I am immersed daily in the community of people who are trying to make money online. And besides trying to carve out my out little piece of the pie, I like to occasionally sit back and observe the lay of the land.

If you asked me what the one thing is that separates the big earners from the ones who struggle to get a monthly $100 AdSense check, it’s strategy. Big earner have and follow one, strugglers don’t.

Goals, ??? & a Plan

You’ll hear a lot about goals (The Secret) and planning (Goal Mapping) when it comes to manifesting dreams in your life, but the one thing that I see overlooked, neglected and undervalued is a strategy.

The three points of the success triangle as I see it:

1. goal
2. strategy
3. plan

All three are essential.

Let’s take an example. Now I don’t know Darren Rowse personally so I can’t claim to know what went on in his head, but here’s my best guess at the process of a successful Blogger:

Darren started blogging as a hobby but I remember reading that at some point he made a deal with his wife that he would take 6 months to create a full-time income from blogging.

Goal: Create a full-time income from blogging.

Plan: Post 20 stories a day of valuable content to various blogs.

The part that is so often overlooked…

Strategy: Online advertising and commerce were just beginning to mature when he went pro, blogs were exploding in popularity and search engines were in love with blogs as a constantly updated sources of information. Therefore each blog post would have a present and residual value. Put enough little flakes of value online and the sum total would amount to a passive income system equal to a full time job.

The Easiest Strategy is To Follow Long Term Trends

The easiest way to make money or succeed at anything is to make a plan based on a long term trend.

Darren identified a trend and built his plan on top of that trend. If he had the same goal and the same plan 3 years earlier, he wouldn’t have made his full-time income goal in 6 months.

BTW, it is my belief that the same trend is still in effect. Meaning that someone with the same goal, strategy and plan could produce the same results as Darren did. However, since competition is higher, secondary factors like market research (choosing a profitable topic), communication ability and quality, and technical factors (search engine optimization) are now more important.

Take at Look at the game Monopoly

Who’s going to win most often in a game of Monopoly? The person with the best strategy. Typically you can win most of the time, just by having any type of strategy. For example: buy one high quality matching set of properties and develop them fully to hotels.

Monopoly is perfect for learning strategy since it rewards the grouping of properties of the same color.

A good strategy has a compounding effect on your efforts.

In the real world buying any property, over a long enough period of time and you are likely to make money. But buying a property in a great neighborhood or a city about to boom and you’ll make a lot more money.

If Darren had written 20 articles a day and submitted them to traditional publications rather than posting them on his blog, he’d probably still be a starving artist rather than a 6 Figure Blogger.

3 Reasons Why Strategy Matters so Much

1.) A well chosen strategy allows you to leverage the trend. An expression from my Grandfather, “when the tide comes in, all the boats rise.”

In short, it is easier to have success if you have a trend working in your direction. Identifying major trends is important.

2.) Strategy takes guessing and, more importantly, emotion out of the working of your plan. When you have built your plan on a strategy that aligns with a long term trend, all you have to do is to work your plan and pay attention to the macro events which may cause a change in fundamentals.

Your hunches and the day to day emotions should never influence decisions in your plan.

3.) Takes the guesswork out of it.

In my investment club, macro trends are always used to base decisions on. For example, about 2 years ago we asked the question…”how can you make money from the shortage of fossil fuels?”

The leaders of the club passed the question to a team of analysts who concluded, by proper research, that Nuclear, given the restraints of time and money and global warming concerns, is the most viable alternative to highly polluting fuels currently used to produce energy.

The best play on the solution to global warming trends = Uranium. Here’s a look at the chart of a typical junior uranium stock from the last year or so.

