This is the second part in my series on creating positive change in your life. If you missed the first part, please read it before reading this. You can find part one here – Is It Really Possible To Create The Change You Want In Your Life?.

Next up we begin a look at what I’ve learned and become aware of on my own journey to create what I want in my life. There’s a lot to cover here, so I’ve broken this section into two articles, starting with a look at three very vital concepts.

If you haven’t manifested your own desires and want to change your life, take on board what I have to say here, and in the articles that complete this series. I promise it will help you in many ways…

Here Is What I Know So Far

I’ve proactively changed many aspects of my life for the better, especially in the past five years. The key word here is “proactively”, which could be interchanged with the word consciously, or intentionally. The point being that I decided I wanted something and then went to work to create the change necessary to have what I wanted. It wasn’t just hoping, dreaming, or thinking about the change, it was all of those things AND focused action designed to take me there.

The end outcome of achieving what I set out to is usually different to what I expected, and of course as per the universal rules I talked about in the first article in this series, the process, the journey of creating the change turned out to be more valuable than actually arriving at the outcome.

Although we are motivated by changing certain physical circumstances we exist in, often it’s the internal shift, the growth we go through on a personal level, that turns out to be the most valuable outcome. The physical benefits are like having the cake, while the real change is learning how to cook, something you can take with you long after you finish eating the cake.

Although many of the stories I’m about to tell you relate to a personal milestone, event or challenge from my life, the cornerstone of the story is the lesson learned as a result. Luckily for us, I’ve been chronicling many of these lessons by revealing the stories here on this blog, so together we can go on a trip through the last ten years of my life and extract some of the most important and powerful revelations as they apply to creating positive change.

I’ve included a link to the original articles that recount in more detail the situations and the key learnings. I strongly recommend you read these articles too, as they will greatly reinforce the messages of this article series.

This is some of the most powerful content in this blog in terms of helping you change your mindset, increase your own self awareness and achieve what you want. I say this in confidence because they are the benefits I gained by living these experiences.

Here we go…

1. Personal Congruency (Confidence through training)

Source: Personal Congruency… At 21? How To Be Confident At Any Age

Way back during the first year of this blog I talked about my trip to Seattle to play in the 1998 Magic world championships (a card game that has a competitive tournament series, sort of like poker, but geekier). During this trip I was able to meet some of the stars of the game, and play against the best of the best. The result of this once-in-a-lifetime experience was a change to how I perceive people who are considered famous and a deeper understanding of how they got there.

People who are exceptionally good at something get there because they repeated processes over and over again in preparation for an experience, or in an attempt to qualify for the experience. They then had the experience, which helped them become more confident heading into the next similar experience. This is why in professional sports or competition of any kind it’s usually a huge advantage to have “been there before” as you’re not intimidated by what you don’t know.

This opens up the idea that expertise and success comes to people who choose to go after it. Yes talent, gifts and luck play a part, but the greater your “courage of conviction”, the more likely you will be successful. If you build the tools to create the courage through hard work, then you are more likely to succeed, even if you have never had the success you are striving for before.

It’s worth reading this article because I wrote it when I was 26. I’m 30 now and a lot happened during those years. I wrote that article having had minor financial success in my life at the time, but feeling confident about where I was heading because the positive signs were becoming very consistent and I truly began to believe I could have what I wanted, at least financially, because of what I was doing. I was starting to become proof of the concept I was writing about. I was starting a process of change, just as I was starting to build this blog.

2. You Control Your Perception (Interpretation is half the battle)

Source: The Key To Happiness

I read a book called Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman. It’s a really interesting book, and one of the most enlightening ideas I took away from it was this -

Optimistic people do not see reality. Instead they contort their interpretation of what they are experiencing to see it as positive, regardless of what is really happening.

Pessimistic people have a much firmer grasp of reality and as such often see the negativity in what is happening to them and other people around them.

Optimists are essentially fooling themselves so they feel better. They manufacture hope and as a result live longer, happier lives. Pessimists see a form of truth, which you might say is more accurate than the optimists, but they consequently suffer more.

So do you want to be the happy fool or the sad realist?

When I was in my early twenties clearly my mind had decided that it preferred to see the negative in what was going on around it. It became so good at this, that the body it had control of started to malfunction.

My mind created so much fear that I started to get panic attacks. Even when there wasn’t a large predatory animal trying to hunt me down, which is a more typical reason for my body to react the way it did, as if it was preparing to fight or run away from the danger, I was feeling these sensations. It was horrible.

I created danger and fear when it wasn’t there and it was because I had learned how to think about things the wrong way. I distorted my interpretation of reality to the point where I suffered physical pain. I call that a form of insanity, but I did find a way out…

As a result of this experience I became a very, very good listener, and this has nothing to do with listening to other people. I started listening to, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say I started to observe my own thoughts, and wow, were they broken.

Back when I wrote the key to happiness I was at a stage where I observed my thought process for the sake of becoming a better thinker. You can call this cognitive behavior therapy if you like, but it’s not that complicated, all you really have to do is “watch” how you talk to yourself. Once you do this you start to realize, at least this is the case for many people, that you really don’t like yourself very much. You spend your entire day being insecure about pretty much everything.

