[speakeasy]

It would be nice to have a central thread dedicated to the topic of location independence. This is a long-term goal of mine that I can't compromise on. I'm not yet at a point where I can jet off to Rio for 6 months and work from a rented apartment, but that's a position I must be in eventually. No compromise. I know many red-pillers dream of freeing themselves from the matrix and being cubicle-free for life. We can share ideas, tips and inspiration on breaking away from traditional 9-5 work here. If you are already there, maybe you can tell your story. Let me start this one by sharing a cool graphic I saw with a bunch of ideas for working online:

[2014]

Great infographic

I'd say online poker should be added to the list. I did that for about 2 years, made solid money. It is harder now though

[Drazen]

One of the asian PUAs from back in the day, Johnny Wolf has a few good recent posts on his blog. There's a system he uses and it seems to be working.

This is how he started in July.
http://www.thesocialsecrets.com/2013/07/...confident/

6 months later.
http://www.thesocialsecrets.com/2013/10/...-progress/

I think the key was writing down his goals and following up on them.

Right now I'm trying to absorb a bunch of information, mainly listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast, Tropical MBA, Suitcase Entrepreneur as well as "This is your life". I know just listening to podcasts isn't going to do much, but I'm doing this instead of watching TV or following the news. Right now (currently) I'm listening to Smart Passive Income Episode 46 where some guy with no coding skills breaks down how he started software development.

I'm looking at ebook generation and then learning more and more as I experiment a bit.

I'm currently doing some outsourcing as well. Basically what I'm doing is hiring a team out of the country to do some business processes (medical transcriptions) and then get clients here. The problem is that my profit margins on that are not very good right now, the process is not very streamlined. I'm looking at other avenues.

[VincentVinturi]

Great idea for a thread and awesome infographic!

I've been doing online marketing for about 3 years and I've been location independent for about a year now. I'm based in Bangkok, Thailand.

Here are some insights I've gained on this journey, I hope some of you guys get value from this...

My story is that I had a job with an ecommerce company for about a year. I convinced the partners of the company to let me create an information product for them from scratch, and they let me do it --- remotely. :-)

Basically, they gave me a start and invested in me and I'll be forever grateful for that. I educated myself on their dime and learned a lot about copywriting, sales, design, product creation, traffic generation and more.

Unfortunately, the partners had a full-fledged startup that was doing really well so they stopped investing in me and the info product and laid me off. By that time, I had been dabbling in affiliate marketing for a few years, and I had several hundred dollars a month coming in from those sources.

2 days before they laid me off, I had bought a one-way ticket to Thailand. When I got the news that I was jobless, I figured "fuck it" and just flew to Thailand anyway, hoping to scrape by somehow.

I didn't really have a lot of money, so I started freelancing. I got 100% of my business from the Warrior Forum. (http://www.warriorforum.com)

The Warrior Forum is an awesome place to freelance for a couple of reasons:

1. You start a thread and you can keep editing it and adding testimonials, reviews, graphics, sales copy.

It acts as your portfolio and sales copy, all in one. Here are 2 of my sales threads. (I don't do the writing anymore but I used to charge 0.09cents a word and my business friends PAID it).

http://www.warriorforum.com/warriors-hir...nover.html

This is the bulk of my business now --- setting up membership sites:

http://www.warriorforum.com/warriors-hir...p-etc.html

This little thread brought me 100% of my business friends at first. Now I get a lot referral business (more on that in a sec)

2. You can charge higher prices on the Warrior Forum than on oDesk, eLance, etc

You can start out charging market prices for your writing and as you accrue testimonials (be sure to ASK for them), you can paste them right back into your sales copy. Can you say social proof? You can also "niche down" and write only a certain kind of article, so you're perceived as the authority on that style of article (be it SEO, dating, whatever).

Once you start getting more business than you can handle, it's time to start raising your prices and see how the market responds. My experience has been that 75% of potential clients will balk at your ridiculously high rates and never respond, but about 1/4 of potential clients will gladly pay the higher price for the higher perceived value.

3. You get instant feedback from the market.

You can put up a sales thread on the Warrior Forum and test to see if there's a demand for your product or service before investing any more of your life into it. WF has over half a million members so you get a really quick idea of demand.

To wit, I once got the bright idea to make handmade signatures for Warriors. I thought I was going to get rich. I put together the service, poised my contractors for the imminent tidal wave of orders, and got ....nothing. Bubkus. Here stands the monument to a "good" idea that the market proved to be...not so good:

http://www.warriorforum.com/warriors-hir...eting.html

I spent maybe 5 hours putting that together to find out nobody wanted it. I think that's brilliant. Imagine putting together an entire business, like so many people do, only to see the market respond tepidly. The ability to find out if your product or service is in demand quickly is absolutely priceless.


