Lifestyle Design Unleashed

photo credit: notsogoodphotography

Today I want to share a tip with you that I have found to be extremely useful over the years to take an existing website and rapidly ramp up traffic and/or profits from it. And that is what I call the “easy wins” principle – sometimes known as the “low hanging fruit”.

The idea is this. You start a website. You create content. You build links and start to generate traffic from the search engines. Hopefully within a few months you have a reasonable amount of traffic and some sales coming in. Maybe you even hit the number one spot for the main keyword you’re targeting.

What I like to do every few weeks with my existing websites is to take some time with the computer turned off to do some “blue sky thinking” about each website. I consider the results I’m getting at the moment – the visitor numbers, the type of visitor, what pages are getting the most interest, what keywords people are finding my site for and use these pieces of information to look for “easy wins” – that is the simplest possible ways to capitalize on my existing sites and take them to the next level.

Here’s just one example. On many of my Wordpress-based sites I use a free plugin called Search Meter which keeps track of any keywords that visitors type into the search box on my websites.

It’s quite common to look through the results for the last few weeks and see that there are a number of popular, common searches that I simply don’t have any content on. These people are essentially pointing the way towards content they’d like to see so if a certain phrase gets searched for regularly I will create some content specifically on that topic.

It’s an easy win. We know people are interested in that subject, so why not give them what they want?

Another idea might be finding a similar keyword phrase to what you rank for already so you can start to focus your attention on getting a good ranking for that phrase. The result, assuming you stay top for your first phrase, will be a significant increase in traffic and assuming your keywords are similar this can be very easy to achieve.

For example if you’re ranking well for the phrase “cheap iphone 4 cases” then with a little link building you could probably also rank highly for “budget iphone 4 cases”.

Looking at the keywords that people are finding you for in the search engines (using your website analytics) will often turn up a range of phrases people are typing into the search engines and finding your website for. Try typing in these searches yourself to see where you rank and if you’re in the top 10-20 results, a little bit of effort should easily push you up the rankings further, quickly building additional traffic to your site.

If you have an existing website that you’re trying to turn into a lifestyle business why not take the time this week to examine the results you’re getting and look for those “easy wins” that can lead to significant improvements in the results you see?

photo credit: tropical.pete

It has been suggested in the past by a number of jokers that “blog” stands for “better listings on Google” because it seems that blogs get all the best rankings in the search engines. Ask most people about blogging and they’ll tell you it’s great for search engine rankings and everyone should start a blog.

Except that I’m not convinced by this argument. I think it’s one of those “golden rules” that everyone just accepts without actually questioning it’s validity.

Today I want to explain why in my opinion and experience blogs *aren’t* necessarily the holy grail for top search engine rankings and equally what you can do to greatly increase your chances of success when running a blog.

When it comes to a decent search engine ranking there are two main factors we need to concern ourselves with; onpage optimization and link building. Quite simply if we want our website to rank well for the phrase “lifestyle design” (as I do for this blog) we want to mention the phrase lifestyle design several times on our site and then build a number of links to our site which say the same thing.

The more links we have and the higher the quality of sites that are linking to us, the better our ranking will be.

However there is also a “trickle down” effect of these links. If we have hundreds of links pointing to our homepage then the other pages on our site that we link to from this page will also receive some of this link juice, thus helping those individual pages of our site also rank better.

And lots of additional pages that rank well for high traffic keyword phrases means plenty more visitors for us – and most likely profit as a result.

A standard website consists of a set number of pages, each of which is typically linked to from the navigation menu, thus each page of the site receives a reasonable amount of link juice from the homepage and are all likely to rank quite well.

In this way I have had some crazy experiences like one site I built having it’s “contact us” page outranking millions of other sites in a very competitive niche for a very profitable keyword phrase just because I put that keyword phrase on the page a few times and the page then received considerable link juice from my homepage.

Now contrast this with a blog. By it’s definition a blog is a regularly updated website. New content is added every so often thus encouraging visitors to come back again and read the latest articles.

But over the course of a few months or years this same blog will soon balloon with hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of content. And you certainly can’t link to every single one from your homepage. Indeed typically the homepage will list the latest articles added and perhaps the most popular articles on the site. Older articles have very few (if any) internal links pointing to them. So they often don’t rank very well at all.

Typically a new article will rank well initially as it is on the homepage and is linked to from all over the site from the “latest articles” area of the navigation menu. But when it is old enough to drop off that menu, it’s rankings drop too.

Therefore it is possible to update a blog constantly, adding new content, whilst seeing very little increase in search engine traffic.

