Categories
Goal Setting

Removing Negativity from Your Life

We all indulge in negative thinking from time to time.

Something in our lives doesn’t go as planned, we get frustrated and negative thoughts start to creep up.

Even some of the most happy, vibrant, always-smiling type people have periods of time in their lives when they start thinking negative thoughts and get depressed or angry.

It’s part of being human. We all do it from time to time.

Why does this happen though? Why are we all susceptible to negativity and how does it affect our lives?

Dealing with Contrast

As human beings we live in a world of duality. Light and dark, good and evil, right and wrong, etc.

As we live out our lives we are exposed to experiences and situations which provide contrast for us.

Contrast helps us to gain clarity in life.

Without contrast we wouldn’t know what we want. Without contrast, everything would be equal and boring.

How could we value something like peace without seeing examples of war in our reality to provide us contrast?

How could we value abundance without experiencing lack in our reality?

How could we value health without experiencing disease in our reality?

Knowing what we want is tied directly to knowing what we don’t want.

Everyone Experiences Contrast

We all experience contrast as human beings. Contrast is good. It can help us to learn and grow.

However, it is how we interpret contrast and what meaning we associate to it which determines whether the event or circumstance is labeled as a positive or negative experience.

For example, let’s say that we work at a job which we no longer like. However, we’re too lazy to look for alternatives. So we keep coming in to work, even though we’re not really happy there.

One day we come into work and our boss jumps down our throat about some kind of problem that the company is having, but which has nothing to do with us.

We try to explain that it wasn’t our fault that this problem arose, but the boss doesn’t want to hear it.

We walk out of the meeting with the boss, steaming.

Now, that type of event is what I am referring to when I say the word “Contrast”.

Although the event provides us with a lot of contrast to consider in our lives, it isn’t inherently a positive or negative event – it’s neutral.

However, how we choose to interpret the event is what decides if it was a “negative” or “positive” event for us.

For example, if this type of event happened to me I may choose to think “I don’t like my job” or “I don’t want to work here anymore” and that would be one way of interpreting the situation.

Another way I could interpret it is to think “I want a better job” or “I want to start my own business“.

Now, when we look at those different ways of looking at the situation, they appear to be very similar.

In one instance I’m thinking about not liking my job, and not wanting to work there anymore, and in the other situation I’m talking about wanting a better job or wanting to start my own business.

The differences are subtle, but the repercussions of how those subtle differences affect our reality are huge.

Let me ‘splain.

The Subconscious Mind – Powerful Ally or Worst Enemy

Our subconscious mind is one our most amazing gifts. Without it, we would literally be dead – instantly.

Our subconscious mind has the power to help us manifest anything we could possibly want in our reality.

However, if used improperly, it can also be our worst enemy.

In order to utilize our subconscious mind to it’s full potential to help us, we must first understand how it works.

Even though everyone from scientists to marketing experts have been trying to figure out how the subconscious mind works for a very long time, we only have a very small idea of it’s inner workings so far.

However, there are some things that we do know about the subconscious mind that are very useful to us.

For example, we do know that the subconscious mind is not a logical/rational mind. It does not think in linear terms – instead it is a parallel processor.

Although the number is not exactly known, it is said that the subconscious mind can process more than 40 billion bits of information per second.

Our conscious mind can only process between 7-20 bits of information per second in contrast to that.

One of the things we also know about the subconscious mind is that it does not understand negative modifiers in language.

Meaning, if we say the words “I don’t like my job”, the subconscious mind does not understand the word “don’t”. So when you say the words “I don’t like my job”, the subconscious mind hears “I don’t like my job.”

When we say “I don’t want to work here” the subconscious mind hears “I don’t want to work here”.

When we say “I am not happy with my life” the subconscious mind hears “I am not happy with my life”.

Do you see the challenge that this presents?

Essentially, every time you say or think a statement with a negative modifier in it, you are programming the subconscious mind to believe the exact opposite.

You’re essentially programming your subconscious mind to work against you!

The Real Problem With Negativity

Some people say that negative people should just be happy with their lives. They should just be grateful for what life brings them.

If they hate their job, they should just be happy that they have a job in the first place.

I say that’s bullshit.

If you want a better job, or to start your own business, then that’s OK! That is NOT being negative.

If you want to lose weight because you want to look better, that’s OK too! That is NOT being negative.

These types of situations and events that we create in our lives, which provide us with the contrast to see what we don’t want in order for us to choose what we do want are POSITIVE events.

If you’re at a job you hate, but are too lazy to find something to do which you’d enjoy more, you WILL attract circumstances which will bring about contrast for you.

Your boss will probably call you into a meeting and rip a strip off of you for doing something wrong which you probably didn’t even do.

You will attract a customer who will piss you off so much you’ll want to quit your job right there on the spot.

These types of contrasting situations WILL come up for you – and that is AWESOME. You want that.

However, we have to realize that those situations show us what we DON’T want, in order for us to become crystal clear on what we DO want.

If we are too lazy to choose what we DO want, however, then we will simply just continue to focus on what we DON’T want and will continue to manifest that.

As trivial as it may sound, the words that we use to describe the situation in our minds and in our spoken words make a huge difference in what we manifest.

“I don’t want to work here” and “I want to work somewhere else” may sound like the same thing to your conscious mind, but they are opposites to the subconscious mind.

Remember that the subconscious mind does not understand negative modifiers so it hears “I want to work here” instead of “I don’t want to work here”.

So the real problem with negativity is NOT that we experience a contrasting situation and decide that we want something else instead.

That is not the problem. It is fine to want something more, something better in our lives.

However, how we interpret the contrasting situation using negative vocabulary, then we set ourselves up for failure.

The Subconscious Mind is a Drive-Thru Window

Here’s another way to think about it.

Imagine that you have two favorite burgers at McDonalds. The Big Mac and the McChicken burgers. Those are your all-time favorites that you’ve loved for years.

Now, imagine if you were driving through the McDonalds drive through, and wanted to order a burger. Since the last time you ordered a Big Mac you decide that you don’t want that again.

Now, imagine if that drive through window had a microphone that you speak into, but the microphone was installed with a state-of-the-art “negative modifier filtration add-on” which automatically filtered out any negative modifiers.

So, now imagine sitting in the drive through and the drive-thru person coming onto the speaker and saying “May I take your order?”, and in response to that you say “Yes, I don’t want a Big Mac.”

What do you think would happen next?

Since the microphone automatically deleted the negative modifier “don’t”, your order was heard as “Yes, I want a Big Mac.” So guess what the drive-thru person will give you?

He’ll give you a Big Mac. Exactly what you DIDN’T want.

Now, that would obviously be a ridiculous thing for McDonalds to install such a filter on their microphones, but that is exactly how our subconscious mind works.

But even if that filter wasn’t there, let’s say that the drive thru person did actually hear you say “Yes, I don’t want a Big Mac.”

Would that be any better? Not really, right?

How would that person know what you DO want, just by you telling them what you DON’T want.

Inside your conscious mind, it may be an obvious thing since you only like those two burgers and you have decided that you don’t want the Big Mac this time. In YOUR mind it is very clear that you in fact want to order the McChicken burger, but the drive thru clerk can’t deduce that from you simply saying “I don’t want a Big Mac.”

How would they know whether you want the McChicken, or a Cheeseburger. Or maybe you want a salad!

The only way to make it clear to the drive-thru person what it is that you want to order is by telling them what you DO want, not what you DON’T want, right?

Well, our subconscious mind works the same way.

We must learn to speak to it in terms of what we DO want, not what we DON’T want. We must tell it what we DO like/prefer, not what we DON’T like/prefer.

It is this distinction which makes negative thinking so dangerous.

Our subconscious mind hears every thought we have. We must learn to speak to it like we would speak to a waiter at a restaurant. We need to tell it what we WOULD like to order, and not what we WOULDN’T like to order.

Conscious growth doesn’t come from settling for a life less than what we desire. It is not about avoiding contrasting situations. It is not about learning to just be happy with what we’ve got.

Conscious growth comes from embracing those contrasting situations and learning from them – but THEN we have to become crystal clear on what we DO want, and what we DO prefer in response to the situation, instead of programming our subconscious mind to further attract exactly what we don’t want.

Categories
Goal Setting

Don’t Make This Mistake with Your Beliefs

Let me explain with an example.

Just over a week ago I went in to see my dentist. I’ve had a loose crown on a tooth for about a year now and I’ve been procrastinating going in to see the dentist because I knew it would require an extraction.

It’s a tooth that I originally had problems with 15 years ago and which I managed to be able to save for 15 years, but which now needed to be extracted and replaced with an implant or bridge.

Finally last week I decided to go in and see the dentist and finally get it pulled.

After getting the tooth pulled, the dentist prescribed me an antibiotic to treat the small infection that has begun to take place around the gum surrounding the tooth and a pain killer to deal with the pain from the extraction.

Ok, so what does my visit to the dentist have to do with beliefs?

Well, here’s the thing… I am a believer in alternative medicine and I believe in energy healing.

So when the dentist gave me the prescription for the antibiotics, I had to ask myself whether or not I should take them or if I should just use energy healing to deal with the situation. After all, I am a Reiki practitioner and have done healing work on myself, my friends and family members.

