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Meditation

Life is crazy.

“Really, Jason, that’s news?”

I spend so much time going in so many different directions.

Cleaning out our inherited hoarding house, managing the remodel, work, side hustles, kids, friends, family, relationships, maintaining our house, maintaining a relationship with my wife, garage sales, school starting, junior high football season, insurance policies, probate, rush hour, insomnia.

Some days, I feel insanely scattered. I can’t focus. I have a hard time making decisions. I waste time.

Those days, I need to clear my head.

That’s where meditation comes in.

I don’t do the money hum. (Om mone padme, Om)

Instead, I have three activities that demand a total focus. They drive out any scattered thoughts or unimportant concerns.

They have to because, quite frankly, they can be dangerous if I don’t concentrate.

1. I shave. I use a double-edged safety razor, so bleeding for the throat is a real concern. For 10 minutes, nothing else in the world matters. It has only recently struck me how valuable this is. That value makes me want to start shaving every day, with a straight razor. More focus, more often.

2. I ride. For the past couple of years, it’s been hard to find time get my motorcycle out. Small children seem to want attention every day. It got to the point where I was ready to sell my bike. This spring, it was seriously misbehaving. Finally, at the end of the summer, a friend got it running better than it ever has. I took it out for a couple of hours and came back feeling more clearheaded than I have in a long time. I won’t be selling my bike until I have its replacement.

3. I shoot. Shooting involves a series of simple actions that require concentration to do well. Load the gun, line up the sights, which eye is dominant, breathe, don’t breathe, squeeze the trigger, hole in the paper. Again, it’s not an activity that’s conducive to worrying about the bills or work. It’s a way to shut out the world for a few minutes.

For me, a few moments or a few hours of shutting down everything except one thing is the way to stay sane and focused.

How do you deal with it when the world comes crashing in from every direction?

Sunday Roundup: Balancing Fun and Frugality

Misc

Friday was another Yakezie Blog Swap. The topic was: “Balancing Frugality and Fun.”

Here is the list of articles:

Latisha Styles shares her story about going on a shopping diet at Narrow Bridge.

Joe gives us 10 different ways we can have fugal fun in almost any city at Prairie Eco-Thrifter.

The other Joe shares with us his memories of time with his Grandpa growing up and how he taught him to have fun at Mom’s Plans.

Ashley reminds us to spend those dollars where they will give us the most happiness at My Personal Finance Journey.

I shared that making memories is what counts at Financially Consumed.

Denise tells us that any kind of fun is possible with a little planning, determination, and work at Money Cone.

Money Cone shares with us how they have become a latte sipping frugal Mac user at The Single Saver.

Jacob shares with us 5 different techniques we can use to balance frugality and fun at Money Talks Coaching.

Eric at Narrow Bridge shared 3 ways he’s found to have fun on the frugal at Retire by 40.

Hunter tells us why corporate bankruptcy isn’t fun at all at Live Real Now.

Melissa shares her story of how her family balances frugality and fun atSmart Money Focus.

Eric defines the ultimate frugalite and the ultimate spender over at Financial Success for Young Adults.

Carnivals I’ve Rocked

Selling Your Car was included in the Totally Money Blog Carnival.

The Evils of a Reverse Mortgage was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance.

Thank you! If I missed anyone, please let me know.

Make Extra Money Part 4: Keyword Research

Finance

In this installment of the Make Extra Money series, I’m going to show you how I do keyword research.

Properly done–unless you get lucky–this is the single most time-consuming part of making a niche site. If you aren’t targeting search terms that people use, you are wasting your time. If you are targeting terms that everybody else is targeting, it will take forever to get to the top of the search results.

Spend the extra time now to do proper keyword research. It will save you a ton of time and hassle later. This is time well-spent.

If you remember from the last installment, when we researched products to promote, we narrowed our choices down to a few products.

What I’ve done is create a spreadsheet to score the products. You can see the spreadsheet here. I’ll explain the columns as we populate them.

The first column contains the name of the product. Easy. We’ve got 10 products. I’m going to walk through scoring 1 product, then, through the magic of the internet, I’ll populate the rest, and you’ll get to see the results instantly. Wow.

The second column is the global search volume for the exact search term. I base my product niche sites primarily on the demand for a given product. Everything else is a secondary consideration.

