I’m sure the following idea is something a lot of you guys will recognize in yourself or what you see in others that are interested in making money online. “I want to make money online so I could barely have to work and make tons of money.” “I would have so much free time to do anything!” While that might be true for a few of us, especially for a short time, for me and Becker we truly do enjoy our work. Work isn’t something to be avoided, it should be pursued. While on your first year of success you might want to do like 2 buddies of mine (that I met while traveling) who decided to go world traveling for a year (aka 30+ countries within 12 months) eventually… You did it. They currently both settled in some foreign country and one of them I know for sure is concentrating on work again now that he has a more normal lifestyle. The freedom from IM and being an entrepreneur comes from being able to work when you want on what you want. I know some of you will think this is ridiculous but making $10,000+ a month of money without effort does not lead to automatic happiness, as I was able to observe from my surroundings. You get bored. No new things to be proud of. No challenge.
After reading a few months ago an AMAZING book called The Millionaire Fastlane, I have been debating where I want to use my current earnings + time. I want to focus on long term projects. By the way that book is a REALLY good read and I honestly would recommend it to anyone whether you want to be a millionaire or not. It just gives you a proper mindset to follow.
Personally I do not think my life would change much whether I made millions per month or not, it’s an indirect goal. With $4,000-$5,000 a month with minimal maintenance effort, I already can travel anywhere in the world for any length of time, go out with my friends when I want and buy organic food or any electronic gadget I might want. At this point I want to contribute to something that I will learn a lot from and be proud. All my work recently has been on the link back (Becker has a lot of great ideas that we want to implement) and especially a local iPhone app that will be an interesting blend of local/online advertising as far as I am concerned in that project.
How motivation can transform someone
This app is done with my neighbor who is a real hustler (aka does not give up) and has gone from a driving instructor to an extremely hard working person. For the past week as the app is about to launch, he has been driving around town from 8am to 8pm pitching our app to big business owners and then debriefing with me from 8pm to midnight and exchanging ideas on promotions, pitching ideas, seo traffic, ppc campaigns etc. The app really came from his vision and you can see how now that he is working towards this goal he is one of the most determined person I’ve ever met. I’m really happy he brought me on board. Sadly, due to the importance of being able to meet face to face this project limits my ability to go world traveling during the cold Canadian winter but I’m really excited at all the learning this project will give me. I’ll be doing a bit of SEO for it but it is especially going to teach me a lot about PPC and local marketing. I’ve also been learning a lot about video editing, graphic designing and making a facebook fanpage with a custom landing page that has s video to hopefully convert more people. It’s been time consuming but I have not really been tracking the time ;). Like in this picture where I finally finished rolling up posters at 6am, I’m dead tired. They will be for promoting our app around town. Will be interesting to see if this is effective vs online advertising which is starting… today! I’ll do another post soon with some updates on what I’ve more specifically been doing recently (PPC, fanpages, sales letters, a few adsense sites, working on conversions etc.)
Find something that motivates you
Anyway, what I wanted to point out in this post is the importance of finding something that motivates you if you want to succeed. The reason I wanted an online business was to be my own boss and ESPECIALLY wake up at noon+ every single day. I HATED waking up at 7-8am for school or the day job. I actually enjoyed school. Work was also great. When I was not falling asleep and I could keep my eyes open in front of the screen. I figured if I do not enjoy that now then when I’m in my 30s I will be a grumpy older man. My mom used to tell me “oh you will see Alex, you will get used to it.” Uh no… more like I will be used to feeling tired & miserable…
My coworker on the iPhone app was tired of having a job with poor pay and not much of a future and really is working hard towards being a millionaire now. Who knows if he will succeed, but he is clearly motivated. I’m not sure what your goals are, but find them and make sure to use them as leverage to stay focused for many months/years. Some people would consider it to be “kinda cool” or “a fun thing” to succeed online and really, I think you need a much more focused approach and goal if you want to reach success.
You might as well quit now if that is the extent of your motivation.
As I explained in my previous post on how to succeed online, you really can’t simply copy others even if there are a lot of good courses out there to put you on the right track. You must figure your path for yourself. If you quit well… In my opinion you simply did not believe in your goals enough to stay focused.
