Where do You Put Your Eggs? Focus or Diversify?

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.

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