Most poor people do not seem to understand the most basic concept of money:

The amount of money someone has is roughly how much value they have contributed to society. (excluding those who don’t ask for it: non profits, volunteers etc)

Take for example a book seller on a street. He sells a book to a customer for $10. In return that customer has received more than $10 of value. That customer could feel that book is worth $50 if he thinks he got a really good deal, or $10 if he feels it was just worth the money, but if it was only worth $5 to the customer he wouldn’t have bought the book – because he’d be giving away more money than he thinks its worth.

So in return for earning (not taking) $10 that book seller has given over $10 of value to this person.

Do you really think this book seller is doing a bad thing for society for earning that $10? Should he now be forced to give it to others because he has earned it?

If you’re thinking logically you’d realize there is absolutely no reason why he should be forced to give that $10 away. He earned it fair and square and in return gave more than $10 of value to this person, he did some good in the world to earn that $10 and thus he deserves it.

This is all big business is doing; but on a much larger scale.

So if a business has earned $1 million in a year how much value have they given to society? To their customers? Over $1 million of value!

This is something to be truly celebrated, here comes someone who has built a company and has given over a million dollars of value to the world!

Yet a lot of people don’t feel that way, they think “oh its earned a million dollars, therefore it’s taking money from society and should pay some back”. And they slander it, completely forgetting that this is a company which is helping a great many people with their daily lives.

How do I know this company is helping people? They are paying it millions of dollars, people don’t just pay someone money if it doesn’t improve their life in some way.

You know what this comes down to?

Greed.

Simply put, these poor people (although they don’t feel like it because “they’re the good guys” *rolleyes*) are greedy, and feel they are entitled to money simply because someone else has more than them, ignoring the fact that these businesses don’t owe them jack shit (and have done a lot more good for the world then they ever have).

I still have not seen a single legitimate reason why companies owe anyone anything other than ‘oh they have lots of money so they can afford it’. So really it just comes down to the poor being greedy and feeling that just because someone has more than them they deserve a piece without doing anything for it.

If the business is polluting / destroying the earth or doing damage to society in some way (harming people etc) then sure they should pay for their actions, but other than that, there is no reason why they owe anyone anything.

If you want business owners to contribute to helping the poor here’s a radical new concept: How about you do it yourself. Lead by example.

Go ahead and turn your skills into something valuable to others, earn some more money, then give it away. It’s win win for everyone and you get to contribute back even more than you are currently.

Why do you believe that you or anyone else is entitled to something for nothing? If you really care about the state of the world, get off your high horse, stop trying to cut down the tall poppies and start taking action to help society.

What the world needs is more people giving back and less people getting jealous of others (and subsequently not doing anything themselves because they feel inadequate). Are you going to be an action taker, a doer, a helper? Or are you going to be yet another complainer?

The chief problem I find with most charities is either one of the following:

• You have to give away your money to help.
• You don’t know how well your money is being spent (are the poor starving children ACTUALLY getting all that money, or is most of it going to the charity organizers?)
• You have to keep giving and giving, at no point do the people start becoming self sufficient.

About a year ago I discovered a charity that solves all these problems, and does so in a truly remarkable way. Instead of giving a man a fish, they teach them how to fish.

The charity is known as Kiva, and instead of just donating money they allow you to loan money out to entrepreneurs in 3rd world countries. Then those entrepreneurs use that money to grow their business, employ locals and boost their countries economy. Eventually once they have made some more profits they pay the loan back and you get 100% of your money back.

So far I’ve loaned $400 and have not had a single person default on their payments, in fact the overall repayment rate is 98%, so you’re practically guaranteed to get all the money you donate back. Oh yes, and 100% of the donation goes to the entrepreneur, Kiva asks if you’d like to make an additional donation to them to keep their operations running but you are never forced to give to Kiva themselves.

Once you’ve been paid back, you can withdrawl that money, or lend it again and again and again, helping thousands of people with the same $25. So rather than just feeding a child for a few days as with other charities, you can really help rebuild a country, improve their economy, give locals jobs and more.

