The Journey to Financial Freedom

This has already been a popular topic of conversation here. So why continue on this line of thinking now?

Ah, that’s the thing. First, I don’t think I’ve actually talked about a couple simple facts about blogs. Like the simple fact that when you write something interesting, and your blog is linked into the web properly you can attract traffic. Where would the traffic come from? Here is a horribly incomplete list:

• Search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN;
• MyBlogLog and similar blog communities;
• “Social Networking” sites such as Squidoo, Facebook and twitter;
• Other blogs - If you comment and participate on other blogs, people will visit you;
• Offline promotion. A simple card with tear-away tabs with your URL can be effective;
• Online advertising - free ones like Craig’s List, and paid ones like Google adwords.

One other thing I’m pretty certain of is this: Many people want to use things like blogs, Squidoo and Twitter. They can write or put up audio or video. But the technical things involved in setting up a blog can keep a blog from happening.

That’s a problem that I want to help people with. Come check out my email newsletter; and feel free to write any time to let me know what type of blogging issue you could use help with. You can leave a comment here, too, if you like.

Cheers,
Tim

I’m getting ahead of myself again, second post in a row. But I’m anxious to share this idea with you and hear what you think about it.

So what I’d like to suggest is that writing a blog can be a great way to get a biz going, even before you have any real idea how to start a biz for yourself. Maybe you don’t really know how to run a business. Maybe you don’t know how to make money, but you do know an idea or topic you are passionate about. Maybe you have some great skills, but you use them at your job - and you know you do NOT want to depend on those skills in your business. Maybe you just know that having a blog can be a great way to run a business. There are people that have a blog as the center of their business, with affiliate links, paid blog posts and other monetization methods providing them a workable living.

Whatever the reason, here is one major argument I would like to put forward. You can start a blog for like $5 a month - on your own domain! Yes, you can start even easier on blogger.com and hundreds of other places. But believe me - you WANT your own domain. If you don’t know why, trust me, ok? The short explanation is that when you do get noticed by the search engines, if you have a blogger.com blog, then you will be building blogger.com’s already awesome ranking a little stronger. They won’t really notice! Build your blog’s popularity on your own domain, and your Alexa and google rankings can become quite respectable. That helps bring visitors, and visitors click on links. Visitors clicking links cause sales to happen just like the birds and the bees.

But enough of the gory details. My point is this - if you have something you’d like to write about, and writing isn’t akin to having a tooth pulled, then it can be a great start of a business. You could talk about your pet cats, and eventually help people evaluate all the goodies they can find in the local pet store and online to keep their cats happy, and to make your pet-owning experience more convenient. You might not understand how to turn your writing into a business at first. That’s okay. If you do some writing, and if you do a few things that help other people run across your writing, then you’ll make some friends. You’ll gather a flock of people that like to hear what you say. Later when you figure out a focus and business to run, you’ll be very grateful that you’ve got that flock of friendly people out there, scattered around the world listening to what you say.

Let me try to explain my idea like this. Say you know you want to get involved with motorcycle sales. [I still really miss my Honda VFR I had back when I lived in Singapore!] Maybe you figure out pretty quickly that for the business setup and funding you’ll need, it will likely take you 12-18 months to really get started. At the same time, say you have a friend who happens to be working on a new magazine - about motorcycles. You realize that writing an article or two for the motorcycle magazine can really boost your credibility. And when your friend asks if you can help to drive up readership, you realize that you can interact with a lot of people in your future marketplace while talking up the magazine.

Now, what if you were able to leverage some of your writing and new friends to get your motorcycle business up and running in 12 months? Do you think you might get special rates to advertise with your friend? And do you think your business would benefit from all the magazine readers that heard about you long before your cycle shop even opened?

That’s what I mean about starting a blog helping you with starting a business.

But there are a few more benefits I think you might get from this approach. First of all, what if it turns out you’ve picked a bad topic to write about? Say you start writing, all excited. You put up 3 or 4 posts on your blog. You ask a few friends to take a look. And then it becomes hard to write. Say you find yourself avoiding your blog. I saw a statistic recently that many blogs die in less than a month. Maybe your first blog dies of rather natural causes. Let’s look at that. What would you lose in that situation? Well, if you were paying $5 monthly for the blog, you’d be out around $5 - maybe as much as $15 when you realize that your blog has died.

