Niall Doherty left his last office job in 2011 and set off on a mission to travel the world while making money online. Since then he’s been to over 50 countries, written a couple of books, and started several businesses. His website, eBizFacts is the best place to find information, reviews, and a much more to about making money online.
In This Episode We Talk About:
- After traveling to 55 countries, where is Niall considering making his “homebase”
- Why Niall chose to travel around the world for 44 months without flying
- Writing a book while crossing the Pacific Ocean on a cargo ship from Japan to Peru
- The teenage dream that led Niall from Ireland to living in New Orleans
- Why Niall eventually left that life behind and gave up a U.S. green card
- Niall’s fallback plan in case his digital nomad dreams didn’t work out
- The book that changed Niall’s life and sent him on the path to building his business
- The best ways to get started making money online
- How Niall finally “cracked the code” to making more money from his blog
- How much money Niall has earned and spent living as a digital nomad and making money online since January 2011
- “New Level, New Devil” and Niall’s grand vision for eBizFacts
Links:
eBizFacts – Niall’s excellent website full of resources and unbiased advice about making money online
eBizFacts Newsletter – All the best information, links, tools, and more that Niall finds each week
The Cargo Ship Diaries – Niall’s book about circling the globe in 44 months without flying
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Transcript
Neville Mehra:
Niall, welcome to Never Normal.
Niall Doherty:
Thanks Neville, glad to be on here.
Neville Mehra:
You’ve traveled extensively over the years. Where do we find you today?
Niall Doherty:
I am in Tbilisi in Georgia for the past six months or so, and I ended up here accidentally almost with the pandemic looming and I’d never been here before. It’s turned out to be a really cool place to be. One of those places that there’s nothing particularly great about it, but there’s so much that’s good or good enough that overall, I love it and we’re thinking of staying here long term. I’m here with my girlfriend. It will probably end up being our long term home base.
Neville Mehra:
That’s quite an endorsement. Do you know offhand how many countries you’ve been to? Just to give people some frame of reference on out of the number of places you could be choosing to live in that you’ve visited.
Niall Doherty:
It’s over 50. I’d say it’s about 55, something like that.
Neville Mehra:
You spent quite a bit of time years ago traveling much more frequently than any of us are now in the pandemic of course, but traveling around the world. Was it 44 months without flying, did I get that right?
Niall Doherty:
Yeah. 44 months, did one complete circumnavigation. So started in Ireland, went east and basically all the way around one complete loop and came back to Ireland from the west without taking any airplanes.
Neville Mehra:
So you were traveling I guess over land, in cars, on trains, and then how did you… Did you take boats? How did you cross the Pacific? You would have needed to cross both the Atlantic and the Pacific to make it all the way around.
Niall Doherty:
Yes. And I went across the Indian Ocean as well. So it was cruise ships cross the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, and I got a cargo ship across the Pacific from Japan to Peru with a stop in Mexico along the way, and Panama.
Neville Mehra:
Why not hop on a plane?
Niall Doherty:
I wanted a challenge. I knew, it wasn’t long after I quit my job, my last 9-5 job which was the end of 2010, so almost ten years ago now. I hadn’t really traveled that much before, and I knew I wanted to really see the world. And then I was thinking, instead of just doing a typical trip around the world where I just go to the places most people go to, is there some way I could do it a little different that would be challenging, that would put me in places I wouldn’t otherwise go to, so there’d be a bit of a random element to it. And, could I do it in a way that it’s a good story that would actually be of interest to people? I was already thinking personal brand, I was blogging at the time.
Niall Doherty:
Can I turn this into something that people will be interested to follow? And it just came to me one day, what if I tried to do it without flying, if I tried to do a big round the world trip without flying. And it just captured my imagination and I was like yeah, I think I’ll try and do that. And so I did it, took as you said 44 months. Took me through 37 countries, and was very challenging. That was… I finished it in 2015, started it in the end of 2011. And it was surprisingly hard to get from certain places, or to get out of certain places without flying. I thought it would be easier, but it was great in that it was challenging because it developed this resourcefulness in me that I’ve been able to apply to other things since.
Neville Mehra:
And I definitely want to bookmark that and come back to that resourcefulness. But I just also want to highlight, I think that’s an underrated strategy, optimizing for an interesting story. We often want things just to go really smoothly, especially travel. We want to optimize everything, pre-check, and minimize the luggage and do all of these things that we can to just make the journey as smooth as possible. But smooth is good in the moment, boring later. Cargo ship from Japan to Peru is probably a pain in the ass and very uncomfortable in some ways, but makes for an interesting story.