My god was this a turning point for me! I couldn’t believe how mean I was. I thought I was a good person before this, in fact I thought I was so nice that I deserved better in my life, but I was wrong. I was an absolute bastard to the person that mattered most – myself. I spent nearly every waking moment judging myself, and the world around me, and 90% of the time I was negative.

From the seeds of your worst moments, come your greatest strengths. Becoming aware of my own internal dialogue was a massive gift and has positively influenced my life since then. The awareness born from actively listening to how I talked to myself, and then making a very conscious choice to change how I interpret the world around me and thus how I talk about experience to myself, gave me the toolset I need to, well, be happy.

I can’t really put it any better than I did at the end of the article, so I’ll repeat it here…

Happiness is ultimately not in anyone else’s hands or controlled by any external element at all. It’s purely a choice you can make. As often as I can I choose to be happy. It’s not always as easy as that but by undertaking to change the way you think and create an ongoing positive dialogue with yourself you are both working towards the same goals – that’s you and your little voice – both aiming for happiness.

Once you gain the power by becoming self aware of your own voice inside your head and how you perceive the world around you, half the battle is won. You are in control and that will always be the case no matter what happens to you or your environment.

Creating positive change in your life begins with how you interpret life itself. If you want things to change for the better, the first step is to make the choice to see the world in a way that is beneficial, on the inside. The outside world is always open to interpretation, and you will never know the real truth, so why not create perceptions that help you?

The key take away from this article is self awareness is the first step towards creating the change you want, in fact, it is all you ever need if you really drill down to it. You are the master of your own universe.

3. Work Ethic (Do it even when you don’t feel like it)

Source: How To Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up

This is still one of the most popular articles on this blog with almost 250 comments as I type this, I wrote the article because it is clear people need encouragement. Heck, I need encouragement too, so I wrote this just as much for myself as I did for you.

Your mind is your strongest asset and your weakest link, and can be a very clever saboteur. It has a huge influence on your emotional state, and your emotions are the fuel that feed your creativity, or stifle it.

If there was a lesson that every blogger, entrepreneur and athlete knows well, it’s the importance of consistence and persistence. I wrote about this in some depth in my very first free report – How To Start An Internet Business – and it’s safe to take this on board as fact.

To be successful you’re going to have to work hard, over a long period of time and there will be stages, many of them, where you just don’t feel like it. If you want to change, learning how to work through periods of lack of motivation, depression, feelings of loss, confusion, or any state brought upon by negative thought patterns, requires that you learn two things -

1. Your thoughts are choices of perception that you are in control of entirely (the previous section discussed this)
2. You can choose to just do it (credit to Nike) regardless of how you feel

As you probably know from experience, sometimes even when you are aware of your inner voice, and even despite telling yourself all kinds of positive and good things, you still feel like crap. The reason for this is you don’t believe in what you are saying to yourself, which is often very hard when you’re still on the journey to change, because your physical reality hasn’t become what you want it to…yet.

A true master of self awareness chooses their emotional state because they are in complete control of their internal configuration and have need for nothing in the external world (like totally zen). For most of us, the outside world has, and will have for our entire lives, a huge influence over us because we want something from it. As long as you have a sense of attachment to anything, and this is especially true for attachments to people, you’re going to suffer (go Buddhism!).

This happens to me too, and although I can say it’s not as pervasive as it once was, I still feel lousy sometimes when I’m not getting what I think I want, when I want it. This is especially the case when you are working to change something that requires you have an experience you have never had before, or where you have attempted to have the experience, yet failed, perhaps multiple times, reinforcing the belief that you will never attain your goal.

Chances are if you are reading this blog, one of the things you are attempting to do now is make money online, and you’re not there yet, so you’re forced to do things to make money that you don’t like (e.g. a job), and you feel bad about it. This is a classic situation where you need to push through and keep going, even in the face of emotional adversity, and as I outlined in the article, often simply making the decision to act even when you don’t feel like it, will pull you out of the negative mood.

The important point here is that you need to realize your process to come to a change is going to involve feeling all kinds of emotions, many of which will not help you change in the direction you want to. The greater the change you desire, the longer the journey, and the more you are going to experience along the way. It’s your job to pilot the ship forward no matter what the conditions, with the belief that your destination is always moving closer, even when you feel like you are going backwards, and you are never certain of when you will arrive.

Coming Up: Taking It To The Next Level

I’ve introduced you to three principle concepts required to realize positive change in your life -

1. Confidence through training helps you create a foundation for growth
2. Self awareness – You choose your perception of reality
3. Working regardless of inner or outer conditions is the path to what you want

You can no doubt see how all three of these concepts are very interrelated and impact each other. As you continue through this series you’re going to see that all these concepts are governed by universal laws, and in the end there is only one variable that really matters when it comes to making change. That variable is you.

Coming up next we’re going to look even deeper at how you are the greatest agent for change there is today. Although your focus right now might be to change aspects of your own life, by the end of this article series you’re going to see how important it is that you go through this process, because if you can truly grasp this, you will see that you’re also the key to changing absolutely everything that you perceive as wrong on this planet.

But let’s not get too deep just yet. First we need to understand what’s governing the process of change, how your own behavior dictates results, what drives your behaviors and how simple it really is to change behavior if you just tie it all into the right mindset.

