Have I been suffering from an advanced case of "Shiny New Object Syndrome" over the past ten months or so? It certainly seems like it!
A few months ago I was talking up a new online community that I was building on the Skool platform. I called it Conversion Catalyst and several people from the CTP community joined the free version and contributed to the community. But then something happened and I pulled the plug on the community. I've been meaning to explain what was going on, and in this video and blog post I attempt to do that...
Thank You For Supporting The Project
But first, I'd like to thank those of you who supported the projected by joining Conversion Catalyst and taking part in the community, especially:
The Online Business Lover's Dilemma!
In the video I talk about how I unexpectedly found myself presented with another opportunity that, like a saucy strumpet, led me down a different path and into greener meadows...
Video Transcript
Back in the 17th century, an English poet called Aphra Behn wrote a poem "On Her Loving Two Equally," and the first couple of lines run:
How strongly does my passion flow,
Divided equally 'twixt two?
And then in the third stanza, she asks Cupid to cure this divided love,
Cure then thou Mighty winged god,
This Restless fever in my blood;
One golden-pointed dart take back
But which, O Cupid, wilt thou take?
The Lovers Card of the Marseilles Tarot
And this may remind us of the Marseille version of The Lovers in the Tarot deck. This is an early version by Oswald Wirth, inspired by that tarot image, the Marseille deck. And in this image, we see, in this case, a young man who's presented with two paths or two options, and they are two types of love. And blind Cupid above him is pointing his Arrow at his heart:
Community Building or... LiveGood?
Well, I found myself inadvertently in just such a situation. It is where I found myself increasingly having to make a choice between two versions of my online business. One was the community that I was building, Conversion Catalyst, and the other was the LiveGood affiliate program.
What happened was last Black Friday, I bought a special offer by Sam Ovens of Skool.com. I bought a Year's membership of Skool and I got some extra training thrown in as well as part of that Black Friday package.
And I bought into the idea that I wanted to build an online community, a business based online community. And I spent several months gradually building out the content of that community. And then I ran a trial version. I had about 30 people who joined the community as free members, and that was all in the experimental stage. And I was preparing to launch over the summer of 2023.
But then, right at the beginning of 2023, another guy who I greatly admire, Jeff Aman, contacted me. He contacted his Network and said, "Hey, there's this new program launching," or maybe it had just launched, "called LiveGood." And it was the program he'd been waiting for to plug into the Prosperity Marketing System as the primary business offer.
And so, I jumped on board and joined LiveGood through Jeff Aman. And I'm quite high up in Jeff's network or his matrix.
Livegood Lives Up To The Promise
And what I found was that LiveGood has lived up to the promise. And I started making money quite passively with LiveGood to the extent where I'm making several hundred dollars a month, hardly doing anything to promote it myself. Though that is going to change moving on.
How Do I Really Want To Run My Online Business?
And I found myself increasingly conflicted about which way to go or whether to bring them both together. And, in fact, I did set up some LiveGood training inside the Conversion Catalyst Mastermind.
But what I gradually began to find was that there were various frustrations and difficulties that I personally encountered in trying to run a community. And I started to question myself as to whether that was really what I wanted to do or not.
This is against the context of someone who is also doing quite a lot of offline teaching. I have two College gigs here in Japan and a bunch of private classes as well. So during term time, I'm away from my computer a lot. I'm in the class teaching face to face. And so time spent on your online business becomes quite limited, as I'm sure everybody can imagine or knows through direct experience.
And so I found myself having to try to decide what am I really trying to do with my business. Do I really want to push ahead with the community? And I found, to be honest, my enthusiasm was beginning to wane when it came to building a business-based community. And I had to do a lot of introspection.
I had to question myself, is it some kind of block in my development that I've created a community? It's still free, there's 30 odd members, everything is working okay in the community. But something didn't quite feel right. Is it a limitation? Am I putting limitations on myself? Or is it something that I thought I was enthusiastic about? After all, I spent many years as a teacher, I love teaching, and it seemed to me that an online community may be a good way to develop that.
Finding My True Passions
But I found I had a lot more enthusiasm for blogging, for crypto, for making videos like this one, and also for affiliate marketing. And so after a while, I realized I had to choose.
And since LiveGood was making money, in fact, I've fairly quickly earned back with LiveGood the thousand dollars that I'd invested in one year's membership of school. Yeah, it's about $100 a month to run school, so I got it at a discount. I'm pleased to say I've recouped that money thanks to LiveGood profits, which I've put into the Hive blockchain, Hive-backed dollars.
[See this blog post about putting LiveGood profits into HBD:
https://ctptalk.com/@hirohurl/how-im-using-hbd-to-compound-my-passive-livegood-profits ]
So I had to make a difficult decision, which was okay, I've tried Skool. I did think about turning Skool into a more general sort of online training program, bringing in English language teaching, history teaching, literature teaching. These are all things I teach: language, literature, and history, and other stuff as well like communication.
But in fact, I realized I came to realize that being committed to a community wasn't really the way I wanted my business to develop. I like the idea of being able to blog when I want to blog, being able to make videos when I want to make videos.
So anyway, I had to make the decision, like the lover-boy here, which way am I going to go? Which of the two roads? And in fact, I'm going down the more trodden - it seems - road of promoting a very popular program.
However, there's a huge amount of growth left in LiveGood, but LiveGood really has impressed me. It was something totally unforeseen. I was going to commit myself this year to building an online community. I had no idea Jeff Aman would hit me with this excellent affiliate program.
We have people in LiveGood who, with just 11 referrals, are making several thousand dollars in profit a month. I have five or six referrals, I'm making several hundred dollars a month, and I have done very little to promote LiveGood. That is going to change moving on. I'm starting a new blog called fit50s.com. And you'll see on the blog, I brought over the LiveGood training materials from Conversion Catalyst. This blog is very undeveloped. I'm going to build it out over the rim what remains of this summer, so August and September. I hope to build out this blog and moving much more strongly in the direction of working with and promoting LiveGood.
[Blog: https://fit50s.com ]
I'm with the Green Lady of LiveGood!
So there we are. I was in the lover's dilemma, and I have been in the lover's dilemma for several months. But I'm moving with the green Lady of LiveGood from now on.
Okay folks, if you're in a dilemma, I hope that helps. You're not the only one. There's a lot of choices we have to make. We often get caught with too many choices in internet marketing. So find what it is you really like, spend some time thinking about how you're going to move forward. What do you really want to do? What character do you really want your business to take on?
In my case, I found that it was blogging, making videos, and working with affiliate marketing more than teaching and training directly online through a community.
There still will be the ability for people to engage with me one-to-one through the blogs, through the comments sections of the blogs, through the comments underneath the videos, and also through my email list. If you're on my list, you can contact me anytime.
Okay, anyway, that's it for me. Going forward with the green Lady of LiveGood from now on.
David Hurley
#InspiredFocus (when not stuck on the horns of a dilemma)
https://fit50s.com
https://davidhurley.net
Take the Livegood tour: https://LiveGoodTour.com/hirohurl
Aphra Behn, "On Her Loving Two Equally": https://www.poetry-archive.com/b/on_her_loving_two_equally.html