We have the bastard dishwasher from Hell…

That’s not how it was advertised in the shop obviously.

And it breaks down every few months.

It cost us around £150 and we’ve had it YEARS.

It’s older than one of our children I think.

So common sense screams to me ‘Buy a bloody new one’ and to be fair sometimes my wife screams the same thing.

We can afford a new one obviously, and even where we live you can get one delivered and installed in around 48 hours for a small extra charge.

So why won’t I buy one?

Well the problem is that when it first packed up it was less than two years old.

Out of warranty but annoying enough for me to be stubborn and refuse to buy a new one when it had broken down so quickly after purchase.

So I went online and to my lasting surprise I learend how to fix the bastard.

With this particular model there is a fault where the base fills with water, triggers a trip switch and needs manually draining before it will start working again.

And when I fixed it I felt like Tarzan.

So now when it buggers up and I can see that the problem is the same one, I fix it.

Takes a couple of hours but leaves me feeling the same way I feel when I chop wood, or fix the car or put shelves up.

It’s not cost-effective.

In those hours I could create something online that would bring in much more money than fixing a fault costs.

More than enough to buy a new one and get some bloke to install it.

BUT THAT’S NOT THE POINT…

The point is that we all need to ‘do’ things now and again.

Real things that are a throwback to earlier times when things weren’t so disposable and people could craft things with their hands.

Yeah I know it’s romanticism and it’s easier to dump the old one and buy a new one.

But I think it’s a mistake, and not just from the ‘disposable society point of view that older people seem to rant on about in pubs.

I think creating things, art, manual labour, music, artisanship and repairing are vital for our spiritual and mental well-being.

There’s something that feels intrinsically wrong with disposal. If you’ve ever thrown away an old wobbly kitchen table or a wheelbarrow with a broken strut you’ll maybe know what I mean.

Throwing away something that someone created doesn’t feel quite right, even if it was created by a machine in a factory.

Hippy shit absolutely.

But some of you will know what I mean.

Even recycling doesn’t quite hit the spot because you don’t SEE for yourself what happens to the items you recycle.

So I spend quite a lot of my time away from the PC doing things like that – stacking logs, cutting wood, digging over the veggie bed, even changing the nosepads on my specs for some I bought on Amazon for £1 (I know), brewing my own beer (coming soon) and weird little bits of stuff that make me feel like a human being.

Dunno why it helps calm my soul, but it does 🙂

We’ve got four dining chairs that are on their last legs and won’t make it through Christmas so rather than taking them to the tip or freecycling them (they’re so wobbly it’s not fair to inflict them on someone else) I’m going to spend a few hours chopping them up to burn to keep us warm over winter.

(Yeah I know we could just switch on the central heating but let me have my romantic ideal eh?)

That’s proper recycling.

They’ve supported my fat arse for years and now they’ll keep me warm chopping them up AND when I burn them.

Not sure there’s a point to this post…

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If you’re selling to the ‘make money online’ niche you’re going to hit some obstacles.

Possibly the biggest of of these will be skeptisism.

Your prospects just won’t believe it’s possible to make ten grand a month from their kitchen table.

It is of course, but it takes some work, even more commitment and a lot of dedication – at least to get started.

I’ve found that the best way to get around buyer disbelief is simply to put any ‘selling’ on hold and to try to help them  as much as possible.

But that in itself throws up new challenges.

What helps one person might hinder another.

How do you know HOW to help people?

One person might benefit more from making a dozen mistakes and learning from them (like me), while another might make two
mistakes and quit because they think they’re a failure.

Likewise some people might ask yo to sell them something that you know won’t work – but if they don’t get if from you
they’ll just buy it from someone else.

What do you do in that situation?

For me the answer has been just to show people what has worked for me.

I can’t tell anyone for definite that using Instagram as a marketing platform works or not because I’ve never done it.

But I can for sure tell (and show) people that Ebay, Facebook and Twitter work well for online marketers because I’ve done it myself successfully.

Basically I’ve found that if I try to help people by showing them business techniques that I’ve actually used myself and  made money from, things work out pretty well.

I also feel confident of what I’m teaching, and I know the subject inside out – there’s no guesswork or theory.