Yaro Starak
Blogging To Awareness

---

Get your bonus copy of my book
“How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1,000 Online”
Download Here

Even though I’m already in a happy place from both a personal and professional standpoint, I love to read self improvement books in my free time. Because no matter how good I feel about my life, there are always new ways to improve myself, to push myself and to test my limits. So when my buddy Tim sent me over his latest book, I jumped at the chance to review his newest creation.

I must admit, I was a little bit taken aback by the title when I first cracked open the book. “How To Be Rich And Happy” as the title of a book makes for a very lofty goal and sounds a little too good to be true, almost like some sort of get rich quick scheme. However as I began reading the book, I immediately realized the powerful message that Tim and John were trying to convey.

In just a few chapters, “How To Be Rich And Happy” had me hooked and I couldn’t put the book down. Tim’s use of personal anecdotes and inspirational stories made me feel refreshed and I immediately felt motivated to take on some new challenges in my life.

Not only does this book provide inspiration but it also outlines a concrete set of steps on how to reach your goals as well. You will learn how to analyze your current situation and use a tried and true formula to achieve happiness and wealth. In short, “How To Be Rich And Happy” is a book that helps you live the life that you want to live.

In fact, the information contained within the book so closely matches the fundamental concepts of entrepreneurship that I strongly recommend this book to all small business owners. This book will inspire you and make you a better entrepreneur!

About The Authors

About John
I don’t know John personally, but I do know that he has overcome many hardships throughout his life and is an extremely accomplished personal development guru.

He has been honored alongside Oprah, Wayne Dyer, Tony Robbins and Lance Armstrong as one of the 100 most influential thought leaders in the field of leadership and personal development.

About Tim
I’ve been following Tim’s blog The Discomfort Zone for well over a year now and I just love his inspirational writing style. Not only does he provide free information and advice on his blog but he’s also a highly respected and sought after professional life coach and NLP master practitioner as well.

I’ve shared correspondence with Tim in the past and he’s a great guy whom I highly respect.

Recommended

To sum it up, I highly recommend reading this book if any of the following apply to you

• You are stuck in a rut with your current job
• You are unhappy with your current financial and personal situation.
• You want to take control of your life but keep putting it off.

“How To Be Rich And Happy” will inspire you to take action and you’ll feel a renewed sense of determination after reading the book. I know I did. Plus there’s no risk either. If you don’t like the book, just let the authors know and they’ll gladly refund you your money.

You can check out “How To Be Rich And Happy” at www.howtoberichandhappy.com

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Tim Brownson or his ebook in any way. Tim is someone that I met while establishing my own blog and I have absolutely nothing to gain from the sale of his ebook

The Truth About What Motivates Us

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Dan Pink has a new book coming out at the end of the year – Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us – that may help people rethink the entire notion of the carrot and stick approach to motivating and rewarding employees. Seems that autonomy is a much greater motivator than we understand.

Dan will be a guest on an upcoming episode of the Duct Tape Marketing but this past summer he presented the central theme of his book durting a TED Talk. The 18 minute clip below is worth watching over and over again. (Dan’s a great presenter and this video could be used to teach how to present.)

This is part one of a series on how to create positive change in your life based on what has worked for me, what hasn’t, and what I’m currently learning. Rather than write one of my usual 4000+ word monster articles I’m breaking it down for you into more manageable chunks.

This is going to be a very important series if you’re ready to arm yourself with some powerful tools in the battle for happiness, success and contentment in your life, so get ready. Here we go…

This Is Who I Am

As a blogger you are at times more open with your thoughts and feelings online than you might be in person, even with your closest friends and family. Despite knowing that thousands of people read this blog every day, I find it easier and I’m much more succinct, when I share my thoughts and ideas here, at least when it comes to certain subjects.

One of the wonderful, if surprising at first, experiences as a result of being open with people through a blog is that eventually you gain some kind of notoriety for being good at something. When I started Entrepreneurs-Journey I wanted to share my business experiences simply for the sake of sharing and to see whether other people found what I had to say of value. Some people did find what I had to say valuable, so I kept saying things, and more and more people found me and started listening.

Eventually my perception online became that of an “authority” in my niche, at least to a small sub-segment of the population. I became a “someone” rather than an audience, in one little corner of the universe, in this case as a blogger who talks about entrepreneurship, marketing, and personal development.

This is a great event for all kinds of reasons, but the most important reason, and be sure to underline this, is that with authority, more people actually read what I write. With the attention that authority gives me, I enjoy the privilege and honor of being able to influence people. This is power and it’s something you have to be very careful with as power is trust, and you don’t want to abuse people’s trust.

What’s a little strange for me is that I’ve not really done anything to enjoy my position other than tell you what I think and do. I haven’t been officially trained to do this in any way, I didn’t go to school to learn to blog (I started one instead), nor was I instructed along the way about the right way to do things. In reality I’m pretty much exactly the same as you are right now, except I’ve spent the last five years sharing aspects of my life through this blog over and over again, week after week.

The Challenge That Is Changing Yourself

One of the most interesting subjects, one that I’d like to tackle with you now, is the concept of whether it is really possible to change, especially in a proactive, self-determined manner. This isn’t about fate or destiny, this is going after and getting what you want.

When I say change, I mean real change. I mean the kind of change that takes you from where you are now, to where you really want to be, although using a phrase that relates transition to a destination or a time isn’t quite complete. What I’m really talking about when I say “be” is the state you are in. It’s the change of state, the way you think and consequently act and thus experience, that I refer to when I mean change.

