Howdy, my Substack friend!
I hope you’re having a fantastic weekend wherever you are in the world.
Right now I’m writing this from Colonial Williamsburg, which is a very pretty, and fascinatingly historical city.
We had our first wander around yesterday, exploring all the old colonial buildings, and have immediately decided that two things absolutely must happen while we’re here.
First, a proper walking tour so we can get the historical lowdown on the place.
Second, a haunted pub crawl. Obviously! 😂
Apparently we also need to complete the Historic Triangle and visit Jamestown and Yorktown, and we’re hoping we might catch a reenactment while we’re here.
Then yesterday a local barman, who is apparently a descendent of the Chickahominy Indian Tribe invited us to a powwow in Charles City.
I’m not 100% sure what it is even after his explanation but there’ll be a parade, singers, dancers and all sorts of interesting things happening so I look forward to sharing that experience with you!
If you’re from this part of Virginia, or you’ve travelled around here, please tell me in the comments what we absolutely shouldn’t miss. We’ve got two weeks left in the US and I intend to squeeze every last drop out of them.
Travelling Through America’s Past
We arrived here after leaving our house sit in Richmond a couple of days ago, which was a very sad affair.
I enjoy house sitting, and it’s super kind on the wallet, but saying goodbye to the animals is always the saddest part, and the two cuties we looked after this time, Roscoe and Jada, were particularly gorgeous company during our time in Richmond.
Williamsburg is now our final stop on what has been an absolutely epic trip down the East Coast. I love how much American history we've inadvertently travelled through.
We started in New York, where I wandered the streets, paid $18 for a hot dog (😳), had a drink with a stranger in Times Square, attempted to reenact Working Girl on the Staten Island ferry (epic fail), started yapping in Central Park (more on that in a future post), and became friends with a local.
I wrote about my NYC adventures here:
Then we headed to Philadelphia, where I ran up the Rocky steps (of course), met up with a good friend of mine from Phuket (her family live just outside Philly), discovered that this was the birthplace of the United States, and stood inside Independence Hall where the Declaration of Independence was adopted.
From there we went to Washington DC (which was awesome), and immersed ourselves in the stories of the Founding Fathers, then Richmond and its Civil War history, and now we’re slap bang in the American Revolution.
And this is why I love travel!
There is no better way to learn about the world than standing in the places where its history happened.
You can read about something, you can watch documentaries, but there’s something very different about walking the streets, standing inside the buildings, looking at the monuments and reading the words of the people who were there before you.
You walk away knowing things you probably would never have sat down at home and decided to study.
Travel just broadens your world and your understanding of it in every sense of the word.
And I have absolutely loved our travels through the US. Beautiful country. Beautiful people. ❤️
Meanwhile, behind the pretty travel photos…
I’ve had a heck of a week.
If you’ve been following along for a while, you’ll know I’m currently attempting to build This Big World into a $10,000-a-month-profit e-commerce business while travelling the world.
Can I Build a $10k-a-Month Ecommerce Business While Travelling the World?
I was feeling in a particularly buoyant mood writing this article and had a bit of fun with it. For the full (and best) experience listen to me reading the article, particularly my very bad impression of ‘voiceover man’ at the end. I hope you enjoy reading/listening to it as much as I enjoyed creating it!
I knew it would be challenging.
I may have underestimated quite how challenging. 😂
With Q4 approaching (the busiest season for ecom brands), I’m experimenting with AI video ads, learning TikTok advertising, fighting with Meta, working on new creatives and generally trying to learn seventeen things simultaneously.
In the meantime Amazon are proving to be the awful platform I always knew it to be.
They’re currently holding onto my profits, they’ve locked me out of my main Seller Central account because of technical problems their end, and I’ve spent a crazy amount of time this week dealing with support.
The good news is that my brand-new This Big World Shopify store is now live!
And long term, this is where I really want to build the business.
Shopify is harder because Amazon already has millions of people wandering around with their credit cards out. On my own store, I have to find those people myself.
But the difference is, with Shopify, I own the customer relationship.
And if you’re building any kind of income online, this is vital.
You don’t own your Instagram followers.
You don’t own your TikTok followers.
You don’t own your Facebook audience.
And on Amazon, I don’t even get access to the email addresses of the people buying my products.
These platforms have been designed to sit between you and your audience. (It’s how and why they make so much money!)
That’s one of the things I love about Substack. Every time we publish something and somebody subscribes, we’re also building an email list. If Substack disappeared tomorrow, we could export that list and still communicate with the people who’ve chosen to hear from us.
That’s a business asset.
So use the big platforms. I certainly intend to keep using Amazon, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and everything else that helps me reach people.
But wherever possible, give those people a reason to join you somewhere you control.
I’ve been banging this drum for years, and wrote an entire article about it a while ago:
If you’re trying to build an online income of any description, have a read. It’ll be the single most important thing you’ll do when building a business online.
Which brings me to something else I’ve been thinking about this week…
Do you keep pushing your dreams aside because something else always feels more important?
If you do, I empathise.
I’ve wanted to become a prolific nonfiction author for years. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not planning to churn out a novel every six weeks while competing for the Pulitzer Prize, but I’d love to publish at least one, maybe two useful books a year.
Except there’s always something else. An ad needs creating, a website needs fixing, Amazon has locked me out again, there’s somewhere I want to visit, something needs researching.
And the book gets pushed down the list.
This week I realised I can keep saying becoming an author is one of my biggest goals, or I can start behaving as though it is.
So I’ve committed to writing just 500–1,000 words every morning. ‘Freedompreneur’ is almost finished and my goal is to publish it by the end of October.
I’m replacing my first hour of the day scrolling, reading irrelevant crap and generally disappearing down my phone, with working on one of my biggest dreams.
How about you? Where could you find an extra hour in your day to work on that thing you keep saying you really want to achieve?
Because if it’s genuinely one of your dreams, at some point it has to make it onto your calendar.
Although apparently we’d better get a bloody move on…
Because this week AI took a particularly cheery turn and apparently it might kill us all by the end of the decade. 🙄
Honestly the fear mongering that goes on in this world of ours is beyond me. It always makes me think of the Mark Manson quote:
Believe What’s Useful Not Necessarily What’s True!
Is AI going to transform humanity?
Probably.
Is it going to take millions of jobs, cure horrible diseases, create entirely new industries, make us vastly more productive, become superintelligent, end humanity, or somehow manage all of the above before I’ve eaten my bowl of Frosties?
I have no bloody idea.
And frankly, neither does anyone else.
So I’m going to keep learning about it and using it, because I think ignoring one of the biggest technological shifts of our lifetime would be daft.
But I’m also going to keep writing my books.
I’m going to keep building my business, travelling the world, touching grass, swimming in oceans, eating food I can’t pronounce, wandering around cities I’ve never visited, meeting interesting people and embarrassing my daughter on the internet.
None of us have ever known what the future holds.
And while the robots are deciding whether to destroy the world, I intend to see as much of it as possible. 😂
I’ll report back next week, assuming I survive the haunted pub crawl.
Have a fabulous weekend!
Jo x
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