Make Money While Almost Doing Nothing

What Is A Blog?

2007-05-04T09:02:00.000-07:00

By; Elvis. 11th Nov. 2006

This is what I am always asked through emails, conversation, Instant Messaging chats and Phone calls. If you’re reading this you may well be asking the same question.There are a number of ways I could answer this question ranging from the broad to the highly technical. Here are a few definitions from other much wiser people to get us started;

‘A weblog is a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically, that can be viewed in an HTML browser.’

‘A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links.’

'A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.”

‘A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know.

There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there’s also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc.’‘A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web.

The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.” Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog. Postings on a blog are almost always arranged in cronological order with the most recent additions featured most prominantly.’

‘A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging”. Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries”.A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger”.

A blog comprises text, hypertext, images, and links (to other web pages and to video, audio and other files). Blogs use a conversational style of documentation. Often blogs focus on a particular “area of interest”.

What is a Blog? Confused yet? Don’t be -

I'ts really quite simple. To put it as simply as possible, a blog is a type of website that is usually arranged in chronological order from the most recent ‘post’ (or entry) at the top of the main page to the older entries towards the bottom. Blogs are usually (but not always) written by one person and are updated pretty regularly.

Blogs are often (but not always) written on a particular topic - there are blogs on virtually any topic you can think of. From photography, to spirituality, to recipes, to personal diaries to hobbies - blogging has as many applications and varieties as you can imagine. Whole blog communities have sprung up around some of these topics putting people into contact with each other in relationships where they can learn, share ideas, make friends with and even do business with people with similar interests from around the world.

Blogs usually have a few features that are useful to know about if you want to get the most out of them as a reader. Lets examine a couple briefly.Archives - You might look at the front page of a blog and think that there is not much to them. A few recent entries, some links to other sites and not much else. However its worth knowing that there is a lot more going on under the surface that might initially meet the eye. For example in addition to the main page of this blog - at the time of writing this post there are over 520 other pages or posts below the surface that I’ve written over the past few months. When I write a post like this one it goes to the top of the front page. As it gets older and as I add more current posts it begins its journey down the page until it disappears from it. This is not the end of its life however, because it goes into the ‘Archives’ of my blog. It sounds like a dusty dark place but its really just like a filing cabinet that is easily accessible in a couple of ways. You can read my ‘archives’ simply by looking on the ’sidebar’ (over on the left of this blog) at the ‘archives’ or ‘categories’ section. There you will see links to all my old posts which you can access either by category. You’ll see a category for ‘Advertising’ - click that link and you’ll see all my old posts on the topic of Advertising with the most recent at the top and the oldest at the bottom. Comments - Not all blogs use comments - but most do.

This blog is not a monologue but a conversation. You can give me feedback on almost everything I write simply by clicking the ‘comments’ link at the bottom of each one of my posts. This will take you to a little form where you leave your name, email and a link to your own blog if you have one as well as your feedback, comment, critique, question, essay on why you love my blog, promise of money…. etc). Try it now. Scroll to the bottom of this page, click ‘comments’ and fill in the blanks with a little introduction to yourself.A great way to learn about blogs is to read a few. Leave some comments, ask questions and bookmark your favourites. An even better way to learn about blogs is to start your own. Ok - you might be laughing at me now - you think you are not web savy enough to have your own site? You wouldn’t know where to start? You don’t know how?

My Secret -

Let me share a secret with you - Two years ago I knew nothing about blogs, I had never used the internet for anything more than email, surfing and chatting to friends and I could only barely do any of that! But one day I discovered a blog and after surfing from one to another (blogs tend to link up to other blogs a lot) for a few hours I was hooked and wanted to start my own. I found that there are free blog services that almost anyone could set up in a matter of minutes. Really it is that simple. Literally millions of people blog from around the world. Its not just something for young people, or geeks, or cool folk, or Westerners, or even for people with their own computers - instead its something virtually anyone with access to a computer and the internet once or twice a week can start up.

Are you still confused?

Would you like more information? Below are a few helpful articles on the topic - there are many more on the web - just do a search on your favourite search engine. Otherwise shoot me an email using my ‘contact’ button with your question and I’ll do my best to get back to you. Mr. Elvis Evarobe has written a helpful history of blogging for those who are interested in learning more about the blogging evolution over the past few years. What makes a Weblog a Weblog? Mr. Elvis Evarobe also wrote a good article titled What is a blog and why do we need one? If you are new to blogging and want some hints on how to get started - keep an eye on my Blogging for Beginners Page for more ways to explore blogging.

How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs?

I’ve been reflecting this week about the amazing diversity of opportunities that are opening up for bloggers to make money from blogs. I’ve long advised that bloggers seeking to make money from blogging spread their interests across multiple revenue streams so as not to put all their eggs in one basket. The wonderful thing is that this is becoming easier and easier to do 2007 has seen many options opening up. I thought I’d take a look at some of the methods that bloggers are currently using to make money through blogs. Income Streams for Bloggers - How they Make Money from Blogs Advertising Programs -Perhaps the most obvious changes in the past few months have been with the addition of a variety of viable advertising options for bloggers.

The most common way bloggers seem to earn money online is via the contextual ad program from Google - Adsense.

Google AdSense - It is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website's content pages and earn money.

Because the ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site — or matched to the characteristics and interests of the visitors your content attracts — you'll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages. It's also a way for website publishers to provide Google web and site search to their visitors, and to earn money by displaying Google ads on the search results pages. Another popular one is BlogAds.

The secrets of pursuing wealth

The book below (Discover What You Need To Know In Pursuit Of Wealth) is not only useful for Bloggers but it also helps to create multiple streams of online income!

Overcoming Limiting Financial Beliefs

2007-04-25T12:27:00.000-07:00

By Elvis, 12 March, 2007.

What limiting financial beliefs are holding you back from achieving all the wealth and abundance you deserve?

The Million Dollar Experiment has yielded a surge of emails containing stories of how participants have uncovered and broken through self-limiting financial beliefs. Even those who haven’t manifested any money yet have told me how the simple act of focusing on attracting greater wealth and abundance (for the highest good of all) has caused internal resistance to surface. And then such resistance can be dealt with consciously. A few people have told me that overcoming these hidden blocks is even more important than the money itself.

Everyone seems to have different blocks. For some people it’s the notion of having excess cash — more than is needed for survival — that causes discomfort. For others it’s the whole idea of being rich and the negative associations they’ve learned to connect with rich people (greedy, selfish, evil, corrupt, etc.). And some people have told me it’s a self-esteem problem that has to do with feeling undeserving of extra money and therefore being blind to financial opportunities.

Tony Robbins devotes a segment of his Personal Power II program to the topic of financial mastery, and he says the primary reason we don’t experience financial abundance is that we have negative associations to having more money than we need. That’s a controversial statement, but I think he’s spot on. The hard part though is identifying what these blocks are. Most are installed in early childhood, and they become so internalized that we’re usually not even consciously aware of them. We take such limiting beliefs for granted without even noticing how readily they sabotage us or how downright stupid they are.

My #1 financial block was my resistance to the concept of making money very easily, almost effortlessly. I learned in childhood that money was the result of hard work. Although I received occasional gifts for holidays and birthdays, if I wanted extra money I usually had to labor for it in some way. I carried this belief with me through many years of entrepreneurship. If I wanted to make more money, my strategy always seemed to be based on hard, hard work.

