Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

This is a problem I’ve never had to deal with yet watching a few friends recently start new websites has made me realize that getting a brand new site to be discovered (indexed, listed) by the search engines can be a difficult task. In my case since I’ve been operating online for so long whenever I launch a new site I simply link to if from my existing sites knowing in confidence that Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search will quickly index the site. But what do you do to get a site indexed if you have no existing portfolio of sites already established to take advantage of?

How Do Search Engines Work?

First you must understand how exactly the search engines find websites and index content. In order for your website to show up in a search result your pages must exist in the search engine’s index. Each search engine has an absolutely massive index (let’s not talk about comparing index sizes, it’s like a search engine mid-life crisis joke waiting to happen) and it’s constantly updated every minute of every day. The search engines have what are called bots or crawlers or spiders, basically computers that ‘pretend’ to be browsers surfing the web devouring content like hungry monsters. There job is to make sure the search engines have the most up to date index of webpages possible so that when a person uses a search engine they get the most relevant response available. Obviously it’s a lot more complicated than that but I’m into simple explanations and that’s really all you need to know.

Your goal is to get the little spider to come visit your site and index every page of content so as to maximize your search engine results page performance. In order for a spider to crawl the web and visit your site there must be an incoming link pointing to it. So what’s the best way to accomplish this? Read on…

Submit Your Site To Directories

One of the paths of least resistance to get an incoming link is to use a directory. Directories exist to simply list websites, usually broken down by category. All you need to do is fill out a form and depending on whether submissions are manually or automatically approved, your link will show up in the directory with a period of time, usually 24 hours.

The problem with directories is they are essentially link farms, no content and lots of outbound links. Consequently they usually have very little clout in the search engines and since your link is sitting in amongst possibly thousands of other links the little search engine spiders may never find your site.

In order to maximise your chance of success using this technique choose some of the higher profile directories. If you read this post - Free Traffic From Free Directories - you will find a link to a solid listing of reputable directories that you can submit your site to.

Comment In Blogs, Forums, Bulletin Boards And Newsgroups

This strategy is a delicate one. You don’t ever want to SPAM - purposely post just to mention your website without contributing anything of value. Even if you think you are contributing something of value by linking to your site chances are your post will be deleted since people generally have a thing against self promotion, no matter how valuable your self promotion may be (or you think it may be).

The best way to go about this is to have a signature file (most forums have a function for this) that allows a few lines of self promotion to be included at the end of your posts. Enter the community, get involved in the discussion and contribute. Now obviously you will have more knowledge to draw from if you pick communities based on topics you are familiar with and preferably are relevant to your site. Not only do you improve your chance of search engine spiders finding your site, you might get some real humans clicking your signature and visiting your site as a bonus (this is in fact a good general online marketing strategy to get more traffic to your site - I use it regularly).

A note about blog commenting - thanks to the NoFollow tag which many blogs have on by default, your comments will not be followed by the Google spider. Read this article - Trackbacking Lies - How rel=”nofollow” Stops Spreading the Love - for information about - for information about the NoFollow tag.

A better strategy with blogs, albeit a more labor intensive one, is to set up a blog yourself and start writing up good content. Head to some similar blogs talking about similar topics to your market, join in the conversation by posting relevant comments and you may find some other bloggers will link back to your blog. Most blog commenting systems allow commenters to make their name clickable to a website (my blog does this) so people will read your comment and then click your name to visit your website. When they come visiting and they find some good interesting content they may link to you in a blog post. If a popular enough blog links to you that will be all it takes to get the search engine spiders to find your site. Mission complete.

Press Release Distribution

This technique is easy enough to implement but faces the same issues as directories because so many people make use of it you may get lost in the crowd. You can go to a site like PRWeb, submit your press release about the news of your new website launch and they will publish it for journalists to make use of. A good press release may even circulate all over the Internet but at worst you will be at least published on PRWeb (there are others PR sites out there - try a search for “press release distribution” or similar).

I won’t go into too much detail about how to write a good press release, that’s whole article in itself, just remember to cover the who, what, when, where and why and try to come up with an interesting human interest angle. Note that this strategy is also a very good general marketing promotion technique so it might be worth doing simply for the experience and testing anyway.

