Martin Lecter

Have you ever played the ‘what if’ game? What if you could market a product or service and a lot of people would buy it and you would make a profit on every sale that you make? What if you had 10.000 customers? What if each sale was worth ten dollars? What if you could make a million dollars by introducing people to products and services that they are already looking for? What if?

At the moment my attention is fixed upon Agel Enterprises as possible means of reaching this goal. After all, in order to make a million dollars every month with Agel, one would need to have about 160.000 consumers in ones consumer network. That’s about nine levels of people who each find four other people willing to use the products and so on, where every person purchases two boxes of products each month. Very simple concept.

What if you could make a great deal of money with network marketing? The interesting thing about this networking approach to building a consumer base is that all the people within the consumer network are rewarded in proportion to their efforts in marketing the products even further. All that one has to do is find four people who are willing to use the products and market them to others.

If each person within the consumer network sponsors four other people who are willing to use the products and also teach another four people how to sponsor four people each, then by the time this organization is 9 levels deep it would have over 250.000 people collectively generating over $30.000.000 worth of profit every month – or $1.500.000 in commissions. In theory.. on paper.. it makes sense though.

The only challenge that I see with this is finding people who are interested in buying vitamin products and building a business around the concept. Should I put a sign on my door that says “Entrepreneurs Wanted!”?

Have you ever asked yourself what you would do with a million dollars? I think, that the proper way to make a million dollars is in a way that creates sufficient cash flow that this million dollars can be earned over and over and over again. I have a plan on what to do with a million. What’s yours?

The interesting thing is that this type of marketing concept is that it can be applied to other things as well. For instance, a website selling products can create valuable content that get posted by people throughout the social media network, which would introduce others to the products who in turn spread the word even further.

Think about life for a moment as being similar to a rubik’s cube puzzle. Consider the faces of the cube representing the different areas of life such as health, wealth, relationships, spirituality, career and leisure. In order to solve the puzzle of life, all these areas have to be in alignment with each other – much like the faces of the rubik’s cube.

Learning how to solve the rubik’s cube by trial and error is indeed a very tedious task. If you have ever figured it all out entirely by yourself, then I truly respect you. When I first learned to solve the cube about five years ago – I would pick the cube apart, put it together in the right position and then experiment and write down how different moves effected the cube. Eventually I discovered a set of moves that I could use to solve the cube from any scrambled state within seven to ten minutes.

There is a more effective way to learn this though. Why not read the manual for the rubik’s cube prior to solving the puzzle? Why not learn the steps necessary to solve the puzzle before actually attempting to solve it? Why not learn from other people who have already solved the cube and then improve on their ideas as we become proficient at solving the cube?

The same principle of learning applies to life – too often we try to solve our problems entirely by ourselves and become greatly frustrated in the process. Had we only known that we are not alone. Had we only known where to find the right methods, the information, the answers, the strategies for aligning various parts of our lives – then we could have saved ourselves all the frustration.

Having a half decent knowledge of life is not enough though. What if you know every possible strategy except the one that is used to align the corners of the cube in relation to each other? You have almost solved the cube – but you don’t have this last strategy – so ‘almost’ doesn’t count.

You attempt a move that you think will work and accidentally scramble the cube – having to start all over again. Can you relate to this experience? When you get to the last level and attempt a move that will seemingly lead you to the ultimate success, only to realize that you don’t know how to go back and so have to start all over again?

We were born into this world without an instruction manual for how life works. It’s something that we all have to discover for ourselves. This instruction manual is hidden in the experiences and the encounters that we have in our lives. We just need to find all the missing pieces and put together the whole manual.

We just need to find the pieces of this manual and put together our own manual. Our own book on how to live – with the strategies that work best for us. It is our responsibility to uncover all the strategies and patterns for solving the rubik cubes of our own lives – so that we can use these patterns to solve the puzzle of life over and over again, helping other people to do the same along the way.

We become leaders when we learn to lead our own lives by thinking for ourselves and making our own decisions regardless of what other people think. However, we also need to take input from other people who are more knowledgeable in the areas of life where we lack expertise. We always tend to follow the people who are better than us and other people choose us as their leaders for the exact same reason. What we need to learn is how to take input from other people, while still making our own decisions based upon the goals that we set for ourselves.

I set a goal back in 2009 to read 88 books on personal development, philosophy and business. I ended up reading 62 books. It’s been a tremendously mind broadening experience. I have never read so many books in one year before, but I will certainly continue reading. When we read books we gain clarity over our thinking. We learn how different things in life relate to each other and so we are able to make far better decisions in life.

Apart from reading books, I have also had the chance to be introduced to recorded audio seminars with some of the greatest people on this planet. This is something that really altered my thinking. I have personally gained an incredible clarity over my life after listening to these seminars. And one of the best seminars that I have ever listened to was the Jim Rohn 2004 Leadership Event.

Out of all the people who have contributed most to my personal development during 2009, Jim Rohn perhaps had the greatest impact. After hearing him speak, I set a goal to meet Jim Rohn in person, but unfortunately Jim Rohn died recently and I never had the chance to meet this amazing person in real life. However his powerful ideas will stay with me for a very long time.

