Lance Tamashiro

Play Video

Hey everybody, Lance Tamashiro here, and I’ve been telling you for a couple of days that there’s a lot of things on my mind, and this is a video that I’ve been thinking about making for a while here, and I think I’m just going to come clean, share with you guys my thoughts, and basically just see what your reaction is to this. So, a lot of things have been changing in the internet marketing as you’re probably aware in the last couple of weeks.

Things like the FTC cracking down, things like MasterCard and Visa completely changing their rules, shutting off major marketers’ accounts, and I think that this is actually a very very good thing. And what’s sad to me is that I’ve been getting emails from people, telling me that they’re broke, telling me that they don’t know how they’re going to purchase any products, telling me that they need training but that they don’t have any money, whatsoever. And frankly, this confuses me because you’re all building businesses on the internet.

And so, I wanted to talk to you guys a little bit today about why you’re probably feeling that you’re broke, why you’re feeling that you’re not there, and what I really blame for all of this is the general mistrust in the marketplace. I don’t blame you, guys. I mean I don’t think the problem is that you’re broke. You all are sending messages from your Blackberry’s, you’re all on the internet, you have internet connections, you have computers, you’re actually trying to build something, but I think that you’re going about it in the wrong way, and I don’t think that it’s your fault.

What’s the point in me telling you all this? Well, what I really want to get across to you guys is that this feeling that you have, this doubt that you guys are having. This skepticism towards internet marketing and making money on the internet in general is not your fault.

How did you even get started with an online business? I mean I don’t think that typically most people are sitting around at home, they think one day, “Oh, you know what would be really great is to make a few extra bucks online.” And so, what do you do? Well, if you’re probably like me, you did some sort of like quick search on the internet and found your way eventually to some sort of squeeze page, and we’re all familiar with this by this point – those cool little pages where you go and they offer you some free gift in exchange for your email address and name.

So typically, what happens is you got home, do a quick little search on the internet, end up on one of these squeeze pages with this great sounding offer, you put in your name and email address, and the next thing you know is that you’ve got a bunch of people telling you every single day in your inbox that they’re making all of this money online and that it’s so completely easy, and they basically bombard you, but what happens is you get so many of these messages over and over and over again where you really started out with a very realistic thought process. You started out thinking, “if I could make a few extra bucks, I could actually build something up, wouldn’t it be cool if I had an extra $100, $200?”

But you got caught in this whole sales funnel and the next thing you know, you went from thinking you could make an extra 100 or 200 bucks to you could make all of this cash, retire rich, sit on the beach in your underwear, and mix drinks all day. Unfortunately, you start to think that this could work. You actually at some point start to believe that you could literally wake up the next morning and have millions of dollars in your bank account, and I hate to be the one to break this to you, but it’s not going to happen that way.

In fact, if you think that way right now, I’m going to give you the best tip you’ve ever got. Stop, change your email address, don’t read any more marketing, and go save your money and spend it on something good. Spend time with your family, spend time doing things that actually matter to you because it’s never going to happen. I mean if that happened, if it was that easy, then everybody would be rich on the internet and nobody would be saying that they’re broke or having all these doubts.

So, if you’re buying that dream, I’m here to tell you right now, it may not be what you want to hear, but it’s the truth.

And then what starts happening is the next thing you know, daily, you start getting the same emails from all of these major people, or who appear to be major, telling you about this great product. That their friend just released something really really cool, and because you don’t know any better, you believe them. You go and buy the product, and it leads you to some professionally written sales page where you spend all day reading these sales letters, believing this hype.

I mean these are professionally written 20, 30-page letters that are designed to draw you in, that are designed to sell you on that sort of dream. And what ends up happening is you end up jumping from product to product to product because every week, there’s a new launch and every week, you get all of these emails telling you that this is the next thing, this is the next thing, this is the next thing.

This never stops. It’s an endless cycle. And it’s all of the people getting together, sending you out these launch emails and when you see those emails, the first time you made your scheme over it. But then when you open up the next email and it’s got a different subject line but it’s the same message or for the same product, you start to think about it. And then by the third, fourth, fifth, sixth time that you see the exact same offer from a different person, you automatically think in your head, “Well all of these people are saying that this is so great, it must be.” And then you go and buy it, and typically you’re disappointed, you do nothing with it, and then you move on to the next big product, and they catch you in the cycle. And unfortunately, that’s the truth about what is happening to you.