This is the kind of change where you feel like you’re not the same person you were before, and everything around you has changed as a result of this. You might be living in a different place, associating with different people, you might have a different lover, or several, you might be financially wealthier, or maybe you’ve lost or gained weight, or you no longer do something you wanted to stop, like drinking, or smoking.

All these things are symptomatic of change, to say they are the change isn’t quite accurate. It was something about you on the inside that changed, that caused a physical change to manifest in reality. It was YOU who changed.

When you experience this kind of change you know it, because when you realize the change you stop yourself and go “wow, I’m actually feeling what my previous self wanted to feel oh-so-much back then“. I’m living what I previously wanted to live. I am what my past self wanted to be in the future, if we include the element of time. I am now where I wanted to be back when I was somewhere else, if we include the element of place.

It’s this idea of change, and it’s change for the better that we want, or at least what we perceive as desirably better today (it may not actually turn out to be so, but we assume it is for now since we don’t know yet), that intrigues me. The idea that you are in charge of your own “personal development” is powerful. Imagine being in charge of claiming what you want in your life?

Yeah, it sounds good doesn’t it, but let’s state a truth – change is hard.

Significant change takes effort, and often so much effort that by the time we get what we wanted or arrive where we wanted to be, our value system has changed too, so you may not even want what you were working so hard to acquire. That I believe is a clever built-in motivation tool nature has given us so that we’re always striving for more. If we got everything we wanted instantly and easily then the value wouldn’t be there and we’d stop striving to make ourselves better.

Consequently, the lessons we eventually take away from any dramatic change in our lives are these, which many people come to understand as universal principles if they live long enough…

• We should live in the moment,
• enjoy the journey,
• understand that what we want isn’t what we really want and,
• that we will always want more until we decide we don’t.

Tricky isn’t it.

Is Change Even Possible?

I remember as a child listening to my mother on the rare occasion she hosted a party at her house. My mother is not the most social person and while she loves sharing ideas with other people, she’s closer to hermit than socialite. That doesn’t stop her from talking her mouth off when she’s had a glass of wine and the people around her are saying things she feels a need to respond to (nowadays she doesn’t need any alcohol to get her started!).

One of her favorite subjects as I recall, is whether change is even possible in the first place. She steadfastly believes people can change on a fundamental level, and we are talking about the tiniest of individual personality details, all the way up to global consciousness. Some people didn’t agree with her, they argued that no one could truly change, which is why as humans we will always have the problems we have, in some shape or form.

I remember listening to her passionately explaining her viewpoint on this subject, although from my recollection as my mother’s son, I felt more uncomfortable that here was my usually soft-spoken mother becoming more animated than usual, resulting in me wanting to be somewhere else (parents are, like, so embarrassing!). I generally preferred to find a way to be in another place when adults where drinking and talking loudly, but no doubt my mother’s viewpoint on change has impacted my own perception of whether change is possible, so credit where credit is due.

I Haven’t Quite Mastered This One…

As I stated at the start of this article, sometimes as a blogger you have to get personal. It’s one of the most powerful tools we have to engage our audience. However, in the case of this subject, I have to admit I don’t feel quite as comfortable as I’d like to when talking about my own perception of how to change.

Normally, as the authority, it’s smart for me to assume a tone in my blog posts that I know what I’m talking about, and to a certain degree with many subjects that relate to marketing, I do, at least comparing my own skill level and knowledge with my audience’s. I know just enough more than my readers so that I can provide value.

Marketing in so many ways is a science. Talking about how to make money, or relating a story of how you did something to get a result is simple enough. The concepts we are dealing with there are straight forward, like pieces of a puzzle you just have to arrange in the right order.

Concepts like change are much more fluid and complex. Most personal development subjects are that way because we’re dealing with some of the fundamentals of life. As a result, I’m best teaching by revealing the aspects of my own journey, even though I may not have figured it all out. Writing an article like this isn’t just for you, it also helps me, as I come to a greater realization of my own place by sharing with you. As they say, the best way to learn is to teach.

Here, discussing how you can go about changing your life for the better, I feel the need to make note of where I’m personally at with the topic because, well, I’m not quite there yet. At least I’m not where I want to be, so there is still more change to make.

I expect this is likely the state I will remain in for most of my life because as far as I can tell, no human ever masters change or remains content with how things are permanently, unless they are enlightened or dead. I don’t exist in a perpetual state of enlightenment (nor am I convinced that’s what life is all about if you consider the practical world, not just the spiritual world, although they can overlap if you become self aware enough), so I can only imagine what it is like.

For the sake of making this applicable to you, I’m going to assume you still have a strong desire to make changes in your life too and you’re not quite enlightened yet either. At least we’re coming from the same place .

This is part of the reason why this subject is so compelling. Being comfortable that life IS change is one thing, and I’m all for going with the flow, but taking a proactive interest in determining what changes in your life is a different story. You want to be the driver in your life, even if you can never be sure where the road is taking you or what you will pass through on the way.

Coming Up Next: What I Can Teach You Now

Coming up in the next part in the series I’m going to review what I know so far in terms of how I’ve been able to realize growth and change in my own life. There are some very strong repeating themes in this, and I’m seeing a pattern that I’m still trying to come to terms with myself.

