Just relaxing and kicking back after putting down the telephone to the holiday company, I thought that I would share my experiences with you. This is the first time that I have arranged and booked a holiday whilst running an internet business and I must say it was a very rewarding experience.

For those of you who have read my eBook “Internet Business and a Life of Freedom”, (If you have not yet read it, then be sure to subscribe and download a copy), you may recall me giving an example of the way that most people working a 9 to 5 job would go about booking their annual holiday. In the chapter entitled “Freedom to Make Decisions and Do What You Please”, I refer to having to make a choice of booking your holiday when you find it and then asking your boss for the time off, or asking for the time off first and then finding a holiday to fit into that time period. This is the way that I have always booked my annual holiday – until today!

Honeymoon Hunting

At the beginning of March this year, my fiancée and I are getting married after being together just over 7 years. We had to cancel our previous honeymoon plans after having to put the wedding off for a year. During that time the price of the honeymoon had literally doubled which would have made it virtually impossible for us to afford. So, we have been keeping an eye out for an ideal honeymoon location in a nice warm part of the globe, that is more affordable for us. My newly started internet business is not yet bringing in a consistent stream of income, so it was important that we kept within our very limited budget.

But here’s the thing. After my fiancée had located the ideal holiday (I can’t stand holiday hunting on the internet – it takes absolutely ages!), I was able to book it immediately without even needing to consider if I could have the time off work or not. This to me is a big part of having the freedom to do what you want to do.

It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I realised that we had arranged the wedding and the honeymoon, without me even needing to get any time off approved, or worry about what kind of state to leave my workload in. Usually, having been working in IT, I would need to get all my outstanding work complete and then explain to an external consultancy firm how to run my servers! I had to stop for a moment to take in this experience as it just happened almost without being noticed.

My fiancée is still working her 9 to 5 job, bless her, and she has had the pressure of sorting out her workload. She sees clients and she has had to contact them to let them know that she is going to be away from the office for 3 weeks and seeing as it’s getting close to the end of the tax year, she has got the added pressure from her boss to ensure that she has billed her clients to-date, in order to get funds paid in before the end of the financial year! What a hassle.

A New Way of Life

Me? Well, I have it slightly different now and I must say it is much less stressful. Admittedly, I may have to sit down a couple of times a week for and hour or so whilst on honeymmoon and while sipping a nice ice-cold beer on the sun terrace, in order to type a blog post or two, but that’s what I enjoy and it wouldn’t seem like work to me anyway. All I will need to do is put my laptop in my bag and go! We are due to go to Egypt for a few weeks for some time alone to get over the shock of tying the knot and wondering how our lives will be changing! All I needed to do was to make sure that the hotel that I am staying at has an internet connection. That is all the requirements that I need, oh, and sunshine and my new wife, of course. What more could I ask for?

I know that weddings are never small affairs and even though ours only has a few carefully selected people (I think around 25 in all), organising it has been a 2 year experience. When we started to make the arrangements there were concerns about me getting the time off work, but needing to put it back a year has led me to this point in my life that I am at today. I feel so lucky and enlightened being able to move quickly and travel on any date available, due to the fact that I can just get up and go without the need to pass it by the boss first and wait for his agreement. What an eye opening experience!

This is the freedom that I talk about. The freedom that allows me to be flexible in my approach to work and work from virtually anywhere in the world. I have worked hard to get to this point and it sneaked in the back door without me realizing it. But now as I write this, I can be sure that my dream is coming together piece by piece, designing my ideal lifestyle is on the right track and I have been able to claim the first piece of freedom only four months in to my internet business. This is not only proof that I am on the right track, but also proof that you don’t need to be making extreme amounts of money in order to benefit from the lifestyle flexibility that internet business brings.

I look forward to sharing more events like this with you in the coming weeks and I hope that you can get some form of motivation from this experience in order to take your life to the next level, by running your own internet business.

Firstly, let me wish all of you a prosperous 2010.

