Entries Tagged 'Goals' ↓

Before I explain what I mean by this I will address a very obvious objection to my headline. Why am I telling you not to create webpages, blogs or products about making money online when I blog about making money online?

Very simply, I don’t make my money online through this blog. It currently represents only about 1-2% of my total online income. I assume that this proportion will rise somewhat as it becomes more popular, but I never expect it to be more than about 10% of my total online earnings.

I enjoy writing this blog because it helps me to think through my own ideas about Internet business and because I want to help people improve their lives by starting their own Internet business. Obviously, if I can make money from this blog so much the better, but the earnings from it could disappear tomorrow and I would hardly notice.

OK, enough about me for one post, what does this have to do with you? In fact, I think this point is extremely important, because it is the biggest single mistake I see people online making online.

Why Do People Think Writing or Even Creating Products About Making Money Online Will Make Them Money?

I think the simple answer is that they see other people doing it and decide to copy them and do it themselves. For example, they see supper bloggers like John Chow who report incomes as high as $30,000 a month, writing about making money online and think well that looks like a good idea, so they copy it.
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This is part two of a question and answer session I am doing with myself. Look at yesterdays post for questions 1-5. Here are questions 6-10.

6. Why am I keeping my new project a secret?

I think I have already addressed this in my previous two posts. I don’t want any competition and I don’t want to influence the result. Beyond this, I want to prove to myself that I can actually build a successful Internet business from scratch not based on PPC.

However, just because I am keeping the overall project a secret does not mean that I won’t post updates on how its doing. Moreover, I plan to tell you about which tools I am using and how well they are working for me.

Nonetheless, for the time being I do not plan to reveal any specifics about my project any time in the future.

7. What things stand in my way?

My main obstacle in this new project, as with all my projects in the past, will be me. I am going to have to overcome some of my laziness and my tendency to procrastinate. To help me I have outsourced some of the work (I will explain more in a future post).

At the end of the day though, I will still have to put in a fairly substantial amount of work to get the kind of results I want. It is going to be a long term project, so it is going to require a sustained effort, something I am terrible at.

I will post updates on my progress here as well as my setbacks in terms of both laziness and procrastination.

8. What are my goals?

Obviously, I want my new project to be a success. For me that means that I would like to have net earnings of $10,000 US a month or more. If you read yesterdays post you will see that this is substantially higher than my current income.

I plan on saving the vast majority of this extra income and investing it. Ultimately, I hope this will give me total financial freedom. This will only be achieved, if I continue to live somewhat frugally. What really matters in terms of long term financial success is not how much you earn but how much you keep (both savings and investments).
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As I am sure you can tell yesterday’s post was the first in a long time. However, reading it again I felt that it was not as clear as I would have liked it to be. The overall tone was correct but I think it could have been a bit more straightforward.

So, today and tomorrow I am asking and answering a total of 10 questions to myself. Hopefully you will find them interesting but if not, they should at least serve as an outline to where I am coming from and where I hope to go in the future in terms of my own Internet business.

1. Do I make enough money online, to live on?

The short answer is yes I do. However, as you will see below, many people will probably think that I what I earn would be enough for them.

2. So how much money do I make?

This varies a fair bit from month to month but recently my net monthly online income has been between $1,600 US and $3,200 US. Both my revenue and expenses can change dramatically from month to month so there is not as much stability as I would like.

However, that being said, my non-Internet related expenses are usually less than $1,000 a month (including rent, food, booze etc.). So even in bad months I am able to save some money. I live very frugally, but that is not to say I would not be happy earning more money. I will elaborate more on this point tomorrow.

I am sure many people reading this, think $1,600 US a month is too little to live on; but the fact is that I can work (almost) whenever and wherever I want. This independence for me is the most important thing for me at this stage of my life. If I had a family this arrangement would probably have to change, or I would have to start earning more.

3. How many hours a week do I work?

Again this varies widely from week to week depending on what I want to get done and what needs to get done. For example, last week I took a short trip and I think I probably only worked about 5 hours. And to be honest I never work more than about 30 hours a week due to my laziness.
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Well I know it has been a few months since I made my last post. I do apologize, but the fact is that I am extremely lazy when comes to doing almost anything. I must be among the world’s greatest procrastinators.

One of my goals for 2008 is to try and be better about all this but as you can see it is not off to a great start. Moreover, right now this blog is not a huge priority for me because I am working on a much bigger project.

Unfortunately, I don’t want to reveal what it is now or in the future. The reason being that I don’t need any competition in the niche I am targeting.

In fact, my main reason for restarting this blog is to try and keep myself motivated and focused on my big project. I figure that if I get into the habit of posting about how it is coming along, that this will in turn encourage me to keep at it (see laziness above).

This also means that the new version of the blog will be more focused on me personally and on how my project is going and less to do with the how to start your own business online. If you are still interested in that please read my previous posts since the information there is still good and relevant.

I intend to post the occasional review about upcoming Internet marketing products, but quite frankly I can tell you now that 99% of them are a waste of money. In a future post I will explain exactly what tools I am using to achieve my results and you can take it or leave it.

I hope you enjoy the new direction this blog takes but to be honest I am not too bothered if you aren’t. I hope it will prove to be an inspiration but I am unsure if my new project will be a success or failure, only time will tell.

My one piece of advice from all this is not to follow my example. Don’t procrastinate, don’t put things off until tomorrow that you could do today. If my new project succeeds it will be in spite of my huge ability to procrastinate not because of it.

Thanks for reading

Ian

Since it is Sunday I want to keep this post short. However, I came across this article on the New York times site called, After Succeeding, Young Tycoons Try, Try Again. I though it was interesting because it illustrated how hard people have to work to make billion dollar internet companies. Fortunately, if you have more modest goals you won’t have to work nearly so hard.

Still, I think it is a good reminder of what is possible if you stick to your internet business dreams.