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Money Problems – Day 1: Setting Goals

Today, I am starting a series, Money Problems: 30 Days to Perfect Finances. The series will consist of 30 things you can do in one setting to perfect your finances. It’s not a system to magically make your debt disappear. Instead, it is a path to understanding where you are, where you want to be, and–most importantly–how to bridge the gap.

I’m not going to run the series in 30 consecutive days. That’s not my schedule. Also, I think that talking about the same thing for 30 days straight will bore both of us. Instead, it will run roughly once a week. To make sure you don’t miss a post, please take a moment to subscribe, either by email or rss.

In this, the first installment, we’re going to talk about goals.

First, we’re going to ask 3 questions.

What is your financial goal?
Why?
How can you get there?

The first question is “What is your goal?” Of course, in this series, on this site, we’re only going to be addressing your financial goals. Losing 300 pounds, growing wings, and flying to the moon may be an admirable goal, but it’s considerably outside of the scope of this project.

So, what is your financial goal? Do you want to retire a millionaire, or become financially independent? Do you want to pay off your debt, or save enough money to see the world? Do you want to learn how to retire by 40?

Your goal does not matter…to anyone but you. To you, though, it is terribly important. Without a goal, how can you measure you progress and see what you have accomplished? It’s easy to get frustrated and give up when you can’t look back and see what successes you have actually accumulated.

Whatever your goal, you have to do two things:

Don’t let anyone tell you it is stupid or impossible. There is a quote that I can’t find attribution for, other than as an old Chinese proverb: “Those that say it can’t be done should get out of the way of those doing it.”
Write it down and hang it up. This lets you see your goal every day. It will be impossible to forget and difficult to ignore. I have Dave Ramsey‘s Baby Steps hanging on my refrigerator where I see it a dozen times per day.

The second major question to ask yourself is “Why?” Why is this goal important to you? Why do you care?

If you can’t answer that, it’s time to sit back and think about it for a while. Without a solid reason to succeed, you’ll lose motivation and fail. Are you getting out of debt to give yourself a secure retirement? Do you want to save to travel the world because you’ve been dreaming about it since you were in diapers? Do you simply want to provide a secure future for your family? Whatever your reason, it is–and should be–uniquely yours.

The third and final question is “How can you make it happen?” That question has an extremely simple answer: read the rest of the series.

Make Extra Money, Part 6: Setting Up a Site

Business, Finance

In this installment of the Make Extra Money series, I’m going to show you how to set up a WordPress site. I’m going to show you exactly what settings, plugins, and themes I use. I’m not going to get into writing posts today. That will be next time.

I use WordPress because it makes it easy to develop good-looking sites quickly. You don’t have to know html or any programming. I will be walking through the exact process using Hostgator, but most hosting plans use CPanel, so the instructions will be close. If not, just follow WordPress’s 5 minute installation guide.

Installing WordPress

Assuming you can follow along with me, log in to your hosting account and find the section of your control panel labeled “Software/Service”. Click “Fantastico De Luxe”.

On the Fantastico screen, click WordPress, then “New Installation”.

On the next screen, select your domain name, then enter all of the details: admin username, password, site name, and site description. If you’ll remember, I bought the domain http://www.masterweddingplanning.net. I chose the site name of “Master Wedding Planning” and a description of “Everything You Need to Know to Plan Your Wedding”.

Click “install”, then “finish installation”. The final screen will contain a link to the admin page, in this case, masterweddingplanning.net/wp-admin. Go there and log in.

Configuring WordPress

After you log in, if there is a message at the top of the screen telling you to update, do so. Keeping your site updated is the best way to avoid getting hacked. Click “Please update now” then “Update automatically”. Don’t worry about backing up, yet. We haven’t done anything worth saving.

Next, click “Settings” on the left. Under General Settings, put the www in the WordPress and site URLs. Click save, then log back in.

Click Posts, then Categories. Under “Add New Category”, create one called “Misc” and click save.

Click Appearance. This brings you to the themes page. Click “Install Themes” and search for one you like. I normally use Headway, but before I bought that, I used SimpleX almost exclusively. Your goal is to have a simple theme that’s easy to maintain and easy to read. Bells and whistles are a distraction.