Some Trends that You Can Use to Build Wealth

• Near my city (Edmonton) there is $115 billion committed for expansion of an Oil Sands project over the next 5 years, which is driving housing prices up and up due to a huge demand for labor.
• See the uranium example above, as a response to global warming.
• More and more commerce is moving online, but if you look around, especially locally and in smaller businesses, you’ll see that there is a long way to go before e-commerce reaches its full potential.
• While approximately 1 billion people world wide have Internet access, that still leaves 5 billion plus, who are yet to get online.
• The middle class in China and India is expanding rapidly, causing huge demand side pressure on everything from concrete to autos to designer clothes.
• The United States government continues to be fiscally irresponsible, piling up a huge and possibly irreconcilable debt. Hedgers have reacted to this by driving up the price of gold from $290 in 2000, to $648 an ounce in 2007. 

There are probably many others that I haven’t listed, especially in smaller niches. Leave any you can think of in a comment!

Summing Up

Strategy is the key to big and easy wealth. Most people don’t stick to their plans because the plan is not built on a solid strategy, therefore once the emotion of hope and greed or discomfort come into the picture, they doubt, question or abandon the plan.

Every blog post is a little piece of revenue potential, feed them into the right strategy and they will compound to meet and exceed your goals.

This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.

The One Factor That Most Determines Success is a post from: Art of Money

I’m not sure if I’ll blog my way through the entire event and my memory is a bit unreliable but I thought it would be fun to share some of the high-lights and lessons learned from the past weekend in Phoenix at the Rich Dad Headquarters.

On Thursday evening were met by Kim and Robert at a casual reception. Since I went last year meeting Robert and Kim was cool, but not as awe inspiring as the first time. It’s always fun to see someone famous in a small and intimate environment though and I was determined to get a picture of myself with Robert, but when the event actually began, it seemed like a silly thing to ask…so I passed.

This investor made $145k (with a much bigger upside if she develops the property) just by solving a simple puzzle about the ownership of a piece of land and asking the owner if he was willing to sell.

It was also great to see all the returnees from last year again, but the most fun for me was provided when a guy named Peter who, the second I walked in the door, ran up to me and proclaimed, “I read your blog!” I guess having that big picture of me up there was good move by Sean (at least if my goal was to be recognized.)

Profitable Attitudes

When Robert gave us a little wealth building pep talk he talked about a “deal” (the word of the weekend) that one of the participants had pulled down.

She had lived beside an “unbuildable” vacant lot but had a dream of expanding her property onto that lot. No-one knew who the owner was. She tried everything she could think of to find out who the owner was so she could offer to purchase it, but was unable to using conventional means. She was told to just give up and do what she wanted on the vacant lot, others had tried in vain to locate the owner and never succeeded.

One day she saw people pruning trees on the property and asked who had hired them. The said they were not allowed to tell her, but she made note of the company name on their uniform and from that small lead was able to locate the owner of the lot. He turned out to be the original developer who built the sub-division 60 years ago, and had pretty much forgotten about the throw-away lot, that he couldn’t build on at the time.

He didn’t really seem to care about the property (he was very wealthy) and so he sold it to her for $6,000 (this is in Washington D.C. by the way!!!).

To make a long story short she needed to jump through a few hoops at city hall, but she now has the property zoned “buildable” and recently received an appraisal of $151,000 on the lot.

I’m sure over the years many people had tried to find out who owned that land with the idea of developing it, but they didn’t persevere.

Solve Problems, Make Money

We heard it over and over again this weekend. The way you make money is by solving problems and being able to do the things that other people can’t or won’t do. This investor made $145k (with a much bigger upside if she develops the property) just by solving a simple puzzle about the ownership of a piece of land and asking the owner if he was willing to sell.

It’s an illusion that making money with real estate, or probably anything else, is about numbers and in depth knowledge. Creative problem solving makes money. The rest is just details.

Jon Symons
- Thinking about real estate lately, since my landlord just died and I have to find a new place to live!

This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.

Solve Problems Like Nancy Drew to Make the Big Bucks is a post from: Art of Money

This is a guest post by Brian. He skillfully managed to work links to both his blogs into his post, so without further ado, here’s his post:  

I have been writing my parenting blog hosted on wordpress.com for a few months and decided it was time to stretch out and see if I could make some money from blogging or, at the very least, make a name for myself and advance my career as a biologist.