Looking back on the year just gone, isn’t it just amazing how fast the time goes? I cannot believe that it’s been around 2 months since I first put Internet Business DiY up on the Web. I also recognise that I haven’t added any content to it either since then…..so what have I been doing?

Well, after I put the website up I thought that I would start to write some content. I was very attuned to the fact that I did not want to put up rubbish content as I really did not want people reading my words to categorise me that same as I have categorised a lot of other people on the internet that speak about internet business. Most certainly, I did not want my website to look like something that I had just chucked up on the net and hadn’t paid too much attention to.

With this in mind I started to pay more attention to what I wanted to achieve and what I wanted to share with others. It is important to me to help people get their businesses up and running with more than one choice available to them and that the information that I provide is not missing major sections. To this end, I started to commit more thought as to how I could accomplish this without letting people down.

As I was thinking and planning everything down to the last minute detail, my future wife asked me when my “perfect” would ever be “good enough”. I paused and thought back to when I first put the website up. I had all this knowledge to pass on to people and help them and I was trying to get it perfect. But perfect to me and my perfect would never be good enough to me. I took a step back and saw that it was this strive for perfection that was holding me back from sharing the information that I already had and some that I am still learning.

After a new Mister Man was created on my personality; Mr. Exactly, I decided that I had waited long enough, thought hard enough and that what I had to share was indeed good enough.

So to get things off to a good start for 2010, I have decided to cover two of the aspects that people tend to concentrate on when thinking about starting an internet home business. These two areas are “Creating a Website or Blog” and “Making an eBook”. Let’s look a bit closer at these two subjects and what’s in store.

Write & Create Your Own eBook

When people look to create their own product they may get directed, or start to think about creating their own eBook. Writing an eBook is a great way to share your knowledge & ideas and although they have been around for years and been written on hundreds of thousands of subjects, they are still going strong and it is a very good place to start.

With the introduction of Kindle’s and other electronic book readers, it has never been easier for people to carry around their favourite books to read on the go. Whether you intend to write a book simply to satisfy a long-term itch, you intend to use it to market your new business or you intend to sell it for profit, this 9 week project will have you creating your vision confidently.

We will be looking at some of the tools that you can use to get started writing and explore some of the options to create a portable electronic version of your book.

I really hope that you will find this not only an exciting adventure, but also both a challenge and a rewarding experience.

Quickstart WordPress

Creating a website has never been an easy task for many and even today some people still shudder over the thought of creating one. Blogs on the other hand are extremely popular and it would appear that a large number of people are adept at starting a blog. I even know of someone’s granny who has started a blog at the ripe old age of 86!

The good news is that blogging platforms are now so versatile and powerful that they can be used to create websites, almost with ease. So if you want to start a blog you can and if you want to create a more functional website or storefront, you can. Almost all of the tutorials about starting an internet business online, concentrate on setting up a website and signing up for affiliate programs. The first thing they have you do is to sign-up for a web hosting account, then set up a website and finally market your affiliate products.

This is great if this the area that you wish to enter into and there are extremely good profits to be made, but what about learning? By signing up for a webhost account and putting your site live without “playing around” leaves you high and dry in both the familiarity and knowledge departments. If you choose to get familiar with adding content and configuring your new website, you face the chance of messing it up or totally breaking it bringing your site crashing down. It’s common knowledge that no site equals no money when you’re in the internet business business!

In this forthcoming tutorial, we will look at setting up one of the most popular content management systems around – WordPress – without the need to spend a penny. You will get familiar with setting up the software, configuring WordPress, creating and managing content and of course backing up your new website in case disaster hits.

When you finish, you will have a good basic working knowledge of WordPress and be confident in using it, have a test setup where you can try things and get them right before uploading to your website and have a development platform that you can use to build your perfect website or blog.

Build Your Internet Business Knowledge

I am really looking forward to starting and hope that you will come and join me next week and start your journey to building your internet business knowledge, your website and your own eBook.

