Living the American Dream…

- or – Can you make a good living in harmony with Nature?

An open letter to all my friends – present, past, and those yet to be::

Well, now I’ve gone and done it. And, as usual, ask you to reject everything I am about to tell you – at least until you’ve proven it for yourself.

You probably know how I’ve spent most of the half-century on this planet working out how this universe works, boiling it down and making it simple for anyone to understand. And next after that was to make Enlightenment (aka: satori, cosmic consciousness) also easy to achieve. Finally, I worked out what a person was to do with all those possibilities they have after that high state was theirs forever.

These are all written up and available as books. (The final one is available for free here, and courses on what I cover are here.)

Now, it’s all fine to have a high personal state and so on – but what good is it if your broke and can’t afford to buy good food to keep your health?

A person has to make a living meanwhile. And more money is always better.

But to be honest, while I’ve been figuring this “making a living” stuff out, it’s been quite convoluted. Mainly because unless you are dealing with someone who is particularly honest and straightforward, there’s always a bit of a slant or scam in it. So that has to be weeded out as well. (And of course, I was more interested in sorting some major issues like regaining native freedom, peace, and personal abundance to worry about this other much.)

Here’s the logic of what to look for in making a living:

• A living can (and probably should) be made without being part of the conventional “system”.
• It will probably involve the Internet, but for sure it will involve your own network of friends and associates.
• Everybody has to win at this. And that means every single person on this chain of contacts which stretched through any and every life you touch.

While I was checking down these lines, most all regular businesses fell out and didn’t make the cut. And as I do web design to pay my bills, I run across a lot of different business models. And this research was after I did the work of sorting out whether college degrees made a difference (they don’t) and where entry-level jobs would take you (not very far, even after a 20-30 year career with a single company.)

The point all my research repeatedly pointed to this: you have to ignore what passes for conventional “wisdom” and find what really works.

As I’ve told you before, the other half of the “Thrivelearning System” is based on individual work:

1. Knowing the basics of how to make money – and getting really clear on this.
2. Having a website which makes you money and train how to make money online.
3. Doing the research which allows you to find valuable products which you believe in but can dropship – or do affiliates sales for – and so carry no (or little) product in your own home.

All the best companies down this line have extensive training available at no cost. All of them. They really want you to succeed personally.

But the main points are those three above, regardless of the company

What I uncovered recently was a single program which fit all these. Now it doesn’t mean that these others I found (and still recommend) are obsolete. And all that above training you may have taken up to this point will amplify what I’m about to tell you.

One of the funny things is that the company behind this program, as well as the program itself,  is that it’s as old as I am. Both of us started the same year. And I’d heard about it all my life. When I did a web design for one of its distributors, I had to do my usual amount of homework to understand what he and his wife were trying to do with their lives. And they had very busy lives – he’s a 4-time national truck-pulling champion and had a full-time business building racing engines. She works full time for the government in their agriculture branch. But in this last year, they were able to make a full time income using the scraps and pieces of time they had laying around – essentially by just listening to people they meet and friends, then helping them as best they could.

That sounds just too easy, doesn’t it? But it was true – they made over $30K in a year, plus got enough to pay half of a new car. You can see them talking on that new website I just built this last week: Real-Life-Choices.com

The product and business is Shaklee.

Yes, that’s all hard to believe – and I don’t expect you to.  

Why I’m interested in this is that it’s probably the best business model you can have these days. It is basically recession-proof and you earn as much as you work, not just how long you work. It’s the retirement you want, not what your company or the government is willing (or able) to give you. (More absurd claims I expect you to reject. Please.) And the “work” isn’t really – it’s helping people. 

As usual, I ask you to not believe anything I say – to only check it out for yourself. Just another opportunity.

Also also as usual, I’m running way too long on this.

The YouTube video channel to check out on this is FC Shaklee.

And if you like it, you can check out their products here.

Your choice, as usual.

Thanks for being there.

PS. Here’s those links to the products I mentioned above:

Spiritual

1. Find your inner peace – Use Release Technique
2. Learn how to remain calm under stress – Use Silva Life System
3. Thrive financially with your Millionaire Mindset – Learn from T. Harv Eker
4. Simply Wake Up and Live! - Dorothea Brande’s classic.
5. Get a library of proven, workable materials - Spiritual Training Materials

Business

1. Do market research for products which can factually earn you online income - Chris Malta’s Worldwide Brands
2. Master social network marketing - Charles Heflin‒s Synnd
3. Get a site builder and web host with decades of experience -Ken Evoy’s Site Build It!
4. Find the simplicities to protecting yourself legally -€” Dr. Frederick Graves’ Jurisdictionary
5. Get and stay scam free from here on out - Get Scam Free (book and online course)

(I’ve been reviewing some material lately about online business from An Online Sunshine Plan, and thought to make some excerpts available so you can improve your life as you are leading it. These are also on scribeshare.net, and are linked or embedded below. Thanks for visiting.)

Simple schedules to make your online marketing more effective

photo credit:  comedy_nose

Getting your schedules, daily and weekly, is one of the keys to success in online marketing.