While on my way home from the dentist I had to decide whether or not to get the prescription filled or not. For anyone who has taken antibiotics before, you probably know that you’re not supposed to start a run of antibiotics if you don’t plan to finish it as that can cause problems with the infection. So I had to decide whether or not to take them. It’s my body so it was my choice.

I thought about it for a few minutes and then decided to get the prescription filled.

Why would I do that? If I believe in Reiki and energy healing, why would I get my antibiotic prescription filled?

Well, the reason is that I have not yet had the necessity or opportunity to work on my subconscious beliefs relating to Reiki and how well it works for healing a tooth/gum infection. So I couldn’t say with 100% certainty that I believed that me using Reiki healing would deal with the infection.

My subconscious beliefs were not yet ready to trust in Reiki as an alternative to antibiotics. So, acting according to my ACTUAL subconscious beliefs, I filled the prescription and took the antibiotics.

This is what I mean by acting in accordance to your actual beliefs.

Do I want to believe that I can just use my Reiki healing as an alternative to antibiotics in a situation like this? Yes, of course. Why would I want to take antibiotics unnecessarily? But the truth is that deep down in my subconscious I don’t yet believe it to be so with certainty.

So, I chose to go with a method of solving the problem (the infection) that I *do* believe in – antibiotics. I’ve had an infection like this in the past, actually much worse, and antibiotics worked for me so I already have a belief that they work.

Now, the second part of the prescription was for a strong pain killer that I could take if the pain got too unbearable after the freezing wore off. I also filled that prescription but decided to “play” a little with the situation.

Instead of taking the prescribed pain killer, I took Advil instead, just because I had no idea how bad it would hurt after the freezing wore off. Considering this was a molar and there was a big hole in my jaw where the tooth used to be and lots of blood, and swelling, it was a safe bet that there would be some pain.

So, I took an Advil, and I decided to play around with Reiki as a way of relieving the pain. I have had many instances where I have used Reiki to relieve pain, so I already had some beliefs around that reality.

When I went to bed that night, I did a self-Reiki healing session focusing on my jaw, and neck area. I could definitely feel the Reiki energy flowing through my hands, and after a while it slowly dissipated and I fell asleep.

I had a glass of water and an Advil on standby just in case I woke up in the middle of the night in pain, but that never happened.

I woke up in the morning and saw that my jaw was healing really nicely. There was still some swelling, so I took an Advil for the swelling but around lunch time I wanted to experiment and see if I could go completely without any pain killers moving forward. So I stopped taking Advil and I never touched the stronger pain killers the dentist prescribed.

When I went to see the dentist a few days ago she confirmed that the jaw was healing up really nicely.

So now, I have an even stronger level of belief in Reiki as (1) a form of energy healing that aids in recovery / healing and (2) a form of energy healing that naturally alleviates pain.

Those are my beliefs as of right now. I’m aware of that and so I act according to them.

The mistake I see people making relating to beliefs is that they try to act according to beliefs they WISH they had, instead of the beliefs that they DO have.

Meaning, we have to be really honest with ourselves. Just because you have taken Reiki courses, it doesn’t mean that you fully believe in it yet as a solution to ALL forms of medical problems.

If you break your leg, for example, and you don’t really believe that Reiki can heal that – the for heaven’s sake GO TO A HOSPITAL! Don’t sit there in pain thinking that you are somehow betraying some kind of “Reiki Code” by going to a hospital.

Another example I sometimes see is people who have zero belief in making money online, who just decide to quit their jobs and then they call me for advice as to how they will pay for rent the following week.

If you don’t truly believe you can make money online yet, work on THAT BELIEF first. Don’t pretend you believe it’s possible, and start acting according to some set of beliefs you WISH you had. That is a recipe for disaster!

Take action based on your true beliefs.

Take action based on your true beliefs.

One more thing…

Take action based on your true beliefs.

Are you trying to take action based on beliefs you don’t yet believe in? If so, I’m sorry but you’re being an idiot.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about the next thing…
Play With Expanding Your Beliefs

Now, even though I advocate taking action according to your true beliefs, there is a second thing I highly recommend you do…

Play with expanding your beliefs!

Last week I realized that I did not yet believe that my personal Reiki healing abilities were at the level where I could fully 100% trust them to treat a tooth infection. So I took the antibiotic treatment, but it got me thinking about working on those beliefs.

As “luck” would have it, about three days after my tooth extraction I woke up with a case of what I believe to have been pink-eye. Pink-eye is an inflammation of the membrane covering the whites of the eyes as well as the inside of the eye lids.

I’ve had pink-eye before and it’s a nasty thing that really sucks. It’s usually caused by a virus which means that antibiotics don’t work against it but I have had eye drops prescribed for it before and I know they work.

Due to the success of the my “anti-pain” efforts with Reiki I wondered if my beliefs were strong enough to use Reiki to deal with my case of pink-eye. I did a quick belief test to see if my subconscious mind believed Reiki could deal with the problem and I got a yes.

However, I also got the intuitive message to add in two extra “alternative” treatment options on top of the Reiki. One was to use make-up remover pads to “wash” my eye lids, which is something I learned from my optometrist 20 years ago when I first got pink-eye. He recommended I keep a box of these individually wrapped make-up remover pads at home that you rip open and they are pre-soaked in a mild soap solution that you can use to clean the eye lid around the eye.

They’re designed for women to remove make-up from their eyes, but he told me they work wonders in keeping the eye-lids clean, especially the area where your eyelashes grow.

So before going to bed that night, I washed my eyes using those make-up remover pads. Then, I also put a warm tea-bag over each eye – which is something I learned from my parents growing up in Poland. And then, I also did a Reiki healing session focusing on my eyes.

When I woke up the next morning, there was almost no evidence of pink-eye. My eyes were a little bit red still, but about 95% better. For anyone who has had pink-eye before, it doesn’t go away that fast. It’s a nasty thing that just gets worse until you go in and get some form of anti-viral eye drops or whatever they use to treat it.

Did I actually have pink-eye? I don’t know. I believe I did. I can’t really prove it, but I don’t need to. All I was interested in was in expanding my beliefs around my self-healing Reiki abilities and that is what I did. My belief levels around Reiki continue to expand all the time.

However, I don’t try to use it to the exclusion of other treatments that I already believe in. I use it on top of those treatments.

I did the same thing with making money online. I proved to myself that I could make a full time income working from home first while I still worked full time, and then I quit my job once I already believed it was possible.

Acting Within Your Beliefs

When I used to work within the corporate sector with some very successful people who weren’t exactly people who would label themselves as “Lightworkers”, one thing I noticed that they did very successfully is that they believed in their model of reality.

If they didn’t believe in the Law of Attraction for example, they acted in accordance to their beliefs, and they saw success. From my current perspective, it took a lot of unnecessary effort on their part to do accomplish things that way, but they still accomplished things.

In the Lightworker community I constantly see people who try to live outside of the frame of their true beliefs, and they accomplish nothing!

When I first learned about Muscle Testing for example, I thought it was complete hogwash, so I didn’t use it in my life.

When I went to my basic training course last year I had one agenda – to either prove to myself that muscle testing works to the point that I believe it 100% or drop it as a modality altogether.

There is a balance we learned that claims to cause your arms to move by themselves during the process of balancing out a belief statement. To be totally honest, this seemed totally ridiculous to me when I first heard about it. How can your arms move by themselves. It makes no sense.

When it came time to experience the process, I stood there with my eyes closed and my arms out to my sides and waited for something to happen. Then… nothing happened.

I was standing there for what seemed like an eternity. I felt stupid standing there in front of my partner, eyes closed, with my arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross, especially since by this time they had begun to shake from the fact that they were held up for so long.

I began to feel guilty as well since I was the first to go and there may not have been enough time for my partner to try the technique herself. My Ego wanted me to give up and just not say anything or just pretend that the technique worked.

That’s when I had one of those defining moments in life where you make a decision that changes everything. Instead of giving up I decided that I will stand there, and not care if I look like a buffoon even if it takes 10 hours for the technique to work. I would either stand there until this supposed technique actually worked and made my arms move by themselves, or my arms fell off, or the instructor came in the room and stopped me – in which case I would have packed up my stuff and went home – because there is no point in me learning a modality I don’t believe in.

So I stood there, eyes closed, arms outstretched and shaking and starting to sweat.

Then, something crazy happened. My arms moved by themselves. It was as if some invisible force took control over my arms and moved them together. It was beautiful. My conscious mind did not move my arms. I know that. I can’t prove it to anyone, but I know it for myself. THAT is why I believe in, because I’ve experienced it.

When I do muscle testing, I know it works because I actually believe in it. I don’t just pretend to believe in it. If I didn’t believe in it, I wouldn’t use it.

I also believe in the Law of Attraction. Not because it sounds cool, or fun, but because I spent a lot of energy and time proving to myself that it works beyond a shadow of doubt.

If, however I didn’t believe in it, I wouldn’t use it. If I didn’t believe in I wouldn’t use it either.

I use it because I believe in it, not the other way around.

You know that saying “I’ll believe it when I see it”?

I live my life according to the belief that “I’ll see it when I believe it”.

Constantly work on expanding your beliefs, and be flexible in what you’re willing to believe, but take action and live life according to your current beliefs. Not the beliefs you wish you believed in.

Categories
Misc.

Are you Blocking Wealth?

Wealth is an energy field.

Building wealth has a lot more to do with what energy you are at, than what you do, have or who you know.

Many times in my life I have often wondered if I am blocking wealth.