Now, if writing and blogging seem to be the problem - the unnatural activity for you - then maybe authoring a blog for yourself is not such a great idea. I’d say that would be a valuable and inexpensive lesson to learn so quickly, cheaply and easily. Keep in mind that a blog is still very doable for you; just search out the various ways that you can get content for your blog without writing much or any of it yourself. Two methods are using PLR articles and outsourcing the writing. I will write about these soon; drop an email if you’re anxious to hear more about this way of building a blog for yourself.

On the other hand, maybe you love to write. Maybe you have strong opinions on your topic. Maybe it just isn’t something that you want to write about enough to keep a blog going. Did you think you could develop a business built around the topic of your blog, more or less? Yes? Well, let me ask you a question then. If you’ve hit a roadblock writing about your topic in a short 30 or 60 days, is this really a good area of business for you? Do you have enough passion about this topic to get other people excited about becoming your customers? Or, did you just learn a lesson for less than $15 about a potential business topic that doesn’t keep you consistently interested?

Let’s say you decide that is the case. You might be passionate about a topic, but not really crazy about fighting in the marketplace to build a business around that topic. What then? Well, here’s one idea. Take the blog you’ve written, throw it all away, and start up a new blog. Cost to you - $0. Kick off a new blog, hopefully picking a topic that is more suitable and long-lasting for you to write about. Hopefully you collected email addresses on your first blog, so you have some people you can notify about your new blog right away. And start writing. You’ll have learned a bit about blogging from the first experience, right? Again - if we call the first experience a failure (not my view of it, by the way…you learned a lot of things for very little real cost!), let me again stress that it should have cost you the price of a domain for 1 year plus 1 to 3 months of hosting. That’s a cheap lesson to learn. In fact, it may not cost any more than a meal at McDonald’s, or a couple lattes at Starbucks.

Ok, enough talk about the things that might go wrong. What if this really works out for you? What if you do hit on a topic like the blog about your pet cats, or a blog about motorcycles in Madrid - and you can later make money based on your blog. You might be wondering what kind of money you can make from a blog. Well, here are three ways that people make money.

First, you can add links to products - recommend things that you use, or that you believe to be helpful - and you can make money as an “affiliate”. There probably aren’t a lot of things that you cannot get affiliate commissions on anymore. Having a blog about pet cats, you might add links to 4 or 5 cat books from Amazon. You can link to an eBay store that has electric cat boxes. You can post an entry to your blog talking about the expensive toy you just bought your cat - and the fact that the bag laying on the floor got played with more than the $23.92 “Your cat will love it!” toy you carried home in the bag. If you provided a link to that $23.92 item, I’m sure that somebody would buy one periodically. This can grow into the thousands of dollars per month. Don’t get too excited by that, though. Figures over a few hundred dollars monthly require work, and all profits require a measure of patience.

Now, maybe that blog is going fine for you. But let’s say that your pet dies of a heart condition 6 months later. (I love cats. I have 3 at home. This is just a “for instance” scenario.) Would you want to continue your pet cat blog? I’m not sure if I would want to. What then? Well, here’s a second way to profit from a blog. You can sell it! Careful, though - you must have your blog on your own domain for this to work. There are various ways to complete the deal. Done right, you can sell a blog for 6 to 12 times the monthly income you get from it at the time of sale.

For a third idea, you might find after a period of time that you have some valuable advice for cat owners. Maybe you have a rare type of cat, or a type that has it’s particular problems that you’ve learned to solve. One thing about the Internet is that there is always room for an information product. You might write a simple PDF document, which you could sell for $5 or $42. You could get testimonials or actual content interviews with veterinarians or cat breeders - and add $5 or $50 to your product price. Now, to make this exciting - could you actually provide some loving guidance to other cat owners? If so, maybe you could launch a membership site for them. Membership sites can be free. But then there are memberships that are $997 monthly! I haven’t gone to look, but I am sure there are some $100 monthly pet membership sites out there already. The Net is a really big place!