If you want to know what that pattern is, stay tuned for my next article…

Yaro Starak
Changing

---

Get your bonus copy of my book
“How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1,000 Online”
Download Here

Every entrepreneur knows that having the proper mindset is the single most important determining factor when it comes to the success of any small business. If your heart is not into the project or venture that you are working on, you are going to fail. If you don’t have the necessary motivation, then you are going to fail.

In fact, motivation and mindset are probably the most difficult aspects of entrepreneurship to instill in others. Thankfully, Dragos Roua does an excellent job of explaining how to obtain the millionaire mentality with his latest ebook 30 Sentences For A Millionaire Mindset. If you feel dissatisfied with your current situation, then this book will provide you with a framework to turn your life around.

For those of you who are not familiar with Dragos, he is a seasoned entrepreneur who started and sold a very successful internet business back in the late 90’s. He also runs a very popular entrepreneurship and personal development blog at www.dragosroua.com and is a blog I read on a regular basis.

His 90 page ebook is designed to be read one chapter a day with 30 chapters in all. Each chapter describes different aspects of the millionaire mindset and mental exercises for you to assess and improve yourself. Honestly, it’s a very easy read and at the end of the month, you may have a new outlook on life!

In any case, if you have the time, go check out 30 Sentences For A Millionaire Mindset and while you are at it subscribe to his blog as well. There is really no risk as the book carries a money back guarantee. Go buy it now!

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Dragos Roua or his ebook in any way. Dragos is someone that I met while establishing my own blog and I have absolutely nothing to gain from the sale of his ebook

I can’t imagine we are only 2 days away from the Elite Retreat conference. I was packing over the weekend and was thinking back to our 2008 event in San Francisco. I was so sick. It really was a miserable time for me.

At the Elite Retreat I get the best leaders I know in the industry to help the attendees but its my show and I want to solve peoples goals. I size everyone up as fast as possible and the whole time I am focused on solving their problems and helping them get to where they want to.

Just a month back I was at the affiliate summit and was sick also. Being sick sucks in general but at a conference when you are “working” it really sucks.

Both of these times I got sick on the first day I arrived at the conference. I usually get there a day or two early so the cold/flu hits me hardest when I need my strength the most.

Here are my tips for not getting sick while traveling:

Pre-emptive measures

• Flu shot/mist – Every year you should get a flu shot. I used to not get these until I had kids. The flu shot helps you build an immunity to the flu. The flu mist is a new deal that gives you longer coverage and covers more types of flu. You can read more about them here.
• Vitamin C – I take 2000mg of Vitamin C a day. This super bumps up your immune system.
• Airborne Myth – There is a product called Airborne that used to make claims that it would help you to not contract illness while flying on planes. 30+ million dollars later in FTC fines and consumer settlements its now marketed as a simple dietary supplement. Don’t fall for this one! WASTE OF MONEY!

Things you should avoid but are kind of unavoidable

• Don’t shake hands Many people have written about hand shaking and what a barbaric method of greeting it is. There are tons of great alternatives I wish we would embrace. Shaking hands is one best way to pass germs person to person. I would rather shake hands then create the awkwardness of leaving someone hanging. But that is where the hand sanitizer comes in.
• Sit in a isle seat on the airplane – lots of times people will rest against the window area and breathe/sneeze all over it.
• Don’t use the bathroom in the airplane – This is by far the easiest place to contract a cold or flu. Most airplanes only have cold water that do not really kill bacteria and suck for hand washing. Badness all over in airplane bathrooms.
• Don’t Smoke – Smoking irritates your throat and weakens your immune system. I am a conference smoker and usually smoke 2 a day or so when I drink. IM WORKING ON IT!
• wash wash wash wash wash your hands.

Must have items to prevent getting sick

• Keep a mask in your carry on. I am not talking about one of those surgical masks. Surgical masks are made to keep the wearer from preventing spreading their germs if they cough. You need to get a Pandemic Mask like this. If you have to sit bitch on your plane or anywhere near a child bust that sucker out.
• Use Alcohol-based hand sanitizers or gels or antibacterial wipes – I always keep hand sanitizer gel in my carry on and use it frequently throughout my trip.

Hopefully these tips will help you not to get sick while traveling.

If you have any to contribute fire away!

This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog

How To Not Get Sick While Traveling

Having recently finished writing 2 multi-part guides on how to start a small business and how to create a profitable online store, I must say that it felt good to get all of that information out on paper. Creating these guides was extremely satisfying for me on so many levels and allowed me to document the many things that I learned while starting our wedding linens business.

But sometimes I wonder whether these guides will really make a difference. Sometimes I wonder how many of my readers will actually go on to start their own small business as a result.

Based on your emails, MyWifeQuitHerJob.com has readers from a broad spectrum of backgrounds and I’m just curious how many of you are truly serious about quitting the rat race? Hell, I received a strange email the other day from a random reader who recently unsubscribed from the blog.

Thank you for writing this guide, but it really scared me away from wanting to start my own business. It seems way too complicated and a major hassle so thanks but no thanks.

Well geez…nobody ever said that starting a business was going to be easy. Would you rather be completely in the dark over what it takes? Or would you rather be prepared for what lies ahead? If reading a guide is going to scare you away, then guess what? Starting a business is not for you. At this point, don’t even try because you don’t have what it takes!

