Over the past few years, I’ve built up an audience of a few hundred thousand readers and several thousand subscribers with my website, IMPOSSIBLE. Here are a few things I’ve learned along the way:

1. Start a blog

Find a hosting service, start a basic WordPress account, buy a simple framework or template and get started. Write, learn to communicate effectively and help others. Answer questions. Be helpful. Solve problems.

2. Don’t worry about being original

Originality is overrated. Most ideas have been thought of before. But if you can take something that’s been done before and improve it while putting your own spin on it, you can evolve the idea into something compelling.

You don’t have to do something completely new. You just have to do it better. Evan Williams, the founder of Blogger and Twitter, credits this with being the secret to success.

3. Connect with others

You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time around. Spend time around people you want to be like and who challenge you. Always try to be the dumbest person in the room — not by being stupid, but by surrounding yourself with smart people. You’ll find you’ll have more job security with your own network than you’d ever have at a job.

4. Be strategic

If you try 100 different things starting out, 90 of them will do nothing to move you forward. Ten of them will move the needle, but only one or two of those will catapult you forward. Focus on those.

Hone in on what matters and forget the rest. Know which efforts propel you forward and which efforts kill time.

5. Do something interesting

Don’t fall into the trap of writing about writing. Do something worth talking about. People pay attention to Chris Guillebeau partly because he gives great entrepreneurship advice, but also because he’s traveled to every country in the world, and he’s telling a great story with his life.

Writing becomes easier when you’re doing something worth talking about. (Click here to Tweet this thought.) Be interesting, and people will flock to you.

6. Make your own rules

Stop listening to blogs, reading books and taking advice. They’re good, but at some point you have to close the book and get to work. That thing you want to do? Go do it. More advice, ideas and inspiration won’t cut it. You have to take action.

7. Do something impossible

Once you start to grow, challenge yourself to do something you’re not sure you can accomplish. Something that scares the daylights out of you. Then go out and make it happen. Push yourself, grow and see what happens.

People are attracted to action. It might help your community that much more.

Joel Runyon runs IMPOSSIBLE, a platform for pushing your limits, telling a great story and doing something impossible. Get the step-by-step tutorial to starting a blog here.

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The post 7 Ways to Build a Community That Will Help Your Business Succeed appeared first on Brazen Life.

I’ve quit a couple jobs in my short career (hopefully I’ll never have to have another “job” to quit again), and I can tell you that if you’re thinking about quitting your job, there’s one question you need to ask yourself:

Do you want to become your boss?

The way most organizations work is that you’re promoted over and over again. If you do it right, eventually you’ll end up “becoming” your boss. So you might as well take a look at your boss and ask yourself, “Do I like what I see?”

What’s your boss like?

In my own work history, Boss #1 was definitely someone I looked up to and wanted to emulate. I didn’t always agree with his vision or see eye-to-eye with him on every single topic, but he was someone who helped me grow as much as I could where I was.

Boss #2 was a different story. He was like a lost little puppy with very little direction and no actionable guidance. It wasn’t just him, either. As I looked around, I saw more people interested in maintaining their current status than pushing the envelope and seeing what they and the company could become.

I found myself asking myself over and over and over again: Do I want to become him?

I started thinking about what he had coming down the line. Sure, he probably could count on a nice promotion, pay raise and job security for a good long while. But he also got to look forward the same job and same schedule for the next 40 years and a relatively lengthy bureaucratic process to get anything done. Maybe that’s what he wanted.

All I know is that I did not want that. Period.

So I left.

It made the decision so much more clear-cut than I ever thought possible.

A question to ask yourself

Do you want to become your boss?

This question is a little hack that lets you see two, four or even 10 years down the road and get a glimpse of what your life might be like if you stay on the same track. It wakes you up to seeing the reality of your future rather than accepting that “someday” you’ll make a change.

So, if you’re wavering over whether you should stay or you should go, ask yourself: Do you want to become your boss? Because if you stay on the path you’re on, you’re likely to do just that.

And, if you don’t want to become your boss, what are you doing to make sure that doesn’t happen?

Joel Runyon is the author of Impossible HQ, where he started to change his life with an impossible list and a blog about challenging himself. Start your own and check out his step-by-step guide to starting a blog.

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The problem is that their plan was not really a plan. Starting a blog is not an exit strategy. In fact, some entrepreneurs to tell you not to bother starting a blog. But the real problem is not with blogs (or businesses) themselves. It’s the confusion people have between the two.

Once you’ve quit your job and eventually realize your blog isn’t a business because it doesn’t generate income, you wonder what went wrong. But you can’t blame the blog. You need to blame the expectations you had for it.

Before you leave your job to do something else, ask yourself if you want to start a blog or a business.

Let’s take a look at why you might want to start each:

Benefits of Starting A Blog

1. Create a Voice

A blog can give you a voice. That is to say, it can give you a measure of influence and a growing expertise over a tiny (but potentially huge) audience. You can use your blog to gain the kind of influence you couldn’t get through any other medium.

This can lead to all sorts of other ventures and opportunities down the road for speaking, writing and interview engagements depending on how you play your hand. If you do it right, this can be a huge leverage tool for your career.

