subject: Escaping The 9 To 5 Rat Race With Maren Kate [print this page] Escaping The 9 To 5 Rat Race With Maren Kate
Recently, I approached Maren Kate for an interview about escaping the 9 to 5 work life and I asked her a few questions about how to create the lifestyle business she currently lives. It was very interesting how it came back to outsourcing being the No.1 turning point for a lot of us. Maren Kate is awesome at what she does and this interview is a must for people wanting to escape the 9 to 5 job.
How Maren Started Her Blog
Maren just got down school looking around it and thought what she could do with her lustrious English Literature degree and she realized that there was nothing that suited her. Maren says, "I have always since Im little I wanted to have freedom when it comes with financial stability and when it comes with having a good income stream and I realized that if I just did something that followed after what I did in college, I would never have that."
So she decided experimenting with different forms of entrepeneurship and started her blog to kind of attract that process and ever since then she's just followed the different forrays that she goes down the entrepreneurs path, and now that she's involved with my newest startup and she's pretty getting ton on that and from there, she then focused on how to live a more fulfilling lifestyle by kind of cutting down on the things that you dont need and spending on the things you do.
EscapingThe9to5.com Becoming A Passive Income Source
"Me, my approach was a lot more spastic and Im just happy typing away and then one day, I finally kind of got one of my virtual assistants to install some stuff to track our pageviews and stuff and I learned about Alexa rankings and all these different things that I should have known about when I started, and I realized that there was a lot more readers than I thought. Ive always been writing more or less for myself and kind of it was like an online journal."
So maybe a year after she started, she finally got into the point where she's like Oh wow, I could really monetize this. She's never done it to this quick because she's been busy with other businesses but I she was thinking to make it just a test start to look at different ways because she get chats from affiliates that she puts up and then succeeded in the process.
How Maren Started Business Online
Maren gladly shared, "When I was in college I decided to make money on the side by selling antique jewelry on eBay and I do it to the point where it was a you know, 5, $6,000 a month income stream which was great but I was literally working 10 hours a day because every different item was unique so it was a ridiculous amount of work. There were always customer service hassles, there is a lot of problems. And, when I started learning about Internet business and the idea of could have mobile entrepreneurship, I thought screw it Im not going to do that myself. Ill try to teach people how to do it. The problem was I didnt have any experience in how to kind of build a community so I started a few websites trying to teach people how to sell stuff on eBay not realizing that its a hugely over populated niche"
Maren Welcoming Social Media Services
One example is with one of her clients which is now the number one TV show on cable in the US and its called the Pawn Stars. It's like a history channel show where they've got to do all these fun campaigns where Maren and team give away swag or we offer a lunch with the people or the stars of the TV show.
All these different interactive things that allows their fan base to connect with them. So, lets say you know maybe a big company has 100,000 fans, they might get 1% of that fan base that actually interacts. Maren helped the show to have about 90% of the fan base that on the monthly basis interacts at least 2 times so its pretty insane.
Maren's Number 1 Success Key: Outsourcing
"Ive worked with outsourcers from the very beginning because I have no tech background, I couldnt even upload a WordPress theme so I had to rely on other people. And Ive gone through many of them because its very hard to find good virtual workers sincejust like in Internet Marketing, its theres some parts that are over saturated with poor quality and what makes it unfortunate is that you see so much poor quality that you think everythings poor quality. Thankfully, I did a lot of research and spent a lot of time and I found a few incredibly good virtual workers that I added to my team and these people have worked with me for a long time and are excellent and theyre incredibly, incredibly affordable."
What Maren started to realize was that there are maybe 30% of all the virtual workers, virtual assistants out there are beyond excellent. Theyre comparable to anyone you get in your country but they get drowned out by the 70% that are having maybe you know, 30 minutes of experience who are willing to underbid them to ridiculous unbelievable amounts, they get drowned out.
So what Maren's doing is creating a job port and a job placement service for virtual workers and for employers, they only allow the best of the best and because of that, employers can rest assured that theyre dealing with excellent virtual workers because she believes that outsourcing is going to the next 10 years, its going to change the entire face of business.
Lastly, Maren's Entire Stubborn But Clever Figure Does Make Her Branded
"Im ridiculously stubborn. I can fail a hundred times and I get up and Ill try again a hundred and first time and thats when I get it and I dont make all of the mistakes myself. Id be like crazy, I listen to audio books constantly and I listen to a lot of interviews. I do interviews, I have my own podcast and I listen to every interview that I can get my hands on that has to do with the wrong in business because I feel like I dont need to make all of the mistakes myself."
"If I hear somebody talking about Richard Branson talking about a big mistake he made when he started virgin, I can make him into low and then not make that mistake and I honestly feel that all the reading, all the interviews, all the watching Ive done over the last year has been like getting an MBA at Harvard. Because Ive learned from so many smart people who actually have MBAs at Harvard, I dont need to go and spend money and make all these mistakes. I have the benefit of all these people in front of me and thats something to convey to people very few people get it, but if youre one of the people that understand that all the knowledge you need is already out there, you just have to go find it, your life becomes a 100% easier." Maren concluded with a smile.
