Welcome To The Arielle Phoenix Blog – Start Here!

Hi,

My name is Arielle Phoenix and welcome to my blog!

This is so weird, writing about myself, as I am usually writing about a specific topic or query, but here we are!

I am an author, homeschooling mother, cryptocurrency enthusiast, and entrepreneur. And, I can actually say that I am an entrepreneur and mean it because my business ventures make money! Yay…

To be fair, they always have, but never any life-changing amounts and I have an extreme case of “shiny-object-syndrome”. Something you will come to learn about if you stick about on this personal blogging journey!

I could also call myself a “CEO”, now, as I have employees (though none full-time) and have no desire to put that in my Instagram bio or anything of the sort (you probably won’t get that reference if you aren’t a long-time Gary V fan)

I do not say this for whatever low-level bragging rights it could possibly be perceived as; I say it to affirm it to myself more than anything.

The reason is that, for as long as I can remember, I have suffered with imposter syndrome. And, if you don’t know what that is…

Imposter Syndrome

Imposter syndrome is a psychological pattern in which a person doubts their accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a “fraud”. Oftentimes, high-achieving individuals who suffer from imposter syndrome attribute their success to luck rather than ability.

The tricky part is that this usually happens unconsciously. The individual typically underestimates themselves while at the same time believing that other people possess more talent or intelligence, which isn’t always the case.

Another facet is that even when the individual has been successful in a particular venture they’ll discount this or not appreciate it for what it is.

In any case, it has never been that extreme, but I have always had a habit of just downplaying my abilities and achievements.

In hindsight, though, in most cases what I do and have always done is just second nature to me, so I have never really seen anything as a big deal.

Until recently…

By the way, if you don’t want to read all of this, I’ve now put it into a podcast of sorts, enjoy!

Sharing My Journey

The more people I talk to, the more I am encouraged to teach what I know or just share some of these things that I consider to be second nature or not such a big deal.

I often forget that a lot of these things I have been doing, I have been doing so for the past 12 years or so. So what is second nature to me, might not be so to somebody else.

I am sharing my journey going forwards for a few reasons. And, in no particular order.

1. To document this lovely journey for my future self to look back on, read, and appreciate. The struggle is always beautiful in hindsight!
   
2. So my children can eventually read and get into the mind of their mother and also appreciate what went into building everything they will eventually have. (Notice my careful use of the word “eventually”.)
   
3. Because in my bones, I know I will go on to do some great things and I want to have them documented. It will all make writing my future biography a lot easier!
   
4. I have learned a lot of things that I wish I could have told my younger self. The younger me with all of that fire in her belly and no direction. Hopefully, by sharing this journey, somebody like the younger me comes along and finds it or is forwarded it somehow.
   
   Or maybe she has an awesome brother like mine, and he buys her my very inspiring biography 😏 (read this post and you will get that reference…)
   
5. I always give business advice to anybody who will listen. With this blog, I will hopefully only have an audience of people who want to hear what I have to say and will (probably) act on it.
   
   I can then stop bothering those who have no intentions of starting their own business or side hustle and actually want to just complain to me about their day jobs they hate but do nothing about it…)

Where It All Began

For as long as I can remember, my number one goal has been “financial freedom”. What that looked like when I was younger compared to what it looks like now is completely different, however.

It used to be a certain amount of money but as I got older it became a freedom of money worries. When I was younger, I thought that having a lot of money would make me happy and that it was the ultimate goal.

At 30 years of age, I have a beautiful family, they are my everything, they are my why and they are my happiness. I have already won, and at this point, everything else is the cherry on top.

At this point in life, financial freedom means the freedom to enjoy my family.

The freedom to do things with them.

Create memories, and, ensure they have all the opportunities in the world (including that expensive science summer camp.)

I never want to forget this, while I chase financial freedom… And this often pops into my mind when I put the kids to bed as fast as possible at night time so that I can get back on the computer and “do stuff“.

I could go on, and I probably will in a future post. But this H2 is about where it all began, so let’s get back to that, shall we?