Of course for both of these projects we will stick to one of Internet Business DiY’s key aspects of “Low Cost and Effective” and keep the cost of producing both the eBook and a website development platform to a minimum. In fact, if you already own a PC you will have to spend exactly nothing, nada!

Until next week…

Lifestyle design does not always feature heavily in people’s minds when they decide to start a business.  It is however, an area that I believe needs ample attention prior to starting your internet business.  By designing your ideal lifestyle before building your latest internet project, you can ensure that your new venture can be built to bring your lifestyle dreams into reality and support the life that you really want to live, rather than accepting the lifestyle that is presented to you by default, and without too much thought, as a result of the business model that has been built.

The Benefits of Designing Your Ideal Lifestyle

By paying attention to the type of lifestyle that you want to lead prior to building up your internet business, not only do you get to run your own successful business, you also get to live the life that you have always dreamed of living.

We have been conditioned in life to accept working from 9 to 5 each day in order to get paid the money that we need to live on.  The problem that I have always had with this Time for Money scenario is that we end up living to work, rather than working to live and our dreams stay where they are, firmly rooted in dreamland.  This is where lifestyle design comes in.

I address this topic in more depth in my free eBook “Internet Business & A Life of Freedom”, which you can receive immediately by subscribing to our newsletter.  In summary, we end up wasting the prime of our lives going to work in order to earn the money that we need to live on.  As a result, we receive just a couple of hours each day to do what we really want to do and end up living for the weekends.

When we retire, we have the time to do those things that we’ve always wanted to do, but by then it is likely that we no longer have the physical ability that we once had and our pensions probably wouldn’t cover it anyway.

Taking all this into account, here are some of the Key Benefits that lifestyle design can give you:

1. Reduce the amount of time you work each day by increasing efficiency and automating procedures so that the main bulk of the work is done for you.  You can reduce this time to a few hours a week, rather than 40.
2. Give you the freedom to travel the world, if that’s what you want to do, before you retire.  Why wait until you retire when you no longer have the agility that you need?  You can do it now and run your business in the process.
3. Allow you to spend more quality time with those close to you, when you want.
4. Time to enjoy your life immediately and do the things that you’ve always dreamed of doing, rather than having to wait and hope that you still have both the ambition and fitness that you need.
5. Time for Yourself.

Each and every person will have their own priorities and things that they want to achieve in their lives.  If you were to think about the things that you would do in your life, if you had the time and the money to do them, you could easily expand this list.

Goals – The Way To Design Your Ideal Lifestyle

I think that the whole idea of goal setting is looked down upon by a lot of people and when I mention the process of goal-setting to others, the response I commonly get is along the lines of, “That doesn’t work, I’ve tried it before!”.

However, when applied correctly and consistently, putting the process of goal-setting into lifestyle design can bring into your reality the life that you dream of.  Lifestyle design need not be complicated.  In simple terms, it is the process of deciding how you would want your life to look, deciding what steps you need to take to get there and then building your internet business around that lifestyle.

Business teaches us that in order to achieve certain things, we need to set goals in our work and manage our time.  NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming) teaches us similar techniques in goal-setting to achieve our goals.  However, NLP gives us additional resources that can be used in order to ensure that we reach our outcomes.

Defining your goals and applying the actions that you need to obtain them works, period.  You just need to know how to effectively define and consistently apply them, to give you the edge that you need to make life happen the way that you imagine.

Lifestyle Design and Internet Business

I know that this has been a very basic explanation of lifestyle design and it is a very necessary overview, as it’s important to keep focused on why you are looking to start your own internet business in the first place.

For me initially, I would have been quite happy just working the same hours as I was at work, but for myself and at home, in order to bring in enough money to match what I was earning in my 9 to 5 job.  I soon found though, that I was able to concentrate better at home on individual tasks and I could finish an entire days work in less than 5 hours, that’s already a saving of 15 hours each week, without introducing any efficiency or automation!

