So this guy, Rick, contacts me and says he bought ‘Work is a sideline, Live the holiday‘ and has had great success implementing the ideas, tips and strategies I gave in SA’s next bestseller. Listen to this.

I asked him to expand on what’s been going down.

Hi Seth,

I just looked at the timeline of events since buying, reading and then implementing the advice in your book.

I bought your book at the end of July as indicated below.

I used the google keyword planner to get the search volume for “pallet furniture” in Cape Town and I saw it was a low competition phrase with about 300 searches a month so I was happy to try and get a piece of that market.

I then built palletfurniturecapetown soon after and I placed some Gumtree ads for some of the items.

I submitted my site to Google as per your link and used your suggestions to use text instead of a logo to rank higher even faster. I also worked in the site’s keywords in as many places as possible to make it more relevant to Google. It was only about a month and my site obtained the first spot in Google for the keywords ‘pallet furniture cape town.’ So I was seeing organic free traffic to the site and the current owner is still enjoying it.
To have a qualified, targeted buyer visit your site is indeed the holy grail as you put it on page 12 of your book.

As the enquiries started to come in, I realised I did not have the time to run the business.

So 15 Sep I put the site / business up as for sale on Gumtree. I met with a lady by the name of Amanda and explained the business to her and how I simply did not have time to manage the orders. She loved it and said I’m selling for too cheap.

By 18 Sep I received R5 000 in my bank account from Amanda Hoffman who owns and runs the site currently.

She is still not advertising on Google, Facebook or Gumtree and she is effectively selling pallet furniture with just organic enquiries coming in to her niche location based website.

Then the next project:

I discovered a product like you did that wasn’t being sold online, or it was, but it was very poorly marketed and packaged as well as being under priced! The product was a Steel Drum Braai.

It wasn’t too long and I built lekkerbraai.co.za and ran a few premium Gumtree ads to promote the singular product, using the methods you gave in the book. In the first month I sold 27 braais with a profit of about R7 000. We are now in the second month and heading towards a similar month in terms of profit.

This to me, was the perfect example of what your advice in your book could achieve.

It is a real business which I can now realistically sell for R25 000+ based on net profit but I would rather keep it as I am enjoying it and hardly doing any work to deal with the sales.

I am now also expanding with smaller cheaper braais to test the market. That is the great thing about the techniques you give in the book – I can test a product without needing to buy inventory first.

I have several niche website projects in the pipeline now and having fun with the concept.

In terms of time spent on building each site, it takes me about 5 hours per site if all the content is ready.

Yes, I would be happy if you want to publish anything regarding my success following the reading of your book. It is only the 2nd time in my life that I couldn’t put down a book, the first was John Smit’s book and then your book.

I read it in 2 hours and I understood it immediately and could barely sleep with all the potential ideas out there.

Thanks again for writing such valuable content.

Kind regards
Rick Bothma

Love it, Rick – thanks for the email. Nice to see someone actually following through on everything and proving this is surely the way to living the title of the book. It’s also nice – I’m sure – for John Smit, to have his book run alongside mine. Especially when everyone knows what an influence I’ve been to him, let alone the Springboks as a whole, then and now.

By the way, the turnover of the company I detailed in the book, is up 250% last month, when compared to the numbers in the book. And I have another little project I’m about to launch using the same systems. HINT: Jets..

For those of you who haven’t got yourself a copy yet, get it on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) or buy it locally as paperback at sethbook.co.za

Be sure to check the mention of it also in the debut issue of Fast Company magazine, South Africa.

Isn’t it time you fixed your crap life?

CLICK HERE TO GET THE BOOK