Happy New Year! by Richard Grady

Hi Folks!

Welcome to the first newsletter of 2006!

I hope you all enjoyed the holiday period and are now fully refreshed and ready to get back to work :-) Ok, I admit it, I don't feel that refreshed, in fact I feel pretty jaded but I guess that's what a week of eating and drinking too much does to you!

The first thing I want to do is publically congratulate Alex Tew who starts this New Year as a dollar millionaire. I wrote about Alex a few weeks ago - he is the brains behind the MillionDollarHomePage (see my article here). On New Years Eve Alex had just 1000 pixels left to sell and he is now auctioning these last pixels on eBay. At the time of writing, the bidding was up to over $35,000 which means that in just over 4 months, Alex has generated over a million dollars in income with an incredibly simple website idea. Quite amazing and definitely inspirational!

So what have I got planned for 2006?

Well the truth is, I don't know...

It is fair to say that in the past, I knew in January what I wanted to achieve by the end of the year. In previous years I have spent time planning in December (since this is a quiet month for me) but this year is different. In fact, I spent a lot of time in December looking at 'offline' businesses as I was beginning to think that maybe it was time for a change and that 'there was something better' out there.

In the end however, I was reminded just how hard it is to make a large income offline and in contrast, how much easier it is to earn the same amount of money online. Now, please don't misread that sentence - I am not saying that it is easy to make money online - it isn't, it takes a lot of hard work BUT in my opinion, it is a lot easier to make serious money online than it is offline.

So back to my plans (or lack of them) for 2006. There are two problems with working online as I see it:

1. New ideas come at you every single day from many different directions. This is great but there simply isn't enough time to deal with all of them and what often happens is that you end up moving from one idea to the next without actually getting anywhere.

2. When you do have some success and end up with a website (or three) that is generating an almost fully automated income, it makes you lazy - especially if you were a bit lazy to begin with!

I think the second of these reasons is why I will never become a multi-millionaire. I simply don't have the drive - as long as I have enough money to enjoy a reasonably comfortable lifestyle, that's all I want. I would rather have time off than even more money. There is nothing wrong with that off course and everyone is different but I think it is important for you to work out exactly what you want. Do you want more money than you know what to do with (and the 100 hour working week that goes with it) or would you prefer a nice six figure income working just an hour or two a day?

Personally, I like the second option but then as I say, I am lazy :-)

So does that mean that I won't be doing anything in 2006? Hehe, no not at all and I do have a few ideas up my sleeve - I just haven't decided which ones to work on yet.

Watch this space as they say!

A valuable lesson.....

As my longer-term readers will know, I have always recommended 'spreading the risk' as far as online business is concerned. For example, it is far better to have ten websites producnig $1000 of income a month each than it is to have one website producing $10,000. This is common sense but sometimes it takes a real world example to make people sit up and take notice..... so here is such an example:

Last month, Google decided to drop one of my websites out of it's index. I don't mean it shoved it down the rankings, I mean it kicked it right out - the site in question no longer exists in Google's eyes.

Unfortunately, the site was receiving about 1500 visitors a day from Google and was generating several thousand dollars a month in income (as it had been doing for several years). That traffic and the income disappeared over night - gone, quite possibly, forever.

Now whilst this is highly inconvenient, it isn't the end of the world because this wasn't the only website that I owned - far from it. But imagine for a moment if it had of been my only site and that in less than 24 hours, 80% of my income had just vanished.

Now imagine that it wasn't my income that had disappeared but yours....

Now you can see exactly why you need to spread the risk and why one online business isn't enough......

Until next time....

Richard Grady