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Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. I’m Doug Cunnington, and today I am gonna tell you about a few things that I wish I knew before I started working online. Originally, the idea was gonna be five things, and I think I’ve, I’ve messed up here because I have 17 things. That I wish I knew before I started working online.
I should have just divided it up into smaller episodes. But here we are.
And I will tell you after, um, a few episodes in the last couple months where I talked about not using AI too much, I used AI a little bit here. I’ll tell you how before we get into the, the main part of this whole episode. So I came up with my five ideas and I thought, ah, you know what?
I will, I will just check. I’ll put in the five ideas that I have and then I’ll ask chat. GBT. Hey, do you have any other suggestions? I think I asked for like 15. I was like, gimme 15, thinking, Hey, most of these are gonna be shit and I’m not gonna use them, but maybe I can develop some of the ideas I already have.
So I threw out about half of ’em. And then had my five reworked. A couple others. I thought of a few more. Now you know, it’s, it’s fluid. I don’t know which ideas were mine, which actually I know which ideas were mine. ’cause I have a few pages in my notebook so I could tell exactly which ones were mine. But regardless.
I, I used some help and, uh, after I said, don’t use AI so much. Here we are. I used it as a little help and I think I maybe, like I said, I was just gonna do five, keep these episodes tighter. That said, I’m gonna blast through this. So I did. , Write down basically my main idea so I didn’t script it out.
These are more like bullet points. These are sentence fragments. A lot of it doesn’t make sense if you just looked at it, but I’m gonna go through it all.
When I got started online, I really wasn’t thinking, Hey, I wanna do this full time. It was just a side hustle, little hobby, actually. I was doing it for fun at first, and then I started realizing, oh, I could, I can actually earn some money here.
And I wasn’t super happy at my job at the time. This was 2013, so long ago at this point. After I started realizing that I could earn some money, I, I was interested. I was having trouble getting promoted and I don’t know, around the time that I was becoming successful online, I actually did get promoted and I think it was maybe one of the most productive two or three years where I was doing pretty well at work.
Right before I got laid off, there was a whole other story, but also I was overly caffeinated and waking up really early and doing a bunch of work online and then doing my day job, and then I probably worked too much over the weekends and all that kind of stuff too. But. Really, at some point I was like, working online is going to be awesome.
I’m gonna cover some of those ideas here. And these are pros and and cons and just things I wish I knew before I got started.
So working online eventually became the dream and I probably drank the Kool-Aid. And you could imagine it now, right? So, and you’re experiencing it now. So back in, in those days, in 2013, it wasn’t exactly like this, but now you could flip.
Instagram and or what, whatever TikTok, whatever you’re scrolling through, there’s these bullshit post, and you could imagine these, right? You could picture it. You probably saw one earlier where there’s some super cool dude on the beach or maybe sipping wine or a beer. In my case, although I don’t do posts like this, but they’re doing something really awesome on.
Tuesday in the middle of the day, and the caption is something like, I earn $1,200 while I had this private wine tasting and I’m fucking awesome. And it’s a little. I mean, it’s a little grading. It’s made to get your attention and it is, uh, not exactly real. And I will tell you I love working online and I’ve stepped down a lot of the scaled down, a lot of the work that I have been doing the last few years.
But I do love working for myself. It fits my personality really well. I love to have the freedom and the leverage in the scale of what you’re able to do online versus. Me at my old corporate job. The freedom, that’s the biggest thing, especially like the time freedom and being able to sip, uh, wine on a Tuesday at lunch or whatever, right?
So that freedom is really cool, but there are some caveats. So you also have all the distractions. You have, uh. The imposter syndrome. You have isolation. You’re now self-employed, so your boss is still an asshole, but it’s just you now. So I started working full-time for myself about 10 years ago. It, it was such, it was a big thing when I got laid.