This email made me really think about why I hesitated when I first considered starting my own business. I wasn’t really scared. I had the time. I didn’t have the knowledge but I knew I could pick things up. What did it really take to motivate me to take the plunge?

Find Out What Motivates You

If you really want to start your own business and actually be successful at it, you need to discover what pushes your buttons. For my wife and I, it took a pregnancy to push us beyond our tipping point. Before that? I didn’t have any excuses. None. I was just a lazy piece of crap.

But as soon as I saw that pregnancy stick test positive, I got the biggest kick in the ass I’d ever received. I wanted my wife and I to be able to spend as much time as possible with our child and the only way to do that was to take charge of our own income.

Everyone has different motivations. One of my fellow entrepreneur friends decided to take the plunge because he was tired of answering to other people. His tipping point? After 4 straight jobs and not being able to get along with any of his bosses, he realized that he just wasn’t employee material.

The best way to find out what motivates you is to sit down and think about what really matters to you and imagine what your life would be like in your ideal world.

Are you unsatisfied? Do you really want to be working for someone else to make a living? Do you have any special skills that very few people have? Do you want freedom? Do you need security? How badly do you want it?

Stop Making Excuses

There is a good friend of mine who I see at work every single day and he’s the furthest thing from lazy. He has tremendous talent in the creative arts. He writes well and he has the technical know how to learn how to program in any computer language available.

Everyday when I see him, I tell him that he should start a online business on the side. The kicker here is that he’s way more talented that I am on so many levels that it’s a shame that he doesn’t start something on his own. But everyday, I hear the same old excuses.

I really want to start my own business, but when am I going to find the time? I have two kids! I just don’t have any free time at all.

To combat his excuses, I’ve repeatedly offered my help and even volunteered to setup a website for him from scratch to no avail.

The reality is that my friend is still searching for that special something to push him over the edge. He has the knowledge and know how to be successful but he’s still searching for that magic button.

No One Can Help You But You

I’ve seen it time and time again. Most people don’t follow through on their business ideas because they lack that killer instinct. Motivation can’t be learned through a book. It can’t be obtained by reading this blog or any written material for that matter. Books are only useful for teaching the mechanics. Deep down, the only person who can help you succeed is yourself.

So stop wasting your time and money on books, get rich schemes and other useless materials and concentrate on figuring out what makes you tick. Lock yourself in a room and decide what you really want out of your life. Do you really want to be doing what you are doing today? Is your current situation ideal? The sooner you figure things out on your own, the sooner you can change your life for the better. Start now and break out of the trance!

In the previous article on living the 2-hour workday I introduced the concept of travel buffers, cash created either through saving or selling assets that is designed to give you a buffer of capital you can comfortably spend if you need to while you travel.

Travel buffers are mostly for piece of mind so you can relax while you travel or use in case of emergencies, but ideally speaking it’s better if you don’t dip into your capital while you travel. In order to facilitate this, you need some form of consistent income streams that are greater than your total expenses, including costs to travel.

What Is Event Independent Income?

My largest source of income has come from significant events, either selling an asset or conducting a launch for a new product.

There’s an inherent weakness with this type of income – you have to do something, often significant work, to get the result, or once you do it’s difficult to repeat, for example once you sell an asset, it’s gone.

Conducting a launch is definitely NOT two hour a day work, it takes a lot more than that. Depending on how you travel it’s quite possible to integrate periods of time where you conduct a launch, for example I did a reopening campaign for Blog Mastermind while traveling in Toronto, resulting in well over six figures in income. However to complete the work required to conduct the launch, I had to settle in Toronto for a summer, renting a house and effectively living there as a local.

You can choose to travel, stop and work, then travel some more, if you depend on event income like launches, but if you really want true flexibility and never want more than a two hour a day work commitment, then you need to develop some event independent income streams. In other words, you need money that is either completely passive, or nearly-passive, consistent as a result of working only two hours a day or thereabouts.

The challenge with this sort of money is keeping it consistent. So many systems for making money online are fantastic as one-hit-wonders, and they work again and again in different niches, but the problem is the amount of ongoing work required to keep things going or to get started in the first place.

Sure you can outsource much of your work (I’ve got a couple of great podcast interviews about outsourcing coming up soon), which is a great strategy especially when you have a system that is already making money, but it takes time to do this and still you have the challenge of always staying one step ahead of the market or finding new markets to enter once one dries up, or the competition catches up.

In my case I’ve always had a solid independent income stream that’s served me well for almost ten years now.

So what is it? Read on to find out…

The Magazine Model

My very first source of online income was selling things on eBay, a short lived experiment that I had no desire to continue once I ran out of things I wanted to sell (you can read more about my early days making money online in my four part series starting here).

The next income stream I created has served me well for years, even before I was a blogger, but it works great on blogs too. I’m talking about website sponsorship.

I’ve always been a fan of magazines. Back when I was a kid I spent a heck of a lot of time reading magazines about video games, during the Sega vs. Nintendo days (for you 80s children like me, I’m talking about the Master System, NES, Megadrive and Super Nintendo). I actually enjoyed reading about and anticipating games and new consoles more than I did playing them.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my love of magazines very likely translated into a love of web publishing, as owning a website is a lot like owning a magazine. This idea can carry all the way through to today, as owning a blog is a lot like owning your own little fanzine about a subject.

