In my last post, making money on the Internet, I wrote about cleaning up your unfinished business; all those loose ends you have laying around online. I prompted you to think about what it is you’d really like to do online and to consider focusing on one or two main projects.

What I’m really trying to encourage is the idea of you building something substantial, something exciting, something you want to live and breathe every day. Something more substantial than spreading yourself thinly across short term active income streams and five, ten, twenty different web properties all offering various degrees of ‘potential’ and promises of passive income.

To build something substantial doesn’t mean you have to build ‘something else’ or ‘something new’, although that could be exactly what you need to do now or in the longer term. You could quite possibly take something you’re doing now and give it your all – look at the possibilities of building a current site or activity into something more than what you might have planned to.

Jack of all trades, master of none

Perhaps creating something with more authority, depth, size, longevity isn’t for everyone and if you’re just starting out online or feel a lack of knowledge generally, you might be hesitant to think ‘big’. Actually to be perfectly honest, I think the less you know the better off you are.

How so?

If you don’t understand about all the ways to make money online, are not sure what all the Twitter and Facebook fuss is about, you can simply focus on one or two medium to long term projects without so many tempting distractions. Whereas if you know how to quickly build niche blogs, MFAs (made for AdSense sites), review sites, re-purpose PLR, flip websites, find cheap ‘unique’ articles, run a WSO (Warrior Special Offer), perform article marketing, provide writing services, design services and a whole lot more, then you can actually find yourself doing all of those things in some way shape of form.

What happens whilst you’re doing all those things? Well it’s less likely that any one thing will grow into anything substantial.

Going beyond the sale

Is it possible for you to take your active income stream and develop it beyond the initial sale? Develop it into a business? Perhaps you don’t want to and perhaps it’s not your active income stream you’d like to develop but rather one of your favorite niche blogs or review sites. Or it’s something new that you just know you’d enjoy working on and building up.

It can be easier to flitter about from one site to the next to the next, building Squidoo lens after Squidoo lens to point at your sites, to submit article after article to your twenty plus sites but is it worth it? Is it worth it for you to spread your efforts across mini-sites instead of digging into something you and others love and apply all your skills and knowledge to a passion or area of serious interest to you?

Maybe knowing what that thing is you’d love to develop alludes you right now but just starting to consider focusing your energy more will help you get a feel for the difference between sprinkling a little bit of you across many things versus giving a lot of focus to one or two things.

Don’t hold yourself back too long though. Don’t be afraid to develop something out a little bit even if it’s not what you sense would be your ‘ultimate’ online business. You can always sell the business down the track if you find something else you want to pursue that you’re more excited and passionate about.

Considering the customer life cycle

So where do you begin? How do you move from the mindset and busyness of stirring 20 pots of broth on the stove to stepping back and looking for a new recipe full of depth and flavour? Begin by considering the customer life cycle.

In a previous post related to site flipping I mentioned:

There is more to this business though than the simplistic calculation of the difference between the costs associated with your site sales and the final bid price.  There are many ways to earn income from your buyers outside of the Flippa marketplace.

Whether you write articles, flip websites, design graphics, build WordPress themes, offer tech support, blog in obscure niches etc, there is opportunity to retain customers.

I see far less focus on retaining customers online compared to my off-line experience and when the focus is there online it’s more often than not very short sighted. It’s usually in the form of subscribing to a list and then the customer being bombarded with offers that don’t logically flow.

The ‘flow’ of offers I’m used to receiving is quite frankly in the order in which the marketer’s friends launch their products. So today’s offer might be on outsourcing and tomorrow’s on awesome video production. Next week might be about making AdSense sites and the week after niche sites. It doesn’t flow and therefore doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me not to mention help me get anywhere in particular. I haven’t been retained as a customer by many Internet marketers.

Focus and consider your customers’ real needs

When you start focusing your efforts in one or two specific areas you will attract and connect with customers who are very targeted to what you have to share. As you pour out your energy and your enthusiasm into what you’re doing, that will be felt and absorbed by those who share your passion. You will quite naturally retain more customers as you deliver what you intuitively know they need.

Of course there is more to it than simply having a passion for something and sharing it but personally, I couldn’t think of a better and more enjoyable place to begin.

Are you up for the challenge of building something substantial?

Do you haves skills, passion and knowledge that you could should be sharing with the world?

Are you ready to start enjoying yourself?

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