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So after the layoffs were completed at all of our toolboxes were the building and we had all gone home, we of course lost touch with over 95% of our fellow employees from that company. I had no idea what was going to happen and my wife and I began spending away our savings as my unemployment benefits were only $1400 a month, and $400 of that went to my ex-wife for child support. I only knew one thing, and that was I was never going back to working for another company again (a pretty scary thing to tell yourself be easy just never know when you need a job). But this was the pressure I put on myself.

I had been reading on the Internet about a new possible way of making money -- online income. I had no idea how it all worked, and I did not even know about programs such as Adsense or Chitika etc., were you got paid just to have people visit your website’s and click on advertising once in a while. I only knew about affiliate marketing, and I was determined to spend as much time as possible working on his new dream. I went to all of the typical places online, such as forums, blogs (which I didn’t have a clue what they were), and websites the promised the freedom of an online income. I contacted some of the gurus in the business and was pumped up about the possibilities, and I began working 16 hour days researching, learning basic HTML coding, building my first rudimentary website which was about golfing. I wasn’t making a cent, but I wasn’t frustrated either because I was seeing and hearing about other affiliate marketers who are making a great living doing it. Literally when I started I didn’t know how to do much more than check my e-mail and browse the Internet. This was about the summer of 2003 I believe when this all started.

I was on unemployment benefits and decided to take a course on running your own business, and of course the students in my class had typical business models, and my model was the only one that wasn’t online venture. I knew that I only had one year in which to get things off the ground and prove to myself, and my wife, that this could be a reality for us.

By the end of the first six months I had managed to get enough traffic using PPC and organic search results to make about $25 a day. This took me having over 20 different domains and over 500 pages of content on the Internet. The 16 hour days were still going on eight months into my layoff -- this is how determined I was to make a go of it. Thank God I don’t have to do those hours anymore.

I soon learned about all of the different SEO techniques that were out there -- some of them white hat, gray hat, and black hat schemes. I learned about different ways of making money online, such as creating your own digital products (which is still a huge moneymaker for people who buckle down and learn that trade), having contextual advertising on your sites, and having affiliate links on your site, an e-mail marketing. I had to make a decision on which method of income I was going to go after, because competition is stiff and you have to make a choice when you’re first getting going. I chose to go with what I thought was the simplest way and that least hassle over the long run -- contextual advertising. Don’t get me wrong, I delved into affiliate marketing with much frustration, which you can read about here, but it always led me back to the power of residual income that comes from contextual advertising.

One of the most important factors was the support of my wife because she believed in me and she believed in the possibilities of an online income model, yet I could tell I had ex-coworkers, friends, and family who secretly thought I was just dreaming -- still, to this day some of these people think our businesses days are numbered and it’s really too good to be true. You’re regardless of any of the naysayers online or in my own life, I was determined to make this dream a reality.

Not my laptop........but my Adsense report.

During this time which was extremely exciting because I was seeing small success and slow growth over the months, I was telling anybody who would listen about this opportunity and how they could also work from home using nothing more than an Internet connection and a desktop computer or laptop computer, in which I am using right now to do this post.

Not to stray too much for the topic but I am not actually typing this, I am using Dragon Naturally Speaking software and talking into a headset. This entire post will take about 15 or 20 minutes of me dictating into this Wordpress editing box. I encourage all serious writers and bloggers to consider the DNS software because it is deadly accurate now. And this entire post, and the post before which is going to add up to about 4000 words or so, I have only made five different directions -- this is how accurate it is now.

Many of these people (friends, family, ex-coworkers, strangers, etc.) I tried to help and convince actually did try to get started and help them build their first blog using WordPress, or Blogspot. In almost every instance they just didn’t have the time, or the passion to really make a go of it. Perhaps they really didn’t like writing and they didn’t like working on computer as much of someone like myself. As the years have progressed, and I am now in the 60 year of this journey, many of these people are surprised at how much my wife and I take home and net income from the Internet alone. About four months of the year my wife and I make three times what our total income was from past two jobs when we were for other people. The other eight months we make double what we made from our total income when we worked “for the man”.