In 2015, but I completely forgot the 10 year anniversary of like the layoff date. And like when I started working for myself is, it was all a non-event. It turns out it, it didn’t really, it didn’t matter that much fun. I, I should celebrate the 11 year, but I totally forgot about the other. I’m gonna try to number these out.
I’m gonna try to stay on schedule here so we don’t end up with a three hour episode number one.
You can’t earn a lot more money than your corporate job. It seemed kind of crazy when I first heard some of the podcast where people were like, yeah. I thought, Hey, if I can make one $1 a day from one website, I will make 1000 websites and earn $1,000 a day.
This, I mean, I was listening to stuff that was way outta date by the time I got into it, but I was like. I mean, I guess that makes sense. If you could make $1, then maybe you could make a thousand. Maybe you could scale that up. Maybe you could just keep going with it. Right. It turns out it scales in a very non-intuitive way, especially with the, an air quote, the attention economy, where maybe you’re doing a ton of work and then all of a sudden.
Things start paying off. The compounding effect of all the effort that you’re putting in does pay off and it doesn’t make sense when you think about like the worker beam mentality, which is where I came from. I came from, uh, essentially a software company. I was doing project management, I was in IT software, that kind of thing.
Not, not exactly technical. Um. But I worked with a lot of technical people and I had that background. So I was used to working super hard and working weekends and doing a lot of extra just to get like a 2% raise, maybe a bonus of a few thousand dollars. And when I started working for myself, it was very apparent that the margins could be massive if I kept my expenses low.
Then the margins could be like 95% or something like that. As my business grew, as it grew into, into like multiple six figure area, then there’s more waste in the system and the expenses creep up. But it was still like 75% profit margin basically. And it depends on how you’re running your business. And I think now there’s the opportunity to have a lot more.
Tools that are more expensive that will eat into your margins, but you may get different scalability by using those, or things are easier or better or cheaper or whatever. But there are way more tools now than there used to be. Overall, you can earn a lot more money and if I knew that, I probably would’ve tried to start working online sooner.
Number two, it’s not as easy as people say. Like I said, there’s all these, there’s people out there on social media typically telling you how easy it is and how, I mean, I’m not on social media doing it, but if you look through the back catalog of all the content that I’ve created, a lot of it is trying to tell.
You, Hey you, you can do this. It’s fairly straightforward. It’s easy. Some of the steps are easy, but to put all this stuff together, I mean, it can be fairly difficult to do all the right things in the right order. Of course, business models change as well. And the thing to remember is if someone’s telling you it’s super easy and super cheap, and.
You’ll be able to become successful and it’s defendable, right? You might be able to reach, uh, some success fairly quickly, maybe without a lot of background. However, if you can do it that easily, then that means other people can. So there’s some, there’s something, uh, some balance you have to understand where if you can get into it really easy, it means it’s not very defendable and you will have to figure out how to.
Keep a business or start a business and have a bit of a moat where your business is, um, not something that someone can recreate super easy, so it’s not as easy as people say. By the way, if you’re hearing about it from the folks on line in general, TikTok YouTube podcast, this podcast. Yeah. Remember they’re selling courses, they’re selling software coaching something, right?
There’s some incentive for them to make it sound way easier than maybe It really is, and I mean, some people are out there. I, I think, I try to be straightforward. My friend Matt Vei, he talks about how much work that it has taken him to get his business where it is, and I mean. It, it’s possible, right?
We’re trying to tell you it’s possible. We’re not trying to tell you that it’s easy. Next.
Number three, you’ll have a huge amount of flexibility and freedom, but that doesn’t always mean less work. Hopefully it’s work that you’re choosing to do and you’re motivated and you wanna do it, but in the beginning.
You might not, you probably won’t work fewer hours. You might be so excited to be able to work on your own projects, that you’ll actually work more and depending on what’s going on with your life and the runway that you have going, you might end up being like very motivated to make sure you don’t fail, which is valid.