So, I don’t believe that you’re broke. I believe that you’re not believing in people, that you don’t believe any of the hype anymore, and as you well shouldn’t. So, the other problem is you’re spending all of this time, you’re spending all of this money, and you’re only actually using a small fraction, if any, of the stuff that you bought. I know when I got started, I spent thousands of dollars with all of these major gurus, with all of these promises, and luckily, I ran into some pretty good guys early on who stirred me in a better direction and showed me that there were actually some good people online, some honest people online, and sort of let me know what was happening and why I was seeing all of these offers that I was seeing.

The other thing is that they’ve sold you on looking for a “magic button.” Again, like I said, I mean if you honestly believe that you’re going to wake up tomorrow with millions of dollars in your bank account, stop doing internet marketing right now. You’re not building a business. There’s no business offline that generates that kind of cash. Why would you think it would be any different online?

The truth is – is that it’s not. We are in a unique situation, we do have global reach, and we can build businesses from our house. But you need to be realistic. Remember, where you started from, it was probably with just making a couple extra bucks. And now suddenly, you’ve got this fascination that you’ve got to make millions of dollars and be rich. Well, it’s just simply not going to happen. So, the worst part about all of these cheap emails that you’re getting, these products that you’re buying is that you don’t even know these people. You don’t know anything about them. Most of them never even show their face. They don’t have any products. Some of them don’t even have blogs. So, I mean why would you feel compelled to spend money with this type of people? Maybe you should think about that real carefully.

I want to give you something to think about here. What would it take to educate yourself to start a business offline? I mean do you honestly believe that if you are going to go offline and start a business, you could just sign a paper, turn it on, and it would start happening? It’s not that case. I mean I think that we’ll agree.

Think about how much higher education costs. I know at least in America, it can run up to $30,000 a year or more. It’s not a cheap proposition, and people do that just to go work for the 9 to 5 grind.

Think about how much time, effort, and money it would take to actually start a successful offline business. It’s not something that you could do with no cash flow. It’s not something that you could just start up on a credit card. It’s something that you would have to seriously sit down, think about, plan for, and start it.

And the thing is – is that it’s no different online.

I hate to be the one to break that to you but there’s no difference online except that there’s fewer overhead and fewer tools that you need, and you can actually, with a single person or two people, start a very very successful business, but there still are expenses that you’re going to have to take. And unfortunately, a lot of it is going to be in education. I personally pay thousands of dollars a year to meet with my mentor three times a year to talk to him for 45 minutes – 45 minutes three times a year. I travel all over the country just to get those 45 minutes and some people think I’m crazy for doing that but I say that the investment is paid for itself over and over and over again.

So, what I want to tell you guys, the point of all this is that from my experience, the short time that I’ve been online, I’ve noticed that there’s basically three types of marketers, and just knowing this is going to put you ahead of the game.

So, the first type of marketer and unfortunately probably the type that you most early ran into when you were getting started online with your business is the ones that “sell the dream,” and these are the people that basically do what I was telling you about earlier, where they coordinate the giant launches, they coordinate together where they’re all sending massive amounts of emails for the same product on the same day over and over and over again. And quite frankly, they just do this in a rotation. And if you actually start watching and seeing it, I think that you’ll pick up on it. So, they are basically selling the dream and the truth is – is a lot of the claims they make, they could probably achieve those results, but the problem is you don’t have the connections, you don’t have the sized list, and you really need to think about keeping it realistic.

The second type of marketer that I’ve ran into online and unfortunately, I almost think that this marketer is more dangerous than the “selling the dream” marketer, and this is the “fake it till you make a crowd.” These are the people that always are talking about numbering, always talking about statistics, but never ever showing any sort of proof for it. I’m sure that you have run across these types before.

They’re very good at talking a big game, but when it really comes down to it, have they ever shown you any real proof? The other problem with the “fake it till you make a crowd” and one way that I always can spot these people is that they never talk about their failures. They never talk about their failures. I mean it would be impossible to think that somebody never has a failure online, that they never have a product that launches that didn’t go well.

