Better Me Self

Over the past weekend, I took an annual camping trip up to Maine (it was exciting. It’s the first real vacation I’ve taken without my parents or other adults around, and it was nice to finally have a voice in what happened.)

As this was the first time I’ve camped by myself, I had a lot to learn. From the start, I realized how much went into the trip. Booking the campground, planning how much to bring, how much gas will cost (and how much time it will take to get there, no one wants to set up in the dark) as well as plan what we were going to do and eat when we were there.

The first thing I learned to save money was to shop right. Upon arriving and setting up, we were HUNGRY, so we headed out to a Hannafords right down the road (thank you, GPS)

This was a relatively good experience, except for the people we were with wanted A LOT. We spent $105 split between 4 people, and got tons of food we didn’t need. Next time, I’m going to stick to the essentials.

We used a bit of meat. Probably around 6 lbs of chicken (over 3 mornings, 2 nights) and around the same amount of ground beef. We used tons of vegetables, and made a stir fry one night, and some other great recipes (apparently, I’ll be posting them soon ) that were easy to cook around the campfire.

Besides the Meat and vegetables, we needed very little. We bought things for grinders (saved us a ton, way better than buying $4 fries somewhere else.) and random breakfast items (dozen eggs, ham and bacon, canned potatoes)

Now, back at the campsite, first thing we did was head up to the campsite store, where they sold highly marked up goods and where you had to buy the wood to start your fire (Maine won’t let you bring any wood of you own in)

Wood was $6 a bundle (we needed 5 for the weekend), so there was a necessary $30 cost.

We started up the fire, and use the pots and pans we brought. One of the things we learned was, the smaller the fire, the better the items would cook, so what we ended up doing was starting the fire, then letting it die down, and then start cooking. Nothing ever burnt, and it tasted better than anything we cooked at home.

Another great way to cook food was to wrap it up in tin foil (at LEAST two layers). This cooked chicken, vegetables, and would probably cook basically anything else you wanted as well. It worked awesome. The chicken we cooked was some of the best I’ve ever had.

To camp better next time, I’d use the following tips:

Pack Light – You really don’t need that much. Just enough. Make sure you’re not going out to stores to buy everything that you didn’t bring, though.

Eat Good – There is no reason you shouldn’t eat good while you’re camping. Wrap meat up in tinfoil, and throw it in the coals for a half hour, and you’ve got a great meal. Throw corn in with it, and it’ll taste great too.

Tailor your fire – Don’t have a 3 foot tall fire if you’re making scrambled eggs, and don’t try to boil water over coals. Tailor your fire and you’ll have an easier time.

Live Simple – Leave the laptop at home. Leave the cell phone in your car. You don’t need these things to have a good time, and it can be great to disconnect for a while.

Most of all, have fun. Enjoy yourself while you’re out there, because you may not have the chance again for a while.

I recently posted on Controlling your hobbies, and briefly explained that with enough dedication and hard-work, your hobbies could easily make you money, the trick is finding out how to monetize them.

My three hobbies are simple. Cooking, Fishing, and basically doing anything related to the computer, and I could easily monetize all three.

Cooking? Simple. I cook teach people how to cook, or I could become a personal chef. Am I good enough for either of these to really work? Not really. But with more work, it could definitely happen.

Fishing? There are fishing derbys all the times here, so with enough experience, I’m sure I could win some, netting me some fame and a bit of cash. I could also teach others how to be a good fishermen, and make money off that as well. Am I at that stage now? No. Will I ever be there? Probably not, because it’s not a goal of mine. But if I wanted it to happen, it could, it just takes time.

And last, and probably the easiest, making money off the computer. I KNOW you can make money on the computer, because I’ve personally done it before. ($10 check coming my way, YES!) It’s not a lot of money, but it is a slope that is trending upwards. With as little as a 25% growth per month, I’d be making $30. 6 more months? Over $100. And thats only with a relatively small growth, and starting out at basically nothing.

Now, think of this. If I develop two or three more business that can have the same uptrend, I’ve multiplied my earnings.

Now, those are my hobbies, and honestly, I’m sure there are not to many people out there who have the same hobbies, and those that do, have different experiences than me, making me unique, and having a skillset that no one else has.

And you, you’re unique too.

Think of one hobby. Just one. Now think. How can I turn this into a business? How can I profit from doing something I love?

It’s relatively simple. You don’t have to be better than everyone else at it, either. Be good enough, and market the hell out of yourself? Don’t know how to market? Don’t worry, neither did I when I started, but I’m getting there, and will constantly improve.