This belief seemed very logical and intelligent to me. How could a strong work ethic be a bad thing? But after reading Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth, I came to see just how utterly foolish this pattern was. Hard work is great, but this belief was causing me to pass up far easier ways to earn money. I was confusing effort with value, and it was making me blind to opportunities for making money by leveraging my value instead of simply working harder and longer. When I started focusing on value instead of effort, I was able to make a decent living by working fewer hours (no more sleeping at the office), and I began establishing multiple streams of income that were largely passive (royalties, internet sales with automated digital delivery, host-beneficiary deals, etc.). All of this came about after I dumped the belief that hard work was a requirement for making money. Another belief I dumped was the idea that I had to earn money by trading my time for it. Those changes happened many years ago, but I’ve continued to uncover and purge more limiting beliefs since then.

On the web you’ve probably noticed there’s an almost cult-like aversion to making money in certain circles. I’ve seen this to some degree among fellow bloggers. The Starving Student model is held in high esteem, while entrepreneurial bloggers are seen as more cold and ruthless, as if they somehow care less about their audience or they’re just in it for the money. I feel sad for the bloggers who buy into this limiting belief. Realize that whenever you attempt to monetize anything online, people will whine about it. But that doesn’t mean you have to succumb to group think and sabotage your own financial results in the process. The mentality that everything should be free is popular among teenagers who are still suckling off their parents and who can’t afford to pay for much. It’s nice to be able to provide some value for free, but that model often doesn’t serve the highest good of all.

I don’t subscribe to the belief system that would have me sacrificing myself on the altar of free. In my opinion a better model can be found in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I don’t consider myself an objectivist, but this happens to be one of my all-time favorite fiction books because it conveys such an interesting philosophy. I loved Rand’s take on value for value exchanges. People of high integrity deal with each other by trading fair value for value, but those same people deal with manipulative leeches very differently — by the end of the book, they basically leave the leeches behind and refuse to do business with them at all. I’m not so severe as Rand in this philosophy, but I do find it helpful to think of making fair value for value exchanges and ignoring those who make requests which I consider to be unfair or win-lose. I provide lots of free content so that everyone can benefit, but I’m also fair to myself. I want my work to be win-win. You win. I win. But there are quite a number of people who make requests of me that are clearly win-lose. I simply ignore them. As I mentioned in a previous article on selfishness, I believe in finding a place where service to self and service to others become the same thing. I’ve seen that serious problems result whenever there’s a conflict between the two. I have no interest in being a greedy, self-centered, money-hungry pig, nor do I wish to be a self-sacrificing martyr. My “greed” is directed at increasing abundance for myself and others simultaneously. I put a lot of thought into aligning my good with the highest good of all, such that both are able to point in the same direction.

Many people have pointed out to me that this site has a lot of ads, far more than most blogs. Duh. You’d have to be blind not to notice that. But the reason for all those ads is very simple — people keep clicking on them. Those ads now generate thousands of dollars a month in income for me. They’re paying my family’s mortgage, health insurance, etc. I also use this income to expand the service I’m able to provide. Early ad revenue paid for all my podcasting equipment as well as for a web server upgrade. I’ve been able to put up a lot of content because I don’t have to worry about doing other things just to make money. I’m able to focus my energy on value creation. The ads haven’t prevented me from building traffic either. I’ve already gotten more than a 40x increase in traffic since the beginning of the year, so even if the ads did slow the growth rate a bit, I’m OK with that. If the traffic grew at a faster rate, I’d have trouble keeping up. The ads also create value for the advertisers, most of whom offer products and services related to personal development (which I happen to like). If the ads were irrelevant, very few people would click on them, and I would not be monetizing the site this way. I’ve experimented with a number of different ad layouts, and I’m having a hard time beating the current layout. It’s amazingly effective. I can speculate endlessly about why it works, but for now I just know that it does. I test and tweak things every month and continue to experiment.

If I kept a much lighter ad layout on the site — more typical of what you’ll find on other blogs — I estimate my income from this site would be about 20–30% of what it is now. That comes straight out of my pocket. I think the current trade off is a fair balance between martyring myself to do everything for free and requiring a fee to access the content. I like being able to give so much content away for free, so it’s accessible to everyone. Ayn Rand probably wouldn’t like that I do this, but I want to help people that can’t afford to pay anything. I’m perfectly OK with the fact that some people are bothered by the ads (there are few things I do that don’t bother somebody somewhere). The ads are perfectly escapable for anyone who chooses to do so. If you don’t like ads, you can always view the blog content ad-free via the RSS feed. You can also print out any page of the site, and it will be formatted nicely with no ads. I considered doing a subscription service, but that would hurt traffic growth, since it means locking content away from search engines and killing the potential for incoming links to specific articles. In 2006 I intend to experiment with other revenue models, but the current system is my control to which everything else will be compared.

A year ago I was very anti-advertising. For the first four months I didn’t have any ads on this site at all. Then someone suggested I try Google Adsense, and in my usual fashion of diving in and testing things first-hand, I gave it a go. I’m quite amazed at how well it works. My Adsense revenue has gone up by more than 50% per month on average since the I started in February — we’re talking about a 40x increase over a period of 9 months. And December’s daily average is already up 55% from the daily average for November. I don’t know how much longer this growth rate can sustain itself, but it creates some pretty exciting prospects for 2006. Even if I maintain only a conservative 10% monthly increase through 2006, that will more than triple my ad income. And 20% would yield a 9x increase.

Fear mongers would probably worry about an online ad industry crash. But if that happens, I’ll simply adapt to another revenue model. There are a zillion ways to monetize web traffic.

In order to reach this point, I had to follow my intuition and tune out all the fear-based thinking that would prevent me from enjoying greater financial abundance. I had to consciously work out my own philosophy of wealth and abundance. For me it’s based on creating value for others and receiving a fair compensation for that value. Not greed. Not self-sacrifice. Not worry about what others might think.

I suggest that if you wish to achieve greater financial abundance for yourself, and especially if you’re participating in the Million Dollar Experiment, take some time to seek out the source of your own resistance to achieving greater wealth. For example, does the idea of becoming rich seem in any way offensive or repulsive to you? Explore those beliefs. Journal about them. Take a conscious look at them, and decide if these are really the beliefs you wish to hold. Are your financial beliefs aligned with serving your good as well as the highest good of all?

Are Your Friends An Elevator or a Cage?

2007-03-25T13:02:00.000-07:00

February 30th, 2007 by Evarove Elvis

As a follow-up to the last entry, let’s explore the role of the people in your life. Are they elevating you to be the best person you can be, or are they holding you back?
I mentioned in my last entry that when going through major life shifts, like changing careers, I would shift the people with whom I spent the most time. We’ve all gone through periods where the people in our lives have changed — graduation, moving to a new city, getting a new job, joining a new club, etc. I don’t think I need to convince you just how much influence other people can have over your identity. If you’ve ever experienced a major shift in your people environment, then you know that you change as well.

Most people don’t make these choices consciously though. You might consciously decide to spend more time with a certain friend, or you may ask someone out on a date to begin a new relationship. But few people choose the bulk of their existing friendships deliberately. Chance meetings may be out of your control, but the strength or weakness of your existing connections is largely under your control.
Think for a moment about the 5-10 people with whom you spend the most time. Even include online communities if you spend a lot of time reading them — which individuals are having the most influence over your thinking right now? Actually write out the list — it should only take a minute. And this includes family members.
Now look at the list. It’s been said that this list will give you a glimpse into your future.

Do you want to become more like these people? Yes or no. Is anyone on the list a bad influence that causes you to backslide? Is anyone on the list a shining light that encourages you to reach new heights?

Now have you ever thought about consciously changing this list? Do you realize that you have the ability to populate this list by choice instead of by chance? You’re free to say no to having certain people in your life, and you’re also free to make the effort to introduce new people you want in your life. Sometimes there are serious consequences, such as with family members and bosses, but it’s still a choice.
There’s no “getting rid of people.” People are always drifting in and out of each others’ lives. Associations grow into friendships, and friendships fade into associations. You don’t get rid of anyone. The truth is that in order to make room for new people and new experiences, you may need to loosen up some of your existing connections.
What about loyalty? Shouldn’t you always be loyal to your friends? Once you have a close friend, even if their influence on you is somewhat destructive, shouldn’t you stick by them?

