One of the hardest parts of starting a niche website is to find something to start a niche website about. It’s easy to think of general topics such as insurance or travel but these are not niche topics and you have to drill a lot deeper to find a specific product or service to promote successfully. There are lots of ways to get the creative juices flowing and I encourage anyone to use as many methods as possible when trying to come up with ideas for a niche website. Some people get ideas just from watching TV or reading magazines, some gets their ideas from trying to find a solution to a problem they have and can’t find one. Ideas can come to you in all sorts of ways but the five methods below are the ways I have used so far to find ideas to start a niche website....

Buying your first domain name can be a little daunting. Not only are you taking the first big step in actually doing this – creating a website for yourself – is seems so technical at first and what do all those terms mean. DNS. Nameservers. cPanel. FTP. Once you get your head around the lingo, it’s actually a fairly simple system to master. I buy a mixture of .com and .com.au domains and there are a couple of difference between buying the two. Australia has a couple of conditions that you have to adhere by that you don’t have to when buying .com domains. In Australia, to purchase a .com.au (or .net.au) domain name you need to have an ABN. This doesn’t mean to need to have a business or be trading as a business. You can easily go get yourself an ABN at the Australian Business Register website. By doing...

In my first couple of posts to this blog, I talked about how I was planning on eventually leaving my day job to be self employed full time, only to be made redundant. It was sort of a surprise and I just wasn’t ready for it. I say it was ‘sort of’ a surprise because the business wasn’t doing well and the work was running out but I definitely thought there would be others to be made redundant before I was. I had just returned from 5 weeks travelling around the U.S. so my plans were to continue working there for at least 6 months and save some money up. During this time I was also going to get some work freelancing in web and graphic design to keep some money coming in while I build up my “passive income”. Redundancy two weeks after returning from holiday with no money...

I was made redundant on Monday. I was working for someone who used to be a friend. And I say used to be friends but not because she was my boss or because she made me redundant. As a mid-30′s woman running a very successful business, my boss was a very good friend of mine. She was positive, ambitious and funny and I looked up to her. She was the kind of person who made you feel good after spending time with her. It was getting increasingly harder to find time to spend with her though – we’d make plans, she’d cancel. We’d make more plans, she’d cancel them. She screened calls and never called back. She’s busy running a multi million dollar company, it’s ok, I understand! I then started working for her and got to see a very different side of her. She was stressed, snappy and in...

Reaching your long-term destination might feel impossible today as you try to sort out where you are in your life. But there is no time for self-pity; you have important work to do now. Don’t waste precious time because this small window of opportunity won’t remain open too long. Acknowledge anything that isn’t working and make changes as needed to get back on track. That’s my horoscope for today. They have been like this for the past year, telling me things are changing, that my life is coming to the point where I want it to be etc. On my igoogle homepage I have a widget which displays a Daily Horoscope. Horoscopes are funny to me – when they are good I believe them, if they are bad I don’t. I do like to believe in “the universe” and astrology and horoscopes but I also believe that you make decisions...

I could have sat for days trying to decide what to write. In fact I did. I didn’t want my first post to seem too new…like “Hi, this blog will talk about blah blah”. Then I wondered if I should start writing about a topic as though this blog had been around for a while, no introductions. I was browsing through my blog reader today and came across a post by a blog that I didn’t even realise I was subscribed to, Office Buddha, about choices and which is the right to make. The post resonated with me as it’s sort of how my life is at the moment. The right choice, and the one that scares the hell out of you are usually the same. At this point in my life I have a few things going on, things that I’m trying to make happen and I’m on the brink...