Jim Rohn has made perhaps one of the greatest contributions to the world by sharing his ideas and teaching his philosophy the way he did.

Today it’s been 30 days since I have started this blog and I’ve been looking at my analytics reports to see if there are any trends present. From a personal perspective it has been a very productive month. I’m writing down a great deal of my thoughts in my journal anyway, so making the transition to blogging has been a logical next step in my writing. So far it’s been a very rewarding experience for me. This is definitely something that helps me to think more clearly.

Writing is an excellent way to debug your thinking. As I write I discover inconsistencies and glitches in my thinking – giving me an opportunity to fix all the bugs and make fewer mistakes in life.

I remember hearing Zig Ziglar mention that everybody should write a book for themselves on how to live. When Zig finished his book See You at The Top (aff), he considered it to be one of the most profitable experiences that he ever put himself through. Surely he made some money on the sales of the book, but the greatest value came not from the actual sales but from the tremendous advances in Zig’s personal development during the time he spent clarifying his ideas for that book. This is really something to consider doing.

What do I make of the information provided to me by Google Analytics so far? There are probably many ways to interpret it, and there probably isn’t yet nearly enough information to make an accurate analysis of the site, but here is what I can see so far:

• Most of my traffic comes from facebook and twitter links. This traffic mostly results from people who already know me and who click on my links. This is like the warm market for your ideas.
• About 10% of my traffic comes from ValueExchange web directory. Big plus to them for this! These are all new readers who have never seen the site before.
• The bounce rate metric is going down on the scale, meaning that people are now often staying to explore the site before they bounce away to another site or close their browser window. I’m happy that the bounce rate has decreased because it means that I’m really writing something of value to my readers. I’m intending to press it even further down by writing even more interesting and thought provoking content.
• The average time spent on site has increased over the past month which is good. This means that the content on this site is becoming more captivating, but it still isn’t as captivating as I want it to be.
• I’ve had 83 completely unique visitors over the last 22 days since installing analytics tracking. A total of 163 visits. This is an average of 3.77 unique visitors per day and an average of 7.40 total visits every day. This number might be slightly off due to my own visits on the site – however the unique visitor count is more accurate because I only track visits on the main site and not on the administration interface which I usually spend most of my time on. This means that the traffic is currently growing linearly at a rate of about 0.3 visits every day.
• Twitter and Facebook marketing is effective. On Feb 16 my main interent connection died and it took a while to fix it. The effect you can see on the traffic is that it dropped as my twitter and facebook updates moved lower and lower on people’s news feeds. This is normal and as more and more traffic comes in from google and other sources it will not be necessary to market directly over facebook and twitter. An additional promising traffic sources are pingbacks and simple direct marketing that you can do by posting links to my articles to your friends and on social networks such as digg.

My intention is to increase the quantity and length of my posts in order to cram more value into each and every post, in turn attracting more visitors. Search engine optimization is definitely on my list of things to do.

The reasonable prediction would be to say that if things continue moving forward at the current or better rate, by the end of the first three months of operation this site should be getting 25 visits or more every day. This is of course assuming that the traffic grows linearly. If it grows exponentially then I have no idea where this number is going to be. Hopefully search engines will pick it up soon enough.

We all have this dream of eventually becoming financially independent. In this article I’ll show you how to think about financial independence in terms of cash flow. In the previous article I wrote about productive, consumptive and investing activities. Read that article as well because it relates to this topic.

My definition of financial independence is that we have enough income being passively generated from your personally invested resources in order to pay our bills. An incoming cash flow that is there regardless of whether we choose to work or not to work. Most people don’t need much passive cash flow to consider themselves financially independent. How much do you need every month to pay your bills and have a good lifestyle? What we need to do is figure out how to put that income completely on autopilot.

When I talk to people about money I realize how uneducated most people are when it comes to this issues. Making money is not about selling your time to somebody else and giving away all your assets – it’s about spending your time on yourself and building valuable assets that produce passive value and passive income.

Most people think of making money in a non passive way. This is how we are taught that money is being made – you show up for a job every day and you get paid per hour. However, is it really the most effective way for us to make money? Why not build a web store and put our income on autopilot? Why not leverage technology to build a service that people can use completely on their own without any interference from ourselves?

It’s interesting that passive income opportunities are virtually abundant in the world – yet most people fail to see them because they are not thinking of income generation that way. Yes it takes a great time investment to make passive income work, but everybody needs to start somewhere and everybody starts from zero.

The problem seems to be that it really does take a great deal of time and effort to build something of value and most people are not willing to do that. It’s simply a matter of your philosophy – do you prioritize short term gains before long term benefits or the other way around?

Financial independence is about passive income. About building assets that you have complete ownership of assets that provide passive value to others. It’s about sharing your work with others. Financial independence is about having enough income coming in so that we can choose to work or not to work. It’s about doing what we love and making a living through our efforts and having a complete freedom of choice as to what kind of work you want to do.