Click “Install”, “Install now”, and “Activate”. You now have a very basic WordPress site.

Plugins

A plugin is an independent piece of software to make independent bits of WordPress magic happen. To install the perfect set of plugins, click Plugins on the left. Delete “Hello Dolly”, then click “Add new”.

In the search box, enter “plugin central” and click “Search plugins”. Plugin Central should be the first plugin in the list, so click “install”, then “ok”, then “activate plugin”. Congratulations, you’ve just installed your first plugin.

Now, on the left, you’ll see “Plugin Central” under Plugins. Click it. In the Easy Plugin Installation box, copy and paste the following:

 All in One SEO Pack
 Contact Form 7
 WordPress Database Backup
 SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2
 WP Super Cache
 Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress
 date exclusion seo
 WP Policies
 Pretty Link Lite
 google xml sitemaps
 Jetpack by WordPress.com

Click “install”.

On the left, click “Installed Plugins”. On the next screen, click the box next to “Plugins”, then select “Activate” from the dropdown and click apply.

Still under Plugins, click “Akismet Configuration”. Enter your API key and hit “update options”. You probably don’t have one, so click “get your key”.

Tools

The only tool I worry about is the backup. It’s super-easy to set up. Click “Tools”, then “Backup”.

Scroll down to “Schedule Backups”, select weekly, make sure it’s set to a good email address and click “Schedule Backup”. I only save weekly because we won’t be adding daily content. Weekly is safe enough, without filling up your email inbox.

Settings

There are a lot of settings we’re going to set. This is going to make the site more usable and help the search engines find your site. We’re going to go right down the list. If you see a section that I don’t mention, it’s because the defaults are good enough.

Writing

Set the Default Post Category to “Misc”.

Visit this page and copy the entire list into “Update Service” box. This will make the site ping a few dozen services every time you publish a post. It’s a fast way to get each post indexed by Google.

Click “Save Changes”.

Discussion

Uncheck everything under “Email me whenever…” and hit save. This lets people submit comments, without actually posting the comments or emailing me when they do so. Every once in a while, I go manually approve the comments, but I don’t make it a priority.

Permalinks

Select “Custom structure” and enter this: /%postname%/

Click save.

All in One SEO

Set the status to “Enabled”, then fill out the site title and description. Keep the description to about 160 characters. This is what builds the blurb that shows up by the link when you site shows up in Google’s results.

Check the boxes for “Use categories for META keywords” and “Use noindex for tag archives”.

Click “Update Options”.

Date Exlusion SEO

Check the boxes to remove each of the dates and set the alt text to “purpose” or something. This will suppress the date so your posts won’t look obsolete.

SEO Search Terms 2

This plugin reinforces the searches that bring people to your site. It’s kind of neat. Skip the registration, accept the defaults and hit save.

WP Policies

Scroll to the bottom and click import. We’ll come back to this.

WP Super Cache

Select “Caching On” and hit save.

JetPack

Across the top of the screen should be a giant banner telling you to connect to WordPress.com and set up Jetpack. You’ll need an account on WordPress.com, so go there and set one up. After authorizing the site, you’ll be brought back to the Jetpack configuration screen. Click “Configure” under “WordPress.com Stats”. Take the defaults and hit save.

Contact

On the contact configuration page, copy the code in the top section. You’ll need this in a moment.

Pages

Now, we going to create a couple of static pages. On the left, click “Pages”, then “Add new”.

Name the first page “Contact” and put the contact form code in the body of the page. Hit publish.

Menus

Under Appearance, click “Menu”. Enter a menu name and hit save.

Then, under “Pages”, click the box next to “Contact”, “Disclaimer”, and any other policies you’d like to display. Hit save.

Widgets

Also under Appearance, click “Widgets”. This is where you’ll select what will display in the sidebar. All you have to do is drag the boxes you want from the middle of the page to the widget bar on the right. I recommend Text, Search, Recent Posts, Popular Search Terms and Tag Cloud. In the text box, just put some placeholder text in it, like “Product will go here”. We’ll address this next time.