Unfortunately, a lot of these people are at sort of the mid-level, I’ll say, in marketing where you don’t know what they make. They make these outrageous income claims, it goes up and up and up, and unfortunately, like I actually know some of these people, and I know that their list aren’t as big as they claim they are, I know that for a fact that their income isn’t as big as they say it is. And so, I would really encourage you to take a close look at the people that are telling you about what great product creators they are, how much they know about memberships sites. If you look around and they have no membership sites, if they have no products – I mean this red flag should be going off everywhere.

I mean the other day I saw an email come across from somebody who was claiming to be a master product creator, and then I went and looked and they didn’t have a single product. So, how do they have such a great product creation system and how are they such a good product creator if they have no products? It’s totally baffling. So, you don’t even really have to dig deep to find these people, but just do a little bit of due diligence and figure out if these people are telling you the truth or not.

Luckily, there is a third type of marketer that I’ve run across, and these are the honest entrepreneurs. These are the people that are actually “walking the walk.” These are the people that are actually doing what they say and providing real value to their customers. Because let’s face it, the truth is is that there are people out there that are making good incomes online from doing the right thing. And the real trick is just to find those people and hunt them out. Unfortunately, for most people, they never actually get to find those people because the hype sells much better.

So what now? Well luckily for you, at least there is a light at the end of the tunnel. The first thing is that just realizing how this game works and not there’s three types of marketers out there. It’s going to put you in an infinitely better position to plan out your business, to understand the types of people that you want to be taking advice from, and to actually figure out which type of person you want to be, and I hope that every one of you is choosing to go on the path of the honest entrepreneur.

I think that what you should do is look at the marketing that you’re receiving, look at the emails that you’re getting, look at the way that they’re marketing to you, and figure out if you’re getting any value from it. I mean I know a lot of people that are just on all of these lists, like they get thousands of emails every single day and it’s just from people going, “here’s my free thing, here’s my free thing, here’s my free thing,” and then typically, they’ll buy something eventually.

I mean honestly, if these people don’t even have their own products, if they aren’t teaching you anything, they’re just sending you links to go sign up to somebody else’s list, I mean what value is there in that? I mean you can study all day, but the fact is until you take action online, you’re not going to make any money and you’re not going to improve your situation. So, figure out if you trust these people. I mean I’m not saying like go do a massive research on them, but see if they have a blog, see if you can see anything about them, see the crowd that they run with, see if you can figure out if these people are actually worth you even reading their emails. And if they’re not, just get rid of them.

So, the best part is there is actually a lot of honest good people making real money on the internet. It’s your job to seek those people out. And luckily for you, I’ve given you some of the information that I have learned in my short time online and how to identify these people, understanding that they’re out there, and I’m hoping that since you’re on my list, reading my blog, you’re not going to get caught in the sort of traps that I see people getting caught in out there.

So, that’s all for today. I thank you for taking the time out for reading, for watching this video, and I wish you all the best of luck.

Notice: Only 43 More Comments Will Be Allowed in This Blog Post...

Play Video

Hey everybody, Lance Tamashiro here, and today I want to talk to you about why you need to be thinking about having a recurring income for your online business. Now, a lot of people that I know and that I’ve worked with in the past think “Oh I’m just going to work really, really hard on this one cool ebook, I’m going price it at $7 dollars and everybody in the world is going to come buy it, and I’ll just be rich! The truth is that’s not the case. The whole key on making money on the Internet is to build a recurring income.

Now, that’s the big point here. Everything else that you do is just spinning your wheels, if you’re not thinking of making a recurring income then all that you’re really doing is doing the same thing that you’re doing in your day job, you’re trading your time for dollars, and what you really want to do is get to the point where you basically put up a membership site, get something that’s recurring and get paid for it over and over again.

Now, the one thing that I really want to stress to everybody here is that your niche is not important. Now, a lot of people think, well, I can only make recurring income in internet marketing, I can only make income trying to teach people how to play the guitar, that’s not the truth! The truth is, is that if you have anything at all to teach or a service to give, then, you can start your own membership site.

How do I know this? Well, look around you! Every single business model that is successful both online and offline is based around a membership model. I want you to change the way you think about memberships right now, today!

