Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

Last week I used some of my work time to read and respond to all the various comments that people left on resources I released in the build up to Membership Site Mastermind opening.

Although I spent several hours reading over 500 comments and writing about 50 of my own, it’s worth the time invested. I learn so much about my audience this way, which helps me better serve you because I understand where you are coming from. Any chance you get to do research like this, you should take it.

One of the things you have to come to terms with when you run a teaching business is that you will receive the same questions over and over and over again.

Each new person who becomes exposed to your work is new and usually has the same common questions and challenges as everyone else. Their experience is unique to them as an individual student trying to learn how to do something, while for you as a teacher, you repeat yourself with each new student. The more people you help, the more you repeat.

I bring this up because it’s clear many people are struggling to deal with the same issues and tell themselves the same false truths when it comes to starting an Internet business. This is the fundamental reason why only a tiny percentage of people actually make the kind of money they want to from their business, while most people do not. It’s the people who choose not to believe these things and who do it anyway, who get a result.

If you believe something that stops you from getting what you want, then you have a built-in failure mechanism. Why guarantee your own failure? If you want something so badly, who do you make a choice to see the world in a way that automatically prohibits you from ever having what you want? That’s just silly.

Three Lies You Need To Stop Believing

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Welcome to part three in this series on creating positive change in your life. Before you begin reading this article, I recommend you review the first two parts –

These ideas focus on you being the catalyst for change, so let’s take a deeper look at how much power you really have to create the kind of results you want in your life…

A Hard Lesson: You Can’t Control Everything

Potentially one of the most depressing moments in your life, especially as a young person, is coming to grips with your own limitations. I’m all for creating a strong base of self esteem so you feel like you can achieve anything, but it’s necessary to realize that you’re not going to be the best at everything and some things you won’t ever be able to do.

We’re all born with gifts, natural abilities, and strengths, but conversely, there are things we’re not good at and other elements that impact our lives, which are based on the “luck of the draw” that is the lottery of life. Your genetic make-up, where you are born, what era you are born into and all kinds of things can hinder your ability to create the change you want in your life.

Your environment has a huge impact on who you are, how you think and what you do. You can expand your universe by taking in new inputs, but you’re limited to what inputs are available (hence the phrase you don’t know what you don’t know). Although you live in an infinite universe, for most of us we can only function within a finite universe or, well, your head might explode, or at least you won’t be able to function within the framework of the society you call home, or the body you operate within.

Despite having your own unique set of circumstances based on your environment, physical make-up and ever expanding consciousness, there are universal principles that you can apply to help you create what you want in your life, regardless of your limitations. In the end, as is always the case, in comes down to the choices you make.

You’ve been given the power of freewill, which means in all circumstances you can make a choice. This is a wonderful gift, but dangerous in the “wrong” hands, so it pays to put some effort into ensuring you are making smart choices – that’s smart in relation to what you want of course, which is going to be different from person to person.

Let’s take a look at a basic framework of ideas you can use in order to help you make the right choices. Like the previous article in this series, I’ll draw upon other blog posts I’ve published as source content for the ideas. Please read the source articles too as they will enhance your understanding of each concept.

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This is the second part in my series on creating positive change in your life. If you missed the first part, please read it before reading this. You can find part one here – Is It Really Possible To Create The Change You Want In Your Life?.

If you haven’t manifested your own desires and want to change your life, take on board what I have to say here, and in the articles that complete this series. I promise it will help you in many ways…

Here Is What I Know So Far

I’ve proactively changed many aspects of my life for the better, especially in the past five years. The key word here is “proactively”, which could be interchanged with the word consciously, or intentionally. The point being that I decided I wanted something and then went to work to create the change necessary to have what I wanted. It wasn’t just hoping, dreaming, or thinking about the change, it was all of those things AND focused action designed to take me there.

The end outcome of achieving what I set out to is usually different to what I expected, and of course as per the universal rules I talked about in the first article in this series, the process, the journey of creating the change turned out to be more valuable than actually arriving at the outcome.

Although we are motivated by changing certain physical circumstances we exist in, often it’s the internal shift, the growth we go through on a personal level, that turns out to be the most valuable outcome. The physical benefits are like having the cake, while the real change is learning how to cook, something you can take with you long after you finish eating the cake.

Although many of the stories I’m about to tell you relate to a personal milestone, event or challenge from my life, the cornerstone of the story is the lesson learned as a result. Luckily for us, I’ve been chronicling many of these lessons by revealing the stories here on this blog, so together we can go on a trip through the last ten years of my life and extract some of the most important and powerful revelations as they apply to creating positive change.