Some lessons come slowly – at least to me. Schedules are a necessary part to achieving goals. But sticking to them sometimes gets in the way of intuitive, right-brained, imaginative flights-of-fancy.

At least that’s how I see it.

For some twenty-plus years, I was part of a corporate cult-ure which ate up over 60 hours of my time every week. There were policies, strategies, evaluations, analysis, production conferences, financial planning meetings, very few perks, and lots of penalties. So finally I quit and “retired” to the family farm to sort things out (which is going along quite well, I can say after 7 years here).

But I really developed a resistance to all this structure. I’m an artist at heart, but an engineer lives in there, too – so I’m all about figuring things out and letting out some of that inspired brilliance whenever I can.

So, like Europe after Rome collapsed (who saw frequent bathing as to “Romanesque”), I gave up all the structure of “weekly analysis based on the progress on strategic plan execution” in order to be more than a bit Bohemian. However, I did manage to keep to three time slots daily/weekly (one for farm, one for work, one for my artistic and Internet urges) out of necessity. Farm was to provide my room and board. Work keeps my bills paid. The third one is for “everything else”.

Now this worked fine for awhile. I went back to college (for the first time) and was able to complete a few degrees. I wrote some books and started marketing them – having to learn all sorts of stuff about online marketing, which work still continues.

But when I really got torqued about my day job, I got motivated to do something about it. Like Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich”, I now had a BURNING DESIRE (his emphasis). I hated my day job and would do most anything to replace it. A good sales pitch and a chunk of change on a credit card gave me an additional reason to succeed.

When I finally started taking their lessons to heart, I gave a post yesterday about the lesson’s learned.

You have to start with your vision-to-accomplish and work this down into weekly and daily To-Do lists, when you then do. Each day, you need to review your vision statement (2 or 3 times or more is best and then your plan. From these, you then check over your recent To-Do’s and see what it is you should now be doing next to move your existing scene toward your envisioned scene.

At the beginning of each week, you write a list of steps to do that will get parts of your current planning done. Then work from that weekly To-Do list to make your daily To-Do list. Simple.

Current planning? Yes, you are going to update your planning as you learn more and get more networking accomplished. Hill said to revise your planning as many times as you need to in order to get the best approach to your vision.

You are going to have to have a daily schedule for your work – the stuff that’s going to make you financially independent. And it’s going to have to include:

1. Open your binder or folder where you keep all your traffic for that particular business. (Get one if you don’t have one. This is a basic organizing tactic.)

2. Check and review your vision statement – and envisioning it with all the emotions connected to it, getting the idea that it’s already here.

3. Check your plan to see if it’s accurately going to achieve that vision statement – and tweaking/revising as needed.

4. Check your Weekly To-Do list for what is done and what you can do today.

5. Write your Daily To-Do list off that – and what you didn’t finish yesterday.

6. Check your emails so they don’t back up, which includes eliminating spam and opting out of non-productive mailing lists.

7. Review your RSS feed aggregator – and streamlining this to only those sites which give you truly useful data on a regular basis. (Sure, you can get your news this way, but take care you don’t get sucked into Yahoo’s daily 100 posts… “useful data” is the key.) You find and subscribe to useful blogs/sites so you get new data quickly, faster than you could log onto that many sites – and less distractive.

8. Allot some time here to leave appropriate comments on any site/post that allows you to leave your site url. (And consider unsubscribing from those who won’t.)

9. Now, take some time to check your metrics and see how your sales are doing, how your website is converting your customers. Might be something you do one day out of the week. But if you can convert it to an hour or so daily, it will help you keep on top of things.

10. Note down poorly performing web pages you have. Or pages you can’t metricize. (Google Analytics has a free program for you which fits on most public pages.) Figure out if you have to tweak these or note for later overhaul.

11. Your next piece of time will be in developing new products to sell and/or launching a marketing campaign for these. If you do a single new product every week, then spend the rest of that week (or the next week) marketing it, you’ll have between 20 and 50 new products creating revenue every year.

12. Just before end of your slotted production time, check off the To-Do items you accomplished and note which are still in-progress. Put your list in your binder or folder to keep it secure, then close it for the day.

There you have it – a simple way to organize your life and business to stay on top of everything you have to do and to get it all done.

You have to be prepared to run your business as a business. Doesn’t mean you can’t love what you do – you really should, after all, because why are you doing what you really don’t like to do?

Get your binder so you can organize your business into a highly efficient scene. And watch your profits grow and grow as your real work becomes more and more enjoyable.

Good Hunting!!

A Guide to the Thrivelearning System - Links and Resources

Spiritual

1. Find your inner peace – Use Release Technique

2. Learn how to remain calm under stress – Use Silva Life System

3. Thrive financially with your Millionaire Mindset – Learn from T. Harv Eker

4. Simply Wake Up and Live! - Dorothea Brande’s classic.

5. Get a library of proven, workable materials - Spiritual Training Materials

Business

1. Do market research for products which can factually earn you online income - Chris Malta’s Worldwide Brands

2. Master social network marketing - Charles Heflin’s Synnd

3. Get a site builder and web host with decades of experience -Ken Evoy’s Site Build It!

4. Find the simplicities to protecting yourself legally – Dr. Frederick Graves’ Jurisdictionary

5. Get and stay scam free from here on out - Get Scam Free (book and online course)

Additional Thrive Learning Sites:

Thrive Alliance
Best Education Guide
Business Startup Resources in Wisconsin
Thrive Cafe – Seattle
Organizational and Personal Effectiveness
Thrive Learning Management System

(I’ve been reviewing some material lately about online business from An Online Sunshine Plan, and thought to make some excerpts available so you can improve your life as you are leading it. These are also on scribeshare.net, and are linked or embedded below. Thanks for visiting.)