My first successful website, about the card game Magic: The Gathering, was my first successful case study of running a magazine, although it was a bit more interactive than paper, one of the wonderful features of the world wide web. I wrote the content myself and eventually brought on volunteer writers and integrated user-generated content tools like forums and chatrooms.

In the Blog Profits Blueprint I introduce the concept of the magazine model for making money online and dissect it further inside the Blog Mastermind coaching course. As I explain, most bloggers begin using the magazine model as it is the simplest to get started with.

The magazine model simply means you make money from advertising. Your job is to create an entity that has enough attention that you can translate that attention into an income source. This is exactly what I did with my first successful site, and later did with my blogs and other websites I have owned.

In a way, the Internet is just one massive magazine shop, or like a free newspaper funded by advertising income. Understand this and you will understand one of the oldest business models in the world – the publishing model – and it applies just the same, at least in principle, to the online world. It’s the same model, just with new tools and formats, with the same goals – getting the attention of, and influencing people.

Staying Power

I’m not going to break the magazine model down too much in this article as I’ve talked a lot before about the elements in previous articles on this blog. If you really want a detailed description, check out my archives (in particular read my series beginning here – Is Professional Blogging A Sustainable Business Model?), study the Blog Profits Blueprint again and if you’re really keen, join my coaching program Blog Mastermind.

Simply put, selling banners and text links and other forms of sponsorship media on a website or blog is a great independent and consistent income stream, providing you are willing to do the work to keep publishing new content so people read your “magazine”.

My Magic: The Gathering website taught me this. During the five or so years that the site was in my charge and big enough to make money, I had banner sponsors, some of whom sent me cash month after month for YEARS.

It was because of this experience that I later developed a near-passive income stream on my blog, although it took a bit of tweaking to come up with something completely hands off for me.

So how good is this income stream?

Well I can say that I’ve been writing to this blog for almost five years, and for almost four years of that time I’ve made at least $1,000 a month, every single month, thanks to sponsors.

For the last three years it’s been somewhere between $2,000 and $3,000 a month, and that’s only from banners and text links, no sponsored reviews, no affiliate marketing, just advertisers paying a monthly fee for exposure to my audience.

Consistency is impossible to judge without time passing, so I’m confident now when I say that unless some major shifts occur online, either to my business or the industry it operates in, the Internet or society itself, this money will continue to come for as long as I keep blogging. It’s stable, independent and consistent, and has been for years.

What Is A True 2-Hour Workday?

When people challenge me that there is no way I can work just two hours a day, I agree, I don’t work those few hours if I counted up the time I spend on projects that have the potential to make me money.

Although defining what “work” is invariably becomes important if you want to get semantic about a true 2-hour workday, what I can say to you is that I have made enough money to live off quite comfortably just by writing my blog.

You could take away my products, the income from assets I’ve sold and even the affiliate revenue and leave just me, my blog and my sponsors, and I’d certainly only need to spend two hours per day to keep it running, and generate what most people in western culture earn in a year.

You could live like a king if you chose to do this outside of the wealthiest countries with the strongest currencies, for example if you lived in Asia, or Eastern Europe or South America.

In Australia where I live, if I earn $3,000 US dollars a month, I’m not rich, but that’s enough to get by. The challenge of course is what would you do with the rest of your time if you only need to work two hours a day, and I expect like me, you might choose to use at least some of that time for more business projects and increase your earnings, or you might just keep doing what works and increase the return you get from it.

There’s no reason why you can’t double your traffic to get a similar increase in advertising revenue, if you keep giving people what they want in terms of content (your magazine becomes more popular).

Stress Free Living

Imagine this: You’ve saved up a nice travel buffer, perhaps $20 or $30K, enough to live on for a year. You’ve got an income stream that’s consistent and keeps coming month after month as long as you spend a little time each day doing something you love (in fact, the money is a by-product of doing what you love, you don’t actually have to do anything to “create” the money, it’s passive as long as you keep creating value for other people).

You’ve got ample time, you enjoy the work you do although you don’t have to do it for long, and you have countless opportunities in front of you.

Sounds good doesn’t it? Yeah, I know it is because I’ve been living it (and then sum) for the last few years.

Making money from sponsors is not the only way to develop an independent income stream, but in today’s content-drive Internet, it’s one of the best ways, especially if you’re passionate about something.

If you really understand what I’m saying here, advertising income isn’t really the “answer”, it’s just one of the options available to you, if you choose a model that results in you becoming noteworthy in your industry.

As Ed Dale recently told his 30 Day Challenge students, you don’t need to be the best expert at something, you just need to have passion. Leveraging passion to establish authority, and build your tribe (ala Seth Godin), is the key.

This method is so much easier than any other way of making money because it rewards you for being passionate. It doesn’t focus only on the money, or the system or trends that are changing. It’s about you and how that something about you can translate into value for people who share your passion or have a need that your passion can meet.

The reason why you can make money from an income source like advertising, be confident in your future because you know it will be consistent, and work very little to keep it coming in, is because you’ve established status that can’t be easily taken away. That status results in consistent traffic, and thus revenue, because you’re willing to do a small handful of things (create content) to maintain it.