2. Improve Your Communication Skills

In my opinion, the best thing about blogging is that it’ll help you grow some great communication skills. Not right away, though—you’ll suck at first, but eventually, you’ll start to realize you can think through your own ideas better and communicate clearer because you’ve improved with practice.

If you want a practical way to teach yourself communication skills, maintaining a blog is killer way to do it.

3. Create a Long-Term Asset

A blog is a long-term investment. If you’re only planning on writing for two months, don’t even bother. However, if you’re willing to stick with it for a couple years, a blog over the long-term can be a powerful marketing tool.

With that in mind, you’ll need something to sustain yourself throughout the process, so make sure you have a few ideas on how you plan to do that.

Keep in mind that a blog provides a lot of avenues for revenue down the road, but it rarely generates revenue directly. In other words, blogs are a great marketing tool, but they do not come baked-in with a product (which is important if you want to generate revenue).

If you want to quit your job and start a blog, it’s worth thinking about how you can make it sustainable and bake a business model into it from the start.

This brings us to the business side of things.

Benefits of Starting a Business

1. Generate Capital

A successful business means one thing: you’re generating capital. If you’re not making money, you don’t have a business. Sure, money is only one measure of a business. And you can do a lot of things without generating a billion dollars.

Ask yourself how people can give you money for your product or service. Because if you’re running a business, you need to have dollars and cents coming in. If you don’t, it’s just a hobby.

2. Create Freedom and Options

A business gives you freedom, and money gives you options. Again, money isn’t the only important thing here. But if you quit your job, you’ll need another source of income.

Blogging might seem like a great option, but unless you’re a blogging superstar, blog success won’t come overnight and money isn’t guaranteed. If you want to be sustainable, it’s a good idea to have a business idea in mind for how you’re going to cover your baseline expenses every month. Once you have a business and a revenue stream established, you’ll have more options to do even more things you want down the road.

3. Quickly Validate a Long-Term Investment

A business is a long-term game, but if your business solves a problem or provides a service that people need, you’ll find out quickly whether or not your business idea is valid.

From there, building your business is a long-term proposition, but you can validate it much quicker than you can sometimes do with a blog.

So, what are you really trying to start? A blog or a business? Make sure you know the difference.

Joel Runyon is the author of Impossible HQ, where he helps people to push their limits to the impossible. Check out his complete guide on how to start a blog here.

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Online business owners somehow believe that their business is failing in spite of them—when the reality is that it’s failing because of them.

Internet businesses often fail for the following three reasons. If this sounds like your business, you can still do something about it before it’s too late.

1. You don’t have a business model

Figure out your business model from the start. Don’t fool yourself and say that you’ll figure one out when you get X amount of readers, users or another arbitrary number. Those vanity metrics don’t really mean anything. Hammer out your business model as soon as you start your business.

Answer this one question: How many different ways can someone give you money?

If the answer is zero, you have a problem. If people can’t pay you for anything, don’t be surprised if and when they…gasp!…don’t give you money.

You are not Instagram. Facebook will not buy you out of the blue for $1 billion. Build a business model into your business from the get-go and don’t wait for the money part to “just happen.”

How to fix this problem: Create a product answering someone’s question. Offer a service to solve someone’s problem. You can even put a big donation button on your site. Whatever you do, create at least one way for people to give you money. Yes, it’s that simple.

2. You still think it’s all about you

Nope. That’s not how it works.

Build something for others. Find out what problems they have. Then solve them.

I don’t care how much you love ice cream. If you all you want to do is eat ice cream and talk about ice cream all day, you’ll never actually have a business (you’ll just spend a lot of time eating ice cream and getting fat).

Instead, try ranking, curating and organizing all the best types of ice cream out there. Help ice cream parlors promote their businesses and bring in more customers. If you’re feeling particularly gung-ho, create your own brand of ice cream that is somehow better than all the other brands of ice cream out there.

Bloggers fall into this trap all the time. They want to talk about what they’re interested in—instead of talking what other people want to talk about or solving problems other people need solved.

For example, instead of blogging about your transformation on the Paleo diet, try sharing helpful resources, tools and food lists to help others make the transition, too. Yes, your story is interesting, but the tools are more useful to other people and thus more valuable.

How to fix this problem: Cut yourself out of the equation. Talk obsessively to other people about what they need—then deliver it.

3. You think “online business” means “easy business”

Too many people think they just need an Internet connection to get started. They somehow think that also means that as long as they have a website, all the other hard parts of business go away. Not true!

Remember the whole problem-solving thing we mentioned earlier? That means you have to actually do work, so bust out some elbow grease! The reason it’s a problem in the first place is because there was enough of a barrier at some point in time for someone to think “this is hard” and give up before solving it.

That means you need to step in and fill that space. It might not be easy, but it’s probably not as difficult as you imagine it to be, either.

Regardless of the difficulty, if you can fix a problem or find a solution for someone’s pain, there’s a good chance they’ll pay for your service or product.

How to fix this problem: Don’t be afraid to do the hard work. The reason it’s hard is the same reason it’s valuable. Do what other people aren’t willing to do, and you’ll benefit.

Are you guilty of making any of these mistakes? How are you going to change them?

Joel Runyon is the creator of Impossible HQ and runs an online marketing agency, Impossible Agency. Follow him on Twitter @joelrunyon.

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