Here is a link to see it full size.

The Hosting you use for you Business Website or Blog is important more than ever before.  With Google and the other search engines penalizing you for slow load times and people frankly becoming impatient with sites that take forever to load, it is not imperative that your site runs fast.

Cloud Red Hosting is what I use and recommend to all of my clients.  Give them a try. No long-term contracts and no fuss or muss. Just good service at a good price.

Do you need Transcription Work done? Try out www.YakWrite.com and get your first 1 whole hour of audio done for just $20! That is about 8,000 words worth. Just let them know you are a new customer when you order and they will refund you the difference when you order! (i told them to do this).

Why Join?

1. It is a great way for you to learn how to add more to your bottom line.
2. You can learn from others in a wide variety of industries and niches.
3. You can let people know about your business with links back to your site.
4. Get access to the latest trends and techniques to help you add more customers and make more money.
5. It is FREE!

So, just sign up today and get started. If you know of other people that want great information on how to help their business, tell them about it too.

Self-promotion and common sense is allowed. But stupidity and bad manners are not tolerated.

Thanks and welcome aboard!  Go Here to sign up!

Cheers,

Andrew Anderson

Google has updated it latest search engine called Panda and some people have more than a few things to worry about and others are happy as clams.

What does all of this mean to most of us as business owners?  Well, it means we have to one more thing we have to keep tabs on, but it also further reinforces what I have been saying for years to all of my SEO clients and to my business partners.

What is the best SEO strategy?

Give Google and people what they want, which is good relevant content.  Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

You don’t try and trick Google and you don’t try and “Trick” people to come to your website.

If you consistently deliver up good quality content about the subject at hand you win, period.

Are there best practice rules and techniques on how to do this that 99.8 % of most busiensses don’t know about and perhaps 99.999% of the new breed of fly by night SEO consultants don’t know about? ABSOLUTELY!

And you know what? It will probably stay that way simply because this information is so valuable.  Being listed on the first page of  Google for your search term is not worth just a little bit more business, but 10x to 100x more than not being listed in some cases.

But, here again, if you do the common sense things to get listed in the first place,  then you are ahead of the vast majority of business owners and consultants out there.

I will post some of the basics that you can start doing right away and here is the first one.

Blog, blog, blog, blog.  It is perhaps not only the easiest way for Google to show you some love, but also the most direct way for your customers to show you love as well.  They may find you through a business card or word of mouth and in your blog if you show that they you know what you are talking about, then you are far ahead of your competition.  I am talking about blogging at least once a week here.

More on this later.  But, the bottom line is give the Panda whatever it wants and it will be nice to you. If not, it has a vicious bite.

Cheers,

Andrew “Easy” Anderson

I hardly ever login to Linkedin and only do Facebook about once a week if that.  Plus, I  have been keeping my Twitter to a minimum these days which is a whole other blog post, but in my quarterly login to Linkedin, I came across one of what I think is one of the core truths about making money.

The first time I heard something similar, it stopped me in my tracks and here is what I distilled that rather shocking moment down to.

“The Key to being successful is to become great at what you are good at, not becoming mediocre at what you do poorly”- Andrew Anderson

And that my friend is pretty much the secret to making money in a nut shell.

If you every really want to get ahead, you need to figure out what you are good at and say to heck with the rest. Become the best that you can be at it.

Let people that love to do what you hate do it for you.  If you can pay someone to do laundry and it costs you less or even the same as what you love to do, let them do it.

Same goes with Yard work, and everything else.

When you do things you don’t like, you are not going to do them as fast or as well and it takes time from practicing and getting good at what will truly make you money.  The mind set may be foriegn to you, but it works.

When someone tells me they have a maid or domestic help, I think what a smart cookie. I used to think they were lazy or pretentious.  Shows you how truly ignorant I was.  They were actually smart and had a lot more money and free time than I did.  But I eventually figured it out.

Now you can too.

Cheers,
Andrew Anderson

How To Fix The Economy Overnight

OK, well, I thought that I would throw that pic in there just because they were advertising to a very niche market and you know what? It actually worked.  Right up until the busy body whack jobs imposed the prohibition.  Kind of like the anti-smoking, anti everything elitists idiots now.   I will show you how to make money from this fact as well as other herd mentality tid-bits.  Plus, just some other random Profit ideas for you to think about.

Now you may be asking yourself, what the heck does that have to do with Profits Everywhere and are easier now then ever before?

And what about “How To Fix The Economy Overnight” ?

Just a note, beer is actually good for you by the way.

It is can be distilled down to one simple word?  Chaos!

If you are like me, you have probably realized that the patients have taken over the asylum.  The idiots are in charge and the stuff the politicians and special interest groups are making happen, is beyond anything that you could ever make up.  Well, there are a number of people that saw this coming, but that is another story.

But, I think you will agree we have some bizarre things going on.  While any Single Working Mom that is supporting herself and her kids  could go to Washington and solve the whole debt crisis and get things straightened out in 3 days, we have some first grade whankers in charge that don’t have a freakin clue or care about the damage they are doing.(again with very few exceptions) You know why? Because they honestly do not care about you.  Not really. It is one big money and power grab pure and as you can see, they do not care if they ruin the country and hurt millions of people in the processes.  If they did, they would not be doing what they are doing would they?.  They truly are out of control like never before.

How To Fix The Economy Overnight

If they opened up drilling on half of what we have in the US. Gasoline would drop by $1.00 per gallon and the economy would turn around overnight.  It puts money in every-one’s pocket, things cost less, and the money stays in the US.  Wouldn’t you like to save a buck a gallon on gas?  You could be virtually overnight.  In case you did not know it, the US has more oil and natural gas reserves than all of the Mid-East. But over 90% has been put off limits by the Federal and State Government.  Did you know that?

The Debt Crisis Is Not Solved, But That Is OK

They still just got an extra 2.1 trillion to spend, they still get an 8% increase in the budget next year and the year after and no money will actually be cut. Things are going to get worse. That is the bottom line.  They are purposely driving the economy off the cliff which is what Saul Alinsky said to do, of which most of the executive branch are all followers.  Google it if you don’t believe me.  Do you remember the term “Fundamental Change”  well you are witnessing it.  Kind of not what you expected I bet is it?

I am not going off on a rant here, just pointing out reality is all so that you can profit from it.  If it weren’t for the fact that so many families and people are getting ruined by what they are doing on purpose in DC, I would be almost happy about it.

The end result is Chaos, the likes of which we have not seen since before the great depression.  Inflation is at about 20% right now, and they are printing money as fast as they can which is eroding any savings that you have but, making commodities go up. i.e. grain, gas, iron, tin, gold, silver. Basically things that are used to make things that you need to live.  There is a reason why gold and silver has never been higher!  The REAL unemployment numbers are close to 20% as well. They don’t count people that are unemployed after their unemployment runs out.  Really?

How You Can Make Money From The Idiots In Charge

Well, while everyone is panicking, figure out what you can do to help them save time or money and prove it.  Or give them something entertaining.  More people are checking out now than ever before because of all of the stress.

During the great Depression, people had money for Movies, booze, and alcohol.  No different now except there are a bunch of alternatives to the movies.

Which is why if you have a great product or service, it perhaps is the best time to roll it out.  Do it now while everyone is panicking.

Mark my words on this, The Stupidity is just now really starting to kick in.  Expect it, plan for it, profit from it.

Cheers,

Andrew Anderson

OK,  my friend’s 15 year old daughter Megan said this to me awhile ago and I realize how wise she is every day.

