Live Without Working

No, the orders haven’t come pouring in, and I haven’t jetted off to some distant island. What’s happened is summer has struck in full strength, and my time has been spent setting up and filling a pool.

I’ve paused my adwords campaign because I think I’m just pissing away money. Clicks are not converting to orders, which probably means I need to improve the site and shirt designs. That takes time I haven’t had. It’s not a failure of Mr. Ferriss’ system, I’ve been spending the time on family 8-)

Clicks are also costing about $.90, which is just too high. That means a whole host of things, from keyword selection to ad content to site content needs tweaking. That too takes time.

In the mean time I’ve noticed that Google Alerts is kicking out a small but steady stream of new mentions for my scrapbooking t-shirts store, which will lead to more organic clicks anyway.

So please stay tuned - I’m not walking away, just temporarily distracted.

Incidentally, a friend  who’s a bit more successful than I suggested checking out www.webmasterworld.com. I also found www.warriorforum.com. I plan to review both in time.

I’m finding that Google Adwords Budget Optimizer system doesn’t seem to work very well. I suspect it’s because my ad budget is so small, but there’s not a lot of documentation to explain what a good budget should be. There is a function that will suggest a budget, but I’ve never seen it do anything but agree with the budget I’ve already set.

It may also be that I’m too impatient and am expecting results too quickly. On the internet it’s easy to get used to seeing a change or response in minutes, where days or weeks used to be the norm.

My new  store selling scrapbooking t-shirts - www.croppertops.com - is now open on Printfection.com. My Adwords campaign has produced a massive 20 clicks so far, but this is a pretty small niche and Google’s budget optimizer still figuring out what to do.

No orders yet, but I think that’s to be expected. I haven’t optimized anything, and the designs need some improvement. I chose Printfection.com because of their pricing and policies, but their interface & management tools are more primitive than CafePress.com. I may open a store on both, but I would prefer to use my own domain and I’ve read (but not confirmed) that CafePress frowns on redirections.

I need to tune the ads, upload more designs, and as sales come in explore other, more expensive, advertising venues.

So far so good!

I got the final version of the logo this morning, and got it up on the store. I added a design to provide a little more variety, and then “opened” the store for business. I also got some Google Adwords advertising going - not much, $20/day - to see what kind of response I would get. I’ve got Google analytics set up but it seems to have a bit of trouble with same-day stats.

I’m excited! I’d be a lot more excited if I got an order, but with ~20 hits so far that’s a bit optimistic.

There aren’t any line breaks between paragraphs. The correct tags are in the HTML, but for whatever reason it ain’t showing up right. I’m working on it, so please be patient.

What does it mean to live without working?

I’m still exploring that concept, but so far I’ve decided that it means living a unified life instead of two lives as most of us do now.

Most of us live two lives. We live our working life, which involves going to work, working, and all the other stuff that goes along with that life. Business travel. Trips to the dry cleaners. Reading business books to keep up with the latest trends. We may enjoy some of this or maybe not.

The second life (going in order of time spent)  is our personal life or family life. This is the one where we do what we want. We spend time with our families, or our significant others. We enjoy hobbies, and do the things that bring us great joy.

The problem is that the first tends to make us money that we spend on the second. We need the first in order to live the second. The problem is that most of us would rather live the second than the first - we work to live rather than live to work, right?

Does it have to be that way? What if we could find a way to live a life we’re happy with, that gave us what we wanted, but didn’t require us to work? What if we could live without working?

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I want, and how to  get it. I’ve read several books, and tried several things. I have many more books and ideas yet to try. This blog will discuss what I’m reading and trying, and hopefully it will help some other people. Hopefully it will also build some traffic as well ;-)