But, no matter how good he gets, or how scary it gets in the future (because we don’t assume it will always be this good), we intend to stick vigilantly to the plan and stick to the course going forward. Even if this means selling our house, our motorhome, stop traveling, stop spending money like water, and stop driving a fairly expensive car -- we intend to work at home even if that home is a trailer. The freedom is that important to us, and the stress of self-employment and standing on my own is much less stress than working for company that manipulates you, lies to you, and lays you off whenever they feel like it. I know I still sound bitter, and perhaps I am a little bit bitter regarding the past experiences I have had being a worker bee, but I guess that’s my little mind game an issue that must be tackled over time.

In some ways I look back on the anger I had towards my employer and I feel bad about the distraction, the noise, and the drama I created in the workplace. Some of these coworkers I had actually enjoy their work and did expect their employer to provide them with cradle-to-grave security. They did showed up for work on time, did their job, were polite to all, and went home grateful for everything in their lives. They didn’t need a mouthpiece and a rabble-rouser raising sh*t every time management came across as ingenuous.

It’s easy to feel that way now because I am free of their control, and those old crews are all long gone now, and even most of the management that I despised has been laid off themselves, moved to another side of the country (or world), left the field altogether, quit working, or died. I would hope that if I ever was forced to work for an employer again, I would be more mature about the whole process and understand that I am lucky to have a job at all, and lucky to live in a country where every to quit a job, leave a job, change a job, be self-employed, move anywhere in the country, travel anywhere in the world, have any religious beliefs, etc. etc. etc. etc. -- you’ve heard the story before. But you know sometimes I doubt I could ever be a quiet, faithful, and loyal employee.

I suppose I’m writing this at this stage because so much time is past since I was an employee, and since I “wasn’t quite sure” if we could make it living off of an online income. Our life is living proof that you can make a very good living working at home on your computer, and it’s not just some big scam played out on millions of people who dream of such a life. We are only an our mid-40s to late 40s (I’m 46 as I write this) and we are averaging about $12,000 a month in net income with our online business. My family, friends, and neighbors can’t believe this because they have either seen or checks, or see our lifestyle. My wife and I travel about 3 to 4 months of the year and we don’t do any work at all because our websites are up making money as we sleep and as we spend time just having a good time. I only really work hard during November, December, and January. I were crazy long hours late today which total of two about 12 to 14 hours of work. The big difference is is that it doesn’t feel like work to me. I love working on my computer, building new websites, building new niche domains, and writing right here on Zulit.

It’s snowing right now with HUGE snowflakes pouring down, and my wife and I are having another coffee about 15 minutes before noon. We have two full sized golden retrievers who live us in a house that’s way too big for the four of us. We have a brand-new motorhome which we use for traveling, and were getting ready to go to Palm Springs for 2 to 3 months this winter. Every day we wake up and do whatever we feel like doing, and we may be use our alarm clock once or twice a year because we have to pick somebody up at the airport who is visiting. We are quite literally spoiled beyond belief. My wife also quit her job and works with me full time at home. Now when we see a massive snowstorm like I am watching right now (video below), I think of all my fellow coworkers who were no question driving to work in this, commuting across the country (many still do), and moving their over 40 bodies and over 60 bodies around in the cold, up the ladders, in and out of service trucks, and making very little relative money for their efforts. We are so thankful for the life we have lived these last five years, and I honestly feel guilt because of the life I’m living compared to some of my fellow cohorts I used to work with on the job. I suppose this is why I’ve done so much extra work for nothing except the satisfaction of helping a friend (many times strangers) try getting started on the Internet.

Winter doesn’t really annoy us that much anymore because we only go out when we feel like it and frankly, when you don’t have to drive and work in the snow winter is a very beautiful thing. This doesn’t mean I’m going to cancel my trip to Palm Springs this year or anything, but watching the snow fall has a much different effect on me now.

I have not put up too many posts like this one where I discuss the lifestyle of an Internet marketer, and on a very personal level the lifestyle of your humble narrator, his wife, and his two dogs. But, I am speaking very much to myself right now as I try to take in in retrospect the past five years of change. I do still hope that my words will be taken as reality by those strangers who find themselves reading this post on this website, and have the same dream of working at home for themselves, and putting a job they really don’t like.

