I mentioned last week that I would finally start updating you on some of my entrepreneurial endeavours.

Firstly I have to say, this isn’t easy. By ‘this’ I mean everything related to going a different way about things. Trying to make a living outside of the standard 9-5, five days a week. It’s tough as hell.

Having said that, unbeknown to most I am still working the nine to five (well, 9-6) at the weekends! I’ve yet to make any real money through my own businesses, and have therefore been working weekends in a different branch for the company I left almost a year ago – the same company I worked for when I was 16!

Not that I’m complaining. Currently, it’s a necessity. Without it my funds would have dried up a long time ago. And it’s not so bad a deal. I like my colleagues, as well as my boss. For a necessity, you can’t really ask for more than that.

As many of you will know, I’m a huge fan of the 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss (if you’re new here, despite it’s spammy sounding title – this book is one of the greatest business idea boxes of all time).

This was the book that just blew me away by last summer. It was the book that helped me the discover the likes of Tim Ferriss (of course), Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuk, Leo Babauta, Ramit Sethi, and others, which in turn introduced me to tens, if not hundreds of similar websites and blogs by people, many of which who I now call my friends.

What I will say of the book, is even through the concepts and ideas within it are very much evergreen (as Tim would say); as you would expect, the specific tools required to do something, and even the ability to do that task at all, are now very out of date (the most recent re-write being 2009). Unfortunately this is something the printed business book is going to come up against more and more.

I realised this for the first time after finally implementing the first landing page I’d ever created at the start of March.

Everything was set up, word for word ala 4HWW. I submitted to Google Adwords and awaited approval.

I was not approved. Far from that, the domain name was banned from participating in the Google advertising program. After researching the email, it turned out this had only recently come into effect. Google will no longer advertise landing pages, especially ones that are clearly being used to dry run a currently non-existent product.

I was lucky to have only had the domain banned. Google take such a hard line on anything outside of their policy that I could have had the domain banned from Google entirely (organic search results), as well as having my Google account terminated (which at the time was my main email address account. Not cool).

What next? I’ve worked on so many ideas in the past ten months. Off the top of my head, here are some of those ideas (some reached full website stage before being abandoned, some were simple ideas):

• Parkour/Freerunning Website
• Job Interview Body Language eBook
• Comedy Writing Course
• Telescope Review Website
• Software Review Website
• Learning South American Spanish Email Series
• Learning Portuguese from Spanish Email Series
• County Council Refuse Collection Advertising Website

These are just the ones I remember. Often before going to sleep I’ll come up with new niche ideas, write them down, then wonder what the hell I was thinking of the next morning.

So you’re probably wondering by now, how much have I made in all that time, through all those ideas?

£21

(approx $34)

And £19 of that came just a few days ago through a single affiliate sale. But you know what. I couldn’t be happier! Here is the tweet I sent out when I made my first 75p online last month.

Okay, so a lot of things I’ve attempted have failed. I get that. I’ve wasted a lot of time on projects that haven’t worked. I totally agree that if you learn from a failure, it’s not really a failure, but these past six months I should have upped my pace here and there.

Feedback, not failure.

I’ve got big plans to grow this blog, but for the meantime at least I’m limiting myself to one post a week so to concentrate on the business side of things.

I’ve given myself a strict monetization plan to stick to for the next few weeks. Currently I am working on finding a two-three perfect niches (I don’t want to put all my eggs into one basket again). I realise now that a huge factor in the success or failure of a business comes from the initial idea. If the niche doesn’t balance out, you’re going to struggle.

Onwards!

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