A membership is not just something where you get new content every month. Its something where you get to bill people every month either for your information or your service, and let me give you a couple of examples, I bet the majority of you have a cellphone. Guess what? That is a membership site, they have a fix term length, usually it’s like two years and you have to pay over and over and over again. Guess what I bet you most of you have landline service if you don’t have a cell phone service. That too is a form of a recurring membership site.

Do you own a car? I bet you make car payments. Do you own a house? Or pay rent? All of those are types of membership sites, and all examples of things that you can do to trade your time for dollars that are recurring instead of one to one, you want to look at this as one to many.

I’ve recently pulled my list and the big thing that I found is that people thought, well Lance this is way too hard! It’s way too hard to setup a recurring membership site, its way to hard to get people to pay me time and time again for my information and I want to tell you right now, that’s false! You need to change the way you’re thinking about this.

So, one of the big things that I found out is that people said, Lance, I don’t have any contents. Am I an expert in anything? How am I going to get people to pay me over and over and over again? Well the truth is that if you know anything at all, then you’re an expert.

One of the big things, especially in the Internet marketing industry that people forget is that there is a huge learning curve. So, even if you just know how to put up a squeeze page, even if you know just how setup an autoresponder, even if you just know a good program, an affiliate program to promote, all of those are information that somebody just getting started doesn’t know that you had to learn and that’s enough information that makes you an expert on somebody, and that’s the key to learning more and more and being able to charge more and more for your membership site.

The second thing that people told me is that it’s way too technical to setup a membership site. Again, false! All you need to know is Wordpress, you need to have the right plug-ins and you need to have the right scripts. This is cheap, this is easy to do, and it’s not hard at all. Even if you just re-think your model and rethink of your autoresponder as a membership, then guess what? You have the ability to make a recurring income and a membership site.

So, what I basically want all you guys to do today is to stop overthinking this! It is true, the key to a successful online business or business in the offline world is recurring income but it doesn’t have to be as hard as you’re making it. You don’t need fancy scripts. You don’t need a ton of information.

All you need to do is to start at the point where you’re at, whether it’s beginning guitar. Remember, if you’re learning guitar, you know something more than somebody that is just getting started, and you have something to teach that person. You don’t have to fill-up an entire membership site for years and years when you don’t even have a member, and that is something that is really, really bothers me. The truth is you only have to be one step ahead of your first member.

So, if you have a membership site, why would you spend a year building up content when you don’t even have somebody paying you yet? Wouldn’t it be a better idea to make weeks worth of content, find that first member and always stay one day, or one week, or one month ahead of that one person? It’s been told on the Internet that the average lifespan of a membership site is two to four months, so let’s round it up and call it three months.

If the average time that somebody stays in a membership is only three months why are so many of you spending months and months and months building six months, one year, two years of content? All you need to do is stay one step ahead of your longest subscriber. In that way you’re not spinning your wheels. You can start bringing in money while you’re increasing your own knowledge and starting to bring money into your online business

So, with that being said, I want to know where you’re at today. I want to know what kind of site you have. Do you have a membership site setup? I bet you, if you think hard enough, you probably do. Let me give you a perfect example.

A couple of week ago I was with my friend Robert Plank, hanging out in North Carolina, and we started to have this whole discussion where we were talking about what is a membership site. What constitute a membership site? What “officially makes it” so that I have a membership site, and you want to know what we came up with? It’s that all of these big terms that people are throwing around are untrue.

The only thing that you need to have a membership site is to charge one person one payment or more, and that makes it a membership site. It can be fixed term, it can be open ended, but think about the example like I gave you earlier. You have a car payment, you know exactly how many payments you’re going to have to make until that membership ends and you own the car. If you have an ebook that you sell for $97, guess what if you’re having trouble selling it at $97, make it two payments of $47 and suddenly you have a membership site. So, stop over thinking it, but I want to know do you have a membership site?

Finally, what is your membership site? If you think you have any sort of product at all, you have a membership site, and another thing that I want to tell you is that I personally own a membership site that is made completely of other people’s products. That’s right, I took master resell rights, private label rights, and different types of products, threw them up all on a single website and I charge people month after month after month to get access to these. So, without even owning your own product, you can successfully start your own membership site.

