Archive for August, 2007
If you are new to Create Business Growth, we close out each week with our Who Said That?, where we give some link love to other blogs and regular websites that we feel you may find interesting.
Let’s get started!
If You Only Read One Thing Today- This is THE ONE
Did you ever wonder how Timothy Ferriss, a virtual unknown and first time author became a New York Times Best Selling author? After doing a great deal of research, he chose BLOGGING as his method of creating enough buzz to sell his book. He did NO offline marketing whatsoever. Get ready to change your entire perspective on blogging with Ferriss’s post How Does a Bestseller Happen? A Case Study in Hitting #1 on the New York Times
The Not-To-Do List: 9 Habits to Stop Now
I’ve been blogging almost non-stop this week about things that Tim Ferriss says TO do in his book the 4 Hour Work Week. On his blog, Ferriss details 9 Habits to Stop Now if you want to be successful and enjoy your life in the process. My favorite, ‘Do not over-communicate with low-profit, high-maintenance customers.’
39 Steps To Create Your Own Online Product
George Manty of the blog Can I Make Money Online is on a quest to make his entire living via the internet and has decided to reveal everything he is doing to make money online. His post, 39 Steps to Create Your Own Online Product is thought-provoking, overwhelming, and exciting all at the same time. Even if you don’t do all 39 steps, this post is sure to get your entrepreneurial juices flowing.
Are You Building a Business, or Just Chasing the Competition?
Diane Aull of Search Engine Guide asks Are You Building a Business, or Just Chasing the Competition? Diane posted this back in April, but Fred liked the post so much that he recommended it for today’s Who Said That. How much of what you’re doing with your business or your blog comes from the heart, and how much is trying to stack up to the competition? Diane describes how chasing the competition is expensive, unproductive, and ineffective. Instead, she recommends focusing on making your business (website/blog/etc.) the best it can be and says ‘you just may be surprised one day soon to find you’ve got competitors focused on catching up to you.’
12 SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make
Even if you think you don’t care about SEO, you’ll want to read this. These are not recommendations on how to stuff your blog posts with keywords, but very practical tips that live up to the post’s title 12 SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make. After reading this, I can see that I’ve got some work to do!
**who**
August 31 2007 | Who Said That? | 4 Comments »
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea. Francis Bacon
We do Quote of the Day seven days a week 365 days a year.
However, Create Business Growth is primarily a Monday through Friday
blog and our regular posts are usually available before noon EST.
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Have you seen Very Affordable Website.com?
August 31 2007 | Daily Quote | No Comments »
He’s beaten the odds on many fronts-from battling cancer to establishing a profitable freelance writing career- both of which are no small feat.
Now Chris Bibey, author of 2 books and the blog ChrisBlogging.com shares the details of how he built his profitable freelancing career on his daily blog, which offers tips, tricks, and strategy for earning a full-time income through writing, blogging and internet marketing.
After graduating from college with a journalism degree, despite battling a completely unexpected and persistent cancer in his thyroid throughout his entire college career, Chris took the path of many aspiring writers- a completely unrelated job in sales and marketing.
But his encounter with cancer had taught him a valuable lesson that many of us don’t learn until far too late. He felt completely unfulfilled in his job and didn’t feel he was getting paid what he was worth. And while most of the population of the world feels this same way yet continues to drone one, Chris knew that life was too short to waste time doing anything he didn’t enjoy. In response, he quit his job and set out to pursue what he loved writing.
It was a good thing that I got sick. Now I see life with a different perspective. I don’t want to put myself through the day to day stuff that I don’t like. A lot of people think working at a job you don’t like is just a part of life that you have to deal with, but it doesn’t have to be.
During his first month as a freelancer, he made $53 by doing a horrible freelance writing job that he found through FreelanceWriting.com. Discouraged but not beaten, Chris continued to scour the freelance writing job boards and the next month cleared $850.
That second month I did a job for a real estate company in FL who needed a lot of work- it made me realize that there WAS work out there and that I could make a substantial amount.
In the third month, he brought in $2287 and that figure continued to rise. Now Chris is quite comfortable and doesn’t regret leaving corporate America one bit.
Could You Do It?
Could you jump ship from your current job- whether it be working for someone else, or abandoning your own business that you no longer love to pursue your dreams? The idea can seem scary, but as Chris’s story proves, it can be done. Here’s how he did it.