About 3 weeks ago, I decided to write a new self-hosted blog. As advertised, the wordpress installation took about 5 minutes, however, I have yet to write a single blog entry.

Why you might ask?

Because what they don’t tell you is that setting up your blog is addictive. I really don’t know any other way to describe how I’ve spent so much time doing stuff that seems so trivial. I’d like to be writing posts and marketing my new blog, but somehow the set up seems to be sucking up my time.

Real Life

This is where I’m getting my latest fix. There’s so many plugins it’s difficult to know where to start.

I guess this is really the root of the problem. I figure that I have about 2-3 hours a day to work on my 2 blogs. For me, that’s more than enough time to crack out 2 posts and read a hundred or so other blogs looking for inspiration. But, if you’re spending your allotted time setting up your blog, it’s a little hard to find time to write.

Themes

This sucked up most of my time early on. There’s lists of themes a mile long. But I found it hard to choose from most of them since they provide little information about the themes (especially color-wise) in the list, so I picked one of the 83
beautiful wordpress themes you probably haven’t seen since it has screen shots of each theme.

That’s great, but even the best theme isn’t perfect, so it’s off to the theme editor. Having no experience with CSS makes it a little difficult to figure out exactly what to delete/move/add to get it looking exactly how you want it. The names are fairly self-explanatory and maybe if I could figure out exactly what the heck the loop is, I’d understand it better. In the end, trial and error seemed to be faster than reading more help manuals.
Just make one change at a time and if when you bring down your site, replace the file you just changed with your backup copy (you did make a backup copy right?).

Plugins

This is where I’m getting my latest fix. There’s so many plugins it’s difficult to know where to start. One things for sure, everyone’s got an opinion on which plugins you should use. I’ve come to the conclusion that plugins are probably more useful for fixing problems that you’re having rather than trying to actually extend the capabilities of WordPress. Not that the latter isn’t important, I’ve just decided it’s probably not the first thing you should work on when setting up a blog. Thus I’d rank Akismet much higher on your to do list than related entries when setting up your blog.

The Little Things

All the little things have sucked up a lot of time too. You have to set up feedburner feeds, figure out which analytics is best and install it, make a banner and a favicon, submit your site to all the search engines, and set up a robots.txt. The fact that I had to update wordpress twice, first to 2.1.1 and then again after the security issue to 2.1.2 didn’t help.

Enough is Enough

At some point, you just have to call it quits and start on your blog. So I’m here to say, “I’m Brian and I have a blog set up addition.” There, I said it. The blog is not perfect; I’d like to add some links (blogroll) on the right side and some ads, but I guess those can wait. I’ve been dry for an hour now (as long as it took me to write this post). If I’ve really kicked the habit, you should be able to go to my new blog on investing in small biotechs stocks and see a few articles (since I sent this into Jon a few days before it’s scheduled to run). If not, at least you’ll see a new improved theme with all the bells and whistles.

This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.

Why the 5-Minute WordPress Install takes a lot longer than 5 Minutes is a post from: Art of Money

Muhammad Yunus

Last night I caught a fascinating interview with Muhammad Yunus [book: Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty].

Mr. Yunus started a bank in one of the world’s poorest countries. His first loan was for $27 dollars and it was shared between 42 people…and it made a big difference in their lives.

He gave loans to people who have no collateral, he busted the business model of every major bank that came before him by challenging the “truism” that poor people were not credit-worthy, and he did it with trust and hand-shake loans.

The video below is just a teaser for an hour long video [costs about $2.99 from Google Videos - now free, see update at the bottom of the post] but it will give you the idea of how Mr. Yunus got started.

Mr. Yunus’ bank [Grameen], which lends money, based on only trust to the poorest people in the world who have zero collateral, has a 98% repayment rate. I’m guessing that traditional banks are just a weeee be jealous of that number.

So how did he do it?