Niall Doherty:
I love that way of travel. Whenever I hear somebody saying, “I’m trying to visit the top 100 golf courses in the world,” or, “I’m trying to visit all the UNESCO World Heritage sites,” or whatever it is they have some sort of mission so it makes the travel more meaningful. It’s not just checking things off a list either, it just adds another dimension to travel when it feels more like a mission instead of just, “Let me look on Skyscanner, see what’s cheap in September, okay. I’ll go there.”
Neville Mehra:
Yeah. I agree. It’s funny you mention that, there was a period where when I was looking for books to read, I noticed a pattern in subtitles so I actually started looking for it. So I would just go to Amazon and search for “One man’s search for”, because there were a bunch of books that I read that were just such and such title, versions of a theme for Eat, Pray, Love. But in this case written by men. It was people who were doing things like that, visiting every country that Ryanair flew to was one of them. Visiting every country in Europe, visiting every country in Africa. So those were some travel ones. But there were others, and it was just people who made these almost arbitrary missions for themselves. And I think it just gives you some kind of a goal post or something to aim for, but it’s all the serendipity and the things that happen along the way that make those interesting stories. And speaking of, you went on to write a book about that experience, right?
Niall Doherty:
Yes. I actually wrote it on the cargo ship, so I was 26 days I think it was on that cargo ship from Japan to Peru. And I decided I would write a book while I was on there about my journey so far. And then I updated it a little bit once I finished the trip, so after I went through the Americas and across the Atlantic and back to Ireland. So most of the book is about the first half of the journey and crossing the Pacific, and then I added on a few bits and pieces at the end of it to wrap up the whole journey.
Neville Mehra:
And that book is The Cargo Ship Diaries?
Niall Doherty:
Yep, that’s it. The Cargo Ship Diaries.
Neville Mehra:
I’ll make sure we link to that in the show notes. You mentioned that you were already blogging at that point. Was that how you paid your way on this trip? Was blogging a business for you at that time, or were you just writing stuff for friends and family?
Niall Doherty:
I wanted it to be a business, Neville, but it didn’t really go to plan. Looking back, I was very idealistic and overly optimistic when I quit my job. It was the end of 2010, and even at that time people were starting to see digital nomads and people blogging online about ‘I travel the world and work from anywhere, and isn’t this awesome, and this is how much money I make’. There was people, write an e-book in a weekend and sell it for $10,000. As in, they would earn $10,000 from selling it. And I was like, “I could do that.” I had no experience running my own business but it just looked so simple and I started doing pretty much that when I quit my job. I was like, “Okay, I’ll just start writing.” I already had a blog about personal development, productivity, whatever I felt like writing about. The kind of Tim Ferriss lifestyle design copycat blog. And I was doing that and expected I would be able to make a living doing that and I’d launch a course, I was selling an e-book, and never made much money from it.
Neville Mehra:
And this is all around the time you started traveling? In 2010 you said?
Niall Doherty:
Yeah, yeah. So quit my job the end of 2010 and almost a year later, I started my big trip around the world. And in that year, I went back to Ireland for a year, focused on trying to get the business off the ground. I moved to Spain for a summer, started learning Spanish. And really working a lot on just figuring out how to make money online. And I was trying to generate passive income basically, I was trying to do what these early digital nomads were doing and made look so easy, which is you have a blog or you write an e-book and you make money while you sleep because this thing is just up on your website and people can buy it.
Niall Doherty:
And I quickly found that it’s not that easy, and I really only started to make decent money when I turned to freelancing. I was lucky in that I already had a skill. My old job was as a web designer, so I worked as a web designer for a university in the US, in New Orleans, for three years. And I went to college for that kind of thing as well. So I kind of knew worst case scenario that if my passive income dreams didn’t come to fruition quickly, I could fall back on that, on the freelance web design. So that’s what I did, and once I started taking that seriously and made that the main thing, I was able to start earning more money than I was spending each month, which was right around the time I left on my around the world trip.
Neville Mehra:
So during those 44 months of traveling, you were paying your way basically by doing freelance web design as you were traveling and you were also running a blog and a course and that kind of an online business, sort of on the side? That wasn’t your main income at that point?
