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I wouldn’t trade my job for the world. I probably wouldn’t even trade it for a higher paying desk job. I don’t really believe that you can put a price on the freedom that being an entrepreneur allows. Each day I can wake up at any time I choose (normally 8:30). I eat a quick breakfast and head into the office and am checking email by about 8:45. Of course this daily routine can change depending on if I have a meeting set up or am out of town.  Here are a couple of the biggest reasons I love being an entrepreneur.

Security

I know that the traditional feeling is to work for someone else (company) and move you way up the ranks until you make management or get placed in charge of another project. I don’t like this type of system and highly recommend against it. Being an entrepreneur, I realize the goal for myself is to create a product or service that generates a decent income and then do it again. Eventually you have set up 4-5 different businesses all generating revenue. What would happen if one of those were to fail? Nothing really, you would be out some time and cash, but overall you would just pick up and move on to the next project. I have never really been concerned to fail in a business idea (which I have) simply because I know I can probably create a new and better product learning from my mistakes. If you and your businesses are diversified enough, there is little to worry about (other than the Internet going away).

Lifestyle

Before starting my journey of entrepreneurship, I never really grasped the idea of lifestyle design. In what other business can you take your work on the road with you as you criss-cross the world all the while knowing everything is going to be okay? Nowadays, with a smart cell phone, you can handle just about any situation that might arise while you are traveling. With Wordpress, I can set up weeks worth of future posts to publish on my blog the whole time I am gone. With email auto-responders and virtual assistants, I wouldn’t even have to go online for weeks at a time. I like traveling and doing outdoor activities and at any time I know I could run off for the weekend knowing that things will be just fine without my every involvement. We can choose what kind of lifestyle we want. If you want to make millions, by all means, do so, if you want the freedom to travel or spend as much time with your family as possible, all options are on the table. You pick and choose the lifestyle you want.

Opportunities

Opportunities come to everyone and at anytime. The best thing you can do is prepare and be able to capitalize on those opportunities when they arise. It is hard to seek out and suggest people try different opportunities when you don’t have the final say in what gets done. Being a self employed entrepreneur allows you to pursue and capitalize on different opportunities when they present themselves (including the forced presentation of opportunities). This is also where the security factor plays in because you are able to seek out completely different areas of business all the while pursuing the things you enjoy. Being able to seek out your own opportunities is like treasure hunting in a way because you never know what you are going to get. Ultimately, you will be able to hone in your opportunity-seeking abilities and will succeed more often than fail. Basically you become a business inventor.

Reward

Nothing could be more rewarding than doing the things you love while providing value to others and being justly rewarded for that value. How much fun is it to run your own business and set your own schedule vs. conforming to the will or others? At my last job I was a slave to the phone, so much so that even 30 seconds late could get you in trouble, including and not limited to the removal of incentives, not getting a raise, verbal / written warnings and possible termination if actions where habitual. I look back at that job and can’t even think of one thing I miss other than the people who worked there. As I add more value to the businesses I am employing (with my time) I can’t help but feel rewarded. Watching your handy-work in action and seeking the positive impact you have on your customer is a rewarding feeling to have. Subsequently, the more value you add to people and businesses, the more you are rewarded both in feeling and money.

Conclusion

This is by no means a complete list. Feel free to add your own thoughts about being an entrepreneur in the comment section. Remember to ask yourself while others are getting laid off in a slowing economy and being told everything is okay until the day the pink slip shows up, who is more secure? Security is best when provided by yourself. You can only control the things you have direct control over. If you don’t have control over your paycheck, what promise do you have it will be there tomorrow? Get excited knowing you can start making the change today that will guarantee security and the lifestyle you desire tomorrow, because today matters.

Actually, that title is a lie. I really don’t believe there is a fast track to becoming a millionaire. I do on the other hand think that you can achieve the riches you desire in a short time frame if that is your goal.