Google Sitemaps

For the more technically savvy out there Google provides a sitemap submission system that gives you the tools to directly communicate with Google to let the search engine know when your site updates and ensure your entire site is indexed. This is only available for Google.

Manual Submission

Most search engines provide a facility to submit your site manually. Now while this may end getting your site indexed it really is just about a useless activity and could even slow down the process of becoming indexed. Remember that search engines rely on links to find, and more importantly, to evaluate sites (read my articles on search engine optimization if this is a new concept to you). Get yourself one relevant quality incoming link and that will do a lot more to get your site indexed quickly than manual submission ever could.

Some search engines offer a form of paid inclusion service that will speed up the process of getting your site indexed. Personally I think this is a waste of money. It might get you in the door but it won’t have you ranking highly for any search terms. It’s like opening a door to let you join the end of a very long queue. In order to advance up the queue you need to get incoming links. Incoming links will also open that door for you for free, so paid inclusion is really a waste of money and time. Focus on incoming links.

Link Loving And Paying For Links (Link Prostitution?)

Link love is a relatively easy thing to be on the receiving end of. You have probably heard of the favor bank, the social currency of our world. You can open an account with almost anyone by making a deposit by simply doing them a favor. Maybe you’re really good at graphic design so you can create a logo, or perhaps you’re an accountant so you can offer tax advice, or a lawyer could look over a contract or, well you get the picture. You can then make a withdrawal by asking for a link to your website. Favor currency flows quite freely and can easily be accrued by doing good deeds.

If you don’t feel like using the favor bank you can always try the other currency, cold hard cash, and buy some text link ads on other sites. A $50 link on a prominent site for a month should do the trick to get your site indexed. This is the rich man’s answer though and really should not be applied if your goal is only to get indexed, there are so many free ways to do it it’s hard to justify spending the cash. However if it forms part of an overall online marketing strategy that you intend to put into place anyway you may as well start spending straight away and kill two birds with one stone.

It’s All Part Of The Online Marketing Process

I’ve only barely scratched the surface of the many ways you can get your site indexed. Really it’s one of the easiest tasks, so don’t stress about it for too long. If you have the intention of putting into place smart online marketing practices and learn as you implement, then the initial indexing step will not concern you. The overall search engine optimization process takes a lot longer and you will quickly realise that just getting into the index is the very start of a long hard push, trying to raise your website from the very bottom of the index to the top result pages for your key terms.

Yaro Starak
Search Engine Optimizer

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Does the idea of continuous passive income from websites you can set-up and forget about sound good to you? Well that is what niche content websites are all about. Let’s take a look at this online income method.

I was over at Ben Bleikamp’s new blog, College-Startup, where he has been writing about his efforts to create niche content websites.

The concept is reasonably simple. Do some research, find some very tight niches that aren’t well serviced at the moment, build a content website targeting the niche, stick some AdSense, Chitika and similar advertising programs up and just let it sit there earning a few dollars a day.

Now you must be thinking how does this make good money? Well it doesn’t make much, but if you are lucky and do your research well, $2-$3 a day is enough to consider it a success. Once you have done this you can move on to your next niche content website. Over a period of a year if you set yourself a goal to create one of these content websites per week at the end of 12 months you would have 52 niche content sites. If they all make an average of $2 per day that’s $104 per day total, around $38,000 USD per year. Best of all the websites require no maintenance, it’s all about picking an untapped niche and filling it with content.

How To Make This Work For You

Before you run off trying to pull this off remember that in order for it to be successful you need to be confident you can successfully generate good search engine traffic to the niches you select. The recursive income only comes when you have search visitors clicking your ads. By the way, random search visitors are usually better ad clickers than loyal readers and that’s one of the reasons why this technique can work. Randoms come to your site once, read your content, click an ad and probably leave never to return again. Loyal readers come back for new content and often screen out the ads. It’s not in your interest to establish a repeat audience using niche sites. You don’t want the responsibility of adding new content since chances are finding content about a niche you don’t necessarily have much interest in can be tough. In this case it’s just search traffic you care about, forgot about being sticky.

Step One: Find A Niche

First you need to find niches where there is some traffic. You should use the usual tools, such as the overture inventory keyword data miner, to conduct research on how many searches are done for certain key phrases (look for sites with at least 1000 searches per month). Don’t aim for keywords and topics that are highly competitive, look for low competition with *some* traffic. Take for example Jonathan Wold’s Sump Pumps Information niche. How random is that! Do you even know what a Sump Pump is? I don’t, but he suspects enough people are searching for sump pump information online and he only needs a handful of them to click his ads per day.