Niall Doherty:
I tried a lot of different things, and I made money in several different ways. But the most consistent, the most reliable, was freelance web design. I did an online course selling e-books, doing advertising, kind of virtual assistant work. Some coaching. All sorts of different stuff, but freelancing was always the thing I could rely on when I needed to earn money consistently.
Neville Mehra:
You mentioned also, just rewinded back in time through your story, going in reverse chronological order here, the fact that you were living in New Orleans at the time, that that last job that you quit before deciding to travel around the world. But for those who don’t know, you’re Irish. Obvious to me from your accent, perhaps not to everyone. So how did you end up in New Orleans to begin with? Because that was another mission of sorts as I see it.
Niall Doherty:
Yeah. It was strange. I used to meet people in New Orleans and they’d be like, “Where are you from?” And I’d tell them I’d from Ireland and they’d say, “What are you doing in New Orleans?” And the answer always surprising them. And the answer was, “I came here because my favorite basketball team plays in New Orleans.” So I grew up in Ireland as a massive basketball fan, NBA fan. Just myself and my cousin, early teens, just became obsessed with basketball and the NBA in particular. And this was in the 90s in Ireland where there was no internet, the best you could get was reading in USA Today two days after a game happened what the result was. Like look at the score, it was 103-101, I bet that was a good game. We had no idea.
Niall Doherty:
The internet started becoming a thing in the late 90s in Ireland and we were able to start downloading video clips or reading about the games the day after or even listening to a live radio broadcast about the games. And so my teenage dream was like someday, I would love to go to the US and be a season ticket holder for my favorite team. And my favorite team was the Hornets, they were originally the Charlotte Hornets and then they became the New Orleans Hornets. And it was kind of random that I picked that team, I just picked a team, I liked their colors. Yeah, I stayed true to that dream and, what was I? I went to New Orleans for a month in the summer of 2007. And just went there as an internship, but it didn’t turn into anything bigger, and I needed someone to sponsor my visa so I could stay long term.
Niall Doherty:
But then I ended up going back a few months later, I found a job for one of the universities there as a web designer and they sponsored my visa to be there for three years. And then I got season tickets to the Hornets and I had a website about the Hornets, like an early sports blog about the team. And that started picking up traction and I got a media credential to go to the games for free and sit at the media table, sometimes sit court side at the media table there. Basically just live my teenage dream to the max. Until I finally grew out of that and was like, “Huh. I’m spending a lot of my time watching and writing about 10 guys chasing a ball around a wooden floor. Maybe this isn’t what I want to be doing for the rest of my life.”
Neville Mehra:
Was there some moment when that changed? I mean, I’ve grown up around a lot of diehard sports fans, older guys who were fans of a team, often a not very winning team, for decades and decades who’d be in the stands year in and year out. They never seemed to really get tired of it, even with losing seasons and all that. You had a press pass, you were sitting court side, that sounds pretty exciting to someone who’s a huge fan. What on earth would make you want to give that up?
Niall Doherty:
It just occurred to me that the reason why I decided to give it up is very similar to the reason why I decided not to stay in an old safe and secure department store job I had in Ireland before I went to the US. And it was that I was seeing these people who were in their 50s and 60s who are diehard sports fans, or back in the department store these people who had worked that type of job for 30, 40 years. And I was like… They seemed fine, they were probably happy with their lives.
Niall Doherty:
But I just realized I don’t want to be like that, I won’t be happy if I’m like that when I’m 50 or 60 years old. So I didn’t want to be working at a department store in my 50s or 60s and I didn’t want to be going to basketball games and getting really worked up about the outcome of a game. Even a play-off game, I didn’t want to make that the center of my world and what made me happy or sad for the rest of my life. It was a gradual thing that dawned on me, “Is this really what I want to…” It was fun for a while, but is it really what I want to center my life on long term?
Neville Mehra:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. You put it so concisely, but I’ve had that feeling for a long time. I enjoy sports, there was definitely some thrill about it, but it’s almost like the opposite of mindfulness or something like that, this idea of getting super worked up about something you have zero control over the outcome of. And seeing that en masse, if you can step out of that collective delusion or something, that this thing actually matters. Because to everyone in that arena, it’s the most important thing in the world. But if you just zoom out even a tiny bit, it’s absurd. Who cares? A bunch of guys threw a ball through a hoop and one of them threw it through the hoop a few more times than the other one. Okay, cool. But why should I be depressed for the rest of the off season now because my team threw it through that little orange hoop one less time? So you had that realization, and what did you do about it? Did you just tear up your press pass one day and walk out? Was there a specific moment when this hit you?
