Rock Star Lifestyle Design

Putting in the best young writers from Personal Finance, Location Independence, Entrepreneurship, Small Business and Social Media, Brain Melting Ideas and Technology you get the modern day version of Captain Planet, or what they have collectively called Untemplater.

I was really excited to learn that this project got off the ground and was lucky to get a sneak peek of their Manifesto early last week. The Untemplater Manifesto follows Jun, Monica, Carlos, Cody and Adam as they tell their story of how they are ditching the white picket fences, 2.5 children, mortgage and lifestyle that was the dream of our grandparents. Each of their stories is unique, with challenges, struggles and game changing ideas that make you feel like anyone can do this.

Grab your copy here.

The new site is a great looking multi-author blog for 20-somethings, college students and young people that know deep down they were destined for a better life than the one they are told to follow.

In addition to the site really kicking ass, the aspect that I wanted to touch on was that 7 young, alpha entrepreneurs were able to build this business in 3 months or so. Putting their strengths to use, finding a business model and creating an environment to scale the site is an incredible feat when you look at how busy all of them are.

I encourage you to go check the network out, leave a comment, read the manifesto and if you have the urge to say something, they are looking for inspired minds to write for them as well.

• Untemplater.com
• Untemplater on Twitter
• Untemplater Facebook Page

Best of luck to all my friends that have put this site together!

-Greg Rollett

photo by Mike Schmid

As we close out 2009 and look at ways to have a rocking 2010 I have been looking at what provides true value into my life and into my business. This includes the things I pay for and the things I spend my time on.

Money and Value

My mindset is that we spend money on the things that are going to improve our state. For me that includes buying music to improve my mood or get my blood flowing. This can be in the form of food that cures a feeling of hunger. This includes education, where I buy things to compliment what I already know and what I think can enhance my business.

Chris Brogan wrote a great post today (that I felt was unnecessary, but it turned out to be a great conversation) on value vs. cost. There is a new eBook by a blogging buddy of mine Nathan Hangen (I wrote about Social Media and Product Launches for him a few weeks back) entitled Beyond Blogging in which Chris (along with myself and a ton of awesome bloggers and marketers) are affiliates.

The complain came from purist commenters who do not place value in an eBook that has a cost of $47. The logic is that either:

• information is supposed to be free, or
• eBooks are written on Microsoft Word, have no distribution cost and thus should be much more inexpensive.

Ah. This is killer to me. The comments on this post were handled very supportive of the cost vs. value proposition. If you are a blogger and want to use this book to make money then it is an investment into your business and education. If you buy it as a book that you are going to read for leisure, than yea, its probably too expensive.

This is the same stuff I deal with when pricing my own products. I want to make them affordable that people will give them a shot and put some of the stuff I talk about into action. Then I also want to price it high enough to where the people that would never take action and are leisure customers/subscribers/fans don’t buy. And that’s okay.

There was an awesome comment by Michael at Remarkablogger that summed it up best:

Here is something to consider: the people with an “investment mindset” instead of a “cost mindset” are the ones perfectly willing to shell out hundreds and even thousands of dollars on training they know will help them succeed in their pursuits.

And those are the people who DO succeed. I don’t know a single successful person who is also a cheap-ass miser that can’t even invest in his own success. All the people whining about the cost of this (or any) info product can basically put themselves in the “failure” camp until they make that leap of faith and invest in themselves. Strong words, I know, but I don’t see anything to indicate otherwise.

The value to me in anything I buy does need to be justified and I think you should justify the cost in your head as well, you just need to do it in what Michael calls an “investment mindset.”

Creating an Investment Mindset

This investment mindset can be applied to nearly all purchases. When grabbing lunch out today I made a purchasing decision. I chose to invest in my health and mindset by ordering the salad and soup. A cost mindset would have seen the burger and fries on special for $5 and made the decision to save a few dollars while sacrificing nutrients, calories and a mid-afternoon bathroom run.

When I look at investments into my education I look at long-term value over short term cost. It may not be an exact science but the thinking goes something like this:

• What is the item?
• What is the item supposed to do for me?
• Can I apply this to my life or my business now?
• Is this something that I can use in the future as I grow or need new ideas/revenue/etc?
• Do I have the time, energy and resources to use it? Will I?
• Does this align with the way I am doing things now?
• Will this item give me a return equal to or greater than the price tag?
• The price?
• Yes or no?

Again this isn’t a perfect science and isn’t meant to be. Most purchases are based on emotions and wants versus real life needs.

Remember all we really need is some water, some nuts, Nike B-Ball shorts, a white Hanes T-Shirt, a tepee and a warm shower now and then.

