As you may have noticed, post count has dropped off quite a bit this month. It’s become harder and harder for me to stay motivated to write on this blog. I’ve known that this day would come one day, and now it’s finally here. This is goodbye.
Beyond Bounds started as an experiment for me. I didn’t know anything about blogging. Really, I didn’t know very much about how the internet really works, besides some basic HTML that I learned in high school. I used the internet as a consumer, but I had never tried to produce anything. Beyond Bounds was my first attempt at actually producing something for others. Before this blog, my life was focused on consumption – entertainment and information. Now, I understand the power and importance of adding to the world, and how through that process you actually gain more than you give – a lot more.
Beyond Bounds also began as a language / culture blog about China and learning Chinese. At the time there weren’t many people on the internet writing about it, and I wanted to share my experiences. The truth is – I was very naive. I thought I knew things, but now I realize that I didn’t and don’t know everything, not even close. I got lucky, and I didn’t even understand why. You can go back to some of my first posts and you’ll see a difference in language learning understanding from then until now. Through blogging I learned a lot about language learning, but most importantly I learned how to learn.
Learning about cultures and language is one passion of mine that will always keep, but right now the time has passed for that as you can see from the sudden change in topic of my newest posts. I don’t want to write anymore about sentence mining, how the brain learns, or any of that. This stuff doesn’t add much to my current life situation. I’m a firm believer in always focusing on things that will have the greatest positive impact in your life, and that thing happens to be money at the moment.
I want location and financial independence, and they are more important to me now than anything else. My entire 2011 focus is on making this happen, and if it doesn’t happen this year, next year will also focus on this. I’m willing to make whatever sacrifices it will take to reach my goal, and this blog is going to be the first sacrificial lamb. However, this is not because I don’t have time to write, but because this blog isn’t going anywhere and no longer adds as much to my life as it did before.
5 Reasons why I’m letting this blog go:
1) It lost focus and can’t gain it back. Blogs have archives, and to me this blog is stuck in language / culture land. When I think about writing here, it takes my focus off of what is most important to me right now. Most of my readers still are here for my older language posts, which keeps bringing me back into the past. I also have to see the “language / China” categories everyday. I need a clean slate. It may sound silly, but psychologically this is important for me.
2) It’s losing readership. A blog that is losing readership overtime is a blog that needs to make some major changes. I changed the site layout, but honestly it doesn’t matter. A blog can be super successful with a simple free layout; it’s all about the content. The fact that this blog is losing readership kills my motivation. It feels like I’m going backwards.
3) I want to take a new direction. This site doesn’t reflect who I am anymore. It was a great learning platform, but I need a platform that reflects who I am right now so I can passionately work on my projects, and then passionately write about them.
4) A blog needs to have a definable focus so it can dominate in SEO and become a major player. If I focus on learning Chinese, I bet I could become the Chinese expert, but I’m not focused on learning Chinese anymore. Writing about it would make me feel that I’m living a double lifestyle, which is tiring. This site has language, escape 9-5, health, and China as it’s focus… that’s not a focus, it’s a personal blog. I don’t want to write a personal blog anymore – I want to write stuff that will be helpful to the world, be a platform for my own learning, get my name out there, and maybe even make me some money. Personal blogs rarely succeed, and I know this one won’t.
5) The experiment is over – I’m ready to take blogging seriously. I’ve been telling myself for a long time that this blog is my training grounds for future ventures, but I never set a goal for when the training was over. Now that training is over. My tipping point was that I’ve learned what it takes to succeed and built the personal skills to get there. This blog has been a constant reminder for me about what I want to do, who I want to be, and where I want to go in life, and it’s constantly pushed me forward. I took a huge break in between 2009 and 2010, but once again the blog pulled me back to life thanks to a reader question in my email box. I now have the confidence to move forward and KNOW that I will never give up again. I’m ready to take off the training wheels and get going.
What next?
I’m going to start a new blog, but this time with a focus that can be expressed in 1-2 sentences. I’m going to do keyword searches and plan my SEO attack. I’m going to be actually planning post topics and series’ and preparing them well. I’m going to be using video and audio in addition to text.
I’m not going to be writing about language, sorry. I haven’t settled on the exact topic yet, but it will most likely have something to do with business. Exactly what angle and how I’m going to do it will be decided in the coming weeks. I’ll post the new website on here, which will be my last post.