For example, 10 years ago when I was stuck at a $3,000/month income I wondered if I was somehow unconsciously blocking myself from earning $5,000/m.

When I started earning $5k/m, I wondered if I’m blocking myself from earning $10k/m etc.

Whenever I ever wanted to manifest something – like a new car, a new house, more income, a relationship, new friends, or whatever else – there would often be a delay – lag time – between me creating a desire for something and it’s achievement.

While in that lag time I often wondered “Am I blocking this somehow at the unconscious level?”

I would ask myself “Is there some kind of limiting belief that’s blocking this from happening?”

I have worked with many mentors and coaches that have helped me to overcome those blocks and limiting beliefs and to help me open up more of my connection to abundance in its many forms – health wise, money wise, relationship wise etc.

This past week I have come across an awesome “Wealth Block Tester”.

Meaning, if you ever wondered about whether or not your current beliefs or energy or environment or thoughts are blocking you from manifesting wealth – I have a very simple test for you.

The Wealth Tester

To determine whether or not you are ready to build wealth in your life, here’s all you need to do.

Complete the following steps, (if you haven’t already), and the final step will tell you whether or not you have wealth blocks in place.

Step 1

The first thing you need to do is to connect to a morphic energy field of wealth.

If you are blocking wealth, this will be very difficult to do. In fact as soon as you read what I’m about to say next, you might start to sweat a little.

Either one of those options will connect you to the energy field of wealth.

A really good friend of mine who is an intuitive energy healer felt the connection immediately after he signed up as a affiliate. I felt the connection as soon as I signed up. And I have also spoken to three or four other friends of mine who are very “energetically sensitive” to these kinds of things and we all agree on the fact that has a VERY powerful morphic field of wealth, health and prosperity.

Listen guys, I *know* what I’m saying here sounds strange.

But it works.

I have shared this thing with a LOT of people in the last week or so.

Including the people on my Blog, probably close to 10,000 people have heard about this from me.

I have also shared it with probably 50-60 people in my personal network.

And you know what I have discovered so far?

I have discovered that only those people who are NOT blocking their wealth are able to pass this test.

Everyone else who I know who *IS* blocking their wealth right now has NOT been able to follow these simple, yet incredibly powerful steps.

For example…

… I have had someone tell me that when they tried to load the website, it won’t load for them. Their browser just crashes. The GIN site never crashes for me.

… I have had someone tell me that they were just about to sign up and all of a sudden their computer got a virus from somewhere else and now they have to re-format their hard drives before they can sign up. I never got a virus.

… I have had someone tell me that when they try to listen to the CD’s on their computer, they CAN’T do it because they IMMEDIATELY get interrupted within a minute of clicking PLAY by something or someone. I didn’t let interruptions get in the way.

… I have had someone tell me that when they tried to burn the audio files onto an audio CD so that they can listen to it in their car, the audio CD didn’t burn properly and the audio was all scrambled. None of my audios were scrambled.

… I have had someone tell me that while listening to one of the audios, the sound just all of a sudden CUT OUT for no reason and the rest of the audio is just blank empty space. My audios have no blank space.

… and about 20 or so MORE weird happenings in the last few days alone. 🙂

LOL!!!!

The reports I’m getting from people are hilarious!

It’s like a Gong Show. I’m seriously waiting for someone to tell me that they tried to listen but they got abducted by aliens or something. 🙂

This company and the CD set, has such a strong morphic field of wealth, health and prosperity that people, and their computers, cars, CD players and telephones are literally ALLERGIC to the energy **IF** the person has strong ANTI WEALTH beliefs and blocks in place.

I’m not joking guys.

I’m being TOTALLY serious.

I would also be willing to bet that a LOT of people are actually going to have an “allergic” reaction (energetically) to this Blog post.

It probably won’t load for many people.

Those Who Have Passed the Test

In addition to the hilarious stories I have heard from people as to WHY they CAN’T join for some reason or another, and CAN’T listen to the CD’s, there have been a few people I know who HAVE signed up and who HAVE started listening to the CD’s.

And the amazing thing that I’m hearing from them is that their lives have literally ALREADY started changing, even though they JUST STARTED listening to this stuff.

Here’s an example of an email I got from one person (who prior to this I didn’t know) who started listening:

I asked here if it would be OK for me to share her email with people on my Blog and she was totally OK with it, which is why I’m posting it.

The reason she says “I have no idea who you are but you have changed my life” is because up until a few weeks ago she didn’t know who I was. She just “co-incidentally” stumbled upon my Blog while searching for a WordPress related technical issue and saw me writing about the this stuff and that’s how she got into it.

I have spoken to a few other people who are reporting the same things to me. Some of these people I know, and others I have never met in my life.

But what I’m seeing is that *IF* they can join as an affiliate without some kind of “mysterious force” stopping them, AND they can start listening to the CD’s without their CD player or MP3 player blowing up or whatever else they manifest to block them from this information – THEN they begin to see immediate life changes in their lives.

Not just money/wealth changes either.

And the crazy thing is that all of these people just heard about this a few days ago. I mean I’ve only heard about this a few weeks ago.

Anyway… that’s the wealth tester.

I already know that someone will say that this “Wealth Tester” is BS and that I’m just trying to make money off people by getting them to sign up for them using my affiliate code, and that’s fine. They obviously don’t pass the wealth tester.

The bottom line is that I don’t care if you sign up under my affiliate code. Of course I would prefer it because I want to hang out with cool people like you if you’re interested in building wealth and if we’re on the same team then we’ll most likely hang out together a lot more than if you sign up under someone else’s affiliate invitation code – but using my code is NOT a prerequisite of this test.

If you don’t want to use my code then go find someone else’s – but take the test. If you want to connect to a different morphic field of wealth besides, go for it, but they are NOT easy to find and it will NOT be free.

If you don’t, for WHATEVER reason, it most likely means you have some major energetic and/or subconscious belief blocks towards building wealth.

And when I say WHATEVER reason – I mean WHATEVER reason.

If you can’t sign up for – because your computer blows up – that’s you blocking it.

If you can’t listen to because your MP3 player scrambles the audio – that’s you blocking it.

If you can’t listen to because every time you click play the phone rings – that’s you blocking it.

If you can’t sign up for – because you don’t think you can afford membership – it doesn’t matter since the affiliate level is FREE so that’s no excuse. If you are using that as an excuse – that’s you blocking it.

If your excuse is that you don’t have time for this stuff right now – that’s you blocking it.

WHATEVER excuse you can think of… it’s you blocking it.

Period.

It costs nothing except a little bit of your time / energy to sign up and listen to the CD’s.

There is no excuse.

The only excuse is if you’re not ready to build wealth and you’re blocking it by manifesting WHATEVER reasons that show up in your life.

And that’s OK. I’m not judging you. I’m just sharing with you a cool “tester” to see if you’ve got wealth blocks.

What will you do next?

Will you take the steps I wrote above?

Categories
Monetization

Launching an e-commerce store

The first thing I worked on is implementing an inventory management system to keep track of my inventory, costing, pricing etc.

For inventory management, I am using a software called AmberPOS.

AmberPOS is a point of sale / inventory management software which integrates with the Interspire Shopping Cart software I’m using on my website.

I’m still working on getting all the inventory sorted out and put up on the website. For now I have about 15-20 items online.

Building Traffic

Besides getting more inventory up online, the next most important aspect of building up the site is to start getting some traffic to it.

There are a number of different things that I have done so far to help with that.
Getting the Site Indexed in Google

Interspire has some pretty cool features for marketing your Ecommerce website online.

The first thing I setup was a Google sitemap feed to let Google know whenever I add or update content to the site.

Luckily, Interspire makes this really simple. You simply click on Marketing > Google XML Sitemap and it shows you the link to your sitemap. If you don’t know how to take it from there, there are step-by-step instructions on how to setup your sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools.

Secondly I also setup a Google Base Product feed. Once again, Interspire makes this really easy. You go to Marketing > Google Base Product Feed and follow the instructions for setting up a Google Product Feed.

This gives Google a live feed of all the products in your store for indexing in their Google Product Search engine.

With a Google sitemap feed and a product feed setup, Google should have no problems indexing my site. Google Product search is still in beta, and I don’t know if it gets any real volume of searches but since it only took a few minutes to setup, any exposure I get from it is better than nothing.

Looking Into Free SEO Traffic

Next I wanted to do some preliminary SEO keyword research to check how competitive the market is for magic stores.

My initial research shows that the more common keywords in this niche are fairly competitive. The major players have fairly highly ranked websites with high Page Rank and domain authority.

To get some traction I will have to go beyond the obvious keywords like and try to optimize for more long-tail keywords.

In the meantime though, I want to start getting some kind of traffic to the site since SEO can often take months before getting any real results.

Luckily, SEO is not the only way to get traffic to a site.

Pay-Per-Click traffic such as AdWords is one way to go, but for now I decided to start with a different source of traffic.

Connecting to the Community

A great, but often overlooked source of traffic is to purchase banner ads on highly targeted Forums and Blogs.

There are a LOT of magicians around the world who hang out on that forum.

So as a starting point, I purchased a small 110×80 banner ad on the forum as a test to see if I can get some traffic to the site.

It’s nothing huge, but since the website gets a fair amount of highly targeted traffic I don’t need a lot of traffic to potentially start generating sales.

