Re-evaluating My Online Business

bynightwatch

838 followers

4 years ago

Why I Needed To Re-evaluate My Online Business

One aspect of my online business was in building WordPress sites for clients and then offering them an ongoing maintenance contract. It was a way of getting passive income.

That part of my business fell apart during the pandemic. People either didn't have the budgets to hire a web developer as budgets tightened and incomes shrank, or they had the time to learn the skills themselves while they were stuck at home.

So a large chunk of my income started to dwindle away as less and less business came in and maintenance contracts were cancelled.

Of course, I'm also an affiliate marketer but here too, I saw a decline in income. Passive income from subscription-based programs dropped as people cancelled their subscriptions. People also seemed to want to spend less on business products in favour of luxury items and ways to divert them from how the pandemic was affecting the world.

I also realized I had my fingers in too many pies, had too many plates spinning, so to speak.

I ran over 50 of my own websites in addition to those I was maintaining for clients. It was too much. Nothing was getting the time it deserved.

So I sold off as many of the websites as I could or I just put the domain names up for sale. This brought in some one-time income while reducing my hosting and domain registration fees.

I now maintain 3 core websites and 2 non-core sites.

I also swtiched to primarily promoting high-priced products in the affiliate marketing space.

A commission from just one sale covers my miving expenses for a month.

It beats trying to sell tens of lower-priced products. And it takes about the same amount of work and effort.

During this time, I've also been building my email lists. Two strategies I'm looking at to increase the number and rate of signups are advertising on YouTube and using a specific viral marketing technique. These are both low-cost paid advertising strategies which advertising on Google Ads or Facebook are not.

Returning To Cryptocurrencies

Earlier this year, I got back into investing in cryptocurrencies. I originally invested in 2014 and got out completely in 2018 with a nice profit but ignored that market until January 2022.

The reason I got back in was to make some of my money work for me. Sticking it in the bank was a money-wasting exercise as inflation far exceeds the interest paid on a savings account.

Leave your money in a bank account and it's purchasing power is being eroded by about 10% per year (at the current rate of inflation).

Investing in cryptocurrency programs was a way to combat that and make my money grow more than the rate of inflation.

But, since these are risky propositions, I only invested money I could afford to lose.

There were two new investment vehicles that made an appearance in 2021 - Decentralised Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and Decentraised Finance (DeFi) that caught my eye.

DAOs promised extremely high yields, like 100,000% APY which, to be honest, appealed to the greedy side of my and many others' natures.

DeFi is essentially banking without the regulations and without the oversight of a central authority. It provides far higher returns than traditional banking but is much more risky.

To cut to the chase, pretty much all the DAO projects failed. Some crashed and burned. Some were scams where the developers ran off with their investors' money. Some simply faded away because they were badly run but were not scams.

On average, I lost about 80% of what I invested in various programs.

Lesson 1 learned: don't invest in DAOs.

Lesson 2 learned: be very wary of investing in any project on the Avalanche blockchain as there's a huge failure rate.

Lesson 3 learned: be very wary of investing in "Node" projects. A node should be a server/computer on a blockchain that does work in validating transactions on that blockchain. However, "node" projects frequently use the word "node" as marketing speak for investment plans and not physical computer hardware. Most of these projects have failed or are in the process of doing so.

So I lost money on those too. In some cases I lost my entire investment.

The Crypto Downturn

If you follow the news about cryptocurrencies, you'll know that the prices of most (but not all) cryptos have been significantly down since about February. They bounce back a bit and then fall again.

Actually, it's nothing new. Bitcoin, the oldest crypto, has been doing this since its creation in 2009. Back then, you could buy a pizza for 10,000 Bitcoin. Actually, Bitcoin Pizza Day is celebrated on May 22nd every year now!

Today, those 10,000 Bitcoins would be worth about $300,000,000.

So, while the price of cryptos may rise and fall by large percentages in the short term, the long-term trend is that their value continues to increase over time.

A friend of mine bought a single Bitcoin a few years ago for a few hundred dollars.

He has no intention of selling it and sees it as a potential retirement fund when his work life is over in about 20 years.

If Bitcoin collapses in that time, he's out only a couple of hunred bucks which he won't even miss after all that time.

So Where Am I With Cryptos Now?

So after my trials and tribulations this year, I've settled on 4 programs that I believe have true long-term potential.

One of these is more of a Forex program but deposits and withdrawals are in Bitcoin. It pays about 1% of your investment each weekday (not on weekends) though you can never reclaim/withdraw your initial investment. You can level up your investment for higher daily earnings which is what I've been doing. I've been in this for over a year.

Another is actually an entire and growing crypto ecosystem but I've only invested in two parts of it - one which pays 1% per day on your investment (including on weekends) up to a maximum of 365% at which point your contract ends. I've been compounding my earnings each day to increase my investment and therefore my daily earnings. The other part I've invested in pays 3% per day on average but is riskier. Again your initial investment is locked for life and you can compound earnings daily.

The third project invests in real Nodes on a variety of blockchains. These pay returns, 85% of which are passed on to investors. This has been running for 30 months and has averaged a 10% per month return in that time. You can compound some or all of your earnings. It's lower reward but lower risk.

There is a fourth program I invested in is on the Avalanche blockchain. I think it has real potential but may not live up to expectations. It too is a node project but one where node is used as a term for an investment plan, not a piece of hardware. I did join this project before I decided not to join a node project like this again. So far, I've lost money on this one due to the price drop of their coin.

Cryptocurrencies, and indeed stocks, are in a bear market at the moment. They will bith recover at some point and prices will start rising again. At least that's what I believe, but what do I know?

My investments in the crypto projects I'm in are, essentially, a gamble. One or more of them might fail. One or more of them might succeed wildly. But if you're not in, you can't win.

Conclusion

So, in re-evaluating my online business, I've focused on promoting a handful of high-priced products and services and some quality subscription-based products and services that generate a passive income.

Some of my profits I put into crypto projects. Granted, I picked some doozies at the beginning and lost money as a result (but only money I could afford to lose) and now I'm funding 3 projects that look to be sustainable for the long term. And I have one outside gamble that may or not pay off over time.

The idea is for these crypto projects to provide another source of passive income in the future once I've been able to withdraw an amount equivalent to my initial investment and then to withdraw 25-50% of the ongoing earnings and compound (reinvest) the rest into the program to continouously increase my investment and earnings.

So what do you think? A good business plan or a fool's errand?