Mastering the Mindset of Making Money Online Making Money Online is a Mindset.

This week I have reached a number of new records in my online money making ventures.

New Subscriber Record

Firstly, after the release of my newest eBook “The Three Pillars of Making Money Online” my reader count has hit a new record.

As of today my reader count is now at 1,915 subscribers via RSS and Email.  I’ve been hovering around 1,800 – 1,850 subscribers for a while now and I know a big part of that was due to the fact that my personal passion has become more focused on making money online, but until recently that wasn’t totally reflected in the theme of my blog.

I’ve evolved my topic from “how to make money doing what you love” to focus more on “mastering the mindset of making money online” as that is really my passion now.  Making that change has helped me a lot because it’s given me something more specific to focus on with this Blog.

My new eBook fits in nicely with my new theme, more so than my previous eBook “The Passion Project”.  The other thing that I also added in was a Lightbox that pops up when a person first visits this website, offering them a free copy of my eBook.

When I first saw a Lightbox like this on a couple of other sites I found it a bit annoying because on those particular sites I had already downloaded their eBooks, so when the Lightbox showed up after they first installed it I didn’t like it.

However, I didn’t think of it from the point of view of being a brand new visitor to a website, in which case I do like it when right away I’m given the option to get something for free.

I recently watched a video by John Chow where he talked about his conversion rates jumping quite drastically ever since he installed the Lightbox on his site.  So I decided to do the same thing myself and test it out.  So far I’m really happy with the results.  The numbers are still not big enough to be totally accurate, but so far the Lighbox is converting at a rate of 12.2% which is quite high compared to my numbers before.

The coolest thing is that this Lightbox functionality is built right into AWeber so I didn’t even need to install any third-party scripts or software to make it work.

New One Day Affiliate Income Record

Yesterday I had a record day for one day profits for my affiliate marketing campaigns.  Here are my stats for yesterday:

Total Revenues: $926.66
Total Costs: $379.48
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Total Profit: $547.18

This is a new record for me for one day profits.  I can’t wait to be doing numbers like that and higher every day.  If I did that much profit every day, that’s about $16.5k/month or just under $200k/year in income.  (Not a bad wage for working from home!)

Of course I know that every day isn’t going to be a record day, but the cool thing is that every time you hit a new record your belief levels grow and it becomes easier to hit those kinds of numbers or higher again in the future.  My next record goal is to hit $1,000 in profit in one day.

Twitter Followers

Although this one isn’t a huge deal compared to the numbers of followers I’ve seen from other more serious Twitter ninjas, my Twitter follower count has also hit a new record of 672.  I figured I’d take a screenshot and report it today anyways so when I look at this post a year from now I’ll know where I was at.

eBook Typo Fixes

As I’m sure anyone who’s downloaded my new eBook so far has noticed, there were quite a few typos in the eBook.  Now here’s a quick little story of what happened with that.

I’ve been working on the concept of that eBook for a while now and finally on Saturday morning I woke up and decided that I’m not going to bed until I finish and launch that eBook.  I had a whole bunch of other things to do on Saturday as well, on top of watching Zoe.  I was also supposed to go to a birthday party, but because I decided to finish the eBook I elected not to go.  There just wasn’t going to be any way I could finish the book if I went.

I had most of the book done by midnight, but I didn’t have anyone to proofread the eBook as my wife had already gone to bed.  I proofread it a few times myself, but it was starting to drive me nuts because every time I went to proofread the content, looking for spelling mistakes and typos and such, I would find myself wanting to add to the content instead.

So finally I just decided to release the book “as is”.  I went to save it as a PDF file and then I realized that none of the hyperlinks in the eBook were working.  I had to upgrade to the new Online Adobe PDF writer software and then I ran into more problems due to Adobe formatting the pages slightly differently than MS Word.

I then had to spend three hours of messing around with design and the table of contents to make it look ok once it’s converted to PDF.  Finally I had the eBook finished and ready at around 4:30am.  I put it up and went to sleep. 

This morning I received an email from “Ebele” from the UK.  Although it wasn’t her original intention, Ebele ended up proofreading and highlighting all the typos in the eBook as she read through it and sent me a PDF file with all the typo’s highlighted.  Nice!  Thanks Ebele!

So now I’ve gone ahead and fixed all the typos and I’ve uploaded a new version of the eBook so that thanks to Ebele, you guys no longer have to read all the typos.

So what’s the lesson here?  Get out of your perfection mind-frame.  So many people fail to make money online because they are afraid to release “Version 1.00” of something and then fix the typos and bugs later.  Take a lesson from Google.  Don’t be afraid to release beta versions of things.

This weekend I finished and launched my newest eBook – “The Three Pillars of Making Money Online”.  This eBook is part of my shift in focus for this Blog, making the transition from my main topic being “how to make money doing what you love” to “mastering the mindset of making money online”.

