Ashley: Hi Rob. Thanks for joining me today.

Rob: Hello Ashley.

Ashley: Certainly great to catch you after all these months on the internet.

Rob: It’s lovely to speak to you too Ashley.

Ashley: And we’re having some nice weather here in Switzerland. Are you guys doing all right in London?

Rob: It’s actually a good day today. I’ve been out and spent most of my day in the cafe, so it’s really good. It looks nice. A bit of a cold wind coming from the north there.

Ashley: Actually, yeah. I caught that when I walked out the door this morning too. It’s part of our joys of working from home. We can go out and come back in and we will work like depending on how we want to do that. That’s one of the topics we’re on today.

But before we get to that, we will just quickly hear a little bit about you. Can you tell everyone quickly what you do, how you got there and anything else you think is worth noting?

Rob: Right. Well, I will try and keep this as briefly as possible. So I’m talking from London, in the UK, and this is where I’m from. So I was very kind of directionless in my early 30s, going from office to office as a freelancer.

I was doing graphic design. I was actually only an art worker. I didn’t actually do graphic designer. I kind of took somebody else’s designs and laid them out and I was very much a Mac Photoshop and Illustrator and “design” guy and then in 2005, I started my website RobCubbon.com. 2006, I started blogging properly and that I did a blog post every week or so.

That really started things for me. I started to get work through my website in 2006. You didn’t have to be a great blogger in order to get some action on Google, I’m pleased to say. So I was very lucky in that respect and I stared to get a bit of work which I could do from home.

Because I had found work to be a very unpleasant experience for most of my life, I didn’t enjoy work. I wasn’t into it at all. I just did it to get money really.

It was quite life-changing to be able to earn money from home and quite enjoy it as well because I found that I was asked to do more interesting things and I had to liaison with the clients and I found that very interesting.

I had to do the whole job from beginning to end. It was more challenging and I just loved it in every single way. So after two years, I managed to work exclusively from home. I’m with my own clients and gradually kissed the freelance jobs goodbye, which as you probably picked up by now I didn’t really like. So I was quite pleased about that.

So that was great and then since then or since the beginning really, I’ve been – I think Tim Ferriss has a lot to answer for actually. I have been very much focused on the passive income side. Just I find it so interesting. I just love everything about it, carrying on blogging of course, going into different platforms like Udemy as we were talking about and Amazon Kindle.

So in the year since then, I have built my audience, my brand and the passive side whilst keeping my clients in the active side as well. So that’s where I’m at at the moment. I don’t know if that answers your question.

Ashley: Well, you can certainly talk about whatever you like and I think it’s all valuable information. But I mean the reason I got you on here today is because you’re one of the prominent people to me who’s doing this.

Now of course many bloggers are selling courses and some of the big guys like Amy Porterfield or Jeff Bullas or whatever. They’re all quite famous. They’ve had a big kick start due to who they are or they’ve done a very good job of promoting themselves and have a huge backing. I wouldn’t say you don’t have a big audience. I think you have quite a reasonably sized audience from what I’ve seen in some of the blogging tools which evaluate you. You’ve come up quite highly as well.

But I think what you do differently is that you’re not one of these superstars but you found a way that we can all aspire to, to make an income on the side which I think is crucial these days and accelerate your free time and give yourself more freedom to actually not have to constantly search for clients. I think that’s to me one of the really, really important things that we can get out of this call.

Rob: Yeah, that’s really great you say that Ashley because I was thinking, I am a bit of a poor man’s Pat Flynn in that I think – you’re absolutely right. I don’t have the audience at all of any of the people you mentioned.

However, I enjoy a lot of what I’ve done in the last few years and I haven’t made huge amounts of money but I’ve made a liveable amount of money similar to what I was earning before and as you say, I have the freedom to do what I want when I want.

So it’s not earth-shattering. It’s not sexy. But it suits me.

Ashley: Well, I think that’s one of the reasons I think it’s so interesting is because everyone aspires to be the next Pat Flynn and that’s great to do that. But it’s highly unachievable because we can’t all take such a huge audience out of the audience that exists. It’s probably never going to happen for most of us.

So I think that it’s better to be in some ways realistic. It’s always good to strive for things and it’s great to have that on the back burner and constantly push your audience and maybe try to meet people and leverage influences or whatever you do that’s worth doing.

But most of us are never going to get there. So while we’re trying to get there, and while we’re dreaming about getting there, we need to look at day to day life and how to actually earn money. You’ve got the two sides which is exactly what you do. You’ve got the side where you have a client and you’re getting paid more or less for the hours you work.

Then you’ve got the other side which is creating products and selling them and that sells while you’re not working. OK. You have to market that and that’s something people don’t realize and I didn’t realize when I made a course.

Yeah, and if you don’t do this passive side of things, which is again why I want to talk about it, then you’re restricted to an hourly or a packaged wage which is restricted by the number of days of the month and how many clients you can get.

If that’s all you’re ever going to earn, you’re always going to hit this ceiling and even that ceiling may not be hit all the time because you won’t always get clients. You might have a really slow peri