Also, since I’m liquidating my inventory at 30-50% off retail prices, I’m hoping the word will spread once a few people check out the site.

I designed the banner to be simple, direct and to more or less fit in with the colors of the forum, while at the same time hopefully grabbing people’s attention.

Before purchasing the banner I took a quick look at the Compete.com stats to see just how much traffic they get.

They’re averaging around 22,500 unique visitors per month, with just over 136,000 visits per month.

They also offer bigger banner placements as well as other promotional opportunities, but for now I wanted to just start with a small banner and track how much traffic I get from it before committing to something bigger.

Starting small will also give me a chance to get a lot more inventory up on my site.

That’s pretty much all I’ve had time to do on the site for now.

I’ll write more update posts as I make more progress.

Categories
Misc.

Transforming Anger into Motivation

Ever have one of those frustrating days where you just want to go back to bed and start the day all over again?

Ever have one of those weeks, or months or years?

Sure you have – it’s part of being human.

It seems that no matter how hard we work to bring order into our lives, there is always at least one part of our lives that’s driving us nuts.

If we get our careers going, and our financial situation stabilized, it seems that all of a sudden we run into health problems.

If we get our health and finances in order, now all of a sudden our relationships suffer.

If we get our relationships and health in order, we never get to relax.

If we take a vacation to relax, suddenly our career goes south.

There’s always something that seems to pop up in our lives that frustrates us.

It doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, healthy or sick, single or married. If you’re alive, you’ve got some kind of challenges in your life. It’s a given.

Avoiding Frustration and Anger

One of the most common and worst things that we can do when such a situation arises is to go into turtle mode.

Going into turtle mode means retreating into your shell to try to avoid the frustration and anger that you feel.

Anger and frustration are a type of energy. If you try to ignore that energy, it will just intensify and get worse over time.

There are many avoidance patterns we can go into when such feelings/energies arise.

Some of us turn to eating food or smoking cigarettes when frustration & anger show up. Some of us go shopping or to watch a movie to try to distract ourselves.

The challenge is that avoidance doesn’t work. Overeating causes you even more frustration and anger long term. So does smoking, or retail therapy.

Nobody is perfect. To some degree, we all at least sometimes resort to avoidance behavior when dealing with anger and frustration.

Some of us do it all the time, never dealing with the root issue.
How to Deal with Frustration and Anger

If avoidance doesn’t work, then what does?

How do we transform frustration and anger into something useful in our lives?

One of the most effective ways I have been recently dealing with this exact issue is something I learned from a book

The book relates to finances and money, but I have used the same technique for dealing with every situation in my life recently.

Whenever you feel the energies of Frustration and Anger rising up in your life, in any situation, simply follow this formula.

Accept the feelings. Don’t try to avoid them. FEEL the feeling of anger. FEEL the feeling of frustration. Don’t try to downplay them. Trying to downplay them will just make things worst. If you’re angry, BE OK with being angry in this moment. Be honest with yourself and acknowledge the feeling of anger/frustration within you. It wants to be heard. The more you try to ignore it, the louder it will get.
Ask the feeling/energy what it’s trying to tell you. What is the problem / challenge that is “causing” you to feel angry / frustrated. You can either acknowledge it in your mind, or write it out in your journal. Let the feeling / energy be heard. Let it say what it wants to say.
Tell the truth about the situation. Accept responsibility for everything you create in your life 100%. Don’t give away any power to anything or anyone else.

The first two steps in the formula are pretty self explanatory. I don’t think I need to go into any more depth as to what they mean.

However, step #3 is the most important one to understand.

What exactly do I mean by “Tell the truth about the situation”?

Well, the truth about any situation in our lives is that WE are the ones who are 100% responsible for creating it.

That is the truth.

We create 100% of everything that we experience in our realities, no matter how much it seems like someone else or something else might be at fault.

I know that’s not easy to accept, but it’s the truth. It is the ultimate truth.

Let me give you one example of how I have used this process in the recent while.

A few weeks back I called one of my credit card companies to make some changes to my account. While on the phone with the service rep there, I was told that in order to make the changes I wanted I would need to make a payment for a certain amount first and as soon as they receive that payment, they would be able to make that change for me.

Just to make sure that I didn’t mishear the person, I asked them the same question a second time to make sure that they understood what I was asking for. Once again the rep assured me that she understood what I wanted and that there would be no problem processing that change as soon as they receive the payment in the amount they requested.

So I made the payment and I called in a few days later to check if they had received the payment. Once the payment was received I asked to speak to their account reps again and asked them to make the account change that I originally wanted.

Well, guess what happened next? This second rep proceeded to tell me that the account changes I wanted are not possible. That the only way I would be able to make such changes was to close my account and re-apply from scratch for a brand new account with them.

After a very frustrating 30+ minute conversation with them I basically realized that I was lied to by the first rep who told me that the changes I wanted were totally possible just as soon as I made a payment. I don’t know if they make a commission or some kind of bonus based on how much money people send in for payments after speaking with them or what, but basically I was lied to.

The changes I wanted are not possible, and the payment I was asked to make had nothing to do with anything. It had no bearing on the changes I wanted at all. The first rep just wanted me to make a payment, and lied to me in order to get it, most likely knowing that I would make the payment and then when I call in a second time I would be someone else’s problem to deal with.

Now this is a perfect example of being frustrated and angry. I got off the phone with this credit card company and I was pissed. Not because the changes I wanted to make were not possible, but because I was lied to.

If I knew from day one that those changes were not possible, then I would have made other arrangements with another credit card company but instead this rep wasted my time and just lied to me.

What was even more frustrating was the fact that the new rep I was dealing with on my 2nd phone call was not at fault. She didn’t lie to me. She did nothing wrong, so getting mad at her wasn’t going to solve anything.

After I got off the phone, I followed the formula as listed above.

I accepted my feelings of anger and frustration for being lied to. I didn’t try to shy away from them or hide them. I let myself FEEL them.
I asked myself why I was angry. I realized that what pissed me off was the fact that I was lied to and had my time wasted and that I couldn’t really do anything about it. Getting angry with the new rep wasn’t going to accomplish anything, as she wasn’t the one who originally lied to me. Since I didn’t have the name of the person I spoke to originally, nor did I record the conversation, I had no proof that I was lied to. The company does record their conversations so I could have asked to speak to a supervisor and probably could have been able to track down who it was that spoke to me, but that would have wasted even more of my time. And to what end? Even if we found the conversation, all the supervisor would have been able to do is apologize to me. It still wouldn’t have solved my problem, just would have wasted more of my time.
Once I let my mind vent a bit about the situation, I then told the truth about it. What was the truth? The truth is that I created that whole situation. It was 100% my doing. I created this event in my reality. I am 100% responsible for it. Nothing was done “to me”. I did it to myself. Once I accepted this truth, the feelings of anger and frustration dissipated.

I know that #3 is not an easy step to take. It IS the hardest step of them all, but it is the one where you reclaim your power from your anger and frustrations.

There are many levels at which we can accept #3. From a purely physical world perspective, we can say that I am 100% responsible for not recording the original conversation with the operator and I didn’t ask their name.

I am 100% responsible for making the choice to even have a credit card with this particular company. I am 100% responsible for needing the changes to be made to my account in the first place. I am 100% responsible for trusting the phone rep even when my intuition was telling me that what she was saying didn’t sound right.

I am 100% responsible for applying for that credit card 13 years ago.

I have to take 100% responsibility for everything related to the situation in order to reclaim my power from it.

If we look at it from a more spiritual perspective, things get even clearer. From a spiritual perspective, I am responsible for everything in my reality. I’m not just responsible for falling for a lie, I am responsible for creating a reality in which credit card phone operators lie.

My subconscious beliefs create the reality I experience and I am responsible for my beliefs.

Even if we only accept step #3 partially, within the physical world realm and ignore the spiritual implications of it, there is still a lot of power to be re-claimed from our anger and frustrations.

I would encourage you to try out this technique the next time you feel frustrated and angry. Even if you don’t take full responsibility in step #3, but just claim 5% or 10% or 25% of the responsibility, you will still reclaim your power from it and your anger/frustration will dissipate to that degree.

I’ve been doing this for over a month now and I’m really loving this process. Every time I feel angry and frustrated, I go through the process and usually end up laughing at myself with the thought “Oh man, why did I create THIS experience? What a fiasco. Hehehe….”

It is so liberating to take responsibility for your life instead of feeling like a victim of circumstances.

The more we accept that responsibility, the more liberated we feel.

You may ask, “Yeah, but what do we do then?”

Meaning, what do we do once we accept responsibility?

Well, the right course of action – if any necessary – will present itself.

For me, after reclaiming my power from the situation, the course of action involved me closing my account with that credit card company.

I was a client of theirs for 13 years. They lied to me. I took my business elsewhere.

I didn’t do it out of a place of anger or frustration though. It just seemed like the most “responsible” course of action to take after what happened.

This morning I received my first letter from them, asking me to reconsider closing my account.

Of course I’m responsible for creating that too. 🙂

Try this technique out.

It really works.

Categories
Monetization

How to Boost your Adsense Earnings in Minutes

The other day I was looking through my AdSense account, and found a nifty little trick for boosting earnings.

By default, whenever you install AdSense on a site the ads shown are typically based on the content of your post as well as the browsing history of the person visiting your site.

