What is the magic ingredient that makes this blog succeed, when so many others fail?

Based on my observations, here are some of the elements you can apply to make your blog something special. Note you don’t have to apply all these ingredients, one could be enough, though of course if you apply more than one you increase your chance of success.

1. Enter a market early: Many of the top blogs are that way simply because they were one of the first, or the first, to enter the market and devote serious time and energy to produce valuable content on a consistent basis.
2. Be prolific: Never give up is a great attitude, and some blogs, while not necessarily always having the best content, always have something new and interesting. If you publish multiple articles every day for years, the force of your consistency can take you far.
3. Personality power: Some of the most popular blogs focus on the quirky, loud, controversial, attractive, cute, sexy, unusual, outspoken, intelligent, or any typically interesting human characteristics that make people want to pay attention to you.
4. You’re established: If you’re already a player in your market, as in you’ve done something not many people have done, even just one major accomplishment, that can be enough of a leverage point to highlight your blog above the rest.
5. You’re famous: If you’re famous then people automatically pay attention to you and that includes reading your blog.
6. You experiment: Some of the best blogs are hinged on the back of a “scientist” in their industry. A scientist is anyone who conducts experiments that have results other people want to know about.
7. The journeyman: Some blogs begin with little focus other than being what blogs were first created for, as daily journals of what’s going on in your life. Do this for long enough and if you live an interesting life, people will read simply because they’ve come along the journey with you so far and they want to know what’s next.
8. Writing style: While it’s not a mandatory requirement, some blogs succeed because of the quality of the writing.
9. Connections: If you know people who know people, the sheer power of your network can result in a popular blog because you learn insider secrets, or are the first to report interesting news, or have interviews with famous people.
10. Technology: Some bloggers use cutting edge tools, like high production value video, or beautiful graphics, or music to enhance what they do, leveraging online technology and multimedia to deliver a user experience that is difficult to find anywhere else.

Many of the above techniques cannot be taught, while others you can learn but take an above average level of effort to succeed with. Of course, this is why these techniques work. If everyone could do these things easily, they wouldn’t be effective, so as in all things in life, that which comes with greatest effort offers greatest reward.

Bear in mind that these ingredients must be inserted into a solid framework for a successful blog to begin with. Without a base understanding of what it takes to build a great blog in terms of technology and the web in general, you might have one of the above “magical” ingredients but lack an understanding of how the blogging tool works to distribute your magic to the world.

Thankfully it is easy to learn the process of how to build a great blog. Processes can be replicated.

Don’t act too surprised when I tell you this – I happen to have one of the best courses available today to learn this process. It’s called Become A Blogger Premium and it’s a video training program to learn the process of how to build a successful blog.

Right now I’m offering a $1 trial, but it expires on Tuesday at midnight February 9th 2010, after that you will have to pay full price upfront to join, the trial offer will be gone.

You can find out more about the program and sign up for your trial right here -

www.becomeablogger.com/signup/

Good luck finding your magic.

Yaro Starak
Magician

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www.becomeablogger.com/signup/

******

• Click here to download the text transcript [ PDF ]

Press play to begin watching the video (this video is taken from directly inside the Become A Blogger Premium course).

I’m giving you access to a special preview of one of the strategy video presentations I did for the Become A Blogger Premium course. Note this video I’m sharing with you today is hosted on Viddler, however the premium videos inside the members area are all hosted on Amazon S3 high speed servers.

This video is a particularly powerful one as it covers my concept of “Impact Marketing”.

Many bloggers struggle to build significant traffic and that’s usually because they lack any truly effective marketing techniques. There are many simple blog traffic building techniques that work, but they work slowly and don’t have a big impact. Impact Marketing is all about making a splash and attracting greater than average traffic back to your blog.

This video reveals some of the impact techniques I’ve used and seen others use to great effect online. Remember these techniques are more than just linkbait (although they make great linkbait too), this is about building long term traffic attracting assets that keep a stream of people come to your blog over time and a rush of people coming in the short term.

Do You Like To Know Why And Then See How?

This video is an example of the strategy focused videos in the Become A Blogger Premium program. About 25% of the videos are like these, with me presenting to you my strategies and techniques from a conceptual point of view.

The rest of the videos show you how to implement the ideas live, by taking you through each step to make the technique a reality. Gideon Shalwick teaches you all the how-to videos and does a darn good job at it too!

If you’re ready to take your blogging seriously, want a clear path to success, have some time over the coming months to focus on your blog and enjoy the teaching style Gideon and I use, then please don’t miss out on this run of our program.

The $1 Trial is now available, so you can get full access to our program for a full week trial before deciding whether the program is right for you. You can claim your $1 Trial here -

www.BecomeABlogger.com/SignUp/

(Trial offer expires on Tuesday February 9th at Midnight.)