Thanks again everyone for reading and the support. I hope some of you stay with me in this incredible journey, but of course I will understand those that choose to spend their time elsewhere.
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You know that you’re business is set to go when someone else is already doing it
While still working on the manufacturing details of my product, I found that someone has already started selling a product designed almost exactly the same. ”SHIT!” was my first reaction. I started to panic, my palms started sweating, and I called my manufacturer screaming at the top of my lungs “what is taking so long? We missed our chance!”
Then I slowed down, took a breath and realized something – they did my market testing for me. I don’t have to test to see if the market is ripe for my product, which would have taken another month anyway. Now I know that there is a market for my product AND I have information about pricing. These guys are selling the product for a much higher price than I had originally planned, and are selling a lot. They just saved me a month of trouble, even though I was sort of looking forward to all of the things I could learn in the testing phase. On top of that they let me know that profit margins are much higher than originally anticipated. SWEET.
One company can’t dominate the entire market
There are always going to be new ways to reach new customers. In this case, this company can only be found on the Chinese version of Ebay so far, which tells me that they are just getting started and that there is plenty of time and room for me to join the fray. I’m not afraid of someone else entering the market. Actually, this takes me somewhat back to what many people were telling me to do in the first place – find a product already on the market, and sell it competitively. That I can do.
This screams “e-bay” business to me, and although “e-bay” is better than nothing, it’s not a long-term business model that I want to consider; mostly because of the high competition price cutting that goes on. It’s a good place to start learning the ropes though. It all reminds me of the “pit” from the TV show Spartacus. Make your way out of the pit and you may some day become a business gladiator!
Competitors doing well means that your business can do well too
We don’t all have to be the first one on the market. You don’t need to always have a competitive edge to make money. If the market is saturated, you can always look for new ventures, or try to find a competitive edge either with a new product design (hard road), price point (short term), or by just being smarter from production to customer service (medium difficulty).
The guy that lives next door to my mom in our little tiny town in Northern California sells random look-alike electronic items online, and he makes a decent income doing it. He has his contacts in Hong Kong that send him the newest in fake electronics every other month, and he e-bays his way to stardom. There must be a thousand or more people doing this, and 10 new competitors flood these product markets everyday, and yet they all still make money – or else they wouldn’t be there. While I wouldn’t want to join that rat race, it’s sure a lot better than many alternatives.
My co-worker sells everything from board games to iphones purely through word of mouth. All of these things are extremely competitive and he can barely be competitive on price; however, he has one thing going for him that 99% of the other competitors don’t – trust. His customers trust him, so they come to him in a market in which you never know when your getting ripped off (I’m talking about the Chinese market here guys). Setting up a little stall and selling to people you know is a great business model in China for many people. While it’s not scalable – which is the ultimate goal – it at least gets you off the ground. This guy moves so much product through our company (he sits right behind me), that I often have to squeeze through the aisle to get through.
I love small business
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I purchased a package of amazing business resources at a 72 hour sale not too long ago, and I’ve been slowly going through all of the e-books. One of the books included was an SEO guide put out by one of the best down-to-earth business bloggers out there. I’d like to give Ittybiz credit as I share some of the ideas for free here. If you want the full run-down on Search Engine Optimization, you should probably look for it. For a site that wants to “help 1000 people quit their jobs this year”, I can’t help but sign on. The only thing I have to criticize Ittybiz on is the fact that the Ninja SEO School book was nowhere to be found on her site; that’s pretty fail. Good luck finding it though.
Search Engine Optimization is super simple
The book makes SEO seem so simple that even a monkey could do it. After reading the book and then looking at my own site, I realized that a monkey could run my site better than I do, because I have the worst search engine optimization on the planet.
When optimizing your site for Google, the last thing you wanna do is any of the “tricks” found online. Tricks are for kids and hookers anyway – not those of us that are legitimately trying to quit our day jobs and make some money online (hookers aside). Don’t buy back-links. Don’t spam the shit out of your site with keywords. Don’t do anything that looks unnatural.
Basically – if you have to stop for a moment and think “is this gonna get me banned from Google?” – it will. Don’t do it.
