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Well coming up this Sunday (4^th May) is world thanksgiving day and we will be celebrating it in our church with a spirit of thanksgiving all day. As I was thinking about world thanksgiving day that was coming up I started becoming more and more thankful for the things I have in my life.

This post is a little off topic but I do truly believe that being thankful is helpful in order to be successful. Being thankful allows you to see the positive in situations that have passed and gives you a humble spirit of gratitude, not a prideful spirit. We need to remain humble because “pride comes before a fall”. Humility and thankfulness with guide you towards success and success in an enlightened way, where it benefits you and others.

So how can we be more thankful?

Think of things we are thankful for – Simply sit down and think about things you are thankful for. Spend 5 minutes writing out a list. On my list are things such as my family, my girlfriend, my friends, my opportunity to blog and start my own business, the guys in my small group at church etc. Write out a short list and be thankful

Keep it on your mind everyday – Every morning when you wake up talk to God (or to yourself if you don’t believe in God) and say one thing you are thankful for about the coming day. This helps you get your mind right at the start of the day and will lead you to be more positive and successful in your daily business ventures.

Look for things to be thankful for – If you run out of things you are thankful for then search for them. Don’t settle for having a non thankful spirit, look around you can you be thankful for having a roof over your head and a beautiful wife/husband? I think you can and I think there are many more things you can think of.

Ask our friends what they are thankful for – asking people what they are thankful for not only helps them get a thankful spirit but also helps us realise things we are thankful for which we never would of thought of. Ask all your friends or clients or work colleagues what they are thankful for.

Watch a sunrise/sunset – Sunrises and sunsets are one of the most beautiful things on this planet. What one of my friends did was he bought a disposable camera and every time there was a beautiful sunset or sunrise he would take a photo. In the end he ended up with around 40 photos of beautiful sunrises and sunsets he could be thankful for.

So be thankful, it is amazing how it will change you day. It will make you more humble, more productive, more positive and will lead you to have greater success

One of the greatest ways to make money online is to sell your own products to a customer base that trust and like you. Sometimes when we start out it can be difficult to earn money online because we are selling someone else’s product which we do not believe in. We don’t have our own product to sell , nor even think we could create our own product so we settle for second best incomes that don’t allow us to achieve anything of significance.

Now it is definitely possible to make money (and lots of it) by selling someone else’s product, but often when you have your own product (and a good product) you have the potential to earn a whole lot more money than you would have been able to otherwise.

Why create your own products?

1. You believe in your product more – This is the main reason I have begun developing my own products to sell to my customer base. At first I was attempting to sell a product I had never tried and truthfully would not buy myself. So why would my customers buy it? Truthfully I had no hope of selling these affiliate products to anyone so I had to create my own products that I believed in which I could sell.
If you made your product then you will know it’s value and can therefore pitch it better to your customers and increase sales.
2. Others can sell your product for you – This is the beauty of having your own product, others can sell it for you. Other people will happily sell your product so that they can make a nice commission on it. They send targeted traffic to your sales page, you complete the sale and then they get a commission and you get the remainder of the sale. You get free targeted traffic and you make sales that you would never have made otherwise. You influence is now no longer limited to your website and your customers but increases to include other people’s websites and their customers also.
3. You get a larger commission – If you are selling someone else’s product then you will earn a commission on that product (this can be as little as 4% on amazon.com or as much as 75% on clickbank.com). If you are selling your own product then you make 100% of the profit, or if someone else sells it for you then maybe you only make 25% of the profit and give away 75% but that’s 25% you would never had made.
4. It gives you credibility – If you have your own products then it gives you credibility as an expert in your field. With credibility it is much easy to draw customers and the make sales as people will begin to trust you a lot easier. Having your own products to sell or give away is one of the greatest ways of building credibility.
5. It builds your brand name – Branding is important, people will continuously buy from a brand because they know and trust it. My dad will only buy Billabong branded clothing because he likes the brand and trusts its quality. With a good product to call your own you are building your brand name every time you sell a product to someone. This is a great way to make multiple sales from each customer over time.
6. It builds your database – One of the greatest ways to make money online is to have a customer database in which you have regular contact with your customers. This means you have a highly targeted market of people who trust you and are likely to buy from you. It is vital that you begin building your database. Whenever you make a sale it is an opportunity to add a name to your database list. If you are selling someone else’s product then you might make a sale but the person selling the product gets the customer for the long term. So selling your own product is great because you can not just sell to a customer once but multiple times over.
7. You can sell products offline as well – Say you write a book, or make a training program. You can then sell this product offline as well to whoever you come in contact with and make extra money that way

 Personally I have just written a very useful 10 page report for anyone wanting to make money online.

