Monthly Archives: February 2015

Where’s Your Mind At?

As mentioned in my previous blog post, I am committing myself to publish a step by step approach on how I will create and build an online business from this blog.  By achieving this, I am hoping that you too can benefit from this journey.  Granted, I have already made the first step by creating this blog. I will demonstrate how that can be accomplished in an upcoming blog post.

However, the most important first step is whether anyone really has the right mindset to pursue this type of journey.  Motivation to stay the course is so critical.  So many have started and abandoned the whole process.  The main reasons are:

  • Lack of confidence
  • Lack of support
  • Fear of failure
  • Steep and time consuming learning curve

These are common emotions that we all possess at one time or another.  The challenge is to overcome these roadblocks and to demonstrate to yourself that you can achieve something you never would have thought possible.  People do challenge themselves to achieve unbelievable results.  Like running a 10K run or even a half marathon.  Some have tried parachuting out of a plane.  Then some of us would just rather challenge our minds and create something that might actually turn out to be useful and helpful to others.

With the right mindset and the motivation to succeed is crucial before even thinking about starting an online business.  Even then, there will be failures along the way.  However, these failures can be incredible learning experiences to build on for any potential future ventures.

My first objective in starting an online business was to research the market I’m focussing on, that being the retirement or soon to be retirement community.  What do retired people really want or need?  What would make retirement life a more enjoyable time?  What opportunities exist out there for the retirement community?  What would help to improve the overall retirement lifestyle?

Asking those type of questions would be the beginning of creating an idea for a potential solution to help satisfy a need or want.  However, how do you know if that potential solution would be of any real interest to your target market?  I will address that in the next blog posting on how best to validate your idea through sampling of your target market.

Are you with me?

Changing the Game

I have spent the last year reflecting on what else I could do to challenge myself, to help stimulate my interests and to keep myself more mentally active.

I have already talked about preparing for retirement, the retirement process and making the best use of our time.  But I want to do more and you should too.

Our lifetime is so precious.  We need to contribute more to society as a whole.  We need to help and serve people to keep busy during their retirement.  Too much relaxation will tend to dull your senses.

I am personally going through that period of time in my retirement now where there is more time available to take action to stimulate the mind.  Hopefully with something that’s exciting.  Then it hit me.  I have learned so much from my son’s entrepreneurial online business, I thought this might be of interest to many other retirees who are looking for something to increase their mental activity and to perhaps even supplement their retirement income with their own part-time online business.

So, I am changing the game for the next few blog postings.  I plan to publish several posts on a streamlined approach to creating and running your own small online business.  Granted I will be taking several lessons learned from my son’s successful business and simplifying these into a step by step approach which I will also be implementing along this journey on this very blog page.

We will all learn how to implement the following key elements of an online business:

  • Researching and finding a niche market where your skills and knowledge can be shared
  • Working with a partner, son or daughter to help motivate yourself
  • Creating a blog on WordPress that will provide helpful information
  • Developing actionable information lists
  • Creating a lead magnet to attract new email subscribers
  • Developing and publishing an eBook
  • Marketing yourself and your brand
  • Monetizing your blog
  • Pricing your product
  • Managing online payments
  • Cloud accounting software
  • Free software tools
  • and so much more

The thing is….

The price of entry into an online business is so minimal – it’s unbelievable.  There are so many tools available for the beginner and lots of them are free.  I plan to provide detailed information on these tools and how to actually use them, because I will be implementing these same tools as I build my own online business.  We will be experiencing the whole journey together.  This should be fun and I do hope you too will be inspired to challenge yourself to learn something new and most of all, to share your knowledge and help others.