This video features inside look at my updated $30,000 home office. It’s the perfect place to make money online and live the Dot Com Lifestyle. The office is a work in progress. I will be updating it throughout the months. Keep an eye out for future updates.
Everyone wants to be successful because it’s an inner feeling that can’t be matched by anything else. When you have conquered every obstacle, you know you’re the best at what you do and will make sure you don’t lose focus. I’ve spoken and read about many successful people who have conquered their life’s dream and they’ve said this feeling cannot be replaced within anything else. However, they also said that to achieve your ultimate goal, you have to make tweaks in your life to stay focused and on track. I read an interested article recently that looks at what the MOST successful people do differently and I was surprised to read some of the things. They are all NOT that different than what we can do but it’s the discipline they have that makes them so effective. I’ll go over them in this two part series, but keep these elements in mind so you can apply them to your daily life going forward.
Let’s get started…
One of the greatest elements of these people is they know how valuable time is and do NOT take it for granted. All of these people have made a living as the greats because they don’t waste time on anything that they don’t find useful to their improvement. For example, they ONLY take part in activities that adds to their bottom line, and that’s what makes them so amazing in nature. They are NOT different than us or have any special skills, but have a totally different mentality. Many people often think time is “infinite” and highly successful people think time is “finite” so you have to make the most of it.
At the end of the day, they close their eyes thinking how much output they have achieved throughout the day, and ask, “Could I have done more?”
One of the greatest assets these people have is their ability to step out their comfort zone. They know that after doing things for a long time, and when they become easy, there’s a serious problem. For example, when you do things that are easy to conquer, then you have NO more potential growth through them so you have to come up with something more challenging. It’s only when you have to adjust to learn something difficult that you’ll succeed at what you’re trying to achieve. Here’s a solid example,
When you workout doing the same exercise for a long time, your body becomes accustomed to the weight and stops changing. It’s safe to say your body becomes stagnant. Have you noticed when you shift the weight and exercise that you’ll notice your body challenging itself, making more adjustments….right? You’ve essentially stepped outside your comfort zone.
One thing I’ve noticed is successful people had very “SPECIFIC” goals and won’t break them no matter what. For example, they know what they want to do and have a detailed outline on how to achieve it going forward. There is NO point in simply logging onto your computer and working when you don’t know what you are trying to accomplish. It’s better if you write out everything you want to do and make it right to the point. Saying “I want to write content” isn’t good enough because you have to be significantly more specific. It’s better to write down and achieve “Writing 2 posts per day for 1 month straight”, which will keep you very focused on your end goal.
Give it a try and let me know how well you do in a few months. Writing specific goals will help you stay focus on EXACTLY what you need to do to achieve what you WANT to do.
This is the end of Part 1 and it’s very simple and to the point. I decided to create a series so you have time to implement the following in your lives without being too overwhelmed. In Part 2, I’ll be discussing some other cool strategies.
In this episode of the Dot Com Lifestyle Vlog, I unbox the 2018 7K MacBook Pro. No, the 7K doesn’t refer to the resolution. It refers to the price! Yes, this MacBook cost over $7,000 ($7,224.17 to be exact)!
One of the most important components to living the dot com lifestyle is the ability to leverage of the incredible power of passive income. So long as you are stuck trading hours for dollars, you’ll never be able to avoid the bottomless pit of the 9-to-5 rat race. You are far too integral to your actual earning ability.
To live the dot com lifestyle to the fullest, you need to remove yourself (at least in part) from how you earn your money. You need to figure out a way that you can continue to generate income even when you’re not sleeping. You need to keep making money even when you’re sleeping. That’s mission critical. It won’t happen right away, but it should be your end objective.
You’ve likely heard that the most common attribute among millionaires is that they have multiple sources of income. Some reports indicate that they typically have as many as seven income sources, if not more. This does not mean they have seven jobs. Instead, it means that they likely have several sources of passive income.
And while this is a broad, sweeping oversimplification that ignores possibilities like capital gains, we can break passive income down into one of two main types: residual income and leveraged income.
When many people say “passive income,” they’re probably thinking of residual income. This is when you continue to generate earnings based on work that you had completed some time in the past. You do the work once and then you get paid several times for it.
