Today’s technology is constantly evolving and improving. What seemed impossible fifteen years ago, is now completely known world-wide and a basic part of life. It ius amazing what we can do today. Think of the markets that have collapsed. The music industry, becuase now you can be your own record comany. Book publuishers are on the way out, because if you want to write and publish yourself today, you can. You can do anything, and it is only getting better. The tools have only begun to start the change in markets and business.
You have the tools to run a business today that the CEO’s of the world’s largest companies didn’t have ten years ago. These tools allow a solopreneur to do alone what before took and an entire large company full of people. You have an iPhone in your hand that has more computing power than the computers used to land a man on the moon. You have access to knowledge and tools that the greatest minds of history not only didn’t have, but didn’t dream of having. You need to use these tools. Know them. Own them, and once you can, you can grow and make your business do anything. That is what the starting of these business experiments and what this site is all about. There is a huge potential in on line business, and it truly has just started. My starting a simple business on line taught me the basics so that I began to learn what questions to ask and what to do next. Just doing anything makes things happen and the best way to learn is to decide to do a project and then find a way to make it happen, learn those specific skills you need to make it happen. Start it today. While you are at it, the secret to success is to network, and then network some more, and try to meet as many people as you can. With each connection comes more opportunity. I plan on running different Business experiments, basing them off what I havwe read or learned, and letting you find out what I find out. If you want to make your business better, you need to make yourself better. Your business is only as good as you. Let's go. D PS: Join our mailing list. Give me some ideas on how to improve, and let us show you what we have learned to make you and your business better. How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It by Mark Cuban
Love him or hate him, Mark Cuban is a very smart guy, who has made a career out of being outspoken and doing things his way. I read his blog, which is great, and this book is a collection of some of the best. I have highlighted the parts that gave what I thought was the best advice. D "I had to kick myself in the ass and recommit to getting up early, staying up late and consuming everything I possibly could to get an edge. I had to commit to making the effort to be as productive as I possibly could. It meant making sure that every hour of the day that I could contact a customer was selling time, and when customers were sleeping, I was doing things that prepared me to make more sales and to make my company better. And finally, I had to make sure I wasn’t lying to myself about how hard I was working. It would have been easy to judge effort by how many hours a day passed while I was at work. That’s the worst way to measure effort. Effort is measured by setting goals and getting results. What did I need to do to close this account? What did I need to do to win this segment of business? What did I need to do to understand this technology or that business better than anyone? What did I need to do to find an edge? Where does that edge come from, and how was I going to get there? The one requirement for success in our business lives is effort. Either you make the commitment to get results or you don’t. The thing you do need to do is learn. Learn accounting. Learn finance. Learn statistics. Learn as much as you can about business. Read biographies about businesspeople. You don’t have to focus on one thing, but you have to create a base of knowledge so you are ready when it’s time. School isn’t the end of the learning process, it’s purely a training ground and beginning. In my humble opinion, once you have learned how to learn, then you can try as many different things as you can, recognizing that you don’t have to find your destiny at any given age—you just have to be prepared to run with it when you do.R Of course, there is always a caveat to destiny, and that’s obligation. The greatest obstacle to destiny is debt, both personal and financial. Never settle. There is no reason to rush. If you aren’t happy with where you are, simplify your life and go out and try as many things as it takes to find what you may be destined to be. If there is such a thing. In basketball you have to shoot 50 percent. If you make an extra 10 shots per hundred, you are an All-Star. In baseball you have to get a hit 30 percent of the time. If you get an extra 10 hits per hundred at bats, you are on the cover of every magazine, lead off every SportsCenter and make the Hall of Fame. In business, the odds are a little different. You don’t have to break the Mendoza Line (hitting .200). In fact, it doesn’t matter how many times you strike out. In business, to be a success, you only have to be right once. One single time and you are set for life. That’s the beauty of the business world. The point of all this is that it doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them and from those around you because … All that matters in business is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are. You said, and I’m paraphrasing: “Everyone has got the will to win; it’s only those with the will to prepare that do win.” In a lifetime of running businesses I have developed a lot of rules that have been almost infallible. Here are a few of them that I use religiously to this day: 1. Everyone is a genius in a bull market 2. Win the battles you are in before you take on new battles It’s a huge lesson for entrepreneurs. Win the battles you are in first, then worry about expansion internationally or into new businesses. 3. You can drown in opportunity Few businesses only have one opportunity. Every entrepreneur’s mind goes crazy with the new and exciting things she can do beyond the new and exciting things she is already doing. The risk is that you can drown in all these opportunities. So let’s start at the beginning. In this post I am only going to provide you with the very first and most important of all the rules for anyone starting a business. Rule #1: Sweat equity is the best startup capital The best businesses in recent entrepreneurial history are those that began with little or no money. There weren’t 100-page-long business plans. In all of my businesses, I started by putting together spreadsheets of my expenses, which allowed me to calculate how much revenue I needed to break even and keep the lights on in my office and my apartment. I wrote overviews of what I was selling, why I thought the business made sense, an overview of my competition, why my product and/or service would be important to my customers and why they should buy or use it. All of it went down on a piece of yellow paper or in a word processing file, and none of it cost me more than the diet soda I was drinking while I was writing it up. I remember the foundation for each of my businesses. Once I could put the idea on paper, I gave the company a name. From there, I took the most important step: I tried to find people to shoot holes in the name. Each inquiry cost me next to nothing to get great feedback. Each enabled me to check the foundation of my business idea to see if it was easy to shoot holes in, and most importantly, they all served as sales calls. Each company eventually became a customer of ours. There are only two reasonable sources of capital for startup entrepreneurs: your own pocket and your customers’ pockets. Success is about making your life a special version of unique that fits who you are—not what other people want you to be. How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It It was Aaron Spelling, I believe, who said, “TV is the path of least resistance from complete boredom.” Which is another way of saying that it’s easier to watch TV than to sit there and do nothing. Which describes exactly how people make most of their choices in life. They take the easy way. They take the path of least resistance. There are certain things in life we all have to do. There are certain things in life we choose to do. Then there is everything else. The things we do to kill time. In every case, all things being equal, we choose the path of least resistance. Understanding this concept is key to making good business decisions. Moral of the story: Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you. The cheaper you can live, the greater your options. Remember that. 5. Start the day motivated with a positive attitude You are going to screw up. We all do. I can’t tell you how many times I did and continue to. It happens too often. But no matter what happens, every morning, the minute after you wipe away the crust from your eyes, remind yourself that you are going to enjoy every minute of the day. You are going to enjoy the twenty interviews you have. You are going to enjoy waiting in the heat for your roommate to pick you up afterward. You are going to enjoy realizing how frayed your collar has become and how sick you are of your one, lonesome tie. You are going to enjoy all the bullshit you have to deal with as you chase your goals and dreams, because you want to remember them all. Each and every experience will serve as motivation and provide great memories when you finally make it all happen. It’s your choice. Entrepreneurs always need to be reminded that it’s not the job of their customers to know what they don’t. In other words, your customers have a tough enough time doing their jobs. They don’t spend time trying to reinvent their industries or how their jobs are performed. Instead, part of every entrepreneur’s job is to invent the future. I also call it “kicking your own ass.” Someone is out there looking to put you out of business. Someone is out there who thinks they have a better idea than you have. A better solution than you have. A better or more efficient product than you have. If there is someone out there who can “kick your ass” by doing it better, it’s part of your job as the owner of the company to stay ahead of them and “kick your own ass” before someone else does. 1. Time is more valuable than money You have to learn how to use time wisely and be productive. How wisely you use your time will have far more impact on your life and success than any amount of money. 3. No balls, no babies This is something a blackjack dealer once told me when I asked him if I should hit or stick. It is also my favorite line and probably the thing I tell myself the most. Once you are prepared and you think you have every angle of preparation covered, you have to go for it. No balls, no babies 9. It’s not whether the glass is half empty or half full, it’s who is pouring the water This is one of my favorites. The key in business and success at any endeavor is doing your best to control your destiny. You can’t always do it, but you have to take every opportunity you can to be as prepared as—and ahead of—the competition as you possibly can be. Take the lead, and you can control your own destiny." How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It Today’s technology is constantly evolving and improving. What seemed impossible fifteen years ago, is now completely known world-wide and a basic part of life.
