Serve No Master: How to Escape the 9-5, Start up an Online Business, Fire Your Boss and Become a Lifestyle Entrepreneur or Digital Nomad

by Jonathan Green

  Nearly every marketer I know has a pool of graphics that they use all the time to look professional at the drop of a hat. And we’re greedy, always looking for something new – it doesn’t have to be epic quality, just good and new.

  The great thing about graphics is that you get two shots at every customer. The first time they see your offer, they might buy it in case they need those images at some point in the future. They are stocking the cupboard.

  All those people who don’t buy on the first pass will come back later when they realize they need that specific image. They need that fancy red arrow, and they come back to your website to buy it. The price might have gone up, but they still pay, because people need resources. In the long run, it’s cheaper than hiring someone, and it also helps you expand your pool of potential clients every time you make a sale.

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  Video

  Right now, the world’s #2 search engine isn’t Bing or Yahoo – it’s YouTube! As the Internet speeds up, more and more people are switching from text to video. Like I told you earlier, literacy rates are plummeting. People want their information mixed with entertainment and video is the way to achieve that. People want to stream video pretty much all the time. Speaking their language is just smart business.

  No matter your passion, you can start up a YouTube channel as you hone your video skills. You can start a political channel and put up a video once a week talking about your favorite news stories. You can set up an account on Patreon, where people fund you for each video you produce. Get sponsored by ordinary people at $1 a video and you can quickly replace your income as you build up that fan base.

  It’s a pretty cool way to structure your business and requires no advertising on your channel. You can also just make videos and run YouTube ads on your channel. It’s similar to Google ads, probably because Google owns YouTube. They just put commercials in front of your videos sometimes, and you get a small piece of the action. You can also drive fans to your main website where you sell DVDS, shirts or just about anything else.

  There’s a lot of money here, but you’ve got to realize that you MUST create stuff that is emotionally satisfying and consistent. You can’t be boring – you need strong ideas and opinions. When you have a strong opinion growing your channel is a piece of cake.

  The tremendous opportunity right now is in making videos for children. The top videos I watch have about a million views. The ones my daughter watches are creeping towards a billion. That’s where the big money is. It’s a whole new ball game. You can make videos with cartoons and old nursery rhymes and children’s songs that are no longer in copyright. Children will watch a video they love hundreds of times and each time your view count ticks up. Those big numbers mean big advertising dollars.

  My daughter's favorite videos right now are regular people who dress up in superhero costumes and walk around their house. They don't do any talking and just mime different stories. I don't get it, but when I see the views these videos get, I realize that these people are geniuses. They bought a costume for fifty bucks, played around in their house with their friends and now they are the most popular people on YouTube.

  If your talent runs toward the video production end of the spectrum, you can turn a spare room in your house into a studio. Setup a green screen and let other people come over to record at your place. As you get dialed in on how lighting works and the best way to remove green backgrounds you can create training courses for people. The best investment I made early on was in a course that taught me how to make professional quality lights from parts at the hardware store. I learned about lighting color and temperatures. It was so valuable to me, and I know other people love courses like that too.

  You can do a lot online with video, and it’s a growing medium. You can make live action videos, cartoons or just do like I do and record your computer screen. The ability to create content that looks great is very valuable.

  In between, there are people with film editing skills. If you can edit well, splice together video, and sync up voices, there are always people looking for that talent on the sites for freelancers. Getting great with video is a cool skill that allows you to do more than just sitting at a keyboard all day.

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  Networking

  I’ve already covered the networking skill in great detail, but I just want to drop a little reminder. This skill can and will turbocharge your business, and believe it or not; you can get referrals all day long from an active network.

  You can even turn networking itself into a business. You go to conferences (or even network online) and keep building up your Rolodex of contacts. When you connect two people, you get a piece of the action. This is a real job that is called being a JV recruiter. There are other names for it, but it’s a serious business. Many people will gladly offer you a taste of the action for a great introduction.

  Relationships are everything in this game, and the ability to form connections with people quickly will make them want to spend time with you, work with you and make money with you.

  Some people get into online business because they think it means they never have to communicate with another human being again. It’s possible to live in isolation like that, but if you want to make big bucks, then networking is a powerful skill to develop. Many people who work online are socially awkward, so if you can get out of your shell and provide the social lubricant, they’ll love having you around.

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  Sales

  I have a guy working for me that has one skill – and that’s sales. He gets a percentage of all the business he brings in. I’m in a time zone 13 hours ahead of most of America, and it is impossible for me to connect with people on the phone during most times. If you are a strong salesperson, then start looking for opportunities right now!

