My Weekly Share The Journey, Share the Learning Video 12 March

Here is my latest share the journey video where I share what I have learned from my own experience and from my mentors over the previous week

There is also a transcript below the video if you prefer reading

Transcript

Every week I share what I’ve learned the previous week. I’ve calculated that I’m doing at least eight hours, in a typical week about eight hours of mentorship, coaching and masterminds.

So what I’m trying to do is sort of pass what I’m learning on to you, so what I’m learning on to you, so it helps you. I’ve paid several thousand pounds, dollars, whatever, to go on these mentorships and the training. So you’re getting that, you’re getting leverage to that for, or just for watching basically.

So enjoy, yeah.

Anyway, before we go any further, I just want to say a huge Ramadan Mubarak to any Muslim viewers, welcome along and yeah. So last week, I think Friday, I celebrated, I didn’t celebrate actually this year, I had my birthday, 67 years old.

Yeah, the numbers are stacking up, but it’s a number. Yeah, anyway, it made me think about the way we view retirement these days and, you know, with the longevity which we, in the Western world, we now enjoying and take for granted. There is a real fear that, you know, the money is going to run out before you leave this place, if you like, yeah.

And it’s a real fear, I felt it myself. A few years ago, I sat down and I looked at what money I’d got, what pension I’d got and the lifestyle I’d got, the lifestyle I wanted. And yeah, I thought, well, that’s not going to keep me in, it’s not going to give me the lifestyle I want after I retire for the rest of my life, if you like.

So this is where I started my sort of online journey around two and a half, three years ago. And I decided that, you know, I needed to start building some sort of income online. Anyway, if you look on the blog, I wrote a short post on the blog about the importance of that and sort of implications. (of lonhevity)

I think, although I’m 67, I think 20% of the population in the UK at least are older than me. So it shows the sort of increase in population. And I think I read somewhere when I was researching this  post that most of the local authorities in the UK expect to have a growing number of over 85s by 2026 and a further increase by 2036.

Yeah, it’s good to know. But it’s also been nice if we had the money to enjoy that life or the care if we wanted it. Yeah, my dad’s went into a care home last year and it’s, they are wickedly expensive.

I know he’s getting government help with it. But, you know, the first one he went in was a brand new one. It was £1,200 a week, which I don’t know what it is in dollars, but 13, 15, something between 13 and 1500 per week, which I don’t think many can afford that.

Anyway, have a look at the blog, there’s a little article on there about ageing. And what we can do to make a little bit of a sideline income in our retirement. And I think that online income specifically, affiliate marketing is the ideal thing you can do.

You can do it from anywhere in the world. Obviously, I’m down here in Gambia. And it’s a very good climate for the British winter, to be honest, at the end of the day. Yeah, so I can do that business down here.

So my Monday mentoring with Paul Mahoney last week focused on finances, the financial ladder, if you like. And well, so maybe if you haven’t done the sort of previous to that, it’s totally irrelevant. You won’t understand what I was going on about. But yeah, for the future, that is something that I may include in my blog. We’ll have to see about that.

Somebody  was asking, when should I set up my business? Is it when I want to start making money? Start making a profit? Or what? To which the answer is, as you said, if you want to go into business, you set your business up immediately at the start. So it’s a proper business.

So I set up a  proper incorporated business. a limited company in the UK they are. I don’t know what they are in all the different countries. I don’t know what the costs are.

Obviously, I’m a limited company in the UK here, you can set up a limited company  for 20 pounds. So yeah, set up a limited company (or equivalent)  and get a business bank account. Banks can be a little bit funny about business bank accounts because they want to say that you’re a real business.

Now, a proper a proper website address or a proper website, proper address does prove that you’re a proper business. I think somebody on the mentoring applied for a bank account hsd given their website address as their Instagram account or something like that.

So, you know, the bank more or less laughed at it and said no. But yeah, you should have no problem getting a business account. And  this particular mentor actually does recommend having two business accounts, two separate business accounts.

Because when you do start making money, you can start making a lot of money. And banks, I believe, I understand banks don’t like you put a lot of money into them for some reason. Yeah, who knows? A lot of money fastened into them so that they’re not used to what can happen on an online affiliate marketing business.