This is why I believe that just having a blog isn’t enough to get top search engine rankings. Indeed in those cases where most of the top results are blogs I think it has more to do with the simple fact that there are a lot of blogs competing for that keyword phrase and so by default quite a few of them will get top rankings for their primary keyword phrase (though whether they get top rankings for older articles is another matter).

If you want to generate significant traffic from your blog, including getting good rankings for your individual articles as well as your main homepage, then we need to approach the concept of blogging in a rather different way to just regularly adding new content.

Basically we need to add new content and then build links to it. This is a key element that many blogging authorities fail to mention. Because when your individual articles have a number of links pointing to them they should still retain an excellent ranking even when they drop off your blog homepage.

So how do we build links to individual articles on your blog? There are a ton of them so I don’t want to go into detail about them all but just a few ideas include submitting them to the social bookmarking sites (Bookmarking Demon does this for you if you want an automatic solution), writing and submitting articles to the article directories that link back to individual articles rather than your main homepage and also encouraging your readers to link to posts of yours that they find particularly interesting.

You can also use blog commenting and trackback marketing to increase your results yet further.

You can even use internal linking to increase the links pointing to your individual articles such as through the use of a sitemap (which you can build further links to) and through the use of a “related posts” plugin like I use here on Lifestyle Design Unleashed.

There are two take-home points here. Firstly don’t believe everything you read without testing it out for yourself. Secondly a key element if you decide to build a blog is to ensure you build links to your internal pages as well as your main homepage.

photo credit: somegeekintn

Many people would like you to believe that lifestyle design is the route to nirvana – and that when you put the effort into creating your perfect lifestyle the sun will always shine, the birds will always sing and life will skip along happily and easily.

And whilst do a degree this is true (minus the exaggeration!) I’m afraid to say that having been on this journey for some time there are actually a number of potential downsides to lifestyle design too.

Yes, I hate to be the one to say it, but lifestyle design as we know it from books like The Four Hour Work Week isn’t necessarily for everyone. Of course, one of the benefits of the whole principle is the flexibility inherent in the concept so you can take the bits you want and leave the rest, but I thought it might be beneficial here to try and give a balanced view of the pros and cons of lifestyle design based on my own experiences thus far.

The Pros Of Lifestyle Design

Freedom

The biggest benefit of all when it comes to lifestyle design is simply the potential freedom that this process can grant you. Indeed I would hazard a guess based on emails I have had through this site, from forum posts and other blogs that freedom is really the biggest draw of all. Freedom to get up when you want. Freedom from a job that sucks the life out of you. Freedom to control what you do and when you do it. Freedom to do al those things you want to do but never have the time for.

Amazing Experiences

A knock-on of this freedom is the ability to have some truly amazing experiences. When you free up your time and no longer need to fit into a standard job with it’s controls over your time, your energy and your location you are immediately more free to go out and really experience all that life has to offer. Honestly ask yourself how many things you’d like to do, or would have liked to have done, over the last year but couldn’t thanks to “work commitments”.

Fascinating Conversations

What I have found is that most people caught on the treadmill we know as the rat race really have very little time for really living. So their conversations are taken up with topics such as the weather, what is happening at work at the moment and the new car they’re considering purchasing.

Ring up your friends from one week to the next and nothing has really happened. I lose count of the number of emails and phone calls I have had over the years from people who have absolutely no news – even if it is months since we last spoke – because most people really don’t have time for a life.

Lifestyle designers are by default different. They have the time and freedom to experience life and so you will discover a group of passionate people who are living a full and enjoyable life, where things happen and there is plenty of news. This makes for fascinating conversation and a more stimulating form of communication.

Being An Inspiration To Others

How many times have people said to you over the years “I’d love to do x but…”. Whether it’s writing a book, traveling the world, learning to play an instrument or to speak a new language. Maybe it’s getting into shape or even something as simple as painting the spare room.

Most people have things they’d like to do, but they never seem to get round to actually doing them. They don’t take the leap.

Those of us who are successful at our lifestyle design goals are, by our very nature, doers. To be successful at lifestyle design we have to go out there, grab life by the throat and make changes.

And when you start to really achieve things; when you start to make genuinely positive changes in your life; you’ll find that you can become an inspiration to others. A catalyst to show the way and prove that things *are* possible. You *can* make changes. You just need to apply yourself.

And it’s a great feeling to be the motivator that helps others to achieve those goals they’ve always aimed for but never dared to strive for.

Living A Fulfilling Life

The freedom to choose what you do and where you do it, to mix with interesting people and experience new things every day quite simply can lead to a more fulfilling and satisfying life. A life where it doesn’t feel like life is running away from you while you just try to stay afloat. A life where you live consciously aiming to do all the things you want.