Happy holidays to everyone!
this is exactly my motivation: working on my own terms + getting payed based on value, not based on time.
good post as always 😉
Hey Alex love the post 🙂
“”
I figured if I do not enjoy that now then when I’m in my 30s I will be a grumpy older man. My mom used to tell me “oh you will see Alex, you will get used to it.” Uh no… more like I will be used to feeling tired & miserable…
“””
I 2nd that for life.
I mean common. If we are fucking honest:
All the people I look around, to some extent are exactly those grumpy people who worked their asses off in shit conditions and now have the standard life. For me it is a little bit like in a cynical movie ( i live in upper class germany, hi : D )
Also. I laugh at all the guys driving their Porsche Cayenne or Q7 or whatever in my neighbourhood. I DO NOT even have to look who is in there, I guess it’s a grumpy to a big degree chode looking man over 60 who worked his ass off his whole life and now drives a porsche cayenne ( and half of them is owned by the bussines they work in anyways I bet ).
Well, of course shit is not that black and white – I recently looked through the window of an aston martin or Audi R8 and the guy was laughing at me and looked like he was under 60, maybe 51 <—- total pimp – but it's black and white enough for me to say, fuck conformity, let's do sth more epic
cheers
lol i am not trying to be spamming BLs for my site xD
Didn’t see my name was how to be happy for yourself xD you can change it to skyyisthelimit or gayassgerman dude or whatever you like
oh and @my 1st post
…i guess its an old grumpy man….
and then i look at the car, and it always is. i always guess right, with the 60 year old chode sitting in the porsche cayenne driving nextto me, srry should read my posts before i post, just wanted to make this clear!
I’m not a big fan of cars to the point that unless I was a millionaire I would not spend more then hmm $30-40,000 for a car but ya I really did not want to grow older accepting what I do as a “life”. It’s much more fun and unpredictable what happens currently. New projects every now and then, new things I am forced to learn… Sure, I might get all my sites banned and stop making money but that’s nothing different from getting fired for no reason. I also have a few different sources of income now :).
Yep the largest being cakefarts.com you dirty man you!
Yep
I honestly think why I am successful online is because my first sites (college flirt) was a huge passion of mine.
All my other sites flopped because there was zero motivation besides making a passive income, but CF was my biggest hobby.
I learned an insane amount just like you are with this iphone app =)
One thing I think everyone should keep in mind: Whether you read the LB, smart passive income, viper chill etc.. While everyone one of us has a passive income, do you see any of actually being passive?
Pat flynn flys around the country doing webinar
Glenn allsop is constantly cooking something new and amazing up
I am constantly trying to get my dog to stop peeing on the floor
Alex is making and iphone app and starting a very Unpassive business, that he loves
Very few people that are passive about life achieve a passive income =)
Yup.. It’s definitely not passive for now. If it works out, it will in a few years as we can hire people to replace some of the things I do. I guess the same thing that happened in IM but later on since the tasks are not just write articles/submit articles.
Becker, you mentioned here Pat Flynn, and Glenn Allsop.
What other IM blogs do you read? I just checked them both out, and they’re honest people, and I love their content (just as much as I love yours). I’d love to hear about others as well.
I read both of those (more for advice on blogging than SEO)
I also read chad hamzehs blog consistently. Its not as big as those two, but it is all just pure gold
The sad thing is that many of the best minds online cannot blog well, or have no interest in it. Finding a person who is a great blogger and IMer is very rare
Oh I should have mentioned something really important, my first and biggest success in terms of websites was a health website that became somewhat of an authority site in my first year. When I started I enjoyed a lot learning about health so writting for that site was less of a chore. I would read books on the subject and then write out articles related to keywords I could rank for. I did not have an EMD for it. The website made no money for 6 months unlike the other ones that for whatever reason ranked way faster buttttt after 6 months, that website blew the others out of the water. It started making $20/day.. up to $80 at it’s peak. I would of never written so much for that website if it was not for my interest in the subject.. I probably would not have reached $20+/day on that site because the only reason I did was that I kept publishing stuff and making articles for backlinks was quite easy for me on that subject.
