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

  They don’t teach you how to manage a credit card bill, fix a broken washing machine, splice a wire, negotiate a discount, get bumped up to first class or anything else that would improve the quality of your life. The education system totally sucks, and it won’t get better in my lifetime. They’re entrenched in their ways, and that means it’s a great time to slide under them and teach stuff of value.

  If the education system in America improved, it would probably knock down my business. But thanks to all those unions, there will never be meaningful reform, and I’ll be making money for a long time to come.

  The great thing about the online world is that you can learn something, make it work, and then train people to do the same thing. I learned how to master Amazon by emptying my wallet for dozens of courses. I think I own nearly every course on the market. Then I filtered out the garbage that no longer works and added in tons of my personal techniques. My system uses the foundations from other places, but my experience allowed me to improve that system over and over. This approach to knowledge, learning and then doing, and then teaching again, means that you’re always up to date.

  Believe me; you have knowledge within you right now that people will pay desperately for. It’s all about finding the right approach.

  Just now, I stopped writing to find those two resources. I found a woman who has a great DVD on teaching infants to swim. Unfortunately, she hasn’t updated her website or product in years. She offers no instantly downloadable alternative. Why would I want to pay extra for her to ship me a disk that can get damaged, especially since it’s an international delivery? I wanted to buy her knowledge, but that one little mistake lost the sale. If a competitor entered the market with the same knowledge in the medium I prefer and offered instant delivery, they could capture that sale.

  The only reason you are reading this book is that I have knowledge within me that you desire. You have knowledge within you that I desire too. No matter what your profession or hobbies, there are things that you only learn when you get deep.

  Most people have no idea what the different codes on plane tickets mean. If you work at the airport dealing with shouting customers all day long, you could leave that job behind just by teaching those same people how to interpret the secret codes on their tickets. So many people would pay to learn how to better navigate the nightmare that air travel has become. And the kind of people who would pay for that knowledge would pay a LOT because they’re busy. There are tons of somethings that you think are nothing – and figuring out one of them could change your life forever.

  XIII

  Finding a Market

  What new technology does is create new opportunities to do a job that customers want done.

  - Tim O'Reilly

  89

  Where are all my customers?

  So many new companies are altars to the ego of the founder. It’s a big mistake, and I see this in big and small businesses all the time. They put their store in a neighborhood they like to hang out in, stick low-rent stuff in “classy” (read: expensive) areas, and stick a singles bar in a neighborhood where everyone is married. If the main reason you do something is that it feels like a good idea to you or reinforces your self-image, you need to step way back and reassess.

  Trust me; there’s nothing worse than having a beautiful store in the wrong neighborhood. You want to find out if there is a market before you start anything else. You could put out fantastic training and techniques for getting pagers cheaply, but nobody would care because it’s not 1992 anymore. You want to be sure that there are people who like what you want to talk about before you walk too far down the path.

  One of the first people I tried to help out had a music store. He was a friend of a relative, so I met up with him to help him find customers. He had great gear at great prices with one of the coolest websites I’ve ever seen. He paid thousands of dollars for that website. Unfortunately, it was coded in Flash, which is now essentially a dead programming language. Go to a flash site on your iPhone and nothing appears because iPhones can’t even read that language. Neither can Google. So Google was sending him no traffic.

  One little mistake kept his market from finding him. You want to find your market where they are. Figure out what’s working, and don’t try to outsmart your customers.

  90

  Interest

  Here’s how I start my research process:

  The first thing I do is fire up Google to see if people care about the topic. Before I started my blog, I began searching around for terms that apply to my site, such as: quit my job, escape the 9-5, digital nomad, and a bunch more. I wanted to see if other people were performing similar searches. Some powerful tools show you how often different searches are performed every month. That’s a good baseline to see if people even care about the term you’re targeting.

  If your idea is only getting a thousand searches a month worldwide, then people just aren’t thinking about it yet. That book you’re working on about teaching your dog to smoke might be an innovative idea, but you don’t want to jump the gun. When you perform these searches, you want to check out the different sites that appear. First of all, you’re going to get information, second, you’re going to get a sense of the emotional appeal. What’s being sold? How are they selling it?

  I also love to find a good forum on a topic. The questions people ask in a forum can be very telling, and again, you’re getting people’s real language, their true emotion. You want your website or product to answer the most popular questions.

  In dating, it blows my mind, but a large percentage of the questions on the forums I check are about long-distance dating. Men and women frequently write about being in multi-year relationships with people that they have never even seen a picture of, let alone met. I thought that everyone has a digital camera or a friend with a smartphone by now, but the frequency of that question showed me a need in the market, and it led me to write a book about long-distance dating.