Now, think of how to market whatever you’re doing. Say you want to be paid to sky-dive, (Yeah yeah, it’s something I have dreamed about for a while now, and after my first jump two weeks ago, I want it more now than ever before), whats the first step?

First off, get good at what you’re doing. Skydiving? The only way to do it is practice.

Second, would be to market yourself to a local skydiving site. Show them what you can do, all that you’ve practiced, and you’ll have a good shot at it.

Third, and probably most important, is to make yourself different. It’s simple. People are stupid (sorry) but we really are. We buy things we don’t need, we don’t buy things we do, and are persuaded by dumb things. Think about it. When the Superbowl comes up on the television, why do so many people watch it? It’s not because of the football. People LOVE the stupid commercials. And they talk about them for the next week or two. Everyone remembers the funniest commercial, but half the people who saw it probably don’t remember what product the commercial was about.

Make yourself different, and you’ll get noticed. People will look specifically for YOU!

These simple tactics:

Work Hard
Love What You Do
Make Yourself Different
Get Lucky

Will work on ANYTHING you try. Don’t believe me? That’s because you’re not doing it.

Blend in with the crowd, and you’ll become the crowd. And that’s something you definitely do not want. Unless, you like your boss telling you when you’re going to work and listening to everything he has to say. If that’s the case, you’re doing great!

Over the past week, I did something that most people consider a stupid move.

With a baby 3 months from being born, I made the move to part-time, and cut our total household income in half. Now, along with my boss, my co-workers, and family, you must be wondering, why the hell would I do this?

Simple. I wanted to better my self, live my dreams, and live happy.

The risks in this are pretty extreme, I know, but I’ve got a plan, I didn’t just decide I didn’t want to work as much randomly.

First off, I’m dropping from 40 hours to 18, and will gain about 6 more hours per night. I plan to invest these 6 hours heavily into this blog, and into other ideas that I’m working on, and hopefully, turn a profit. It’s a dream, but it’s something I believe could be attainable.

I’ve set a goal for this. I’m cutting my income in half, so by JANUARY, I need to find a way to make up my lost wages, totalling about $1200 per month. Hear that folks? In 4-5 months time, I WILL be making $1200 (or more!) per month in an online business, or I will be FORCED to go back to work full-time, UGH!

But really, why am I doing all of this? I’ve got a good job, and it makes absolutely no financial sense to take this risk.

Because to me, it’s Worth the money.

The benefit of an extra 6 hours per day is immense. It’s nearly a quarter of my work week back in my minds, and that’s something I absolutely love. I have a bit in savings, and the savings will continue to grow, just at a slower rate now, so I’m not worried about the financial aspect a bit. And finally, I’m going to have the time to make my dreams come true.

For the past few months, I’ve been struggling. Making the switch from a high school student to a full-time worker was tough, and to be honest, I hated it, and if I can avoid it, it’s something I never want to do again.

I hate working to make the CEO rich, while I pinch pennies. But yet, I really don’t have any desire to be the guy in charge. I want to be comfortable, free, and happy. I hated leaving my girlfriend for 11 hours at a time. And most of all, I really don’t enjoy the work I do anymore.

So no more. I’ve laid out my goal ($1200 per month, in the next 4-5 months) and I plan to meet it.

Have you ever felt like you seem to always find a new hobby to do? Think your hobby is to find new hobbies? Well, that has to change.

Nowadays, it seems more and more people don’t really have a true hobby, so they’ll keep adding more. Doesn’t seem so bad, but for each hobby you have, you have to think of all the costs associated with it.

My main three hobbies are cooking, fishing, and using the computer. While these have had some start-up costs, the maintenance has been relatively low.

Cooking has probably cost me the least. I’ve spent $20 on an Electric Wok, and have inherited most of the other items from my family. While you could argue that the food could be added to the cost of the food, food is a pretty essential item, and I’d have to pay for it regardless.

Fishing is great. For one, it gets me outdoors, and along with the fact of getting a fish I can take home every once in a while, it gives me some bonding time with friends, as well as something to talk about with the guys at work. It’s a great hobby, and helps me in more than one way. The start up cost for this was kind of expensive. I had to buy a fishing rod, a tackle box, and some bait, as well as a $35 fishing license once per year. This cost me around $80 my first year, and will probably be around $50 from here on out, and I’d say I spend well over 50 hours a year fishing, so for less than $1 an hour, fishing is a great (and cheap) hobby.

And the computer. I’ve sunk more into my computers than literally any other item in my life. I’ve got a top of the line laptop (a year old now, and a huge regret. WHAT was I thinking spending $1750 on a laptop???) and a great, hand-built desktop that cost me around $800 with a monitor. (That’s $2550, for those keeping count.)

