Big Sister Coaching And Training
It's all about the energy of life, so stop wasting your will power!
It's all about the energy of life, so stop wasting your will power!
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.
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