If you run a business, this is especially true. In Tony Schwartz’s book, The Power Of Full Engagement, he shows several studies that when you get interrupted by things like texts and emails that it takes you a full 20 minutes to get back to the mental focus that you had before you stopped what you were doing to check the text, email, im etc. Wow, does that suck or what?

Not only that, specifically when you are texting, because of the brevity, important details are often lost and misunderstandings occur on a regular basis.

How Much Texts Really Cost You

I am in the process of quantifying this, but in the studies I am doing right now with a couple of guinea pigs, each text looks like it costs somewhere between $20 to $300 in actual lost revenue and this is harder to quantify, but it could be over $500 to $1,000+ in lost opportunity costs.  Pretty cool!

How does that make you feel?

So, do yourself and your business a favor, and stop texting unless it is a freaking emergency. Because it does make you stupid even if you are not and it does hurt your bottom line whether you realize it or not.

Plus, if you really have to answer texts all day, you really need to rearrange how you are running your business. If you can’t disengage, you don’t have a business, you just have a job.

If I don’t answer your text, now you know why.

Cheers,

Profit Consultant

OK, having a Social Media Manger seems to be in Vogue these days.  I have seen the ads for some of them with absolutely ludicrous requirements.  I know I have been laughing my ass off just reading the want ads for them and you can bet Gary Vaynerchuk is as well.  I want to share some of the joy with you here.

First off, the biggy seems to be a Journalism Degree or even better yet an MBA.  Really?  How or why that one is relevant is beyond me and actually it is totally irrelevant as I will show you.

What they should be asking is, do you have the ability to communicate in 140 characters or less and do you send out a minimum of 1,000 to 5,000 texts a month? This one is obvious as Twitter is a huge part of social media.

Here at two sample out takes from ads that are laughable.  These are from a REAL ads… LOL

Completion of an advanced degree (e.g. MA, MPH, MJ, MBA) and six (6) or more years of relevant experience

* 7+ years traditional media experience working for industry-leading company with significant media budgets in the area of digital marketing.

Wow, since Twitter has only been around for 3 years and Facebook did not really get going until about 2007 tell me how you pull off that 6 or more years of relevant experience ?   This is not traditional media either. Can you say Clueless?

A High School Dropout And Grandma Are More Qualified Than An MBA

There were more like this but this is an example of why most companies Social Media SUCKS.   Give me an 18 year high school dropout that has 20,000 followers on Twitter and Texts all day or or 72 year old Grandma that has a huge circle of friends that she stays in touch with and they are going to be more qualified than a dooffus that has spent the last six years learning from text books that were out of date 3 months before they went to print from professors who don’t know what the word profit means.  Yea… cool… let me hire 5 of them please. ..NOT.

Both the high school dropout and Grandma have better suited skills than the MBA by far with proper supervision.   They know how to communicate on a one on one basis and have practical experience doing so.

Old Media Skills Will Get You Killed In Social Media

Social Media is a whole different ball game and unfortunately most companies are clueless as to why. This is not traditional media and the skills used in old media will get you killed in Social Media.

This is about one on one interaction. It is direct marketing pure and simple and there are very few really good direct marketers out there. Which is why most Ad Agencies suck at Social Media.

But, if you are clued into this, that is good news for you!  Because it gives you the ability to clean the clock of the clueless out there.  Social Media gives a single Mom who is running her business out of her bedroom the chance to go up against multi-national companies and win!

This gives a single Mom who is running her business out of her bedroom the chance to go up against multi-national companies and win!

Seriously, if you know how to engage your customers via Social Media,  you will win out against the MBA’s and especially the Ad Agencies that are running Social Media for their clients.  They don’t get it either. But Ad agencies as a whole is a complete other clueless story.

There have been some notable disasters recently where Interns and other silly people have been turned loose on Social Media for clients and cause huge problems because they were clueless and yet had the power to cause a public relations disaster with one little Tweet.

Don’t Fall Victim To CTS

The Red Cross, Chrysler, and Kenneth Cole have all fallen victim to the Clueless Tweet Syndrome or what I am calling CTS.  CTS is bad, very bad.

Which brings me back to my main point. If you are a small shop, spend a couple of weeks figuring out a Social Media game plan and then use common sense and you can and will beat the big boys.

If you can afford it, hire a really good, and I do mean good Social Media consultant and outsource your Social Media to someone that actually knows what the hell they are doing.  You can get a real expert team for less than it costs to hire a single Social Media person and you can hit the ground running the right way.  For less than $2,500 a month you can get an expert team in to do things right if you want a complete turn-key experience.  If you are small company, you can get started for about 10% a month or $249.  Well, at least that is what I charge.  Contact me here if you need help or have questions about your Social Media. I will give you a free 15 minute session.

With Social Media being a necessity and not an option if you want to stay competitive, if you get your act together here you can own your niche and it is a totally level playing field.  This is one of the few areas of life where size does not matter.

I am going to give you two qualifications that can really nail down someone that you may want to bring on board if you do decide to go ahead and hire someone.

If you are a regular reader, you know that I am friends with Marilyne Woodsmall who is the author and creator of Personality Language ™ and which is the most advance behavior modeling tool in existence.

Using Personality Language ™ testing you need to find someone under the Motive People Pattern that is an Affiliation Type and under Primary Interest pattern a People Type.

Those two qualifications should knock out 90% of the people out there and help you zero in on someone that can actually do the job well. And as to hiring, if you are going to hire someone internally, you need to be using Personality Language ™ testing.  It is by far the best set of indicators that I know of for sure.

But the bottom line is this. If you can afford it, find and hire a qualified Social Media consultant to set up your game plan and acquaint you with what you need to get going correctly. Then you if you want bring in your own people to manage it great. But, make sure the people you hire have real qualifications such as empathy, good texting ability, good communications skills, and know marketing as well as having common sense.  A tall order I know.

10 REAL Qualifications For A Social Media Manager…

1. Must be comfortable texting and show a minimum of  1,000 texts a month
2. Must have been on Twitter and Facebook for a year minimum and have over 100 friends and followers and been active on a regular basis
3. Must have good marketing and sales skills. This is important. Your Social Media in order to be effective must have a game plan
4. Must be empathetic and a good listener
5. Must be great at problem solving and thinking on their feet
6. Must have a pleasant personality and enjoy interacting with people
7. Must be creative
8. Must have a clue and common sense (there are some tests for this)
9. Must be positive minded and have a Move Toward rather than a Move Away From motivation pattern
10. Must be able to type

That is it, schooling, experience, and age do not really matter. Really…

Follow what I have listed above and you will be ahead of the herd and your competition.

Cheers,
Andrew Anderson
Social Media Consultant

PS Contact me here if you need help or have questions about your Social Media. I will give you a free 15 minute session and answer as many questions as I can.  This is not a sales call but just honest to goodness free info for you.  I want to see you succeed.

This is an update of a post I did awhile ago… very relevant for today thought don’t you think?

Could it be that the real secret to profitability is to be Intelligently Lazy?  Could it really be the more Intelligently Lazy you, are the wealthier you become? And what about Alligators?

Well, like a lot of revelations, this one popped up rather unexpectedly right after I took a Green Pill this morning.

With this revelation came a whole breadth of understanding like revelations often do.  Point in fact, one of those revelations is I can tell you are Intelligently Lazy too because you are here reading this.

Hopefully, if I communicate this to you correctly, you are going to want to become the laziest person you know.

