How I Traveled to South Africa for Free
Back in July, I had the wonderful opportunity of traveling to South Africa. It’s a beautiful country and I recommend you go there if you get the chance.
The beginning of the year I had all these plans to travel to different states. Florida, Atlanta and California. Going to South Africa was definitely not in my plans. However, the stars seemed to align to make this trip possible.
I didn’t start thinking about going to South Africa until May of this year. I had a friend who was returning there. When she left to go back, I said I have to go there.
Now prior to this the only countries I’ve visited outside of the U.S. was England and Antigua. And the longest flight was about 11 hours.
South Africa is roughly a 22 hour flight.
So I heard from the grapevine that another friend of mine was planning to travel to South Africa in July. After speaking with him, he offered to let me stay at his place during my visit.
So I hadn’t bought the ticket yet and I already had a place to stay I the foreign country.
Since this was my first time traveling there, I felt it was imperative that I travel with my friend on the same flight at him.
Now remember I wasn’t planning to go to South Africa so I didn’t have money saved up ready to purchase the ticket. You can search on your own to see how much a round trip ticket to South Africa costs.
So while I am trying to figure out how I’m going to pay for this plane ticket, I get an email out of the blue from a gentleman from Denmark who is ready to give me money.
It sounds hard to believe, but yes. This guy wanted to give me money to buy one of my domain names. The timing couldn’t be more perfect.
After a few emails back and forth, I had the money deposited in my bank account.
I was able to go to South Africa. I had a blast. Check out some of the photos.
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One thing I should mention about how this relates to having an online business is that I did not have a job. Things might not have gone so smoothly if I did. I wasn’t tied down to a 9 to 5; so I could travel at any time. I didn’t have to check how many sick days I had left or get my vacation approved by a manager. The keyword is flexibility. Flexibility, or freedom with how you spend your time, is one of the great benefits of having your own online business.
The plane ticket cost over $2,000. I sold a domain name for a few thousand dollars in profit. The entire process was done over email. This more than paid for my trip.
So when you think about it; I traveled to South Africa for free. Actually, I made a profit!
How to Sell Without Being Pushy
Now matter how you make money online at some point you have to sell stuff. Especially, if you want to really want to crush it, you will need to create and SELL your own products.
Now the average person is not a salesman. They are just a guy/gal who love to talk about what they love. So how does the average person sell without knowing how to sell?
“Be like water my friends.”
Sorry, I just wanted to sound cool. Here is what you do.
1. Don’t sell. Make recommendations.
You will not succeed if you are known as the guy always selling stuff to people. People are really good at sniffing those kind of people out. You don’t want to be that guy. Don’t you ignore or hang up on telemarketers? There are online versions of them as well. Don’t be that guy.
Instead make recommendations. If you are writing a blog post about a problem that many of your readers face. You can show them how to solve the problem and recommend a tool they can use to help.
Build Passive Income Before Quitting Your Job
One of things I’ve noticed in my life and in others trying living their passion online is that there is often many barriers to cross in order to succeed.
One of them is the security of consistent income. If you leave your job how can you continue paying the bills? A passive income business doesn’t happen overnight so what should I do in the meantime?
Even if you’ve saved up some money before leaving the job to focus on your online business, there comes a point when that money will run out unless you are able to add to it.
When Gary Vaynerchuck stepped away from running the daily operations of WineLibrary.com to start WineLibrary TV he had a starting point. He business was already profitable. He had the financial cushion to focus on his online wine show until it grew to what it is today. “The Internet’s Most Passionate Wine Program”
I preach alot about following your passion and going after your own online business. But after personal experience and seeing the apprehension of others, I understand there is only so much you can do in your business if you are worried about the rent and food.
So here is what you should do.
If you are currently working at a 9-5 job:
Don’t leave your job until you are matching your income.
Start working on your passive income business after hours. Hustle hard to get the business where you want it. And when you have a godo amount of income coming in you can easily switch “jobs”.
Work less hours at your job.
If you work less hours you are able to come home earlier to work on your business for longer. You may also be able to network more since you would have more time.
20 Sites To Find Affiliate Programs To Make Money
Affiliate marketing is one of the pillars of making money online. And finding the right programs for you to join to very important. To ensure success with promoting affiliate offers is to find ones that are related to the niche or topic you are in. You also need to make sure you are aware of any new offers that come up.
That’s why I’ve composed a list of places where you can research the right affiliate programs to join and promote to your audience.
Enjoy!
5 Great Reasons Why You Should Set Goals
In my business I am learning that I need to set goals in order to make sure I am getting things done. If I don’t then I lose focus quickly, projects get delayed and money goes away. In this video, I talk about the 5 reasons why you should always be setting goals.
