Things have been pretty quiet on my blog lately as I have been building sites like crazy over the past couple of months. I changed my direction pretty dramatically after I have decided to go back to full time employment upon returning from the Philippines in December.
Tomorrow afternoon I fly from the UK to Manila to do 10 weeks of volunteer work on a Marine Conservation project. I studied marine biology at university, and I am very excited at the prospect of spending the next few months diving on some of the most diverse coral reefs in the world. The data that I will be helping to collect is part of an ongoing assessment of marine resources in the area, with a view to helping local people care for and manage their marine environment more sustainably. The work is going to involve a lot of diving surveys, as well as working with local communities. I have done similar work in the past and I really can’t wait to get out there and get involved.
As I mentioned above, I changed my business strategy fairly radically a couple of months ago. Basically, I decided that the best approach for the growth of my business would be to go back to full time employment, while investing some of my wages each month in to outsourcing. As I will be working fulltime, hopefully from January 2011, I decided to get on with building lots of sites and getting them up and running so that next year I can focus solely on building the sites out and doing SEO work on them. This was quite a relief as I was getting a bit sick of spinning articles and submitting them all over the web for backlinks to my older sites. Also I don’t think I was very efficient at it, as the process seemed to take me forever. Now I will just outsource the whole process and concentrate on the things that I enjoy, giving my business direction, and setting the websites themselves up how I want them.
When it launched a while back, I signed up for Affilojetpack, and I have been busy building 10 new sites in 4 different jetpack niches since then. All 10 new websites are now uploaded and complete with email autoresponder sequences, squeeze pages, a few pages of content, as well as some product reviews. While I am away I hope to spend a bit of time writing some articles for these sites and adding content to flesh them out a bit more. I have done some research and found that Globe (a telecommunications company in the Philippines) offers a USB device called “Globe Tattoo” that allows you to connect to the internet from anywhere with a mobile signal. It seems quite affordable, and will make working on my sites while away much easier than hunting down free wifi spots. I have checked and found out that the marine research station where I will be based has a decent Globe signal, so that should work out pretty well.
While I plan to do a bit of work while I am away, I will mainly be focusing on the marine research project, so I doubt I will get a huge amount of work done. I get back to the UK in December, at which point I will start applying for jobs and look in to recruiting a full time writer, probably from the Philippines funnily enough. I will outsource all the article writing, spinning and backlink building for all of my existing sites, and maybe build a couple more once I have finished SEO on my existing ones.
Hopefully I will be earning enough to both get by myself, and pay for the growth of my online business. I have checked the figures and they look feasible. Over the course of 2011 I will keep a close eye on my online income, reinvesting all of it back in to the business as I will have a full time wage to live on myself. When my income hits $1500 p/m over the costs of my outsourcing activities, I will go back to working on my sites full time (or maybe just do the whole 4 hour work week thing and keep the sites ticking over while my outsourcers do the heavy lifting).
I am not sure exactly what sort of job I will look for when I get back from the Philippines, but at the moment I am thinking of trying my luck with some local webdesign and SEO companies. Although I am a qualified marine biologist, there just aren’t any jobs around that pay decent money. My last job was as a science technician in a local college, so I might go back to that. I guess it just depends on what is available at the time I get back. Hopefully I will find something fairly interesting in the science/technology area, but I would be pretty happy to do anything for a while. The fact that I have an online business gives me something to look forward to and should keep me going through the 9 til 5 drudgery.
My dream would be to work for most of 2011 while building my online income, then hopefully by the end of the year be able quit safe in the knowledge that my business will be able to support itself and me. That would free me up to chase my passions, maybe doing some more voluntary marine conservation work, build some schools, and generally just help people less fortunate. I really hope I can achieve my goals and do something positive with my life. Nothing frightens me more than the thought of an easy comfortable life earning money for myself and never doing anything good for anyone. What a waste that would be.
I can see myself spending lots of time in the Philippines if my plans come to fruition. Not only are there marine conservation volunteering opportunities, but there are also numerous other charities for great causes, such as helping street children (of which there are many in the Philippines). The opportunity to do some really fulfilling voluntary work, coupled with the great outsourcing opportunities that the Philippines offers for my online business, could be a match made in heaven.
So I have lots to look forward to and am very excited about life at the moment. I will post another update in a week or so when I have settled in to life on a marine research station in the Philippines. Im sooo excited.
Now back to the packing, I wonder where my passport is?
Rodders