Sponsors may come and go, but if you are a leader, there’s always another company who wants to be associated with you and willing to spend money to do so. What’s important is what you’ve built and what you continue to accumulate day after day, even though it only takes a little time to do so.

This is yet another reason why, as I traveled for 8 months of 2008, I was financially secure. I have an income source that covers all of my expenses as long as I write a handful of articles to my blog each month, which I love doing of course. This income stream means that most of the other money I make becomes capital as my expenses are covered. It’s all gravy from there.

How Can You Create Independent Income Streams?

If you want to develop some kind of independent income stream, owning a website – which a blog is a great option – and then selling advertising from it, can work really well. Hopefully since you read my blog, you’re already taking steps to achieve this outcome.

If you don’t make much money from advertising right now on your websites or blogs, don’t worry too much, everyone who has ever made money from advertising grows through this period. When I first wrote this blog I didn’t make a penny from advertising for a good six months, and even after that it took a long time to get things going.

The challenge with advertising is that it’s relational to traffic. If your blog has low traffic, it’s harder to get sponsors and you can’t charge much. Once momentum kicks in you can charge more and it becomes easier to get more sponsors, in fact you may not have to do anything at all, they will come to you. Just as you do with your target audience/customer when you develop an avatar, consider your target sponsor and their motivations (a “sponsor avatar” if you will), and you will understand what it takes for your blog to be worth spending money on in their eyes.

Your job, is to focus on value creation and marketing. You must blow people away with what you give them, asking for nothing in return and then, and this is work, put in above average effort to get out there and use the marketing tools available to show people what you offer. Doing this every day, provided you are operating in a market with enough people, will work, I guarantee it.

If you’re looking for more specific advice regarding selling advertising on your website, including how much traffic you need before you start making money, have a read of one of my earlier pieces (May 2005 – this blog really is getting old!): How to make money from your website selling advertising and once again, if you are really serious about making money from a blog, taking my Blog Mastermind coaching program is definitely the fast track option.

So now you have two components that can help you lead a 2-hour workday and travel the world if you so choose. Travel buffers give you piece of mind and independent income streams keeping you going. It’s not easy, but this lifestyle is available to ANYONE who wants to go after it. The first step is to commit making it a reality by taking action every day.

Good luck!

Yaro Starak
Blessed To Work

---

Get your bonus copy of my book
“How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1,000 Online”
Download Here

What Does Labor Day Mean Today?

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

The Labor Day holiday in the U.S. was created as a way to celebrate and highlight the struggles of the American worker for organized rights.

The way we work, the workforce, and what work even means has changed so much over the years that it almost calls for an entirely new definition.

I’ve been asked to judge what I think is a pretty clever Labor Day related contest from the folks at Elance. First off, the grand prize winner gets healthcare coverage for 2010

The event is being called Labor Day 2.0: Online Workers and Elance Celebrate “New Way to Work” and it’s an opportunity for self-employed professionals and their clients to showcase working online. Recent research estimated that there are 37 million American workers who are independent contractors, part-time or temporary staffers, or self-employed and pioneering a new way to work — completely online.

The “New Way to Work” contest begins on Labor Day, September 7, 2009 and ends with the winner announced on December 11, 2009. The contest will give the broader world of online workers and their clients an opportunity to earn their moment in the spotlight.

To take part in the contest, participants need to:
1. Showcase their “new way to work” through any medium they choose, be it photography, a blog article, a Web page, YouTube video, tweet, cartoon, art installation, song, haiku, or any other means to demonstrate their point.
2. Publish and promote their example to capture the attention and imagination of a broader online community.
3. Notify contest judges of their effort via Twitter (use #new-way-to-work) or by posting a link on Elance’s Facebook fan page.

Get more info on the contest on the Elance blog

Throughout the contest, Elance will highlight the most creative, compelling, innovative and inspiring entrants on the Elance blog. After narrowing the contestants to a set of finalists, the Grand Prize winner will be selected by Elance and a panel of judges including Tim Ferriss, bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, technology investor, and productivity expert; Tory Johnson, career expert, founder and CEO of Women For Hire and New York Times bestselling author whose latest book is Fired to Hired; and John Jantsch, author of Free to Choose: How to select any 80 hours a week you want to work (soon to be not so best seller).

For every post here on AM Beat, it takes me about thirty minutes to an hour to draft an idea, conduct initial research, and then actually write the post. The actual writing of the post can take about 20-40 minutes.

However, today an amazing thing happened. I was able to crank out five regular AM Beat posts in an hour and a half. These posts would normally take two and a half hours to write. How did I do this? I currently have no Internet access.

I realize that when I have access to the web I tend to get distracted, needing to check my e-mail, stats, news feeds, social networking and social media accounts, etc. This wastes precious time and a post that should only take half an hour to write ends up taking an hour and a half. However, by losing my internet access all together, I am able to use my time so much more efficiently.

Now I could have just closed my web browsers, but the temptation and tendency to reopen them still exists. By going to an area where I have no web connection, I don’t give myself the option to log-on.

So here is what I recommend. When you have a number of offline tasks that require a computer to complete (like typing up these AMBeat posts), get all the information and research you need from the web before hand, make a checklist of what you need to get done, and then unplug your connection and get to work.