Loyalty is one of my personal values. But my value of loyalty means being loyal to my vision of my highest and best self and to my core values. And this runs both ways. While I know I can’t afford to hang on to friendships that conflict with my values, I also can’t hang onto friends that I may be holding back in some way. I only want to have win-win relationships where everyone benefits.

Loyalty to a friend sometimes means having to let go. It means being loyal to their highest and best self as well. If someone is destroying their health by smoking, for example, you aren’t showing loyalty by smoking right along with them. What are you being loyal to then? Death? True loyalty sometimes requires that you break destructive connections, get yourself back on solid ground, and then decide what you can really do to help your friend (which sometimes requires letting them hit bottom).
How about a realistic example? Back when I was in college, I would occasionally use pirated software. I had several friends who were software pirates and who’d keep offering it to me, and I’d sometimes accept if it was something I wanted. But when I started my own software business after graduation and began thinking about the kind of person I wanted to be, I realized that software piracy had to go. So I decided to stop.

But of course what happened next? You guessed it. Some more pirated software was offered to me, and I gave into the temptation. And then I beat myself up about it. And that pattern cycled a few more times until…
I realized if I wanted to stop using pirated software, I had to stop associating with pirates. So I consciously decided to let those relationships fade, which on a couple occasions required actively telling the other person I couldn’t have them in my life anymore (and why). Then I built closer friendships with more honest people who would never consider software piracy. My new friends and associates elevated my thinking to their level, and I found it easy to let go of software piracy permanently. I was positively infected by the thoughts of those who don’t pirate software, so my new mindset just doesn’t even consider piracy. I either buy what I want, or I do without.
Today I use a lot of shareware programs, and they’re all registered. Even though I could save money by tracking down pirated versions, I just don’t. I won’t even consider it. And it has nothing to do with being worried about getting caught or getting a computer virus or not having the latest version or wasting too much time. Software piracy just isn’t me. I’m a non-pirate.

This change had some unexpected positive side effects too. When I let go of piracy, I felt a lot more deserving of my successes. It elevated my sense of self. There was nothing on my computer to give me the subconscious message: yeah that was a nice success, but you’re still a thief. This is one very basic example of how consciously changing the people in your life can change you for the better.
What about trying to change/rescue people in need? Although I don’t think it’s impossible to transform a destruction relationship from within, it’s very difficult unless you have a lot of support. While you’re trying to elevate the other person, you’re sinking at the same time. You’d probably need a buffer of many other strong relationships in order to transform one destructive relationship. I think the best approach is to leave the destructive relationship behind, form new relationships to get your strength back, and then (keeping those new relationships), you’ll have the ability to revisit and transform the old destructive relationship with a much reduced risk of being sucked back into old patterns.

I think you can get a pretty good idea of what a person is like by looking at the people who surround that person. Think about it for a moment. What kind of people does George Bush spend the most time with? What about the Dalai Lama? Your children? Even Jesus was surrounded by the 12 Apostles. So one betrayed him, and one thrice denied knowing him, but 10 out of 12 isn’t bad. If you had a dozen loyal devotees following you everywhere, perhaps you might enjoy some fairly elevated thinking too.

It can take a lot of courage to tell someone, “I’m sorry, but I can’t have you in my life anymore.” But even though this might seem like a selfish act at times, it’s often the best thing for the other person too. If a relationship is holding you back in some way, understand that it’s also hurting the other person. For example, if you work for an abusive boss, your acceptance of that situation constitutes silent approval, encouraging your boss to continue to behave abusively (towards yourself and others).

If you smoke and suddenly say to all your smoker friends, “I’m sorry, but I can’t continue to be friends with people who smoke anymore. I’ve decided I need to be a nonsmoker,” you’ll probably meet with a lot of resistance. But if you follow through with it, your actions will eat away at some of those old friends. And a year later when you’re a nonsmoker, one of them will contact you privately, “I’d like to quit too. Can you help me?” And you will be able to help. You might even renew your old friendship, but at a whole new level.

The kinds of relationships I seek out today are those which have the potential to be win-win, where both people can help each other to grow in positive ways without holding each other back. Not one person using the other — synergy. I’m always open and inviting of new friendships of this kind. If I ever feel like I’m stuck in a cage, I know it’s time to reach out and make some new connections and/or loosen up some old ones.

Making Money Consciously

2007-02-05T13:12:00.000-08:00

March 12th, 2007 By Evarobe Elvis

How important is money?
How much is enough? Is money a distraction from one’s spiritual path? Is it a necessary evil? Is it unfair that some people have more money than others? Is poverty more noble than wealth? Is it possible to become an enlightened millionaire?

Even among highly conscious people, the subject of money is a contentious topic. As an individual you’ve probably wrestled with this subject on many occasions. Social attitudes towards money are so incongruent that it’s no wonder people are confused.
Is money a positive resource or a consciousness-lowering distraction?
Like most people I grew up with mixed associations about money. In some ways money was a good thing; in other ways it was a necessary evil or a distraction from what was really important.

On the one hand, I saw evidence that money was good. It’s not hard to recognize that money bestows certain advantages. Some problems can be solved by money very easily. Money can provide food, clothing, shelter, heat, transportation, education, technology, entertainment, medicine, and so on. Given the way our society currently functions, if you have a lot of money, you have a lot of solutions. Money surely won’t solve all your problems, and it can create new problems of its own, but on balance it’s safe to say that money is a powerful problem-solving tool.
I think Earl Nightingale said it best:

Nothing can take the place of money in the area in which money works.
On the other hand, there are some things I don’t like about money. I don’t like that it’s used as a gatekeeper for certain “privileges” like proper medical care, healthy food, or decent educational resources. I also don’t like how it induces people to behave dishonorably to attain it. While I admire many of achievements of today’s titans of wealth, many of them acquired their wealth through means I couldn’t stomach.

Conflicting beliefs about money.

For most of my life, I’ve been stuck with incongruent attitudes towards money. Objectively, material wealth seemed like a great thing — I should definitely pursue it. Subjectively it seemed like a giant distraction — why should I need it? Intellectually, wealth seemed good. Intuitively, wealth felt irrelevant. I hadn’t yet figured out a way of thinking about money that was congruent across multiple perspectives.

Have you been struggling with a similar internal conflict? If so, you’re certainly not alone because this conflict is largely the result of social conditioning. We have some influences telling us that money is very important, while other influences tell us it’s not. Look at what happens during the holiday season. Advertisers tell us to spend, spend, spend. The more money we spend, the better our holidays will be. Buy your wife an (inherently worthless but nonetheless expensive) diamond necklace, and she’ll love you forever. On the other hand, we might watch a classic holiday movie like

It’s a Wonderful Life that tells us we need to keep money in perspective and that relationships are far more important. Mixed signals abound.

This social conditioning affects our relationships too. What assumptions do you make about people based on their income or financial assets? If you know someone’s financial status, but you’ve never even met him/her, do you prejudge that person by assigning other qualities that may or may not be true? What assumptions would you make about a millionaire? About someone who’s totally broke? How would you feel dating someone who earned 10x as much as you? How about 1/10th as much as you?