Why We Have Made It This Far

The reason we have made it this far is because of one mitigating factor. We have been grateful for the smallest signs of success. In my teaching of others, I have discovered an all too common reality that people considering working at home on their computer; a lack of patience, dissatisfaction with early income, lack of passion for the goal, and most important of all a lack of faith that it can be true.

When we made our first three cents online it was on my decrepit and poorly designed golf website. I had misspelled the word apparel when I use the words “golf apparel” and this resulted in someone using the same misspelling looking for some product. They landed on my three week old crappy website and lo and behold they clicked on an ad. This made us three cents and I considered to be free money. This is crazy of course because I have been working 16 hour days, going to the library, researching on the Internet, talking to successful affiliates, you name it -- I did it. But for some reason that three cents seemed like free money. I remember my own mother looking over the computer screen when I show them the click that maybe the three cents, and she laughed because deep down inside at that time she didn’t believe this could be a viable and long-lasting source of income. She believed in what I was doing and she believed in me, but she knew that I had always dreamt bigger than most kids on the block, and she’d see me fall flat on my face with another big dreams before -- truly she was as concerned for me.

So the reason we have made it this far in the reason we are netting as much income as we are these days and these months and these weeks, is because we were more than satisfied with the small trickles, and the slow slow slow slow slow procession of new pages being cached and indexed in the search engines.

I remember teaching my uncle this year in mid-2009 and explained that his first goal should be to make about $1400-$1500 a month from his websites. The next day when we were using Skype to do more training he said to me, “You know Terry, making $1400 a month doesn’t really float my boat”. I knew right then that he wasn’t going to make it in the world of Internet income. The fact is that it’s just too competitive now, and there are just too many websites, too many pages, too many URLs, and too many webmasters that are fighting every day for these trickles of income. You have to love it, and you have to think of it almost an extreme terms.

I remember saying to people in 2003 when I first started this, that this was like “life and death” to me. Literally I felt like I was fighting for my life. I was so miserable being an employee that this was a fight for existence. Of course this was an insane thing to say to myself or to anybody else for that matter, because that mindset set me up for the possibility of huge stress and anxiety issues, which I did actually have trouble with, to the degree that I had to use medication, and umpteen self-help books to get me through the year or two. I don’t know what would’ve happened if I didn’t have a wife that I have. The fact was that healthy or not, this was the attitude I had. Can you imagine if you were in a jail cell and told he could never leave it as you work on your laptop and earned your way out. Can you imagine how hard it would work building websites, and building blogs with fresh original content (like this article), if you thought your only chance of leaving a jail cell was making more than $4000 a month online. I guarantee you that you would one day succeed. You may not get out of jail for one year, two years, three years, four years, five years -- but you would get out.

I hate to say all of this to those newcomers to Internet marketing who have this dream afresh in their minds -- this could be you. Yes YOU! I don’t want to discourage you from the same dream that I have and the same dream I am living, but I want to be factual about what it takes to succeed at this game. You have to want this really bad, and you have to understand what you are up against.

You must love what you are doing, just like any other endeavor in life, if you want to succeed and beat the competition at the game. You have to be willing to spend the ridiculous hours it takes to make a web property eek out some traffic and a trickle of cash. At first this is exactly what it would be like with a brand new domain. It used to be that a newcomer could come along and bang up hundred domain names on niche products, and start making some fairly significant income, but those days are long gone. The search engines are much more sophisticated now, and the competition is tenfold. There is only one way to start to succeed in this game now, and I will share some of these beliefs below.

If you want to make it start with one website, one of the main, and work it, work it, work it, work it, work it! Work for the first year just writing good solid content that is helpful to visitors. Of course you can create the odd inbound link to your new domain from a third-party website such as MySpace, Hub Pages, and Squidoo, just to get the search engines to see your work. I wouldn’t go any further than creating three decent inbound links for the first six months -- I just write like I am right now (or speak into a microphone as I mentioned above). It’s preferable that you use some kind of dynamic web platform such as Wordpress, Joomla, etc., but it’s not completely necessary. In fact, many of my old straight up HTML pages outrank and outperform my dynamic websites that use all of the modern web technology to their advantage. If you just simply write 100% original pure content the search engines will take notice of you, and they will take notice of you in a hurry. If you look at the Internet closely you’ll notice that almost everything you read has been duplicated by hundreds of other sources on different domains.