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There are three ways you can use money. You can waste it, you can spend it or you can invest it. How are you spending your money? Lets have a look at the three ways of using your money.

 Wasting Your Money

Those who waste their money don’t even give a second thought to where their money goes. They waste their money on stupid things such as gambling and porn, and they have an “it’s not my responsibility” towards money where they will never apply principles for good money management but instead they simply blame someone else for their poor financial situation. They blame the government, or they blame to lotto and the fact that their numbers didn’t come up. If you fall into this category then it is time to change you attitude and mindset towards money quick smart. Stop wasting your life and wasting your money, learn to invest your money.

 Spending Your Money

Spending your money is a step up from wasting your money but it is not much of a step up. People who spend their money use their money to provide themselves with items and pleasure right now but do not care to think about the future. People who spend their money often end up with large credit card debts as all they use their money for is themselves right now, they don’t think about the future. I see people all the time who work all week and then spend all their money on the weekend drinking and smoking and partying. People who just spend their need to think about the future and how they can invest their money instead of just spending it on the now.

 Investing Your Money

People who spend their money in this way are spending their money wisely. Instead of just wasting or spending their money they are investing their money so it brings a solid return. This can be a return for themselves or a return for other people when they give their money away. By investing your money you are using it wisely on things that will bring you a great return. You can use your money to invest into your business, into the stock market or real estate and you can even use your money to invest into your relationship with your family and friends or you can use your money to invest into the lives of starving/dying children all over the world.

Investing money is a completely different mindset to spending money because you are not just thinking about the now. You are more thinking about the future, you sacrifice now so that you and those in your sphere of influence can have a better future tomorrow. This is where you should be spending the most of your money.

I am an investor and this is the goal for everyone. The other day I was challenged within myself (by God) to give a certain amount (which is double what I wanted to give) to my youth ministry on a Friday night. I gave it and then a couple of hours later an opportunity arose which earn me more than double the amount I gave and required almost no work at all. So be an investor and you too will see great opportunities come your way.

” This friday night I was challenged within myself to give $20 to my local youth ministry. May not sound like a lot to many people but that was 20% of my money for the week. I was hesitant at first but gave it because I truely believe in the principle of tithing. Not even 2 hours later an opportunity arose where I was able to buy a phone really cheap and sell it making $50, then the next day a work opportunity came up doing some gardening and I made $60. All up $110 out of $20. That is a 450% return in 3 days. You can’t complain about that”

- Ryan McLean (28th April 2008)

The 4 ANZAC Pillars of wealth and success

The past weekend has been the ANZAC day weekend in Australia. This is a time where we as a nation remember and celebrate the sacrifice tens of thousands of soldiers who gave their lives to protect our country. My great grandfather (my mother’s grandfather) was an ANZAC who served in WWI and he was infact the older surviving ANZAC veteran in history. He was not that last to die but he lived to be the oldest (104). So when ANZAC day comes around every year I am proud to call Australia home.

The ANZAC spirit is based on 4 pillars of strength. They are as follows:
Mateship, Courage, Sacrifice and Endurance.

I really believe that when it comes to building wealth these 4 pillars of the ANZACs can become 4 Pillars for wealth growth and financial success. Let me show you how.

