I was posting out a minimum of 2 CDs a day for my eBay digital information business, Bestmultimediaguides. Quite often the sales were into double figures, my record was 19. Not bad for someone who didn’t know the first thing about the business a few weeks earlier. Also don’t forget, since eBay had banned digital downloads, selling info products on CD-ROM was virgin territory for everyone; I had no blueprint I could follow. However, with my moving to Turkey I was faced with a dilemma – what to do with my eBay business?

Originally I had set it up purely for research, was there life in selling info products on eBay after the death of digital downloads? I wanted to get an answer to that question, hopefully a positive one, and then complete my “how to” guide showing people how they could sell via CD-ROM. The plan was to then declare “mission accomplished”, close the eBay store and focus on completing my product. Unfortunately……..Bestmultimediaguides was far more successful than I had ever imagined it to be.

Just when I thought I was going to have to post all my CDs out from Turkey with all the negatives that came with that – far higher postal charges, 10-14 day delivery times out of the blue a solution presented itself. I was contacted by someone on eBay who was interested in buying a number of my products. We got chatting about various internet related matters and I mentioned that I was shortly emigrating to Turkey. Without hesitation, without asking anything for himself he offered to take care of despatching all my orders. Amazing.

That man is a gentleman from Yorkshire called Steve Rowley and I am eternally grateful to him for helping me keep my eBay business going for me. Steve, as well as being a successful internet marketer is also a specialist in Debt Management – very much an important subject in these difficult times. If this is a subject that concerns you, then have a look at my “Recommended Web Sites” section on the right hand side and click the “Tenable Solutions” link, that’s Steve’s own company. If you want to see what he is doing online, have a look at the links “Akajones Universe”, “Chewybone”, “Hoksy”, and “Magic Keywords”. This is a man who knows what he’s doing.

So anyway, safe in the knowledge that the order despatch part of my business was in safe hands I boarded the 11.00 Turkish Airlines flight from Manchester to Istanbul taking me to my new life. I managed to get a window seat, 30 minutes into the flight I had my last glimpse of England, appropriately enough it was the White Cliffs of Dover.

Just over 12 months ago I wrote the first post on this blog. It was a brief welcome and introduction about me. This is the post here:

Welcome to the Blog

(link opens in a new window)

In that post I briefly wrote about my old offline business and my decision to move to Turkey. You can read about that in more detail in the posts following that one. However, a major factor in taking the decision to move to Turkey was that I could see the UK housing bubble was going to burst, and I was determined to get out at the top.

In the summer of 2007 I called in several estate agents to value our house. All of them thought the housing boom would continue, at worst the market would be flat for 2 or 3 months, then the party would resume. So much for expert opinion! Anyway, when I got the valuations I was shocked.

We had bought our house back in 1998 – a nice enough house, 4 bedroom detached with a nice garden on a new build estate. Nice enough, but nothing special. I thought we had paid far too much money for it back in 1998 – by 2007 it was supposedly worth THREE TIMES what we had paid for it!

So we put it onto the market in September 2007. Within days we had  lots of interest, and an offer – at our asking price! I’m not going to bore you with the details, but after the deal fell through a couple of times, we finally moved out at the end of June 2008. We were probably the last people in our area to get “full market value” for our property.

We got out just in time, the market had peaked about 6 months previously. If we had waited another 12 months (September 2008) to sell that house I doubt we would have got 75% of the 2007 price.

Apart from giving you a bit more background information about me there is a point to this story. I had predicted the end of the housing bubble at the end of 2006; this didn’t become reality until nearly 12 months later. I’m certainly no expert but I used common sense, as explained in the ratio between average earnings and average property prices. Unfortunately common sense seems to have disappeared across UK society.

My advice is if you apply common sense, most of the time you will be right. If I had ignored my own common sense warnings I would still be living in a house that was losing money every day, in a market with very few buyers, with the dream of emigration a long way away.

But anyway, there we were in July 2008 with a nice sum in the bank but essentially homeless! The next part was the actual physical move from the UK to Turkey. Tune in tomorrow for the rest of the story!

But here’s a quick summary of a few things that have happened since my last post

1) Decided on which internet business to run after rejecting several alternatives
2) Set up a business on eBay at a time when about 95% of the sellers in that category were leaving
3) Despite making every mistake in the book I became the number 1 seller in my category in less than 3 months!
4) We sold our house at more or less asking price – just before the property market in the UK collapsed
5) Emigrated to Turkey!
6) Set up another web site related to the eBay business
7) Got suspended by eBay for breach of copyright – that’s an interesting tale in itself…
Back again on eBay having learnt a lot of INTERESTING stuff about how they conduct their business
9) Launched 2 products from scratch to sell online
10) Now currently in back in the UK for Christmas and New Year

Like I said, lots to catch up on. Look out for my post tomorrow….

If I was pushed to say what is thing that interests me most in life, I would have to say travelling. I started properly (i.e. rucksack over the shoulder and guide book in hand) back in 1984 at the tender age of 21. Although I’m sure it’s difficult to believe today, but generally in those days most people my age didn’t go in for solo travelling around Europe or further afield. Yes, you would meet a few people especially in the summer, but nothing like the amount of young people on the road today. Most of my contemparies were content with 2 weeks in Majorca or a Greek island but that was it.

Whilst not averse to sitting on a beach and getting pleasantly drunk at night, I didn’t want to waste a precious holiday doing that every single day. I preferred to select a part of Europe, and then travel there by train. It was great to meet other people – fellow travellers from other parts of the world as well as interesting locals. Some great friendships were made that way that still last to this day. I’ll write a separate post later with my travelling experiences in greater detail.

