Creating Blissness From Your Business: Living in Rhythm with Your Heart and Soul
The word blissness came to me as a result of a challenge issued to me by my creativity coach. She was praising me on the progress I'd made in my fledgling business. I actually shuddered when she said the word business, as it conjured up images of women in austere dark suits clutching heavy briefcases, sitting in endless boring meetings and never having time to do what they really wanted to do.
My coach suggested that if I didn't like the word business, to think of a different word to call it. I accepted the challenge. A few weeks later, the word blissness blossomed in my mind and I gleefully chose it for my own. I know that teaching SoulCollage® workshops and building my website KaleidoSoul, is a business, but I choose to call it my blissness because it is giving me something that I never had before: an opportunity to share my passion for SoulCollage® with the world in a way that creates money and spreads joy at the same time.
SoulCollage® is a personal growth tool (created by Seena Frost) that is a mystical, magical blend of self-discovery and the fun of collage. Each participant creates his/her own deck of collaged cards using magazine images that speak to the subconscious mind. A SoulCollage® deck has four suits that represent our personality parts, persons who have influenced our lives, animal energies that assist us as allies, and archetypes who resonate with and inform our life's direction and purpose. Inner surprises abound as we interpret our cards and do soul readings with our decks.
I knew immediately on making my first SoulCollage® card that I wanted to create a business revolving around it, but I had no idea what this would involve. However, I was so passionate about SoulCollage® that I dove right in. I had no business plan, and my only goal was to share the wonders of SoulCollage® with as many people as possible.
The key to creating a blissness as opposed to a business springs directly from one's passion (heart) and intuition (soul). There's no way to create work that sings to you unless you are living that work from your own heart and soul. And in order to allow the flow of universal abundance, you need to be in touch with your own inner wisdom (intuition).
I began by avidly continuing work on my own SoulCollage® deck. The deeper I went with the process, the more excited I became about sharing it with others. I set up a few local workshops in Eastern Massachusetts, and began teaching.
It soon became clear to me that I needed a website, so I did a lot of research and found SiteSell's Site Build It (SBI), which not only has helped me build KaleidoSoul.com, but is helping me to market it as well. Getting KaleidoSoul up and running was a crash course in web design, internet marketing, keywords selection, and the basics of HTML, but I thrilled to the challenge.
After that, each step I've taken has come from following my intuition. This has been a real lesson for me in being open, aware, and listening at all times. As I have continued on this path, I have found myself led to take the next step, and the next…..
I trust my inner hunches and follow where they lead. In this fashion I have created a monthly ezine called Soul Songs, found other websites interested in helping me promote KaleidoSoul, developed an active community of SoulCollagers on the Yahoo Groups board, written e-courses about SoulCollage, and am now getting ready for our first annual SoulCollage® Weekend Retreat this August.
There are plenty of things about this blissness that are tedious, of course- photocopying flyers for my workshops, writing press releases and website updates, to name a few. Yet when I remind myself that this is all a part of my blissness, I am reminded of why I began it in the first place- to live in rhythm with my heart and soul. And then the monotonous tasks carry me forward to the next creative step.
My one wish for you is- blissness in the daily rhythms of your life and work.
The Home Business Dilemma
How often do we dream of having our own business? How often do we day dream about doing this and doing that if we had our own business?
We would start imagining how we would treat our employees, our customers, our partners. How we would do it different than what we are seeing at the workplace of our day job.
After all those positive thoughts our minds start drifting to the negative side. Why can't we have our own business? Then the answer would always roam around not having the money for it. We would think about the risks of losing the security provided by of our day job. What if that business ate up all our savings? What will happen to children, the mortgage, the car loan…etc?
Then a light flashes at the end of the tunnel. Our mind becomes creative and thinks about starting something small, something that we can do after work. May be we can start something at home.
Now we get excited. We roll our sleeves and we start to research for ideas. After a couple of months of research we get brain washed about how easy it should be to make a "SIX FIGURE INCOME IN FEW WEEKS." It is funny how our brains forgets that most those ideas that we went through are not true ideas, but we get stuck with the idea that a home business should make us RICH..RICH..RICH in no time.
After finding the idea that seems to suit our needs and looks workable we take out our credit card, pay the fee and start calling our friends and family and tell them the exciting news. We think this might also be a clever and indirect way to encourage them to join the business.
The following day we go to work. Of course there is no way we can be productive during the day as we are waiting impatiently to go home and start selling.
We go home, switch on the PC/Laptop put our credit card on the table and start searching for ways to advertise on the net. Although planning is at the heart of any business but we will not get into it here. You can read more about planning for your business whether it is offline or online business in our article at the following link: http://businessfountains.blogspot.com/2006/03/planning-for-failure-ignore-this.html
We go to sleep happy and proud that night while imagining the flowing money that must be coming in while we are sleeping. We wake up very early to check what happened. We realize that no sales were made. We think its OK, it's the first day anyway. "We have to be realistic," our mind tells us. "Nothing can happen in one night." We go to work, we make sure nobody is watching and we take out the piece of paper we had the site written on and we keep checking if any sales are happening. Nothing yet.
But the program that we are in is advanced and provides traffic stats, so we click on the stats link and realize that we had three clicks since last night. "That is good. This is not bad at all," we say.
But tonight our friends are coming over, so we cannot work. Tomorrow we promised some other friends that we will go out for dinner. Our partner says that we have to go to the movies. We will realize that each night we have some other priority that we have to attend to and that business can wait for tomorrow night.
At the end of the third week we would realize that the business is not working and this whole idea of home business is not worth it and it does not deliver what it promises, "SIX FIGURE INCOME IN FEW DAYS."