Mateship (Friendship)
When building wealth mateship is a vital aspect to your journey. Why? Because we are designed so that we learn from people. Mentoring is one of the best ways to learn. By taking a millionaire out for coffee you can learn more about wealth in 1 hour than you ever could reading over 100 hours of books. We learn by interacting with people, we pick up new ideas and new habits through people. We learn at seminars or in teaching series, everything we learn comes from people.
Mateship can really push us along when we have friends we are doing the journey with. Mates can guide us in the right path and can pull us into line when we have strayed from the path. Life was mean to be lived with people and mateship is very important to life and to wealth building.

Courage
It takes courage to step out of the box and go after your dreams (even if your dreams are to retire). I stepped out in courage in March 2008 when I invested the last of my money into www.foolswealth.com in the dream that one day I could teach people worldwide how to become extremely wealthy. It took courage when my friends saw my website and then criticised me to death. I actually received a text message from my long time friend which he did not mean to send to me saying that he was ashamed that this was my website. It took me courage to push through that rejection and to strive towards my dream and it will take you courage also.
People don’t want you to succeed. You know how when you see a celebrity magazine, and you see the stars and how their lives are in turmoil, that you feel a little bit better about yourself. Because if other people don’t have their lives together then you feel as if you are doing alright. If you begin to become extremely successful then your friends will begin to feel self conscious. So they want you to stay where it is comfortable so that they look good next to you. Have courage to push beyond that.

Sacrifice
Sacrifice is one of the biggest nesecities when it coems to building wealth. You will have to sacrifice a lot now in order to have more in the future. You will have to make some sacrifices with your fashion and where you eat out. You will have to make sacrifices with your time where you will need to work on your wealth development. You will have to sacrifice nights working from home while your friends are out partying and having a good time. You will have to sacrifice many things, but in the long run it will be worth it because you be wealthy and able to do everything you want to do while your friends will be struggling with debt and dissatisfaction. That is a much greater price to pay. So you will need to build upon sacrifice early on in your journey, but it will pay dividends in the future.

Endurance
Becoming extremely wealthy will not happen through some “get rich quick” scheme, although I wish it would. It will come through a lot of hard word and a lot of time put into your investment plan. For example I need to have endurance with this very website www.foolswealth.com which it is in it’s beginning stages. It starts off slow and it is the same whether you are in the stock market, real estate or business. The saying “you need money to make money” is not entirely true, but the more money you have the easier it is to make more and more money quicker.
You need endurance if you ever want to be extremely wealth because it is not going to happen overnight.

So remember the 4 pillars of wealth creation, mateship, courage, sacrifice and endurance.

When people hear the two words God and Money together they will more often think of a fight like God vs Money instead of a partnership. Many people believe that God doesn’t want us to have money, and that in order to become a Christian and have a relationship with God we will have to lose all our money and become a missionary in Africa. This is so far from the truth.
God and money go hand in hand. God wants us to be prosperous and to enjoy life and he knows we need money to do that, also to add to that God wants us to make a positive difference in the world and he also knows that we need money on order to accomplish that task.
The idea that God hates money is definitely not based on what the bible says. It is based upon a religious mindset that requires people to set down and follow stupid laws in order to have a relationship with God. However, this is not the case. The bible clearly states that relationship with God is not about rules and regulations and the rule that you must be poor in order to go to heaven is made up.
God wants you to be prosperous and to live a long and happy life and make a positive impact on your community. The bible says “The love of money is the root of all evil” not money itself but the love and worship of money is the root of all evil. Because the love of money is selfish it neglects righteousness and all other forms of good.

A friend of mine is a missionary in Cambodia and she has seen and heard the most horrible things. In Cambodia their nation is corrupted with the love of money. Girls are sold into sex slavery before they are even teenagers just so people can earn money and literally people will steal babies, kill them, cut them open and rip out their guts in order to stash drugs inside the baby. Then they will smuggle drugs pretending that the baby is asleep. The love of money is dangerous, but money can be used well also.

With God on your side he can help you earn a lot of money. He can bring riches and prosperity your way like you never would have imagined. I know that he is bringing riches and prosperity my way because I know and love God.

So how can you get God on your side when it comes to wealth?