Finally, one of the most important things that you need to know about your membership site is what is that retention rate? And how long do people stay in, and it’s sort of like what I was talking about earlier, what is the purpose of having a hundred days worth of content, if you only keep people on average for 30 days? You’ve just wasted 70 days worth of time, of content that people would never see.

Wouldn’t it be better to restructure that content so that you can build over and over and over, or stretch it out so that you can only have content for the amount of time that people are going to see it?

So, the main point that I’m driving home here is that there’s lots and lots or easy solutions! In fact Robert Plank and I have six proven models that we use over and over again to build recurring income, and most people just think of us as like these “Products Creators” that’s people that are always pimping out new things but the truth is, is that we try to put everything we can into a recurring income because we would rather do the work once and get paid for it many times, than do the work once and get paid for it once, and that’s what I want to encourage you to do.

Notice: Only 19 More Comments Will Be Allowed in This Blog Post...

Notice: Only 79 More Comments Will Be Allowed in This Blog Post...

Have you ever noticed how much PayPal fee’s are when you send money to a business partner or get paid from an affiliate promotion?

Did you know that you can automate your payments by uploading a simple spreadsheet?
Did you know that you can send large amounts of money to your business partners drop your fees to $1?

It’s true and here’s how…

Play Video

That is just one simple strategy to can use to manage your time and money more effectively.
Make sure you check out Time Management On Crack (look at the people who have bought this!) and learn how you can really become a productivity machine just like Super Robert.

Notice: Only 71 More Comments Will Be Allowed in This Blog Post...

I was reading some emails from my list and I realized that there is an important lesson that few people talk about when trying to build an online business. It was something that was very powerful for me personally.

When a lot people are getting started with their home-based, small business they want to do everything themselves. The want to be completely self-reliant.

That’s a terrible goal to have for a couple of reasons.

Building a Business Is LONELY

Having a person to reach out to and share your successes and failures with is vital.

If you don’t have friends that understand what you are doing your going to end up sitting at your desk for 20 hours a day and your going to be miserable.

Even worse you are going to sacrifice your relationships with your friends and family.

You need someone that understands your excitement when you make progress.

If you don’t build relationships with people that understand what you are building, you are just setting yourself up for failure.

Don’t Try To Do Everything Yourself

A lot of people miss the boat here. They want to learn and do it all themselves. I am not saying that you shouldn’t keep learning.

For me personally, I learn better through doing. So I need to find people that I can emulate.

The key to fast growth in your business is to find people with different skill sets than you that you can learn from.

Accountability

It doesn’t matter if you actually have a real “partner” (see the video.. ).

Just make a list of 4 things that you can accomplish today and write it down. Email it to someone or just post it on this blog.

Give it a try for one day. Post your accountability list as a comment.

Notice: Only 83 More Comments Will Be Allowed in This Blog Post...

About once a week, my daughter Grace will wake up early in the morning and “help Dad drink coffee”. I love these mornings when the house is quiet and it is still a little dark out.

One morning I did the “parent thing” and decided that I needed to take some pictures of her because she was growing so fast.

So I took out the camera, kneeled down to capture my memory…

“No Dad! No Pictures”, she ran off.

I was determined not to lose my Kodak moment so I went over her to and tried to explain, the best I could why I wanted her to smile and take a picture.

* For the memories
* To show mommy
* It would make me happy
* She will be glad some day

All of the reasons that made sense to me, but obviously means nothing to a little girl whose biggest concern is when Diego is coming on TV and if she can sneak a “jump, jump on couch”.

Finally, I asked her if she would like to take a picture of me.

Her eyes lit up, she grabbed the camera and did her best to take a picture. She giggled with excitement as she told me to smile and “took my picture”.

Then, she handed me the camera and told me to take her picture. We had a great time while she smiled and ran around the house posing with her toys.

Now she loves taking pictures and this has become a game we play and a way Grace and I connect. Oh yeah… and I get to have pictures like these for my old days…

It is funny how our friends, our families and our mentors can “tell us” over and over again what is good for us, but we don’t really grasp onto that until we are ready in our way.

My friends, Jit Uppal and James Rivers have been trying to get me on Twitter for months now.

They have laid out all of the benefits and even shown me proof of how it is working for them, but…

I never cared.

