Mike Filsaime CANNOT Make You Money!

First off, let me just say that it was a rather slow week as far as learning and development goes. My full time job has taken over my life, and I am looking forward to August, when I will finally be done with it! The whole experience has revealed to me how badly I need to achieve my $200 a day goal before graduation. I *hate* being in the same place for seven hours at a time, working for somebody else.

With that said, I did have an interesting conversation with my friend's father today. We got to talking about what we plan to do if/when the economy collapses. I personally will be planning on my websites to keep me afloat. Since the web is international and I already have a few customers from Australia (their economy is supposed to be entering a boom right about now), I should be good. Granted, I only have one money maker so far and it's only an average of $15 a day, but I have plans... :-)
His plan was to head off to Alaska and live off the land for a while, until things get better.

We started wondering about how our fellow Americans would fare. Our guess? Not too well. See, one of the scariest developments I've seen in the last decade or so is the growth and entrenchment of the "social security mindset." This is like the bastard child of the "job mindset" and the "lottery mindset." It denies individual responsibility and places the expectation for one's income on the shoulders of someone else.

The social security mindset sounds a bit like this:
"I have an inalienable right to all the resources I need to live comfortably. Therefore if the economy goes bad, it is the government's duty to ensure that I get some sort of paycheck."

This thinking is deadly to success. Yet I think it's this very mindset, or at least a similar one, that drives some people to purchase e-book after e-book in hopes of finding "the golden ticket." How many advertisements have you seen so far claiming that so-and-so will do all the work for you, and that all you have to do is sit back and reap the rewards?

There is one person responsible for your success or failure: you. I don't care where you are or what you've been through. Whether you succeed or fail is wholly contingent on your own actions.

Do you want to know the secret to success?

Make a goal.
Plan a way to achieve that goal.
Remove every obstacle between you and your goal, one at a time, until you have reached the goal.

Mike Filsaime cannot make you rich. Reed Floren cannot make you rich. Jonathan Budd, Eben Pagan, Yanik Silver... none of these people can make you rich. Only YOU can make you rich.

My friend, this is one reason why so many fail. If you sit around waiting for a boat to take you away to Never Never Land, you'll be waiting forever! You have to swim yourself.

When I began trying to make money online, I did not know PHP. I did not know SQL. I did know HTML. I also knew that some of these MySpace adding 'sites were making money hand over fist. I knew that if I wanted to make one, I needed to learn PHP and SQL. I bought "PHP and MySQL for Dummies" and I read (most of) it. I bought some web space and a domain. I made the website, FriendBlastr. I promoted it hardcore, and after not having much success I figured out that my obstacle at that point was inefficiency. So I started promoting my website to people who had influence over more people than I did. That's when I finally began making money. I saw where I wanted to go. I put my head down and did what I knew it took to get there.

I did NOT buy ebooks on the subject.
I did NOT get knocked off course when people started telling me I'd never make any money because the market was already too flooded. (I knew I could provide quality my competitors couldn't.)
I did NOT get distracted by the first "Get rich online" scheme to come my way.

I removed obstacles, one at a time, and I reached my goal.

My obstacle right now?

Not enough sources of income, not enough time to maintain more.

Solution?

Begin more and outsource the marketing so I can afford to keep up on the maintenance. First with my experimental layouts 'site (it'll bring more traffic than cold cash, but traffic is GREAT currency on the web... just ask MySpace and Facebook), then my topsites, then... my other ideas. :-)

This is my method. This is what works for me.
I hope it works for you too.

Good luck with your ventures.

Visualising my dreams

Somehow, today i felt really good about myself. Went for lunch at the Central Business District of Singapore. As i stood in the distance and looked at the gargantuan skyscrapers that fill the horizon, my heart beat faster and a thought flashed in my mind. “Someday I’ll be among the giants of business. Someday I’ll be a tycoon. Someday will be very soon.”

I’m already on the path there. I have my plans laid out already. So i’m really excited.

Top Ten Young Billionaires On The World

Top Ten Young Billionaires On The World
There are 946 billionaires in the world, with an average age of 62. There are 33 billionaires under the age of 40 on the list. Of the 33 young men on the list, 16 have inherited their vast wealth, while 17 are self made billionaires. Only four on the young billionaires are bachelors, making them very eligible.

Of the 33 young billionaires, only one is a female. Chu Lam Yiu, the only female on the list is 37. She founded and chairs Huabao International Holdings, a flavorings and fragrance business.