1. Have a relationship with Him – God wants you to have a normal relationship with him, not a religious duty to him. He died so we can have relationship, so we need to have it by talking to him and asking him for help etc.
2. Be Generous – It is biblical that as your give it will be given back to you. I gave a large offering to my youth ministry in the beginning of 2007 and I believe that it will come back to me in income this year. In fact I am believing to be able to give 10 times in the offering next year that I did this year.
Give your first 10% to God, be generous to people and God will reward you with wealth coming back to you.
3. Create Wealth Righteously – When making money and creating wealth do it in a way in which it benefits both you and those who you are working with/selling to. In other words just don’t rip people off. Enlightened millionaires seek to make deals which create win-win situations for both parties in the deal, not win lose situations where they win out but the other people lose out.
4. Pray For God’s Provision – Many people think they can’t ask God for money because that is a vain thing to ask. Then I would like to question why do you want the money? I want God to increase my finances so I can make a positive impact on the world and I believe that God will honour that and bring wealth and customers into my life. If you have never prayed for wealth then you should start praying for it.
5. Have Faith – The bible says that without faith it is impossible to please God. So have faith in God. Have faith that he will come through on his promise, that he will provide for you when you need it and that he will do what you prayed for.
6. Have Action – The bible also says that faith without action is dead, so have faith that you can action out. Believe God to bring customers to you but then set up a website that will drive customers to you and will make sales, don’t just have faith and do nothing because then I would question if it is even faith at all.

Scraping Together Enough Money To Keep Going

When you are on your way to becoming a millionaire there is likely to be a time in your life when you will have to sacrifice a few things in order to make money in the long run.
“Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy”
– Saadi Shirazi

It is therefore likely that you will not have enough money to buy all of the things that you wish to buy. So in order to afford what you really must afford (or really want to afford) you will need to be able to scrape together just enough money to buy what you want.
This is the case for me at the moment, with my internet career just starting and beginning to rise I do not have a lot of cash flow. However, I have become the master at scraping together enough money to be able to purchase the things I really desire.

Let me show you a few ways you can quite simply scrape together enough money for the things that you want.

1. Money Tin – Do coins in your pocket annoy you? Well instead of spending them on a coffee or something you don’t really want why not get a money tin and putyou’re your spare change in there. You won’t really miss it (because it is only $1 or $2 at a time) but over a few months you can save up a lot of money. I wrote a more detailed post on using a money tin to save money here.

2. Cutting Spending Costs – Cutting spending costs doesn’t always have to mean going without (although sometimes it definitely does). There are many easy ways to cut your spending cost and still get the things you want.
You can buy clothes and other items when they are out of season, like buying jumpers in summer or buying soccer boots for next year after the soccer season just finished. This is a great way to save money and pick up the bargains and sales prices.
Buy food in large amounts when they are on special. My family does this in order to save money, they buy soy milk when on special and buy 50 of them. They save about $1.50 per litre, so they save about $75 they can spend somewhere else.
Don’t buy what you don’t really need. Maybe just get one coffee per day instead of two, or drink water instead of buying soft drinks. Simple sacrifices every day can save you a lot of money.

3. Making some extra money – You can make some extra money on the side to increase your cash flow a little until your business/investments begin to bring in some real money.
You can do small jobs such as mowing peoples lawns for some money. I personally will be doing some gardening for my girlfriend’s mother in order to make some extra money.
Look for opportunities for buying and selling. I recently found an opportunity to buy an O2 (PDA/Phone) off my friend for $50 and resell it for more to make a profit. Look for opportunities where you can buy things cheap and sell them for more. Ebay is a great place to sell items to a large targeted market.
Make some money online. Often this can take some time, but you can make money online by advertising on your website and selling products to people all over the world. It is a great way to earn some extra income.

4. Borrowing money – Often borrowing money is a necessary evil in order to live while your investments are getting off the ground. Credit cares and personal loans are often a great for the short term, but make sure you can pay them off. You can often get money from friends or family (even if it is just $20). Don’t be afraid to ask for money. credit card, friends, personal loan, refinance your home loan

5. Receiving gifts – The bible says to ask and you will receive. When you go out with friends ask for one of them to shout you (pay for you). Ask a friend for $20 or more. Ask and you shall receive.