You may not know it yet, but I am actually giving you quite a compliment.  Let me explain to you why, by giving you two old adages you may have heard before.

• Most people are too busy making a living to ever become wealthy
• Most people are too busy doing urgent things, rather than important ones

This is because, as the old saying goes, it is hard to drain the swamp when you are up to your ass in alligators.

You are probably saying OK, what the heck is he talking about?  Well, I bring this up for a couple of reasons that I will make clear in a minute.  Here are some scenarios so that you can see what I mean.

Which Pill Are Your Taking Everyday?

I am going to call this option #1 or the Red Pill which is the Intelligently Hard Work Pill. You can use your intelligence, work hard, and spend a lifetime trying to figure out how to do things on your own.  This is what 99.999% of people do.

I am going to call this option #2 or the Green Pill which is the Intelligently Lazy Pill. You can read a book or a blog and learn the basics from someone else who may have spent their whole life learning about a subject or perhaps spent millions of dollars learning what works best and then emulate what they do, or even hire them.  These people most likely love what they do and are therefore very, very good at it.

So I ask you this,  which pill would you rather take?  The Red Pill or the Green Pill?  Which one do you think is going to cure your malaise called lack of wealth or put more money in your pocket the quickest? Which do you think is going to work the best?

Now if you are here, you have the propensity to be Intelligently Lazy which is a great thing in that you are out trying to learn something from someone else on how to be profitable.  Now what we have to do, and this goes against nearly all conventional wisdom, is  get you to become even lazier by learning from others even more.

Once you recognize that the lazier you become in this particular area, the faster profits are going to start hitting your bottom line.

I am going to reveal something else that I know about you.  You are involved in selling or marketing something.   You have a website or work in a business that sells something to customers who then give you money.

Even if you are not directly involved sales or marketing, nothing happens with any business until there is a sale.  With that in mind, and remembering how we decided that taking the Green Pill is the only smart way to go, how many books have you read on sales and marketing lately?

Hmm…do you think it might be a good idea to up your reading list a tad?

I am going to suggest that you read some of the following so that you are not inadvertently slipping yourself a Red Pill.

1. Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins – You can download this one free in PDF format by going Here

2. Ogilvy On Advertising by David Ogilvy

3. How to Advertise by Ken Roman and Jane Maas

4. How to Write a Sales Letter that sells! by Drayton Bird

5. Obvious Adams: by Robert R. Updegraff

6. Personality Language by Marilyne Woodsmall and Wyatt Woodsmall. If you click on the title, you can get $5 off of this book

7. www.21to21.com and of course this site.

Are there others? Absolutely, and I will post more at a later time,  but these should get you pointed in the right direction.  So the choice is really just how Intelligently Lazy can you become and how fast can you become truly lazy?  Your bank account could become larger right away.

You can get most of these books on Amazon.com and if you buy used versions, you can pick them up for only a few bucks.

Doing Things That Are Urgent Versus Doing Things That Are Important And Alligators

Here is where it can get out of focus sometimes.

You need to figure out which alligators are merely a pain in the butt and is not putting you in mortal danger. These non life-threatening alligators can take the form of having 20 things to do seemingly all of the time, having customers needing attention, an email that has to get out, or just trying to keep up with all the different things going on that absolutely demand your attention right now.

Could you put off sending that email to customers until tomorrow?  If that’s the case, use the time today to read a chapter out of one of the books above and make your email even better.

The result could be you getting a better response rate and getting 5 more orders which in turn eliminates an alligator that was biting you.  It can take the form of  a vendor looking for payment or alligator that said you really should get a new computer.

I am not suggesting you make a list per se, although I do find once you write down the alligators’ names, they are usually a lot less scary.

Then you simply take a step back and look at what you can do to be more Intelligently Lazy about things.  Oftentimes, it will make several other alligators go away as well.

Now I mentioned that I got the revelation after taking my Green Pill this morning.  I was reading some Drayton Bird who was a partner of David Ogilvy’s and is a pretty smart Bird if I must say so.

I have been pushing for Planned Ignorance as well with myself and my clients, which is a whole other subject and I will explain at a later date.  Because of this, when Bird mentioned Intelligently Lazy, it fit in with what I have been observing over the years with successful people and in my own success.  Let me have another one of those Green Pills please, Gulp!

The choice is really that easy and we make the choice every day, whether we realize it or not.

Cheers,

Andrew Anderson

PS  Here is to taking only Green Pills!

HIRE RIGHT THE FIRST TIME: Part II Qualified Sameness

THE CHANGE PEOPLE PATTERN™ – SAMENESS

By Marilyne Woodsmall

HIRE RIGHT THE FIRST TIME:

THE CHANGE PEOPLE PATTERN™ – QUALIFIED SAMENESS

Remember that now more than ever, given the present state of the global economy, it is so critical in your hiring practice to choose the right job candidate who best matches the tasks to be performed. Employers cannot rely on traditional resumes and a person’s physical appearance in hiring the best people for specific jobs. Instead, when you use People Patterns™ in your hiring, you will save you time, money, and valuable resources. You will enhance your productivity since you will be hiring right the first time rather than wasting time looking for new people to replace bad hires the second time around.

Over twenty years ago, we created Profiling Plus™, our own behavioral assessment instrument that specifically targets hiring and personnel. This effective and practical behavioral tool is one that synthesizes our knowledge of behavioral change and typological research and models. In the context of these articles, we are simply focusing on one aspect of work.

People Patterns™ are so revelatory in understanding why people do what they do. Remember that knowing how a person thinks and how he or she behaves in a particular context in the execution of a given task is going to be much more informative as far as determining how competent a given individual is going to be in the execution of a certain job. I insist on reminding you of an important point. It is that the best predictor of future behavior is past history. What determines a person’s suitability for a job is best reflected by what the person has done in the past in similar situations. It is these very factors relating to past and present behavior that are revealed through People Patterns™.

In this article let’s focus on the second element of the Change People Pattern™: Qualified Sameness, as it relates to personnel and hiring. There are obviously certain tasks that are much better suited for individuals who are qualified sameness in orientation.

Interestingly, the average business person in the world is qualified sameness. Chances are that if you are the typically successful business person, you probably see the world and conduct your business through qualified sameness filters. Also, the military often appeals to those who are qualified sameness (as well as sameness people). If there is a lot of variety of task, as in special forces units or with the French Foreign Legion, for example, you will more likely find individuals who tend to have marked difference traits in their behavioral profiles.

What distinguishes a qualified sameness person from a pure sameness person is that although the former likes jobs in which there is some repetition of task, the qualified sameness person needs some elements of variety to be part of the task from time to time. Each qualified sameness person is unique in the manner in which the element of variety comes into play. For example, in sales, the individual may enjoy the sameness in terms of selling the same product line, although he or she may like to expand the customer base so that they are always seeing new people rather than focusing on the same list of customers they see all the time. Or else, they may be selling the same product and experience the difference element by traveling to different cities.

Secretarial jobs and executive assistant jobs are well suited to qualified difference in that there is usually a set routine of certain tasks that need to be performed on a daily basis such as going through mail, taking phone calls, making appointments, etc. The element of variety may manifest in the planning of events, in receiving different visitors.

In the typical business, most managers tend to be qualified sameness and they well suited to handle different types of people because they feel comfortable with repetition and variety to different degrees. I mentioned assembly work in a prior article about sameness and personnel selection. Often, it is the supervisor on a given shift who tends to be the qualified sameness (or qualified difference person depending on the tasks at hand) because he or she is the one who has to be able to deal with changes that may come up. These unexpected elements of variety may take the form of glitches in a system that have to be corrected or changes in scheduling, etc. Generally speaking, good supervisors of sameness employees tend to be qualified sameness (or qualified difference depending on the context and task in question).

