Image by woodleywonderworks. Flickr Creative Commons License.
Notice that everyone is recommending  personal coaching these days?  It’s really the “in thing”.  However, for some of you, for one reason or another, you choose not to play this game.  Maybe just not for now, or maybe never.

However, you’re probably doing courses, reading a stack of personal or professional development books, getting regular emails from your favourite “gurus”, all providing good, useful information and new paradigms and insights.

So start keeping a journal, to bring out those inner conversations that you have between you and yourself, and you and the words of others.

Write down your reactions to various messages.

Write down your successes but also your struggles, and analyse them, now or later.

Write down your aspirations and your obstacles.

Write down your priorities – even things as banal as a “to do” list if you want.

Write down your goals – take the time to get clear about what you really want to achieve.

Write down your appreciation for your life – be aware that 99% of the people in this world dream to have a life like yours, even with the problems and dramas.

Write about your relationship with yourself – the interaction between your fears and your hopes, how you support or sabotage your dreams.  Allow the inner voices to be heard.  The playful child, the scared child, the pouty teenager, the cool adult, the angelic higher self.  Let them speak as needed, in relation to various situations in your life.

Write about your relationship with others – particularly in reference to any new emotional habits you’re trying to establish.

Keeping a journal can help to clarify, release, envision, empower your attention and focus.

Image by “ChasingDaylightPhotography” Flickr Creative Commons License.

Assuming you have sufficient finances to have access to a computer and to the internet, you can begin to make a start on your online passion-based career without having to spend a large amount of money. Time and dedication to your goal can go a long way to making up for a lack of money.

Lack of money can be an excuse, but not a real reason, for not getting started. There is a lot of valuable information and resources offered at no charge if you take the trouble to search diligently for it.

Here are some ways that you can overcome lack of money as you begin to build your online business:

1. If there is a topic you want to learn more about, search for the information you want online.

2. If there is a program you believe you need, search for free software (often called shareware). However, before you commit to downloading anything, search for reviews and critiques of the software. Many times freeware is still in a developmental stage, and can cause problems on your computer, so make sure it is reputable and has positive feedback.

3. Sign up for newsletters from those who you believe you need to learn from. Often, successful people will offer a lot of valuable information for free in articles such as this one.

4. Connected to the previous point, read through the free resources offered on sites. Frequently, the author will “braindump” their information in snippets before organising them into structured courses or books.

5. Sign up for free courses on topics you need to learn about. There is a lot of good stuff out there, of sufficient calibre to get you started with the basics, and to get you up and running.

6. Sign up for free teleseminars or webinars offered on your topics that you wish to learn more about.

7. If you do sign up for a course or classes, look for a monthly payment alternative. Many courses or classes offer them.

8. Your online business basic services – when you’re ready to implement them – would include $10 a year for a domain name, about $20 a month for an autoresponder and about as low as $5 a month for webhosting. Oh, and you do have protection for your computer, don’t you?

9. Have a good look at your budget, and determine what can be better utilised in investing in your education. Are magazines really necessary, for instance? What about the amount you spend on buying coffee and lunch everyday. Would that $200 a month be better spent invested in your business?

In fact, I would highly recommend many of the above steps even if you do have enough money to start your online business. Especially when you are familiarising yourself with a new concept or program, get into the habit of searching for the best quality information – which will sometimes be free, and sometimes offered at a price with authentic (ie not over-inflated) value.

Okay, let’s say you’re interested in starting an online business based on your passion, so where would you start?  It’s a minefield of distracting information online, so it’s not really helpful to search for online business information for newbies (a term used for new beginners in a field).  Many of the sites that you might come across want you to subscribe to – and eventually pay them  to learn- their way of doing business, with their products or their systems.  Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, provided you’re familiar with the various online business models, and you decide that there is value from learning one particular system in more depth.

Before I go any further, I want you to commit this mantra to memory:  “The opportunity of a lifetime comes around every few days”.  This has never been more true than for the online world where you will find yourself pressured to spend money NOW before the opportunity is lost forever.  Create a bookmark labelled “Things to consider buying” and file all website addresses with the incredible offers, to review at least 24 hours later, and maybe even weeks or months later when you’re in a better educated position to reconsider them.

You also need to be aware that many online business opportunities brought up by search engines tend to be for people who don’t really have a passion or strong interest.  They tend to be generic business opportunities.  Similar for someone who might buy a bricks and mortar business so they can have a job, like a gas station or a corner store.  Such an approach to earning income tends to irk us passionate and creative types who can only think of the longterm boredom that a routine career – online or offline – would bring.

Also, be very wary of any claims that suggest you can earn thousands of dollars in a matter of weeks. I have no doubts that many such claims are true, but there is often a lot of hidden background information that isn’t revealed, like how long they’ve been at it, how much time they’ve been able to commit to it, how strong their knowledgebase was to begin with, how much they had to spend to make it happen and how many people they were able to market to.    It doesn’t happen to someone new to the whole field of running an online business unless you have friends in the right places willing to give you a jump start.

The truth is that you are committing to a very steep learning curve, with very frustrating times ahead.  It will not happen as fast as you want it to, but realise that the journey of a thousand miles is completed by taking one step after another.  And yes, you must be prepared to spend money on your own education.  Compared to other business opportunities, this investment in your education doesn’t need to be overwhelming, and will be covered in a future article.

Now, because passionate people like to dive right in, my recommendation would be to at the very least to begin a blog.  It’s quite thrilling to a newcomer to see their words uploaded to the web, and it doesn’t take a lot of technical skill at all. You don’t need to know about domain names, or web hosting.  Not at this stage. A blog is a safe and easy place to begin.  And it’s free.

With a blog, you can experiment safely.  It’s okay to have a number of false starts because it will take a while for you to settle in to your niche – to find your perfectly comfortable position that you can claim as your very own.  Its one of those things that you can’t really think out beforehand, but rather sort out as you go.

With a lot of creative and passionate people, it’s difficult to know where to begin with sharing your knowledge.  So, with blogs, you can write small chunks, called “posts”, and one suggestion might be to write a series about your specialty from your own chronological journey, your major discoveries and insights along the way, why you are so excited about the subject.  You might also wish to write some tips and hints, or break down a technical situation into simple language, or what the latest research in your area reveals.

There are many free blog companies(called “platforms”) for you to choose from, but I’d like to suggest one called “wordpress”.  Because some time down the track, you’re going to want to get more serious about your online business, and with wordpress, it’s easy to change gears and upgrade to a more professional level.  WordPress is a platform used by many successful online business owners because it allows many variations of displays and income producing activities.

And as your knowledge and confidence grows, and you decide that a blog is no longer the way for you to go, you at least have built up a body of work that you can transfer into a book, a course, or a traditional website

I also want you to get used to doing online queries whenever there is something you want to do but don’t know how to do it and you don’t have someone you can just ask.  The days of printed manuals are long gone.  Simply go to your search engine query box and write in your question as how you would ask a real person.  I like to put inverted commas around my questions so that the words are searched for as a group, exactly as I’ve written them, rather than broken up throughout a site. For instance, some of my recent queries have been “how do I break up an mp3 file in audacity” (audacity is a program I use to record my voice for making lessons online), and “how old is the popular internet” which didn’t yield any results, so I deleted the word ‘popular’, but then had to be selective in browsing through the responses.

Sometimes you may need to rephrase your question to find what you’re looking for.  Often the most helpful response will be written in plain language written for other people who had the same question.  This way, you gradually build up your own familiarity with online jargon and increase your confidence with carrying out various tasks on your computer.