To find the demand for a product, go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. In the “word or phrase” box, enter your product name, exactly. In this case, it’s “X-Pain Method”. When the search results come up, change the match type to “Exact”. You should have something like this:

Enter the global search volume in column 2. In this case, it’s 73. Keep this window open, because we’ll be coming back to it.

Column 3 is the search competition. Go to google and enter your product name, in quotes. In this case, “X-Pain Method”. Put the total number of search results in column 3: 223000.

Column 4 is the search competition, but only what appears in a page’s title. Your search query is intitle:”X-Pain Method”, which yields 4400 results.

The next column is for the average PageRank of the first page of search results. For this, I use Traffic Travis. I use the 4th edition, which is paid software, but you can get the free version of version 3, instead. I’ll use version 3 for this example. Open the software and click on “SEO Analysis” on the bottom left of the screen. Put your search term (“X-Pain Method”) in the “phrase to analyze” and set the “Analyze Top” to 10, then hit “Analyze”. When it’s done running, just add up all of the PRs and divide by 10. Ignore Travis’s difficulty rating.

Now, for the rest of the columns, we’re going to look at the keyword tool again. We’re going to pick 3 alternate search terms. Here are the criteria:

At least 1000 global monthly searches. We want terms that people are searching for.
Competition bar at medium or less. This bar is just a rough guess on competition, so it’s really an arbitrary exclusion factor, but it helps narrow down the choices.
A “buying” keyword is preferred, but not necessary. This is a term that indicates people are looking to spend money. “Back pain doctor” is a buying keyword, but it’s not an indicator that someone wants to buy a product, so we’ll skip it. A buying keyword isn’t absolutely necessary, because these will also be the terms we’ll use to generate content later.
It has to be related to our product.

Once we pick the keywords, we’ll throw them into google to get the competition, just like we did to populate column 2.

“Exercises for back pain” has medium competition and 1900 monthly searches. It also has an estimated cost-per-click of $3.02, which means people are paying for this.

“Lower back pain exercises” has 6600 searches and medium competition. It’s actually on the lower end of medium, so it looks really promising.

“Lower back” has 4400 searches and low competition, with a CPC of $6.24. This should be a good one. Scratch that. It has 40 million search results, but only 4400 searches. That’s a lot of competition for a small market.

Instead, I’m going to search for “cure back pain” in the keyword tool and see what I get. “Upper back pain” is better. Low competition, 18000 searches each month, and only 2000000 competing search results. Now, I’ll score it.

You really want at least 500 searches per month for the product name. More than 2500 is better. I’m going to assign 1 point per 500 monthly searches.

You also want a lower number of search results. Less than 10,000 is ideal. Less than 100,000 is still decent. More than 250,000, I’d walk. So, under 10,000 gets 5 points. Under 50,001 gets 4. Under 100,001 gets 3. Under 200,001 gets 2. Under 250,001 gets 1. Any higher gets 0.

The ideal intitle search will have less than 2000 results. More than 100,000 is too time-consuming to deal with. 0-2000: 5 points; 2001-10,000: 4 points; 10001-25000: 3 points; 25001-50000: 2 points; 50001 to 100000: 1 point.

The perfect product will have the first page of search result all with a PageRank of 0. That’s a 5 point product. I’ll knock off half a point for every point of average PR.

The related terms are more relaxed. They are what’s known as “Latent Semantic Indexing” (LSI) terms. We will be creating articles to match those search terms, mostly to make our niche site look as natural and real as possible. Any actual traffic those pages drive is just gravy. Points for the related searches start at 10 and get 1 point knocked off for each 3 million results. We’ll be treating the 3 terms as one for this score.

That gives us a perfect score of about 25. There’s no actual upper limit, since the score for the search volume has no upper limit. X-Pain Method scored 18.22.

Now, excuse me a moment while I score the rest.

I’m back. Did you miss me?

I’ve finished scoring each of the products and sorted the results by score. The clear winner is the back pain product, but the lack of searches bothers me. The wedding guide looks much nicer, especially if I target the phrase “wedding planning guide” during the SEO phase of the project. That change alone brings the score almost to first place.

Frankly, I’d take either 2nd or 3rd place over the back pain product. The bare numbers don’t support it, but my judgement tells me they are better products to promote.

There is one final step before deciding on the product. I have to buy it. I can’t review the product without seeing it and I can’t promote it without approving of it.

That’s the secret to ethical niche marketing, you know. Only promote good products that you’ve personally read, watched, or used.

