Lessons, Tips and Tricks for Making Money With Interviews

We talk about creating content from our office in our posts occasionally and I received an email asking about it. So I filmed a quick tour of our massive world headquarters for you.

online entrepreneurs, small business issues content creation offices

It’s Spring Break here in Orange County, California and so the child-unit is out of school and we’re horsing around quite a bit. It will be a light posting week, as you can tell, as the normal work routine is completely out of whack.

We love the fact that we can take time off whenever we want. It ranks right up their with “signing your own paychecks” in terms of benefits of working for yourself. Of course the big joke in self-employment is that you tell yourself you’ll take vacations whenever you want and leave early whenever you want. The reality, of course, is that you work harder than you ever have for anyone else and rarely leave early.

But 12 hours working for yourself is like 2 hours working for someone else. Actually there’s just no comparison. Emile and I are absolutely ruined as employees – there’s no way we’ll ever go back to working for the man. It’s much better to be the man.

Anyway, one of the questions I seem to get a lot from people is how I schedule my workday so I thought I’d do a quick post about it. I try to schedule my days in writing the night before and it rarely goes according to plan. But here’s what my ideal day looks like. I’ll also be trading during market hours.

5:30 am: Get up and work in the home office for 30 minutes before the family wakes up
6:00 am: Get my daughter up and help her and my wife get out the door to the ice rink and school
(my daughter is a figure skater and skates every day before school)
7:00 am: Arrive at the office about 10 minutes away from home
(I enjoy having an office but I sometimes work from home too.)
7:00 am – 8:00 am: Write emails for our membership site auto-responders or current content promotions, check overnight content sales and memberships
8:00 am – 9:00 am: Read forums in membership site industries and post messages and replies (with snappy signature line link to our site, of course)
9:00 am – 10:00 am: Work on content consulting gigs and offer help to paid content sites
10:00 am – 12:00 am: Conduct interviews and create content for sites – check on outsourcing jobs like transcription and audio editing
12:00 am – 1:30 pm: Lunch. I gotta have lunch. I’m no good without lunch. Maybe some errands.
1:30 pm – 2:30 pm: Answer email, request interviews via email and follow-up on previous requests
2:30 pm – 3:30 pm: Pow-wow with Emile about current software projects and website updates
3:30 pm – 4:30 pm: Read blogs within our website industries, comment and reply to comments, check affiliate earnings for the day
4:30 pm – 5:30 pm: More content creation (and lately working on guest blog posts for sites related to our own content sites)
5:30 pm – 6:00 pm: Tweak, re-write and adjust our content site emails and web pages based on tests we’ve run
6:00 pm – Head home, help daughter with homework, watch national evening news, spend time with family, read
9:00 pm – Workout in the garage then back to home office to answer emails, plan schedule for following day, brainstorm content ideas
10:00 pm – Think about heading to bed and hopefully do so soon. More reading.

Every day is different but that gives you a good sense of what I may be doing on any given day.

selling content online, small business issues typical work day, world's best boss

Fred Castaneda is someone I’ve known for several years through the podcasting industry. He’s as enthusiastic about his podcasts as anyone I know.

I had the privilege of being interviewed by him for his Struggling Entrepreneur podcast a few weeks ago.

If you’re interested in how I went from police officer to small business owner and what I think is my biggest challenge, head over via the link below and take a listen.

My thoughts about writing business plans and planning exit strategies are sure to make the small business “gurus” cringe.

Click here to listen in.

small business issues Fred Casteneda, podcasting, Struggling Entrepreneur podcast