[Monopoly Journey] Achieve Financial Freedom

[rispel]

== Monopoly Journey to Financial Freedom ==​

Hey everyone! I'm starting this journey in the hope to get some additional insights and feedback from the pro's. I read a lot of amazing journeys already and thought it was time to do one myself. So what's with the Monopoly thing? I believe in creating long term online assets which can increase in value over time. In addition: I'm starting with nothing and would like to end up with hotels

== TARGET ==
So the second part of the title is Financial Freedom. For me the target is dependent on my lifestyle, and I use the following formula:
Monthly Expenses - Online Income = Positive
In my case I need about 2k gross per month as a bare minimum. That means that I need about €70 per day net profit. I want to reach this goal somewhere in September, which gives me about 170 days.

== HOUSES ==
And with houses, I mean online assets. Everyone is free to their own opinion, but the priority of my future assets is as follows:
1. Websites - E-commerce
2. Websites - Ads/CPA
3. Mailing list
4. Social Media accounts

== STRATEGY ==
Since I want to have multiple income streams I will use different methods. I know that I will only succeed through focus, so I will start a couple of projects simultaneously and choose the one which shows most potential. To refer back to Monopoly, I will buy some streets and see which one I can start building a house on.

== JOURNEY ==
I will update "whenever I feel like it", but at least once every 10 days The first step will be setting up a new VPS and finding some domains. The first revenue should be made around May 1st, so I got quite some time for the sites to be build and age. I will do most stuff myself (except writing articles) and will let everyone know when and where I outsource.

It would be awesome if my BHW heroes would notice this thread and help me along the way. I was very impressed with the dedication and progress of Kinlee, ComputerJunkie and Royserpa. Hopefully I will be able to follow in their footsteps and reach my first goal.

 

[Jwick]

You will have to need a lot of traffic to make the asset more valuable right? This will be tough.
Good luck on your journey

 

[arlamelk]

Ambitious project, but these are the best. Good luck!

 

[IsLive]

I am in the same boat as you are, good luck! Although I do have the passive income so I have less pressure, hope you will have the same relief soon!

I do have 1 question, why a vps? And can you attach that to your hosting company?
I tried to search the forums with no luck, maybe you can help me out?

 

[blogzandstuff]

Well I hope you pass Go and don't end up in Jail

 

[Buzzika]

subscribing to this journey...
if you need a "discipline buddy", i.e. someone to checkup on your progress and tell you to eat shit if you're slacking on a daily basis, hit me up.

I can also use the same when I slack off too. I have never had someone to hold me accountable. Could be a good thing.

 

[IsLive]

subscribing to this journey...
if you need a "discipline buddy", i.e. someone to checkup on your progress and tell you to eat shit if you're slacking on a daily basis, hit me up.

I can also use the same when I slack off too. I have never had someone to hold me accountable. Could be a good thing.

You guys are so helpful, I'm really loving this community.

@satyawrat a discipline buddy is really a must tbh. I have one as well and it really gets you going.

 

[JLTMzz]

Very interesting,will follow, good luck

 

[Jwick]

You guys are so helpful, I'm really loving this community.

@satyawrat a discipline buddy is really a must tbh. I have one as well and it really gets you going.

subscribing to this journey...
if you need a "discipline buddy", i.e. someone to checkup on your progress and tell you to eat shit if you're slacking on a daily basis, hit me up.

I can also use the same when I slack off too. I have never had someone to hold me accountable. Could be a good thing.

This is so true. Helps alot, I know.

 

[Coepi]

Hey @rispel
I have the exact same goal, the exact same timeline/deadline, and I'm also doing the same you're planning on doing (ecommerde, website for the ads and social media as a source of income and traffic for my websites).

Definitely going to follow your journey!
Good luck man!

 

[rispel]

You will have to need a lot of traffic to make the asset more valuable right? This will be tough.
Good luck on your journey

@Jwick
I agree. My plan is to short-term buy traffic (social advertising mostly) and convert them either in buyers or subscribers to the newsletter. Eventually most traffic should be "free", and I prefer to use the 80/20 principle, where 80 procent is free and 20 procent is bought.