When you write fresh and unique content I’m not talking about some kind of article that has some brand-new idea that no one is ever thought of before -- I’m talking about words and sentences that have not been duplicated online yet. For instance if you were to just highlight about 10 words in this paragraph and copy it to the Google search engine, with quote marks at the beginning and the end like this;

“highlight about 10 words in this paragraph and copy it to the Google search engine with quote marks”

…..this is the result. (unless someone has scraped this article, in which case I will find them and deal with them later)

This is what I mean by original content. So many newcomers think that when the so-called gurus keep yapping on about original content they are talking about mind blowing articles that should set you apart like a Nobel winner. Nope! They are simply talking about what I’ve demonstrated above. Just to prove my point, go to E-zine articles and do a search for a topic you want. Select one of the links from your search (and no, not the Adsense ads) in open up one of the articles. Highlight about 7 to 10 words from the article and use “” symbols of the front of the string and the end of the string just like I did above, and do a search in Google. You will see this article has been posted on many different places. Notice above the screen there is a link from the Google results tell you there is more results to see which they have omitted from this screen. Click that link and you will see there is likely 50, 60, 70, 300, 400 other places on the Internet that those exact words are being used in that string and in that order. That piece of content has been beaten like a dead dog on a hot summers day. You don’t want anything to do with this.

You want to create an article that is 100% unseen anywhere on the Internet. This is why the bloggers do so well with income and traffic. Most of these bloggers only have one or two or three domains that they work on because you can’t create massive amounts of pure content as shown above if you try to handle 100 domain names. So you want to stick to only one domain when you start. Even if it seems slow, I promise you they will beat your competition over time. You’ll start to get links from other webmasters to your articles because they can tell what you speak of is true. You don’t need to beg, buy, borrow, steal, rob, pilfer, or spam inbound links. The search engines will see your content is 100% fresh and new and they will reward you for it. The other webmasters will reward you for as well, and the search engines will further reward you when they see links coming from other webmasters who see the quality of your domain. A purist approach is not a bad thing in this new Internet we have filled with spam, splogs, etc. This is what is known as White Hat SEO. I would not even worry about using some kind of a link machine or linking software. I would just use the Wordpress blog like this one.

Of course there are the Black Hat fans out there, many of whom I can relate with, because I have tried every trick in the book myself -- I just had to -- I couldn’t help myself. I had to see if this stuff really worked, and yes, it did work on a very temporary basis, and then all my work was flushed down the drain with all the other gamers out there. In the long run, the domains that I own but have always brought in money and continue to bring in money are purely White Hat projects.

Anyways, I’m getting off the subject a little bit too much here, and I’m sure I will find other times to write about all of my theories regarding search engines, inbound links, site navigation, software platforms, etc. etc. etc. -- but not today. This was just a recap of what we have experienced over the past five years, and now I must go shovel some snow.

All the very best you this Christmas season.

Terry Zulit

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Well, it is now December 2009, and I have been in the business of Internet marketing and online income for close to six years. In May of 2003 I was laid off yet again from the company I had worked for for 15 years, and something snapped in me, wherby I was willing to take any risk as long as I could be free of working for the heartless and cold blooded bastards we called upper management.

I saw the way people were treated in the company that I worked in and I remember the anger I had every time I saw an employee being treated like nothing more than the number and the stock animal. There are so many examples of the inhuman way corporations treat their employees, but nothing quite compares with a meeting I was in with the upper management team from our head office shortly before I was laid off.

There were some sizable layoffs coming again in our company, and we all knew it was coming for over a year. Management was always good at making us employees extremely nervous and for good reason. They knew the majority of us would be so terrified of being laid off that we would hunker down and work like dogs to try and impress their direct management in whatever department they were working in. This tactic is used by corporations all over the world and it’s particularly nasty. We would have to listen to each other wine and complain with fear about the possibility of being laid off in the near distant future. It was quite revolting to watch all of us shaking with concern about how we would pay for our groceries, or mortgages, or car payments, our children’s clothing, our children’s braces, etc. etc. etc. etc.