So that’s something I didn’t know, something I learned last week. So something to bear in mind.

Obviously, if you incorporate in a company, it becomes its own legal entity. So you are able to put some of your household expenses through there. If you’re if you’re working from home, you can you can you can put some of your household expenses through your business. And I think in the UK anyway, you can go back several years and put any mentorship through there as well.

So when you when you start making money, making a profit, you can write some of that old stuff off against your income. So that you’re making you’re paying with you’re paying for that outgoings with money before it’s taxed. Yeah.

So if you pay for something from your own salary, you’re paying with tax money. If you pay for something from a business, it’s not being taxed yet, you know, it’s only taxed if it’s a profit. So that’s one of the benefits of having a separate entity for your company.

I think people like Robert Kiyosaki highly recommend that that sort of that sort of pathway to take.

Talking of business, sort of website setup. I think it’s important to have your own presence on the internet.

Don’t rely on Facebookeyc  to always be there. Don’t rely on Facebook to keep your account open the number of accounts that I know people that they’ve been thrown into Facebook jail as they call it whatever for no reason really, you know, Facebook have their own little rules and quirks and things and they can very quickly very easily close down accounts, restrict accounts, whatever.

So I think the recommendation is to have your own sort of web space and an ideal way to do that is to have a blog. So I will be doing a written tutorial on this maybe this week. I think I’ve got the outline of it ready. So keep an eye out for that.

Just to give you a sort of brief idea of what you’re looking at. If you decided a name, your own name is brilliant.  So joeblogs.com, for instance, I think Joe blogs would have gone. Incidentally, joesblog.com is available at auction. Yeah, I think it’s $200 at the moment.

Joe blogs.org. What I founf in my research in this Joe blogs.org. No, sorry, joesblog.org was still available. So I bought it, registered for $7.49. Don’t know why, just thought it a good idea. You never know!

You never know what these things are going to be worth in the future. I may have even mentioned before that the best deal  I ever made online was selling,  a URL, blinds247.com,  for less than 20 pounds. I registered it for a few years and decided that, you know, I couldn’t compete with the big boys online in the window blind companye of them offered me £5,000 for blinds247.com. They trade as blinds247.co.uk and they obviously wanted the .com because we were coming a little bit of a pain in the bum for them, I think. But they offered me £5,000 for it and I said, well, I prefer £10,000. And they said, okay.

So that is the best, yeah, the best bit of business I think I’ve ever done online. And it made a little bit of profit maybe over the years with selling blinds that, you know, for ourselves on our own e-commerce website. Anyway, that’s enough of that.

Anyway, I would suggest that you go to a company called or a website called namecheap.com. There’ll be a link down below in the description for them. There you can register your domain name. I think .com is about $10.

.org is $7.40 something, I think. Yeah, register your name there. And then you need some hosting, maybe namecheap.com

Namecheap do WordPress hosting. Or you can go to somewhere like InterServe who also do good, robust, reasonably priced WordPress  hosting. If you go to two different companies, you will need something like Cloudflare in the middle.

That’s free of charge, but it gives you some extra, an extra layer of protection in there. So yeah, if you find sort of WordPress, WordPress, a WordPress site with WordPress hosting, you basically, you’ve got your name, you’ve got your, you’ve got your website more or less set up there. Yeah.

So that’s your, if you like your little bit of real estate that you own on the internet, your little place on the internet. So that’s the basis of it, like your new home, your new piece of real estate. And then you’ve got to, then you’ve got to add furniture to it, curtains, carpets, the things, you know, furnish it, make it look good and start posting to it.

Anyway, more of that, more of that in the future.

I think patience was one of the messages for later last week.

Suddenly, suddenly people don’t have the patience to see things through, but they start the next shiny object and expect to make money immediately. Not just online. I personally, last year, in the blind business, we used to have a scheme where we help people set up in their own local window blind retail business.

Yeah. We would, I would train them with a training set up. We’ve got a training site still.

I would train them on the website, on the training site, everything they really need to know about window blinds. And they are window blinds, drapes, whatever you want to call them, wherever you are. They are simple, I can do it. So I can, I can sell them, fit them. So I’m sure anybody can.

