Wikipedia has 10 different definitions for the term “value”, 12 if you include those definitions on subcategories.

I personally don’t have a specific definition but I know when I am given something that is of great value. The other day I was give a link to Chris Guillebeau’s manifesto 279 Days to Overnight Success. Its a free report on how to make a living out of blogging online. If your interested in making a living online then this would be the definition of value, hands down.

Even if your not interested in making money online, you should still read this as it is fascinating. You can download it by visiting Chris’s site here or directly download it by clicking here.

Hope you enjoy and get as much out of it as I did.

I live a relatively different life compared to the majority of people. I don’t work 9-5, although I have in the past and all that did was tell me that is just was not for me. I don’t like to be put in a box and told what to do and how I should be doing it. I like to find opportunities that are available and pursue them and if they work and are sustainable I develop them and either sell, or hold onto and grow. I work when I want and how I want.

If your reading this blog then chances are that my life isn’t so different but then again, you are the minority. I have read books such as Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Work Week and Robert Kiyosaki’s, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. What I have taken from these it not so much the ability to only work four hours a week or determining the difference between an asset and a liability. I don’t believe these books are designed to give you the direct answers but rather to stimulate thought and ideas regarding ways you can live the life you want to live as well as having sustainable financial freedom.

What is my take on supporting your lifestyle? Its not particularly complex but this is my method. Over compensate for your liabilities using your assets. First I guess we need to clarify the term liability and the term asset. This isn’t particularly complex either as I’m not an accountant and won’t be taking their definition of what an asset and a liability is. My definitions are inline with that of Robert Kiyosaki and it’s quite simple:

Asset: Something that leads to money coming in.

Liability: Something that leads to money going out.

Wow… how complex is that? It’s not your traditional definition of the terms by any means, probably far from it but I don’t care. My accountant’s job is to get all technical regarding these terms. My job is to put them in a form that is understandable so I can create structure for how I want to live my life.

Once we have an understanding of these two terms we can lead on to supporting your lifestyle. To support any lifestyle you want, no matter how elaborate it may be, it can be done by simply by getting this equation to work: Assets > Liabilities. Assets are greater than liabilities.  It’s as simple as that. If the money coming in is greater than the money going out you can do whatever you like.

It may seems that I have just stated the obvious but you would be extremely surprised by the amount of people who just don’t get this concept. They rack up credit card bills and go out on extreme nights out only to find themselves strapped for cash with weeks to go until their next paycheck. Yes of course this could be just down to not being able to manage money correctly but if you had assets that overcompensated for your liabilities then you would not run into this problem.

First you need to find out what your lifestyle really costs. If you like to go out and party then factor that in, how much does it cost you to go out every week? Do you have a passion for traveling? How much money do you need for your traveling? If your not sure about how to calculate your expenses then I would recommend you do so by using Tim Ferriss’s lifestyle calculator.

Once you have calculated your lifestyle cost then what you need to do is find assets that will generate enough income to pay off your liabilities. What I do not recommend is finding one cash cow which you believe will pay off all these expenses. By doing this you are developing a mentality of “have a job/asset/income that pays well and then spend as much of it as you can”. Sure if you can find an cash cow or passive income that generates $5k a day then fine, but the likely-hood of this is minimal.

I believe the key is to determine your ideal lifestyle then set up assets and income in order to support it. This is alternate to the usual approach of taking an income then determining the lifestyle that you can lead from it. By determining your lifestyle first you are telling yourself that this is the life you want to lead and you will find a way to lead it. You are telling the world what you want and in turn the world will deliver. The standard method forces you to conform to influences around you, rather than getting them to conform to you.

For example, you may like to eat out a lot and buy new clothes on a regular basis. Say this costs you $500 per week alone. Build an income stream in order to support this particular aspect. You may also own a house and need to pay a mortgage of say, $2500 per month. Ideally what you would want to do is find a passive income that generates about $3000 (you always want a buffer). Maybe you want the car of your dreams which is another $1000 per month. Set-up and and build another passive income so you can afford your dream car then purchase it.

It’s much easier in my opinion to create a few income streams that generating $2000 per month that it is to generate one bringing in $7,000 but that’s not the important thing to get out of this. The important habits you develop is that of a millionaire mindset. You learn that to support any further expenses you don’t need to limit yourself to what you already have. There is no need to take out from your current assets as you know you can create more revenue opportunities to support any new expenses by purchasing or creating good assets.

Don’t be afraid of turning the tide and creating the lifestyle you want to lead without thinking about the restrictions. I am talking about lifestyle expenses from a purely monetary point of view. You may just determine that you wish to do more “doing” things rather than simply “having” more things. Now you have the option. Determine what you want then devise a way to achieve this. Do it the traditional or “normal” way and your only really limiting yourself.

