Archive for the 'Business' Category
On the 21st September 2007 I worked my last day as an employee and I started my online business full time. It’s been a bumpy ride since then full of unexpected events. In this post I’ll recall the highlights of my first 6 months online, check in with how I am doing, and project forward for the next six months.
How I Started Out
I’ve already written a series of posts about my background, the last year of my career, how I went from software to Internet marketing, and the dreams & plans I had back then so I won’t repeat all that here.
I knew I wanted to quit my day job and make a living online but I didn’t know how to go about it and I didn’t have the confidence to quit. Then in August 2007 I embarked on something called the Thirty Day Challenge run by Ed Dale and that changed my life! I failed at the challenge - I never made any money but doing that challenge taught me enough to convince me that I could succeed. Three weeks later I resigned.
My Initial Plans
At the time I was heavily into software development. That was my background, it was my job, it was my passion and I wrote in one of those early posts that my overall goal was to make a living developing software and that ultimately I would like to develop a cool and geeky mmorpg which is a Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Game of which I am a big fan.
However I didn’t want to dive into it right away so I decided to do some Internet Marketing as a way of bringing in some money ‘quickly’. Oh how naive I was! All I really knew at that time was what I had learned in the 30DC so I imagined myself building sites in various niches and making money via affiliate marketing. Six months on I still have not managed to achieve this!
My First Project
Initially I played around with a niche that I had been working on as part of the 30DC - playdough of all things! I never made a penny out of it and it never even got any traffic. However within a couple of weeks I got the idea that if I was going to go to all this effort to promote some affiliate product, wouldn’t it be better to go after a high paying commission rather than just a couple of dollars?
Off the back of the 30DC I had joined The Immediate Edge which is Ed Dale & Dan Raine’s paid membership site. One of the things I really liked about it was the project based approach that Dan took. He’d take a subject such as Infroducts and make a project out of it then he’d blog about all the details of that project. I liked the idea so much that I stole it and the High Paying Niche Experiment was born.
That project failed pretty miserably but I still use the project based approach now and I always think in terms of projects as it helps keep me focused in my work.
Breaking Away From the 30DC
A lot of my early posts were about 30DC stuff and a lot of my early readers were other challengers but I knew I had to break away from that if I was going to achieve any long term success. During September I tried hard to blog daily whilst I was still working out the notice period in my day job and I managed to put together a few posts that did fairly well.
In my first month in business I spent more time blogging than anything else. This was good in one way because I put out a lot of good content, much of it did well in social media such as StumbleUpon and I began to see some real growth in my readership.
The downside was that I wasn’t earning any money. Somewhere along the way I got introduced to Article Marketing and I began to knock up some software that could help me with it so my second project was born - the Article Masher project. As you can see from the project page, I only ever got as far as the introduction, ouch! However, that one is still marked as being on hold because I do intend to revive that but not quite yet…
The Twitter Guide
The one idea that I had from the 30DC that I actually followed through with successfully was to write a guide to Twitter. As soon as I started using Twitter and saw the way others were using it I could see its potential and I could also see where so many other people were going wrong.
I put a lot of effort into my guide and it was a massive success, doubling my RSS readership, gaining me a ton of traffic and inbound links. Basically, it put me on the map and is probably the best thing I have done for this blog to date.
Incidentally, if you are still skeptical about Twitter check out my profile - I have 700 followers now. I’m considering releasing a new version of the Twitter guide getting rid of personal and fluffy stuff like cute apps and focus it purely on marketing. Let me know if you think that would be a good idea. I would probably charge for that version :p
Then The Walls Came Crashing Down
After I released the Twitter Guide I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. My niche sites had failed, I couldn’t seem to get the enthusiasm up to continue working on the Article Masher and I was starting to feel a bit lost. I knew that things were not working out as I had planned and I wrote a post about the need to be flexible.
To be honest it’s probably just as well I didn’t have any major projects on the go at the time because two days later my partner of 10 years broke up with me and my world as I knew it ended overnight. If you look through the posts towards the end of November and the beginning of December you’ll see that I had no focus at all - I was totally winging it just trying to post anything I could muster just to keep up appearances.