I even signed up one day just so they would stop bothering me about it.

That sounds bad I know, but like you I have a million other things I am working on in my business and Twitter just seemed silly and a waste of time.

Just over a week ago, Jason Fladlien and I interviewed Jit on his use of Twitter.

During the call, I had an “a-ha” moment and I sat and implemented all of the tips that Jason was sucking out of Jit, since then I have spent about 5 minutes a day on Twitter and am building a list I can not believe!

I am going to be honest with now. I was the biggest Twitter skeptic there was. I couldn’t believe that anyone really cared about 140 character messages or that they would help with my business.

If they did, they certainly wouldn’t see them in the mess of Tweets that are posted.

I signed up for a link shortening and tracking service called Cli.gs. This is a free real-time service that tells you how often your tweets are clicked on. I was shocked when I sent out a test to my small Twitter list of Followers and got the following results.

Who would complain with that amount of traffic from such a small amount of time and work investment? Lots of traffic streams is the goal right?

I was definitely starting to realize the power of twitter so I thought I would try one more experiment just to make sure.

This time I used a script called MyFreeViralTweets and sent an email to small portion of my list telling them that I had a free gift for them. I do this occasionally for my list so I knew I would get some decent traffic. Only this time I added MyFreeViralTweets to the page “just to see”

I was shocked. I generated a bunch of traffic from other people Tweeting about it!

Now imagine the amount of traffic that you can generate from Twitter if you build a decent sized list. I have been at it for less than a month now!

My advice is to start slow and small. Don’t get overwhelmed. Just sign up and spend a few minutes each day watching the conversation and getting used to it.

Who knows, it may even become one of things you wished you had started doing earlier! Just Get Started.

So what is holding you up with Twitter? Am I totally crazy and wasting my time? Are you building a Twitter list? Leave your comment below and don’t forget to tell your Tweeps about this post!

Notice: Only 84 More Comments Will Be Allowed in This Blog Post...

I admit it. I bought the dream.

I honestly thought that building a successful online business was easy, little work and would allow me not only financial freedom but also more free time than I would know what to do with.

I couldn’t wait to buy a brand new laptop and sit in a bar while making money sending out emails.

My wife bought it too. She couldn’t wait to spend more time at Sundance Resort “doing nothing”.

It was all so easy. While I admit I am not the smartest person in the world, I can usually figure things out after beating my head against the wall a few times. So I started building a list and my business.

Things were going great! Well except for the fact that I wasn’t making as much money as I thought and I was constantly tired, overwhelmed, frustrated and confused. I was literally working 2 jobs and didn’t feel any closer to financial freedom or personal freedom. The exact opposite was happening.

I rarely saw my wife or family. I didn’t talk to my friends for weeks at a time. And for what? To be able to pay myself $2 per hour? (If not less?)

This isn’t the way the dream was supposed to happen.

It got even worse for me about November of last year. My list had grown to a size that most people could not believe. It was even fairly responsive. I had learned how to make “just enough” from it. But it was nothing that could cover my bills, let alone take my wife on her getaway she had been planning.

I admit it. I panicked.

I could no longer justify the amount of time that I was spending on my “business”. And that sucked because I could see that I was so close. I knew that I almost got it. I just knew it was within reach.

Then I looked at my “business”. I looked at it hard.

I had a very big list. I did know how to earn some money from it, so I knew it was possible.

I was quickly becoming a stranger to Grace and my wife. I am so fortunate that I have a wife who believes in my and supports me. But this was NOT what was supposed to be happening. The dream I bought into was supposed to have me rolling around on the floor and playing with Grace. I bet she didn’t see me 1 hour per day during this time.

I had no real product, something I made. What? How could I not have a product? Isn’t that just mandatory?

My business was empty. I didn’t know the people on my list. I didn’t give them anything special. What I did was just copy and paste pre-made emails and hoped people bought the product. My list could care less about me and the way I was treating them I was showing I could care less about them.

I had basically decided that I need something to change or I had to give up, which I didn’t want to do.

I looked around me and contacted Jason Fladlien. I told him I wanted to talk to him about my business and I him paid him to do so.

What started as a customer – client phone call has no turned into a great friendship and my business has changed.

He convinced me.