I have a university degree in Business. The importance they placed on creating and defining a business plan was paramount. You need a business plan there are not two ways about it. It needs to have all the information including where your business will be located, what you will do, your revenue model, your sales forecasts, a SWOT analysis, a mission statement, first aid steps and a budget… among many other things. What complete rubbish.

I’m about to tell you this. If your interested in trying out a new business idea and decide to start by putting a business plan together then your a goose. When starting out a business plan is an acceptable form of procrastination. I will repeat that again and put it in bold and italics. A business plan is an acceptable form of procrastination. If you have a bright idea and want to get the ball rolling and you set off to write a business plan then all that is doing is stopping you from getting started. You may be thinking writing a business plan is getting started but I’m sorry, it’s not. Getting started is jotting a few points down and then doing it. Not thinking about it or writing about it but actually doing it.

Why skip the business plan? The first thing a business plan will do is make you reconsider your initial idea. You will come across hurdles and barriers that you didn’t think about before and slowly but surely you will be weened off the idea before you have even started. You might be thinking that this is a good thing right? This would mean that you have effectively saved yourself time and effort by finding out all the flaws in your idea before wasting your time, right? Wrong. What you have done is convinced your mind that the idea is not possible, nothing else. If you had actually started implementing your idea you would have come across these barriers regardless. In every business there will be barriers. The difference is that because you have started and are immersed in your project you will find away around these barriers. Thinking and pin-pointing these hurdles before hand will make starting less likely and therefore you will never find solutions to these problems.

Another problem is that a business plan actually complicates things. A business plan will flood further ideas into your mind and your fantastic small idea will turn into an overwhelming behemoth before you know it. You add more and more bells and whistles, change tact and thinking about more revenue models and target market opportunities. You no longer have a great simple idea but a complex global conglomerate before you have even started. This will again put you in an overwhelmed and less motivated mindset and cause you not to start. If you keep it extremely simple, then its very easy to get started and create your idea. Once this idea has been created you will then know where the other opportunities lie.

A business plan is effectively your mind trying to find a way to not get started. This could be due to a fear of failure, fear of the effort you need to put in or fear of not knowing how to get it done. It’s all a form of procrastination. What your doing is taking the relatively easy and non-confrontational option of working on your ‘business plan’. I am guilty of this, if I didn’t feel confident about getting started I just focused on my business plan. It’s like not wanting to make cold calls so you prepare emails instead. The problem here as I have mentioned before, is that the business plan is not just a time consuming procrastination but it will also give you more and more excuses why you shouldn’t go ahead with your idea. Very rarely does it motivate you even more to pursue your idea, your motivation is already existent pre-business plan and all your doing is finding a sure fire way to destroy that motivation. This is the worst type of procrastination, let alone a productive, business enhancing task!

Nothing is ever constant especially in the current business world. Your business plan and direction will continually adapt to internal as well as external forces. Businesses today need to be extremely flexible with the ability to adapt quickly to change. After creating a plan for your business, you will certainly find that what ends up working in the real world is entirely different to what you had in your plan. Sure a business plan is adaptive in itself but why start with one? Why not do your idea, learn from it then find out the best way to move forward. Not the other way, that would be a complete and utter waste of time. When you get an allergy test does the doctor give you a plan of what you may be allergic to because others are allergic to it then move you on your merry way? No. The doctor tests you for each individual allergy by giving you a bit of the cause and watches for a reaction. Only then does she form an outline of what you are allergic to. Why doesn’t your business idea need testing then?

Am I saying never to do a business plan at all? No, I think a business plan is great, but not for when your starting out. I am going against everything I have been taught and the reason for this is that I am basing it on experience. A business plan should be implemented after you have gone out and tried your new idea, not before. Today, things are so much cheaper to create compared to what it once was so there is absolutely no excuse to have an idea and not put it into action. To be fair this wasn’t the case 10, maybe even 5 years ago, so what we are taught in schools, colleges and universities are defunct only a few years later. Now it is essential you go out and create your idea, only then will you be in a position to determine what you should include in your business plan.

A business plan can also be effective when you are working with a group of people. A basic plan will help put all the ideas down on paper so you have a chief aim and defined objectives to work towards. Even then, the plan should really only be a couple of pages long, if that at all. It needs to be just enough to point out the main details and get everyone thinking along the same path. This is not really a business plan but a basic business outline, leave the plans for later.

