A Tiny Flame Rekindled: Multiple Streams of Income Plans Return

The next turn in my journey to creating multiple streams of income happened back near the beginning of 2007.

In 2007, one of my favourite bloggers at the time published a fascinating book called The Four Hour Work Week. His name is Timothy Ferriss.

Well, as you probably know, little Tim got quite popular after he published that book. He used ground breaking methods of promoting it and spread the word by networking his ass off with well known bloggers in related topics.

Suddenly his face was everywhere. Every blog was going Tim crazy, little niche businesses became the hot topic and Tim has since been invited to speak on stages world wide.

Knowing your strengths and multiplying them is a great tactic. Tim just happens to be fantastic at getting his ideas across and networking with people. Networking makes the world go round. Especially the digital world.

The Fire Was Lit

As expected, his book kind of lit a fire in me as it did many other people. It seemed like it was a shining light at the end of the tunnel for the salary drones of this world – myself included.

I’ve always kind of been a little bit capitalist. Thinking of little ideas that could make a few dollars, or even millions of dollars. Idea generation isn’t my problem.

I immediately began churning out ideas for little businesses with the aim to create lots of little multiple income streams with lots of little businesses. “Finally”, I thought, “I’m back on track”.

I kept thinking about it and thinking about it and then I began over thinking it and over thinking it. Paralysis by analysis had set in. Before long I was super-paralysed. I couldn’t move because I was so damn scared of what I had to do next: Take action.

I choked on the “taking action” step.

Don’t get me wrong, Tim’s theories are flipping fantastic – but you’ve got to be ready to give them a go. I mean really ready. That’s something that I’m constantly coming to terms with.

If you don’t have someone there to spot you – someone to keep saying to you “dude, you’re turning into the guy in the red Mercedes” (an inside joke – read the book) – then I highly recommend re-reading at least the first part of this book every 6-12 months. I’ve found it’s amazingly motivational and prompts you to get your ass back into gear and get back on track with your dreams. The first half of my copy is well worn.

Taking Action (Or How To Loose $500-$1000 In A Few Days)

I eventually did take some action – I bought a hosting account and I set to work on building a website for buying and selling used musical instruments. I was really into the guitar at the time – hence the segue from IT into music. Perfect combination of my skills I thought – music and IT.

Wrong. I spent about $500 in software building a website and another $200-300 in advertising and nobody came. Crickets.

Somehow, somewhere, I’d skipped a step – I’d forgotten to test my market thoroughly enough to ensure there was a need for what I was building.

$500-1000 of software and advertising investment down the drain. Not bad, but not good either – I won’t be repeating that mistake in a hurry.

Recap

So, it was now the start of 2008 and I’d had my first big failure. I was frustrated as hell and didn’t know why my plans of creating even one of my imaginary multiple streams of income weren’t working. It seemed like everywhere I looked, loads of people online were having great success fulfilling Tim’s principles – what was wrong with me?

The answer, as it turns out, was nothing. Nothing is wrong with me, and if you’re in the same situation now, nothing is wrong with you either.

There’s one more post in this little mini series on my journey to creating multiple streams of income and it’s about how I finally started having some success.

This is the second part of a three part series on my explorations of multiple streams of income. Click here to read the third part of this series. And here’s the first part.

Photo credit: DeusXFlorida

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