- Jump in with both feet. You can have some success trying to start a business part time, but it’s not as effective as if you commit yourself to it entirely and have no other option but to succeed.
- Before leaving his job, he saved enough money to get by for 4-5 months
- If you begin earning more than you thought faster than you thought, keep that money around in savings just in case
- Figure out exactly how much money you’ll need each month to get by
- Work on securing steady, regular clients that bring in enough to pay the bills. This way, no matter what, you’ll get by. Make sure you have enough time left over after doing this work to make additional income
- Venture out and try new things to bring in the extra cash. Never tone down the marketing side of things even when you’re comfortable
- Keep regular clients engaged by connecting frequently by email, IM, or phone-even if you don’t have a current project on your plate
- Pitch ideas to current and past clients rather than waiting for them to come to you with projects
Whether your freelance writing or starting a business selling goods, these tips are universal.
Becoming a Published Author
In the midst of all this, Chris also wrote two books. Not only was this a personal success, but also greatly increases his reputation as an expert on his subject matter and as a writer. His first was about West Virginia Football and more for fun.
His second book titled, Open Your Heart With Basketball: Mastering Life Through Love of the Game has cover quotes by Regis Philbin and Dick Vital, and a forward written by University of Arizona men’s coach Lute Olson.
Although it is based largely around the game of basketball, it also teaches life lessons at the same time. To give some details, Open your Heart with Basketball touches largely on how my life and basketball career were affected when I was diagnosed with cancer. As you can imagine, the lessons taught in the book can help you succeed in life, sports, and of course, business.
It was no accident that his book now sits on the shelves of Barnes and Noble backed by star-studded cover quotes and forwards. Chris went about the publishing of his book with the same persistence the cancer had shown when challenging his thyroid. Rejected by numerous publishers as can be expected by any new author, Chris persisted and landed a publishing contract and an advance with Dreamtime Publishing in Miami.
The publishing company helped to get the book in the hands of several celebrities such as Regis. Then Chris set to work, personally contacting big names on his own list to write the forward.
When I tried to reach Lute Olsen, I talked to the secretary and lots of other people and eventually got through. I’ve talked with Dick Vital on the phone a few times. You can make a lot of friends and meet a lot of people with your writing career.
Chris’s blog offers daily insight about the steps he has taken to achieve success. His approach to helping others through transparency of his daily activities, successes, and setbacks make this blog an interesting read for any entrepreneur or any one dreaming of becoming one.
Thank you Chris for this inspiring story!
Each month, we feature someone in a NON-sponsored interview like you just read above. You can learn more about Interview Me by reading this page. If you would like to recommend someone (including yourself) to be featured, please e-mail Christine [at] Create Business Growth [dot] com and tell us the WHY behind your recommendation.
August 30 2007 | Interviews | 1 Comment »
The man who has no imagination has no wings. Muhammad Ali
We do Quote of the Day seven days a week 365 days a year.
However, Create Business Growth is primarily a Monday through Friday
blog and our regular posts are usually available before noon EST.
If you are around on the weekend, please enjoy surfing our blog or
reading our Who Said That? archives. If this is your very first
visit or you have not subscribed to RSS, you can subscribe now.
If you need help with RSS, check out this tutorial.
Have you seen Very Affordable Website.com?
August 30 2007 | Daily Quote | No Comments »
Have I mentioned that I am now a huge fan of Timothy Ferris, author of the 4-Hour Work Week? You may have guessed as much, considering that 2 of my last 3 posts were focused on my new favorite book that I believe every entrepreneur, freelancer, dreamer, risk-taker, and free-thinker should own.
When I picked up this book in the bookstore, I opened it up to someplace in the middle, which happened to be chapter 9, (Income Autopilot I) and began the usual skim. I thought I might pick up a piece or two of useful information and then perhaps put it down and move on to skim another book.
I stood frozen in the isle of Barnes and Noble engulfed in what I was reading. At some point I realized that needed to find a comfortable chair and wandered through the shelves toward one end of the store relying only on peripheral vision to get to the destination. It was this chapter that drove me straight to the cash register to purchase it.
One part in particular really stood out to me, and that was a small section called How to Become a Top Expert in 4 Weeks. Being in the business of promoting people and businesses through press releases and internet marketing, the information in this chapter was incredible. And it can be for you too if you’re goal is to gain exposure and make money.
