AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Ways To Escape The Rat Race

What are the ways to escape the rat race?

Rat race (noun, an Americanism dating back to 1935-1940):

“any exhausting, unremitting, and usually competitive activity or routine, especially a pressured urban working life spent trying to get ahead with little time left for leisure, contemplation, etc.” (Dictionary.com)

If you’re fed up working your job, commuting for hours or dealing with your nightmare boss, it might be time to escape the rat race! But how? If you need your employment income to live, you’ll need to somehow replace it, or reduce your outgoings, or both. There’s various ways you can earn an income which can, over time replace your employment salary completely. Here’s a few ideas:

Build a property portfolio and rent – you’ll typically need a few properties to replicate a full time employment income
Start an online business – anyone can build an income online through selling other people’s products and services (drop shipping/affiliate marketing)
Invest in income producing assets – dividend shares
Rent out a spare room ( if you have one)
Get a buy to let property, bed and breakfast or run an AirBNB business

Of course all of these ideas require investment of some kind, especially if you want to purchase a property. An online business is probably the cheapest option.

Ways To Escape The Rat Race: Other Ideas

There are of course other ways to escape the rat race. You can switch careers, change jobs or start a business of your own. Consider what you would be doing with your time without the need for a job. Another option is to build a portfolio income from a number of part time jobs or small businesses.

The best way to escape the rat race is to completely replace your income. But this will take some investment and time. Here’s a few strategies which will help you relieve the pressure, free up cash and unburden you from the rat race.

Stop Spending

One of the quickest ways to unburden yourself from financial pressure is to downsize. Can you change your home or car? Stop spending on needless items, quit drinking and/smoking and free up cash which can be saved and used for investments. What direct debits are you currently paying which you could do without? Can you sell things you don’t use?

Pay Yourself First

Paying yourself first is a strategy used by the financially well off. Most people pay all their bills first and spend what’s left. The wealthy know to escape the trap of needing to constantly trade time for money, they need to create savings and invest in income producing assets. You can’t do this without money! Paying yourself first means to set up an automatic payment from your wages as soon as they come in. Let this become a normal event and the money will build up in a savings account. This has a two fold effect:

You learn to live on less – building a good habit for the future
You build a savings account which can be used for business/investments and which earns interest.

Your Latte Factor

David Bach talks about your “latte factor” in his book The Automatic Millionaire. The Latte Factor refers to those things you purchase on a daily or weekly basis, which although seem like small purchases add up over the year; such as a daily latte (coffee). If you spend $5 on a latte and $2 on a biscuit every day for a year you will have spent $2555 over the year.

Knowing how your little spendings effects your overall outgoings can allow you to save money where you didn’t know you were spending.

Stop Acting Rich

In Thomas Stanley’s book Stop Acting Rich, he points out that those who live in rich neighbourhoods typically spend more. That’s because there’s an influence from the people around you. If the “Jones’s” have a new car, you buy a new car to keep up! When you stop acting rich you free up a lot of money.

So if you have an expensive watch and/or a performance car and so on, you’re wasting money which could be giving you more investments and more freedom. There’s a saying in Texas “big hat no cattle” and a similar one in the UK which says “all mouth no trousers”. It simply means to show a persona of yourself which is different to the reality. The fancy car and expensive watch are props for your self image. Are you holding up your projected image to show off?

Ways To Escape The Rat Race – Do What You Love

While a large income might be something you have achieved, it doesn’t necessarily go along with a happy and fulfilled life. Perhaps a simpler life is one which is more gratifying? Doing a job you love is one of the best ways to escape the rat race. So even if you don’t have the resources to buy property, invest in stocks and completely replace your current income, you can find other work which is more satisfying, downsize, sell assets and free up more time for the things you enjoy.

If you have an interest of some kind you could turn it into a business you love.

Online Mentoring Platform For Startups

An online mentoring platform for startups can give you the start you need with an online business. Whether you have products/services of your own or not, you can start an online business from scratch. Many people are looking for a way to earn online and don’t have any products or services of their own to sell.

In this situation, you can simply sell other people’s products and services with a business model called affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing lets you sell existing products and earn based on what you sell. Whatever business you decide on, you’ll definitely need to learn how to market your business. A business without customers is no business at all, and this is one of the most important elements of building a successful operation.

You can learn more about this business system and online mentoring platform here.

Online Mentoring Platform For Startups: What You’ll Learn

With so many people online one of the most important elements of building an online presence is marketing. Without marketing you can’t grow a business and you certainly can’t scale it. Marketing is to your business as the heart is to the body. Your marketing “pumps” your business with customers! Marketing is more than simply advertising. Marketing is every touchpoint between you and a potential customer. Therefore it’s important to get your marketing right if you want to attract the right customers.