The so-called seven year itch cycle applies to qualified sameness people when it comes to staying at a given job for a certain period of time. Unlike the classic sameness person who may stay in a job for years or for life, the qualified sameness person will remain at the same position or job from seven to nine years approximately. Often the time factor is dependent on how much variety the person likes to experience in the job.

The other factor that determines how long a qualified sameness person stays at a given job is often based on how long it takes the person to learn a new set of skills and increase his or her knowledge base in performing the task. As long as the qualified sameness person continues to learn new things on the job, he or she is more likely to stay at the same job. The moment that boredom sets in, then the qualified sameness person is likely to want a change of jobs.

Finally, remember that in the typical business world, most people will be qualified sameness in orientation. They will be most happy and most productive in their jobs when they have a combination of repetition and variety. The context in which the variety manifests will be different for each job and for each person, as will the duration needed for the difference factor to appear.

For practical purposes, when it comes to hiring someone who best fits a given position, it is not about a particular People Pattern™ being good or bad. It is simply a question of finding the right person with the appropriate Change People Pattern™ to fit the task or tasks needed for the job to be done with competence and ease.

Click on the book below to order your copy today! Type in 21 in the coupon code and get $5 off!

Listen to what has happened at what I consider the best Social Media management tool and learn how you can use HootSuite to help you make more money, stay engaged with your customer base, and learn from the Secret Sauce that HootSuite is using that has lead them to dominate their market in less than a year.

Enjoy,

Andrew Anderson

Here is a link to sign up for HootSuite and get a free account or you can click on the image above or below. If you are a business, you really should look at signing up for the pro service at only $5.99 per month! It is the only way I use to manage my social media for myself and clients. I am also an affiliate too. Which as you know if you are a regular reader of mine, just how rare this is as I always drink my own Kool Aid.

Click the play button to listen to the interview or download the mp3.

HootSuiteInterview.mp3

Interview With Dave Olson Of HootSuite

Andrew: (Laughter) Yeah, okay. Hello, this is Andrew Anderson and I’ve got Dave with HootSuite on the interview here, and we haven’t spoken in, gosh I think it’s been 8 or 9 months or so. And quite a bit has changed. Um, the one thing that hasn’t changed is I’m still a big fan of HootSuite. I still think it’s the best social media tool that any business can use out there. And, point in fact, I became an affiliate, so I think I’ve sold a couple of subscriptions for you guys and I’m also a paying user of them and as everyone knows, if I don’t like something I won’t talk about it and I will not use it. So, that will set the stage for Dave Olson here and we’ll let you rip. Um, so you guys since we last spoke, um, you’ve surpassed a million users I believe. Is that correct?

Dave: Yeah. You know, it’s been a wild year since we spoke last, and it feels like every week we’re pushing out some exciting announcement and even as equally exciting, we’re finding ourselves in the middle of world affairs and business successes and all sort of stuff. So, it’s a real wild ride. We’re up to about 1.3 million users now and adding at a great pace every day. And it’s also really exciting that these users are coming from all around the world.

Andrew: Wow. Yeah, I hadn’t even thought of that. Um, one of the big things that has gone on, and I mentioned it previously is that you’ve gone to the paid model for your business customers. You still offer the free service, right?

Dave: Yeah. We sure do. In the basic plan which is free is, is really what’s used by 95% or more of our user base. Before we switched over to those premium plans, we looked real carefully at how people use HootSuite, the feature sets, the amount of networks. And we found that people either have a few, you know, maybe their personal Twitter or Facebook maybe LinkedIn. Or else, they have a ton where they’re clearly using it for business use. So, we kind of designed the packages to fit into those buckets. We first made some announcements about it at the end of last summer. Did a little bit of a very slow roll-out so we could really get some feedback from the market. Made some adjustments and finally migrated everyone with a month-long grace period and so on to make that decision and, ah, you know we had–of course, when you first roll out something like that, there’s going to be a few people who have some, maybe have a little bit of frustration…

Andrew: (Laughter) Get bent out of shape.

Dave: Yes, indeed. But for the most part, people were really excited. And the work that we had done building the community was folks like yourself, really paid off ’cause folks were coming out and saying, “Hey, you know, it’s $5.99 a month and look what you get.” And it allows them, I mean, you know, we’ve got to make a living, too, right? So.

Andrew: Yeah. No, it’s a deal. It definitely is. Of all of the roll-out models to the–what did you call it? Freemium or Premium levels?

Dave: Yeah, it’s Premium, yep.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s the best one that I’ve been involved with, you know, as a customer. And it was fairly painless and it wasn’t a mega amount of money. If you can’t afford $5.99, you probably shouldn’t be in business anyway. But if, you know, it was $19.99 though or $29.99, I would have had to think about it a little bit, you know? So.

Dave: Yeah, and there’s certainly some upgrades and we really tried to put into that a-la-carte model so if you wanted to build a team out, well, there’s an additional charge for that. You can opt into some elevated support times if that’s something that’s really important to you. But at the same time, um, you know, that 95% of the people are using our free basic tool and finding everything that they need within that. Um, and even the basic matches up great against any other tool out there by any measure. Um, you know, obviously we take really good care of our entire community–both with adding new features, adding new networks and providing that really top tier customer support. All of those things are so important to us.

Andrew: It is. And I think Gary Vaynerchuk, you know, has talked about it and about the thank you economy about keeping your customers happy. Which you would think it’s common sense. But you guys do a particularly good job of it which is, you know, amazing because I think the norm is really service these days in so many areas.

Dave: Well, it’s interesting because we have this weird role of using HootSuite to promote HootSuite. So it feels a little recursive sometimes. But the same things that I tell people about, you know, you’re out selling widgets, this is what you should do with HootSuite, we do the exact same things in here in-house. We send out hundreds and hundreds of twitters a day, personally following up with people. You know, anyone who follows our Hootwatch account which is kind of our media and backchannel announcement list or else my personal account can see that throughout the day, we’re always finding people who are doing neat things, turn their friends onto the products, writing great blog posts. You know, we really try to amplify the success of our users as, you know, as reflective on the good work that we’re doing.

Andrew: Right, and do you want more followers on your personal thing? Or do you want to keep that quiet?

Dave: No, that’s fine. I, ah, DaveOHoots, and we also have a number of different Twitter handles. Of course, there’s the @HootSuite but another neat thing that we’ve done since we spoke last is we’ve really gone big on this internationalizing–for lack of a better word–where we’ve built out Twitter accounts and we’re providing support and monitoring, at least community building, in several different languages now. Particularly in Japanese and Spanish. We have everything that we’re releasing as far as our case studies and info sheets and marketing materials is going out in Japanese and Spanish as well as English and usually on the same day.

Andrew: Wow, that’s cool. Very cool.

Dave: Yeah, it’s pretty neat. You know I did–I’m sorry to interrupt there–but ah just before the holidays, we did a big announcement in Japan and I was there, skyped in through Skype video chat to a media briefing room back in Tokyo, and I’m there coming in from ah my house with the video cam because we had to coordinate hours and seeing, looking back at all these Japanese reports, they’re in this media briefing room and the next day, seeing us written up in Japanese in these major newspapers in Japan. Ah, we certainly get, we have a lot of fun with that and really savor the opportunity to go there and build. And Japan, in particular, is an under-realized Twitter market. If you ask people what was Twitter’s high watermark of most tweets per second, um, we’ll say, you know, it must have been the Super Bowl or maybe the Oscars the other night. Or even the World Cup football, you know the soccer tournament? None of those are the high watermark. The high watermark of Twitter ever is 4 seconds after midnight on New Year’s Eve in Japan.

