Michael Dethrones a Common Career Fantasy
Archives: Daily Issues
Issue# 2713
- WEALTHY: If you could have any career, what would it be? (Michael Masterson)
- HEALTHY: 2 secrets to staying motivated for your fat-loss program (Craig Ballantyne)
- WISE: Samuel Johnson on perfection
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- Are you still just a student? (Clayton Makepeace)
- An instant credibility booster (Paul Lawrence)
- It’s Good to Know… about the rise of online video
- Add “patois” to your vocabulary
* Hightly Recommended *
How This “Dirty” Word in Real Estate Can Make You a Fortune
Why would you EVER want to invest in real estate these days?
The market is in shambles:
RealtyTrac reports that 860,000+ properties were repossessed by lenders last year.
5.4 million Americans are behind on their mortgage payments, says the Wall Street Journal.
Foreclosure.com says that home foreclosures jumped to nearly one million homes in 2008 – a 64% rise from 2007.
Yes, the situation is bleak.
But the truth is, there IS money – BIG money – to be made in real estate.
Especially when it comes to that “dirty” word: foreclosures.
Charles Petty has made $3.2 million in the past few years. But he hasn’t done so using any real estate investing method you’ve heard of…
No, he found a little-known “loophole” in the foreclosure process… And now he makes tens of thousands of dollars a month, from his laptop, sitting by his swimming pool.
He’s not a realtor or a property buyer. He doesn’t sell. He doesn’t even visit a single property.
Yet in the past 3 months alone, he’s made over $80,000.
Find out what this foreclosure “loophole” is – and how you can use it to make your own fortune – right here.
“It is reasonable to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance toward it, though we know it can never be reached.”
- Samuel Johnson
The Perfect Business for Today, Part 2
If you could have any career you wanted, what would it be?
According to a magazine article I read years ago, the most common “career fantasy” is to be a professional athlete. Next on the list was actor. Then musician. Then model.
That should not surprise you. Madison Avenue and Hollywood have made those careers seem glamorous. But despite the tons of money, adoring fans, private jets, and special privileges, I wouldn’t want to be a celebrity. Here’s why:
- The careers of athletes, actors, models, and other celebrities generally have a downhill trajectory. They hit their peak relatively young, and then start descending, often rapidly, until they are scurrying in the darkness, looking for any work they can get. It’s pathetic.
- They are slaves to themselves. A celebrity must always maintain his public persona, because that is how he makes his money. If he begins to act differently, he loses his stock in trade.
- They have to work really, really hard – and athletes, in particular, are on the road most of the year.
- They have no privacy. Yes, it’s cool to be able to get good tables at trendy restaurants. But who wants to eat while everyone in the joint is staring at you?
No, the life of a celebrity is not for me. And if it’s part of your fantasy life, leave it there.
There is a much better way to earn a living. One that can give you more income than you could ever spend, more wealth than you could ever use, and more freedom than Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, and Oprah Winfrey put together.
I’m talking about becoming a super-successful small-business owner.
Small business, by the way, isn’t all that small. By definition, it includes businesses with annual revenues up to half a billion dollars. If you owned a business that was making that kind of dough, you could easily pay yourself 10 million bucks a year.
I have about a dozen friends who started down the small-business road when I did – i.e., in the early 1980s. And they are all worth between $50 million and $500 million today. That may not be in the Warren Buffett league, but it’s certainly enough wealth to not worry about the price of gas or the price of a new car.
When you are a successful small-business owner, you can live as conservatively or flamboyantly as you wish. You can stay in your old neighborhood or move to a custom-built mansion. It’s up to you.
Because you have the financial capacity of a movie star, you can buy the privileges they sometimes get for free. You can sit in the same seats they do. You can go to the same parties. You can have the same toys. If you want to. But you probably won’t want to, because the small-business lifestyle keeps you grounded in the real world.
There are an infinite number of avenues for first-time business owners to explore – but not all of them are worth pursuing.
I listed all my criteria for the “perfect business” in Part 1 of this article. Based on those criteria, I’d write off any business where your income would be limited by the hours you would be able to spend at it. That would include lots of prestige professions like doctoring, lawyering, and any other career where you bill for your services by the hour or day. I would also eliminate businesses that require you to be there all the time, including many small retail businesses and many personality-driven franchises.
The ideal business would be one with unlimited upside potential – one you could eventually sell for millions of dollars. And, once up and running, it would not depend on you to keep it going. You could step aside and let others take over the day-to-day operations.
Finally – and this is a big one – the ideal business would give you the opportunity to be both creative and analytical. It would challenge you intellectually and satisfy you emotionally.
Tall order. But not impossible. There is one business that meets all those requirements. Would it surprise you to know that it is online information publishing?
That’s right, it’s the business I’ve been in for many years – the one ETR recommends to its readers all the time.
I have been part of the launch of at least two dozen online information publishing businesses in the past 10 years. Though they needed a lot of my time when they were in their start-up stages, now, on average, I spend less than an hour a month on each of them. My partners and the superstars that run them do all the real work.