3 Things to do to Rock SEO
Google is super straightforward it the way it crawls the web, and standard HTML and text are there to communicate directly with those crazy SEO spiders.
1) Know your keywords and target them hard. Focus on a couple main keywords while also branching into long tail ones.
If you look at this blog, you’ll realize something – my keywords are all over the place. Actually, I never put ANY time optimizing this site for search engines. I kinda write randomly and just hope for the best. I’ve never really tried to bring this site to the top, mostly because I’m schizophrenic – one day I’m a language blogger, the next a business blogger, and the next a monkey with a typewriter. But whatever, this is my personal blog. For a blog that’s trying to actually build traffic, that makes no sense. You need to learn about your keywords with keyword tools and then target the ones with the most searches and least competition in combination. When doing anything on your site, just keep in mind what impact it will have in Google.
This is really freaking easy. For instance, if I decided to make this blog about learning Chinese, then my main keyword would be “learn Chinese” and probably “learning Chinese”. Long-tail keywords are just a fancy name for keywords that have very few searches. So why do you want them? Because they are easy to rank high for, and with lots of them you will eventually build traffic.
A long-tail keyword could be “Self-learn Chinese in Beijing” or something. You can find all of these through keyword search tools. Once you get a list of maybe 100 keywords, you would keep those words in mind when writing. I might write a post “Self-learn Chinese in Beijing” and talk about my own experience. If another key were “Chinese bathrooms smell”, then I would use that phrase in a post about “Chinese bathrooms”.
The best thing about these long-tail keywords is that they all help build your main keyword. ”Chinese bathrooms”, “Chinese freakonomics” and “Chinese schizophrenia” all help me build my “Chinese” ranking.
2) Optimize all titles. The title of your blog, the subtitle, the title of your posts, and the headings in your posts all communicate with the google search engine optimization crawlers that “this is what is important. Take note!” If you’re trying to sell widgets, then the title text of your blog should read “Widgets for Sale” or “Buy Widgets”, or something like that; then you should probably have another page on your site that is “Widgets”, and another one for “Buy Widgets”, then maybe another one “About Widgets”. The posts under those pages might be “10 Things about Widgets”, “Red Widget”, “Blue Widget”, and “How to use Widgets”. Don’t be witty – SEO crawlers don’t have a sense of humor and don’t want to guess at what keywords you need to be listed under.
It’s all super logical and easy. Everything ranks in importance, and it all tells a story to the crawler. Title text is first: “I’m selling widgets”. Crawler: “Hey this is a site about selling widgets, we probably should send people that want to buy widgets here”. Page titles: “Buy Widgets”. Crawler: “Ok, second confirmation about buying widgets”. And so on.
Using the h1 – h6 HTML font tags also help tell the crawlers what’s important. In your text you should make sure to use them to emphasize things that are important, and it should contain keywords. (h1) Buy Widgets From Us (/h1) will gain you brownie points with the crawler. (Not real HTML syntax)
3) Optimize Anchor text (aka link text), and inter-linking throughout your site. Don’t link to a page on your site with the text “click here”. I didn’t know this before, but that basically only helps the page linked gain ranking with the keywords “click here” – which I’m guessing you don’t really want to be ranked for. If instead the link text was “buy widgets” then the page would gain keyword ranking for “buy widgets”. I’ll bet that people searching for “buy widgets” are more likely to buy widgets than those that search “click here”.
There are quite a few more things mentioned in the book and I’m sure I’ll go back and reference it until it’s all ingrained deep within my skull, but the above 3 stuck out the most as the easiest actions that you can take to optimize your website that I never paid attention to, sadly.
According to the Ninja SEO School (the name of the book), these easy changes mean the difference between no ranking and top 10 page ranking. Shit, no wonder this blog hasn’t taken off yet (not to mention all of the other problems, ha).
Why Do I Care About SEO?
I’m trying to get out of 9-5 so I can travel freely and learn more language, among other things. I’m doing this by making money online, or at least trying to. In order to make money online, you usually need a website and that website needs traffic. One of the most effective and cheapest ways to gain traffic is through Google Search. I want to dominate Google Search, so I care about search engine optimization.
I also decided that I want to try to drive people to this site so they can tell me how cool I am. Isn’t blogging awesome?