You have the tools to run a business today that the CEO’s of the world’s largest companies didn’t have ten years ago. You have an iPhone in your hand that has more computing power than the computers used to land a man on the moon. You have access to knowledge and tools that the greatest minds of history not only didn’t have, but didn’t dream of having. You need to use these tools. Know them. Own them, and once you can, you can grow and make your business do anything. That is what the starting of these business experiments is all about. There is a huge potential in on line business, it truly has just started, and starting a simple business on line taught me the basics so that I began to learn what questions to ask and what to do next. The best way to learn is to decide to do a project and then find a way to make it happen, learn those specific skills you need to make it happen. Join the mailing list, give us siome ideas, and let us show you what we have learned to make you and your business better. I plan on running different Business experiments, basing them off what I havwe read or learned, and letting you find out what I find out. In between the notes and the reading, let's also learn by doing. If you want to make your business better, you need to make yourself better. Let's go. D Find your niche, know it - being everything to everyone will make you in the end, lonely and poor. The more you drill down to a market, and get very specific, usually go three levels down. The better you know that market the better your business will do. Know your market, who they are, what they look for, and most importantly, what they need and want to buy. The market isnít about you, it doesnít care what your passions are, so it is critical that you understand this. You need to get your customer what they want, and what you want is secondary.
On the plus side, what the internet has shown us all, is that no matter what we like, what odd quirky thing we find interesting, we now know there are similar people with similar interests out there online. The more we understand that, the better the business. D Hustle matters. Grit matters.
I know, you love ideas, and you are great at them. You have several millionndollar ideas. You are a machine. Listen. Ideas are cheap pieces of head lint. Ideas do not make anyone rich. Ideas are merely daydreams when you do nothing to make them happen. They are nothing more tan wishes without action. You will have a million ideas, and the ideas that you will have will pop in your head constantly, and most of those ideas you won't notice or you will ignore. Some of your ideas will be so good that you will get excited, and you won't tell anyone that way no one will steal your idea. Do yourself a favor and tell someone. Get some new thoughts on your idea, some fresh eyes. More importantly, take action on your idea. get others to believe in your idea, and get hem to take action. Ideas are constant and cheap. Ideas are not the key to success. The only thing that matters is what you take action on and the results you get. What you do matters, not what you think. Take action. Do something. Anything. I do not listen to what people say, I watch what they do. What they say only tells you who they want to be or who they think they are, but what they do tells you who they are. As you start to take action on your thoughts and ideas, and things start to happen, what you will find is thst other opportunities will come up, and other possibilities will come your way. Action creates success. Ideas equal wishes and work just as well. On life, only grit and hustle matter. D The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late (Portfolio) Part 2 In turn, if the product or service is designed to solve a specific unsolved problem or meet a specific unmet need, and if the message is targeted well, so that you happen to be someone with that unsolved problem or unmet need, you will be happy to hear about the product or service. Good marketing, Seth Godin writes in Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, “start[s] with a problem you can solve for a customer (who realizes he has a problem!).”4 Good marketing, in other words, is not something you do after you create the product; the fact that most marketing is done this way is why we hate the word “marketing” so much. In his wonderful book No B.S. Direct Marketing: The Ultimate, No Holds Barred, Kick Butt, Take No Prisoners Direct Marketing for Non-Direct Marketing Businesses, which is in my view the single best introduction to direct-response available, Kennedy lists “Big Company’s Agenda for Advertising and Marketing,” which includes: 1. Please/appease its board of directors (most of whom know zip about advertising and marketing but have lots of opinions) 2. Please/appease its stockholders 3. Look good, look appropriate to Wall Street 4. Look good, appropriate to the media 5. Build brand identity 6. Win awards for advertising 7. Sell something He then lists “Your Agenda” for advertising and marketing, which includes, in its entirety: 1. Sell something. Now. There are several important reasons you should learn marketing, even if you work for a large corporation and aren’t planning a career in marketing. 1. Marketing is a mentality. It’s a worldview that puts customers’ emotional reality first, and inquires deeply about their needs, wants, and desires. 2. There’s no better way to rise up the ranks of your organization than bringing in new business, or coming up with ideas that bring in new business. 3. If you’ve noticed, your job may not seem so secure these days as it used to. Now is a good time to start thinking about what skills you’re bringing to the table if you find yourself looking for work in the future. “Understand that no matter what you’re doing, even if you want to be a ballplayer, a rapper, a movie star--nothing happens until something gets sold. Ever. The reason actors make so much money is because their face sells the fucking movie tickets. It’s not about their ability to act. The reason the musician gets rich is because he sells a lot of seats and records. Or his song gets used in a movie—it’s a license, a sale. The key to making money, and therefore living a life of less stress, is to cause someone to joyfully give you money in exchange for something that they perceive to be of greater value than the money they gave you. The key there is ‘joyfully.’ Most sales and marketing you study, you learn how to trick people into parting with their money, or badger them into doing it, or make them so miserable that they think you’re their only salvation. None of those situations involve the word ‘joyfully.’ I listened to some of Eben’s recordings and started reading some of Kennedy’s books, The crucial turning point for me was listening to a recording that was part of Eben’s “Guru Mastermind” home study marketing course. The recording was called “How to Write a Killer Sales Letter” and featured Eben’s main copywriter, Craig Clemens, who has generated over $50 million in sales through his copy. The key revelation from that recording, for me, was that when you’re communicating with a marketing message, you need to get inside the heads of your prospects, figure out what matters most to them in their lives, and talk to them about that, not about what you want to sell them. They don’t care about what you want to sell them. “If you aren’t talking to your prospect about their strongest and deepest wants, needs, and desires, you are doing them a disservice,” Craig said on the recording. Good marketing, in turn, speaks to the prospect about their deepest emotional realities, their innermost desires, and about helping them achieve what they want in those realms. Thus, the best marketing is all about human connection, on a genuine level. If you can truly help your prospect achieve their deepest wants and desires in the area your product or service addresses (and if you can’t, you shouldn’t be marketing it in the first place), then you are actually doing your prospects a great service by communicating with them about their problems or issues, because few people ever meet us on that level, even in our personal lives. The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late (Portfolio) A QUICK-AND-EASY GUIDE TO TEACHING YOURSELF MARKETING IN TWO MONTHS Step 1. Create an e-mail address that is not your main e-mail address and does not go to your main inbox. I’m going to be asking you to sign up for a lot of different free e-mail newsletters, and they will flood your e-mail account, so make sure it’s not your main account or inbox! Step 2. Go to the following websites. Not only should you read everything you can get your hands on in the archives of these sites, but you should also sign up for the free e-mail newsletter available on each site, with the e-mail address you created in Step 1. You should sign up for these newsletters because all of the people I’m going to recommend are master copywriters. You can get an entire education in marketing and copywriting just by comparing and contrasting the different styles of these marketers. Once you begin diving into some of the resources I mention above, you’ll see that there is no “one” way to market, no “one” tone you need to adopt. There are so many different tones and styles here, from Dan Kennedy’s over-the-top hard sell, to the wickedly funny copy of Marie Forleo and exercise guru Matt Furey, to Jonathan Fields’s super-sweet soft sell, and everything in between. If you are offended by a particular style, or it’s just not for you, then find a marketer you vibe with more and learn from him or her instead. (All of these newsletters include links at the bottom, which allow you to remove yourself from them if you no longer wish to receive them.) Once you’ve exposed yourself to lots of different styles (to see the range of what’s out there), you’ll probably find one or two teachers or sites whose values and sensibilities match your own. Start focusing your energy on learning from them—while never fully losing awareness of what others are doing out there as well, for diverse ideas and perspectives. (If you know how to do such things in your e-mail program, set up filters or rules so that each marketer’s e-mails go to a different mailbox or folder—it’s just easier to manage that way.) Note: Many of the people I recommend here, including Eben, Marie Forleo, and Jonathan Fields, are personal friends. In no case am I receiving any commission, payment, or other benefit for recommending you to anyone here. Be aware, most of the people on these lists will eventually send you to landing pages, where they sell their products and services. Learn as much as you can from these landing pages, as they’re often masterful examples of marketing. But obviously, do your own due diligence before deciding to buy anything. By the way, all of the people I mention below graduated from college, unless I mention otherwise. But hey, we won’t hold that against them. The biggest lesson I had to learn was how to fail faster. That was the biggest one because every day, I’d take three sales calls, take three rejections......... The more I increased my failure rate, the more success I had at Xerox.” Success is its own skill. There’s the skill of the craft. Then there’s the skill of success. It’s an independent