Category — Daily Rambling

[UPDATE - Adding 1,000 people a day will likely get your account suspended with Twitter. To avoid this add around 300 per day, and don't mass unfollow people quickly. For me I would have a week off following people to do one mass unfollow....then start following again. This makes growing your account a bit slower but is still a great way to grow your account quickly]

I have set myself a BHAG – A Big Hairy Audacious Goal – to get 50,000 twitter followers by 1/1/11 and to make loads of money from those twitter followers.

Currently I have about 5,400 twitter followers and this is growing every single day. But it is time to up the anti and to increase my twitter followers by 10 times that amount. In the mean time I may as well starting making a bucketload of money from my new found twitter fame.

So How Can You Actually Grow Your Twitter Following By 50,000 In Just 6 Months?

It is actually a lot easier than you might think. All it takes is a little diligence and some hard work…or you can outsource these tasks for as little as $1/hour using ODesk. It is really easy and almost anyone can do it.

Step 1 – Find A Twitter User With 50,000 Followers Who Is Following The Same Amount of People

By finding a twitter user with 50,000 followers who is also following 50,000 this means that they autofollow everyone who follows them. It also means there is a good chance that all of their followers will autofollow anyone who follows them.

If you want to follow more than 50,000 then find a few users with 50,000 followers each. Or find a user with over 100,000 followers who is also following 100,000 people.

Step 2 – Everyday Follow 1,000 of Those Followers

Everyday twitter allows you to follow 1,000 people. So everyday you need to follow 1,000 people. The chances are that most of the people you follow will follow you back.

This is painful work, and who has a couple of hours to spend everyday for 6 months? I certainly don’t…that is why step 3 is so important.

Step 3 – Outsource Following Tasks For $1/hour
Instead of trying to follow 1,000 people a day yourself you can outsource this task on ODesk for as little as $1/hour. It wouldn’t take more than 2 hours per day to do this…that’s $2/day.

The awesome thing about outsourcing is that because you are paying someone to do it, they will do it everyday without fail. Meaning you could grow your twitter following by more than 182,000 followers in 6 months…and it will only cost you around $350. (182 days x 1,000 follows per day = 182,000). Once you reach 50,000 followers it will likely only take you a few tweets to make your $350 back, because a huge twitter following is a money making machine.

Now not everyone you follow will follow you back, but that is alright. Of 182,000 that you follow in 6 months time it is very likely that at least 50,000 people will follow you back. Those that don’t follow you; you auto-unfollow all of them at once using one of the many tools out there

Click Here To Sign Up For ODesk For Free

So Now That I Am Growing My Twitter Following How Do I Make Money From It?

There are a few different ways to make money with your list.

1. Sponsored Tweets
Sponsored Tweets is a website that allows you to sell a tweet. This means advertisers can pay you to write a tweet about their product.

Some movie stars with upwards of 1.5 million followers charge around $8,000 for one tweet. Who needs to ever work again if just one tweet will make you that much money!!! Just 5 tweets a year and you would be well ahead of the average wage of Australia/America.

But with 50,000 followers you could probably make around $50-$100/tweet from Sponsored Tweets. Do that once per day and you will be making $18,000-$37,000 per year just from Sponsored Tweets.

Click Here To Sign Up For Sponsored Tweets Today And Starting Making Money

2. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is another great way to make money by tweeting. Instead of being paid to tweet you write a tweet with an affiliate link in it. Everyone who signs up for your affiliate offer through the link in your tweet makes you money.

John Chow has approximately 55,000 followers and he made over $4,000 from one tweet just by posting about an affiliate offer.

Market Leverage and Motive Interactive are two affiliate networks that have some pretty good offers. You don’t even have to sell anything to make money because some offers pay you a small amount (around $1) for every person that enters their email address.

Get just 1% of your 50,000 followers to sign up for one of these offers (remember they don’t even have to buy anything) and you have made $500.

You can also market products that people buy. Some products on Market Leverage pay you $80 and the customer only buys the product for $30. Get just 1% of your 50,000 followers to buy this product and BAM you just made $40,000.

Affiliate marketing had a lot of potential on twitter. Just write your affiliate tweets as you would write any other tweet and try not to make it look like spam.