Niall Doherty:
It was a gradual realization. I’m not sure if the transition was gradual, because I do remember one day I was at work and I just decided… I was in the process of getting a green card so I could stay in the US long term, and I just automatically was going through that process because my teenage dream was just to live long term in the US and do the basketball journalist type of thing. And the job I had, it was a good job, it was safe, secure. I probably would have been up for a promotion if I stuck it out there. I liked my colleagues, I liked the work. I think it was from reading these early digital nomad bloggers. And I was already really into personal growth, and I just thought of what are some really good avenues for personal growth? And staying in that job and continuing to write about basketball didn’t seem like good avenues for that. Whereas traveling the world and running my own business, building and running my own business, those two things especially seemed like I would really grow from pursuing those things and traveling and building a business.
Niall Doherty:
So I remember I was in work one day and figuring out some of the green card stuff and the next steps, and it just hit me. Wait a minute, do I really want to stay here? If I go down this green card path… I think it was something like I wouldn’t be able to spend more than six months out of the US at a time for five years or something like that. There was some restriction where I would be stuck in the US. And I just realized, I don’t want that. I want to have this freedom that I see these people online having where they travel the world and work from their laptops. So that became way more appealing to me, and I remember I called my mother that day in work once it hit me and I was like, “Yeah, I’m not going to get the green card. And I think I’m going to quit my job at the end of this three year period,” which was only a few months away, and I’ll figure it out from there.
Neville Mehra:
How did she react?
Niall Doherty:
She was great about it. I’m very lucky in that sense, my parents, they push back against some of the things I wanted to do but generally they’re happy as long as I’m happy and not hurting anybody. And they were also used to me-
Neville Mehra:
Yeah, you were already living in another country at that point-
Niall Doherty:
Yeah, because of my favorite basketball team. So they already knew I was never normal. So yeah, she was fine about it.
Neville Mehra:
That’s definitely something else that we have in common, I think that support from home that makes it easier. As you’re describing this, there’s so many directions I want to go in from here but one thing I feel the need to point out is that it’s almost like it’s easy to be stuck in that mediocre middle where you had a comfortable job, you were doing something that was already pretty interesting. You followed your favorite basketball team, and you could sort of just keep doing that forever. But applying for the green card sort of forced you into this realization that if you kept going that route, it put a few constraints on you, where it started to be almost like a more defined opportunity cost of doing this. Okay, now you can’t travel. Even though you were at that point just staying in one city, the fact that someone was going to tell you by a rule that you couldn’t travel gave you this need to push back and say I don’t know if I really do want this.
Niall Doherty:
Yeah. That’s a very good point. I wonder if I didn’t have that restriction, or didn’t have to do the green card thing-
Neville Mehra:
If you could just keep renewing every six months or something.
Niall Doherty:
Or if I was from the US so I didn’t need to worry about visa stuff, if it would just have been easy to never really question what I was doing, there was nothing to force the issue. One year more could turn into ten years more and continue writing about basketball because that’s what I’d done, and that’s my identity. So yeah, it’s very easy to get caught in those things and I guess if you don’t have anything like visa issues forcing you to question it, you need to force yourself to question it and ask yourself, “Is this really what I want to be doing for the next five, ten, 20 years of my life?”
Neville Mehra:
Exactly. And the website that you were running at that time, that was strictly like a hobby, you were just writing about basketball for fun? Did you have any aspirations to turn that into a full time job, into a business?
Niall Doherty:
No. I am as far from a natural born entrepreneur as you can get. Which is weird, because my dad has worked for himself all his life. My brothers run their own business. But they’re kind of like trade businesses, like carpentry and that sort of thing. And it’s not… I don’t want to sell them short because they’re very good at what they do and they make good livings for themselves. But it’s not what we typically think of as entrepreneurial, it’s more self employed. So I never really thought myself as an entrepreneur, I never really had visions of being an entrepreneur. It was reading The Four Hour Work Week which got me thinking about doing that. But I think I lost track of your question.