education. My experience is, it takes about the same amount of effort to learn the skill of success as it does to learn the skill of the craft itself. So, it might take years to really learn what you need to learn to become a great engineer, or an attorney, or a musician, or a manager. In my experience, the skill of success breaks down into three things. The skill of marketing. The skill of sales. And the skill of leadership. First, marketing. Throw away everything you think marketing is because most of the marketing you’ve been exposed to, which makes you sick to your stomach, is crappy marketing that doesn’t work anyway. Fortunately, you don’t have to learn that. You just have to learn effective marketing, and effective marketing is really simple. It’s the ability to get people who don’t know about you to know about you. That’s it. If you can get people who don’t know about you, or your service or your company, to become aware of you, then you’re successful in marketing. The second skill of success is sales. For some people sales is worse than marketing, and for others marketing is worse than sales. Either way, we have this belief in our culture that these two things are icky. That sense of ickiness is one of the things that perpetuates the lie that if you just get better at your craft, you’ll be fine—you can just do what you do, without focusing on marketing or selling what you do, because marketing and sales are icky and low-integrity. It’s just not true. You have to be good at these things in order to be successful. If you think sales is sleazy, manipulative, or disgusting, it’s because what you’ve been exposed to is bad salesmanship. Any time we’re exposed to people who are totally incompetent at their job, it feels like crap. If you’re being “sold at,” and they’re not connecting with you at all, and they have no idea what you want or need, and they’re just “blah blah blahing” on about their product or service, they actually don’t know the first thing about sales, and their incompetence is what feels like crap to you. When sales is done well, it’s a really simple discovery conversation. The conversation basically follows the following contours: “Hey, what do you really want? What matters to you? Well, this is my ability to provide that. Does that seem like a match to you?” It’s just that simple. The third skill of success is leadership. Leadership boils down to the ability to change the hearts and minds of people. Not controlling people; it’s a myth that the leader has control. Your leadership consists precisely in your ability to define a future you don’t have control over. The leader doesn’t have control over what the employees do; she has to influence the employees to do what she thinks is best. The more you understand that you have no control at all, and you’re dealing with a bunch of people with free will who are going to do what they want anyway, the more you realize that the skill of leadership really boils down to the skill of influence. If you’re taking on a role of leading others, people don’t do what you say just because you say it; they only do what you say if they’re inspired. Which means, you have to study “What influences people? What works then? It’s simple. While we normally think of salespeople as fast-talking slicksters, it turns out that the more the prospect talks—about their problems, their fears, their frustrations related to the needs your product or service addresses—the more likely they will want to do business with you. Which means, effective sales isn’t about spewing off a slick pitch. It’s about asking a lot of questions. The right questions. And then listening. What are the right questions? Any question that gets the prospect deeply connected with their frustrations, fears, and desires around the problem that your product or service addresses. If you try to sell a solution before you’ve mutually agreed on the problem you’re trying to solve—which is what most salespeople do—people mostly aren’t interested.” What I learned from Victor, and from reading SPIN Selling, is this: if you’re talking with someone about their innermost needs and desires, the last thing you want to do is throw a bunch of manipulative pressure on them. After Victor’s demonstration, both Jena and I bought SPIN Selling and read and absorbed every word. This single book obliterates the need for any more sleazy, pushy, aggressive, annoying sales tactics on the planet. And sales becomes—breathe a sigh of relief—an honest conversation between two authentic human beings. Victor says: “The most useful class I took in college was public speaking. I use it a surprising amount. The second most useful class I took in college was how to be a listener—I took a peer counselor class for suicide prevention, which was all about how to listen without judgments. Thus, the most useful classes I took in college were not part of the main academic experience. “Read about it, study it, and frankly, just do it. A lot of it is trial and error. All experience comes from mistakes. Either making them yourself, or learning from someone else who has. It all counts. But unfortunately, experience is not something you get in college. Mastery comes from doing. Either do it yourself, or learn it from someone who did.” Look for the Book Spin Selling. If you have the will and the drive to better yourself, you usually can, no matter how much (or little) formal education you have. Learn how to sell by creating trusting relationships, and everything else falls into place. The tools are readily available to you. All you need is the will. The duo focused on two things: creating a great product and selling it well. “You don’t want to be in the order business. You want to be in the reorder business. Big difference. My goal was not to sell something to somebody. My goal was to sell something that was so good, they want to reorder it again. " (Michael’s note to readers: Quentin’s Friends, http://www.quentinsfriends.com, is one of the best personal and professional networking resources I know of. I’ve been an avid member since 2003. I am not personally involved with Business Network International, http://www.bni.com, but it also has an excellent reputation, with chapters worldwide. These are two examples of the many low-cost ways now available to increase your business network. High-quality business networking is no longer only for graduates of expensive alma maters.) “Being consumers wasn’t our focus, it was being creators.” The goal is to always spend your time creating, not consuming. Bootstrapping is a concept central to the themes in this book....... it’s a strategy that involves getting to the point of profitability as quickly as possible—even if the profits are small—and then continually reinvesting profits to fuel growth. Make small, incremental investments in your human capital and earning power. The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late (Portfolio) The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late (Portfolio) by Michael Ellsberg
An interesting book, and it is interesting more for what it points you to than what it says. The author seems very smart and very well connected, and it is to these connections that the book bring the most value, my list of books to read next has just grown much larger. This is a book on self education, and how to make the most of what and who you know. Make sure you buy a copy. Notes He had by that time spent a decade of his life in passionate pursuit of learning things that would make him successful—sales, marketing, leadership, management, finance, and accounting—within the context of owning real-world businesses, with his own money at stake. Have you ever stopped to ponder how utterly bizarre this state of affairs is? How in the world did we all get so convinced that academic rigor constituted a prerequisite, necessary, and sufficient training for success in life? Sir Ken Robinson, author of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, has pondered this puzzling question a lot. Libertarian critic of our current educational system Charles Murray makes the point another way: “We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring a liberal education at the college level in the same way that we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becoming a master chef: something that understandably attracts only a limited number of people.” Developing your practical intelligence will have far more impact on the quality and success of your life. According to Gladwell, the main difference is that, in addition to his rocket-high IQ, Oppenheimer also possessed exceptional practical intelligence in navigating his way through the people who could influence his success in the world, “things like knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.” Langan in turn possessed little of this kind of intelligence, and thus was never able to gain much of a toehold in the world of practical achievement. In his book, Gladwell shows that once a person has demonstrated passable logical, analytic, and academic skills, other factors have much more influence on real-world results—specifically, creativity, innovative thinking, and practical and social intelligence. To the extent that we develop these aptitudes in our lives, we tend to do so out in the real world, not in formal institutions. I was earning money because I had become good at marketing and selling my copywriting services. There are boatloads of good freelancers who are broke, simply because they don’t know how to market and sell their services. Lifelong learning and professional development are necessities in the current career environment; this book is your guide to self-education for success in the twenty-first century. Yet, the lives of the people profiled in this book show conclusively that education is most certainly not the same thing as academic excellence. The driving theme of the stories in this book is that, even though you may learn many wonderful things in college, your success and happiness in life will have little to do with what you study there or the letters after your name once you graduate. It has to do with your drive, your initiative, your persistence, your ability to make a contribution to other people’s lives, your ability to come up with good ideas and pitch them to others effectively, your charisma, your ability to navigate gracefully through social and business networks (what some researchers call “practical intelligence”), and a total, unwavering belief in your own eventual triumph, throughout all the ups and downs, no matter what the naysayers tell you. The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late (Portfolio) First, job security is dead, as anyone who has had a job recently knows. You’re going to have many different jobs, employers, and even careers in your life. So where you get your first, entry-level one—the single thing that a BA credential really helps with—becomes less and less relevant. Building a portfolio of real-world results and impacts you’ve created, over time, becomes more and more relevant. Second, the Internet, cell phones, and virtually free longdistance calling have created new opportunities for flexible, self-created, independent careers; this trend has been helped along by the gathering storms of millions of hungry, highly