3. Email Marketing
I love making money from email marketing and to me a large email list is always going to be better than a large twitter list. So why not use twitter to grow your email marketing list?

To get 5,000 email subscribers can be hard. But if you build up a twitter following of just 50,000 followers (which will be easy) then you only need 10% to subscribe and you have will have a email list teeming with potential. Keep outsourcing your twitter building using ODesk and soon you could have over 300,000 twitter followers, which could build a MASSIVE email marketing list.

Offer your twitter followers a variety of free stuff (different offers will attract different people and increase your chances of more subscribers). Then set up a bunch of email autoresponder messages with Aweber and let the emails market affiliate products for you.

For best results use the emails to market both your own products and affiliate products. It is also a good idea to writing teaching emails and teach people how to do things, and then recommend them products.

Aweber is awesome because you can run your entire email marketing campaign on autopilot. You write the emails once and when someone signs up Aweber send out the emails (in order) for you. So you can literally make money while you sleep.

Click Here to sign up for Aweber for $1

4. Website Traffic
You can use twitter to drive traffic to your blog, website of squeeze page. I use a plugin called Tweetly Updator, which automatically updates my twitter account whenever I publish a new post on my blog. This generally sends a small influx of people to my blog.

I am sure that when I have 50,000 followers instead of 5,000 I will get a lot more people coming to my blog through twitter. Economies of scale

5. Sell Your List

I have never done it myself, but I am sure that you could create targeted twitter followings and sell them to people.

As you can see, growing your twitter list to 50,000 in 6 months is not only easy, but it can be very beneficial and bring in a fair bit of extra income. That extra income could pay off the credit card, pay off your home faster, pay for a holiday or a night out, or completely fund your lifestyle and give you the freedom to do whatever you want. It is your choice.

Everyday you waste is a day you are missing out on an abundance of income from twitter. So get cracking. Go to ODesk and get a worker for $1/hour who will build your list for you.

Wow Hostgator is amazing. I was trying to log onto my blog to write a post and I had a random 500 error showing up.

One of the things I have found with hosting is that you will always have some problems with your site from time to time, no matter who you are with. Having a good support system allows you to fix your problem quickly and get on with your day to day business.

Well I just got home from work so I am in bed on my iPhone and I have this problem. So I log onto Hostgator support on my iPhone and select the chat option. Within one minute I was chatting with someone from support WHILE I WAS ON MY IPHONE!!! Talk about an amazing support system. In no time my problem was fixed and my site up and running.

Hostgator support system rocks and it is for that sole reason I would recommend them to anyone setting up a new blog or website.

For a $9.94 discount on your hosting use the coupon code RYANMCLEAN or BESTHOSTING. You can’t go wrong with Hostgator and I would highly recommend them.

I love it when things work!

Today I was reading my 4 month old baby daughter a book on my iPhone and showing her a bunch of flash cards.

With new technology coming out every day making our lives simpler and more complicated at the same time, the need for paper is becoming smaller and smaller. Look at the changes that have happened or are happening:

• Email replaced snail mail
• Sales pages replaced sales letters
• Advertising online replaced flyers
• Blogs and other news sites replaced newspapers
• The iPad, Kindle and other Ebook readers are replacing books
• Digital cameras replaced printed photos

We are moving towards being a paperless society, and I have been thinking about making the ultimate leap and going paperless. I mean not keeping any bit of paper I don’t need.

There are some pieces of paper you can’t avoid keeping. I have to keep the registration slip for my car, there are some receipts I need to keep and some bits of paper are practical to keep (like my trust deeds etc). But the idea of removing every bit of paper from my desk, my bag and my house is very enticing.

I am definately considering it and want to make the move either this year or next year. Man it would feel good to purge myself of all paper.

So how could you do it? I wrote down a few things I would do to make the move to paperless.

Create An E-Filing Cabinet On Your Compuer
Create a folder on my computer and scan all the important documents I need.

Most important documents you don’t need hard copies of. Bank statements, health care info, superannuation statements, car receipts, school reports etc. For most of these things a scanned copy in a filing cabinet on your desktop would suffice.

Back Everything Up
I would get Mobile Me and back everything up so that if my computer died I would still have everything. I would also get an external hard drive too.