Product Creation

I started creating my own information products because I didn't want to depend on other vendors for my business and I desperately wanted to be able to work remotely from anywhere in the world.

I wanted to be in control of my financial fiture and the direction of my business. Imagine being an affiliate for an information product and then for no reason the product goes offline. Happens all the time and the affiliate marketer's income goes POOF!

So far I've created the following info products:

http://www.singoperanow.com - a course on how to sing opera (I used to be an opera singer back in the states)
http://www.sixpacksuccess.com - a course on how to get six pack abs
http://www.smartkeywordresearch.net - a course on how to do proper keyword research (this course is outdated now)

I've also published 3 kindle books, which I also turned into audiobooks.

http://www.amazon.com/Vincent-Vinturi/e/B00CAJBZSU

I'm not going to divulge what these income streams bring in but all I can say is, there's nothing better than the feeling of waking up to a payment notification and a thank you email from a guy or girl who's thankful to you for creating your product and bringing value to their lives :-)

I've now come to the point in my seduction career where I feel I have way more experience and understanding about women (and life) that I have something truly valuable to offer. So I'm now focusing on creating information products in the seduction niche. A lot of money to be made there.


Some freelancing tips:

Underpromise, Overdeliver...

The parallels between game and business are striking.

In business, whenever you're dealing with business friends (clients) you ALWAYS want to estimate hours and budgets very conservatively. If you quote a client 20 hours for project completion and it takes you 15, they'll be happy because not only did you deliver but you saved them 5 hours of budget expenditure they were cringing at having to pay.

Whereas if you estimate 10 hours and it takes you 15, the client STILL pays the same amount of money objectively speaking but their expectation was to only pay for 10. "...And now I have to pay for 5 more!?!"

You MUST manage expectations properly! This is the rule above all rules and I can't emphasize it enough if you want your business friends raving on your behalf and sending referrals your way unsolicited. Repeat after me: "UNDERpromise, OVERdeliver..."


Charge for your time!

If you let people abuse your time and tap into your expertise for free, you are robbing yourself and you are robbing them.

Yourself, because you're giving your time away for an uncertain payoff. It's like buying a girl dinner and dimly wondering whether it'll lead to sex. It may or may not.

And it robs the client because people don't value what they get for free. You can give them life changing, transformative business insights and they will sweep them right under the rug because they haven't invested anything and thus have no incentive to cash in on their investment. Humans understand price but we have trouble understanding objective value...

Thus, they'll probably never implement something that it took you years of hard work and trial and error to figure out. So at the very least, you can get paid for your time.

Simply state your consultation rate and insist on scheduling an appointment, be it on Skype or in person, or whatever. Don't let them ramble and ask questions and take up your time free of charge. Refuse to do it. If you don't, you'll kick yourself afterwards, especially once you never hear back from them when you thought --- THOUGHT --- that you had a hot lead on some business.


Do great work

The way you do anything is the way you do everything...

There's no substitute for working your ass off and giving clients what they want and anticipating things they may not know about.

I still work 7 days a week, and I have for the past 2 years. Every so often I'll take a day off but most of the time I'm hustling. The adage "work smart, not hard" only applies to you when you have the leverage and capital to make your money work FOR you. If you're trading your time for money, the extent of how "smart" you can work is firing annoying clients who don't pay on time, and charging more for your time to weed out the nickel and dimers.

Aside from that, make no mistake, you'll be working your ass off.

It's also important to communicate with your clients and let them know where they are timewise and budget wise. This is part of managing expectations and also fosters mutual emotional investment with the work you're doing. It's to a client's benefit to keep THEM accountable and keep them in the loop. Just like it's your job as a friend to tell your male friend he's letting himself get fat and lazy and he's watching too much TV, it's your job as a conscientious contractor to give a client tough love, politely. They will thank you for being demanding and respect you a hell of a lot more.


Make friend with key players

Like it or not, business is all about relationships.

I know all the key players in my niche and I'm on good terms with them. I make introductions, I broker JV deals, and I add value to my community. In return, people with a lot of authority refer clients to me, and on the strength of my reputation, I can charge the kind of rates I deserve.

You also get the additional, priceless benefit of being in contact with people who are probably smarter and more successful than you. Just like hanging out with naturals is going to elevate your game basically by osmosis, so too will "hanging out" virtually with shrewd businessmen and businesschicks elevate your biz game.


That marketing thing

A lot of guys, my younger self included, have the very mistaken idea that they can write an eBook or two and cash out. Well, MAYBE that happens from time to time. But it's very much the exception and not the rule.

