I’ve been seeing a lot of people bragging about how much money they’re making blogging, affiliate marketing, selling ebooks, whatever. The people doing this bragging are almost always in the $100-3000 a month bracket, and they are so proud of this accomplishment that they feel the need to brag about it and act like they’re the ultimate badasses. Now, I’m not writing this to criticize people making $100 a month, I’m writing it for two reasons:

• To encourage you to shoot a lot higher. If you’re making a few hundred or a few thousand a month, you now need to reassess your goals and set the bar higher. Consistently making the exact same amount every single month is not nearly as impressive as learning more and expanding your businesses to continuously increase your earnings.
• To tell these people to shut the fuck up. If you’ve taken economics you know about “opportunity cost,” which is basically what you have to sacrifice to get something else, for example the opportunity cost of getting an A on tomorrow’s test would be not going out with your buddies tonight. The rest of this post will be about how to analyze opportunity costs and risks of business models and campaigns to see if you are actually “profiting” as much as you think you are.

Opportunity cost is very closely related to what we usually think of as “risks.” You might have two great business ideas but only enough time to work on one. The opportunity cost of working on one is not working on the other, and you are taking a risk - hoping the idea you choose to work on will be more profitable than the other would have been. There are three main things you have to “risk”:

• Time: A “problem” I frequently encounter is I’ll have lots of great ideas, enough money to fund all of them, but not enough time to work on more than one or two. I’m taking a huge risk when I decide what to do because if something fails, I’ve wasted a lot of time that I could have used to work on something else.
• Money: When most people think of costs and risks, they think about money. THIS IS THE NUMBER ONE PLACE PEOPLE TOTALLY FUCK UP. If you’re making $50 a day from Adsense, good for you, but if you’re working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, not so good for you, because if you’re willing to work all day, there are many many jobs that will net you a lot more than $50. Even if you’re making $100,000 a month, you might still be suffering a non-monetary loss, such as sacrificing your health, hobbies, friends, social life, or maybe you dropped out of school to pursue something that was extremely profitable for a few months but then went out of business. I could probably double my bank account if I wanted to, but there are things in my life that I’m not willing to sacrifice for that extra money.
• Legal: Depending on what kind of business you’re running, you need to analyze the legal issues and risks before rushing into it. Talking to lawyers and making sure everything is legally set is always a good investment. Obviously there are cases when you know there is a legal risk, but the monetary reward is so high that you don’t care. You need to be able to assess all aspects of possible risks to decide if what you’re doing is really worth it.

Whenever you’re brainstorming a new business plan Continue Reading »

I’m very good at getting people to work for me for free. I’m also very good at convincing people that I’m always right, even if I’m not. Being able to do things like this is by far one of the best business skills you can acquire, and while you obviously shouldn’t try to “manipulate” your friends (because that’s basically what it is), use these tips in business settings to make your work a lot easier:

Using emotion: If you want to change someone’s mind, you always want to appeal to emotion, not logic. You can literally PROVE someone wrong using logic and they still won’t change their opinion, because often the thing you’re arguing about won’t be exactly cut and dry, and let’s face it, people don’t like admitting when they’re wrong. It can also make them resent you and have the opposite effect from what you were trying to do.
• Establish credibility: Why would people listen to you if they don’t know who you are? If some random person I met at a party tried giving me business advice, I’d listen, but if it didn’t sound that great I’d just blow them off. If that same person pulled up in an Aston with $100,000 cufflinks, I’d listen, and no matter how absurd they sounded, I’d still try out some of their tips. Don’t be scared to show off accomplishments and successes to establish credibility - it can make or break a deal.
• Repetition: Sometimes if you repeat something enough, even if it’s not true, people will begin to think it is. It sounds stupid, but it works. Being constantly exposed to only one side of an argument also makes you a lot more prone to accept that side.
• The bandwagon effect: This has been psychologically proven and it does work. If you’re in a room with five people and Continue Reading »

professionalism - the standing, practice, or methods of a professional, as distinguished from an amateur

I hate going to the doctor, and I hate it with a passion. It’s not because I don’t like my doctor, in fact he’s a really cool guy, we went to the same college and we get along great. It’s because I have to wait for ten motherfucking hours to go in because they’re always behind schedule. If you find me a doctor who never has a wait, I’ll switch immediately. People hate waiting, especially when you’ve already set a meeting for a specific time and then show up an hour late. This is by far one of the most unprofessional things you can ever do. I tolerate it from my doctor because I don’t want to get sick so I don’t really have a choice, but if a business associate did this on a regular basis he’d get the boot without thinking twice.

Before I started this blog, I contacted Unique Blog Designs, a popular blog design company for a quote. A few days after submitting my request they emailed me back asking for a phone number so we could discuss the details of the project, and I promptly replied. A few days later, no phone call, so I replied again. A week later, no phone call, and to this day I still haven’t heard back from them (luckily I found a better designer, and you’re looking at the finished product right now!). Taking a ridiculously long time to answer emails is essentially the same as being late for an important meeting and it is the easiest way to lose business. I’ll never work with Unique Blog Designs again and if my friends ask me about them I’ll tell them to stay away, not out of spite, but because it’s just not worth the trouble. Even if they receive a hundred requests a day, they still need to make the effort to reply to all these people in a timely manner.