educated young men and women in India, China, Eastern Europe, the Philippines, and elsewhere, happy to do the work that entry-level Organization Men would have done in years past, for a fraction of the cost. This emerging competition has encouraged many people in the West to “think outside the organization” to create careers for themselves that can’t be outsourced, offshored, or automated. More and more Americans of all ages are waking up to the reality that you don’t need a nine-to-five job to be a valuable, contributing member of society and to create wealth for yourself and others. Millions of small-business owners, entrepreneurs, computer programmers, graphic designers, independent consultants, writers, and freelancers make valuable contributions to society (creating four out of ten new jobs in the economy), outside the realm of working for a boss nine to five (or eight to eight). Daniel Pink calls it “Digital Marxism: In an age of inexpensive computers, wireless handheld devices, and ubiquitous low-cost connections to a global communications network, workers can now own the means of production.” Education is still necessary to learn how to do the great work that gets you paid. But these days, almost all of the education that ends up actually earning you money ends up being self-education in practical intelligence and skills, acquired outside of the bounds of traditional educational institutions. Here they are, the courses in The Education of Millionaires. SUCCESS SKILL #1: How to Make Your Work Meaningful and Your Meaning Work (or, How to Make a Difference in the World Without Going Broke) SUCCESS SKILL #2: How to Find Great Mentors and Teachers, Connect with Powerful and Influential People, and Build a World-Class Network SUCCESS SKILL #3: What Every Successful Person Needs to Know About Marketing, and How to Teach Yourself SUCCESS SKILL #4: What Every Successful Person Needs to Know About Sales, and How to Teach Yourself SUCCESS SKILL #5: How to Invest for Success (The Art of Bootstrapping) SUCCESS SKILL #6: Build the Brand of You (or, To Hell with Resumes!) SUCCESS SKILL #7: The Entrepreneurial Mind-set versus the Employee Mind-set: Become the Author of Your Own Life At the very least, we want to make a difference in our communities. This is what feels meaningful to us: making a difference, having an impact, living for a purpose. Yet, there’s a paradoxical aspect to “making a difference” and “having an impact.” The world doesn’t always care whether we want to make a difference or have an impact on it. In fact, it can be downright hostile to us when we try. The world doesn’t automatically open its arms to us just because we have good intentions. The bigger the impact you want to make on the world or in your chosen field—the bolder your purpose is—the greater the risks you’re going to have to take. Which means, the greater the chance that you’ll end up making no impact at all. I said, “Mom, Dad, look at all the basketball stars and football stars who go right from high school to the NBA, or the actors and musicians who don’t bother with college because their careers are already in motion. There have to be business stars, too, who don’t need to go to a four-year program to learn their field. If I go through four years of college, I’ll just be on a level playing field after four years—whereas now I have an advantage. Spending four years in school means I’ll be four years out of the business world. Everything changes like lightning in the Internet world, and they’ll have caught up to me.” These types of family dramas and arguments, in my opinion, boil down to arguments about our sense of safety versus heroism in life. Safety and heroism are almost always opposed. People tend to feel safer and more comfortable with the known over the unknown. An “impact” is a change in course, so if you want to make an impact in your field, you’re asking people to venture into the unknown. The more of a change of course your innovation or leadership represents, the more you are asking people to abandon safety and comfort, which is not usually something they’re willing to do without overcoming a great deal of resistance. There may be entrenched interests who are quite happy with the way things are now and who aren’t interested at all in your “impact,” thank you very much. In fact, they may say you can take your impact and shove it! Try to rock the boat too much, make too much of a change, and these people may try to oust you from the organization, community, or marketplace, or even try to harm your reputation or career prospects. Anyone who has dealt with office politics knows this. Any artist or entrepreneur who has tried to do anything innovative knows this. If you want to become wealthy or famous, which I presume you do if you’re buying and reading a book on success, then you’re going to need to make a difference in the lives of many people. (By definition, it’s impossible to become famous, and it’s also very difficult to become wealthy, if you impact the lives of only a few people.) Making an impact on large groups of people involves leading them in some way. Yet, seeking to be a leader is akin to seeking what economists call a “positional good.” Those who do end up leading often achieve leadership, amass wealth, fame, or support, or make an impact on the world, largely through the effects of word of mouth. Followers/customers/fans convert other people to followers/customers/fans, who convert more people to followers/customers/fans, until a big group—which business author Seth Godin calls a “tribe”—has amassed around that given leader, company, or artist. This is how most artists, musicians, actors, writers, and entrepreneurs who become famous and wealthy do so—through the viral-effects word of mouth. When word of mouth takes off, its effects are extremely rapid and dramatic (the “tipping point” that Malcolm Gladwell writes about). Yet, word of mouth is one of the least predictable things on the planet. No one really knows what the next word-of-mouth sensation will be. At any point in your career, you’ll usually be choosing between one path that is safer and one path that has the potential to feel more meaningful to you, between one path that is more certain and one that offers more of a chance for a sense of purpose and heroism. It’s hard to be a hero if there’s no risk involved. But, as Randy Komisar points out in his book The Monk and the Riddle, there are also a lot of unacknowledged risks to not following your passions, of sticking too close to the beaten path in the name of safety and predictability. These include: “[T]he risk of working with people you don’t respect; the risk of working for a company whose values are inconsistent with your own; the risk of compromising what’s important; the risk of doing something that fails to express—or even contradicts—who you are. And then there is the most dangerous risk of all—the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.” He told me that, a lot of the time, people put off taking any steps toward living a more fulfilling life, with the idea of “keeping their options open.” Yet, according to Randy, the idea of “keeping your options open” is an illusion. Randy pointed out to me that the words “decision” and “decide” stem from the roots “cise” and “cide,” to cut off and to kill, also the roots of many other words related to cutting and killing, such as “incise,” “concise” (cutting out nonessentials), and “homicide.” Thus, a decision is to cut off, or kill, other possibilities. “People feel like, unless they’re affirmatively making a decision, they’re not making a decision. They think, ‘How can you fail if you’re not making any decision, not cutting off any possibilities?’ The reality is, you’re making a decision all the time. You’re making a decision not to follow a path that might lead you to fulfillment. The real question is ‘What risks are you taking by those decisions you’re not making?’ You need to capture what you do, identify it, and codify it, so it can be taught to many, many people. First teach it to a team, and then beyond. The Art of Earning a Living is the art of finding creative ways of bringing the spheres of money and meaning together and making them overlap significantly. You’re going to have to create a solution unique to you and your circumstances. STEP 1: Get on Your Feet Financially The best way to get financially stable, once you have some kind of job—any job—is to exhibit the entrepreneurial leadership values on the job The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late (Portfolio) STEP 2: Create More Room for Experimentation This step (and all the rest) applies to groups A, B, and C mentioned above. (Presumably those in group A are already financially stable and thus have already completed Step 1.) The next step in Aligning Your Money and Your Meaning, once you’re financially on your feet, is to create more room for experimentation. Experimentation takes time. It takes money. And it takes room to fall and to fail. It’s just so different—and better—figuring out how to make a difference in the world and find meaning in your life when your bills are covered and you have a secure roof over your head. If you’re working seventy-hour weeks at a corporate job, however, there will be very little space left over for anything else but that. In this case, you should begin taking some risks at work. See if you can get buy-in from your boss to focus more on results you achieve, rather than focusing on hours logged. There are some great books on how to make this transition, including Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: No Schedules, No Meetings, No Joke, the Simple Change That Can Make Your Job Terrific by Cali Ressler and Jodi Thompson; Chapter 12 of Tim Ferriss’s The Four-Hour Workweek, titled “Disappearing Act: How to Escape the Office”; and also The Custom-Fit Workplace: Choose When, Where, and How to Work and Boost Your Bottom Line by Joan Blades and Nanette Fondas. STEP 3: With This New Space in Your Workday, Begin Experimenting! Seth Godin recommends this path for many people. He told me: “For fifty thousand years, humans did what they were passionate about, and then they did something else to eat. I don’t think there’s anything written down to say that those days are gone forever. We don’t have a poetry shortage. There’s plenty of poetry. No one gets paid to write poetry. If you want to write poetry, write poetry.” STEP 4: Striking Out on Your Own (for Those Who Want to Change Careers, Become Entrepreneurs. Whatever it may be, if you want to make a living from it and leave your current job, you’re going to have to do a deep dive into the success skills in this book, particularly marketing, sales, and networking. You’re going to have to wrap your own passions, talents, and purpose—the things you care most about and are best at—in the package of these fundamental success skills. Seth told me: “People have this idea that either you’re a cog in the machine, just working for the man, or you’re out singing onstage, making your living that way. It seems like there’s a lot in between—there are a lot of people who may not have what it takes to become the next famous musician, but who are finding ways to make money with what they care about. “Think about this restaurant right now. It’s not really like any restaurant in New York City that I’ve ever been in. Where did it come from? It’s not here because someone made chairs or china, which are available to everyone. It’s here because someone’s putting on a show. And they’re charging many times what they would get if they were selling it from a street cart. “I’m saying that’s ‘art.’ Someone didn’t just copy it. Someone had to take various components and put them together, to create something that was worth experiencing, and sharing, and talking about. On the back of that, you can build a business that makes tons of money selling food. “The art here, the experience of seeing it, that’s free. Anyone can walk in this place, look around, get it, and leave. The souvenir part—the experience part, the owning-the-table-for-two-hours part—that’s what they make money from. “McDonald’s fooled us into believing that the purpose of industry was to churn out standardized quantity at low cost. This place reminds us that, no, there’s an alternative to racing to the bottom. And that is, racing to the top.” I was developing a valuable set of skills. Not editing/writing skills, which were already fine. I’m talking about the success skills in this book, particularly sales, marketing, and networking. In his book The Monk and the Riddle, Randy Komisar advises you to ask a simple question about your current mode of income: Would you be willing to do this for the rest of your life? If the answer is no—if the thought of doing your current gig for the rest of your life makes you totally depressed—then you owe it to yourself (having only one life to live) to figure out what kind of pursuit you would be willing to live till the end. WITHOUT FAILURE, THERE IS NO LEARNING Indeed, if there’s one single trait that sets all the self-educated millionaires I interviewed for this book apart from other people, it’s their relationship to risk. And yet, I don’t believe the people I feature in this book simply took a bigger bet than everyone else and happened to get lucky and win. Rather, I’ve seen that they have systematically and intentionally developed a style of working that allows them to take lots of small bets—bet after bet after bet after bet—all the while making sure that they don’t get wiped out of the game if one or many of them go south. In other words, I believe that for most of the people featured in this book a trait even more important than luck was resilience. I believe this is a distorted view of entrepreneurialism. Most of the self-educated people featured in this book took pains to make sure that their “downside was not so exposed,” to use the parlance of investing: they made sure that a failed business would not mean total ruin; it would just mean a few scrapes, a few good lessons learned, and up they are again at a new one. No biggie. They are calm, relaxed, and cool about failure, not hysterical and terrified, because they view failure as necessary for learning. Here’s where the resilience comes in. For Mike, his failure wasn’t condemnation to perpetual ruin. He started out with the assumption that life has risk. Rather than see failure as something to be avoided at all costs (as most of us see it), he instead designed his life and mind-set around the inevitability of failure and how to cope with it. Instead of viewing his first big failure as ruin, he simply decided to view it as an opportunity for an interesting change in life plans. To be sure, they aren’t banking their entire life future on one single dream or bust (say, becoming a rock star, à la David Gilmour). But rather than never try their hand at any dream at all, and sticking to a safe-but-boring course instead, they keep trying one dream after the next, maximizing their inner and outer resilience for the inevitable failures. They fail early and often, and turn courses on a dime, until something begins to gain traction. What makes it different from, say, a gambling addiction, is that these people are masters of making sure they stay in the game when luck inevitably turns against them. Unlike a gambling addict, they have consciously cultivated a lifestyle of resilience. These people are not addicts of gambling; they are addicts of learning in the real world. And learning in the real world involves failure. Lots of it. “People who have been successful are still as likely to get it wrong as right going forward. They just try more things,” Mike told me. “That’s the difference.” Mike’s advice for young people who want to combine their passion with their money? “Start with the passion and the drive. You’ve got to have that hunger. From that passion and desire, go actually do some stuff. Try some little businesses. Get some failure under your belt. Find out what works and doesn’t work, and don’t worry about the failures, worry about learning.” One of the best ways to avoid this kind of horror-story scenario when reaching for your dreams, even if your business doesn’t end up working out, is to start a service business. Usually, overhead and start-up costs are low, you don’t need to borrow a lot (or any) to get started, and you can begin generating revenue immediately. Even if the business doesn’t work out, the consequences of failure are usually minimal, “The very best things you can do when starting a new business,” Josh told me, “are, number one, keep your overhead as low as possible, and number two, make sure you’re getting recurring revenue as quickly as possible. If your revenue is semi-predictable, you can just grow and grow based on the cash that the business is throwing off, instead of having to get investments, loans, and so forth.” The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late (Portfolio) In his book, which he presents as a business education in a book without the need for $100,000 of debt (http://www.personalmba.com), Josh talks about a concept called “iteration velocity.” He quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “Our goal is to have more at bats per unit of time and money than anyone else.” “When creating a new offering, your primary goal should be to work through each iteration cycle as quickly as possible. Iteration is a structured form of learning that helps you make your offering better; the faster you learn, the more quickly you’ll be able to improve.” In a blog post entitled “One in a Million,” Seth Godin writes, “The ardent or insane pursuit of a particular [risky] goal is a good idea if the steps you take along the way also prep you for other outcomes, each almost as good (or better). If ... bending the market to your will and shipping on time and doing important and scary work are all things you need to develop along the way, then it doesn’t really matter so much if you don’t make the goal you set out to reach.” Seth continues, “Does spending your teenage years (and your twenties) in a room practicing the violin teach you anything about being a violin teacher or a concert promoter or some other job associated with music? If your happiness depends on your draft pick or a single audition, that’s giving way too much power to someone else.” I met with Elliott and the other cofounders and executives—all in their twenties—in Miami, where they were renting a group home together. The eight of them collectively choose new cities to live in every few months, all over the world, where they meet people to invite to their conferences and work remotely via laptop and cell phone. “I attribute my success so far, 100 percent, to the people I’ve met and learned from. It’s not even a question. [Motivational author, and college dropout] Jim Rohn says, ‘You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.’ And on a bigger picture, you are a reflection of the twenty or thirty people who give you the best advice. Everything is about people. It all starts with you surrounding yourself with great people who you can learn from. I view life as learning. It’s all learning for me, all the time. I’m literally nonstop learning. I read books every day. I talk to people every day. I’m always out looking for new people I can learn from.” if you want to be successful, and make a huge impact in your life, find exceptional people to learn from, and surround yourself with them. “This turned out to be the most significant decision in my business career—to find someone who is massively successful and go to work for him. Through that, I got into the world of marketing and sales. I discovered a lot of the past marketing and sales geniuses, like Claude Hopkins and Eugene Schwartz and John Caples and David Ogilvy, and read all of their books. I read Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, which was very impactful on me. Eben said, “Leadership is like a fountain. Imagine the leaders are the water near the top, ready to burst out of the fountain. The water about to burst out is being pushed up by water below it. If you want to succeed, find leaders who are doing amazing things in the world, and push them up. Find powerful people and help them reach their goals. If you’re of service to them, they will be of service back.” And, while you may hope to get something in return, you must always do it with absolutely zero expectation of getting anything in return. The vibe has to be one of giving, not taking. Some people spend their time amassing financial capital— cash, stock, bonds—and real capital such as buildings. In turn, I’ve noticed that many people I interviewed for this book spend an inordinate amount of time, effort, and money investing in the growth and maintenance of what I’ve called “connection capital.” Connection capital is anything that can help you expand your network of connections (your “tribe,” as Seth Godin calls it), and is not significantly used up in expanding this network. The two biggest forms of connection capital are (a) your already-existing connections and (b) your ability to give good advice. Being able to connect people to each other is a massive asset, which in turn helps grow the amount of people you know, which in turn grows your ability to connect people. Get the snowball rolling, and it may surprise you how fast it grows. Eben says that the three areas of life the majority of people spend most of their time worrying about are money, relationships, and health. I’m going to teach you two questions that, if you put them into use at parties, events, and conferences, will change your life forever and will grow your network faster than you ever thought possible: 1. What’s most exciting for you right now in your life/ business? 