The combined net worth of the 33 young billionaires is $118 billion,. This gives them as average net worth of $3.6 billion..

1. German Prince Albert van Thum and Taxis is the youngest on the list, at the age of 23. His inherited fortune is estimated at over $2 billion. The prince is single.The German Prince first appeared on Forbes List at the age of eight, when his father died, making him the youngest billionaire ever on the list. He appeared on the list again at the age of 18, when he inherited his father's fortune officially. The eligible bachelor lives in the family castle with his sisters and his mother. He often is away racing cars in the Italian auto-racing league.

2. Sergey Brin is 33. His self made fortune as co-founder of Google is estimated at over $16.6 billion. Sergey Brin is a United States citizen living in Palo Alto The California. The Google co-founder is single.

3. Larry Page is 34. His $16.6 billion fortune is self made as co-founder of Google. Page is a United States citizen living in San Francisco, California.. Larry Page is single.

4. Anurag Dikshit: The 35 year old has a self made $1.6 billion fortune is from online gambling. He wrote gambling software allowing gamblers from around the world bet against one another in poker. He is a citizen of India and is married with one child.

5. Andrei Meinichendo is 35. His self made fortune of $4.6 billions comes from banking and energy. He is a Russian citizen living in Moscow and is married.

6. William Ding is a 36 year old who has a self made fortune of $1.1 billion made on the Internet. As the chief executive of Net Ease which has a business in on line gaming. Ding is a citizen of China.

7. Chaniga Vorasarun, has an inherited fortune of $2.3 billion from construction and investments. He is a citizen of Saudi Arabia and is married with 2 children.

8. Jerry Yang is a 38 year old with a $2.2 billion fortune. His self made fortune was made on Yahoo. Yang is a citizen of the United States living in Los Altos, California. He is married with two children.

9. Constantino Oliveria. 38 years old has a fortune that is inherited and growing, from GOL Airlines. Hi fortune is estimated at $1.1 billion and lives in San Paulo, Brazil.

10. Pierre Omidyar is 39 and has a self made fortune of $8.8 billions from eBay. The United States citizens lived in Henderson, Nevada and is married with th 3 children.

Garden State

Yesterday I helped a friend and her family move to another house, so I'm a little tired and feeling rather laid-back. Fortunately, this is perfect for this message, for what I learned over the week.

Last night I watched a movie called Garden State. It was an interesting movie, written by, directed by, and starring Zach Braff. (Depending on how current your tastes are, you might recognize him as the actor who plays JD in Scrubs.)

It's about a guy who has (unnecessarily) been on one form of lithium or another for the past ten years or so of his life. The movie starts when he makes a trip back home (first time in nine years) and leaves all his medication behind. Without getting too much into the plot, the point of the film is that you can either waste your life trying to make everything perfect before your begin it (which will never happen), or you can just take what you're given, do the best you can with it, and let the chips fall where they may.

So many times I see talented people who could really do something with their lives sitting around doing nothing, resting their laurels on one kind of excuse or another. Ultimately it always comes down to one thing: they're afraid of failing. In the bitterest of ironies, they value their lives so much that they waste their lives in preparation, afraid that they'll ruin their lives if they (as Van Halen puts it) go ahead and jump.

I'm sure you've heard this a thousand times before, but it's true: no matter what you think, you'll never know what might have been if you don't even try. You can't win unless you run the race. Even if you lose, take some comfort in the words of Mick Jagger: "You can't always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes you'll find you get what you *need.*" (Emphasis mine.)

Of course, if that were the *whole* point of Garden State, then it would be little more than a quirky feel-good film. What really made it a classic (it is a classic, right?) was the subtext that ran alongside the primary point, counterbalancing the motivational material with a bit of staid wisdom.

There's a character in Garden State, Dave, who invents quiet velcro and cashes out. He lives in a gigantic house with a HUGE fireplace. He drives around his house in a little dune buggy, it's that big. As Dave puts it, "I've never been so bored in my entire life."

See, Dave had a dream. Dave pursued that dream. Dave achieved that dream. He'd be considered successful by most people. He jumped. The problem is that it turned out that he didn't really want what he'd thought he'd wanted. Really what he wanted (and what I think most people want) was fun, variety, and friendship. Instead he's stuck with a big house, sitting around doing nothing while all his friends are out working. Ironically, his friends end up having more fun than him. They live fuller lives. Why? Because they are satisfied with what they have.

