Life Updates

A few weeks ago, Lisa and I touched base to record our latest podcast episode. It had been a long time between drinks so really it was just to catch up and also see what we both have been doing since we initially started the Podcast that is Live Work Digital.

Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash

Obviously we haven’t posted much in recent times but there is actually also 2 episodes that were done last year that remain unpublished. They will be launching shortly.

We could have easily shut everything down, but I had always had the feeling that the podcast had to keep going. I felt that it would help us both in the longer term. It was just a gut feel because we put in a lot of effort to get it started and it would have been a shame to let the knowledge go by the wayside.

Lets face it, the last 12 months has been an interesting one for everyone. For me, it was being apart from my wife who is a Permanent Resident in Singapore. From the very start, we were in a long distance relationship and we both just travelled back and forth the whole time. With having kids from a previous marriage and the fact that I was finishing my University Degree in Digital and Social Media, this was the path we were destined to follow. Like everyone else in most parts of the world, we just had to do what we could to get through and remain as positive as we could. So, now I start my new journey in Singapore and looking forward to opening more doors, whilst I build my brand and doing a little more studying. (TESOL – Teaching English as a Second Language).

Photo by Hello I’m Nik on Unsplash

For Lisa, her e-Learning business was going from strength to strength. She had plenty of learnings along the way as all small business owners do. More on this on our podcast but her business was gaining momentum and she knew she had to make changes to take it to the next level. Currently she is in the process of rebranding but she also has changed the structure of her business. Along the way, she also consulted for a large Queensland based corporation. This was where she had an ‘AHA’ moment. She realised that she was not built to work for anyone else again! She was a busy girl indeed but she knew this fact. So much so that she was not able to start her last University Subject to graduate. She is about to finish that shortly now that she has a bit more time up her sleeve.

Photo by Aditya Saxena on Unsplash

More insight into both our journey’s will be on our upcoming podcast but what is evident is that both our paths are clearly involved in working and living in the digital environment. We will therefore continue to spruik the Live Work Digital message. Of course, it isn’t for everyone, but what is evident now is that the workplace environment in most industries has changed forever. Whether we like it or not, most of us cannot avoid this fact.

Until next time, Live Work Digital.

Luki

It’s time to Adult again!

It has come to the time that I need to start to become an Adult again. Well it has been a month since I have finished my last assignment and closing my University degree which I started 3 years ago. It really hasn’t hit me that I was able to finish it within the 3 years since I set my goal to study. As a major bucket list item, I spent a lot of mental energy in getting it done through the past few years. During my travels I have managed to complete it whilst at the same time living the Uber experience as a driver. I have spent the past few weeks unfocused on many things.

https://unsplash.com/s/photos/graduation

During 2020, I spent a lot of mental energy on focused on the small things and like everyone, just tried to get through every single day as best I could. In reality, this has been my life the past 10 years, so in many ways it has been not much difference in that respect. Every day my energy  is spent on getting through another day. For 10 years I have fought so hard to get through every day and build my life from scratch again. Throughout all of this, I have seen my kids grow up to be young men. I am very proud of them and I have a sense of optimism for them, despite everything that has gone on.

Looking back at the back end of the year, the second major lockdown of Melbourne really took it out of me. My last couple of subjects took some doing as I struggled to focus on the assignments and keep up with the required tasks. Somehow I got through it and I will now graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Digital and Social Media  from Curtin University. What a mind blast! It still hasn’t hit home yet. Once I attend the ceremony and walk on the stage to get that piece of paper, it will only become real then. It is of course easier for me to get the document delivered to me, but I want the whole Shebang graduation experience. With Co-Vid and all things that are surrounding it there are no defined dates for this to happen soon. There is also the logistical hurdle being in Melbourne and getting to Perth to attend it. I have however registered for my graduation to happen in Singapore as they have a campus there, so this suits me fine. Of course, the date is yet to be confirmed also.  I have waited 30 years for this, and I will do it in style.

https://pixabay.com/photos/legs-street-alone-challenge-loner-1031653/

What some people don’t realise is that my wife actually lives in Singapore, and we have not been together since early March when I surprised her for her birthday with a quick visit. I got back as the world was crashing around us and Australia went into lockdown after the Formula 1 Grand Prix.  It sure hasn’t been easy on both of us.  I have survived daily by not focusing too much on it for too long and now I have finished my studying, I have had some extra time to reflect on the situation. She has endured so much through the year being isolated from me and her family in Indonesia. I have my kids here so to a certain extent; and this has helped me get through it so far, but I feel guilty for still being here in Australia whist she is there on her own.  