Neville Mehra:
The question was around the website that you were running at the time about the Hornets, the idea, was your day job at the university like an actor working at a restaurant while they’re waiting for their big break? Or, were you happy to just do that as a passion project, the university job was your source of income and the website about the Hornets was strictly for fun with no aspiration to ever hire employees or earn a living from it.
Niall Doherty:
Yeah, it was totally that. It was just for fun, never thought about making money off it. Even when ESPN came and said, “Hey, we’re building a network of blogs that cover each team and we would like your blog to be our ESPN affiliated Hornets coverage.” And I was like, “Yeah, cool.” And they paid us $200 a month, almost nothing. When I think back at it now it’s like wow, really? But to me it was like any money was a bonus because we weren’t looking to make money, we were like who would pay us to write about basketball?
Niall Doherty:
This is what we do for free anyway. So I never really looked to monetize it, I had no idea about how you would even monetize something like that. I ended up handing it off to a couple other people who were helping me with it. We all did it for free, but one had more entrepreneurial aspirations. I think the site did go on to make some money. I don’t think it ever became a thriving business or anything, but again for me, it was never even really a consideration that I would make money doing this kind of thing.
Neville Mehra:
I find that incredibly ironic given what you do now and that one of my favorite articles on your website is this giant list of obscure ways that people make money online. And writing a basketball blog wouldn’t even probably qualify for that list at this point, given the number of strange things people do. Or just interesting activities that you wouldn’t necessarily think could be monetized, and in this case you’re doing something like running a website that’s about popular interest topic and earns revenue through either advertising or subscriptions is about as vanilla, stock standard a business model as one could find on the internet.
Neville Mehra:
So at least one, maybe a few switches flipped at some point. You decided you didn’t want the green card, you were going to travel. You now wanted to build a business, it sounds like a lot of that maybe came out of Tim Ferriss’s seminal book for our corner of the internet, The Four Hour Work week, and you took roughly a year I think you said to make that transition between leaving the job, going back to Ireland for a while, trying to build up the business. How did you then get the confidence to actually start traveling? Did you set a date for yourself or was there some milestone that you reached?
Niall Doherty:
I did set a date. I knew I wanted to leave before the end of the year, I think I even set the date as the end of September or start of October, something like that. Because I just knew that I needed to force the issue. My money was running low, I quit my job with about $12,000 saved up and I believe by the time I left on my trip, the proper round the world trip, I was down to about $3 or $4000. And what gave me the confidence to go for it anyway, because it would have been very easy to just say, “Let me get the money flowing in consistently or let me build up my savings a bit more just to be safe.”
Niall Doherty:
But the reason I went ahead anyway is because I was pretty confident in my skills as a web designer that worst case scenario, I could just hole up somewhere in Eastern Europe a few months into my trip and just do freelance web design gigs for $20, $30 an hour. I wasn’t going to end up broke in a gutter somewhere. So having that to fall back on, having that assurance, was massive. Because if I had no skills, if I had been a lawyer or something, some kind of skill or profession that doesn’t translate as easily online.
Neville Mehra:
No skills like one of those lawyers, you know?
Niall Doherty:
Kind of everything now as a lawyer you could make money online now, but back then, ten years ago, there was certain skills that lent themselves much easier to making money online and web design was one of the top ones. So that gave me a lot of confidence that I could make it work.
Neville Mehra:
Yeah, I think you and I both coming from a web development background and speaking English as our native language is basically hit the jackpot when it comes to pre-existing skills for being able to do what we do now. I mean, I could see though even with that, most people seeing their bank account balance go from $12,000 to $3 or $4000, running in the opposite direction saying, “This business thing isn’t working out, I have less money now than when I started,” and you took it the other way and said, “Well, I have the money that I have but I have confidence in my ability to earn if I need to.” And this is I think a crucial point that I mention to a lot of people, is that by traveling, you’re also able to control your location, which means you can sort of control your monthly burn rate in a sense.
Neville Mehra:
And as you said, hole up in Eastern Europe or basically anywhere, because coming from certainly these days Ireland, and of course the United States and many other Western European countries, Canada, Australia, we have higher costs of living than almost anywhere else in the world. So if you can just move to somewhere different, that alone can eliminate a huge percentage of your expenses and then you can find the income to match those as you go. Instead of just burning thousands and thousands of dollars as you’re hoping something is going to take off, give yourself more runway. We don’t have a huge amount of time and there’s so many directions I want to go in from there to where you are now. But just continuing along that line, you were doing freelance web development as your main source of income. Your website, your blog in a sense, is your only source of income? Is that accurate?