Posts

We’re not going to worry about getting posts in place, yet. That will be the next installment. However, the steps in the next installment could take 2 weeks to implement, and we want Google to start paying attention now. To make that happen, we need to get a little bit of content in place. This won’t be permanent content. It’s only there so Google has something to see when it comes crawling.

To get this temporary, yet legal content, I use eZineArticles. Just go search for something in your niche that doesn’t look too spammy.

Then, click “Posts”, then delete the “Hello World” post. Click “Add new”. Copy the eZine article, being sure to include the author box at the bottom, and hit publish.

To see your changes, you may have to go to Settings, then WP Cache and delete the cache so your site will refresh.

Congratulations! You now have a niche blog with content. It’s not ready to make you any money, yet, but it is ready for Google to start paying attention. In the next installment, I’ll show you how I get real unique content and set it up so Google keeps coming back to show me the love.

How to Have a Perfect Life

Life

A few years ago, my wife and I were discussing life improvement, the options in front of us, and our future goals. She said she felt trapped by the scope of our goals and didn’t know where to start. That led to a discussion on

achieving our goals, which led to this.

Examine your life. Take stock of every aspect of your life. What pleases you? What upsets you? What do you do that adds no value to your life? Or worse, removes value? What do you do that adds the most value? What would you like to change? Eliminate? Improve? Count the small things. Nothing is insignificant. Write it all down and be specific.

Analyze your list. Are there any obvious patterns? Is there a single thread that is making you miserable or affecting multiple other items? Would eliminating 1 factor improve 90% of the rest? Is there a bad job or a toxic relationship ruining your happiness? Be honest and be critical.

What are your dreams? Where would you like to be in six months? A year? 5? 10? How would you like to retire? When? Write it all down. This is now your life plan.

Set goals. Set concrete, definable goals. Set goals that have an obvious success point. When you reach your goal, you want to be able to point it out. “Lose weight” is not a goal. “Lose 50 pounds in the next year” is a measurable, definable, concrete goal. Set incremental goals to reach your larger goals and, more importantly, your dreams.

Here’s an example:

Dream: Retire at 50.

Incremental Goal: Get a 10% raise within 6 months
Incremental Goal: Eliminate debt within 3 years
Incremental Goal: Max out 401k contribution
Incremental goal: Save 150,000 within 10 years
Incremental Goal: Save 45k each year after that.
Retire

When you are setting up your goal plan, make sure to include the analyzed items mentioned earlier. These are the things that will make today happier for you.

Now, you have examined your life. You have analyzed the results. You’ve gathered your dreams and compiled a goal plan based on your hopes, dreams, goals and desires. What’s next?

We’re going to take a page from David Allen. It’s time to Get Things Done. What do you have to do next to reach your goals? What is the next step? Don’t let yourself be overwhelmed by the scope of the entire list. Select one single item from your plan and look for the one single next step to make on the path to that goal.

Going back to the retirement goal plan, the next step towards a 10% raise could be researching salaries for your job description in your area to give you ammunition in the meeting with your boss. It could be updating your resume to hunt for a better paying job, or even just studying up on some resume tips.

If you want to run a marathon next year, the next step is to start walking every day to train your body.

If you want to improve communication with your spouse, the next step is probably to let her know.

If you want to eliminate debt, the next step may be setting up a budget or canceling unnecessary services like cable.

Every goal has a path leading to it. If that’s not true, you haven’t defined a concrete measurable goal.

Examine your life. Analyze your situation. Know WHAT you want. Know what you want to change. Set goals to get there, one step at a time. Take a single step towards your goals.

Then take another.

What are you doing to reach your goals and improve your life?

2011 Goals

Life

It’s that time of the year when people make public promises to themselves that last almost as long as the hangover most of them are going to earn tonight, otherwise known as New Year’s Resolutions.

Not a fan.

I am, however a fan of planning out some concrete goals and doing my best to meet them. I do this through a series of 30 day projects. I set a goal that can be reached in 30 days, and push for it. I tend to make my goals fairly aggressive, and I tend to meet them.