There is a constant feeling of fear in my mind and I haven’t quite pinpointed the reason for it. Maybe it is a combination of many things. I am not so much scared for my kids as I am of what lays ahead for me in the future. I have been living through a sense of failure now for nearly a decade now. So much so that surviving each day was no different to any other day since I went through my divorce.

I have had so much to do with my kids and no matter how I look at it, I have had this sense of fear that I have failed them. Every time I dwell on it, it upsets me. I know this is not the case, but my failings are my own and this impacts on my point of view. This Christmas has been a tough one as I am normally with my wife travelling in Australia or elsewhere. I have spent a lot of time just being with myself and trying to chill. I have also been driving more on the roads again as the city has come out of lockdown. This has kept me busy and things are nearly back to normal on that front, but I am finding it more fatiguing than I remembered it to be. My future however does belong  in the digital space.  My instinct and intuition are that I will continue with this blog and podcast as I move forward. I also have been working on an e-commerce project the past 6 months and am working through the testing and soft launch phase of this. I haven’t spent as much time on this as I should have in recent weeks, but I am guided by my energy levels at the moment. Part of the getting back on the horse is writing this blogpost and getting the momentum back in my goals for the next 12 months.

E-Commerce – Its a thing. Are you in or out?
https://barssupplements.com/

So here I am. I still have lots to share and write about, but it is a start. I have some podcast episodes to launch in the coming week or so and I need to get the feelers out on the job market (maybe). The cynical me is thinking about who would want to hire a 51-year-old graduate. I am now at the point where my previous work experience maybe doesn’t get me in the door to similar roles. Having said that, I don’t actually want to do the roles I used to do. It defeats the purpose of doing my degree and forging a career in the digital world. My instincts continue to tell me that this is my path and I need to make sure I continue down it. There is a business side and a creative side of me that is ready to show to the world and it is time to come in from the long run.

Stay tuned world – Live Work Digital

Luki

Episode 7 – Elliot Jaffe [Writer]

Hi all. Welcome to episode 7. For this episode we feature Elliot, a young University graduate who is finding his place in the world after graduating from his Bachelor of International Business Degree from the University of Auckland. On a chance conversation with a random rider in the car through lockdown, I met Chelsea. We got to talking and she mentioned her partner was working with blogs.  Through this connection, I connected with Elliot and this is how we ended up talking about his experiences in this new digital age and how he navigated to this point in his life.

After completing his degree in 2016, Elliot continued on and also completed his Masters with honours. The world was at his feet and it would seem that he had it all planned out. As many young people do in this age, he decided to take a bit of a break to travel. After a stint in England playing a bit of cricket and a detour to Japan, he decided to settle in and plan out what the next move to be.

The plan was not to necessarily move to Australia, but Chelsea managed to get a job at the Children’s Hospital in Melbourne and their destiny was set in motion. Elliot managed to get a couple of Sales roles and it would seem that this was to be his future path. Deep down however he knew that this was not the path he really wanted. In fact, he didn’t really know what he wanted to do with himself.

Like many others, when the country went into lockdown, he suddenly found that the work dried up and was suddenly out of work. He then made a decision that the sales area was not something he wanted to go into and accidentally fell into writing. 

He decided to develop a blog to document the stories of small business owners living through the pandemic. He wasn’t sure how to go about it in the beginning. He just did his research and made a start. He learnt how to build a website, utilise Zoom and then also taught himself how to touch type to transcribe the interviews he does.

He also didn’t have much of a network, but he just went to work contacting small business owners randomly to see if they wanted to get involved in his project. Some said no, but most were open to a conversation and he went on from there. His Sales experience started to kick in and he just went to work connecting, chatting and then interviewing. Check out his work with our very own Lisa Listama of the Live Work Digital fame!

Small Business World Blog

His story is one of positivity. His blog continues to grow  with the stories of hope and determination from business owners doing it tough. The message is clear,  local small businesses are struggling but they continue to fight and remain hopeful for the future.

He made a decision to follow another path and in the middle of it he found his passion. We love the fact that he is able to connect with random business owners who want to share their journeys.

What is clear is that no matter what stage of life or career you are at, the opportunity is there for anyone to be able to change course. Elliot is an amazing example for this generation of new leaders connecting and building relationships through this digital age we live in. There is still some uncertainty for the immediate future, but what is clear is that we can all find despair in these tough times, but we can also find hope and optimism as well.

