RWL234 Mastering Location Independence with w/ solopreneur Weston Davis

Alex :
0:00

Welcome back to the Remote Work Life podcast. I'm your host, alex Wilson-Campbell, and today we've got a really exciting guest with us. Weston Davis is a location-independent freelance digital marketer who has worked with a diverse range of businesses. Weston has a passion for helping businesses grow organic web traffic and attract more customers through strategic content. But what's even more fascinating is Weston's unique side project his deep involvement in the martial arts community. Through his writing, weston shares insightful articles on martial arts, offering guidance for those looking to make informed choices about their training, while also diving into real world self-defense strategies and sharing inspiring martial arts stories. Today we're going to hear about how Weston blends his marketing expertise with his passion for martial arts and the valuable lessons he's learned from both fields. Weston begins by talking about how he started out in content creation.

Weston Davis:
1:00

In school I majored in business and after university I did a lot of hospitality work because I had this wonderful idea of traveling the world and living an adventurous life by working on a cruise ship. And then, a couple of years before COVID made it cool, I became interested in remote work after reading Tim Ferriss' Four Hour Workweek and began a long career transition into a digital marketing role. At first I wasn't quite certain what I wanted to do and no one would hire me because I had no digital experience. At that point, All of my jobs had been in hospitality, so I had to volunteer and freelance, slowly but steadily, earning like minimum wage, then more money, and experimenting with different sorts of digital marketing, to find my way. At this point, I am a digital marketer with three years of experience. My specialties are in on-page SEO and writing website content, and I'm refining those skills all the time. At this point, I have developed a wide variety of skills, all geared around building, promoting and then monetizing website content.

Alex :
2:07

I'm intrigued to know more about your business and work, so tell me more about that and how long you've been running it for.

Weston Davis:
2:13

I've been freelancing and volunteering for about five years, but I started officially freelancing about three years ago, when I became a full-time digital marketing freelancer, and over the course of those three years I've assisted eight small businesses in a variety of different digital marketing tasks, but over time I've steadily focused more and more towards SEO and blog content. At this point, though, right now I am developing a new business. I have built my own website all about martial arts and helping people make inherent martial art choices. I'm monetizing it with affiliate marketing, so like promoting different products that people will need if they choose to join, let's say, mixed martial arts or taekwondo. I've been at this for about six months and the website is progressing very quickly. It's definitely hitting some really good early metrics that show that probably in two years time it will be a decent side source of income?

Alex :
3:12

What inspired you to be location independent with your work?

Weston Davis:
3:16

Wow. So this question actually cuts pretty deep into my why. When I was a little boy, when I was asked what I wanted to grow up, I would always say I want to grow up. I would always say I want to be an adventurer, like the people I saw in movies, read about in books or played in video games. And of course, everyone thought it was ridiculous because no one could do that. When they grew up they have to be policemen or doctors or stuff like that, and I was confused about my life for a while.

Weston Davis:
3:40

But when I became an adult I had an epiphany and realized that actually I could be an adventurer. I just had to find a way of making money while doing it. And at first I thought the best way of going about that would be working on cruise ships, and it's not a bad lifestyle. But after I learned about remote work and the location independence that comes with it, I realized that was a better avenue. And what it really all boils down to is I fundamentally believe that the true currency of life isn't money.

Weston Davis:
4:09

It's the experiences we have. Once we are old and can't move any longer and we reflect back on our life. We're going to reflect on the things we did and the things we did not do. We only have one life and we have a limited amount of time and I do not want my life to be boring. I want it to be locational independence, so that I can have a wide variety of experiences with different people in different places. I also believe that location independence creates a wide variety of lifestyle opportunities, like taking a strong currency from one region and bringing it to a less expensive region.

Weston Davis:
4:45

Or alternatively and I think this is something I want to explore and it's starting to come about business opportunities. We live in a time period where people are able to live in a way they've never been able to live before, and we're only beginning to start to see the businesses opportunities that are going to come out of that.

Alex :
5:07

Why inspired you to start this particular type of business.

Weston Davis:
5:09

Okay, so for this question, I'm going to speak about my martial arts website, Path of Martial Arts, which is designed to help people make informed choices in the martial arts they study. And, being straight up, I got into this niche for selfish reasons, for my own personal development. At this point in my reasons, for my own personal development At this point in my career, I've learned a lot about SEO, I've learned a lot about how to write blog posts and I've also learned a lot about affiliate marketing. So what that means is I know how to build websites, I know how to market them and I now know how to monetize them. And while I'm looking for new full-time work to really refine my skill set just a little bit more, I built my own website, partly as a way to make a side income, but also as a way to develop my skills and constantly practice SEO, copywriting, web design, graphic design, podcasting.

Weston Davis:
5:59

I make audio blogs on my articles all these skills and the reason I chose this niche is I did an audit of all of my interests and the ones I wanted to write about the most were either very competitive or the search intent for those topics was murky. It's like I wanted to write about how to live a good life and how to develop better careers, but if you search stuff like lifestyle, you're going to find a whole bunch of articles about how to decorate your house and Thanksgiving, so it's very confused. But I got to martial arts, which I have a background in. I did about 10 years of training in Taekwondo and I'm currently training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Muay Thai. I've also trained in karate and capoeira and I looked at that and it's a very popular topic, as you could imagine.