That leaves me free to start and nurture new businesses. And for me, that is the most interesting sort of work. Information publishing allows me to direct my attention to projects that are fresh and exciting – so I’m never bored and always raring to go.
By the way, the least successful of these information publishing businesses – started 16 months ago – will do $250,000 this year. The most successful will do more than $60 million.
As I said, I no longer have to be actively involved in any of them. Yet, they continue to provide me with streams of income. And if they are ever sold, I stand to make a bundle.
So that’s one reason I’d recommend online information publishing to you. It will give you the chance to retire long before you are old enough to retire.
A second reason: The pricing structure is based on “inelastic demand.” This means, as I’ve pointed out before, that your prices are determined by you, not the market. In other words, you can charge pretty much whatever you want for your products.
If you are selling investment advice, for example, you could charge $39 for a monthly newsletter or $5,000 for a trading service. If you are selling self-improvement ideas (which is what ETR does), you could charge as little as $19 for a teleconference or as much as $3,900 for essentially the same information that is delivered in a more personalized way.
Because of its pricing structure and because its market is global and easy to reach, an online information publishing business can grow as big as you want it to grow. You can make – quite easily – a few hundred thousand dollars a year running a small, tightly directed online business. Or you could make tens of millions or even hundreds of millions (my primary client is in that category) simply by allowing the business to grow naturally via the Internet.
And you can do all that without having to worry about inventory. When my clients first began marketing their information on the Internet, they delivered physical products, because consumers were accustomed to getting books and magazines and newsletters. But that’s no longer the case. Today, you can give your buyers the choice of online or physical delivery. About half will choose to get the information online – which will save you lots of money. The rest will be happy to pay extra to have you print up and mail the information. All that means a healthier bottom line.
A few other reasons that I touched on last week:
- Information publishing is usually a cash business, which means you don’t have to worry about receivables.
- It does not require an expensive location or a lot of high-priced employees. In fact, it’s a truly portable business. You can start it practically anywhere in the world – as long as you have an Internet connection.
- It is relatively free of government and industry regulations. Not only that, but all publishers – including information publishers – are protected by the First Amendment. This means you can publish just about anything you want to, so long as you don’t lie or cheat.
So that’s it. That’s why my vote for the perfect business is online information publishing. If you are not already in it, what’s stopping you?
[Ed. Note: Are you ready to start your own perfect business? Our 5 Days in July Internet Business Building seminar is just 8 days away - so don't delay. Sign up now.]
* Highly Recommended *
The Shocking Truth About Walt Disney’s True Identity
Walt Disney is a household name, much beloved by children and parents everywhere.
That’s why what I’m about to reveal may shock you:
He may not have been one in the parrot-toting eye-patch-wearing, ship-terrorizing sense…
But Walt Disney was a “pirate.”
He discovered buried treasure in a book of fairy tales and turned it into a raging river of cash that hasn’t dried up since. These days, his company is raking in $37 billion a year.
What Walt did is completely legal. And you can do it too.
You can use the Internet to dig up “treasure chests” that are yours for the taking…
…and turn them into steady profit streams that pour thousands of dollars into your bank account each month.
Getting Paid to Learn
Let me tell you something that all the copywriting gurus out there probably won’t.
Everything that you can possibly learn about copywriting by reading and taking courses and going to workshops won’t do you one freaking bit of good if you don’t put it to WORK. Because it’s not until you begin applying this stuff in the real world that you REALLY begin to learn!
Students have to pay to learn. Once you begin doing, others PAY YOU to learn.
Courage – true courage – means being scared to death and then doing what needs to be done anyway. So think about what scares you most – what’s holding you back or limiting the amount of money you could be making… SHOULD be making right now.
Write those fears down on a scrap of paper. Then make it a point to take them on, one by one, this week.
When I was beginning my copywriting career, my biggest fear was approaching prospective clients. So I forced myself to do it for two hours every morning. I dialed the phone until my fingers bled – and before long, I got pretty good at selling myself. Next thing I knew, I actually looked forward to the times I set aside to fill my writing schedule.
My prediction: You’ll be shocked to discover that the very things you’ve feared… the very things that have stood between you and the success you dream of… become the things you love doing the most.
[Ed. Note: Master copywriter Clayton Makepeace publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine The Total Package to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits. Claim your 4 free moneymaking e-books - bursting with tips, tricks, and tactics that'll skyrocket your response - at MakepeaceTotalPackage.com.
Is fear stopping you from starting your own Internet business? Learn how to boost your skills in copywriting, Internet marketing, e-mail list building, search engine optimization, and more at Early to Rise's 5 Days in July Internet Business Building Conference. Find out how you can build your own fully functioning online business in just five days.]
How to Use Quotes to Strengthen Your Advertising
No matter how you choose to promote your business – with traditional direct mail, e-mail, display ads, or even radio or television – your ads aren’t going to work if they don’t have credibility. If your prospects don’t believe what you’re saying about your product or service, they’re not going to buy.
One good way to convince them that what you’re saying is true is to back up your claims with a quote from a respected media source.