The key is to find topics that people search for and advertisers use Pay-Per-Click marketing and other online advertising methods to sell to these people. Your niche content site helps to bring these two groups together and you take your middle man fee, with the help of the search engines for traffic and advertising programs for a monetization system.

Always be certain there are monetization possibilities before starting a niche content site otherwise you will be wasting your time. Look for AdWord campaigns by doing Google searches for the niche you are considering - if you see several ads down the right column that target the niche then you know advertisers are paying to reach these markets. To be really thorough, log into AdWords and set some test campaigns up and see what the bid prices are for your keyword research subjects. If the prices are reasonable then there probably is some competition for those keyphrases from advertisers running AdWord campaigns.

Step Two: Scan For Competition

Once you find a few niches you think have potential search those keyphrases and see what results show up. If the natural search result sites that turn up are badly optimized (look for low PageRank, poor title keyphrases and heading tag keyphrases) and you are confident that a site with well optimized content would quickly jump to the top of the rankings and by quickly I mean about 3-6 months (remember the Google Sandbox is going to impact how quickly you get high rankings) then you might have your first candidate for a niche content site.

Step Three: Build A Site

I suggest you go with WordPress to manage your niche content site. WordPress is blog content management software that runs off a PHP/MySQL backend (this blog uses it). It’s very easy to set up, handles most of the search engine optimization for you and all you need to do is pump in the content and off you go. There are some occasions where a plain static HTML site may be more appropriate, for example when you only need a micro site of a handful of pages and it would be quicker to just set up the few pages using a HTML template design, but I’ll leave that up to you (read Bo’s Marketing-Syndrome post on WordPress vs Static HTML? for more discussion on this topic).

How To Find Content

At first thought this would probably be the hardest part of using the niche content site technique - how do you come up with content for a niche site that very likely you have next to no interest in or experience with? Now if you are not the writing type and can’t waffle on and bang out a few key pages of content yourself by utilizing what’s already available online, then you may want to try these options:

• Use articles from public article repository sites such as Ezine Articles and GoArticles

. Writers contribute articles to these sites that you can republish on your site as long as you keep the author’s byline intact. The downside of this is that other people also can do the same and your article won’t be original. However if your niche is small enough there won’t be that many other people out there discussing the topic (in fact you are banking on it) so if you are lucky enough to find some on-topic articles in repository sites, make use of them.


• Another popular method is to republish Wikipedia content. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia contributed to by anyone and if you have ever used the site you know that it has entries on virtually any topic you can think of. Chances are your obscure niche content site topic will have some entries in the Wiki and under the GNU Free Documentation License you can republish the content on your site.
• Freelance writers all over the web are eager to take your money in exchange for their writing skills. Elance is the largest freelancer hub online and listing your article writing project there will flood you with responses. Most writers are pretty adept at producing content on almost any topic, even if they just regurgitate someone else’s writings in a new way. A few thousand words shouldn’t cost you too much money. If possible try and establish a long term relationship with a good writer if you plan on needing their services again.
• There are special article subscription services that give members the rights to make use of articles, some even promise a certain amount of new articles on a range of different niches will be provided on a regular basis so as to keep members subscribed. The idea here is that you get access to an article pool that only other members are granted access to. This is deliberately done so the articles are only utilized by a handful of people and often membership sites will cap their numbers at a few hundred. Members can do what they want with their articles knowing that at worst only a few hundred other sites are using the same materials.

  Personally I have never subscribed to an article site and I’ve read various reports, some good, some bad, about article membership services. I’m skeptical about the concept and I don’t like the idea that you have to either choose a niche that directly matches the articles available or try and modify articles to match your niche. I also have no idea where article membership sites source their articles but I have a feeling it would be a room full of trained monkeys writing the new articles each month (or ahh, freelance writers of course, and let’s not talk about cheap Indian labor). Given that most members subscribing to the articles will be chasing the same niches this seems like a formula to guarantee you will have at least a few hundred people competing in your niche - not much of an opportunity then is it!