Here were my goals and results for 2010:

January: Wake up at 5am AND read to my kids every night before bed. These were easy goals to meet. A year later, I am still getting up much earlier than I ever have, even if it’s not 5AM. I write better late at night than I do early in the morning, anyway. I’m not still reading to my kids every night, but we are making progress on teaching my four-year-old to read.
February: Do 100 push-ups at one time by the end of the month. I accomplished this in 22 days. I also had a secret project that involved doing something sweet for my wife every day. By the end of the month, she was convinced I had done something horrible that I was trying to make up for.
March: Do 100 sit-ups at one time by the end of the month. It took me a week, but I found out how bad sit-ups are for your back. Pure failure.
April: Spring Cleaning. I will declutter every room in my house this month. We missed one room and one closet, but made a lot of charities happy.
May: Have a sit-down dinner with my family, at the dining room table at least 3 times per week. We managed this one and enjoyed it, but we haven’t managed to keep it up. I’ll have to try this again.
June: No computer use, while anyone else in the family is awake, except for household necessities, such as bills. This one worked well and improved the quality of our interaction. I’m not quite this strict about it, but my computer use has gone down dramatically while my family is awake.
July: Write fiction every day. I don’t think I wrote more than a few pages of fiction, but I did write every day.
August: Buy nothing new this month. We came very close to doing this one perfectly. It wasn’t easy.
September: Attempt to learn a new language. Total bomb. I never even got started.
October: No yelling at the kids. Have you ever thought about trying this with a a two-year-old and a four-year-old? We never got started.
November: No complaining. Not at home, not at work. I didn’t make this an actual month, but I’ve been trying to complain much less. I think it’s been working.
December: I will have done 14 projects this year. December is a month off. As planned, I took December off.

So I missed 4 months of projects. This year, I’m going to modify my overall plan and only do 6 projects, every other month. That will give me a month off to either relax or incorporate the goal into my ongoing habits without any stress.

Here are my goals:

January: I’m going to do Tim Ferriss’s Slow-Carb diet. Yes, it’s a fad diet, but it beats the constant stream of garbage I eat now. The basic plan is to avoid anything white; no bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, or sugar. That’s accompanied by a targeted supplement regimen and a timed exercise plan to manipulate my metabolism. I’m not adding any aerobic exercise to my day, because I want this to be as controlled an experiment as possible. If it’s working at the end of the month, I will keep it going. It’s time to not be fat anymore.
March: In February, I managed to get myself able to do 100 pushups in a single set. In March, I hurt my back trying to do the same with sit-ups and that killed my workout habit. This March, I’m going to do the 100 pushups challenge again, but this time, I’m going for perfect pushups. Last year, they got sloppy after about 80. This year, that won’t be good enough.
May: I’m going to do at least 30 days of the Couch to 5k running program. It’s a 9 week program. As a 30 day project, it’s designed to establish the habit. When I tried picking up running last year, my knees were causing problems. Hopefully, my January project will mitigate that this year.
July: I’m going to pick up a new language. This is the failed plan from September 2010. I’ve narrowed it down to either Spanish, Swedish, or Italian. One is useful, one is a part of my heritage, and one is for fun. At the moment, I’m undecided.
September: Undecided. I am leaning towards a “nice” month. 30 days of doing something nice, for someone, somewhere. If I go this route, I’ve got 9 months to plan, because that’s a lot of things to do.
November: Absolutely undecided. Any suggestions?

That’s my plan for the new year. Six specific goals, each lasting 30 days. I could definitely use some help for September and November. Please give me some suggestions in the comments.

Making Extra Money Part 3: Product Selection

Finance

When you’re setting up a niche site, you need to monetize it. You need to have a way to make money, or it’s a waste of time.

There are two main ways to do that: AdSense or product promotion. To set up an AdSense site, you write a bunch of articles, post them on a website with some Google ads, and wait for the money to roll in.

I don’t do that.

I don’t own a single AdSense site and have never set one up. This article is not about setting up an Adsense site.

My niches site are all product-promotion sites. I pick a product–generally an e-book or video course–and set up a site dedicated to it.

Naturally, picking a good product is an important part of the equation.