2. What’s challenging for you in your life/business right now? (If you feel you need to brush up on your own social intelligence—including your sense of tact—a great place to start is the book Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships by Daniel Goleman. I highly recommend this book: social intelligence is something we learn almost nothing about in our formal education.) Here are several areas where you can often give valuable advice: MARKETING AND SALES. I have found that most people who have built their businesses around marketing don’t know jack about sales. And most people who have built their businesses around sales don’t know jack about marketing. In particular, you should learn about direct-response marketing and copywriting, FOOD, WEIGHT, AND NUTRITION. Most people who are successful in the worlds of business and money are highly driven. And many people who are highly driven ignore their health; their success so far has come at the expense of their health. If in the course of your life and self-education you have learned to overcome your own chronic health challenges, or have achieved your ideal weight or learned a lot about nutrition, fitness, and healthy lifestyles, you’ll often know a lot more about these topics than many successful businesspeople do—particularly SPIRITUALITY, PURPOSE, AND MEANING. If you’ve thought a great deal about the more existential, philosophical aspects of life, and have come to some personal wisdom or understanding in these areas through your own life journey, providing support in these realms is often a great way to serve people who are more powerful and successful than you are. (See Success Skill #1 on connecting with your sense of purpose and meaning.) HOBBIES, PASSIONS, AND CAUSES. You can often connect with influential people through shared hobbies and passions. Of course, this knowledge has been keeping golf courses running for centuries. I happen to have no interest in golf whatsoever, so I’m not going to write to you about golf. But I’ve found that cultivating a wide range of cool, hip, discussion-worthy hobbies maximizes your chance of being able to share with and give to amazing people you meet. RELATIONSHIPS. In most cases I’ve seen, there’s not much of a correlation between success in business and money, and happiness in relationships. If anything, I’ve seen a negative correlation. You should definitely read The Trusted Advisor by David Maister, Charles Green, and Robert Galford, and Networking with the Affluent by Thomas J. Stanley, two of the best books on high-integrity, no-sleaze connecting I’ve read. Another great resource, which adapts some of these strategies for the digital and social media age, comes from David Siteman Garland (http://www.therisetothetop.com). In his article “From Tim Ferriss to Seth Godin: How to Interview and Build Relationships with the Most ‘Influential’ People in the World,” he emphasizes the same point everyone else is making in this chapter—when you find creative ways to serve people you’d like to connect with, “ask for nothing [in return].... By doing [that], you will separate yourself from 98% of the pack.” He then outlines a specific, detailed process for finding creative ways to be of service to influencers on the Web. This is required reading for anyone interested in the topic of this chapter. “The happier you are in giving,” self-made multi-entrepreneur Russell Simmons told me, “the more people are excited to be around you. You become ‘sticky.’” However, if you start out making this trade of time and elbow grease in the hope of gaining teachings, make sure you’re able to convert those teachings quickly into connection capital (i.e., into a network of connections and the experience that allows you to give valuable, high-impact advice, thereby providing more value to your network, drawing in more connections). For a simple reason. Relying on time and elbow grease and service as your main form of giving—potentially valuable as these gifts may be—severely limits your scope of giving. There are only so many hours in the day, and so many hours of elbow grease you can give before you conk out. In twenty-first-century business parlance, this form of giving is “not scalable,” or “not highly leverageable.” They reach their upper limit of scope quickly. In turn, connection capital is a highly scalable, highly leverageable form of giving. By developing connection capital—that is, your “emotional bank account” of trust and goodwill among your already-existing contacts, and your bank of experience and knowledge from which you can give valuable advice—you can decouple the impact you make on others’ lives from the time you spend making it. you can (and have to) learn on your own, educating yourself out in the real world: How to network and connect with powerful teachers and mentors (the subject of this chapter). How to start and manage a business. How to market and sell effectively (Success Skills #3 and #4). How to lead others. How to discover your sense of purpose and meaning (Success Skill #1). In other words, he invested his other forms of capital (sales skills, financial capital) into connection capital—the ability to help people massively in the space of two minutes just by making introductions within his network. You begin to see what separates him from nearly all other twentysomethings, indeed, from nearly everyone else in the working world: Elliott has decoupled his labor from his capital, and focused on building some pretty amazing capital for himself: a world-class tribe of people he helps and who help him. He has become a capitalist—a capitalist of giving and service to others. The second form of connection capital—that is, the second form of giving that can expand your network of teachers, mentors, and guides in life—is as we’ve seen, advice giving. Steve Pavlina expresses a similar theme in his book Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth. Zig Ziglar, another legendary motivational speaker, author, sales trainer, and self-made multimillionaire (who dropped out of the University of South Carolina to pursue a career in sales), has said, “You can have anything you want in life, if you will just help other people get what they want.” In Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, which is the best book ever written on the central importance of giving within a business context, Seth Godin writes: “It’s difficult to be generous when you’re hungry. Yet being generous keeps you from going hungry.” What Simmons and Seth Godin and Run are suggesting is that affluence is perhaps better indicated by the amount of the flow. The more value that flows in and out of our lives, the more we and others benefit, and the more affluence is generated. One thing I see in common among all the successful self-educated people I’ve met—which is different from the way most other people think—is that they tend not to see a contradiction between living a comfortable life for themselves and helping others. Keith Ferrazzi (http://www.keithferrazzi.com) is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Never Eat Alone and Other Secrets to Success: One Relationship at a Time and Who’s Got Your Back: The Breakthrough Program to Build Deep, Trusting Relationships That Create Success—and Won’t Let You Fail. These two books are absolutely required reading if you’re interested in anything in this chapter—two of the best books on networking and connecting ever written. “The right way to go about it is to be generous with the person you want to connect with. And in this case, the generosity is: you tell a story. Tell a story about how you drew inspiration from their teachings and their example, how it impacted your life, and all the ways you’re passing that gift on to others now. If you move me enough with what you’ve accomplished with my teachings and how you’re serving others, then yes, of course I want to help you. I’ve helped all kinds of young people who have reached out to me with their stories of the amazing things they’ve done applying the concepts in my books. When I invest my time and effort in helping a young person, the dividend I receive in return is their gratitude, and their success.” Whether you’re a fast-food server or a cubicle jockey in a mindless corporate shit job fresh out of college, you’re not going to create anything better for yourself unless you make a fundamental shift: from viewing yourself as a passive follower of paths other people set for you, to actively taking responsibility for creating your own path toward success, however you define it. Thus, how much education you have doesn’t really matter ; what matters is whether you make this fundamental shift in mentality. “In the end, I learned more from him than in all of my schooling. He was a salesman, to the bone. He taught me the importance of sales. What I learned from my grandfather was, the key to making money was to cause something to get sold. Whether you sell it yourself, or you employ someone to sell it and you get some of the money. He would always say, ‘The only way to make money is to buy something at one cost and sell it at a higher cost. If you do that, and you hustle, you make as much money as you want.’ “I asked him to take me under his wing, and he taught me not so much a skill set, but a mind-set. The mind-set that was: ‘You can do anything you want. The people who are professing to be experts, telling you what you can and can’t do in life and how to do it, are just a bunch of fucking jackasses. The model that society teaches you to become successful is highly flawed.’ And he used his personal story as the example of that, because he had no education past eighth grade. In Kennedy’s words: “The breakthrough realization for you is that you are in the marketing business. You are not in the dry cleaning or restaurant or widget manufacturing or wedding planning or industrial chemicals business. You are in the business of marketing dry cleaning services or restaurants or widgets or wedding planning or chemicals. When you embrace this, it makes perfect sense to set your sights on marketing mastery. If you are going to make something your life’s work and chief activity and responsibility, why not do it exceptionally well?”2 Whenever Cameron Johnson has started one of his dozen-plus profitable businesses, many of which he’s sold for nice payoffs, he asks a few simple questions: “What do people in this industry need? What’s bothering them, hassling them, costing them money, keeping them from getting what they want? . . . [C]ustomers with needs come along every single day. There are always people and niches with unfulfilled needs. With this approach to business, you don’t need to rely on luck, timing, or the fickleness of fads and crazes—just on your own ability to observe and create. Choose a niche, find a need, and then see what could help those people do their job better.”3 In turn, if the product or service is designed to solve a specific unsolved problem or meet a specific unmet need, and if the message is targeted well, so that you happen to be someone with that unsolved problem or unmet need, you will be happy to hear about the product or service The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late (Portfolio) You want to be an entrepreneur? Then go meet an entrepreneur.
Find one, and get to know them, learn from them, work for them, intern. I suggest this for two reasons; First you are only as valuable as your network, and you need to start to build one, and having entrepreneur's in your network is awesome. Second you will discover that they are no smarter than you are, or luckier, what they have is an ability to see opportunity where others do not, and ability to take action. They see risk differently. You will watch them and you will start to think, I can do that. And you can do it, the only difference between you and a entrepreneur, is that they took action, and once you take action, good things will start to head your way. D The first thing any new entrepreneur should do is that you need to define yourself as an entrepreneur, call yourself an entrepreneur..
