Archive for January, 2008
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Another piece of advice from The Richest Man in Babylon is to discipline yourself when it comes to saving your money. They give the example of a man who decides that he is going to throw one pebble in the river each day. It would make sense if this person would miss a day that he could say to himself that he will drop two pebbles the next day. It would make even more sense if his goal was to eventually put as many pebbles in the river as possible, that he would start on the first day by throwing as many as he possibly can at that time.
The book does not agree with what most of us would look at as pure logic. It says that you should only drop one pebble per day and if you forget one day, that you should go back to the river and drop the pebble for that day instead of dropping two the next. The reason being is that if you discipline yourself and continuously do the same thing, it will become natural and you will be able to do it for a long time. If you choose to take shortcuts, you will either burn out or give up at some point.
I find this to be true with many things in my life. For instance, blogging. When I write a few blogs at the same time and then post one per day, I usually end up getting lazy and missing at least a day once all of my posts run out. When I write each and every day, I miss less posting because I am on a schedule and I don’t have time to get lazy.
I noticed the same thing when I work out. Most people that are out of shape that decide to get into shape try and overdo their workout at the gym on their first day. During the workout they are pumped and feel like they can handle everything but when they get home, they are more sore than ever. Each day after that the pain gets worse and worse and does not allow you to work out again for at least a week and by that time you are not motivated anymore.
If you take things one day at a time and start building a routine that you can handle, you will be much more likely to continue for many years. If you are working out, try just going to the gym on the first day for 15-20 minutes and do a light workout. You will leave feeling good and that you can handle more. Take that feeling and come back the next day and the next and so on. Then you will be able to add each day in small increments until you are happy with your workout.
When it comes to saving money, some people feel that it is easier to give a lump payment into their savings once a month or even year (especially when they are saving in a tax free IRA). The only way to make sure that you continue to save is to put money in your savings regularly enough that it becomes a habit. At that point it will be hard to break.
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January 30 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Back to the book “The Richest Man in Babylon”, here is another lesson that I feel is important to share. “Put in 10 pieces of copper into your purse but only take out 9”. When working for pieces of Copper keep 1/10th of what you earn and save it. That will start building your ultimate wealth. In modern days the advice can be applied by putting 10% of our paychecks into a savings account. The book talks about investing a little later on but this piece of advice is the most important to start off. Without the savings, we will have nothing to invest.
This advice is pretty common and can be found in almost any personal finance strategy or book. It might be written differently or sound different but they are all the same. Rich Dad, (Robert Kiyosaki) says to “Pay Yourself First”. Before paying bills or buying what he calls “doodads” (things that we spend money on that don’t put money back in our pockets), we must take a portion of our paycheck for ourselves.
In “The Automatic Millionaire”, David Bach mentions the same thing. The first step to becoming an automatic millionaire is to pay yourself first. Preferably 10% of you salary if possible. Bach says that if you have the money taken from your paycheck and automatically placed into your savings, you won’t even notice that it is gone. It’s weird but most people can live off of 90% of their paycheck, no matter what their situation is. If it is out of site, then it’s out of mind. We know this because we see people getting raises in their paycheck every day and yet, these people do not start saving more, they start spending more. The more money people make, the higher their lifestyle becomes. There are people who make 7 figures a year and still live paycheck to paycheck and then there are people who in their best year made under $60,000 and retired millionaires. That is the story of the first automatic millionaire that Bach speaks of in his book.
I personally agree with the advice to pay yourself first or save 10% or however you want to put it. I also agree that once you start doing this and make it automatic, you don’t even notice that it is gone. I have direct deposit for my paycheck and regular transfers of at least 10% to my savings account. I don’t notice a change of lifestyle or anything… until I look at how much is piling up in my savings account.
My finances are so automatic that it is like a computerized game that just continues calculating my savings as my turns (or weeks) pass. The money comes in through direct deposit, automatically money is transferred to different accounts of mine such as savings, fun account and charity. The rest of my paycheck stays in my checking account which has automatic bill payments for all of my other expenses including rent (I’m looking to buy but more on that later), credit cards (I only spend what I have in my checking, I use credit cards because I get points, longer to pay and I get a full spending summary at the end of each year), gas and electricity ( I pay the same every month and get a credit or bill for the difference at the end of the year so I don’t have to calculate and I Can budget better), cell phone (the bills are always wrong so this is a little headache), and all the other fun bills that overflow from my mailbox.