… and it doesn’t cost you a cent.

I’ve started donating 1% of all company profits to Kiva (and continually reloaning when those donations are repaid) and may increase that amount in the future.

If you’re still confused here’s a nice video that explains the concept better than I ever could:

So start your first donation today at http://www.kiva.org and start helping make the world a better place

There are only differences of opinion.

There’s no such thing as a stupid person. Everyone always makes the smartest decision given what they know.

Everyone has biases, prejudices, judgements which is why we believe *others* (never ourselves) are stupid.

The next time you meet a “stupid person” try to think from their point of view. Not this fake thinking it through, but truely drop all your biases, prejudices and judgements and think exactly as the other person.

Their opinion doesn’t look so stupid now does it?

It’s all you have to do.

As much as I dislike Apples business practices, they are currently booming, and they’re booming because they build remarkable products.

Take the smartphone, for going on 10 years we’ve had pocket PC’s and smart phones. HP made iPaq’s, Dell made Axims, always one upping each other slightly, small incremental improvements. In this time the market barely grew, geeks of course all had one, but they were never really a mainstream item.

Then apple came along with the iPhone, and they didn’t just build a slightly better smart phone, they completely redefined what a smartphone was. They built something remarkable.

They took something complex and made it simple, sleek and sexy (half the people I know bought one simply because of how it looks and feels…) and it took off.

Blizzard did the same with World of Warcraft, they took a standard MMO Formula, made it simple and beautiful and gained 10 million players in just a few short years (the previous record was held by Everquest with a whole of 400,000 players)

How did Microsoft become such a huge company? They redefined their market. While everyone else was using dos and text based applications they went ahead and built a graphical interface that was simple and easy to use: Windows.

Google simplified finding information, they didn’t build a massive directory with thousands of links everywhere like yahoo and altavista, they just had one box, you enter what you want to find and it finds it. Simple. Sleek. Sexy.

If you want to grow your company fast, don’t just one up your competitors. Redefine your market, build something different, build something worth talking about, and your profits will soar.

So the duckling theory was created by my friend MK a while back, and its funny how often it comes up in every day life, once you start noticing it it can’t be unnoticed

Basically its that:

“Cute animals / people / objects become cuter when under slight distress ”

You know how every group always has that one person that everyone likes to tease (in a friendly way) because its funny / cute when they either pout or try (and fail) to retort? Duckling theory

You know why videos such as this husky pup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XMugVbHQks are super incredibly cute? Duckling theory

You know why its always really cute / funny when girls get upset / distressed about non-dangerous animals (moths, mice, bugs)? Duckling Theory

MK originally came up with the idea while watching a group of ducks float downstream with Min and Fifi, and proclaimed “hey wouldn’t it be so much cuter if they little ducklings got swept away by a tiny waterfall and tried to swim against the current but couldn’t and tumbled down the waterfall?” and aside from the animal abuse allegations from Min and Fifi (which were in essence an application of the Duckling theory as they found it cute when MK frantically tried to explain) she had a good point, cute things do get cuter when they become distressed.

Whoa, haven’t posted in here in aaages.

Been having a lot of thoughts about the future recently and where the world is going.

One of the most interesting areas to me is that of automation and efficiency, the entire world is getting faster, more effective and better at what they do, yet at the same time people are doing more. Why is this? I believe it’s mostly to do with us as Humans being able to easily adapt, but the systems we have built our society on can’t. 

A Notable one is that of every business in the world believing it’s best to work 9 to 5 and you get paid on the amount of time you are in the office. 

When you think about it, it just doesn’t make much sense. It makes sense from a managers point of view because it’s easy to mark a role and judge someones productivity based on what time they logged in and out. 

However it’s incredibly inneficient. 

Just like on office space what it boils down to is employees giving the job their best shot in the early days, realizing they get 0 reward for putting in extra effort and slowly falling back to do the minimum required work not to get fired. 

If you go to work 4 hours a day and get twice as much done as the guy next to you who worked a full 8 hours you’re still more likely to get fired. 

