I like distance. I don’t like the idea that my work owns me. As far as I am concerned, a business is not ‘complete’ if it can not function without me. I should be redundant, easily replaceable. I should not be running the damn show, just owning it.

Online marketing and blogging has been one such field of interest that has eluded me since like ever. By God’s Grace, I have more than one income streams so the ‘desperation’ is not there. But I do detect a ‘Will’ there somewhere, and as you all know that “where there’s a will, there’s a smith.”

Please note, the whole industry of internet marketing is based on the notion of a loner working from the basement of his house, making millions. It is this ‘doing it myself’ bit that has caused me much frustration. So I need to perhaps separate myself from the online business world, and then see the results. Treat it like I treat all the other enterprises. And then see the results. Instead of writing every post myself, hire someone to do it. Instead of putting up WordPress blogs every other day, get someone to do it. Monitor the results. But let someone else do it. Get out of the way.

The only thing is that this ‘getting out of the way’ costs money. And given the casual nature of your avergae ‘Internet Marketer’, setting aside a sizable chunk of cash just so you get to do less, is not very high on the agenda. That perhaps has to change. I know how the system works. I have been at it for the past two months or so. The results, I admit, are not anywhere near ‘good’. Consider my Clickbank weekly sales snapshot:

But the last few weeks have me convinced even further i.e. “there is more where that came from”.

And I feel that I am doing it wrong. Not because there is a set way of doing this. But because this is not how I work. I like to stress here that you may work differently, maybe you are one of those involved persons I was talking about earlier. But that is just not the point. The point is that to make a system out of this, I need to:

1. Identify a set of activities that will achieve the desired result
2. Divide the activities in logical categories
3. Divide each category to one, two, or as many persons it takes, to do all activities.

The above 3 point system is perhaps the most condensed form of ‘The E-Myth’ or the ‘business as a system’ approach towards making money.

This division and then the delegation of work will give me the distance that I suspect makes the business work. As humbling as it sounds, it seems to be ‘me’ that hinders progress for the business. And that should make sense. I can only do so much in a day, and I am accountable to no person so if I skip a few tasks for a few weeks, no biggie. This of course is death to the business, which is I suspect, not good generally.

So here is what I will be working on God willing:

1. I need to set aside a set amount of cash to do all ‘online business’. This will give me my ‘financial constraint’ and put pretty much everything in perspective.
2. I need to set up a system to get the cash earned online to be funneled back into the system. Living in Pakistan, that can be a problem sometimes. So I need to have a bank account where I can receive cash. The only thing that is deterrent to people in Pakistan is this very fact. For example, there is no PayPal here. Also, you need at least USD 2,000 to open up a Dollar account. Not cool. So this system needs to be worked upon.
3. I need a set of activities that, when performed, will give me a working, doable system online. These set of activities would include coming up with a niche to get into online, then develop the relevant content etc, and then promote the website(s) to get traffic, and hopefully generate some sales.
4. I need to first find, then keep, good people who deliver what I ‘expect’ them to deliver. Easier said than done. Way, way easier said than done.
5. Dish out the work on a weekly basis, monitor results, pay and get paid. Simple.

And then one day, God willing, I will post my Clickbank Sales Snapshot and you will probably go, “this guy is now photoshopping this, this can’t be real!”

Interested?

If you are interested in keeping track of what I am doing and where I am going with this, I suggest that you please subscribe this blog (email on the top left, RSS on the top right). If you are already subscribed, and reading this in your feed reader or inbox, then thank you for subscribing. I am hoping that this little experiment will benefit both of us; we get to learn and earn.

Talk soon. God bless. And good luck.

It never lets you know what you’re gonna get.

But there you are, alive and hopefully kicking. You have to live it, this life. Might as well get used to it. So you try. You fail. Your try harder. Fail harder. And then you succeed. Only to fail a couple of times more. The successes are the punctuation of life. The don’t come often, but come they must, to make sense of it all. And they do. If you keep at it.

I am guilty of philosophizing life. Get over it, so are you. Everything has meaning, only if you have the right dictionary.

You need to get a life to live one. Streamline it. Compartmentalize and categorize it. Tag it even.

Everyone should have a blog. Open to all. Not to write the most personal of thoughts, no. But to write to open channels of communications. To read, to see, to learn. Hopefully.

Writing is therapeutic, they say. They are sometimes right.

That lead me to further think and try to come up with something that is more useful, something that we as bloggers can use to identify our blogs.