Andrew: Really. Wow.

Dave: 6,000 tweets per second. Now, to put that in a relative sense, the high watermark of the Super Bowl was 3,000-4,000 tweets per second. So, you know, at 4,000 tweets per second, Japan crushed that and this is like a whole other tech economy that a lot of folks don’t even realize really exists. And 140 characters in Japanese. That’s like a small novel sometimes.

Andrew: Really. Wow. Um, the–and I’d also heard, and I think this is relative to Facebook, that they have fewer friends but they communicate more with them. Have you guys seen that to be the case? Or is that just something I heard?

Dave: We don’t see near as much activity on Facebook in Japan as we do with Twitter. But we’ve also noted that the big social network in Japan is one called “Mixi”.

Andrew: Really.

Dave: And that has Facebook-like domination. You know where Facebook dominates most markets, Mixi is absolutely the dominant social network in Japan and, as such, we added it to the, we added it to the dashboard so now besides Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Myspace, Ping, etc., now we’ve got a Mixi which is big in Japan and we’ve also added Ning recently, too, which is a little experiment that we’ve been doing with the Ning community. So, we’re really now, we’re trying to branch out and find where those passionate groups of communities where we can tap in and give them something that they really need to help them do their work.

Andrew: Cool. Yeah, so you got Mixi in the mix now. That’s interesting. What’s their user base? Do you happen to know? Or rough estimate off hand?

Dave: Oh, it’s tens of millions.

Andrew: Oh, it is. Wow.

Dave: Yeah, and when we launched that–the blog post–I got a lot of reference linked into some stuff so you can learn more about how social media is developed in Japan. And actually this year at South by Southwest, ah, we’re hosting a panel called “Big in Japan” that kind of, we brought together a few different cross-cultural business people from Japan and North America to talk about how do you localize for Japan? How do you outreach to that market? When do you know it’s the right time to go in there? What are the expectations in the market? ’cause it’s been a fascinating experience for us, for sure.

Andrew: Um-hmm. Well, I wish I was going to be out there this year, but not going to be able to make it. The most–I’m going to go back here. How does it feel to have, you know, as many customers as you do now? Did you guys project this? Was this in your realm of possibility? What was the viewpoint back in April of last year?

Dave: Well, we certainly put a lot of, um, importance on listening to our users and building the tool that we know we can build. And we here have, you know, we have an outstanding team of people who come in with ideas, and we go from idea to execution very rapidly. So, it’s more driven by that if we build the best thing, the thing that we know we can build, then people will come and come on board with it. You know, we’re here using it that too so we know what the people out there want. We listen voraciously to customer feedback. And our development team just doesn’t know the meaning of the word, “Oh, no, I don’t think we can do that.” And they rock stuff out in record time. So, really, we’re so focussed on getting that next integration getting that next release out that that’s kind of our focus. You know, that one-game-at-a-time kind of thing rather than looking at the broad breaststrokes. That said, you know, we’re lead by a real visionary thinker who’s always coming in with some other way to, ah, you know push something amazing out and, you know, that’s some of the examples you mentioned with the affiliate program. The Crowdsource translation program which now Twitter and a few other companies have hopped on board and released very similar programs. Our Hoots with University program. You know, we, we’re always launching something. And it’s really based on that user feedback and where we see a need in the market.

Andrew: Oh, cool. So your focus is on the product and the customers take care of themselves basically. I mean the growth.

Dave: Ah, yeah. I certainly would do things to encourage that along. But, it’s, you know, we don’t do traditional advertising, per se, or now we have a business sales department here that helps that along but did the users kind of take care of themselves? We really put a lot of effort into once people sign up for their account to make sure that they get onboard and really engaged. You know, it can be a little intimidating if you’ve gone right from Twitter web and all of a sudden, you’re looking at HootSuite because there’s a lot of power in there. And it can be like sitting down in a jet plane cockpit of you’ve never seen it before. So, we’ve added a lot of resource to kind of help people get over that learning curve and get up to speed quickly.

Andrew: Gotcha. And then, I guess from a little bit different standpoint having been involved in the startup, you got any advice for other startups out there that are, you know, growing fast or they’ve got a great product and, you know, what you’ve learned with the growth thing that looks like a real hockey stick.

Dave: It does. And it’s not just because we’re Canadian.

Andrew: Yeah, although that doesn’t hurt, huh?

Dave: Really, kind of from a personal standpoint in making sure that, you know, remember why it is that you got into this game and, you know, write down those things and kind of leave messages for yourself to look at six months later so you kind of remember where you came from. Because, you know, it’s not an easy life doing a startup. It’s a lot of late nights and it’s a lot of hustling. There’s a lot of change to get stuff out and get stuff pushed out. So you have to kind of take care of yourself in the sense that remember why you’re doing it. But, from a business standpoint, absolutely take fantastic care of your customers. Make them into your stars. Listen to everything that they have to say. You know, we try to reply back to most everyone and, ah, but we certainly listen in to everyone.

Andrew: So, you guys are in the catbird seat as far as social media goes. Where do you see social media heading? I mean it’s, it’s got a major impact these days on a lot of things, and I’m not sure that people realize just how big it is. But I want to get your take on that.

Dave: Well, I think that very soon, we’re to the point that people stop calling it social media and it’s just media. It’s just–everyone has this, this ability to amplify. So I think that the power of these web tools is just starting to be felt because regular folks, you know, folks who aren’t geeky or early adopters, or whatever, as they’re coming on board and they don’t have preset notions about what these tools can do, I think that’s where you see the really exciting things. I think you’ll see companies engaging with their audiences in a more authentic manner with creative kind of advertising.

Andrew: Right.

Dave: You know, we’ve seen with the Twitter promoted tweets, I think you’ll see a lot of creativity in that space where there’ll be kind of special offers, geo located offers and that kind of thing. With what we saw recently in Egypt, which was a stunning story for us when we came in one day and we saw 7,000% growth in Egyptian signups and traffic in one day.

Andrew: Wow.

Dave: Basically what happened is when Twitter and Facebook were first shut down, word quickly got around that you could still get out to those networks through HootSuite and so for 36 hours, we were the outlet for a lot of this conversation which was amazing for us to watch and something that you could have never possibly predicted.

Andrew: Right.

Dave: So I think the one thing that I can say for the future is that it’s going to be very different than what we’ve seen the last couple years where it’s more, um, people who have the ability to speak to one another in all sorts of different ways. I mean, you know, you and I, we have Twitter and Skype and phones and emails and that kind of thing. But there’s a lot of people who are going skip a lot of those steps and go right to the social media, and they’re going to be able to do amazing things from a business, political, social realm that we can’t even think of.

Andrew: Right. Huh. Yeah, I hadn’t realized that you guys were the outlet for that. You know, imagine that they didn’t report that on the news. Go figure.