Book Review: Delivering Happiness

Finance, Reviews

In April, I was given an advanced reader copy of Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh on the condition that I give it an honest review. Delivering Happiness is being released today and here is my review.

Tony Hsieh was one of the founders of LinkExchange, which sold to Microsoft for $256 million in 1999. Shortly thereafter, he became affiliated with Zappos.com and ended up as CEO. Zappos.com was later sold to Amazon.com as a “wholly-owned subsidiary” in a stock-exchange transaction valued at $1.2 billion.

Delivering Happiness is his story and that of the creation and management of Zappos.com.

The book is divided into three sections: Profits, Passion, and Purpose.

Section 1 is largely autobiographical. It tells the story of Hsieh’s business ventures all through his life, from a failed worm farm to a failed newspaper to an abandoned greeting card business. Obviously the business of having children sell greeting cards had improved between his childhood and mine, because, when I did it, there were many more choices than just Christmas cards. I still have both the telescope and microscope I earned selling overpriced greeting cards. An important lesson imparted is that past success is not an indicator of future success. Different personalities, goals, and economics can change the result of two nearly identical activities.

Hsieh tells the story of the excitement of building LinkExchange and how he knew it was time to move on when the excitement faded, largely due to a surprising change to the corporate culture. After leaving, he spent some time just living and reviewing his past activities. He came to the conclusion that the happiest times of his life didn’t involve money. Doing things right beats strictly maximizing profits. Taking business lessons from the poker table, he reminds his readers that the Right Decision may lose sometimes, but it is still Right.

When he gets into building his business on a foundation of relationships, he is reminiscent of Keith Ferrazzi. Don’t network. Build your relationships based on friendship and let the friendship be it’s own reward. The rest will follow.

Section 2–while denying it was intended–reads heavily like marketing copy. It is almost entirely about how wonderful Zappos.com is to work for and with. I think it is fascinating to read about how successful businesses are built and how the corporate culture comes with that, but it’s not for everyone. The important points from this section include being open to necessary change without being reckless and their insistence on transparency. I don’t believe in hoarding information and it’s wonderful to hear others feel the same way. They go as far as giving all of the profitability and sales numbers to the vendors, live, which makes the vendors feel respected and gives the vendors an opportunity to suggest future orders based on past trends. That saves time and effort for the buyers at Zappos.com.

Section 3 attempts to tie the business lessons to life lessons and almost–but not quite–succeeds. After discussing differences in vision and alignment between the Zappos executives and the board, he talks about his growing speaking arrangements. When he started, he nervously memorized his presentations, resulting in mediocre speeches. When he discovered his “flow”, it all improved. His method of writing and speaking involves being passionate about his topic, telling personal stories, and being real. When he adopted that plan, his speaking became natural and popular.

In the final chapter, Hsieh actually discusses happiness. His equation is Perceived Control + Perceived Progress + Connectedness + Vision & Meaning = Happiness. He works to apply all of this as a part of the corporate culture at Zappos, giving the employees a measure of control over their advancement, duties, and culture. The employees help write the Corporate Culture book, which is given to all new hires and vendors. I intend to get a hold of a copy in the near future. It sounds like a fascinating read.

He also addresses the three types of happiness: Pleasure, Passion, and Higher Purpose, also described as Rockstar, In The Zone, and Being a Part of Something Bigger. The first is fleeting, and the last is long-lasting.

Would I recommend the book?

Yes. I found Delivering Happiness to be incredibly interesting, but, if you have no interest in how a successful-but-not-traditional company is built and run, or if you are bored by successful people, this book is not for you. The book is largely autobiographical and a case study in the success of Zappos.com. If that sounds remotely interesting, you will not regret reading this book.

Now, the fun part. I was given two copies of the book. The first one is becoming a permanent part of library. The second is being given away.

Giveaway

There are three ways to enter:

1. Twitter. Follow me and post the following: @LiveRealNow is giving away a copy of Delivering Happiness(@dhbook). Follow and RT to enter. http://bit.ly/czd31X

2. Become a fan on Facebook and post about the giveaway.

3. Post about the giveaway on your blog and link back to this post.

That’s 3 possible entries.

Next Sunday, I will throw all the entries in a hat and draw a name.

Future Reviews

If you have a book you’d like me to review, please contact me.

4 Ways to Change Your Life for the Better

Life, Parenting, Relationships

Everybody has bad days. Everybody has horrible days. That doesn’t matter. The important thing is how you feel about your life as a whole. What can you do to make your life more worth living?