It began when I was around 13 years old. I used to sell my ‘low-income family’ meal ticket worth £1.75 of school lunch, to a girl in my class for £1 (she just wanted the sandwich; I wanted the cookie and drink!)

Coupled with the savings I made, buying a dodgy monthly travel card from another hustler, I soon had a few pounds to play with…

I took a trip down to South Side, a local shopping centre, and saw that I could buy multipack sweets and crisps (candy and potato chips for my American readership) for £1 and sell them for a small profit at school.

I did this every day, reinvesting the profits and buying more stock.

Each and every day, I would sell out and go home with a pouch full of coins. It felt amazing! My mum was like my accountant; she would keep track of inventory for me, write out a price list, help me adjust pricing, make sure I had enough change each day, etc.

Every day I would go to school with two bags; one with my books and stationery, the other with my stock. This buying and selling experience set me up for a very successful run on eBay a few years later…

A Few Years Later…

Around 2008, whilst poking around on the internet one day, I discovered some Chinese wholesale sites, I still remember some of them to this day. There was one called Beltal, another called Trade Tang, and one you may have heard of which is still about today, DH Gate.

The 16-year-old me had stumbled upon hustler-heaven! I wasted no time, and with the assured safety of something called “Escrow”, I found some products and whipped out my Visa Electron.

Back then, whatever counterfeit trading standards or regulatory bodies police the internet today, were not so efficient. eBay also was not very strict, and needless to say, you could get away with selling a lot of stuff that you can’t now. And that I did!

I was 16/17, banking hundreds of pounds a day from my computer. I would get PayPal notifications on my Blackberry constantly. My local Post Office man expected me and my entourage of parcels every day.

I had a solid run, until I got a letter from DHL stating that my shipment had been seized or something to that effect. It all started going downhill from there as eBay had also begun taking down listings and before I knew it they had closed my account.

For a few years, I found ways around selling on eBay and working around their restrictions. I also began selling on Amazon which made more profit but you had to wait a lot longer to get your money and they soon began removing listings, too.

After a while, it was just more trouble than it was worth, and, in addition, China had popped up on these platforms undercutting everybody – my solid run had come to an end.

Fast Forward A Few Years: Passive Income At Last!

I had gotten a taste of making money online, I had seen what was possible and in comparison to the little day jobs I had had, it was a no-brainer – I had to find something solid online. It is very hard to go from hundreds a day to £7.50 per hour…

I would literally be writing out my future autobiography if I listed each and every online and offline venture over the years from selling cars and laptops to my own fat burners and workout programs… (I might blog about those other ventures down the line), but, in 2015 I had seen an online success that I had not seen before…

For the first time, I had created a site that was generating actual passive income. I made it on Moonfruit (of course)! I had no idea what WordPress was and I stuck with what I knew.

I woke up to Paypal notifications, I got Paypal notifications whilst on holiday; every time I picked up my phone there was a…. yup, you guessed it – Paypal notification.

I used Instagram to build up a following, manually following and unfollowing accounts that had a customer base similar to mine. Then I found a piece of software to automate it for me and grew the account to over 250,000 followers.

I made good money on the site and by using the Instagram account to sell ad space until one very sad day- I went to log in and saw the account had been deleted. All of that effort, gone. Instagram gave me no reason and no way of reinstating the account – it was gone.

Though it upset me, I never gave up hope with regard to making money online. If anything, I had more successes and experiences of it working, and this inspired me more.
Behind me, there were countless failed ventures but also a wealth of experience that I could not have gotten otherwise.

Failure

The most common reason for those failures tallied up to two things;

1. Inability to scale.
   
2. Some gatekeeper or platform shutting my efforts down.
   At one point, a very rude and unprofessional PayPal employee, upon seeing my passport ID, responded to me asking how I was able to obtain the goods I was selling. I have some theories on why that was her response, but we move…
   

Nonetheless, by the time I stumbled upon the concept of creating niche sites and blogging for income. I was ready!

What drew me most, was those two components of my failures above and a third which I never mentioned; consistency.

