Love what you do, do what you love
Yesterday I read an eBook about making money with blogs. It suggested that people who start blogs just to make money mostly fail. ‘You cannot start a successful blog just to make money, you must be passionate about your subject matter.’ I agree it would make it easier. But the main reason for failure due to no passion is that one soon gives up. If therefore I could be disciplined not to give up and keep doing the research and writing blog posts, then surely I can be successful without a passion for the subject matter?
I look at what I am passionate about: Rugby, helping people be successful, getting fit, reading, movies, cooking. Now some of these areas of subject matter are marketable but exist in pretty competitive market places. I don’t know enough about Internet Marketing to know how to make money out of the other areas of subject matter.
But most people work in an area they weren’t passionate about when they started. I myself have taken jobs because of the money, because of the type of company or its reputation, other benefits and even location. I wasn’t passionate about the what that company did. But I became passionate about my role and became successful. The same applies to my Internet Marketing. I need to remain passionate about Internet Marketing and making money. This will allow me the motivation and discipline to be successful, rather than being stopped from starting a highly lucrative website on say ‘buying cars online’ just because I am not passionate about ‘cars’. Jeff Bezos from Amazon made a huge list of things to sell online (cars, houses, furniture etc) and decided to give books a try. He has turned out somewhat successful without perhaps being initially passionate about books.
I plan to have as many web assets as I can get started but hand the majority over to third parties who are passionate about the areas of subject matter. I am not sure yet whether it is time or money that will determine when I hand them over. If I earned 50-70% on a website with no work whatsoever, then I would call that a success as long as the care taker was able to keep the revenue going. I need to give some thought to how I set up the legal and technical aspects of each web asset so I can maintain control.