The Importance Of Keyword Click Through Prices

For most niche content sites AdSense and/or Chitika will be the main monetization strategy. These programs pay on a per click basis and click through prices are calculated based on advertiser demand. The golden mix is to find a niche with few well established content sites but a lot of advertisers competing to find customers. This means click through prices will be high but the market is not likely to stay untapped for long and likely a bunch of competing content sites will pop up. In fact you may never find this combination.

A more likely scenario is a niche where there are high click prices because of lots of advertisers and a few well established content sites or moderate to low keyword prices but almost no competition. How you can succeed in these situations is to be better at search engine optimization than any of the other sites. If your site pulls more traffic you get more clicks.

The situation you want to avoid is a niche with few advertisers so low click through prices. No matter how much traffic you get and much you dominate a niche, if there are no advertisers paying to use Google AdWords you won’t get any AdSense income or it will be 10 cents a day from the one advertiser with no competition. Bear in mind however that there are general advertisements, for example Chitika can show cameras, computers and other electronic products that may appeal to a general audience and produce enough click throughs to make it worthwhile. This is a risky venture though since your niche is not relevant to your monetization method, the amount of income you earn will like be very random and inconsistent.

Underachieving Due To Low Entry Barriers

If you have read Perry Marshall’s Renaissance Club Newsletter you will know about two online marketing strategies he discusses, one called ‘underachiever’ and the other ‘overachiever’.

Note - if you haven’t signed up for the special offer to try Perry’s marketing newsletter it’s still available and you still get the Definitive Guide to Google AdWords, five marketing reports and five audio CDs thrown in just for trying out the membership for one month at $29.95 - check it out here for more information.

Overachiever

Overachieving is when you dominate a niche, become an expert and “go deep” by offering more than just one product or service. You may offer seminars, audio recordings, DVD video classes and a whole host of additional materials that make the lifetime value of a loyal customer a lot more than a once off purchase or text link ad click. This method means you can afford to compete by making a loss on the sale of your first product or lead capturing method because the value over time of that conversion is much higher. I’d say Perry’s offer that I mentioned above is a loss leader (overachiever) strategy too, he can’t be making money shipping off all these CDs and reports at such a low price and paying out affiliate commissions - but he knows that the 5% of customers that become fans and purchase everything he produces will spend hundreds to even thousands of dollars over time.

Underachiever

Niche content website building is an underachiever strategy. Profitable niches rarely stay uncompetitive for long and as niche content site building becomes popular you are going to be fighting with others for niches. Underachieving is when you deliberately choose to lightly skim a niche, perhaps by selling an ebook to a market that currently is not satisfied. Niche content sites service a unique niche with basic information and generate advertising income as a side effect, there is no intention to further capitalize on the audience. The idea of course is to rinse and repeat, building up a portfolio of profitable niches. The problem here is that you must keep working to find new niches to replace those that become too competitive to fight for.

For those that can manage a lot of sites and in fact enjoy the variety that comes from building sites on such an array of different topics, the niche content site strategy can work well. If you can build a really large portfolio, competitive action won’t impact you significantly because it will take a long time erode your entire income stream. Remember though that it’s not true passive income forever since you will need to replenish your portfolio with new niches if you want this strategy to work for you long term.

In my mind however a better way to go about this is to treat niche content site building as an education and research tool. Learn what it takes to get free traffic to a site from search engines. Learn how to optimize sites, find profitable niches and build content quickly. When you stumble across a niche with unexpectedly high demand and return consider switching your strategy from underachiever to overachiever. Start collecting email addresses to build a list. Get an ebook written, find affiliate products to sell, create a membership service, record screencasts to build information products, and “go deep” in the marketplace. Become the expert in that niche so you can own it and depend on it for long term income despite competitor actions.

Leverage Your Previous Hard Work

I’m sure you will find that many of the weird and wonderful niches you come across are already serviced by hobbyist sites, very unprofessional, perhaps hosted on free hosts with designs created in Frontpage or even (shudder) Microsoft Word. They usually have low PageRank but due to lack of competition will show up as top results in search engines. A quick search and easy technique to surpass these sites in the search engines is to leverage one of your already successful, high PageRanked sites.