Weston Davis:
6:45

But from a web search perspective like Google, it's extremely uncompetitive and I'm like this is a fantastic playground to practice my skills. I can write and practice my abilities for SEO, copywriting and such in this uncompetitive environment where I can get some easy wins and be motivated through the learning experience. And as I've gone along, I've become much more nerdy about martial arts and all the various aspects of it and I really do see that I am filling a niche. I do a lot of research for my topics different gear, which martial arts are effective for self-defense or which martial arts are best for kids and a lot of the articles I see are very low quality. They're written by people who are better martial arts than me, like their dojo owners. But the dojo owners don't know how to write good content. They don't know how to make well-optimized websites that are easy on the eyes, easy to read, that load quickly, and I'm really seeing that I'm actually filling a big gap in the market by creating well-researched, informed, easy to read articles about martial arts.

Alex :
7:53

How did you identify the niche for your products or services?

Weston Davis:
7:57

I answered this in the previous question, but I'll go a little bit more in depth. As I mentioned, I did an audit of all of my interests for what I would like to build a blog about, and I determined, using SEO tools like Ahrefs, that the not just one martial art, but the entire topic of martial arts, like all martial arts. On Google, the search, it's very popular, they're very popular to search, but they're very uncompetitive. Like you, do not have to have too many backlinks to rank high for those keywords. Now, digging a little deeper than that, what I would recommend to someone who's listening to this podcast if you're considering starting a business, I think it's worthwhile to write down all of your interests, everything you are passionate about or at least moderately interested in, or maybe you had experience in it. I mean, for me, martial arts was something I did as a kid and I hadn't done it for like I. The last time I attended a martial arts dojo before I started my new website was eight years ago. It's something that was in the back of my mind. You know I wasn't thinking about all the time. Only when I like dance or practice doing like weapon performances do I really channel that martial arts, energy. So I'd really recommend writing out all of your skills and as you do research.

Weston Davis:
9:13

You want to look into domain names. You want to look into how competitive the topics you want to write about. Are you want to do research on advertising? Is there money if you were to advertise the? Are you want to do research on advertising? Is there money if you were to advertise the keywords on the topic you're interested in? Do research into the sort of products that you could promote.

Weston Davis:
9:33

I'm very big in affiliate marketing and I did a lot of research into various products like punching bags or boxing gloves or mouthguards that I could promote on my website and get a commission if someone bought those products through my links. So I would really recommend, as you audit your niche, you come up with your interests, you do a lot of research to see how competitive they are, if they could be monetized effectively, and as you choose a domain name, pay very close attention to are there other businesses that use similar domain names? If you search that domain name, are you competing with big businesses like Amazon or Apple? If you were going to name your business I don't know, apple buys Apple store or whatever like that you'd be competing with Apple. For that you want to be careful of those things. There's a lot of research that goes into choosing your niche.

Alex :
10:25

How did you attract your first clients or customers?

Weston Davis:
10:29

Okay, so I'm going to speak very briefly about my volunteering experience and my freelance experience, but then we can talk about my website. At the beginning, when I was making the transition into remote work, I had to volunteer. I had to reach out to people on LinkedIn in topics I was interested in. I was really interested in remote work. So I just joined all the remote work forums and met people and spoke with people and offered to help however I can, and that gained me some early experience. It also gained me some like I would do some tasks and try new things and some of them I'm like, oh, this is fun or oh, I'm good at and you? I also got some early testimonials out of that and I met my first real client through that and yeah, so at the start, if you're doing a career transition, you're probably going to have to volunteer and then work for minimum wage and then go up from there Switching to my website, which is a totally different business model.

Weston Davis:
11:25

So from a website perspective, I am now, in six months, sold about $200 worth of products on Amazon and different martial arts websites. I know how to do affiliate marketing where, basically, I join the program, the affiliate program of different companies where I promote their products through links that have my unique tracking code. And if a person reads one of my articles about, let's say, boxing gloves or coupons, which is a sort of martial arts self-defense weapon, and they buy it, and they buy a product off of the links that I'm sharing on that page, I get some commissions. So, as I said at this point, I made about $200 in six months. I got to be more accurate. I've sold $200 worth of products in six months, which is pretty good for a start, but the commission I'm getting is they were from three to 10%, so I've actually made probably about $30. But as a website increases in traffic and backlinks and such those about somebody increase quickly, a lot of website builders can make six figures off of a website or multiple websites, and that's the path that I'm on now.

Alex :
12:35

What steps did you take to launch the business?

Weston Davis:
12:38

All right. So, talking about my martial arts website, I mentioned this a little bit in a previous question, but I audited my niche. I did a lot of research on the domain name, because that is so important. Your domain name really is your identity and you want to make sure that it's unique. You want to examine the ground upon which you build, like I should my. I think my first name was like your martial arts journey. I chose that domain name. No one had it, but then I searched and I saw that there was another YouTube channel, a very popular and established one, called Journey of Martial Arts, and I would be competing with it and it could cause me liability issues where our brands would get confused with each other and they might send me nasty emails. I just saw all of this and I'm like, oh shit, I got to change my name, so I went with Path to Martial Arts and I realized that with that name, it evokes the spirit I'm trying to get of make informed martial arts choices while also having, if you search, path to Martial Arts, I'm really competing with a couple of forums for the first spot on Google, so that's fertile ground. After that, I signed on with WordPress, and WordPress is a wonderful CMS to build your website with, because I was a novice with WordPress up like the way I wanted to, or structure the website the way I wanted to, and they walked me through how to do it. And by walking me through how to do it, they were teaching me how to build websites. And at this point I built two beautiful websites using those lessons. I built two beautiful websites using those lessons.