Go ahead, say to yourself. Again. Say it aloud to yourself. Again. Don't hide it, say it loud. If you can’t call yourself one, then no one else can either. It is an action, and one action leads to another, and then to another. The first action is to define what you are. If you call yourself an entrepreneur, and if you act as one, then world will treat you as a entrepreneur. There are no official badges, no governing body that needs to sign off, so if you want to be one, if you choose to be one, then all you have to do is take action. You just need to do something, anything, and you need to do it now.. You know if you are being real, you know if you mean it. If you don’t, if you can’t commit, if you can’t do, then you will not succeed. You become what you do, and starting this at this very moment, you need to start trying to create value out of any and every opportunity that comes your way. It entrepreneurs Entrepreneurs are creators, they are artists, they make things happen. To paraphrase Jean-Baptiste Say, the entrepreneur moves economic resources out of from inefficient productivity and moves it into higher productivity to get a greater yield or value. Entrepreneurs take assets someone isn’t using, and then finds a way to make money with it. They don’t accept the world, they look to change it. D Get Rich Click!: The Ultimate Guide to Making Money on the Internet
Another one of those books with a title that sounds like a scam, but I heard Marc Ostrofsy on Mixergy, and he was sharp, and he had me thinking by the end of the interview. It is a good book, that basically gives an overview of the different ways to make money online. Interesting. Notes. For the first time in history, a single businessperson can compete on equal footing with large, multinational firms. Anyone can sell something, collect the money for the item, then go purchase it and send it to the buyer. Making money is exactly like war. It is a very competitive environment. The winner of a war is the side with the best information, knowledge and understanding of the terrain they’re on and the opposition they’re facing. Just as in a war, your business needs “intel” in order to succeed and make money. You need to know everything you can about: everything about business. We will all have failures along the way. It’s failing fast, learning from that failure, and getting back in the game that makes the difference between winners and losers. Ideas are good until proven otherwise! Ideas are fragile and need to be handled accordingly. A nurturing approach to ideas is essential for any Internet-based business or any business that uses the Internet even in a supporting role. With that in mind, here are some points that will help: Be an original thinker. If “it’s never been done that way before,” you might actually have a winning idea. There’s more than one kind of originality. Can you come up with creative twists on already existing ideas? Think about selling as you go. Successful online entrepreneurs plan, set goals, measure and sell. Be a good doer, not just a good planner. Convert prospects to paying customers. Having followers or even fans is great, but you need to enable them to exchange their cash for your product or service. You should also empower them to inform others who need your product or service. Once you have a paying customer, learn how to serve that customer on an ongoing basis. Shoot for an ongoing relationship. Be sure to thank your customers for their business. Then turn thank-you opportunities into cash-generating sales. Are you testing new ways of putting your ideas into action? If something works, tweak it to see if you can get even better results. Can you replicate your success? Is your idea “scalable”? Are you relentless in your pursuit of profits? The top line is important but the bottom line is what you put in your pocket. Certain industries take to it naturally, like computer supplies, travel agencies, bookstores, brokerage services and jewelry sales. But industries such as food and beverage, real estate and automobile are still learning. Meanwhile, furniture sales, pet supplies and home food delivery have so far been unsuccessful with Internet disintermediation. When online jewelers sell diamonds from a website, it is only AFTER they make the sale and collect the money that they buy the diamonds from a wholesaler and have them drop shipped directly to the retail customers. You must have an income other than “ad sales” unless you have an immense volume of traffic coming to your site. If ad sales are your only income stream, don’t bother to solicit the “smart money.” The Internet produces new business models and also reinvents traditional business models. Online business models are still evolving. New and different products and services pop up every day. This gives rise to supporting products and services. A business can make substantial profit by helping others execute their plans for making money. LaundryView.com is an Internet application that allows you to monitor the status of washers and dryers in connected laundry rooms through a web browser. LaundryView.com was developed in response to requests for greater control over laundry activities. Since many people tend to do their laundry during similar time periods, it results in busy laundry rooms. LaundryView’s mission is to help you save time by providing information about the current state of laundry room equipment wherever you have access to a browser or e-mail messages. Get Rich Click!: The Ultimate Guide to Making Money on the Internet Zappos’ Ten Lessons in building a successful business on the Internet: The e-commerce business is built on repeat customers. Word of mouth really works online. Don’t compete on price. Make sure your website inventory is 100% accurate. Centrally locate your distribution. Customer service is an investment and not an expense. Start small. Stay focused. Don’t be secretive. Don’t worry about your competitors. You need to actively manage your company culture. Be wary of so-called experts. CHANGE = OPPORTUNITY for someone in the game. True Internet entrepreneurs look way beyond their last online transaction or the most recent commission check. Their websites become part of their lifestyles. They live and breathe everything Internet: their clients, their affiliates, their products and services. The Internet is a communication medium. Consider it a supplement and extension of non-Internet marketing. It’s not a replacement. If you use a website to make money on the Internet, your website should have a specific purpose. Having a website just because “everyone else does” is not a good reason. Goals for your website must be part of your overall business model. Make your website as interactive as possible. That means both initiating communication with your clients and responding to their initiatives. Define the target audience you want to reach and address those people in a way that will make them want to respond. “Meet them where they are.” Learn as much as you can about your prospect and target market: What do they want? What do they need? What do they read? Where do they go? With whom do they interact? What are they paying others for their products and services? Set specific and measurable goals for every aspect of your business activity. Make it easy to do business with you, easy to buy from you, easy to respond to you and even easy to complain to you. Watch what other successful businesses and entrepreneurs do. If it works for them it may work for you. If it doesn’t work for them, understand why and see if the same conditions apply to you and your business. Pay attention, understand, analyze. Implement or don’t implement accordingly. Effectiveness on the Internet is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Every business is different. Learn your craft and learn it well. For our purposes, this applies to making money on the Internet. Reading this book is a valuable step toward achieving that goal, but the undertaking requires time, energy and concentration. Here are seven different ways to buy and sell products and services on the Internet and profit through e-commerce: Make your own product and sell it yourself. Make your own product, and find a third party to sell it and fulfill the orders. Make your own product, find a third party to sell it, and you fulfill the orders. Buy someone else’s product, then sell it to the end consumer. Buy someone else’s product, then sell it to a reseller (third party) with a lower profit margin per product, so they can resell it for a profit. Sell someone else’s product without buying it, collect the money, then have the product manufacturer manage the fulfillment. Sell someone else’s product without buying it, then let the manufacturer handle collection and fulfillment. In this model, you typically collect a commission for the sale that is less than you would make with the other six options above. However, you benefit by not having to purchase or store inventory, or maintain staff to manage fulfillment. (See Chapter 6 for more on this concept.) For any product, there are four areas that require effort: making the product, selling it, collecting the money and fulfilling the orders. You can handle any or all of these activities yourself, or you can outsource them (I like to make certain my firms oversee the money portion in any option we choose). Here’s the underlying strategy that makes this basic business model so incredibly successful. Blinds.com has no physical inventory and no product on hand. Nothing is purchased before it is sold. There is no guesswork about what we need to maintain in stock, and money isn’t spent to purchase the product until after the sale is made. The Blinds.com website is very user friendly. Customers purchase the products, the business places the order with one of many preferred suppliers, and then each supplier drop ships the item to the customer. We’ll have more to say about Blinds.com later in this chapter. “Sell It Before You Buy It”: How to Do It Step by Step You can “sell before you buy” with virtually no limits! Do you need products to sell or ideas to get you started? Here are some suggestions: 10 Steps to a Successful “Reverse E-commerce” Business Go down to your own version of “Harwin Street.” That’s a location in Houston, Texas, where importers sell large and small quantities of products at wholesale prices. Most cities have a Harwin Street. New York has Canal Street; Los Angeles has a few streets downtown; San Francisco has a handful of them in or around Chinatown. If your city doesn’t have a concentrated location for importers, check out your local flea market or a major city that has a shipping port where items flow into the United States. Take some digital photos of 20, 30 or 50 products you think might sell well online. These could be watches, statues, automotive products or articles of clothing. This is a test to see what will sell. Make sure to note the costs and how much inventory the importer or wholesaler has available. Write advertising copy to accompany your photos to try and sell your newly found “virtual inventory.” Post them on eBay or any other online sales outlet (Craigslist, online classifieds, USAds). See which products sell and which don’t. Collect the money. Fulfill the sale. Repeat steps 4-7 for the products that sell. Go back out and find more products to test for sale. Remember, the most successful sellers sell and resell and resell again – often from the very same photo. Using this business model isn’t just about making money—you are also being paid to learn. You learn what sells, what doesn’t and how much profit you can get from each product. You find out which items are popular, how many people are bidding on your products and much more. Vertical search – searching a market by a specific business category – is ripe for growth. This includes the computer category, software, video games, baby products and toys. Growth rates for pet supply, cosmetics and fragrance categories are expected to exceed 30 percent, surpassing all other growth rates. Putting Your Ideas into Action Get the best domain name(s) you can that define your products or services. Get good, high-quality links pointing to your site. Understand how to increase Internet traffic – both free traffic, (known as organic traffic) and paid traffic. Master “niche marketing.” Don’t try to sell everything. Be the best with your own product or category. Make it easy for customers to do business with your site. Sell before you buy. You don’t need inventory. Customers pay for all sales up front and in full. All orders are drop shipped by the manufacturer after the custom blinds are made at any one of their suppliers around the U.S. Search Engines: Understanding Them Is the Real Key to Success Search engines will “blacklist” sites that violate their rules. The most common violation is Keyword spamming – adding Keywords to your titles and tags that have nothing to do with your site’s content (and yes, search engines can tell). Other offenses can include Keyword crowding, Keyword repetition and Keyword drowning. Learn what these terms and concepts mean, and don’t do them! Blacklisting can seriously reduce your traffic, which affects your income, which affects the value of your assets. Get Rich Click!: The Ultimate Guide to Making Money on the Internet Most Internet users are not inclined to wade through pages and pages of search results. So the goal for businesses is not merely to be listed, but to place in the first few pages of results – ideally, on the first page. Basic optimization strategies include cultivating incoming links and presenting quality content (especially text) that incorporates