You Can be an Expert
Ferriss says there’s a big difference between being an expert and being perceived as one. I couldn’t agree more. It doesn’t matter if you’re an expert and no one knows it and it doesn’t matter if you are the top expert in your industry or not if the media is coming to you for expert advice. If you know more than most people about a particular niche, you can be an expert.
Ferriss’s Advice on How to Become an Expert in 4 Weeks
I don’t want to deter anyone from buying this book because I don’t want Ferriss to lose out on any of his much deserved royalties. Though I’m recapping his bullet points here, there is much more to gain from the book itself including resources, more tips, and tricks to accomplish these tasks to becoming an expert in 4 weeks.
- Join 2 or 3 related trade organizations
- Read 3 top selling books on your topic
- Give one free 3 hour seminar at the closest well-known university
- Give 2 free seminars at branches of two well-known big companies such as AT&T or IBM
- Offer to write 1 or 2 articles for trade organizations
- Join a service that journalists use to find experts to quote for articles
Share Your Opinion!
What do you think of Ferriss’s strategy? Can you see yourself doing this? If not, why? What was your favorite part of the 4-Hour Workweek? If you own this book, what convinced you to buy it?
August 29 2007 | Business Building and Business Networking | 23 Comments »
Many readers have expressed interest in the online travel business opportunity I mentioned in an earlier post titled, “An Online Business Opportunity that Has Really Caught My Interest“. It is an exciting business model that is almost completely fool proof, lucrative, and can be managed in your spare time. Don’t get me wrong, you will need to put some effort into this, but the payout can be extraordinary.
David has spent a great deal of time researching the heck out of this company and running the numbers and is 100% on board. I still don’t know all that there is to know- only that I trust him and really believe in this business model.
In order to answer questions about this business opportunity, David has arranged for special guest Todd Strand to host a free no hype, no pressure webinar next Wednesday at 9 EST. You learn more about what will be covered in the webinar here: https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/641951789
You have nothing to lose. Who knows? You may learn something new!
August 29 2007 | Announcements | No Comments »
Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed. Joseph Addison
We do Quote of the Day seven days a week 365 days a year.
However, Create Business Growth is primarily a Monday through Friday
blog and our regular posts are usually available before noon EST.
If you are around on the weekend, please enjoy surfing our blog or
reading our Who Said That? archives. If this is your very first
visit or you have not subscribed to RSS, you can subscribe now.
If you need help with RSS, check out this tutorial.
Have you seen Very Affordable Website.com?
August 29 2007 | Daily Quote | No Comments »
I’m officially deeming this week Tim Ferriss week. Tim Ferriss is my new hero and the author of The 4 Hour Work Week. The current chapters that I’m slowly devouring are about outsourcing with Virtual Assistants.
If you’re thinking boring, hold on to your hats
I’ve read about outsourcing¦ but never in the way that Tim Ferriss and his guest writer AJ Jacobs, editor-at-large at Esquire magazine, talk about how they use them.
It was during the part ‘My Outsourced Life’ by AJ Jacobs that begins on page 113 that I got up from my comfy reading position, grabbed a pen and started underlining. This part actually had me laughing out loud and was too important to be forgotten. I thought about including some of my favorite quotes from this part, but I think you need to read the whole 5 page story for it to really have an impact. You can read the entire excerpt on Ferriss’s website under Outsourcing Life.
The Mastermind Behind Your Life
In this Automation portion of the book, Ferriss is talks about leveraging the power of Virtual Assistants to handle tasks that you don’t really NEED to do. Surprisingly, this could be just about everything. Think about it… with the right Virtual Assistants, you could literally be a master puppeteer in the play of your own life as you spend your time doing only what is truly most profitable and most valuable to you.
At first I thought there wasn’t much I could outsource. But the more I read and the more I thought about it, the more I realized I could outsource a heck of a lot of tasks that would make my life a LOT more enjoyable and give me the time to put more ideas into action – the ideas I always think that I don’t have time to breathe life into.
I realized that I could outsource the tasks to a Virtual Assistant like:
- Finding people to interview
- Scheduling interviews
- Research for articles and press releases
- Finding supporting images for web content and articles
- The writing of the book I’ve been saying I was going to write for the last 10 years
- Background research on a new business idea
- Dealing with things that stress me out beyond belief like the traffic ticket I have to pay and taxes
- Generating sales leads
- Sending out samples and info to prospects
- Much more that I haven’t yet realized yet
What Could You Outsource?