Your branding is a big part of this. Branding is used to send a congruent message throughout your marketing message. Have you noticed how big companies such as CocaCola, Ford, Pepsi, McDonalds have a clear marketing brand which is congruent throughout their marketing? Their marketing message “becomes” their brand and people recognise this through their branding imagery and logos.

Online Mentoring Platform For Startups: Avatar

The online marketplace is absolutely saturated with other brands, messages, marketers and advertising. To find your customers online is much easier when you know who they are: this is known as the customer “avatar“. Your ideal customer is someone who will love what you have to offer and become a lifetime fan! But in order to filter out all of the other people who don’t want your services/product, you need to understand who to aim your marketing messages at. Otherwise you can waste a lot of time and of course marketing budget.

Getting to know your avatar is key to this concept. Where do they hang out? What do they read? What are they interested in? Once you have built up a clear picture of who you are trying to find, your life will get much easier. You’ll be able to place a clear marketing message in front of the right people who can benefit from your service/product.

Mindset Of An Entrepreneur

Building an online business requires a different mindset than working a steady job. If you bring an employee mindset to an entrepreneurial endeavour, there’s a good chance you’ll create more difficulties for yourself. That’s because an enterprise needs a different mindset for it to succeed. The technical “groundwork” of an employee is a different skillset to the purpose driven vision needed by an entrepreneur to get their ideas to take off and actually make a profit.

This is a difficult thing to learn unless you’re surrounded by other entrepreneurs, which unfortunately most people are not. The mindset required to stand out online as a digital entrepreneur will be taught as part of the curriculum of the program you can access here.

Scaling

Scaling a business can be tricky and you need to have everything in place before you take this step. Your marketing strategy should be profitable already before you start to increase your marketing budget and scale, as you can easily blow through a large budget with online marketing methods.

You also need to ensure that your business is running smoothly; that you can still have a life and won’t be inundated with too many tasks. Ideally get everything in place so that you can still have a life when you take this step. Automation and infrastructure should be in place to deal with more customers.

Ready to start? Access an online mentorship program to help you build your business here, even without any products/services of your own to sell.

Make Money Selling Digital Products

In today’s digital age, it’s easier than ever to make money by selling digital products. From e-books and online courses to stock photos and graphics, there are countless opportunities for entrepreneurs and creators to turn their passions and expertise into a profitable business.

One of the biggest benefits of selling digital products is that there are no overhead costs associated with manufacturing, storing, or shipping physical goods. This means that you can start your business with minimal investment and grow it at your own pace.

Make Money Selling Digital Products

Another advantage of selling digital products is that they can be easily scaled. Once you’ve created a product, you can sell it to an unlimited number of customers, which means that your potential revenue is practically limitless.

There are many ways to sell digital products, including:

Online marketplaces: Platforms like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, Udemy, and Shutterstock allow you to list and sell your digital products to a wide audience.
E-commerce platforms: You can also sell your digital products on your own website using an e-commerce platform like Shopify or WooCommerce.
Social media: Platforms like Instagram and YouTube are great places to market and sell your digital products.
Affiliate marketing: You can also make money by promoting other people’s digital products and earning a commission on each sale.

To be successful in selling digital products, it’s important to have a clear understanding of your target market and to create products that meet their needs. Additionally, it’s essential to have a strong marketing and promotion strategy in place to drive traffic to your products and increase sales.

Overall, selling digital products can be a great way to turn your passion and expertise into a profitable business. With the right approach and the right tools, you can easily create and sell digital products that will help you achieve your financial goals.

Make Money Selling Digital Products – No Products, No Problem

A key ingredient for success with digital products is to create/choose a product which people actually want. The downside to digital product creation is that creating your own products takes time and effort. After having creating a product you still need to sell it. It’s therefore much easier to choose products which are already selling, and promote them as an affiliate.

Affiliate products are everywhere online; anyone can join an affiliate program and sell almost anything online. Physical products are available too to sell. You’ve probably used Amazon, for example. Amazon has an affiliate program which anyone can join to sell thousands of products. Digital products can be found on sites such as Clickbank.com. Clickbank is a digital product “marketplace” where affiliates can find digital products which already exist in a number of categories.

You can find products in almost any area you could think of on Clickbank. From online piano courses to online business tools, from Yoga courses to building skills, Clickbank has a huge array of digital products you can choose from.

The Main Thing Is Selling

Even with an amazing product of your own to sell, the key is to actually sell! Without traffic to your website, even the best product in the world won’t make a single sale. Product owners learn many ways to generate traffic to their online sales pages and can choose from a number of promotion methods such as:

PPC – pay per click advertising using platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook, YouTube etc.
Organic traffic generation methods such as content creation, blogging etc.
Place your products on a site where affiliates can promote them for you, for a commission (Clickbank for example).
Social media marketing – both paid and unpaid methods
SEO – search engine optimisation can be used for free traffic.

