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It’s Crunch Time: No More Day-Job

no-more-day-job

After an entire year and a half of back and forth and then back again, I finally made a decision about what I’d do when I moved to Canada. Despite being a little bit crazy, perhaps, I decided to go all-in on the digital entrepreneur and make my living off of Amazon Affiliate niche sites and self-publishing books. I got my last paycheque from my university in South Korea about a week ago and now it’s crunch time. Here are some of the feelings that I’m having these days about the whole online business thing:

No Day-Job: Loving It!

I’m loving the lack of a day-job. I have freedom to do whatever I want to do, whenever I want to do it. I guess that’s why I was attracted to this kind of lifestyle in the first place. The thought of having to get on some sort of 9-5 schedule at a day-job with two weeks vacation was far too disturbing for me to even consider seriously. I’m 100% sure at this point that I made the right decision.

Living for Free: Seems Very Wise

I moved to a farm on Vancouver Island where I live for free in exchange for 13 hours a week of work. By “free,” I mean quite literally free. I have no bills each month except for food, cell-phone gas + insurance for my car and entertainment. By doing this, I have far less pressure to start earning the serious money from my online business than I would if I were burning through a couple thousand a month in rent and utilities and all that. At $0 for rent, the price is most certainly right. And the farm work is pretty chill.

Registering as a Business: It’s Time

In Canada, there are a whole bunch of tax benefits if you own a business. It’s also not so difficult to set this up yourself, so I plan on doing that in the next few months. It doesn’t matter so much now, but it will once I start to earn enough that I’d actually have to pay some serious tax.

Amazon Affiliate Niche Sites: The Key to My Future

This past year while I was still in Korea, my main focus was on self-publishing books on Amazon. They’re earning around $400 a month, so it was certainly worth investing my time into this. However, I’m a little burnt out on them and want to change my focus for a while.

The new plan is Amazon Affiliate sites. I started off a few months ago with this site: Menstrual Cups and have been really encouraged by my sales. However, the fatal flaw seems to be that menstrual cups are around $30 maximum and you really only need one of them for at least a few years. This means that it will be pretty difficult to earn more than about $500 a month with this website.

With this in mind, I started a new Amazon Affiliate Niche Site that has a lot more potential. The average price of the product is higher, the topic is more general and people would potentially come back and buy more than one thing. Check out: Kitchen Gadget Reviews. The site is in the basic form I want it in, but the plan is to add a whole lot more reviews of different kitchen products.

Virtual Assistant: I’m Hiring One!

Two of my favourite online business podcasts are:

They both talk extensively about hiring a virtual assistant and how it’s necessary to scale your business up. I never doubted that it was true, but when I still had a day-job, it didn’t seem so necessary to hire one. My online ventures were mostly something I did in my spare time for fun. But now, it’s time to get bigger and I think a VA is the way to do that.

I’ve started the process to hire someone in the Philippines as a content writer. The reviews of kitchen products are really easy, yet very tedious to write so I think it’ll be perfect to have someone else do that for me so I can focus on other things. Paying an employee: scary! And I know it won’t pay off right away, but I’m confident that it will by the end of the year.

Pool of Money: I’m Going to Buy a Website

I talked a bit on this blog about what I was going to do with my pool of money from teaching in South Korea.  I had a few ideas including investing in the stock market or buying some property, but I’ve now decided on websites, particularly Amazon Affiliate ones. The way it works with Amazon is that you get into a certain commission tier based on the number of products that you sell.

Amazon-affiliate-tier

I currently make it into the 7% tier each month, but I’d like to make it into the 8.5% one. This is where a strategic website purchase can come in. If I can buy a website that has 1000+ Amazon sales each month, that will put me into a higher tier so that I’ll earn extra money on all the products that I sell.

I’ve been scouring Empire Flippers for the right one! I recently made a $20,000 offer, but someone bought it before I did. I’ll keep looking and hopefully make a purchase within the next couple of months.

Onwards and Upwards!

So that’s the little update about all-in on the digital entrepreneur after I quit my day-job. I’m feeling very optimistic about the future and my online business. I think it’s going to work out and the goal of $2000 a month profit by the end of 2016 seems totally within my reach. The goal of $5000 a month profit by the end of 2017 doesn’t seem like such a stretch either.

How about you? What are you working on these days? What’s one of your goals for 2016? Any plans to quit your day-job? Comment below and tell me!

 

2 Comments

  1. Have you looked at flippa.com? the prices seem more reasonable – but I don’t know anything about it – in fact the first I heard of buying a site was from your blog! Good luck!

    • Flippa doesn’t screen the websites as well as Empire Flippers does and they seem to accept just about anybody. I like Empire Flippers because they’re done a lot of the hard work for you already by only accepting the best sites for sale there.

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