6. Lay-by – The act of paying something over time is a great idea. Personally I cannot afford right now to buy new jeans and a collared shirt but I can pay it off $20 at a time over the next couple of month. Try lay-bying clothes instead of buying them straight away, it will help your cash flow immensely.

So when it comes to cash flow in the early days of your journey to become a millionaire be smart and learn how to scrape together enough money to live comfortably and then invest everything you can.

Stumble Upon Advertising is cheap, this is why is can be so effective if done correctly. In order to use stumble upon advertising it will take just a small budget as you will be able to send at least 100 new visitors to your site for just $5. 

If you are running a blog then advertising can be especially effective in the start up of your blog. Many bloggers use advertising to launch their blog and get people reading it, once they have gotten their initial readers they find that their blog will grow organically without advertising, just through word of mouth, search engines and social networking.

There are many different ways to advertise your website. Some of the most popular are Google Adwords and Yahoo advertising, also Facebook advertising is becoming increasingly popular to target a specific demographic or market area. But today I want to chat to you about an easy and relatively cheap way to get started in the marketing world, or to boost up your current marketing campaign.

StumbleUpon

- StumbleUpon is a growing social bookmarking service that is used by many people around the globe. It is a service that many webmasters (people who own and run websites) use in order to promote their site, both through organic advertising (free traffic) and through paid traffic.

StumbleUponAds allows you to submit a page on your blog to be shown to StumbleUpon users as they go Stumbling. The cost is 5 cents per impression so for as little as $5 you can have 100 Stumble Upon users see your page. This is significant especially if you have been paying up to $1 per click on Google Adwords advertising.

The beauty of StumbleUpon is that it is relatively cheap, infact you don’t even need to create an ad you only need to create a page that you can send people to. You can also target your page to be shown to different categories as well as specific demographics (age, location and gender) and that you have the chance of your page being Stumbled up the rankings in Stumble Upon naturally. This means if people see your site and vote that they like it then you can move up the ranks and possibly get a lot of ongoing free traffic through your original paid advertising. 

Stumble Upon Advertising lets you set daily budgets and limits to how many impressions you want on any given campaign. The payment is via PayPal or Credit Card.

If you pick the right page to submit in this way and throw a few dollars at the campaign it is not uncommon for organic stumbling to happen and to end up with many more impressions than you paid for. The key is to pick a page that Stumble Upon users will like and vote for which I will tell you more about below.

The StumbleUponAds interface gives you a report on how many people saw your site, how many voted your page up and how many voted it down. This enables you to test different pages that you want to advertise and to adapt those pages to see what different versions of it work best.

How to Make StumbleUpon Advertising Effective For Your Campaign

The key to making a StumbleUpon advertising campaign work for your website is to do two main things:

1. Have Great Content To Please Stumble Upon users to get Organic Stumbles - While 5 cents per impression isn’t that expensive (it’s a lot cheaper than some other forms of advertising) it’s more expensive than free traffic (duh). Your goal should be to start the campaign off with paid visitors and then let the natural voting up of content take over. To do this you need to create content that is appealing to the Stumble Upon users who will be viewing your site. You can easily check your stats and see what people liked and didn’t like. Start by advertising a few pages, see which ones people like and which ones they don’t then cancel the ones people don’t like.

2. Make Your Page Sticky - The other way to get extra value from a StumbleUpon advertising campaign is to get the visitors who come to your blog to come back again and become loyal readers. This is one of the biggest challenges that you’ll face with advertising using any means - but particularly on a service like StumbleUpon where users have their cursor hovering over the Stumble Button ready to surf on to the next site. Of course the best way to hook someone onto your blog is to create compelling content that they can’t live without - but also consider other ways of making them loyal readers by prominently offering subscription methods, driving people deeper into a blog.

3. Test and Tweak - The key with StumbleUpon is not to throw big money at a campaign straight away. Get your landing page/post ready and then set a small budget (a few dollars) to see what results you get. Once this is spent - do some analysis of how many people voted the post up and down. If there were more downs than ups you might want to change something about the post (title, add a picture/video, change your opening paragraph etc). Then run another small campaign to see what impact the changes have. Do this until you have a page that is consistently getting voted up and then turn up your budget a little. Keep in mind that you might only need to get a relatively small number of up votes before SU will start sending you organic traffic so be ready to pause your campaign once this starts to happen or you could waste your money.