Weston Davis:
14:24

After that, I think the first thing I did was I targeted a topic martial arts weapons. I targeted it one because that's where I've had a lot of martial arts experience. I know my martial arts weapons very well. I do a lot of dance performances with martial arts weapons and I also knew that I could market those affiliate products training staves or even real staves, or training swords or real swords. I started with that and then after that, I created a content plan where I said, okay, I want to create topics on what are the best martial arts for self-defense. So I'm going to structure it as a tier list and I might do a martial arts industry report or talk about what is the best martial arts for kids or martial arts gear. And I haven't written all this yet. I've written probably half of what I just said, Because what I'm realizing now is all of this stuff is important for different reasons, but I have to prioritize certain things.

Weston Davis:
15:18

Right now I'm prioritizing articles about martial arts equipment, because it means that I'm creating more affiliate links to martial arts products on my website and once I write all of those articles, I'm going to any article I write about mixed martial arts. I could post advertisements to martial arts MMA gloves or MMA boxing pads. It allows me to monetize my full website by writing those articles. My next step after that is going to be pursuing backlinks, because right now, my website has no backlinks and it's still on page two or even four or six for a lot of the searches I'm going for. Even though it's an uncompetitive niche, it's very important for me to reach out to other martial arts creators or communities or stuff like that, and encourage them to link to my content. So that's going to be the next major step, did you?

Alex :
16:11

face any challenges in the startup phase and, if so, how did you overcome them?

Weston Davis:
16:16

Oh, my God, have I faced challenges over the past six months, oh Lord. I came into this and I came into this from a strong position. I'd been writing website content for years. I'd had victories. I'd gotten blog posts to rank a page one at Google at this point. I managed an affiliate program for safety wing. I learned from the very best affiliate marketers in the travel industry in that job, so I came in very strong. But I still faced huge challenges over the past seven months.

Weston Davis:
16:48

I think I've already mentioned that the domain name was a struggle. I had to learn a lot about how to choose a good domain name and make sure that it's going to have great potential for the long term. I had to learn how to build WordPress websites, and I think I mentioned that WordPress thankfully has this excellent assisted service where you can work with happiness engineers and they will walk you through step-by-step how to do, how to write blog posts or how to structure your website just the way you want, and if you really don't know how to do it, they'll help you do it. But I never let them do it for me. I said you show me how to do these things, walk me through it, but I will do it and by doing that, I went from being a novice in WordPress to actually being a pretty advanced user in about six months.

Weston Davis:
17:36

Affiliate marketing man. It's a beautiful business model, but it comes with a lot of hurdles, like, for example, amazon has very strict rules about its affiliate marketing. You can't copy paste images. You have to use API HTML to get images from them. At this point, with the Amazon associates program I had I learned that joining affiliate programs often takes like days or even weeks, and I want to write content like right now. I learned about affiliate networks where you can join like multiple companies at once just through that one application, and that was a big time saver. It definitely got me, and also it got me access to some of the best companies that I wanted to market their products anyways, that's how I found out about that. Going forward, I think joining affiliate networks would save me a lot of time and energy Also with affiliate marketing, there's compliance issues and saved me a lot of time and energy.

Weston Davis:
18:30

Also with affiliate marketing, there's compliance issues and I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I love. I've really enjoyed building my website and writing my content because it's like building a house for me and I enjoy the artistry of building a website. So where I'm going with this is balancing the artistry I have in my mind with these rules is really hard and it's very satisfying to break through those walls at the end. But it's like there have been a couple weeks or even a few months where I was just banging my head against walls, trying to figure out how to balance the rules and limitations that these programs were forcing on me with my artistic sense of how I want these articles to look. And it really just takes a lot of talking to tech support and a lot of research and a lot of practice and a lot of learning to make that happen. But I've recently broken through some major walls and the content's flowing swimmingly right now, so I'm so happy about that.

Weston Davis:
19:27

And the last thing is writing. I grew up being very proud of my large vocabulary. I was taught how to write long form essays in English class and then I get into sales and business positions and writing positions and realize, wow, no one wants to hear me talk about all the details or jabber, jabber, jabber about this or that. They want me to keep it short and simple, not keep it long and lengthy. And as I was writing, I would write these very long, very detailed articles that even if I made them visually stylized, they could be very dense. The way I got around that was I spoke with, I found mentors. I was very fortunate to connect with the head of content at SEMrush and I paid him for consultation calls to advise me on how to write my content better and get to value faster, and his advice definitely helped me. So reaching out to mentors was good and I also learned something great If I write a really long blog post, yeah, that blog post by itself is a very bad thing, but it's actually an opportunity to turn the topic into a content pillar when, if I write about every martial art and how it ranks for self-defense on the A to F tier, I can actually create sub-articles for each martial art explaining why they are ranked the way they are, and then briefly link you know, briefly summarize that in the main article and link to it and instead of having one extremely long, extremely dense post, I now have 16 concise, connected, interlinked posts.

Weston Davis:
21:04

That increases my SEO. So those are some of the challenges I've dealt with in the past seven months and it's been a really great learning journey, frankly. But oh my God, if I tell you, if I had hair, I would have pulled it out a few times.

Alex :
21:18

What marketing strategies have been most effective for you to grow your client base or grow your customers?

