This post is about how to feel the fear and do it anyway – and how it relates to passive income. You’ve heard all the catch phrases right? Feel the fear and do it anyway, if you find what you love to do you will never work a day in your life, the wind beneath your winds etc.
Short version – be careful! I use sites such as HubPages as a way to create content on a different IP and to provide free backlinks to my own sites. To honest I started with HubPages because I liked the community and now I stay because I liked the community, and because I can get free backlinks to my own sites – I think HubPages is OK with it – they make money from (some) of my hubs and I contribute to their community.
I have a dream: to do what I want when I want – and I am very, very lucky to be living it! Passive income isn’t a terribly easy goal – but I am getting there – and I think I just turned a big corner, let me explain. Not income wise, but in the psychological, mumbo-jumbo department!
When I did my last update I had had a pretty bad month. I lost my part-time job in late January – and it had stuffed up my productivity! How so? Even with only 2 days a week work it gave my week structure. Now it was gone and I appeared to be going nowhere. I admitted my frustration in a private forum I am a member of (sorry closed to new members at the moment – I’ll let you know if it re-opens) – and got jumped on pretty hard. I thought my problem was keyword research – but it wasn’t – the problem was I hadn’t down enough work!
That is not to say I wasn’t spending all day at the beach, nope worse than that, I was distracted by forums, commenting for fun, twitter and a whole lot of other unproductive stuff! In fact an on-line friend asked me what sites I wanted to promote in a mutual-help group he was starting – and I didn’t have any I could be bothered with anymore!
I wasn’t being lazy – not logging on lazy – but I was unfocused I hadn’t figured out what I had to do to succeed – even though I did know – and have known for nearly a year – build more sites! For goodness sakes the original name of this blogs was “Journey of 100 sites!” Had I developed 100 sites – nope!
I got mad – first at my colleagues in the forum – and then at myself! Someone called me stubborn – I laughed out loud – its odd how someone who has never met you can pick out some major personality trait like that!
My main issue was: people say you can’t achieve unless you believe that you will achieve – but I don’ t believe in anything I can’t touch: the Easter Bunny, Father Christmas and God being my main examples.
I’m not much into the pop psychology, “law of attraction” crap. I did however, somewhat in desperation, do a bit of a google – and came up with the concept of visualisation. Sorry I don’t know where I got the check list from – I wrote it on a bit of paper – and it was very useful- leave me a comment if you recognise the source! Having decided on what your goal is: in my case passive recurring income from niche sites – you need to go through the following steps:
OK nothing better to do at midnight when I couldn’t sleep so I worked thru the steps.
Sorry for the ramble – now I have to go and build some more sites!
EDIT – this post moved me to tears writing it – and this video totally expresses what I not have the skill to say in words:
Marketing and I have come a long way in the last year – its possibly one of the most important insights have got to this making money online game!
My first degree is in science and analysis is one of my strengths. Twenty years after my first degree and I did a graduate business diploma and was horrified by some of the courses. Marketing was the worst: they had “laws” about how to sell. I remember a big argument I had with a rather shrill marketing lecturer when I challenged her contention that you sell the dream not the product. She claimed it was a law: I pointed out, correctly I believe to this day, that it was an unproven hypothesis or even just a statement, it wasn’t a law. The fact that the apple will drop from the tree is a law, that the sun will rise tomorrow at a certain time is a law: that I will buy a certain brand of toothpaste because it will help me make friends – is, to be blunt, and I was, an un-tested theory. I lost the argument though: she had the microphone and no one else in the class could understand the difference between a law and a marketing hypothesis!
That pretty much sealed my view on the marketing industry. Self-serving, lacking in rigour and a waste of space. I continued to ignore marketing and scorn it. I understand the appeal of consumer products to kids and even to those who lack the basics of life: my first car will always live in my heart – because it was my first taste of freedom! Now cars are just a form of transport: I buy the one that best fits my needs and the price I can afford to pay cash for. I am a car salesman’s nightmare 🙂
So then I decide to become an online marketer – logical right? Its taken me about a year to figure out that is what I am you see. I thought I was going to develop a website and people were going to be so impressed with my wonderful content and I would make money. How was I going to make money – well I was a little hazy on that point: but the wonderful content is still there on my over-30’s independent travel site
You see I couldn’t be a marketer, that’s as a bad as being real estate sales agent isn’t it? And remember I don’t understand marketing or think its worthwhile. Real estate I know a bit about: a lot really, more than most of the agents I have dealt with as a customer. I still use agents to help me buy property though. Why? Because the top 2% of agents that I trust are very,very good at property and know the market inside out. Sometimes they have told me to run not walk from a deal, and I have. Now they are not the agents who win the top agents awards – which are really top commission earners awards. But they are long-term agents who make a comfortable living doing it. They know their product so I turn into their repeat customer.
