Publishing my first posts was really exciting! It’s great to see my idea turn into reality.

The first one was my investigation into high-ticket affiliate marketing, and I talk about what that REALLY is. I may have a little bit of a rant about it – you’ll have to listen to find out 🤫😂

I also published a worldschooling day in the life post, and once I had some content on the site I finalised my design for my post pages.

Finally, I talk about recurring tasks, and the importance of automating, templating, and recording your processes to save time, and have a consistent look and feel.

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Resources mentioned

I mention the following resources in the podcast.

Some of these links are affiliate links, meaning I will receive a commission if you purchase via that link (thanks!) – see my disclosure here.

My high-ticket marketing expose – yes, I get a little bit passionate about this stuff! So unethical.

Divi theme builder – my WordPress theme and its utterly fantastic theme builder.

Canva – Graphic design for the design-challenged – drag-and-drop lots of fantastic templates, stock photos/graphics/videos.

Worldschooling day in the life in Athens 🇬🇷 – wondering what long-term worldschooling actually looks like? Check out our day in one of our favourite cities in the world with all five of our children.

Australian Homeschooling Summit – my previous business, and I participated again in 2024. It now has hundreds of workshops and is a FANTASTIC resource if you’re homeschooling!

Transcript

Hey, I’m Kelly Kotanidis, and welcome to Online Business from Scratch where I’m taking you behind the scenes as I build my new online business, Business in Your Backpack, from scratch to a full-time income while making sure it’s a great fit for my traveling homeschooling life. I’ll be walking you through everything I do and why so you can follow along and build your own flexible online business quickly and efficiently.

Now, this is the second time that I’m recording this podcast. Lucky they’re short. So, I set it all up the first time and I experimented with my sound, and it was all great. And then after I recorded it, luckily I checked because I’d been recording it with my inbuilt laptop mic instead of my USB mic, and the sound was terrible. It sounded like I was in a bathroom at a pool. It was so echoey. And I’m really glad I did go and check it because I have plans to record three episodes, and it would have really sucked to go and edit them in a few days and then find out that I actually had to re-record them all again. So here’s to double-checking!

So, in this episode, we’re here on day eight of my new business. It’s actually only six days since my last update because this week I have been very motivated. So I finished writing my high ticket affiliate marketing expose post and published it. So yay for the very first post of many. Now, this post came out of left field, really. I just kept seeing people banging on about high ticket affiliate marketing, how it funds their amazing travel influencer lives, how they’ve got six-figure incomes, six figures per month, some of them claim, and yet they’re very sly about the details in public. It’s all “PM me for the info, no, I’m not going to tell you what I do here. You’ve got to chat to me privately about that,” and things like that. All that screams scam to me.

And because I’m endlessly fascinated with scams and cult-like things, I PM’d a few people, and I did the first few steps to check it all out. And I was right; my suspicions were correct. High ticket affiliate marketing is just what they’re calling multi-level marketing now because everyone’s caught onto the fact that MLMs are pretty scammy and they have a 99.6% failure rate, which is really excessively bad.

So I got lots of screenshots, and I wrote up a big long article about it. And so now I have something to link on all those travel groups that are full of desperate MLM recruiters, and I have a much better alternative, I think, in the form of online business, to show people who are looking for location independent income ideas. And it is good to be able to go on those groups and say, “Well, actually, this is what high ticket affiliate marketing is. I don’t think it’s a great idea, but here’s a big pile of free resources I have, like my blog post and my Business Idea Blitz course, and you can go and look at these without making any sort of commitment at all, and I’m not going to ask you for any money. And then if you decide that you want an online business, well, in the future, I’ll have some way, some paid way, to help you do that. It’s much less scammy than saying PM me and I’ll tell you all the details about how I travel with my family and earn eight figures per month or whatever they’re doing. Who knows?

So writing that was fun. My husband might disagree because I told him all about it, probably a bit too much. So feel free to go check out the post and comment on it, or message me about it, especially if you have any true stories about your experience that I can share anonymously to warn others, because the whole MLM racket is pretty horrific. The stuff they all say when promoting signing up with them, it really doesn’t match the bleak reality of the income reports. The maths does not work out at all because there are far more people claiming high income than there are people actually making a high income, based on the company’s own income disclosures. And I’ve got screenshots and income disclosures and all that sort of stuff on the post, so check that out if you’re ever tempted at all to go and join an MLM disguised as a high ticket affiliate marketing company.

Okay, so let’s get away from my MLM obsession and back to strictly business. So after getting the post up, I spent a few hours ironing out kinks in the site, like the individual post layout. So that’s something that you can’t really do until you have content in there because you don’t know what it will look like when it’s all finished. So if you find yourself getting stuck on things like that, just put it aside because anything you make before you have content might not work once the content is added.