Having The Time For Things That Matter

What happens if you need time off work tomorrow because a family member is ill? What if your child has a play at school that clashes with a meeting at work? What if your favorite band are performing live near where you live but you know you have to be up at 6am the next day to get to the office in time? Likely the formality and control of a “normal” job will make these issues a real problem for you.

But they’re not an issue for lifestyle designers. They control their time and so can choose to spend it however they want. All of the above problems are simple for people who are financially independent. But not for those trapped in a corporate world.

And let’s be honest here for a moment, however unsavory the truth really is. When you get old what memories are you really likely to cherish the most – how you managed to get to work on time that Thursday or that amazing gig you attended with your friends? That you succeeded in getting a $2,000 raise thanks to your excellent attendance record at work, or that you were there by your loved-ones bedside to support them through their sickness? The choice is yours.

Increased Energy

This benefit of lifestyle design seems rarely to be mentioned yet for me was one of the biggest and yet most surprising aspects of giving up formal work. Quite simply a “normal” job requires a huge amount of effort both physically and mentally. It’s not unusual to get home from work totally zapped for energy.

The last thing you want to do is go out in the evening for dinner or to the gym. You just want to put your feet up. You just start to recover over the weekend before having to start the whole process all over again.

When you’ve been working fulltime for years you don’t realize just how much your job really takes out of you. Within a few weeks of quitting your job, of staying in bed till your body has had enough sleep rather than getting up because of your alarm, of spending your time doing things you’re passionate about and not constantly being on the go you will probably find your energy levels rising.

I found I was almost like a different person. More passionate. More patient. More willing to listen to others. Kinder, if you like, because I was no longer tired, stressed and in a hurry the whole time. Life just because easier and more enjoyable and I felt better equipped to enjoy it.

The Cons Of Lifestyle Design

Irregular Income

However boring your job is, the predictability that can make it so dull also has upsides. Generally there are no nasty surprises in store. Each day is much the same as any other. And of course at the end of each month you can look forward to a regular and predictable paycheck.

When you are working for yourself this isn’t always the case. Incomes can go down as well as up. Websites can drop out of the search engines. Affiliate programs can close. Adsense accounts get closed down and so on.

On the other hand incomes can go up considerably such as when your site finally hits the top spot in the search engines or when testing a new monetization strategy pays off.

However this means that budgeting can be a little more difficult and it pays to monitor your money a little more carefully and save a chunk from your better months to cover any nasty future surprises.

Greater Responsibility

In many jobs you simply need to turn up, do the bare minimum each day and then go home to relax at the end. It’s boring but typically once you walk out of your workplace your responsibilities end.

In lifestyle design you are taking responsibility for your own life. It is up to you when you work and how much money you earn. It is up to you to do your taxes and ensure you stay within the law. Certainly you can hire people to help you with all this (which I recommend) but just be aware that when you’re working for yourself you have far less fallback.

Loss Of Friends

I don’t want to suggest that those actively involved in lifestyle design are anti-social friendless individuals but more that as you develop personally so your group of close friends is likely to change.

If you currently work with some people you get on well with – even regard as friends – the fact is that as you spread your wings, quit your job and go out to experience life many of these friends will quite simply be “left behind”.

They will still be trapped in the rat race and probably won’t have the time or freedom to allow them to join you on your adventures whatever they may be. Once you’ve left the workplace you may well also find you have far less in common with them and far less to talk about.

In their place you will likely meet new friends who are involved in lifestyle design in their own way – whether they know it or not.

It is easy to be sad about slipping away from friends – and of course it isn’t inevitable – but you should also appreciate that lifestyle design allows you to really become your true self. The new friends you will meet along your journey will then probably be even better for you – and turn out to grow even closer to you – than your old friends who will probably still be doing what they are doing now in ten years time (whilst moaning about it!).

Self Discipline

Becoming active in lifestyle design requires self discipline and self motivation. You’re going to have to put the effort in now so that you can reap the results in the future. This can mean giving up short term gratification to achieve greater things long term.

But there is also another side which I have seen time and again. Once you have a successful lifestyle business which is easily covering your monthly expenses with minimal time and effort it can be easy to get complacent.

I have suffered from this problem as have many other people I know; that quite simply when you quit your job knowing that your expenses are covered with just a few hours work a week it can be easy to get lazy and comfortable. It doesn’t matter what you do so long as you pay your web hosting and domain fees – the money keeps rolling in.

Ideally this freedom provides opportunities to really experience life has to offer but it’s surprisingly easy to just get lazy instead.

