Mornings are by far my least favorite time of day. At least for the most part.

To give you an idea, I usually start working (when I actually work) at around 9PM and oftentimes push through till about 3 or 4 in the morning. People have given me all kinds of advice over the years on things I should do to become a “morning person” like “everyone else”, but it just doesn’t work like that for me.

No matter how early I go to bed or how many coffees I gulp down upon getting up, my brain power never truly kicks in until after sundown.

This is perhaps why, when growing up, I was the most useless kid on the farm. I hated those early mornings and looking back, I am certain the morning world hated me too for getting out of bed before noon. Hehe

Sunrises To Behold!

These last couple mornings have been different though. I have been trying to wake up super early a few days in a row now to try and capture the beautiful sunrise over the ocean here in Bali, Indonesia. This is the best shot I have gotten so far.

As you can tell, I never actually got out of bed to take it. Lazy… I know

You can’t really capture the beauty with an iPhone camera while still half asleep, but that is a heavenly view to wake up to nonetheless.  And want to know the best part? My wife and I wake up to beautiful views like this almost every morning!

Chances are you couldn’t care less about traveling the world or seeing and enjoying the finer things in life, so let me ask you this: what exactly are your dreams? What would your ideal day to day lifestyle look like?

Living the Dream

I like to think that my wife and I live a pretty awesome lifestyle (she just confirmed that we do, hehe). I am not saying that to brag or show off, but I will say this: there honestly are very few things we would do differently if all limitations were to be removed.

We both love our dream life and you know what? We are no millionaires!

So often when I talk to people I hear them say things like “You are so lucky. I’ll start living the dream once I’ve made my first million” or “that’ll have to wait until I retire” etc. But why?

Truth is, I did not get lucky. All luck was against me and life knocked me down hard – almost daily – for 2 years straight, but I refused to stay down. Failing literally wasn’t an option for me, so I kept getting up – time and time again – and tried again. As Jon Bon Jovi would say “Success is falling nine times and getting up ten.”

Well said sir!

Looking back though, a lot of those “knockdowns” could have been avoided if I had started out with a specific end-goal in mind. Sure, I had huge ambitions, but if someone had asked me what I wanted out of life or what it would take for me to consider myself “successful”, I would not have been able to give an answer.

I wanted success, but had absolutely no idea what that would mean for me. So the lesson I learned is…

Become Very Specific with what it is You Want!

Things like “I want a million dollars” etc are not clear at all. We all want those things (most of us at least) but why do we want them?

Is it to pay off old debt? Have more free time to enjoy with family? How about: having the time and money freedom to travel the world? Those 3 were/are my big ones!

The key for me was to figure out EXACTLY what I wanted out of life. I don’t have everything figured out yet and I am constantly re-adjusting as I go along, but truth is: the clearer we become with exactly where we want to go, the easier it will be to figure out exactly what it will take to get there.

It is one of those “ask vague questions and you’ll get vague answers” scenarios. We have got to become very specific!

I am writing things down almost every other day now. Why? Because it helps me become super clear with what it is I want.  There is just something magical about putting things on paper.

Which leads me to my next point…

Staying Laser Focused!

This is extremely hard to do if you work online. Especially if you are a new(er) entrepreneur in the “internet marketing” niche. If it isn’t facebook, it likely is another new “shiney” product that is distracting you, and probably wasting a ton of your precious time. I am talking from experience here. Been there – done that!

Every single day I get half a dozen emails – all recommending a bunch of new product launches. I am not going to comment on the quality of these products because everyone is entitled to their opinion, but let me just say this: unless you have a way of making all products you buy work for you (as in – they help you reach your end goal), stop wasting money on them.

Most internet marketing startups fall into the trap of buying every product that promises instant riches but fact is, they will very likely not work for you – especially if you do not follow-through and implement them. I say this because I have been there.

I spent literally thousands of dollars on these shallow products – hoping that “this will be the one that will do it for me” but all they ever did was frustrate me with information overload. Nothing ever worked on a worthwhile scale – no matter how positive I felt about it.

All those product launches I bought into were a waste of my hard earned money, and more importantly, a waste of my time. Especially in the beginning when I was just starting out.

Was all the information within the guides useless? Were all the plugins and software useless? No!

They had their purpose, but for me, they were the wrong things to focus on.

Example: Every now and again I have someone emailing me, telling me of all the plugins or guides they bought and yet are still not making a dime online. If you focus on buying new products, your wallet is not going to get any fuller. In fact, keep it up long enough and you will dig yourself into a lot of debt like I did some 3 years ago.