The company will simply say:

“Work 8 hours a day and get 4 times as much done…

But we’re still going to pay you just as much…”

So where’s this motivation coming from again?

It’s all well and good wanting to help grow the company, but if your reward for doing work… is more work, then why would you give a shit about working hard?

What it comes down to is a system that was designed in the past primarily for simplicity. 

It’s kind of hard for managers to look over every detail of every person in a 10,000 person company and judge them based on results achieved. 

It’s sooo much easier to just look at the times they logged in and out. 

But with computers and technology so advanced these days you can monitor pretty much anything, just set up systems with checklists and more that staff can all work with and managers can easily see. 

The problem is: companies aren’t keeping up.

and the government especially isn’t keeping up. 

Out of every friend I have who’s working / worked in government none of them would say they worked especially hard, it’s just too easy to do sfa and get away with it. 

Now the problem isn’t that people are just lazy and don’t want to do work. Because anyone that’s ever played World of Warcraft can understand just how friggin hard people work for that new shiny piece of loot. I’ve known some to spend 1000 hours+ doing the same repetitive task over and over to get one new mount. 

and it isn’t even real…

The problem is games and web applications (web 2.0 stuff) are keeping up with the times, they are setting the pace. They are entertaining, addictive, fun and everything people want. 

Jobs are not.

Some jobs are quite fun I must admit, the games company I worked for previously is a good example of that, so is working in a bar. Google is doing a superb job at making a fun workplace happen.

But they are still missing a few critical elements to being places people WANT to go. 

Rewards are a big element, nobody wants to do extra work for no reason (even raiding in WoW you get loot sometimes ). 

Cutting the beurocracy and unneccessary tasks would be another great step (I’ve seen companies throw money down the drain because half the staff are doing jobs that don’t even need to be done). 

If you think an 8 hour day is needed for your employees to get their stuff done, here’s a test:

Tell your employees if they get their work done by lunch time they can go home. 

Now watch how fast that 8 hours of work magically turns into 4. 

Tasks expand to fill the time alloted to them. 

What I’d love to do is create an ideal work place, discover everything people want and provide it, provided they are being as efficient and hard working as possible I see no reason not to. 

Have any ideas on what you’d love in your workplace? List em below.

Do you feel you can’t build an outstanding business because of all the competition out there? Feel Insignificant beside these massive blogs with thousands of daily readers? The problem is not them, it’s you!

I’ve just started coming to terms with how incredibly different web businesses of today are to businesses in the past. In the world of Web 2.0 no longer are other sites like yours competition, or even enemies, they are pretty much your best allies in your ultimate quest for insane levels of traffic. The reason for this is that the web is now an evolved social network, where thousands of people all over the internet seek out quality information from blogs everywhere, and want the best of all worlds, not just what you have to offer.

Thus I’ve realized that if you give away links to your *competition* (otherwise known as other sites in your niche), and you start telling everyone about great new programs and things you found without wanting anything in return (as in providing non-affiliate links to products), people really start to respect you and keep coming back for more and more.

It’s really counterintuitive isn’t it? Most people have the belief that if they send their traffic to other pages they’ll be lost forever and never come back to hear what THEY have to say. Nothing could be further from the truth. The real truth is that when you give away things of quality people see YOU as the source of amazing information as well as that other blog you just linked them too.

Just look at search engines, they simply provide the information you need and send you on your way in just a few seconds, yet you keep coming back to them again and again, simply because they fill your need. If you fill the needs of your visitors you’ll start to see this too, they start to realize you are doing this for them (not sending them to a random page so you can cash your next big affiliate cheque) and they want to hear what you have to say more and more.

In my life I’ve found the very best knowledge comes from multiple sources. I’ve never had any one person teach me even 10% as well as many teachers put together, because every teacher adds another layer of knowledge you just can’t get from anyone else. Every person on the internet is unique and will explain things in their own way, hence why it’s in their best interest to seek out additional information on a topic they are interested in, and it’s in your best interest to show them where to find that information (because then you’ve just risen that little bit more in their eyes).

