With so many people flooding the market, competition is fierce; even for jobs that don’t pay well. Getting a job today will require a new way of thinking of things. It will require you to think like an entrepreneur.

Whether you realize it or not, you are an entrepreneur. Instead of selling candles or financial services, you are selling the knowledge and skills you have developed over the years to a business that needs them. And instead of doing contracted work for multiple clients like the average freelancer, you devote the bulk of your time serving only one client for several years.

While scary at first, this change in mindset is incredibly freeing. Why? Because it opens up avenues of opportunities that you may not have otherwise seen or pursued. Sure you can look for employment at another company in the same industry. But you can also change industries altogether simply by investing in a little education. You can even convert your knowledge and skills into a home based business, something I recommend highly.

Today I’m going to show you how to think like an entrepreneur and secure a job in this crazy economy.

The first step is to sit down and think about what you want to do. Do you want to continue doing the same work you have been doing or do you want to change careers? A New York Times article suggest that some industries are contracting to a much smaller size or are going away for good.

If you are in a growing or at least stable industry and you like what you are doing then sure go ahead and look for a job in the field. However if you are in a contracting or unstable industry, I highly recommend jumping ship.

If you’ve decided to change careers, you need to make sure the skills you have developed over the years will translate well to the career you have chosen. Start by writing down all the jobs you have held. Underneath the job title write down all the technical and administrative tasks you did while in that position. If you need to, pull out your job description for help. In addition to that, list any skills you have cultivated that had nothing to do with work. For instance, if you write on the side, add that. Do illustrations for fun? Add that to the list. Did volunteer work? Write it down.

Now this next step is going to require quite a bit of thought and maybe some help. From this list you want to extract the skills involved in completing those tasks. For instance, say you were a scientist for a pharmaceutical company and your job was to perform experiments that determined the safety of a particular medication. The skills you would need to complete this job function are the ability to manage a project (set up the experiment and see it through to conclusion), organization (tracking the results), data analysis (interpreting the results) and the ability to speak, write and present ideas (explaining the outcome of the experiment so that it is understandable to others).

While the job you did may be specific to the pharmaceutical industry, the skills you acquired are the ones that need to be in sync with the job you want. Don’t worry, though, if your skills don’t measure up, you can always go back to school or look for a position that straddles the gap between what you do now and what you want to do that will train you for that dream job.

The real challenge, however, is not developing the skills for a job that you want. If you put enough time and effort into it, you can learn how to do anything. The difficulty lies in convincing the hiring agent that you are the best candidate for the job. This is especially true if you are switching from one career to another and doubly true if you are stepping down in rank (i.e. going from an upper management position to a front line position). This brings us to an entrepreneur’s greatest challenge.

Selling.

That’s right. Even though the product in your business is you, you still have to sell yourself to prospective employers; especially now when supply (employees) is greater than demand (jobs). You have to convince the hiring agent that out of all the applicants he or she will be interviewing, you are the one they want to hire.

The secret to selling yourself to prospective employers is to stop thinking about yourself. It sounds crazy I know but Zig Ziglar once said “You can only get what you want, if you help enough other people get what they want.” While the hiring agent understands that you need a job in order to save your house, they really don’t care. Seriously. All they care about is:

Are you the person who is going to bring in the sales that will keep us in business?

Are you the person who will reduce our customer complaints?

Are you the person who is going to show up to work on time every day?

Are you the person who is going to help me solve my problem?

Employers are not just looking for people to fill a position. They are looking for people to help them get what they want whatever that may be. And you, being the savvy entrepreneur that you are, will convince them that yes, you are that person who is going to help them get what they want which will, in turn, ensure that you get what you want. A Job.

First do research on the position you are applying for. Read the job description. Tap people whom you know who are already doing the type of work you are applying for. Ask them what a typical day is like. You want to make sure that you can do the job and that it is something you want to do. Use the information you get to tailor your resume to the position you are applying for.