I do check each of my accounts including all bank, credit card and other major accounts at least once a month to make sure that everything is working properly and to watch my savings grow.
Now that I have savings built up, it is time for the next step, to start investing and take advantage of one of the greatest tools in the financial world, “compound interest”. I suggest you do the same. Some people seem lucky because they saved money and invested well but knowing what to do and when to do it is how to get lucky. If you have any similar stories, please leave a comment.
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January 29 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
One of the most remarkable things about being a parent is how much I can learn from my children in any situation. Children are pure and don’t have any outside motivations or involvement in politics or anything else. That is why what you hear out a child’s mouth is often the truth. Unless they are trying to score an extra treat, deny hitting their sibling or stalling so that they don’t have to go to bed. One thing that I noticed recently is the difference between my three year old son myself getting out of bed in the morning.
My morning routine consists of waking up to the alarm, pressing the snooze button, waking up to the next alarm, opening my eyes and then slowly getting out of bed. My son’s morning routine consists of opening his eye the second he hears something, jumping out of bed and running to either the tv or my bed depending on what he wants that morning.
You see the difference is that when I am waking up, I look at the day and think to myself “ok, here’s another day, let’s get ready and head off to work”. My son gets to play all day so he wants to start his day as soon and as quickly as possible.
After noticing this difference, I decided to change my morning routine. Instead of slowly getting out of bed in the morning and thinking about just “another day”, I am going to make each day special so that I can jump out of bed just like my son.
My previous attitude to getting up was that of an unlucky person. As long as I was thinking about my day as just another day, I was blocking all the possible luckortunity from my day. The second you change your attitude and mind set, you wake up like a lucky person and open up all of the day’s luckortunity.
Everyone needs something to look forward to in life. We need short term, medium term and long term events to look forward to to keep our lucky attitude.
Short term can be something special you have that day like meeting up with friends or going to see a movie you have been waiting to see.
Medium can be anything from an activity you are planning for this weekend or at the end of the month to a commission that is coming in soon to a vacation that you are looking forward to.
Long term is accomplishing your goals that you have been working hard for.
For me, I wake up, look at my long term goals, think about how it will feel once I have accomplished them, think about what I need to do to get there and then think of what I can do today to make sure that I stay on track. Doing this lets me jump pretty quickly out of bed in the morning. I’m still not as fast as my son though.
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January 28 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Jerry Seinfeld has a routine about people always messing over their “future selves”. Be it “night me” vs. “morning me” or “present me” vs. “me in 12 months”, it’s all the same idea. He talks about staying up at night is great for “night me” but it will mess over “morning me”. He can party and drink all night long and not worry about it because you can just let “morning me” worry about it.
The same goes for store promotions that offer “don’t pay until 2009”. I can afford anything I want right now. I’ll let “future me” worry about that when the time comes. I remember growing up with commercials with a little jingle “don’t pay a cent right now at Leons”. They offered no payments until whatever year was coming up. People love those deals because they really do think of themselves as 2 separate people. They think to themselves “well, I need a couch now and I’m definitely going to get a raise before the payments are due so I might as well buy it and pay for it later.
Everybody at one point or another sees something that they like but don’t necessarily need and they say to themselves “I deserve it”! They think “I work hard and it is time to reward myself”. I look at this and think that this is a little selfish. Why treat yourself to something and leave nothing for “future you”?
Think about it. If you took the $100 or $1000 or more that you are about to spend and invest it or even just put it into a savings account, “future you” can will be able to buy more for the money.
This world is about helping others and future you is one of those others. If you help him, he will be able to help more people in the future than you will ever be able to help in the present. Just like parents saving money to give to their kids when they move out, go to college or get married, “present you” can do the same thing for future you.
This concept is how the world works in a very simplified comedic delivery. “Present you” goes to school so that “future you” can get a job. “Present you” works hard so that “future you” can get a promotion. That is why “present you” should think twice about buying knickknacks and other things that you don’t need and instead put the money to work for “future you”. The way that luck works is that you have to be ready for the opportunities when they come. “Present you” is all about preparing for the opportunities that “future you” will be presented with. And if “present you” is handed an opportunity, just think of how much it can pay off for “future you” as well as the future generations that come from you.
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January 25 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I started reading the book, The Richest Man in Babylon this morning on the subway on the way to work. I have read a few reviews on the book, added it to my amazon.com cart and it arrived this past week. I knew that it was a must read but I didn’t realize how useful the book would really be. It pretty much speaks of common sense from many many years ago which still applies today. The problem is that nowadays many people no longer have common sense. I feel that there are many topics in this book that I would like to cover so I will post a few articles about this book.