Niall Doherty:
It’s the major source. There’s a few different income streams, but they all come from the one website now which is my old blog, I repurposed it into a blog all about online business and getting started, making money online.
Neville Mehra:
Yeah, yeah. Let’s not bury the lede any more than I already have. So eBizFacts is your site and you write about making money online, how to make money online, and crucially I think you operate as this… Whereas everyone else out there is trying to tell you, “Here’s how I made money online and you can do it too,” and they’re sort of selling almost like yesterday’s winning lottery numbers, right? Because things change so quickly, people are basically saying I was making money doing this thing, but quickly before that dries up, let me try to make money telling other people how to do that thing.
Neville Mehra:
And instead of doing that, you’re basically operating as this, almost like an ombudsman of sorts who’s reviewing those different strategies, ways of making money online, corralling the different… Whether it’s weird ways of making money online, online courses, people who teach this stuff, websites like Upwork and Fiverr and whether or not those are really good ways of making money online. How did you get from freelance web design to actually making money from your own website, as opposed to just selling your skills to others? Was there some point at which that changed?
Niall Doherty:
I mean, the goal was always to give up freelancing and give up trading time for money. Freelancing is what I’ve heard referred to as a bridge business, it gets you from working 9-5 to running some sort of more scalable online business than can generate, has the potential to generate some passive income and separate your time from how much you earn. So I was always looking for ways to stop freelancing. It is great, I still recommend freelancing is one of the best ways to get started making money online. You learn so much from freelancing and working with clients. It’s so low risk, and the return on investment is much faster.
Niall Doherty:
Because even if someone listening to this had no idea about web design, and they decided to become a freelance web designer, and I know people who’ve done this where they just study and learn as much as they can for two months and learn how to use WordPress and WordPress page builders and these kind of things. And then they can go and charge $15-20 an hour after a couple of months and they earn as they learn more. A year later, they can be up to $40, $50 an hour. So freelancing is great that way, but there is a ceiling. There’s only so much you can earn as a freelancer.
Niall Doherty:
Some skills you can earn more than others, any kind of skill that’s tied pretty closely to the clients revenue, such as copywriting or Facebook ads, things like that. You can usually charge a lot more. But ultimately, I think most people want to end up with more of a scalable business. So I was looking for, experimented with all sorts of ways I could make money online apart from freelancing. And the one that I got into that I spent a few years on was an online course. So I had an online course teaching people basically how to start a freelancing business, because I saw that as one of the best ways to make money online.
Niall Doherty:
Or at least one of the most reliable ways, and to start making money online sooner rather than later without having to put in six months of effort up front. So I had a course on that and it did okay, I ran it for about three years and it made about $3 or $4000 a month on average. Had a few hundred people sign up for it, but never really got over the hump where it was earning enough to justify the amount of time and effort I put into it. So after three years, I decided I would shut it down not knowing what I was going to do next, just knowing that I had to shut it down because it was… I felt stuck, it was never really going to do better.
Niall Doherty:
I tried so many things to market it and nothing really moved the needle. So I took the plunge again, shut down the course not knowing what I was going to do, and then had a conversation with a friend who ran a website similar to what I’m doing now but in a different niche. And his model was affiliate marketing as well. And he had gone from $4000 a month to $40,000 in a year and a half. And the money was great, but what he was doing, the way he was doing it really appealed to me because he was just basically writing the best content he could for his audience, for his niche, and publishing it for free and monetizing it through affiliates. And I really liked that idea.
Niall Doherty:
He didn’t have to sell anything, he would just review stuff, he would publish stuff, and it was a natural lead in to a product that he liked and he was happy to recommend, then that would be his affiliate link and people would buy through that. I really liked that idea, and he said to me, “Why don’t you do that for making money online? You’ve done it yourself for several years, you’ve researched a lot about this, you’ve taught other people how to do it, and I think this would be a good direction for you.”
Niall Doherty:
So that’s how I got into eBizFacts which was almost two years ago now, and it’s quickly become the most successful online business I’ve ever had and the most fulfilling, because I really feel like the content that I put out there or that we put out there, because we’re more of a team now, really helps people make more informed decisions about what kind of online business to start and then how best to build different types of online businesses. So we try and steer them away from the shady stuff or the over hyped stuff and towards the stuff that’ll actually get them results, and try and set more accurate expectations.