Google does it’s best to match the best performing ads to your site since Google, just like you as a publisher, only makes money when people click on the ads.

So it is always in Google’s best interest to show only the best performing ads on your site.

However, as good as Google’s algorithms are, they are not perfect and there is a way to squeeze some more value out of your AdSense earnings.

Here’s what you need to do:

(1) Login to your AdSense account.

(2) Click on the “Allow & Block Ads” tab.

(3) Under “Blocking Options” you’ll see a section called “General Categories”. Click the edit button to the right of that.

(4) You will then see a screen like this:

What this screen will show you is the category of ads that Google AdSense displays on your site, and the earnings that each category has earned you in the last 30 days.

For example, in my account I can see that “Arts & Entertainment” ads were displayed 3.6% of the time on my site, but they only contributed to 0.5% of my earnings.

If I look at the “Beauty & Personal Care” category of ads, I can see that it was only shown 2% of the time, but earned 7% of my total earnings in the last 30 days.

If we look at “Home & Garden” we can see that those types of ads were shown 4.9% of the time on my site, but they earned 0% of my 30 day income.

When you study your categories and the earnings they create for you, you can then get a better picture as to what type of ads your specific audience responds to most. Your category stats are going to be different from mine, so you need to make sure you study your own numbers and don’t just guess.

In my case, since I saw that the “Home & Garden” category took up 5% of my impressions, but generated 0% revenue for me, I decided to block those types of ads on my site. Obviously my audience doesn’t respond to “Home & Garden” type ads.

By disabling that category, it frees up 4.9% more page impressions for the other categories that are actually making me money. If for example those 4.9% of impressions were applied to the “Beauty & Personal Care” category, that could result in about 15% increase in earnings for me.

Of course Google will distribute the extra impressions amongst all of the categories that are not blocked, but it can still be a pretty decent sized boost to your earnings for just a few minutes of work.

Categories
Goal Setting

Your Guru is Lying to You

When we see a success story of a person that inspires us in life, we often want to learn how that person has achieved the success that they enjoy.

In the corporate world, the strategy a company uses to achieve results is often highly guarded as an intellectual property secret.

Employee’s sign non-disclosure agreements to keep “what works” under lock and key. Even with non-disclosure agreements in place, often times employees are only told what they need to know to do their jobs and the rest is kept secret from them.

That’s just the way it works in the corporate world.

Your competitive advantage / strategy is what keeps you alive in the business world and able to keep the lights on.

As a former participant in the corporate world, both at the private and publicly traded company levels I was very much involved in doing business this way.

There was no such thing as reading your competitor’s Blog to find out what they were going to do next to compete with you. Figuring out what your next move was going to be, often depended on what your competitor’s next move was going to be, and learning how to observe and anticipate the moves of your competitors was a hugely beneficial skill.

Also, when competitors succeeded in areas you were not doing very well, learning how to observe and identify what it was that they did to produce a result was also very beneficial.

Having the ability to observe, analyze and anticipate your competitor’s next moves wasn’t just beneficial to your business, it was often the only way to stay in business long term.

I feel that I was always good at this part of business in the corporate world.

Enter The Gurus

Shifting my focus to the online world of blogging, affiliate marketing and making money online in general was a very interesting contrast for me.

Bloggers were making money online, and sharing how they were doing it with their readers.

Internet marketers were making millions, and then creating courses to teach others how to make money online as well. Even though they charged for these courses, they were still very inexpensive compared to the potential payoff if what they taught worked.

At first I didn’t really understand why someone would do that.

I mean, if you’re making $500k/month doing something, why teach everyone else the exact strategies you’re using to do so. In the traditional corporate world that would be like suicide.

As I started reading more and more Blogs related to making money online, I started seeing more and more people sharing blogging income reports and giving away all the “secrets” to how they are making their money.

At first I thought this was a very foreign concept, much different from the competitive point of view typically seen in the corporate world, but I really liked it.

The idea of a society where everyone shares everything with everyone freely (not necessarily for free) was very appealing and I really liked it.

As I started to implement what the “Gurus” taught, all of it made perfectly logical sense.

I saw no harm in trying so I followed what they said.

After months and months of frustration though, I was not able to produce the same results they were producing. Not even close.

That’s when I made a shift in my thinking.

Putting My Competitive Goggles Back On

After spending 15+ years reading hundreds of personal development books and studying successful people, there is one thing that I learned along the way that was a huge paradigm shift for me.

The thing I learned is that most successful people don’t know what made/makes them successful.

Actually I would say that is the case with all people, not just successful people.

As human beings we are absolutely horrible at identifying the factors that make us successful.

In the majority of most cases, what makes people successful is not what they think it is.

So, even though I left the competitive style nature of the corporate world and entered the world of Blogging, and Internet marketing, and starting getting around people who are much more into the “co-operative” model of reality, rather than the “competitive” model of reality, at the end of the day I realized that nobody is going to hand you the secret to success on a silver platter.

You have to figure it out on your own, for yourself.

Are you willing to accept that?

I hope so.

Finding Success

The way I was finally able to achieve results online was to think about making money online through the same goggles I used to wear in the corporate world.

When I wanted to learn how to make money as a Blogger, I started studying successful Bloggers.

I didn’t listen to what they were WRITING on their Blogs, I watched and paid attention to what they were DOING.

For example, if a particular Blogger wrote a post about 10 awesome free WordPress theme sites, but at the same time they were having a custom theme designed for $1,500, guess what I did?

Did I go and try to find a free WordPress theme on one of those sites they wrote a post about? No.

I did what they did. I invested in a premium WordPress theme.

If I read an article by a Blogger who was writing about how they achieved a certain result, I assumed that was only half of the story. I investigated further to find out what else was happening.

That is the way to find success.

Find someone you’re inspired by and then model and emulate what they DO and HOW they do it, not what they SAY they do how they SAY they do it.

If there is some kind of result that I have achieved, that you would like to achieve, don’t listen to a word I say – because I may have no clue what I’m talking about. Instead, pay attention to what I’m actually doing and the “secrets” will be revealed to you.

Why Gurus Lie

Some of the most successful, warm-hearted, nicest people in the world are lying to you.

It is not because they mean to. It’s not because they want to lie, or to teach you the ‘wrong’ way to do things, or because they want to see you fail.

In almost all cases, most of the “gurus” teaching anything, genuinely want to help people to succeed.

However, the challenge is that they don’t know what actually made them successful, so they teach what they think made them successful.

And a lot of times what they teach is exactly the opposite of what you should be doing.

Examples of Not Knowing What Works

One example of not knowing what makes people successful that has been popping up for me lately is related to marketing.

Because people come to me for marketing advice, one of the first questions I always ask people is what works for them right now.

I’ll ask people “How are you getting clients right now?” and they’ll typically give me an answer right away.

Some will say “Oh, most of my clients come from word-of-mouth advertising.”

Or they will say “Oh I advertise in _________“, etc.

If I dig deeper and ask them a question like “What do you think makes your word-of-mouth advertising so successful?” people will often tell me a whole story about it.

Often times a lot of these people actually go around saying things like “Word of mouth advertising is the best type of marketing” etc.

They really DO believe that their most effective form of marketing is “word of mouth“.

The interesting thing is that when we actually quantify the reality of where they are getting their customers from and why, we find that their “word of mouth” marketing sucks. The real source of their current customers is something totally different and they just don’t realize it.

I’ve worked with clients who had a huge growth in their overall revenues due to SEO efforts, but they attributed the increases to a new sales person they hired. Business people especially are always making many different changes in their businesses at the same time, but very often they attribute any successes to the sexiest ideas they implemented or the ones they came up with themselves.

Take any business that’s succeeding and thriving, and ask their programming department why the business is succeeding. All the programmers will tell you it’s because of the recent changes they made in their software.

Ask the marketing department the same question and they’ll tell you it’s because of the new marketing strategy they just implemented.

Ask the accounting department and they’ll tell you that it’s because of the right decisions the CEO is making due to the financial information that the accounting department is providing them.

Ask the janitor and they’ll tell you it’s because he switched cleaning detergents.

It’s human nature to take credit for success. And to shift blame onto someone else when things are failing.

When the were competing for the Stanley Cup this year, I would often ask people “How was the game?” since I hardly watched any of them.

It was always interesting to hear that when the won a game, people would say “We won!”, but when the lost a game, people would say “They lost.” 🙂

I guess nobody ever considers themselves a part of the team when they lose, but they do if they win.

Why Success is Hard to Figure Out

Whenever I achieve some sort of result in life, I’m always inspired to share it with others.

I really honestly look back at what it is that I did in order to achieve something and then I try to teach it to others.

Because I keep a semi-daily journal of all my successes and failures, I often refer back to where I was in the past and try to compare it to my current situation to try to figure out what changed.

Once I become aware of what I think it was, I often share it with others via conversation, Blog posts, videos, or by mentoring others.

What very often happens though is that even though people make those same changes in their lives, they don’t always produce the same results.

Sometimes it’s just because they don’t even come close to emulating what I did, but sometimes they do yet it still doesn’t work.

For example, in the last 20 years whenever I have ever wanted a job I simply printed off my resume and applied for a job. I only had 3 actual jobs that I had to apply for (besides the business I ran myself), and each time I simply printed the resume off, faxed it in or brought it in in person, and I got the job.

In the last 20 years I have never applied for a job and not gotten it.