I believe these mixed associations lead many conscious people to conclude that money itself is the problem. Maybe it’s better to find a way to live without money at all… at least cut its presence down to the bare minimum. If money is truly a distraction from conscious living, wouldn’t the most conscious choice be to shun money altogether? Maybe give up your worldly possessions and join a monastery?
Within the scope of religion, money often plays a confusing role as well. Supposedly Jesus wasn’t a particularly wealthy individual, but today’s Catholic Church is as wealthy as they come. According to United Nations World Magazine, the Church has several billion dollars in gold alone, and when you consider their massive worldwide real estate holdings, their artwork collection, and their tax exempt status, the amount of wealth controlled by the Catholic Church is staggering. While figures are hard to estimate due to the complexity and scope of the organization, some believe the Church is the world’s wealthiest entity, with the Pope controlling more financial assets than any corporation or government on earth. Whether that’s true or not, the Church’s wealth certainly makes for an interesting contrast with the life Jesus supposedly lived. When it comes to your financial future, should you model Jesus or the Pope? Or someone else entirely?

We could go deeper into the quagmire of confusing financial beliefs, but I don’t think that would be helpful, so let’s put the social models aside for now and take a fresh look at money to see what role we would have it play in our lives.

What is money?

Money is a social resource – the primary social resource. Money has no inherent value of its own, but we assign it value through social agreement. If I give you $100, you can withdraw $100 of value from society. The only reason this works is that we agree by consensus that $100 has a certain value. If we all agreed that money was worthless, then money would have no value whatsoever.

Because it’s a social resource, money isn’t a perfect medium of exchange. The value of anything, including money itself, is determined by social consensus. That may be the consensus of just two people, such as when you buy an item from another person. Or it may be the consensus of a large group, such as when you buy or sell stock in public companies.

When your personal valuation roughly matches the social consensus, you’ll conclude that pricing is fair. When your personal valuation drifts from the social consensus, you’ll conclude that certain items are either over- or under-priced.

Although there will be serious consequences to doing so, you’re free to opt-out of the social contract of money. Most people would find this totally impractical, but you can choose to assign no value whatsoever to money if you wish. However, if you still want to take advantage of social resources, you’ll need to create your own social contracts on a case-by-case basis. This could include barter or other forms of exchange, or it could involve leveraging relationships to meet your social needs.
For most of us, the social contract of money is far too advantageous to ignore. While the monetary system is far from perfect, it’s more efficient than the alternatives. By assigning a monetary value to our social exchanges and by making it easy to transfer money from one person to another, social trades are performed with relative ease. Buying groceries, going to work, using electricity, or connecting to the Internet are all examples of social trades, and by social consensus, all of these are reducible to money.

Even money itself can be assigned a price, as anyone in debt can readily attest. If you want money today, you can purchase it by pledging a greater amount of money tomorrow.

So money is essentially social credit. It’s an IOU from society, enabling you to extract a certain amount of social value whenever you want. The more money you have, the more society owes you, and the more value you can extract.

How to earn money.

Let’s consider what it means to earn money. Since money is a social resource, earning money means acquiring more of that social resource. When you spend money, you convert money to value. But when you earn money, you convert value to money.

One way to earn money is to sell possessions. Take an item and sell it, and you’ll receive money for it. Another option is to acquire items at one price and turn around and sell them for more than your costs. Companies dig up resources all over the planet and sell them for a profit. For individuals this approach might take the form of buying objects, stocks, or bonds at one price and selling them at a higher price. Sometimes value is added in the process (which may just be added convenience), while other times the money earned comes from market inefficiencies.

Perhaps the most common way to earn money is to sell your time. Get a job and trade hours for dollars. The greater your ability to personally deliver a high social value, the greater your earnings potential. The difference between making $10/hour vs. $100/hour is that the latter work has much greater social value. This difference isn’t anyone’s “fault” — the difference is due to the social consensus about the value of certain work. Note the difference between absolute value and social value. Top athletes may not perform useful work in an absolute sense, but their compensation is based on the social value of their service, which is currently very high.

Another way to earn money is to create a system that earns money for you, such as a business. This is my personal favorite, since it can provide far more leverage than selling time. I also find it much less risky in the long run, since owning and controlling a money-generating system is more secure than trading hours for dollars at someone else’s discretion.

You can also earn money by selling money itself… aka investing. By loaning your money or assets to someone else, you can earn interest and/or dividends. How you earn money depends on what you invest in. Investing in a new business is very different from investing in a criminal organization. One form of investing creates social value; the other steals it.

And of course a final option for making money is to steal it. Historically this has been a popular option, but I won’t give it serious consideration here.

If you think about it, there are two basic ways to earn money:
1. Make a social contribution, and receive payment commensurate with the social value of your contribution.

2. Take advantage of market inefficiencies to extract money without contributing any value.

Option 1 includes getting a job, running a business that provides products or services, reselling items with value added, or investing in any of these outlets. Option 2 includes reselling items without added value, gambling, mooching off others, crime, or investing in any of these.

Here’s another way of labeling these two strategies:

1. Contribute.

2. Mooch.

Unless you’ve somehow opted out of the monetary system, you’re using one or both of these two strategies right now. One strategy will likely be dominant in your life — either you’re creating genuine social value and being paid for it, or you’re mooching off the value created by others.

Note that #1 is essential for the monetary system to survive and thrive, but #2 is not. The only way moochers can survive is by extracting value from the contributors. But ultimately someone must contribute, or there can be no value for the moochers to extract.

Incidentally, Ayn Rand wrote a fascinating novel called

Atlas Shrugged about what would happen if the world’s contributors left to form their own society, leaving the moochers to fend for themselves. The contributor society became a paradise, while the moocher society fell to pieces. Rand suggested that a system that rewarded moochers at the expense of contributors was evil and that contributors should be free to decide how their work is used (and whether or not they will support any moochers).

Some degree of mooching is to be expected. Children mooch off their parents. Those who are unable to contribute mooch off those who can. Whenever we enjoy the fruits of someone else’s labor without paying for it, we’re mooching. We all mooch off the hard work of our ancestors. But eventually we have to decide whether we’re going to continue to mooch for the rest of our lives or begin making a genuine contribution. Will we remain moochers for life, or will we become contributors?
Obviously your life will include some contribution and some mooching, but what’s your primary strategy for generating income today? Do you contribute social value? Or do you mooch off the value of other contributors?
Let’s consider both possibilities.

The moocher mindset.

Opting into mooch mode means you’re extracting more social value than you’re contributing. Your focus is on getting as opposed to giving, so you take more out of the system than you give back. The moocher mindset suggests you can always rely on others to pick up your slack. It’s the mindset of unearned entitlement. Since you still need to extract value such as food, clothing, and shelter — value which others must provide for you – you live at the expense of others. Your burden may be shouldered by an individual such as a parent, or it may be shared by society at large, but either way you survive by suckling the social teat.

Sometimes mooching becomes so habitual it’s easy to overlook. Many people who seemingly have contribution-based careers harbor an underlying moocher mindset. They aim to extract as much social value as possible while contributing as little as possible. They work to make money to the degree it’s necessary, while mooching as much as they can get away with. Such people don’t have inspired careers because work is only seen as a means to an end, not an outlet for genuine contribution. Take a look around and see if you can identify the moochers in your life. Who is there to get rather than to give?

Another name for the moocher mindset is the scarcity mindset. Since you aren’t creating value of your own, the money you extract must come from someone else. It’s a zero-sum game. Whatever you gain, someone else must lose.

The moocher mindset makes the attainment of financial abundance very difficult because in order to succeed financially with this mindset, you must embrace certain values that most people would consider negative. Your gain is someone else’s loss, so getting rich requires taking advantage of more people. In order to gain by mooching, someone else must cover your extraction with real value. So the more wealth you accumulate, the more you steal from others.

Most people can’t handle the thought of becoming wealthy at the expense of others, so usually the moocher mindset gives rise to self-sabotage instead. If you fall into this pattern, you’ll experience a love/hate relationship with money. On the one hand, you may want more money, but on the other hand, you may feel disinclined to make too much, since you know that the more money you get, the more someone else has to pay for it. For example, if you make a living as a professional poker player, then you know that the more you earn, the more money others have to lose… not the best motivation for a highly conscious person to achieve financial abundance.