By the middle of December I couldn’t take it any more and I unloaded my personal problems onto the blog in a very personal post. What happened next was pretty amazing - all the pain that I was feeling lifted the instant that I published that post. The very next day somebody new came into my life and we have now been together for 3 months and I am very happy. I just sold my half of my house to my ex-partner and we are getting along as friends just fine now.
Picking Up the Pieces
However, the split changed me permanently. Work lost a lot of its meaning for me and I spent a huge amount of time with my new partner. I wanted to work, I had to work to learn a living but I felt as though I had lost my purpose.
There was one tiny glimpse of salvation. On the weekend of the split I knew that if I was going to make it through the weekend I had to occupy myself in some way so I decided to write an ebook and that happened to be my WordPress ebook. I managed to write the bulk of it in one sitting but it wasn’t until January that I finally got around to promoting it - this gave me something to do.
Once this was done I felt better but still didn’t really have any work focus and I still wasn’t spending much time working. The posts throughout February were ok but I still wasn’t really doing very much.
A New Mindset, a New Beginning
What did change in February is that I made some money! When I added up my sales stats for January I was astounded to find that I had made $1387 which was a huge leap from the previous month. This changed everything. Suddenly I knew I had the ability to make money and this changed my mindset.
I began thinking about this business as a business rather than just as a random blog. I realised that by focusing on real, solid projects not only would I be likely to earn more revenue from them but I would also be able to be a much better blogger also because I would have real projects to blog about - I could relay real experiences, real results and so on.
I began to think about my business in terms of assets and began to brainstorm the kinds of assets that I could build. By the end of February I had decided on several new projects that I was going to work on ad for the first time in months I felt as though I had a clear focus for my business and began to really believe that I can make a full time living from this gig.
Whatever Happened to Developing Software?
In my last podcast where I announced those projects I admitted that I still had not got around to developing any kind of software and I said that I was going to create a project based around games programming. Guess what? I’ve still not started it yet…
This has been niggling at me for months. One day recently I sat down and decided to just brainstorm what was going on with my own feelings. I like developing software but it can also be a royal pain in the butt when you get a bug that takes you all day to solve! To be perfectly honest, I’m not a great programmer, I’m probably not even a good one. I’m very slow at it and I’m not somebody who can just whip something up really quickly.
The idea of trying to make money developing software was really stressing me out. But what was also stressing me out was the idea of losing my skills if I didn’t keep them up. This has happened to me before. So I played a “what if” game with myself. What if I did no programming for an entire year? What if I had to learn my skills from scratch over again?
Suddenly I realised that it wouldn’t be so bad. See programming is a very fast moving industry and languages, technologies and techniques change all the time. What is current now will not be current a year from now. My C# 2.0 skills won’t do me much good if I want to do C# 3.0 and so on. I realised that it didn’t matter if I took a break, even if it was a really long break because whenever I decided to pick it up again I’d have to start over anyway.
So I just let myself off the hook and as soon as I did that I felt a sense of relief. Funnily enough just last week I did happen to whip up a quick piece of software to help me do something for my post about CSS Galleries so the basic skills are still there but I can rest now and just concentrate on IM safe in the knowledge that all the programming books I’ll ever need will be there waiting for me when I am ready to start again.
Looking Forward to the Next Six Months
So now that I know that software is not part of my immediate future I can concentrate on my IM project. Sometimes I make myself laugh at the speed at which I change my plans. Just one month ago I was talking about doing an eBay project, starting a niche site and a newsletter for this blog. Then I got an idea for a StumbleUpon course and all of those ideas just went flying out of the window!
Ok not quite, once I have got AWeber setup for my email course that would be a very good time to start my newsletter but other than that I am not starting any other projects until my StumbleUpon course is finished. And not only that but in that time I’ve also had ideas for other products that I want to create.
What I now know about myself is that I get new ideas all the time. Sometimes I incubate them for a while and other times I just jump on them immediately and drop my other plans like a hot potato. This will not change - that’s just me, that’s how I work. I don’t plan months into the future. I stockpile all my ideas, I review them all the time, add new ones and ditch old ones.
