Youtube video transcript
My name is Phil and I am a lazy blogger. It’s been over three and a half months since my last post. And this is why. Hello, YouTube, and a very special hello to all my subscribers, my name’s Phil. And welcome to my channel, where I document my journey, building an online income, hopefully helping you with your own journey, doing the same thing.
So the Keeney members of you will see that I’m actually in a new location. There’s a new back. So I actually moved apartments this weekend. I’ve moved across Taipei city. I’m now living in a place called Taoyuan and I’m actually living in one of those apartment complex that they have here. So there’s lots of these little kinds of facilities, these little rooms.
So I’m actually filming this in the library. Hopefully, no one’s going to kill me with a pole or anything anyway. So there’s lots of these little rooms around. So in the next couple months, you’ll see me shooting in different places, trying to find a nice, interesting studio, cuz the good thing is everyone’s at work and I’m filming this in the morning.
So that’s great. Anyway, today I want to talk about just a few things that I’ve been thinking about. I’ve been looking back at the last year and a. And just thinking, why has my productivity slowed down? Why have I stopped adding poster blogs? What’s blocking me? And hopefully through that, you’ll pick up a few pointers and not fall into the same trap.
And that will mean that you’ll be much more successful than I am at this moment in your own journey. So I’m not trying to make any excuses, but I have. I Came across a few hiccups in my journey, a few sort of roadblocks and the first ones were with basic equipment. So one of the things that I really struggled with was just having something reliable to write my blog on, something reliable to use as I’m trying to build an internet company.
So I actually bought my original laptop that I had been using for about four years. And it was totally free because at that time I’d been working in France and France is a great place to work because the government really forces companies to take care of its employees. So every single month I would get 50 euros as a voucher.
I think it’s called a check candle and it was basically a voucher for. You can spend it in certain stores. And one of the stores that I could spend it in was a department store called FAC and it had a electronics kind of air by phones and things like that. So I saved up these 50 year old checks over like about a year or so, and I managed to get about, it was probably a laptop worth.
1,500 to 2000 euros. And it served me well up until about six months ago where it slowed down, it took ages to open up programs. I was trying to edit videos. It would crash. It was just such a pain in the backside because a five minute job was taking me an hour because of the speed. It was loading things.
Anyway, I had a bit of money sitting in PayPal stupidly. I had it in PayPal, but I had money sitting around and I was. Arming and arming, should I invest in a new computer? Should I actually upgrade and get myself like a beast computer and build it myself. And I was really reluctant to spend money on something that I saw as a luxury.
Good. Rather than saving it for content or something like that. But in the end I bit the bullet because my wife couldn’t take my complaining anymore. And I got my friend, Michael, who I do a YouTube channel with called the IELTS grind. And we went to this little place in Taipei where you buy the parts and they build it for you.
And funny enough we both don’t really speak Chinese, but he was translating for me in English to the computer guy, cuz I know nothing about computers, but it was a funny situation. Anyway, that was the first thing that blocked me, not having a decent computer or laptop to write on really having something up to date fast.
That’s not gonna slow you down. It will really help with the motivation when it comes to writing blog posts and even editing. The other thing that really got me was actually a decent internet connection for the last two, three years. I’ve been doing everything off a mobile hotspot. Now there’s nothing wrong with a mobile hotspot if you’re just surfing the internet.
But when you are trying to do Kind of uploading things and uploading videos, for example. So I was getting this really annoying thing where I was uploading a 60 seconds short and it was telling me it was gonna take two hours. It was so frustrating because if you’ve gotta leave the house or do something like that, you’ve gotta take your phone with you.
You can’t leave it to upload a video. So having a really good internet connection is something worth investing in. This might not be a problem for most of you because you are at home and you have a land connection. But this is the first time in three years that I’ve installed a land connection upstairs in the apartment.
I’m so happy with it. It’s so much quicker and I don’t have to share it with other people trying to use the same bandwidth. It’s amazing. So apart from the equipment and the issues I was having with that, which was really making me not want to get out of bed and start writing, cuz it was such a pain and I.
I was getting so frustrated. The other thing that kind of got me a little bit down, and the reason why I haven’t been publishing so many posts on my blogs is the writers that I was using. So I did a video all about how I hired local writers, local expats here in Taiwan through Facebook. And it really did work very well.
I got quite a lot of writers and the content. Too bad for the price I was paying, which was the local hourly fee that a ESL teacher, someone who teaches English as a second language, would get for working with kids for an hour. I thought it was a pretty good deal, but I had a few issues.
Sometimes. I was getting lots of typos and things like that. And the biggest mistake I made was I never once sent an article back. I felt a little bit of guilt or something like that. I felt, oh, maybe I’m not paying people enough to ask them to rewrite things, to go through it and correct mistakes.
