Greg had got fed up with the corporate treadmill and had taken time out to travel when Fiona was told she was being made redundant. She decided that she too didn’t want to keep on in the corporate world and says she realised it was damaging her health. The couple attended a three-day internet marketing seminar and their lives changed from then on.
Their book is a crash course in internet marketing. It tracks every step of what you need to do if you want to sell online and explains the different types of marketing, including affiliate marketing where you don’t need your own product to sell. It goes into the detail of how to set up your own website and how to use social media and it speaks about the importance of giving yourself deadlines and having a mentor, even to find out what might be the best type of business for you.
The authors say having a mentor is necessary for a variety of reasons, including helping you do due diligence research around the best niche for you, getting you started as quickly as possible, keeping you on track and helping you find partners for joint ventures.
They say having a good
mentor is about investing in yourself and your business. “You will make a huge saving in the long run,” they counsel. “Having a mentor is something that will supercharge your business and improve your results.” They also recommend being a part of a supportive like-minded community.
In addition to support networks and the practicalities of setting up a business, including everything from how to avoid being scammed to how to get your family to buy-in to your new lifestyle, the book also recommends tools which can help you, such as password storage software, auto Twitter software and a keyword and niche research tool.
The authors don’t specify the kind of earnings you can make as they say this depends on what you put in and what you want out of your business, but they do say that if you work hard and smart building your business on the side of your regular work “you could easily be sacking your boss within six months”.
The laptop lifestyle certainly seems to have suited the authors. The book is sprinkled with pictures of them travelling the world. If marketing and selling products, whether information or actual goods, is your thing, the book gives you all the information you need to get started.
They say: “We can work anywhere in the world that has an internet connection. That’s why we were able to spend a summer in Madeira, go off to France skiing with our friends and fly off to Malaysia, taking time to experience Singapore and the Malay peninsula in the process.”