There’s a lot of new readers so I think it’s time for a reminder or familiarization post. Your boss and company, no matter how nice, doesn’t care about your future. Your government doesn’t care about you or your future. Nobody outside of a few family members and select friends care about you. They only really care about themselves.
I’m new to wifi money and work an in person job that under pays me. Do you recommend getting into a SaaS sales role to earn more and free up some time to work on my business?
Everybody that is worth their salt is underpaid in corporate America. The questions you should ask yourself is:
- Does changing jobs give you *a lot* more time to build a business
- Does changing jobs give you *a lot* more money to invest in your business
- Are you potentially going to be unemployed because you are throwing away your political capital, starting new, and risking new company doing layoffs?
- Is the new job going to take a year of extra work to learn to perform in the role, hence taking away time from building a business?
I run a local mortgage lending business. 100% of the business comes from sphere of influence and real estate agents referrals in our local market.
We started posting content on social media and Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to generate business opportunities without having to be in person. The goal is to build a brand that will generate referrals.
I started reading the sub stack from the start. Is there anything I should highlight/focus on with being a service business where all of our income is local?
I want to become location independent while bringing on more clients.
I don't know the industry at all but if 100% of your leads come from referrals/contacts, it sounds like that's how the industry works. Why not pick one city at a time and develop contacts there?
You can go the LinkedIn/digital marketing route but I don't know enough about that industry to advise. Does any meaningful lead acquisition in the industry actually come from sources other than referrals?
you mentioned in the post that "I’m also considering taking on a few more clients on and writing about how to get different businesses off the ground or accelerated.", just curious if you are still taking on new clients at this moment? Thanks!
I am working on setting up a new affiliate marketing website in a specific niche and am analyzing existing websites and key words to see if the niche is worth giving it a try.
Could you please give some guidance (or name an article in which you covered it) on how attractive metrics look like and what niches to stay away from?
For instance, I understand that if on 1st page of SERP I find names of big websites, it will be very difficult for me to compete with them but at what point is the niche good enough and not too difficult to rank well enough?
There's no cookie cutter way of doing this. If there was, you could just analyze 1000 niches and pick the easiest.
"Attractive metrics" - Depends on what tools you're using. I use SEMRush so I use their KD%.
Look across the biggest sites in the space and see what the KD and traffic is for the top terms. You can then compare that to other niches that you're interested in. That should give you a rough ballpark.
Look for a niche that has a few pillars that you can build in then after time, move on to another pillar in the niche.
Stay away Health, Finance, Gambling or anything grey.
This question was in reference to affiliate marketing. For affiliate, hell yes stay away. You're never going to be able to compete in the health niche as a *newbie*. Anything's possible but you're increasing your chance of failure.
BTB was referencing ecommerce. If you're selling diet pills or skincare, your acquisition channels are usually going to focus more on social, paid ads, and *repeat purchases*.
Appreciate all the content. I've typed out a lot of dumb questions to you that I've been able to go back in your guides and find answers to. Been playing around with the ezoic access now program, and so far the pain hasn't been worth the $1 I made.
Thanks. I wanted to try it out since I have more info than monetized posts. But it's caused a lot of technical headaches and the juice hasn't been worth the squeeze.
I'm interested in your setup, are you working primarily for yourself as freelance? Do you have staff and is it hard to scale?
By way of intro - used to run a software business, had staff but was incredibly difficult to scale as the work we did was customized heavily and bespoke dev so you couldn't replace developers with others. We were therefore very sticky with our clients, but couldn't move beyond a small team.
I would've liked to grow it far more and offer simpler/productized services to get to the annuity model that other software dev houses have managed.
3. There's a 99.69% chance that you shouldn't be running ads to your new affiliate site. Affiliate is *mostly* an SEO game anymore.
Caveat: Yes you can do affiliate on social. Yes you can run ads and make it work for an affiliate site if you look at the LTV of the user and not just the first purchase.
BUT if you're asking these questions, you don't have the skillset to pull it off yet or the funding to test as much as you'd need to pull it off.
You don't just learn how to market or run ads by reading. Create an ad account and start running low dollar campaigns to learn. Also read through all of Google's documentation
Deeply grateful for you and for all you share with us helping us learn and find our way. Thank you.
Have a blessed day.
Hi BTO-
I’m new to wifi money and work an in person job that under pays me. Do you recommend getting into a SaaS sales role to earn more and free up some time to work on my business?
Everybody that is worth their salt is underpaid in corporate America. The questions you should ask yourself is:
- Does changing jobs give you *a lot* more time to build a business
- Does changing jobs give you *a lot* more money to invest in your business
- Are you potentially going to be unemployed because you are throwing away your political capital, starting new, and risking new company doing layoffs?