Ambitious project, but these are the best. Good luck!

@arlamelk
Thanks! Aim for the moon...

I am in the same boat as you are, good luck! Although I do have the passive income so I have less pressure, hope you will have the same relief soon!

I do have 1 question, why a vps? And can you attach that to your hosting company?
I tried to search the forums with no luck, maybe you can help me out?

@IsLive
Fortunately I also run a small company which makes enough to get me through the months, but getting it on a more 'passive' level would be great. The more desperate you become, the more eager you become as well in my opinion.

Regarding the VPS > my webhost offers one (Dutch provider). It is not managed, but they do offer images with CentOS 7 and DirectAdmin installed. I had to do some serious Googling to get it where I wanted, but after it was setup I only needed to redirect the DNS to the right IP address and everything worked great. I am not very knowledgeable about servers, but feel free to add me on skype and we'll see if I can help

Well I hope you pass Go and don't end up in Jail

@blogzandstuff haha yea I thought about the jail part. Better not go blackhat

subscribing to this journey...
if you need a "discipline buddy", i.e. someone to checkup on your progress and tell you to eat shit if you're slacking on a daily basis, hit me up.

I can also use the same when I slack off too. I have never had someone to hold me accountable. Could be a good thing.

@satyawrat
Sounds great man! Sorry I didn't respond earlier. I also have some other stuff going so I won't be putting in hours every day of the week, but being hold accountable sounds good. I got a detailed planning which I am supposed to stick to. Could you add me on Skype? Username rispel.im

You guys are so helpful, I'm really loving this community.

@satyawrat a discipline buddy is really a must tbh. I have one as well and it really gets you going.

@IsLive hear hear

Very interesting,will follow, good luck

Thanks

This is so true. Helps alot, I know.

Looking forward to having one

Hey @rispel
I have the exact same goal, the exact same timeline/deadline, and I'm also doing the same you're planning on doing (ecommerce, website for the ads and social media as a source of income and traffic for my websites).

Definitely going to follow your journey!
Good luck man!

@Coepi
Let me know how it goes! If you want, we can connect on Skype to discuss progress and ideas!

 

[rispel]

== UPDATE #1 ==
So 10 days have past. So far I've mostly been doing the ground work, which is against my own strategy of starting 'lean' this time. Shame on me and hopefully a discipline buddy will help


What I've been up to:
- Setting up a VPS with CentOS7 and DirectAdmin to host my own sites with decent speed and at low cost (expenses are €15 per month, including legit DirectAdmin license). This took me well over 2 days, since I didn't know sh*t about servers.
- Setting up SSL on the domains. Apparently you can get them free from Let's Encrypt and it has a big advantage against most non-ecommerce competitors in my country (over here you are required by law to have an SSL certificate when dealing with personal data, thus e-commmerce).
- Keyword & competitor research. Nothing fancy, I took a 30-day trial at SemRush and downloaded some competitor organic ranking keywords in niches I am familiar with or interested in. SemRush already has metrics for the competition and in addition I will perform a search query and use the Chrome plugin SeoQuake to manually evaluate.


First properties
I will update you tomorrow or the day after with more in-depth information about my first projects. I have bought a couple of domain names and actually purchased an entire website from someone I know. My lesson here was to not overestimate the worth of a website if someone doesn't update it anyone. It isn't great, but it gives me a head start on aging and linkbuilding. The metrics: DA 6 PA 21 TF11 CF18, 7 backlinks in Majestic.


Overall planning
Thought I would share this with everyone, so I can be held accountable even though I'm taking this monopoly game one step at a time. The initial idea when I started planning this out was to have my first profit by May 1st. From then on I need to increase (linear) with about 0,60 per day to reach my goal in September. From May onwards I'll update with a graph at least every 10 days.

Thanks for the support so far! Really appreciate it!