You should check your email at least once a day, and reply to any businesses related questions immediately. If someone knows they’ll receive a reply the same day, there’s a LOT better chance they’ll want to work with you, which means more money for you. When I was just getting into blogging, I emailed John Chow to ask him for advice and to see if he could recommend any good forums for learning about blogging, and he replied the same day Continue Reading »

If you haven’t seen the movie 21 yet, go see it tonight. It came out a few weeks ago and it’s by far one of the best movies I’ve seen in awhile. It’s about a college student who gets into Harvard Medical School but doesn’t have the $300,000 to pay tuition (yup, $300k ), so in order to raise the money he starts playing Blackjack with a few of his classmates, learns how to count cards, and wins hundreds of thousands in Vegas. Card counting is a method in which each card is assigned a value (-1, 0, or +1). The player keeps a running tally of the total count and uses it to determine how likely they are to win a hand, and uses this to decide what to do. Casinos hate people who can do this and if they know you can count cards, they’ll ban you from their casino, although contrary to popular belief it’s actually perfectly legal. However, I’m not going to teach you how to count cards - I’m posting this because there are a lot of business lessons you can learn from this movie that can be applied across the board:

• Plan: The team spent months perfecting their skills and planning every detail. I can’t tell you how many businesses I’ve seen fail because someone gets a great idea and jumps into it without the proper planning and preparation. If you’re launching a new blog, you don’t need to spend half a year planning it, but I’d definitely recommend at least a week or two.
• Marketing strategy: The main character didn’t want to join the team initially, but they really wanted him so they ended up sucking him in eventually. They did this by basically leading him on and telling him what he wanted to hear. One reason he didn’t want to do it was he thought it was illegal, so they told him nothing about it was illegal. When they got to the airport, they gave him $200,000 to stash in his boxers so the airport security wouldn’t know about it. Transferring large sums of cash is illegal but since he was already there, he decided to just do it. When they got to Vegas, they gave him a fake ID and a new identity, which is obviously illegal, but since he had already been sucked in and had traveled to Vegas, he was a lot more likely to just say “fuck it” and go along with it. The Reverse Funnel System employs this technique by making people pay a small sum for the information about their product, and then once they’ve paid, they ask the buyer to pay a larger sum for the rest of the information. Since they’ve already been sucked in and don’t want to have wasted money, people are now more likely to pay the larger sum than if the RFS just asked them to pay it from the start.

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Business skills 101: don’t be lazy. Sounds obvious, right? It should be, but so many people can’t seem to grasp the idea that if you don’t work, you don’t make money. I used to work in the entertainment industry, doing music production and party promotion and while it was fun, it was very stressful. I had to work with a lot of rappers and let me tell you right now, rappers are the laziest people you will ever meet. In all my experience, I only met a couple that I actually liked, out of hundreds. Let’s look at some reasons why I hate them so much and how you can learn from their mistakes:

• They’re always late: It doesn’t matter if they’re about to have the most important meeting of their life, they’ll be late. You can call to check in with them as many times as you want, but they’ll still figure out a way to be late. Even if you go to their house to pick them up, they’ll take a long time figuring out what to wear and end up being late anyway. Being late is one of the best ways to show that you’re unprofessional and to lose business deals and money. Never be late and never make people wait, because people hate waiting.
• They’re irresponsible: They don’t get stuff done. I remember one occasion where I found an unsigned artist I liked and was planning to take him to a million dollar studio to record some demo tracks. He was almost an hour late and when he got there he didn’t have anything ready to go. Obviously if you’re going to a studio to record, you need to write some songs so you’re ready to record. You don’t pay for studio time so you can sit there and write your songs on the clock. If you want to be successful, you have to get things done, and you don’t want your business associates thinking you’re irresponsible or they won’t want to work with you.
• They’re hard to reach: For some reason they like carrying the most expensive phones but they don’t like answering them. If people can’t reach you, how are you going to take care of business? You can’t. Make sure people can reach you when they need to. I recently wrote a post about Ari Gold, a character from the show Entourage. He carries two phones, a main phone and a “bat phone” for emergencies. He always answers his main phone so the bat phone isn’t even really necessary, but he still has it just incase. Be like that.
• They mooch: Rappers are the ultimate parasites. They don’t like paying for anything and they even get mad if people won’t spend money on them. They think they’re the most important things in the universe and it’s impossible to reason with them. They don’t like listening to other people’s opinions and rather than having educated discussions, if someone doesn’t agree with them, they won’t even pay attention. First, people hate mooches, and if you know any mooches I’m sure you’ll agree. After awhile no one wants to be around them and no one pays any attention to them. People also hate people who don’t know how to discuss business. Saying “I’m right and you’re wrong” isn’t discussing - it just makes you look like a fool. Listen to other people’s opinions and take in as much as possible.

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