Some people are able to bypass this problem of financial self-sabotage by lowering their consciousness. They learn to make money without rationally considering the consequences of how they’re earning it. They invent justifications to explain their actions while keeping their awareness from getting in the way. Ultimately this is the mindset of criminals.

The more you align yourself with the moocher mindset, the more difficult it will be for you to experience financial abundance and remain conscious. Ultimately you have to choose one or the other: be conscious or be wealthy. You can’t have both if you subscribe to the moocher mindset. If you find yourself stuck at a certain level of income and unable to go any higher, an underlying moocher mindset is probably the culprit. This is the mindset that leads you to ask, “How can I get more money?” instead of, “How can I contribute more value?” It’s also the mindset that says it’s a bad idea to earn more money, since your gain is someone else’s pain.

The contributor mindset

Now let’s consider the contributor mindset. This mindset recognizes that the best way to make money is to provide fair value in exchange. Create genuine social value, and receive payment commensurate with that value. Due to market inefficiencies, sometimes you’ll be underpaid, and sometimes you’ll be overpaid, but the basic idea is that you earn money by contributing.

If you want to earn income as a contributor, you must contribute social value, not personal value. Many would-be contributors get stuck on this concept. Personal value is whatever you say it is — you’re free to decide what has value to you personally, and it doesn’t matter if no one agrees with you. Social value, however, is assigned by social consensus. If you believe your work has tremendous value, but virtually no one else does, then your work has high personal value but little or no social value. Here’s the key point: your income depends on the social value of your work, not the personal value.

If you want to generate income from creative work, then your work must have social value. There’s no getting around that. No social value, no income. If your skills and hard work are not in alignment with the creation of social value, then you will not be able to generate income as a contributor.

This isn’t an unfair system — it’s just how the monetary system works. Since money is a social resource backed by social value, it makes sense that you won’t get paid much for providing something of little or no social value. The saying “Find a need and fill it” certainly rings true, assuming we’re referring to a social need or desire.
This web site, for example, has a fair degree of social value. Whether you or I value it as individuals is financially irrelevant. It successfully generates income because the overall social consensus is that this site has a certain level of value. And that social value makes it possible for the site to generate income. If there was no social value to this site, there would be no income potential.

Another name for the contributor mindset is the abundance mindset. This mindset says that wealth can be created from ideas and action. Your gain is a reflection of the social gain you’ve contributed. If you want to earn a high income, you must contribute a lot of social value. The more social value you create, the more money you can earn. This is a win-win mindset because you’re putting value into the system for the benefit of others.

Under the contributor mindset, you receive money as payment for your social service. The money you earn is society’s way of saying, “In exchange for your valued contribution, you are hereby granted the right to extract $X of value from society at a time of your choosing.” This is a beautiful thing!

The only real limit on your income is how much social value you can create. If you want to earn more money, then develop your skills and talents to facilitate the creation of lots of social value. The best way to increase your income is to figure out how to deliver more social value. Focus on giving, and the getting will largely take care of itself. The systems to reward social service are already in place, so all you need to do is plug your service into the existing marketplace.

Generating income from social contribution is a very positive experience. Consequently, it won’t lower your consciousness like the moocher mindset. With the contributor mindset, wealth and consciousness are not in conflict. In fact, they synergize extremely well, especially if you reinvest some of your income into expanding your contribution.

If you adopt the contributor mindset, just be aware that members of the moocher mindset will sometimes mistakenly count you among them. As you work to increase your social contribution and thereby earn a higher income, moochers will project their values onto you, concluding you’ve become greedy and must be taking advantage of others for personal gain. Don’t let moochers dissuade you from your path though. Let your inspiration come from the desire to provide even more social value. It would be less honorable to withhold your value just because others misinterpret your motives.

Pro bono contribution

Under the contributor model, you always have the option of making a contribution pro bono (i.e. for free). You don’t have to receive the full social value for your work if you don’t want to.

I like having this option because it means I can make my work accessible even to those who can’t afford it. This web site represents a tremendous personal investment of time and energy, so it certainly isn’t free from my point of view. But because I can leverage technology to keep my costs low, it’s practical for me to provide abundant content without requiring an access fee for every visitor. Paying for the value received is entirely optional and is left to each individual visitor to decide for themselves.

Money is social credit, so when you decline to receive money for your work, you decline the social credit you’ve earned. While it’s perfectly fine to decline the social credit you’ve earned, be sure to consider what you could do with that social credit if you choose to receive it. Could you re-invest it to make a bigger or better contribution? If so, then paid work makes more sense than pro bono work, since you can use the money to expand your mission and serve even more people. Money makes you more of who you already are, so if you’re already a contributor, more money can allow you to expand your contribution.
You can also aim for a nice balance between paid work and pro bono work. It doesn’t have to be either-or.

Making money consciously

Contributing social value is the primary strategy for making money consciously, but by itself it’s still not enough. The problem with social value is that your personal values won’t perfectly align with the social consensus. I’m sure that if everyone on earth were like you, the demand for certain products and services would shift dramatically. For example, if everyone were like me, fresh fruits and vegetables would have even higher social value, while factory farming would have none whatsoever.

When you attempt to provide social value without achieving congruence with your personal values, your motivation will be very weak. You won’t be inspired because you’ll be doing what you feel you should do, but not what you want to do. I often see this happen with people who jump into blogging on a topic they think will make them a lot of money, only to give up after a few months because they can’t stomach it any longer. Please don’t do this to yourself.

Alternatively, when you attempt to satisfy your personal values without providing any real social value, you get the starving artist syndrome. You may be inspired by work that totally fulfills you, but it won’t pay the bills. Please don’t do this to yourself either.
The solution is to find an area of overlap between your personal values and social values, and work within that area of overlap. This will allow you to do what you love and create something that others value as well. Don’t force yourself to choose between your integrity and your income — choose both!
Social values and your personal values will fluctuate over time, so be prepared to adapt. In my early 20s, I launched my computer games business. At first it aligned perfectly with my personal values but not with social values — I loved the work, but I wasn’t making any money. After several years I reached a point of balance, where I was enjoyed the work and making a nice living from it. Further down the road, my personal values changed, and the work no longer inspired me, even though it still had social value. So at that point, I opted to change careers and started this personal development business.

Personal development is a field which has high social value, and it also aligns beautifully with my personal values. Consequently, I can generate substantial income in this field and be very fulfilled at the same time. Don’t underestimate the importance of alignment between personal value and social value. Both are essential if you want to make money consciously.
Unless you’re really inflexible, it shouldn’t be exceedingly difficult to envision a way for you to contribute social value that also aligns with your personal values. This is a problem that can be solved if you put some thought into it. For most people the more difficult challenge is how to transition. For that I’ll refer you to the article

The Meaning of Life: Transitioning.

Congruent contribution

Two simple realizations can help you achieve a congruent mindset about money and push beyond limiting financial beliefs. First, you must consciously adopt the contributor mindset and abandon the moocher mindset. And secondly, you must find a way to contribute social value while achieving alignment with your personal values. Once you’ve internalized those two mindsets, you’ll be in a position to generate abundant income while serving the greater good.
If you want to generate income without lowering your consciousness, you have to get your limiting beliefs out of your way. Holding yourself back from earning more money doesn’t serve anyone. Limiting your income only limits your contribution. The conscious reason to earn more money is that you can put those social credits to good use. Use them to expand your service to others. If you’re living an honorable life, then it’s a good thing for you to receive more money. You’ll be a good custodian for it. The more money that flows through your life, the more resources you can invest into your life purpose.

Becoming Wealthy Inherently Evil?