The eBook covers what I believe to be the three pillars of making money online – Mindset, Strategy, and Execution.  While most “make money online” courses and products focus and teach the exact strategies of making money online, very few ever take into account the mindset of making money online or the need for proper execution of the strategies being taught.

The eBook dives into the three pillars, focusing mainly on the introducing the exact mindset I personally use to make money online.

I have used this mindset to make money online as a blogger and as an affiliate marketer.  It’s actually the same mindset I’ve used for the last 15 years to get ahead in the corporate world as well, but it works even better when applied to the online world.

I’m releasing this eBook out free of charge, so if you’d like to grab a copy of yourself just fill out your name and email address in the boxes below and you will be instantly emailed a copy of the eBook.

If you’re already a subscriber to my newsletter, you were emailed a link to the new eBook on the weekend.

The eBook is a nice, short read, only about 40 pages long and I hope you guys enjoy it.  I’d love to hear your feedback on it after you’ve had a chance to have a quick read.

Enter your name and email below to receive “The Three Pillars of Making Money Online” delivered to your email in the next 3 minutes:

Enjoy!

An average person thinks anywhere between 12,000 to 50,000 thoughts per day.  For most people, 99% of the thoughts that they will think today are going to be the same thoughts they thought yesterday.  The conscious control we believe we have over our lives is an illusion.  Our lives are ruled by our subconscious minds.

When you go to the grocery store, do you stand in front of the liquid dish detergent isle trying to make an informed, conscious decision of which detergent would be best to buy or do you just grab the brand and type you always buy?  When you walk over to the bread isle, do you look at all the different types of bread each time, or do you just buy the regular one you always buy?

At some point during this month, did your telephone company call you to try to sell you on another month of telephone service, or were you just automatically billed for another month?  What about your cable or Internet service?

Universal Habitforce

I first read about the term “Universal Habitforce” in Napoleon Hill’s book “Think and Grow Rich”, but I’ve since adapted my understanding of it to mean something different than what Mr. Hill talks about in his book.

To me, Universal Habitforce has many faces.  It’s easier to understand the power of it if I give you a couple of examples from my life.

Weeds In The Garden

The property that I live on has some of the most amazing soil I have ever seen in my life.  All of the plant life around my house is huge.  All the flowers and bushes grow and flourish in this soil.  Unfortunately, so do weeds.

A month ago I decided to rip out all of the plants and flowers that were growing in one section of my front yard.  Every year they’ve been spreading and basically taking over the patch of grass that separates my house from my driveway.

When these plants are nicely trimmed and groomed, they look nice but when I get busy and have no time to do any gardening they take over my front yard and grow like nuts.  Essentially, they employ universal habit force to thrive.  By default, I don’t normally have time to cut these plants back so by default they grow bigger and spread.

When I decided to rip the plants out, I also had to make a decision as to what I would have to do in order to get rid of all the weeds that have grown in between the plants as well, since the last thing I’ve got time for right now is ripping out weeds. 

So, here’s how I used “universal habit force” to my advantage.  After I ripped out all the plants, I leveled the ground a bit and then I dropped down a whole crapload of grass seed and then I let the universal habit force do the rest of the work.

For the first week or so, nothing happened.  There was just this spot of dirt in my front yard that looked somewhat ugly.  The following week is the week that we got Zoe so there was no way I would have had any time to do any gardening.  Luckily, I didn’t have to.  The grass seed began to sprout on the second week.  At first it was just in a few patches here and there, but by this morning the patch of dirt is now 90% covered in grass. 

See, all I did was plant the seeds and then left it alone as I was busy with Zoe and my affiliate marketing.  I didn’t sit there and have to motivate the grass seeds to grow.  I didn’t have to feed them nutrients, they just fed themselves from the ground.  I also only watered them twice.  The rest of the time they got water from rain.  Some of my weeds came back, but the majority of them have been replaced by grass.

This is an example of utilizing universal habit force.  Leveraging the power of nature to your advantage.  Aligning with natural systems that already exist to accomplish something you want.

Housetraining Zoe

Here’s another example of using universal habit force to my advantage.  This is something I learned the hard way with my dog Kobe.  You see, house training a dog can be pretty difficult if you don’t know what you’re doing and you try to force it, instead of utilizing universal habit force to do it for you.

What do I mean by this?  Well, the premise behind house training a dog is that you want to teach them to pee outside, not inside your house.  So, the idea is to create opportunities where the dog can go outside to pee and then praise the shit out of them for peeing outside.  This helps them to associate peeing outside = praise.  At the same time, if they try to pee inside you can interrupt them and sternly say “NO” and quickly take them outside and wait for them to pee out there and then praise them again.