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"How To Start An Internet Business
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The idea is that “standard” blogging practices may not be enough to make your blog stand out, and since it’s so easy today to make use of multimedia and social media, why not leverage these technologies to increase your traffic and blog performance.

The latest X-Factor training video was just released for free on the Become A Blogger blog, which you can go and watch right now here -

X-Factor Video: How To Make Money With Online Webinars

This video shows how Gideon recently used Webinar software to create an entire product and generate over $13,000 from literally just a few hours work. Webinars are great teaching tools, which can be recorded and distributed on your blog.

If you don’t know what a Webinar is, have no idea what software you can use to make one and how they can be turned into a product creation tool to generate a nice income as Gideon did, go watch the two videos on the Become A Blogger blog and Gideon will reveal everything to you.

Make sure you leave a comment there too, as Gideon loves to get your feedback.

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We’ve had over 2,000 people take this course during the past year, so it is by far the most successful program I run in terms of raw number of people who have joined.

If you’ve not participated before, then as a special incentive for you to give it a go when we open it for the first time in 2010, we’re going to offer a $1 trial, but only if you join within the first six days.

The doors will open for the $1 trial this Thursday at 10AM Eastern US time and the offer will expire on Tuesday, February 9th at midnight.

If you’ve never heard of Become A Blogger Premium before I recommend you do two things first, which are completely free -

1. Check out the ten videos Gideon put together to teach you how to set up a blog. You can find these at www.becomeablogger.com
2. While you are there, opt-in to get your free copy of the Roadmap To Become A Blogger report.

The Roadmap Report is a very thorough document that takes you through two core areas -

1. It lays out my system for building a successful blog, which has now been tested, implemented and proven successful on blogs in all kinds of niches.
2. A full explanation and case study examples of Gideon’s X-Factor marketing techniques. The X-Factor techniques use a combination of social media and multimedia (things like video, audio, twitter, facebook, youtube, webinars, ustream, etc) to give your blog an extra boost.

We’re very proud of this report because it focuses on both the fundamentals of good blogging, but also teaches you how to leverage the current exciting online trends in social and multimedia, which can give your blog a real edge.

You can read Roadmap Report, or listen to it (we provide a free MP3 version too), by downloading your copy after opting in here -

www.becomeablogger.com/roadmap/

If you enjoy the report and like the style of teaching in the ten free videos, then you are a perfect candidate for the Premium version of our program. The training is all done in very clear and easy to follow video demonstrations, so you just have to repeat what we recommend you do.

If you don’t want the stress of figuring out how to build a successful blog, like your hand held throughout the process as we lay out a clear path to follow, and video is your preferred learning method, this is the course for you. There’s nothing else like it.

In the next couple of days I’ll publish some great videos from inside the premium program so you can sample our training, and then on Thursday the program opens.

In the meantime, make sure you study the Roadmap Report today or tomorrow.

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Make sure you look out for Laura’s cat – she features in this interview too.

Click here to download the audio-only MP3 [ 54 MB ]

This interview is a great story, which for many online entrepreneurs will seem very familiar – as it was for me.

Laura is young, but she’s not young in terms of how long she’s been running an online business. Like many people who got started online, her first “business” was freelance web design, however today she’s doing something a little more unique.

Laura has various products, but one area she specializes in is helping other people become famous in their niche using social media.

During this interview you will hear a great example of a podiatrist (foot doctor) who followed Laura’s advice and basically become that famous online foot doctor guy, leading to all kinds of cool things happening to him.

I recommend you listen to this story if you’re thinking of leaving your job so you can get a feel of how a person can progress from one business model to the next, all the while making money. You may not have your ideal business in mind yet, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start one. Like Laura, who just decided she couldn’t do the full time work thing, sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith and make a change.

How Exactly Does Laura Make People Famous?

During the second half of this interview Laura explains how exactly she became good at making people famous, including how she uses tools like Twitter to accomplish this. She believes in the power of personality, which is something she runs her business by, with most of her clients choosing to work with her because they like her. That might seem obvious, but there’s a powerful marketing lesson in there too, which Laura subtly explains.

On an interesting side note – one of Laura’s best friends was a star for a full season of the show “Heroes” and Laura ended up helping her develop an online presence. You can hear that story along with lots of other interesting insights, inside this great interview. Just click play above to begin listening.

Laura is about to open her Backstage Pass To Twitter program, and you can download her 7-page report –

Why Being an “Expert” is Making You Useless on Twitter
(Avoid These Five Well-Meaning Twitter Mistakes)

If you want to learn more about Laura check out LauraRoeder.com.

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"How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1,000 Online"
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My premise was that thanks to networked portable devices and the Long Tail, bands would survive because distribution networks would allow them to reach their fans much easier. In effect, I was preempting the arrival of the iPhone and stating something similar to Kevin Kelly’s concept of 1,000 true fans being enough for a creator (like an artist, author or band, etc) to survive.