Your next step is find out all you can about the company. Read the company’s website. Do a search for them on the internet. Read their marketing material. Network with people who work for the company so you can get inside information about their policies and processes. If you can, try to visit the business and look around. What are the employees wearing? How do they interact with each other and the customer? Are they formal and straitlaced or are they laidback and casual?

This may seem a little excessive at first. However, you cannot effectively market yourself as the person who will help them get what they want if you do not know what they want in the first place. Your research should reveal where they are doing well and where they need help.

Now that you have all of this seemingly useless information about this company, here is the first of many places where you are going to use it to sell yourself as the solution to their problems. Extract from your findings at least ten ideas that will help the business operate better. They can be ideas for increasing sales, or providing better customer service or saving money. Ideally, these ideas should relate to the position you are applying for but any you come up with should be fine as long as they are good.

What you are about to do is offer the company a taste of your skills and knowledge. Just like those in-store demonstrations where employees offer you a piece of sausage in a cup in the hopes that you will buy a package, you are going to offer the company a taste of what they will be getting if they hire you.

The place where you offer these ideas is in the cover letter to your resume. Open the letter with a brief introduction of yourself. Then in a professional and courteous tone, list two or three of the ideas you have about how they can improve their company. Do your best to quantify the results the company will get should they implement your ideas.

Do not use high pressure sales tactics or close with something crazy like “Call today for more great ideas about how to improve your business” as this will turn them completely off. All you are trying to do is get your foot in the door and offering some tangible benefit up front will definitely have them picking up the phone and calling you.

In the next article, I will discuss how to win at the interview. In the meantime, don’t despair. Hope is in the air.

The Plot Café was updated fairly regularly throughout the month thanks, in part, to reprint article directories. I would love to be able to produce original content for the site but there just is not enough time in my day at this moment. I was able to score three interviews with three wonderful fiction writers which you can read here, here and here and I have another two lined up.

I finally overhauled BloggingShed and got an original template on there.

The New BloggingShed

I felt a little bit like a fraud claiming to be a web designer and yet using a blog template designed by someone else. I’m really happy with the way it turned out. This month I’m going to work on getting The Plot Café overhauled (since yes I am using a template for that as well).

I also helped a friend set up her website. So really, I created two templates last month.

A couple of my articles on Ezinearticles were reprinted on other websites so I got a few backlinks for The Plot Cafe.

Now for the bad stuff.

My earnings for January were a whopping $3.00 and some change and that was strictly through advertising. However, since I didn’t do a whole lot of marketing of either site that seems appropriate.

Productivity was far below what I wanted. I did not concentrate as much on my websites as I would have liked. My excuse is that I had bit of offline drama going on that made it impossible to concentrate but in the end all that is really an excuse. I need to discipline myself to push through whatever craziness is going on in my life so that I can achieve the results I want.

My goal for February is to blog at least two times per week on BloggingShed; ending the month with at least eight original articles. I want to produce one template and four articles for marketing purposes (give away free).

As far as income is concerned, I want to make at a minimum of $50 this month to cover the cost of web hosting. So having said that; BloggingShed now has ad space available. So if you are looking for low cost but fun place to advertise your products or services, check out the, oh so low, rates on BloggingShed. I also still have my WordPress templates for sale at the new economic bailout rate of $19. Learn more here.

So did you accomplish what you wanted to get done in January? What are your goals for this month?

The first site is called BloggingShed. This site is going to be the one that brings in the majority of my income. BloggingShed is a blogger’s help site where I post tutorials for the various blogging software out there, talk about how to make money from blogging, how to market and promote your blog, discuss design and coding and make snarky comments about stuff I find on the internet.

I realize that there are tons of blogs about blogging already on the internet and that I’m pretty much trying to shout to the world at the bottom of the mountain but blogging is something that I feel I can make an honest go at. I already have a fair amount of knowledge about it and I am comfortable learning and writing about the topic. The challenge with this site is going to be in differentiating it from all the other blogging sites out there. I have a few ideas that I’m still toying around with.