Setting your strategic Internet marketing scheduling

- may be the key to your sanity and profits…

Now I’ve recently completed a third course this summer in marketing and web building. To say the least, my head was full to bursting – until I sat down and scratched it all out on a yellow pad.

The simple priorities are these:

1. You have to make profitable sales to stay in business.

2. You have to market to get leads and convert these to buyers.

3. You have to research and review your progress against plans you made.

Now, these three programs agreed on these three, but differed in how to get them done – and in the sequence you should work on them.

There were simply a few points they also agreed on as to how to do this – but they didn’t agree on an order:

• Build your web presence with a web host and a domain name.

• Use a WordPress blog to add content.

• Add monetized links that are relevant and contribute to the content.

• Promote actively – often three times more than you would spend on anything else.

Since these courses were all built on search engine discovery, they all had basic SEO tactics in that training. Two of the three were hinged on social media marketing (which is a bit of an oxymoron, since social media shun marketers…)

But our point is how to organize this. I’ve read the stories where a person spent months on building up an ecommerce site only to make nothing on it (and thank Gawd for his day job…) My first training was devoted utterly to learning how to use their proprietary web-building software.

And the other extreme was a course where they spend hours telling you how to do social marketing – 15/16′s of the course, in fact – and then gave the final hour was on how to monetize. Meaning that the bulk of their students would simply opt for more training – since what they taught in that sequence would keep the person broke.

However, the breakthrough was in the third one. Here, they said to do your research and find your market first – but that you were also finding how to monetize it as part of that research. Then you built your blog and started promoting.

Let me break with all three – they are all right and also wrong.

• You don’t build anything overnight.

• You do continuously build and refine what you already had going.

• Promotion is a big part of marketing, but you also have to monetize constantly to convert viewers to buyers.

• And you have to have a plan, plus review the metrics of that plan to make any success.

Part of this was learning and breaking down a Jack Humphrey 60-day plan. Which was great – but it really was a finite recipe and couldn’t be used without a great deal of other data. (Which is why they only gave it to you behind a hefty paid subscription.)

When gridded out, that plan really boiled down to a repeating set of actions, plus adding one or two new promotional outlets each week. 8 weeks of basic content addition, plus tons of promotion.

But it was even simpler than that.

Weekly schedule:

1. Research and Review: Review your previous week, all metrics, and create your to-do list.

2. Monetize: Find new income sources (affiliates or new products) that you can add – and sign up for them or create them for your sales funnel.

3. Promote: Content – add more linkbait (truly memorable blog posts) to your site.

4. Promote: Comment – find where people are linking to your site and comment on theirs. Or Stumbleupon, Digg, or Twitter about them, if no direct comment possible.

5. Promote: Converse – join in the conversation on various forums which have to do with your niche.

So: Research/Review – Monetize – Promote – Promote – Promote.

This also follows a longer cycle of what you are going to be doing. In the beginning, you need to spend a sizable amount of time defining your niche and the long-tail keywords you want to optimize for (and write content about). Part of this will be finding if that niche is actually one where people spend money – and you’ll be finding affiliates or products that can be sold within that niche. Once you have these two established, you can spend the rest of the time promoting and getting yourself – and your products – known.

Those are the bare bones – and you can see that this has lots more below it to make it work.

But I hope you can use this to streamline what you’re doing and so become more profitable…

PS. Note that this is only five days worth of work. Take the weekend off with your family – or go read a book – or go hiking — or do some more of whatever you still need to get done with your jobs… Your choice.

A Guide to the Thrivelearning System - Links and Resources

Spiritual

1. Find your inner peace – Use Release Technique

2. Learn how to remain calm under stress – Use Silva Life System

3. Thrive financially with your Millionaire Mindset – Learn from T. Harv Eker

4. Simply Wake Up and Live! - Dorothea Brande’s classic.

5. Get a library of proven, workable materials - Spiritual Training Materials

Business

1. Do market research for products which can factually earn you online income - Chris Malta’s Worldwide Brands

2. Master social network marketing - Charles Heflin’s Synnd

3. Get a site builder and web host with decades of experience -Ken Evoy’s Site Build It!

4. Find the simplicities to protecting yourself legally – Dr. Frederick Graves’ Jurisdictionary

5. Get and stay scam free from here on out - Get Scam Free (book and online course)

Additional Thrive Learning Sites:

Thrive Alliance
Best Education Guide
Business Startup Resources in Wisconsin
Thrive Cafe – Seattle
Organizational and Personal Effectiveness
Thrive Learning Management System