Most online marketers have a site that they devote the majority of their time to, likely a blog or their main business project. This site enjoys good, hard-earned traffic and has lots of backlinks that were built up over time. Using this site as a tool to promote another site is an advantage, especially in the niche content market.

For example this blog is my main site. If I built a niche content site I would link to it from the sidebar that is on every page giving the niche site lots of valuable backlinks, PageRank points and helping it to very quickly enter the search engine indexes. In fact I’d hazard a guess that a site-wide link from this blog alone would vault a niche content site to the top of the results for it’s niche without much other work on SEO. There might be some sandbox issues initially, and true the relevancy of the links would not be very good, but given the competition likely doesn’t even know what SEO is and your carefully researched niche is small and untapped, the advantage is significant. Having a powerful site to leverage is a big helping hand for a niche content site marketer.

Conclusion

You will be surprised by what type of niches you can dig up. Often the most bizarre topics have real followings. Everything from how to raise turtles, where to find the best secondhand clothes, how to do magic tricks, how to snowboard, learning to cook vegetarian - and these are mainstream topics already well catered to. It’s your job to find the obscure, to think outside of your box and find markets that you would personally never consider being a part of yourself. Thankfully the search engines are full of keyphrases and all you have to do is get out there and research. Browse Wikipedia, follow the external links and expand your horizons. You may find some very profitable niches that no one else has thought of.

Yaro Starak
Internet Business Guy

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Brad Fallon, author of Stomping The Search Engines (try the free course, it’s very good) and one of the more well renowned search engine optimization (SEO) experts runs a blog. One of his entries, Pixel Ads — Be there by being (a small) square goes into a discussion of pixel ads and their SEO effectiveness. He’s also put up a test on his own website to demonstrate another way to use Pixel Ads and so far this is the *only* good use I have seen of pixel ads besides of course the fad that is the Million Dollar Homepage (MDH).

Many people thought they could duplicate the MDH and enjoy similar financial success. The fact is that it’s a fad and only the first will make good money because only the first has the buzz and the traffic. No advertisers will want to buy pixels on a site that doesn’t have traffic and lots of backlinks like the MDH does. Sure a few very quick replicators that managed to drum up some press coverage may have managed to make a few bucks but nothing even close to what the MDH has managed to achieve. I’d never bother to even consider replicating the MDH but it seems hundreds of other people did.

Brad Fallon has placed pixel ads at the top of his SEO blog offering squares at $50 a year and he’s managed to sell a few. His site already has some good traffic given his high profile and extensive online marketing, it also has a PageRank 6 so there is value and appeal for other businesses looking to attract the SEO audience that Brad has. The Pixel Ad format offers a very affordable method to get a site-wide link on Brad’s blog that lasts a full 12 months. That is pretty good value.

The pixel ad banner sits at the top of his site and doesn’t detract too much from his content. It’s like any other advertising banner position, it just happens to be occupied by a lot of different advertisers paying a low yearly fee rather than a few advertisers paying a monthly fee (or something like AdSense or Chitika). Since pixel ads are new it has a unique appeal and perhaps might get more eyeball attention for a while since it’s not a standard advertising format that people are used to like a 468*60 banner or large leaderboard.

For webmasters looking to test out a new advertising format pixel ads are an innovative way to monetize a site. It helps if you have a well established website, with good traffic and high PageRank in a niche where other companies will want to advertise. I would not consider selling pixels on a small site, it will just make the site look less popular as your pixel ad board will be empty. On the right website pixel advertising may add a few extra thousand dollars to your yearly income without taking up too much space on your website.

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I just spent some time adding a few months worth of updates to my business timeline and I thought you regulars might not realise the additions are there so I’ll re-post here. This is pure Yaro indulgence, nothing too educational.
******

My side projects, Yaz.com.au and Student-Marketing.com.au have been dropped. The main reason for ceasing work on both projects is this blog. I have a lot more fun and find it more rewarding to work on tasks that improve this blog or are spin-offs from it.

Student-Marketing faced some resistance from universities and I never did like the feeling I got from putting up posters - it feels illegal, like you are breaking the rules - so I want to do less postering, not more. Despite how much I’d love to have an Australia-wide national postering network and how much that would help BetterEdit grow, it’s not the right path for me. At the same time I started Student-Marketing I hit a bit of negative resistance to the business and conversely, the positive reinforcement I received about this blog was so more powerful that it was an obvious choice regarding what way to go in the future. I always follow what feels right to me and in this case the choice was a no-brainer.