To make money selling digital products you need to get a number of things right. Firstly you need a product which will sell. Since there’s thousands of products online already selling, it’s wise to choose something which is already marketable. Building digital products of your own is time consuming and you may not even sell once you’re finished. So the fastest way to make money from selling digital products is to learn affiliate marketing. Affiliates sell other people’s products online and earn commissions based on what they sell.

But if product creation is more your thing, you can partner with affiliates so that they make the sales on your behalf. You pay them a portion of the sale price, in exchange for doing the selling.

Learn more about selling digital products online with this short video course.

Make Your Own Website To Sell Stuff

Can you really make your own website to sell stuff from? Well, there are many free website building platforms which allow you to do this completely free. Weebly.com, Wix.com and WordPress.com (to name just three platforms) all offer this service completely free.

But once your website is up and running are you actually going to sell anything? That’s the big question. It’s easy building a website, but much harder to get people to come and visit it, and more difficult still selling something from your site. Why would anyone come and buy from you anyway and what do you have to sell?

Selling stuff from a website is tough, even if you have something great to sell. You still need to advertise your site, otherwise no one will know it is there!

Make Your Own Website To Sell Stuff – No Products To Sell? No Problem

If you already have a business to sell (or a product), or a service, you’re already way ahead of many. Your issue is then getting people to your website, you might want to skip to the next section if that’s you). A website is definitely a good idea if you have something to sell already, but what if you don’t?

No business or product to sell? That’s no problem because you can sell other people’s products. A clever business model known as affiliate marketing lets you list items from websites which you don’t even own. When you make a sale through your unique affiliate I.D. you earn a commission based on the sale.

Alternatively you could build a product specific website and sell something unique; sourcing your products as you sell them. But many people will simply go to eBay, or similar auction site to find such items. Why would they visit you?

Make Your Own Website To Sell Stuff – Marketing Your Site

As a newbie to affiliate marketing I thought I could throw up a website and suddenly people would flock to buy whatever I was selling. The truth was rather disappointing. Think of opening a garage in the middle of the desert, trying to sell petrol/gas and you’re somewhere near understanding how little people will care about your new shiny website.

And, even if they did find you, you then have the task of trying to sell them your product/service without actually having met them. With the competition online this is an unenviable task. Anyway, most people won’t buy from a website on their first visit, particularly from one which they are unfamiliar with. It takes several touch points before someone will buy from a website.

To get people to your site in the first place takes either paid marketing or effort in terms of content creation. Paid marketing is almost instant, but costly. You will likely lose money while testing it and trying to get the right people to your site. Blogging is a cheaper route. By creating content which attracts the right audience you can build massive traffic to your site over time. But this takes time and there’s a lot of competition online in almost every topic. See also paid marketing vs organic marketing.

Some Good News

But it’s not all doom and gloom. There’s some good news in this too. Having a website which sells is awesome and it’s worth keeping this in mind while you’re building your online empire! Imagine having a website which attracts thousands of visitors each day and many of them buying from you. Not only that, but imagine the products fulfilling themselves – not having to deal with any customers or deliveries, or even handle any products!

The business model of affiliate marketing is exactly that. Affiliates “partner” with companies who already sell products and services online. Amazon, for example is a popular website which also has an affiliate/partner program. Many people sell for Amazon and receive a “cut” when they make a sale. Amazon has a lot of products to choose from, but it doesn’t pay very well.

However, you can also promote other affiliate products which pay much better and which even pay recurring commissions. Recurring commission affiliate products are some of the best you can promote as an affiliate. They pay you recurring commissions for your referrals. So once you have sold a few, you get a nice, recurring payment every month – for the lifetime of the customer. So even with only a few sales you can build a good income up with these kinds of products.

Selling High Ticket Items

High ticket affiliate products are those which carry much larger price tags than the average product you might find on Amazon, for example. A high ticket sale can earn you at least $500 in commissions, just for a single sale. A few of those goes a long way, especially when you consider Amazon’s commission structure for affiliates. Selling an Amazon product worth $100 can earn affiliates as little as $1 if the commission is 1%.

High ticket affiliate products are a good idea therefore for a couple of reasons:

You earn more for what can easily be the same amount of work
It is easier to use paid marketing to get traffic to your website with high ticket items and still turn a profit.

If you’re selling low valued products from a website, it’s much more difficult to become profitable using paid marketing. The growing competition online means people are pushing up the cost of online marketing. So if you’re running adverts which cost $1 per click, and only 1% of people buy from you, you’ll need to cover $100 in ad spend just to break even; assuming you make $100 on a sale.

With high ticket items and recurring income products this pushes up your profit potential and you’re more easily able to spend on an advertising budget while still earning a profit.