We wish him well for his journey ahead.

From us, until next time….Auf Widersehen [Live, Work, Digital]

Episode 5 – Trish Martin [Digital Marketing Guru]

In this week’s instalment of Live Work Digital Podcast we are chatting to Trish Martin from Chromatical. She is a Marketing Guru. Trish is a a colourful, vintage clothed, bright and bubbly soul that knows all about digital marketing.

Her vast experience in the marketing world should render her about 85 years old but she is so young and is just about to expect her first child!

I (Lisa) approached Trish to jump on our podcast for a number of reasons:

1. She knows her digital marketing shiz and us business owners/entrepreneurs/digital nomads NEED to know how to market to our vast audience.
2. I am in her Chromatical Club (listen for details) and have experienced first hand the value and knowledge she gives to us members. The ideas can be so small and so big that they will launch your business into the stratosphere.
3. I think she is a top lady and genuinely wants to help people.

I don’t know about you, but I’m baffled by social media marketing. Like, why does it matter if I have a nice Instagram feed? Why do some businesses post a lot and some not at all? How often is TOO often to post? What should I even post about?

SO MANY QUESTIONS

Trish covers all of these questions AND MORE in the podcast.

So get your fave cup of tea/coffee or wine (hello!) and get that pen and paper handy! You are going to want to write her tips and tricks down.

LISTEN NOW!

Don’t forget to jump on Trish’s social here and get ready to smile because her feed is a DELIGHT!

Trish Martin, Digital Marketing Guru

Let us know what you learned from the podcast!

Enjoy,

Lisa Sparkle 🙂

How Not to Make a Podcast [Journal #4]

Ok folks, it has taken a bit of time to update everyone with this post, “How not to make a podcast.” As we mentioned, this journey is all about learning and developing the concept as we go. With the actual subject completed at University that resulted in this project, Lisa and I are now focused on the next subject(s) of our respective degrees and our own personal lives.  It is now a balance to maintain and continue both the blog and the podcast. 

Lisa is going gangbusters with her E-Learning business so that is her priority. For me, I continue to drive as the country comes out of lockdown. It has become busier in some regards, but it is still a bit of treading water with Taxi drivers back on the road and more ride share drivers as well. Along with this, I am also working out my next move as I need to start thinking about what happens next after I complete the degree in November.

As much as we have slowed up a bit and reflect on our progress, it was also time to take stock of where to go with Live Work Digital.

These are the sort of things we are now assessing at this point of the journey:

• Should we upgrade our WordPress blog site from the free version?
• What is working with our Instagram?
• What is the impact of LinkedIn?
• Do we need to change our feel or branding? 
• Do we need to focus on branding at all?
• How do we promote our podcast further?
• Do we need to continue to reach out to people to get more content?

Currently we are about to launch our 5th episode and still have 2 more in the wings ready to be edited and already have another 2 or 3 potential as well which essentially covers our initial target of having a 10 episode season.

There is also the opportunity for Lisa and myself to use this platform also for our own businesses and opportunity by recording specific content that we could release. This is something that we have kept in mind throughout the journey.

As we move forward with our episodes, we will continue to find our brand and share our experiences. Our focus has been on ensuring the episodes continue on and we are organised with that area.

The purpose of the blog and the posts are to ensure that we are building our SEO presence and we continue to learn more about this area of digital marketing. Testing our presence through my personal browsers and the words Live Work and Digital, we seem to have a reasonable online presence,  especially when the search is on the words with no spaces. (liveworkdigital)

Photo by Edho Pratama on Unsplash

Our images that are tagged on social media appear regularly on searches. This is because we have made the effort to ensure our images are embedded with information through the Alt Text html coding sequence. (Which we learnt from Jason Borg, our SEO Guru)

Presumably the hashtags we use are also having an impact on search results. This is also another area which requires a bit of focus. We are continuing to play around with this aspect of SEO on Instagram and LinkedIn specifically. 

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Also on search results for Live Work Digital, our videos on YouTube  appear. Yes, we have a Live Work Digital YouTube Channel. It’s not a big focus, but it is there. We thought that in the long term it will obviously build our ongoing presence. More to come on that one at a later date.

The whole SEO thing has got me thinking as I have been focused on the Key Words as a starting point. The question I ask myself currently is:

• Who would search for us?
• What questions would be put to Google that would lead people to us?
• What is the more important? The Blog or the Podcast?