I did that for sure. So you may find that, uh, just because you’re flexible, it doesn’t mean you’re working less and you might work all the time. You might work anytime you have a free moment, you might overdo it. If you don’t watch it, you’re your own manager. This is number four. So. Again, you can kind of go overboard with the amount of work that you do.
And it’s also very difficult to be the manager and also the person that does the work. And you’ll hear a lot of people have talked about it. I think Paul Graham or originally wrote about it and made it popular on, uh, Y Combinator blog or something like that. And then a, a shitload of people have repeated it.
Switching gears from like doing the, the actual work. Like if you’re writing content to produce, um, a YouTube video, for example, thinking about strategically what you’re gonna work on and what the business needs to work on versus actually writing the script. Those are two different things, like one’s deep in the weeds, the other one’s more like vision and what direction.
That the company or business or whatever work you need to do or your contractors need to do, you have to understand the full picture from that higher point of view. So it’s, uh, important to understand like what motivates you to work and how you like to work, and then if you have a team, how to manage them.
But. You have to watch it because you might end up working too much. So it’s good to have like systems in place to make it low friction, to be able to work, but also it’s important to have, um, like the shutdown down routine so you know when to stop work and when to relax and rest, because that is also very important.
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Moving on to number five, distractions are everywhere. There’s inbound emails. One tough thing is like doing research. You hop over on YouTube or wherever you have to do your research. I mean. Yeah, you’ll need help if you’re trying to do your research on TikTok. Geez, I had to delete it off my phone and all that kind of stuff.
I mean, I never really got into it. But anyway, even if you’re doing research, super easy to get distracted and deep work, the work that you would need to do to get your shit done. It’s not easy to do. It doesn’t happen accidentally, and you have to, you have to schedule the time that you’re gonna work.
Highly recommend that you check out the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. All of Cal Newport’s books are very good, so. Check any of them out, but deep work will get you started in that sort of frame of mind. And I also recommend time blocking, which is covered in the book. Cal didn’t make it up, but he definitely popularized it and you can look that up and, and find whatever blog posts or videos to uh, see how to do that.
Fairly straightforward, very effective.
Number six, don’t work on too many projects. It’s easy to take on one more thing or just have too many projects going on at once. I had. Websites. And then I was thinking, oh, I’ll, I’ll scale it up. Just like uh, I was talking about I’ll build six websites at the same time. I’m a project manager. I have all these systems and templates and I’m gonna automate it.
And you know what? It was a lot. So I was doing all those websites. I was writing content. I had a course, I was also doing the SEO for the websites, and I had an outreach business. An outreach business was actually really successful. And it turns out it was too much and I didn’t like it. And eventually I, uh, decided not to do it.
Basically, I was overwhelmed because of all the stuff that I was working on. So when I cut out many of the things and just focused on one or two, one is even better. But if, if you can only narrow it down to one or two, everything got better. I made more progress. And the thing is, when you’re working on a lot of different projects, even if you time block and you wake up early and you have too much caffeine, just those are all the things that I did.
If, if you do that, you’ll make a tiny little bit of progress in each one of the pro projects and. It is super discouraging because you’re working so hard and you’re barely making any progress anywhere because you’re only spending whatever an hour a day on each one of the things, and you keep switching tasks and it’ll make you go crazy.
I did not like it very much, so when I quit. Most of what I was working on and just focused on one or two things got much better and I made a lot more progress. And you could probably think to your about your own situation and, and think about times where you were like, this is the most important thing.
I have to finish my taxes by this specific date before I go on vacation. Turns out you could do it much faster, uh, than you think when you have a deadline and when you’re only working on that one thing, you’re not getting distracted by other stuff because you’re. Only focusing on doing your taxes.
Number seven, income is gonna be uneven. It depends on your business model, but with the websites I was working on, revenue went up and down when I had more of an agency. Like I said, I was doing the outreach business for a little while. If I sold a lot in a short time, then maybe I was able to pull in a lot of revenue right away.
