Click Millionaires

Scott Fox

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814432235
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

The new American Dream is doing work you love with the freedom and income to live the life you want. Thanks to the Internet, anyone can launch a business with little or no start-up capital or technical expertise.

The rules have changed. The American Dream is no longer the "corner office." It's a successful lifestyle business you can run from your home, the beach, or wherever you desire. In this book, lifestyle entrepreneurship expert Scott Fox teaches weary corporate warriors and aspiring entrepreneurs how to trade the 9-5 job they hate for an online business they love.

This guide explains how to combine outsourcing, software, and automated online marketing to build recurring revenues, all while working less and making fewer lifestyle compromises that corporate "success" requires.

In Click Millionaires, you will learn how to:

• find a lucrative niche on the Internet that matches your interests and skills;
• choose an online business model: from blogs, online communities, digital delivery, online services, affiliate marketing and even physical products;
• position yourself as an expert;
• build your audience;
• design the lifestyle you want;
• and balance passion and profits to realize their personal definition of success.

Featuring stories of dozens of "regular folks" who have reinvented themselves as "Click Millionaires", this inspiring and practical guide shows you how to stop dreaming of a better life and start living it!

PART ONE

REDESIGNING YOUR LIFESTYLE FOR SUCCESS

1

work less, live more

becoming a click millionaire

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.

—Lily Tomlin, actress and comedian

There has to be a better way!

Isn’t that what you have been thinking? Are you tired of the work you do, or the people you work with, or the low pay or uncertain career path? Or maybe all of the above? Or the fact that you may have to continue that same routine for years or decades more? Do you really think that you’re going to be able to save your way to a comfortable retirement working for someone else? Aren’t the odds of a comfortable retirement small unless you save so much that your working years are painfully light on luxuries, vacations, and toys?

If you are like I used to be, you probably thought getting that corporate job was a ticket to both money and security. Unfortunately corporate employment has turned out to be more of an “income for dummies” plan than a lifetime meal ticket. You are still required to contribute most of your waking hours to the corporate bottom line—but that’s no longer a guarantee for steady pay, job security, decent health coverage, and a comfortable retirement. Sadly, the only person who cares about your personal fulfillment and financial independence is you. Add the daily pressure of commuting to an office, working with people you normally wouldn’t spend time with, pursuing priorities set by people who don’t understand the needs of your customers, plus the constant threat of layoffs, it’s no wonder that more and more people feel trapped in a rat race from which they can’t escape!

Don’t Just Get a Job, Get a Life

If you challenge traditional assumptions about career priorities, you can discover that there are new solutions to these work-life balance issues. It’s okay to put your own life ahead of making money or climbing the corporate ladder and you don’t have to do work you dread just to keep afloat. Today you have the opportunity to redesign your life around what’s important to you and define success for yourself. You can choose to build a lifestyle business online that supports both your family and your own personal life goals, even with little capital or technical training.

Redefining success on your own terms can allow you to rebalance your life to achieve the goals most important to you. Instead of focusing simply on making money, I’d like to help you find the courage to define your success not just in dollars, fancy cars, or shiny objects that are promoted to you on television, but to include increased flexibility, creativity, and happiness, too. But motivation and a willingness to make some sacrifices along the way are not all you need to build a profitable lifestyle business for yourself. You need specific practical recommendations about which online business opportunities and tools are the best today. Personalizing those recommendations into a plan that you act upon can make the difference between wishing you were successful and being successful.

I wrote this book to help you do just that.

This Book Is Different

Too much online moneymaking advice is focused on finding clever but unsustainable ways to attract more website traffic. That kind of approach focuses on tricks—it helps you exploit small advantages in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or search engine optimization (SEO), or attracting traffic from the latest YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, app, plug-in, software, or other “hacks.”

These approaches sometimes work, but by the time an online marketing “guru” gets around to telling (and selling) you his latest traffic-attraction tricks, you can be sure that there’s not much money left in that competitive market.

More importantly, building businesses on temporary market inefficiencies doesn’t build the long-term asset value and recurring income of the Click Millionaire business system that I want for you.

So, this book is not going to teach you how to become the 100,000th person to rehash diet secrets into a free e-book, build a huge email list overnight with YouTube videos or mobile apps, or use Google Adwords PPC ads to promote affiliate marketing offers.

Instead of teaching you to push a product that may be outdated in six months and require you to start over again, this book is going to help you develop a new business and career that grows into a satisfying ongoing lifestyle for you. It’s going to teach you to redefine success for yourself, redesign your life around the things that matter most to you, and support that lifestyle with your own Internet-based business that allows you to enjoy the financial independence, creative control, and schedule flexibility traditionally only available to people who already had millions in the bank.

The goal is to find a lifestyle balance that is comfortable and fulfilling for you.

You Can Build a Business as Unique as You Are

My goal for you is to create something new; an original and unique business that positions you as an expert in your chosen field; a business that channels your efforts into something more significant than just increasing your click-through rate by 0.01 percent; a business that targets niche needs that speak to you and those in your target market on a fundamental level. I’d like to help you mine your niche to generate long-term recurring profits from a sustainable, personally satisfying lifestyle business that is meaningful to you.

For example:

How about building a business around your unique personal experience so that you can help others solve similar problems in their own lives?

Or developing an interest you have into a new expertise you can use to help advise others with similar interests?

And delivering that information or those products in a cost-effective, consistent, ethical way that attracts loyal customers to create a profitable business around you and your favorite hobbies?

I have done this personally in a bunch of market spaces that most “experts” and keyword research would have said were saturated, including probably the most competitive area of all, Internet marketing. Together we’ll make sure that your approach will be different, successful, and practical, too.

What’s a “Lifestyle Business”?

A lifestyle business is one where you prioritize lifestyle benefits over growth and profits.

It’s a real business that makes you real money but one that also lets you enjoy more of the life you deserve. With little risk or cash investment, these new kinds of online businesses can help you create a “laptop lifestyle” that finally frees you from working for someone else. Plus, they can make you happier because you spend your time working on projects you choose with people you like. The money is not the point. Your lifestyle as the owner is.

You may feel like you’re not qualified to b...