Neville Mehra:
Yeah. There’s certainly an elegance in the simplicity of it as you described it. All these online businesses sound like they have so many moving parts but when you describe yours, it’s just find a topic that a lot of people are interested in, write the best thing out there on the internet about it, and then if you’re linking to a product that they charge for, ask the person who’s selling that product, the company who’s selling that product, to pay you a small commission. In most cases, I think they already have those affiliate programs set up whenever someone signs up for it. And after years of brainstorming all these different business models and creating courses and going through all this, whether it’s membership sites or whatever, just all these different models.
Neville Mehra:
It sounds so simple and it’s working. I don’t just take your word for it on this conversation. Aside from the fact that we’re friends, I have the privilege of knowing how much money whatever you’re doing makes every month because you share your finances, I think I would call it almost like radical transparency. I’m scared just thinking about it, there’s something to me that even though I feel like I have nothing to hide, we all build up the myth around who we are and there’s the story that you tell the world about yourself and then there’s your bank records and your tax forms and all that. All this is very topical in American politics at the moment. You take a very different approach to our current President, not to drag him into this, but you share basically your income statements and all of your expenses and everything that you’re doing, broken down very detailed with pie charts and all of that, every month. And you’ve been doing that since 2011?
Niall Doherty:
Yeah. Right after I quit my day job, I decided I would start posting everything I earned and spent each month. Now I have stepped back from it a little bit in recent months because now I only do business income and expenses. Before I used to put down how much I spent on toiletries and how much I spent on flowers for my girlfriend. And just got to a certain point where it was like, people don’t need to know that. It was more interesting when I was traveling the world and it was interesting to see how much I spent in different countries and how much it cost to live in different countries, and making the transition from living in the US or Ireland how much it costs each month just to live there, versus these different countries I was in around the world.
Niall Doherty:
But now that I’m living more settled, I have a home base, I don’t think it’s as interesting anymore and there was a bit of me just as you get older, do I really want to tell people how much I spend on toiletries each month? Do people need to know how much I spend on flowers for my girlfriend? So I stepped back-
Neville Mehra:
Well I think in the beginning too, it’s almost like bragging. I know I’ve certainly done this and I’ve seen a lot of other digital nomads almost brag about how little we can spend for a great quality of life, especially in the early days when this was maybe a little bit more of an extreme lifestyle, it’s certainly become somewhat more common, especially with Instagram and social media putting all this front and center, at least in my feed obviously. But there was a time where you’d tell someone, “Yeah, I’m going to go live in Indonesia for a few months,” and they would assume that you were in a grass hut or something like that and whatever.
Neville Mehra:
Or that they’ve been to Disney World for a week and it cost them $5000, so they assume when you say, “I’m going to travel full time,” that you must be a billionaire. And instead, you’re showing them hey, I’m in Thailand and I have this beautiful apartment that would cost you $4000 or 4000 euros a month in Dublin or New York, and instead I’m only spending $1200 a month or whatever it is. But yeah, I can totally see now how once you’ve made that point, you’re just sacrificing your privacy for not a lot of marginal return.
Niall Doherty:
Yeah. I thought it’d be cool to just keep it going until I was actually exactly ten years, then I’d have here’s exactly how much I spent over the ten years. And I kind of wanted to do it as well until I felt like I’d broken through to a certain level of success with online business. So I could show the whole journey of I started out, I quit my job, I didn’t know anything about running a business up to earning millions online every year. I’m not quite there yet, but I can still show that progression without having to reveal all the little details.
Neville Mehra:
Yeah, that’s exactly why I bring it up. You are still sharing these, you’ve taken out some of the personal side which I think actually just sort of clouds the data because now it’s even easier to see your business made this much a month, these were your legitimate business expenses and this is the net. Because anyone could sell a million dollar bills for 99 cents each, you’re showing very clearly that you have a high margin business that as your investment in SEO and just building the business pays off over time, the expenses haven’t really grown that much relatively, but you just had your best month ever a couple of months ago in July.