Every time the company used scare tactics whether or not they were legitimate stories are not, it was done in the same fashion. Somewhere in upper management leaks of information were being pushed out through through word-of-mouth to some employee in the country. Of course these rumors ran like wildfire to every station in every department. The result was always the same in that the fear level of the employees dropped dramatically, and the more belligerent and egotistical employees (this includes your humble narrator) would be outraged and call them on it. Sometimes the rumors turned out to be nothing, but sometimes they were very much real. In this case the rumors were very much real.

Anyways, before the story gets bloated way out of proportion, this is what happened.

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We were all called up to the “big board room meeting center” to meet with upper management from the East Coast. We all knew what this was about and I brought my little recorder which I took to all of the meetings I went to, and sat at the front of the table so I was closest to the management team. I wore my black leather biker jacket because deep down inside I probably felt it was one-way for me to pretend I was tougher than the rest. I realize now how young I was, how naïve I was, how silly I was, and how manipulated I was.

The management team swaggered into the room and two of the managers (the two top guys) took center stage and began talking. They said they had brought us all there to discuss the upcoming layoffs and make it official that there would be people losing their jobs.

The board room was your typical swank long room with expensive leather seats and a extremely long and shiny table for all to sit at. All of the high-tech audiovisual equipment was installed, including all of the niceties for food and beverage displayed around. Several different phones were on the table for people to use during the meeting, and of course there was high speed Internet available. This particular room was the one room that us employees rarely ever saw, and you could tell that we were all out of our element.

The two top guys from upper management who were at the end of the room definitely in the physical power positions with full view of every entrance and nothing behind them. You could feel the tension in the room which was stupidly high, as everyone awaited the ugly news about the impending layoffs.

They began by thanking us for coming to the meeting, and you could tell they were a little bit nervous perhaps, because of the news they were about to give us, but they didn’t let that affect their default body language, which was an air of huge arrogance. The man who did all the talking was obviously in his late 50s or early 60s, and someone we had never met before. This is extremely typical because when it comes to big layoffs and bad news these big companies and corporations always bring in a new face that will never be seen again to break the news. I’ve seen it many times before.

He started telling us about how times were tough and how they were going to need to lay off employees in the hundreds. We had all been hearing the rumors for over 6 to 7 months and most of us were expecting this to be the news of the day. Then the questions began from the employees.

As usual, I was extremely vocal and a menacing character in the eyes of management, and most of them knew my name and my reputation for being a rabble-rouser. You could tell they very much disliked me using a tape recorder that I had in full view of all who are in the meeting. I asked them many questions about their poor choices and management decisions over the last couple of years, and pointed out that if it wasn’t for their poor management skills, we would not be laying off a single person, and in fact we would be hiring more employees. Whether I was right or not, it didn’t really matter – they didn’t like my tone, they didn’t like my questions, and it was pretty obvious they didn’t like me.

When I asked the head honcho how much we were going to lose in the way of jobs, he sort of grimaced at me because of the way I was pinning him down for answers. He cocked his head back and scratched his neck with that bottom feeding fish expression on his face, and asked this question to the management team that was standing behind him;

“How many bodies do we have here Dave?”, he asked as he turned around to look at a punchy looking and disheveled manager who was obviously extremely uncomfortable.

“Well we have about 350 bodies here Jim?”, as his eyes darted nervously around the room.

“Bodies!!??!!!!???, I yelled, nearly at the top of my lungs. “So we are bodies now huh – not even numbers, let alone names!!!”

Jim, the head honcho hardly showed that his feathers were ruffled, except for his face turning red with anger or embarrassment – I could not quite tell which. It was too late though for him to try and explain his attitude and his poor choice of words, because the floodgates of anger were open. The other employees in the room which numbered in the 80 to 90 range were packed in tight and my voice was no longer required in the feud. Questions and comments and exclamations were being hurled simultaneously from many of the employees in the room at this point. You could see the upper management team was now very nervous and fidgety, trying to maintain their composure, and their upper hand.