Difficulties With Credit

Compare how difficult it will be to get a loan or mortgage when you have a sensible, reliable job with a stable company and again when you are self employed earning money from a small network of websites.

Generally it is going to be far easier to get credit in the first place so if you’re seriously considering anything in the near future that will require credit – such as buying a new house – then it pays to get this goal ticked off while you’re still employed rather than after you go fulltime working for yourself.

Any pros or cons of lifestyle design that you think I missed? If so, please leave me a comment as your opinions are important.

 
photo credit: fuzzcat

Looking at the keywords that people have found this site through recently I was interested to discover a number of searches for phrases related to quitting lifestyle design. I find this somewhat ironic as so many people are just getting started on the journey but all the same the question begs some serious thought.

We can define lifestyle design as the process of creating a lifestyle that you love. Where you earn money either residually thus freeing you up to do other things, or by working on things you really feel passionately about. Or ideally both.

You feel contented and satisfied with life with the right balance between excitement and security. You don’t long for the day to be over but instead relish every minute and are shocked how quickly each day has passed.

When we think in those terms many of us have ideas as to what that lifestyle will look like to us. And of course our vision is an essential roadmap helping us to make the necessary changes in our lifestyle.

So what about quitting lifestyle design? I can think of only two real reasons to consider quitting and they are that either you are giving up for whatever reason (any why would you ever *deliberately* stop aiming for a better, more fulfilling life?) or when you finally achieve that ultimate goal.

And yet even the ultimate goal is likely to shift over time. Your opinions, values and experiences will change and with them so will you, making lifestyle design a pursuit more like Buddhism where really it is the journey more than the destination that counts.

Some might argue then that lifestyle design is somewhat pointless; why put considerable time and effort into creating your perfect day, everyday, only to find that “perfection” is a moving target.

The simple fact of the matter is that one of the main goals of lifestyle design is freedom. Freedom to work when you want, on what you want. Freedom to travel. Freedom to indulge your passions and freedom to control what you do, when and with whom.

And this concept of freedom is interesting for two reasons. Firstly freedom is a recurring theme in most people’s lifestyle design plans no matter what the other elements. And it’s this same freedom which *enables* you to make extra changes.

Let’s say your goal is to earn a fulltime living online working only a few hours a week so you can go travelling the world. You achieve that goal and have the time of your life but after a year or two you start to miss having goals to achieve. Life is drifting along effortlessly and you need some extra goal to aim for.

So maybe you decide to spend six months volunteering for a company or charity whose work is meaningful to you. Most people couldn’t do that because six months without wages simply wouldn’t be possible. Except you already achieved your first goals so you *can* afford to do it. Because you’re earning money from your lifestyle business.

If it weren’t for hitting your first goals – and then having ther freedom of time and money to look at life from a different angle – not only might you never have seen your “calling” but quite possibly you wouldn’t have been able to afford it either.

So in this way lifestyle design builds on itself. Like working out at the gym you get “stronger” over time and so increasing the weight you can lift gets easier and easier.

So when do you quit lifestyle design? Never really. You will hopefully reach points where you are perfectly contented for the time being and when this happens just enjoy it and be in the moment. But if your aims and goals change along the path don’t be afraid to make more changes in the search for the ultimate lifestyle.

photo credit: Viajar24h.com

When I meet people for the first time I like to ask random, searching questions which not only provide interesting topics for discussion but also help me to get a better understanding of that person.

One example would be “tell me what you would do if you won the lottery”, another might be “what is the best memory you have of your childhood?”. But my favorite is simply “what’s the most exciting thing you’ve ever done?”.

Sometimes you get some great answers. I met a guy once who worked in a warehouse driving a forklift but had actually done hundreds of sky dives over the years and even appeared in several James Bond films when he was younger. That was years ago and I still remember the guy despite only meeting him that once.

However more often than not, I get nothing more than a frown. “Exciting?” they ask, staring into the distance thinking. A worrying proportion of the time they can’t think of a single thing.

“You’re 30 years old and you’ve never done *anything* exciting?”

To me this seems more than a little bit depressing.

So I have two points for you today. Firstly, please leave a comment to tell me what the most exciting thing you’ve ever done is. Secondly, whether you have an answer to this question or not, why not put a plan in place that you will achieve this year no matter what – to at least have one exciting experience.

Fly a plane, parachute jump, zip line through the rainforest, be an extra on a TV show, race a car round a track, break a world record, win a competition, run a marathon, do a bungee jump. Do something that will raise your heart rate, something a little crazy, something you’ll probably remember for the rest of your life, that will give you something to talk about for years to come and that will help you stick out in people’s minds.

