If you are out for profit as your number one goal, you should get a regular job because that is what a regular job is. If you are out for profit as a secondary or even 3rd or 4th on your list of goals you will be more likely to succeed and here’s why…

1. When you are out for profit as a #1 priority, it clouds the vision you have and you therefore end up with a product or service that is also clouded because you have been thinking about profit instead of making the product or service the best it can be.

2. People are more likely to use your product or service if they see that you are not solely out for profit. They realize that a better product will come from a company that focuses more on the thing that they are selling, than the money from that product.

3. You are less likely to give up on something that you don’t see profits from right away if profits are not at the top of your priorities, and if you don’t give up you don’t need me to tell you that not giving up is pretty important to succeed in anything.

It is also import to keep profits somewhere high on your list of goals. If you don’t, well if you don’t think that profits are mortally important to your business you shouldn’t be in any sort of business.

This is something I have learned in my 10 month  journey on the internet. I wasted a huge amount of time on this site trying to put ads on it and write the same kind of stuff as all the rest of the people in the “Make Money” blog scene. Turns out it doesn’t work. I realized that I had to put my effort into  one of two things; Learning something new or putting some effort into what I already know. I chose something that  I know and am passionate about, cars.

Now that I’m not out solely for profit it is so much easier to do what I need to do to reach my ultimate goal of doing what I want when I want. I have a huge amout of work to do in the coming months and probably years on GearHeadWiki but it now seems more realistic because I spend more time working on it instead of worrying how to monetize it. When anything gets big/good enough, I believe it will basically sell itself. If your business doen’t sell itself I think that you are probably in the wrong business.

Do what you love, it will pay, all you have to do is put what you love first.

I have done a lot of reading in the past couple of weeks, both on and offline, and one thing that keeps surfacing is the idea of finding a niche market and growing by diversifying. On the surface these look like the are mutually exclusive, how can you be in a small, well defined area of a particular market (niche) and at same time expand into other, larger, less defined markets?

I think that it all depends on how you look at what your niche is and where you want to diversify into. Currently I occupy the niche of unsuccessful, aspiring web entrepreneur, which is where most people who are trying to break into the “MMO” or Make Money Online niche. Many people just like me buy up hundreds of websites with the idea that, “if one site makes $5/month the 100 sites will make $500/month”. These people are right in a sick sort of way, but who really wants to maintain hundreds of sites? I know I don’t. But how many sites does it take to be successful? 1? 7? 150? I really didn’t know…

So I went to the people at the top of the MMO world.
Darren Rowse
John Chow
Jeremy Schoemaker
Zac Johnson
Andy Beard,
Mark Wielgus
Daniel Scocco
Jim Kukral
Courtney Tuttle
and many others that didn’t email me back or their answers where something like, “we don’t give out that kind of information”.

Turns out the average number of sites these people run is about 5. Now obviously if you have 5 sites you are not guaranteed success but the most successful people on the internet only focus on 10 sites or less. This should tell you something about the person that is just making a mess of the internet with hundreds or even thousands of “ad-rich, content-poor” trying to score $5/month on each one. I thought about stooping to that level but soon realized that with a little more initial effort I could have something 10x as big.

At this point I own 8 domains but this one and another are the only ones I use for anything at all. The latest domain purchase came out of my idea that I need to stick to what I know or learn something new. Well I know cars so I have launched my 2nd internet property GearHeadWiki. It is a site dedicated to all things automotive including something completely new to the internet, free online repair manuals. I envision that GearHeadWiki will get rid of any need for anyone to have to purchase a repair manual for their vehicle again.

If you like cars and want to be part of this project please feel free to create or edit pages. Anything is helpful and if you have any questions please email wiki[at]gearheadwiki.com.

When I was in grade 11 I spent a night working for a man who removed flooring for a living. I had previously had a few jobs before this one, but this one was different. It taught me something. It taught me that time is worth as much as I decide it’s worth. All of the jobs I had up to that point had paid me <$10/hour and this one paid me around $18/hour. I didn’t realize it at the time but now have realized that my time is worth different amounts to differnet people. Now I know that might not seem like a big deal, but for a kid in grade 11, to all of a sudden have a jump in pay of nearly 80% is a huge deal. Also it’s not like I had gotten any smarter and also didn’t work any harder than I had at any other job I had in the past but, to this man MY time was worth more.