The most important part of product selection is that the product has an affiliate program. Without that, there’s no money to be made. There are a lot of places to find affiliate programs. Here are a few:

Amazon. If you don’t live in one of the states that Amazon has dropped in retaliation for passing laws that attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling on collecting sales tax, you can sign up as an associate and collect a commission on every referral you send that turns into a purchase. That means you have a lot of product to choose from. Unfortunately, your commission is small, so you need to promote fairly expensive products to get a decent return. On the other hand, people trust Amazon, so that’s one less hurdle to making a sale.
Commission Junction. These are the people managing affiliate programs for a large number of credit cards and banks. If you’ve opened an account with INGDirect through one of my links, I got a commission for the referral. (Thank you!) They have a lot of other products, too.
e-Junkie. This one is a popular distribution system for bloggers. It’s likely that, if you’ve bought an ebook from a blogger, e-Junkie handled the fulfillment process. A lot of the products available there have an affiliate program, but that is up to the owner of the product.
ClickBank. My favorite. This is one of the largest affiliate networks specializing in electronic products, whether that’s membership sites, ebooks, or video courses. Commissions are good, often 50-75%. They also offer a 60 day guarantee of every product sold through their site, which helps soothe the wary customer. This is the site I’ll be using for this series.

The first thing you need to do is sign up for whichever program you intend to use.

If you’re not going with Clickbank, feel free to skip ahead to the section on keyword research.

Once you are signed up and logged in, click on the “Marketplace” link at the top of the screen.

From here, it’s just a matter of finding a good product to sell. Here are the niches we’re going to be looking for:

Back pain
Bankruptcy
Conflict resolution at work
Detox diets
Fat kids
Foreclosure avoidance
Job hunting
Weddings
Writing sales copy

I’m going to look for one or two good products in each niche. When that’s done we’ll narrow it down by consumer demand.

For now, go to advanced search.

Enter your keyword, pick the category and set the advanced search stats. Gravity is the number of affiliates who have made sales in the last month. I don’t like super-high numbers, but I also want to make sure that the item is sellable. Over 10 and under 50 or so seems to be a good balance.

The average sale just ensures that I’ll make a decent amount of money when someone buys the product. I usually aim for $25 or more in commissions per sale. Also, further down, check the affiliate tools box. That means the seller will have some resources for you to use.

This combination will give us 36 products to check out for back pain, unfortunately, none of the results are for back pain products. After unchecking the affiliate tools and setting the gravity to greater than 1, I’ve got 211 results. Sorting by keyword relevance, I see three products, two of which look like something I’d be interested in promoting. One has a 45% commission, the other is 55%. The X-Pain Method has an initial commission of $34 and claims a 5% refund rate. Back Pain, Sciatica, and Bulging Disc Relief pays $16, which will make it a potentially easier sale. I’ll add both to the list for further research.

I’m not going to detail the search for the rest of the niches. That would be repetitive. You can see my selections here:

Back pain – X-Pain Method; Back Pain, Sciatica, and Bulging Disc Relief
Bankruptcy – I’m dropping this one from the list. It’s too complicated and deserves an attorney. I don’t know enough about the topic to make sure it is up to date.
Conflict resolution at work – Management Training: By the Book; Anger Management for the 21st Century
Detox diets – Master Cleanse Secrets: 10 Day Diet; Master Cleanse Insider; Eating for Energy: Raw Food Diet for Weight Loss
Fat kids – I’m dropping this one, too. A kid’s health is too important. I don’t want to sell a dangerous or unethical product.
Foreclosure avoidance – How to Stop Foreclosure in 7 Days Flat; Foreclosure Defense Secrets
Job hunting – Guerrilla Resumes; Amazing Cover Letters
Weddings – All Types of Wedding Speeches; The Master Wedding Planning Guide; Amazing Wedding Planning
Writing sales copy – Instant Swipe File; Ad Copy Creator Pro; How to Write Killer Copy

Now we’re going to go through a few steps for each of these products.

The Sales Page

We need to make sure the sales page doesn’t suck. If the site doesn’t work, is hard to read or navigate, has a hard-to-find order button, or just doesn’t look professional, it’s getting cut.

Raw Foods is eliminated. The sales video is horrible and the order link is at the bottom of several screens worth of nothing. It’s a crap site.
The 7 day foreclosure-avoidance product is out. Site’s down today. I want reliability.
Management Training By The Book is out. I don’t like typos on the sales page, especially in the page title.