  There are companies always looking for sales consultants. You come in, help them streamline their process and improve their numbers. Then you take a fat check and waltz on out the door. So how do you get a foot into this game? You start out freelancing, helping people write and refine their phone sales scripts. As you build up a reputation and get more testimonials, you can take on bigger projects with bigger paychecks.

  From there, as always, you can turn your skills into products - teaching a growing crowd of people how to improve their sales skills. You can become a master of the sales world, just by teaching basic principles to your customers.

  Whether you want to work for other people or yourself, the ability to sell is invaluable. When you are on the phone with potential clients, the art of sales is critical. Getting someone to hire you and pay what you are asking for is all part of the craft. There are tons of courses on sales, and a lot of what I shared about favors and building relationships will help you to get started. You can learn even more about persuasion by reading the blog posts on my site.

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  Arbitrage

  Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.

  - Warren Buffett

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  Buy Low Sell High

  Arbitrage isn’t the easiest thing in the world to master, but it is easy to learn the basics. You buy something from one person and sell it to someone else for a higher price. Most of our economy is built on this model, and if you own a computer, I can guarantee there was some arbitrage along the way.

  The same factories in China make almost every computer. Then they slap on different logos so American companies can resell them to people like us at a massively inflated price. Rather than complain about this practice, let's get in on the game.

  Whatever skill you decide to develop, arbitrage is an excellent way to grow your business. Instead of writing books yourself, you build up a stable of ten ghostwriters and pay them four cents a word while you get paid six cents a word. I know that seems like an absurdly small amount, but over time that will be a huge amount of money. You’ve also just turned yourself into management. POOF! Your days as a grunt are over!

  Earlier in this book, you read about peo
ple passing up my six figure ideas? Odds are you read those passages and thought, “Wow, those guys were dumb to pass up a genius idea!”

  Okay. Your turn.

  This is an easy business model that you can develop in less than a month. Start an arbitrage business by advertising on college campuses. Those kids are used to writing all day long, and they’ll be more than happy to make a little extra change by putting in some extra time. As your staff graduates, flakes out, moves on, whatever, you can keep expanding by hiring new freshmen. As people who work for you get better and raise their prices, they can go out on their own while you bring on new people to train up.

  Is this the only form of arbitrage? Absolutely not! Just think of where people are buying and where you can get it done well for less.

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  It's not just about the stock market

  Another form of arbitrage is like a super powered version of the stock market. On the stock market, you only get to place one bet at a time. The only way to scale is to place larger bets, and you have very little impact on what actually happens. You purchasing a stock won’t raise the price unless you buy huge volume. With pure online arbitrage, you can increase your scale – and do it quickly.

  The most popular way this works is with the CPA market, where people pay you each time you get them an email address from a new person. What you do is buy traffic from a source. There are tons of people selling traffic, everywhere from ads on Facebook to direct mailings. You can pay someone to send an email you write to their customer list. So you send that traffic to a CPA page. Let’s say you’re following in my footsteps and doing gift cards, like I did years ago. You get $1.08 for every single email you get submitted. Each time a person fills out the form, this is your reward.

  When you start running traffic to the offer, you keep tweaking. Eventually, you get it to point where you spend $1.03 for each email submit. So if you spend $1.03 a day, you will make 5 cents a day. This seems like small potatoes until you scale up and spend $10,000 a day for $500 profit! This is the real arbitrage game. To get into this one, you want to start out with a little spending money, ideally around $5000 in your war chest. With a budget of around $100 a day, you can learn to master this game in 3-6 months. It takes a lot of the basic skills we covered earlier to create ads that convert and get as many people as you need to go through your arbitrage funnel.

  This is a great business if you’re technically minded and like looking at stats. As you get better numbers, your days flip from red to black, and you can start scaling. This is a fun game that has all the excitement of the stock market, but unlike Wall Street, you have the ability to impact and control your results.

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  Global Market

  People have been dabbling more and more with something called geographic arbitrage for the past few years, where you hire someone in a foreign country to do your work for you. You can hire a full-time programmer in India for a few thousand dollars a month and then resell that work for ten thousand dollars a month. You have to know what you are doing to ensure that the work you resell is up to snuff. I’ve dabbled in this game in the past and sometimes the people you hire will turn in crap. If you don’t catch it during your quality assurance process, it can get past you and all the way to the client, and rest assured; one bad outsourcer will CRUSH your business if you don’t stay on top of things.