Start From Scratch And Use An All In One Business System

Building your own website for profit has many problems attached with it as you can see. Even with products to sell, you need a marketing strategy to get people to your site. This can be costly or time consuming. With physical products you need to keep sourcing products if you’re selling something you own. But with affiliate products you can keep selling the same products over and over from your site. You don’t have to personally handle products with affiliate marketing, or deal with customers.

A similar business model is drop shipping where you outsource product delivery/manufacture to another company and your website is the go-between to find customers. See also drop shipping vs affiliate marketing.

To learn more about the different types of online business models, and to access an all in one business system and step by step training, access these free videos. You’ll also be able to build your own website which is pre-populated with affiliate products which you can sell.

DUMB Goals

What are DUMB goals? According to Brendon Burchard, they are:

Dream-Driven/Destiny Driven
Uplifting/Inspiring
Method-Friendly – (Enjoyable/easy process of attainment)
Behaviour-Driven – (Habits triggered by normal daily behaviours)

Here’s a video of Brendon explaining how SMART goals may be too cerebral (and realistic) for you to get excited about them! If you’re not excited about a particular goal, you’re probably not setting the right one, or you’re aiming too small.

In my article on SMART goals you can see the difference in goal setting approach. SMART is an acronym for:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Time Bound

While I like the SMART goals idea, I definitely agree with Brendon; particularly regarding the “Realistic” part of the Goal setting process. While a realistic goal is attainable, it’s often not terribly exciting.

As a child I used to dream about stuff with a totally open mind. What Brendon is saying is that this natural ability to dream big is easily lost by pinning goals down into small boxes and dutifully working for their attainment; ticking off activities like a robot! In this scenario you can easily get too caught up in the minutiae of the detail, while losing the bigger picture of your larger destiny/dream!

DUMB Goals Vs SMART Goals

A DUMB goal therefore maybe more useful in that it can fire you up and motivate you into action. But there’s still a place for SMART goals within perhaps a shorter time frame. DUMB goals could be used for the 10-20 year timeframe and SMART goals could be used to track that your activity is aligned with your longer term goals.

Ultimately if you’re not motivated by your goal, you’re very unlikely to achieve it. So which are better between DUMB goals and SMART goals? Well of course this depends on you. Some people are more motivated by getting analytical about their “baby steps” and making progress, however slow. Others are more motivated by the grand vision, of the 5-10 year plan.

I suggest finding a goal setting plan which you are comfortable with and which means you can maintain enthusiasm for your longer term goals by aligning smaller steps you can take every day. If you lose your enthusiasm, you can always realign with your goals and refocus on your longer term vision.

Aligning Yourself With Your Goals

Choose a goal for the next 3-5 years and write it down. Does it excite you? By how much does it excite you out of 10? If it’s less than a 10, start again. Your 3-5 year goal should be super exciting to you; otherwise you’re more than likely not going to stick on the path to achieve it.

Once you have found your 10/10, 3-5 year goal, ask yourself how attainable it is? Do you believe you can attain this goal? On a scale out of 10, how achievable do you think it is? If you have scored less than 10/10 for believability, you need to change your goal.

A good goal should give you a 10 out of 10 for desirability and a 10 out of 10 for believability. If you don’t really, really want your goal, you’re not going to go after it, particularly if it’s difficult. If you don’t believe your goal is possible, you’re not going to chase it either.

This simple exercise is a good way to find goals which are meaningful to you. While a DUMB goal sounds like a good idea, how long will you actually chase a DUMB goal if you don’t really believe in it?

In Stuart Lichtman’s book on achievement he goes into further details on how you can attain a seemingly impossible goal. See also Stuart Lichtman cybernetic transposition.

Overcoming Limiting Beliefs About Money

Overcoming limiting beliefs about money can take some time. After all, you’ve probably been thinking about your limits for years! Most people have at least some limiting beliefs about money that have been picked up unconsciously, often from their childhood. It’s not until you struggle, that you will begin to look for the hidden spectre to your success – yourself, or rather your own limiting beliefs about money, and/or yourself.

But your beliefs are invisible. So how can you route them out and change them to allow you to become more success conscious? A good first step is to become more conscious of how you think, feel and talk about money, wealth and other aspects which relate to money in your life. Here’s a few common beliefs which are easily picked up unconsciously before you are even 10 years old:

Money doesn’t grow on trees
Rich people are greedy
You’re selfish if you earn a lot of money
Money is the route of all evil
It’s virtuous to be poor
I don’t care about money
Money is hard to earn
Life is hard

Of course how you feel about yourself and your ability to earn money is another common thread to lack, struggle and poverty. Limiting beliefs about yourself will most likely bring about problems with earning money too:

I’m not good enough
I’ll always be poor
I don’t have the right background to earn money
I don’t have the education
I’m a failure

Overcoming Limiting Beliefs About Money – Your Circle Of Influence

The 5 people you spend the most time with will often reflect your own ideas and attitudes towards money and aspiration. “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”. — Jim Rohn. As the saying goes, birds of a feather flock together.

