My 4 Hour Workweek

There’s a lot that can go wrong when you’re trying to start a business – and it doesn’t matter if you own Subway franchise, a multi-million dollar consulting business, or a collection of niche websites that aim to earn you money passively.  Businesses large and small, simple and complex, all suffer from the same core problems with varying magnitudes.

To cover these issues (as I see them), I’ve decided to write a short series: The 7 Deadly Sins of Entrepreneurship.  This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of “sins” nor are they issues that ever entrepreneur will face.  Ideally, if you’re doing everything 100% perfectly (which no one does), you won’t experience any of these.  Today, I’ll start with the first one:  Impatience.

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We’re all pretty familiar with website hosting services and the affiliate programs that go along with them.  After all, if you’re going to make money online, you probably need to buy a hosting account.  Their affiliate commissions are usually pretty lucrative ($50+ per sale!), which is why you’ll see affiliate links and banners for hosting services on most blogs.  Hostgator and BlueHost are two of the more common ones.

I don’t heavily promote hosting at all – I have a couple links on my resources page, but beyond that, I’m not really working hard for hosting affiliate commissions.  Because I suspect many of you promote hosting either actively or passively (through banners, etc.), I thought I’d bring this finding to your attention, specifically if you promote Hostgator.

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The first month of 2011 is in the books, and winter is here in Chicago.  The blizzard this week wreaked havoc on nearby businesses, but fortunately the internet world is somewhat immune to weather conditions.

I have mixed feelings about January.  It was definitely a month of change – as I detailed in my 2011 goals, I changed jobs (and careers) this past month.  As is usually the case, I didn’t spend enough time (or as much time as I wanted) on my internet business(es).  My results were still positive, but growth has been slower than I’d like.

Anyway, I’ll let you read about it and decide.

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With my January income report coming up later this week, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about something I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly discussed here before: reinvesting.  You often hear about “reinvesting” as it applies to large corporations.  For example, XYZ Manufacturing Inc. had a profit of $4 million in 2010 – instead of paying it out to its owners, the company reinvested the money by putting it toward additional research and development, to hopefully bring greater earnings in the future.

The same concept applies to us too – we can take our earnings, however large or small, and put it toward things that can help us expand our income potential.

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I read a statistic that showed a relatively high percentage of people give up on their New Year’s resolutions within the first few weeks of January (sorry, no reference link for that), so I thought to myself, “why not wait until a few weeks into January to even create my New Year’s resolutions and goals?”

In all seriousness, I just haven’t had the time to sit down and think about them, and I really believe this isn’t something a person should take lightly.  If you’re committed to reaching your goals throughout the year, you need to be willing to put in the initial time to create high quality goals – that is, goals that actually motivate you to act and achieve them.

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Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Brooke Ferguson from BusinessBackpacker.com.  For those who aren’t familiar with Brooke and her work, she leads a pretty fascinating lifestyle.  In fact, I would say she lives and breathes lifestyle design, and seems to do an excellent job teaching others how to do the same.

You hear a lot about people preaching “lifestyle design,” but Brooke actually demonstrates it.  She was even featured on the Discovery Channel (the show aired this past December), which I thought was really cool.  After coming across her blog and reading about how she travels the world, basically living out her innermost passions, I knew she was someone who I had to interview for My4HWW.

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For those of you who are on the list and have been receiving my e-mails, you know that Newbie Niche Site Month has come to an end.  I know there were probably a lot of you who got the e-mail and went to register a particular domain, only to find that someone had beaten you to it.  Unfortunately, that’s how it goes!

Hopefully even if you weren’t able to grab any of the domains, you got a little bit of insight into exactly what micro-niche, exact keyword domains look like, and perhaps they inspired you to go out and find your own.  Anyway, I wanted to recap exactly what Newbie Niche Site Month consisted of for those who didn’t receive the e-mails (and yes, I’ll list out all of the domains I sent out).

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It’s been more than two months since my last niche side duel update, so many of you are probably wondering if I’m even still working on this site.  The truth is, I hadn’t for awhile, but I have recently started making some changes.  There were a lot of things that had kind of demotivated me, but one of the main ones was a domain change that put me off of Google’s radar for awhile.

The good thing is, I got back on Google’s radar, and in a big way.  This got my motivation back up and I made some changes to the site that I think will make a difference in my earnings.  This short story doesn’t have a very happy ending though, at least for the time being, so you’ll have to keep reading to see what happened.

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