I couldn’t possibly say what I’ll be doing over the next six months. I would like to think that I build a profitable niche site, start a popular newsletter and release products that give me a big pay day but who knows? All I know right now is that I love my work, I am so pleased I quit my day job and I am happier now than I have been in years.
Thanks to everybody who reads this blogs, comments here, sends me free stuff (I’m looking for a copy of the new Product Launch Formula if anyone wants to give me a free review copy JEFF!), links to me, and generally just makes my life enjoyable and this blog successful. I would not be here writing this if it wasn’t for all of you.
Making money online is often a solo affair and those that do it full time are usually self-employed. So, this counts as a business. The question that I want to debate today is just how hard should we be working at our own businesses, especially when we work from home.
This post has been prompted by an article by Don Miller that I read recently. It’s about Running a Home Based Business Like a Business. Don talks the merits of treating a home based business just like any other business and warns us to be wary of the freedom that comes with working from home.
With Freedom Comes The Need for Disclipline
I love the freedom that my new life gives me. It used to really annoy me to have to turn up at work at 9am 5 days of the week! I hated having to ask for days off or explain that I wasn’t feeling well and I simply hate being told what to do on a daily basis. Employed life was just not for me.
So now I can get up when I want, work when I want, do whatever work I feel like doing, and I can take as much time over it as I like. It’s easy for me to go to the gym or run little errands around town. I don’t have to explain to anybody what I am doing, I don’t have to justify myself in any way. Well I suppose those last couple of points aren’t quite true as I do feel a certain responsilibity towards my blog readers but that is self-imposed and not a result of my circumstances.
Of course the trouble with all this freedom is that it is so easy to abuse it. Just last week I had a couple of days where I had nothing planned and I had intended to work really hard those two days. I was going to write a load of blog posts, do some more marketing for my ebook, catch up on some courses I am working through and so on. On the first day I got to about 4pm having done pretty much bugger all and wondered where on earth the day went! The next day was pretty much the same!
I Used To Be More Organised
After reading Don’s post I felt rather guilty because he suggests I should create a schedule that mirrors my day job, use a to-do list, curb my email time and basically discipline myself much more!
This is just what I used to do. In fact, before I had even quit my day job I had created myself a time planner and plotted out just how much time I was going to spend on various activitied related to work. For the first few weeks in business I worked extremely hard and I tracked all my hours diligently.
There’s More to Life Than Work
The trouble with all this hard work is that it came at a price: I sacrified many of the important things in life in order to make time for all this work. I stopped going to the gym, I stopped doing Karate, I didn’t see my friends and I totally neglected my home life with my family.
The reason that I dived into work so heavily is that as long as I was not earning an income, I was eating into the equity in my home so of course I wanted to start earning money as quickly as possible. However, money is not everything and that really hit home when the relationship with my partner broke down.
Since then, I have been unable to get back into my previous groove and to be honest, I have absolutely no desire to do so. Nowadays I work the equivalent of no more than 3 days a week, sometimes less than that. Instead, I spend time with my family, with my friends, I exercise, I go on days out, I do sports… in short, I’m enjoying my life!
Work Smarter, Not Harder
I’m sure we’ve all heard the expression that it is better to work smarter and not harder. Back in October I reported that I had worked 235 hours in the month and that I had not earned any money. In that post I also shocked myself (and my readers!) by realising that a huge proportion of my time had been spent on activities that were non-essential - lots of reading and not enough doing.
That’s all changed. For instance, as a blogger, I love to read blogs and I have a ton of great blog feeds in my reader. I used to read them all dilligently but now I just scan through the posts and will only read those that stand out and even then, I tend to scan the content a lot more.
Now when I get to work I know that I’m only going to work for a few hours (usually) and quite often it may be several days before I do any more and as a result I have to force myself to concentrate on what’s important rather than feeling as though I have to do everything.
The cool thing is that since I’ve been working less, I’ve been doing better. For a start, I’m actually earning some money now which is nice!