My friend, if you aren't satisfied with your life right now, as it is, you will never be satisfied with it when you finally find material success. Real success is more about who you become than what you gain. The thing about wealth is that it does nothing to solve whatever issues you're carrying around. You can never run from yourself, you know?

So yes, pursue your dreams, but in pursuing those dreams do not lose sight of who you are and who you want to be. Be wary of dreams that have to do with living large. A lot of the time an excess of material possessions will rob you of the very reasons you wanted those things in the first place. Yes, you get a bigger house, but what good is it if you're always working to pay it off?

As far as my business goes, my MySpace account was deleted last week. I am now promoting FriendBlastr from eleven separate accounts to avoid being cut off like that again. Also, my laptop is dead. I am typing this on my friend's laptop. Consequently, it is likely that I will find out this week just how autonomous FriendBlastr truly is.

Good luck with your ventures.

Billionaire focused on big picture

For someone who only got into film-making in earnest a few years ago, the scale of Anil Ambani's latest initiative - a joint venture with Steven Spielberg - would normally come as a shock.

However, for seasoned observers, the move was typical Ambani: the billionaire industrialist, like his equally wealthy but estranged elder brother Mukesh, never does anything unless he sees the potential to become the -biggest.

"He's not there just to put in $5m or something," said Bhushan Gajaria, analyst at SSKI Research in Mumbai. "This is very much the kind of thing that Reliance does."

Anil Ambani has become a frenetic dealmaker since he and Mukesh split their family's industrial group, Reliance Industries, between them in 2005. He has expanded his part of Reliance, which he renamed Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, into a sprawling industrial, infrastructure, media and telecom empire, amassing a fortune estimated by Forbes at $42bn.

His mobile operator, Reliance Communications, India's second-largest, has made global headlines with a planned tie-up with South Africa's MTN. The deal would create an emerging markets giant but faces opposition from Mukesh.

In some ways, the mooted joint venture with Mr Spielberg's DreamWorks is even bolder, potentially taking Mr Ambani in one swoop to the top of a new industry for Reliance.

The challenge, however, as with many of his daring plans that have yet to come to fruition, will be in the execution.

The 3 Main reasons why 97% FAIL online?

The 3 Main reasons why 97% FAIL online?
1) Wrong Program...
2) Don't know what to do...
3) Procrastination...


So, in order to be successful online, you have to:
1) Choose the right program
2) Study it and dive into it
3) try it out as soon as possible

Pull the Lever!

I'm going to keep this short for once.

Leverage. This is the one thing that separates the successful people making pretty good money from the successful people making lots of money. It's the strategy that's hardest to learn for most people. After all, most people are used to working a job for a living. A few are comfortable using their own skills to hack out a living. Even less are comfortable hiring other people for a living.

Yet this whole money making thing is a numbers game. If you have a way to make $2 for every hour you put in, you could do one of two things: you could sit there and do it yourself and make $14 for 7 hours of work *or* you could hire somebody else to do the bulk of the work for $1 an hour. Most people will just do it themselves or not at all. However, if you decide to hire somebody, then not only are you earning $1 an hour ($2 minus the worker's wages), you also have 7 hours with which to do other things that might earn you even more money. And if it turns out that you can hire somebody to do that job... well, find enough of those things and you're looking at some serious cash.

Another more common way of using leverage is in conjunction with the launch of a product or business. If you are confident that your idea will result in nice, fat profit margins once word about it gets out, it is possible to find investors willing to fund your venture at its onset. You can use this cash to spread the word quickly and jump right into those profit margins. This is, of course, much riskier than the first way, but if your idea is good it could result some very fast wealth.

At all times, remember this: business is a numbers game. The trick is to find as many ways as you can to bring in more money than you pay and to do so in a way that it does not require more time from you than you can spare.

Remember, you can make money anywhere there's a demand for something, online or offline. As long as you can keep your cost lower than your profit, you'll do well. Just remember to make sure your profit margins will eventually be big enough to hire someone else to do the work at some point in the future. (One reason I like online ventures: doesn't cost a whole lot to hire someone to take over for you IF you've set things up right.)

Like I said, it's a number's game. On a side note, I've had some numbers rolling around in my head for the past couple of days. Not sure if they're going to lead anywhere yet though. I'll let you know if they do. :-)

Good luck with your ventures.