Take a look at how many RSS feeds or email lists you are subscribed to right at this moment. Are you subscribed to and only visit one website? If you’re like me you probably aren’t, in fact im willing to bet you have at least 5 RSS or email subscriptions at the moment and you constantly learn from each of these sources.

Getting knowledge from multiple sources is advantageous in a variety of different ways:

• It’s less biased – When you have the opinions of 5 different bloggers on the one topic, it’s very unlikely you’re going to hear a common bias from all of them, and you’ll start to become more open minded, which in turn will empower you to make the right choice.
• It’s more effective – You learn far faster taking in multiple inputs and putting them together, you get the ‘whole picture’ so to speak rather than lots of little pieces.
• You gain more perspective – You can see things from different angles and learn to look at things from different perspectives.

The truth is people will seek out additional information and knowledge on any area of life they would like to improve, and you can either help them with that or try and push against them, trying to force them into buying what you want them to buy and doing what you want them to do. Which do you think is going to lead to more visitor loyalty?

Microsoft started off from the beginning in a competitive mindset, attempting to force customers to use proprietor software, run only their products and use your computer how they want you to use it. This worked great for many years while they held a monopoly over the market.

But then along came Google, the company that wants knowledge to be free, and to help users find what they desire, never being locked into using only *their* products.

Is it any surprise that Microsoft has seen almost zero growth in the past 10 years, while google has become one of the fastest growing companies ever? It’s through this open and transparent nature that Google has collected quite an army of evangelists who use Google products constantly in their life, while Microsoft has only seen a multitude of haters against their company.

The reason businesses used to think of others in their market is competitors is because they sold physical items that you only needed to buy once, there was no need to have two or more, things such as vacuum cleaners, appliances, TV’s etc. There’s little use in directing customers to a competitor if it means you are going to lose a sale.

This has changed in the digital world however as pretty much everything we as bloggers produce (knowledge and information) is unique to us and is free to distribute to as many people as we like.

Nearly every big blog on the internet has gotten that way by working with other blogs. They link to other blogs constantly, they have blog carnivals, competitions and more to help promote other blogs as well as hoping those other blogs will promote them back in return.

By forming bonds with other blogs in your niche you benefit your visitors greatly as they come onto your one site, then see 4 others in a similar field and subscribe to the RSS feeds of all. Then blog readers coming to these other 4 sites all do the same thing and suddenly you have 5 x as many readers.

Everyone benefits from this model, the readers get more quality and informative content, the blogs get more readers, and the advertising companies get more eyeballs, it’s win win win for everyone.

As a personal example of this, my first blog was on dating and I wanted to run it like a business (thinking It’d be somewhat like Double Your Dating). The problem was, I didn’t want to share my customers because I believed “If they go to another dating site, they may only follow them and never come back here”, oh how wrong I was. I never networked with other blogs, I never went into blog carnivals (as then I’d have to link to other blogs) and I didn’t want to ever link to other blog posts as then I may lose that visitor forever. I was deeply rooted in a scarcity mindset and it cost my business dearly. After a year of blogging I was barely getting more than 30 visitors a day.

Why did this happen? The problem is I wanted to run a business, but also have a lot of traffic, and so I tried to mash together a blog and a business which just doesn’t work. A Blog is a social medium, and as such you need to socialize with other people on other blogs, on social networks, on twitter and more. You can make money off a blog, but you can’t run it like traditional business with traditional thinking models of “Everyone else is competition I must eradicate!”.

So embrace the new social medium of the web and start to network with blogs similar to yours. If you have a blog similar to this one, leave me a comment below and I’d love to post a link to you to help you out with traffic (and perhaps you could post a link back to me too). Also start to trackback other blogs in your posts and comment on other blogs regularly, to both provide more and more valuable content, as well as get more and more traffic every day.