You can read the full article here –

The Music Industry Evolution – How Localisation, Social Networks, Niche Markets and the Long Tail Will Change Music Forever

In summary, I talked about having some kind of portable device you could take to you local gig to purchase music by the band playing right in front of you. No longer would the band need to go through a big label and no longer did the fan need to head down to the local shop to buy a DVD, which in the case of the small fan-base artist, probably wasn’t even available in the shop.

I was talking back then in theory about what is true today. We have iPhones and similar devices with access to the web and iTunes that we can purchase music with, and music artists don’t have to be super-popular to survive, they just need a hardcore fan base, just like a blogger can do well with a small fan-base, relatively speaking (I’m one such example).

Now We Have The iPad

If there was one thing I didn’t see coming, though it probably was more obvious than I thought all those years ago since iTunes and the iPod already existed, it was that Apple would be the dominating force for the introduction of these technologies. They’re doing it again with the iPad.

Of course the iPad is yet to be proven a success, but seeing its release did give me a little portent into a possible future, which I for one would like to see eventuate.

Before I explain the future I see, if you’ve never heard of the iPad, go check it out here at the Huffington Post –

Apple iPad Review (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

The possibilities of a device like this are significant, too many to talk about here comprehensively. This device isn’t quite a laptop, but it’s more functional than an iPhone. It can run programs in full screen, which is quite usable, unlike an iPhone in some situations, yet isn’t quite as robust as a personal computer. It’s light and thin, so can easily fit into a backpack or bag, but won’t slide into your pocket.

For me, the real insight was how this device is going to change the game, is in the consumption of text based media. No doubt video and audio will play a big part in how people will use their iPads, but I think we might finally have a device that will one day replace the newspaper and book, or at least go as mainstream as these mediums are (replacement will never be complete as there will always be a group of people who prefer the old-fashioned models).

When I first saw the iPad I immediately had a Star Trek moment. If you’re a Trek fan then you know the little pad devices that were used on the show, which not surprisingly, look a lot like the iPad. Back in 2005 I wrote about a Nokia web-enabled pad device, but it was a bit premature, with Apple once again looking to enter the market with the game-changer, though that’s no guarantee for the iPad at this stage.

We’ve had the Amazon Kindle for a while now, which is a great device, but I don’t think it’s as exciting as the iPad because it’s a little too one-dimensional and it just doesn’t look cool. Focus is good, but in this case with the iPad, multi-functionality goes along way. I wasn’t that excited about the Kindle, but I can see where the iPhone would come in handy and could very quickly become a must-have device, or perhaps a future incarnation of it will be – it’s just does too much cool stuff not to have one, and it’s affordable.

The Newspaper of the Future

So here’s the image that immediately jumped into my head when I first saw the iPad…

I saw a coffee shop, with tables and chairs outside, not that different to our current daily rest spot. The one significant difference is that every table had a iPad like device available and instead of reading the newspaper, people were reading the newspaper in digital format on the iPad.

I saw this eventuating in two possible ways -

1. The iPad, or it’s successor more likely, becomes so standard it’s like a television and everyone has one, so you pull it out at the coffee shop to read the latest news by downloading any newspaper in any language from around the world. That’s not its only purpose of course, but due to the array of functions and affordability, not having an iPad will be the unusual situation. Since they are more portable and affordable than most laptops, more people will have them.

Or…

2. Instead of everyone personally purchasing an iPad, they will come down in cost so much that manufacturing the device will be negligible, and coffee shops will provide them for free to use – and not just coffee shops, you can basically use these devices everywhere and anywhere as standard interfaces into the digital world. They will be tools available to anyone at all times in all locations and intrinsically have no value, so there won’t be any reason to steal them.

   In this case, our patron at the coffee shop simply picks up the device and reads the very latest news from the New York Times, or the Sydney Morning Herald or Toronto Star, or virtually any media they choose and leaves it there when they finish, like we do with paper newspapers today. Thanks to things like cloud computing, the device won’t provide personalization, it will only be the interface into the digital world, with your settings and files all stored online.

I like the idea of option two better, as it means information would flow more easily and there would be no cost to “get connected”. The devices would be free because they would be funded by commercial business, both large and small, who thanks to the adoption rate of these devices, could target media to virtually any type of person on the planet. This would be like having Google AdWords, banners, video advertising, etc that we have now, but with the entire world accessible to target with media. You could even target your ads or content based on where a person was using their “pad”.

It’s an ambitious image, but I don’t see it that far off. There’s a lot of little details that need to eventuate, including finding profitable models for newspapers, the challenge of ad-blindness killing response rates, technology dropping in cost and network infrastructure rolling out across the planet so global portable high-speed access is a reality, but it’s all doable.