After all, everyone loves exciting people. And I still haven’t forgotten the James Bond stunt man…

photo credit: pfala

After the preablea week or two ago it’s now time to delve deeper into this exciting project. If you cast your mind back you will remember that we’re going to go on a journey together as I show you a very, very simple way to earn some money on the internet.

Remember that the goal here is just to get you to build a few simple websites, a process that will only take you a few days in total, that will draw in visitors and earn you a little money on the side.

The goal is *not* to enable you to retire from your job but rather to simply help you to prove to yourself and your family that you *can* make money online while teaching you some essential skills along the way. This project should also provide you with a small income which you can reinvest over the next few months into your main lifestyle business which we will be covering in great depth in the forthcoming months.

I just want you to earn your first few dollars online – that’s it.

With that said, and the basic ideas outlined in part 1, let’s crack into the project in more depth so that you can actually start taking some practical steps to getting this project under way.

The Concept

The concept of this simple system is that we are going to build a number of tightly-focused niche websites, each with only 5-20 pages of content. Because these are small sites they can be a little hit-and-miss in their results so I suggest that you aim to build a reasonable number – between 5 and 10 is ideal – to give yourself the best possible chance of success here. The sites are quick and easy to build so it shouldn’t take long at all and I regularly build 5-10 sites in less than a day once I have my content created (which we’ll cover in the future).

Each of these sites is only going to receive a tiny number of visitors each day (think 5-20 unique visitors per day) but are all going to be highly targeted and therefore should make us some money.

What we’re going to do is to focus on promoting physical products as an affiliate. By physical products I mean the sort of stuff that regular shops sell – cupboards, bike helmets, thermal gloves and so on. We’re going to target people who are specifically looking to spend money on such a product before helping them to make a purchase and into the bargain making us some easy money.

Picking Your Niches

We don’t want to compete with the big boys with these little mini sites, instead we want to pick the low-hanging fruits. We want to target specific keyword phrases that probably aren’t worth most large companies aiming for.

The easiest way to pick your 5-10 niches for your 5-10 sites (one niche per site) is to simply go shopping in your local town or city. Just walk around and look at everything that is being sold. Take a notepad and jot down ideas as you go.

Examples might be sandwich toasters, gas barbecues, insect repellent, hair dryers, tea pots, electric showers, chainsaws, door mats, iPhone cases, Eminem posters and so on.

All actual, physical products that people buy.

There are a few tips when it comes to taking down your ideas and deciding on exactly which ones you will use to create your sites around…

1) Avoid Trademarks

I wouldn’t target phrases like “morphy richards kettles” or “ford car stereos” for my main keyword phrase. There is a chance that if you buy a domain name with that trademark in you could get into trouble.

2) Think Niche

When it comes to choosing your topics, think of tight niches. Small numbers of people looking for a specific product. So I wouldn’t focus on just chainsaws for example but I would look for a sub-niche like “cheap chain saws” or “small chain saws”. We want the people who find our sites to be highly targeted and focused on exactly what we’re promoting.

Keyword Selection

Let’s assume by now that you’ve chosen your ten niches. As an example, one might be soldering irons. This niche is probably specific enough without having to break it down further by building a site specifically about a type of soldering iron.

When it comes to the main page of your website you’re going to target the phrase “buy a soldering iron”. This means you ideally want a domain name with this phrase in it. BuyASolderingIron.com would be perfect. The same domain with a .net or .org ending would also be fine. Or you could add a word onto the end of the phrase to get BuyASolderingIronOnline.com or suchlike.

By targetting that exact phrase you’re going to draw in the few people each day who actually want to buy such a product online. They’re probably not doing research but are sitting there, credit-card in hand looking to spend some money. And having the keyword phrase in your domain makes it easier for you to rank for that phrase.

So you know your main keyword phrase for each of your websites now and you know what your domain names for each should be. The only thing left to do is to decide on what the inner pages of your website are going to be about. And the answer is subtopics of your main phrase.

For this we use the Google Keyword Tool. You type your product type in (“soldering irons” for example) and see what other suggestions Google offers up. Ideally here we want to look for brand names of different soldering irons that people are searching for. Each one we find becomes a secondary keyword phrase that we will build a separate page for on our site. Typically 5-10 of these pages is sufficient so just go for those with the highest number of monthly searches.

Looking at the results from Google we would pick phrases such as “weller soldering irons”, “hakko soldering irons” and “magnum soldering irons” as topics for the pages of our site. Including these brand names on our pages should be fine as they won’t be part of our domain name. And someone searching for the phrase “buy a hakko soldering iron” is what we call a highly targetted individual, highly likely to make you some cash.