If you want long term success with a location independent business, you have to learn marketing. Marketing is the art-science of getting your offer in front of people (traffic), getting them to buy your offer (copywriting and conversion), and constantly improving your offer to increase revenue (optimization).

If I could recommend just ONE resource to learn online business and marketing in one place, I'd say check out Eben Pagan's DVD course "Get Altitude". There's your business education right there, no joke. It's that good.

Creating a product is the easy part. Getting people to buy it is the hard part. Notice that many of the successful info marketers on this forum take advantage of this and other outlets to get eyeballs in front of their offer. They post valuable information in the forums to earn trust and establish themselves as authoritative contributors. They do guest posts on ROK, they leave comments on blogs.

They actively participate in this community. So when somebody reads an insightful post by Steve McQueen, for instance, on ROK, and click through to his Nightclub bible offer, they know he isn't just "some dude". He's a guest poster on ROK, a valued member of the forum, and a well known participant in our little world.


I fear I've rambled... If any of you guys have specific questions, fire away! :-)

[speakeasy]

Dude breaks down methodically how he makes money off writing online:

[Teedub]

Vin, how do you get those paypal widgets? You know, the 'Add to cart' buttons on your sales pitch?

[VincentVinturi]

(10-28-2013 03:28 AM)Teedub Wrote:  

Vin, how do you get those paypal widgets? You know, the 'Add to cart' buttons on your sales pitch?

You go to your paypal account and to "payment buttons" and create your payment button. Then you get two options, an HTML embed form or a direct link (email link I they call it).

You copy the email link and then you post whatever add to cart image you want. Just search google for "add to cart button" and look under images. Then embed the image code between a link tag. Like this:

Quote:

[link="http://www.paypal.com/long-string-of-characters][IMG="http://www.URLofyourimage.com"][/link]

The above is forum code (BBCode)

If you want to do it in HTML it'll look like this:

Quote:

<a href="http://www.paypal.com/long-string-of-characters><img src="http://www.URLofyourimage.com"></a>

[2014]

Excellent Vincent, very well put.

I am just starting out in this world. I am thinking of trying a little bit of everything. I have the goal to be location independent (100% online work) and so far drop shipping, copy writing, blogging and coding seem to the best bets.

Keeping my eyes on this thread for sure

[VincentVinturi]

(10-28-2013 05:55 AM)2014 Wrote:  

Excellent Vincent, very well put.

I am just starting out in this world. I am thinking of trying a little bit of everything. I have the goal to be location independent (100% online work) and so far drop shipping, copy writing, blogging and coding seem to the best bets.

Keeping my eyes on this thread for sure

You probably won't listen to me. But instead of half assing a bunch of different things, pick one thing and stick to it until it's making you consistent money. And if you DO listen to this advice, keep scaling up what works. Trying to do more than 1 or 2 things well is a recipe for a long, frustrating, moneyless path to success. Take it from me...

[pitt]

Vincent just wondering, are you making ok money (enough to live on) from your kindle books?

[samsamsam]

(10-28-2013 11:40 AM)VincentVinturi Wrote:  

(10-28-2013 05:55 AM)2014 Wrote:  

Excellent Vincent, very well put.

I am just starting out in this world. I am thinking of trying a little bit of everything. I have the goal to be location independent (100% online work) and so far drop shipping, copy writing, blogging and coding seem to the best bets.

Keeping my eyes on this thread for sure

You probably won't listen to me. But instead of half assing a bunch of different things, pick one thing and stick to it until it's making you consistent money. And if you DO listen to this advice, keep scaling up what works. Trying to do more than 1 or 2 things well is a recipe for a long, frustrating, moneyless path to success. Take it from me...

I agree with VV. But in the beginning you have to figure out what works so it doesn't kill you to try some things out. But you should focus sooner rather than later so that you can get the benefit of scale and focus.

[VincentVinturi]

(10-28-2013 11:46 AM)pitt Wrote:  

Vincent just wondering, are you making ok money (enough to live on) from your kindle books?

From the Kindle books + audio books I don't make enough to live on, no. It's just a nice little passive income stream. But I do know people who have scaled the kindle book business model and made a lot of money from it.

I plan to write more kindle books because it's such a simple business model that requires almost no promotion to get sales. Although, if you DO promote via your Facebook, blog posts, social media, etc., then it helps you rank higher in Amazon search. But it isn't vital...

