By Mikael
If you are still hanging on as a reader of this blog, I would like to start by apologizing that I haven’t updated it frequently and that almost 4 months have passed since the last post. However, I do think that it can be turned into a lesson that I find most people are struggling with and that I myself have had a hard time with in the beginning of my online business career.
I have talked about the topic of FOCUS before but I find that it is important to remind ourselves about it from time to time. If we haven’t got a clear and precise goal that we can keep our focus at, we will often drift from one thing to the next and get very little productive work done. I don’t know if you have ever tried it but I have personally done it so many times that I stopped counting.
Ever since I started a challenge based on a webinar I heard on the Keyword Academy where I am a member, I have had no problem keeping my focus and been able to work consistently and effectively to achieve the goal I sat out to reach. The plan was a one year plan but because of my focus and the fact that things gets easier when you are doing them consistently, I have almost reached my goal already.
Reaching that goal as doubled my online income and from the looks of it, I am going to double it once more before the year has passed. That means that listening to a webinar, keeping my focus and taking massive action will most likely result in a 4x increase of the monthly earnings.
What Have You Done Lately?
So now you know why I haven’t taken the time to post on this blog and what I have spent my time on instead. Even though I enjoy writing these posts I am not making any money from it and when time is limited it will therefore be kept at a minimum and when I feel that I have something valuable to share.
But what about yourself? Have you taken the time to look back at the first 4 or 5 months of this year and made up how far you have come towards your goals? Because you do have goals, right?
If not, now is the time to set some goals and start working on them. It doesn’t have to be money goals. You can set goals about all kinds of stuff. Health goals, travel goals, family goals etc. But without them you can’t focus and without focus you will always tend to drift.
Don’t drift through life. It is simply too short to not make the most of it. Focus on what you find is important and start taking action towards it TODAY.
To Your Success,
Mikael
By Mikael
WOW!!… Because of The Keyword Academy and the methods these guys teach, I have never (ever) been as productive as I have been in the last 3 weeks. I know this might be a strange statement considering that I am running a decent online business already, but what I learned from one of their recent webinars has revolutionized my business.
I don’t want to sell you their program (even though you can get access to everything for $1), but merely explain some of what it is that I have learned through the TKA membership.
More Virtual Real Estate Means More Income
When you are making money online from websites that bases the income on traffic, you will need to focus on getting more of it. Now there are at least two ways to receive more traffic and they are: 1) getting more links to improve ranking and 2) adding more content to your sites so that they can rank for more terms.
Both of these will to a large extent involve content creation and whether that content is placed on your own sites (expanding your virtual real estate) or place on other sites (article directories, guest posting etc.) with links back to your sites, it will increase your traffic.
So what it all comes down to is to create more content. You can write the articles yourself or you can outsource the creation. Only key point is that you must make sure that it is quality content.
Some will argue that any kind of content can work and I agree. The difference between crap content (spun, scraped etc.) and quality content (unique, written by a human) is that quality content will work for you long term.
If you plan on staying in this business and not running a “business” that has to outsmart the search engines all the time, you need to focus on quality and on quantity. Both are needed to grow your business long term.
So what did I achieve in the last 3 weeks? Well, to be honest I am quite proud of having expanded my online business with a total of 100,000 words of quality content (about 70-80 articles). I have had help in the form of VA’s and hired content writing, but I did write a large part of it myself as well.
In comparison this equaled what I did in about 4 months in the end of 2009. Talk about in increase in productivity. And all of this is due to a single webinar from TKA that made me realize what I needed to do.
To Your Success,
Mikael
By Mikael
Have you made a habit out of listening to motivational and personal development talks and lectures yet? What about reading books on personal development and achievement as well as biographies of people that have accomplished great things in their lives? If you answer is “no” then you REALLY need to start making this into a habit ASAP. If you haven’t even considered listening and reading material like this I can only encourage you to stop reading this post right now and go pick up your first book or CD.
But enough “call to action” 
What I really wanted to talk to you about is something I re-learned from listening to a 2004 Jim Rohn leadership event training.
In that training, one of the speakers is the well known Denis Waitley and even though I had heard this lecture several times, then one of the things he talked about hit me and I therefore want to share that with you as I believe it can help anyone that is struggling or who feels discouraged or impatient.
Becoming a Master at What You Do
We live in a world where everything is happening at rapid and increasing speeds and still we’re struggling with accepting the speed (or lack thereof) and most of us feel that things should happen even faster (especially the success we seek). I don’t know about you but I find it to be a very strange phenomenon even though I also suffer from it from time to time.
In the seminar Denis talks about the fact that it will take 7 years and 10,000 hours of practice to become a master of your field. 7 years and 10,000 hours! That will probably seem like forever for most people.
But when you think of it then it probably makes sense. Practice makes perfect and whatever you job or education is I am sure you can agree that you didn’t become a master in that area in a year or two. You will definitely get better and you might even become “good” in a matter of a few years but mastering the skill takes more time than that.
So if you take this as a fact and apply it to your online business or in your search for financial independence, then ask yourself if you have really spent 7 full years and 10,000 focused hours to get to where you want to go and master the skills of that particular area? My personal answer is NO and I therefore know and accept that I am not there yet and that more work, trial & error and education are needed. But when you have a deadline that says “7 years and 10,000 hours” it isn’t quite as difficult to accept as when you work without a definite goal and timeframe.
It will still feel like a lot of time on days where you’re in a bad mood or feeling discouraged but that is when you need to remember that it will take 7 years and 10,000 hours and if you choose to do nothing for a week, you’re only postponing the deadline.
