Great quote from Nik Halik I heard yesterday: “The stock exchange is the place where wealth is transferred from the uneducated to the educated.”
Be warned!
The other day I was writing a section for a new book and posed the question: what would I do if I was broke and had only $5 in the world?
I’d buy some bread, some butter and some ham and make some sandwiches! But I wouldn’t eat them…
I would sell the sandwiches for $5 apiece. That way I would have money to buy more bread, butter and ham. I’d have enough to eat myself, so I wasn’t hungry any longer and STILL have a little profit.
I’d do the same again next day. I’d end up with even more profit. I could buy a lot more bread, butter and maybe different fillers (cheese, salads, pastrami etc) and sell even more sandwiches each day.
Pretty soon I could grow this to a sandwich bar business or even a restaurant. And from there, who knows.
The point is, if you have understood what I just told you, you’ll never want for money. What’s the secret? USE MONEY TO MAKE MONEY. Buy your wealth!
Most foolish people would spend the $5 on a sandwich. They are consumers, not entrepreneurs! That’s the difference.
If you really want to succeed, to have wealth beyond your wildest dreams, you have to face one challenge; it’s the one that scares most people: change.
You can’t keep doing what you are doing and expect more.
So if you are in a limited income situation, in other words a job with a fixed salary, or maybe no job and fixed income support, you have NO CHOICE. You must establish something which is capable of changing, growing and adapting.
Let’s face it, nobody ever got seriously rich by progressive salary increases. Ain’t going to happen. You can’t expect to win at cards and keep winning bigger and bigger amounts! You could marry the boss and inherit his empire, as the lady did who now owns BMW. But these are not a valid paths to wealth.
To build wealth, serious wealth, you need something you own and control which can grow to meet your increased needs.
Almost by definition, that means you need a business of your own. Read the rest of this entry »
There is a lot of satisfaction to creating your own products for sale. Also a lot of pitfalls, so listen up.
A successful product needs to be:
• valuable to the market (something needed and wanted, in other words)
• of reasonable quality (not necessarily perfect)
• affordable
• easy to consume (put to use)
It’s not important that products be original or new (books on dieting come out in an endless stream). Or that they be intrinsically costly to create.
The value of a product is NOT in the cost of production. Its value is in what it does for the consumer. A Bentley sports car costs little more to manufacture than a Nissan – cost of steel, cost of rubber and upholstery, cost of instrumentation and so on. But a Bentley creates a vastly different transformation in the customer’s self image. Read the rest of this entry »
Let’s continue from before. If you know what section of the market you are looking for, you need to lay some bait (like in fishing).
You need to choose a good keyword, which I am going to assume you know how to do.
Once you have a good keyword, you need to make it perform. Let’s suppose your keyword is “raise my child’s reading age”. Note that keywords are not necessarily just one word. They can be a phrase, like this one, which we would call a “long-tail” keyword. You certainly know what’s in a person’s mind who types in this phrase, right?
If – and ONLY IF – you can answer that person’s needs, then you can go fishing. Read the rest of this entry »
Say what? SEO stands for search engine optimization. That means using deliberate techniques to improve your chances of being high on the list of websites that Google shows to surfers searching for your topic. That is to say, the natural list, not including paid ads listings. We call this the “organic” listing.
You can recognize the organic list; it’s on the left hand side. It’s usually very long and goes on for dozens, maybe hundreds of pages, on that particular search term.
Paid listings (in other words advertisements) are on the right and sometimes above the organic listing.
Using Google AdWords will allow you to pay for advertisements shown when somebody types in a particular search term. So if you sell golf equipment, you will pay to be shown to surfers looking for “putters” or “Improve your golf swing”. Quite bluntly, the more you pay, the nearer the top of the display list you come.
Competition is getting quite brutal. What used to be a few cents a click years ago may now have risen to $5-$10-even $50 a click. This is how Google makes most of its money and what makes Google increasingly powerful (and maybe even dangerous). Read the rest of this entry »