First of all, that’s more than I spent on my first car, and this was ALL while I was making around $150 a week (with relatively low expenses.) Now, that’s a lot of cash, probably about half a years worth after I spent money on gas and food. Looking back, it was an absolutely foolish decision. I actually skimped on some parts for the desktop, so it’s fading, and my “high-end” laptops hard drive is breaking, and the battery is already broken, and it’s only been a year.

BUT, while I could’ve fueled my computing fire a bit cheaper, they WERE a great investment. The computer I was using was SLOW. It was OLD, and really, it took me literally, about 10 times as long to do anything. All the time I’ve saved over the year or so since I’ve built my computer has been more than worth it, and as I plan on using the computer to work from home eventually, it was more than worth the investment (and besides, it feels WAY better)

So how exactly do you limit yourself?

Try new things
Don’t limit yourself to one thing. Find out what you like before investing a bunch of money in it. Try it out a few times, and if it’s not worth it to you, then never do it again. If you like it, great, stick with it, who knows, it may pay your bills someday .

Love what you do
If you don’t like what you’re doing, then why do it at all? There is more than one way to carry out any given task, and to do it in a way that’s not enjoyable simply isn’t worth it.

Limit your hobbies
As well as the fewer start-up costs and maintenance costs, you’re doing fewer things. This mean you’ll spend more time on each task, gaining more experience, and becoming skilled in each thing you do. And when you’re limited to just a few things, you’re much more dedicated.

Limit your hobbies, save a small fortune, and love what do.

Since starting this blog, I feel I’ve learned a lot. I’ve joined the Millionaire Club, the Yakezie Alexa Ranking Challenge (and significantly lowered my Alexa rank. 12 million to 2 million in a month! It’s progress!) and have read more e-books than I’d like to admit.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned? Stop wasting time!

Everyone does it, it’s a hard thing not to do. I do it all the time, and try extremely hard to get motivated to do ANYTHING sometimes. And then sometimes, I’ll get extremely motivated and do more work than I’ve done in the past three days.

A good tool I’ve used to keep my time-wasting in check is Chrome Nanny. It’s an extension for Google Chrome that I can set to block a website (or websites), after I’ve been on them for a certain amount of time each day, or block them during certain parts of the day, so it’s easier to stay focused. It’s working good, but it almost seems like instead of surfing Facebook, I’ve found other sites to waste time on. Not exactly a good trade-off. As I refine the settings and sites it blocks in the next few days, I’m sure I’ll have it helping out more

After I block all the websites, the biggest obstacle is getting started, and more importantly, getting started on the right things.

I always feel as if I’m doing “research”, and while it’s definitely a good thing, a better thing would be to actually take ACTION and write a post, email a fellow blogger, or otherwise make real progress in improving my status, instead of just reading about it.

What do you waste your time on? What are the things you should be doing, but are not? Sound off in the comments.

Another milestone down here.

I recently wrote my first guest post, and I’m very satisfied with how it turned out.

It brought me a few new visitors (a few, but it’s progress) and it has also introduced me to some new blogs I will be guest posting on in the near future.

The article is here:

Until reading this post by fellow blogger Ryan over at Planting Dollars, I had never really thought of it. A lot of money to me is not a lot of money to the man who makes a $100,000 a year, and in turn, a lot of money to him is probably not that much to Warren Buffet. It’s all a matter of perception.

If you think a million dollars isn’t a lot, then you will see it as an easily attainable goal, and will probably reach it far easier than the guy who thinks a millions dollars is something he will only see in his dreams. Change your perception, vastly increase your potential.

So how exactly do you change your perception? A good way is to change your environment. In Bel-Air, $100,000 a year probably wouldn’t be considered a lot of money, while in a rural town in New Hampshire, a very select few make that much. (I know, I live here.)

But what if you based your perception on your family, and how well they’re doing? What if you’re living up to your father’s shadow, and feel you’ll never make it.

My tip? Stop Comparing

Really. It doesn’t do you a service to compare yourselves to others. Are you happy with what you have? Or are you upset because your neighbor has more?

Instead of using the knowledge that others are better, and the things they have are impossible to reach, use it as motivation. “They can do it, why can’t I?”

Never feel inferior, because no matter what you have, you’re always going to have less than most, and more than some. It will never change, and unless you come up with the next google, it will never be any different from that.

What you CAN do is be happy with what you have, but always, always improve your situation. You may never have a multi-million dollar mansion, but you don’t need “a lot” right? You just need enough. Everything is good in moderation.