These employees were all men and all mechanics who were all mostly over the age of 35 and up, who are responsible for mortgage payments and supporting families. 90% of us had licensing and over 15 years experience in the field, and though we did not like the prospect of being laid off from a long time employment, we were not afraid to show our anger, our fear, and our frustration. We have had enough.

Jim, Dave, and all of the others in the management team which numbered a total of ten to a dozen men were now trying to wrap things up at the meeting short. They knew they had to get out of there in the board room was designed in a way that the management team could slip out the door they stood beside and be completely separated from our group. Security was certainly looked into with his room was designed. Three of the management team began moving slowly to their exit door they were so nervous with the body language and the tone of the room. One of them was terrified and I felt a little bit bad about him, because the truth was I was just trying to frighten these bastards, and I never really had any intention (nor did anybody else in the room) of causing them physical harm.

The management team soon got things off and Jim announced that he had to get to the airport to catch another flight and bring more bad news to other employees around the country, trying to deflect some of what we were feeling by letting us know we were not the only ones being laid off in the country. He cut it off and said he was sore you can stay longer (yeah right) and that we would hear more from our immediate management team at our base.

When we left the room we were all chatting amongst yourselves some of us with our chests puffed up like juveniles on our way to the entrance way of the roughhouse barroom, and some of us were just shaken. One thing for sure that we all have in common was that we were relieved to finally get some closure on all the rumors that have been swirling around all these past months. The hardest part is waiting and not knowing what your future is going to be. I still think that even with bad news like a layoff being in the mindset of an employee can be less stressful than self-employment. You are with your buddies and your coworkers together and you were never really alone with this kind of big and bad news comes down the pipe. You all have the same problem coming and you have someone to talk to, complain with, whine with, and cry with (sometimes literally).

I remember the we all got our official pink slips in our company mail slots. Seeing that piece of paper made it official, and he could tell that some of us were secretly excited that a change was coming. I for one was excited to be leaving this dull and decrepit workplace that I have despised the last three years. Many employees loved working there and they were extremely terrified at the prospect of finding a new job and losing all of their seniority and benefits.

When the day came that we had to leave to pack up our toolboxes I remember a sinking feeling that it was all over and I would likely never see some of my coworkers again. I remember being disgusted that management had to go and look through all of our toolboxes just in case any of us were stealing anything from the company on the way out the door. I remember walking out the last door to the outside air thinking that I was finally free of tyranny (laughter). I even yelped as I gave my card pass to the last manager as I walked out. I gave my toolbox to another employee, and 90% of the tools that were in the box. I was leaving much more than a job – I was leaving the career.

This is continued on my next post which you can read by clicking here…..

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This is an article that will answer the hot question from people – whether to start a business that you love or start a business on something that is profitable. If you confuse with this decision, I also suggest a proper way to solve the confusion in this article.

One of the hot question that most people ask when they want to start their own business is whether they should start something around what they love or something that is hot, trendy and profitable. Yes, I also think that this is a very important question to ask before you start any business. Your decision is going to be your main business theme in future.

Let’s discuss the pros and cons of each decision so you will have a clear idea on the options that you have.

Do What You Love, and the Money Will Follow You

In recent years, there are a lot of experts suggest that we should start a business around something that we love. Their advice will be “Do What You Love and the money will follow you”. This is a quite a interesting and attractive idea to start a business and it is no doubt that the book “Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow”, by Marsha Sinetar can be such as hot seller.

There are a few benefits to follow this advice:

• It may sound easier for you. I believe no people will complain if they are given a task that they love to do. I also believe that people will spend all their time on something that they love. I even believe that people will be happy if they spend time on their hobby every day and make money from it. So if you start your part time business around what you love, the chances that you will success are higher. You can spend most of your time on it without feeling any boring and weariness.

• You are the expert. If you are passionate on something, you can easily become an expert on it. Since you have spent so much time on it, your know-how, experiences and skills are higher than others. Well, people like to deal with those people they think is expert. So this is the way your part time business can grow.

Now, don’t you think it is great to start a part time business on your hobby? But please wait a minute and read on.

Yes, it may sound great that you can make money from your hobby. However, there is a myth on this – There are no guaranteed that you will succeed on this. This is because its risks!

Some of the risks are:

· The market is not big. You start a business around your passion. You passionate about it but not everyone in this world. So your market may be very niche until it is hard for you to really make money from it.

