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

I’ve made some form of income from the Internet for the past ten years. That’s incredible for me to consider, as I look back over the years how for such a long time I felt very insecure about where my next paycheck was going to come from and whether there would be another one the following month.

For the first five years, roughly from 2000 to 2005, my income from the Internet varied, reflecting the choices I had made and my own variable focus. It went something like this…

• I made spare change money selling stuff from around my house on eBay
• I played a card game called Magic: The Gathering and began selling the cards I won at tournaments in online trading forums and newsgroups
• I built a website focused on the same card game, eventually earning a few hundred dollars a month from banner and newsletter sponsorship
• I started an e-commerce card shop from the website and continued to sell my winnings from tournaments, and began buying product at wholesale prices to sell online at retail (until credit card fraud forced me to shut it down)
• I started a proofreading business, which after a slow start, eventually earned enough income to pay me a full salary, equivalent to a first year university graduate

This is a list of the projects that I made money on during those five years. It doesn’t include the websites I built that shortly after I abandoned, my brief experiments at AdWords arbitrage and other various false-starts because I was so easily distracted by new methods to “make millions” online.

During this time I finished my university degree, held a couple of casual jobs and traveled too. I also watched, often resulting in plenty of self-doubt on my part, as my friends entered graduate jobs, which looked a whole lot more secure than what I was doing at the time and often paid them better as well.

Looking back over those five years the money I made proved surprisingly reliable, even though at the time my confidence in the income stream wasn’t there (good old hindsight). I had enough time to work on new projects because I focused on ideas that didn’t need too much personal time from me once set up, for example getting volunteer writers for my card site and using contract editors for the proofreading site, so I could easily manage them both at the same time.

The end result was a diversified online income stream that continued to grow as long as I did a few key activities (like put up posters to promote the proofreading business), plus I was creating assets that I would later sell.

The Era Of Rapid Income Growth

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Tyrone Shum has participated in both my Blog Mastermind and Membership Site Mastermind programs. He’s special because not only did he study the materials (which is rare enough!), he went on and has built himself a successful blog and last year launched a membership site too, so he’s a real action taker.

Part of the reason he’s one of the unusual people who actually gets stuff done is because Tyrone knows how to outsource, in fact that is his specialty. In this guest post from Tyrone he offers some advice on how to outsource your blogging effectively…

Get More Done

Recently, I saw a poll on a very popular blog asking if they outsourced any of their blogging. I thought it would be a great opportunity to share with you some tips from my experience of outsourcing blogging tasks to virtual staff in the Philippines.

Undeniably I love my work but that doesn’t mean I can manage all the things effectively from advertising to marketing, from article creation to posting, from directory submissions to email marketing, and so forth all by myself. Additionally, not all bloggers plan ahead of time, and get things completed as early as possible without missing deadlines. So we have to replicate ourselves to meet different demands. I’m not talking about cloning but it’s how we distribute tasks to virtual staff to finish more tasks at the same time.

I’ve summarized the most important points to outsource as part of your blogging below, here we go…

Tip 1: Outsource your blog design

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I’ve been debating for a while whether to publish this blog post because it’s a bit off topic and very self indulgent, however lots of people have been asking me questions about these two changes to my life, so I’ve decided why not tell you about them.

Consider yourself warned, this article will not likely improve your life or your business in any significant way, but if you’re curious about what’s going on in my life, read on.

(On a side note, it never ceases to surprise me how talking about your personal life on your blog, no matter how unrelated it is to your blog topic, can enhance relationships with your audience. Voyeurism is alive and well in the blogosphere and is a great traffic technique. So there you go, I did manage to sneak in an on-topic lesson.)

I Finally Got The Chop

You probably know me as that blogging guy with the long hair and the funny name who looks like this –

Late in 2009 I decided, after more than five years with long hair, it was time to go back to the short hair version of me.

The funny name stays, but today I look like this -

As a kid growing up my mum was in charge of my hair. She figured what’s the point of hair cuts so I just looked scruffy most of the time and was often confused for a girl when I was very little.