Some of you may be looking to work every hour of the day in order to build up your business empire and have thousands of people at your beck and call.  Others may only want to work and hour or so each week.  We are all different and our dreams are different and whatever dream you have currently, lifestyle design concepts can certainly help you to achieve them.

We shall be covering more on lifestyle design as we progress with building our internet businesses.  At this stage, it may be worthwhile just thinking about the life that you really want, rather than the life you have come to, or think that you should, accept.  Explore those dreams once again as you start to consider the type of lifestyle that your internet business could give you.

As the founder of Internet Business DiY, I would like to sincerely welcome you to our brand new website.

A lot of hard work has gone into planning the launch of this exciting site and although you may think that it doesn’t look that exciting at the moment, I can assure you that it will develop into a place that you will hopefully want to “hang out” and learn all about starting and running your own Internet business.

I am truly excited in working with you to create your ideal Internet Business.  I just hope that I’m not “talking” to myself for too long!

Let’s get going…

Where to Start?

This was a big question in my mind.  “How should I start the website?”.  Should I fill it all with content first, fill it partly with content or start out with a bare-bone website and build it over time?

There’s no doubt that some people will come to the site early on in its development and go elsewhere thinking that it hasn’t got anything to offer for them.  However, my thinking was, that seeing as this is the start of a brand new, no fluff site about starting and running a new Internet business, that the best place to start would be at the beginning.  This way, you can start and grow your business as the site grows and help each other every step of the way by offering feedback and opinions on the topic areas covered.

For you, the starting place is simple:

1. The best place to start would be by reading Our Story.  This will give you a good overview of where Internet Business DiY hopes to position itself in this very competitive market and how it came into being.
2. Next, take a look at Our Vision.  This discusses the 4 Key Elements to cost effectively make the most out of your business.
3. Take a brief look at our Comments Policy and Privacy Policy together with our Disclaimers to get familiar with our operating procedures.
4. Finally, take 5 minutes to subscribe to our Newsletter “Regain Your Freedom” and claim your Free 75-page ebook, written personally by me, on how an Internet business can change your life.  In addition to receiving this original ebook, you will get free entry to our quarterly competitions and be the first to hear of exciting new happenings with Internet Business DiY.

Create Your Own Professional Website in 14 Days

Having been in IT for a number of years, I have spoken to so many people who have asked me how they could set up their own website and have it look professional, with minimal knowledge.  One of the best ways, I’m sure, is to pay for a web designer to do it for you, but this can get a bit on the expensive side and is not the first route that people tend to look to because of this expense.

When people are first starting out with their own business, they can be quite unsure as to whether it’s going to be successful and although they may go all-out to ensure that they have given it their best possible shot, it makes a lot of sense not to spend too much money making that shot happen.  At best, it will work out and they won’t look back, at worst they will lose every single penny that they’ve invested which will impinge on them starting up their next business idea.

With this in mind, we will be launching a 2 week course on how you can get a professional looking website up and running, live on the Internet.  We will cover areas that other courses miss out completely and give you a good overview and working knowledge on all of the technologies that are required to make your ideas a reality.

Create Your Own Professional Website in 14 Days is aimed to be available towards the end of the year.  If you would like to be notified of its availability, please ensure that you register your interest as soon as possible.  You can do this by subscribing to our Newsletter and claiming your free eBook.  On the eBook download page you will be given the opportunity to register your interest in the course.

Coming Up!

In the next post, we will start our journey in our Lifestyle Design section, where we will start to look at what type of lifestyle you hope that your Internet business will give you.

This is a logical place to start as your business needs to support your lifestyle.  We will look at what you are hoping to achieve, what you really want and how you can start to tailor your new business to support that lifestyle that you dream about.

Until then, think about your ideas for your new Internet business, prepare to have fun, join in the discussions on each of the topics that we address, take consistent action and make your dreams become your reality!

That’s all for this time, but be sure to add Internet Business DiY to your browser bookmark and subscribe to our RSS feed.  New post announcements and information as it happens will be available on Twitter, so remember to follow us there.