By this point then we have found the topics for each of our sites. We have selected a primary keyword phrase for each and have decided on the keywords for the pages of our site.

Next we need to register those domains and set up some web hosting so we can actually get working on building our sites.

Register Domains

I personally use GoDaddy to register my domains. Having tried literally hundreds of domain registrars and web hosts over the years I strongly recommend you follow my suggestions which will make life easier and cheaper for you than trying an “unknown” company.

So visit the GoDaddy site, site up for an account and then do a search for the domain names you want. Remember the domain should take the form of, in order is desirability:

1) BuyA[NicheProductType].com
2) BuyA[NicheProductType].org or BuyA[NicheProductType].net
3) BuyA[NicheProductType]Online.com

Personally if all those options are gone I drop the site idea and generate another one until I have my domains registered.

Buy Web Hosting

For web hosting I use HostGator as they are very cheap, highly reliable and you can host unlimited domains with them so we can build all our websites on this one account and only pay one small monthly sum, rather than paying hosting for each of our sites in turn.

As some of your sites will be successes and some will likely be failures it makes sense to keep our costs as low as possible to maximize your chances of making a profit. No point paying $10-20 a month to host a site that doesn’t make you any money.

That’s it for this section. I would encourage you to follow the steps and choose your niches, select all your keywords, buy your 5-10 domains and buy your web hosting so that you are taking positive steps towards earning your first dollars online. In the next part we’re going to look at actually setting up your websites, before examining the simplest way to create content for your sites and how we’re going to market your sites and make money from them.

photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

Over the last few weeks I have been enjoying rewatching Band Of Brothers on DVD. But what struck me, even more than the series, were the special features.

A few of these features included interviews with the actual Second World War soldiers featured in the series and I was taken with just how tough life was for the men. I don’t just mean while they were away at war – that goes without saying. But also either side of the war.

Many of the troops came from poor families living in rural communities trying to make ends meet through farming and so on. The lack of housing and the economic issues after the war led to poverty, severe lack of housing and so on. Rationing continued for some time after peace was declared. In the UK alone thousands of homeless families squatted in old disused military bases before being thrown out.

And this was in the 40’s and 50’s which may sound like a long time ago but really isn’t.

Fast forward to today. Healthcare is readily available and we’re living longer than ever before. Laws surround our working conditions to protect us and our health. The “American Dream” is alive and well where if you’re willing to apply yourself and work hard you can achieve amazing things. Travel is cheap and most of us take regular vacations, have exotic foods from around the world in our cupboards and regard technology like cell phones and cars as an essential part of everyday life.

In comparison to just a few decades ago, life is amazing. Even after the recession.

We’re wealthier, more free and more able to follow our dreams every day. Hundreds of people have quit their jobs to work on an online business and travel the world.

Right now, the world really is your oyster.

Have you ever thought about this? About how through simple luck of being born when you were, in the country you were, you would be surrounded by all these possibilities; all this potential?

Once you start to realize that no matter how crappy your job is right now and no matter how small your house might be you’re still part of the luckiest generation ever you not only start to appreciate what you have more but also want to make the most of the possibilities open to you.

Now is not the time to moan about the issues in your life – issues that are tiny in comparison to what your grand parents and great grand parents had to put up with. Now is the time to make the most of all that is available. That all those men fought for.

It’s time to grab life by the horns, start making positive changes and get out there to really experience life. Make the most of it. And never forget just how lucky you are.

photo credit: SuperFantastic

I’ll be honest. I’m out of shape. And I love a clearly-defined goal such as losing x amount of weight by a certain date rather than just “getting into shape”.

So having recently discovered the 7 Weeks To 100 Push Ups program I’ve decided I’m going to commit to this first fitness challenge. Assuming all goes well this will act as my first step into getting my physique back again and shifting those extra pounds.

Except I don’t have 7 weeks. I have about 6 and a half.

The reason is that my birthday is at the end of August which seems like a natural finish point to try and get up to 100 push ups by then.

The real benefits of the 7 Weeks To 100 Push-Ups program by Steve Spiers is of course that it is a program that can be easily done in the home with minimal time and no real investment of money so it’s an easy way to start getting back into shape.

Of course as a composite exercise, push-ups (or press ups) exercise a huge range of muscles in the body from your shoulders, chest, triceps and core meaning you get a whole-body workout with minimal investment of time. Even better, the book includes a range of “modifications” to the exercises being carried out so that if and when you hit the magic 100 push ups you can then do the program again if you like but focusing on different muscle groups.

As an example you can aim for 100 push ups with your hands splayed wide to work your chest more or with your hands very close together to work on your tripceps giving lots of possibilities and variety in the one simple program.

