Steve Mills - Online Entrepreuership with the SPOKE system

Online Business is more than just blogs

Just a quick post today to make sure that everyone knows that I am still around and kicking. I have had a busy last month, consolidating a couple of exciting new opportunities that have presented themselves, and getting my teeth into some challenging new internet marketing campaigns.

I just wanted to put the idea out there today to all of the bloggers out there that are wondering how to make money online with their blogs. The short answer is that you have a very small chance of making a decent income with just your blog alone. A blog that just has posts, a few adsense ads and some affiliate programs (like this one is at the moment) may turn some dollars, but not enough to get the bank manager excited every time you walk in.

You should not be considering yourself just a blogger, but taking the next step, treating this area seriously and start thinking about starting an online BUSINESS. Sure, a blog may be an integral part to it, but at the end of the day you need to know how to attract peoples attention and move some kind of product. The internet is full of bad information about “How To Make Money Online”, in fact there seems to be more of this around today then ever before. But in-between all of this there are some sound strategies of people that have gone before and made Sustainable Online Enterprises.

Like the byline of this site says, I am all about helping people become Sustainable Personal (as in personally branded) Online Connected Entrepreneurs. Its a simple phrase, a small acronym that can be easily remembered and applied to everything you do online. It is a system that outlines how to gain traffic, and then monetize that traffic so that your audience becomes your customers, and yes, even your fans in the year to come.

By utilizing the wide variety of ways to promote your business, develop content and target customers the SPOKE system deals with social media, google adwords, SEO strategy, blog optimization, marketing and advertising theory, personal branding and sound business knowledge to provide a comprehensive system to at the very least give a good online business idea a head start.

Quick Between Posts Update

Sorry for the delay in posting on here but life has been hectic, and I have had  lot of projects on the boil. Oh yea, and I started using Twitter which has kept me busy. If you want to follow me click the link.

For those that have been reading this site for a while, you will notice that I am currently redesigning it (yet again) to give it a simpler interface. I am planning on publishing a lot more material, specifically about the advantages and massive opportunities, but also about the pitfalls and traps of using social media to promote your brand.

Stress Of Connection Culture

I just saw an article today on the news.com.au website about the effect of email on productivity

The main thrust of the article is shown below.

“THE average employee is productive at work for just four hours a day due to a flood of disruptive emails and phone calls, according to a new study.
And the biggest culprit, say workers, is the constant interruption from internal emails.
The lost productivity is costing business billions of dollars a year and also taking a toll on workers’ health, with three quarters complaining of stress from too many distractions in the office, the Daily Mail reports. “

Now this is not a new phenomenon, there have been reports coming out like this very frequently for the last 10 years. As soon as business started to give their staff email and internet access the phenomena of continuous partial attention was born. There are so many things that you need to do, so many different streams of information that need to be monitored, and so many interruptions that you never get into a “flow” state. This leads with difficulty concentrating on complex tasks and working on large projects.

The thing is though, that as we move into an information economy this way of working is the norm. My job actually requires me to be monitoring and reacting to many different information streams, to be writing email, to be answering social media messages. The ability to be able to gather, synthesize and output large and diverse streams of information is going to be the skill to have for the next decade. The trick is to be able to do this, and then be able to “switch off” at some stage and manage your stress levels, interact with your “offline community” family and look after your mental and physical health.

There are a number of both subtle and large psychological changes that seem to occur in the always connected mind, from a mild nagging feeling that you are missing out on something if you are not online, to stress attacks from the overwhelming information. It can be as addicting as it can be empowering.

There is a current that is flowing through the blogging community at the moment as to whether social networking and microblogging on twitter is a distraction or if it is a vital piece of work to be integrated into the day. I think we need to explore what are the costs and benefits to connecting technologies, in the short term to our stress levels, ability to concentrate and ability to switch of, but also in the long term to beneficial results on career, connection, community and learning.

It is very early days for this technology, and we are just seeing the first glimpses of our future as a connected world.

