Feel Reality

Fuck “the dream” of Being a Millionaire

The word “millionaire” has become trite. It’s a goal that just doesn’t have the ring to it that it once did.  1 in 100 people in the US are millionaires. I certainly know 100 people that I’m smarter than, so that can’t be the secret.  I also know 100 people that lack the ambition that I have.  So to that can’t be whats required either.  So what does it take to be a millionaire? I don’t care. Who wants to be a millionaire? 99 out of 100 people, the other one already is.

According to Google 908,000 web sites contain the phrase “I’m rich” while 1,300,000 contain the terms “I’m broke”. Hmm this doesn’t correlate. It appears that way more people are willing to boast that they are rich than admit to the world that they are broke. Plus, there are a lot of us in the middle. They call this segment “the middle class”. Which brings another search to mind “middle class” turns up 23,900,000 results. WHOA! That is where we all must be!

I could show you where the rich congregate in disproportional numbers. The online news and publications that the affluent read, what they buy, where they invest, where they spend their time, what they enjoy doing. Outcome can be qualified and quantified based on consumption. Eat a lot get fat. Eat something poisonous and the autopsy will reveal what it was that caused your condition. 

Positive thinking will not make you rich. The secret is not in your mental state, it’s in the facts and figures that worked for those before you, those around you and those who will come after you. You have to research, monitor and emulate.  You have to know what it takes to become rich in order to be rich.  “Millionaire” is not a magic word, it’s not a fantasy, it’s a status that 1 in 100 Americans have already obtained.

12,500,000 sites will tell you how to “make money online”, 24,500,000 can help you “lose weight”. How much money are you making visiting links? How many calories does it burn to click your mouse. Market Basket data and data mining made Google the monster that it is today. Use it to your advantage, the answer is in the numbers. Separate the real from the fake and act. Filter… and stay tuned.

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Making Money Online Isn’t Easy

First off, let me state that I still catch myself running from one buzz to the next trying to squeeze a profit out of the latest trend.  I don’t consume myself with this and I often give it a half assed effort, but I figure most things are worth a try.  I’m not telling you that you should abandon hope or give up on your quest to internet riches; I’m simply telling you the road will be harder than you initially anticipated.  Everyone wants to sell you on the idea that you can make money fast on the internet and that for a small initial investment you can turn huge profits. I will spare you the research and tell you that most of these clowns haven’t made a dime themselves, and the cash they do mint, comes from suckers looking for a quick fix. It’s like the old school classified ad trick, “Learn how to make money placing classified ads, send $10 to...” There are people out there doing it right and they are converting but it takes time, effort and (yikes) money to make it work. 

I guess you could say I took a fast track approach to making money online myself. I didn’t have a degree in Computer Science or Business before I started churning out websites. I learned HTML early on (circa 1993) and used that knowledge to give myself a voice.  It was a hobby for a long time before it became a profitable hobby.There are a lot of code monkeys writing HTML and spamming the interwebs with content, but 99.9% of all that content is useless. It literally took me a decade to determine that I wanted to pursue a career in this field.

I am not saying it will take you ten years to build your base and get started. In fact, I never really took it seriously, or invested much time until about five years ago… Consider the time line; we experienced a highly publicized boom and bust period where it always seemed too late or too risky to jump in. For a while the future looked dismal and the resiliency of the internet was questionable.

Over the past 5 years I have read countless marketing, online marketing, web development and coding books.  I have two book cases full of them. Sure, I read fiction now and then to calm the buzz, but in the interim I burned through more than the average college student’s tuition in web and business related nonfiction. I took classes to learn as I went along, I got the certifications that I thought were necessary, and I put the blood, sweat and tears into creating a portfolio of sites that were built upon the principles that I was establishing.  You will never have all of the information that you wished you had before you jump in, you have to have a good starting point and then learn as you go.

The bottom line is that it will take hard work to be successful online. In fact, the online world is so highly competitive that it will probably take more effort to churn a profit or make a living in this space then it does IRL (in real life). You have to learn how to differentiate whats real from what’s fake and investigate your sources. For everyone mentor there are a hundred cheap suit wearing, smiley faced ripoffs trying to extract cash from your pocket.  Some of those richie rich types do fake it until they make it, but you’re not going to learn anything from their e-book. 

If you want to make money online you need to build a strategy with a strong foundation, just as you do in any other venture. Again, the strategy doesn’t have to be fool proof, throw it out there and let people shoot holes.  Give it a shot and learn from your mistakes. There are always going to be one hit wonders and having one isn’t a bad place to start. Just don’t spend all your time looking for them.  Invest the time effort and money into building a solid foundation and you should succeed.

And for the record… I did eventually parlay those classes into a degree. I do believe your paper trail establishes credibility, but I haven’t forgotten that the ultimate paper trail in business is green. 

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It’s finally starting to hit home

You can’t wait around for the perfect time to make something happen.  I’ve always had this debilitating fear of trying new things, because I didn’t feel like I had all of my ducks in a row before I jumped. For the longest time I’ve felt that financial freedom is the answer to all of my problems. If I had the money to make things happen, they would. If I had a cushion to fall back on, I wouldn’t have to fear the jump.

My mind is constantly spinning w/ new ideas. I take action on the ones that I feel are the most compelling, but I’m always abandoning concepts in search of the next great thing. I guess this is closely related to idealistic concept of money as well, the end goal is never in sight. I’m always diverging, taking the fork in the road, because the grass is always greener. 

I think that is why I started this blog and never updated it (until now).  I didn’t like the design, but I didn’t want to put money into a hobby without a monetization plan. I didn’t want to cheapen my message by plastering banner ads all over the place just to make a buck or two.  If you are shoemoney or johnchow and your ads are bringing in $25-35k a month for you, then you should keep them.  But if you’re just some random dude posting messages on shoemoney and johnchow to bring attention to your low traffic adsense pit, you just don’t get it and you look like a cheap whore. A copy of a copy of a copy isn’t going to bring the same return that the original did. Do something original.  I don’t want to learn how to make money online from a guy making $3.00 a week in adsense revenue. I guess that is a topic in itself.

Now, for the first time, the unfinished pieces of my “big idea” are starting to take shape.  I guess you could say I have a loosely formed strategy. I don’t have a particular end goal in mind. But, I do have a better concept of the direction that I want to take things in. All of the disjointed ideas and misguided adventures are slowly molding into an idea that I can stand behind. Whether that idea later becomes a book, a business or just a new philosophy, I’m not sure. What I do know is; I have finally found something(s) to believe in.

I’m slowly becoming more comfortable w/ the idea that everything that I generate doesn’t have to be in final draft form. I don’t need to refine all of the edges before I let others in on my concepts. There are millions of people out there with less experience, less know how and less business intelligence making things happen, because they don’t know any better. Sometimes knowing what you are up against, can be a bad thing.

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