And then as I was doing the work to serve those clients, I wasn’t getting any new revenue in. So I ended up with months that were very flat. So maybe you earn. A few thousand dollars in one month, but then for a few months while you’re doing the work, you don’t earn anything, right? Or it’s much slower because you’re not getting the same pipeline of business.
It just depends on your, your business model. But often, if you’re working for yourself, it’s gonna be uneven. Very smart to have cash on hand and save the money during the good times. So save that money. This is not financial advice, so do what you gotta do, but having an understanding of your cash flow is super important.
You need to have the cash on hand to weather the months that are slower. So if you have a seasonal business, you need to have cash on hand. And then don’t forget about taxes, right? Again, not financial advice. Consult your own professional, whatever you need to do, but. If you’re earning money and no one is withholding taxes, you will have to pay that later.
So just remember to save whatever you need to save and put it aside so that you can pay whatever, 30% taxes or 40 or whatever you need to put aside more than you think. Right? It’s good. It’s good to have it there, even if you don’t need it. Next, number.
Number eight, the results matter more than the amount of hours that you are working. So this is a double-edged sword here. So when you had the corporate job, perhaps you had to. Sit in your desk and have like FaceTime. I remember FaceTime where, and we’re talking, you know, not the, not the, the video chatting app on your phone here.
FaceTime is going into work and just sitting there. Even if you’re not doing anything, you don’t have to do that. And I think people are aware, super aware from like working at home maybe. To do what you need to do. It only takes like three hours a day or something like that. And the thing is like if, if you’re working online, you don’t have to sit at the desk just to look busy.
It’s only results that matter. So if you’re not doing things that are getting results, then you don’t need to sit there. So you don’t have to put in the FaceTime and and think, Hey, I’m just going to grind it out and I’m gonna sit at my desk for 30 hours a week or 40 hours a week, or whatever. It depends on your working style.
That may impact people more than others, but if you’re in that mentality, then you could probably shift to something a little bit less focused on the number of hours working. Number nine is isolation.
It can be an issue, especially if you’re. A person that doesn’t like feel the drive to go interact with other people.
So if you’re introverted, you might think, Hey, I’m introverted and this is great. I don’t have to talk to other people. I can stay in the house and not go out and have conversations with people. But even if you are introverted, it can be helpful and it can be good for you to go and be out in the world.
And. Go to groups and have the human interaction. It’s, this is a whole other subject area, but I listened to a podcast recently and the study basically. Proved that even introverted people that were acting extroverted, they ended up being happier than if they just didn’t talk to people. And then extroverted people were told to be introverted and, and don’t have, you know, even just idle chit chat when you’re.
Riding the, uh, train or the bus or whatever, and they were, they were less happy. So even if we don’t think the human interaction and the chatting will be helpful, and maybe you think you’re gonna be happier by not talking with people, you’re probably wrong. And if you’re introverted out there and you’re thinking, Doug, you’re wrong, I would be happier.
Uh, you gotta check out this study. ’cause it, it was, it’s fairly conclusive and if you think about it. Think about times you’ve had nice conversations with people, you probably felt better afterwards. So we’re talking about those, so don’t get isolated. One hack that I had is I started the podcast and started working on YouTube.
So basically, you know, it’s not exactly the same, but the amount of conversations that I was having with people and it was almost always like video chat.
This is a pretty good way to, um. This is a pretty good way to hack it because even though it’s not exactly the same, it is, uh, I, I have, I have friends across the world basically, so I, I joined like mastermind groups and stuff like that, and that is a good hack.
We’ll call that like a sub, a sub area is just having a mastermind group, so that prevents the isolation. But it could also help you with, uh, just growing the business in general. So maybe that’s 18. All right.
Number 10 is sales and self-marketing. So some people are better at this than others. I didn’t come from a marketing or sales background, but you have to be self-promotional.
Generally, you, you are gonna need to talk about yourself and even if you’re not directly selling something, like I sold courses, so I had to be able to sell. With videos I needed to be able to sell mainly with email, so I focused a lot on copywriting. Even if you don’t want to be too promotional, you should probably get over it.
