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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…
2015: In the Books 2015 is in the books and it’s time to turn my thoughts towards 2016. This will be a particularly interesting year for me because after living in Korea for a decade, I’ll be moving to Canada. The plan is to kick the online business into full-time mode (See: All-In on the Digital Entrepreneur) from what I can currently squeeze in when I’m not busy at my day-job teaching in a university.…
How to Make Money Blogging. Hint: It’s not Easy You’ve probably heard of someone who knows someone who made it big in the blogging world. They struck it rich with a fabulous idea, were in the right place at the right time and made a ton of money. I’m here to tell you that that’s not the reality of most (almost all?) bloggers. If you want to make money blogging not only do you need…
A Controversial Blog Post A few days ago, I wrote a blog entry over on My Life! Teaching in a Korean University called, Korean University Jobs: The Golden Handcuffs. Basically, I said that while university jobs in Korea are quite lucrative, they’re also not a great long-term choice for quite a few reasons. I posted the blog to a few of the English teacher in Korea Facebook groups and the reaction was strong to say…
The Wealthy English Teacher: Teach, Travel, and Secure your Financial Future is now available on Amazon. It has a much bigger potential audience than my most nichiest of niche first book about how to get a university job in South Korea. I’m hoping that it’s the type of book that people really like, and tell their friends about, who in turn tell a few other people. So far, I’ve sold a decent amount of copies in…
I Was Shocked to Discover…Outdated Public Profiles! In my recent effort to focus more on quality over quantity in my Internet ventures, one of the things I did was to spend a few hours and update all my public profiles to have some sort of cohesive message. In some cases, like on Blogger and HubPages, I had stuff from years ago that didn’t really make sense anymore. Even more disturbing was the fact that both…
Sales of my new Ebook, How to Get a University Job in South Korea: The English Teaching Job of Your Dreams are maintaining steady at about 1/day since the initial rush in the first couple days, which I’m pretty happy about. My marketing strategy thus far has consisted of the following things: 1. Using my Amazon Associates account to promote the book on my existing blog, My Life! Teaching in a Korean University, both on…
I’m totally convinced that the way to make money online and drive traffic to your sites is by having an empire of sorts. Like I mentioned a few days ago, simply having a single Ebook on Amazon but without any social media or blog following of any kind will make it pretty hard to be successful and make a lot of sales. I was just recently looking at the referral stats for this blog and…
Something that I’ve seen as I’ve ventured into the world of self publishing is the need to already have a positive reputation and a following of people in whatever community you can find your target audience in. While I’m sure it is possible to self-publish a book that is a one-hit wonder, I don’t think it would be that easy unless it somehow went viral. I think followers of my blog (My Life! Teaching in…
Squidoo shut down their doors a couple of months ago and moved all my content over to Hubpages. After some initial annoyance getting all the details sorted out, it’s actually been pretty painless and it provided me the motivation I needed to get my sites updated because Hubpages seems to have stricter content standards than Squidoo (they’re serious about spammy stuff!). One thing that I didn’t notice until a couple of days ago was the…
These past few days, I’ve been talking about how to write an Ebook as I go through the process myself. My first book should be up on Amazon in a week or two. I’m definitely a beginner in this world of “Ebook” but my hope is that my readers can learn along with me. I’ve already discussed: How to Choose a Topic Editing Formatting Cover Design Marketing via the Email List Today, let’s talk about…
This past week, I haven’t had classes at my day-job due to midterm exams, so I’ve been busy working on my first Ebook. I’ve wanted to write one for a while because I think diversity is the key in trying to live off passive income. I really have no idea whether affiliate marketing on Amazon or Iherb will be successful in the future, whether Hubpages will shut down, or whether there will a huge crash…
A couple of months ago, I got an email from Squidoo saying that they had merged with Hubpages and that Squidoo would be closing down and all the content would be going over to Hubpages. I was initially quite annoyed, but of course that’s the risk when you use a platform that isn’t your own to build websites. I’ve been so busy at the day-job since that announcement that I didn’t really have much time…
When people talk about frugality, something that gets kicked around quite often is the Latte Factor. That is people who go to Starbucks every morning and drop $5 on a specialty Latte when they could just make a cup of drip coffee at home and save themselves $4.80 each day, which adds up to over $100/month and more than $1000/year. And I get that. Frugality is all about the small choices you make each day…
One of the podcasts that I listen to for inspiration and practical tips related to passive income is, “The Smart Passive Income” podcast by Pat Flynn. Pat is an upbeat kind of guy and extremely savvy about the Internet business world. I’ve already learned a lot from him including the importance of podcasting (I’d like to start my own!), and why you can’t do everything by yourself (I’d like eventually get big enough to hire…
One of the big debates that I have in my head all the time is whether to work more at my day-job, or whether to spend more time building up my passive income streams through things like building niche websites, self-publishing books and HubPages. My job at a Korean university is kind of ideal actually because according to my contract, I only have 9 teaching hours, although I usually get forced to do 11 or…
I was just listening to the Empire Flippers Podcast, episode #87 where they are talking with Dave Hermansen about building Niche Websites and the importance of understanding SEO. This is a topic that I truly know very little about, but which I know is of extreme importance if I want to eventually make my living online. Along with becoming proficient at WordPress and learning a programming language or two, this is my big goal for…