As an extension on using Key Words in our blog posts (Which we do sparingly and try not to overdo it!) we want to focus on short statements at the beginning and at the end of the posts which relate to the Blog Post Heading. This is something I learnt on a podcast recently so hopefully this will add to our searchability. Which makes sense as these statements are potentially matching the questions that people potentially be entering on their Google Search for answers. For example, “How not to make a Podcast!”

We want our blog to be a portal of information to the concept of “Living and Working in the Digital World.”  We want to inspire people through our podcasts by listening too and having conversations with ordinary people that are living it and doing it. Maybe we can educate people along the way and encourage them to open doors.

Anyway, My next step is now to check out and analyse how our website ranks on Google and there are some free tools that we can use. I purposefully haven’t looked at these up until this point because I want to see what impact the website has based on the things we have done on the blog. (With no clear knowledge or direction apart from actioning some things that we have learnt along the way). There will of course be a whole blog topic on this area in the future.

It has got me thinking though as to how our domain name impacts on the whole thing. This is the domain name that we started with:

https://liveworkdigital.wordpress.com/

We then captured the domain liveworkdigital.com. At the moment, people can find us on here, but they will be directed to the WordPress domain name. We had to upgrade the site from the free version to the next level so that we were able to map the domain name to WordPress. 

Photo by Stephen Phillips – Hostreviews.co.uk on Unsplash

So I hope to update everyone next time on what impact this has on SEO rankings of the site.  I purchased the domain name from a separate provider not attached to WordPress. My guess is that we may need to transfer the name but who knows!

We are just making this whole thing up as we go along right?!

Then there is the question as to how we promote the Podcast! But you will all need to read the next blog post to find out our progress there. As you follow and watch us, you will inevitably see the subtle changes in what we are creating.

Until next time,

Live Work Digital……..Luki

 

Episode 4 – Rory Callaghan [Integrated Health Professional]

In this week’s instalment of our Live Work Digital Podcast we have Rory Callaghan. Currently he resides in Bali,  living what some may call, the  Dream Digital Lifestyle. He is a qualified Physiotherapist and also has a background in Sports Science. At the age of 25 he suffered burnout working 70+ hour weeks. It was at this time, he realised that something needed to change. So, started his journey to find a solution to live a better and healthier life for himself.

In the process of getting his health back he set about working on a solution so that others wouldn’t need to go through what he did. From this point on, he was devoted to the pursuit of recognising and developing this ‘Self Care’ revolution.

He wanted to develop a  holistic community dedicated to the preservation of health and wellness worldwide. For everyone, for mother earth and its oceans, mountains, plains and rivers. So this is what he did.

The essence of his philosophy is based on the need that we all need to work on our own self before we start giving and helping others. If our own cup is empty, how can we be the example for others? We all need to fill our own cups until it is overflowing with all the good stuff. Once it is full to the brim then we can allow the  overflow  to spill over to the people we want to help and share our lives with.

Along the way, through  his journey he made a decision to partner with a Health and Wellness company which took him to Indonesia. From here he realised that Bali was a place which nourished his soul and he literally decided to sell up everything to base himself there for the foreseeable future.

Photo by Niklas Weiss on Unsplash

From the Island of the Gods (Bali) he continues to work on his concepts and ideas. For those that want to know more about his selfcare framework, he has a free download  that is available to anyone via his website.

On our podcast He shares with us some of his journey and some of the hurdles he faced to get to this chapter in his life. He is one amazing guy who simply made a decision that this is the life he wanted, and he set about to achieve it.

He advocates that everyone has the ability to create a new and different chapter in their lives. His message to anyone who is questioning where they are in life,  is that if something doesn’t feel right, then you need to stop and take a breath. We all need to stop and think about we want with our own individual circumstances instead of accepting that this is the way it is. It is only then that we can lean towards a more rounded and healthier life.

He does live a lifestyle which many people may be envious off, and he uses the digital world to get his message across. He does, however,  cautions that it may not be for everyone. There is a lot of hard work still to get to this point, and the journey may be a never ending path. We must admit though, we like his version of working 9 to 5 very much.

His path is not the norm, but it is the exception. His dream is not everyone’s dream but he encourages everyone to be courageous, to be brave and to be bold. If anyone wants to know more about how to get involved, check out our blog or message us through any of our channels and we can connect you to him.

Until next time. Live Work Digital

Lisa & Luki