The Email List

If it has an email subscription form, we’ll need to subscribe, then double-check to make sure our affiliate information isn’t getting dropped in the emails. If it is, the seller is effectively stealing commissions. In the interest of time and laziness, I’m going to eliminate anyone pushing for an email subscription. It’s harder–and time-consuming–to monitor that. On of my niche site had a seller completely drop their product. Instead, they pushed for email subscriptions so they could promote other products as an affiliate. Absolutely unethical.

Wedding speeches is eliminated for throwing a mandatory email entry into the order process. There’s no guarantee they are up to anything shady, but I’m taking the simple route.

Checkout and Credit

Finally, we’re going to visit the checkout page. You need to do this from every links in the newsletter and the links on the sales page, just to make sure you’ll get your money.

The way to tell who’s being credited is to look at the bottom of the order page, under the payment information. It should say [affiliate = xxx] where xxxis your ClickBank ID. Anything else, and the product gets cut from the list.

When you are checking these, don’t click on every possible link at once. That confuses the cookies. Do one at a time. I tried to do it in one batch for this post and lost half of the cookies. If it weren’t for the fact that I already own one of the products and bought it through my own link and got credited, I would have been talking undeserved trash about thieving companies.

Other Factors

Sometimes, when you’re examining a product, it just doesn’t feel right. When that happens, drop it. There are millions of other products you can promote. In this case, I’m dropping the anger management program because, in my experience, angry people don’t think they are the problem. Here’s a life tip: If everyone else is a jerk, the problem probably isn’t everyone else.

Another important factor is the sales page itself. If it doesn’t make you want to buy the product, why would anyone else?
Amazing Cover Letters is eliminated because it’s too easy to overlook the buy link. If I have to hunt for it, it’s losing customers.
Amazing Wedding Planning is getting eliminated because I don’t like the sales page. The buy link is easy to overlook, and it doesn’t compel me to buy.

Now we’re down to 10 products in 6 niches. At this point, we’re comfortable with the sales pages and we know that they are crediting commissions. As it stands right now, all of the products are worth promoting.

Back pain – X-Pain Method; Back Pain, Sciatica, and Bulging Disc Relief
Detox diets – Master Cleanse Secrets: 10 Day Diet; Master Cleanse Insider
Foreclosure avoidance – Foreclosure Defense Secrets
Job hunting – Guerrilla Resumes
Weddings – The Master Wedding Planning Guide;
Writing sales copy – Instant Swipe File; Ad Copy Creator Pro; How to Write Killer Copy

We’ll make the final determination after doing some heavy keyword research in the next installment. That’s where we’ll find out how hard it is to compete.

Any questions?

Money Problems: 30 Days to Perfect Finances

Welcome to the series, Money Problems: 30 Days to Perfect Finances. The series consists of 30 things you can do, each in one setting, to perfect your finances. It’s not a system to magically make your debt disappear. Instead, it is a path to understanding where you are, where you want to be, and–most importantly–how to bridge the gap.

Day 1: Setting Goals

To start with, we look at 3 questions:

What is your financial goal?
Why?
How can you get there?

Day 2: What’s Going Out?

On day 2, you’re going to find out what you are spending. For most people, this will be a bit of a surprise.

Day 3: What’s Coming In?

For day 3, you’re going to examine exactly how much money you bring in each month and think about how you can make more.

Day 4: Making A Budget

On day 4, you’ll build a basic budget. This doesn’t have to be intimidating.

Day 5: Boosting Your Income

This is the day we really dig into ways to make more money, whether that means getting a raise or finding work on the side. Nothing beats more income for balancing your budget and getting out of debt.

Day 6: Reducing Expenses

Second only to more income, reducing expenses is the best way to save money.

Day 7: Paying Off Debt

If you’ve got debt, you are in interest-slavery. Make that go away!

Day 8: Insurance

On day 8, you’re going to look at the insurance you have and the insurance you need.

Day 9: Health Insurance

On day 9, you’ll spend some time learning about your health insurance options and how to examine what you’ve already got.

Day 10: Debt Insurance

Debt insurance is insurance you pay for that will pay your lender in the event of your death, dismemberment, disfigurement, disembowelment, or unemployment.

The rest is yet to come. Check back often!

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