I’ve included a link to the original articles that recount in more detail the situations and the key learnings. I strongly recommend you read these articles too, as they will greatly reinforce the messages of this article series.

This is some of the most powerful content in this blog in terms of helping you change your mindset, increase your own self awareness and achieve what you want. I say this in confidence because they are the benefits I gained by living these experiences.

Here we go…

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This is part one of a series on how to create positive change in your life based on what has worked for me, what hasn’t, and what I’m currently learning. Rather than write one of my usual 4000+ word monster articles I’m breaking it down for you into more manageable chunks.

This is going to be a very important series if you’re ready to arm yourself with some powerful tools in the battle for happiness, success and contentment in your life, so get ready. Here we go…

This Is Who I Am

As a blogger you are at times more open with your thoughts and feelings online than you might be in person, even with your closest friends and family. Despite knowing that thousands of people read this blog every day, I find it easier and I’m much more succinct, when I share my thoughts and ideas here, at least when it comes to certain subjects.

One of the wonderful, if surprising at first, experiences as a result of being open with people through a blog is that eventually you gain some kind of notoriety for being good at something. When I started Entrepreneurs-Journey I wanted to share my business experiences simply for the sake of sharing and to see whether other people found what I had to say of value. Some people did find what I had to say valuable, so I kept saying things, and more and more people found me and started listening.

Eventually my perception online became that of an “authority” in my niche, at least to a small sub-segment of the population. I became a “someone” rather than an audience, in one little corner of the universe, in this case as a blogger who talks about entrepreneurship, marketing, and personal development.

This is a great event for all kinds of reasons, but the most important reason, and be sure to underline this, is that with authority, more people actually read what I write. With the attention that authority gives me, I enjoy the privilege and honor of being able to influence people. This is power and it’s something you have to be very careful with as power is trust, and you don’t want to abuse people’s trust.

What’s a little strange for me is that I’ve not really done anything to enjoy my position other than tell you what I think and do. I haven’t been officially trained to do this in any way, I didn’t go to school to learn to blog (I started one instead), nor was I instructed along the way about the right way to do things. In reality I’m pretty much exactly the same as you are right now, except I’ve spent the last five years sharing aspects of my life through this blog over and over again, week after week.

The Challenge That Is Changing Yourself

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I had a meeting with a friend and his business partner last week. The request was to “pick my brain” on the best way to move forward to generate some passive income streams online.

These two particular people are like a lot of people I know. They’ve got tech skills, they know the Internet well and they have lots of ideas for cool Internet business applications and websites.

Unfortunately they’ve managed to dig themselves into a situation where they spend all their time working on client jobs, running what you might call a “consulting” tech firm, completing various programming and web development projects for other people’s businesses. The money in this business model can be good, but it has some serious downsides too, namely -

• You have to deal with clients, usually one-on-one, a very low leverage interaction and often just painful as you have to work you way through lots of annoying clients to find the good ones
• You work very long hours, which my two friends could certainly testament to
• You know a lot about a lot, yet have difficulty specializing in anything
• You’re in competition with every other jack-of-all trades web development firm out there, which means you unfortunately end up competing on price, and it’s certainly not nice to have to undercut yourself simply to work with bad clients

Those points aren’t necessarily true across the board, but I’m pretty sure any person who has ever consulted or done any kind of web development work for clients will know what I’m talking about.

My friends are smart enough to realize the path they are on is not going to lead them to where they want to go, so they’re looking to make some changes.

The goal is to develop some form of income stream, or several, that could replace the need to take on client work. As always, the relationship between time, money and freedom of choice is heavily integrated here, as my friends are looking to make more money without drastically increasing their workload and eventually freeing up their time so they can do what they want to, rather than what they have to.

Let’s Not Be Strict About Passive Definitions

I’m about to reveal what I talked about during our meeting with my two friends. In terms of what I suggest you do if you are looking to make some passive income online, I don’t want people to get too caught up on the idea of “pure” passive income.

The methods I’m about to talk about are not pure passive income sources, however they have the potential to be low work, high return income sources that can potentially become very close to pure passive longer term. The fact is, it takes time to develop these income streams, but we all love the phrase passive income so I’ve decided to use it here in the title of my post.

So to clarify, what we are looking to do is start up completely new projects that have the potential to become good sources of near-passive and possibly pure passive income, it just might take some time to get there.

First, Understand Your Unique Opportunities

One of the first things I discussed with my friends was taking their present situation and turning it into something that’s less work for them. Sometimes the “lowest hanging fruit” is just a simple adjustment to the business model you are following now, transforming your core skill from labor intensive, to hands-off delivery, or at least much less work.

Here’s some examples of how you might do this -

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