Weston Davis:
21:24

At this point with my website. It is all organic. There are a couple of friends, especially in the martial arts sphere, who I share my content with, to get their opinions, but I have to say that for the most part, I write the articles, I index the articles, I make sure that they are as well written as I possibly can, and one of the beautiful things about websites is I can update them to make them better written and more stylized to attract more attention. And, following my SEO playbook, in the past six months I've gone from zero monthly traffic to over 150 visitors a month, which is a good start. In my experience with SEO, I know that probably in a year, by the end of the year, especially if I keep going at the rate I'm going or increase the amount of content I'm going at, which is actually very possible now that I've built a lot of the systems that were slowing me down, I'm confident that I could get a thousand views and monthly visitors and probably by two years that number could go to 5,000 or above, depends how hard I work, and I'm working pretty hard. So I think I could go above 5,000 in two years, but that's all organic.

Weston Davis:
22:34

One strategy that I'm mulling around in my mind right now and I'm about to implement it is I do these dance performances with martial arts weapons or using martial arts techniques and I'm thinking that I will create a section on my website where I will integrate YouTube videos of me doing these dances and promote the products that I'm using.

Weston Davis:
22:52

If I'm doing a staff dance, I can promote the staff, but I think it also creates another marketing avenue and also an element of virality where I can dress up as Saitama from One Punch man and do some martial arts stuff, or dress up as Fade Rothman and do like dancing with knives or stuff like that to draw in a more casual, interested crowd who might then check out the highly informative, no-nonsense martial arts articles that I've written. So that's another avenue to get backlinks. That's going to be a major thing for me and I'm on that end. I'm thinking that I'm going to have to do some community work, where I'm going to have to join martial arts communities and develop relationships with different martial arts businesses so that they promote me, and that's a very important element of my marketing, because without backlinks my web pages their growth is going to be capped what sets you apart from your competitors In the martial arts sphere.

Weston Davis:
23:47

I would say that if you look at videos on YouTube or TikTok, the topic of martial arts is competitive. You definitely could tell an amateur from someone who's like a professional fighter in MMA or a sword master who could cut through three watermelons in one slice. You know what I mean, but in web search it's a lot simpler, and that's the primary arena where I'm competing right now. I believe I only have truly four businesses that I would truly consider real competitors to myself. My most of my competitors are dojo owners and martial arts martial artists, mma fighters. They have a lot of experience. They are. They're almost certainly better fighters than I am. They are less rusty. They've trained longer. They probably trained students I've never trained any students so they have the advantage of having more experience and more skill as a martial artist. My advantages, though, is that they are terrible writers, generally speaking, and they're even worse with web design and seo. If you look at most of the ranking articles for what is taekwondo, or what is its history? Or is it good for kids, or is it good for self-defense? What is the equipment that I need if I'm going to start training in Taekwondo? The articles are crap. They really are Talking about my strengths now and my advantages is I know how to do SEO far better than them. I'm a better writer, but I also am very determined to research good information. I intensely research the topics I'm on Right now. For example, I'm writing about writer, but I also am very determined to research good information. I intensely research the topics I'm on right now. For example, I'm writing about Taekwondo gear that you're going to need. So it'd be stuff like a uniform, like a chest protector, the right head gear and stuff like that, and at first I, from my own experience, I knew what sort of gear you could use. But doing my research, I learned that if you want to compete in Taekwondo at the highest level, like professionally or at an Olympian level, you need gear that is approved by the World Taekwondo Federation, and I completely altered my article to find gear approved by them. Adidas makes a whole bunch of gear that's approved by the World Trade Taekwondo Federation, so you can use that gear at any level. And I made sure that was the stuff I was promoting, because I want to make sure that if I recommend something, it's well-reviewed. I've personally used it ideally, but rarely that is the case, or it's got to be something that you can carry all the way to the top, that you keep on using. For years.

Weston Davis:
26:20

I put a lot of energy into making sure that my information is good and that I'm recommending the right things, and especially if I'm talking about stuff I don't know, like I've written about mixed martial arts.

Weston Davis:
26:30

I've never done mixed martial arts and I've ranked martial arts trainers who are way more experienced than me on YouTube comparing different martial arts styles, and I took detailed notes about what they said and referenced those notes and linked back to the parts of the videos where they spoke about it. When I said something that was that I didn't know was that I hadn't personally experienced these more professional people had experienced. So I put in tremendous research and energy into making sure that what I'm saying has rounds, has backing and you know, between them and me, hopefully we're getting close to the truth. I also, on my website, really strive to be humble and let people know that there's a lot I don't know and I'm doing the best I can and I'm referencing the work of other people. So and that's something I also don't see a lot of my competitors. So those are some ways I stand apart.

Alex :
27:34

How do you stay productive while working remotely?

Weston Davis:
27:38

Staying productive while working remotely is a process of years, if not a lifetime. I'm certain for some people it is a lifetime process. I certainly. When I started working remotely, if the pressure was getting to me I could easily get distracted. I could goof around on Netflix. This was some years back.