What about for investment? Don’t you need a plan? Yes of course you do, but you also need something to show for your idea. Most investors and venture capitalists want to see something in action before they decide to invest. So do something first, then plan out after.

A proper business plan takes times and effort. This is time where you could be putting things into action. This is the time when your at your most motivated and excited yet you will be putting it to waste. This is the time that will enable other people to leap frog you and get a started on your idea. This is the time when you could lose your first mover advantage. With the endless number of plug-ins and software on offer as well as the ability to easily and safely outsource the creation of your concept, the only person you have to blame for not getting started is yourself. Stop using your business plan as your excuse.

Moving on from my last post about step 1 of starting a business and getting the general idea together, step 2 is about getting together a concept outline. So what we know after the first step is that the Youtube model seems quite easy to replicate and has proved a ‘relative’ online success (slightly understated!).

How will it work and what exactly will I be doing? The basic concept outline would be very simple and go something like this:

Service outline: The site will be a video sharing site designed specifically for mobile phones where users can watch and download videos directly from their mobile and also upload videos from the web or via their mobile phone.

1. People visit the site

2. People can search a large number of video’s.

3. After conducting a search, site users can have the video streamed to their mobile or download download the videos directly to their mobile in several formats depending on the phone they are using.

4. Site visitors can upload videos directly from the net or via their mobile phone.

5. Visitors come back and hopefully tell their friends about this cool service.

Now this seems unbelievably simple and it is. You might even think why would I even bother to write this down as it’s just so obvious. Well the reason why I would do this is because it provides an outline of what I’m aiming to do and puts it down in a formative state. Each step here represents it’s own individual story. Each story has its own complications and issues but the goal is to get the story breakdown on paper so you have something to flesh out.

If you don’t quite understand let me use some other reasonably complex websites and give them a brief concept outline:

Facebook:

1. Users create an account

2. Users edit and customise their account.

2. Users can search and/or invite friends to join their network

3. Users can share information including photos, texts and videos with their friends

4. Users come back to see what their friends are up to and to share more information.

Ebay:

1. Users can choose to buy or sell good online

2. Buyers search for goods they like and bid on items they wish to purchase

3. Sellers advertise products they wish to sell.

4. Once an auction is finished buyers and sellers exchange payment and shipment/pickup details.

5. Buyers and sellers come back to buy or sell goods in a safe online environment.

Its excrutiatingly simple but each heading can tell quite a complex story. The task now is to flesh out each story heading in order to form a successful business.

This will move us to step 3, working out an appropriate revenue model.

This is a must see, well actually, “listen to” blog post. Its again by Yaro Starak who interviews the net famous Jeremy Shoemaker (aka Shoemoney) and posts it as a podcast.

An absolute must for anyone interested in entrepreneurship or making money online. Its long (over an hour) so make sure you have a bit of quite time so you get the most out of it!

Enjoy – Click here to listen to Podcast

There is just way too much jargon out there. With the growth of web 2.0 comes the growth of terminology that we need to get our head around. If ROFL, LOL, IMAL, LMAO are not enough then comes things like tags, Digg this, Stumble that, backlink this, .tv, .me, micro-blogging, clouds, XML and XHTML. C’mon Tweeple!

So the question is, do we really need to complicate things even more? Well of course we do! That’s what Internet people do, they make things simpler and quicker by complicating them. Sort of anyway. They take a simple concept and funk up the name so you need to spend hours researching what it is only to find out you knew what it was all along, however through another term coined by someone else.

Lets take DoFollow and NoFollow links for example. The first time I laid eyes on these terms I thought here we go, another way to drive traffic or optimise your site to get an extra 3 visitors per year or give you brownie points for the search engines (also known as “page rank juice“). I decided to ignore it and move on yet these silly terms kept popping up all over the place. The funny thing is no one ever bothers to explain them, they use the term like its assumed knowledge by dropping them in and moving on. Or if they do explain, they explain them like it was some new uber feature leaving you perplexed and contemplating whether what you have learnt so far needs to be discarded to make way for this new mega-concept.

How about this:

DoFollow Link: <a href=”http://www.xxxxx.com”>Link</a>

NoFollow Link: <a href=”http://www.xxxxxx.com“ rel=”nofollow“>Link</a>

DoFollow is a normal link that search engines will regard as a link back to your site. A NoFollow link is a link where a search engine will disregard the link back to your site. DoFollow is better for search engines and page ranks (aka page rank juice). NoFollow not so great for search engines and page ranks. Use NoFollow to ensure best optimisation and value for paid links from your site.