For example, I have authored three books to date. Writing and publishing those books was a lot of work, to be sure, but this is work that I completed up front. Now that they’re listed on Amazon, I earn a little royalty every time someone buys a copy. I did the work once and I get paid again and again.
Another good example of this, in the context of making money online, is how you can make money on YouTube. You put in the work of shooting, editing and uploading the video once, but that video will continue to get played (hopefully) for years to come. If the video is monetized through AdSense, you’ll continue to generate ad revenue. If you have Amazon affiliate links in there, you’ll continue to generate affiliate commissions, at least in theory.
That’s the fundamental concept behind residual income. It’s the same way that musicians might get paid every time their song plays on the radio (or is licensed for a project), how photographers keep getting paid each time someone buys their image on a stock photo site, and so on.
The other form of passive income that may interest you is called leveraged income. This is where you leverage the labor, efforts and activities of other people to generate income for yourself. If you’re the owner of a traditional business, you hire a number of staff to do the actual work (assuming you don’t put in the work yourself), and you get to reap the benefits of the bottom line.
Even though blogging isn’t passive income, you can see how John is utilizing the advantages of leveraged income to his advantage. He hired writers (like me) to help populate his blog with fresh content on a steady and reliable basis. He still writes his own posts, but this blog wouldn’t have nearly as much content on it without his team of writers.
And either directly or indirectly, he is profiting off the work of these writers. It’s passive in that he doesn’t have to do the actual writing himself. The same can be true for any number of possible endeavors where you choose to outsource your work. A great example is the agency model. A client comes to the agency for a project, but the agency simply outsources the work to freelancers at a lower rate and profits on the difference.
It’s not that residual income is necessarily superior or inferior to leveraged income. It’s that you should be considering both as part of your income mix, in addition to other possible sources of income you may have. After all, if you want to be rich, you’ll want to have several income sources working for you all the time. Even when you’re sleeping.
Blogging and building an online empire is more than simply writing and fancy images. An online business is about increasing user engagement to a point where you’ll be able to convert them, achieving your bottom line. I’ve always told my clients to always have a purpose or bottom line in mind when starting a blog because this will keep your focus clear. With a clear focus, you can take the necessary steps to ensure you will achieve the desired outcome you set out to achieve and this means getting closer to success. However, again, this all depends on the way you engage your readers, ensuring they are happy with your blog and the content you have published.
I’m surprised at the amount of people who forget user experience depends on a lot more things than simply content. Over the past several months, I’ve outlined elements that contribute to an increase in blogging traffic and engagement. Here are a few:
However, I’m surprised by the amount of people who don’t consider “website speed” an issue when building their online business. Did you know your poor “web speed” contributes to a decrease in user engagement, increase bounce rate, and stagnant blog growth? Today, I want to elaborate on web site speed and why it’s so important to keep testing it over several months.
Testing website speed is simply plugging your URL within a testing tool and finding out how long it takes for entire pages to load on your website. The longer it takes, the worse for user engagement because this means people are NOT able to read your content quickly and when they need it MOST. However, the quicker your page loads, the better because access to content they require is available right away. Here are some tools I’ve used with great success to test my website speed. I like these tools because they provide a detailed report on what I should change, my current speed, and I can even test from different locations:
Testing your website speed should be performed a few times a year because it will ensure everything is running optimally. This will also ensure nothing has happened along the way that has hindered your loading time. For example, here are a few things regular testing can help you figure out:
Testing your speed regularly will ensure your sever is operating correctly and nothing has caused it to reduce response time. For example, I’ve had an episode where I tested my website and made adjustments to increase load time of my blog. However, within 3-4 days, my speed was down and this is even when NO new content or images were published. I checked to see if plugins had updated on my website, which caused it to slow down, but I could find nothing. After vigorous testing, I was able to find out my hosting provider had a fault on their end and this contributed to my site slowing down considerably in a short period of time.
I would NOT be able to find out what was going on if I didn’t test my website on a regular basis and make the right adjustments afterward.
If you’re an avid blogger and continuously posting new content, then you have increased the chances of your site slowing down. How? Each time you publish content, you’re adding a load to your server in the form of content, images, videos, etc. It’s important you keep testing to ensure content published over several weeks has NOT affected the speed of your website and if so, you can always make changes if necessary. For example, after publishing “5” large posts on my blog, I needed to go back and optimize images and videos to ensure they were compressed because they were affecting my load time.