I’m not saying it’s a perfect solution, but it’s the best one I’ve found yet.

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Share your secrets.

It’s the best way to make money.

Many online marketers keep the things that work to themselves.

This is a big mistake because if you want to find success you SHARE your stuff.

After all you’re positioning yourself as an expert right?

If you visit a well-know gardening or cookery blog you don’t expect to read about the stuff you already know

You want to know that little trick about how to get your pork rind crispy and sweet, or how to use copper wire to protect your leeks from snails.

You read their content, admire them as experts THEN you buy the book, or the DVD box set.

But so many internet marketers are tight-arses with the information they know works.

Sure, put some (but not all) of your best stuff into your products and sell them.

But at the same time freely give away some of your best stuff too, on your blog, in interviews, on webinars and in your free reports.

Remember these top chefs, gardeners, property developers and all the dudes who have their own TV series don’t just make their income from selling books with their best info…

… they also consult, mentor, endorse and recommend other products to the huge following they’ve built by giving away good, solid information.

The more good stuff you give away, the more successful you’ll become.

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Well it’s the hardest bloody thing I’ve ever (tried to) learn to play.

So far anyway.

Seriously toying with the idea of bagpipes next but can see that ending in divorce/violence

So here’s a very quick 25 second clip of my banjo playing to date, because many people have asked how I was getting on with it

PS I can’t speak and play at the same time so a few laughing grunts is all I can manage, along with a look of concentration that could easily be mistaken for bowel trouble and/or trapped wind.

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…and all feels right with the world.

Had my dodgy tooth sorted.

Sorted out an iffy tyre on the car

Found an outsourcer who specialises in converting ebooks to Kindle format for one of my niches

Just made a cup of green tea and bought in plenty of wine yesterday

It’s sort of…nice…when everything feels (briefly) settled

Only lasts a while of course until the next list of jobs appear – but that’s why life is never boring…

 

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I use a pre-pay card for a lot of online purchases.

This is one card I use. Nothing to do with Apple – I just took the pic on the top of my Macbook lid.

There are loads to choose from out there depending on where you live and what you do online.

Not the big stuff or for business use, but for purchases where I prefer to do damage limitation should anything go awry.

For example:

1. Letting the kids buy apps, films and games for their tablets. They’re good kids and totally trustworthy but sometimes in-app purchases and play store / istore purchases can be a bit deceptive and not clear as to what is being bought. Having a pre-paid card for these means they can only spend what’s on the card

2. Offers from various online companies, internet marketers and trial purchases. I use my pre-paid cards to enrol in 30 day trials, $1 offers and the like, some of which can be notoriously hard to cancel. If they make me jump through hoops to cancel a trial, or worse, if they’re downright dodgy they can’t keep billing my card if there’s no credit to bill

3. Ordering on internet sites where something flags up as being slightly dodgy. Usually I’m wrong and I have to say that over the years of using credit and debit cards on the internet (and I use them a LOT) I’ve only to date had ONE instance of someone using my credit card details. They bought a number of computers before I sussed it out and the bank cancelled my card. It was a lot of hassle getting the money back though.

So I’m a big fan of pre-paid cards where you can just fund (for example) a couple of hundred quid to it from your bank account at the start of the month and if something goes wrong that’s ALL you can lose. I’m not saying it’s a nice thing, but I’d rather do that than someone get access to a credit card with a limit of thousands.

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Rainy Saturday.

Needed to take a trip to Bradford to pick up a few business things from a supplier so we had a quick Google/TripAdvisor search about what there was to see in the area and ended up at Bolling Hall.

This is a wonderful, charismatic house that dates back to the 1300’s but weirdly is situated in the middle of a housing estate just a mile or two from Bradford city centre.

It looked almost derelict and we nearly didn’t go in but glad we did.

It was almost empty apart from ourselves and two museum staff, one of whom told us the best ghost stories ever about what he’d seen and heard in his years working there.

He might have been winding us up a bit but the kids listened to him, eyes growing wider as he told the story of the very real, solid-looking man in 18th century clothing who stood and watched him disarm the alarm on arriving in the building one morning…

…before vanishing into thin air.

He told us about the white lady in the ‘ghost room’, the phantom children in the nursery (WAY creepier than the ghost room) and warned us to keep a ‘nose’ open for the overpowering scent of roses that pervades one of the haunted corridors.