Dave: Well, we actually got quite a bit of coverage about it in itself and part of that was, you know, we were so fascinated with what had happened that we released an infographic. We also did an infographic for our million-user threshold where we kind of broke down for social media geeks to see what percentage of messages go out through Twitter versus Facebook versus the other networks in what media and kind of our growth patterns. But we did the same thing for Egypt where we kind of tried to articulate in some way our impact. And it wasn’t to put ourselves in the story but it was, I mean, we couldn’t help but feel an affinity with these people when the tweets started to turn to, “They’re using flags as bandages now.” You know, that’s–and they’re sending these messages out through our tool that’s made by this group of developers and marketers here in a little office in Vancouver and we’re having impact in world affairs. It was a pretty incredible feeling, and we just wanted to share that with the world in the form of this infographic.

Andrew: Gotcha. And then, well I’ll have to put that on the site, too. But you gotta remember, I live under a rock when it comes to news, and I’m also involved in a startup, too. So, I don’t have a lot of free time. (Laughter)

Dave: Yeah, if it hadn’t impacted us so directly, I definitely wouldn’t have been as well informed. And now we’re seeing the same thing in Libya. And so we start seeing the internet as this, ah, as a very heavily wielded political tool in a lot of ways. So, it’s fascinating to watch and I think the next year or two, it’s just going to be wild as the tools evolve and the understanding of what these tools can do moves away from the cynicism or the self-referentialness and becomes more and more mainstream.

Andrew: Right. Um, I guess in, I’d like to get one or two of the newer tools or techniques, you know, that HootSuite can give a business the ability to use now that, and I know it’s come a long way since the interface, you know, 8-9 months ago, um, do you have any high points there that you might, someone that’s new to HootSuite from a business standpoint that might be relevant to them?

Dave: Sure. From a business standpoint, there’s two that jump out at me right away that I think business users would really love. In the last 6 months, there’s been a lot of conversation about influence. I mean, of course, you love all your followers equally. But, from a business standpoint, you want to reach out to the people who have a big reach first and foremost to help amplify your message. So, we’ve integrated Klout into the dashboard. Klout, that’s with a K. They have an algorithm that measures people’s reach and influence based on who follows them, how many times they get re-tweeted, you know, what kind of clicks they get. Basically, their realm of social influence. And then they assign a score to each person. Now, I don’t want the social web to turn into a popularity contest, but it’s a great way that within your HootSuite streams, you set a search stream for, you know, profit coaching or something like that, right? And then you start looking down and you can move a little slider bar across and it’ll drop off all the people who are under that certain level of Klout so you might find the ten people in your network that have high Klout scores that you want to outreach first to with some kind of special offer or to put an advance notice of some message or something like that. Also, on each person’s little popup profile card, you’ll see their Klout score.

Andrew: Okay, yes. Go ahead.

Dave: The second thing that I think is really handy is Retweets. Retweets are obviously a really powerful way to build your network, amplify messages and kind of do a favor back for the people who are in your network. And now we’ve added a way where you can choose which Retweet style you want to use on the fly. So on each tweet, you can choose the old school RT style where you can put in some more notes and add, “Wow, I thought this was a great article” and Retweet, etc. or you can do the new web native style that’s similar to Twitter web and you can choose that on the fly. So whichever one you like, you can choose them, and you don’t have to be stuck with one choice. So, it’s the best of both worlds.

Andrew: Gotcha. And then, one of the other features I like, and I don’t know how long it’s been there–it’s seems like it’s been there forever, but–is the ability to manage conversations you have with individuals and they stack up so you don’t have to go searching for them.

Dave: Yeah. That’s super handy, especially if you’re dealing with a lot of volume and managing like, you know, monitoring brand sentiment for example. You can see well, like why is this person saying this? And at first, it can, you know, be a little disorienting but as you start to expand the conversation and go back to find out where that comment came from, it really puts it in context, and context is everything in understanding what people are feeling.

Andrew: It indeed is. So, I know you’re a busy guy there and I don’t want to take up too much more of your time but anything else you want to throw into the mix?

Dave: Ah, well a couple things that we love to see people doing is if you write a blog post or have some tips about HootSuite that you’re sharing with your audience, let us know, and we’ll include your blog post in our user-created tutorials, give you a nice link back, and share your news and share your site with our audience. Ditto with any kind of media articles. We round those up and put them in news roundups. WE also tweet them out over a HootWatch. So, there’s a couple fun things if you want to engage with us a little bit more. And if we see you doing neat stuff and helping other people out–learn about HootSuite–we might even send you a HootKit which is a little envelope of stickers and pins and tattoos and other cool treats.

Andrew: Okay. Well, that’s cool. And then what’s the best way to just go to the–is there any particular Twitter name that they should follow to do this? How do they get in touch with you guys?

Dave: Well, just check out the blog, and it will give you all of the hints and clues and stuff. But if anyone has any questions, DaveOHoots is a great way to get started. If you have Help questions specifically though, go right to HootSuite_Help and we’ve got some fantastic technicians always all day long that just answer any questions via Twitter. So we’re definitely eating our own dog food and I tell you what, it’s pretty tasty.

Andrew: (Laughter) That’s pretty good. Yeah, you know, and any of the business owners out there that aren’t using HootSuite, I can’t recommend enough and for all the reasons that you just said, Dave. Plus, there’s tons more that once you get used to it–which won’t take very long, you know, within 5 minutes–you should be up and running on most of the, you know, some of the really good features on there and then, you know, you can always dive into it. But, you know, it’s the only way that I could even imagine managing, you know, all of the Twitter accounts we have and keep sane at the same time.

Dave: Well, all these folks out there who are going to sign up for your business account, I encourage you to do it through Andrew’s affiliate link.

Andrew: Well there you go. Thanks for the plug!

Dave: Let’s get this guy some beer money. Right?

Andrew: There you go. So, I’ll have to check and see what the sales are. But, yeah, maybe I could go buy a beer here soon and if not, maybe I’ll buy you one next time up in Vancouver. So, alright, well Dave, thank you very much. Thanks. This is an interview with Dave Olson at HootSuite–the best social media product out there for business that I can think of for sure. So, thanks a bunch for chatting with me, and we’ll get this up on the blog here and hopefully a couple people will read it and start using HootSuite and make their life a lot easier.

Dave: Sounds great, Andrew. It’s a pleasure to chat with you again.

Andrew: Okay, take care. Bye-bye. And that’s it.

An interview with the author of the new book “Personality Language” Marilyne Woodsmall

(OK, I threw in the part about finding the love of your life but it is possible   )

I did this interview when this book first came out and I see that there a few people have picked on just how valuable this really is and are starting to teach it. But, why not get it from the Horse’s mouth so to speak instead.

Get comfortable and take a listen to an interview I did with the author of the new book Personality Language. Listen in as we discuss how using Personality Language can dramatically boost your profits.

This is a totally new way to reach not only new customers, but get a lot more sales from your existing customers.

I hope to have more chats with her about this mind-blowing new way to communicate with your customers and increase your profits.

We talk about how Personality Language and you will find out why you want to layout all of your Blog posts, Sales Letters, and Information Products this way if you want to have the most success with them and become profitable.

Marilyne Woodsmall and Wyatt Woodsmall, who are Human Success Modelers wrote this as a primer to introduce this new way of thinking.

While you may not have ever heard of them before, I can bet that you have heard of, or seen on TV, or on the Internet, or read the books of some of the many people that either one or both of them have coached. People like Anthony “Tony” Robbins, Eben Pagan of Internet Marketing fame (if you have never heard of him before, under the pen name David DeAngelo who sells over $20,000,000 of Dating eBooks and Advice on the Internet every year and doesn’t even have a published “real book”) , Joe Polish of Piranha Marketing, world-class Marketer and Joint Venture specialist extraordinaire, and finally a host of Olympic Athletes and Coaches that brought home oodles of Medals, and quite a few other people that you have heard or seen as well.