Weston Davis:
27:56

Over the years I learned that I think working remotely, and especially if you're a solopreneur or a freelance, you're setting your own schedule. It's super important for me to I keep two schedules. I keep a Google calendar where I write out all the different things I'm supposed to do during the week and for really important meetings like, for example, recording this podcast, I mark those things in red so I make sure I don't miss them. I also keep a daily journal and I write on a long post-it form like the work tasks I have to do what are the top three things I need to do today, what are the tasks and chores I need to do? And I also have a couple of little daily things like daily exercise, brushing my teeth twice a day, stuff like that. Those are a couple of ways I keep myself organized and keep myself focused on the big picture For this business staying organized in that I've actually created sort of my own content calendar where I've identified topics for different things and I have it all in a spreadsheet and I also keep track of. I have notes for every article I write and over time I'll realize oh hey, I actually need to update the affiliate links on this page to make sure they're more compliant. Or I think that after I write this future article in a few months I need to come back to this article and link back to that article, or so on and so forth. So that's another way I stay organized. I think the last thing I want to say about this topic is in my work.

Weston Davis:
29:16

I find that the sweet balance of work is your job should be 50% fun, engaging and free flowing and it should be 50% very hard, very challenging, but you're learning a lot. See, if your job is like always fun and super easy and stuff like that, it means you're not growing. But if your job is super hard, where and I had this like where I was trying to solve some very challenging affiliate marketing compliance and design problems and web design problems even earlier than that, it was just so hard and so painful. I was learning a lot but I was having like zero fun and my productivity would nosedive, where I would spend more time playing video games or more time walking because I just wanted to get away from my work.

Weston Davis:
30:02

And I think as you do remote work and as you grow as a professional, you're going to go through times where sometimes you're having a lot of fun and it's just so easy to do the work, but you're probably not growing that much and other times you're just going to be like oh my God, it is so hard and I'm slamming my head against the wall and I'm bleeding hard and I'm slamming my head against the wall and I'm bleeding. It hurts doing this work. And as much as you can try and find and choose work where you reach that balance of you're having some fun and you're learning some stuff, that's the sweet spot and if you are in that sweet spot you will be productive, you will grow, you'll become a better professional and you will get better career opportunities over the years. How?

Alex :
30:43

do you manage the day-to-day operations of running your business Are there any particular tools or techniques that you use?

Weston Davis:
30:51

All right, so for day-to-day stuff. I mentioned in a previous question and how do I stay productive? Google Calendar Get a calendar. It is super important for your life. I also personally love writing down my daily tasks in my journal and scratching them off. It feels so good to scratch them off. If I scratch off everything on my list, I've had a really good day. I tell you that In my website business, every morning I check Ahrefs and I also check Google Analytics and I check WordPress activity to see how my website is growing, if any technical health issues have cropped up or whatever. To monetize my website, I've recently invested in a program called Lasso, which tracks all of my affiliate links, which is extremely helpful. I was having to use a spreadsheet to track all of the sales and stuff up until this point and it's also really useful for creating affiliate marketing promotions and using Amazon products in a way that's compliant, while also still being able to use their images without having to do HTML coding or API Getting a little technical here.

Weston Davis:
31:56

When it comes to writing, I'm definitely using a lot of AI, but not in the way you would think. I don't tell hey, I don't tell AI hey, write this article for me and I'm going to copy paste that shit. No, I use AI to help me edit my writing. I'll write what I want to say and I'll run it through Chad, gvt or Gemini and say, hey, rewrite this using simple words. I want it to condense my ideas, make it easier to read while still keeping the main spirit, and oftentimes there's a lot of times where I'm like, okay, this, and I do the sentence by sentence.

Weston Davis:
32:28

Oftentimes a sentence is perfect. I'm like, oh, awesome, I'll just copy paste that. But other times, like AI is just not getting the message, I need to edit it myself. Or I actually don't like how AI is rewritten and I alter that. So AI plays a major role in how I edit my stuff. I also sometimes use it to look up these topics, but I always want to find the sources of the topics if I'm going to be writing long form about them, because in the modern age, it's so important to establish credibility, and if you don't have the credibility within yourself, you need to have the credibility of other people who are smarter than you and have spent, or who have at least spent, more time writing the topics than you have and have credibility.

Alex :
33:07

You need to reference them can you give me a high level view of the different revenue streams within the business and, if possible, what they generate?

Weston Davis:
33:17

ladies and gentlemen, this is the section you have been waiting for, because I'm going to share with you something that is very valuable for a wide variety of people who want to become location independent. In the website business and in the YouTube business. There's a thing called affiliate marketing, and you might not know this, but 80% of the businesses you love, from the mom and pop brick and mortar to the big Apples and Googles and Disneys have an affiliate program. What it is in a nutshell is you join an affiliate program saying that you will promote the products of this business and you promote it as a link. They give you a link to any one of their products with a tracking code unique to you, and if you share that link on your website and talk about their products, or if you share that link on your social media or your YouTube channel and people click and buy, you get a commission based on the sale. The commissions range from crappy commissions, like 3%, to awesome commissions, like 25% of the sale. Imagine selling, let's say, a $5,000 massage chair and you get 10% of that. If you advertise these $5,000 massage chairs on your YouTube channel or your website or whatever, and you make a sale every time you make a sale, you're making $500 for that 10% on the $5,000. So you know a lot of people are making six to seven figure incomes on this stuff.

