Interview with Scott Jones of Self Made Minds

Scott Jones is one of my personal heroes when it comes to online enterprises (though don’t tell him that!). I’ve been running my own websites for a while now. With a few influences from Scott, Al and Jason on Self Made Minds (SMM), I’ve started my journey with a new area, namely mini-sites. Generally I find the information on SMM to be helpful and inspirational. But sometimes I get jealous at the fantastic deals they do!

Scott earns a 6-figure income from running his network of websites, which is something that most of us would be more than happy with! Among Scott’s network, he has a highly successful website Tattoos by Design and a very valuable TVs.co.uk (currently worth low £xx,xxxx I believe). So here’s a short email interview with Scott, which emphasises that success is directly related to hard work, research and more hard work!

When you started, what proportion of your successes were down to luck? Do you feel that’s any different now?

I started slowly with lots of reading and late nights working so I wouldn’t put any of it down to luck per say, it was a better time to start back then as linking between sites was commonplace and all webmasters did it freely. It’s a lot harder getting new sites off the ground today with the sandbox and the competitive nature of the internet, big money and large businesses have changed the playing field, but I enjoy it.

Who or what inspires you with your work?

I don’t see it as work, I enjoy what I do so that in itself means I can dedicate the hours needed without having to measure that against any success or monetary gain, I am pretty materialistic though so money is always the end game.

When it comes to the website businesses, what do find most addictive about it all?

The fact that every time I click send and receive on my mail program I could get an email that could change my life.

What would you say was your biggest mistake? What did you learn from it?

I chased topics that had high search traffic rather than high value advertisers, having 30,000 visitors per day is great but now I know I could make just as much from 300 visitors in a different niche. I work smarter now and keep in mind that everything I do has to be low maintenance.

Do you have trouble motivating yourself at times? How do you get past that block?

Not at all, I can take as much time off as I want but I am hungry for success and always push myself forward looking to work hard now to secure a future for myself and my family so if anything my wife tried to cull the hours I put in, I find it hard to switch off and slow down more so.

What’s your greatest achievement with the website businesses?

I don’t think I have one, I am proud of some of my rankings, I was very happy when my wife stopped working and I fully supported my whole family after all the support she gave me through my learning years, I also won an award from Sir Alan Sugar which ranks pretty highly.

What do you dislike most about working for yourself?

I am never satisfied or content with what I have achieved so push myself forward – which is also a strength I guess?

What are your plans for the future? Retiring before the age of 40?

I am 32 now and could be called semi-retired really, I only need to work about 1 hour a day but choose to work long hours, a lot of my income is still reliant on organic rankings so in the next 3-5 years I plan to have everything in place so that I am future-proof and can fully retire if I wanted.

What one piece of advice would you give to anyone wanting to work for themselves?

Start before you get married and settle down if at all possible and do it after you get a mortgage.

Thanks to Scott for his time. I hope you found the information above to be useful. I’ve also found an older interview (2006!) with Scott on a different site that you might be interested in, I found it on yfs1.com.