Here is my November 2019 progress report! I’m bringing back these progress reports so I can document my passive income / financial freedom progress as well as talk about my thoughts and feelings!
Creating Courses and Interviews – November 2019 Progress Report
Interviews
I would say November was productive, moreso because of features and interviews. I’m a bit insecure about just talking sometimes…like I feel like I don’t have that much to say and trip over words. So I get scared of speaking in public, getting interviewed, and even interviewing others. It all just makes me uncomfortable as I’m definitely an introvert. But lately I’ve become more and more confident around speaking about my journey and my lessons around passive income, and I’m feeling quite productive getting onto more and more shows. It hasn’t become 100% comfortable and natural yet (and I don’t know if it ever will) but it’s all a work in progress.
Here are 3 examples of shows / features I got on last month:
- Four Ways To Earn Extra Money While Keeping (Or Preparing To Quit) Your Day Job
- Travel Like a Boss – Solo Female Traveler, Digital Nomad, Silicon Valley to Chiang Mai
- Debt.com – The Financial Challenges of Debt and Divorce: 28 Experts Respond
The podcast interview with Johnny FD was an exciting one as he was someone I had heard about and had read his blog before I traveled.
Passive Income
I hadn’t been touching my passive income streams too much as I had been focused on building my brand, but I recently decided to recruit my boyfriend to team up with me on Amazon FBA. Like I mentioned before, passive income businesses take a decent amount of time, effort, and possibly capital to start up BUT they don’t take a lot to maintain. After you’ve successfully built them out, you could leave your businesses running and they can still continuously make money for you. However, you still need to keep up with maintenance through customer support and restocking of inventory, for example, which may take only an hour a week. Amazon FBA is in that same realm as it is quite a set it and forget it business model if you find winning products. But, you still need to make sure you restock your items when they’re getting low.
I was still selling items, but a bunch of my top sellers had sold out during this past year. It’s literally been a year since I revisited Amazon FBA and Merch by Amazon.
The main reason why I stopped working on Amazon FBA and maintaining it was that I had many other things I needed to take care of including Digital Nomad Quest and my full-time work. Building up my brand is probably #1 in my priority list. I find it way more fulfilling to teach people how to do what I have done so that they can design their lives rather than merely do what society says you’re supposed to do.
Anyway back to Amazon FBA. The products I had selected were actually doing well so I wanted to continue with it. I have a pretty decent niche and I thought it would be cool to start building up a brand. My strategy is to sell smaller trinkets and test around, but I haven’t spent the time trying to build a cohesive e-commerce brand that could be spread across multiple platforms like Etsy, Shopify, Amazon, and eBay. This time, I think that if I had help, I would be able to do some big things in the e-commerce space. Plus working with my boyfriend is super fun :).
Full-Time Work
So yes. I’m currently working as a Marketing Manager at a startup in the Bay Area. While I left to pursue my digital nomad life, I decided to come back because home (the Bay Area) felt right at the time and still does. I took a job because I wanted to expand my skillset and make sure I work towards mastery. Sometimes I feel like I build things, get it to a good level, then move on too quickly. If I focused my efforts on building up my brands and actually getting even stronger at Marketing – who knows where I’ll be in 5 years! I now realize that focusing on mastery is way more powerful and fulfilling than focusing on money.
My job has actually been really fun, and I get to work remotely a lot. I’ve also teamed up with a Marketing consultant and it’s really made a huge difference and he’s taught me a lot. We’ve rebranded and redone our product, and we’re now getting it ready for launch. Something that’s more my bread and butter is the digital marketing component of marketing strategy, but I hadn’t explored in real life marketing and experiential marketing too much. We’re planning to put up billboards, printed assets, and even host launch parties in order to activate in multiple markets. This is quite different from what my Marketing background is, so the more I learn, the more excited I am about my full-time position! I believe that we should always be growing, and I feel like that’s what I’ve been doing lately. So I have no complaints!
San Diego – Fast Track Course Creation Workshop with Pat Flynn
My boyfriend and I flew down to San Diego for Pat Flynn’s Fast Track Course Creation Workshop. It looks like we’ve been traveling once a month for conferences! Because we both are in similar fields (real estate and online business), we’re really trying to merge our efforts so we work together towards our dreams. I find we have pretty complementary skills which makes teamwork pretty easy with him.
I’m all about investing in yourself, and I started spending a lot more money on my own education. This course workshop was $3,000! It is normally $4,000 but because we went as a couple, we each paid $3,000. That’s kind of a lot of money, lol. But we managed to build out our outlines during the workshop which I thought was quite helpful.
Here are some shots of how it went down:
I’m just thinking about this now, that I was the youngest kid in the workshop. This is a nice feeling when lately I’ve been feeling like the oldest person in most rooms. Even if my Asian genes don’t show my age, I’m probably older than you think :P. Anyway, the course workshop made me realize – we all have a lot of time. Some of the students were in their 60’s-70’s and they’re still working on their online businesses/dreams. It goes to show that it really doesn’t matter what age you’re at. Anybody can work towards their passions anytime they want. We’re also younger than we think!
The course creation workshop was helpful mainly because of the time we set aside to work, as well as the network we’ve gained. I feel I knew most of the steps towards creating a course, but this workshop solidified my knowledge. Now that we got more in-person experience with Pat Flynn as well as other members in the group who are pretty far in their businesses, we can probably get their advice when we need it, or chime in when people have questions.
It’s been over a month since the workshop and we haven’t been recording the course because of other pressing matters, unfortunately. But I hope to change that by end of this month (December). My boyfriend and I want to get these courses out and start building up our authority in our niches. What also makes me excited is that one of our courses is an out-of-state real estate investing course, and we plan to do some investment ourselves and guide people step-by-step in the course to show how doable it really is.
Conclusion
2019 is almost done! I’m trying my best to scramble and get things in order for 2020. There’s a lot to do, and I’m excited as there are so many things to learn and build. I hope you guys enjoyed my November 2019 Progress Report around creating courses and getting interviewed. If you guys have additional comments let me know!