It seems like everyone is trying to make money online thinking they can replicate someone else’s success in a short length of time and end up making as much money. The truth is everyone pays their dues. Like starting out on the ground floor of the building and working your way up, it takes some time. Sure you could start out a few floors higher than most, or climb the floors faster than most, but it won’t happen overnight. This isn’t just a post about telling you that “you can’t do it,” or “it’s really hard to make millions online.” The exact opposite is true. Look at Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook. He bypassed the millions and went straight to the billions. What I am really trying to drive at here is the process you go about making your money.

Focus on the lifestyle you want

So many times and probably the number 1 reason for bloggers and online entrepreneurs failing is because all they are doing is chasing money. Chasing money is a very, very hard thing to do. Sadly, most people who could live off the chase of money quit before they have really made any money from their online ventures. It takes time to start turning a profit, and if you haven’t been in the make money online game for long there are a lot of bumps and bruises along the way.

If you think you would like to try one way or the other to make money online, my first advice is to do as much as you can for as little a$ you can. You don’t want to go broke trying to live out your dream of self employment and the freedom that working online brings. Make the Internet work for you, not the other way around. I very rarely feel guilty stepping away from the computer and going outside or on a last minute trip to family or friends. Often business picks up when I am gone because of all the work put in preparation for the mini vacation. I don’t think I could pick a line of work online that involves my direct involvement over every aspect at all times.

The secret to making money online is really the secret of motivation. If you can’t stay motivated doing what you are doing for next to nothing for six months to a year, the chances are high for failure. Failure is likely, not because the idea is bad but it is unlikely someone will stay motivated for that long without immediate returns. If you compare all of the “A-list” bloggers, most started out doing it because they loved what they were doing and a year later they started getting rewarded for it. Find anything that you are really passionate about and focus on that for the first phase of making money. Often, your passion will probably be specific and niche enough to draw a good crowd with the potential to monetize it in short order down the road.

It won’t take long from the time your first project gets off the ground, and all of the lessons you learned from it will steamroll right into the next project or phase. The skills you learn along the way will continue to carry you through each project you take on. As you take on more and more projects, you build a nice big foundation to grow from. This is why there is no magic bullet for making money online and basically to each their own. I never want to be just average, and I doubt I have ever been. So, I would hope you are the same way.

Don’t settle for average or the mundane online either. Look to the edges of the subjects you are interested in and never forget there are close to 7 billion people in this world. That is a lot of untapped potential to find the people who are out there with similar interests as you. Become an authority in your field and niche. I promise you, if you stick with the things you know and love, you will succeed and make your millions.

I can’t say enough how much fun the Bon Jovi concert was on Saturday night. I am playing a little catch up but I am sure you will enjoy. Don’t forget that on the video there are little dots and those are embedded comments or links to sites I talk about. Enter the contest and get some free traffic.

Everyone is in trouble now. I found a really easy way to add video to my site, and now you won’t stop hearing me talk while seeing my ugly mugs…ha… Anyways, Sitehoppin.com (my affiliate link so you can get the 25% discount) is kicking some major butt, and I can’t wait until you start making some money with them while gaining traffic at the same time. I will let you watch the video for the rest.

This is a followup post about Sitehoppin and what I have learned over the last two weeks. For the first week, I really didn’t do much with it other than use it to hop Entrecard blogs in order to drop cards and gain credits. Then last week I really began tapping all the resources Sitehoppin has to offer. It has quite a business model built around it.

First, let me tell you how I have been using Sitehoppin and what I have gotten as a return on investment (ROI). In two weeks, I have received 4,224 unique page views to our sites from Sitehoppin. In comparison, Entrecard has delivered about 14,000 (according to the Entrecard stats) since December 2007. That means that in the two weeks I have used Sitehoppin, I have received roughly 5 weeks worth of traffic from Entrecard. WOW. You mean to tell me that when I started using Sitehoppin, I more than doubled the traffic I was receiving from Entrecard with the same amount of time invested? I have spent about the same amount of time using both sites that I would previously spend on just Entrecard. But now I am reveiving twice the traffic for the same time. What is there not to love about that?