· Competition. If your hobby is too general, then chances that someone already start their business on it. If there are hundred thousands of people doing it, then the chances your business can survive will be low.

· The unexpected factors. Maybe you underestimate the cost to start your business around your hobby, or maybe you overestimate its potential, or it takes more energy and efforts to succeed. All this unexpected factors may ruin your business.

While pursuing your passion sounds great to everyone, however, there are more you have to think and plan. Maybe because of this, I found there are another group of business owners start their business in a totally different way.

Follow the Trend, the Money will Follow You Too

Generally, for this idea, you go out and find a trend which is hot or going to hot soon. Then you start building a part time business around it and make tremendous of money from it. There are many examples who have built their success using this simple theory: Jeff Bezos(Amazon), Ebay(Pierre Omidya), Michael Dell(DELL) and many others.

Some of the advantages to start a part time business are:

• It is Hot.  You are starting a business on something that is hot and highly demanded by market. That’s mean your business can grow like a fire and spread out faster than you can imagine.
• Less Effort. Sometime you don’t really have to push your business that hard as you can leverage the trend and it will push your business to the next level.
• The potential of growing. I found that many businesses that start on this way can grow to a level that is hardly achieved if you start your business with the first idea.

Of course, there are also some disadvantages too:

• It is not easy to find the hot trend. What I mean is it is not easy to find a trend that can be remained for a long time. For example, Olympic Game is a hot trend but it is a short term trend and it is hard for you to start a stable long term business on it.
• You have to be fast. Trend is just like a current and sometimes you have to act fast to capture it. But in some cases, it is hard for us if we are new to everything about business.
• Competition. Just like your hobby, some trend maybe too general until the competition is quite high.

Well, my first impression about this business starting advice is it doesn’t sound easy at all. I just think that it is quite confusing for a newbie to start business by finding a trend. So what can we do?

What I have chosen – Combine Both Advices

I knew and understand that I can start a part time business in 2 ways. I also confuse for quite some time to make my decision. I have to decide how to start my online part time business. I really don’t know what to choose. So in order to overcome this confusion, I made my decision that I can combine the 2 advices together!

First, I start a business around my passion and something that I love. This will ensure I can spend most of my time on the business (doing something I like) and learn how to run or build a business. After that, I will keep searching the trend. As my experience increased, I can start finding the trend in my business field and analysis it. Once I find the correct trend, then I will start another business according to the trend. The skill of market research is important here and we can learn it from our first passionate business.

My theory is quite simple and is easy to understand and follow. If you have any new ideas, you can share it here with us.

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Last weekend, I started to listen to a self-improvement audio course from Dr. Steven Covey, a famous author and speaker on personal effectiveness. The audio course is about the famous audio book: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

In fact, I bought this tape for many months ago and last weekend only I can spend time on it. What an “effective” guy I am I know that in order to be success and achieve financial freedom, we must learn how to be effective. All of us only have 24 hours per day and how we can leverage the 24 hours and accomplish what we need to do is the key to be success. This is the main reason why I bought this tape.

The First Lesson

So today, I just want to share the first lesson I learned from the tape – The price that we must pay to learn something.

According to Dr. Steven Covey, the price that we must pay is work diligently and share with others.

I think the meaning of work diligently is we must use what we have learnt frequently until it can be part of our nature. Besides that we must also keep thinking and dig deeply about what we learn in order to understand it better. From my experience, if you dig deeply enough on particular information, you will find out more and learn more eventually. You will feel that you have discovered a lot of new knowledge with the simple information that you learn for the first time.

Another price that we must pay is sharing our knowledge with others. Dr. Steven Covey recommends that we must share and teach what we have learnt with others within 24-48 hours. This will reinforce and reassure what you have learnt while you teaching it to others. I think this is some kind of generosity other than money. Just like the wealth, the more we share our wealth to others by helping them, the more wealth we will gain. Knowledge is our wealth too and so the same theory can be applied over here.

Can you be my listener?