Applying the Investment Mindset to a Real Buying Decision

This year Stompernet was the biggest investment that I made in my personal development. At $200 / mo it is steep for continued online marketing information, of which I think I am pretty well versed. Here is the process I see looking back with some analysis on my buying decisions.

What is the item?

Stompernet is like the Harvard of online marketing. With instructors that have been there and done that, resources and connections, live events and a suite of tools to make my life/business tasks easier.

What is the item supposed to do for me?

There are a few key things that I wanted to get out of the product. A support team. People to answer questions. A mastermind group of internet marketers. The tools - specifically Market Samauri, the Article Spinner and Submitter and the free 800 number. All these combined would save time, give me confidence and accountability.

Can I Apply This To My Business or Life Now? What about the future?

Yes. The second I got my username and password I was in, had access to the tools and started digging into their archives. On my recent Rock Star Business Series launch I got feedback on affiliate software, payment terms, salesletter help and some great things to look at on the backend. As I am gearing up for some new products in 2010, there are some awesome things that I have been picking up to improve conversion, boost sales numbers and increase transaction size.

I have also applied some of the lifestyle videos into my daily habits. So much of working online is mental and they have some great teachers for mindset.

Do I have the time, energy and resources to use it? Will I?

This is the biggest “iffy” part I had with Stompernet. Could I justify $200  /mo if I never watched a video or used a few of the tools. To this day I still haven’t touched a few of the tools and am still trying to find the best way to use the 800 number.

The forums can be a time suck and there is more videos than someone could watch in a lifetime. For me, the answer here was a maybe. The best thing they teach is that you use what you need and the rest will be there when you need it. That was a huge selling point.

Does this align with my current business / lifestyle?

Yea. I really want to indulge fully in online marketing and they are the Harvard. There is no tomorrow. I knew that if I wanted to make something happen, it had to happen now. The average perfect day for me includes working on my laptop from home. I needed that accountability now.

Will this item give me a return equal to or greater than the price tag?

That is the plan. If you look at $200 / mo as the investment, I would spend $2,400 a year on the product. Since joining I have increased my revenues (not profits, yet) to almost that much per month. I plan on surpassing double that amount per month in the 1st quarter of 2010. So yea, it has produced a very nice ROI.

Yes or No.

Honestly I pulled the trigger at 11:55pm of the last night of their pre-launch. I can’t say this was the easiest decision I ever made. When I thought about the value it brings in, the decision now looks easy.

The decision was still based on emotion, but it was an investment decision. It was not a cost decision. Deep down I knew I would make more than I ever invested in the training.

Other Investment Minded Buying Opportunities

photo by Anke van Lenteren

Your food. Every time you eat, whether you are cooking or eating out, you have made an investment in your health. Are you making this based on cost, or as an investment towards a long, healthy living.

Your time. You will never get time back, no matter how hard we try. Are you investing your time to create a better lifestyle for yourself or are you choosing a cost based lifestyle. This can be mental cost as well. Staying home on the couch, or reading blogs instead of working, etc.

Your work. The economy is tough. Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur or an Internet Marketer or musician. Some choose to work and that’s cool.  No matter what career path you choose, make the decision based on an investment mindset versus a cost mindset if you want peace of mind.

Taking a job for the money is a cost mindset. Selling acai berry because it has the highest affiliate payout is a cost mindset. If you choose to sell the acai stuff, be sure you are doing it from an investment standpoint - maybe learning to drive affiliate traffic, looking at conversions or outsourcing and automation. Use that investment to fuel something more powerful and valuable in your life.

The Last Penny Story

I always love the seminar speakers who come up on stage and they start with their story of what they did to make it. It generally breaks down like this. Crappy job. Wanted to make a change. Bought a course. Invested a bunch of time. Stuff started to happen. Boom - success.

I remember one story where they said they had paid something like $2,000 to go to a conference and didn’t have enough money to book a room so they slept in their car for the weekend. That weekend he worked his ass off at the conference and met everyone from the people in the seats to the multi-million dollar speakers. Something like 6 weeks later he made $10,000. Then $100,000. Then the $1,000,000. He said most of that came from the relationships he made in that room. It may have been his last $2,000 - but was that investment worth it?

The Choice is Yours

We all have the mental capacity to make whatever decisions we want to make. The person in control of our thoughts, beliefs and emotions is us. The value we see in products comes from our own perception and reality. The next time you see a long sales letter, or an offer to learn something or are faced with putting crap in your body versus something that will help keep you healthy so you can surf at 60 - think from an investment mindset.

Happy New Year and please let me know your thoughts on this. I think it’s huge for those looking to make a huge impact on their future.