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Over the weekend I attended Ed Dale’s 30DC Coming Home three day event in Melbourne.

Ed Dale, if you don’t know him, is one of Australia’s most well known and likable Internet marketers, who adds a uniquely Australian flavour to the industry. Currently he is most well known as one of the founders of the 30 Day Challenge, an introductory program that aims to take any person from absolute beginner to making their first few dollars online, and beyond, within 30 days.

Ed also has a rep for website flipping, having earlier in his career sold his website portfolio for $5 million dollars. He then moved on to teach how to build niche sites with Frank Kern using the “Underachiever Method”, which focused on creating small sites that each earned a few hundred dollars a month, and then pumping out as many of them as you could.

Ed is one of those types of people who likes to keep up to date with everything and anything going on online, with the eyes of a marketer and a geek. He’s constantly talking about the future before it gets here, and it’s clear this is a passion of his more so than a business interest – he just likes to geek out on technology, marketing, social media and the web, but always refers back to how it could be used to make money.

The seminar on the weekend was by far the most relaxed event I’ve been too, led by the TubbyNerd himself (Ed) wearing his sandals, shorts and geeked out shirts. This wasn’t a formal seminar with suits, or people attempting to keep up professional appearance or sell you anything. It was a bunch of experienced guys and girls coming together to teach a bunch of up and comers how to make money online, in the format of a casual conversation. Just how I like it

What Are We Talking About

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This is the fourth article in a series on Positive Change. My goal with this series is to give you the tools necessary to manifest positive change in your reality, or simply put, to get what you want and eliminate what you don’t want in your life.

Before you read this article, make sure you read the first three in the series in this order –

1. Is It Really Possible To Create The Change You Want In Your Life?
2. What I Can Teach You About Getting What You Want
3. Why Creating The Change You Want Is All About You

I re-read the first three articles in the series before beginning this fourth chapter, which led me to a realization that I was potentially missing out one of the most important points. Based on observation of people who struggle in life, this sticking point is something critical to eliminate early on, otherwise you’re going to hit a brick wall every time you look to make changes.

My intention is to complete this series with an insight that is literally the key to not only having whatever you want in your life, but also making the entire planet a better place, but before I do that, we need to get one roadblock out of the way. Let’s do that now…

We’ve laid a framework that can lead you to realizing positive changes in your life, which is based on the following five core principles -

1. Those who truly excel in life do so by repeating processes over and over again, resulting in a compounding effect that can eventually take you to amazing places. A “success ladder” is available to achieve almost anything in life, so if you’re prepared to go through steps and repeat something often enough to get good at it, you can have or be almost anything you want.
2. Your awareness – how you interpret everything around you – is what governs your ability to get things done. How you see the world impacts how you think about the world, which impacts how you feel, and thus how you interact with the world. Your interpretation can help you or hinder you, and this is regardless of what is true – the choice is entirely up to you. You decide your truth, so choose to see the world in a way that is beneficial for making the changes you want in your life.
3. Some things are out of your control and you’re not always going to get what you expect. You must master the art of continuous improvement, regardless of conditions. You’re human, so you’re going to feel emotions that have the potential to derail your progress, but only if you let them. It’s necessary to keep taking steps towards change, even when you don’t feel like it.
4. There’s always a smart choice you can make, given a set of conditions, but unfortunately most people do what other people do, which often is NOT the smart choice. Don’t let social conditioning, peer pressure or accepted practice govern your choices, instead, assess what you personally have to work with, and make the best decisions from where you are coming from and where you want to go.
5. Follow the success patterns of other people – the smart decisions other people made who presently have what you are now seeking are there to be modeled any time you want. Don’t follow anything blindly, but don’t go in blind either. There is so much information available to learn almost anything, so use these resources to help you discern the smart choices for you.

Beware Your Own Ignorance

These five principles can take you far, but there’s an insidious force that has a nasty habit of derailing people before they adopt and practice these ideas, which I label “Ignorance“.

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