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My college physics professor was a quirky old man from Transylvania and he had an odd way of teaching. At the end of every segment he would close with “and the most important thing is don’t get confused“. My roommate always laughed at how ridiculous such a statement is – is getting confused really up to me?
“Don’t Get Confused” has stuck with me since college. Confusion not only leads to inaction, but it also leads to loss of motivation and fear, which then leads to avoidance. Yet, it’s not actually confusion that is at fault, but rather our reaction to the feeling.
Confusion is a warning sign – a feeling. Confusion itself is not a bad thing, just like a fever or a runny nose. These are signs telling you to slow down. We have systems in place to help us direct our attention, but if we respond inappropriately bad things happen.
The most common reaction to confusion is avoidance. We are afraid of failure, and confusion can definitely lead to failure. Ironically the most common reason for failure isn’t the confusion, but rather avoidance of the problem. So here is where my professor steps in and says “don’t get confused”. There. Problem solved, right?
Unfortunately, my professor’s words were a little lacking in logic, but I will forever thank him for directing me toward a better solution. It’s impossible to not get confused; however, it is possible to be aware of your own confusion and deal with it before it crashes through your life.
Confusion brings the big fuzzy white fog, as I like to describe it. You can’t see what you should do next. The next step in the math problem, or the next move in your business plan all get lost in the mess of equations. When this happens, it’s time to slow down and realize that you’re confused.
Confusion is best dealt with by first taking a deep breath. Do something simple and clear your mind. Meditation is awesome, but exercise will do the trick. I like doing yoga. Getting sick also helps clear your mind of all of the garbage that’s been festering away inside your head – I’ve been sick for the past few days, and my mind is as calm can be. When you clear your mind, you start with a clean slate; your mental “RAM” gets cleared, and can be allocated properly to tackle new obstacles. You may notice that this will be a recurring theme in the way I do things – a clear mind works better than a busy one.
What comes next really depends on what the problem is, so I won’t go too far into it; but I will say that taking action and then correcting yourself later is often better than thinking harder about the solution now. Sure, you’re first action is likely to fail – but through failure you get feedback and learn, which leads you to new possible solutions and new actions, which then give new feedback.
The better and quicker you respond to confusion, the more success you’ll find in life. Maybe one day you’ll be able to embrace confusion as a buddy, as it’s a buzzer telling you it’s break time. ”Confused? Yes I am! I’m off to the beach.”
I’d even say that the more often your confused the better – it’s a sign that you’re challenging yourself.
Then again, Zen masters don’t get confused, because their minds are always crystal clear, but they’re a myth anyway.
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I don’t care how cliche new years resolution posts are; they are important nonetheless. While the eventual goal is to not rely on your external environment to be able to make radical changes, we can’t deny the power that our environment has over our thoughts and emotions. When you move to a new place, you feel that you get to start over. The same thing happens when a new year rolls around – you feel like you get a new chance to start with a clean state.
2011 Focus: Location Independence
Everything is changing for me in 2011. I’ve never been so excited about so many things as I have about my plans for this year. I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. I see that location independence will actually happen for me, although I’m not sure when.
How I’m getting there:
1) I started a translation business, already have my first client and have finished 2 projects with great results. I’m working together with another translator buddy on this and I’m excited about where this can go. I don’t love translation but this is something that can get me out of 9-5. I’m the main translator right now, but as projects grow I will be giving out work to fellow translators and splitting the profits.
2) My first 4hww project is looking good. The design is done and I’m now looking carefully for a Chinese manufacturer that won’t steal the idea. I’m going to have to invest a bit of my savings into the project, but it is for sure worth it; the experience itself is worth the cost. Fail or succeed it doesn’t matter- challenge and growth are most important.
3) There are quite a few start-up ventures and business ideas that I may be getting involved in. I’ll be choosing one venture to put my heart and soul into and make something happen. Ventures range from import export to video games to cool websites. Some of these don’t require a lot of time and thus can be done side-by-side with my other projects, but some of them may require quitting my job and working full-time on.
I’m not so worried about the “how” anymore. After being exposed to all of this for so long, my brain has adjusted to the point where the “what” and the “how” don’t seem as important as just showing up and getting stuff done. In my mind, location independence is just a matter of time and work now, not a matter of hows and whats.
