Monthly Archive

By that I mean the end of the year…We’re about to start the fourth quarter and it’s time to assess your field position… (can you tell it’s a Fall Sunday?)…

Here’s the thing, I own a side business buying and selling real estate…haven’t done any deals lately because I am waiting on a decision from a bank on a short sale I have been working on (for over 10 MONTHS!!!! I’ll save that story for another post) , but nevertheless, I am still a business owner. Now here’s the thing, I have an accountant, and like most business owners, guess when I sit down and have “The Tax Talk” with her…yeah, sometime in late February, early March - just when she’s got just loads of time to spend chatting with me…not.

So, this year I am going to try something different. I am going to set up a meeting with her for an hour, just for a checkup - Go over year end tax strategies, let her know what I have done this year, go over my books to make sure there are no surprises. More importantly, run my plans for the next year by her and make sure I am heading in the right direction. I also intend to go over my plans to start my virtual company, to make sure I have my ducks in a row.

I guess you get so busy with life that you forget simple things that may save you a ton of hassles in the future. This is my application of the 80/20 rule.

On another note I am still reading Made to Stick.. Did I mention how good it was? I am starting to apply what I have read in my communications both in my personal life and my “day job”.

I also added a blog roll link to this site - The 4 Hour Work Week Forum. It looks new and promising; I am joining it and intend to participate.

Over in 43 Folders, they have a great article on personal outsourcing. I have included the link here. I have also added the site to my blog roll, it is another blog I check in on frequently.

I apologize for not updating as often as I should. I will make an effort to post a little more frequently than once a week.

On another note I just picked up the book Made to Stick; it is really good!

It basically presents ways to communicate more effectively; basically you do this by making your ideas “sticky” by employing the elements using the SUCCESs acronym:

1. Simplicity
2. Unexpectedness
3. Concreteness
4. Credibility
5. Emotions
6. Stories

They illustrate each concept with concrete examples. For instance, they introduce the book by retelling the urban legend about the businessman who accepts a drugged drink from an attractive woman in a hotel and ends up having a kidney stolen (the full legend is here). Actually, you can take most urban legends you have heard, and, pretty much by definition, they fit the criteria.

I am looking at this book from an internet marketing angle. How do I make my message “sticky”. As I progress I will show how I employ what I have learned from the book in my material.

Why do we wait for milestones in our lives to reflect on where we have been, and where we are going? Why do we wait until New Years Eve to reflect on our lives, or our 50th birthday? Why isn’t it an every day occurrence?

Last night I attended the 50th birthday of a good friend of mine. His wife threw him a party with close friends and family. It got me to thinking that in a little over two years from now, I too will be celebrating my 50th. My wife asked me if I wanted a party and I told her that I intended to spend my 50th in another country, preferably on a beach (my birthday is in February).

Lately, each day I ask myself, is what I am doing moving me closer to my goal, or further away. I am of the school that basically there is no such thing as failure. Every action you make produces an outcome - desirable, or undesirable. When the outcome is undesirable, you make a correction and try again. In the Thirty Day Challenge, I did not make a sale at my first attempt. I am looking at what I did wrong, and changing my approach. I am also still on the lookout for other streams of passive income.

If you looked at my life earlier on, you would see that, like a lot of people, I have been basically on autopilot. I get up, go to work, come home, help my kids with homework, go to bed…rinse…repeat…

True Story:

One day, about a month or so ago, I left my house in the morning, and as I locked my front door I noticed on the wall to the left of my door an unusual looking bug. After looking at it for a bit, I got to my car and headed out. Later that evening, I came home (burnt out from work, as usual). I got to my front door, and to my surprise, the bug was still there, pretty much in the same spot. At this point, I thought to myself, “stupid bug, you’ve got like hours left in your lifetime on this planet, and you spend it on the wall by my front door”. I gave it a gentle flick with my finger and it flew away. Then I thought to myself….”What’s your excuse?”

Incidentally, I told my other mentor this story, and she said to me “now you know what it’s like to be a mentor…we give you a gentle push to take action.”

So…What’s your excuse?

What a lousy week this was.

Even though it was a shortened week, it seemed to go on forever. The fact that I have been fighting a cold, and I have been temporarily assigned to another team at work, for a month to help them out, didn’t help much. All this and I haven’t even touched on my life outside of work.

To put it mildly, I have been totally overwhelmed. Life seems to be getting in my way…

I still have been plugging away at the 30 Day Challenge’s last week of lessons. Since my first attempt failed, I am going to restart by choosing three new niches and taking it from there, instead of putting my proverbial eggs in one basket. Now that I have completed the challenge, I have a better idea of what to look for. I am also going to join a couple of other affiliate programs. I want to at least make a sale this month.

Before I read 4HWW, I was pretty frustrated with my job (I mentioned this in an earlier post). I had for a while looked at ways to venture out on my own. So I turned to real estate investing. In another entry I’ll talk about that aspect of my life, but what I wanted to mention here is that I have two really good mentors that I look to for guidance. One of them, who also happens to be my source of financing, has drilled something into me that I will never forget…he basically told me that I am not an investor, but more of an orchestrator. As much as want to rehab houses myself, my real job is lead a team of sub contractors to do the work for me. I basically coordinate them to get the job done.

This is Timothy’s approach. Don’t do the grunt work yourself, hire the people who are experts and let them do it for you, (yeah…despite the fact that I want to learn Ruby on Rails or Ajax to make a really cool website myself).

It’s much more cost effective. Your job is to go out, generate business and come up with the big ideas. To this end, I have been toying with the idea of having “Your Man In India” work on content for an ebook for whatever niche that looks good.

Still, I need to test the niche before I commission the book. So that’s my course of action. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I was kind of disheartening to see that my blog never showed up on Google; in fact, ironically, if you did a search on “carseatratings.tumblr.com” at one point, you got a link to this blog! So I am going back to the drawing board. The 30 Day Challenge - challenge portion is officially over, even though they are continuing with weekly education and tips. I still recommend anyone interested in affiliate marketing to go to that site and go through the training and the forums (I believe they are still allowing people to join). People pay a lot of money for the information provided in the free challenge.

The purpose of the training is to test your ideas to see if there is a market. If there isn’t, move on. Don’t fall in love with your niche if it’s not profitable. I have saved all the training, and I will spend a couple of days going back over it and give it another try.

I am also on the lookout for quality resources for people who want to go independent. I can’t think of a better time for people who truly want to go out on their own to do so. There are a ton of resources and communities that provide information, tools, and, more importantly, support. To start things off I am adding a link to one of my favorite resources - Freelance Switch to the blogroll. They provide information for Freelancers of all types.

The blogroll link is to their 101 Essential Freelance Resources (be sure to read the comments as well, the readers provide some of their favorite resources).

So, it’s back to the proverbial drawing board regarding the the 30 Day Challenge. I have several other niches to try out.