important Keywords. Ranking Many factors contribute to getting higher search-engine rankings. “On-page” factors are those associated with your site’s web pages. “Off-page” factors are ways to affect your ranking that don’t appear on an actual web page. On-page factors include: Strong Keywords. Determine the best Keywords and Keyword phrases for your market, products and the people searching for your products and services. Design. Know how to design a page that is search-engine friendly. This is part art, part science and extremely important. I recall an entire website that was designed in a type of software that makes website design easy. The site looked great, but the search engines couldn’t “read” any words on the page. The result: the beautiful site was invisible to the search engines. Create words. Put words on your page that are the exact same as the top search engine queries people type into the search engines when they are looking for what you provide. It’s also a good idea to use synonyms for these words. Each page on the site must be original content. Don’t copy text from a supplier. If you take the product description directly from a supplier, your page will be the same as every other firm that uses the same text. You won’t place any higher in the rankings, and the duplication may work against you. Freshness of the content. Keep your content up-to-date. Be on top of your market so you can continually revise Keywords and copy. Usability. Make certain your site is user-friendly. Categorization schemes based on hyperlinked text are excellent ways to improve rankings and help your visitors quickly find what they are looking for. Direct navigation. How much direct navigation traffic does the site get? A domain name built on one of your primary Keywords is like gold. Metatags. Each page of your site needs a unique “metatag” to tell the search engines about that page. Make sure you understand how to use metatags properly. Stickiness. Look at website metrics that let you know how long a visitor stays on a page and on your site overall. Do people stay on your site for 8 seconds or 15 minutes? If users stay on a site longer, the site is generally doing a better job meeting their needs. Sites that aren’t sticky generally fail to present targeted, persuasive copy (and copy does affect your ranking). When visitors stay on a page longer, search engines give the page a higher importance rating. Site submissions. In general, you are better off waiting until the spiders naturally crawl your site. There are techniques to speed up the process (see Chapter 5). When search engines do allow you to submit your site, the process can take time. Submitting your site may make sense if you have made major changes to your site, but be very careful not to submit frequently. Understand the specific requirements of each search engine and submit your web address accordingly. Off-page factors include: Links. Frequently reevaluate the inbound and outbound links to your site and answer these questions: How many links point to your site? Are they quality links? How old are the links? What is the content at the other end of those links? Were they “free” links or did you pay for them? Do you “reciprocate” these links? Do the links take the prospect directly to the page they want or to the homepage? Directory listings. Services such as Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and Yahoo! are respected directory listings. When these directories include a link to your site, it has a bearing on how the search engines rank your site. Submitting each page on your site separately (each with its own set of Keywords) to a directory can also help raise your rankings. Local search allows users to designate a geographical locality when they search for Keywords and phrases. The local-search search engine then restricts results to the location the user specified. Some of the larger local search sites are: Yahoo! Local (local.yahoo.com) Windows Live Local (maps.live.com) Google Maps (formerly Google Local) (maps.google.com) Superpages (superpages.com) If you want to increase your visibility in these search engines, make sure you embed location information in your website. If you don’t, local search will not locate you. Learn as much as you can about local advertising and marketing via the Internet. “Geo-targeted” domain names are gaining a huge following. Names like NewYork.com, Dallas.com or Bahamas.com have become instant profit centers. For that reason, these domain names have become the ultimate Internet real estate investment. If you want to truly understand the good, the bad and the ugly of search engines, I strongly recommend you read this. Keywords for a website need to be specific to the site or page on the site, relevant, applicable and clearly associated with the content on your page. Understand how search engines allow you to use Keywords (i.e., placement, color). Understand how many times you can use a Keyword on a page (frequency, density, distribution, etc.). If you use redirection technology, it should facilitate and improve the user experience. Know this is almost always considered a trick and can lead to a search engine blacklisting your site. If you use redirection technology, it should always display a page where the body content contains the appropriate Keywords (no bait and switch). If you use redirection technology, you may not alter the web address (redirect), affect the browser back button (cause a loop) or display page information that is not the property of the site owner (or is not allowed by agreement) without sound technical justification (i.e., language redirects). Do not submit pages to the search engines too frequently. Direct Navigation Traffic There are ONLY three ways to reach a website: Click on a link from another website. Click on a link in search engine results. Enter the specific domain name or URL into the browser address bar . . . known as direct navigation. Direct navigation traffic is by far the most highly targeted form of web traffic available. If your firm is lucky enough to own the proper domain name for its industry, not only will you get this highly targeted “type-in” traffic, but you will keep you competitors from obtaining those leads as well. When you choose your domain name, remember this quote from the former CEO of McDonald’s: “We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenue from which our tenants can pay us rent.” Real estate is a great road to wealth. “Domain names and Websites are Internet Real Estate.™” – Marc Ostrofsky Several organizations have estimated that traffic to unused, generic domain name sites, also known as “parked domains,” drives 10 percent of the Pay-Per-Click market. Conversion rates from click to purchase for direct navigation are almost double those for search engines. Making Money with Direct Navigation The best thing you can do to bring traffic to your website is to control as many natural, direct-navigation, typed-in domain names as possible, provided they are related to your niche market or industry. Traffic generated in this way comes directly to you and will never be dependent on the ever-changing search engines. Here are three ideas that’ll help you quickly generate dollars using direct navigation: Redirect ALL of your generic domain names to your primary domain name website. Barnes and Noble does this with books.com. Use a generic domain name site as a vertical portal that redirects to your company’s products or to your main site. Johnson and Johnson does this with Baby.com. Create a new “brand” with a generic domain name. Beer.com has done this on their site with the tag line “the official beer of the Internet.” Other owners of generic names are following suit and should do well (until corporate America figures out the value of these assets and starts to buy them up). Investing in a direct navigation generic domain name can yield a good if not great return on your investment. It will depend on the quality of the domain name, how you market and promote it, how you attract traffic and how you convert the traffic into actual clicks and sales. Generate enough traffic and sales, and you build equity. 10 Great Reasons to Own a Generic Domain Name You get the best targeted traffic possible, better than Pay-Per-Click or link traffic. If a person is typing in the very word your firm represents, they are more likely to be a buyer. You keep your competitors from getting this targeted traffic. You can get traffic you never expected. The domain is considered “Internet real estate.” You can “write off’ the cost of this business asset (but ask your CPA or lawyer for advice first). You can increase your search engine ranking with a great domain name. You can get “accidental” traffic that might otherwise have gone to your competitors. You own “mindshare.” That, too, will bring traffic to your business. There is great public relations value in owning a one- or two-word generic domain name that is the name of your industry or business. When stories are written about an industry, topic, product or service, the media often look up these firms by the generic word or web address. Your firm saves money on not having to buy as much Pay-Per-Click advertising. No one else can ever own it – as long as you pay your annual fee! That may include investing in domain names with new suffixes. Dot-com names are still the most popular and are expected to remain “the gold standard” for domains. But new suffixes like .biz, .info and others called “cc.TLDs” offered by specific countries like .eu (European Union), .cn (China) and .es (Spain) may also provide opportunities to make money from direct navigation traffic. Vertical search is search narrowly defined around a central topic, industry, niche, format, genre or location. Vertical search engines or websites that offer vertical search for a given topic can focus on travel, health and medicine, shopping, law, government, blogs or even geographical areas and municipalities. Eighty percent of vertical search engines fall into the four primary categories of retail, travel, financial services and media/entertainment. Sites by compiling information, products or services and make that data easier to read, easier to navigate, more presentable, more efficient or better organized for the particular target market. [Note: If you want to play with this business model, please be sure to ask your copyright attorney about the legal ramifications before proceeding.] Comparison sites save people’s time. They offer many types of products from many providers. A comparison site owner earns commissions on the sale of products or services from the comparison site. Merchants sign up with a comparison site and make their product inventory available for the comparison site’s search engine by Keyword. Every online entrepreneur and business should consider paid search advertising as a strategy for making significant income. 7 Steps to Start Making Money with Google AdSense Sign up for a Google AdSense Account at GetRichClick.com/adsense. Place the html code that Google supplies into the coding for your website. This allows AdSense to feed relevant ads to your site. Monitor clicks with the software Google supplies. Tweak and refine content and Keywords to get ads that are as targeted and relevant as possible. This increases the likelihood visitors to your site will click on the ads. Drive targeted traffic to your site. Review your content and Keywords periodically to improve the quality of your traffic so that you make more money. Receive commission checks from Google. How to Refine Your Site’s Use of Google AdSense Keep your content to one main topic per web page. Help the ads stand out with colors, positioning, borders, bold type and white space. Continually test ad placement and appearance (you can use Google website Optimizer to test these factors – it’s free). Add more content related to the primary Keyword phrase. Create more Keyword-focused pages. Increase click-through rate. Use a simple design for your site with lots of white space. Don’t make the appearance cluttered. Display the AdSense ads prominently. According to Google, ads in the skyscraper format on the right side of the page work best. Focus on one topic per web page. This allows Google to place the most relevant ads, which will increase your click-through rate. Increase the value of clicks. Create pages and topics to encourage AdSense to feed ads with more expensive Keywords or use Keywords that pay you $.75 per click vs., say, $.50 a click. Usually an ad is composed of three lines of text. The first line of text is your ad title; it’s the dominant element in your ad and contains the link users click on. You get 25 characters (including spaces) to capture the attention of your audience. The next two lines are for descriptive copy; each line contains a maximum of 35 characters. The last line of the ad is the web address to which the ad links, so users know where the click will take them (this line is not linked). Constructing Keyword lists is an “ongoing and never-ending” brainstorming exercise. New products, services, trends and concepts — any and every Keyword or set of Keywords that you can think of to bring prospective clients to your site should be written down and used on the site to attract more eyeballs to your site. Remember, there are only three ways to get to a website: Using a search engine Via a “link” from another site or domain By direct navigation (typing the domain name directly into the toolbar) Get Rich Click!: The Ultimate Guide to Making Money on the Internet |
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Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” |