The second site I will be working on is The Plot Café. This is a site for fiction writers that I have been working on for the past year. It started out as Openlore Fiction Writer’s Magazine but I changed the name because I had a completely different idea for Openlore that I will be developing at a later time.

The Plot Cafe is a website that caters to readers and writers of fiction. The site has book reviews, author interviews, writing prompts, videos and articles about writing and publishing. There is a ton of other stuff that I want to add to the site but as time is an issue at the moment (at least until I quit my day job), I have to keep the site at a sustainable level of management.

My plan with these two sites is to generate multiple streams of income through them both. The first stream is the obvious ad revenue. Right now I have Google Adsense running on both sites but as soon as I hit the $100 mark I’m going to take them off. I feel like they make the sites look amateurish. However I’ve already invested some time and effort with the program so I want to at least earn my first check before I shut it down. I plan to trade the Google Ads for Banner and Block ads where I’m able to exercise a little discretion as to who advertises on my website. I’ve also got a few affiliate links (Barnes and Noble, Gevalia Coffee) and will be adding a couple more.

The second stream of income I want to build is the sales of web and blog templates. I have two templates on sale already and am working on a third. I’m not really interested in getting into the custom design arena although I’m pretty sure I would be able to make a good amount of money in it. I’m really looking to build a business that will generate income whether I’m actively working on it or not and I can’t see that happening with me offering a custom design option.

My third income stream will come from ebooks that I will write and sell. Writing is my passion and this is where I want to spend the bulk of my time. I have a file folder of ideas for ebooks, so I imagine that this is going to be the biggest stream of income that I develop.

And last but not least, I want to offer online classes in both blogging and writing. I got this idea from a copywriting blog I read on a regular basis. It’s a lot easier than it sounds. The hardest part will be coming up with the curriculum and making sure students get what they paid for out of the class.

I have a lot of work to do, an overwhelming amount of work, which is why I’ve decided to move forward slowly. My Achilles Heel is that I have this tendency to try and rush things because I haven’t quite weaned myself off the teat of instant gratification. Even though it feels counterintuitive, I’ve given myself permission to go slow because in the end I’m pretty sure I’ll actually get a lot farther ahead.

I’m dividing the year up into quarterly goals. For the first quarter (Jan – Mar 2009) I’ll be focusing on generating content and drumming up traffic to the websites. I’m not really concerned about making money right now, although I won’t refuse it if I start earning some. Mostly I want to concentrate on building the sites’ reputations with good and useful content and generating buzz about them.

I realize this means that I’ll be working a job for at least another year but it will be well worth it when I can finally hand in my resignation and know that I will be just fine.

What about you? Are you working on building an online business? How are you planning on reaching the goals you have set for yourself for 2009?

No one is reading your blog.

Don’t feel bad. About 90% of the blogs on the internet are standing shoulder to shoulder with you on this Dock of Shame. The good news is that with time, focused effort and a few of these suggestions, you can overcome your no-traffic nightmare and turn your blog into the rockin’ place to be.

1. Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing

The internet is like the United States national debt. It just keeps growing. With billions of web pages on the internet, the only way web surfers find the information they need is through the use of a search engine like Google and Yahoo. Therefore it is important that your website is organized in a way that makes it easy for these search engine giants to scan and properly index your web pages.

This involves a little voodoo magic. First you need to cut off a lock of Larry Page’s hair…Just kidding. Seriously, search engine optimization (or SEO) techniques range from simple to complex. There are many websites on the internet that give free SEO instruction or you can save yourself time and money by just buying Naomi Dunford’s SEO School.

2. Write Linkable Content

Don’t make the mistake that a lot of website owners do and forget that people visit blogs for the content. What that content is, is entirely up to you. However, if you want to increase traffic to your website at least some of that content should be linkable.

Linkable content encourages people to link to it, talk about it and recommend it to others. Unlike other types of blog postings, such as news posts or personal updates, linkable content is designed to always be relevant and strives to be comprehensive. An example of this type of content would be a how-to article or even a comprehensive list of resources.