I realized that the key was to find people that will pay me what I KNOW my time is worth. I do actually believe that I am something special and deserve to payed more than almost all people are willing to pay me. This is all part of the reason I have made this website, to document my quest to get paid what I am worth. I know that I dont deserve the same pay as lets say a surgeon or some bigshot athlete but on the other hand there are many CEOs who go to 4 meeting a year and get paid more than anyone else on earth. You have to think of also what other peoples time is worth to you.

A surgeon might be worth $1000 dollars to you, but if he is only worth $1000 to each person and performs 200 surguries a year, then his time is worth $200,000/year. A CEO of some big company, on the other hand, might only be worth $1 to you but in this case 1,000,000 people think that he is worth $1 therefore he is overall worth more than the surgeon. I don’t know about the rest of you but I would like to be the CEO.

Another point being that, what I think I am worth does change day to day and year to year. For example, I know that I am worth more today than I was when I was 16 and I will be worth more in 20 years than I am today because of what I can provide people through my increasing knowledge, skill, and experience. It basically comes down to supply and demand, I need to find out what is the best way to turn what I can supply into money.

I hate the word niche because ever since I started looking to make money on the internet, this little word has followed me wherever I look. According to Dictionary.com niche means:

1. an ornamental recess in a wall or the like, usually semicircular in plan and arched, as for a statue or other decorative object.
2. a place or position suitable or appropriate for a person or thing: to find one’s niche in the business world.
3. a distinct segment of a market.
4. Ecology. the position or function of an organism in a community of plants and animals.
Adjective
5. pertaining to or intended for a market niche; having specific appeal: niche advertising.
Verb (used with object)
6. to place (something) in a niche.

Obviously in the case of business and making money 2, 3, and 5 are the ones that make sense but you are always given the impression that a “niche” is something very small and very defined. I have come to realize that a “niche” is just fancy speak for what area of the market you work in. This does not have to mean something that says that you only sell the minute hands for watches, what people mean by “find your niche” is just that you have to pursue something. You can’t go after everything, so choose something (doesn’t matter what) and go after it.

If I were to start writing on this site about begonias and the new gardening gloves I just bought, that wouldn’t make sense, but it would if this were a gardening blog.

This isn’t to say that you can’t be in more than one niche, but you have to separate them or you tend to look a little dodgey. Most people who make money on the internet do business in more than one niche but they separate them to get the most out of each one.

If you want to have a large amount of money you need to do one very important thing: STOP WORKING FOR MONEY!! Now I know many of you are thinking, “He is going to tell me that I need to make my money work for me” but if you thought that you would be wrong. However, that is great advice and also one of the most important principals to acquiring unfathomable amounts of wealth, that is not the message I want to convey right now.

If you work for a set amount of money every hour, day, month, or even year there is a huge probability that you are missing out on ridiculous amounts of potential income. Why? you might ask. Well, it just happens to be your lucky day because I am about to tell you. If you work for, lets say an hourly wage, you will only ever make that amount of money for your time that you work. You may get a raise but you will still be limited to that amount of money per hour you work. There are some exceptions to this, as there always are, such as big CEOs like Steve Jobs or Ray R. Irani (respectively top 1 and 2 top paid CEOs) but, hey, if YOU can set how much you make at the beginning of the year in the hundreds of millions, you aren’t the one read a website about how to make money anyway.

This is where you brain comes in and you think about what you can do to create streams of passive income. There are the common types of passive income, such as stocks or mutual funds, but how many people can live off of what they make from their mutual funds? Not too many. I don’t even know how, yet, I will come up with $15/hour every hour of every day but I know that putting my thoughts out there for other people to read could be part of that process of not working for money.

(PS. If you have any ideas (good ideas!!) on how a person could achieve a goal of $15/hour every hour of every day please comment or send me an email so I can try it and tell everyone how, exactly, to do it for themselves.)