- Gives Clarity On Your Ultimate Goal – You now have direction to where you want to accomplish.
- Pushes You Forward – Gives you motivation to keep doing what you are doing.
- Makes You Super Focused – You don’t waste time going after shiny objects. You spend time on what’s important.
- Get Things Done Faster – You make things happen faster and are more efficient.
- Keeps You Accountable – It makes sure you are doing what you need to be doing.
Here are 2 of my goals:
Lose 25 pounds by December 31.
Write at least 4 posts per week.
Please comment below and let me know what are your goals are. Let’s keep each other accountable!
Click Here to Order: Stories of the World’s Most Successful Internet Marketing Entrepreneurs
Click Here to Order: Stories of the World’s Most Successful Internet Marketing Entrepreneurs
This is a new book that I am starting to read. It is 300 pages and has a ton of information about the back stories of successful entrepreneurs and their businesses. Because of the content and writing style it’s going to take me a lot longer to finish that Crush It! but I know it will be worth it.
What I like about it is that you always hear about the stories of the gorilla internet companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter but what about the small business doing $20 million a year in sales? This book goes into that.
Think of it as the paperback version of Mixergy. (I hope no one gets offended by that analogy.) I love Mixergy.
Aweber Is Better Than MailChimp For Affiliate Marketers
I was alerted to some interested news about MailChimp’s new policy. It basically prohibits affiliate marketing links in emails using their service.
According to MailChimp:
there are some industries that send certain types of content that result in higher than normal bounce rates and abuse complaints, which in turn jeopardize the deliverability of our entire system. No offense intended, but because we must ensure the highest delivery rates possible for all our customers, we do not allow businesses that offer these types of services, products, or content:
- Illegal goods or services
- Escort and dating services
- Pharmaceutical products
- Work from home, Internet Lead-gen, Make money on online opportunities, etc.
- Online trading, day trading tips, or stock market related content
- Gambling services, products or gambling education
- Multi-level marketing
- Affiliate marketers
- Credit repair, get-out-of-debt content
- Mortgages and/or Loans
- Nutritional Supplements, Herbal Supplements or Vitamin Supplements
- Pornography or nudity in content
- Adult novelty items or references in content
- List brokers or List rental services
- Marketing or sending commercial email without proper permission
This move by MailChimp will cost them alot of business. Even if a company is not heavily into promoting other offers as an affiliate They we not use their service for that reason alone.
I have never used MailChimp personally; aside from on behalf of my web design clients. At one point I was thinking about maybe testing them out. Their biggest selling point is that the first 2000 emails are free.
But now I’m glad I am with Aweber. Aweber loves working with affiliate marketers and over 100,000 of them use their service. If you want to get into afffiliate marketing you must choose go with Aweber.
Why Automation is Important for your Passive Income Business
When you have your own business you realize that you need to get smart fast. You need to make sure that you’re focusing on the important things and not wasting time.
That’s why I love automation.
Automation is using processes, tools, systems or software to get things done without human interaction. All the big companies use to work more efficiently, save money and please their customers.
Business process automation, or BPA, is the strategy a business uses to automate processes in order to contain costs. It consists of integrating applications, restructuring labor resources and using software applications throughout the organization. – Wikipedia
It’s part of the saying “Word Smarter, Not Harder“.
Here are the reasons why automation is important.
Save time. By using technology to get things done, they can be completed faster than doing them yourself. Also, since you are not the one doing them there is less of a chance of you putting things off to the last minute.
Save money. Since time is money, if you are saving time, you are also saving money at the same time. This is because it leaves you more time to focus on money-making activites. Plus you don’t need to pay and/or train someone else to do those tasks.
It’s scalable. You might think you are fine doing those 10 simple tasks a week on your own. But as your business grows, so does the amount of those tasks. If you have an automation system in place you can add as many tasks as you want.
I’ve already touched on this topic briefly when I blogged 52 Week Method For Making Money With Your Email List. This is where you use Aweber’s autorepsonders to automatically send emails for you for a year.
Here is something cool. I’m not actually typing out this blog post right now. I’m really using this nice little tool that I found which allows me to talk while it writes the post for me. This tool, which I will write…er…talk about in another post, allows me to get my thoughts down quickly and create blog posts faster.
There are tons of tools out there to automate certain task. Think about how you can apply the same idea to all aspects of your day. What do you spend a lot of time doing that you could automate?
Free up some time; let technology work for you while you focus on with the things that are really important.
photo credit: burgerfeet1
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How To Make Money With Social Media
I wanted to show you this video. It was recorded during a workshop for the annual miniEnterprize Canada conference. The venue was University of British Columbia. The speaker in John Chow. If you don’t know who he is you should really get to know him. He earned $500,000 in 2009 from his blog JohnChow.com. He knows his stuff.
