Those of you who used to follow my blog – FreeYouNow.com – and maybe some of it’s previous incarnations might have been wondering where I’ve been for the past 7 months or so.
My last blog post was from October last year, and then I kind of disappeared.
I originally started blogging way back in April 2006, when there were much fewer blogs around and people didn’t live on Facebook and smart phones weren’t even around yet.
I really enjoyed blogging as both a kind of personal journal and as a way I could give back to the world. The three main things I blogged about were entrepreneurship/making money online, personal development and fitness.
About five years ago now I also started offering one-on-one coaching and helping people to become entrepreneurs and to make money online for those who could afford my help one-on-one, and my Blog was my outlet to also offer some of that help and advice for new entrepreneurs for free.
At the beginning of 2015 I decided to really step things up and to put most of my one-on-one coaching on hold in order to instead offer and reveal a lot of the strategies and secrets I learned as an entrepreneur and personal development nut over 20+ years, totally free on my blog and YouTube channel.
I wrote hundreds of blog posts and released dozens of free videos.
By October, however, I had come to the realization that even though most people criticize coaches and mentors for not offering any of their advice for free to those who can’t afford to pay for coaching / mentoring, VERY FEW people out there actually value and utilize that advice, when offered to them for free.
This became even more apparent to me on multiple occasions when I was asked for advice on certain questions from someone who was a paid coaching client, and I had already answered that exact same question not even a week prior to that on my Blog.
Even when I would send them a link to a blog or video I recorded which answered their question exactly, they didn’t read it or watch the video – they would rather pay me and have me re-answer it or re-explain it to them on the phone and only then they would value the advice and take action on it.
I also started looking at the track records of my students who I had previously mentored one-on-one, and had now shifted over to giving them an abundance of awesome content, totally free on my blog, and it was completely obvious that they weren’t putting any of that advice into action.
This was one of the primary reasons I decided to put my blogging on hold, as the amount of time and energy I was putting into it was incredibly disproportionate to the amount of value people were actually willing to take from that content.
What I decided to test out and re-focus my energy towards was a different strategy.
Instead of trying to teach people what to do, how and why to do it, I decided to just start applying what I know works as an entrepreneur into starting and building a totally brand new business, part time.
The new business I started is in the tabletop gaming niche, a hobby that I’m becoming very passionate about, and so I re-launched an old blog I had called TabletopGamer.com and also launched a new ecommerce store at TabletopGamerStore.com.
I figured that by applying what I know about personal development, entrepreneurship and marketing to an actual project, I could teach people to be successful using a strategy that Abraham/Hicks beautifully summarized in this quote:
“Teach through the clarity of your example.” ~ Abraham/Hicks
Meaning, instead of trying to TELL people what to do and how to do it, instead I’ve been simply focusing on SHOWING them what I’m doing and using that as a tool to stretch their imagination, their beliefs and to hopefully inspire them to do something similar in their lives as well.
Shifting my focus to teaching in this way has had a HUGE shift on my life.
It is SO much easier to just go out there and DO what I know how to do, and to just produce results myself and then have my example be the teacher instead of me trying to teach what to do and how to do it.
Of course in hindsight this makes total sense.
Our world is becoming more and more inundated with an over-abundance of information, and so people are paying attention less and less to information until you show results, and even then they derive more inspiration from just watching you DO something, than from you teaching them what you’re doing.
So that is what I’ve been mainly focusing on.
My Tabletop Gamer business has taken off to a great start, generating sales almost immediately after I started applying some of my ninja marketing strategies and in February of this year I launched my first ever Kickstarter campaign for a new line of tabletop terrain I had designed.
It was a small, very specialized project which I had only expected to sell about $1000 – $1500 worth of terrain through, but I was very excited to see the campaign hit over $17,000 in orders in 30 days.
The project did so well that I am actually still in the process of producing all the tabletop terrain to fill all the orders that came in right now as I write this post.
So for anyone looking for an example and some inspiration for making money online with your own business, just follow along with my TabletopGamer.com blog and see what I’m up to there and then just apply it to whatever niche you’re passionate about.
Which now brings me to this Blog, and why I decided to write THIS blog post today.
The Future of FreeYouNow.com
With my tabletop business being there for anyone who wants inspiration or an example of how to build an online business part time, I’ve been thinking about what direction I want to take this blog.
What I’ve decided to do is to re-focus the direction of FreeYouNow.com to be more of a personal development and fitness blog.
I’ve just recently started a new weight loss and fitness plan, and this gives me the perfect opportunity to once again teach through the clarity of my example, by sharing the successes and failures I experience on my path towards getting fit and healthy.
I’ve already been learning some awesome new things that I’ve never talked about or shared in blog posts or videos before, which I’m hoping to share in future blog posts and to mainly focus on just going through my journey towards health and fitness and maybe hopefully inspiring someone else to take on that same journey in their lives as well.
So stay tuned, I’ll be blogging about my new fitness and health journey very soon.