At the beginning of the Book the main character, Arkad is poor and he wants to become rich. When Algamish, a rich man came to ask him for his services, he said that he would work overnight to have his product ready by morning if Algamish would tell him how he became rich. Algamish agrees and teaches Arkad to be rich.
The first piece of common sense from the book that I want to speak about is “don’t ask a brick maker to buy jewels for you”. Arkad (the richest man in Babylon), when he was first learning to be rich, gave money to a brick maker who was traveling far away to buy precious jewels and then when he came back to Babylon, he would sell them and they would split the profits. Arkad was called a fool because he trusted a brick maker to buy jewels. The brick maker came back to town with what he thought were precious jewels but ended up being pieces of glass.
This teaches us that when asking advice or for an expensive favor, ask an expert. As the little rat says in Robert Kiyosaki’s game “Cashflow 101”, “Don’t ask a stock broker for real estate advice”. If you want to know about real estate, go to a real estate investor. Not only that, don’t go to someone who is a bad real estate investor or even an average one. Go to an extremely successful one and you will get good advice. If Arkad would have asked a jeweler to buy jewels for him, he could have been successful but instead he lost out on his entire investment. People many times think that asking a professional in the field is expensive but if you look at this story, you learn that it is more expensive to take advice from someone who is not an expert.
Year ago in Babylon and in Modern day United States, advice is always free and plentiful. The price we pay though is who to listen to and who to tune out. Most people in the world listen to the people closest to them such as their parents and friends. It is no wonder that the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. The advice that we get determines the road that we take to the future. If you want to get lucky, find a person that is where you want to be in life and ask him for advice.
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January 24 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I was driving down the highway last night on the way home from a conference and my mind started to wonder. All along the side of the highway I saw billboards for all kinds of different companies and services. What really caught my mind was a billboard advertising Diet Coke. I’m not sure why it caught my eye from all of the other signs but maybe it is because I own shares of Coke and I’m always thinking of my best financial interest. The thing that got me to start thinking was “why did Coke choose this location to advertise?”
The first thing that came to mind was “they have a huge budget and want to get as much exposure as possible so why here?” I would understand if they bought the side of a building in Times Square to advertise because that is the most expensive advertising real estate in the country. Then I started thinking that Times square will cost 100 times more to advertise in but they will get 100 times or more exposure from their advertising. So maybe everything is proportional and it doesn’t matter where you advertise because if you use the same budget then you will get different amounts of space but the same exposure to the same amount of people.
At that point I recalled a conversation that I had a while back with a business associate who was trying to sell a strip mall that he owned. He told me that he set a price for the property and had many people respond to the offer. He signed an initial agreement with one person who said that he just wanted to do his due diligence and do some research and if everything checks out, he will buy the property in 30 days.
At the end of the 30 days, the person came back to my business associate and said that his researched came back and he was willing to pay an amount which was 20% lower than the asking price. My business associate turned him down since he had many other people interested in the property.
The exact same thing happened with the next two potential buyers and they both offered almost exactly the same price as the first person. My business associate couldn’t believe that every single person gave him the same number so he asked the third potential buyer how he came up with that number and the person explained it to him. He filled in a formula which included all sorts of elements such as how much traffic was in the area and how much income the property would produce. When filling in a formula, there is almost no thinking involved, you plug in the numbers and in spits out the maximum price to pay that will be profitable.
Professional real estate investors do this for every property that they go to. They don’t really care about the location. They just care about the bottom line. If one deal doesn’t work out, there are plenty of other deals just waiting for them.
The same thing goes for billboard advertising. Large companies such as Coke do not randomly choose locations to advertise. They have teams of analysts looking for the locations that will fit into their formula. Their final decision on where to advertise is based on how much it will cost them per view. They have a set price that they are willing to pay and if the location fits, the go for it. There are many other factors such as where their target market lives but all of the elements fit into their equation.
Some people may look at the billboards and think that Coke just plugs advertising in wherever there is an opening and hopes for the best. Those are the same people who don’t know the difference between “chance” and “luck”. Lucky people know that to get lucky, you must put in the work beforehand. Business, advertising and pretty much anything else are not risky if you know what you are doing. That is why the more experienced people are usually better at their experience related tasks. If you want to get lucky, your only task is to get experience and know what you are doing.