So another thing you can do is to just pay attention to what your circle of influence (friends and family) has to say about money, income, wealth and aspiration. Are they negatively inclined towards money? If they are, you’ll likely pick up on these same attitudes if you hang around them for long enough.

How do your friends talk about money, and about people who have it? If it’s in a very negative way, you can be sure they have some limiting beliefs about money.

Overcoming Limiting Beliefs About Money – Your Story

Everyone has a story which they tell people when they meet. What’s your story? Is it a story of woe and strife, or one of joy and abundance? Most people have some back story of woe and struggle, even if they don’t talk about it. If your story is about lack, struggle and poverty, you are feeding the very ideas you want to change. Stop giving energy to the negatives and begin to write a new story for your life, one which you want to happen instead of the one you wished hadn’t.

Your subconscious mind is wise and listens to everything you are saying. To begin to change some of your negative programming around money, you need to first become conscious of what you’re saying and thinking on a regular basis.

Once you become conscious that you are giving more energy to the things you don’t want (thoughts/words of poverty consciousness), you can begin to break the habit and stop feeding those negative beliefs. Start paying attention to what you say about yourself. You’ll begin to see/hear your self image which is related very strongly to your ability to earn money.

Maxwell Maltz – Psycho-Cybernetics

Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon who realised that many patients still had problems after successful surgery. If a patient had a poor self image, no amount of plastic surgery solved their issues. So Maltz started doing therapy with patients before surgery, helping them with developing the self image.

He discovered that after the therapy, many patients no longer even wanted the plastic surgery. Their problem was mental in nature and not physical. Once the self image was changed, their problems went away!

Holding limiting beliefs about money is similar. If you can change the negative programming towards how you see money, you can potentially change things much more powerfully than chasing money in the ways you always have.

Write A New Story

Once you have uncovered some of your limiting ideas around money by listening to your self talk, your circle of influence and your “story” which you tell yourself (and others) most frequently, you are in a good position to make some changes. If you continue to see yourself as the person in your (negative) story (and as a victim), you’ll keep repeating the same and getting the same!

The negative stories and self talk are a key indicator as to your deep subconscious beliefs about money. You can also think back to your childhood where many of these beliefs took hold.

Before you reach 10 years old, you have no conscious reasoning ability and you will have accepted your parents ideas about money unconsciously. So a good way to uncover your subconscious beliefs is to think about their attitudes towards money/wealth and income. What did they used to say about money? Can you think of any scenarios or situations where your self worth was an issue, or the issue of money came up?

Installing New Ideas

Installing new ideas about money can be a long process. Remember that you have most likely been repeating old stories and beliefs to yourself over many years. By listening to your self talk, story and that of your friends and family, you should be able to see more clearly the negative comments and ideas coming up about money.

By noticing them, without comment, you can become clearer about the kinds of ideas you would rather have! Here’s a few ideas which you can use:

Money comes easily and frequently
I get paid for being “me”
I am enough
I choose to be wealthy
I love and approve of myself
I’m happy and grateful
I choose happiness

These statements may of course not be truly authentic for you at the moment. But remember the old beliefs are not either – they are just faulty “programs” which are keeping you from a fuller and more enjoyable life. When you see the old beliefs and ideas as a faulty program, you’re going to be more willing to embrace some new ideas which you can use as mantras.
Whenever the older ideas come up in your mind, I’m not good enough, I’ll always be broke” etc., choose a new one to replace them with. Repeat it many times. Let the new mantra take over the old belief and make a habit out of repeating the new idea.

Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic Time Bound

Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time bound. What do those words have in common? SMART is an acronym for goal setting and specifically means Specific, Measurable, Attainable Realistic and Time bound. SMART goals are better than whimsical goals because you can gain greater control, meaning and motivation from them. A goal without measure is not really a clever goal, it’s more like a wish or fantasy.

So one of the biggest reasons people don’t accomplish goals is because they’re not SMART goals.

Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic Time Bound

Without a specific target for a goal, your goal is more of a whim or fantasy. How will you know you have reached your target if you don’t specify one? An example might be “I want more money”. But how much more – exactly? Or, “I want to lose weight”. By specifying your target you are making a dream/fantasy into a very specific purpose. It gives your goal weight and specificity.

A more specific target is to say “I want to earn an extra $500 a month”, for example. Or “I want to lose half a stone in weight”. These are specific goals which can be measured. You’ll know when you attain them by checking your income or your weight – based on your current income or weight! But this is still pretty vague as a goal. Just by wanting something doesn’t mean you will attain it. To get even more specific you could say I want to earn an extra $500 a month from the internet, for example. Or, I want to drop my weight down to 12 stone, for example.

Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic Time Bound: Measurable

The second letter of the SMART acronym means measurable. This is pretty important because many goals are simply wishes without a connection to the real world. To make a wish real you need to pin it down with real world measures. With the examples above you could measure your income before and after you have accomplished your goal.

If you’re currently earning $100 a month from the internet and you want to earn $500, that’s something you can measure. But saying “I want to earn more money” isn’t measurable because you will keep shifting your goals because there’s always “more”! How can you know when you have achieved it?!

You may never even notice when you achieve a shift in income or a loss of weight with a vague goal such as “I want to lose weight” or “I’d like more money”.

Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic Time Bound: Attainable

The third letter in the SMART goal acronym is attainable. This is pretty important too because without an attainable goal it’s likely to fall into the same category as wishes and fantasies! If you don’t really believe you goal is attainable, you’re going to falter somewhere on the path to achieving it. As

Henry Ford once said: “whether a man believes he can achieve something or not, he is right”! If you set a goal, but don’t believe it’s possible, how motivated do you think you’ll be to get started?! Pretty unmotivated I’d say. Without an attainable goal, you’re likely to give up pretty quickly and carry on as before.

While a lofty goal can be motivational, it’s also likely you’ll give up if you don’t really believe in it. Your goal needs to motivate you and be lofty enough to get your excitement levels up, but not too big that you won’t actually make a move towards it! This brings us to the next letter of the SMART goals acronym: realistic.

Realistic

The balance between an achievable goal and a realistic goal is a fine one. How will you know what is achievable unless you set a really big goal and pursue it? But is your really big goal realistic? If a super big goal intimidates you and motivates you, it’s probably a good one. But if it puts you off and demoralises you, you should probably pick something else.

Striking the balance between realistic and achievable is personal to you. Still, a goal should be big enough to inspire you into action, but realistic enough that you believe it is possible, that way you can pursue it with a positive mental attitude. A big goal you don’t believe in is simply a wish, dream or fantasy.

Time Bound

Without a date on your goal, it’s still a dream. A date on a goal gives it an expediency without which you will lose momentum and drive. Using the previous example of losing half a stone in weight, you could set a target to get to your ideal weight in 3 months, for example. Set the date and your ideal weight for your goal and you have a time frame with which to bring a goal into reality.

If there’s no time frame on a goal, it becomes something you “would like to happen one day”! When you take this approach to goal setting, you let yourself completely off the hook and there’s no accountability because you will settle for “whenever” as your time of arrival.

I highly recommend Stuart Lichtman’s book which discusses goal setting in great detail using cybernetic transposition and Stuarts “three step” process. You can access his book by clicking on the image below.

Online Royalty Payment: How To Earn One

If you’re wondering how to earn an online royalty payment, listen up! Royalties are typically paid to musicians, actors, writers and other types of performers or creators. As a former professional stuntman, I earn royalties from the film and TV performances I have done in the past.

Some time ago, I wondered how I could earn royalty payments working online, in some way. The answer I discovered is a clever business model known as affiliate marketing. Affiliates earn commissions through product referrals. As an affiliate, you’re effectively a third party referrer of customers. Affiliate marketers benefit from their content even years after they have created it, effectively making their income similar to royalties.

So what is affiliate marketing, how does it work, and how can you benefit from it and earn from it?

Online Royalty Payment – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to generate an income online. Affiliates are third party referrers but they can earn an income similar to royalties by selling other people’s products and services online. This website, for example is an affiliate website. If you should buy something from one of my recommendations here, I earn a commission based on the sale.

But there’s many ways you can earn as an affiliate. Here’s a few of the most popular strategies which affiliates use to sell other people’s products online:

Blogging
Email marketing
Paid advertising
Video marketing
Social media platforms
SEO – search engine optimisation

Online Royalty Payment – Affiliate Marketing Commissions

Royalties are paid to performers and creators based on work they have done previously. But you can earn commissions in a similar fashion as an affiliate in a number of ways:

Create content which can be monetised with affiliate products – this can be written content (blogging) or video content for example
Build an email list of subscribers and automate the sales process through email marketing using an autoresponder
Sell subscription products (which continue to pay long after the sale)

Blogging, is a good example of how affiliate marketing can earn you a royalty income because once you have created a lot of content, you can get traffic and sales automatically, and for free! With paid marketing, you can pay to get people to a website but you need to keep paying in order to keep generating sales.

Earning On Autopilot – Other Earning Methods

Another way you can effectively earn a royalty income online is through using advertising on your content. Google Adsense pays content creators to place advertising on their content. With each click on an advert, creators get paid a percentage of the advertising fee. With enough content and visitors these small amounts can add up to a nice passive income – much like a royalty.

Content creators use video and blogging to build up a portfolio of online content which can be monetised with Google Adsense or a similar alternative. Over time content can attract the attention of the search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and Duckduckgo.com etc. When this happens you can have a nice passive income from a blog or video channel on YouTube.