Neville Mehra:
I think you were over $18,500 and so for those of us watching from the sidelines, it’s been really impressive to see that craft start to make that curve upwards. Is there a point where you feel like you have made it? We’ve talked about a couple of missions that you were on in life so far, first moving to New Orleans and following your favorite team and then with travel, traveling all around the world without flying. Now with this whole online business thing, is there some point where you feel like you’ve achieved the objective?
Niall Doherty:
A friend of mine likes to say new level, new devil. So every time you reach a new level, there’s all these… It’s not perfect, there’s all these other things that come with it, this baggage that comes with it. And that’s certainly true. Now in some ways, just getting over that 10k a month mark was big for me because it took me ten years where I thought it would take ten weeks when I quit my job. But there’s definitely milestones I’d like to hit, getting to $1000 a day in revenue is something that I’d look at as the next big milestone. Building a team, a proper team, because it’s mainly me producing all the content on the site at the moment. But the grand vision for eBizFacts is to be the go-to place for somebody who wants to start making money online, this would be the gateway where they can come in and see what all the options are and how they compare to each other, and what would best work for them given their skills, their goals, how much time they have available et cetera.
Niall Doherty:
And it’ll basically help them make a more informed decision about how they can make money online, and point them towards the best resources for doing that once they’ve made that decision. So that’s the grand vision, which is hard to measure, when do we get to that point? But I feel like there’s a lot of work to do to get there and I’ve never really built a team before, so that’s the new level new devil part now is how do I hire the right people, how do I be a good leader for those people and ensure quality and all that sort of stuff. So that’s the next challenge, and once I figure that out, hopefully I’ll eventually figure that out there’ll be probably some other peak off in the distance to go for, yeah.
Neville Mehra:
I like that, maybe that’s what I should call my next podcast, New Level, New Devil with Neville. I like that a lot. As I said, there’s so much I want to ask you based on all the experiences you’ve had both in travel, which we covered a bit this time around, but also in business. We talked only fairly briefly about what I think around huge accomplishments that you’ve had at eBizFacts and I would love to dig more into what’s worked and what hasn’t. You mentioned Tim Ferriss, he’s a big fan of the Pareto principle and that idea that 20% of the effort produces 80% of the results. So perhaps those can all be topics for a round two at some point if you’d be up for it, because I think we’re just about out of time. But as I said, there’s a lot that I would love to come back to.
Niall Doherty:
Yeah. There’s so much more we could go into and I’d love to discuss with you Neville, so yeah, a round two sounds good.
Neville Mehra:
Awesome. I’ll look forward to doing that. In the meantime, remember new level new devil or next level, next devil as the case may be. And for those who are listening, Niall talked about his aspirations for the site. I think you’re already well on your way for eBizFacts to be the best place. It’s the best place I know of on the internet to go and get straight, cold hard truth about ways of making money online. None of this I quit my 9-5 and here’s how you can too and in three days be earning $10,000. It took you ten years, but I think you’ve pointed people to a lot of resources and things like that that will help on that journey and maybe give them a little bit less of the trial and error. So for everyone listening, I encourage you to check it out. eBizFacts, is there anywhere else you want to point listeners to?
Niall Doherty:
The website is the best place and if they want to keep up with my latest finance reports and the new content on the site, subscribe to the email list. I do a weekly newsletter, so I spend every Friday putting that together, spend a few hours on it, and it’s basically anything I come across that is related to making money online. So new ideas, any good tips I’ve seen, any opportunities. I put them in the newsletter each week so people can jump on that if they like this kind of stuff.
Neville Mehra:
I spend a few hours just reading it. I’m an inbox zero person, and I kind of hate you for that newsletter because everything else I read quickly and I process it and I’m like okay, if there’s some task I do it, if there’s just something I need to read and reply I get that done and I’m back to zero. And I consistently have, at any given time, one of your newsletters sitting in my inbox because there’s so many things in there that I flag for I want to come back to this, I want to come back to this, that’s a really good article, I’ve got to see how that person did that. That’s an interesting thing, how could I do that in my business? Every single week without fail, there’s at least a handful of things that I read in your newsletter than I’m like, this is great. I’m going to come back to this exercise and do it, or article and read it. So thank you for that, but if you sign up for it, be prepared there’s a lot of good stuff in there.
Niall Doherty:
Yeah, thank you for saying that Neville.
Neville Mehra:
Absolutely, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for joining.
Niall Doherty:
Yeah, thanks for having me on Neville. I look forward to round two.