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January 23 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
One of the most important ways to get lucky is by developing lucky habits. Everyone in the world has habits, some are good, some are bad, and some don’t make a difference one way or another. The point is that everyone has them. Habits range from biting your nails to always asking 10 people for advice before going ahead with a business deal and beyond. The Trick to getting lucky is to make yourself “Lucky Habits”.
Throughout this blog you will read about different ways to get lucky. I wrote about speaking to strangers, taking different routes to work, setting goals, and many other lucky habits to start.
Humans are creatures of habit. The reason that people usually don’t change much over time and that children turn out very much like their parents is that they learn habits when they are growing up and are stuck with them. Habits that you learn in your youth can cause you to become brand loyal to certain products just because your mother used them at home. You can also start drinking a cup of coffee every morning because that is what you see at home, school or the office. The only way to break a habit, change a habit or start a new habit is to consciously make it happen and work on it.
Habits are extremely hard to break. That is why it is so hard for people to quit smoking, lose weight and keep it off and change their overall financial situation. There are so many programs out there for all of the above examples but so many people just can’t do it. To quit smoking, you need to stop doing something you are so used to do. To lose weight and keep it off, you need to change your lifestyle to include exercise, different eating habits and a new mindset. To change your financial situation, you must first learn how to do it and second, change the way you deal with finances. It might mean starting to save money, it might mean investing, it might even mean cutting up all of your credit cards to make sure you don’t get into greater debt. All of these are easy to read about, study or get advice from friends but the hard part is changing your habits and creating new positive habits.
Change Your Habits
To change your habits, you must make the changes part of yourself. You need to set goals, write them down and find a way to make sure you follow them. Here are some ways to change your habits:
1. 1. Write down the habits you want to change and make sure it is somewhere you will see it every day.
2. 2. Tell a family member or friend to keep you in line.
3. 3. Get a partner with the same habits and change them together. Then you can push each other.
4. 4. Replace your habits with a better habit. For example, for smokers, every time you want a cigarette, have a candy. Or if you want to lose weight, get rid of junk food in your house and fill the fridge with vegetables so when you are hungry, you are forced to eat healthy.
5. 5. Do a little every day. You can’t change all of your habits in one day. It takes a lot of time and effort. Try changing one habit at a time and when you feel comfortable, start working on the next habit.
I recently decided that I needed to change my financial situation. To do this, I needed to get rid of all of my financial knowledge that I learned in the past and I started relearning everything from the ground up so I can build myself a solid financial foundation. I have been reading a lot, especially books from the Rich Dad, Poor Dad series and teaching my self to think like a “rich person” according to Robert Kiyosaki. I wrote down my goals and I started tracking my personal finances by creating financial statements for myself at the end of every month. I also started investing. At first, I didn’t think I could afford to invest but now I invest very regularly since I created the habit of putting aside investment money every month.
Take a good look at your life, look at where you are now and think about where you want to be in 10 years, 20 years and 30 years down the line. Then figure out what habits are going to get you there and figure out how you can put them into place. The sooner you change your habits, the sooner you will accomplish your goals.
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January 21 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Over the last few months I have been doing some research for this blog. When I decided that I was going to start the blog I started looking into everything I needed to know to build the blog, set it up and post articles. I also researched how to increase traffic, how to advertise the site and content and how to keep on track. Finally, in my research, I found and came up with hundreds of ways to get lucky that I could write about each day. The problem was that I kept writing and I never looked back to see what I wrote.
Don’t get me wrong, I built the site, I set up all the features that are currently functioning on my site and I filled the site with regular content since I started. So far, I am doing pretty good with this blog, at least I think so. The problem is that I am not doing great.
This morning I was looking through my shoulder bag and I found pages and pages of notes that I took and put together for my blog. As I was looking through them, I noticed I followed some of them but most of them have not been followed. When I started to think about it, I realized that I am still taking notes every day on how to improve my site but I am not implementing them as regularly.
In life, if you want to get anything done and get lucky, you have to take action. Preparation is good but only action will get you anywhere. If you are taking a road trip, you can buy a gps and then look up your route on Mapquest and then on Google maps and plan pit stops along the way but you will never get anywhere unless you get in the car and drive. Action is the most important part.
In many business books I have read, they use the saying “ready, fire, aim!” as opposed to the more common saying “ready, aim, fire”. The reason for this is if you spend too much time aiming, you will miss your opening or opportunity. They suggest doing a little research and getting “ready”, then just going for it (“fire”). Once you are on your way already and you can see how things are going and “aim” to readjust your direction.