  You should only resell stuff that you understand. You can apply this principle to almost any industry right now. Whatever your current day job is, there is a good chance you can hire a foreigner to do all the work for you for a fraction of your salary, especially if you work on a computer. Companies are sending jobs offshore all the time; you might as well get in on the game.

  In this business, you become the manager of a team. You have to keep track of your workers and make sure they deliver quality work on time. You will find that you do well with some countries and poorly with others. That’s just figuring out your strengths and weaknesses. It’s something interesting in the new global market and allows you to turn negatives in our economy into advantages.

  The more you explore online, the more you will get a feel for this concept. I would start by providing a service that you understand, and then expanding your offerings by hiring people internationally.

  Stay in the middle of the flow, and you ensure that any product goes through you. Your clients don’t care who does the work; they just want the work done well and on time.

  To get more advanced with this technique, you can take advantage of expat communities around the world. Where I live, there are tons of Westerners who just want to chill out and live the surfer lifestyle. There are people like this in locations all over the world. They take jobs in local hotels, cafes, and restaurants. They’re tour guides and surf instructors and English teachers. So they are living here making a much lower wage than they would back in their home countries. They just want to make enough to support their lifestyle.

  I hire people around here all the time. I have an awesome girl on my team who is doing bigger and bigger projects. She works hard, and I keep training her on more advanced skills, sometimes in person, and sometimes over video. We see each other in person once a week, when she comes to pick up her salary. She works her own hours, and I don’t track her time at all. I give her a timeline, and as long as she delivers on schedule, I don’t care if she works eight hours a day or two. I apply the same principals from my life to the people who work for me. She gets to work in between the best surfing times and has complete control over her destiny. Before working for me, she was working in a cafe with a schedule and making less money for more hours.

  This is a more advanced arbitrage move. You get Western workers at something approaching international prices. She’s been earning my trust for months now, and I’m hoping to let her run an entire revenue stream soon. I just love working with people that I don’t have to babysit.

  I also like hiring college students. They have access to academic pricing on software, they don’t demand super high wages, they’re eager to learn, and best of all they have access to all those overpriced academic journals. I use a lot of cutting edge science in many of my products. So I want to read and quote journal articles from this year. Some of those magazines charge ten to twenty thousand dollars a year for a subscription. That’s pure insanity. A college student gets them for free because the university pays that exorbitant price.

  Hiring a virtual assistant from another country can cut down your time in the office massively. You can get a full-time assistant who speaks English for under $500 a month all day long. A good one will manage your schedule and organize things for you like a champion. They can do research and set up all your meetings. Just having someone to manage your personal affairs and remind you it’s time to pick up the dry cleaning before a black tie affair can be priceless. Don’t assume that offshoring staff is only for the big corporations.

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  The Power of the Dollar

  The dollar is the strongest currency in the history of the world right now. I’m not a currency trader, but I do track how it competes with other currencies. I can’t give you exact numbers because they change all the time, but in the past ten years, the dollar has gotten stronger against the Euro, the Canadian dollar and the Australian dollar. You can hire someone for even less in another country because of that exchange rate. I pay people in local currency all the time. It allows me to pay them a real wage and the strong dollar means it costs me even less. A good exchange rate can save me 25%.

  Putting all the technical details aside, pay attention to the power of your currency. Knowing if your money is strong or weak right now should affect your hiring decisions. You don’t want to hire people in China because their currency is tied to the dollar. You’ll never find an edge there. But many other countries provide great opportunities. When a currency is weak against the dollar, you want to hire people from that country.

  Most people ignore this little step, but it can cut down your bu
siness costs very nicely over the long-term. And it’s like I’ve been saying throughout this book – rich people get rich by controlling what they spend. There are quite a few countries that use dollars in the stores, like Panama and Cambodia. When the dollar is really weak, you hire people in these countries and avoid dealing with exchange rates.

  The key to working internationally is understanding the exchange rate and pouncing when the time’s just right.

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  Knowledge is the most valuable resource

  There is nothing more valuable in our society right now than knowledge, and people will pay a premium for it. Right now I’m about to pay for knowledge on two topics. Today I’m going to buy something about training a Golden Retriever and something on teaching an infant to swim. I’m not just a producer of knowledge; I’m also a consumer.

  The knowledge business is so strong because most universities are a garbage fire. At your average college, maybe five percent of what they teach has any value outside their halls.