  You will be surprised by what you find. Your ideas as someone who knows the topic won’t always match the questions that people ask the most. Whenever I talk to someone running a small brick and mortar business or something physical, I ask them about the most common questions that customers ask them, because that’s the main thing that should be on their website. This is where the knowledge of your market can be invaluable.

  If you search and scour the Internet, but nobody is talking about your topic, you might have an idea that won’t go anywhere. It sometimes happens no matter how much prep you put in, but it’s way better to try and find out before you sink any money into a bad idea.

  91

  Competition

  There are around twenty excellent websites that are all about what I’m teaching in this book. There are blogs about quitting your job and living the full-time traveler lifestyle. Some are about becoming a nomad, and some are about moving somewhere new and staying there. Instead of freaking out that other people stole my idea, this gets me excited.

  You don’t want to be the first one with an idea. If nobody is talking about it online, your product might just fix a problem that nobody has. The fact that there is enough traffic to sustain twenty other people talking about my topic is great news. There’s already an audience connecting with the concept.

  Those guys are your competition. They’re also your friends, so spend some time studying them and seeing what you like most. Personally, I have no interest in re-inventing the wheel. I look at all the sites similar to my idea and pick out the things that I like. Maybe I like the colors on one site and the organization of another. I look for elements that I think work.

  There’s always room for other people in the same industry. Because geography does not limit my customer base, I always see other people in the same space as a good thing.

  I was doing a search this morning, and I looked at more than thirty websites for editors. Almost all of them were just terrible. Images in the wrong places on the screen, broken code, no way to make con
tact even if you DID want to hire them by some miracle. They also had a broad range of pricing structures without any justification for why some had a higher price point. Most of them didn’t even have examples of their previous work or a walkthrough of their process.

  The structure of these sites threw me off.

  There is a big opening in that market for a skilled editor who has a website that isn’t garbage. The large quantity of sites tells me that it’s an active and growing market. The bad quality of those sites shows me my opportunity. If I have a better site, I can start to siphon off some of their business.

  The more you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your market, the faster you can build a strategy.

  92

  Do people buy books about it?

  Maybe you have a magnificent idea. You want to help people quit tobacco and save some lives. That is a great idea! So you write a book about quitting snuff. The only problem is that nobody has taken tobacco that way since the Middle Ages. It baffles me that people don’t check Amazon before writing an entire book.

  I like to restrict my searches to just Kindle books because the numbers are much more accurate. I need to see at least five books on that topic that are in the top thirty thousand Kindle books, or I move on. That number is my litmus test for a subject. Books ranked below that are making pennies.

  A perfect example is teaching your baby to swim. When I taught my daughter how to swim, she was two years old. I wanted to get a book on the topic for some ideas. She hated the water and would scream like crazy any time she got near it. One of my neighbors even came over to yell at me because of all of the noise. But I couldn’t let that stop me from trying.

  When I was eighteen, a fellow college student drowned right in front of me, and it’s a memory that haunts me to this day. To make matters worse, I live on an island where there are pools everywhere. Teaching my child to swim isn’t a luxury; it’s about safety and protecting her life.

  Things have changed since then, she's a very strong swimmer and totally comfortable in the water. In fact, she’s the best swimmer of all the kids her age, and when she was in a kayak that flipped over last year, she was completely fine.

  When I was researching techniques on teaching her to swim, I started with Amazon. I discovered books that I could tell were produced by other marketers. They just had a look that I can recognize. They all had a mixed bag of reviews. When I looked at their rankings I realized that sales were abysmal - people don’t want to teach their kids to swim from a book. It’s a much more popular search term on Google and YouTube. I learned that people wanted videos, not a book.

  This year I began teaching my six-week-old son to swim. I did some research, and most people think that’s the earliest you should start. Again I turned to Amazon to find a good guide. There is only one book there worth reading, and even that one was filled with too much Eastern philosophy. I don’t want to teach my kid the oneness of all things or show him how to float in the space between raindrops. The little dude just needs to learn how to swim! That’s it!

  What I learned as a customer is that there is a deficiency in quality in this space. I might put a book out about teaching my kids to swim because I see opportunity. I already have books about raising my children, so a book about swimming would fit in that brand. It would be a follow-up book. Someone buys one of the more popular books and then buys the swim book later. My research showed me that the market is not popular, but that if I do it right, there is a little bit of opportunity there.