Keep your eyes peeled to see how I get on and to see whether I manage to get to 100 push-ups by my rapidly-approaching birthday.

photo credit: Andre Charland

Belief is a powerful thing. Henry Ford is reputed to have said that “whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve”. Thousands of people make a full-time living online but when you’re first starting out in lifestyle design and trying to increase your income while freeing yourself from your day job it can be tough.

There are almost as many ways to make money on the internet as there are people doing it. Everyone has their own preference from selling ebooks, to setting up directory websites, to blogging, to affiliate marketing, CPA offers and so on.

Figuring out where to start can be one of the biggest challenges. And almost as big is knowing how long to stick with an idea before giving up. Some ideas will take months to come to fruition, during which time you need to stay strong and motivated and keep plugging away until the results start showing.

During that “lag phase” when you’re putting in the effort but not really seeing any results the only thing that will really carry you forward is your motivation. The longer the time to get some results, the more motivation you will need. And you will also likely need resilience as many of your friends and family (and maybe even you right now) will be cynical about whether it really is possible to earn money off the internet to free yourself from your day job.

So I want to give you something today. Over the next few weeks I want to place into your hands a small, simple business model that anyone, irrespective of experience, can use to earn money online.

Now, I need to be honest with you before we start. The goal of this model – of this series of articles – is not to help you quit your job. The model you’re going to be learning isn’t going to make you rich. And you will need to invest some money in the process (though not a huge amount).

The point of this series of articles is to simply teach you what I think is one of the simplest, easiest and quickest ways to make just your first few dollars online. To prove to yourself and everyone else that you can make money online.

Because once you see those figures; once you actually start to receive some money thanks to your internet activities, this will not only help spur you on to greater things, but it also gives you an argument against the naysayers who may try to tell you that you’re wasting your time.

Again, you will not be able to use this method to quit your job unless you’re very lucky indeed. It’s more likely you’ll make $50-100 a month from your efforts. But you should make something and that’s the goal.

Proof that it’s possible. Your first dollars earned online. And also some practical skills – the foundations if you like – to enable you to start building your own lifestyle business online.

We’ll get to building your full-blown lifestyle business in the coming months but for now let’s just focus on those first few dollars. On that tipping point when you finally realize “hell, I can do this!”.

So what is the method I’m talking about? Quite simply we’re going to build a number of minisites, and then monetize them via affiliate marketing. You’re going to discover how to carry out keyword research, how to build your websites, how to create content the easiest way I know how and how to attract traffic to your sites.

Yes, I know lots of people teach affiliate marketing. Yes, I know you may have read dozens of articles and ebooks on the subject. But having been online since 1997, I’ve never heard anyone actually lay out a model as simple or as powerful as mine.

You’ll quickly build a number of websites with minimal experience required, you’ll draw in small volumes of highly targeted traffic and they will make you money. What’s more, the process is quick, easy and enjoyable. You can also outsource it if that is your desire though I would advise you to put the hours in yourself so that you are learning some vital online skills which will come in handy in the future.

With that little introduction out of the way, I’m going to end this first part of the series. Keep your eyes peeled over the next few weeks for updates where I will take you step by step through the process so you can start to implement it as quickly, easily and effectively as possible.

photo credit: paul (dex)

If you’re looking to create an online business that will generate profits for you on autopilot so that you have both the financial freedom and the freedom of time to spend your life following your passions then one essential consideration should be that of how you’re going to get traffic to your website.

The fact is that there are an almost endless number of ways to generate visitors to your website. From advertising in newspapers and magazines through to using online classified ad sites or building up a Twitter following each experienced webmaster has their favorite traffic generation techniques.

All of these methods work to a degree and all of them have both strengths and weaknesses. If you were trying to just drive as many visitors to your site as possible with the plan of simply making as much money as possible from them you would ideally use as many of these traffic generation techniques as possible.

However when it comes to a “lifestyle business” our desires are rather more specialized. Quite simply we want to set up our website marketing in such a way that visitors keep arriving at our site(s) without needing any constant input from us.

So lets take the example of the newspaper advert we mentioned a few moments ago. I have placed adverts in national newspapers and made literally hundreds of dollars from a single advert. The results were impressive and as I was selling a high-ticket item I was able to make a healthy profit from just a small number of sales.

But every week you need to place that advert again because the traffic starts to tail off after just a few days. If you don’t keep investing in paying for those adverts, if you don’t keep on telling the newspaper to run those ads, if you don’t carefully track your results to ensure you’re making a profit then you will fail.