Why identify our blogs? Well, so you can work on them with respect to their type. This will lead to greater focus, less of the useless stuff and will help you win the Grand Prix (well, OK, not the GP but it will sure as heck sharpen your skills at pruning the useless activities).

Now, onto the three types of blogs:

1. Money Making Blogs
2. A Blog For Your Business
3. A Blog As Your Business

Let’s see how each of these are different, and more importantly, what ‘high productivity’ activity can you do in each.

Money Making Blogs

Note please, all 3 types of blogs have the potential of making you money. But these Money Making Blogs have ‘make money’ as their core objective. It is not spreading brand awareness, it is not upholding the principles of human race, it is simply to make money. You set up blogs in areas where there is money. These are relatively smaller sites, that you set up, after identifying your niche. These blogs typically will have less content and will focus on highly specialized niches. For example, you will find blogs dedicated to single products rather than a category of products.

The highest productivity activity (let’s call it HPA because that makes it look cool – and easy) for Money Making Blogs is to have lots of them. A single money making blog will probably not get you upwards of 50 to 100 USD per month. But there are people who own thousands of them. No, that is not a superlative, I do mean ‘thousands of blog that earn a measly 10 to 20 bucks a month’. Yup, you too are good at maths, and that is around 10 to 20 thousand dollars per month. But these are typically larger operations, with guys churning out blogs in the hundreds. Quality score is way low, but these Money Making Blogs do exactly that. They make you money. And nothing else.

You can’t really brag about them, lest someone steals your stupid niche. And it quickly becomes monotonous to create blog after blog, in the same format. You do it only because you have your HPA set up as ‘create more blogs’. This is perfect if you have people you can hire and train them to do this for you.

A Blog For Your Business

My friend recently quit his job (read: he was laid off) and started his own event management company. That is cool, being self employed. But business is business, and you have to have your basics right. And you need to pay to get those basics right. Things like stationery items must be at your disposal (tip: only get your business cards and envelopes printed, and use your color printer to print out letterheads on-the-go, you’ll thank me later). You would also need a website. Or even better, a blog.

This is the type of blog that will have ‘latest news’ as their main category. If the CEO/Owner of the company is really down with it, he/she can start writing day-to-day happenings at the office on to the blog. These types of blogs are typically not-so-well-known but are a great way to connect with customers. These blogs are also very easy to maintain and a lot of customers expect a blog on your website. It is A OK if that blog is really a news bulletin, but it should be updated frequently.

The HPA for this type of blog is to post an update on it through your mobile phone, so it is easier for you keep your business blog fresh with timely news.

Blog As A Business

This is the holy grail of blogging. A blog that is the business itself. Again, I would give examples of people like Shoemoney and John Chow and Yaro Starak. These guys have blogs that are the business. They may or may not sell products, but all ‘money making’ is done through the medium of their blog – the online traffic that they have worked so hard to capture and retain.

These types of blogs are usually run like magazines, with sometimes a lot of people contributing towards the content.

Blogs that really are not blogs (the not-so-personal types of blogs) can also fall into this category.

The HPA on this type of blog is to keep reminding yourself that give first, get later. Give away great content, give away great advice, to build an audience – then based on your audience and their feedback, you can ‘make’ a product that is pretty much already-sold. Or you can sell advertising. But as long as you have traffic coming in, you are a success.

The only two ways to make money with blogging are:

1. Personal  Blogging Style
2. Not-so-Personal Blogging Style

What the hell?

Let me explain.

Personal Blogging Style

Have you visited Yaro Starak’s blog? You know why I called his blog Yaro Starak’s blog instead of ‘Entrepreneur’s Journey’ which is the actual name of the blog? Because the blog is written in very personal way, a lot of ‘I did this’ and ‘I made a million bucks yesterday’ kind of stuff. The personal blog style is of course very well used by Glen at Viper Chill, by John Chow and by Jeremy Shoemaker.

Not-so-personal Blogging Style

Do you know who runs Mashable? Thought so. Gizmodo? Engadget? Exactly. You do not know the author(s) the way you would know a ‘personal blogging style’ type of blogger. But examples like Mashable, Gizmodo etc are the top of the food chain. Most of the blogs in the Whole Widey World (www) are Not-so-personal type of blogs that are just put up to get search engine traffic to come there, see the ads there and click on them. This makes the ‘non personal’ types a lot of money (to the tune of 100s of 1000s of dollars per month!), but they are essentially not blogs.

Seriously, there is only one type of ‘blog’

I mean, what is a blog if it is not personal? I know, I know, the world has moved on and now the blog is a remarkable tool to use (and abuse), personal or not-so-personal. Hence the distinction.