For advice on how to write a great article, check out my blog post “How to Write a Great Article”.

3. Write and Submit Press Releases

A press release is an announcement that is written for and circulated to various news outlets. The goal of a press release is to get picked up and talked about by those news sources which nets you increased exposure and traffic.

The first step is to write the press release. Afterwards you can submit your press release directly to those news sources or use online PR Services such as PRWeb or Market Wire.

4. Engage in Article Marketing

Article marketing is the process of writing articles and submitting them to article directories. Webmasters, looking for free content, will download your articles and post them to their website. Article marketing provides you with backlinks and exposure for your website which can be substantial if your article is picked up by enough webmasters.

Writing for article directories is a little different from writing for blogs so check out this article for some great tips. Visit this website for a comprehensive list of article directories to submit to.

5. Submit to Internet Directories

An internet directory is a collection of links to other websites. Some directories are general in scope, meaning they have a wide range of categories encompassing a wide range of topics while others focus on a specific interest (called a niche) such as personal development or web development.

There is much debate as to whether or not internet directories really bring in traffic. I say it depends on the directory. Some directories, such as BlogCatalog, have an active community surrounding it that encourages members to visit each other’s blogs. Others…well, not so much.

When submitting to directories, look for ones that specialize in your blog’s topic. You stand a greater chance of getting traffic from a niche directory than a general one.

6. Network with Other Bloggers

The notion; “If you build it, they will come”, only works in the movies. You wouldn’t go to a party, stand in a corner and wait for people to talk to you. Likewise you can’t start a blog and just expect people to visit it. You must take it upon yourself to get out there and introduce yourself. Read and comment on other blogs. Participate in forums and social networking sites. Submit to blog carnivals.

7. Guest Blog

Guest blogging is sort of like article marketing except it’s much more effective. Instead of posting your article to an article directory, you write specifically for another person’s blog. The blogger gains quality content for their website and, in return, you get to share your expertise, as well as your website, with their audience.

To learn how to be a great guest blogger read, “How to Guest Blog without Disaster.”

8. Paid Advertising

Paid advertising is an effective means of getting the word out about your website. Often it is the only way to get your blog into places that will offer you a nice stream of steady traffic. The cost of advertising will range but a general rule is that the more traffic a website has, the higher the price to advertise on it.

Before opening your wallet, be sure to evaluate whether the website caters to your desired audience and whether you will receive your desired outcome. If you are really strapped for cash, offer to guest blog or exchange advertising.

9. Get Your Blog Reviewed

You can purchase a paid review through a service like Review Me. This is where you pay a blogger to tell others what they think of your website. The upside is that if the blogger really likes your website, then you’ll get a glowing review. The downside is that the blogger is not restricted to just saying good things about you or your website. So if they have any issues with those will be discussed.

The second way you can get a blog review is to network with other bloggers and agree to write a review of each other’s blog. This is a win-win situation for both of you as you each will earn a free review as well as make connections in the blogosphere.

10. Offer Something for Free

People. Love. Free. Stuff. Especially if it’s high quality free stuff. The best freebies are things people will actually use. On the internet this would be a web template, graphics or a plugin that makes their internet life easier.

The nice thing is you can always find places on the internet to advertise your freebie for free. Some will even host your download although I highly recommend you place the download on your website as well. If your freebie is cool enough people will tell their friends about it thus earning you free advertisement and traffic.

11. Hold a Contest

Next to getting free stuff, people also love winning stuff. The trick with contests, however, is getting people to enter. This is usually overcome by offering prizes people actually want to win so ixnay on the Weird Al Yankovic records.

Depending on where you live there might be laws that govern how a contest is run so be sure to check this out prior to advertising your contest.

12. Interview Other Bloggers

Just as you are looking for ways to advertise your blog, there are other bloggers out there doing the same thing. What better way to help each other than to interview them. You gain because you have fresh content to post on your blog and your interviewee will tell their readership all about their interview with you.