I for one hope something like this happens because it means far less paper usage, which is a good thing for our trees. That only leaves us with the challenge of how to power all these devices. I expect being so small, eventually having some kind of solar power panel on the device, or making them kinetic like wristwatches, so you just move them around or shake them a few times to create enough power to use them for a session, are possible solutions, if technology takes us there.

No matter what happens, it’s an exciting time to be alive – technology is advancing at an incredible pace and what used to be science fiction is becoming reality.

Yaro Starak
Predicting

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What is the Personal Theme?

Personal Theme is brought to us by Kevin Muldoon of Blogging Tips.

Themes that are paid for are often called Premium Themes, and usually offer distinct advantages to free themes available. They may have different color schemes and/or design layouts built in. They usually have an options admin menu that allows you to add, remove or change features of the theme without the need for any HTML, CSS or PHP knowledge.

As the theme author is getting paid for their work they will often spend more time fixing any errors or problems that get reported with their theme, there is often documentation, and in a lot of cases support forums in case you get stuck or need to solve a difficult layout problem.

Some free themes are well supported and have similar features to some premium themes (Atahualpa and Thematic come to mind) and there are many free and premium themes available, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, so let’s take a look at what makes this theme unique.

What Is Under The Hood?

This WordPress theme was designed specifically for personal blogs and comes with 10 color schemes to choose from, though users can easily change the background image or background color.

Installation is a straightforward as possible for a premium theme. It can be done by uploading the zip file in your WordPress dashboard via Plugins > Add new, or you can unzip into a folder and upload to your wp-content/themes folder via FTP if you prefer. You don’t need to do anything further besides activating it, no file permissions need to be messed with.

Personal Theme comes with an admin options area in which you can do many things. This short video I put together for you below will take you through most of these options, so watch it now for the details…

The ability to easily add social bookmarking icons is a nice idea, plus the Feedburner subscription box, author image and bio section add some nice touches. Other options are pretty standard, such as excluding menu items, changing fonts and an archives page.

What Could be Improved?

On the theme menu options page, a floating save button or a save button in each menu section would be useful for someone (like me) who likes to play around with the options, rather than having to scroll down to the bottom each time. Plus I always advocate moving the Save and the Cancel/Reset button as far away from each other as possible, as it is a constant source of frustration with themes and plugins that put the almost identical looking option buttons next to each other.

I would have liked to see some more options in the admin panel too. Being able to define categories to be displayed on the menu would be very useful, a featured post section (though the custom layout seems to kind of do this), and automatic thumbnail image creation is rapidly being standard too, so that would be great. Perhaps it’s a lot to ask for, but with the competition offering these features and more there needs to be more functionality and flexibility to compete.

For the option to exclude pages from the header I would have preferred a selectable list of current Page names, as getting the Page ID, especially for new bloggers, is a challenge in itself and can easily be prevented. Also the option for the header menu links is to exclude Pages, while the option for Pages in the footer is to include the Pages – this could be a little confusing, if you’re not confused already!

The image uploader seemed to be “wobbly” for me too, adding /demo/ in front of the path to my uploaded image. This may have been fixed in a later release than I have, and was easy to correct at my end, but shouldn’t occur.

In terms of design, the options are nicely varied and leave room for customization. The layout isn’t quite to my particular taste, in terms of the blog posts being separated with the background showing through, but these things are very much down to personal style. I do like how the menu tabs are displayed and the comments “balloon” and the theme is very neat and clean.

How Good Is The Support?

You get lifetime support for the theme, but what does that entail? Essentially the forum, which seemed to be well staffed with prompt responses and personal involvement by Kevin when I searched it. The forum seemed open to be read even by non-purchasers which can be useful especially for people like me, who may be working on the theme but not privy to the client’s forum access details.

The FAQ is fairly brief, but the theme is easy to set up and get going, plus the forum covers many other questions that may arise.
(From Yaro: Kevin very recently sold his BloggingTips.com blog to a new owner, which I believe includes management of this theme too, so you should check out who is providing support for Personal Theme before you buy it.)

How Much Does It Cost?

For a premium theme, the price is reasonable at $49.95, especially when you consider the license.

The good news about this theme, is unlike some other restrictive licenses on premium themes you are permitted to use this theme on as many domains you own. Also, as you would hope (and these days expect) you will also get free lifetime upgrades for this theme. There is only the one license type and so covers anyone who would need it for personal or business use.

Should You Fork Out For This Theme?

The Personal Theme is on par with the very best of the free themes available, and I often think that those authors should charge for their work. $49.95 however seems a little over-priced to me, $10 cheaper would make it seem more value for money.