Problogger on “When Blog Competition Is good” – http://www.problogger.net/archives/2005/04/08/when-blog-competition-is-good/

Dosh Dosh 7 Essential Tips for networking – http://www.doshdosh.com/networking-within-your-blog-niche-tips-for-niche-bloggers/

I seem to be linking to Problogger and Dosh Dosh a lot. If anyone else has any good posts/sites on blog competition being good feel free to tell me about them in the comments, google won’t help me find any

It’s come to my attention that many beginners in the business world are making the same basic mistakes. Now these aren’t mistakes per-se, simply that this beginner is doing things in the wrong order and at the wrong time.

You may disagree with the following, and if you do I encourage you to leave me a comment to tell me why, for I love a good argument… I mean discussion.

The Mistake: Building a Business
Now don’t get me wrong, building a business is awesome and is by far the best way to make money in the long run. The simply fact is however, those who start out by attempting to build a big business, produce their own products and try and be really big from the get go usually fail miserably.

The problem is not that this is a sound business model, it’s simply too much for one person to carry and as such you’ll run out of motivation before the project is finished, netting you no income and a lot of wasted time.

A Better way to go about it is to start off small, keep those big dreams in mind for the future, but don’t work on them just yet. Whenever someone asks me “How do I make money on the Internet?” I always give them this simply quiz:

What do you like better, English or Maths?

If they pick English I tell them to start blogging, or do the Bum Marketing Method. If they pick maths I tell them to start working with adwords selling affiliate programs.

The reason I do this and don’t tell them to start their own business is simply that when you’re a beginner building a business from scratch is just way too much work. The thing that gave me and gives most people the most motivation to keep going with making money on the internet is that very first dollar, the dollar most will never see if they set their sights too big to begin with.

Of course aiming high isn’t bad, it’s awesome to aim for the stars (I’d love to be the next Sergey Brin or Larry Page someday), it’s just not good to undertake a huge project right off the mark, because most people don’t have the willpower to carry through with it.

Once you’ve made that first dollar online it’s like you’re a giant snowball rolling down the hill gathering more and more snow and momentum as you go, it truly is an exhilarating experience. You can start to really see the potential of the online world and will have much more motivation to keep on going with it.

Once you start to bring in a moderate income from the internet it’s a great idea to ditch those early methods of making money (keep a blog going, but writing articles to promote affiliate products is still not building your own brand and product) and start focusing on building a real solid income. It’s at this stage you should be able to outsource some of your work to get the ball rolling. No longer do you have to spend months doing boring tasks to build a business, you can outsource it to India for $200 and get it done in days

Then you simply continually reinvest that money that you earn into even bigger and better projects, building your own brand, your own company with your own products and start taking on the big boys. The best things is, due to outsourcing being inexpensive and fast you can build a business as fast as your budget allows.

2 Weeks ago if you mentioned twitter to me I would of gone “oh yea, that thing, everyone keeps talking about it but its just so pointless…”. Which have been my thoughts of twitter ever since I heard about it over a year ago.

Now however my opinion has seriously taken a backflip, and I’ve started to realize just how powerful microblogging really is.

If you’ve never heard of twitter you can check it out at http://www.twitter.com. It is a web 2.0 service that allows you to post sms like messages which all your friends (and fans) can see. I like to think of it as a big permanent chatroom where you get to listen to who you want, and most posts are of great value, not simply spam messages or “OMG HI 2 U!!!” style messages.

What I really love about it is that it brings you and all your “Internet Idols” so to speak to the same level. I’ve been able to talk to a few of my Internet Marketing heroes (those that have helped take my businesses from barely getting by to thriving on the internet) one on one and realized that they are just normal fun people.

Not only this, it is excellent for finding great content, I’ve only been on twitter for a few weeks and have found 2-3 products as well as 5-6 blog posts of amazing quality that I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.

Last of all its perfect for businesses and blogs, as you can announce anything you like, new products, new quality content and so on and all your fans can find out about it immediately without needing to visit your website. Note: Do interact with the community, if you simply go on to promote yourself without networking with others you’ll find yourself with no followers and no one wanting to talk to you.

My Twitter profile is at http://www.twitter.com/timjrobinson if you haven’t yet added me.