Over the past week or so, I’ve made a Twitter account, and have set forth on trying to figure out the best way to make it a tool for this blog.

There are so many aspects that go into this though. Really, what is the best way to use Twitter to gain a following? And when I say following, I’m talking about something different from the amount of followers you have. I want a following, a group of people who care about what I say, and aren’t just following me so I’ll follow them back.

Should I get a ton of people to follow me, even though most will not know the brand, or respond to my tweets?

Or should I let the Twitter sit, and gain hardly any followers, but have them all be people interested in this blog?

I’ve come to somewhat of a compromise, I suppose. For now, as a beginning blogger and someone who is trying to get exposed, I’m going to use Twitter to fuel my blog, getting a lot of followers and hoping that a small percentage of them will tweet back, or even visit the blog. That is the hope anyways. If this doesn’t work out, then there is always the alternative.

Later, if this blog becomes somewhat of a success, I’ll stop attempting to get followers altogether, and let my blog do the talking instead.

This seems like a valid compromise to me, and I’m hoping it will pan out in the future.

What are your methods for getting a laser targeted Twitter audience?

If you haven’t yet read my introduction to Niche Blitzkrieg, please read it here

Day 1

I just purchased the product, which meant I was off to work. It was late at night (bad idea), so I knew I was going to be up for a while, which was alright with me.

First things first, I slowly skimmed the first couple of pages, and kind’ve went (I KNEW IT!) when it tried to sell me more items. The first item it sold me (Bad *ss RSS Tool) is not something I recommend. Why? Only because it’s outdated, and a lot of the places it submits to do not seem to work. I looked up a couple reviews on the product, and heard the same thing. But hell, it was only a dollar, so I guess it was alright, and it did help a little bit, just not as much as it could’ve.

One of the first lessons was to “test the waters”. Find your niche, and build on it. After following a few of his steps, I threw up some quick pages to test the waters.

Now, none of these really did what I hoped they’d do. The RSS tool shows pages in the first or second page within an hour, and after two days, I only found 1 on google, and it was on page 4. Not bad, I guess, but not what I was expecting still.

This took me a few hours to do (well, thats me, if you dedicated yourself to only this, you could do it in less than a half an hour, I’m sure)

So, with a little bit of a lack of confidence, I headed to the forums, to try to see what others had to say about my problems…

They required me to register, and upon doing so, activate your registration. Fine, it’s not like it’s something I haven’t done a million times before. But for one of the first times, it actually didn’t work.

The forums (and support) that I’m essentially paying for, didn’t work. This irritated me beyond belief. So I opened a support ticket, stated my problem pretty clearly, and hoped for the best. (It sucks for him, but since I read the great reviews, I was kind of expecting quite a bit. If I wasn’t expecting as much, it probably wouldn’t be as bad.)

And this summarizes my first day with Niche Blitzkrieg. In the next post, I will go into more detail about how the rest of the program worked for me, and how the support actually is.

For more on my opinion of Niche Blitzkrieg, read Niche Blitzkrieg: Week 1

I’ve been contemplating this for several days now, and will probably continue to do so until I either buy the product, or find something new to obsess over.

These products are very run of the mill. Basic information entered into a PDF or videos and sold for much more than their worth. The worst part? Most of the information could be found easily on the web, sometimes even on the persons own blog! How’s that for screwing you over? (To be fair, Trent, over at TheSimpleDollar does this exact thing in a fair and honest way.)

But this is different. I haven’t heard one complaint as of yet, and people are not saying they have quit their jobs within a week to pursue this full time. They have to work, and don’t make much at first, but it’s all about POTENTIAL.

The potential is there, and they can see their efforts being multiplied in the near future, and being able to work from home. Work from home? Oh hell yeah. As you may know, working from home is a dream, so any mention of it gets me rather excited, but when I see reviews all over the web saying it’s possible, it’s hard to control the urge to buy everything and make my dream a reality.

But I guess I’m probably getting ahead of myself here. What is “Niche Blitzkrieg”?

Blitzkrieg literally means “Lightning War”, so Niche Blitzkrieg is a lightning fast way to find niche groups and capitalize on them, putting the money directly into your pocket.

Every review I’ve read on it has been a positive one, citing the great customer service as one of the best things about it.

So, I finally bit the bullet. $4.95 to start, with the remaining balance to be paid after my 7 day trial is over.

That’s not to bad, I suppose. I’ll probably stick with it for the hell of it.

To read my initial thoughts on the program, please read Niche Blitzkrieg: Day 1