While I know first hand how much work has to go in to create a theme of this standard, there is stiff competition from some free themes mentioned previously, and premium themes like Woo Themes offering similar features with a much wider range for a lower price (though you do have to purchase 3 at a time, but it is only $20 more).

By far the two most popular themes (free or premium) that I’m using for clients at Blog Tech Guy are Headway which offers a much more customizable theme for only $37 more than the Personal Theme, and Thesis is another excellent choice for the same extra cost.

Thesis requires more HTML and CSS knowledge to get looking the way you require, but both are very powerful themes for not a lot more. However the licenses are more restrictive, limiting the installations to two (Headway) or one (Thesis), unless you have a Developer license and then there is still a per-website license fee.

Personal Theme is still attractive for someone who wants to be able to take the next step over a free theme, or is looking for a premium theme that has a fair number of features and can be used on an unlimited number of websites. The license terms make that price a lot lower if you use it on multiple websites.

However it is not really suitable for business blogging, though it can be made to fit that purpose of course, it seems geared mainly towards general blogging, hence the name Personal Theme. For that it is a pretty average choice, and fits in a gap between completely free and higher priced premium themes.

You can check out Personal Theme via our affiliate link here – Personal Theme and also demo the theme here.

Joel Williams

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If you’re feeling the fear regarding quitting your job to start up a business because you’re worried about the financial strain, freelancing as a cash flow source is a great idea. Here’s what Ali has to say about it…

Entrepreneurship. Attractive, enticing … and risky. Let’s face it, however attractive the idea of quitting your day job to start your business is, it might just not be a realistic option. Maybe you have a family – or an expensive gadget habit – to support. Maybe you’re not convinced that your dreams can stand up to reality.

The problem is, starting up a business venture while you’re working full time is hard. You might well have already experienced this – either you end up with lots of plans but no energy to put them into action, or you work evenings and weekends and quickly burn out.

There is, however, a middle road between employment and entrepreneurship. It’s called freelancing, and it can help you over that chasm between where you are and where you want to be.

How Freelancing Can Get You Over the Gap

I quit my day job a year ago. I’m still paying my bills and rent and putting some money aside for the tax man.

Like you, I’d love to be one of those internet entrepreneurs earning six-figures a month. I realized the hard way, though, that that sort of success doesn’t exactly happen overnight: I launched a blog, hoping that I could quit my day job and make a fortune from it … and it took eleven months to receive my first Google Adsense check, for a whopping $122.25.

(You might want to take a look at Yaro’s timeline or Darren Rowse’s story if you believe that the A-list somehow got there instantly.)

Freelancing Income vs Entrepreneurial Income: My Real Figures

First, a reality check.

How much might you make from freelancing, whilst trying out more entrepreneurial activities on the side?

To begin with, pretty much all my income came from freelancing: working for clients, rather than generating money from my own ventures and websites. I made a few dollars a month from Google Adsense, and that was about it.

A year on, things are shifting. In 2009, my income per month, to the nearest dollar for each, looked something like this:

• $1160 from freelance blogging
• $165 from magazine writing
• $460 from new/repeat advertising on my first blog, www.theofficediet.com
• $97 from sales of my e-course, the Staff Blogging Course (launched back in May 09, so this was bringing in more money initially)
• $18 from affiliate commission (only got started on this towards the end of July)

As you can see, it’s the freelance work (the blogging and magazines) which is paying the bills. I’m now making decent money from the blog The Office Diet, which I launched in January 2007 – but it’s taken a year and a half to get to that point.

Freelancing Bonus #1: Gaining More Time

It’s only because I freelance that I’ve had the time to start building the other sources of income. My freelancing takes up much less time than a day job – usually around 10-12 hours a week, instead of 40 (plus commute). With the vast majority of my freelancing, I can work at whatever times suit me – giving me a huge amount of flexibility.

By freelancing, you can often double or triple your hourly rate compared with a salary. Sure, you can’t usually work forty billable hours a week as a freelancer – but you can work part-time like I do, and use the rest of your time for other projects.

Freelancing Bonus #2: Gaining Relevant Experience

I don’t know about your day job, but mine didn’t teach me the skills I needed to be an entrepreneur. Freelancing, however, gave me the chance to build up the knowledge and practical experience that I needed.

By working as a staff writer for a number of very big, successful blogs, I had a huge amount of knowledge to draw on when I launched my own blog in July 2009, Aliventures. It’s taken me under a month to get 150 subscribers – whereas it took me nearly five months to do the same with my first blog.

Could you gain paid experience in something directly relevant to your entrepreneurial dreams, by working as a freelancer? This might mean freelancing in:

• Copywriting
• Graphic design
• Computer programming
• Social media
• Blogging
• Ebook design and publication

… there are a huge number of possibilities.

Freelancing Bonus #3: Gaining Self-Discipline

How self-disciplined and self-motivated are you?