But if someone wanted to get a job and I told them to simply print off a resume and fax it in, that might not work for them.

So the advice of “Just print a resume off and fax it in.” is rather useless for most people.

What works for one person might not work for another.

What Works

So if listening to Guru’s is not the answer, then what is?

What I have found to work for me is a formula of getting your information from three sources:

Listen to what Guru’s say. Sometimes people DO know what works. They tune into the exact thing that made them successful. And often times even when they don’t know everything that made them successful, what they do communicate WILL help you out. It just might not be the full story.
Observe and model what Guru’s do. Learning to be an observer is very important. You can learn SO MUCH about how to succeed in life just by opening your eyes and watching people and modeling what they do. That doesn’t just mean watching what they do when they are doing what they do, but what are they doing in their off time. Larry Bird practiced taking shots for 4 hours a day when he was a kid – every day. Model THAT, and not just what he did on the court if you want to improve your shot percentage. Model his breathing, his physiology, his workout routine, his visualization process etc. Not just what he does on the court.
Listen to your intuition. Above all, tune in to your intuition and follow it’s advice. If a “guru” tells you that the only way to achieve X is by doing Y instead of Z, but your intuition is telling you that Z is the right path for you, then chances are that Z *IS* the right path for you. And even if eventually you end up doing Y, just like the “guru” said, maybe you learn a lesson by doing Z that you wouldn’t have learned if you tried to do Y. Always trust your intuition.

With the above formula you can’t go wrong. See, in the above formula, what “gurus” say only accounts for 33% of your decision making process. So even if they are wrong, because they don’t know what made them successful, or even if they are lying to you on purpose, it doesn’t really matter because your observations (2) and your intuition (3) will be there to override that decision anyways.

One Last Piece of Advice

One last piece of advice I’d like to throw in for good measure when it comes to emulating people.

When studying the success of someone, try to connect with the version of who they are which is just a few steps ahead of you, not light years ahead of you.

For example, let’s use making money as an example since it’s easily quantifiable.

Let’s say you are currently making $0/month and you want to make your first $100/m online.

If you look at someone who is making $10 million dollars online and try to emulate what they do RIGHT NOW to make their next $20 million, chances are you won’t succeed.

Instead, try to look at what they DID to make $100/m in the first place.

A lot of “guru’s” who are making a million dollars per year are learning the lessons they need to learn to make two million a year.

However, those lessons might not be the same lessons you should be learning to go from $0/m to $100/m. Make sense?

Try to emulate those who are a few steps ahead of you, or who work with people and teach people who are a few steps ahead of you.

I am much more interested in learning from people who make $1,000/m more than me from their Blogs than from people make $1 Million in one day doing a launch.

I listen to both, but the person a few steps ahead of you is the one that’s easier to emulate and produce results by emulating.

They are the closest vibrational match to who you want to be next.

I’m more interested in learning how a fat guy lost 20lbs and reduced his body fat % from 35% to 30% as an example, than how a bodybuilder who has been fit for 15 years dropped from 12% body fat to 10% body fat.

In martial arts training I’m more interested how a white belt finally committed to showing up to training every week, twice a week, than how a black belt would go about disarming someone with a gun.

Categories
Misc.

Body fat testing

If you guys remember from my previous post on body fat testing, I basically talked about how inaccurate standard bathroom scales are when it comes to calculating body fat %.

I shelled out more than $250 for my bathroom scale as well, so it’s not like it’s a “cheap” one either.

As I said in my last post, if you’re thinking of getting one of those scales – don’t bother. They’re pretty much useless.

After getting my first scan done, I was already sold on the benefits of doing this kind of scan and have been telling everyone about it. However, after today’s second scan I’m even more sold on it and will be promoting it to everyone I know.

If you’re even dreaming about doing any kind of weight loss or exercise plan, do yourself a huge favor and get one of these scans done before you start so you can accurately track your progress.

My Body Fat Testing Results

Firstly, I’ll mention that when I got our scans done on Nov 3rd, we were already 16 days into the weight loss competition so I had already lost about 10lbs by that time. So really our “before” scans are not true “before” scans since they aren’t taking into account the first 10lbs of weight loss.

Either way, the scan does accurately represent what happened in the last 40 days which is just under 6 weeks.

Here are my results:

The great news is that between the two scans I’ve been able to accomplish something that isn’t very easy to do. I successfully cut fat and gained muscle mass at the same time.

My total weight loss was 4.3 lbs but I actually lost 5.6 lbs of fat during that period of time.

At the same time, while cutting more than 5.6 lbs of fat off my body, I also gained 1.5lbs of muscle mass.

I don’t care who you are, cutting fat and building muscle at the same time is not easy. Losing weight is not that hard, but doing it in a way where you don’t lose half of it in muscle mass is the tough part.

I don’t remember exact numbers off the top of my head, but I think he actually lost a little bit more weight than me, but what the scan revealed is that he lost fat and muscle at the same time. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think it was about 40-50% of the weight loss for him came from lean muscle mass.

So even though I think he lost a little bit more weight, he actually didn’t lose nearly as much fat as I did (less than half the 5.6 lbs I lost), and he also simultaneously ended up losing some lean muscle tissue which is not good.

What happened to himis not uncommon. I know because I’ve done the same thing in the past when all I was focusing on was weight loss.

This is why most starvation diets don’t work.

It is also why just doing cardio doesn’t work either.

If you want to cut fat, without destroying the lean muscle mass your body needs, you must follow a diet and exercise program designed specifically for this goal.

What Does Fat and Muscle Look Like?

One of the biggest things I’ve noticed lately when talking to people about weight loss is that most people have a totally inaccurate view of how much a pound or five pounds of fat or muscle really is.

For most people it’s just a number. 5lbs, 10lbs, 20lbs, 30lbs – the higher the better. We hear these kinds of numbers being thrown around in the weight loss industry all the time, usually when trying to sell you some sort of crappy crash diet.

The challenge is that 20 years ago, if an advertiser said “With our solution you will lose 5lbs of fat“, people would be impressed.

Today, you see advertisers saying “With our solution you will lose 30lbs of fat in 7 days” and people are still not impressed. Everyone wants instant results NOW.

When I hear people saying “Oh I know this guy who went on this diet and he lost 30 lbs in 1 week” I cringe, because there is always more to a story like that. Unless you’re talking about liposuction or something, you can’t lose 30lbs of fat in a week or two. Of course you can dehydrate yourself beyond that point.

There are professional athletes like boxers out there who lose like 15lbs of weight (not fat!) in a 72hour period when they’re cutting weight for a boxing match. BUT, that is NOT fat loss we’re talking about. All that they do is dehydrate themselves and lose 15lbs of water weight, which is dangerous and they put it back on within 24hours of making weight.

Don’t mistake dehydration with fat loss. They are totally different things. Yet another reason to get a scan, instead of relying on your bathroom scale “weight”.

Let’s get a more accurate view of just how much 5.6 lbs of fat really is. Maybe if you see some pictures it might re-calibrate your thinking a bit.

This is a 250 gram (0.55 lb ) stick of butter. Yes, this big chunk of fat I’m holding in my hand is only half a pound of fat.

So, if that is about half a pound, then what does 5.6lbs of fat look like? Well, imagine 10 of those!

That’s how much excess fat my body has shed in the last 40 days or so. Pretty crazy right?

So what about muscle? How much is 1.5lbs of muscle? Gaining 1.5lbs of muscle doesn’t sound that impressive at first, does it?

Well, here’s a photo of an 8 oz steak ( ~ 0.5 lbs ). Sorry, I don’t have anything in the picture to compare scale but I think you can get a general idea of what an 8 oz steak looks like.

So how much would 1.5 lbs of muscle be then? Well it would be approximately 3 of those steaks:

I know this is not super accurate, nor are the pictures to scale, but I think it at least illustrates the point that a pound of muscle or fat is a LOT.

30 lbs of fat would be about 54 of those sticks of butter. Pretty crazy right?

Do you really think your body can safely shed 30 lbs of fat in a week or two? Or put on 20 lbs of muscle in a few weeks, like some hyped up muscle building products claim?

I really don’t think so.

Bone Density

One thing I totally didn’t notice until I got home was that the scan revealed that my bone weight dropped from 2.8 kg to 2.7 kg which is a loss of 0.1 kg (approx 0.22 lbs).

I didn’t notice this when I was there so I didn’t get a chance to ask about it, but if this is correct it would seem to indicate that I’ve lost some bone density in the last 6 weeks.

I have to double check on this with him, and also check my research, but if this is correct then it may be attributed to a few things:

Lack of Mineral Supplements – I have a good quality multi-vitamin & mineral supplement which I know I need to be taking, but for some reason I haven’t been taking it regularly in the last 6 weeks. I was pretty good with it for the first few weeks of the competition, but then I just stopped taking it. I don’t know if it’s just laziness or some kind of mental block, but I always have a hard time taking my multi-vitamins every day.
Exercise Causing Acidity – Exercise and fat burning are acid-forming activities in your body / blood. When we begin exercising, the body will actually pull alkaline minerals ( like calcium & magnesium ) out of your bones to buffer the acids in your blood – unless we have those alkaline buffers readily available in our body through supplementation (aka multi-vitamin & minerals).
Protein Consumption – My protein consumption has increased since starting this competition. I eat protein in the form of meats and I also supplement with high-quality whey proteins. Although there’s nothing wrong with protein, since our body needs it in order to build tissues and muscle, eating too much protein can be acid forming for the blood. And of course once again if our blood becomes even slightly acidic, the body will automatically pull alkaline buffers from the bones to neutralize the acids.
Lack of Hydration – Although I have increased my water consumption since starting this body transformation, I know it’s still nowhere near the levels I should be at. I have to check my research again, but I do believe inadequate hydration also contributes to bone density loss.