Goals, Plans and All That Stuff
In his article Don says that we should set out each day with goals and that if we don’t we’ll be headed for mediocrity!
I used to be a planaholic! Is that a word? Well anyway, I absolutely loved to make plans and I loved to set goals too. I had pieces of paper with hundreds of goals written on them and I’d make pages and pages of plans on how I was going to achieve them. And then something would change in my circumstances and I’d end up having to re-write a lot of those plans.
To be honest, I spent way more time planning to do something than actually doing it! I was always stuck in what we programmers call ‘Analysis-Paralysis’. It made me feel good to plan, I felt like I was achieving something but I was just kidding myself! Most of the time I wasn’t getting anything done at all!
It’s so different now - I make a few notes such as ideas for blog posts but generally speaking I just take a few minutes to decide what’s important to work on at any particular time and then I just get on with it. I totally go with the flow. I don’t have kind of schedule whatsoever, I just wing-it and it’s working for me.
State of Mind > All Else
Recently I shared my theory of successful blogging and stated that I believe that a blog does well when the writer is true to himself in his writing and doesn’t try to force out posts. I said that the state of mind that you’re in when you blog comes through in the writing and the readers pick up on it. If you blog with passion then your readers will feel passionate too and are more likely to subscribe.
Now I think that this state of mind applies everywhere! Right now, I feel good about my business. I feel that quitting my day job was absolutely the right thing to do and I also feel that I can succeed in business by going with my intuition with regards to work. If I feel like I have been slacking then I’ll take a step back and put more effort into work. If I feel like I am neglecting my personal life then I stop work immediately and go do something else.
I’ve ditched all the plans and schedules in favour of gut feelings and instincts and that’s quite a big thing for me because it’s a huge change in personality.
I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this topic - both from people who have the luxury of being in business for themselves full time and those that are doing it part time.
I just watched episode 4 of The Next Internet Millionaire and once again contestants are being asked to do things that don’t seem to have anything to do with Internet marketing - eating worms! But after watching more and thinking a little deeper I realised that perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here.
Eating Worms - Seemingly Irrelevant, but Funny!
I watched the first 3 episodes last week and I was pretty harsh about the content of the show but I got some value by seeing the marketing lessons in the production of the show itself. The worm eating challenge (yes live wriggly worms!) in Episode 4 was part of a challenge to answer 10 customer service emails in 15 minutes. Those who could eat the worms didn’t have to answer as many questions and thus had more chance of passing the challenge. At first I was horrified but I have to admit, it was pretty funny :-)
The speaker for this episode was Marlon Sanders, he seemed like quite a character. There was one thing he said that made sense to me. He said that your level success over the next few years doesn’t depend on your skills, on the classes you take, but it depends on your ability to confront the tough stuff, deal with things you don’t want to have to deal with, do the things you don’t want to do.
There’s Always Crap to Deal With
This is very true isn’t it? In just about any endeavor in business and in life in general there is always a negative side. Nothing is rosy all the time and those who think it should be are just naive. But I would add that just plowing through the crap of life is not always the smart thing to do. You should always evaluate the situation and think about it in the context of the bigger picture and on your goals.
For example, eating worms may not have anything to do with Internet marketing in general. However for those contestants, they are playing a game for which the prize is a joint venture with Joel Comm. If they want that prize, they have to win the game and if eating worms can help them do that then that’s what they should do. Personally if I had been up there, I would have been like Jamie. I would have given it a go but I honestly don’t think I could have done it!
…Especially in Business
For my new business I haven’t encountered any problems yet because I haven’t really started but I remember from past experience that when I was in business before there were all sorts of problems and there was always work unpleasant work that needed doing. The intelligent approach is to first determine whether or not this work/problem/thing will bring you towards your goal and if not, don’t do do it. There is no point doing something unpleasant when it doesn’t serve you.
Some people think that I am crazy and irresponsible to quit my job and that sticking it out is just one of those tough things that needs to be done. But I see it differently. I looked closely at my career, at my long term goals and I saw that they were at odds with each other. My day job was not taking me where I wanted to go so for me, it’s not smart to continue with that.