Finally in the civil war room we found the death mask of Oliver Cromwell. Not sure if I was supposed to take a pic but couldn’t see any signs telling me not to, so I did.

Anyway if you get chance I’d recommend a visit to Bolling Hall. Admission is free and it’s a great way to spend an hour scaring yourself on a wet afternoon. Very interesting, a little creepy.

 

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Yesterday I put load music on Spotify and spent most of the day playing about with domaining – buying domain names to flip and develop.

Great fun.

A few days before that I put my CPA head on and was tinkering with offers, traffic and tweaking results while eating a hot beef sandwich and drinking too much coffee.

And last week I spent a day writing something for Kindle in another niche that I’d wanted to do for a long time but kept putting off.

Add to that a few days of escaping to grab the last of the autumn sun doing some beach walking while the kids were on school break, some gardening and some planning for the future over large glasses of wine with my wife.

I can do this because I can strip what I do down to a ‘core business’

This is basically building my list and being an email marketer.

There are a few other things that need to be done such as writing my newsletter and keeping in touch with clients but on the whole I can break things down to a few hour’s work a week.

Giving me lots of time for ‘trying stuff’ and experimenting with new income models, and more importantly spending time with my family.

Taking things right back to basics – stripping it down to the nuts and bolts – took some doing and even more self-discipline because the temptation is to over-complicate – at least it was for me.

But now I’m earning more money than I was years ago and working less.

The easy part is looking at what brings you the most money in your business with the intention of stripping everything else away.

The hard part is actually doing it.

 

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I built this log store myself…

(well I assembled it if we’re being totally honest – the pieces were already cut for me)

…and we filled it up with logs five weeks ago. Now the weather has gone even colder we’ll be going through even more wood I reckon.

A cord of logs costs £60 including delivery and it takes around eight trips with the wheelbarrow for me to transport them from our drive where the delivery bloke dumps them round to the log store at the back of the house

(stay with me there’s a point to this)

We don’t have (or want) land big enough so we can fell our own trees and I don’t massively enjoy working with chainsaws anyway because I’m too clumsy, although a mate of mine says cutting up his own trees is a real stress-busting exercise for him.

So we buy it in, and also chuck any offcuts, fallen logs, rough wood that we find into the back of the car too to add to the pile for free.

Doing this sort of stuff keeps me grounded, gives me time to think and plan ideas and more importantly keeps life ‘real’ because working on the internet can sometimes be a bit unreal.

I found out long ago that it’s really unhealthy both mentally and physically to spend more than a few hours at a stretch staring at a bloody computer screen – it makes me feel like crap and doesn’t do my thought processes any good.

So as well as having a work ‘to do’ list, I also have a physical ‘to do’ list.

Sounds daft but it’s SO easy (too easy) to work at your PC only to find five hours have passed and you’ve not had any fresh air, eaten anything or even looked up from the monitor,

So today on my physical to do list is

1. Stack the log delivery into the log store (IF he decides to deliver today – you never can tell)

2. Unload the big car after the business event we did on Sunday. It’s still on the drive and full.

3. Take an old broken office chair to the tip (STILL not done that from weeks ago)

That’s it – not much but it’ll take a couple of hours combined and that’s more than enough to take me away from my desk to get some fresh air and some exercise.

It’s a real joy being able to work from your computer at home, but you need to keep an eye on your balance with other things.

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I sort of like this pic.

My £1600 15” MacBook Pro Retina screen computer is nicely folded up so I have somewhere to put the FIVE notebooks I’m currently using to house my projects, ideas and other stuff I’m currently working on.

I do use my Mac of course, a lot.

But sometimes you need to feel and see and be able to just scribble stuff out rather than hit the delete key.

For me it’s just as important to see the things I’ve rejected rather than delete them as though they were never there.

I get my notebooks and pens from poundshops (discount stores but with less helpful staff) and I have piles of them.

Ultimately it’ll be a problem when I can’t get to my desk for spiral bound notebooks, but until that happens bugger it – I like pen and paper…

…especially the ones that have rings from my Guinness or wine glass on them.

That’s when the REAL ideas come to the surface…

 

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