So once I published the post, I set up a nice header and footer. I made a blog post template in Divi Theme Builder, and the site is starting to look pretty good. It’s actually looking so good I had a compliment on my design skills, and let me tell you, that does not happen very often at all. I started off 17 years ago with the worst overdone rainbow unicorn vomit site you can imagine in FreeWebs, if you remember that one. Every color and pattern imaginable was on there. It would have hurt people’s eyes. But that’s what we all did in the early 2000s, right?

So then I went very plain, which is still a great option. Plain is fantastic, and if you’re DIYing or you’re starting out, it really is the best option. And if you have a look around online, you’ll see that many of the most popular sites are quite plain and functional. They have minimal colors, minimal styling, and they work really well because of that. And I’m only recently learning how to jazz my website up a bit without going overboard because going overboard is my natural tendency, as anyone who knows me and my love of color knows very well. So getting compliments on my design is great. It shows me that I am finally on the right track.

Now, as part of publishing the post, I needed to make image templates. WordPress has a featured post image which shows in Google search and Facebook and places like that. And I also made a pin image for Pinterest. So I had to make templates for each of these. I’ll use these templates for each post and page. And I did this in Canva. Canva has a lot of really great templates, so I just went through them, I picked one I liked that was fairly plain, and I edited it to make the first featured and pin images. And now they will be templates for all the others I make. I’ll just copy the last one and update it to make the next one, new text, new photo, boring sort of stuff like that.

So once I got that post up and all that stuff sorted, I was on a content rampage. I just wanted to publish more. And so I had the bright idea to republish a post I wrote about our world schooling day in the life in Athens. So that post is still on Fearless Homeschool, my previous business, but the new owner is wonderful and said, “Sure, whack it up on your new site.” So I got that up in less than 2 hours. There’s nothing particularly strategic about that post, but it is decent world schooling content that illustrates the sort of life that families can have if they have an online business and what it actually looks like when you’re traveling long term because it is quite different to the whole touristy, cram everything into a week sort of holidays that most people are used to. So I think that very quick turnaround to get that post up was worth it.

Now, promo-wise, because it’s never too early to start thinking about promotion, especially with the long lead time that a lot of things have, because, you know, you might apply for a podcast or a summit or some other sort of event that doesn’t actually happen for 3 months or more. So I also submitted all my workshop details for the Australian Homeschooling Summit. So that is a summit that I created and ran for seven years and then sold last year. Now this year, instead of running the whole shebang, I’m just doing one solo workshop about how to afford to homeschool and one group Ask Me Anything about tech use in homeschooling.

And I have to admit, it feels kind of weird to be on the outskirts and to not be gearing up to run a summit and juggling dozens of tasks and putting it all together. But it’s also a big relief. I’m not really missing the work involved, and the new owner is doing a fantastic job. So it’s actually really fun to sit back and look at someone else do it and do it well and go, “This is fantastic. Everyone’s being well looked after. Everyone is happy. It’s great.” So that is a really good thing. I can see now that selling my previous business was definitely the right decision, and I’m having much more fun with this, building it from scratch. So there are no regrets there.

And I don’t know, maybe I’ll regret it a little when I’m not getting an avalanche of income like I’m used to getting at the start of every year. But still, I pretty much doubt it. I’m actually looking forward to a really peaceful February for the first time in many, many years.

So there you have it. I’ve been laying the foundation for my new site with good solid evergreen content that I can share and setting things up so that all these repeating tasks that I will have to keep on doing are automated or templated as much as possible. So whatever you’re doing in your new business, always watch out for tasks that you can automate or make a template for or write a short checklist that you can follow each time because it saves you a lot of time and also a lot of stress. Because when you come back and do it again and again and again, you know that you’re doing it properly. You know it matches what you’ve already done, and you don’t have to remember every single step or start fresh every single time because that’s exhausting. And often if you do a task that you might not do again for another two months, you’ve completely forgotten what you’ve done by the time you come back to it. So it’s really good to have, you know, a bit of paper in a notebook or a Google doc or something like that that you can go, “Oh, okay, yep, I remember that’s how I do that thing.”

Now, if you are enjoying this podcast, I have one small favor to ask. Can you please give it a five-star review in Apple Podcasts or Spotify? And you can even go for both if you’re feeling extra generous. This helps the show rank higher and reach more people, and that helps me a lot and will hopefully help those new fans as well.

So thank you for listening and for the review if you do that. I will be back sharing my next very foundational online business steps very soon with my brand new site. So don’t miss it. I will see you then.

Thanks for listening!

Got any questions? Feel free to to drop them in the comments below.

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