Conversely, jump on any opportunity that arises for you to be interviewed and don’t forget to reward your interviewer with a mention on your blog.

13. Viral Market with a Game or Video

People are always looking to be entertained. That’s why putting up a fun flash game that people can play on your site or uploading a funny and memorable video to YouTube is a great way to attract visitors.

Don’t worry if you don’t know the first thing about coding a game or shooting a video. Experts in these two subjects are just a Google search away.

14. Write Testimonials

When looking for products or services to purchase, one of the things I look for are testimonials from current or previous clients. If there is a website, I visit it if only to make sure that the reviewer is real. Think of all the online products you use and then contact their sales department about putting up a testimonial from you that includes a link to your website. You gain traffic as well as support your favorite products and services.

This list is by no means exhaustive but should get you off to a great start. I’d love to hear about some things you have done to increase traffic to your website.

What is the article’s purpose?

Before you write the first word, you need to figure out what you want the article to do. Do you want the article to educate your audience? Entertain them? Get them to buy something? When you know why you are writing the article, you can position the information in your article for maximum effect.

For instance, in sales letters, I believe acknowledging the problem your customer is having and then following up with how it can be solved by your product or service is an effective writing strategy. Say your customer wants to increase traffic to their website. You would start the sales letter off with something like:

‘If you are like many first time website owners, you don’t have a clue about how to get people to visit your website (the problem). Our book The Traffic Generator will provide you with the tools you need to explode traffic to your site and make you an internet superstar (the solution).’

Knowing your article’s purpose will also keep your writing focused and on track. Many potentially fantastic articles have been reduced to rubbish by irrelevant examples and meaningless tangents. An article about how to make a caramel espresso drink shouldn’t include a story about the time your child spewed milk from their nose unless it relates, in some strange and disturbing way, with the steps for making a latte.

Who is the article for?

The term “Target Audience” refers to the group of people you are directing the information in your article to. Think of it as being at a seminar. The article is the speaker and your target audience is the crowd of people sitting there listening. You need to know who these people are and tailor your writing so that it speaks to them. A twenty-two year old college girl is not going to respond the same to writing aimed at a forty-five year old married man.

Ask yourself who would be interested in reading about the topic. For example, you are writing an article about Victoria’s Secret’s new Biofit bra. The answer to this question would be women who wear bras. Depending on your article’s purpose, however, you will need to refine the answer a little because within that particular demographic are a variety of subgroups. There are women who only wear custom made bras. Some women are cheap and won’t pay more than $15 dollars for a bra. Other women think Victoria’s Secret is the epitome of all things evil. If you are writing a sales letter for this bra then your target audience is really women who wear mass market bras, will pay the ticket price and who like the store chain.

If you don’t know much about your target audience, research! Talk to people in that group. Read the books, newspaper and magazines they would. Haunt their favorite hangouts. This is also where the internet becomes your best friend. With the millions of blogs out there, the blogosphere is a wonderful resource for tapping into the mind of your audience.

What is the article’s message?

This is otherwise known as the point of the article. For example, say the purpose of the article is to convince people to buy life insurance and your target audience is people who think life insurance is a waste of money. The point of the article would be the importance of having life insurance and/or that your company offers the best coverage and terms.

To figure out your article’s message, ask the question ‘What is the article about?’ and write down what comes to mind. You may have many ideas but pick the one that can be used to accomplish the article’s mission and is of interest to your target audience. It is a waste of time and effort to write about the history of life insurance as it does very little to sell a policy just as very few in your target audience would want to know the genealogy of the company president.

Other Tips

Use examples, metaphors and similes that your target audience can understand and relate to. If you are writing an article directed at married Christian women, an example of how you found god while drunk at your local dance club is going to miss the mark completely. Likewise, using country euphemisms such as ‘lick the calf over’ will fly over the heads of your average city resident.