The main point is to take action or else nothing will ever get done, no matter how prepared you are. Now that I am 2 months into my blog, I can start to aim and look through all of my notes on how to improve this site. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment.
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January 17 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I know this woman who always has an answer for everything. The answer is usually “I am this way because…” and then she ends off with either “that’s how I was raised”, “my parents abused me”, “my schooling screwed me over” or something else to that effect. The point is that nothing is ever her fault. She can always pinpoint exactly what messed her up and take pride in the fact that it was not her fault and there is nothing she can do about it.
When I first met her, I felt really bad for her. She had a terrible upbringing and she was faced with terrible circumstances which made her turn out the way she did. After getting to know her a little better, I noticed that she was taking this a little too far. She was taking incidents that happened way in the past and applying them to her everyday life.
I thought about this woman recently when I was having a conversation with a friend who was telling me that she was having so many problems in life. Her school screwed her over by not teaching her properly. She says that they even apologized for doing such a poor job. She is having problems at home but they are all her parent’s fault. She had problems with her friends but the problems were all for one reason or another. This story sounded very familiar.
When I started thinking about it, I realized that we all have a little bit of this inside of us. We don’t want to be wrong or at fault so we blame other people for everything that happens to us. It is all pathological, after finding something to blame a failure on, we are somewhat comforted to know it is no longer our fault and anything that comes from it is not our responsibility.
I had this problem for a little while. It was ingrained in me to blame first and then figure out what just happened. I found myself blaming everyone and everything for anything wrong in my life. I got messed over by some of my teachers in high school and I blamed my failures on them. Later in life I realized that I can blame all I want but it won’t do me any good and it doesn’t affect the person I am blaming in the least. All it did was make me more comfortable with my failures since in my mind, they were not my failures, they were someone else’s.
The major problem with that is that failures are good and if you blame everyone else, you are losing out on the opportunity to fail. You are giving yourself a double whammy by not allowing yourself to benefit from your own failure and at the same time keeping yourself in the position to fail again. It becomes a never ending circle where you blame something for your failure, you don’t learn from it and then when it happens again, you are still at the same level and continue to blame the same thing over and over again. You might be 90 years old and blame your bitter life on a 2nd grade teacher who held you back for a year. Does that make sense? Letting one person or action control your entire life, even decades after they are gone?
In an earlier article I wrote about why failures lead to success. If you fail and learn from your failure, you elevate yourself to a higher level where you will be able breeze your way through the situation if you are faced with it again. If you do not claim the failure, you will not learn any lessons and the next time you are faced with the same situation, you will once again continue to blame.
The two people at the beginning of this article need to grow up and take the credit for some of their failures so that they will learn from their mistakes and be able to raise themselves to a higher level. After all, wouldn’t you prefer to learn a lesson, move on and live a happy life than spend your time blaming your miserable life on someone else?
If you don’t learn your lesson, then it is all your fault!
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January 16 2008 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
There are two different thoughts on building up social and professional networks. One is to invite and accept anybody and everybody and the other is only to accept friends and people you actually speak to. I use both of these with my social networking as well as a third. For certain networks such as Facebook, my rule is I will invite someone or accept a friend invitation only if I have spoken to them in real life. I will not share all of my personal information and pictures from my last vacation with someone from across the world who just wants to have as many Facebook friends as possible. For professional networks, I don’t care who sees my information. In fact, I want the whole world to see my information because the more people that see my professional profile, the more luckortunity I can get my hands on. If I was looking for a job and only my closest friends knew, I’m not sure what I would end up with if anything. On the other hand, if the entire world sees my qualifications and that I am looking for a job, there is a much larger chance that I will find something I like. The third thought is to invite as many people as possible with absolutely no connection to you. I did this with a MySpace account to see where it got me.
With Facebook, I can keep in touch with close friends and family and keep everyone informed of events in my family’s life. I can share pictures of my children and let everyone know when the next birthday party is. I stopped going on Facebook so often because it takes up too much time and I have more important things to do with my time but fortunately, the rest of my friends are still online whenever I need them.
With LinkedIn it is a little difficult to connect with people you don’t know and it is even hard sometimes to connect with people you do know. To connect with someone you usually need to know their email address. In today’s age people have between 5 and 10 email addresses and you never know which one they will use for linked in. To get around this problem, at least for others to connect to me, I added my email address as part of my last name so when someone sees it, they can invite me to connect right away. You can do this too by writing your name as “firstname” “lastname(email address)”. Then anyone who knows you or has ever heard of you can join your network.