He gave the highest priority to the people who needed the loans the most. The poorer you are the more likely you are to get a loan. This decision was based on the belief that these people had a sincere desire to build a life for themselves and that they realized that a loan was a golden opportunity to create something of lasting value.

Compare this to charity or a donation that does not have to be paid back… Mr. Yunus realized that a loan taught the borrower a lot more and therefore created a more powerful and independent person. The gained pride, strength and confidence in their abilities when they successfully paid off a micro loan. Then they were ready for the next step financially.

Lending to the Poorest was only Part of the Equation

The percentage of loans in a traditional western bank by gender?

Men = over 90%

Mr. Yunus’ bank wanted to do something radical and make half of its loans to women. But then they began to notice something amazing:

Loans made to women were doing a much greater good to the borrower’s family than loans made to men!

Yikes, I’m sad to say that it makes sense. Mr. Yunus’ bank tossed the 50/50 lending ratio out the window and now lends 97% to women.

The poverty rate in Bangladesh has decreased 25% since Grameen began its micro lending practices, and is on target to reach 50% by 2015.

An amazing story…on December 10, 2006 Mohammad Yunus will receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway. Yes, the peace prize, undoubtedly sending a message about the relationship between poverty and peace.

Click here to view the embedded video.

UPDATE: Very cool news on this post, since I originally posted, VISA has sponsored the full length Yunus Microlending video and so now you can watch it for free in one of 100 different languages. Thanks to Maria for the tip.

This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.

Micro Lending and the Decline of Poverty is a post from: Art of Money

Learn the game by
becoming an insider.

This week’s installment of Rich Dad Wednesday continues with the concept of the “insider.” The first thing that comes to my mind when presented with the term insider is Martha Stewart selling her Imclone shares as the result of tip from the companies CEO.

That’s one kind of insider information…the bad kind…the illegal kind, the kind that ends your butt up in the slammer.

Being an insider is how most easy and big money is made. Not the illegal way of directly profiting from information that hasn’t been announced to the public, but the profitable way of having enough of a keen interest in a subject to live it, until you find an edge that gets you the kind of information that nobody else has.

What is an insider?

An insider can be an expert, with experience, connections and possibly influence. He has information that, when applied to his business, gives him an edge over his competitors.

An example.

I have a friend who’s into real estate investing. He’s done really well at it…to the point where he doesn’t really have to work…but he was getting bored, so he decided to take a job as a construction manager for a company the builds cell phone towers.

Where are cell phone towers being built these days? Near new housing developments. Do you think that working with all the developers in his area, gives my friend insider information that benefits his real estate investments? You bet!

The money he makes in salary will likely be insignificant to the money he makes from the information he assimilates just by showing up and doing his job [Rich Dad bonus tip for today: never work only for money...work for knowledge and learning].

What do you want to do?

And how could you benefit from being on the inside? How about volunteering a couple hours work a week for someone who is already doing what you dream of.

There isn’t a real estate investor on the planet that doesn’t have a fence that needs painting or a tree that needs trimming. Or an Internet business dude or dudette that doesn’t need a keyword list cleaned or some templates reconfigured.

You can learn a lot just from doing menial tasks for someone who is established in what you want to learn.

When I first started out blogging I volunteered to do some backup blogging for Darren on one of his much smaller sites, when he went away on a vacation. At the time I had never used a WordPress site and never written for a site that actually made money.

I got to see how it all worked, how he had his ads set up and many other things [like how he orchestrated communication with 30-40 bloggers so he could take a relaxing month-long vacation] just from putting in a couple hours a week of my time.

It turned out to be a great way to learn and the experience of taking a peek inside a pro blogger’s shop sold me on having an Internet business, and using WordPress as my blogging tool of choice.

Want to get rich?

Find a way to get some inside information and experience. Try using a tangential approach to get to the center of where you want to be. Just listening to the conversion of a really successful person can make you a lot of money…because you’ll learn how they think…which is everything.

Jon Symons
Hanging out at the coffee shops where famous Internet gurus go, so you don’t have to.

This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.