When formatting your article, take the medium into consideration. People do not read articles on the internet the same way they do articles in printed media. This has to do with their mindset. People have been conditioned to expect longer pieces that span multiple pages in print media. On the other hand, shorter pieces are more successful on the internet simply because people treat their computer monitor like their television set and want information in digestible chunks. Use short paragraphs and a reasonably sized font to make it easy for people to take in what you’ve written.

Mind your spelling and grammar. The best way to look like an amateur is to post an article full of typos and poorly worded sentences. While you don’t have to have a PhD in English, you should pay attention to the warning your text editor throws up when there is a typo or grammar problem. At the very least, read the article out loud. Oftentimes our ears will pick up mistakes our eyes miss.

Crafting a great article is a challenge but well worth the effort when you are rewarded with phenomenal traffic, a bigger paycheck and the status of superstar writer among your peers. Quality wins every time.

As a webmaster, you may be wondering how to get your brand new, still in the bubble wrap, website listed in these giant cyber catalogs. Well, there are two ways robots find new websites. Either by following links from other sites or from the queue of direct submissions.

It has been my experience that sites found via links from other, trusted, sites are indexed faster and avoid the sandbox effect than when submitted directly to the search engine. I call this the referral effect and the keyword here is “trusted”. A trusted site is a site that’s been around for a while, uses no or very little reprinted content and has accumulated a good quantity of quality links itself. The trick here is finding a site that fits all of these qualities, that is active and does not use the no-follow link attribute.

A link from these sites can gained in several ways. You could get added to a blogroll or link page. You could purchase advertising on the site or you could post comments in the area designated for them. To view whether or not a site uses the no-follow link attribute you can either view the source or install an extension such as SearchStatus for Firefox by Quirk.

The second way to get indexed is by direct submission. Though you can submit to every Search Engine you come across most search engines get their results from the big three; Google, Yahoo and MSN. So directly submitting to them is your best bet.

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

Enter your web address and then wait. It usually takes a few days before the robots show up at your site to index it.

Additionally, all of the search engines support sitemap submission. A sitemap is a document that lists all of the content to be found on your website and makes it easier for the robot to fully catalogue your site.

Go to:

Google Webmaster Tools

MSN Webmaster Tools

Yahoo Site Explorer

As a bonus, you can also ping the search engines to notify them when you have new content and therefore entice the robot to come visit your site again.

Yahoo Ping

http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=

http://www.yoursitemaplocation.com

Google Ping

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping?name=You+Site+Name&

url=http://www.yoursiteaddress.com&changesURL=

http://www.yoursitemapaddress.com

MSN Ping (Note: Moreover is MSN’s ping service)

http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.yoursitemapaddress.com

If you use WordPress, you can just set it up to automatically ping the appropriate servers by going into your dashboard, click on Options and then Writing. At the very end of the page will be a box that says Update Services. Just add the above to the list. For an entire list of places you can ping visit Update Services.

You can also use your Robots.txt page to help robots find your sitemap when they visit. Robots will usually hit this file first when visiting your site for instructions on what they can and cannot index on your site. To direct them to the sitemap, add the following code to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/yoursitemapaddress.xml

Getting your website indexed is only the first step towards doing well with the search engines. In an upcoming article, we will talk about how to optimize your website so that it ranks well with the search engines so that they can actually bring you enough traffic to make you the internet rockstar you were meant to be.

PageRank is a sort of meter that Google uses to signify how relevant or trustworthy the content is on a particular web page/website. The theory that most website owners and web marketers work with is that when people use a search engine to look for information about a subject that they will not look past the first two pages of results. Therefore it is best to be ranked within the first one to two pages of the results. Google’s PageRank supposedly tells a website owner where their site/page ranks on the first page of results. So if your site/page rank is a 3, that means it will be listed third on the page starting from the bottom.

It is my opinion that PageRank is nothing more than a marketing ploy gone wrong. Google makes its money by selling advertising space on its search engine and through it’s Adsense program. To get people using both, it introduced PageRank which first tapped into people’s innate need to feel superior to others (otherwise known as pride, the deadliest of deadly sins) and then into their greed as people began making millions of dollars via the Adsense program.

