Setting goals is an important aspect of growth – for business, for personal development, and for life.
Without goals to guide our actions, without that X on our map to navigate towards, we’re aimlessly wandering.
We’re wanderpreneurs.
And sure - wanderpreneurs can still grow and be happy – but setting goals will keep us on the right path, and if we are to ever get off that path, we’ll know, and we can steer right back onto it.
Does an entrepreneur without goals ever succeed?
How will he or she ever truly know?
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I like to publicly share my yearly goals here on SPI.
Why?
Well for one – I share almost everything, but it’s much more than that. Click Here to Read More About Pat’s 2012 Goals
Three-hundred and sixty-four days ago I published My 2011 Goal Post - and as the year 2011 comes to an end, it is now time for my performance report.
Setting goals is extremely important, but it’s even more important to evaluate your performance toward those goals so that you can understand the four W’s of self-evaluation:
- What went wrong…
- What went right…
- Why, and…
- What’s next.
To quote myself from a year ago: “Some things in 2011, naturally, will happen unplanned.”
And of course – they did.
I met a lot of my goals, and some – I completely missed.
Here’s a recap of my goals from one year ago, what I learned and where I stand now. Click Here to Read More about Pat’s 2011 Goals
I’ve had a lot of success online, but I’ve probably had even more failures – and I’m very thankful for each and every one of them.
Without my failures, I would not be where I’m at today.
As Winston Churchill once said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
It’s a lot like dating actually.
We date people we like and are interested in, and sometimes it just doesn’t work out. We take those experiences, what we liked and disliked about our previous relationship, and that shapes who we are in the next. Click to continue…
I received an interesting email from an SPI reader over the weekend:
“I don’t get it Pat. You make all this affiliate income (your June income report was off the hook!) and you have never come across as being pushy or aggressive with your promotions. I read your blog and am subscribed to your newsletter and you have never sent me anything but content, and somehow you’re earning a CEO’s income. I hope this isn’t rude, and it’s not that I don’t believe you, but how exactly are you doing this?”
To answer this question I can break it down into 4 key concepts:
- Provide massive value.
- Earn massive trust.
- Learn and understand the needs and wants of your followers.
- Lead and teach by example.
Combining these 4 concepts together allow me to share products (some of which I am an affiliate for) without being hawkish, and instead of worrying about losing readers, subscribers and potential customers, I’m actually strengthening the relationships I have with them.
For many of you, this isn’t groundbreaking news – and some of you are already putting these concepts into practice, which is fantastic.
Today, however, I wanted to provide you with a more detailed and concrete example of how I earn an income from affiliate programs, specifically illustrating where on my site (and “off site”) sales are coming from. Click Here to Read The Details About My Affiliate Commissions
This is a guest post by John Corcoran from California Law Report. John is a lawyer and blogger who understands that there are a lot of people who blog and do business online who don’t take the necessary precautions to legally protect themselves and the assets that they’ve created. Although laws differ depending on where you live or where your business resides, this is really important advice – and probably a reminder to a lot of you who have been meaning to take action, but have yet to do so.
Even though John is a lawyer, he is probably not your lawyer (if he is, then that’s cool!), so before you decide to take action based on the information presented in this post, it is recommended that you first consult with your own attorney.
I, of course, am not a lawyer.
Cheers, and here’s John:
Pat recently wrote a post on The Dark Side of Successful Blogging in which he explained the many negatives he has had to deal with as SPI has experienced explosive growth over the past less than three years.
Just like any successful business, successful bloggers experience growing pains as they begin to gain a following. Usually success means outgrowing an original hosting provider or email marketing provider, as well as countless themes, plugins, affiliates, and maybe even phone systems or office space.
What successful bloggers usually don’t realize as they are building a following and watching their income grow each day is that along the way, they’ve built some major assets which need guarding and protection. The domain, the blog itself, the brand, even a Twitter account with substantial followers can all quickly become extremely valuable assets. And on the list of “to do” items, I’m willing to bet that setting up legal protections to guard blog assets falls pretty far down on the list. Read More About Protecting Your Blog’s Assets
As a blogger who does both video and podcasts, I’ve invested in a number of gizmos and gadgets to help me run my businesses. Below, you’ll get an over the shoulder look at exactly what I’m working with. Also, please note that some of the links below are affiliate links to Amazon.
The Desktop Computer
Currently, I’m running a 24″ iMac Computer. This piece of hardware was my very first Apple purchase made back in October of 2006 and I’m extremely satisfied with it. It’s really handy for all of the graphic design and other multimedia stuff that I do on a daily basis. Plus, because I have an iPhone app business, the Apple computer is quite necessary.
For those of you who want the specifics, it’s a 2.4 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, and her name is Betsy.
Market research, surveys, focus groups, middlemen, test markets – these are all things that people (and companies) spend a ton of money on to ensure that a new product they create with will become a winning product.
You can I – the bloggers, internet entrepreneurs and small online businesses owners of this world, can utilize many of the above strategies to ensure that whatever products we construct will become winners too. Whether it’s for a future product such as an eBook, course, membership website or software (or even physical products if that’s what you’re into), we have the convenience of working online to easily and inexpensively conduct market research, create surveys, find focus groups and run test campaigns.
There is, however, one particular no fail strategy that we can all use to create the next winning product.
To fill you in, I’m going to quote my new favorite book, Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson, who are the founders of BaseCamp:
“The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use.”
It’s as simple as that.
When you “scratch your own itch”, as the authors like to call it, you accomplish several things: Click to continue…
This is something a little different…So far, I’ve published 20 monthly income reports, and 1 annual income report. However, I’ve never posted anything in detail about my expenses, until today.
I don’t know exactly why I have never included them in my reports. Maybe it’s because when I first started doing these reports there were virtually no expenses to take into account. That being said, I do know that many of you are curious to see what a typical month looks like, so here it is.
The following is my expense report for June of 2010. Click to continue…
Virtual Assistants, or “VAs” for short, are helping people get more things done each and every day. If you’ve read the 4-Hour Work Week, then you know that Mr. Timothy Ferriss is a huge fan of using VAs for all of the clutter and “the things that I don’t want to waste my time doing in my life” type of stuff. Like many internet marketers and other lifestyle design artists, I’m sure he has several full-time VAs working for him at this very moment.
I, on the other hand, don’t have any full-time VAs. I only hire providers and pay them on a per project basis. I’ll tell you why in a second, but there’s one thing I need to address first. Click to continue…
This is the second part to my two post series about starting an LLC. In part 1, I talked about the pros and cons of starting your own business. Part 2 will walk you through exactly what you need to know before you apply.
Here’s that disclaimer again: I am not a lawyer, CPA or any kind of professional. I simply share my own experiences about how I did things, and the actions you take based on what I say is not my responsibility. As always, you should seek advice from a trusted professional before making these types of decisions. Thanks!
Let’s get right into it. Click to continue…
No, I'm not a millionaire, but I am living off of passive income made online. I'm here to show 
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