I don’t know about you but if I’m exploring the South American rainforest, I don’t want to have to get on my cellphone every few days and ring a newspaper half-way round the world to ask them to run my ad. And I certainly don’t want to be analyzing traffic stats and ROI every day.

In short, I want to have my cake and eat it. And if you want to build a lifestyle business then you want the same. You want to market your site once and then receive traffic as a result of your efforts for months or even years to come.

In short, a key element of a lifestyle business is the principle of residual traffic.

Because if you can create a website that is good at earning money from visitors, and you can get visitors on autopilot then you’ve essentially created the perfect hands-off, residual-income lifestyle business.

And the effort to run one of these sites on a daily basis, once it’s all set up, is so minor that if your first site isn’t quite making you as much money as you’d like to live your ideal lifestyle, you can simply set up a second or a third. Becase you have the time.

Now again I should mention that I have tried out a huge range of different traffic generation methods over the years and while some have failed, many have been tremendously successful. For our purposes right now though I’d like to simply mention the best methods I have tested for generating predictable, residual traffic, and with predictable, reliable, residual income.

Organic Search Engine Traffic (SEO)

Organic search engine traffic is all about getting your site to appear in the search engines when interested, motivated visitors type in a certain keyword phrase. You have a website about planning a wedding? Then you want your website to appear in the first few results of Google, Yahoo and Bing when someone types in phrases like “wedding planning”, “planning a wedding” and “how to plan a wedding”.

This means that the visitors you get will be highly targeted because they are specifically searching for the topic of your website. They are therefore more likely to stick around on your website and will also be likely to consider clicking an advert, buying a product you promote and so on.

Over time you can pick up hundreds of related rankings which suck in traffic for you every day.

Links From Other Sites

If you can convince other popular, high-traffic sites in your niche to link from their website to yours you can actually receive a surprising amount of traffic.

As an example, I built a site a few years ago that got quite a number of well-placed links from other authority websites and was getting over 200 visitors per day simply as a result of people clicking on links from other sites and appearing at mine.

Of course while links are put up, and some will come down over time, I have found this form of traffic to be pretty steady and reliable over the long term.

RSS Subscribers

If you are a subscriber to this blog then you will know all about RSS. In essence, visitors to your website can “subscribe” to your website and whenever you publish a new article on your website, your subscribers will be informed of that fact.

This means that if you have thousands of subscribers, even if the search engines change their algorithms and you lose all your rankings, every time you add new content to your website you should see a spike in visitors.

Right now with this website as it is so new I am still working on my search engine rankings and receive only a handful of visitors this way right now. Equally, thanks to having quite a few RSS subscribers, every time I publish a new article like this I see a significant spike in visitor numbers.

Email Marketing

One of the ultimate traffic sources is simply to set up your own mailing list. Gather email addresses of interested people who visit your website and produce a regular newsletter for them.

I was on the receiving end a few months ago when someone mentioned one of my websites in their newsletter and overnight I received just over 1,000 unique visitors. Even better that traffic kept on coming for a good week or so afterwards.

Imagine if you had a mailing list of thousands of people and you could send traffic like this to any website or webpage you choose. If a new product is released that you really like, you can immediately send a deluge of traffic through some of whom will hopefully take action on your recommendation and buy the product you like so much.

As a result you earn a commission and I know of people who make a fulltime living in this way. Once every month or so they send out a newsletter which generates several thousand dollars in sales in a 24 or 48 hour period and then they go back to taking life easy for the rest of the month. What could be better?

As you’re no doubt aware, some of these residual traffic generation techniques are actually synergistic – they feed off each other and boost your results. The more links you have, the more search engine traffic you’ll get. And assuming your site is good, the more people who find your website through the search engines, the more will actually link to it from their own site.

This is what I refer to as the “tipping point” of traffic generation. When you start off, you have to put the time and effort in. You have to take some massive action to get your site listed highly in the search engines.

But after some effort, your rankings start to increase. Your traffic starts to increase. Your PageRank starts to increase. Your visibility starts to increase. And then people start linking to you naturally. If you build a great site, once you start appearing organically other people will start to push traffic your way and running your website becomes easy.

In the same way, the more links and search engine rankings you have, the more people will subscribe to your site and join your mailing list and you can see your results moving ever higher as all these techniques feed each other into a traffic-generating vortex.

So just to reiterate; there are lots of traffic generation techniques that work. But when it comes to specifically building a lifestyle business that will provide you with enough income to cover your living expenses yet take up as little time as possible to run I would stick with those golden traffic methods of SEO, link building, RSS subscriptions and marketing to your mailing list. They’re the easiest, cheapest and most reliable ways to generate hands-off traffic (and sales) for your internet business that I have found.