News Archive

The latest addition to our family was born just before Christmas last year and I haven’t answered a phone call since.

I’m in a bit of a transition phase at the moment. After seven years I’ve been fortunate to achieve a number of things that most people would be happy with. I’ve significantly increased my income from my previous ‘proper job’ and I have managed to reduce the number of hours worked from 60+ to around 27. Not bad! Now I am happy to maintain my income but I would like to further reduce the hours that I work each week so I am trying to move by business from something that requires less day-to-day work and instead relies on more automation and short bursts of activity on my part. As I do this,…

This morning I woke up in my own bed. Nothing terribly exciting or remarkable there however we’ve just got back from a long weekend away on a boat on the Norfolk Broads. My partner is pregnant and is finding sleeping difficult. That combined with the size of the beds on a boat meant that I spent time sleeping anywhere but in the bed. After a few nights sleeping on the floor of a boat, you come to appreciate the finer things in life – like a mattress and decent pillows!

One area of my business which I am keen to grow is the hosting side. Hosting is a very easy market to enter as evidenced by the shear number of people doing it. You can set up the business within days and once set up, the profitability can be very high. The difficult part is attracting customers. There are literally thousands of companies offering web hosting, why should anyone pick you?

My first real online business focused on web site design for other small businesses. I spent a great deal of time looking at what other design firms were offering before settling on my own four packages, with increasing price points depending on the number of pages the customer needed on their site. At that point, I had basically no income and like everyone I was hustling, scraping by to earn enough money to survive.

We are in the second day of storm Ciara, a storm that is battering the UK and other parts of Western Europe. There’s flooding in some areas, power cuts and trees being blown over, causing traffic jams around the country. On Saturday morning I spent some time preparing the house before the storm hit later in the day. I checked the outside of the house, located some candles in case of a power cut and tied anything in the garden that could get blown away, down.

I recently added a blog post called ‘Stealth Marketing Gave me 10 New Customers in a Week’ which described how I came across a web hosting company that had lost its way.

The internet is full of bloggers and Instagrammers who seemingly travel the world with little more than their passport and laptop whilst earning plenty of money as they do it. This is the dream though, right? You are young, you do not have any commitments, want to visit new places and as a digital native, you can find ways to make money online. With the reduced cost of living abroad, what can go wrong? Plus, it’s much more fun than starting a business at home!

Around this time last year, I added a blog post to the web site of my hosting business. Around 12 months later, this one post bought in 10 new customers within one week and more are still trickling in.