Use Sitehoppin to drop Entrecards

Yes, I know using Sitehoppin to drop Entrecards is a little slower. But, if you rate the pages while dropping, you will gain one extra visitor to the site of your choice for every two pages you rate. Over the course of dropping your 300 Entrecard limit for the day, you can effectively gain an extra 150 visitors to your site.

And here is a little secret: in slideshow mode on Sitehoppin, you gain 1 beer credit per hop. So with multiple tabs open, you can gain a few more beer credits while dropping Entrecards. In the amount of time it takes you to drop your 300 Entrecard credits, you are receiving roughly the same amount of traffic from Sitehoppin to your page. Won’t this degrade the value of the visits and credits? The simple answer is yes and no.

It costs 10 beer credits to receive 1 hop to your site. If you are not manually hopping the sites and rating them, it takes 5 times longer to acquire the same amount of credits. This lowers the incentive to just set it and forget it. Plus, at any given time there are over 2,000 visitors hopping sites on Sitehoppin legitimately because it serves them no interest to cheat the system if they do not have a use for the credits they generate. Looking at how setting 5 tabs to automatically hop sites degrades the system. You still have to acknowledge that the sites being hopped are still receiving a page view. In the long run, more real people are going to be seeing the pages shown than not.

Money to be made

Unlike Entrecard, Sitehoppin has a built in affiliate program designed to help everyone involved. The customer and member looking to save money on buying beer shares receives 25% off when using an affiliate link. The affiliate will receive 25% of the net profit after the discount is applied. Then of course Sitehoppin is receiving the remaining 50% to grow, expand, advertise, eat, sleep and drink. It’s a pretty bare bones setup.  To date, I have made $30 from people buying Beer Shares with my affiliate code. It’s not a lot of money, but when I combine that with the 4,000+ page views to my sites in two weeks, I am pleased with the results. I find it hard to imagine that someone like John Chow would not try and promote Sitehoppin when profits are that easy to make.

Don’t forget that in the Beer Stock Market you can actually resell the words you bought. If you own the word Business and someone else wants it you can resell that word to them for whatever price you would like. I don’t want to give out too many of my ideas, but imagine if you bought a bunch of small letters, numbers or words and then resold them. You could resell a letter or number that you bought for $2 and make 100% profit off of the deal. Hmmm… I hope I didn’t say too much. It’s the law of numbers, eventually the smallest letters, numbers and words will all be bought like domain names and to resell them would be easy and profitable.

Like StumbleUpon without the hassle

Lately, it seems that StumbleUpon has started banning a lot of people for really petty offenses. What StumbleUpon fails to realize is that those same people they are banning were the people that lead to the success the site has had. I don’t see Sitehoppin banning people for stupid offenses. Sitehoppin would probably ban you if you actually figured out a way to piss Max off. As long as you don’t do that, you are fine. The cool thing about Sitehoppin is the ability to submit all your urls to the site’s directory. In the near future, I beileve that once a site has received a rating of ( x ) by the users as they hop, that url will automatically be removed. I am not completely sure of the final details, but I do know they will soon be in place. With that said, if you have a lot of good posts on your site, feel free to sumbit them all to Sitehoppin for others to see.

I have found a few other ways to really maximize visitors and earnings from Sitehoppin but will work on perfecting those first before I show you how to make some real money. Be excited and look forward to many great things coming from Sitehoppin. I know Max is slaving away day and night to constantly improve the site and coding. If you have any suggestions, you should really chime in and share them with Max. If you haven’t already bought Beer Stocks and started receiving your share of traffic, you should hurry up and do so. Remember that it is always best to buy a word that pertains to your site or niche, but if you can’t afford that, try starting with single letters or numbers. It is better to get your feet wet first before you jump in. Don’t forget that if you use my affiliate code, you will receive a 25% discount. One letter could cost you $.75 for your share of traffic. Now thats a deal.

Here is a video of Sitehoppin’s founder Max explaining how all the pieces come together, enjoy!