Replace Books With The iPad
I would get an iPad with iBooks and replace all my books with the iPad. All my books would be in one place and there would be no paper

Import DVDs onto Computer
Let’s face it, DVDs are on their way out. I would convert all my DVDs into digital files and store them on a hard drive that was connected to my TV so I could watch whatever I wanted when I wanted.

The Cost
I estimate the cost to be:
2 x Wireless hardrives = $1,200
1 x iPad = $600
Repurchasing Book Collection = $3,000

So really it would cost me about $5,000 to go completely paperless….if I could afford it then I would do it in a heartbeat.

The other day I visited this cute second hand book store and I bought the Robert Kiyosaki book “The Cashflow Quadrant”.

The book talks about the different ways to earn an income (as an employee, self employed, business owner and investor) and talks about the best way to move towards financial freedom.

I have read the book before but it is good to refresh my memory and get re-inspired to achieve financial freedom.

How To Achieve Financial Freedom
Robert recommends that the best way for most people to achieve financial freedom is to start to generate money by owning an automated business first (one that brings you money whether you work or not) and then invest that money to make more money.

This is encouraging for me to hear. As I do not currently have the money to invest (in property) to achieve financial freedom that way I have been focusing on building my automated business in my spare time (while working as an employee and being self employed).

My automated business is quite simple really. I collect email subscribers and send them automated messaged using Aweber. I am good at collecting subscribers but not as good at converting them into cha-Ching.

A Little Frustrated
At the moment, reading the book, I am a little frustrated. I want to spend time building up my passive income, but time seems quite hard to come by at the moment. I also don’t yet know how much I make per subscriber so I can’t spend money to build my list quicker.

So at the moment I am juggling earning a good income, paying off some debt and saving some money (or trying to) and still having some free time to develop my passive income. I am not the best juggler yet.

Light At The End Of The Tunnel
My list is making money…that is the good news. It isn’t costing me anything but is making me money every month. The system is there I just need to build on it to make it more profitable before I scale it up to include more subscribers and more customers.

So there is light at the end of the tunnel. I know what I have to do, but finding the time and energy to do it while paying all the bills is the hard part.

This is just a personal rant because I couldn’t read the book, get all fired up, and then just go to sleep. I had to get my mind on paper.

A lot of people getting married ask me where I got my photography, video and other things done. This page outlines who I used and will tell you why they are awesome and why you should use them too.

<<<<<<<THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS>>>>>>>>>>>

Photography – Daniel Griffiths – http://dgphotos.com.au

Videography – Gary Wright/Sketchbook Media – http://Sketchbookweddings.com.au

http://www.sketchbookweddings.com/weddings/Entries/2009/5/24_Ryan_and_Kelly.html

Ryan & Kelly Photoshoot from Sketchbook Weddings on Vimeo.

Flowers and

When I spend time working on businesses I want to make sure that I am working smart, so that I don’t have to work hard. The smarter you can work the more money you can make.

The internet is a great place to start a business because you have so much leverage. You can leverage technology to work smart for you so that you can work less and earn more. For example, my websites are live 24 hours per day working for me, generating an income and taking sales. I just let them be and they do all the work for me. My websites reach out to customers, my websites collect customers details, my websites make sales for me without me having to be there. This is a great way to use technology as leverage to create a great business.

I have come across a great way that I can build two businesses at once. This method makes it twice as likely that my hard work will bring in a good financial return. The better return I get on my hard work the more money I make and the richer I become. So do you want to know my simple method for building 2 businesses at once? Well let me explain it to you.

I have two businesses. They are

• Property Finding Service at http://CashFlowInvestor.com.au
• 14 Day Passive Income Generator Training course at http://RichAcademy.com/aweber

I am using the email marketing tool Aweber to grow both my businesses at once and I want to show you how.

• I created an email newsletter for CFI (CashFlow Investor) using Aweber and I also created my RA (RichAcademy) e-course using Aweber.
• I spend time marketing CFI and I find it fairly easy to get decent amounts of traffic to the site. So on CFI I put a sign up form to allow people to subscribe to my email newsletter for monthly property updates. Whenever someone subscribes to the newsletter they get sent an email recommending them to try my Passive Income Course.