- Is the new job going to take a year of extra work to learn to perform in the role, hence taking away time from building a business?
*note* I’m referring to a remote tech sales position.
Hi BTO-
I run a local mortgage lending business. 100% of the business comes from sphere of influence and real estate agents referrals in our local market.
We started posting content on social media and Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to generate business opportunities without having to be in person. The goal is to build a brand that will generate referrals.
I started reading the sub stack from the start. Is there anything I should highlight/focus on with being a service business where all of our income is local?
I want to become location independent while bringing on more clients.
TY-
I'm confused at your question. In the second to last line, you say to focus on local and on the last line you say location independent.
We want to become location independent and generate more opportunities in places we are not local.
All of our business is local referral at the moment, which we want to move away from.
I don't know the industry at all but if 100% of your leads come from referrals/contacts, it sounds like that's how the industry works. Why not pick one city at a time and develop contacts there?
You can go the LinkedIn/digital marketing route but I don't know enough about that industry to advise. Does any meaningful lead acquisition in the industry actually come from sources other than referrals?
Thanks for the tips/insight.
That's what we are doing now. Very relationship based business.
you mentioned in the post that "I’m also considering taking on a few more clients on and writing about how to get different businesses off the ground or accelerated.", just curious if you are still taking on new clients at this moment? Thanks!
I meant that statement for my IRL business I am but I don't generally cross pollinate as the risk of doxing is too high. (I meant writing about them)
I am working on setting up a new affiliate marketing website in a specific niche and am analyzing existing websites and key words to see if the niche is worth giving it a try.
Could you please give some guidance (or name an article in which you covered it) on how attractive metrics look like and what niches to stay away from?
For instance, I understand that if on 1st page of SERP I find names of big websites, it will be very difficult for me to compete with them but at what point is the niche good enough and not too difficult to rank well enough?
There's no cookie cutter way of doing this. If there was, you could just analyze 1000 niches and pick the easiest.
"Attractive metrics" - Depends on what tools you're using. I use SEMRush so I use their KD%.
Look across the biggest sites in the space and see what the KD and traffic is for the top terms. You can then compare that to other niches that you're interested in. That should give you a rough ballpark.
Look for a niche that has a few pillars that you can build in then after time, move on to another pillar in the niche.
Stay away Health, Finance, Gambling or anything grey.
This question was in reference to affiliate marketing. For affiliate, hell yes stay away. You're never going to be able to compete in the health niche as a *newbie*. Anything's possible but you're increasing your chance of failure.
BTB was referencing ecommerce. If you're selling diet pills or skincare, your acquisition channels are usually going to focus more on social, paid ads, and *repeat purchases*.
Appreciate all the content. I've typed out a lot of dumb questions to you that I've been able to go back in your guides and find answers to. Been playing around with the ezoic access now program, and so far the pain hasn't been worth the $1 I made.
Ezoic blows. Shoot for your own products, sponsored content, affiliate sales, etc.
Thanks. I wanted to try it out since I have more info than monetized posts. But it's caused a lot of technical headaches and the juice hasn't been worth the squeeze.
Yup. The Dude is correct. I don't do display ads on my content sites. Tried it previously and also found the juice not worth the squeeze.
Good to know. Going to remove them and add more monetized articles
I'm interested in your setup, are you working primarily for yourself as freelance? Do you have staff and is it hard to scale?
By way of intro - used to run a software business, had staff but was incredibly difficult to scale as the work we did was customized heavily and bespoke dev so you couldn't replace developers with others. We were therefore very sticky with our clients, but couldn't move beyond a small team.
I would've liked to grow it far more and offer simpler/productized services to get to the annuity model that other software dev houses have managed.
1. Idk what social media has to do with affiliate offers. To find offers, look at the affiliate platforms in this article. https://bowtiedopossum.substack.com/p/affiliate-marketing-part-1
2. Look at your competition and see what their site looks like. Learn to build a site here. https://bowtiedopossum.com/the-basics-of-your-first-website/
3. There's a 99.69% chance that you shouldn't be running ads to your new affiliate site. Affiliate is *mostly* an SEO game anymore.
Caveat: Yes you can do affiliate on social. Yes you can run ads and make it work for an affiliate site if you look at the LTV of the user and not just the first purchase.
BUT if you're asking these questions, you don't have the skillset to pull it off yet or the funding to test as much as you'd need to pull it off.
You don't just learn how to market or run ads by reading. Create an ad account and start running low dollar campaigns to learn. Also read through all of Google's documentation