2006-11-23T15:49:00.000-08:00

February 6, 2007. By Evarobe Elvis

Is it morally wrong to attempt to become wealthy?
It’s no surprise to me that the Million Dollar Experiment, while mostly getting a highly positive reception, has also uncovered some opposition from people who believe the pursuit of financial wealth is inherently greedy, selfish, immoral, or just plain evil.

How do you feel about the whole idea of having more money than you need? A lot more. Excess cash. Does that concept excite you or make you feel uncomfortable? Is is attractive or repulsive? A mixture of both perhaps? Do you feel you’d have to compromise your integrity in order to achieve this goal?

What about earning money very quickly? A fast turnover. Making a quick buck. Does that raise some level of indignation within you?

If a friend were to say to you, “You know what. I’m going to go ahead and become rich,” how would you react? Would you assume this person has become a “sell out” or is about to compromise their integrity? Would you ridicule them for even setting this goal? How would you feel after they achieved the goal? How would you feel if they failed and gave up?

Isn’t it interesting to witness the complex feelings that arise when we examine our beliefs about money? Notice that I haven’t even addressed the actual process of acquiring money in any of these situations, merely the notion of wealth itself.

What role does intention play in the pursuit of wealth? Is the very idea of intending to be wealthy inherently evil, corrupt, or somehow wrong? Or can one become wealthy and still have integrity?

The level of “good” or “evil” you associate to money comes from your own beliefs and intentions, not from any innate quality that money possesses. By itself money is neutral and powerless. Your own thoughts will serve to define the role of money in your life.

If money or wealth are somehow connected with evil, greed, or selfishness in your mind, imagine what effect that will have on your financial decisions. Sounds like a good way of preventing yourself from ever becoming wealthy, doesn’t it? Is that a choice you’ve made consciously? Do you feel it’s the right one?

It isn’t money or the pursuit of money that has any moral connection — you might as well be collecting rocks, beads, or sea shells. It’s the energy you bring to money that matters. Money will play the role in your life that you intend it to play, and that intention will largely arise from your pre-conditioned beliefs. If you’ve been conditioned to associate negative qualities to money (especially through your upbringing), then money will play a largely negative role in your life. If you associate positive beliefs to money, then it will play a positive role.

But most likely you have mixed associations to money because socially conditioned beliefs are inherently incongruent — it’s a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth. Your concept of money develops mixed associations to both good and evil. You want more money for yourself, but not too much more. You step towards greater wealth and then back away from it. You dance around money for fear it might be dangerous to acquire too much of it, but then when scarcity overwhelms you, you think of little else. Eventually you figure you’re better off thinking about money as little as possible.

Been there, done that. It’s all so much nonsense.
Your money will derive its energy from you, from who you are as a person. Greater and greater wealth will simply squeeze out more of who you already are. If what’s inside you is good and noble and of high integrity, that’s what will come out. But if what’s inside you is fearful and uncertain, then fear and uncertainty will come out.

If you feel good about yourself, your thoughts, and your behavior, then having more money will only enhance those positive feelings and help you spread them to others.
What are you doing to earn money right now? Is your work devoted to the highest good of all? Or have you put yourself in a situation where you’re earning money in such a way that’s neutral or negative? Do you make money by creating or by competing? Are you giving your best value to the world or trying to get a free ride on the value creation of others?

We all grow up with a mixed bag of socially conditioned beliefs about money, especially from the media. By the time we’re working adults, we become bogged down with the heavy baggage of these limiting beliefs, causing us to behave very strangely and incongruently. Think about it for a moment… how rational is your financial behavior right now? Would an outside observer describe your financial decisions as truly intelligent and congruent when taking a deep look into your income, expenses, assets, and liabilities? Do you earn and spend money intelligently?
The only way out of the quagmire of limiting beliefs is to step back, uncover such beliefs one by one, and then consciously decide whether or not they’ll continue to be true for you.

Is money the root of all evil? Is the love of money the root of all evil? Or will money simply take root in the soil of your own thoughts?

Does making money quickly imply greed and selfishness? Or is it just being efficient and intelligent?

Does making extra money mean that someone else loses (scarcity mentality)? Or can you make money while simultaneously increasing the wealth of others without hurting anyone (abundance mentality)?

Is it intelligent to make only enough money to survive and cover your basic needs? Or is that really just being lazy and uninspired?

Have wealthy people compromised their integrity? Or is it possible to genuinely pursue greater wealth in a manner that serves the highest good of all?
Is the best way to fight poverty to give more cash to people who possess a deep-seated scarcity mentality? Or is it better to challenge this mindset and plant the seeds of abundance in their thoughts?

In order to acquire greater wealth, is it necessary for you to take more than you give? Or can you become wealthy by giving much more value than you receive in return?
How many wealthy people do you know intimately as opposed to through sensationalized media stories? What is their motivation?

If you had absolute financial abundance, what would you do with it? If that money were to allow you to express more of who you already are right now, what would you express? A noble purpose? The need for security? Fear and uncertainty? Self-sacrifice? Abundance and increase?

If you become wealthy and then teach hundreds of other people to do the same, have you done them a disservice and corrupted them? Or have you given them a tremendous gift?

Did you ever conclude that becoming wealthy would be out of your grasp? Have you ever thought about changing that belief?

These are all questions to consider when deciding what role money will play in your life.

One of my favorite quotes about money comes from the late, great Earl Nightingale:
Nothing can take the place of money in the area in which money works.
So amazingly accurate when you take the time to think about it.

I’ve had to face down a lot of these incongruencies within myself. What role is money to play in my life? Should I earn just enough to get by? Should I aim for financial independence? Do I serve people best by being broke, by earning just enough to cover my expenses, by achieving financial independence, by getting rich quickly?

Eventually I decided that it would be a good thing for me to become wealthy. Given that my purpose is to grow and to help others grow, I cannot ignore the financial dimension of personal development. If I become financially wealthy, then through my purpose I’ll naturally strive to help others do the same.

Working on my wealth is really no different than working on my self-discipline, my health, my productivity, my relationships, etc.

Once I made this decision, the first thing I had to do was to purge all those limiting beliefs about money from my psyche. I found quite a bit of rubbish in there, and I just let it go and decided that I would find a way to be wealthy that would be congruent with the highest good of all. Then I took some time to adopt more empowering beliefs about wealth and money.

Can achieving greater wealth for myself serve the greater good? I definitely believe this is possible. After all, it was my pursuit of passive income streams that gave me the freedom to create this web site in the first place. Those streams of income allowed me to spend my time writing and posting hundreds of articles without charging for them. I was able to spend months working full-time on this new career before I earned a dime from it. I think it should be obvious to anyone that this site is designed to give away a lot of value without requiring you to pay for it. But I could just as easily have taken a scarcity approach, charging for every shred of info and blocking access to it for those who couldn’t afford it. As I see it, this is one of those areas in which money does work — my passive income gives me the freedom to focus on giving without worrying about receiving.

But is it intelligent for me to give and give and give until I’ve exhausted myself through self-sacrifice? Or is it better to strike a balance between giving and receiving? What if I can help generate millions of dollars in extra wealth for others? Would it then be fair for me to share in that abundance as well?

When I write about productivity, there’s a bounceback reflection that increases my own productivity. The same goes for any other topic on this site. Whenever I focus on giving, I end up receiving as well. Should I block that reflection? I think that would be a mistake. I’ve seen how this very reflection feeds right back into the giving side, creating a positive loop of giving and receiving.

But the focus has to be on the giving side, while remaining grateful for anything that comes via the receiving side. Whenever I remember to do that, I find that my own good and the highest good of all are perfectly congruent.