Suppose that you could ONLY spend 2 hours per week actually touching your work. What things that you do are so critical that only you can do them? What did you do all day yesterday that someone else could have done for you if you absolutely could not work that day but had to finish everything you had committed to?
Replacing yourself is a strange thought. I think we resist the idea because it is a blow to our pride. But is it really? What if you could spend more time doing what you are brilliant at and letting other people handle the details? What could you accomplish?
Share Your Experience!
Do you outsource some of your tasks that you once handled yourself? What could you outsource if push came to shove and you could only spend 2 hours per week actually touching your work? What’s holding you back from outsourcing?
August 28 2007 | Time Management | 8 Comments »
Hello Readers,
Instead of posting a quote today, I’m requesting that you send me some of your favorites.
David [at] Create Business Growth [dot] com
I’ll include your name, where you are from and a weblink if you will send all that along with your quote.
Cheers,
David
August 28 2007 | Daily Quote | No Comments »
I’ve been reading the 4 Hour Work Week- Wow. If you haven’t purchased this book, I would highly recommend doing so. This book really is unlike any other that I have ever read. Ferriss’s blunt, unconventional, down to earth, tell-all style is refreshing to say the least and life altering if you try even one of his suggestions.
Usually, I’ll tear through a book this size is a day or so, but not this one. I really have to stop and think about what he’s saying. I’m almost afraid that if I read it too quickly and absorb too much too fast, that I’ll be so unsatisfied with my current work-life balance that it will be too much to bear. That’s how good it is. I love it.
So how do you find 2-10 extra hours per week?
Stop obsessively checking email!
I am so guilty of this and would venture to say that my email habits prior to reading this book were costing me about 10 hours per week in completely wasted time.
Are You Checking Email Just to Feel Important?
The first point I’d like to talk about that has already made a huge impact on not only my work, but also my stress level and my life, is managing email. Ferriss says that for the last 4 years, he has only checked his email once per week on Mondays-“ that’s it!!
Though many of us believe that our businesses and our lives would fall apart if we weren’t to tend to our email constantly, Ferriss says that this simply isn’t true. In fact, he says that his business became more profitable once he removed himself as a bottleneck!
He calls email an enormous time waster a task that we engage in that keeps us busy but that often is completely unproductive.
And here’s where it really gets uncomfortably true…
He basically says that those of us (including his former self) who constantly engage in time-wasting unproductive activities for the sake of keeping busy are doing this to gain some sense of false importance. Ouch. But so true.
He doesn’t recommend that you go from serial email checker to once per week right away. Instead, he recommends shutting down email and checking it once at noon and once again at 4:00.
Sounds easy enough, right? Wrong!
David read this book while he was on vacation a month ago and limiting email checking was his first action toward a 4 hour work week. David and I are both self-proclaimed email addicts. Before reading the 4 Hour Work Week, we were serial email checkers and instant responders.
This was the first action that both of us attempted to implement and promptly failed. We’re getting better though and constantly trying new to eliminate the unnecessary burden of email that is holding back our lives for no good reason. There were several problems that sucked us right back in to being email addicts:
Pretend problem #1
The first problem was the fear of missing something. After shutting down Outlook for several hours at a time, I realized that I wasn’t missing anything critical. But for some reason, I started shutting it down less and less, until it was open all the time once again.
Pretend problem #2
Then a technical problem: how do you SEND an email to someone without opening your email and getting caught up in your inbox? David’s solution was to open a separate email account for sending emails only. My solution will be to continue sending all of my email to Outlook, setting email to delete from my web based email upon delivery to Outlook, and sending email only through web mail. This way, even if someone replies to me, I won’t see it until I check Outlook at my predetermined times.
How Email Can Destroy Productivity
This weekend I shut down Outlook all day Saturday and checked it once on Sunday. When I did open it, 200+ emails poured in, 63 of which landed in my inbox and the rest in junk. Handling those emails took me about 25 minutes. However, if I had responded to them as they rolled in, they would have cost me so much more time it is almost inconceivable.
Though each email may only take seconds or a minute to deal with, the cost of stopping what you are doing, losing focus, allowing stress into your life, and changing your train of thought to reply can set you back an immeasurable amount of time and cause a project you’re working on to take multiple times longer than it needs to.
Share Your Experience!
Are you an email addict? Have you overcome an email addiction? If so, how has it changed your life? Have you read The 4 Hour Work Week?
August 27 2007 | Time Management | 22 Comments »
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