So yeah, this guy started up at the same time we had a, I offered a Facebook advertising opportunity to go with it, a very favourable, at a very, very, very favourable terms. So what would happen is that we’d run their Facebook campaign, generating them leads, they would follow up the leads and go from there. I mean, usually that is going to cost somebody at least £500, $500, whatever a month.

Some charge a thousand dollars, but I wasn’t charging that. I was charging them. It was set up to do sort of £5 per lead, payable at the end of the month, a very, very favourable term.

So you tell these people, you know, don’t expect a quick fix. It’s going to take, you know, your Facebook, you haven’t really got a Facebook page at that time yet. So we set a Facebook page up.

We populated it quick for him. Well, I told him how to populate it quick. I gave him a lot of images and said, you know, post this lot.

So then we set up his Facebook advertising account, got everything ready. And I told him, I emphasised, please do not expect big, big results the first month or the first two months. Month three, you may be getting some somewhere because you’ve got a brand new account here.

You’re going to start putting adverts out on it. Facebook will be watching it. You’re going to get people looking at your site because, well, I’ve got a proven system.

They’re going to come to you and it’s up to you to look after them and turn them into customers. At the end of the day, leads are not customers. Leads are not profits.

Leads are just, well, leads. It’s the whole system that, the whole business experience which makes the profit at the end of the day. Anyway, long story short, he lasted a week and disappeared.

He took me off his Facebook site and a week later, he did amount a little bit in the week. He said, oh, Steve, I’m getting, I’ve had a couple of enquiries and I booked them and they’ve ordered, they’ve put a hundred pound order or whatever, yeah. So I said, oh, come on, man.

It’s better than what you did last week. But yeah, he lasted a week. He removed me from managing his Facebook ad account and the week later, he was on a blog, not a blog, sorry, a Facebook group for wonder blind companies, selling his books, his sample books.

It’s the mentality, you know, a week, you’ve given it a week, man. It’s not working, sell the books. Craziness.

Yeah, so, yeah, patience is required. I do believe somebody told me quite recently that most overnight successes in the sort of online sphere take 18 months to happen. So, we can’t all be a TikTok or a, what else, fast.

Some of these other companies that have sort of appeared and got massive sort of overnight, I think most are going to take a while to build to anything worthwhile. So, yeah, patience is extremely vital. So the rest of the time I’m working on some software, a suite of software, if you like, which shortly I will be able to offer.

So it’s a very, very exciting program at the end of the day. It’s suitable for businesses who are doing anything online in any niche at the end of the day. It sort of takes care of contacts.

It takes care of email responding. It takes care of CRM, saving your contacts, building funnels, storing your websites or hosting your website. There’s a website you can put WordPress websites on there.

There’s social media posts and a hell of a lot more. There’s automatic social media posts, which has saved me $60 a month in something I wasn’t buying before. I say that I will be able to offer, I’m very sure, very, very soon.

So watch this space. Yeah, and I will keep measuring and telling you what I’m doing on it and what I’m learning. So, you know, when I do launch, when I’m able to offer it, I’ll be able to offer an extra layer of support, if you like, in addition to what the software supplier actually offers.

And other extras too, as you may expect. Anyway, week ahead or last week, yesterday, excellent football match, soccer, top of the English Premier League, Premier League soccer, football is the best in the world. But yeah, a mega good game between two top clubs, two top managers and two managers, coaches, whatever you want to call them.

And yeah, enjoyable afternoon. So yeah, onward and upward this week. Pretty packed week actually.

Wednesday, I think I’ve got more or less have meetings and meetings and online stuff all day. With sort of closing the limited company down still, which should finish happen off Wednesday. Yeah, that’s the final meetings.

All online these days. So yeah, that’s about all this week. And yeah, keep an eye on the blog.

Yeah. Stevemore34.com. You’ll find some useful articles, some useful posts, articles, whatever you want to call them, that are going to go on there. There are a lot of things planned, a lot of ideas that I’ve got outlines for, they’ve got to just finish and they’re going to go on there.

It’s going to be, could be a mega place, in my opinion. That sounds big headed, doesn’t it? And I intend for it to be a mega place to find all sorts of information, all sorts of relevant, useful information that you can take away and use in your business. End of the day, that is my, one of my aims on my online business.

Okay guys, thanks a lot and see you next week.