That’s the basic premise anyways.  Now there are some problems that arise out of this.  Firstly, young puppies can’t hold their bladder for as long as an adult dog can.  Also, they don’t like the feeling of having a bladder even half full, so what they do is they just want to pee all the time – anywhere they can.  This means that if the puppy is inside you have to keep a constant eye on them at all times, which can be pretty challenging when they want to pee every hour.

Not only that, but they don’t like peeing when people are watching, so they’ll often run into another room and pee before you can chase in after them.

So, how can we utilize universal habit force to help us in this situation?  Well, firstly there is a habit that dogs have that prevents them from peeing close to where they sleep.  So, if instead of letting your dog sleep on the floor you instead put them in a properly sized kennel that isn’t too big for them, they typically won’t go to the bathroom inside the kennel where they sleep.  This isn’t foolproof as sometimes puppies will still have an accident in the kennel for a number of reasons, but 98% of the time they will not go in there.

So, if you put them in the kennel when they go to sleep you eliminate the chances of them peeing while you’re sleeping.  Then, when they wake up if you take them out of the kennel and take them straight outside to pee, they begin to form a habit of going outside to pee.

This is an example of utilizing universal habit force to our advantage.  I don’t have to teach Zoe not to pee inside her kennel.  It’s already bred into her DNA.  I just use that knowledge to make it easier for me to create opportunities for her to wake up, go outside to pee and get praised for it which reinforces the good behavior.  I found this method of housetraining much better than putting out newspapers in the house for the dog to pee on.

Default World View

Another example of utilizing universal habit force is to learn and study the default world view of a society or a demographic and utilize that to your advantage.  For example, let’s say that 80% of my website visitors use Internet Explorer as their browser.  Now, let’s say that I personally don’t like Internet Explorer and I use Firefox instead. 

Now, what if I had some kind of feature on my website that only worked in Firefox?  Well, that would mean that 80% of my visitors would not have access to that feature.

If this was true, I could utilize two solutions to this:

1. Write some code that checks if my visitors are running Internet Explorer.  If they are, proceed to try to convince them that using Internet Explorer is inferior to Firefox and that they should switch.  Ask them to install Firefox to enjoy the full benefits of the site.
2. Modify my software to work in Internet Explorer as well.

Which one of these do you think utilizes the universal habit force more? Obviously it’s #2.  If you want to make money online, learn who your customers are and understand THEIR world view.  Then, build value and services for them and their world view, not yours.

Affiliate Marketing

The world of affiliate marketing is tremendously influenced by this.  Those that understand the existing natural habits of human behavior stand to make millions, while those that try to get people to act like some ideal scenario they imagine in their heads will go bankrupt.

In large quantities, people are very predictable.  It’s absolutely insane to see just how mathematical trends can be.  Once you become attuned to these subtle details that make the difference in being able to connect and influence people, you open the doorway to another world.  It all starts with understanding how universal habit force applies to people.

Look at the continuous success of diet offers and make money from home offers.  All these diet offers promise to help you lose 20 lbs in 20 days, and all the money making offers promise to teach you how to make money from home working 2 hours a day.  It really doesn’t matter if it’s possible or healthy to lose 20lbs in 20 days by taking some supplement pill and sitting on the couch.  The point is that the average person out there wants that to be true and they’re willing to pay for product after product until they find that solution.

The secret is to figure out how people are already thinking, and then to find ways to automatically make money by offering value to those people who think that way by offering them the solutions to the problems they keep having.

Of course this is easier said than done, but here are some examples of ways people have utilized universal habit force to make money online:

• Forced continuity membership sites that sell you once, and then keep charging your credit card until you cancel.  They don’t have to resell you on the product / service every month.  They sell you once and then by default you keep resigning up each month.  You actually have to take action in order to cancel, which is why most don’t.
• Creation of auto-responders that take new visitors through an email newsletter sequence that gets sent out to them automatically with no intervention from the site owner.
• Users who communicate on your Blog by leaving comments to each other end up creating valuable content for your site pretty much by default
• Forum communities where people leave posts and generate content for you automatically
• etc.

Making Money Online with Universal Habit Force

I know this concept is somewhat abstract, but if you become aware of how universal habit force plays itself out in your life and how you can utilize it to help you make more money online, you may surprise yourself with just how quickly you begin to see results.

Some of the questions that you may want to ask yourself to apply universal habit force in your life to make money online may be:

• How can I structure my online business in a way where by default my income grows each month?
• Am I seeing this from the point of view of average client I want to attract, or am I just looking at it from my biased perspective?
• If there is something that I need to do each day in order to produce some type of result that turns into income, is there any way I can automate it?
• How can I help others to provide more value to themselves and others like themselves?

If you’re totally stuck and don’t know how this could apply, here’s an example.  Go find an Audio CD training course that will help you make money online, but that you haven’t had time to listen to.  Now, go to your car with that CD and pop it into the CD player.  When it starts to play, turn off the engine (you may or may not need to press stop on the CD player) and lock the car back up and go home.  Now, by default, the next time your drive your car somewhere, you’ll be listening to that Audio CD.