My clients at CFI want to generate a passive income through property. But a lot of them are also interested in other ways to generate a passive income. By teaching them (for free) how to create a passive income online they begin to trust me more AND they can achieve their passive income goals.

So far I have had a success rate of about 20%. That means that 20% of people who sign up for my CFI newsletter will also sign up for my e-course.

• My ecourse is free, but I make money from affiliate sales and sign ups. So whenever someone signs up for an affiliate service or product I get a commission.
• I can now focus on building my email subscriber list for CFI so that I can get more paying customers through the door (by converting subscribers into clients) but I can also grow my secondary source of income without any extra work.

Instead of trying to market two products individually and spending a lot of time and energy on marketing. I can focus on marking CFI and then still grow my list of ecourse subscribers through that. So I am effectively growing two businesses at once. A great way to leverage your time.

In my mind I think goal should be fun. If a goal isn’t fun to go after, then it is going to be a lot harder to achieve. I like to make my goals fun, then going after them makes life a lot more interesting. My latest fun goal that I have created for myself is this

To be able to send out an email broadcast through Aweber and make $1,000 or more within 24 hours.

It would be nice to be able to say “Oh, I just need a lazy thousand for…(insert reason here)…I’ll just send out an email to my readers recommending them this awesome product”.

To be able to do that would certainly make those stressfully money situations a bit less stressful.

I think that is a fun goal to aim for. I don’t really have a time frame for it. I am looking to really give a good crack at monetizing my list this year and growing it even bigger…so I guess I want to achieve it this year.

Do you have any fun goals you want to share?

I love reading books. Two of the most recent books I have read are Richard Branson’s books “Losing My Virginity” and “Business Stripped Bare”. Richard Branson has recently become one of my heroes (in the last few years) ever since I found out about Virgin Galactic.

It has long been my dream to go into space. So much so that in year 11 in high school I went to not one but TWO space camps…did someone say nerd? Branson is making space travel available to the general public for a few hundred thousand dollars and for that I admire him. Soon I will be able to achieve my dream of space travel…once I am a roaring business success.

REVOLUTIONISING AN INDUSTRY

Branson’s books are basically an autobiography of his life. He tells in great details the things he has done, and how he has achieved them. Branson looks for industries where there is little competition and he feels the customer is getting ripped off. He then launches business to offer and better service for cheaper to his customers.

Virgin Blue in Australia is one of the top low fare airlines, it came into the game when Quantas and Ansett were the only real competitors and it revolutionized cheap airfare in Australia. Virgin mobile was launched by offering prepaid to customers who couldn’t get a plan (this was before prepaid was the norm). He launched Virgin Record stores to offer discounted records and a better buying experience for customers who were getting ripped off. Branson makes billions by finding industries where the customer is being sold a raw deal. He has revolutionized many industries by providing more for less.

HOW I WANT TO DO BUSINESS

My current business idea that I am working on is in an industry where I feel customers are being sold a raw deal. It is my aim to offer customers a great service for a fraction of the cost they would currently have to pay.

I really like Branson’s method of creating a lot of businesses in different sectors. Most people focus on one area of expertise and stop there. I think that I want to be like Branson in the fact that I want to start businesses in lots of different areas. I want to find industries where the customer is getting a raw deal and I want to offer a better service at a better price.

I am working on one at the moment, and when that is successful I already have another business idea that I want to work on. My second idea will be offline and will require some capital first, so it requires the success of at least one business before it.

Gone are the days of trying to make money blogging. I feel I am really developing as an entrepreneur and moving up to bigger and better things. I want to start and run businesses that hire other people, that stimulate the economy more than just my own pocket.

MOVING INTO COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE

In the future I want to start businesses and use them to buy property. The cash from my first business I will use to invest in property and achieve financial freedom. I will also use it to fund my next few businesses. Eventually I want to start businesses and use them to buy the real estate they operate on. Then sell the business and keep the real estate. Something like a restaurant. Start a restaurant and use it to buy it’s location, then sell the restaurant and charge rent for the property. This sounds like a good way for me to move into commercial property.

MY JOURNEY FROM WANABE PASTOR TO ENTREPRENEUR

I have had an interesting journey over the last few years. In 2006 I started bible college with the goal to be a youth pastor. In 2008 I quit college and got married and decided that being a pastor was not for me.