Coupled with the interest in travelling, I was always interested in speaking foreign languages. At the moment I speak German fairly fluently, can get by in Spanish and French, and as I’m shortly emigrating to Turkey – guess which language I’m learning next? Actually I can get by pretty well in Turkish at the moment, as long as the subject doesn’t get too detailed! In the past I have also been able to get by in Russian, Hungarian and Italian when I have been to those countries but it’s been a while now…

At home I enjoy doing DIY projects, especially outside in the garden. I designed and landscaped our garden about 8-9 years ago building a pond, stream, waterfall and a wooden summer house amongst other things. Since I got the pond, well a pond isn’t much use without fish, so I have developed a good interest in koi carp amongst others.

Other things I enjoy are stamp collecting, a hobby I started as a 7 year old child which I have never quite been able to give up. What is interesting about stamps (I collect only Europe between 1914 and 1945) is that you can follow a lot of the history of a country or region from its stamps. History is another thing that fascinates me, it is interesting debating what happened and why. And of course there are never right or wrong answers, only opinions. For example I remember sitting an exam about 30 years ago. The first question was “Explain why Serbia was responsible for starting the First World War”, the second question “Explain why Serbia was NOT responsible for starting the First World War”! Fascinating stuff and a good way to develop debating skills.

I enjoy learning new things on the computer! Seriously I do, a lot of people think that is a bit “geekish” but I disagree. Six months ago I honestly had no idea what a blog was, 3 months ago I had no idea how to create one. I visited blogs of course, but I just thought they were normal web sites. Until a few weeks ago I had never used Microsoft FrontPage or FTP software to upload files from my PC to my web site! It’s not as if I’m a computer Luddite either, I first went online in 1994 using a Psion Series 3 (anyone remember those), a dial up modem and a Compuserve account. What happened to Compuserve by the way? I even had an email address back in 1994, it was something weird like 12345678,277@compuserve.com…..how things have changed.

Finally, I do enjoy electronic gadgets such as PDAs and mobile phones. I just love the idea of being able to carry all that information around with you, even if most of it is completely unnecessary. For the geeks, my current PDA is a HP4700 which although it is over 2 years old, I just love the screen quality. My mobile phone is a Nokia N95, fantastic phone and camera but terrible as a PDA. I was tempted, briefly, by the Iphone but what stopped me was not being able to add more programs to it. Other than that the Iphone is a work of art!

With the honourable exception of cricket I’m not that much into sports these days. I used to love football but here in England the huge amounts of money in the game have completely ruined it. It’s just not that interesting to watch anymore, look at the pathetic displays by the England team over the last 10 years. But I do enjoy test cricket. Yes I know, England have declined in the last 2 years, but quite honestly cricket is not such a partisan game as football. I can appreciate great players regardless of their nationality. For example, to show you how sad I am I spent part of my Sunday today watching a match between Bangladesh and South Africa and thouroughly enjoyed it!

So that’s a little bit more about the person behind this web site. I’ll share more with you as the next few weeks unfold.

First off, as you’ve probably already guessed, my name is Robert Black. I am 44 years old, married to a beautiful Turkish lady (no doubt she’ll read this blog so I’ll get into trouble if I don’t write this!), presently unemployed, and living in the north of England. That’s actually a picture of me in the graphic header at the top of the page – no I haven’t done that to be vain but I wanted to show that I am actually a real person and not just another anonymous internet warrior.

Why have I started this blog? The clue is in the tagline on the header graphic “The Mobile Independence Internet Challenge”. This site is actually going to be a written and visual recording of the next few weeks and months of my life. Until 6 weeks ago I was running a very successful business here in the UK, which I had been operating for 22 years. I sold that business at the end of 2007 and in the next few weeks I am emigrating to Turkey to start a new life there.

Neither my wife nor I have a job to go to in Turkey and it’s not really an option to transfer my old business there. So initially we are just going to be living off our savings. When the money runs out, that’s it (gulp!). For the last 12 months or so I have been researching ways of making money on the internet. The attraction of that to all of us I guess, is the dream of travelling or being anywhere in the world, and as long as we have a laptop and an internet connection, we can earn money.

That’s the theory we’ve all heard – I decided some weeks ago to “burn my bridges”, sell my house and my business in the UK. Then to challenge myself to live and earn money independently from anywhere in the world (in my case Turkey). Hence the tagline “Mobile Independence Internet Challenge”. I want to see if it is possible from a standing start and with very little knowledge for me to be financially independent and mobile (i.e. anywhere) – my challenge to myself.

So why should this blog be a must-read for you? Well, if you have ever dreamt of travelling the world for a longer time, or even emigrating to another country and you want or need to earn money at the same time, then this blog is for you. If you too have been inundated with mailshots, emails or ads on web sites promising you that there is a fortune to be made on the internet, then this blog is for you. If you are sceptical about making money (any amount of money) online, then this blog is for you.

Either I will succeed, or I will fail. If I fail then hopefully I will have detailed the failed steps for you, so you know what to avoid. If I succeed, then if you too want to succeed, all you have to do is copy what I have done! I am a complete Internet Marketing newbie, as of today I have made zero money online, that’s £0.00 or US$0.00 at today’s exchange rate of 1.95

I will be posting several times a week, to let you know how I’m getting on, tell you a bit more about myself, share ideas with you etc etc. As I learn new things, I’ll pass them on to you – what works and what doesn’t. I’m sure it’s going to be a hell of ride whatever happens so why don’t you come along?!