I am right now working on an e-book that will show you EXACTLY how to earn money with the second type of blogging. You won’t like it just I don’t like doing this kind of blogging. I mean, it is impersonal and that is not what blogging should be about. This is the kind of opportunistic type of blogging that will probably end up wasting your time (and earn you some cash – sometimes serious amounts of cash). But why write an e-book on it then? Good question.

First off, using these ‘mini blogs’ to earn money is not something new. The reason they are called mini ‘blogs’ is not because they are blogs of a personal nature, but because they use the blogging platform to publish their content. The ‘type’ of content is anything but blogging, but the platform is, hence they are called mini blogs.

And secondly, making money online is not easy, and using this technique although guarantees a return, but it can be anywhere between a few hundred dollars a month to thousands!

Personal Example

I have bought the course Profit Instruments and did what it taught me how to do, and have already made upwards of 350 dollars. But that is over a period of two and a half months. I am currently experimenting with the course and trying to figure out an easier way to have ‘mini blogs’.

But blogging is not about money alone. For example, taking out a newspaper has the potential of earning you tons of money. But most ‘newspaper men’ I know do not do it for the money. Money is a by product, and a fine by product no doubt, but a secondary objective under all circumstances. It is the connection, the attempt at spreading something worth spreading, that is what fuels the journalist. That is what fuels most of the most successful bloggers out there.

Of course there are techniques. Shoemoney has his Shoemoney System, John Chow has his Blog Profit Camp and Yaro Starak has his own courses for sale, and these guys make ‘serious’ amounts of money. But it is easier being these folks than being the person who puts up 100′s of blogs, earns a few thousand blogs, and that person can’t even reveal the kind of blogs he is running, not only because he will reveal his niche, but because the blogs will be an embarrassment to begin with. Of course, I am talking about ‘bloggers’ feeding off the lowest wrung. Much like the tabloids that print the craziest crap to sell copies. “we are not in the business of selling news, we are in the business of selling paper” kind’a guys.

But there is a lot of room between the ‘scammy’ types and the Gizmodos and the Engadget type of ‘impersonal’ types of blogs.

Althought Gizmodo is run on a blogging platform, but it is a ‘magazine’.

I am forced to make this distinction and might end up declaring the second type of blogs as not being blogs at all, but good ol’ website; ezines evolving from the ZDNets of the old. What do you think?

First off, I think the course is a bit high priced for the kind of value it delivers.

And here’s the second part, it delivers some great value.

The beauty lies in its simplicity. I can tell you what the course tells you in perhaps a few, well though-out lines. But that information will be quite valuable to you. And the amount I paid Ritoban to get access to the Profit Instruments course, I have already made that back. It has yet to make me a thousand bucks, but I am almost half way there. And that’s with almost 2 months or so into the game.

Should you, as a potential ‘earner’, buy it?

I will break it down for you in the coming days… stay tuned (you can subscribe to this blog using the form on your left – the one with the blue background )

Talk to you soon,

God bless.

Upon checking it out on my blog, there seems to be a problem with the theme that displays the embed code on the front page. But the post page of the blog has the player coming up nicely.

I get to do whatever I want because I have all the time in the world. For example, the 4 hour work week by Tim Ferris did not teach me anything new. I have a lot of time on my hands, almost by default.

I buy nice things, but not expensive things, usually because they are expensive. Duuh! I am not rich, also almost by habit. But I make more than most, by God’s Grace.

And I am happy, by God’s Grace.

I do not believe there is a formula for success (normally, and somewhat crookedly defined as having making a lot of money). But I do believe that success, naah, in fact, the world belongs to the bold and not to the smart. I am too smart for my own good. Heh.

If there is a formula, I think that is ‘take action’. It is the simple act of ‘doing’ that can qualify as the ‘secret formula’, if that. I have read all the books you have probably heard about – all the good ones, top ones, bestsellers, packed with doable information and advice. Bull shit. They don’t work. You know why? Because they tell you to ‘do this’, and you want to read another one. Search for a magic pill, and when you find it, search for a better one, that is how most of us live our lives. It is pathetic I know.

All four enterprises that make money for me (sometimes in access of 100,000 US $ in a year!!) were all started because I said, ‘what the heck! why not!’ and just went ahead and did what I thought at the time was the right thing to do. Nothing more, and crucially, nothing less. They were incomplete enterprises at the time, and in many ways, are still incomplete. They definitely do not come close to the ‘business advice’ I dole out to my friends and the occasional client on ‘how to start this business and that business’, but these enterprises work. I think I have learnt and validated and re-validated an important lesson here; you gottat go at it. It is with this same frame of mind that I have started this blog here, for example.