While the Yaz! website is still online I am not working on it anymore. It was to be turned into a Facebook for Australia, which I still believe is a fantastic opportunity for any web entrepreneur. For those who do not know the Facebook concept, it is student social software service much like LinkedIn, Friendster and Ryze that allow people to make social connections online and leverage contact networking. Facebook targets the university and school demographics and has experienced explosive growth in the USA. I expect whether Facebook itself or a copycat service launches in Australia it will do equally well.

I would love to be involved in a project like Facebook, a true start-up Internet company, but I just don’t have the tech skills to build the site nor the time to devote to a project of that size. It really deserves the focus of a full time team and since my partners and I were not going to get it launched anytime soon the project was shut down. We all had conflicting interests and personal situations pulling our energies elsewhere. As with anything in entrepreneurship you need the right combination of variables to occur at the same time and for Yaz! this is not the case, for the moment. I have slapped some AdSense ads on the Yaz! site so it should make a few dollars a month from search traffic to justify keeping the domain in case of future opportunities.

Where to now?

I have decided that I want to find an alternative method of marketing for BetterEdit to move away from the current dependency on postering. Placing posters has been by far the most cost effective and successful marketing channel I have used but besides doing it myself, which is quite labour intensive, it’s just too hard to coordinate. The ROI of paying professionals to poster for me is not ideal, it’s not bad, but I’d like to experiment with some other marketing methods. I’ve begun testing to find a reliable online or less labour intensive offline marketing method for BetterEdit, starting with Google AdWords site targeting and other online advertising methods. Hopefully I will stumble upon a method to reach international students that is equally effective as posters but not as difficult to maintain.

Right now my focus is on two things -

1) Double the revenue of BetterEdit.com.

I’d like to either sell the business or hire someone to manage it for me within two years and to do that I need to double the current income level. If I double it I can afford to hire someone or hopefully sell the site and earn enough to not worry about income for a few years and invest the money in other projects. As I recently wrote about in this blog, I just finished a redesign and refocus of the BetterEdit sales process, which provides some additional tools such as a free report lead generator to make use of to test different marketing techniques. The result of the redesign has also seen BetterEdit vault further up the global search engine results, which always helps.

2) Writing and podcasting, and loving it!

At the moment I am loving nothing more than writing and podcasting for this blog and other websites. I have a hundred gazillion different topics I want to create content for and many different ways to package this content up, but for the moment the best tool I have is this blog, so I’m using it. I’m braindumping as much as I can so that eventually I’ll have enough content to do all kinds of things, and as a great benefit I grow a nice readership along the way. I must admit if it wasn’t for the fantastic feedback, comments and participation I get from my readers and the blogging community in general I wouldn’t find this work nearly as enjoyable as I do, so thank you all! I can honestly say regardless of how much money I make everytime I get a piece of feedback that makes me smile I realise more and more that money, or the desire for more, is such a waste of energy. The feedback is so much more fulfilling and I expect in the long term the finances will handle themselves. I’m taking my own advice and keeping my focus on this blog as a creative expression of me, rather than worry about how I can make more money.

That’s not to say I’ve totally stopped attempting to make an income from what I do online, I’m still chasing the dollar, I’m just not creating all that horrible frustration energy (or at least keeping it minimized) by wanting more more more, right now now now. That being said I’ve seen some promising signs regarding affiliate income growth and I’m going to start experimenting with some advertising on this blog to find a balance I’m comfortable with (content vs ads) that eventually leads to a full time income as a side effect of indulging in my writing and podcasting. If I can help some other entrepreneur’s gain exposure for their enterprises by promoting what they are doing on my blog, and they are willing to support me with income in return, then it’s win-win.

I’m also about to launch a web development service in partnership with two friend’s companies. I’ve realised that a lot of my readers and listeners would probably appreciate it if someone like me handled their SEO, website and online marketing so I should at least make these services available. One friend runs a quality web design and web development business and the other an online marketing service. Having access to my friend’s resources means I can offer services that I have good faith in to my audience, so if you don’t feel like putting into action what I teach yourself, you can pay someone do to it for you, and someone with the Yaro seal of approval to boot!

