Former Co-Founder of Fizzle. I now teach web creatives how to make better videos of themselves at DIY Video Guy and do video production at Caleb Wojcik Films.
Follow @calebwojcik
Everything changes when we stop thinking about how to get ahead or skip steps, and focus instead on building consistent, repetitive creative habits. Business builders early on in their career often think looking for shortcuts or figuring out the mistakes to avoid is the best way to be successful faster.
You know it when you see friends doing it. They use words that belittle what they do:
Do your best ideas come from sitting down, focused with a pad of paper, and trying to come up with them? Or do they come spontaneously, when you least expect them to, and then quickly float away before you can capture them?
There may come a day when you need to switch domains. It might be that the brand name you chose years ago doesn’t properly explain what your unique selling proposition is anymore. Or maybe you are transitioning from a branded domain to a personal domain. Or vice versa.
Selling what you make online is more complex and frustrating than it should be. Platforms like iTunes and Kindle take a huge cut of your profits, well-known payment processors freeze funds with no explanation, and most shopping cart software looks like it was built in the 90's.
You know the rush. A guest post you’ve written goes live on a huge site, you finally launch the product you’ve been working on for months, or an older article of yours gets Gizmodo’d. You watch your traffic spike and you can’t peel yourself away from the analytics for the whole day.
People like to dream about what you get when you choose to become an entrepreneur. But what about what you give up?
If you're like me and many other entrepreneurs that I know, your mind never stops coming up with new ideas for your business. (Much to the chagrin of your sleep schedule.) You probably even have a system in place to captures all those ideas no matter where you are. Later, you then go through and decide which ideas are the best, most worth your time, etc.
There's a specific step every entrepreneur needs to take that isn't talked about nearly enough. The news likes to cover the "overnight" success stories like Facebook buying Instagram for a billion dollars or Angry Birds selling millions of copies, but they don't share the key first step that the people who built these stories took.
What if you didn't even need a blog or audience of your own to bring your courses to the masses and earn a living from them? What if you could earn six figures teaching to a quarter million users on a single online learning platform?