This is a procastinator’s blog, make no mistake. I suffer the dreaded analysis-paralysis when it comes to online stuff(!!), including blogging and internet marketing. It is to ‘crush’ the overwhelming feeling of ‘this is not right, this won’t work’ that I have started writing here, just to see if this feeling is right or not!!

I also know that I tend to take this ‘online marketing and blogging’ field a bit too seriously. The idea of letting loose, that has worked oh-so-freakin-well in my other enterprises, doesn’t seem to get any headway when it comes to blogging. I hate that. An excellent post on Copyblogger helped me finally identify this ‘bottleneck’. So now I’m thinking, ‘what the heck!’. Again.

Find a Good Teacher

I have only recently seen first-hand the effects a good teacher can have your business/life. In one of my soon-to-be-enterprises (God willing), I heard of a person who was allegedly doing something remarkable that was thought to be impossible in the field. So I searched for him. And as with most things you search for long enough, I found him. I traveled hundreds of kilometers to meet him, and see him at his ‘workplace’ and asked him some questions that I had prepared while on the way. I know now for a fact that I am light years ahead in the game already, just because I met a ‘master’, and had a cup of tea with him! Now I know ‘exactly’ what to do and why I am doing it. (I can very easily be wrong, of course… but that only time will tell!)

I already have a few very good teachers in the field of blogging as well. I have learned from the best. I have studied the Membership Mastermind course from Yaro Starak, and am currently enrolled in J Shoemaker‘s Shoemoney System. These I believe are good teachers. And I can say from experience, finding good teachers is your ONLY job as a good student (just like finding the RIGHT employees is your ONLY job as a business owner, but more on that in a different post )

Finding the right teacher is important. Heck, it is essential. How else will you learn? I mean, think about it for a minute here. You ‘have’ to learn, whether you learn consciously or not – no matter what, you will end up learning ‘something’. What does that mean? That there is a teacher somewhere in the mix, hellooo? Don’t you think that it is better to find your own teacher(s)?

The difficulty I’m facing at this moment is what topics to choose to write despite the fact that they are thousands of websites already available? Can you please guide me how and what should be my approach step by step. These days I have time to develop my online business…

First, he has one thing going for him and that is ‘niche selection’. He has already identified his niche, his ‘area of focus’ for his blog. And on top of that he has based it on something that he already has knowledge about, so that will be less ‘work’ for him in the long run.

And he raises a very valid question; how can I blog successfully about a topic that is so commonly blogged about?

The answer is simple. That does not mean it is easy. In fact, it is the hardest thing you would probably have to do, and continue to do, to succeed in blogging. What you have to do is be different. Yes, that’s it. Differentiate your blog from all the others and you will get noticed. Getting noticed is exactly equal to more traffic coming to your blog.

Differentiate

Do you drink Coke or Pepsi? Or it doesn’t matter? Both these companies operate in the exact same niche, they have the exact same customers, so they have to be somehow different from the ‘other brand’ to ‘get noticed’.

Consider a blog by the name of Viper Chill. The blog topic is very, very competitive i.e. internet marketing. And how is the blog different? Little things, for example, the length of the post/article. The writing style is also very casual, and each article is packed with usable information. You as a reader can easily see that a lot of time has been put in writing and compiling the posts, and that in itself sets the blog apart from other internet marketing blogs.

How can you be different in your niche? Well, that only you can answer. For example, start podcasting on your blog. Can your blog be better off if you make different videos and put them online? How about using a tool that not many blogs in your niche use, such as Facebook Connect etc? Maybe you can ‘differentiate’ by being very open about yourself, or if your niche has a lot of blogs with textual articles, you can maybe use info-graphics? Of course, the possibilities on ‘how to be different’ are quite endless, and that is why it is important to Listen to your market.

Differentiate & Listen

When you try out new techniques on your blog, to set it apart from the rest, always ‘ask’ your readers what they think. If the readers of your blog like one technique over the other, then of course, use that technique (your readers may respond and interact more to your podcasts than your video posts, for example).

“But hardly anyone visits my blog, so why bother asking a handful of people?” you may ask. I can ask, “maybe that is why you blog is not visited by many, because you do not care?”.

The right attitude to have, I think, is that you respond to each and every comment your blog posts get, and pay attention to each and every feedback you get, because you may ‘own’ your blog, but it is the readers of the blog who should define it.

More goodness, God willing, coming soon.
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