So how does this idea of starting with a blog sound now? It is definitely possible to take a half-baked idea, and get to work writing. While the ideas for a business are percolating in your brain you can already be establishing some blog posts. People love to find an informative site on a topic that touches their heart. You might just develop a warm market of blog readers while your half-baked ideas are being developed. And believe me – writing about a topic can help you to develop your initial ideas into something much more concrete and specific. And while you are writing, the people you attract to read your blog can assist you as well. You can test your ideas out on them. You can get their feedback to your blog posts, and you can put a survey on your blog. Effectively, your readers can help you with market research.

For more details on how to actually put this plan into action, leave a comment, drop me an email, subscribe to my Get Your Biz Going email list - or do all of those. But do take some action. And take advantage of the community here on the Internet - stop back here and see what other people have said as well.

If you hadn’t guessed it about me, I like the Internet. I mean - as a way to get ahead in life, I like the Internet. As a way to reach out and help others - I like the Internet. Have you thought about it? If you don’t already know what you are going to do to get ahead, let me give you a suggestion. And if you’ve already got a good plan and a way to generate more and more income, then you might want to establish a new Internet income stream.

Actually, I just like it. How about you? Now, some of you are thinking that reading a blog or two and checking on your next vacation is fine, but nothing more. I understand that. Or you might be unsure, curious, maybe thinking that getting something going on the Internet would be exciting. But scary. I guess this will be for you, then. I’d like to help calm your fears a bit, give you a few ideas, and help you to take some action.

First off, realize that the Internet is most like the new medium for moving information, as in….radio, then TV, now the Internet. Have you heard about Web 2.0? That’s like the original Internet, but with interactive communities for people to share their thoughts and experiences. You can find out what websites a friend has bookmarked; you can shoot a video of your new grandkid on a phone and upload it to your Blog; you can subscribe to a podcast series from Stanford on Social Entrepreneurship - and iTunes will sync that to your iPod or iPhone for you automatically. I like to use an FM transmitter and listen to those things in the car while I’m driving. I heard Zig Ziglar mention that you can get the equivalent of a master’s degree by listening to quality audio material for a year or two while driving.

So if we think about using the Internet for a platform to build a business, or to provide an additional channel for a business, we run into a big problem. Basically, the Internet is huge, yet a lot of websites sit out there and starve and they never get people to visit. Some people put a lot of time into building up a beautiful website, and spend a lot of money on that. That approach is as flawed on the Internet as it is anywhere. Unless the money you are spending helps to support a decent plan, the money is potentially being wasted. If so, this also wastes time. And I’m sure you can relate to the emotional stubbornness created by spending a pile of money supporting an idea. It can create a huge blind spot.

Let me explain it this way. Las Vegas was started as an awesome entertainment area, but it wasn’t going to get any visitors, was it? Part of the success plan had to include the transportation and the attraction of visitors. They didn’t start off with the Luxor out there, did they? No - they got things started, and they split their resources between building an amazing entertainment environment and attracting the visitors that would happily exchange their money for hotels, food, blackjack and shows.

Think for a few moments about the phrase, “building a business”. Isn’t that what I just described? The alternative is to build some amazing website with all the bells and whistles, maybe some wonderful flash, blah blah blah…. But if that amazing site is effectively as visible as a glittery signboard in a remote area of the desert, all that perfection will need a LOT of remedial promotion to bring interested visitors to it. The results in that situation would likely be disappointing for a period of time. The point is that putting more stress on starting a small Internet business, and growing that business by responding to its marketplace will normally produce better business results. And it can definitely be less emotionally straining.

But how do you design a business using the Internet? Actually, that’s not much of a problem. If you start looking for business ideas, they are everywhere! That is part of the problem with the Internet. There is just too much! Search on certain things, and you get no results. Search on other topics, and you can get 5 million results! Google and other search engines generally do a great job of providing us good results first. But, that is not always the case. And there are definitely a few whole classes of low-value website out there basically designed just to transfer dollars from us into the website’s coffers. You need to filter what’s out there, consider the source of the information, and generally be a bit discerning. The same things you do if you are watching the news, reading a newspaper or a magazine, or hearing someone interviewed on the radio. We don’t automatically trust the information on an infomercial, do we?