-Greg Rollett

P.S. If you are serious about wanting to make income and a living from your blog in 2010, I highly recommend Beyond Blogging by Nathan Hangen and Mike Cliffe Jones. He worked really hard to break into everything you need to do, do NOT need to do and brought along some powerful friends like Chris Brogan, David Risely, Chris Guillebeau, iJustine, Penelope Trunk, Pete Cashmore and more.

If blogging is not your thing no worries. Enjoy your holiday and leave a comment below on what you want to invest in to make your life better in 2010.

This is a presentation I gave at CoLab Orlando on Continuity Programs and Membership Sites. This is the business model that I have created for my own businesses and those of my clients. The video comes in just under an hour and has some great takeaways. I am working on getting the slides up as well - having some issues formatting for Slideshare.

If you are thinking of creating a membership or continuity type business, I’d love to chat and check out your model. Having this type of a business is crucial to efficient lifestyle design. The reason is simple:

If you can predict your income, you can plan your life.

With continuity you can really see how much money your company will make in the coming month and give you an idea of what kind of marketing you need to do to get to the number of members that you need to enjoy your ideal lifestyle.

Happy holidays and enjoy the video.

-Greg

Today I am happy to bring you another guest post, this time by Justin Freid. Justin is an upcoming youth marketer that specializes in SEO and Social Media. We had an opportunity to talk over the phone and had a great conversation that led to similar goals and ideas. I asked him to write a post and introduce himself to this audience. In this post Justin diggs into some of the new social aspects of search engines and how they may affect your personal brand.

Over the past few weeks major search engines such as Google and Bing have began to show blog posts, tweets and status updates on search engine results pages.

This new form of blended search has been cast under the name of Social Search. Google specifically stated that your social network is a large part of your life and their influence should contribute to your search for information. With tweets and blog posts showing up in search engine results, this presents an opportunity to utilize social media to associate your personal brand with highly searched terms.

As most people know, SEO doesn’t happen to a website overnight. The structuring of your website, creating great content and link building is a lengthy process. So if you are trying to brand yourself in an industry such as SEO or Marketing, you will have a tough time showing up on the first page of results for industry related terms.

With tweets, blog posts and status updates now taking up a spot on SERPs, this presents a great opportunity to overcome the length of time you would need to invest in SEO. By simply doing some keyword research and utilizing your social media profiles to broadcast your message and personal brand, you can begin to use Google and Bing’s social search for your benefit.

Here is what you need to do

Use a tool such as Google Keyword Tool and simply enter in a popular term for your industry, searching through the results to find highly searched terms. The results will show a green bar that shows how competitive the search terms is. Pick a few of these terms that relate to the brand you are trying to create and then utilize them in your blog posts and status updates. The terms you select should have a perfect storm of number of monthly searches and competitiveness. (High search volume, not extremely competitive)

The next step is integrating these keywords within your tweets, blog posts, status updates and social media profiles. Make sure not to overuse these terms and end up spamming your tweets and blog posts. The key is to wisely insert these terms into your status updates and blog post titles. This will help you take advantage of the new social search and have your profiles and blog posts show up in search results.

If you choose the right keywords and insert them effectively into your social media profiles, you may end up on the first page of search results for terms that no matter how hard you optimized your website for, you would never show up on.

The largest drawback of this tactic is that it borderlines spamming the search results. You need to attack this plan and post quality information in a tasteful manner. You could easily ruin all the personal branding you have done by filling your latest tweet with 25 hashtags.

Keep in mind that Google has not come out and said how long social results stay atop the new Social Search. It could be minutes, hours or days. So keep an eye on how long your updates stay atop Social Search results and post new quality content accordingly.

Justin Freid is an internet marketing entrepreneur specializing in SEO and social media marketing. Justin currently heads up Petersons.com’s SEO and social media marketing efforts and is pursuing a MBA in marketing from Philadelphia University. You can check out Justin’s views on SEO and Social Media at Justin Freid | SEO and Social Media Blog.

Last week I had the opportunity to co-host a teleseminar with #1 Amazon SEO author Michael Fleishner. We had a chance to talk about SEO, getting your site primed, how to get some links and good ways to kick start your site. While you didn’t get a chance to listen live, I will send you a copy of the 80 minute MP3 by signing up here.

On the call I mentioned that guest posting was one of the most important things bloggers can do as it kills a few birds with one stone. So in the spirit I wrote a guest post on his marketing blog about Gen-Y entrepreneurs and he came back with a great post on publishing a book, something I always want to know more about!