Weston Davis:
34:43

I used to work at Safety Wing where I worked with the best travel influencers in the world and the affiliate marketing. These are people like you and me who got interested in remote work, decided to start traveling and they wrote articles about their travels and usually they'd write it in a frame of here's the awesome stuff to do in Mexico or here's the stuff to watch out for in Thailand, thailand, or here's the most beautiful parks in the world. As they do it, they have these affiliate programs like travel insurance or backpacks or hotels or flights you can do, and these guys were paying for their travels and their lifestyle by writing these articles and promoting these products. It's an extremely powerful model. Another revenue stream that I can use on my website is AdSense and advertising, which is something that I can do. Once my website hits certain metrics, I can put WordPress ads on my website. After I get 1,000 monthly visitors a month, I can also do Google AdSense as I get approved for their program.

Weston Davis:
35:45

A couple of other ways of monetizing, like websites and YouTube channels are like selling my own products or creating digital resources that I could sell, usually like educational resources or stuff like that. Website writer, youtuber or social media influencer, there are going to be businesses that will pay you to use affiliate links or advertisements for their products on your website. So not only are you getting the affiliate revenue or the advertising revenue, but you're also getting like 500 to a thousand or ridiculous amounts If you're like huge, like a major influencers might get paid like $10 dollars for a post, and that post generates a lot of additional affiliate marketing revenue for your, for them and a lot of sales for the business.

Alex :
36:30

So it's a really good model what are some of the biggest challenges that you currently face as a location, independent professional?

Weston Davis:
36:38

right now. We're living in a time period where it is very difficult to get like upper level remote work jobs. I know that there's a lot of articles that say the economy is strong, job market is good, but I tell you I'm not feeling that, and I know a lot of other people aren't either. It's very difficult to get a new job these days, and I say that as that's one way of getting income. We're talking about freelancing here. I think it can be challenging to get freelancing clients too. It's just a very competitive environment at this point.

Weston Davis:
37:13

Talking about the website industry, currently AI is disrupting things and making things simultaneously easier and harder to progress. I think AI is an immensely powerful tool, but a lot of the search engines are figuring out how to use it and they're making adjustments that are cracking down or changing the game so rapidly for creators. For example, I believe last month or two months ago, google de-indexed 40% of the internet. I'm going to say that again in language you'll understand. Google removed 40% of websites from search. That's if they were making money through their websites. 40% of the internet just lost their business, and the reason is because Google deemed their content unhelpful rubbish. Ai, cheap quality crap. But if you're a small business owner, you don't know the rules like I do. I study them. This is where I want to go with my profession.

Weston Davis:
38:05

Also, talking about AI, there's a question. I feel like the bar is constantly being raised these days. I've learned so much and I still feel like I'm constantly under threat of being rendered completely irrelevant by technological progression In the SEO business and website content business. I think a lot of people are saying that it's going to be good for the best talent, though it will enhance them, not take their jobs. But that's the best you got to be, the best to rise in. Today, the mediocre are dead. I'm going to say that again the mediocre are dead in the world of AI, and that's a very scary thing. I do not want to be mediocre. I'm terrified of being mediocre because in five years, mediocre is dead. So that's a big deal I think the future of there's also a question about is AI the Google killer? Are we still going to search for things on Google? Are we still going to search for Weston Davis's opinion on martial arts when we can ask ChatGPT or Gemini to give us information on martial arts and the answer there is hey. I want to make sure that when ChatGPT or Gemini mentioned stuff on martial arts, it's referencing my website. So I still get traffic that way. So that's a new frontier.

Weston Davis:
39:20

And talking a little bit personally, one of my biggest challenges with location independence so this might ring true for a couple of yous is my family. My father is elderly and he is in his life where he does need help, but he's very stubborn about getting it from any outside source other than family, like me. So I last year I actually had a location independent job where I could go anywhere and for most of the time I was living in San Francisco, which is very expensive taking care of my father because emotionally it's he needs me and it's tough, but it's difficult for me to leave him knowing that he wouldn't be able to take care of himself. I just want to mention that because maybe this will speak to you. There's times where I think a lot of people's parents and families and friends can be very resistant about you traveling the world or stuff like that.

Weston Davis:
40:11

But there's a whole added dimension of difficulty to really spread your wings and live location independent and free when you have an elderly family member who needs you to survive, and it's a long process of compromise and difficult discussions to help that person accept that they need that. We need to put structures in place that don't involve you or me being the support, the full support. Of course we are going to be there for them. But yeah, that's one of the biggest challenges I've dealt with in my location independent career and when I talk to people about it they're just like wow, that is a tough problem and I don't know how to solve it. And I tell you what I don't really know how to do it either. I'm figuring it out as one of these days.

Alex :
41:03

How did you assess the demand for your products or services in the market?

Weston Davis:
41:08

So when building a website or a YouTube or a content channel, I think there's a lot of tactics and tools that make it fairly easy. Talking about websites specifically, it's very easy if you have the right tools. I used Ahrefs. I could have used SEMrush or Ubersuggest, but I used Ahrefs to research the topics that I wanted to write about with martial arts and I saw that a lot of these search terms let's say, martial arts, weapons or taekwondo could get thousands of monthly visits and their keyword difficulty, which is a ranking that Ahrefs gives keywords based off of their competitiveness, was almost universally in the easy category or the mildly easy category. It still takes a lot of work to get them, but it was incredible the opportunities that were available there.

Weston Davis:
41:57

I also assessed the advertising capability by going on AdSense and searching terms related to martial arts that people would advertise to pay money to promote. This was a trick I got doing research on how to do this stuff on YouTube videos and that helped establish that there was definitely some monetization potential there. I did a lot more research into affiliate products, like the best affiliate programs for martial arts, and determined that there were a lot of products like equipment martial arts buy to train or services. Like I saw, you could make some decent money promoting kung fu retreats, for example. So there were all these. There were all these opportunities in place. I just saw that it was. It was uncompetitive, it was popular, there was a lot of traffic, there were monetization opportunities.

