Thoughts On Taking The Week Off
The first week of July was pretty hectic for me. Unusually, this wasn’t due to work.
In fact, the first couple of days were the first days in God-knows-how-long that I didn’t do any work. Because the business didn’t fall apart at the seams, I did what people have been telling me to do for years now:
I took some time off.
The internet business world – and business in general – is crazy. You can always find more stuff to do.
And for a lot of you guys, you probably should find stuff to do on your online business. This isn’t a hippy manifesto about chilling out and living in the moment. I’m not really the person to talk about that.
But I took the week off. I barely did any actual work, and wrote a few articles for this site to keep the streak going. I answered emails and other small jobs, but didn’t start any new projects or spend hours writing, admin, or anything like that.
Here are some thoughts I got from the experience.
The Meta-Game Of Online Business
I wrote about game theory a while back. Every game has rules – i.e. in chess you move the pieces in a certain way. Every game has meta-rules – so in poker it’s not about the cards but about reading a player’s strategy so far as risk tolerance is concerned.
The meta-rules of online business stay the same. Provide value, use direct response knowledge to create your funnel – be it complex email marketing or short and snappy Ads>Product page.
The methods change though.
And whilst plenty of people talk about this, few separate it into meta-game and game. Because of that, opportunities are missed.
For instance, when I started with this personal branding thing, you had a blog and it was your central hub. The meta-rule everyone followed was “own your platform.”
Now, the board has changed. People don’t have their own blogs to the same extent. It doesn’t matter as much.
Blog > List > Sale has been replaced by Twitter > List > Sale where Twitter can be any social media outlet.
And that’s cool. It works better. I’m an old man, behind the times and all that.
(More on that to come though. I’ll jump in with the whippersnappers soon enough.)
But the problem people have with “best practices” is taking them at a surface level. Twitter > Email List > Sales is a best practice now but it will shift.
Understand the meta-game or you’ll get caught with your pants down like some of the guys who dropped off the radar after their Instagram Spamming Businesses got nuked.
Fruits Of Labour
Folks who know me will realise I’m very much in the paranoia camp when it comes to long term stability. Hence the working constantly thing. Make hay while the sun shines because at some point winter will come, and all of that.
The crazy thing about my week off though – and the reason I’m rethinking all of these things – is because I made more money not working for one week in July than I did in all of June.
It was a good week for income.
And I wish I could say it was because I stumbled upon a gold chest or because I found some secret untapped source of niche goodness…
… but it wasn’t.
It was actually just fruits of previous labour that come from all the stuff I talk about on this site.
I had a few affiliate commissions from niche sites. Some royalty payments on a sales funnel. Another person got in touch because they’d underpaid me from another payment period. The ebook publishing empire prints money.
And none of this is superhuman money. I didn’t net a million-dollar payday or anything. But if you learn the skills, do the experiments and build assets, $5 commissions add up. And if you build sites/funnels around recurring commissions, then you can wake up to emails saying you’ve made $100+ while you were snoozing or deposits in your online accounts with more money than you made in a previous month.
That’s Not A Brag…
I don’t say any of the above to brag though. It’s all a bit magical to me.
Here’s the point though:
There’ll be times when you can’t work. I had to navigate through a bunch of personal stuff and couldn’t work. The fact I made passive income while not working made the whole thing better and helps the business tick over.
When you’re starting out or you’re working on the internet in your free time to pay the bills, barely scraping by, getting an extra $100 or a few $100 emails is a godsend. Especially if you can’t work for whatever reason.
And ultimately, this passive income came from just sitting at a PC and typing some stuff up, whilst learning the stuff available in the archives and paying a nominal amount for web domains and hosting.
Final Thoughts
So there are some thoughts on online business.
Most stuff says the same, the stuff that changes does so at the surface but the deeper game still remains the same.
And if you work hard and plant seeds for the future, they’ll come to fruition.
That’s what this site is all about.
See you in the next one.