Keeping focused

Those two goals above look nice and clean don’t they? To be honest it’ been very hard to stay on track. I currently have at least two other blogs that I’m just itching to flick the ON button on, but alas, I must keep the focus simple to avoid repeating past mistakes by taking on too many projects at once. I was so close to buying a website at auction recently that I just knew would be right for me and would probably be a long term earner, but I decided to hold off like a good entrepreneur and keep the focus tight. Those things will happen in the future, when I’m in a place I can devote time and energy to them. Man patience is a bitch though!

Yaro Starak
Internet Business Entrepreneur

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I remember when I was in my early twenties, heck, it was only a few birthdays ago (I’m 26 now). Flashback about five years and I was a fresh out of university nobody with a degree in business management that I just scraped a GPA 4 in (this is equivalent to a pass, in Australia Universities grades are 1-7, 4 being a pass, 7 being the best). I spent most of my university days lost. Half the time doing what I needed to get through my degree, the other half of the time indulging in whatever hobby took my interest. Throw in some tennis, a handful of casual jobs and lots and lots of glossy-eyed staring at the beautiful girls on campus and you had my life at university.

It’s not a period that I would want to go through again because it was full of growth experiences and as usual growth is painful. Girls, job interviews, difficult subjects, forced studying of materials I had no interest in whatsoever, failure and success made me generally uncomfortable and unsure of myself for a lot of the time. It all ended and I came out of it alive, perhaps a little jaded, a little bitter, and of course a whole lot lost. No doubt not that unusual for someone in their early twenties.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a period of life my life that I’m glad I went through, I needed to grow as a person. It wasn’t always comfortable but it taught me a lot and throughout that period my confidence slowly blossomed with each new experience. As I’ve grown past the confusing early twenties I’ve realised more and more how vital confidence is, how a person’s congruency with themself is the most important building block for a successful life.

Where does confidence come from?

Reading about, listening to and watching the most successful people, no matter what fields they are excelling in, makes you feel that these people are special. Something about them makes them different from everyone else and you may even go as far as ruling yourself out of achieving similar success because you believe that, for whatever reason, be it luck, genetics, personality or upbringing, something about really truly successful people makes them different from you. It’s as if these people are special and you can not be like them because you lack whatever magic ingredient they have.

To make yourself feel better and gain education you read books and study the materials written about the special people so you can emulate them and be special too. You read the habits of highly successful people. You follow goal setting guides, motivational mantras and build blocks to success. For some reason it doesn’t work for you, further cementing your opinion that really successful people are special and different and you can’t replicate that magic purely through study, self discipline and by following road maps. You just weren’t born to be successful, you were born to struggle.

Famous and successful people are just people

In 1998 I had the luck and skill to qualify for the biggest event in the Magic: The Gathering (a strategy card game) calendar, the World Championships, that year played in Seattle, USA. I had played well, was lucky and made some smart choices at the Australian Nationals to land second place and a spot on the Australian World Championship team. By this time Magic had become a big deal, with three million dollars distributed as prizes each year (first place at the world Championships that year won $36,000 USD). The level of professionalism had increased greatly as a result and there were people playing the game competitively for a full time living. Magic even had superstars, players you read about in magazines, watched on ESPN and cheered for during live web coverage of the big events. In many ways a regular Magic player admired these superstars as special people, people that were very successful in life and possessed a gift or some form of unique talent, much like a young golfer might admire Tiger Woods or an entrepreneur might look at Richard Branson.

Olle Rade, a young guy from Sweden, enjoyed tremendous success at Magic, winning a Pro Tour and at that point with lifetime earnings well over $50,000 USD and he wasn’t even 20 yet. I really admired Olle. Then there was John Finkel, who back then was known as the best Magic player with well over $100,000 in career earnings. These guys were superstars, overachievers and in my mind sitting on a pedestal above everyone else.

Heading to Seattle I had my first chance to meet and play these superstars of Magic. I’m not one to gush over celebrities but sometimes you can’t help but feel a little in awe of people you’ve read about in the media. Since I knew so much about these famous players and they knew nothing about me I felt I wasn’t on equal terms, I wasn’t confident and in no way did I consider myself one of them.