The ploy worked and Google dominated the search engine market but then things began to go wrong when people realized that Google’s PageRank algorithm was based on how many websites linked to their page/site and that they could increase their PageRank simply by increasing the number of websites linking to their site/page. And so the paid link industry was born.

Google claims that paid links distorts the search results in its search engine by making a site seem more popular than it really is. They don’t seem to realize that they are the cause of this problem. By giving links more importance than they really should have, they have created the situation they now find themselves in with people buying links in order to increase their PageRank and rake in more traffic and money.

In an effort to stuff the marketing genie back into the bottle, Google has begun to devalue the PageRank of sites that use the services of the paid link company Text Link Ads as this seems to be the only way they are able to detect what links on a page have been paid for. And of course the internet has their panties in a bunch about it because many have made Google their god. They select web templates, write content and market their sites only for Google’s benefit and are now realizing what it means to be, excuse my net speak, pwned by them.

What website owners need to realize is that one, when it comes to self made gods, there is no appeasing them. Today it’s paid links. Tommorow, there will be a ban on all other advertising except Adsense. The day after that it will be approved content only. All gods want to remake the world in their image and without opposition Google will do just that to the internet.

Secondly, the internet has evolved since Google hit the scene. Not only are there other search engines that are just as good if not better but the focus has now turned to social networking. Just as you would not place your retirement savings into one account; you should not depend on one source for your website’s traffic. You should expand your marketing efforts to include other search engines and the new ways people are finding content on the web.

One thing Google did right was prove how important it is to think holistically when it comes to website marketing. Stop being Google’s slave and evolve to a higher level of thinking. Failing to do so can and will cause your internet business to die.

In all actuality, making, say a billion dollars is quite possibly the easiest thing you could do in life. It is so easy that you can do it one step and I won’t even charge you to share with you what that step is.

How to Make a Billion Dollars

Step One

Convince one billion people to give you one dollar each. Since there are approximately 6.5 billion people in the world, finding enough people shouldn’t be that hard.

Alternatively you can convince one person to give you one billion dollars and to make life even easier for you, here is a link to a list of the world’s billionaires.

Now I know you are probably thinking that I’m having a great laugh at your expense. You would be partly right. The fact is that there is a very basic and simple business lesson to be learned from this which is that when it comes right down to it all of the financial goals you have in life depend on the willingness of others to share their money with you.

It does not matter if you are providing a product or service or if you are looking for charity, the ideology is the same. Why do you think businesses spend so much money in advertising and so much time building their reputation? In a world where people have a multitude of options literally at their fingertips, they, the businesses, are trying to convince as many people as they can to give them a dollar.

If your financial goals seem overwhelming just break it down. I’ve even provided a cool chart that I made myself to give you a starting point. Now what you do to convince people to give you money is entirely up to you but know that making money really is that simple.

I received the latest update email from an entrepreneur’s community I joined called StartUp Nation. In the email was a link to the web forum that listed ideas about starting a business. There were some really good ideas in there. As always, though, before getting involved with any of them, do your homework and make sure you are not involving yourself into some kind of scam.

If you don’t want to sift though pages and pages of posts there are a few sites that will provide you with ideas for starting a business such as:

Springwise

Iconoculture

Entrepreneur.com

For myself, I’ve decided to get involved, somehow, with technology. I love to cook and hope to open my own coffee shop/bakery one day but I thought about it more and decided that that’s something I want to do in my golden years after I’ve made my multi-billions in technology.

I’ve got an idea which still needs fleshing out a little more. The main thing I’m trying to work out is how much it is going to cost to get started and where the capital is going to come from. I want a debt free company so loans will be the very, very, very, very,very,very,very last thing I look at and I do not want my company to be publicly held so selling shares is out of the question. I have this fear that I will put a ton of work and effort into building the company and someone will come along and try to take it from me.

A friend of mine’s husband owned his own software company without loans or going public so I’m going to see how he did it.