We’ve been working that out over the past three years. As I said, we left on a one-way ticket. And we were starting from scratch again with this failed family business, which told us one thing, and that was that we wanted to do online work. Yes, the previous business was an online model, but it involved an organic fruit and veggie delivery business. There were so many layers to it. Dealing with fresh produce was hard, so even though it was completely online, it was very complex. And so it told us we want to do that online model. And we want to continue with that. We just didn’t know exactly what we were going to do.

Now we’re in the position where we kind of were forced to sell our house. Okay, so we got a little bit of money from the sale, not a huge amount, as a buffer to let us kind of recover and to start again. And to figure out how we were going to make money online, we knew that we wanted to make money online. We knew that we wanted it to be a lot simpler than an organic fruit and veggie delivery business. But we were lucky that we had that money from the house. And then we needed to sell our rental as well. So we had that buffer, I guess what you could call savings. It was savings to work with.

And yes, I’ve been in health and fitness for the last 20 years, and I know that I wanted to keep doing that, and it was just figuring out how to take that more online. I’ve done pretty much every role in the health and fitness industry. Fitness management and personal training, group fitness instructor course, tutoring, presenting, all of that. All things that require me to be in a place and trade time for money, and spend a lot of time planning and preparing, and following up and supporting people. I thought I’m going to evolve to become an online coach, from being a personal trainer. And yeah, that’s been a lot harder to sell than I could have envisioned. I found it very easy when it was a face to face interaction. So we have a lot of ways to earn income as a backup, things that we’ve been working on.

I knew that I loved writing, and for me, I could just write, and that would be my most enjoyable thing to do. It allows me to be a little bit introverted and to sit on a tropical island too because you don’t need a really good internet connection. I worked on my personal website platform, and I have a blog, and it’s now monetized. We see that as long term because we’ve had to undergo a lot of learning along the way to get it to the point where it’s able to make money as well. So in the meantime, I put myself out there as a freelance writer, and I’m not a trained writer, but I have earnt money that we’ve needed for day to day expenses, not all the time, especially not in the past year because I’ve been focused on the baby thing. My credibility in the industry has allowed me to be a freelance writer, and I only write about health and fitness. So you don’t have to be a trained writer; it’s having a bit of credibility, and you’ve got Grammarly too, that can help you, if writing is not your main strength.

Colin, he’s started all his skills from scratch, and he’s got an IT background. He’s very systems minded. So when we had that previous business, he automated the business completely. Sales are not his strong point, we couldn’t get the sales that we needed, but systems are his strength. He’s decided to specialize in SEO. So we decided that Google and making friends with Google was going to be our main strategy. Social media is very, very secondary for us; it’s definitely not our main thing. Colin says that he’s done his apprenticeship now, only just at the point of finishing his apprenticeship, and he’s going to continue learning because you have to continue learning to stay up with the play on all of this. He’s refined his SEO Services only recently, so now, because SEO is a big thing as well, he has three very specific services that he offers, and that’s based on what he’s learned. He’s experimented on my health and fitness site a lot. So we’ve shown that we can get paid posts to page one of Google. We focused on making my post rank before thinking about how to monetize our site. I had the post on page one of Google that I still don’t know how to monetize at all. So we didn’t necessarily think about that strategically from the start, it was more like how do we learn SEO and how do we learn to get more traffic, and people visiting these posts?

So it’s, ever-evolving and Colin is gradually niching down more, and I’m getting clearer about what posts I want on my website and which ones don’t fit in ongoing but mainly on our site. The long term strategy is through affiliate marketing, so selling other people’s products and services, because that’s a whole lot easier and faster to do then creating our own. We have created so many things in the past that people didn’t necessarily want to buy, and you think you’ve done your homework, and your research, and then nothing. It’s much easier to experiment with other people’s products, and we only choose things that we use ourselves, or we fully believe in. We’re very open and transparent with all of that, and I would only recommend fitness things that I’ve used myself, or that I know my clients will get a lot of value from.