I lost a lot of interest in it over the past 6 months, partly why my adsense income has decreased I guess but maybe I can get back into it in the future. Nowadays I’m more interested in other things such as IM and Muay Thay.
Quality material again Alex.
Thanks 🙂
@alex, awesome post, thanks. definitely got me more motivated.
@becker, yo blogblueprint disappeared and their list is advertising “autotrafficbuddy”, is that same shit? got a 10-30k/month search pool with a $30 affiliate conversion that’s almost ready to go. only competition is around 98 total backlinks but that’s for the whole site and im targeting pages.
@both, how much of a difference do overall backlinks make vs. backlinking directly to a page?
no
http://www.seoblueprint.org/blogblueprint/
and as for your questions I am sure there is some relevance, but the saying has always been that google ranks pages, not sites
Awesome 😉
As for the backlinks question, basically what Becker said. I try to spread it out a bit but really, if you backlink a lot an inner page it will most likely rise up even if the domain barely has links.
ty brobro i remember that guys face. hes so soft and humble, like a 4th grade teacher
Excellent book. I’m gonna read it again! I’m working on a passion project right now…do you recommend focusing on that or building up multiple sites?
My plan is to start making some money first and then repeat what works and disregard what isn’t.
Work on both at the same time, it’s what worked for me. You want to have multiple things going on.. Always
Sounds good! Cheers
there is some really nice content on this site.
I want to create some authority blogs using the strategies on this site.
I also want to learn how to flipp websites!
k. bout to get all up on that blogblueprint, but first. how fast is “too fast” to build backlinks? i have 5 particular pages that im gonna rank first, based on alexa it shouldn’t be hard at all (biggest competition for all 5 is 94 total links to the site). is 100 links in 5 days to a single page going to get me noticed or am i being unnecessarily paranoid?
ive already been banned for adwords once for no reason (seriously they were just like fuck you…then i called and they were like “oh haha sorry yah silly google let us fix that”). i dont wanna get this site banner outta nowhere. it’s been up for a couple of months (3-5, not sure) but i’ve only linked like 3-5. im an adwords whore and this is my first run @ seo so i wanna make it nice n shiny you know?
BB naturally limits you to 20 links a day so if you are only using that, it’s definitely not too much by most standards. It’s really hard to 100% “play it safe” with Google currently unless you are a big brand. but ya if you get a penalty because of the 20 BB links a day it’s not because they were built too fast but probably something else.
tytyty. you guys are the shit.
and millionaire fastlane is sex, thanks. i totally want to recommend books, but the only good ones i know that i found for myself are outliers by malcom gladwell & the confident leader by larina case. outliers is an under-the-hood look at success via oddities (it’s an eyebrow raiser) and the confident leader is a straight up productivity+independent leadership handbook.
ty 1 more time
NO YOUR SEX….i think….
=)
Outliers is on my kindle to read next :D. Well.. next.. the thign with a kindle is I have like 5 books I want to read on it 😛
Sweet article. Reminded me of when I was young telling my parents who were tired from work: “How hard can it be? You just show up and stay put till you leave.” Made sense, till it was me who had to show up…haha.
how do you guys feel about adsense alternatives for informational websites?
such as adbrite?
Try it out, when I try alternatives they never make more money then adsense. However, on one of my websites I was able to put infolinks and my adsense revenue did not seem affected. Infolinks added a few more $’s a day for that site, which was a good increase considering adsense is $5-10 by itself.
Ya I wish I could use adsense I got banned. So my only option for informational sites is adsense alternatives.
Personally, freedom is the reason I’m working. I want to be able to work from anywhere, with little effort and time (after the initial grind to get business off the ground of course).
I’ve got a success story to share in this regard, as I’m finally making progress in this regard!
http://www.freedombusinessblog.com/chris_success_story
Lots of value in it for anyone that has dreams of living the passive income life 🙂
Nice 🙂 Thanks for sharing.
Great post. I’d like to make money online so I can have more time to spend with my family, friends, and to travel. I think if I make a good amount I’ll have more time for them and it will make us all a bit happier.
No more stresses of making money and more time concentrating on what makes us happy in life.
So I am going to continue to work towards that goal.