4 Hour Work Week

A friend got me this book and I have to say – it’s a good read. It’s not a smooth read, but a good one. There are a number of points that really hit me – and that’s always enough to make it a good book. Even 1 good point that blows me away is awesome. This had a handful of them. I’ll cover the ones that hit me hardest…

1st - Stop playing in dreamspace occupied by 90% of the world. Dream unrealistically and far out – because there is a lot less competition there. Great ideas come from far out dreams. I have some far out dreams, and always put a lid on them for being too nutty.

My latest far out dream? Take this if you want, it’s a guaranteed successful business:

“Born Again! and Again! and Again!”

Basically it’s a spa type deal. A person goes inside. Strips naked. Climbs into a silicon bladder that zips up – ziplock style in the fetal position. The water is warm and, well, just like umbilical fluid. The person lays sideways inside a rubber form fitting model of a giant woman. There is a snorkel or something giving air and the mom is also zipped up. The experiencer lays in what is the womb… and experiences the outside world like this for up to 15 minutes or so.

Then the birth pangs begin. Screams are heard. And a team of spa attendees push the silicon bladder with experiencer in it – towards the uterus and out the fagina where there are lights blinding you and the bladder pops open and you lay there naked in the slushy umbilical fluid mess.

Talk about an experience!

I love the idea – but, don’t see it catching on here in Thailand. Japan  yes. Thailand – not for now. USA – yes. I can see this working. Cost? About $79 to be born again.

I have other ideas that are stretching the bounds of morality… decency. I’ll keep them to myself for now.

2nd – The point of starting a business is to remove yourself from it. Get it going – and ease yourself out. Empower managers, workers to make decisions. Review their decisions closely at first – and later, every week or month. Have extensive FAQ’s. Don’t answer email. Don’t attend meetings.

3rd – Get rid of customers that aren’t in the top 20%. Just drop them. You’re spending 80% of time with them to figure out issues and work on problems. They cost you 10 times as much as good customers that just pay repeatedly and love you. Find more like this and drop the rest. You’ll free up your time too.

It’s funny – Tim Ferris would consider me one of the “New Rich”.

I don’t consider myself that yet.

Another few years maybe?

Great book – buy it – you’ll be WOWED a couple times. And that’s enough to make it worth the price of the book.

Making Money with Video – Difficult?

If you can hit “record” on your video camcorder you might be able to make a couple thousand dollars for your effort.

I did a search on YouTube for “funny videos” and sorted by views and length < 4 minutes.

Here are a couple that I found.

If you were in the YouTube Partner program you’d make about $800 for every million views of your video that have advertisements on them. With these 5 videos you could have made $67,520.

Not that difficult… all you need to do basically is hit record a lot…

Blood, 19.3 million views >

Ask her about monsters, 2.5 million views >

Laughing, 28 million views >

I don’t like you mommy, 34.6 million views >
Is this one that brilliant to deserve this many views?

Have you seen the Remi Gaillard videos – the guy from France that does whacky stuff? He has over 263 million views of his videos.

It is not that difficult to make money with YouTube videos – do you have it in you?

How I Added 150 Visitors Per Day Instantly

You may in the same situation, you may not be. You might be able to add 150 or more unique visitors per day to your website in just one day just by making a simple change.

Here’s what I did…

I have a number of ebooks available for free download. These are my books that I created, and yet, this trick would work with someone elses material as well.

I noticed in my stats that I was getting about 200 unique visitors per day downloading my PDF ebook at one of my sites. They were hotlinking to the page from another site that must have posted the direct PDF link. Well, many sites were linking to it, as it turns out.

This is fine, and I allowed for that when I created the ebook because the ebook has some advertisements for other ebooks that cost money, as well as links to some of my other sites. If someone downloads it through a hotlink I’m still a winner because they’ll see these other ads and site links.

Oh, I should mention, this particular ebook has had 128,000+ downloads – most of them from hotlinks not originating at my site. Free ebooks are hot – if you have the right subject.

Anyway.

I wanted to turn these ebook downloaders into visits at my site to see what impact I could have on my stats, so I tried something.

I updated the ebook with even more great information and changed the name and dropped it in a new folder on the server – effectively killing that hotlink for all the sites that linked to it.

I then created a one page Word Doc that I converted to a PDF with the same name as the old ebook and put it in the same directory on the server.

The one page PDF loaded instantly when someone followed the hotlink to it. The one page said,

This eBook has been updated thoroughly on 11/09, and now has 139 fact-filled, illustrated pages. Go here to grab your copy:

[Link here ]

That was it.

At that link I created an information page for my ebook and had an order button for $2.

There have been solid sales from day 1. More importantly, I’ve gained 150 new visitors per day ever since that would never have become visitors.

Try it if you have a similar situation… or, create a similar situation.

Banner Trick

There is remarkably little variation in the 125×125 or other sized banners websites run.

Finally there is a novel look at how to create them – don’t miss this…

Jonathan Volk finds a new banner design intriguing…

Where Did Rebecca Kelley Get Her Potty Mouth?

Who IS this Rebecca Kelley – and did she grow up on a ship full of seamen? Is her middle name, “Diceman”?

If you don’t read ShoeMoney’s blog you’re missing a lot. He’s got great articles when he finally has time to write one, but more importantly for today’s article here on this blog – we’re talking about Rebecca Kelley.

Who IS this girl – the Andrew Dice Clay of the blogworld?

I saw a couple guest posts she did on Shoemoney.com and I thought… “hmm, she’s a bit unrefined wouldn’t you say?”

I asked myself. I do that sometimes.

And yet I liked the couple of articles she wrote… I wouldn’t say I was craving for more, but I liked what I read so far.

Then, I get today’s article in my feed and I think I’m reading Shoe himself talking about a “deuce” in the toilet… but then a couple things just don’t fit Jeremy’s style – like proper grammar and spelling… I look at who wrote it – and it’s that potty mouth girl again!

I gotta say, she kicks ass – and I don’t know where he got her, but I want her too. Very interesting and unique articles from her every time and she’s not playing in the mainstream sandbox with the same types of posts 95% of all bloggers are repeating, and she’s not playing with a mainstream vocabulary either – and you can see that for yourself in today’s post over there.

Congrats to Shoe for putting this girl in the mix – it’s really good reading, even if it does remind me of being in the military. If Shoe doesn’t watch his back this girl is going to take over Shoemoney and make him wear her shirt.

Note for everyone that is trying to make it writing on their own blog:

If you’re an excellent writer you are much better off to get guest posts on a major player’s blog than you are to write for your own, as of yet, unnoticed blog. It is MUCH easier to convince 1 person – Shoe in this case, to let you write an article a week – or two even, than it is to ramp your blog up to 55,000+ RSS subscribers.

If I wasn’t so stubborn I’d do it myself. I’m stubborn though…

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