Sounds crazy, right?
Starting a business isn’t meant to be about having fun.
It’s meant to be about hard work, late nights and freaking out over your bank balance. Maybe throw in an ulcer or two along the way.
Traditionally, that’s what starting a business has been all about.
I’ve been there myself as part of a few different start-ups over the years. It’s always been about the big dream. And that dream has usually revolved around a huge pot of money.
I have written about this before, but as it’s early in the year I wanted to tackle the subject again.
As the New Year gathers steam, we feel inspired to set new goals, maybe move forward in new directions, and take on fresh and interesting projects.
That’s all good.
But there is a caveat.
Don’t be lured into taking on someone else’s goals, directions and projects. They may be a perfect fit for that person, but not so much for you.
Let me explain.
As the end of each year approaches, and the holiday season looms, most of us come up a little short.
We wish we had a little extra money in our pockets. More to save. More to spend on our families over the holidays. And more of a cash cushion so we can sleep better at night.
An extra $12,000 – one thousand more each month – would certainly make a big difference. In fact, for many of us, that extra thousand dollars a month would change our lives.
So how can we do that? Really, there are only three ways.
You probably remember this from your own time at school.
When you enjoyed the subject, and liked the teacher, you learned faster and did well. And the most enjoyable classes where those in which you were actually doing something rather than just studying a text book, line by line.
Long story short, you always learn more when you’re having fun. And what you learn sticks when you learn by “doing” instead of just reading text books.
The same is true when learning online writing and copywriting.
You can study all you want, but you’ll learn most when you “do it”, and when you’re having a good time.
Which brings me to my own favorite learning tool.
If you’re an author, you probably have a website.
And if it’s like the typical author website, it’s what I call Author Platform 1.0.
In other words, it’s old-school, with 20 pages of content or less. Or to put it another way, it’s a brochure for your books.
And if you’re not sure what I mean by the word “platform”, it’s the word publishers use when asking you if you have an audience…a large group of people you can reach out to when it comes time to sell your books.
Back when I had my first book published in 2002, by McGraw-Hill, they were very keen to ask about my platform. They wanted to know I had an audience ready and waiting for publication day.
And back then it worked fine to create a ten-page author brochure online…Author Platform 1.0.
It worked.
But it doesn’t work anymore. For two reasons.
WordPress has become the world’s most popular website-building platform. The site you’re on right now is a WordPress site.
Along with so many other people, I like WordPress for a number of reasons. You have total flexibility over the design of your site. It’s the most social of all platforms. And it makes it incredibly easy to add new content and edit existing content.
In short, I love it.
But not all my sites are built with WordPress. My money-making website, CoffeeDetective.com, is built with and hosted on the SiteBuildIt platform.
Why? Because the platform was created specifically to optimize the performance of content-rich, topic-specific sites like my coffee site. In fact my coffee site attracts over TEN times the traffic of the site you’re on now. And believe me, the coffee topic is fiercely competitive.