Firstly, I don’t have the mercy to be a pastor. I am blunt, which is often interpreted as being rude, and I just don’t have much empathy for people. Being a pastor would drive me crazy…all the hugs and the caring just isn’t my style. I would prefer to live an exceptional life and just show people how to do the same…not cuddle them through their problems.

I did a spiritual gift test and Mercy was my lowest ranking gift, I got HALF the points for mercy as I did for the 2nd lowest gift. I figure I am better off focusing on my strengths (which I am told by the test that they are teaching and preaching) than trying to fix what is obviously a weakness. Just my opinion.

The change from pastor to entrepreneur happened as I began to find myself not achieving much in the church environment. I was leading a small group, but as far as being pastoral went I wasn’t very good at it. I think this is partly caused by me trying to be ‘the perfect christian’ on the outside, but not being real with who I actually was on the inside.

Throughout bible college I explored ways to make money online. I tried designing tshirts, I tried blogging and ran over 50 failed blogs. When I finished college in 2008 I was making money as a freelance writer online, but this was cheap work and I wasn’t making much money.

It wasn’t until last year when I decided to stop my attempts to make money in each and every way online that I started to get focused. I realised that trying to make money 100 different ways meant I made almost nothing. So I decided to take a time out and then focus.

In the last half of 2009 I pretty much gave up blogging and spent my time reading book after book on finance and investing. Robert Kiyosaki changed the way I thought about money and business. Now I am a changed man, and I have a clear vision about what I want to achieve and how I want to achieve it.

Moving from a bible college student to an entrepreneur was a gradual process. I love the challenge of starting and running business and I love the positive change you can create. I now doubt I would ever be a pastor, it seems to limiting for me.

I will definately minister the good news, but it will look different to what I thought it would be like when I started bible college in 2006. I love business and I am definately glad to be making it my life.

I am happier now than I can ever remember being in my entire life, and that joy spreads through my family. It benefits my wife and my daughter. I am exactly the man I want to be right now, and I am so happy to be real with myself and who I am. I hated being a fake Christian…pretending I was holy and ignoring the real me. I am so glad to be me and my relationship with God has only grown because of it.

One of the things Tim Ferris talks about in The 4 Hour Work Week is a dreamline. A dreamline is basically your dreams written down as goals to achieve in the next 6-12 months. A dreamline also contains the calculation on how much money per month/week/day your dream will cost.

One of my dreams is to own a Lexus Rx330, which you can buy for around $35-40k second hand (3 years old). A dreamline encourages you to look at the monthly cost instead of the overall figure. This makes things seem more achievable.

If I could borrow $35,000 to buy my Lexus I would likely have to pay 14.5% interest (on a personal loan). That works about to about $5,075/year or around $100/week. On my wage $100/week is a lot of money.

However, I believe I have found a way to achieve that dream for just $20/week. There is a property I am looking at buying in a country town. I can purchase the property for $0 down using vendor finance. The property is on a big block so I could subdivide it and sell off the block of land.

The property is negative cashflow at around $20/week. But subdividing and selling off the land will not lower the rent. So I can subdivide and sell the land, put $35-40k in my pocket and it will still only cost me $20/week. I can then take that $35-$40k I received from the sale of the land to buy my Lexus.

I then end up with a Lexus that effectively only costs me $20/week and a property that effectively costs me $0/week (because the loss is passed onto the Lexus theoretically). So instead of spending $100/week for a Lexus, by being smart I end up with a Lexus and a property for just $20/week. That makes my dreams look really affordable.

The only thing I am unsure about is whether or not you need to get your property re-valued when you sell off the land. If the banks then revalue your property lower you might be required to pay back some of your mortgage, making your profit less and the deal less lucrative. I will look into this one.

Your dream doesn’t have to be a Lexus. It could be a holiday around the world, it could be whatever you want it to be. By being smart with property you can achieve your dreams for a fraction of the cost of the traditional methods.

One of my mates asked me if I would be willing to buy a negatively cashflowed property in order to achieve that. My response was something along the lines of “As if I wouldn’t pay $20/week to live my dreams. I can afford $20/week”.