My gut feeling is that it’s probably a combination of all four of these factors. I would be willing to bet that the increase in exercise and protein consumption, along with inadequate hydration has elevated my “acidity” levels for the last 6 weeks or so and due to a lack of daily mineral supplements my body has had to utilize a bit of the minerals stored in my bones to neutralize the acids.

I’ll be doing more research on this for sure. In the meantime I need to smack myself for not taking my multi-vitamin and minerals. Doh!

Why You Should Get a Scan

Raising your awareness is one of the biggest keys to success in life.

Have you ever said to yourself “I’m watching my weight“, or “I want to lose 10 lbs“?

The question I have for you is “10 lbs of what“?

Without accurate body composition analysis, weight loss is rather meaningless.

Weight loss can come from fat loss, muscle loss, bone density loss or from dehydration. Losing 5 lbs or 10 lbs doesn’t mean much unless you know how much of that weight loss came from fat, muscle and bone mass.

I’ve only had two scans so far, and really they were only done less than 6 weeks apart and I’ve already learned so much about my body.

Ideally you’d want to do your scans at slightly larger intervals, such as for example every 3 months in order to see more drastic results, but I can’t tell you how motivating it is to see that you’ve built 1.5lbs of muscle by doing strength training or that you’ve lost 5.6lbs of fat.

Last year when I was doing P90X I know I was building muscle while simultaneously losing fat, but my bathroom scale seemed stuck at 212 lbs or so and that was really demotivating. If I had gone in for a DXA scan back then and saw how much muscle I put on during the 58 days I was on P90X I probably would have stuck with it long term.

Do yourself a favor and get a scan done on your body. Even if you do it just once a year, it’s still a great way to become more aware of what your body composition looks like so that you can track your progress.

If you live elsewhere, I’m sure you can find other people offering the service as well.

Categories
Misc.

Turning Failure into Success

I began working on a small project that I naively thought was going to make me a lot of money online.

Like a lot of other people, I heard the success stories of guru’s who wrote eBooks and became overnight success stories selling millions of copies overnight.

So, I set out to write my own eBook with the thought that even if my eBook is just 1/10th as good as theirs I should still be able to sell at least a thousand copies, right?

Even if I only sold 1,000 copies, at $29/copy that would be $29,000 in my pocket. And imagine if I was able to sell 10,000 copies!

Writing the eBook

When I began working on this eBook, this Blog was still under the domain and my main slogan / topic was “Make Money Doing What You Love”.

One of the very first trends I noticed while just starting out with that Blog was that quite a few of my readers ( like all 20 of them ), weren’t really sure what they wanted to do in life.

Meaning, I noticed that quite a few of my readers would say stuff like “I love your Blog, but I don’t even know what I love to do. What do you do if you don’t know what your passion is?“

That gave me an idea…

I decided to write an eBook on “How to Figure Out Your Passion in Life“.

I was all excited because I knew the topic was popular, as I know a lot of people have no clue what their passion in life is. So I started researching the topic like crazy.

I began reading all kinds of Blogs on the topic. I read several books. I experimented with a bunch of different exercises and ways of figuring out my own passion in life, and I found several really cool exercises which really worked.

After a lot of research, testing, experimenting, and writing, I had my first eBook written.

Selling the eBook

All excited at the prospect of making thousands, possibly tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars selling my eBook I put it up on Clickbank and waited for the money to start pouring in.

The first few sales trickled in within the first few days. Most of them came from the 20 or so Blog readers I had on my Blog at the time.

After about a week or so, there were no more sales. I tried reducing the price, but that didn’t seem to change anything.

I tried changing the sales page, and a whole bunch of other things. Nothing seemed to help.

My hopes were shattered. I felt like crying.

What happened to the thousands of dollars I thought I was going to make?

Was my eBook really that bad?

That didn’t make sense to me, as people would have to buy it first to not like it, and the few people that did buy it loved it!

Was it my marketing? My sales page wasn’t the best, but I thought it was much better than most of the other ones I saw on Clickbank.

Learning The Most Important Lesson

That is when I learned one of the most important lessons of online marketing.

It’s a lesson that I try to teach all of my mentoring students – although sadly most of them don’t listen.

Not that I blame them because until that moment in my life, I didn’t listen either.

The biggest lesson in online marketing success is to build your audience first.

The reason my eBook didn’t do very well is because I had no audience!

My Blog at the time had 20 subscribers, yet somehow I thought that I would sell thousands of copies of my book. It just doesn’t work that way.

There are a lot of guru’s even today selling people on this idea of “Just create a digital product, and you will sell lots of copies!”

What they mean is that if they create a product, they will sell a lot of copies, but that is because (a) they have built a brand around their name, and (b) they probably have a list of 350,000+ email subscribers, and (c) they have access to other email lists where they can get affiliates to promote the product to a few million people.

THAT is why their products sell. It’s not that their products are so much better than what you can create. It’s that they have push-button access to millions of people. Period.

Converting Epic Fail to Epic Success

Disappointed by my “Epic Fail” eBook, I wondered what I should do next.

My Blog wasn’t growing at nearly the speed I had hoped it would.

My eBook wasn’t making me any money.

How was I ever supposed to quit my job, when I couldn’t even sell ten copies of an eBook for $9?

That’s when I made a decision that changed everything.

I decided to give away my eBook for free, instead.

I setup an Aweber account and decided to send people a free copy of my eBook in exchange for becoming a subscriber to my Blog.

The result was amazing.

People started signing up for my email list and I started to get really good responses on the eBook.

Once people started signing up, I was able to start emailing them every time I wrote a new Blog post as well which meant I started getting more comments on my Blog.

By getting more comments, I got more inspired to write more posts, which led to more subscribers and in turn even more comments.

The success cycle began.

I launched my Blog I had 39 RSS subscribers and around the same amount on my email list.

Just six months later, by June 2008 I had over 1,000 subscribers on my Blog.

By that time I had actually written several eBooks which I gave away for free on my Blog.

Today, just over 3 years since starting this Blog I have almost 10,000 subscribers.

99.9% of my subscribers today originally subscribed to my Blog in exchange for something free.

The Power of the Ethical Bribe

Here are 3 rules of Making Money Online that I have come to learn from my “mistake” of trying to make bank with my eBook.

Rule #1 of Making Money Online …. People LOVE free stuff.

People LOVE free stuff. There is no better way to build rapport with people than to give them something valuable for free.

If you are willing to make something of value, and give it away for free, people will love you for it.

Basically you are creating an “Ethical Bribe”. You agree to give someone something valuable for free, in exchange for them signing up to your email list.

Once they are on your email list, you treat them with respect by not spamming them and they reciprocate by staying subscribed long term.

It is THE best way to build an online audience FAST – Period.

Rule #2 of Making Money Online …. Most people are afraid to give away free stuff.

Most people online are afraid to give away their “best” stuff for free. I see Bloggers slaving away for years trying to establish an audience and when I suggest to them that they write an eBook and give it away for free as a bribe, they say something along the lines of “No, I’m going to wait until I build an audience first, then I’m going to sell my eBook to it.”

Yeah, well good luck with that.

The other thing I hear people saying is “If I give away my content for free, then nobody will ever want to pay for my stuff in the future.”

That is a pile of crap. It is totally not true.

But, here is the good news. 99.999% of Internet Marketers out there will always think this way, so the great news is that there is very little competition for YOU!

Don’t be an idiot. If you don’t have an audience right now, start building it today by giving away something for free.

In the long run, it will make you a pile of money.

Rule #3 of Making Money Online …. Most free stuff on the net is crap.

This is an important one. Remember, when I originally wrote my eBook, I wrote it thinking that I was going to make thousands or tens of thousands of dollars selling it. So I treated it like a ten-thousand dollar project. I didn’t just slap it together in 15 minutes.

I put so much energy into the eBook that if somebody paid me $30 for it, I would still think they got a great deal out of it.

To me, that eBook was worth at least $30/copy. And then I gave that away for free.

The mistake a lot of people make when creating a “Free” eBook or report to give away on their Blog is that they treat it as a “Free” eBook.

Meaning, they slap it together thinking “Who cares, people aren’t paying for this so why should I bother making it good?“

This is the wrong mindset to have. You want to create your “Free” bribe/eBook as if you’re writing an eBook that people would gladly pay $30 for, and THEN give that away for Free.

That is what will impress people and get you a growing audience FAST.

Differentiate yourself from everyone else out there by creating something of value, that you would have zero hesitation charging for, and then give it away for free.

Categories
Search Engine Optimization

The Importance of SEO

One of my goals for 2010 was to learn to do SEO on my sites.

Throughout the year I’ve invested close to about $10,000 into courses, software, testing and outsource salaries to learn and test various search engine optimization strategies.

More and more now I’m getting people asking me about SEO tips for their websites, especially from regular brick-n-mortar business owners who want to get their sites ranked ahead of the competition.

