Take The Leap

August 28th, 2009

One of my favorite movies of the past 20 years actually was considered a box office flop but later gained a cult following. It featured the first pairing of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. It was called “Joe vs the Volcano”.Joe Banks worked in a job where routinely day after day people acted like drones and went in to do their job. One day when he went to the doctor he was diagnosed with a “Brain Cloud”. He was told that it was terminal and he would have a very short time to live. After contemplation he was convinced by a person that he would be given very large amount of cash if in the end before he would die, he would jump into a volcano in a far away island. So he lived a life of luxury and eventually set out to go to the island. On the way he met Patricia and fell in love with her. They ran into a storm and the boat sank but they were saved by his luggage that he tied together. They ended up awash on the shore of the destination island. After a party by the natives Joe was supposed to go up the volcano and appease the gods according to the local customs. Patricia decided to go with Joe and jump together. While on the way up Patricia figured out that Joe had a fictitious disease and wasn’t dying after all. Well they had to make the decision to jump. Was Joe going to jump anyways because his life would be no worse off than that of slaving away in his job? The girl he loved was going to jump with him. So they jumped. They decided they weren’t going to go half way, they were going to go for it, hell or high water. The volcano ended up blowing them out about a mile into the ocean and somehow that same luggage mysteriously appeared for them. They were alive and happy in the end.

The movie was very symbolic. The only color and piece of individualism in the office where Joe worked was Joe’s lamp he kept it in a drawer till he came into the office. This was quickly quashed by his boss. When Joe had made the decision to live like a king and die like a man, he said “There are certain times in your life when I guess you’re not supposed to have anyone, you know..certain doors you gotta go through alone.”

You gotta go through alone… Hmm… It may effect your family but it really is a decision that has to originate from you. How many of us are at that road or door? How many of us even notice that there is even a door we could go through? How many of us are living drones going through the paces day after day hypnotized by the media and politicians that determine what is best for us? How many of us all of a sudden are approaching retirement and have yet to live? I’ve said before that most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty, so most never even try anything with even a hint of risk. Well no wonder Joe took the plunge. His supposed demise was not going to be any worse than his dreary existence, though he now had Patricia.

I’ve spent to many years in Corporate America and I’ve made the commitment to get out. Completely out. I want to visit the world, I want to be able run on the beaches of the world while I still can run. I don’t want to wait till I’m 65 1/2. I want to visit places and stay as long as I feel like. I want to share with my wife helping children in orphanages. I want to live. There are too many opportunities out there where you can either simplify your life, slow down and smell the coffee, start part time businesses that make full time income, all while being able to do it anywhere you can get an internet connection. The sweet thing about it, is that the businesses you start can be about the things you are highly interested in and passionate about. Do you see the face of your boss more than your children and wife? Are you looking for something else? Are you ready to make that symbolic leap of faith?

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Content Is King – Learn What To Write About

July 6th, 2009

I know a lot of people out there are getting online to somehow start making some money because they have aspirations of firing their boss, staying at home to raise their own kids, supplementing their incomes or retirements, and to nurture their entrepreneurial spit that hides in each and everyone one of them. If they’ve done their due-diligence they should know there’s a lot more than meets the eye and have partnered up or found someone to emulate to teach them the ropes. Even then, the bottom line on how successful anyone is going to be in this industry is how much traffic they can generate and how they convert that traffic into sales.

I just noticed that what I’m about to say rhymes but maybe it will help to remember. That is “The number ONE thing, is that CONTENT is king”. I heard it said just last week by an online millionaire. Content for me means, blog posts, ezine articles, videos, reviews about others content, and comments on others content. I know a large part of the landscape in social media is Twitter, but it may be possible to convey some content, but 140 words won’t cut it in my book. Twitter is used as the communication channel to tell, educate, and inform others about content that is educational, interesting, and teaches something. It is merely the communication channel.