That’s the sort of marketer I’m going to be online. I am going to be a good and ethical one. I won’t make a $20,000/month doing it – but that was never my aim. Half that amount would see me comfortable for life. And yes you have to sell something to make a living online! That’s how you get paid ! Duh! It just took a while for me to figure it out!
I wasn’t intending to write this post: this is not a political blog, but I am MAD, very mad. Google has had bad press recently in Australia particularly, and in fact our competition watch dog is currently taking Google to court over anti-competitive practice. That’s kinda a given given the size of the US-based Google. That I can live with – its business.
This however makes me mad! I posted recently about Courtney Tuttle’s keyword sniping approach which is all about creating focussed websites. Its NOT about spamming but apparently someone has reported to Court to Google and now he doesn’t even rate for his name for his main site Courtney Tuttle
So what is so dangerous about Court’s site that he shouldn’t be shown if someone searches for his name? Well Court obviously thinks its because he suggested that content wasn’t King, and that getting legitimate backlinks via articles and other means would get your content ranked.
So now Court has to backpeddle, take down his most useful posts on keyword sniping and post in effect a retraction saying he was wrong! Reminds me of the Spanish Inquisition to be honest – remember how you could get burnt at the stake for believing in the wrong form of God, well this is the internet equivalent. No his life isn’t threatened, but his livelihood certainly is, as his main business is an internet marketing consultancy with his brand built around his name.
So because of some un-named, unknown, for reasons which he doesn’t know about, suddenly his business is affected. He’s now guilty and has to prove himself innocent – all because someone is jealous or worse a business competitor can’t think of any other way competing with him!
Photo Credit: saswat
You know at the moment this is the only 1 of my sites which is absolutely 100% working! Why? Because over a week ago I decided to move hosts. My current host hasn’t given me any grief, but it doesn’t have a couple of industry standard tools such as CPanel (a way of managing your site) and some standard statistics packages.
I decided that if I needed the additional functionality down the track then I should
move sooner rather than later – and anyway the host I was moving to is supposed to have fantastic customer support and will move my sites for free.
Now if my sites were just static websites there would have been no problem at all: moving a bunch of files from one host to another is dead easy and it would have taken about 10 minutes tops. Unfortunately though WordPress blogs and BANS sites both use databases to hold you content, comments, well every thing important really. The issue is that the new site had a totally different set of naming standards for databases – so I couldn’t just copy the databases over.
Fine I thought – cut my losses wait the 72 hours get support to do: which they did within the 72 hours. So I went to check, no some bits working but most broken. Like my personal blog is fine except the plugin that manages my over 500 photos scattered throughout more than a year of posts doesn’t. The plugin just plain refuses to work on the new host: why – I don’t have a glimmer of an idea; they all run the same operating system – linux, the host is supposed to support WordPress – lets face it they wouldn’t be in business if they didn’t – but a really common plugin just fails to work!
One of the frustrations of being self-employed is issues like this: I guess this has lost me all of my productive time this week. Even this blog which was actually starting to get a little bit of traffic has nose-dived because I haven’t posted for days – which is fair enough, but guess it just points out how fragile building a business is.
The percieved wisdom is that you won’t succeed without determination, and quitters never win. But the converse isn’t necessarily true either: those who persevere aren’t guaranteed success either. What do I know having sunk a week of time and $16 into this new host. To I walk away, cancel next month’s payment and never know if 1 last email would have fixed the problem: or caused to to waste another 10 hours?
On the bigger side of self-employment: do you stay with your existing trickles of income: not because you know you can grow them: you probably can’t but because at least they are certain. Or do you neglect your existing sources while trying to develop new business models with no idea at all whether the new technique will work for you?