Why SEO is Important

In the “real” world, retail business owners know that one of the most important aspects of opening a successful retail business is location.

A half-decently ran business in a prime location will outperform a perfectly ran operation in the wrong location.

Why is that?

Well, the reason for it is because the right retail location will get you a lot of customer traffic. Even if your product or service isn’t perfect, if your location gets enough targeted traffic, your business will do better than a business with a better product or service in the wrong location.

In the online world, location is also everything.

The location you want to be is on the first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing for targetted keywords.

What most people don’t realize is that 99% of people never go past the first page of search results listings when searching for a keyword.

Meaning, if someone searches for “keyword” in Google, they will only pay attention to the first 10 results.

So if your business is listed as #57 for that keyword term, that is completely useless. Nobody will find you there.

Search engine listings are NOT like the Yellow Pages. Simply being “on the list” is not good enough. You must be in the Top 10. If you’re not in the Top 10, you’re invisible.

When I do consulting for businesses, one of the biggest mistakes I see almost all of them making is that they try to rank for 1,000′s of keywords at the same time.

When I run a report for them, they might have a keyword profile that looks like something like this:

They may rank in the Top 100 or Top 50 for dozens and dozens of keywords and they’re proud of it, totally unaware that a keyword profile like that is totally USELESS for their business.

The reason why is because here is the amount of traffic they get for those keywords:

Do you see what I mean? It doesn’t matter if you’re in the Top 100 for a BILLION keywords, if none of them are getting you any traffic then that is totally useless.

Instead, if that company focused their SEO efforts on just ONE keyword that gets a decent amount of traffic and then got in the TOP 10 for that keyword, they would actually get some traffic!

The same thing is true for Blogs.

As a Blogger, to build your traffic, you shouldn’t try to rank in the Top 100 for 1,000 different keyword terms. You should try to rank in the TOP 10 for just a handful of keywords. Start with ONE and when you’re in the TOP 10 for one keyword, expand out to the next one.

That’s how I’ve built the traffic on this Blog to over 22,000 visitors per month.

The Challenge with SEO

After learning the ins and outs of SEO for over a year now, I have discovered that there are a few challenges with SEO.

First of all, SEO is not something that is easy to grasp for the average person, especially if you don’t have a technical background.

I consider myself a pretty sharp guy when it comes to technology, and even for me understanding SEO is not easy. There are a LOT of moving parts that need to fit together to produce a result.

After a year of messing around SEO I feel like I am finally getting a good grasp on SEO techniques. I’m able to build a site and get it ranked for some pretty competitive keywords within about 6 months of launch. If the site is on a domain that has some history, I can produce results even faster.

However, there is a LOT of work involved in producing results, especially since everything I do is based on “White Hat” techniques. I don’t do any kind of Black Hat SEO or anything even remotely “shady” as the sites that I work on cannot afford to take any chances in getting banned by Google. Everything has to be perfectly “Google Friendly” or I don’t do it.

Because of this, I have to have very strict standards for what I do and how I do it. Very little of what I do can be outsourced to “cheap” outsource workers as many of them follow “spammy” SEO strategies which I won’t do.

A proper SEO strategy is not really that difficult, once you know what you’re doing, but it does require creative thinking and is very time/labor intensive.

However, if properly executed, a proper SEO strategy can get your website ranked in the TOP 10, and possibly even in the TOP 3 for a highly traffic’d keyword and your traffic can literally explode overnight.

I have done this for a few consulting clients over the last 6 months and they have had some incredible results which produced tangible gains to their bottom line. However, to hire me to do this you for you a minimum budget of around $3,000 – $5,000/month is required and you will need to give it at least 3-6 months to see results.

Once you see the results, I guarantee they will be well worth the investment for your business, but not everyone has that kind of money to invest up-front. Especially since there is no guarantee if you’ll see results in one month or six.

So, is there a better way for small businesses or even Bloggers?

Well, for about 3-4 months now I’ve been testing out a new service that promises something no other SEO firm out there offers – not even me if you hire me. 🙂

SEO Service takes a totally different approach to SEO services. Instead of a person paying for SEO services up-front and then hoping to see results a few weeks or months later, SEO Service only charges you a fee once they produce results.

Meaning, only once you rank for your chosen keywords do they charge you their fees. If they can’t get you ranked for the first three months, you pay nothing.

There are no setup fees either, in case you’re thinking that there is a catch.

I must admit that when I first heard of SEO Service I was highly skeptical. Their model seemed too good to be true. Meaning, they are taking all the risk and the prices they are quoting for keyword rankings are NOT very expensive.
How SEO Service Works

Let me show you guys how they work.

I’ll use this Blog as an example. The first thing we do is go to their website. Once we arrive there we are greeted with this prompt:

Once you enter in your website, it will ask you for the first keyword you.

Once you type in your keyword the software runs some real-time calculations and it will tell you exactly how long it will take to rank for that keyword. Here’s my report:

So, as you can see if I wanted to rank for the keyword on this Blog, those are the monthly fees I would have to pay only once I am ranked.

If after month 1 I was ranked #123, I would still pay nothing, even though they would be working on doing SEO optimization for my site for that keyword.

If fact, even if after five months of SEO optimization they were still unable to rank my site for that keyword, I would still pay nothing.

It is only once I got I start to pay.

So basically, until they produce results, you don’t have to pay anything.

Another thing that’s pretty cool about their software is that when you type in a keyword like “personalized coffee mugs”, their software automatically gives you suggestions for other keywords as well.

For example, here they are suggesting I go with “customized coffee mugs” which gets 27,010 searches per month as compared to “personalized coffee mugs” which only gets 9,900 searches.

Now, here’s a very important point.

Pretty soon you have a million websites using the term on their websites because they see all their competitors doing the same thing, and not realizing that their customers don’t refer to that product by that name.

It’s the classic case of the blind leading the blind. Or in this case, the blind copying the blind who also copied the blind.

As I said, SEO is not easy to understand, because a lot of it is based on understanding human psychology combined with technology.

I have spent several hours trying to explain this one single concept to a client before and they weren’t really grasping the concept. They couldn’t understand why a keyword with LESS traffic would be more expensive. 🙂

Anyway, the point here is that when you are picking your keyword through SEO Service, look through the suggestions they give you and get quotes on the different keyword before choosing which keyword you want to focus on.

Don’t assume that just because a keyword is getting more traffic, that it will be more expensive. There are plenty of keywords out there that get very little traffic and cost a lot of money, while other keywords get a lot of high quality traffic, but have very little competition for some reason and you can get them for a much cheaper price.

What Happens Next

Once you choose your keyword(s) that you would like SEO Service to start working on for you, simply click the “GO” button beside your domain. You will be taken to a page where you create your account. Once you create an account SEO Service will go through and approve your website / keyword within about 24hours (or less).

Don’t worry too much about the approval process, it’s easy to get approved. I think they just do a manual approval to make sure you’re choosing an appropriate keyword, and that you haven’t spelled something wrong or that you haven’t chosen a keyword that’s totally inappropriate for your website.

Once you are approved, they go to work and you sit back and wait for results.

It really IS that easy.

I was quite surprised by this, because it seems too good to be true, but it’s not.

So far I’ve tested them on four different websites with four different keywords and they are starting to produce results. For one very competitive keyword that gets a lot of traffic, they have been able to place me #22 on Google for it so far. This is with zero work on my side, and it’s for a keyword that this website had no previous ranking for.

I specifically chose that keyword on purpose to test them out. I picked a really hard, high traffic keyword for them to go after, because I wanted to see if they can deliver before I recommend them to other people.

So far I haven’t been disappointed.

Is There a Catch?

There is no catch to using their service. There are a few things to keep in mind though.

Firstly, they ask for a six-month commitment to see results. Don’t expect them to produce results overnight. That goes for any kind of SEO work. This is one of those “set it and forget it” type of services. Of course you can monitor your progress in your account with them, but you shouldn’t expect to see any real progress in the first few months. You may see results right away, but don’t be disappointed if you don’t.

They may take the entire 5-6 month time frame to get you ranked in the Top 10. Of course, until they produce results you don’t have to pay so it’s not that big of a risk.

Secondly, don’t pick a low traffic keyword if you can get high traffic keyword for the same or even lower price. Use your brain a little. If you can get ranked for “keyword x” which gets 10,000 searches/month and costs $200/m for the Top 3 spot, OR you can get ranked for “keyword y” which gets 350,000 searches/month and costs $220/m for the Top 3 spot – go for Keyword Y! You’ll potentially get 35 times as much traffic for just a few dollars more.

It’s better to go after one or a few high traffic keywords than a whole bunch of low traffic keywords. This is not the time to pick a super specific “long tail” keyword.

Thirdly, one final thing that I think is pretty cool about their services. Once you get ranked in the Top 10, such as for example in the #8 spot – let’s say that you no longer want them to spend their energy trying to get you ranked above that. Such as for example if the #1-#7 spots are taken up by very popular websites which you can’t possibly compete with.

In such a case, you can set that specific keyword into mode, where you pay 50% of the monthly pricing to keep it there. They no longer do any SEO optimization for that keyword, but they might not need to in order to keep you in the #8 spot for example. So in this way you could save yourself some money once you are ranked.

Of course if all of a sudden you drop down to the #12 spot and you want them to do some more SEO to get you back in the TOP 10, you can do that and the price goes back up to regular until you switch the keyword back into maintenance mode.