Now why do we need this jargon to clutter up the net? I understand the need to term a “NoFollow” link as it is different to the standard link but why the “DoFollow”? Its a normal link!!! The problem arises when people, bloggers in particular, start refering to forums as DoFollow and NoFollow forums. Or DoFollow and NoFollow blogs. I feel sorry for the NoFollow blogs because they have been branded as “No – Follow” which to the untrained and relatively normal brain means that you “should not follow them”.

I’m calling for simple organic meanings to stay like that, simple and organic. If they are special then sure, name them, but for the basic and clean  terms keep them as is, it’s confusing enough as it is.

This is the first post in my Step by Step business series. Instead of talking about how to set up a business I will be actually setting up a business and take you step by step through the process I go through from thinking up a business idea through to implementing that idea and also sharing the results. I’m a firm believer of “doing” and that jumping in the deep end is the best way can learn how to do something. You will never learn how to drive a car by reading a book, you need to get out and drive. You will also never learn how to start and run your own business by reading about it, you need to get out there and do it.

A couple of weeks ago I was raving about how mobile will be the next big thing. What I’m going to do now is start up mobile site from scratch and go over all the steps that I will take to get this up and running and hopefully, profitable. My aim here is not only to set up another income stream but to show you how I do it, step by step. I will be quite candid about the results so if it is a flop, you will know about it!

I need an idea. How do I come up with a concept? Well I looked to the online world for inspiration. I asked myself what online business have taken off yet are relatively easy to replicate in the mobile environment? My first step was to visit Alexa and have a look at the top 100 websites for inspiration. There are the usuals such as Google, Yahoo etc. Some of the most obvious ones are in the ever expanding field of social networking, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter etc. However a prerequisite to my concept was that it needed to be easy to replicate and these social networking sites would definitely not be easy to replicate. The possible exception to this would be Twitter but Twitter has a great mobile interface and many people are “Twittering” via their mobile, so that was out. What else? Amazon? Probably a little complex and advanced for mobile (at the moment). Wikipedia? ahhh… no.

Then I took a second look at Youtube. My first look was interrupted by those little voices in my head saying “yeh right.. good try!”.. and “.. Youtube, I wonder what I could look up now?”. Just to introduce you, this is Mr. Negative and Mr. Procrastination.. I have been trying to evict these guys for the last 26yrs but they manage to find their way back in occasionally. So on my second look I managed to focus objectively and break it down to get a clearer understanding. What is Youtube exactly? Well in its essence, its a place you go to watch videos and share your videos to the world. Obviously there are far greater capabilities including networking and social interaction but in its most basic form, its just a video sharing site. Would a video sharing site be that hard to replicate?

The next question is to ask myself what is currently available in terms of video sharing in the mobile world? We know that Youtube has its own mobile version so why would people come to my mobile video site? Also what can I do to separate myself from the others? I did a search on Google mobile: mobile video sharing. There are a few present, namely Vringo, Livecast and Yamgo among others (interestingly Youtube didn’t come up). But looking through these and other sites it was obvious that they were either grossly deprived of content and you could only download a couple of bad quality videos, or they were too difficult to find what you want and start watching by requiring you to download some software or sign up with an account. The beauty of Youtube is that anyone can just jump on, watch a few videos without having to fiddle around with accounts and logging in etc. When browing on your mobile you don’t want to have to download software or log in everytime, it’s not like a PC where you can open tabs and have multiple windows on one screen. Mobile needs to be simple, straight forward and to the point. Give the users what they want straight away so they are more likely to come back. Give them a convoluted sign up process and time consuming ways to access content then you have lost them. Simple.

It’s looking more and more like I will head down the video sharing path but I need to differentiate my business from many of those out there. Obviously the biggest competitor will be the video sharing bohemoth Youtube. So what is their mobile offering like and how can I better it? To be honest, their mobile offering is pretty fantastic so there is no point in me going in there are doing the exact same thing with 10 videos asking people to use my site instead. That would be ridiculous. They do a better job than anyone else in the mobile marketplace by making the streaming of videos to your mobile so simple. You do a search, click the video your after and then watch it streamed onto your mobile.

Not worth competing? Well actually I see an large gaping opportunity presenting itself immediately. The problem with one type of mobile video site is that you need to do a whole lot of mumbo jumbo before you can start watching a video. The others that offer a simple download to mobile service (in 3gp format or similar) don’t have much content. Finally, Youtube makes it easy to watch videos but you have to stream them everytime and this costs you a fortune in data as well as the time it takes to download each time.

So I’m presented with an opportunity here. What if I can take the best of all these mobile video services and combine them into a single, easy to use video sharing service where you can search, submit, download and stream videos? It sounds simple enough. Now all I need to do is find out how I can actually do this!