In the end, it’s important to keep in mind that load speed is very important for rankings and user engagement. Your audience has come to you to find a solution to their problem and when they do, it’ll build loyalty. Let’s imagine they can’t and what it will do for your blogs growth and conversion rate…right?
The main thing is it’s NOT hard to keep testing because you have FREE tools available to you when you need them. Here are two, which I’ve already listed above, you can start using today:
When you think of social media, your mind likely turns to platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The problem is that you are probably only looking at social media as means of networking with other users on a personal level. As blog owners, entrepreneurs, and brand promoters, we need to be looking at social media as a way to expand our reach, bolster our brand equity, and grow our business – and nothing else.
With this direct approach in mind, we can start spending less time on social media as just a regular user and more as a customer acquisition professional who makes the most of what social media has to offer holistically.
Today, we are going to look at some of the best ways to accomplish this through Smarp, an online platform and social media tool designed to empower employees with pertinent content and encourages them to communicate and share their knowledge both within and beyond their own networks. It’s about sharing knowledge and attaining measurable results.
What does social media mean to you?
Social media has completely changed the way people use the internet and connect with others around the world. The same is true with online businesses and brands, but the temptation for procrastination on social media is significant. It’s very easy to get distracted, so it is of utmost importance that workers focus only on the work that actually moves the needle. They need to cut through the clutter.
This is where a solution like Smarp comes into play. It serves as “an internal content hub for employee engagement and advocacy.” What this means is that it offers the same kind of connectedness that its users get on a social network, but it can limit these updates and conversations to those within a private community or organization.
Team members share company and industry news, discuss ways to move forward, and act as brand ambassadors. By sharing out content about their employer, its products and industry trends, employees can build their own personal brands in a manner that helps build company awareness, brand equity and even drive relevant traffic.
Brands like MuleSoft, BNI, Senergy and thousands of others are already implementing this type of technology into their own organizations to increase employee advocacy, while also creating a better and more engaging online work environment in the process.
Source: https://ift.tt/2HPYyy2
Just like regular social media platforms have active news feeds that are always updating, Smarp supports a custom built community for organizations of all sizes. News feeds can be custom tailored with company news, industry news, working tips, corporate blog posts and more. Users can also submit provide updates, and content of their own too.
Why is online engagement important, and how can social media help?
It has been well documented that when workers feel they have a vested interest in a company and its success, they work harder toward achieving their goals. It’s more than just a job when they feel like they belong to a community, and that community’s success is their success.
This kind of mindset greatly encourages higher levels of employee engagement and information sharing among team members, because it’s about achieving objectives together rather than competing with one another.
This makes for a happier and more engaged workplace. And that’s something worth the fight to maintain.
Here are some sobering statistics about the damage associated with disengaged teams, as compiled in a recent Smarp blog post:
In effect, it is much more costly to deal with employee churn – seeking, hiring, and training new workers to replace those leaving the company – than it is to try and improve current conditions and company culture. With an engaged culture, employees are much more inclined to stay. And this creates a more stable work environment too, unlike the revolving door of high turnover.
As we can see from the Gallup poll below, employee engagement greatly affects key business outcomes. The less a team or group of employees cares about a project or task, the less likely that brand is to find success. Conversely, the more they care, and the more they feel personally invested, the more likely the collective effort will succeed in kind.
Dysfunctional companies with highly regimented information flows are organizations with compromised collective purpose. In situations like these, using a tool like Smarp isn’t unto itself going to conjure a sense of belonging.
But if your company has a cohesive culture that unites people around shared projects, objectives and values, a platform for internal communication and brand advocacy can go a long way. It helps to foster this sense of ownership and togetherness, because it encourages higher levels of engagement and interaction among employees.
Workers are more focused and connected with one another, which in turn helps to reduce turnover rates and boost overall productivity. An informed and connected workforce is a happy workforce.
How can social media help inform your staff?
The concept of social media is nothing new, but the ways in which it can be implemented within an organization are changing all the time. Fostering that deeply felt sense of community through active engagement is important. Keeping those users well informed, educated and trained is another goal that Smarp can help your organization achieve.