But What If I Can Only Find 1 Hour Per Day?
The short answer is that it will take you more than 7 years but still about 10,000 hours. This might not be what we want to hear but I find that it is even more important that we stop lying to ourselves. Lying to yourself or living in denial is one of the easiest ways to waste your time and end by giving up. So stop doing that. Call a spade a spade and get going.
The more action you take, the more momentum you’ll get and momentum creates the results that will be required for you to stay motivated to keep going towards the 10,000 hours of practice and trial & error. 1 hour per day will not create a momentum in most cases.
If you can’t find more than one hour per day, then tell your family that for the next long period of time you will need to have Saturdays or Sundays for yourself in order to work on your dream. Lock yourself in your room and plug away. If you cut back on sleep and eat fast, you should be able to crank out at least 15 hours of work in one day and that kind of action is what creates the momentum and generates the results that keep you going.
But since I am not always around to remind you, please (for your own sake) go find some motivational tapes or CDs and start listening to them on a regular basis. They are great when you’re driving your car, vacuuming or before you go to bed. 30-60 minutes per day is enough and it will change your thinking in a way that you will not believe until you have tried it. I promise!
To Your Success,
Mikael
By Mikael
I’ve been wanting to write this post for quite some time because not only is this something that I have been victim of myself (and still is at times) but it is also something that I have seen a lot of other online marketers struggle with time and time again. And the sad thing is that there is absolutely no reason for it!!
But let me take you back to where it all a started…
About 6 months again I had come across an absolutely brilliant e-Book by an online marketer that I highly respect. Not just because he makes +$100k per month (profit) from his online ventures but even more so because he tells it like it is. If you are running in circles and spending all of your money buying new e-books he slaps your face (virtually) and tells you to wake up. His name is Chris Rempel and you might have heard about him and his blog called TheLazyMarketer.
Anyway… His e-book is called Conduit Method and is a top notch book with no fluff and hype (except for the salesletter). It costs a mere $14.95 (which I think it ridiculously cheap) and the stuff it covers is simply amazing (and simple). But that is not the point of this post.
The point is that I promoted this little e-book to a group of online marketers and about 12 of these people grabbed the book but only a selected few actually did something with it (no surprises there). Two of the guys that actually took action and followed the instructions in the book has since shared their results with me and this is where the ”beating yourself up” part comes in.
One of these guys told me that he had ONLY had a ROI (return on investment) of 720% in a 6 month period.
SEVEN HUNDRED AND TWENTY PERCENT!
What did you get on your bank account or in your 401k last year?
Seriously people!!!
If you can take an online product like the Conduit Method and turn it into a 720% ROI product then what is the problem? Now I am not trying to pick on this guy because I have been a victim of this myself and do the very same thing from time to time.
What we need is to put things in perspective. I fully understand that generating a 720% profit from a $15 investment might seem insignificant but if you are able to do this quickly and with very little effort, then why don’t you just do more of the same thing? Eventually you will get to bigger numbers but on the flip side you are probably going to see your monthly growth (in percentage) go down.
The reason I bring this up is that I saw about the same ROI with the Conduit Method e-book, but I was thrilled about the results (even though the total profits in dollars might have been insignificant). But when it comes to my monthly income from Adsense and affiliate sales I track both the total income as well as the growth from one month to the next in percentage.
Over the last 3 months or so, I have seen my income from online activities grow more than 80% (and more than 170% since January) but when I looked at the growth from September to October and found that it was a little over 9% I started to beat myself up.
I couldn’t help but say to myself that I had done a poor job and that everything was bad. Have you ever been in a situation where you had some expectations and even though the result you got was phenomenal you were still not satisfied?
If you have ever had a JOB, you would probably be more than THRILLED if you were given a 9% raise in a 12 month period and here I am complaining about a 9% increase in 1 month. Why is that?
See the Big Perspective and Celebrate Results
I hope that the two small stories above have made you think and if you have been acting like my or the guy I was referring to, then think of this story and stop acting this way. Celebrate that you have made improvements and if it isn’t monthly improvements then look at the quarterly improvements or the yearly improvements.
Things take time and as long as you keep doing what you have proven to work, you will get to where you want to go. Surely you can do more, do it more effectively and efficiently but as long as you are moving ahead you are on the right track and you need to acknowledge that and stop beating yourself up (and I need so too).
To Your Success,
Mikael
P.S. Click here to see what the Conduit Method is about
By Mikael
I’m not going to make this into a long blog post because I know your time is valuable and that you probably feel that you have to little of it as it is. I think it is the “disease of online marketers”
But since we all value our time I also feel that it is important that we all learn to outsource as much of our work as we possibly can. This will both free up our time and also increase our online income.
And we all want both, right?
Normally the different outsourcing courses and seminars that are available online will cost you a fair amount of money and will not always be worth it (I recently tried a well known outsourcing course where I had to ask for a refund).
But this time I have come across a series of very valuable videos (as well as a free report) and I am in the middle of viewing and reading it all. What I have gone through so far has been really high quality and I don’t really understand why it is made available for free.
However instead of wondering about why it is free I thought it was better to make all of you aware of it as well. Head over to Mass Outsource and watch the videos and get the ebook.
If you value your time and want to have more of it while making more money, do not hesitate. Procrastination is the worst killer of online success, and when something this good is offered for free, you would be a fool to not grab it.
To Your Success,
Mikael
Mikael Rieck is the author of more than hundred articles on topics of how to make money both online and offline. He has been online since 1999 and has always had a passion for money making opportunities and teaching others how to make a profit.