But the thing we’ve gotta remember is that if you offer a job and you offer a wage and someone accepts. That is what they’re accepting. They’re willing to do the job for that price. You can’t feel guilty even if you know that you are probably paying less than you could actually afford. So I never sent back an article.
That was a mistake on my part, but then I had a few issues with one writer in particular who actually plagiarized an entire pillar post 3,500 words. And I’d asked them to write something based on all 52 states in the United States. And basically they’d gone to a website and copied and pasted it, all of the information into the article directly from that website.
And, what does that help me ? How does that help me? It’s already on the internet. Why would I want that on my website? And that was just really demotivating. It took me two or three hours to go and actually rewrite it. So it wasn’t just copied and pasted from another website.
That really got me down. And for a couple weeks, I just didn’t want to look at these blogs cuz I thought stupidly, I thought it was another writer who’d done it. And that person was quite prolific on my blog and they had written a lot of blog posts for me and I thought, no, have they done it for 10 blog posts?
Am I gonna have to do it again? And it, but luckily it was a different writer. I’d got my wires. Anyway, the point is what you can do to avoid this is you can make it extremely clear to your writers, what you expect. You can make it plain, that if it’s necessary, you will send back articles to be rewritten or corrected, and you can also make it very clear that plagiarism will not be tolerated and should not be done.
The other thing that I found that I started to do later in my process with the. I actually gave them a very clear outline for every single post. So what I did is I gave them the title to the blog post. Obviously I also gave them all of the subheadings that I wanted. And for each subheading, I actually gave them a little summary, a little kind of overview of what I knew the information was or what I wanted the information to talk about there.
And all they had to do was flesh it. Maybe go do a bit of research, get a few facts and figures here and there. And I really found that was a much better way of doing it. And I got exactly what I was looking for. And all I had to do then was put it into my own voice and it was a much better process.
So this is something that I’m definitely gonna do moving on to this year. So as I’ve been thinking about this, another thing that came to mind. That really slowed down my progress and how productive I’ve been, because I really did start this as being very productive. I’ve been following what’s known as the Project 24 course by Income School, which takes you through step by step, how to build blogs, how to build a YouTube channel.
And I came out of the gates flying. I really, I completed the first part within I hit every deadline. I did it very quickly. I was producing a lot of content early. And I ran out of steam, not because I got bored of the topic or anything like that. It’s because I had that kind of shiny object syndrome.
I started looking around, oh, that’s a good project. Oh, I could do that. So now I’m running three websites, I’ve got at least three YouTube channels. I’m lucky because I only really work in the evening and the amount of money we get paid as teachers here in Taiwan kind of balances it out so I can survive on that.
Only working in the evenings kind of schedule, even though the main problem I have is I’m not staying focused. I don’t really know what I’m doing day to day. Apart from that, I sit down in front of the computer, I’m like, oh, I know I’ve gotta do this, but maybe I’ll look at this first. So one of the things I would say is if you’re starting out or you’re fairly new in this journey, stick to one project.
Just stick to your blog or your YouTube channel until you start seeing a bit of success with that. After that you can spread out if you fall into the trap like I have, and you’ve got many things happening. I think the best thing is to have a dedicated schedule, to have, to know all the tasks that you have to do for that day.
And to know that before you sit down, so this is something I’ve started to do in the last kind of weeks. Just, I sit down at my computer and immediately I start going, because once I start, I really don’t stop. So my wife bought me this new watch here, and it’s really annoying because every so often it says, Hey, fat ass, get up, do some exercise, move around.
I might. No skip. I need to finish this thing. So I think having a clear schedule for the week, for the day, even for the hour, depending how much time you have to dedicate to this thing, you’ve got to get the most out of it. And the worst thing you can do is check your analytics and things like that.
It just wastes so much time where you could be spending that in a much better way. Another thing I think you should do when you are writing or editing or whatever you are doing for your business is turn off any other notifications. You don’t wanna have Facebook messages popping up or YouTube.
Notifications, anything like that have a sterile working space and just focus on what you need to do and get it done as quickly as you can. Because when you are answering messages or taking phone calls, you are losing your train of thought and it’s gonna take much longer. If you are interested in joining me on my journey, building an online income, why not subscribe to the channel?
Because this is what I talk about all the time. If you found this video useful, then please do give me a because it does help me guess what you guys like to watch and what you are finding helpful. And for those of you that are just starting out and you don’t really know the first. Steps, the building a blog or YouTube channel, I can highly recommend joining Project 24, which is run by Income School.
And there is a link in the description. If you want to find out some more information about that, it is an affiliate link, but it doesn’t cost you anything extra, but it does help me carry on doing what I’m doing. Thanks very much for watching guys. I will see you in a new location and a new video next week.