And even if you’re not selling directly, you’ll still be selling your ideas or your value, or even in a networking situation where. You are trying to find partners, then you should be able to be, you know, self-promotional. Even if it’s about talking about the ideas that you have and that you want to get out there.
Or, I mean, again, let’s say you’re not selling anything directly If you want to be on podcast or be on. People’s YouTube channels and collaborate with them. You have to figure out how to sell your ideas. So it’s interesting enough for them to want to spend the time chatting with you.
Number 11, your tools might multiply. Quickly, and this hit me in the last year or so, I mentioned at the top that I was, I’m doing less work now. I’m earning far less money. I retired all my courses. I don’t have many advertisers. Occasionally, if a, if a great partner like Res pops up, I’ll make an exception and I’ll work with them.
But with. Lower revenue. I looked very hard at my expenses. One, I mean, hands down, biggest expense is software. So as I was looking through, one of the biggest costs was, uh, video editing software slash podcast editing software called Script. And I’ll tell you, it is like the baggiest fucking software. I have such a hard time with it.
It is. Trying to do too much. I wish they just stuck with their main goal, which was, um, okay, this is a ran portion. Alright. So I wish they just stuck with having, uh, a transcript created from audio or video and being able to edit the audio or video based on the transcript that that was the baseline. Now they try to have like a full suite of.
Um, like repurposing the video or the content for social media. They’re trying to shove ai. I mean, every co company’s trying to shove AI in every little fucking crevice they could figure out, and I just wanted to do the things that it was doing like a couple years ago. That was fine. I don’t need video conferencing software integrated, the thing is so buggy anyway, that’s like one of the most expensive things.
When I paid for it, uh, this last time around, it was like 600 bucks for me and my producer for my other show. And I mean, that’s a, I mean, that’s a decent chunk. So anyway, we have the script, uh, all in the rant, Canva. That’s super expensive. Like a hundred bucks. That’s the thing. A lot of stuff is not too bad, but you start stacking it up.
So there’s Canva, and then I have audio mastering software that’s fairly inexpensive. I have a little bit of web hosting. I have a little bit of podcast hosting. There’s some other software I’m sure that I’m forgetting about. I can’t quite remember. And it, it all adds up. A couple years ago I was doing a little more photography and a couple paid gigs, right?
I did a couple portrait sessions and I was like, you know what? I need to pay for some software and then I pay annually, and then you forget, and then it renews. And I was like, oh crap. There’s another 120 bucks, another 120 bucks, and it does add up. And it was a little bit, um, surprising as the year was closing out.
So I think my baseline is like $1,300 of software, and that’s probably a little bit of a underestimate. I’m not a hundred percent sure I need to go through, but the thing is like when the money was more plentiful and it was fine, I was paying another few hundred dollars for email software and the course software.
So if you throw all that in, it’s probably. It was probably like 2,500, $3,000 a year just in software or accessories, uh, related to software, that sort of thing. So keep an eye on that stuff and if you’re not using it, then stop using or stop paying for it. So you should do an audit, I don’t know, every quarter, something like that.
Like, Hey, am I using this software? And keep an eye on those expenses ’cause they can creep up. And if you are. If it’s a high revenue business, if everything’s going great, then that’s cool. You don’t have to manage it as closely. There’s some waste in the system, especially if it’s earning more money.
There’s just gonna be a little more waste and that’s totally okay, but keep an eye on it. And then when, when revenue is tight. That’s when you can go through and I, I had a couple rounds and I think I’m, I’m down to the, the minimum of what I want to try to do. There’s some free tools out there, but sometimes it’s more complicated to use or the results are worse or something like that.
So you have to figure out where the best value is to spend that money.
Number 12 is learning. You should always be learning, but only when you need it. So in the beginning, and I think a lot of people are susceptible to this, this might go for software too, but you’re thinking, oh, you know what? I will need to understand. Email copywriting and email marketing. I should go ahead and start learning that now, even though I don’t need it yet.