Most of us, when we answer that question honestly, know that we’re far from perfect! If you’ve spent all your working life in employment – where you have to be in the office during set hours and where your boss won’t be too impressed if you take a two-hour lunch or spend the whole day on Facebook – then you’ve probably got some legitimate worries about how you’ll manage to stay motivated and productive as an entrepreneur.

When it comes to putting in the work that you need to do in order to get your business off the ground, get your website launched, build a following or market your product … will you have the strength to keep plugging on, even if you’re not seeing instant results?

The advantage of freelancing here is that it teaches you self-discipline. You don’t have a manager breathing down your beck. You don’t have to be at your desk at any particular time. But you do have clients and deadlines, and you will find that you develop better work habits, better organizational skills and the ability to self-motivate.

(Until you do, you could end up working a lot of late nights and weekends.)

Freelancing Bonus #4: Gaining an Audience

If your freelancing is in any way related to your entrepreneurial efforts, guess what? You’ve got an instant audience – and potential clients.

A big chunk of my traffic for my Aliventures blog comes from the biggest blog I freelance for, Dumb Little Man. Many of the people who’ve bought my staff blogging course heard about it from a blog where I’ve freelanced or worked for free in the past.

You might want to keep this in mind when starting out on freelancing. Rather than working for single clients who are unlikely to be interested in your other projects, look for ways to get your name out in front of multiple people.

And If You’re Already a Freelancer…

Maybe I don’t need to sell you on being a freelancer: perhaps you already are freelancing, whether part-time or full time.

(Or maybe, having read the above, you’re now determined to make that jump from employment into freelancing.)

Here are four things you can do to make that shift from freelancer to entrepreneur:

1. Think “Business”

When I started out, I resisted the whole idea of thinking like a business.

I ignored any advice about partnerships, expanding or forming a company – I was convinced that all I wanted to do was write: if you’ve read Michael Gerber’s E-Myth, I just wanted to be the technician – not the manager or owner.

It took me a while to realize that having a business didn’t have to mean a bricks-and-mortar place where I’d have to do boring stuff like hire and manage employees. (I’m kinda anti-9-5 anyway, so the idea of becoming an employer myself was off-putting.)

2. Sell Products, Not Just Services

If you’re a freelancer, you’re basically selling your own services. One way to start moving towards being a business owner is to sell products as well. There are plenty of options: you don’t need to start printing t-shirts in your basement… (though an ebay business is always an option).

For example, if you’re a writer, you could write and sell an ebook.

If you’re a web designer, make premium templates for Wordpress and other popular platforms.

If you’re a photographer, sell high-quality stock photography on istockphoto or fotolia.

3. Promote Other People’s Products

Perhaps you don’t have the time, skills or inclination to create and sell your own products. No problem – you can sell other people’s stuff, and get a cut.

Affiliate sellers sometimes get a bad name – perhaps your association is with shady sales practices, poor quality products and high-pressure techniques. It doesn’t have to be that way at all.

If you want to be a successful affiliate marketer, just think through the products and services that you’ve used and love. Write honest reviews of these (if they’re great products, that’s pretty easy to do). All sorts of companies and businesses have affiliate programs, including:

• Web hosting companies
• Software
• Ebooks and online courses
• Amazon…

(If you want to see a review that’s worked well for me, of a product that I absolutely love and promote wholeheartedly, check out my review of Glen Allsopp’s Cloud Living. You might be particularly interested to read the comment from Wesley Craig Green at the bottom of that review.)

4. Teach, Coach or Consult

Although this overlaps with freelancing, a great way to seriously up your income is to teach, coach or consult – all activities which can command a very good hourly rate – and where you can often charge multiple people for each hour of your time (eg. teaching a seminar, running an online membership site).

If you’re interested in going the membership site route, a highly-regarded program to get you started is Teaching Sells, run by Brian Clark (of CopyBlogger fame) or of course, Yaro’s Membership Site Mastermind program.

There are plenty of other methods, though. If you want a low-hassle option which involves initial effort followed by minimal maintenance, go the product route, and produce an ebook, audio download or screencast teaching people how to do something that you’re an expert in.
(This is what I did with my Staff Blogging Course, which has been very well received by both beginner and more experienced freelance writers.)

If you’re not sure how to market yourself as a coach or consultant, there’s a whole module in Naomi Dunford’s fantastic Online Business School on Coaching and Consulting – I’ve reviewed the whole of Online Business School, or you can just go straight to my review of that module.

But Don’t Just Stick at Freelancing…

If freelancing’s so great, you might be thinking, why not just freelance? Why bother with entrepreneurial stuff – where you might not see a return on the time invested?

Freelancing is a lot of fun, don’t get me wrong – but it can mean long hours (searching for new work, admin, invoices, etc) and freelancers only get paid for the hours when they’re working.