There are some pretty cool guides, software, and plugins out there that automate tedious tasks or make things overall a lot easier, but they – in and of themselves – will not make you money in the long run. You need to follow a solid business model – where you provide value in exchange for money – if you want it to work for you in the months and years to come.

Let’s face it: Do you really need the latest guide on how to outsmart Google? Do you really need the hottest piece of software that uses “loopholes” to get you top search engine rankings?

The answer is “NO!”

You really do not need any of the flashy guides and gadgets to make it online. Would some of them come handy? Sure, but again, you do not NEED them to start out with.

Starting Over From Scratch

If I were to lose my business overnight and had to start from scratch, there really would only be a handful of products/services I would invest in to get me back on my feet.

1.) Domain Name:

First thing would be a domain name. I can get a decent .com domain name at NameCheap for about $10 USD per year. Very affordable and – in my opinion – a must have if you want to build a strong/lasting business online.

2.) Hosting:

Next, I would head on over to HostGator and sign up for a simple hosting plan. Again, for just a few dollars you can get a fairly decent hosting package with them. I currently have a dedicated server with them that I host the majority of my sites on, but when starting out, their smallest package should do just fine.

I love HostGator for their affordable “No BS” approach to hosting and their 24/7 support system. I have been with a few hosting companies over the years and when it comes to customer service, HostGator simply is the best in my opinion. You can literally talk to someone there in a matter of 2 minutes if you need to. This can come super handy if you are in the middle of something time sensitive like a product launch.

3.) AutoResponder: 

You will also want an autoresponder like AWeber or some of the other ones out there. I myself have my list hosted at MailChimp.

NOTE: I have nothing against AWeber (or any other autoresponder service provider for that matter). I used to have my lists with them back in the day, but they were a bit pricey for me at the time and I was not too comfortable with some of the “permanent account banning” horror stories I heard but all that could have changed by now. I don’t know. I only pick on them and use them as an example because I am somewhat familiar with them.

At the end of the day, it does not matter where you get any of the just mentioned services from, as long as they are reliable, easy to work with, and fit into your budget. The point I am trying to make here is: those are about the only 3 necessities (in my opinion) that I would invest in to get me kickstarted online and to be 100% honest with you, with those 3 services alone, you can make some nice cash if you are willing to do a little bit of manual work yourself.

Example: A few months back I tapped into a rather obscure niche, bought a domain name and set up a wordpress blog on the domain. I then – without even changing the original template on the blog – started adding content to it that I myself wrote specifically for it.

Throughout the content I recommended an affiliate product and before long, I started getting natural search engine traffic to that blog. I did not get hundreds of unique visitors a day, but at 1 out of 17 visitors buying the product (which averages about $75 per sale), it adds up very quickly.

I was faithful for the first 2 months and added a piece of new content to it every week or so, but I will confess that it has been about a month since I last touched it. Either way, that blog consistently earns me anywhere between $500 and $800 USD per month. Yes, that was after all the crazy Google updates!

Food for Thought: I have been going through some indepth “real estate investing” training material over the years and just recently started going through it all again (as I can see myself getting more and more into that within the next year or so), but here is an interesting observation I made: a real estate property that cashflows as much as one of my sites does, is considered to be an awesome investment.

The monthly income from real estate properties is not really scalable. My sites on the other hand are VERY scalable. All I have to do is find ways to drive more targeted traffic to them and my monthly income will increase.

This was just something cool I came across and I am by no means degrading real-estate investing. In fact, like I said, I will be getting more and more into it myself over the next year or two.

Rinse and Repeat

You say “$500 to $800 per month is not much, Konrad. Show me some real figures!”

It isn’t much, but who says I can not rinse and repeat the strategy? Which is exactly what I have been doing for a few months now. Not all sites perform as good, but some perform even better. All said and done, it all adds up very quickly!

Truth is: there are still millions of untapped obscure little niches that can be very profitable. Just expand your horizons a bit and you will find dozens of them.

Anyhow, it cost me $12 for the domain name, and assuming I did not already have a dedicated server, it would have cost me another $6 per month for hosting. Aside from some good old fashioned manual labour by me, that was it!

Just to clarify, I didn’t even add an optin form to that site when I originally started making money with it, but I have since gone ahead and added it in the footer of the blog and started building a mailing list in that small niche as a result. The list – in case you did not know – is the true asset/cash machine that I can tap into over and over again. I have not mailed that list once so far though, so again, still lots of room for me to grow the revenue from that simple blog!