My intention for becoming wealthy is to do so in a manner that serves the highest good of all. I’m not going to compromise on that. If this intention meets with the universe’s approval, it will manifest. If not, it won’t. My current interpretation of this ideal is to work to help other people become wealthy, as one of many dimensions in which I strive to help people grow. I don’t accept the scarcity model that says I must acquire wealth by taking it from others. I choose to follow the abundance model that says I can acquire wealth by creating even greater wealth for others. I genuinely believe that.

However, if you harbor serious negative associations to wealth that cause you to regard this whole experiment as evil, then you should probably write me off and be done with me. You certainly won’t be the first or the last person to do so. But if you choose to continue on this journey with me, be aware that I intend to help you increase your financial abundance as I do the same for myself, striving to do so in a manner that serves the highest good of all with congruency, not compromise.

An Internet Marketing Solution Can Work For You

2006-11-18T20:53:00.000-08:00

Are you tired of searching for an internet marketing solution?

Are you looking for an internet marketing solution that actually works?

Is the internet marketing solution you are using not getting you the results you want?

Perhaps you are wondering where you should go for a reliable internet marketing solution.

The answers lie just ahead.

Your internet marketing solution should entail building a website that will generate more customers. Your website should have eye catching detail with beautiful photographs or illustrations of your products or services. This will also attract more attention. Your website should also be easy to use and have a catchy logo that is easy for people to remember. In short, keep it simple, yet smart.Another good internet marketing solution is to use an SEO or search engine optimization. Not sure what an SEO is?

An SEO works by optimizing the results of a persons search on the web to lead to your website. When people go to a search engine and type in a particular word or phrase, they get a list of matching sights. An SEO will make sure your website is one of the first ones potential customers will see when they use a keyword in the search engine.Another internet marketing solution is to run an email marketing campaign. This can be done in many ways. The easiest way is to use an autoresponder. An autoresponder sends out a scripted text via email. This scripted text can be an advertisement or promotion of your business. It can list specials, sales, prices, and other promotions. Be sure to have URL links to your website. If you have affiliates, use them too and list their URL links. Use an autoreponder to send these out to people on your mailing lists and to any new or potential customers that have visited your website.

An internet marketing solution is generally based on advertising and promoting your business. There are many companies that can provide this service to you. In general, you should research each business thoroughly to see who has the best price and the best internet marketing solution for you. You want an internet marketing solution that can help you generate the most results. Look for a company that offers a free trial, or a promotional period. For the best route, find a company that offers a full money back guarantee if your results are not positive.An internet marketing solution is essential for a profitable business. You do not want to start your business off on the wrong foot or you will end up in a downward spiral. Make sure you get some help from a valid company to send your business upwards. If you incorporate all of these techniques, your business is sure to blossom.

How To Make Money While Almost Doing Nothing

2006-11-12T17:29:00.000-08:00

By; Elvis, 11th November, 2006.

By November 2006, elvissatte.blogspot.com was launched and it was averaging $2.12/day in income. Now it brings in over $100/day $150/day $230/day $310/day (updated as of 12/04/07). I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion. In fact, I started this site with just Blog and everything was bootstrapped from there.

Would you like to know how It was done?

This article is seriously long (over 8500 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth "That is positive mind". I’ll even share some specifics. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.

Do you actually want to monetize your blog?

Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs. If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it. If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first. If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine. If you think it’s evil, fine. But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path. If you want to succeed, you must be congruent. Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time. It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed. If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it. If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this book helpful: Every Human Being Has Been “Born Rich. It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others. If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it. If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads. Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere. If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations. Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best. If you’re going to sell products, then really sell them. Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy. If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it. Don’t take a half-assed approach. Either be full-assed or no-assed. You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it. I launched this site in November, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in December 2006. There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal. Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback. Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive. Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $2.12 the first Month. If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2007 Adsense revenue figures earlier this year. Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source. Some are in elvissattebooks....

Can you make a decent income online?

Yes, absolutely. At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home. I’m making a healthy income from elvissatte, and the site is only 6 Months old… barely a toddler. If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it. I’ve always done it full-time.

Can most people do it?

No, they can’t. I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word. But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail. The tagline for this site is “Personal Development for Smart People.” And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet. So while most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that most smart people can.

How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart?

Here’s a good rule of thumb: If you have to ask the question, you aren’t. If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will. OK, actually I do. This kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to blogging though. You’ll see it in any field with relatively low barriers to entry. What percentage of wannabe actors, musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves? It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it. Talent counts for something, and the talent that matters in blogging is intelligence. But that just gets you in the door. You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one particular talent. And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are: web savvy. If you are very web savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your living expenses… and then some. But if becoming truly web savvy is more than your gray matter can handle, then I’ll offer this advice: Don’t quit your day job.

What do I mean by web savvy?

Web savvy. You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent functional understanding of a variety of web technologies. What technologies are “key” will depend on the nature of your blog and your means of monetization. But generally speaking I’d list these elements as significant:

blog publishing software

HTML/CSS

blog comments (and comment spam)

RSS/syndication

feed aggregators

pings

trackbacks

full vs. partial feeds

blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic)

search engines

search engine optimization (SEO)

page rank

social bookmarking

tagging

contextual advertising

affiliate programs

traffic statistics

Optional: podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages. I’m sure I missed a few due to familiarity blindness. If scanning such a list makes your head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from blogging just yet. Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage compared to someone who’s more web savvy, so don’t expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your knowledge base. If you want to sell downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce, SSL, digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the list.

Again, you don’t need to be a programmer; you just need a basic understanding of these technologies. Even if you hire someone else to handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know what you’re getting into. You need to be able to trust your strategic decisions, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re a General who doesn’t know what a gun is. A lack of understanding is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation. For example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO well. But you can’t consider each technology in isolation. You need to understand the connections and trade-offs between them. Monetizing a blog is a balancing act. You may need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you, social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others. Seemingly minor decisions like what to title a web page are significant. In coming up with the title of this article, I have to take all of these potential viewers into consideration. I want a title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social bookmarking. And most importantly I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors. I do my best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs. Often that means abandoning cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones. It’s little skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month.

Missing out on just this one skill is enough to cripple your traffic. And there are dozens of these types of skills that require web savvy to understand, respect, and apply. This sort of knowledge is what separates the 1% from the 99%. Both groups may work just as hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their efforts. It normally doesn’t take me more than 60 seconds to title an article, but a lot of experience goes into those 60 seconds. You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them routinely. Whenever you come across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on Google or Wikipedia, and dive into it long enough to acquire a basic understanding of it. To make money from blogging it’s important to be something of a jack of all trades. Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” That may be true, but you don’t need to master any of these technologies — you just have to be good enough to use them. Grab free article for blog beginners.

It’s the difference between being able to drive a car vs. becoming an auto mechanic. Strive to achieve functional knowledge, and then move on to something else. Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I don’t know how many web technologies actually work. I don’t really care. I can still use them to generate results. In the time it would take me to fully understand one new technology, I can achieve sufficient functional knowledge to apply several of them.

Thriving on change

Your greatest risk isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you. Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities. You need an entrepreneurial mindset, not an employee mindset. Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains. It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst. Blogging is cheap. Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal. Your real concern should be missing opportunities that would have made you money very easily. You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities. Blogosphere changes rapidly, and change creates opportunity. It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and to take advantage of them before they disappear. If you hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting, you may simply miss out. Many opportunities are temporary. And every day you don’t implement them, you’re losing money you could have earned. And you’re also missing opportunities to build traffic, grow your audience, and benefit more people.

