The by-line of this site states that I am an Online Entrepreneur and Online Marketing Expert. Now I know that saying that a) I am an Entrepreneur and b) I am an expert can come across as a bit pretentious, but I think these terms accurately describe the way that I make a good living, working great hours and having time and energy to spend with my family.

For the past 11 years I have earned a living from the internet. I have been a web developer, an internet marketing consultant, a mailing list database manager, a search engine optimiser and an online strategy consultant for clients as diverse as large corporations all the way down to local bed and breakfasts. I have learned a lot over the years about what does and doesn’t work in the world of getting exposure and sales of your product using the medium of the internet.

If you look at the definition section for Entrepreneur in wikipedia, it says “An entrepreneur is someone who organizes resources in new and more valuable ways and accepts full responsibility for the outcome.”

An online entrepreneur is someone who can take the raw materials of the internet, sort through the noise and competing messages, and turn them into something meaningful that people are willing to part with their hard earned cash (or paypal credits) for. Anyone with any degree of knowledge, or insight that few possess can leverage this and turn it into a blog, an online course, or a physical book marketed via the web and make a success of it. Any potential online entrepreneur should be looking at the internet as a vast reserve of renewable resources that that are ready to be harvested. You can disseminate trends and turn them into e-books, you can turn traffic into forum sites, newsletter subscribers into affiliate sales.

The second part of the definition is also relevant. Accepting full responsibility for the outcome can sound like a bad thing. If an offline business (bricks and mortar they used to say in the dot com days) with a shopfront, stock , staff and suppliers becomes unviable, it is up to the entrepreneur to cover the debts. This has meant the loss of the family home and bankruptcy for many a well meaning and hard working business person who struck some bad luck or a change in consumer sentiment in the early days of their business. But starting and running an online venture, if the scale of the business is kept at a level appropriate to the demand for the product, has very little risk involved. You can test and measure new products, marketing strategies and sales pitches before you have to rely on them to bring money in from your customers. If you are selling downloadable products, or those with a low cost to manufacture then you dont have the risk of holding outdated stock. You can run the whole show as a one man operation, using contractors and outsourcing work when required, but keeping all of the profits for yourself. You accept full responsibility for the success of the business, and reap the rewards.

I also leaned a lot during my consulting days about running a business and being an entrepreneur. I would see so many small business owners who business had become more then just their life, it had become their prison. The worked 12 hour days, seven days a week and were always on the edge of complete burn out. These people had become business owners, but in reality the business owned them. They couldn’t afford to take holidays because they had made themselves such an indispensible part of the business that it would fail to function if they weren’t’ there. Not real smart when you think about it.

An online entrepreneur however sees business a little bit differently from the average business man.

An Online Entrepreneur is someone that has a diverse range of online interests that either

1. Run themselves

2. Are run by someone else

3. Are run by you with minimal effort and time investment.

Having a blog that relies solely on your writing and advertising from the big networks does not really cut it in the entrepreneur stakes. There is too much emphasis on you as the point of failure for the business. If you don’t write that week/day (whatever your posting schedule is) then the traffic, and therefore the dollars, quickly start to drop off. You can’t take a holiday because you are the business and the business is you. Sure, if you are using you blog to build up a profile that will allow you to sell 100,000 books then that is a different story, but just blogging for adsense is not going to make you rich (or even able to pay the rent in a bad month). It is possible to have a range of online assets working for you pretty much on autopilot. Membership sites, forums, online training, online stores. All of these can run themselves for periods of time without the owner even looking at them. This frees the owner to be able to work where they want, and when they want.

An online entrepreneur is always looking to grow, diversify and systemise their online business portfolio to generate more revenue streams with less time investment.

I think that there is a fourth key element to being an online entrepreneur, and that is the element of personality. Your personality has to shine through in what you do, to become a point of difference from the competition. This is important for offline entrepreneurs too. Take Richard Branson for example. Everything that the virgin company does has his personality all over it. Virgin is Branson and Branson is Virgin. No matter if its air travel, mobile phones or music, it all has the same carefree, fun attitude to it. Now have a look at some online entrepreneurs. Yaro over at Entrepreneurs Journey has done so well, in my opinion because his likeable, helpful and knowledgeable personality comes through in every post, newsletter and product that he delivers. The same for Darren over at problogger, or Steve Pavlina for that matter. The only thing different between your online business and that guy that reads your site and steals your ideas is that you have your personality.. Let is shine through and keep people coming back.

Till Next Time.