Just as wading through the overwhelming noise of mass market social media platforms can be overwhelming, and trying to dig through the mountains of information available online can be equally frustrating. To overcome this, Smarp offers a resource library feature.
It serves as an online directory for learning, training and resource materials for workers and collaborators. Your brand likely already has a lot of premium content in place, but how easy are they to locate? And how often are they actually being read?
Throw a social networking platform into the mix, and not only can all of this content be easily discovered and accessed, it can become a side conversation on its own. It encourages even more discussion and engagement among users as they ask new questions, respond with new comments, and look into how the information can be best implemented in the work that they do.
Is your company ready to go social with advanced and customized software solutions?
Unlike mass-market social networks that lack any sort of real focus and are rife with time-wasting distractions, Smarp has created a platform where team members can share and engage with one another in a supportive environment. The content, both external and internal, is specifically relevant to the organization or community’s goals and vision.
Social media has become an integral part of everyday life for a lot of people and the professional context within an organization should be no different. Brands and management can benefit greatly from a more engaged workforce that feels personally invested in the success of the company. The online social space and business environment powered by the solutions mentioned in this article provide that much needed community and sense of belonging.
We had made dinner reservations for 5:30 pm, because we really wanted to try this restaurant and it was the only time slot they had available. Yes, it was definitely on the earlier side of things, but we were also going with our three-year-old daughter, so we didn’t want to stay out that late anyhow. No big deal.
Punching the restaurant’s address into Google Maps earlier that afternoon, the estimated driving time with traffic would be about half an hour. This was a few hours prior to leaving and driving just before 5:30 pm would mean we’d be hitting the busiest part of rush hour too. Given this, we’d want to leave the house no later than 5 o’clock if we wanted to be on time.
That was the plan. And it was while formulating this plan that I remembered the car needed gas, something I had meant to do the day before. Again, no big deal. It just meant we’d have to leave the house a little earlier to accommodate the extra time at the gas station. Maybe we’d leave at 4:45 pm or so, just to be safe.
But I work from home and the way my mind works is always subject to inertia. Sometimes, it can be really hard to get started and focus on the task at hand. Other times, I’ll get into this intense sense of flow and nothing short of a freight train can stop me. As it turned out, I got into a pretty good flow around 4:30 pm.
And so, as is so often the case, my mind and my work got the better of me and I lost track of time. Not terribly, but we did leave the house at 5 o’clock on the dot and we did indeed make the dinner reservation, but we didn’t have time to stop for gas along the way. The “low fuel” light lit up on our way there and little did I realize that there really aren’t any gas stations near this restaurant.
I probably got more anxious than the situation warranted, but I wasn’t positive we were going to make it to the nearest gas station on the drive home. Thankfully, we did and it really was no big deal. At the end of the night, everything was fine. We had a great meal and we made it home, safe and sound.
You might be wondering what this story has to do with making money online. Well, consider the way you approach your online business the same way you think about the fuel tank in your car. You’ve probably noticed that in Formula One, NASCAR, and other professional racing circuits, the cars pull in for a pit stop rather frequently, mostly to refuel.
When you’re driving around with a tank full of fuel, whether that’s on the street or at the track, you’re carrying around a lot of extra weight. This slows you down and significantly hampers your fuel efficiency, but you don’t really have to worry about running out of gas.
The exact opposite is true if you drive around with a tank that’s almost empty. Your vehicle is lighter, so it can probably go faster, but your fuel pump is working harder and you have to deal with the anxiety of potentially running out of gas and finding yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere.
The way that you should think about how you handle your online business works in much the same way. If you burden yourself with hundreds of projects, thousands of objectives, and millions of things to do, there will always be progress to be made, but you won’t move as quickly and as efficiently as you’re capable of doing. You’re weighed down by all this extra stuff you’re carrying.
If you focus all your efforts and resources into a single objective within a single project, you may make the most progress on that one thing, but it could leave you stranded if that one thing doesn’t work out. You’ll always have the anxiety of running out of gas. And even if it does work out, you will have neglected all the other moving pieces that also require your attention. That’s not smart either.
Just as with your car, the optimal place to be is somewhere in the middle. You’re not wasting unnecessary time stopping at the gas station every few steps, nor are you weighing yourself down with too much of a load. It’s about balance. And that’s the best way forward.