What NOT to do

While you might think that the front page of your website is the best page to send traffic from an Advertising campaign to - I would highly recommend that you don’t. Instead - use a single post as the landing page for your campaign. Pick a post that relates closely to the category and demographic of StumbleUpon users that you are targeting and pick a post that you could see becoming viral (whether as a result of it being entertaining, useful, controversial etc).

Give it a Go

So set yourself a budget and give StumbleUpon advertising a go. It’s actually quite fun and if you keep your budget to a reasonable level it’s not that expensive to do. You’ll drive a little traffic and hopefully learn something about the way people interact with your content through the process.

Want to learn more about advertising? Then check out www.problogger.net

Believe You Deserve To Be a Millionaire.

Recently in the college I attend the lecturer as the class about the perceptions they had of people who were poor and people who were wealthy. It was interesting to see that many of the characteristics people associated with wealthy was greedy, arrogant, lazy, selfish and ungenerous.

A lot of people do not consider becoming rich as a worthwhile goal. This is often driven by their misconceptions of wealth and the way in which they believe wealthy people are.

I understand that there are many other worthwhile goals in life which are more important than building wealth, such as building a family, and caring for people. But I also believe that building wealth is a tool we can use to achieve those more worthwhile goals. Money is not the end nor the goal it is simply a mean to an end, a tool to help make the world a better place.

Take a look at this example and see what you believe about wealth.

A drug dealer is making millions of dollars every year by expoiting workers and selling drugs to people ruining their lives. He then reinvests his profit back into his business by buying more drugs and exploiting more workers. Now this is obviously going to make the world a worse place to live in. Drugs create major problems such as violence, crime, substance abuse, injustice and even murder.

Then there is me and you. We are hard working citizens who pay our taxes and give to charities. We wish we could help the poor and provide jobs for the helpless and opportunities for the broken people and give them a chance to live a happy and successful life. Yet we believe that being wealthy is an unworthy goal and therefore we cannot help these people or make the impact we wish to make.

This guest post comes from HERE…check it out 

1. Price your home aggressively - Look at the other homes in your neighborhood that have sold in the past three months (except for distressed sales) and price your home below the lowest sales price. If there are active listings in your neighborhood the price you select must also be below that of the most comparable home to yours.

2. Make your home the neighborhood showplace - Updated kitchens and baths are what hook most new home shoppers. Look to install granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, and new ceramic or hardwood floors. Carpets should be as nearly new as possible. Add a new coat of paint to your home’s interior and exterior.

3. Enhance Your Home’s “Curb Appeal” - Avoid the appearance of a “drab” yard by planting colorful flowers in selected locations. Seed or plant sod in areas lacking grass. Make certain the yard is mowed, edged and mulched.

4. Clutter Must Go - Even the most up-to-date house will look disorganized if it is filled with unnecessary furniture. Remove all furniture you do not absolutely need. Also, remove personal items (including family photos and portraits). Prospective buyers want to imagine a house with their own things in it, not yours.

5. Make Certain Your Home is Properly Staged - Consider hiring a professional to “stage” your house before prospective buyers begin coming through your door, especially if your house has been vacant for a while. A professional stager will generally charge between $1,000 and $2,000, and arrange home furnishings so that prospects can more easily envision their own furniture in the house. At the same time, an experienced stager can add a touch of class to your home.

6. Don’t Forget Financial Incentives - Offer buyers’ agents a four percent commission rather than the traditional three percent, along with closing cost assistance to buyers. Closing cost assistance is especially attractive now that credit has tightened significantly and 100% loans are next to impossible to obtain.

Homes that take months to sell often require the asking price to be cut multiple times. Additional costs to the seller include continuing mortgage payments, utilities, taxes and insurance, repairs and other associated costs. Following the six tips outlined above can help to greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to sell a home in today’s market.