I’ve begun work on an online course that’s going to teach people how to build a Blog as the central hub of their online business.

I get approached by people with online business ideas each and every week and they ask for my advice on their products or service idea.  I love helping people out so I don’t mind offering my opinion or advice, but it really surprises me that nobody is seeing the flaw in following a business model based on the “I have an idea so I should start a business!” theory.  Allow me to explain.

The Idea to Business Paradigm

The idea to business paradigm of launching a service or product is based on the theory that the primary success factor of a business is whether or not it starts with a “good idea”.  I hear people saying things like “I need a good business idea, then I’ll start my online business” or “I have a really good idea, what do you think?  Do you think it’s going to be successful?”

Questions like these imply that the “idea” for a business is the central determining factor for the success of an online business.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  An idea is just an idea, I have dozens of “good ideas” every week.  Most of them better than the ones people approach me with.  That’s not an ego statement, it’s just that I open myself up to ideas and I journal a lot so they come to me while I’m brainstorming in my journals.

However, an idea is just one little tiny part of a business model.  By itself it’s pretty much worthless.  The business model that you wrap around the idea is the value in a business, not the idea itself.

A couple of years ago I hired a professional design firm (Unique Blog Designs) to re-design my blog and at the same time I also hired an artist to create the mascot you see in my Blog header.

The reason I decided to invest the +$2,000 for a professional design and mascot was because I wanted to separate myself from other Bloggers out there who were mostly running free themes.  Today there are many theme websites that offer professional looking Wordpress themes but a few years ago there really wasn’t that much to choose from.  You either spent the money and went with a custom design or you suffered with one of the crappy looking free themes.

The other reason I wanted to invest in a theme and mascot was because I wanted to invest some money into the project so as to motivate me further to keep going with it.  Starting a Blog can be so easy and inexpensive which makes it so easy for people to start Blogs, but at the same time it makes it just as easy to ditch them as well.  If it cost $400,000 to start a Blog like it does to start some franchises, I guarantee 98% of people wouldn’t be abandoning their business after just a few weeks.

With the launch of Paulymath.com, I redesigned my Blog design and the Blog header to be a bit more streamlined but I still wanted the mascot design integrated into the header as I think it really represents my brand.

A few days ago I received an email from a reader of this blog ( thanks John D.) suggesting I check out a book called “Crush It!  Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion” by Gary Vaynerchuk.  Lately I’ve been receiving all kinds of books from publishers for review and haven’t had a lot of time to do a lot of reading, so looking for yet another book to read was the last thing on my list.

However, something about Gary’s book title and the energy around his Blog really resonated with me.  So I took John’s suggestion and ran out and bought the book yesterday.  After catching up on the latest episode of 24 recorded on my PVR I started reading Gary’s book at around 2am and I didn’t stop until I finished it.

For a scanner that doesn’t finish a lot of books that alone says something about the book.

Here’s my review of the book:

Firstly, I want to say that I just love Gary’s energy.  He’s passionate, loud, authentic and real.  The energy I picked up from reading his book and checking out some of his video’s reminds me of my own energy when I’m “on” my game.

I can totally tell that if Gary and I met and hung out in person we would probably get really excited to meet someone with similar energy, then we wouldn’t stop talking for three hours straight about doing what you love and pursuing your passion instead of spending your life bitching about how much your job sucks, then the similarities in our personalities would start clashing with each trying to talk over the other, then we would get into a huge fight and then we would become best friends.

For years now I’ve accepted the fact that I’m a scanner and have given myself permission to work on all kinds of projects.  Any kind of Blog idea I had, I would just launch it.  Any kind of affiliate marketing campaign I could think of I would try it out.  If I got inspired to learn about any random subject like advanced nutrition or energy healing or psychic development I would just dive into it.

I love being a scanner and the variety it brings to life and I would never change that about myself. However lately I’ve been realizing something that I think is very important for scanners to learn.

What I’ve realized is that after I learned about the scanner personality type a few years ago and finally gave myself conscious permission to do whatever I wanted to do, I kind of went all over the place doing everything.  It was like a burst of freedom, similar to when I first got my drivers license and my first car.

Last week I combined four of my Wordpress blogs into one blog.

A few people have already asked me how I went about the process of combining the content of the sites, so I created this video which goes through and shows you what I did.

For me it was a matter of combining four blogs into one. Two of my blogs had the same “permalink” structure as my new blog, but two of them didn’t. The video shows how to deal with that as well.

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