Don’t do that. There’s too much shit going on. You will find yourself like learning stuff that you’re not going to use or apply, and then you typically forget it. You’re gonna have to go learn it again, and you’re probably busy enough. You should be focusing on the things that are directly related to earning money, so.
You should be happy to learn more, but do the just in time learning method. Don’t learn things just for the sake of learning a thing that you’re not going to use.
Number 13, burnout.
It’s gonna sneak up on you. I’ve largely avoided burnout, and I think part of it is the luxury of being able to choose what I wanna work on, but I was very conscious of it as burnout crept up and specifically on platforms where you get metrics and where you can feel really good when things are going well.
Or you can feel really bad when things aren’t going well and typically, not always, but burnout is often related to the, the sort of platform burnout and content creation burnout, at least in the area that I’m looking at. So it does, it does expand past that. But for me, I disconnected my. Satisfaction, self-worth, anything related to positive or or negative, I disconnected that from the results that I was seeing.
So if you look at my YouTube channel over the past couple years, you’ll see many videos only get a couple hundred views A few years ago. It was getting, well, any given video was getting probably several thousand or even tens of thousands of views because of the topic area, the algorithm maybe. Just what people are interested in, in the world.
And I mean, hell, a lot of it has to do with me, right? So like maybe the effort that I was putting in or not, I, I have no idea. Right? There was, there’s so many things going on. I probably got lucky half the time. Lucky through timing and I probably thought, oh, I’m really smart. I know how to do this shit.
But I probably just got lucky. I don’t know. It’s probably 80%. I mean, I showed up, but I think a lot of it was just related to the timing of when I was doing stuff. All that to say, burnout can just sneak up on you and then you will have very low motivation to do things that you were very excited to do in the past.
So for me, it’s been all about. Seeing it coming and adjusting and tweaking, like what I was spending time on. And like I said, I also tried to get away from the satisfaction, job, satisfaction from the actual results that I was seeing and just thinking like, you know what, it’s um, it’s. It’s great if things are going well, but it’s not, um, it’s not going to completely make my day or, yeah, it, it, it’s weird.
It’s a detachment, just detaching from it. And then from a, you know, non creator perspective, I mean, if you’re always, you know, maybe you’re producing something, uh, eh, you know what? A couple weeks ago I was talking about smoking brisket. So let’s say you have a a small food truck situation, and if you’re always focusing on the work portion of it, you’re always making brisket, even if you love it.
I love brisket, but like if I was managing the fire all the time and constantly like getting more briskets and trimming them, and all I was focusing on was that, and I wasn’t getting enough rest, I would probably lose my mind and it would be. You know, again, burnout situation where at some point you stop enjoying the work that you were so excited to do before.
Number 14, focus on the long term. Often you’ll make better decisions if you’re thinking about long-term goals and a timeframe of three to five years, or 10 years versus months. And I know for me in the beginning, especially when I was thinking, Hey, I need to earn money so that. I can keep doing this so that I don’t have to go find another job.
I probably said yes to some clients that I shouldn’t have. The work wasn’t that great. Maybe it wasn’t a good fit for me from a personality standpoint, but I said yes because I was focusing on short, you know, three week to three month timeframes instead of like three years. And it’s one of those deals, right?
You can make a lot of progress through. You know, small growth with the compound growth over time in a very small, uh, way each week, but you don’t see it on a week to week or even a month to month basis. And if you zoom out a little bit and you have a bigger picture in mind, you’ll probably make much better decisions, especially for.
You know, the aspect of burnout, like I said, if you’re focusing on, you know, long term content creation versus like, alright, we need to do some stuff that’s gonna work in the next three weeks, you’re probably gonna make some crazy decisions. So focus on the long term.
Number 15, success might not last. When I first got started, I thought I knew so much in the first few months and I was just hearing what other people were telling me. I was learning from blogs and podcasts mainly, and then I would try something and it would work. Most of the time it would mostly work.