1. Get out of debt. When you’ve got no debt to pay, you have more options and less risk. If you’re paying $1500 just to service your debt, it will be $1500 harder if you lose your job. If you’ve got no debt payments to make, the impact of losing an income stream is far less. On top of that, you’ll have that much more money to do the things you love every month.

2. Find something you love to do…and do it. Everybody has to do things they hate. For some, it’s cleaning up the cat’s litter box, for others, they die inside a little each time they punch a time clock. Life isn’t all puppy dogs and ice cream, but it’s important to have a little ice cream in your life. What do you love doing? Is there anything you love that you can start doing? Start a business, write a book, volunteer for a charity that matches your values, or grow the world’s largest pumpkin. Whatever it is, it’s time to get started.

3. Eliminate the things you hate. Life’s too short to live with the things you hate. If something is destroying the value of your life, get rid of it. Now, I’m not suggesting you off your mother-in-law, but it may be worth ignoring the phone when her number shows up on the caller ID and skipping Sunday dinner with her. If you hate your job, find another. If you can’t find a way to eliminate what you hate, embrace it and learn to love it, or you will eventually hate more of your life than just the bit driving you crazy.

4. Let the ones you love know you do. Do your children know you love them? Does your spouse? Are you sure? If a meteor fell on your head today, would your kids spend the rest of their lives wondering how you felt? If your wife were in a car accident today, would there be anything you wish you would have said? Now, today, this morning, this second is the right time to let your loved ones know you care. Don’t wait. If you haven’t made it a habit, it may feel awkward. Get over it. Your wife and kids will love you more knowing beyond doubt that you love them. A tight bond with your family can’t be bought, it can’t be bribed, and it can’t be faked. It is worth everything.

What’s one thing you could do today to make your life better?

Over-scheduled

Life

: Image via Wikipedia

Wow. I’m having a hard time believing it’s August already. Every year seems to slip by a little faster, but this summer has truly flown by, somehow without anything to show for it. I haven’t gotten any of the yard work or household projects finished. I’ve taken on so much that I can’t do anything but the side hustles.

This summer, I’ve been busy. I teach classes one Saturday each month, I’ve picked up a couple of web design jobs, I’m the webmaster for a nonprofit, and I’ve taken on an affiliate marketing project. Oh, and I can’t forget my 50-hour-per-week day job or the ebook I’ve promised to help prep and launch. With all of these projects, my cash flow situation is better than its been in a while, but my time is seriously crunched.

That’s not even counting the family activities. We’ve had swimming lessons, birthday parties and family reunions…all in the last month.

Our family is seriously over-scheduled. It seems like there is no downtime, which is a situation I’ve always tried to avoid in the past. Somehow, I’ve lost the ability to say “no”. Because of that, I’m now left with the impossible task of trying to scale back. While I can’t abandon my commitments, I need to work towards resolving them all and not taking on more.

[ad name=”inlineleft”]It’s time to scale back through attrition. In a month or two, I should be down to a sane schedule again, and able to tackle the things I really want to do that have been indefinitely delayed.

Everybody takes on too much at times. How do you avoid over-committing?

Learn to say no. It is okay to refuse to take on more projects. You probably aren’t the first person to turn down the project and you probably won’t be the last. Don’t assume its your responsibility. It is fine to leave it for someone else.
Prioritize. Don’t prioritize your projects, prioritize yourself. Know what you need to accomplish. Know what you want to accomplish. Deny the things that other people want you to accomplish if the new tasks don’t fall into the first two categories. You need to feed your family. You need to pay your bills. You don’t need to take on the soccer team’s newsletter or volunteer to make 1000 cupcakes for some fundraiser.
Know your commitments. Most people overestimate how much available time they have while underestimating how long a new project will take. This leaves them double-booked. Take a realistic look at what you are currently doing, even if it means keeping a log of your day for a few weeks. You’ll probably be surprised by what you are already doing.
Stay organized. If you aren’t keeping track of what you need to do, you’ll end up running around crazy trying to get it all done. Keep a calendar and leave yourself notes. I get daily reminders of what is on my Google calendar each morning.
Know your limitations. If you aren’t technical, don’t volunteer to build a website. Do your strengths, let someone else deal with the things that are your weaknesses.

It’s entirely too easy to do too much. When every moment of your day has two of more things that need to be done, you’ll do them all poorly. How do you avoid taking on too much?