How does a man become successful?
There are many different ways that a man’s success is measured by today’s society. Some are considered successful if they make millions of dollars. Others are considered successful if they gain financial freedom by leaving Corporate America yet still manage to take care of their family. The latter is the type of success that I think is the most important for a man to strive to achieve, and here’s why.
Money can buy you all types of material possessions. Sixty-inch flat panel televisions. High-wattage entertainment systems. And luxury cars, such as a $100,000 Mercedes Benz. Of course, working toward this materialism comes at a high price. It takes time away from your family, requiring you to work over 70 hours a week and miss family functions, not attend your children’s graduations or school events, not spend time with your lovely wife, and not getting any personal time. In other words, it can subtract from your quality of life and ruin the happiness in your home. You have to work many stressful hours in order to pay for all this junk, or otherwise, the bill collectors will come knocking your doors down in the middle of the night and drag you out by your toes.
So how do you go about achieving the type of success that I mentioned?
Forget just seeking a niche; help others with what you know
Many people will tell you to start a business by finding a niche and then marketing it to the right people. At first this seems like great advice. In my experience, it’s the lousiest advice I’ve ever heard. It’s like telling someone who wants to learn how to golf to just go out to the greens and practice until they find the proper way to position their body and swing the club.
Instead, do as I do, and help others with what you know. Anyone who really wants to learn a certain thing, regardless of what it is, will find a person who has experience in what they want to learn and knows how to teach it. My areas of expertise are fitness, business and social improvement skills. Instead of looking for a hot money-maker and the fastest growing niche, I went with what I was good at so that I could provide some real useful information that would actually help people, and earn income while helping and doing something I enjoy.
Don’t believe the books, so-called gurus and wish pamphlets
So-called gurus are usually the ones who will write a book with a flashy title, such as “How To Start A Successful Home-based Business” and “How To Blog Your Way To Over $4o,ooo Per Month. ” They all promise you the secret to making truckloads of money overnight while working only a few hours a week, which I say is complete B.S.
Now don’t get me wrong when I say B.S., because I’m what you call the biggest fan of doing business over the internet, and I do think that blogging can make you a modest income if done right. It’s just that many of these bloggers who say they are making all this money per month are completely full of it. Instead of actually telling you how to make money, they will tell you convincing stories of how they went from zero to sixty in growing and turning their blog into a real money machine virtually overnight.
One blogger who is famous due to his scummy self-promotions is a perfect example of the type of B.S. that I’m talking about. Every day this blogger writes a post or has a guest post promoting some type of affiliate program or list-building service that promises more traffic and income to your blog. At first, it seems awful nice of him to be putting so much time and effort into offering you all this amazing free advice so that you can have the same financially successful life he does. Here’s what he doesn’t tell you, though. He gets a nice little bonus for each person who signs up. Every month, while you’re making pennies on the dollar, he’s getting kickbacks from the affiliate money you earn. He knows that you will get frustrated when you realize that you won’t get even close to the amount that he promises…so what does he do?
Simply creates videos bragging about the places where he eats and how fancy his car is. This is to give you false hope, just like the old Amway reps used to do in order to get you to buy their business opportunity and get into their multi-level marketing scams. Amway would have little home-based parties designed to convince a bunch of poor souls who were looking for a way out of their lousy jobs or unemployment to buy the rights to sell their inferior products. They’d feed off your desperation by seducing you with a booklet of photos that showed people sailing on million dollar yachts, living in skyscraper-sized mansions and driving fancy cars so you’d believe you had a chance of owning the same luxuries. Meanwhile, they’d do nothing but take your money. This blogger uses the same tactic that these Amway representatives did, with one difference.
Instead of having home parties, these so-called gurus have huge seminars where they say there will be other gurus whom you can’t miss listening since they have all the answers you’ve been looking for. Hundreds of people will show up, paying large amounts for the tickets just to hear this rehashed information. Some gurus will even offer you free tickets just to get you there, because then the guru can pretend to be your friend and sell you all kinds of programs and false promises down the road, which end up costing you hundreds of dollars.
These get-rich-quick blogging gurus never tell you that they don’t earn most of their cash by blogging. Instead, the money for their fancy cars comes from giving a bunch of nonsense seminars, selling hyped up affiliate programs and courses, selling e-books with rehashed information, and showing wish books with rich people.
The internet has allowed these guys to advertise these events online now on a global scale, reaching far more poor souls than ever before. And, unlike Amway, they don’t have to sell you tapes, books and other materials in print anymore. Now they can just show videos online, sell e-books and drive cars right on their websites.
How to really make money online
Before you can make any money online, it’s important that you have a realistic mindset of what it really takes to make it in any type of business. You have to look at starting a blog as you would any other business.
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- Consider what you are good at, and be able to teach others in a way that they can understand. If you genuinely help people solve problems, people will see that you’re knowledgeable about what you teach and come to you for help. By finding random niches just because they are a fast growing segment of the market, you may not know much about it and will need to learn from scratch. People want experts when they are learning, so it could greatly impact your business when people find out that you’re just starting out in the field.
- Put your readers first by giving them useful information instead of putting out crappy articles, something that I see all the time. Many bloggers will post every day in order to increase traffic and have people click on their affiliate link so they can earn income – but the quality of your articles suffer, so this strategy only works until people start to see through you. Instead, give people great information and put some effort into creating it so that you can build up a solid reputation that will give you longevity in the business.