One of the keys to achieving financial independence and proactively designing your life is to create automated revenue streams. As someone who has been doing business online for over a decade, I can share with you plenty of successes and failures with trying to find sources of steady income that provide the freedom you need for truly effective lifestyle design.

Recently I was invited by Greg to speak to a group of young entrepreneurs. Although the topic was really focused on search engine optimization, I believe what people were most interested in was learning how to get their web sites generating multiple streams of income – on auto pilot. It is true that once you achieve #1 organic ranking on search engines like Google, it takes a lot less to generate qualified traffic and generate a stream of potential buyers that result in ongoing revenue. But there many ways to generate income that have nothing to do with search engine ranking.

What does publishing have to do with lifestyle design?

Knowing how important lifestyle design is today, I asked Greg if I could share my experiences in publishing. And no, I’m not talking about publishing online content (although I do that too). Rather, I’m talking about traditional publishing - writing a book. In this post, I’m going to reveal how I’ve used a small 120 page publication to generate multiple streams of income and design a life focused on helping others.

I’m not your typical author. In fact I’d argue that my writing skills are weak at best. But that didn’t stop me from writing a book and achieving top selling status. You may be wondering how a guy with hardly any writing ability could produce a book with legs. Well, I think the answer to that question is rather simple - I wrote about something I care about, enjoy, and wanted to focus my time on.

My book, “SEO Made Simple” is the number one ranked book for “SEO” on Amazon.com, the world’s largest book seller. I wrote to share my knowledge with others who wanted to learn about search engine optimization, saving them time and struggle when learning about this exciting area of Internet marketing.

Unlike other books you might read, I took a slightly different approach. Instead of writing hundreds of pages with lots of theory and worthless advice, I thought I’d be direct. If you ever have the opportunity to read my book, you’ll find that’s it reads more like a set of directions (do this, then do this) than anything else. I decided to take this approach because that’s what I needed when I starting in SEO and was unable to find a resource that met my needs.

How I used a book to launch my career

What’s great about this book is that each time Amazon sells and ships a copy for me, I earn a royalty. That’s right, I earn a small royalty on each book sold but never have to deal with printing it, warehousing it, selling it, shipping it, or running a customer service center – sweet! But it gets better than that.

When individuals pick up my book, I not only tell them what to do, but how to do it. And you know as well as I do that having the right tools makes all the difference. So I drive readers through a secret URL noted in the book which brings them to a special page on one of my many web sites. On that page, I list all of the tools I personally use to help me achieve top search engine rankings and which work well with the techniques I reveal in the book. When users buy these products I earn a commission. Not only am I earning royalties on the book, but I’m earning affiliate commissions too!

And it doesn’t stop there. In addition to offering affiliate products, I drive users to my web resources, which I monetize (such as an Internet marketing forum) , allowing me to grow my online businesses. The book has been a tremendous source of traffic as more and more users go online to check out my website, access my secret pages, additional content, and other resources noted in the book.

As you know, not everyone is a “do it yourselfer”. In fact, once starting down the search engine optimization path people frequently don’t have the time or resources needed to implement all of the techniques they need for search engine ranking success. While they are on my secret page, I let them know about my SEO training and consulting services. This helps me grow my business and generate inquiries while I sleep. This is the key to designing the type of life you want when you want it.

If you’ve considered publishing a book or simply communicating what you know to a larger audience, I suggest that you put together an outline and start writing. Commit to 30 minutes of writing per day and make a commitment to keep writing, rewriting, and editing until you have something you can publish. This can be a long and arduous process, or can happen quickly. It all comes down to your commitment and time frame. Once you have a manuscript, consider self publishing. This route worked for me and is pretty easy to implement.

I suggest using CreateSpace for self publishing. This site is owned by Amazon.com and can help you get ranked on Amazon quickly. Ranking is based on sales numbers in addition to title and description so be selective when choosing your title and uploading your description through Createspace.

Once you’ve published your book, be patient. Tell your friends, order copies that you can personally distribute on your own, and promote it wherever you can. I’ve used my website, blog, and social media to get the word out. Whether you are promoting through webinars, blog posts, or email, always focus on your audience. Let them know what this book will do for them. If you content is good, word of mouth will be your best sales person!

This post was written by Michael Fleishner, a marketing expert and author of SEO Made Simple with more than 13 years of hands-on marketing experience. His blog, the Marketing Blog is currently ranked #1 for, you guessed it, marketing blog. Follow him on Twitter, @mfleishner.

Disclaimer: This post features affiliate links to buy Michael’s book, SEO Made Simple. After being on a call with Michael last week, I would recommend his SEO services and think his book is a great place to start. If you end up buying the book on Amazon after clicking on the links, I will be compensated.