As most of my regular readers will know I have been making money with affiliate marketing and producing my own ebooks, writing for other blogs and selling them via adwords, article marketing and banner ads etc.  In 2007 I made around $1000 profit, this year I have made around $5000 profit so far.  However in the last 3 weeks I have produced another product for clickbank which will be the start of a new business venture for me and it has already brought in around $500 on top of earnings of $1000 for other products I promote and writing I do for other blogs.

Me at the centre

The trouble I had in starting a business was that I was doing every single thing myself which included designing web pages, sales pages, opt in pages, graphics for banners, learning about and installing scripts on websites, videos, adwords, affiliate promotion, writing articles, writing sales materials, copywriting, answering emails, troubleshooting, every single little thing you could think of in a business and I was doing it.  This is on top of a full time job and spending as much time with my family as possible.  I wasn’t the business owner,  I was the business!  without me nothing would happen, if I fell ill nothing would get done and the money would start drying up pretty quickly.   So, in effect I was creating another job for myself and not a business.

Now my mindset has changed from creating a new job for myself to becoming a business owner where I have other people helping me do the most time consuming jobs.  Yes, I have to pay them but it frees up a lot of my time to concentrate on producing my own products.  This has only happened in the last few weeks and I can see a difference already.  No longer am I worrying about all the things I need to get done and ultimately falling behind schedule as I have other people around the world helping me produce web pages, sales pages, my writing etc.  I can concentrate on building a business up rather than being the business.

I have started to outsource a lot of the work using a service at www.elance.com for my sales page design and for my writing.  In the next few months I hope to pass most of my work to people I come to trust from elance this will include, graphics, writing, adwords management, cd production, email screening etc.    don’t get me wrong it will take some time to find people to trust and who can work well with my work philosophy but it is a start and will make a huge difference.

I am already seeing a difference in my energy levels.  I still get up at 5am to wok a few hours before getting the children ready for school and then going to work and still work in the evenings but I work on producing more products rather than dealing with other more time consuming issues like sales page design and writing emails for autoresponders ad all the other little jobs that are so time consuming.

Mastermind group

I have even created time to join a mastermind group with Brian McElroy and Rachel Rofe to drive the business forward.  This will last for 10 weeks and I will report back here with progress, it’s the first mastermind group I have joined and am really looking forward to it. I am hoping the lessons i learn and the contacts I make will more than outweigh the initial investment.

The reason for this change in mindset from creating a job for myself to becoming a business owner was down to a video I watched a few weeks ago from Rich Schefren.  I have  posted the video below so you can watch it.  It’s 90 minutes long but if you are looking to create a business online or offline it will be 90 minutes of pure gold.