Let’s back up a bit: Let’s say all you really want at this point is to quit your dayjob and in order to do that, you need to replace the income it currently gives you. For the sake of this demonstration, let’s say you would need to make exactly $5000 per month.

Let’s divide that by 30 to figure out exactly how much you need to make per day to achieve that goal.

$5000 / 30 = $167

Now, if your average commission is $75 per sale (like mine is in the above example), how many sales would you need to make – on average – per day, to reach your goal?

$167 / $75 = 2.2

That means you would need to generate – on average – a little over 2 sales per day, to make your desired $5000 per month. Is that doable? Absolutely!

TIP: If you want to earn bigger commissions, look into small niches with products outside of the crowded internet marketing community.

Next you would need to figure out exactly how many similar sites you would need to set up to reach your targeted number of sales. I think you get the idea though.

Once you get some statistics going, you can very easily break down your averages and figure out the exact number of sales of sales you need to generate, the exact number of unique visitors it takes to get those sales, etc. You can literally remove all the guesswork and – like I said before – break it down to a simple science.

Make Success a Science

I am not very good with numbers. In fact, I failed math in high school (ironic how I ended up working for a leading bank later on, isn’t it?) but these kind of calculations excite me. Why? Because it makes what appeared to be impossible, all of a sudden possible!

Once you become very clear with what it is you want, you can become very clear with what it will take for you to get there. You can’t “hope for the best” if you want to make it big. You got to get very specific!

When NASA sent astronauts to the moon, they didn’t just shoot the rocket up and hoped they would land on the moon somehow. No, they calculated every move to GUARANTEE a safe moon landing. Calculate every move you need to make to guarantee your dream landing!

I can already hear someone snare “Konrad, I don’t want to set up dozens of these little authority blogs” and that is cool. I don’t care how you plan on making your money online (or offline for that matter), break it down to a science with doable/actionable baby steps and then power through them.

Outsource Dreaded Tasks

Another objection you might have is: “I suck at writing” etc etc. My response is, “then outsource it”.

Find someone on fiverr who will gladly do for $5 what you don’t want to do yourself.

We are capable of making enormous dreams come true once we break the process of achieving them down (into actionable baby steps) and follow through with them.

Conclusion

You really do not need any fancy tools/guides/software to make it online. You do however need to become very specific about your dreams/goals/desired outcomes and even more specific on what you will do to achieve them.

Please let me know your thoughts and or experiences in this regard and be sure to recommend this post in your social circles.

The post Scientific Formula to Successfully Living Your Dream! appeared first on Kobra Dynasty.

Have you ever felt like you were holding on to something that distracted you from doing what you really should and wanted to be doing? I am not at all talking about things like facebook, twitter, TV or other small things like that (though those can be the ultimate distraction).

These last few months I have been giving my whole online business some thought and concluded that I needed to get rid of a lot of things that keep me “busy” but are not helping me get to where I want to be 1 year from now – or even 6 months from now.

My Profitable Distraction

One prime example is the search engine marketing services I used to provide to website owners. It was a great service – customers loved it – and I had great success with it. In fact, providing these SEO services is what allowed me to quit my offline business and start working full-time online.

I had systematized the entire service to a point where I had a virtual assistant manage the entire system for me with about 1 hour worth of work per day. And that included customer service (responding to emails, etc). It was going pretty solid – with my highest month being around $6,000 in profit – JUST from selling the SEO services.

It doesn’t really matter where you live in the world, $6,000 per month is a decent income to have coming in whether you work or not. Especially if – like in my case – it came in month after month without me really having to do anything. In fact, if I had walked away from it, it would have continued to bring me in a half decent income for months and years to come.

But getting back to what I was saying earlier: It was nothing more than a distraction to me – keeping me from what I wanted to be doing online. Sure the money was alright, but providing generic SEO services is not something I wanted to continue doing – even if it meant minimal work on my part.

Knowing Your Limits

Google was starting to make some major changes to it’s ranking algorithm and my once overnight miracle service wasn’t quite as powerful as it used to be. The service was still great, but I just did not want to continue providing a service if I didn’t full-heartedly believe in it myself anymore.

So at the beginning of this year (January 2012) I got rid of the generic SEO service completely. I cancelled all subscriptions of incoming payments and shut down the entire system – retiring it for good.