Alex :
42:46

What advice would you give to somebody who's looking to start their own location, independent business or freelance career?

Weston Davis:
42:53

The beautiful thing about being a freelancer or entrepreneur is that you can do things for yourself, and in today's world, I think that is more critical than ever. Being raw, frank and maybe slightly bitter, I'm going to say that you cannot rely on anyone for your career or your life. It's beautiful when they support you, and I think people are really there for you once you reach a level where there's value for them. But think about it Back in the old days certainly before my generation you could get an entry-level job and they would train you and you could get the skills you needed and you could rise through the ranks. These days, you need three years of experience for an entry-level job, don't you Think about it? At every level of business, people want to hire people who already have the skills. How do you get the skills? How do you get the resources, whether you're getting freelance clients or a job or people to invest money in you or mentorship, it just really feels today that no one will give you anything unless you already have something.

Weston Davis:
44:02

And this is where freelancing and entrepreneurship is the answer to your problems. By freelancing, by starting your own business, by volunteering, you get to control your progression. If you want to work and you want to develop your skills and you want to start making money, you can't rely on someone else to hire you. You're going to get rejected nine times and six months later you might get a job. That's six months where you weren't earning money or gaining experience. But if you freelance, if you start your own business, if you volunteer, you create your own experience and experience.

Weston Davis:
44:42

So, talking about someone like right now, I have three years of experience. I know enough to feel confident that I can start a business that can make money. At your start, just get started. Volunteer work for less than minimum wage. Do anything you can to gain experience in the direction that you want your life to go. If you want to get in real estate, shadow a real estate agent. If you want to get into SEO, volunteer like, network with people on LinkedIn and volunteer to work with them. If you want to get into politics I don't know do grassroots politician campaigns.

Weston Davis:
45:19

My point is that you, to start, you're probably going to have to volunteer. You're probably going to have to freelance at less than minimum wage. You need to make it worthwhile for people, to give you the opportunity to gain experience and gain testimonials, and over time you build things up and then once you get to the point where I'm at, where you have three years of experience and people still and it's still hard to get a job in this economy, it's still hard to get freelance clients or this that that's the point where you start your own project, for two reasons One, it might be a great source of income. You might actually really succeed and build your own business. And two, you're learning, you're gaining experience. You're controlling your own growth and progression. You give yourself the gift of growth.

Weston Davis:
46:03

So I highly recommend freelancing and entrepreneurship, especially if you are at a point in your career where you've been rejected for the hundredth or 200th or 300th job and no one's giving you a chance to prove yourself or no one's giving you a chance to do what you were put on this earth to do. Give yourself the chance, screw those guys and reach. Actually, I say screw those guys, but still reach out to them, still apply to jobs or still hunt for freelancers or whatever, but by building your own thing, you are controlling your growth, and growth is what's ultimately going to give you a great career one day. So get started. You can get started freelancing or building your own business at any stage. The further along the way you are, the more likely you are to succeed.

Weston Davis:
46:46

So I actually think that it is a great idea to work with professional companies, people who really know their stuff, for three to five years, especially five years, because by that point you're going to have like low level senior skills. You're going to know a lot about that business model. Those skill sets enough to sell your own skills as a freelancer or as a businessman have a greater chance of success. But at any level you could start, and it's a great idea to start at any level, especially if no one in the world is giving you a chance right now.

Alex :
47:16

And how do you maintain a balance between work and life to hopefully avoid burning out?

Weston Davis:
47:21

I certainly maintain a decent balance for myself, but this question is a little tricky because I think there is a time to work crazy hard and there is a time for work-life balance, and I'm trying to understand what that is. So, talking about me quickly, what I do is I have a part-time job and thankfully I'm able to pay my bills doing it, and I spend my free days building my own website. I have reached a point where I want to make sure that I'm exercising, eating healthy or stuff like that, and I'm limiting my TV video game time to ideally three hours a day, although sometimes I go over that. I find it fairly easy to do that and basically say, just by like, by nine or 10 o'clock, I'm done. You know what I mean. Like. At that point I should just relax. So I think that helps me turn off. It's very important to make sure that you're not taking calls or checking your phone at certain times. I used to work for a globally distributed company, safety Wing, and like half of my team would be sending me messages at three in the morning, so it's really important to just not look at that. Your choice whether you look at your text messages or your emails after hours, don't do it.

Weston Davis:
48:39

But getting back to the philosophical question of work-life balance I raised earlier, I recently read a wonderful LinkedIn post from a man I respect who built a business, a very successful business, and one thing he said that stuck with me is, at the start work-life balance is stupid. Your intensity is your advantage. If you're working like 12 hour days when you're young, when you're hungry, when you're in your 20s, early 30s, to build something meaningful that can give you work life balance, do it. And I was like that's very interesting and I asked myself can I work like 12 hours, six days a week or seven days a week? Gary Vaynerchuk is another example of this. That guy, in his book Crushing it, recommended lionizing people who were just like totally dedicating themselves all their free time to building their side hustles or their businesses.