Again the Woodsmall’s don’t go out of their way to mention them as they don’t like to talk about the people that they have worked or are working with all that much. It is just the way they operate, and I can respect that.

The only reason that I bring these people up is help you give some weight to what I am about to share with you. The folks that I mentioned have used what they learned from Marilyne and Wyatt to help make themselves tens of millions of dollars and to achieve success at a world class level that very few people are ever able to obtain.

Part of what those individuals did to obtain those ultra-high levels of success was to Leverage, with a capital L, what Marilyne and Wyatt gave to them to propel themselves to higher levels of success faster than they could have done on their own.

Now imagine if you had access to that same type of information that you could use to Leverage yourself to those ultra-high levels of success and profitability? Now you can.

Take a listen and let me know what you think.

Press the play button and find out how to improve your sales with Personality Language.

1.mp3

Or you can download it here Marilyne Woodsmall Interview.

Click below on the book cover to order the book and type in 21 to get a $5.00 discount. I can’t recommend this book enough. It is a game changer. I will also be posting other interviews with Marilyne and Wyatt as soon I can talk them into giving up more information.

Even if you don’t buy the book, go and sign up for their newsletter at www.PersonalityLanguage.com as it is well worth it.

Money makes the world go around. You have heard it. Is there anyone out there that does not believe it? Well, I am going to give you some practical tips on how you can start improving your financial situation, immediately. I am not talking pie in the sky stuff, but practical things that no matter where you are on the money totem pole you can start doing right after you read this. I promise you that the concepts are easy to use and implement. Plus, more importantly, they work.

Having been in positions of having money and not having it, I can indeed tell you that life is far easier having it than not, yes, tis true indeedy. I know it is hard to believe. LOL

Looking back now some of those times not having money is funny but, it is not when it is happening to you. I have been totally flat dead broke and not sure where it was going to come from. I have grocery money come in the form of payment for changing my long distance service and ATT at one time put food on the table for a whole month.

It is not fun, it is way overrated, and if you have ever been there, you know it Sucks with a capital S. I know a while back I vowed to not go there again. So, I put my noodle toward figuring out how to do that. It takes up a good portion of each day but, not quite the way it used to though and there are more dollar signs associated with my thinking.Now when I say wealthy, I mean have enough money to live life comfortably and be able to enjoy things without having to worry about money. It does not mean you have to be a millionaire.

There are thousands of books, seminars, and tapes on how to make money. It can be overwhelming, but I love a challenge. I have literally read hundreds. There are some very good ones out there and as you can imagine, many that are not worth the paper they are printed on.

My first bit of advice is to depend on yourself. Make sure that you are the one in control and you know what is going on. Don’t be handing your money decisions off to someone else and then complain about the results if you don’t have a clue what is going on. There is too much info on the net and at the library these days to not get up to speed on what going on in any situation.

Is there a big secret to having enough money so that you don’t have to worry about paying your bills and all that entails? Freeing you up so that you can spend your time on things that really matter like doing the things you love with the people that you love? The answer is an emphatic, YES there is.

In studying wealthy people there are a couple of things that I found that stand out. First off, they feel that they deserve it. Not only do the feel it, they know it. They actually feel that it is there due. What a cool concept. Coming from a middle-class family with all of the usual illogical concepts about wealth this was pretty far out.

The second trait that most of them have is that they are fast at making decisions and they don’t go back and second guess themselves later on.  I have written about this in my Books “The 4 Hour Muse” and “Start On Monday“.  I typically see wealthy people make five decisions for every one decision a not so wealthy or successful person makes. The wealthy person grabs 2 pieces of cake and is eating one by the time most people are deciding if they want any.  The wealthy person will often as not in turn sell the other piece back to the slow poke for a profit.

You have to get used to making decisions faster.  In this day in age things are moving at an unheard of pace and you need to step up your game or you will not make money period.

OK, you might not want to start your own business, you may just want to improve your life!  Make a habit of making decisions quickly, learn from the ones that don’t work out and move on.

Think  And Know That You Can Get The Money

Wealthy people approach money as something that they can indeed obtain and they put several hours a week into it and in many cases a whole lot more than that. I mean that most people go to there job and collect a pay check and then go about there business.

Wealthy people spend a good part of the “Free Time” in better educating themselves about becoming wealthier. They don’t for the most part spend the better part of their lives parked in front of the TV.

One of the other things that I have learned is that they make money work for them, they don’t work for the money, which is totally reversed from what people that are not wealthy think.

I am going to give you an abridged version of this information as I don’t want to write a tome here… LOL

Unfortunately, we are not taught how to make money in schools. No matter how much you paid for your education, I doubt that you learned that basics on how to not only build wealth, but to have enough money to not worry about it anymore. And may I ask, how many of you had a great Economics teacher that made learning about Economics fun? How about rate of returns or compounded interest? Thought so.

It Is Not Your Fault…Mostly 

So, don’t feel too bad if you did not have any great teachers on the subject of money, or if you listened to what the poor ignorant folks in the public schools and what your college professors told you and you have not arrived yet. They were just ignorant and did there woefully inadequate best. Just a fyi, the majority of the wealthiest people in the world do not have a college degree of if they do, they made their money in a field unrelated to what their degree is in.  There are a lot of over educated poor people out there.

Here are a few of the secrets to start having more money and to keep getting more of it.

First off you have to make up your mind that it is something that you really want to do. Not just wish it, but actually get to the point whereby you are willing to do something about it every day. Every single day. Not when it is convenient or when you can work it in your schedule.

Write It Down

In the example here, I put in $5,000, but perhaps you are more comfortable with $50 or $500. Just put in what you feel is right.  Once you accomplish this goal, you can always bump it up.

You have to have a plan and write it down. If you don’t write it down, it is just hot air. You need to not only write it down, but you need to look at what your wrote down every day and act on it. That is not to say that this process can’t be fun. In my books I talk about the fact that no one in there right mind would ever think about building a skyscraper without a Blueprint, or go on a trip cross country without a map, yet, they travel along their financial future without a Blueprint or a Map and then wonder why they get lost along the way.

We are going to take baby steps first, and then you will be running before you know it.

Next , you need to convince yourself that you deserve it. I am not sure why exactly, although I do have my theories, but many of us deep down don’t feel that we deserve to have wealth. It has been programmed in to you. Many feel guilty about having money as if for some reason they are not worthy. This is bunk and BS!

Before I go any further, much of what I am going to tell you is contained in the book, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker. I have had the pleasure of meeting him a couple of times and he seems like a nice guy. I suggest you go out and purchase a copy if you are serious about becoming wealthy he does a great job of explaining this.

As far as programming or your Money Blueprint goes, perhaps you heard while you were growing up for instance that you have to work hard to get ahead. That you have to work like a slave. That the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, the Filthy Rich and all of these sayings with negative connotations.

Not to get off track but the Rich will get Richer for the most part although recently, that has not been the case in the US but that is a story about a degenerative tax system that rewards laziness and punishes productivity.   This should not be a big WOW for anyone. They have to tools and knowledge to grow more money. Just like any good farmer versus city folk that think hoe is spelled Ho. Arghh That was too easy.

Back to the subject. Did your parents have arguments over money? Guess what your subconscious mind thinks when the subject of money comes up? You got it, bad, bad things. Guess what else happens? Your subconscious in order to protect you will make sure to that you do not get enough money so bad things will not happen to you.