For MySpace, I conducted somewhat of a social experiment just to see what would happen. Since I didn’t have a MySpace account and I was curious about what everyone was going so crazy over, I opened an account. I didn’t tell any of my friends about the account but I did start inviting random people from all over to be my friends. I would just browse around and add anyone and everyone I saw. I was surprised to see that somewhere over 65% of these people accepted my friendship and sent me glittery messages all over my wall saying “thanks for the add” or just some random joke. I found it very interesting to see the inner workings of a MySpace network.
I didn’t let that social experiment go to waste though, I invited everyone to visit this site as well as my other site Sucky Poems. I’ve had some traffic from those connections so I got to use some free advertising. I did have more authority telling them about my blogs than a random spammer but still, if I had an actual relationship with any of them, I would probably get a lot more traffic. People are more curious about their internal circle of friends than they are about random strangers. That is why a site like Post Secret although I think it’s great, would be a lot more interesting if it was just for a small area or group of friends. Imagine reading through every secret and trying to figure out who it was.
By opening up your social networks you can choose how you want to get lucky. If it’s professionally, then letting everyone connect to you through LinkedIn is a good start. If it is socially, you can open up your social networks to accept just anybody. I prefer to at least get to know a little about someone first before I become their online friend. You can learn all about me through my blogging, now leave me a comment or a message and tell me a bit about yourself.
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January 11 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
I just received this email from a fellow blogger and I felt it was worth sharing it on my blog. I responded to the email but I feel I should write about what went through my head as I read this email.
Hello,
I recently found your website by simply browsing online for other good blogs. I run my own blog, and I am trying to link to other blogs I think my visitors might like to visit once they are done on my site.
Since my website is visited by 1,000’s of blog readers daily, I am positive many of my visitors would be interested in visiting your weblog once they leave mine. I figured you wouldn’t mind if I link to your site since we are not competitors, and both have similar internet viewers on our sites. Please let me know if this is OK with you? Do you think you can link back to my website hiswebsite.com (for anonymity)? Thanks.
Sam (for anonymity once again)
First of all, linking to other sites is a great way to improve traffic and create friendships with other bloggers. Giving your readers value on your site is the name of the game. Without any value in your posts, people will stop coming back. Of course, the more value you offer, the more people will come back to your site as well as link, bookmark and tell their friends.
Second, Sam made a point of saying that “we are not competitors”. If you open two identical stores across the street for each other that sell the same products, the two stores are competitors. When two people are selling a service, and potential customers only need or want one, the two people are competitors. But when two people have websites or blogs with free content, even on the identical topics, they are not competitors. People do not have to choose only one blog on a subject to ever visit. In fact if someone is interested in personal finance for example, he will probably read many blogs on the topic such as Lazy Man and Money, No Credit Needed, Brip Blap, Money Smart Life and many others. I know that my blog reader is full of them.
My wife just started a blog Fabulous Mommy for fabulous mommies. When she found out how many mommy blogs were out there, she almost decided not to start in the first place. I told her that the more mommy blogs out there, the better it is for her. They can link to each other and compare ideas and posts and even post about each other. Having similar sites can only help.
When it comes to blogs, I believe that there is no real competition, there is only cooperation. By adding someone else’s link on your site or by referring to another blog on the same topic, you are cooperating with the other blog to improve both of your blogs. By helping each other, they both win. If they choose not to help each other, they both suffer.
If anyone wants to swap links with me, they are more than welcome to. They just need to click the friendly links in my sidebar and enter their link. Then when they link to my page, their site will be listed on my site.
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January 10 2008 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
For the last of my 10 posts on how to get lucky and increase luckortunity, I am going to tell you to “stop trying so hard to get lucky”. For most things in life you have blinders on and your eye set on the goal to be successful. Luck is very different since it is not one specific thing that you can focus on, it is many things all over the place. Imagine watching a ping pong match while standing around the middle of the table. As the ball goes back and forth, so does your head. You are concentrating hard to follow the ball but in the process you miss out on anything happening that is not around the ball. On the other hand if you back up a little and you just watch the game being played without concentrating so hard, you see the big picture and get a better feeling of what is going on.
Luck is all around us and if you try too hard, you will end up blocking out all the possible luckortunity. Professor Richard Wiseman states that the hum