It’s a great way to start off on the path to entrepreneurship, but don’t get stuck there. There are loads of very successful business-owners who started out as freelancers: Collis and Cyan Ta’eed are a good example – they were graphic designers who launched the Freelance Switch blog and a whole network of sites in the TUTS branding (eg. PSDTUTS+).

Another example of someone you’ve probably heard of is Naomi Dunford, of IttyBiz fame. She started out as a freelance copywriter – and is now the go-to person for (very) small business marketing advice. Her IttyBiz business includes downloadable products, online courses and coaching.

Are you a freelancer-turning-entrepreneur, like me? Are you a day-jobber with entrepreneurial dreams that just aren’t happening? Share your thoughts, experiences and advice with me in the comments…

Ali Hale wears a number of hats: freelancer, post-grad creative writing student, e-book author and blogger are just some of them. All her ventures focus on getting more from life – a topic she writes about on her own site, Aliventures. (You can grab the RSS feed here.)

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We had come together to discuss our next big project – a live event to be held in Australia during the first half of 2010. However our conversation managed to balloon beyond our initial subject limitation and we were jumping from topic to topic, with each new issue opening up something else.

As the afternoon progressed it became clear that we weren’t going to reach any specific conclusions that day, although the discussion was certainly helpful.

As Gideon pointed out, decisions made now, will impact where you will be in six months. The start of a new year is a particularly important time as most people start new projects, or begin new phases in the development of their business.

In our case we’ve reached transition points, where we face a huge array of opportunities. Gideon and I don’t face the same decisions on all levels since our personal lives are different, as are the stages of development of our businesses. Since we share projects, some of the decisions we make must be made together, and when that happens, we need an extra level of clarity because what we do impacts not just ourselves.

It’s easy to change things when it’s only you in charge, but when you are in a partnership, each shift requires involvement of your partner, or you risk creating confusion and even conflict (read of this article on partnerships for more on these kinds of issues: Is A Partnership Right For You?).

Many of the new opportunities open to us, such as the live event, are projects that we have very little experience with. We’ve attended live events before of course, but never hosted one ourselves, hence we’re wary of what we don’t know that we need to know and prepare for.

Making the decision process even more complicated are the existing projects we have, which could be optimized and expanded, if we choose to follow that path.

To put it simply, this isn’t a simple decision. There are many interrelated issues, conditions and decisions that have an impact on other decisions.

Normally I pick one major project and focus most of my “new creation” energy there, while working to keep the regular processes, like blog articles and email content flowing as usual, but this time it’s challenging because all my new opportunities really are new.

In my case I already made the decision to launch a private coaching program, and if you’re already one of my paying members you should have received an email with a link to the invitation page to check it out. If it doesn’t sell out to my private members, I’ll offer an invite to the public, so stay tuned for that.

The rest of my decision making for the next six months is still a work in progress. This is of course not the first time I’ve faced this kind of “problem” and it’s a very common one for entrepreneurs.

Even as you become more stable, develop cash flow and determine what projects are worth pursuing and what should be scrapped or avoided, it doesn’t make the decision making process any easier. In fact it usually becomes even more complicated, since success tends to open doors to new opportunities, and you always have the opportunity to improve on what’s already working.

So how can you find the answer to the too many opportunities problem, especially when you reach major transition points in your business life?

Financial Return Vs. Personal Satisfaction

There’s an interesting thing that happens as your business grows. All early decisions are pretty much focused entirely on establishing cash flow. I know for sure if you’re getting started right now with your online business, your first goal is to generate money.

Momentum at the start-up stage is all about first surviving, then establishing cash flow to stabilize what’s working by bringing on more resources, in particular more people to help. Once cash is stable and you have at least a base level of regular income coming in, your decision making process actually becomes easier in some respects, since you don’t need money quite as desperately. Instead you’re looking to keep things moving along smoothly, keep the growth curve trending up by using your cash to open up the floodgates on what’s already working.

Once you pass through this stage, you can finally breath a little, confident that your business is running reasonably well without risk of falling apart. If you’ve built a money making machine business and have systems and people running things for you, your own workload will drop at this point as well, freeing you up to make decisions on where to go next.

It’s at this point that your decision making process changes. It’s no longer just about the cash, instead you choose projects based on what you want to do. Of course financial objectives are still important, but the feeling of desperation subsides, and you can go somewhat where your heart wants to take you, as well as your wallet.

This is a wonderful position to be in, but don’t be under any illusion that it’s easier, it’s actually more complicated because you have considerably more options to choose from. The downside risk is usually less, depending of course on what level of investment is required of you in new projects, but if you’re a boot-strapping kind of entrepreneur, or building online businesses, the risk is low.