I used to get annoyed by the rapid rate of change of web technologies. It’s even more rapid than what I saw when I worked in the computer gaming industry. And the rate of change is accelerating. Almost every week now I learn about some fascinating new web service or idea that could potentially lead to big changes down the road. Making sense of them is a full-time job in itself. But I learned to love this insane pace. If I’m confused then everyone else is probably confused too. And people who only do this part-time will be very confused. If they aren’t confused, then they aren’t keeping up. So if I can be just a little bit faster and understand these technologies just a little bit sooner, then I can capitalize on some serious opportunities before the barriers to entry become too high. Even though confusion is uncomfortable, it’s really a good thing for a web entrepreneur. This is what creates the space for a college student to earn $1,000,000 online in just a few months with a clever idea. Remember this isn’t a zero-sum game. Don’t let someone else’s success make you feel diminished or jealous. Let it inspire you instead.

What’s your overall income-generation strategy?

I don’t want to insult anyone, but most people are utterly clueless when it comes to generating income from their blogs. They slap things together haphazardly with no rhyme or reason and hope to generate lots of money. While I’m a strong advocate of the ready-fire-aim approach, that strategy does require that you eventually aim. Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire will just create a mess. Take a moment to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your site. If you aren’t good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for how you’re going to generate income. You don’t need a full business plan, just a description of how you plan to get from $0 per month to whatever your income goal is. An initial target goal I used when I first started this site was $1500per month. It’s a somewhat arbitrary figure, but I knew if I could reach $15000per month, I could certainly push it higher, and $1500 is enough income that it’s going to make a meaningful difference in my finances. I will certainly reach that level by 12 Months from. Blogging income is actually quite easy to maintain. It’s a lot more secure than a regular job. No one can fire me, and if one source of income dries up, I can always add new ones. We’ll address multiple streams of income soon… Are you going to generate income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales, donations, or something else? Maybe you want a combination of these things. However you decide to generate income, put your basic strategy down in writing. I took 15 minutes to create a half-page summary of my monetization strategy. I only update it about once in two Months and review it once a week. This isn’t difficult, but it helps me stay focused on where I’m headed. It also allows me to say no to opportunities that are inconsistent with my plan. Refer to your monetization strategy (or philosophy) when you need to make design decisions for your web site. Although you may have multiple streams of income, decide which type of income will be your primary source, and design your site around that. Do you need to funnel people towards an order form, or will you place ads all over the site? Different monetization strategies suggest different design approaches. Think about what specific action you want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you, and design your site accordingly. When devising your income strategy, feel free to cheat. Don’t re-invent the wheel. Copy someone else’s strategy that you’re convinced would work for you too. Do NOT copy anyone’s content or site layout (that’s copyright infringement), but take note of how they’re making money. I decided to monetize this site with advertising and affiliate income after researching how various successful bloggers generated income. Later I added donations as well. This is an effective combo.

Traffic, traffic, traffic

Assuming you feel qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging (and I haven’t scared you away yet), the three most important things you need to monetize your blog are traffic, traffic, and traffic. Just to throw out some figures, last few months (February 2007), this site received over 1.1 million visitors and over 2.4 million page views. That’s almost triple what it was just 3 months ago. Why is traffic so important? Because for most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic. If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent). You can screw almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it’s really hard to fail. With sufficient traffic the realistic worst case is that you’ll eventually be able to monetize your web site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming). When I first launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my biggest challenge. All of my plans hinged on my ability to build traffic. If I couldn’t build traffic, it was going to be very difficult to succeed. So I didn’t even try to monetize my site for the first few months. I just focused on traffic building. Even after 3 months, traffic building is still the most important part of my monetization plan. For my current traffic levels, I know I’m undermonetizing my site, but that’s OK. Right now it’s more important to me to keep growing the site, and I’m optimizing the income generation as I go along. Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation. More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for you. And it also means you’re helping more and more people. With respect to traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get richer. High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren’t accessible for low-traffic sites. On average at least 20 bloggers add new links to my site every day, my articles can easily surge to the top of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and I’m getting more frequent requests for radio interviews.

Will putting ads on your site hurt your traffic?

Here’s a common fear I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites: Putting ads on my site will cripple my traffic. The ads will drive people away, and they’ll never come back. Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally… FALSE. It’s just not true. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site. Nothing. Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links. Nothing. I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever. Traffic continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site. In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad layout. I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about this. It’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already that even though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if they value the content, they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say publicly. Most mature people understand it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from his/her work. I think I’m lucky in that my audience tends to be very mature — immature people generally aren’t interested in personal development. To create an article like this takes serious effort, not to mention the hard-earned experience that’s required to write it. This article alone took me over 15 hours of writing and editing. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to earn an income from such work. If you get no value from it, you don’t pay anything. What could be more fair than that? The more income this blog generates, the more I can put into it. For example, I used some of the income to buy podcasting equipment and added a podcast to the site. I’ve recorded 10 episodes so far. The podcasts are all ad-free. I’m also planning to add some additional services to this site in the years ahead. More income = better service. At the time of this writing, my site is very ad-heavy. Some people point this out to me as if I’m not aware of it: “You know, Elvis. Your web site seems to contain an awful lot of ads.” Of course I’m aware of it. I’m the one who put the ads there. There’s a reason I have this configuration of ads. They’re effective! People keep clicking on them. If they weren’t effective, I’d remove them right away and try something else. I do avoid putting up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites, including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your screen). Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much. I also provide two ad-free outlets, so if you really don’t like ads, you can actually read my content without ads. First, I provide a full-text RSS feed, and at least for now it’s ad-free. I do, however, include a donation request in the bottom of my feeds.

Multiple streams of income

You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket. Think multiple streams of income. On this site I actually have six different streams of income. Can you count them all? Here’s a list:

1. Google Adsense ads (pay per click and pay per impression advertising)

2. Donations (via e-gold)

3. Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month)

4. Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare (commission on products sold, mostly books)

5. Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer)

Perks

Depending on the nature of your blog, you may be able to enjoy some nice perks as your traffic grows. Almost every week I get free personal development books in the mail (for potential review on this site). Sometimes the author will send it directly; other times the publisher will ship me a batch of books. I also receive CDs, DVDs, and other personal development products. It’s hard to keep up sometimes (I have a queue of over 500 e-Books right now), but I am a voracious consumer of such products, so I do plow through them as fast as I can. When something strikes me as worthy of mention, I do indeed write up a review to share it with my visitors. I have very high standards though, so I review less than 10% of what I receive. I’ve read over 700 books in this field and listened to dozens of audio programs, so I’m pretty good at filtering out the fluff. As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a great deal of self-help fluff out there. My criteria for reviewing a product on this site is that it has to be original, compelling, and profound. If it doesn’t meet these criteria, I don’t review it, even if there’s a generous affiliate program. I’m not going to risk abusing my relationship with my visitors just to make a quick buck. Making money is not my main motivation for running this site. My main motivation is to grow and to help others grow, so that always comes first. Your blog can also gain you access to certain events. A high-traffic blog becomes a potential media outlet, so you can actually think of yourself as a member of the press, which indeed you are.

Motivation

I don’t think you’ll get very far if money is your #1 motivation for blogging. You have to be driven by something much deeper. Money is just frosting. It’s the cake underneath that matters. My cake is that I absolutely love personal development – not the phony “fast and easy” junk you see on infomercials, but real growth that makes us better human beings. That’s my passion. Pouring money on top of it just adds more fuel to the fire, but the fire is still there with or without the money.

What’s your passion? What would you blog about if you were already set for life?

Blogging lifestyle

Perhaps the best part of generating income from blogging is the freedom it brings. I work from home and set my own hours. I write whenever I’m inspired to write (which for me is quite often). Plus I get to spend my time doing what I love most — working on personal growth and helping others do the same. There’s nothing I’d rather do than this. Perhaps it’s true that 99 out of 100 people can’t make a decent living from blogging yet. But maybe you’re among the 1 in 100 who can.

Be renewed!

A million thanks for your Donation... that is my empowerment!

elvissatte@yahoo.co.uk