Finally, if I haven’t whetted your appetite for it enough, perhaps take a look at some of the other more influential bloggers talking about twitter and how much fun they’ve been having once they got onboard:

Probloggers 9 Benefits of twitter for bloggers: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/01/23/9-benefits-of-twitter-for-bloggers/

17 Ways you can use twitter by Dosh Dosh: http://www.doshdosh.com/ways-you-can-use-twitter/

Stevepavlina’s take on twitter: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2008/07/twitter/

The Friday Traffic Report on automated messaging on twitter: http://www.jackhumphrey.com/fridaytrafficreport/reviews/how-to-send-notes-to-your-twitter-followers/

Twitter is an awesome source of blog traffic: http://davepress.net/2008/03/10/twitter-awesome-source-of-blog-traffic/

Cheers, Tim

So you want to have a fanatically popular blog right? The most visited and linked to website the Blogosphere? Perhaps you just want a powerful flood of visitors to your product page so you can quickly and easily make more money? Never underestimate the power of social proof. Having social proof will instantly empower all your content, giving it an effect of being pure gold even if you are discussing the merits of your mother’s Christmas pudding.

Ever wondered how the big blogs get so much power and influence? How they seem to grow exponentially while other blogs have just as many posts yet barely get by in terms of traffic? It’s the simple fact that people gravitate towards what other people like. Hence why 5% of the movies that come out in a year represent 95% of the profits, everyone goes for the blockbusters and everyone wants to see the latest movies so they can talk with their friends about them, share stories in their favourite forums and so on.

No one wants to go to that strange movie made by the weird guy in Russia that no one’s ever heard of, even if it is an amazing thought provoking movie, they’d much rather see spider man 3, because that’s what everyone else is doing. Same goes with your blog. Who would you trust more to make you money: A well known Internet Marketer who gets 10,000 visitors a day, or Joe Biggs, who has an audience of 15? They could even be writing exactly the same stuff, yet the well known guy will get thousands of people following his every move telling him he “spurts pure gold”, while Joe Biggs gets a handful of skimmers who leave his site within minutes.

The simple problem is: most people are sheep. Is it starting to click as to why the bigger blogs only seem to get bigger, while the smaller blogs seem to die out after many months or never really take off at all?

So how do you build this social proof? We’ll as a start don’t have anything on your blog/website that shows it’s unpopular, try and do the opposite and even if you only get 10 visitors a day, tell everyone that you get 300 visitors a month (which sounds like a lot more than 10 visitors a day) . Then report on your traffic increases with percentages, in the previous case, if you get 25 visits one day, report that you just got a MASSIVE 150% visitor increase literally overnight! You’re not lying, just presenting the truth in better light.

If your FeedBurner count is at 5, don’t put it on the site, as no one will want to subscribe to that, if it’s at 50 it’s a maybe and if it’s at 500 put it in easy sight of everyone, as many people will actually subscribe simply because 500 other people have already subscribed, even if they have no idea how good your site is…
The thing is people love to be in the “in” crowd and will do anything in their power to gravitate towards the masses. Whether unconsciously or consciously they see that FeedBurner number the first time they come onto your site and they’ll prejudge you based on how big that number is. If it’s at 5 they’ll think “oh another worthless blog” while when it’s at 500 it’s more like “Hey this blog MUST have some great content, if everyone else likes it…”

This goes true for comments too, if you aren’t getting many comments, encourage visitors to make them, make it as easy as possible to post a comment (don’t require logging in or anything), and even post your own comments under a variety of names to make the article look popular .

Same goes for Digg, if you have a Digg button but you don’t get many Diggs, don’t use one of those buttons that show’s how many Diggs you get or your visitors will think “oh well, this site isn’t getting voted much, must be bad quality” and from then on you’re on a downward spiral right before they have even read your content.

The pure and simple truth is that social proof will instantly improve the power, attention level and quality of your content without you needing to write, rewrite and write your articles again. Just like being in the “cool” group in high school meant you got attention no matter how cool you really were, being perceived to be a popular or “cool” blog on the net will attract instant attention to what you have to say and far more satisfied visitors.