Weston Davis:
49:31

I think the answer is you need to be doing something you love, to work that hard. If you're doing something you love and it excites you and it fulfills you, it's not going to feel like work or pain. You might even learn to love the long hours that you're putting into your projects. And I think when you're young, while you're in your 20s and 30s, before you have all these other life balances, like kids and stuff like that. It is an interesting time to consider saying you know what? Screw work-life balance, let's get this going on. You know what I mean.

Weston Davis:
50:02

That said, I'm not sure I want to promote like burnout or mental anguish.

Weston Davis:
50:06

I think it's really important that if you're going to work like that, you have to find something that you love doing and satisfies you, and I said this earlier, you need to find something that's 50 fun and 50 challenge. It needs to be fun so that you enjoy doing it and so that you don't burn out, so that it fuels you, it gives you energy, and it needs to be also somewhat hard so that you're learning new things and you're growing and you're learning from your mistakes and building new businesses on top of of those foundations. Until you build a system, an income revenue stream in your life or multiple income revenue streams that give you the freedom of location, independence and to have a phenomenal work-life balance that others only dream of, as they're working three jobs and serving coffee and then doing the graveyard shift. I'm also trying to find that balance, like how much work-life balance is right for now and how much work-life balance should I just defer? Should I just work like crazy during 2024 and make this thing happen? I think, if I'm having enough fun, I can. So that's my answer to that.

Alex :
51:11

And what are your goals and aspirations for yourself and the business for the future?

Weston Davis:
51:16

Starting with my business. I'm very much aiming to build this website for two years and this martial arts website and then see where things go from there. There's a lot. I have a lot of love for a certain style of martial arts, but I would say that only recently have I become nerdy and passionate about stuff like UFC or the training or the sparring. I'm getting to an age where I like doing Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and a lot of guys get hurt doing that stuff, even just doing the practice. I don't want to break myself and I'm not really at a point where I want to spar and compete in that sense, but I don't really see myself doing competitions. So I almost see an upper ceiling to how passionate I could be about this niche I'm in. But that said, if it's extraordinarily successful, we'll see what happens. You know what I mean and I think by adding more of my dancing elements into it, I think I might increase my passion. But getting back to the point my aspirations for my own business are in two years it's either I'm going to learn an enormous amount, no matter what, which is great, that's guaranteed, whether I win or fail. I've developed so many strong skills. I've learned how to build WordPress websites, which is a skill I could sell. I'm learning so much about affiliate marketing, which is something I could use for other businesses, etc. And in two years time, my business will either be a nice side source of income or maybe even a full time source of income, and there's also the possibility that, if one day I'm done with this martial arts topic, I could sell my website for a decent sum. There's ways of doing that.

Weston Davis:
52:49

My aspirations going beyond that for business, though, when I decided to make a website, I thought that the thing I could truly commit my life to is researching and finding resources that will help people like you and me, and I think I've definitely talked to the right people here, especially people like you or me, who yearn for freedom and experience and a full life, a life of meaning giving people the resources to get that, getting a little bit. I know that's a vague topic, but some things I was thinking about is like doing research on what goes into a lifestyle and how to balance it, or something very practical which a lot of people can appreciate is giving people resources that will help them get a career that enables the lifestyle they want, whether they want to travel or spend more time with family or so on, because a career and the research I've done on lifestyles a career has an enormous impact on your lifestyle. Probably the only thing close to matching it would be your mental and spiritual health, which is another topic I would be interested in exploring. The reason I didn't write about these things was they're very competitive and sometimes the things you would search around these topics can be pretty murky. I mentioned this earlier If you search lifestyle, you're not going to see how to build a good life. You're probably going to see a lot about how to decorate your house during Christmas and the best curtains for your house. So, my God, this is what we're searching for with lifestyle. But I digress.

Weston Davis:
54:22

But I started with martial arts because I needed to develop my skills, my power, my capacity to do something great, and that is what I'm doing. I'm developing my ability to give. My aspiration is, I think, a good example of one of my idols would be Tony Robbins. Those would be Tony Robbins. That is probably the greatest. He's probably the greatest force human force towards helping people improve their lives and live more meaningfully, and I would love to work towards that same end. I would be happy to do it by myself and I would honestly. I think the best way of making an impact is through people. Everything we get, everything worthwhile, comes through other people. I honestly think To work with companies that truly enable people to find meaning in their lives, that would be my dream, and whether I do it by myself or do it working for a company, or do it working in alliance with companies, the goal is the same. I care about that because when I was younger, I was deeply depressed and I didn't see any meaning in life.

Weston Davis:
55:41

Frankly, I was a danger to myself at that time and I saw cause.

Weston Davis:
55:47

I had no purpose.

Weston Davis:
55:48

If you have no purpose, you don't see all the other beautiful things in your life, which is something I realized after I got out of that funk.

Weston Davis:
55:54

The whole world opens up and you see the beauty and the love of your family and your friends and just the sun and the birds singing and the flowers. You can find gratitude every day and that. I understand that so deeply and it was so meaningful to me. It's probably one of the most spiritual things. Finding purpose, finding passion and reaching a point where you can live out that passion, that meaning, is the most beautiful thing I I'm deeply grateful that I found it for myself and I would love to help others find it, whether it's through their mental health or their work or remote work. Location independence Assuming I figure everything out and really establish myself with a location independence lifestyle in such a way where my family is taken care of and I can truly explore. I'm also very interested in exploring the possibilities of the lives we can live with location independence or the businesses we can build, and sharing that knowledge with the rest of you. So those are my aspirations.