Want to Be Rich? Become an Insider is a post from: Art of Money

This is a special post for anyone that is into investing.

The Freedom Investment Club, of which I am a member, has begun to release Michael Lathigee’s [the club's founder and director] economy conference calls on mp3. I’m assuming that it’s okay to share the link, since it wasn’t placed in a password protected area of their site [better to ask for forgiveness than for permission sometimes, right?]

When I first heard Michael speak live, I immediately pulled out my credit card and paid $800 to join his investment club. Now I’m not impulsive or quick to spend my money, but it was clear to me that he knew more about making money by investing than I ever would and, most importantly, that he had a passion for what he was doing that was very rare. Michael’s club has made me that money back many times over, put that isn’t even the best part of the investment that I made that day. The club holds these regular
meetings where Michaels absolutely leaks incredible investing wisdom and that’s not even the best part of the investment.

The best part is that I could finally relax and just give him a major hunk of my portfolio and know that I was going to get fabulous returns and not really have to think about it too much. But Jon, you may ask, isn’t that incredibly risky? All I can say to that is, not if you saw my investing track record [hint: I purchased my first stock on March 7, 2000...go look at a ten year chart of the NASDAQ to get an idea].

In the first 3 years of existence the club made a 100% return for its members and in the year that I have been in, the returns have again been at or better than 30%.

When you listen to the call you’ll soon realize why.

It’s a little bit tough to summarize without writing a novel but here’s a bit of what you can expect Michael to touch on during the 90 minutes of the call:

• Trend investing techniques
• Principles of wealthy investors
• Some club fund updates
• The magic of compounding…it takes eight or nine years before it starts to get really fun!
• The average investors mindset…and how it causes his/her to make mistakes
• How a pandemic could derail your investments
• Global warming and how you can help solve the problem and make money from it at the same time
• Why Uranium is a must buy and how to avoid getting ripped off on sham uranium stocks
• Gold and silver updates
• What will happen to the price of oil if the US invades Iran

It just goes on and on. Note: the sound quality of the recording is not great…the volume levels are quite uneven. Skip a head to the 5:00 minute mark to avoid all the chat in the audience at the begining, but trust me it is well worth putting up with the technical glitches.

Have a listen and let me know what you think: here link is dead

[this is a direct link to the mp3 so you can right click and save it to your computer or ipod or click it and open in a new window].

This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.

Educated and Impowered Investor is a post from: Art of Money

In my story from a couple days ago called Are You Buying Silver Yet? I mentioned my friend who is completely obsessed with every facet of silver.

Well I’ve finally convinced him to get online and turn some of that knowledge into a blog. Of course he already had a stockpile of domains with the word “silver” in them, so it wasn’t too hard.

If you’re curious about silver you may want to head over to The Silver Story. He’s been online for only a couple hours and he’s got a bunch of stuff up there already:

• Silver As Medicine
• The History Of Silver
• All That Glitters Is Not Just Gold
• The Silver Story

By the way…despite having a bit of a rough day today, his top stock pick GPR.V is up +27.65% in 5 trading days!

This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.

The Silver Story is a post from: Art of Money

This week’s Carnival of Investing is up at Free Money Finance. My story “Are You Buying Silver Yet?” is entered. Some of the other highlights:

• The Fear Index – M3 reporting has ended, what does the final calculation of the Fear Index portend?
• Gold and silver hitting two decade highs – Comments on a MSM article on recent highs in gold and silver, along with a link to a free gold course!
• Trade With Your Head, Not Your Heart – If you haven’t been paying attention to the markets these last two days, perk up, it’s a perfect example of how you should invest with your head and not with your heart.

Enjoy the Carnival!

This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.

Carnival of Investing is a post from: Art of Money

I have this friend who’s really into silver. I mean really into it…he eats on silver plates, with silver forks and drinks from silver goblets.

This particular guy also used to be an investor relations officer in a previous job incarnation. So it’s safe to say he knows his way around the stock markets.