Content does not have to be eloquent prose. It simply has to state some facts, why you agree with or not, why you think it’s important, and what YOUR perspective about them. The exact same topic should be different than what others write because it will be from YOUR perspective. If you’ve discovered something that really helped you, write about it. You have a different perspectives and the people who read your material will appreciate it because they may be just learning, just like you are. As we speak there are tens of thousands of people a day coming on to the internet to find their fortune. You can be their guide.

So another way I come up with content. Whatever your niche is going to be, come up with 75-100 keywords about it. Keywords are going to be your nouns and verbs of the nomenclature of your niche. As an example I’ll use a niche called marketing. Here are ten keywords that would be expected to find for this niche. (affiliate, article. auto responder, back link, banner, blog, business model, central hub, and content). So with those 10 words mathematically I could write about 90+ combination of those keywords. Here are about 10 titles you could use from those 10. Attracting Affiliates With Back links. Do I need An Autoresponder For Affiliate Marketing? Using Back links In Your Article Marketing. Can Blogging Attract Affiliates For You? What Kind of Banner To Use On Your Blog. Using Keywords On Your Blog. Using Keywords In Your Article Marketing. The Key to Your Business Model – A Central Hub How To Write Blog Content.

So there I came up with 10. You get the idea. There is no reason you can’t come up with 75+ keywords for your niche. Think them through. Go to ezinearticles.com and pick the 10 most read articles in your niche and look for them there. Use a thesaurus and find them. Then think of as many combination of key words as possible. An advantage to using multiple keywords in a title is Google will rank them higher. Then sit down and write. Step away when your done. Reread it and check for grammatical errors then post it. Your done. I did this one in about 20 minutes. Went down an had a drink of water and chatted with my daughter, came up to my office and proofed it. There is no reason not to have content. Now have at it! Content is king. If you found this useful consider clicking the Tweet and Face book buttons next to the title.

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Vilfredo Pareto

June 29th, 2009

When starting an internet business one of the things that I think we all struggled with to some extent, is where to spend the majority of our time. There were so many things that we had to figure out. We had products or opportunities, market demographics, determining niches, marketing strategies, auto-responders, capture pages, sales pages, web sites, blogs, social media, fulfillment, phones, fax, etc… to worry about. Then to make things worse, while doing research to find information and recommendations on all of those things, we ended up finding that there are a thousand other choices we had to make. We started wondering if it is all worth it and saw other opportunities that somehow seemed a little bit easier than what our original choice had been. Bottom line, it’s was and still is easy to get distracted.

Another factor that we end up with is having to deal with the 80-20 rule otherwise known as the Pareto Principal. Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian economist who observed that 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the population. This later was expanded and is true for many things. A popular business axiom is that 80% of our sales come from 20% of the business. The one we (especially new entrepreneurs) have to worry about is that we ended up spending 80% of our time on things that don’t contribute to the bottom line. We need to concentrate on the 20% and refine it as much as possible. So how do we go about that?

The first things that that we need to do is prioritize our tasks and spend 80% of our time on the top 20% of that pile. I literally used to have a boss who taught me to take my “in basket”, back when email wasn’t as prevalent, sort it by importance with the most important on top and work from the top. There were items that never got attended to. The people requesting things figured out where to get their answers from someone else or they did their own research. The long term consequences were that people started relying on me for important items because I gave them the attention they needed and the minutia of the daily grind went somewhere else. I ended up getting higher visibility in management’s eyes, got noticed and was handsomely rewarded come review time.

You can do the same thing managing your own business. You may not have the luxury of ridding yourself of the daily minutia, but you can automate it, pay someone to automate it, pay someone to deal with it, or even, getting rid of it altogether. You need to be spending as much time as possible on those actions that give you 80% of your income. You need to outsource or automate as many routine or mundane tasks that you have to perform. By practicing these principals and understanding Pareto’s Law, the bottom line on your balance sheet at the end of the year will reward you.