The bulk of my income at the moment is "active" not passive, i.e. contracting at a high rate. But I'm working on flipping that dynamic ASAP. :-)

[phoenix101]

Reminds me of this Reddit thread, 1,700 comments so there has to be some good advice in there...I pdf'd it and saved it on my hard drive when it came out around 1.5 months ago but never actually got around to reading it.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/commen...u_can_get/

[Dr. Howard]

I'll add my usual 10 cents. This is more relevant to americans who still retain their US citizenship. Beware of your taxes, you still have to file at home. That being said, its not a huge deal to do legally, I work with a Filipino accountant do get things squared away for clients on that end and handle the other end in the US for 'abroad' clients.

[zarzuelazen]

I was location independent for 3 years (2008-2010) working as a freelance editor of academic papers. Unfortunately I'm not now, because I was basically contracting for just the one editing company, and the market got too tough, meaning the business was not sustainable.

That high-lights an important point which should be mentioned: If you are in business for yourself, there is no guarantee it's going to continue! If you manage to get good location independent income coming in for a while, don't think its going to last unless you keep putting in effort. To sustain it, you really need more than one hustle going at all times, and need to keep looking for new opportunities. Never put your eggs in one basket!

[Saladin]

I hate Warrior Forum. Me and my partner refuse to touch it. The bullshit there is piled so high it makes me puke. Plus the SEO clients you'd get from there are usually extremely uneducated...

Anyways, writing isn't for me. Yes you can make good money online, but its only for a guy new to working online. Its boring and takes time. Having a writing team isn't fun either... I'm sure there are people making great cash from writing(like 100k/year) but its not for me.

Right now me and my partner are developing a digital marketing agency. Right now the bulk of our income is from SEO clients throughout the world. Currently we're slowly increasing income, before tax I personally made about 1.5k net this month before taxes. As we build our network and get more offline clients(aka real businesses) our income should increase significantly. My partner has been doing an amazing job networking and we just signed a major white label contract for our services to a large marketing agency.

After setting up this marketing agency, the goal is to set up extremely solid systems to run it while abroad so we're not spending much time on it. We will then expand into learning PPC at a high level, and as well as explore import/export.

[Saladin]

The main thing is I'm viewing it as a lifelong process. Always gotta keep learning and building. VincentVinturi's post was really good because he shows the true mindset of a guy who becomes successful in the long term because of his focus on expanding his income streams and ensuring his income is not tied to time. Aka scalable ventures as opposed to bartering your time away.

[Valhalla]

What does working in SEO consist of?

Do I need to be really savvy or know how to code?

[Brez]

If you're in Thailand, just make a warez site... no issues of getting in trouble and itll be an instant hit making tens of thousands a month....

[Magyarphile]

Some good points raised in this thread...One thing I would add is make sure location independence is for you before you burn any bridges. There are some significant downsides to the lifestyle. In my opinion, freelance writing is soul destroying for any genuine writer. It took me all of two weeks to realize that writing about stuff I wasn't passionate about would make me never want to pick up a pen again. I have decided to go the licensed English teacher route. Its not quite location independent but very nearly in that you can move every year or two. The hours are low and so I can pursue my writing interests on the side.

[pitt]

(10-29-2013 06:10 AM)Magyarphile Wrote:  

Some good points raised in this thread...One thing I would add is make sure location independence is for you before you burn any bridges. There are some significant downsides to the lifestyle. In my opinion, freelance writing is soul destroying for any genuine writer. It took me all of two weeks to realize that writing about stuff I wasn't passionate about would make me never want to pick up a pen again. I have decided to go the licensed English teacher route. Its not quite location independent but very nearly in that you can move every year or two. The hours are low and so I can pursue my writing interests on the side.

Deep. Did you stop writing for elance for good?

[Magyarphile]

Yea, I am done with it, account deleted. I had several high paying jobs in the works too but I didn't care. There is no point being paid for something that destroys you from within. I would rather walk the streets naked and hungry than be robbed of the passion for my craft.

[w00t]

(10-29-2013 06:35 AM)Magyarphile Wrote:  

Yea, I am done with it, account deleted. I had several high paying jobs in the works too but I didn't care. There is no point being paid for something that destroys you from within. I would rather walk the streets naked and hungry than be robbed of the passion for my craft.

Lol I feel the same way about teaching english.
But I have to agree, as long as you are trading your time for money its a shitty deal IMO. Im sick an tired of making other people rich at this point.

[Magyarphile]

Woot, I am not referring to ESL teaching. I mean state-licensed English subject teaching which basically means English literature. It's a dream job for a writer because you get to read/discuss real literature all day. Basically, you get to educate yourself while getting paid for it..

[invictusiii]

As a web developer, I'm struggling to come up with an idea for an app or service I can sell in order to pay the bills while living wherever I want. All I need is one solid idea that I can crank out a functional site for. It seems everyone is trying to put out the same kinds of apps. Invoicing or something similar and I find it uninspiring.