Retune your information stream

If you are a blogger or internet marketer, you will be only too aware of the overwhelming amount of information that is released every day. It is an endless torrent in which some days you find something of relevance, or a concept that you can apply easily to your business. Other days it feels like you are drowning in a sea of sales pages, marketing hype, time wasting posts and RSS.

 

This saturation of media can be thought of as a stream, a constant input of information that your mind has to process, fit into your current model of the world and make sense of.

To simplify things, we can be seen as a computer that takes inputs from our environment and creates outputs in our actions, words and communication with others. Just like you are what you eat, you are what you read, watch and hear to a large extent.

SHAPE THE INFORMATION STREAM 

In order to succeed in business online, you need to be able to make focussed, clear actions in a defined direction. If you set out to write one concise post every three days, or to write 1000 words on a new book or interactive course then you should be shaping your information stream to help you attain that goal. If not, the sea of competing ideas can easily distract you.

I am not saying that you shouldn’t read some things that are off the topic, but perhaps a good rule of thumb is 80% on topic (for the project that you are currently working on) and 20% other information.

TUNE IN AND TURN ON

An apt analogy would be that of listening to a radio (the old, analogue type, not internet radio) when the dial is a bit off the station. The signal is filled with noise, useless junk information that is stopping you from clearly hearing the message that is supposed to be coming through (or at least that nickelback song they keep playing).

If you tune the radio and get rid of the noise and static (useless information) then the signal (useable & actionable information) becomes clearer.

The best way I know to re-align my information stream with my goals is to go through my automatic information collections (rss feeds, email lists, bookmarks, blogrolls) and optimize them for the market or niche that I am working in.

Sort your RSS so that you are constantly seeing information from the top experts, and not being inundated with useless information or empty hype.

I am currently going through this exercise myself, trimming down my RSS subscriptions to a manageable level, only keeping the ones that have consistently provided me with valuable or interesting content.

Removing those that have failed to deliver gives you space to add new interesting feeds when you see them and not have them get lost in the noise. I have been unsubscribing from mailing lists that never have anything of interest, and only keeping the ones that fill my inbox with useable, relevant information.

Wikis, Knols and Hyperintelligence

The announcement of Google Knols a few months ago has got everyone talking about Google trying to take over from Wikipedia as the de facto “go to” place for facts online.

It was easy to find information on the web before wikipedia, It’s just that the information that you found was often in specialist jargon, or badly written, or just plain wrong. Also when you searched for a term, say “calculus” for instance, there was a number of pages that you had to wade through before you found one that fitted your level of understanding, and you really had no idea if the information that you were reading was from a credible source.

Although wikipedia still has minor problems in these areas, it’s peer reviewed operation allows for the correction of errors by others users. The information known about Knols shows that google is trying to fix some of the problems with wikipedia. It is easy for an error or complete fabrication to slip in to an article and remain detected until someone with more knowledge about the subject happens to read it, and then be bothered enough about the mistruth to change the article themselves. This could take an hour for a widely read important article, or it could never happen if it was a fringe topic of limited popularity. Knols, because they have authorship attributed to a subject expert, will supposedly be a more authoritive version of the facts. This isn’t really new thinking, About.com had topic editors years ago, and squidoo.com lenses allow people to create topics and declare themselves experts on things. I’m not sure that this loss of anonymity of authorship and editorship is going to be a good or a bad thing at this point, but it will soon become clear as Knols have their inevitable gain in popularity.

The good thing about the many authored, anonymous nature of wikipedia is that even if the information provided is not the 100% truth, it is a representation of the consensus reality around the subject, and therefore allows you to converse with other about it, apply the subject to other areas and use the knowledge provided as a tool. It provides enough facts, figures, equations, links to experts, software or other resources to give you the head start, and compress anywhere from 5 minutes to 1 weeks of web surfing about a topic down to the time it takes to read the wikipedia entry. More »