 

[Buzzika]

== UPDATE #1 ==
So 10 days have past. So far I've mostly been doing the ground work, which is against my own strategy of starting 'lean' this time. Shame on me and hopefully a discipline buddy will help


What I've been up to:
- Setting up a VPS with CentOS7 and DirectAdmin to host my own sites with decent speed and at low cost (expenses are €15 per month, including legit DirectAdmin license). This took me well over 2 days, since I didn't know sh*t about servers.
- Setting up SSL on the domains. Apparently you can get them free from Let's Encrypt and it has a big advantage against most non-ecommerce competitors in my country (over here you are required by law to have an SSL certificate when dealing with personal data, thus e-commmerce).
- Keyword & competitor research. Nothing fancy, I took a 30-day trial at SemRush and downloaded some competitor organic ranking keywords in niches I am familiar with or interested in. SemRush already has metrics for the competition and in addition I will perform a search query and use the Chrome plugin SeoQuake to manually evaluate.


First properties
I will update you tomorrow or the day after with more in-depth information about my first projects. I have bought a couple of domain names and actually purchased an entire website from someone I know. My lesson here was to not overestimate the worth of a website if someone doesn't update it anyone. It isn't great, but it gives me a head start on aging and linkbuilding. The metrics: DA 6 PA 21 TF11 CF18, 7 backlinks in Majestic.


Overall planning
Thought I would share this with everyone, so I can be held accountable even though I'm taking this monopoly game one step at a time. The initial idea when I started planning this out was to have my first profit by May 1st. From then on I need to increase (linear) with about 0,60 per day to reach my goal in September. From May onwards I'll update with a graph at least every 10 days.

Thanks for the support so far! Really appreciate it!

I am assuming you are not hosting an email server. A better, easier route would have been an Ubuntu vps on LinkedIn or digital ocean + serverpilot.io. You only end up paying for the vps.

serverpilot is limited in functionality, but if hosting wordpress, php sites is all you need it is a good choice.

Handles the setup, security config and management for you. also has wordpress auto install

 

[rispel]

== UPDATE #2 ==
Omg, a year later...! I remembered that I had this thread a couple of weeks ago, but decided to wait until it was a full year after the previous update

So what happened?
One of my projects took off in a very early stage. The workload related to this project was huge, since it was coded as an MVP (nothing was automated). I'm talking 14h workdays, 6 days a week.

Did I reach my target?
Yes and no. Strictly taken I'm financially independent based on my opening post (Monthly Expenses - Online Income = Positive).
My monthly expenses have risen, but the income is still higher. However the income is 90% from one project and I have failed to setup more 'properties'. In addition the income is becoming less and I risk losing my financial freedom within a couple of months. In addition I had to scale up with an office and employees, resulting in less overall freedom with regards to traveling and working 'my own hours'.

What now?
I'm going to give it another shot. Not sure how to structure it and if I want to revive this thread, but I'll give that some thought!

 

[danko6]

Good luck buddy

 

[Naroha]

Monthly Expenses - Online Income = Positive

I hope you are just bad at math.
Congratulations with you earnings and keep it up!

 

[rispel]

HELP NEEDED
I'm planning on launching a bunch of websites, some in the same niche. All sites will be monetized, although they might have different revenue models. I might think I will try different services from BHW with regards to backlinks, social profiles etc.

Question:
Would you suggest to host on different IP's to prevent possible backfires from some services? Would a penalty hit multiple projects on the same IP or is it restricted to a domain? I will use cloudflare for most international projects and the nameserver of my host.

Looking forward to your input!

 

[rispel]

I hope you are just bad at math.
Congratulations with you earnings and keep it up!

Better at math then writing down my thoughts apparently, lol. The equation should be a negative number, but a positive addition to my bank account . When I said it out loud it made perfect sense haha "my monthly expenses should be covered by online income".

Still not sure how to re-structure this thread, but to make things more goal oriented:
First goal: € 3.000 gross income per month from new projects
Stretch goal: € 100.000 by the end of the year
LoL goal: enough ad spend through a creditcard to fly business class to my (yet to be planned) holiday

I reserved a decent amount of money to invest, but would prefer to grow as lean as possible. I like to scale things up quickly when something seems like a winner, so I could use it as a backup for advertising on FB / Google when needed.