And then I was like, oh, I, I have it figured out. Like someone told me this will work. I did it. It worked. So this is the way it is. Things change. And then in the SEO world, like it changes very fast. Things are completely different now. I don’t even know what’s going on. I was listening to, uh. Matt J’s podcast called Business Casual.
He just renamed it business casual and he was talking about SEO and I actually sent him an email and maybe he’ll talk about it sometime in a, in a show or I’ll invite him over, but I’ll skip the details. Basically, I was like, that’s your SEO plan, like for real. Like that’s, that’s what is gonna work and.
He said, I, I don’t think he has seen the results yet, by the way, but I, I was like, uh, you know what? I, I don’t know. I like, I don’t know. SEO anymore. The, the point being it’s changed so much that he was like, yeah, this is, this is what. People are seeing this is what’s working now. And I was like, really? I would never fucking try to do that, that this seems crazy.
Um, but turns out success might not last. So I was doing SEO, I’ve, um, talked about it for many years. I’ve, uh, tapped out a little bit. I have, uh, kind of low interest in it, and I am not on the cutting edge. I think probably. I could come up to speed and, uh, ho honestly, probably in like a week or something like that.
I don’t think there’s all that many, uh, different moving parts than there were. It’s just like the industry has shifted. AI is obviously taking over. Social platforms are bigger and better and all that stuff, but. Anyway, the point is things change fast. Success may not last. So keep that in mind and save your money.
You know, like I mentioned before, have cash reserves. So if there’s some rocky months or something, shifts when the good times are around, like save that money for the rainy days or for changes that you can’t foresee. And if people are out there telling you like, oh, this fuck, I remember that. Even recording and interviewing people on, on this show, people were, I won’t mention any names, but they’re like, yeah, it’s pretty much a, it’s pretty much a repeatable process.
I could buy a site for $10,000. I’ll do X, Y, Z, and then boom, I’ll sell it a few months later. And it worked for a while and then it stopped working and like it just. It stopped working, like it just abruptly shifted. And you know, unfortunately a lot of people built businesses around certain things and then the shift happens and they’re left, um, you know, scrambling, trying to figure stuff out.
So anyway, success might not last. Shit changes really fast. So just keep that in mind.
Next, number 16, have an exit plan. So this could mean have a way to sell whatever it is that you’re working on so that you can get outta there. I was just chatting with someone, uh, locally here. They have a, a brick and mortar business.
Um, it is in the food industry and they were talking about potentially being able to exit and you know, they’ve been running it for over a decade. There’s a lot of moving pieces, but they’re reviewing that idea and it’s, you know, they didn’t set out to start a business and then sell it. It just grew over time.
But it’s good to have an exit plan, and depending on what you’re doing, you might wanna plan a few years ahead of time if there needs to be a transition or something like that further, right. You can have an exit plan, which was more similar to mine, where it was like, I’m gonna eventually retire and slow down.
So like my goal for several years was just save the extra, invest it. And then after some time like that has worked out well. So. Seek your own financial professional advice. This is not advice, but it’s good to have a financial plan, understand your expenses, cash flow, all that stuff. I recorded an episode a little while back, so you could go look for that if you want to.
And I think we are on the last one.
Number 17, don’t let your identity caught up with your work. So this actually comes up a lot with my other podcast, mile Hi-Fi, where I talk about financial independence and personal finance. In early retirement, I interview a lot of people, successful people that have saved millions of dollars, and they reached their goal.
They saved the money, they retired, and then they have an identity crisis because they used to be a powerful lawyer, for example, and now they’re just some dude that doesn’t work. So when people ask them, Hey, what do you do? They’re like, I don’t know. And then they don’t have the same sort of like professional recognition that they used to have, uh, with their, you know.
