I want to revisit and tweak – whenever I see potential in something, I have to explore it further – but I’ll keep the range of products narrower and more focused (particularly on higher-value lines), to see if this is something you can maintain on a low-cost, shared-hosting package.

This is the only approach I can see that would maintain profitability in the long-term.

Sooo . . .

Onto the land purchase (and cigars).

My Wife Grace and I did some brainstorming, and came up with a concept that intends to generate a far stronger return than what we were generating in Funding Circle (even in our first year, when we had a return of around 7.2%).

And the idea we came up with involves owning a fair chunk of agricultural grassland (2.5 acres).

You can find this type of land fairly cheap in the UK, since developers know there’s not a chance in hell of getting residential or commercial planning permission on something like this (so your buying competition becomes a lot narrower, which drives the price down).

The sort of land we bought is pretty much of interest only to equestrian operations, campsite owners (although not in our specific case, due to some covenants that exist on the land), and select farmers.

We managed to source 2.5 acres of agricultural land for just shy of £20k.

Exactly what we have planned with this land, we cannot share at this stage – but it’ll be exciting to share more soon – we’ll be documenting the whole process in a video series, so everyone can see what’s involved and what we’re trying to achieve here.

And the cigars?

True cigar aficionados will hate me for this – but my decision to buy these was purely investment-based. I’m not interested in using them for my own enjoyment (I don’t smoke, for a start).

I watched the price performance of the Cohiba Robustos Supremos 2014 from when I could source them for £450 a case, then checking these the following year, noticed they were now priced at £1,095 a case. A pretty good annual rate of return I would say!

So I took the dive with the more recent Cohiba Talisman Limited Edition 2017, and purchased 2 cases (I won’t disclose the price on here) – planned and implemented a great storage system (super-important if you want your cigars to hold value) that holds them at 69% humidity and between 70-72 degrees Fahrenheit at all times – and will now sit on them for the next couple of years or so to see if something similar happens with the price-tag as happened to the 2014 ones.

The great thing about limited edition cigars is that they start off with very limited production quantities, and they’re mostly sought-after by cigar enthusiasts who will either purchase them with the intention of smoking them, or will be tempted to smoke them down the line.

The supply will therefore constantly diminish (and by the look of the Cohiba Robustos Supremos price trajectory, it diminishes pretty quickly!) – so it’s almost certain that well-stored units will soar in price as they become rarer and rarer.

And if both the land project and the cigar investment don’t work out?

At least we have some fine cigars and a nice view.

You don’t get that with failing stocks and shares!

My next post will explain more about our land project – stay tuned!