The concept of creating niche sites was so attractive to me because;

1. Niche sites allow you to scale limitlessly. Technically, if you have the means to, there is nothing stopping you from creating 100 niche sites with 500 articles a piece…
   Not just that, but the process is extremely replicable:
   
   Do what works.
   
   Do more of what works.
   
   Do that again, and then copy and paste.
   
2. There are no “Gatekeepers” per se. I guess you could count Google as a gatekeeper. But, Google doesn’t know who you are, what you look like, care where you are from, have any agenda etc.
   
   Google will not “shaddow ban” you. Google might de-rank your site if you do some foolishness but he doesn’t care if you move to a new house and register a brand new website and start fresh (kinda like eBay does…)
   
3. The third thing that pulled me was the clear cut results that people were getting. People who wern’t trying to sell anything to me, just sharing their journeys and what they have done.
   
   The proof was in the pudding, all that was needed was patience and consistency.

2020-To-Now

And here we are! In 2020 I registered my first “Niche Site” off the back of a few Income School youtube videos. My sister shared them with me and I was hooked, I binged and created my site.

As I learned more, I created another site, and then another site, and so on. I ABSOLUTELY suffer from shiny-object syndrome and would not recommend somebody who is completely new to the concept of blogging or SEO to do what I did… however, I am not new to this entirely.

My reasoning behind creating multiple sites in a relatively short timeframe was because as I learned more, I learned about the limitations of some of the niche sites I had created and what would be possible with some other ideas I had.

I didn’t create a new site before putting at least 30 or so posts on the current site, also.

In addition, I knew I wanted to have a portfolio of sites to help me get to my income goal of $10,000 per month and that it couldn’t hurt having a few built-up sites, sitting there, maturing.

I liken websites to “digital real estate”, my unofficial mentor, Gary V, once said something very striking. To paraphrase, he said something along the lines of real estate property being the vehicle of our parents’ generation and the internet being our thing now!

It is so true, many people are sleeping on the internet whilst each day some teenager somewhere is building up some multi-million dollar brand on Tik Tok or something.

That isn’t to say real estate is not still an amazing tool, it absolutely is and is still the goal! However, once upon a time, you could work two pretty basic jobs and buy a house. Where I live, you might get a tiny 2 bedroom flat on the 12th floor for £250,000… that ain’t it…it really ain’t.

My Site Portfolio

At the time of writing, I have 9 sites. 2 were made prior to discovering blogging for income and have been making me money outside of Amazon and display ads so I will focus mostly on these 7.

Site	Date Started	Total Posts
Site 1	September 2020	37
Site 2	November 2020	66
Site 3	January 2021	55
Site 4	April 2021	13
Site 5	June 2021	105
Site 6	August 2021	45
Site 7	August 2021	44

As you can see, I have managed to put up a fair amount of content on these sites in a very short space of time. BUT, as you can also see, I am the epitome of “spread-thin”. With these same efforts, I could have had two or three sites with a few hundred posts on each, instead.

I want to also add, that I am a mother of three, full-time. They are very young with my eldest being 5 years old and my youngest being 7 months old… yes…while I was building these sites I was also building a new person! Arielle, you are amazing.

The past 12 months have been non-stop.

I have yet to experience any sort of blogger burnout because this genuinely does not feel like work to me. However, I could not have done it without hiring additional writers and using tools like Jarvis to help me write.

This post has gone on long enough so I will conclude it with what you can expect from the future of this blog…

What I Will Document

Any and everything to do with my personal takes on making money online, investing, saving etc. However, in future, this blog will be split into two sections;

• The first section will cover my personal ventures, what I am doing, monthly roundups and income reports etc. This may include my self-publishing (undecided)- whether I released any new books for the month, and my blogging journey of my affiliate niche sites.
• In future, the second section will cover how to make money in virtually any industry, how to get started, and my unique, personal opinions on how I would go about making it work in that business.

I will be using SEO to cover the second section, while the first will just be me, opening up Google Docs and typing away.

I also plan on utilizing and growing my Youtube Channel (finally) alongside blogging, so be sure to subscribe and follow along with the journey there. I will try to post consistent but useful topics!

If you want to follow along, be sure to subscribe to my mailing list!