Internet Business Blog

As we’re already well into 2008, now would seem a good time to reflect on the past 12 months and to start thinking about the year ahead…

2007

Whilst this blog is intended to be primarily centred around the topic of making money online, it’s difficult to skirt around major life events that take up a significant amount of time and energy. 2007 was the year I got married and even though I spent a lot less effort working on my online endeavours around the big day, my automated income streams continued to work hard relentlessly whilst I was busy getting on with life.

At some point during 2007, I came to the realisation that running a small web design business where everything centres around me was continual hard work with no real exit route other than to sell the business. There’s an element of residual, recurring income that comes from hosting, but otherwise you’re basically paid for your time and that’s something that Rich Dad has really put me off.

I’d already started moving away from having such a big slice of my online portfolio dependent upon Google AdSense and concentrated on developing my own products instead. In a bid to free up more of my time, I hired several different freelancers.  2007 was the year when I got really fed up with useless freelancers wasting my time so product development ended up taking up quite a lot of my time.

To make my money work harder for me, I started having a real stab at investing in stocks and even buying into the behemoth we all know and love as Google.

Oh, and of course, I did some decorating!

2008

Whilst I don’t believe in making new year resolutions (if you’re going to do something just do it), there are a few things I’d like to accomplish this year.

The first is to focus more on completing individual projects. The problem, I find, with trying to work on lots of different things at once is that you lose a lot of time in the overhead that comes with re-focussing on distinct projects as you try to regain mental momentum.

In order to help me achieve this, I’m going to put more effort into planning. I’m going to map out my process flows and keep track of progress.

My second goal is to spend less time on Internet distractions. Feed readers, emails, blogs and forums all have their uses, but they also cause my train of thought to derail.

Thirdly, and this goes well together with my first goal, is to make use of the gigabytes of material I have at my disposal that can be monetised. This includes all of the software and info-products I’ve obtained with rights. One of the reasons why I haven’t been able to make use of a lot of it is because:

• I haven’t gotten around to reviewing it sufficiently to decide what to do with it or
• I’m not happy with the material and decided it needs work or
• it’s trash and would take more time to fix than starting from scratch.

One of the problems I face is that I can be very fussy. I like things done to a certain standard and that often means the only way I’m happy is to do things myself and there just isn’t enough time in the world to allow me to do this whilst achieving all that I want to achieve. Unfortunately, this has meant that, sometimes, there are too many possible channels for my effort and I end up getting distracted instead. I’m not one to procrastinate and I’ve no problem with taking action, but having too many open doors means spreading myself too thin as I try to do everything at once.

So, my plan for 2008 is to knuckle-down, plan and focus!

What are your goals for 2008?