By the end of the tournament I was exhausted. The little sleep I got didn’t help me play the best cards but the experience I gained was amazing. During the tournament I played Olle Rade and I beat him. It was just like any other match and he was quite upset by the end of it, celebrities don’t like losing either. I lost to some other big names and during our non-playing periods enjoyed getting to know many famous players.

By the end of the week I had completely changed as a Magic player. Despite not performing well I left Seattle with confidence in myself as a player and a new perspective on celebrities. Every superstar Magic player I met was no different from me. Sure some had natural talents that I didn’t, perhaps strong mathematical abilities, but I had strengths in other areas. Magic being a game of skill rewards those that practice and study, luck and natural ability play a part, but in the end it’s people playing people and Magic stars were stars because they had done two things - they worked really hard at what they did because they loved it and they had experience from winning and loosing a lot of matches.

How to be confident at any age

If the Yaro of now sat down with myself at 21 and tried to explain the secret to becoming confident and attaining success I probably would have a lot of trouble getting through to him. It’s hard to be a believer without experience and in hindsight faith is a lot easier, but I’ll do my best to help along all those other people struggling to have faith in themself.

There is only one thing you need to understand, and in fact this is more a faith based decision about your future more than it is a tangible truth if you are young and/or inexperienced.

If you don’t have experience, you are young and just starting out in life, you don’t have a history of events to draw conclusions from. Books, videos, podcasts and education in general are a good starting point but you will never have success, you will never get true confidence in yourself without experience, without taking actions and learning from the outcomes.

The beauty of experience is that it comes from both success and failure. While one makes you feel great and the other makes you feel lousy, the end result is still experience and a new framework of perception you can apply to your future life. This is what experience is. This is what you draw on to create success and this is the essence of your personal congruency.

In many ways I’m very successful right now. In many other ways I’m far from it. I’m not a millionaire, in fact I have very few assets at all. For now lets avoid a discussion of the determinants of life success and I’ll simply state that I have a hell of a lot more I want to achieve and I bet you do too.

Have faith in the power of experience

Each setback in my life was usually brought upon by a lack of patience, a desire to become something else and achieve something quickly (life’s version of the get rich quick scheme). During the major catastrophes in life I accused the world of the usual atrocities, that life was singling me out to suffer, that I had somehow been selected as a victim and that it just wasn’t fair. Each new painful experience in life brings about similar feelings and despite my intellectual understanding of reality it doesn’t make the pain less painful.

Your ability to bounce back, to turn the frown upside down, to leverage failure to create success and find opportunities in the remnants of breakdown is a lifeskill of tremendous value. Don’t let your feelings of confusion and loss make you depressed. Leaving school, finishing university or quitting (or being fired from) a job are opportunities that you rarely get in life. These are powerful turning point moments that in most people’s lives only happen rarely. Major change is not a common occurrence for a typical human being so relish the opportunity when it comes along, don’t drown in your supposed lack of identity.

How to deal with confusion

If you are not sure what to do with your life dip your fingers into as many activities as you can and follow those that make you happy (and no doubt will probably make you money too). Use skills to build assets, don’t trade labour for money because it’s not a good long term strategy. Trade your labour today for asset building for tomorrow and start building passive income supports. It will be hard work and it might seem that for many years and months that you are making nothing (I know I feel like that sometimes), but your future self will thank you for it in the years to come.

An empty slate should not make you sad, it’s just space that’s ready to be filled with your energy and ideas as you test yourself to see what works and makes you happy. Have faith in the power of experience to create personal congruency. Remember that other people are just like you, even the most famous, most successful people. They are not superheros blessed with magic powers. They simply choose to fill their lives with experiences, they grew from failures and successes and eagerly jump into new activities with vigour and passion. They have confidence because they can refer back to the outcomes of events in their lives, they know how to deal with situations so they are not afraid to try. Life rewards those people that take action, who don’t follow the crowd but rather follow their passions.

Remember too that life is not quick. It’s a long ride. You want it to be that way right. Why be so eager to achieve certain things by tomorrow? What are you trying to become so quickly that you are creating frustration and stress today. Persist in the activities that you have motivation to work on over and over again, and not just for weeks, but for months and years. Become good at them and then great at them. These are the skills you will develop because you enjoy them. Eventually they will become your special talents that set you apart and you will be surprised how suddenly others look at you as if you are gifted.

Yaro Starak

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