Your subconscious can’t tell reality from make believe. So, while you frontal lobe may know the difference, you subconscious does not. Lets take advantage of that!

You need to believe deep down that is Ok for you to have money and that it is a good thing. How do you reprogram yourself? Much like you learn anything. Repetition of input. You should do this by writing, hearing it, and looking at it. But this may take a bit longer in that you will have to also unlearn what you think you know…LOL

This can be done first by writing it down and secondly by reaffirming it to yourself. Now you may be saying, geeshe this is a bunch of hooey. The only thing that I can say is how has what you have been doing so far working for you?

Look at it this way, if you are not wealthy yet, what have you got to loose? The things that I am going to tell you that you can do will only take about 10 minutes a day and it will only cost you pennies.

First off, and I know some of this stuff may seem a little bit silly but, I can assure you it does work.

Lets get started on the what you need to do. I will ask you to spend some money, that adage that you have to have money to make money is true, but not in the way think.

You need to buy a yellow pad, or a fresh spiral bound notebook and a pen or pencil. Get a string and attach it to the notepad. This way when you have a money idea you can always right it down. I want you to start all the way in the back. This way the latest thing that you do will be on top. Make sense?

Write your name at the top and the date. Write down underneath that, “I deserve to be wealthy.” “I deserve to have enough money to have fun and enjoy life and help those that I love. ” I have a wealthy mind and I am beginning to become more wealthy every day.” ” I am a money magnet.” Now read it aloud 12 times, yes 12.

For those of you that actually do this exercise you might have found it sounds silly and is kind of hard to do. It felt funny, didn’t it? Don’t worry, it will get easier once your subconscious buys into it. It may take awhile to convince it that all of the baloney that it has picked up over the years is exactly that. Do this every day for a month and two or three times a day is even better. You are going to be surprised at the results. If you have a spouse it will greatly help if they buy into this. If not it may be a bit harder and you can just tell them that if they give you any guff, that when you do become wealthy you may just trade up for someone that does appreciate you.

Stay Away From Crap Magnets

You also need to stay away from crap magnets.  (see previous post about them) Stay away from anyone that does not support you in this.  And I do mean anyone, especially relatives.

Now on to some fun stuff. It does not matter how much you make right now. We are going to figure out a budget that will make you money. Here is a plan on divvy up your funds.

If you read Harv’s book and I highly suggest that you do, he puts this exercise toward the back. But I think this is one of the most important steps.

Lets start with a budget. An honest to God right it down on paper budget. You might be saying that I don’t have a whole lot of money to start with or invest. It doesn’t matter, we will show you how to get it too. If you can’t handle what little money you do have now, how do you expect to handle a bunch of it?

I like to start with the best part first. You can do this with jars, shoe boxes, or a spreadsheet and a couple of bank accounts.

Now, what were are going to do is to start putting a portion of your money that you earn to work for you. It doesn’t matter if you have only $50.00 or $500 per month to budget. This program will help you ramp that up very quickly.

You Need A Fun Fund

We will go over a perfect scenario first. 10% of our budget will go for a Frolick fund. And yes, it is exactly that. You will have a fund that you have to spend every month on having Fun and Frolick for yourself.

Why on earth would you start a budget with a Frolick Fund? Well, it serves a couple of purposes. Not the least of which is to keep you and your subconscious motivated to continue with the program. Besides this will give you a taste of the Wealthy Mindset.

You and your subconscious mind works better with rewards and gratification. So, each month you have to go out and spend all of your Frolick fund. Maybe you want to get a massage, go to the movies, buy books, or whatever trips your trigger. But you have to spend all of it each and every month on doing something for you that brings you joy. Ok, you may only have $5 dollars a month at first but, I can guarantee you that once you get into the habit of allocating your money you will find that this amount will grow exponentially.

If you are a couple, this means you may want to do something together or do something separately. As long as it is fun and you spend every penny on you, you are good to go.

10% or $5 dollars goes into your Financial Freedom Account. This money is only to be used to create passive income. You never spend this principal amount, only the income that it produces.

The next portion is 10% that goes for your education account. Use this to educate yourself to make more money. Perhaps you use this to go to college or to take courses on making money or buying books. I know that I have invested a boat load of money attending different classes on different ways to make money. Guess what, it works.

The next portion is 10% and it goes for Long Term Savings for Spending at a later day account.

We have another 10% going for giving. Yes, you can give this to whomever or whatever you want. Now I always mess this part up as when I look around, I can’t think of anyone better to give it to than me…LOL

Let’s say the last 50% goes for overhead and bills and is our necessities account.

So, it should look like this.

10% for your Frolick Fund – you have to spend this on yourself and have fun
10% for passive investments
10% for long term saving for spending later
10% for giving – Even if it is to yourself if there is a deep hole
10% for education
50% for necessities

What does this do for you? Well, have you ever noticed that whatever you mind focuses on it has a tendency to expand and grow? You will be surprised at what starts to happen once you start doing this. You will start seeing opportunity everywhere!

Now where are you going to put all of these hard earned funds. Well, this comes down to where your interests lie.

The Pillow Ratio

What the Pillow Ratio is and why I only invest in small businesses and people

I happen to like the Internet to sell your product. I invest in my own businesses and actually in small niche businesses that I can help scale on the Internet.  I am still amazed that over 65% of the businesses in the US do not have a way to buy their product or service on the Internet. It has a very high Pillow Ratio for me. A pillow ratio is an investment that allows me to sleep well at night. LOL Here are just a few reasons why I only invest in small businesses and people directly.

One, there is no building to burn down, I have insurance in the form of backups of their site. I don’t have to worry about some idiotic CEO fudging the numbers or diddling his secretary and seeing my investment drop 80% in one day. I know what is going on. Generally, there are at least 500,000 new potential customers that go on the Web every day.

My overhead is low and the ” Store”  is open 24 hours a day. If you know what you are doing, you can make a boat load of money. I know I usually get better than a 50% to 100% cash on cash returns or I don’t mess with the deal.

But as you know, you should always consult a qualified professional before you invest your money.  I just play one on TV.  The kicker is to find one that knows his or her rear end from first base.

Your Best Investment

Your best investment without a doubt is the time and money you invest in yourself! Don’t forget that part.

As to some other money making ideas, how about finding a new job or a part-time job where you can expand your skill sets?

The point is that you can do anything to get extra money. Ever tried selling things on Ebay? It still works! Do you have any special skills or hobbies that you could put to use?  Babysitting, mowing lawns, putting together resumes, baking, anything to bring in more money to get you going.

Once you get into the money mindset and you will start having money come your way. And you will see more amazing ways to make money than you ever thought possible.

It takes constant practice and it does take work. I know I get off track every once in a while. But, when I do focus on it guess what?  Money starts coming in out of the wood work!

I know Harv recommends this and I really do as well. If I see change on the ground, even if it is just a penny pick it up and say ” I am a money magnet” and do a little jig. People think that I am crazy but you know what? The universe hears you and starts to send you more of it. Most importantly you own wonderful brain hears you and it starts to go into over drive.

Money finds those that appreciate it and it goes where it is wanted and taken care of. This may sound like mumbo jumbo but I have seen it happen time and time again. Do the same with the money you find in your pants, or your purse. Money will start to come your way, be ready for it, no matter how big or small.

Lets wrap this up and put it in its most basic terms. Start paying attention to and taking care of your money and it will pay attention and take care of you.

Have fun and remember that you deserve to be wealthy and successful and you are a Money Magnet!

Cheers,

Andrew Anderson