Now look what we have done:
1) Invested a small amount of money to start a home business.
2) Invested some more for advertising.
3) Since it is automated then it should do all the work for us while we go and have fun.
Let us remember what our dream was:
1) Have our own business.
2) Spend time with our customers, employees and partners and treat the best way possible
3) Basically our business will become our first priority as it is after all our dream.
What happened?
We said it before, we got brainwashed by the bad ideas. We remembered that they were bad ideas, but we did not forget their promise. "SIX FIGURE INCOME IN FEW MINUTES."
What should we do? We should remember the following:
1) A business is a business regardless of the amount of money you invest. Therefore, you must feel lucky that you found an idea with a small investment.
2) A small investment opportunity should not give you the excuse to ignore it. Imagine if you have borrowed a large sum of money to run an offline business, would you still go to that dinner, that movie or that game?
3) An Automated system does not mean it will do all the work on its own. You have to spend time working the system. Remember it is part time not FREE TIME.
4) A home business or an online business does not mean "SIX FIRGURE INCOME IN FEW SECONDS." It is a business like any other that needs time to grow.
5) You are not an employee anymore, you are the owner, so don't waste time. Remember if the owner caught you wasting time you will be fired. Now you are the owner, you might not get fired, but you WILL lose the business.
Our last word to home business owners, don't underestimate your business because it's a low investment. Treat it as if all your savings and your family's future are at stake.
Making the Most of Public Domain Content
There's so much public domain content available all over the internet, with Master Resale Rights available and sites springing up left and right with Private Label articles you can use to create your own products, but what do you need to bear in mind, what is the best way to use all this content and what can you create with it?
What to Look Out For:
Copyright - you absolutely must check on this - violating someone's copyright is not clever and can be a really expensive mistake not to mention seriously damaging your reputation. Is it really public domain? All those lawyers fees can really mount up when checking into all this but believe me, you really don't want to end up in court over it.
Public Domain Content - If you have the money to have a lawyer look at copyright for you then fine, go ahead and get started. Where can you find this type of content? It can be difficult to find content that is free to use but here are a few links to get you started:
http://www.gutenberg.org/
http://www.wikimedia.org/
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/index.html
Master Resale Rights - If you can't afford expensive lawyers what else can you do? One rather less pricey way is to buy Master Resale Rights to a product - this gives you the opportunity to name yourself as the author, use the content in another product, rewrite the whole thing - the possibilities are endless. Just be aware with this that you will need to look at the terms and conditions of what you are allowed to do with the product before you buy.
On a budget? - not to worry, there are still many ways you can find great content without spending a fortune or worrying about whether you can legally use it. Sites such as http://www.infogoround.com and http://www.thelostfiles.com provide guaranteed public domain or private label content for a monthly fee. You could also sign up to some of the well known internet marketer's newsletters. Why? Well if you're serious about internet marketing you should be checking out all the latest happenings anyway, but a lot of newsletter owners will have free ebooks, giveaways and articles to download - some of which you will be able to use as your own.
So you've got your content ready to go and you've checked your rights and permissions but there is one more thing to think about - sites such as http://www.copyscape.com can check for duplicate content on the internet and of course so can the search engines. This could mean anything from the search engines deciding they won't rate your site as highly because the exact same content is available elsewhere to some smarty pants asking you if you really did write that incredibly good article because they've seen someone else claiming that they wrote it too, so you do need to be aware of this when looking to use content you haven't personally created, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't go ahead and make the most of all that wonderful information.
What Can You Do?
You could just read the information to learn from it yourself; you could read it to get ideas for businesses, more articles, content, the list is limited only by your imagination.
How about:
Ebooks
Print Books
Presentations
Membership Sites
Face to face courses
Mini courses
Teleclass content
Webcast content
Podcast content
Blog content
Content for your Autoresponder
Ezine content
Articles for your site to build AdSense income pages
Viral Reports
Tips Lists
When it comes to using all the content you have gathered, you need to look through it all and decide what you want to produce. If you plan to use content from more than one source, such as 2 or 3 articles by different authors to be combined into a report, you will need to go through and change the content into a similar style, check that it is all written in the same tense, make sure the formatting is the same throughout, check for spelling and grammar (for example - spelling for some words is different in the US than the UK) and look through all the articles to see if any of the points made are duplicated.
Once you've done this, make a list of points you want to make in your report, read the articles through again and start combining them together to fit what you want to say - cut and paste to copy sections into the right place.
Next, look at the way your draft reads now and see if it fits your style of writing, your personality and your business. Reword it to fit with this - there's no point in producing a very formally written, stiff sounding report for a hobby site.
At this point you could just tweak it, proof read it, and then go ahead and publish it but to take it a step further and make it really unique, why not look at how you might rewrite it so that all of the content is yours - now you've got the basic idea down and laid out, it shouldn't take you long to reword things, add in some of your own ideas and keywords that fit your site, and maybe a few quotes and suddenly you're looking at something that no-one else has got, that the search engines will love and that no-one can claim you copied.
Time to start creating!
Two Terrific resources that we have found to create amazing viral reports and ebook products unique to you are the Dead Easy ebook Creator software and Infogoround. To learn more about how you can take Private Label and Public Domain materials and create your own unique audio/video ebook in minutes, visit us on the web at www.cfhsoftware.com and http://powerbusinessbuilders.com/blog.html for all the details. Infogoround is a great way to develop your own adsense cash sites in 20 minutes or less. We'll show you how to put it all together.
John and Andrea Paduchak are successful entrepeneurs, marketers and webmasters. Visit us on the web at www.cfhsoftware.com and
to learn how you can create your
infoproduct.