The time I know that I must share what I learn with others within 24-48 hours, the first people I can think about is you. Yes, I think this is another advantage on blogging. I can leverage on my blog to share what I learn with others easily. So I don’t have to walk around to search for my listener who willing to spend time listens to me. So I decided that I’m going to adapt this learning habit and share whatever I learn over here. The only problem is would you mind to be my listener?

PS : This course comes in 2 formats – book and audio tape. I bought audio tape because I can easily listen to it while I’m busy on with my hands such as cleaning and etc. If you want to buy the course, please click here to do so.

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Nowadays, many people has a dream to start a part time business that can earn them some extra income monthly or even cover all their expenses and become their full time income other than a job.If you think like this, you are not alone. Business is an attractive income source that many people dreams to own. In America, some reports estimated that there are 32 million in this country are in business, either part time or full time. Besides that, study also shows that there will be more housewives start their own part time business.

Actually starting a part time business is quite easy. Maybe you can get started by joining a MLM company or just start web site and make money from the internet business. However, the story will be different if you want to start a success and profitable part time business. It takes more than what you can imagine.

Do you have what it takes to start a part time business? This is what this article is talking about.

What It Really Takes?

Without further ado, let me share with you some of the requirements that I know and found from my experience to start my own part time business:

1. Energy to run the business. You are going to run a business part time. You may have a job or something that you do as your full time income. So you need more energy so that you can run your part time business. Especially in the starting stage, you may have to work extra 5-6 hours per day to stabilize your business. So the first question you should ask is do you have this energy to do it? Anyway from my experience, I found that we can gain more energy by sleeping well, eating properly and exercising. By changing your life style, you can gain more energy to run your own business.
2. The Strong Desire. How strong is your desire to start a business? I think this is the main motivation source that we have especially at early stage where we might not make any money Can you continue and persist with the hard works that may not bring any fast results to you? Can you wait patiently for the results and keep doing and trying? Well, the strong desire I mentioned here is WHYs that I mentioned in my articles. You must have a strong why for motivation and overcome all the obstacles that you may have. I have seen so much of people fail by giving up because they are lack of strong desire.
3. Learn and Take Action. There is another reason why people will fail to start their business – too ego to learn and lazy to take actions. Majority of the people do not have any training and experience in business. So like everything else in our life, you must learn before you can build up a successful business. Taking action is also important. If you keep learning and never take any practical action, then what you have learnt is useless and wasting time only. I have seen a lot of people and even some of my friends are too ego to learn and lazy to take action. So I hope you can remember this and break the block of being success.
4. Self Discipline. You are going to run a business part time, so you properly have a schedule that you must follow to get things done. Please ask yourself this question based on your pass experience: What is the level of your self-discipline? For example, I’m a great procrastinator. I can find any reasons to procrastinate my jobs (I know I must do it though). Therefore I was not going anywhere the time I tried to start my part time online business. Until one day, my mentor reminded me that I was lack of self discipline and I start to understand how importance of self discipline. You are the boss for your part time business. So without strong self discipline, its progress may stop and slow down as everything is depending on you. So if you are like me, then you must learn how to control yourself and increase your self-discipline power. Don’t worry, this can be trained up.
5. Business Plan. There are a lot of ways to start a part time business. However, each of them has a common requirement – business plan. In your business plan, you must understand your market and where are your customers. You may also need to understand your strengths and weaknesses. Generally you business plan should leverage your strengths and cover your weaknesses. Besides that you may also choose the business that fit these 2 factors. Last but not least, you must understand and know the demand of your market and hence provide some kind of unique value to them. This will guaranteed your business success in the shortest time. Well this is not as easy as you think, but you can make it if you know you must.
6. Family Support. We are human and we need supports from our love one to do anything. Their supports can be our biggest motivation to success. If you want to start a part time business, then the first thing you have to do is make your family members, your wife and your family to support it. Try your best to persuade them. I think that this is a must especially if you are married and you have commitment to your spouse, children and family. Just sit down and discuss.

Conclusion

The 6 requirements above are more about the internal factors that is under your control. Of course, there are also external factors such as capital problem, marketing results and other unexpected factors in business. However, I believe if you can manage those internal factors very well, then external factors can be solved easily. So just sit down, spend some time and fulfill all the 6 requirements above before you start your own part time business.

Are You Ready?

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