Traffic Creation

With any monetisation strategy online you’ll need traffic; that is visitors. You can build content to attract traffic or you can pay for it. The best way to monetise paid traffic is through an email list. The email list is the number one asset which affiliate marketers should have in order to build a profitable business from the internet.

With a website, most visitors are simply browsing. Seldom does a visitor make a purchase on their first stop on a website. It usually takes several touch points before a website visitor makes a purchase. (This is a good reason to use Google Adsense since clicking an advert is more likely than making a purchase).

But once you get website visitors to sign up to an email list, you can extend the period which which they can make a buying decision. This is great for affiliates who are selling products. It allows them time to build a relationship with their website visitors over the longer term. Often, someone will make a purchase even years after joining an email list. This just isn’t possible directly from a website, because most visitors will leave and never return!

Get Started

If you’re ready to get started as an affiliate marketer, the key sticking point for many new affiliate marketers is generating traffic and choosing the right products. So to be successful as an affiliate you’ll need some help and support.

Access an “all in one” online training tool which gives you a solid step by step process you can follow here.

Breaking Goals Into Small Steps

It’s great having big goals but breaking big goals into small steps is the key to long term success. A big goal can give you vision and focus and the desire to succeed. But small achievable steps are where the “rubber meets the road”. Without action, large goals are just fantasy! A really big goal can inspire you into new action steps, but it’s the steps themselves which will carry you towards your destination.

Without goals you can easily fall into accepting the status quo and living your life as you always have. Life gets boring and drab when you have nothing to shoot for. But equally, a (too) large goal can put you off taking the required action if you don’t know how to proceed to make it a reality. Or, you can choose a goal which you don’t believe you’ll achieve. Whether your goal is too big or small is determined by whether it spurs you into action, or not. A goal which is too small is likely not going to motivate you. Why bother if you don’t care about the outcome? Whereas a too big goal might seem unobtainable, and result in a similar apathy.

So, before you break your big goals into smaller steps, it’s worth getting clearer on what your goals are; whether they properly motivate you and whether you will take consistent action towards them over a long time frame.

Breaking Goals Into Smaller Steps: Choosing Your Goal

The best book I’ve found on goal setting is Stuart Lichtman’s Cybernetic Transposition. In it he shares what he calls his cybernetic transposition three step process. You can get his book here. “Cybernetic” relates to the mind, or brain, and “transposition” relates to transposing something. In the case of goal setting, you’re transposing a memory in order to create a new goal.

But before you get to that stage, Stuart explains why your choosing of a goal is the most important part of the equation. Most people set goals and give up shortly afterwards. That’s often because they have chosen a goal which they don’t believe they can attain, or that they aren’t motivated enough to achieve.

What’s Your Best Goal?

In Stuart’s three step process he guides you through an exercise in which you can tune your goal into one which is super relevant for you. Your goal should score a 10 out of 10 for desirability and a 10 out of 10 for believability. If you don’t really want a goal, you’ll find reasons to quit. Likewise if you don’t believe in your goal, you’ll fail to achieve it!

One of the main problems with goals setting is that we have multiple parts of out mind competing for the outcome they want, instead of our main objective. For example, you choose to lose weight, but you still like pizzas and beer. Despite a strong resolve to lose weight by joining a gym and setting a diet, other competing parts of out mind sabotage our best efforts. Get Stuart’s book here!

Baby Steps

Another great book on this topic is Stephen Guise’s Mini Habits. There’s lot of good books on habits, but I like this one because it’s pretty simple and straight forward. The main theme of the book is to take your goal and break it onto such tiny, easily achievable steps that it would be possible to take a step each day, whatever happens. Even if you’re having a terrible day, suffering from depression, working long hours or whatever, your mini habit should be so infinitesimally small that you can still do it easily.

An example from the book is a daily push up. A push up isn’t hard to do and anyone who is able can make a daily habit out of doing a single push up. It only takes a few seconds to do. You might think, how is a daily push up going to get you to your goals? But use this as an analogy for your own aspirations. How can you take the idea of a daily push up, and use it for your longer term goals?

Power Of Tiny Steps

The push up won’t get you super fit, or get you on some magazine cover, if that’s your goal. However, what it does do is start the ball of momentum rolling in your favour. We are creatures of habit who carry a lot of momentum for the things we are already doing – or not doing. Making a daily habit out of something small is a lot easier than suddenly turning your life around after years of neglect!

Once in the push up position, you’re much more inclined to do two or three push ups, or even more, especially once you have made this part of your daily regimen.

Breaking Goals Into Smaller Steps – Motivation Doesn’t Work

If motivation alone worked we would all be super fit athletes with a million in the bank! We are all motivated to achieve things, get fit and have amazing lives, but it’s the daily habits which matter. It’s not the fantasies which we carry in our minds which we “hope” will happen that carry you towards your goals, it’s the things you do on a regular basis (which are aligned with your goals); your daily habits.

