Find An Offline Passion To Help Your Online Business Prosper

We all know that the key to success in business is to have a fit and focusable niche. What does "focusable" mean though? It means finding something you're really passionate about and getting really good at it.

With this in mind, find an offline passion that can contribute to your online business and make it easier for you to follow through on your goals. Let's say, for example, that you want to open up a creative visual design shop specializing in children's apparel. Well... find an offline passion that can help you get to the point where you want to be, in terms of expertise, so that when it comes time to open up shop, you'll be able to focus on the business at hand instead of getting bogged down in trying to figure out how to start a design business.

I've been focusing on the running and training side of things for awhile now and have been lucky enough to find a pretty decent passion for it. If you're not sure what type of niche your passion needs to fit in, then refer back to your goals and attempt new hobbies or interests as needed.

During the course of this article I'm going to be talking about three types of offline passions, but before we get there, let's talk about the "Passion Gap" for a moment. The Passion Gap is the time lag between when you start your offline hobby or interest and when you're actually doing it as opposed to just talking about it. So if you've decided on a creative children's apparel shop, then you need to make sure that by the time you begin working on your business concept, in other words before you've decided on a name for your shop (which we'll talk about in another article), that you have already been practicing at least a little bit for at least 6 months.

This is the time where you need to develop a little skill and gain some knowledge in one of your hobbies or interests. I'm assuming that if you're reading this article you don't have an online business to get yourself started with. So for those internet entrepreneurs out there, make sure that you're on board with doing this as well.

When I first started in business, I went into it with absolutely no idea of what I was really doing (other than saying "I wish I could start a business that's like xyz"). Of course, initially my grand ideas were anything but grand, but even then the most important thing was to begin learning skills and practicing them.

For example, I started body building and fitness in late 2007/early 2008 and I have been at it ever since. I have no qualms about saying that had I not started bodybuilding, getting into the mindset of working out and eating healthier (which was a goal of mine once I started), it would have been a lot easier for me to find excuses not to start my business when the time came. So make sure you're practicing your skills now so that by the time you're ready to get online, you're ready as well!

So what are these three offline passions anyway? They are: sports, music and art.

I'll be talking about each of these passions in depth over the next few articles. In this article, I'm going to be talking about art and music.

Alright, now that we've got that part out of the way... let's talk about the three offline passions: sports and music.

First of all, if you're planning on combining your business with sports in any way (athletic wear to promote a certain event, tournaments to cater towards a certain audience, etc.), you need to have a pretty deep understanding of the team or sport itself. You will have more success if you can really get into the mentality and champion it rather than just try to promote it on your website so that follow through is much easier for you once it's live.

Music is a bit of a different thing. It's much more of an artistic skill to have than a sport so you can get away with being sort of knowledgable about it, but you're much better off really pushing your passion for music into the music side of things and practicing as much as you can.

The most important thing I've learned over my 4 years of running online businesses is that the only way to get truly good at what you do is by practicing. If you're not practicing, then don't think that whatever it is that you want to achieve will happen overnight. I've seen a number of people in the fitness world who have worked with me get frustrated because they thought that all it took was to open an online store, but I've also seen people who have decided to sell their own merchandise and have the worst time getting it up and running.

I know that it's hard to find good quality artwork for your store if your focus is on clothing so make sure you're doing what you can right now to get some decent clothing and branding designs up asap so that you're not too far behind when real business comes in.

Alright, let's talk about sports first.

For those of you already doing sports as a hobby, whether it be skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding or something else... whatever you're into, throw it up onto your site and think about what other things you can do to make your site more "user friendly". If you're going to do something that's related to sports in any way (do a shirt design for the Olympians at the Winter Olympics), then take your time building up some great designs and come up with ideas for apparel and accessory items so that when it comes time to open up shop, you don't have a bunch of blank stares when potential customers run through the door.

If you're doing something athletic as a hobby already, then you're already ahead of the game by a long shot. Just make sure you're rocking it at least 6 months in advance so that when your business comes online, you don't make the same mistakes that many of my coaches and athletes have made.

Alright, that's enough sports talk for now. Let's talk about music!

I honestly think this is one of the best hobbies to get into when starting out in business. Not only is there so much information out there about how to get started with music, but there are so many suggestions on how it can be used in a business setting.

Conclusion

In the next few articles, I'm going to be giving you some tips about how you can use your passions to your advantage.

Here's what I've decided will happen with these articles:

Part 1 - Sports (currently live) - The first part of this series that talks about sports in relation to business.

Part 2 - Music (coming soon...) - Part 2 of my series talks about music. I'm going to split this into two parts so that the information is more digestable when it comes time to implement the ideas presented in my suggestions. Music is such a big topic that I don't want to cram too much info into one article so I'm going to break it up into two different ones.