The last time I sat down and had coffee with him I wrote this story about silver investing on my old site. That was May 26, 2005 and silver was ~ $7.00 an ounce. At the time he went on and on telling me why silver was going through the roof.

About 2 weeks ago we had coffee again and it’s all he can do not to sell his kids to put his money into silver.

Normally, despite my earlier mini-rant in my own comments, I’m not the kind to buy high and hope a stock goes higher. But here’s what my silver obsessed friend says.

• Current world wide consumption of silver is about 1 billion ounces annually. Worldwide production is 500 million ounces annually. That’s a 50% shortfall annually.
• There is much less silver than gold in the earth.
• A big one: silver differs from gold in one key factor. When gold is ‘used’ it is normally still available. For example you create a wedding ring…after a couple years you still have the wedding ring and the gold is still available. Silver is used primarily in industrial processes, meaning when it is ‘used’ it is gone.

He went on and on with good reasons but the bottom line is that the underlying fundementals on this precious metal are fabulous. The market has still, for the most part, missed the biggest story of the year in investing.

What is interesting to us is that the mainstream media and average investor have no idea what is going on. CNBC has a ticker in the morning that includes some commodity prices, but silver remains absent. Web sites such as MSN and Yahoo spit out headlines about Google, retail sales, and oil – it is only on rare occasion that gold is mentioned and that is when the price breaks $400/oz or $500/oz. Even the commodities sections of major financial web sites seem to ignore silver…

A little more than twenty six years ago, when the silver market was being cornered, the general public started to wake up. At the very top, there were news stories about average people taking their silverware in to be melted. While we are not anticipating a repeat of early 1980, it is logical to think that the bull market will not end until we see the public paying attention to what is going on.

Why? Silver isn’t sexy. It has been devalued by the public because of comparisons with gold. You know the saying at the Olympics…”second place [a silver medal] is the first loser.” Fine with me.

So better a year late than never. I broke down and got some advice from my buddy and started buying. General advice he gave was to buy only bullion or mining companies. Paper silver is about as worthless as paper dollars…it isn’t backed by any real reserves and when the market realizes that the price of actually silver bullion could skyrocket.

About ten days ago I picked up a hunk of bullion for what seemed, at the time, the exorbitant price of $10.50 an ounce. Today, only ten days later it is worth $11.50…almost a 10% gain in 10 days.

Yesterday I also followed more of his advice and grabbed three junior [and highly risky] mining companies. ORM.V at .80, CZN.TO at 1.25 and GPR.V at 1.70. In less than 2 trading days ORM is flat, CZN is up 2.3% and GPR has gained 11.2%.

It just looks to me like there is a silver volcano about to erupt here. It does take guts though because I’ll be the first to admit the prices on all these stocks look very high.

I’m curious to hear what others think about silver right now. Why isn’t the story bigger? Is it only the new ETF that is artificially driving up prices?

Disclaimer: I’m not a professional advisor or investor. I am not telling you that I think you should do the same as me and actually purchase any silver or stocks of any kind. If you do buy any silver or stocks you do it at your own risk and you take full responsibility for any losses that you incur. Investing is risky and you should consult professional advice before entering into any investments. Whoosh!

This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.

Are You Buying Silver Yet? is a post from: Art of Money

Just some quick linking…I’m planning on investing in some silver soon and wanted to share some resources [no pun intended]. Do your own due diligence but the fundementals on silver look great right now.

THEODORE BUTLER SILVER ARCHIVES

Ted Butler

Silver prices are still hovering near record highs in anticipation of the release of a silver exchange-traded fund. But analysts say investors looking to strike it big shouldn’t abandon silver mining stocks if the new ETF starts trading …

Sourced at SilverStrategies.com

Silver Wheaton (SLW:Amex )

Hecla Mining (HL:NYSE)

Silver Supply and Demand in 2004

Silver Investment Options a good comparison guide to the pros and cons of various ways to invest in silver.

Chart of Silver Prices…bottom of page.

This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.

Silver Dollars is a post from: Art of Money