I still do a lot of SEO and probably forever will be known as “the SEO guy” but I mainly do it now for my own sites and a select few clients who have bigger budgets to work with.

It would take a few posts to explain in detail why I stopped providing SEO services, but the short version is: as long as I have customers, I will put their sites as top priority (before mine). Now that I have less than 5 client sites to work with, I have plenty of time, energy and resources to focus on my own sites.

Setbacks are Setups for Comebacks

Was letting go of a medium-range 4-figure a month income stream really a wise decision on my part? I like to think so. Here is why: If I keep pushing my own sites like I have been these last two months, I should be in the 5-figures a month range before the end of the year – and that from just a handful of my many sites.

Oh and get this: it would be without staff (or some of the other expenses that came with running the SEO services for customers) – which means more cash stays in my wallet.

So here is my challenge for you: is what you are working on today getting you to where you want to be a year from now? Are you holding on to an ultimate distraction just because it gives you a sense of security for the time being? Maybe it’s time to cut loose the safety boat you are dragging to conserve your energy, time, and resources, and bring the big boat to the shore.

The post Letting Go of Distractions appeared first on Kobra Dynasty.

When I started marketing online full-time a couple years ago, I still had this notion that I was going to be a millionaire overnight.

Somehow I felt that God was going to be exceptionally pleased with me and give me more success and wealth than I would know what to do with, and I was certain this would all happen before I would reach the age of 25.
Well fact is, I am exceptionally blessed and not having to go to work every day is more freedom than most millionaires get to enjoy, but I am nowhere close to having that million dollars in my bank account that I always thought I would have by now.

And that is ok!

I have matured a lot as a business owner and despite many of the “overnight internet multi-millionaire” success stories you might have read, I have learned that building a business online takes time and hard work, just like any other business.

Sure… you don’t have to break your back when working online, but there are other challenges you need to overcome. It is very much a growing process!

Keep Building One Brick At A Time!

Every successful marketer I have gotten to know on a personal level over the years has built their business one brick at a time (one website at a time, one client at a time, one blog post at a time, one backlink at a time, etc).

It takes hard work, but the beauty of it is – if you do it right – it will (with time) pay off BIG time!

Here is an email I just received from Jared Croslow, a fellow internet marketer.

Subject: Are you a bricklayer?‏

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Ever get one of those flash backs while working on something?

I was just sitting here working on some backlink systems and an old memory came to me.

It was from when I was about 14yrs old, and I was just starting to learn the family trade of Bricklaying.

I come from a long line of Bricklayers and Tuckpointers. For generations my family has built churches, court houses, and even skyscrapers.

But what I remember is when I first started to learn bricklaying, and the lesson it taught me about business and life.

You see bricklaying is hard work.

Your back hurts.

It’s hot.

The hours suck.

And for a 14 yr old kid it seemed like an impossible task.

My uncle and I were on one of my first bricklaying job which was to rebuild the side of a wall of an old garage.

It was overwhelming to me. Hundreds upon hundreds of bricks.

“How will we ever finish?” I thought.

But my uncle taught me one of the most important lessons of my life…

“We will do it one brick at a time, and lay each brick as perfectly as possible.”

And so we began. One brick at a time. Add a little mortar. Slide it into place. Tap it a little. Line it up. Check the level. Scrap off the excess. Rinse & Repeat.

At first nothing seemed to be happening.

But before my very eyes a wall began to form. A wall that was strong enough to withstand storms, and to provide protection from intruders.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was learning how to create anything of great value in life.

It’s not fast.

It’s going to suck at times.

And at first it appears nothing is happening.

But then all of a sudden, all that hard work. Materializes into a wall!

Are you a bricklayer?

I know what ever you may be working on today can at times seem overwhelming.

I know it can seem as if you will never get to where you want to be.

But I promise you, if you just focus on laying one brick at a time, as perfectly as you can lay a brick.

Not only will you build a wall, but a wall that will survive the storms, and be there for people to come and see for years to come.

So go lay a brick… as perfectly as you can lay a brick.

Have a great Monday,

Jared Croslow
http://www.cliconomics.com

p.s. My grandfather also taught me another very important lesson.

“Your back is only good for so long.”

Thank you internet!

@ Jared: Thank you for allowing me to post this. I very much appreciate it!

@ my readers: Let me know your thoughts or feedback below and hey, if you like it, why not pass it on?

Someone will thank you for it!

Konrad Braun

The post Building an Income Empire – One Brick at a Time! appeared first on Kobra Dynasty.