Find ways to set yourself up to win by default and you will.

For the last few days I’ve been planning out some changes I wanted to implement in the structure, layout and look of my Fitness, Health and Healing Blog.  One of the changes I wanted to make to that site was to re-structure it more as a “website” with a blog attached to it, than just a pure blog.

The reason for this is because I want to be able to start writing more health and fitness related articles, but I want to make them much more extensive than just a blog post which typically gets buried in the archives a few days or weeks after it’s written.  Both my blog posts and articles are going to be much less time sensitive than what I’ve written before, so I wanted a design that could feature more content on one page.

I’m not finished with everything yet, but here’s what the design looks like so far:

Today I’d like to talk about a way to make money online that doesn’t involve Affiliate Marketing or Blogging.

It’s a neat little concept that allows you to take a little piece of wisdom that’s sitting in your mind right now and monetize it.  Let me explain.  Essentially, MindBites is a website that allows you to create a short little video lesson teaching people how to do something in life and then sell that lesson on the website to make money.

The lesson you teach are only limited by your creativity.  Some of the lessons already up there range from “How To Teach Your Baby Sign Language” to “How To Cut Hair With Clippers”.  Pretty much anything can be made into a lesson, and you get to set the price for your lesson.

So, for example if you like gardening you could make a series of video’s on gardening and sell them online.  If you have a killer lasagna recipe you could make a video teaching people how to make that lasagna and sell it online.  I mean the sky is the limit here.  Pretty much anything can be made into a MindBite lesson that can be marketed on this website.

Learn

The website is already starting to fill up with different kinds of video lessons.  There is a main section for all the paid lessons, as well as some free lessons.  Authors of each lesson set the price of each lesson based on the number of credits each lesson costs.  One credit is equal to $0.99, which is the minimum price for a paid lesson.

Here’s one video I clicked on.  After watching the intro to this, I totally want to buy this video and watch the rest of it.  It’s only $1.98 and I also might order that book too.  It looks like a cool way for me to start an organic garden in a small way to begin with.  Check this out:

Isn’t that neat?

Teach

The teach section is for authors who want to create video’s for sale on the website and to make money online by selling these video’s. As I mentioned above, you have full control over how much you want to sell your video for. The only restriction is that your price is determined by the number of credits it is. Each credit is $0.99, so if you wanted to sell your video for around $5, you would charge 5 credits which would be $4.95 per video sold. If 100 people viewed the video, that would be an extra $495 in your pocket right there.

The teaching section also has a bunch of resources that teach you how to make MindBites video’s. Here’s an example one:

Community

The site also features a community section with a forum and a way for people to register and request the types of video’s they would like to see made. Check out the wanted section for video’s people have already requested. Maybe you’ll find something you know how to do and you can get started on making money online with your first MindBite.

What I Really Like About This Idea

About five or six years ago I had this idea of creating a website where ordinary people could capture something that they know how to do that most people don’t know how to do and sell it online. At the time my idea was to make a website where people could create eBook reports of their particular skill and then sell them to others. I did a bit of brainstorming on the idea and even registered a domain for it. I never did get the project off the ground as I was busy working on so many other projects at my job, but I always thought it was a solid idea.

At that time it wasn’t very easy to create online video’s and things like YouTube and Flip Video camera’s weren’t things many people knew anything about. However, with today’s technology I think that the idea of using video as a medium for sharing the wisdom hidden in ordinary people’s heads is brilliant.

I don’t think I have ever met a single person in my life that didn’t know how to do something interesting that most other people don’t know. Of course most people probably take what they know for granted, so they may not be aware of the fact that they know things that most people don’t, but if they really sit down and think about it I’m sure everyone could come up with a few dozen video’s to share with the world.

Suggestions For Improvements

As much as my first impression of the MindBites site is very good, I do have one strong suggestion for the creators of this site.

Here’s what I think they could improve on:

Affiliate Program – This site could have HUGE potential for an affiliate program. For example, let’s say that I visit the MindBites website and participate in the community and I find out that someone is looking for a video on dog training. Well, if MindBites had an affiliate program, and I knew a friend of mine that was a dog trainer, I could send a link to the MindBites site to my friend and if he registers and creates video’s that make money for him and the site, I could earn an affiliate commission.

Having an affiliate program like this, where Bloggers or Affiliate Marketers can promote the site to people and then earn a small % of all the earnings created by the people who they refer to the site could totally make this website explode with content.

Final Words

What do you guys think of the idea behind this site? Are any of you going to try making money online by creating MindBites?

For some reason I really like this site and I might sit down and brainstorm some ideas to create some lessons on something to see just how much money can be made with this site.

Click Here to Visit the MindBites Site