Title of lawyer or doctor or whatever it is, those professionals often have a tough time. So doctors and lawyers, they really have a tough time ’cause they have worked, um, and gone to school for even longer than most folks. And then they’re all tied up in their identity. So when you’re work shifts, you don’t want to have an identity crisis.
And that can even be, like I said, when you retire. Or exit. And actually I have a friend, I hadn’t talked to him for a while, but he retired and he, he’s my age is like mid forties. He retired, he got a little bored after a few months and then went back to his comfort zone. He basically all, all through like high school and like maybe.
To his mid twenties, always worked in restaurants, so he was always going to a different restaurant and helping them open. And it was his comfort area, you know, for, like I said, for a decade, those formative years, he was working in a restaurant and he kinda loved it. So he. Opened a restaurant, number one, and then he also became a partner at another restaurant in his town.
So he was really busy and stressed out. And when I chatted with him, he was like, yeah, yeah, I’m getting out of the, like, management of this business and I’m just gonna be like the owner. Like I, I don’t want to have to deal with all the general manager issues that you have from running a restaurant. And that was his, that was his sweet spot.
He was always e even when he was like. 18 years old, right? Like just outta high school. Or maybe in high school he was like assistant general manager to, you know, a fairly big restaurant. Or then once he got out and he was in college, he was, uh, GM all the time. So he would be like the gm and I’m sure they, they could pay him less.
’cause he was like, whatever, 18 to 22 years old or something like that. So, anyway. Don’t get too tied up with your identity of whatever job you’re doing, even if you’re self-employed, right? So any job you do, um, can be great, especially if you’re self-employed. You should have pride in that. Um, but for me, I know if I got caught up thinking like I am an SEO, I’m a content creator or marketer, and I really like internalized that.
I would paint myself in a corner and I would end up feeling this identity crisis. But as I’ve shifted to doing less work, I’ve had no crisis. I’m like, eh, you know, I do some, some of these, uh, kind of hobbies on the side. It’s pretty fun, but I am not tied to it too much. And you know, I, like, I don’t, I don’t have an issue with it.
I don’t have an issue with it at all. I think at the end of my corporate career, I mean, maybe I, I was like, oh, project manager. I talk about it now just ’cause I, I still have the certification and everything, but it’s not like, um, I’m offended if people make fun of project managers or something. I mean, it’s like, uh, middle management.
Sometimes it’s a wasteful, uh, unnecessary role. Like I get that. So I, I don’t take it personally. If someone has an issue with project managers, I mean, it makes sense to me actually. So anyway, don’t get caught up, uh, with your professional identity, because then it makes it hard to quit when things shift, like.
If I was thinking, Hey, I’m an SEO. This SEO industry has shifted completely, then I’m trying to figure out, oh, what, what do I do now? And I don’t envy the folks that are struggling with that. At this point in time, ’cause I know it’s tough to do and with the way people search and use the internet, the way it’s shifted, it must be very tough for people that identify professionally is SEOs like where, where do they shift to?
They have to change their messaging and kind of just keep going with it. Which seems tough to me, especially when, gosh, I haven’t thought about this in a while, but I mean, remember Google was telling us, oh yeah, like everything’s cool. Like we’re just doing this. Like we’re, we are, we’re showing you and telling you this documentation.
And that we’re doing something completely different. All that stuff was bananas, man. That was just a couple years ago. And like I said, I have low interest in it these days. So when I was listening to Matt’s pod, I was like, oh, man, is that, that is what we’re doing now. So check out, check out a show. I, I, uh.
I’m sure I can find a link out there, but you could look it up, you know, search for it, business casual. That’s it for today. Thanks again to the SEMrush Affiliate Program. If you wanna support the show, please go check it out. If it looks like a good fit for you, do apply for it. I’d love it if you took a look, you know, click over, there’s a link in the description, and I appreciate, uh, SEMrush partnering with me.
For this, this show, these, these handful of shows here in January, so hopefully they’ll see a great response and it’ll be a good fit for you out there. We’ll catch you on the next episode. Thanks a lot.