To focus on one thing or to diversify into many - this is a dilema I find myself facing all the time. With only one week to go before I say goodbye to the 9-5 forever, it’s time for me to get really clear about what I am going to focus on in both the short and longer term.
My star sign is Libra, the symbol for which is balance. I find this interesting because I have always strived to find balance in my life, but always found it quite difficult to achieve. In general I like to throw myself fully into one thing and immerse myself in it (often at the expense of other things) and at the same time, when I become immersed, I usually find lots and lots of sub areas to explore and off I go into a whole slew of new areas…
Diversification Becomes a Massive Distraction!
For example, up until a few months ago I was fully immersed in my career as a software developer. I read a lot books and magazines on development, frequented dev-related forums and so on. I was very focused on the programming languages and techniques that I used in my day job. However, the more I read, the more I found other related topics that interested me.
One of these was web development and I started reading books on that. As I got further into this I began to get lots of ideas for web software that I wanted to write. At the time I was also thinking that I wanted more out of life than just a job so the two came together and I figured I would be able to make a supplementary income from writing my own web based software.
I then discovered the term “Micro-ISV” which is a name used to describe an independent software vendor that is just a single person. (The term was later expanded to include small teams up to 5 people.) I found there were blogs and podcasts dedicated to Micro-ISV’s so I started consuming those and this led me to lots of resources geared towards entreprenurism in general. With my background in business it didn’t take long for the desire to be in business take hold.
The career-related books went back on the shelves and I started reading more and more material related to business and the new directions in which I wanted to go. Once I found the Thirty Day Challenge and started on that there was just no turning back. My point in relation to this post however, is that the more you diversify the more distractions you open yourself up to.
Refocusing for my new Business
Over the last 6 weeks or so my focus has moved away from software and towards Internet marketing. As any software I write will be sold online, this is obviously a very valuable skill. But the cool thing about Internet Marketing is that you can create a profitable income stream very quickly without needing your own product and this is exactly what I need at the beginning when I will have no income coming in at all.
Picking the Major Projects
I am at a point where I need to decide exactly what I want to focus on. First of all I’ll take a bird’s eye view and decide upon the major projects that I will undertake. This blog is one, and niche marketing is another. I will postpone software development until the new year 2008 because otherwise I will be taking on too much.
When starting out there is always a steep learning curve and this takes time, lots of it. If I try and spread myself too thinly there is the danger that I wont get anything done at all. Though I am going into this full time so I will have more time than many people getting started with making money online, there are still limits.
Drilling Down
For this blog there isn’t too much to think about. I have decided upon a daily posting schedule and I have collected a lot of resources that I want to get through in order to become a better blogger. But there isn’t much in the way of branching out that I can do.
Niche marketing is a different story however. One of the things that I find when doing niche research is that whenever I find something that looks good, I can’t quite commit to it because I’m always wondering if there’s something better out there - a better market, a better keyword phrase, a better product and so on. But we cannot deliberate forever.
Start With One Thing at a Time
If I was giving advice to somebody else about to start with niche marketing I would say, allow yourself a certain amount of time for research and then at the end of that time just pick the best one and get started. Work on one at a time only.
Now I am actually not taking my own advice here because I plan to launch three niches all at once as part of an experiment. But as I said, I’ll be doing this full time so I have some leeway :-)
Yesterday I published a post entitled 512 ways to make money online and in that I listed 8 ideas for creating content, 8 ways of monetizing and 8 ways of generating traffic. My idea with that post was to inspire anyone to be able to find *something* that they could do to get started. The danger is trying to do it all at once. Take the traffic for example. For both this blog and all the niches that I will be working on, I want to generate as much traffic as possible and I plan on using all 8 of the methods I mentioned - but not all at the beginning. I’ll start with one and only when I get used to it will I add another into the mix.
[Edit] I just found a great article on Net Business Blog stating that it’s better to focus on building one authority site than to build many small ones. Very interesting, go have a read.