One thing to realize about this overwhelming number of sites and sources of information is this: We are people. People trust people. We may respect the Encyclopedia Britannica, but that is really just a set of books that contain facts. When we want to use the information, we want to be able to turn to a trusted expert. If we hear contradictory information, we’ll likely believe our trusted expert more often than not. They filter and sort and help us process all the chaotic plethora of information that is out there. Any one person can only be really good at a certain number of things. In most other things, it’s good to have a trusted source of information and advice. That saves us time, lets us trust the information that we allow to enter our brains, and that gets stored in our own amazing storage devices - our brains.

So how do we select a business model for the Internet? I suggest that we become an expert to a group of people, our customers and visitors and readers. We limit our focus and get good at solving some problem for those people. And we get to know our customers and respond to their needs. There are lots of ways to make money from a situation like that. We can sell things like books or Playstations. We can sell information, maybe in the form of a PDF, a series of phone conferences, or a podcast subscription. We can run a seminar, give training, or provide a service.

But realize that we are now talking about marketing. So let me tie all this together. One of the basics of marketing is to identify your target audience. Target them, learn about them, talk to them in a way that leads to good communication. Ask your market what they need, how you can help, and what they want to spend their money on. If you build a business with these basics in mind, you won’t likely build a perfect website with amazing sales and entertainment potential when you’ve got no audience and market. That is, unless you have a very good plan for launching that site with a big bang. You are more likely to provide things that your market wants to spend its money on, and enhancing that business over time.

This should help solve the overwhelming volume of “help” available on over a billion websites that exist already. If you know that you’d like to develop a training site to help people establish a successful account service business, then you can safely ignore a lot of things. You will have identified whole classes of websites and information as noise that you can virtually ignore. If you haven’t identified a market and a problem that you’ll solve for that market, then you may end up listening to all the promises and ideas, investigating all the glitzy, hypey sites, and you could spend years on doing research.

I hope this is making sense. If you want to establish a business that uses the Internet, then…well….you’ll have to do many of the same things that you’d do to establish a business or a shop without any Internet components. There are some markets that are hugely more successful online than they can be in today’s world using any other communication medium.

For now, let me leave you with one suggestion. For those of you that have ideas to share, that can talk or write about some topic of interest to you, I have a suggestion. Start out sharing your ideas, putting them out there in writing and audio. Maybe have phone calls or Skpe calls with others. Practice presenting your idea, and conduct some market research in the process. Develop some of the skills that you can use later to run a business that uses the Internet.

How do you do those things? Well, start a blog. Establish a podcast. Become involved in forums and other peoples’ blogs by adding your comments. This networking can lay the groundwork for a support group, or even partners, for your business as it develops. You can also start to find an audience. So, start a blog. Start writing. If you find you’re having trouble adding to your blog after 2 or 3 weeks, reflect on that. This gives you a chance to modify or completely change your “topic” or market before spending any significant money. More importantly, you don’t have the emotional stubbornness and blind spots caused by deciding on a course of action, and putting $100,000 behind that idea. Somehow it is much easier to adjust our direction when our total investment has been some time, and maybe $100.

If this approach appeals to you, then subscribe to get more of these ideas. My Get Your Biz Going email sequence deals with this topic. It gives you suggestions. You’ll see some of the ideas in action. You are reading my blog, but - maybe you have NO idea how to get your own blog started. Maybe you have a website and a few products, and have traffic, but you’re having trouble turning those pieces into sales. The idea is to get the groundwork in place to grow a business using the Internet. Join me to Get Your Biz Going. Another way to say that is - Create Your Own Newsletter. Let me help you change your momentum - and get it going!

A bit of fun - and a Naked Baby…(video)
Would you like to see what some real people have accomplished on the Internet? Some of the big numbers? Heck, I don’t even care - you really just need to see this video! It’s fun - it’s creative - and it has great rockstar appeal. Turn up your speakers. Naked Baby, Big Money Video