It’s a lovely Sunday morning here in southeastern Wisconsin. I’ve been up since 7am and am now here in my office catching up on email and reading some great material from Brian McElroy.

Just got a notice from Amazon that my webcam order placed yesterday has shipped. That means it leaves their warehouse tomorrow and will arrive very soon. I told you Amazon was amazing.

I enjoy working on websites, writing, futzing around with WordPress themes, plugins, and widgets, and all the rest that goes into building a site. One of my current projects is for my friend Mary Carpenter who is such a gifted and creative person. At MaryCarpenterDesigns.com we are working to tell everyone about all the cool stuff she can do to bring more you to your environment.

Mary is a professional seamstress but keyword research proves that more people search for professional sewing  so we are targeting that phrase along with the much broader term of interior design and her own special thing she does called restyling.  The site is still very much in the beginning stages so be kind in your judgement.

I have suggested to Mary that it may be possible for her to do one-on-one video consultations with people interested in learning more about restyling or the image board and design binder ideas. She is working on the idea while getting her business going full-time. If you are in the Madison, Wisconsin area Mary does enjoy doing local work.

I’ll be adding more landing pages to another site today as well. Need to wrap that up for a couple of JV product launches. Won’t take more than a few hours to complete the work.

The hardest part for me right now is value pricing. When I look at what I know and how my intellectual property can be made into salable products, I am still hampered by the feeling that no one wants to hear what I have to say. I’m not yet at a point in my business where I can give glowing monetary reports that make it all look so worthwhile and great.

The much touted “Internet Lifestyle” is there for a very tiny number of people who are happily globe hopping and doing fun stuff while enjoying the fruits of their highly efficient business models. I haven’t gotten to the point of developing a highly efficient business model. According to what I just learned in Simpleology 102 this morning, I am spectacularly inefficient in my business operations. I need to put a reasonable value on my time and involvement just to even claim to have a business.

Up to now I’ve been a student in many ways. There is alway something new to learn so continuing education is a must for online business success. Although I wanted to master JAVA and PHP, I’m okay now to give up on those goals in order to focus more fully on how to help other people solve their problems in areas where I have a solid foundation.

There is no piece of paper framed on my wall that says I have passed the minimum qualifications in any series of tests or graduated from any accredited university in my few areas of website development and marketing expertise. The education I have earned through self-motivated research, study, courses, and on the job training must surely have holes where a few more credits would be required in a school setting. And certainly I will continue to invest in new training as it comes along in areas of specific interest to me and my soon to be much more efficient business.

One thing I have learned by getting to this level of an “intelligent marketer” as Frank Kern might kindly put it, is that focus is essential. If you’re out there trying this and that and nothing ever seems to work for you, it can almost be guaranteed that the products or services you paid for are not to blame. The level of success attained through any system can be attributed directly to how closely the system requirements are followed in order to obtain the desired output.

In other words, if you aren’t doing what the system plan says you need to do in the exact way that the system plan calls for – your chance of success has diminished incalculably.  How can you measure which omission causes ultimate failure if you don’t test the actual system as designed? It took me longer than most people to figure this out. It’s not that I’m stupid; but I do tend to over-complicate things in some dysfunctional effort of my few remaining brain cells almost as if I were trying to surreptitiously hold myself back.

It’s like something finally clicks in your brain and things fall into place when a light turns on and the glimmer of understanding seeps in under the floor boards. Understanding who you are. Understanding what you want. Understanding who you serve. Understanding what they want. And understanding how to bring it all together into one lovely package where it works well for everyone is the ultimate successful thought process  just prior to taking the action step of product creation. This is where I find myself today.

So now I’m in the process of mapping out the future where I am able to help more than a few people at a time. And where the people I help will want to reward me and encourage me to find more ways to help them. That is my desired outcome.

The other day I was going on about how so many people are ready to pay big money for courses like Outsource Force instead of actually learning through experience and failing fast.  Rather than going through the process of hiring an outsource worker directly and possibly paying far less in the long run, they gladly gave up their money in huge wads to avoid making mistakes or looking like a fool. That is the money to stand in front of, for sure. And that’s where I’m going to position myself as much as possible.

If all the people who want to create income streams online are the Niagara River and you are the Nikola Tesla of making money online, your first product is designed to help that river of people be more productive; much like Nikola built the first hydroelectric power plant to harness all the power of Niagara Falls as it rushed by.

Build your trading stall along the Silk Road. Position yourself to sell picks and hammers to gold miners. How can you help them get where they want to go? What knowledge do you have that they don’t know? What success have you had that will help them find their way? What experience has led you here? How are you going to build your power plant, Nikola?

Thanks for being here and enjoying The Way of the Geezer. May a long and happy life also be yours. Sunday morning service is now over.