Advice
I really admire those people who can hold down a full time job and create a business in their spare time. There are several highly respected bloggers who still have a day job and frankly, I just don’t know how they do it. If you are in that situation and you want to start making some money online then I would advise you to focus on just one thing only at the beginning. Pick something, get started, nurture it, develop it and only then start diversifying. Let the amount of free time you have guide you. More time = more diversification, but still keep it sensible.
I have just finished watching the first 3 episodes of the Internet reality show The Next Internet Millionaire. I heard about this a week or two ago but I missed the part about it being an Internet based TV show and I thought that I wouldn’t be able to see it being based in the UK. Slapped wrist for not paying attention!
What a Great Education in Marketing!
… and no I’m not talking about the content of the show. It’s entertaining for sure but don’t watch it thinking that you are going to actually learn how to become the next Internet millionaire. The education I got was from reading between the lines and seeing how the show itself is a brilliant piece of marketing in so many ways.
First Let’s Talk About the Crap
I’m not expert on Internet marketing but from what I have seen on the first three episodes, some of the challenges they are settings the contestants seem totally irrelevant to me. First of all they have them giving presentations testing their presentation and public speaking skills. What’s that about? These are essential skills if you are a customer-facing salesman but since when do you need that to build your online empire? Maybe you need those skills if you are doing the IM campaign for a large corporation but I think many of the people viewing this are individuals who just want to get started making a living online without needing all that corporate crap.
Then there was the logo design contest. Ok two scenario’s here: either you can afford to hire someone to do your graphic design for you or you can’t. If you can’t you are probably just starting out and you can get away with a simple text based logo that you knock up in a free graphics package. Once you start earning a bit of money you would just pay someone to do that for you if you are not artistic! Any Internet marketer who values their time would outsource graphic design tasks so I found this quite unfair for the contestants.
Then there’s the poker game. I don’t even want to talk about that! But hey, this is a TV show and it needs to be entertaining.
And Talking About Entertainment
Here’s the first great lesson. This is a reality show and they are huge at the moment, every loves them, and if you shove the word millionaire in the title it’s bound to get some attention. The fact that it is an interesting TV show means that people are going to watch it and they are - each show is getting in excess of 10,000 views which is pretty good though I dread to think what the bandwidth cost is.
The <Insert Country Here> Idol Approach to Marketing (ish)
I first heard this term coined by Ed Dale and he talks of the Australian Idol show. In the UK we had Pop Idol and in the US there is American Idol. The concept is the same - a bunch of contestants enter the talent show, and each week somebody is eliminated. At the end of the contest the winner gets a recording contract which makes a ton of money for everybody involved.
Now the reason this is such good marketing is that the winner has been voted by the viewers, so the success of the songs produced by the winner is guaranteed. Joel isn’t doing quite the same thing here as he has a pre-recorded show and he chooses the winner himself. However the concept is similar because what he is doing is building massive hype around the joint venture that he is going to launch with the winner. By the time he launches it, his marketing has already been done! Thousands of people will already be hyped up about it having watched the show beforehand.
Clever Use of Sponsors
Each day of the training is conducted by a big name in Internet marketing and with each episode of the show, you can click through to the website for that person right there on the website. The show gives you just enough of a taster to get you interested but of course doesn’t give anything away. We are watching a 50 minute long advertisement and loving every minute of it! Compare that to regular TV that gives you the entertainment then shoves the ads in the middle and that’s the part where you go to the toilet or grab another beer. With this show, the advertising is the entertainment. Very clever.
Let’s Not Forget The Upsells
Don’t you just love that cheesy bit at the end where Joel promotes his little business-in-a-box thing? I don’t know how much he’s charging because I didn’t want to put my email address in there. Somebody please enlighten me as to the cost :-)
Conclusion
As someone who is interested in Internet marketing and has a little bit of experience with it I think it’s easy to criticize a show like this. However, if you look at it from the point of view of Joel, who is his target audience? I suspect that it is not established Internet marketers, but the thousands of wannabes out there who want to make money online but don’t know how.
Watch the show, it’s entertaining and it’s educational. What do you think of it?