When you spend enough time with something, things just start to click. It reminds me of learning Chinese. When I learned Chinese, there was a long period of confusion in the beginning where fluency just didn’t seem like something I was capable of. One day things just clicked, and I was fluent. I didn’t notice the change – it happened so gradually that I couldn’t notice it. The same thing has happened recently with thinking about business and independence – I have been living and breathing it for long enough now that things just make sense.
Now that location independence is foreseeable in the near future, there are some scary choices that need to be made.
Here are some scary choices for in 2011:
1) Quit my job? (luckily people at my work can’t read English, or I might be fired first!)
My 9-5 career is taking off. I’ve moved from localization manager to product designer to product manager, and regional operations manager is next on the list of very possible 2011 promotions. I manage a growing team and am planning a huge product launch. I actually like my job, even though I hate 9-5.
How do I step away from this, and do I? Where is that point where it’s more in my interest to leave than stay. If I stay on this path, I may one day become an industry leader. Does that even matter?
I know that I have to step away from it, so that’s what I’m going to do.
2) Where to go?
It’s been so long since I’ve been home and really spent time with my family that I’d like to head home for a good amount of time. My grandpa was just diagnosed with late stage cancer, so I’d like to spend time with him.
Going home also means that I can lower my financial goals before I go location independent. This leads to my next question:
3) When?
The when is very important for me because it determines how much time and money I will have to work with. If I leave my job too soon, then I may not have the money saved up to push me through to profitability; however, I will be able to put more of my time and effort into my own ventures. The more I wait, the longer it will take for any of my ideas to get off the ground, as I still spend 11 hours a day with 9-5 (actually my job is 9:30-6:30 and I spend 2 hours on the subway everyday going to and from work). The longer I wait, the more likely I am to get burned out as well, and we all know what that means to success.
Since I have already decided that I will be going home, my budget does not have to be very large. I will have free rent and food for the most part. The only money that I will really need will be for the initial investment in my businesses, which I guess will be between $2000 and $3000. It’s best to have more to work with though, so $6k would make me feel better. I’d like to shoot for $10k and that might take until summer.
What happens when I free up my time? I’ll have 11 more hours a day to work on what I want to work on. That’s a lot of time.
I’ll have to play the when by ear. If I can find more translation clients, then the when may be sooner rather than later, as I’ll have constant location independent income coming in.
The goal is to:
1) Gain location independent income to help stretch my savings, but not spend so much time on it to take away from other ventures. 1-2 hours a day is ideal.
2) Have most of the Chinese side of my businesses wrapped up and ready to before I leave. I need to take advantage of my connections and location while I can.
3) Save as much money as I can by living a minimalist lifestyle.
I’m down-sizing my lifestyle to the minimum in order to save as much of my income as possible. I’m selling my piano and most of my other possessions. I’m moving to a cheaper apartment. Right now I have my own 2 bedroom apartment that costs around $750 a month. I’m moving into a shared apartment where I’ll be spending $300 a month.
4) Show up everyday and work hard and smart
Fear:
The biggest obstacle in my path is fear. When fear starts creeping up on me, I start to procrastinate. I put off decisions. I put of work. I stop showing up. All of these result in failures, so overcoming fear is going to be important in 2011.
In order to go after my bigger dreams, I have to take risks. Quitting my job will be a huge risk. Honestly, I’m scared. I’m scared that none of my businesses will become profitable enough to sustain me. I’m afraid of getting stuck doing translation. I’m afraid that I’ll run out of money and will have to work menial jobs to get by until I have to go back to the grindstone. In summary, I’m afraid of failure, and I’m afraid of the rejection that comes with failure.
These fears make it all more exciting. We grow the most when we face our fears, and I know that this will help me grow the most. 2011 will be a year of facing fears.
On the first day of 2011, I faced two of my biggest fears – the fear of being alone, and the fear of rejection. I’m not going to go into detail about it, but I ended a relationship that was bringing me down (actually bringing both of us down). Instead of draining much of my energy in a relationship that just wasn’t working anymore, I now feel fully recharged and ready to move forward with my life.
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Happy new year everyone! I wish you all the best. I hope 2011 brings as much excitement to everyone out there as it is going to for me.
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