So, how do you find appropriate quotes? You can do a Google search. But that’s just a start. The websites of most newspapers, magazines, and trade journals have their own search engines that comb their archives. And by searching those websites, you can get results that won’t necessarily come up on Google.
I used this approach when I was marketing an instructional DVD on how to relieve back pain with stretching. By going to the USA Today website, I was able to find several relevant articles. Then, in my promotion, I included a box that said something like: “According to USA Today…” – and I listed some impressive research findings that supported my claim that flexibility reduces back pain.
Let’s say you market water filters. In that case, you might go to The New York Times and search for “benefits of clean water.” Chances are very good that plenty of statistics and expert opinions will pop up that you can quote in your sales copy.
[Ed. Note: Paul Lawrence is a successful entrepreneur and publisher who has started over a dozen profitable enterprises. To get more practical small-business tips, check out Paul's "Street Smart" program by clicking right here.
Credible sales copy is vital to any business. But without great products and an effective marketing strategy... your credibility won't matter one bit. Learn how to do it all with the Internet Money Club: Independent Learner Edition. It's your step-by-step guide to everything you need to start your own moneymaking online business from home.]
The Key to Dropping 34 Pounds in Just 12 Weeks
I’ve seen men and women lose as much as 34 pounds in just 12 weeks with a good fat-loss program. Some have gone on to lose 100 pounds in 10 months – and ended up looking 10-15 years younger.
The key to these impressive results is motivation. And there are two main ways to stay motivated.
First, make it a personal challenge to stick to your program. Whether you’re doing it to see your stress levels drop so you will stop snapping at your spouse… or to get a six-pack stomach so all eyes will be on you at the beach… your motivation has to come from within. I can’t motivate you. You have to motivate yourself.
Second, get yourself a social support network. Ask friends and family to help you stay on track, and check out fat-loss forums online. (There are hundreds of them!) Knowing that someone else out there cares about you and your success – even if they are thousands of miles away – is a powerful motivator.
If you have failed at your fat-loss attempts in the past, chances are it’s because you tried to go it alone. The truth is, losing fat can be a positive experience. It can also mean meeting new friends online.
[Ed. Note: Need help staying motivated? Fitness expert Craig Ballantyne can help you burn fat and build muscle with three 45-minute workouts a week. Learn how right here.
For more easy-to-implement ideas about how to live longer and feel better, sign up for ETR's free natural health newsletter.]
It’s Good to Know: The Rise of Online Video
More than 16.8 billion videos were viewed on the Internet in April, a 16 percent increase over the month before. YouTube and its parent company, Google, dominate, accounting for 40.7 percent. Fox Interactive Media, Hulu, Viacom, and Microsoft trail with 3.1, 2.4, 1.9, and 1.7 percent market share, respectively.
(Source: ClickZ)
* Highly Recommended *
Wealth Attraction Secrets That Can Turn You into Your Own ATM Machine
Imagine for a moment you are a pitcher toiling in the minors for years.
You are good, just not great… frustrated you think if only you had that “missing ingredient” to put you over the top-put you into “The Show”, the MAJORS.
Then you get a phone call which changes your life. In fact, it’s so mind boggling that you think it’s a joke, that’s because it’s “The GREG MADDUX…” 4 Time Cy Young, 350 game winner and FUTURE HALL OF FAMER, Greg Maddux!
All Greg wants to do is personally coach you for 30 days and give you “his” inside secrets to executing three different pitches. Once he does- you are remarkably transformed into a major leaguer… just like that!
Or what if you’re a swimmer on your high-school swim team. You are up for a big tournament in 30 days… this is THE one you need to win to get that college scholarship!
Problem is, there’s LOTS of competition and you might not be good enough.
That is until your coach comes into practice with MICHAEL PHELPS, 8 time OLYMPIC GOLD WINNER Michael Phelps… and he personally coaches you for 30 days and gives you “the missing ingredient”, that will boost your endurance and speed 10x times to what it normally is. CHA-CHING college was just paid for!
There you are… struggling like every other American through the greatest economic crisis of the 21st century… bills are piling on… your house needs repairs (or maybe you are about to lose it).
To add insult to injury your new business is NOT taking off. You are at your breaking point-and then it happens:
The co-founder of the 1st Home Shopping Network and personal mentor to no fewer than 4 billionaires contacts you.
This rich man wants to give you the “missing ingredient” you need to attract wealth — the one that will turn you into a mean, lean, money making atm machine!
And the best part? He is guaranteeing your success in just 30 days!
RING! Pick up the phone… it’s the billionaire mentor and he wants to make you an offer you can’t refuse! Click here to get all the inside details…
Word to the Wise: Patois
“Patois” (PAT-wah) – literally French for “clumsy speech” – is jargon; a dialect that differs from the standard, literary form of the language.
Example (as used by William Safire in The New York Times): “When the novelist Raymond Chandler… was hypercorrected on [his usage of the split infinitive], he wrote back to his editor: ‘Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois… and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.’”
[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker... build your self-confidence and intellect... increase your attractiveness to others... just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR's Words to the Wise CD Library.]
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