The biggest loss you might have is the time it takes to get a new project off the ground. You could lose money too if your new project doesn’t work, but unless you’re spending significant amounts on advertising or software development, which are not the kind projects I currently focus on, then you really have very little to worry about beyond that sense of disappointment when something doesn’t take off like you hope it would.

Opportunity Cost

The real potential danger in this decision making process is opportunity cost.

Making a decision to focus on one project means you can’t work on another. If the potential upside on a successful project is hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, then choosing one opportunity over another means you could be “risking millions”, though the difference between loosing millions compared to just not making millions because you choose a lame duck project is quite different. It’s still a relatively safe place to be making decisions from.

So that’s basically where Gideon and I find ourselves now. We have plenty of opportunities to make money by starting new projects and optimizing current ones, possibly even selling assets, but cementing what to pursue while a tantalizing choice, is still a difficult one because we forgo one opportunity by choosing another.

We also have to be sure to balance what we want to put energy into with the potential to profit from it carefully. The holy grail is a project that is fun to work on, satisfying on a personal level, and is the most or one of the most profitable. Identifying which opportunities match this criteria is actually very difficult because of the amount of unknowns and the nature of uncharted territory.

The Simple Path To The Lowest Hanging Fruit

The best advice I can offer you, which is the same advice I follow, is to seek the simplest path to the lowest hanging fruit, which represents both a financial and personal reward you are happy with.

By this I mean, choose the opportunities that are simple in nature, which you are clear about how to begin, that you are excited to do, and the numbers are satisfying, if things go well.

This process is going to be different depending on what stage your business is at. As I stated before, the level of momentum, your resources (including staff), and cash flow currently flowing in your business, dictates how much freedom you have to choose projects based on money versus fun. Consider this when deciding what’s important to you and offers quickest return on investment.

In my experience, having one major project going at once, which you work on to completion before starting another, is a successful formula. This gives you clarity of purpose and more importantly, tells you what you definitely shouldn’t be doing (anything that’s not related to that specific project).

In your case you likely have a skill, or talent, or perhaps you’ve built up something to a point where it could be leveraged for more, and you’re reasonably clear on how to start the process, or are at least prepared to put in the time to learn how to make it a profitable venture, which represents a lowest hanging fruit opportunity.

It’s not always a cut and dry decision, and you may need to seek input from your peers, or a coach or mentor, or as I like to do – mull it over for a while so you get a really good feel for how much you want to do something – just not too long!

It also helps to write out your opportunities on a piece of paper and rank them based on criteria like how much money you could make, how much fun it would be, how quickly you could earn a return and how much is your potential loss. Sometimes having this information written down and then put into a graph results in a very obvious winner – the numbers don’t lie if you’re being honest with yourself.

The most important point is, once you’ve made a decision, focus all your energy on that and ignore everything else. If you want to guarantee failure or at best, a very slow path to success, keep distracting yourself with new opportunities.

Good luck with your new projects this year!

Yaro Starak
Brainstorming

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(There’s a tiny bit of lag on this video, but it shouldn’t stop you from hearing the content.)

Click here to download the audio-only MP3 [ 61 MB ]

This was the most highly anticipated podcast interview I have ever done (for me anyway) because it combines two of my all time favorite subjects -

• Making money from the Internet, and
• Tennis!

That’s right, my guest Will Hamilton is a professional college tennis player, who leveraged his knowledge and skill with the game to create a six-figures a year information publishing business, based around a model that uses a blog, videos and a premium membership site area (that model should sound familiar to you).

You can check out his site at FuzzyYellowBalls.com – that’s a tennis ball reference in case you couldn’t guess.

How Will Built His Business

Will started by creating instructional videos on how to play tennis, which he circulated via YouTube (his channel is YouTube.com/fuzzyyellowballs).

His angle was to create videos of a better standard than anyone else out there and capitalize on the YouTube traffic, bring those readers back to his website and then get them on to his email list.

A few short years later and it’s worked really well. He has several hundred videos, resulting in a million video views a month and an email list of 60,000 subscribers – one of the largest email lists in the tennis industry, and it all started as a simple two-man operation (Will and his tech partner Adam).

Once Will established traffic, he realized that his original plan of monetization via advertising wasn’t cutting the mustard, so he decided to follow the premium membership strategy, launching a $25/month a membership site, which currently boasts over 600 paying members. Do the math and that’s over $15,000 a month).

Will’s story is definitely worth a listen because it’s yet another great example of someone starting with a skill, and through consistent work, launches an online business that results in getting paid really well to talk about something you love.

It’s also a great example of the little guy rising up to challenge the large media companies. Will receives press status just like mainstream media journalists when he attends tennis events. It’s quite impressive how far a blog can take you (and yes I’m a little jealous – I’d like to hang with tennis pros too).

Watch this video interview or download the audio file and listen to the full story how of how Will created his online business.

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"How To Start An Internet Business
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