Steve Mills - Online Entrepreuership with the SPOKE system

The Vital Spark For Your Online Projects

There are no shortage of programs, courses and books out there showing you how to make your business work online. You will read one and it will tell you to go through steps A…Z and at the end you should be making X amount of dollars per month.

It looks simple, and if you followed their step by step approach you too should see similar results (if they are being truthful, please do a bit of checking out any incredible or unbelievable “too good to be true” statements at least a little bit sceptically before jumping in headlong).

For most internet marketers, blog owners and other online business people the road to profits starts to look a bit harder as soon as the information has been digested. Because now, when it becomes time to put the theory in to action you hit the first road bump. You need a market to apply this fantastic information to, and idea to base the system on, a topic to write your fantastic new ebook about.

There is plenty of information out there about using Google tools to find a niche, and this is a very good method of finding what people are searching for, and what they are finding as a result of those searches. If you can offer something that is significantly better then what is currently being offered in that niche (or can market / convert the traffic better) then give it a go.

Also, be creative around your research into niches. As the online marketplace has matured, new niches (ones that are profitable) have become as rare as hens teeth. But they are still out there, and new ones are created every day. Just keep your eyes and ears open, look at innovative ways of using the technology. For instance there are a few books starting to appear about using twitter as a marketing tool. Keep your finger on the pulse, be an early adopter of the next big web thing and then inform all of those that jump on the bandwagon later on.

The idea around your internet business and the niche that you target with your material is one of the fundamental keystones to your online efforts. If it is a good niche it could be plugged into any model. Ebook sales, membership site, adsense, affiliate sales.

My Lifestyle Design Plan : A Review

I just thought I would spend today giving everyone a bit of an update to my current situation. I am currently working towards my ideal lifestyle. It is amazing when you look around how many people are not. People think they are, but what they are doing is chasing the next promotion, in order to get more money, in order to buy more things.

I am after more then that. I want an independence of the 9-5, sit in an office workday. I want to be truly rich. Not monetarily rich, but time and experience rich.

Slowly my plan is starting to become real, as I am directing my life and making choices on work habits and situations based on my “lifestyle design.”

Just to get everyone up to speed, my lifestyle design plan is

• To have a variety of interesting work.
• To set up autonomous systems in order to make passive income.
• To have the freedom to work hours of my choosing, in the location of my choice.
• To be able to travel for at least 3 months of the year with my family.

The steps that I have taken so far in the last year have been to :

• Establish a network of consulting clients while still holding down a 6 - 4 (10 hour days plus 2 hour commute) job. This was the hardest part, and one that I will write about in more detail soon. I was working 18 hour days for 3 months there getting things off the ground. Not an ideal lifestyle at all. But people have to consider a small amount of hard yards, a couple of hard months if they want to seriously work at breaking the 9 -5 rut. I’m not talking about the years of corporate grind / deferred lifestyle plan of the usual wage slave, but the ability to make small scale sacrifices for massive long term gain isn’t a bad trait to have.
• Quit the job with a steady net of clients. This gave me 4 day steady work a week, 2 of which working in the city, 2 of which working quite close to home. The other day deliberately left free in order to source more contracts and work on passive income earners.
• Develop 2 sites with passive income earning potential. One is a video sharing site that should attract some advertising revenue, due to it being in a specific untapped niche.
• Develop partnership agreement with one consulting client, resulting in equity share if project goes well. Large passive income earning potential
• A growing network of web development, graphic design and internet marketing clients that I consult with purely over the phone and internet.
• Starting to develop efficiency and knowledge management tools to compress the work day down to a smaller time investment.

So I am starting to get things off the ground, and although I have deviated from my plan a few times and fallen back into unhealthy work habits, I have had the piece of mind to look back at my plan and remind myself that life is for the enjoyment and experience, not the dollars.