Motivation will get things going, but only so far. Your old habits, conflicting ideas and counter-intentions will limit you. This usually happens to the “New Year New You” crowd after they have signed up for a gym membership in January, only to find they no longer use it in March! Old habits win unless you install some new habits and ideas to help you win the battle!

To get the ball rolling, use Mini or Micro habits to help you overcome the momentum of older habits holding you back.

Big Goal, Tiny Steps

A big goal is really useful if it motivates and inspires you. But if it overwhelms you, you don’t really believe in it, or you don’t truly want it, it won’t help you. So getting clear on your goal is an important first step. But you also need an action plan you can follow so you can make daily progress towards your big goal.

Finding a tiny step gives you something you can actually do. Without something tangible you can take action on, your goal becomes only a fantasy. So instead of getting overwhelmed with the entire list of potential things you can do in the future, (which might carry you forward), focus only on what is immediately achievable right now, today.

A tiny step is much better than an endless wish list which never gains any traction.

Breaking big goals into small steps is one of the best things you can do if you’re looking to build an online income. For more information checkout this free video series.

Accountability In Goal Setting

When you use accountability in goal setting you become more committed to your goals and take them more seriously. Without accountability, it can be easier to let yourself off the hook when things aren’t going well. So if you have a “exit excuse” to completing your goals, you’re giving yourself a way out. Accountability in goal setting is the opposite of an “exit excuse”. With accountability you are taking more responsibility and ownership of your actions to achieve your goals. You’re holding yourself accountable to achieve the results.

To hold yourself accountable for a long term goal, you need to make sure it’s a goal you really want. Otherwise, you won’t maintain the necessary effort to achieve it. Your goal needs to be a 10 out of 10 for desirability but also a 10 out of 10 for your belief that you can achieve it, too. If you don’t really want a goal badly enough, you’ll soon give up. Likewise, if you don’t believe you can achieve it, you are unlikely to sustain the effort required either.

If you have a goal which is a 10/10 for desirability and a 10/10 for belief you can achieve it, congratulations! It’s a goal which is aligned with you very well. But if you’re not quite a 10 on either count, checkout this book by Stuart Lichtman on Cybernetic Transposition. In it, he explains a simple strategy you can use to achieve seemingly impossible goals on your first attempt by focusing in on what you really want.

Accountability In Goal Setting: Why Keeping Quiet Can Be Better For Goals

An accountability “buddy” can help you stay the course for the longer term by holding you accountable to your stated goals and daily steps towards them. Ideally, an accountability buddy should be similarly motivated as you are to achieve some kind of similar goal. Friends and relatives rarely make good accountability buddies and you should be careful as to whom you share your goals and aspirations with.

Although it might seem fruitful to state your goals in order to hold yourself accountable, this can be detrimental.

Tests done since 1933 show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen. Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed.

In 1933, W. Mahler found that if a person announced the solution to a problem, and was acknowledged by others, it was now in the brain as a “social reality”; even if the solution hadn’t actually been achieved.

NYU psychology professor Peter Gollwitzer has been studying this since his 1982 book “Symbolic Self-Completion”. He recently published results of new tests in a research article, “When Intentions Go Public: Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap?”.

Four different tests of 63 people found that those who kept their intentions private were more likely to achieve them than those who made them public and were acknowledged by others.

Once you’ve told people of your intentions, it gives you a “premature sense of completeness.”

Telling Friends & Relatives About Your Goals

Telling friends and relatives about your goals can work both ways depending on their own world view and self image. Of course how you interpret their reaction also plays a part. But in many cases, doing so may be detrimental, especially if they harbour doubt and fear in relation to your plans. If they aren’t similarly motivated as you, you may find they won’t support you and they may even undermine your plans; whether consciously or unconsciously.

Why wouldn’t a friend support you building an online business, for example? Well, should you succeed, it may change the nature and dynamic of your relationship and therefore the status quo. Have you heard the Jim Rohn quote saying that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with? Or that “Birds of a feather flock together”?

People you surround yourself with generally will have similar beliefs, attitudes and outcomes in life as you. So if you’re planning on a different outcome, your regular social circle may not be the ones to turn to.

Accountability Buddies – Find One !

I have an accountability buddy I found through the online business community I promote on this site. You can learn more about it by signing up to my email list. A good accountability buddy is hard to find. They hold you accountable to keep turning up and doing the work needed to attain your goals.

However, you also need to hold yourself to account too. Why would anyone waste their time with someone who isn’t as committed as they are?! It works both ways with an accountability buddy – your buddy needs to get something out of the relationship too, which is why it’s good to find someone who has a similar goal to you.

If you’re looking to build an online business you can join a community of online business owners too which is where I found my buddy!

Access a free video series here to learn more.