Steve Mills

Hi all, I am busy getting ready to go on holiday for a week and a half down at the beach with my family, so posting may be less frequent for the next 10 days or so as I get a bit of much needed R&R.

I have been thinking over the last few days how easy it is to fall back into bad habits after you make a change, even if it is a change that you really want to make. For instance, at the start of last year I made the commitment to myself to check email only once per day, in order to limit lost time from constantly checking the inbox, and the distraction of answering mail that really, when you think about it could have waited until the evening.

Email, while a fantastic tool, is a real flow killer. What I mean by that is the constant interruptions, the sense of “this is urgent, I must answer now” that most messages have breaks your attention away from the things that you really should be getting done. I used to find myself checking it perhaps 10 times a day, which is not as bad as some people that I know, but when I look at how I want to be living my life, feeling like “I have to check email” is one of the things that I don’t want to have constantly buzzing in the back of my head.

So the year started of well, I would check my email at 9am, and then just leave it for the rest of the day. I am not going to lie to you, at the start it was a painful experience. I thought I was missing out, I thought that life was going to pass me by. The big surprise is that it didn’t. The worlds turned without me pushing send receive every 10 minutes, and I found that I had at least an hour of productive time more during the day. The one thing that I did learn is that even if you make a minor discretion, it’s not worth throwing in the whole process and going back to your old ways.

Habit Creep, where the old habit slowly starts to worm its way back into your life is always going to happen. It can happen easily. First it’s a check in the morning, then one at lunch, and one at night. And that’s fine. But then its also one at morning tea, then at 11am and so on, until before you know you are back hitting send receiver like a rabid monkey. The important thing is that when you become conscious that you have fallen back into an old pattern to not mentally punish yourself or give up. Just start again and continue.

So If I beat the email demon you ask, then why has this been on you mind for the last few days?

Glad you asked, this has been on my mind because I have become aware of a new, more insidious terror that has crept into suck time from my day. The name of this demon is RSS.
I have got into the habit of checking and rechecking RSS feeds, even when I know that they probably haven’t been updated, even when it is distracting me from more important tasks. It has been my mission over the past few weeks to work on some simple tools to beat “Habit Creep”; the following is what has worked for me.

Top 5 ways to beat “Habit Creep”

1. Write down the permanent changes that you want to make and look at the list once per week. I know that this may sound really pedantic or a bit too much trouble for some, but it really does work. An ingrained habit is your automatic response to a situation, and it will take a lot of work to change it.

2. Only make a change if it is reasonable and increases productivity, not to make a point. If checking email 10 times a day is a real necessity then continue on. Only make a change if it will make a real improvement.

3. Cold Turkey doesn’t work for everyone. A conscious decision to slow down or reduce the amount of a habit can work, if you give yourself a daily reminder. Any change is a step in the right direction, and the only person that you need to prove anything to is yourself.

4. Don’t overly chastise yourself for indiscretion. As I said above, you haven’t failed if you make a slip up and go back to old ways. Just take it as a learning experience on the path to the lifestyle that you want and continue from where you left off.

5. Remind yourself of the positives, not the negatives. On your list of permanent changes, write next to each one what the benefit is. The benefit of not continually checking RSS would be at least an hour of extra time a day, time that could be used to get more done, or to knock off from work early and spend time doing what you love

Just saw an interesting service on the web at snopcap.com

It’s an easy to set up store widget with an integrated player. It is a widget that can sit anywhere on your blog or website, all you need to do is sign up for an account and put a few lines of code up.
To see one in action go over the blog Onesongperweek.com and have a look. There is one featured on the main page of the site, and at the end of every single entry on the blog. It keeps the storefront in the site visitors face at all time, but also provides a service in that site visitors can listen to the whole back catalogue of the artist quickly and easily if you “hook” them and they like what they hear.

The service also integrates into myspace and other social networking platforms. But what do they get for providing the service. 39 cents per track for single tracks, 20 cents per track if people buy a whole album for you. BUT, the service is free for the first 1000 tracks, and then after that if you are running a small label the cost is $100 per year, but you can contact them to work out a deal on the per track fees etc. The other thing is that it is a shared platform for retail as well, people running blogs and sites that promote the sort of music you make can add your tracks to their store, giving you virtual distribution for little effort.

The only other problem for myself and those that I personally know is that the service is only available to artists and labels in the US. I could see myself using this for my own work, and that of the label that I am in the process of setting up. The way that the widget is set up is that you can even host songs from bands that you know, and cross promote each others work on your site.

The address is www.snocap.com , well worth checking out. In fact, I am going to write to them today and see how long till Australian residents can set up an account.