  One of the reasons that I prefer to research on Amazon is that people are there looking to buy. People search for stuff on Google, Bing and Yahoo all the time, and they’re in research mode. They are looking for free information. That’s fine. But converting those people to customers is quite hard.

  Every single person on Amazon is already in buy mode. Nobody is there to kick the tires. The information you get is a little more streamlined. You are moving beyond pure interest, and into the realm of people wanting to pay for information.

  93

  Research Strategy

  Some topics are only popular in video, and some are only popular in books. The results you get from each of your different research strategies will be different. That’s why you want to examine multiple places. Some topics do well for me on the Internet, but the numbers on Amazon are abysmal.

  When I first started selling services online, I found the majority of my customers just by posting ads on Craigslist. There’s less traffic, but people only look on that site when they’re ready to buy. I got a lot of traffic to my site through search engines, but the conversion rates were terrible – most of those visitors were in “lookie loo” mode.

  Audiences exist in different places, and sometimes an idea fades away. Topics that trended last year may have faded away by now. This is the nature of the world, and it’s why you want to stay on top of your market as you build your business.

  If you understand the topics people in your audience care about, the questions they ask, and the products they buy, you’ll start out ahead of everyone else trying to build a business online.

  Way too many people skip the research phase and go right into a passion project. I’m all about passion, and that’s a great place to start, but we want to focus on a passion that intersects with a real revenue stream for you.

  XIV

  Charge a Lot

  ‘The more expensive the better' is kind of the American way, and if you spent $600 for a sweatshirt, then that makes it better.

  - Macklemore

  94

  Get Paid to Learn

  Here’s how it works for most people - when you first start out, you have no knowledge and a limited budget. You build a website and create a product. You write blog posts and then try to get visitors to your website. You put in all of that effort and at the end if everything is perfect, you might start to make some money because these projects only pay out at the point of success. You’re doing a lot of work for free in the meantime, and one little mistake can cause the machine to break.

  When I was starting out, I wanted to learn how to rank websites on Google. So I found some clients who would pay me to rank their websites. I took that money and purchased the resources I needed. You can do the same thing. The great thing about this model is that you get paid up front. Instead of starting out in the red, you start out in the black. People are happy to pay you to learn something on their behalf.

  If you want to find out how to rank books on Amazon, you can find an author and offer to handle all their marketing for the price of my Amazon course. You get the money up front, access to the training, and you even get a guinea pig to practice on. The great thing is that my system works; you will deliver the desired results to that client. It’s a wonderful feeling.

  This method is how you learn as a street fighter. You have to work your way to the top. The danger of starting a project with a lot of capital is that you start to throw it around too quickly. When people start projects with tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s easy to spend some of that money poorly. You overpay for courses and workers as you rush to that end result.

  I met a guy at a conference once who was wearing a power tie like you wouldn’t believe. I asked him how much to get a landing page put together. The market value of a tier 1 landing page right now, if you pay for the best of everything from the copywriter to the graphics is under $5,000. That’s way more than I would ever pay, but I’m talking about if you hire the most expensive people and pay their top rates. I don’t know of any possible way I could spend more than that. Normally, something like this should be under $500. But this guy looked me right in the eye and told me he pays $25,000 for landing pages all the time.

  He’s paying about fifty times more than he needs to be to get a quality product. And my first thought was not to tell him that he’s getting ripped off. Why would I want to hurt his feelings when obviously he’s finding ways to get a positive return on his investment? No,
my first thought was that I would love to be his vendor. I could take that 25k and hire a team for 2-3k to do a crazy overpriced job and make a 20k profit every single time.

  The other move is to become his consultant and offer to cut his costs down by around 80%. I could double his business value in a few days and still take a generous amount home.

  This stuff is very common for people with big budgets. They don’t know what anything costs, and they end up paying more than everyone else all day long.

  Where I live, there are two prices for everything; one for locals and one for foreigners. Most tourists don’t ever catch on to the system, and they happily pay the inflated price in ignorance. There is nothing wrong with that. If they pay a reasonable price and walk away happy, nothing bad has happened.

  The real secret is to avoid being that person yourself so that you can control your war chest. Controlling costs is crucial. It’s why I like to get paid to learn.

  A few great things happen when you are getting paid to learn. You have to finish the fancy course you just purchased because you aren’t playing with your money. It lights a real fire under your butt, and you’ll feel a stronger sense of obligation to learn, implement and succeed. You also get a great testimonial from that first client. Getting paid up front helps this game to seem a little more real. Instead of chasing a magic rainbow, you now have very real cash in your pocket.