Jason convinced me that I had all the foundation in place to create a new business, one that would achieve all of the goals that I had including more time with my family.

He convinced me that it wasn’t hard to make my own product.

He convinced me that I could connect with my list and they would forgive me for my “copy and paste” tactics of the past and that I had lots to share with them.

I got focused

Since that phone call my business is thriving, I feel better about what my business is and most importantly I get to spend time all day long taking “breaks” and playing with my daughter.

Her current favorite thing is to watch Diego and make dad do what she calls the “Diego Dance”. This basically means dad gets to jump around in circles and sing and laugh all ending with a big hug from her.

I also started getting emails from readers on my list. They were actually taking time out of their busy days to ask me a question or thank me for a recommendation or a product and a few times just to tell me thanks for the email.

So far this year I have launched 5 products (I think, yikes) and am consistently finding more time to spend with my family.

What changed? I watched what Jason and his business partner Robert Plank were doing and copied them.

What did they both have in common? They are both MASTERS of time management. In fact, I even like to refer to Robert as “Super Robert”.

I started simple and took on 1, just 1 of their time management tips and got amazing results.

First, I started not trying to plan everything at once. Robert talks about his grandfather having “lists of lists he needed to make”… that was me. No wonder I had no time. How did I solved this?

Start thinking of your day not in projects but just tasks. I write down 4 tasks that I can complete in a single sitting and do them, one at a time. It is amazing how much you can get done when you aren’t thinking about a million things.

In between each task I reward myself by leaving the office and going to play with Grace and spend time with my wife. Even if it is just 10 or 15 minutes. It’s amazing how much quality time you have when you focus on one thing.

Just Try It!

It may sound simple and might sound stupid, but you are still reading this.

Just try this one thing. Make a simple of lists of tasks. Not projects. And just complete those. Don’t think about anything else.

This simple little trick literally brought me one step closer to realizing “the dream”.

Be sure to share this tip with your Tweeps…

Notice: Only 88 More Comments Will Be Allowed in This Blog Post...

I quit watching the news on January 8, 2009…

Ok, I have caught myself maybe 4 times watching a broadcast.

I have been addicted to politics and world events since I can remember. I used to pride myself on understanding, as well as I could, what was going on and how events “would impact me” and the people around me. My wife would say I was obsessed. I would check the stock market every 20 minutes, follow the daily news stories and rant all day about what “the mess” we are in.

I found myself falling into a huge depression as I wondered what happened to all of the people that were losing their homes and jobs. I would literally yell at the tv during news casts in anger about what was going on around me.

This is obviously not the type of environment I wanted my 2 year old daughter Grace to grow up in.

So I quit.

I didn’t even watch the inauguration. Something I could have never imagined missing in the past. I quit watching the stock market except to check in for a quick peek once every couple of days. But I didn’t spend hours reading message boards and new stories on the latest scandal or fraud case. I just ignored it all.

I am the happiest I have ever been since I have quit.

Since I quit I have made several new friends, spent more time getting to know my neighbors and most importantly have been able to create a happy and stress free environment for my daughter, my wife and myself.

My childhood friend just called me and was feeling depressed about what was going on in the world and his frustration about needing to find a job and fast. He was desperate and wanted to talk.

For every idea I gave him, he had 6 excuses of why he couldn’t do THAT. So I would respond with a simple question, “So, you do or do not NEED to make money?”. Each time he would explain he did and would do anything. I would give him a suggestion and he would give me more excuses.

I must have given him a dozen ideas of things that he could do to make money.

I finally told him to “quit” and call me when he was ready to make a change and hung up. Not the nicest thing, but I just couldn’t go around in circles any more.

Then I got a skype message from my friend, Jason Fladlien. If you know anything at all about Jason, then you know that he is one of the hardest working people on the face of the planet. Not only that, but when he needed money he painted houses until he could build his online business, was a monk and even a rap star (Go J-Flad…), basically whatever he needed to move forward.

He is a guy that isn’t afraid to try something because of some comfort zone or let what other people think of him dictate what he does (take a look at his picture here if you don’t believe me).

Jason started telling me that he was having a record day in sales and how excited he was.

It just opened my eyes to how different two people’s experiences can be based on their attitude and work ethic.

Now I am looking at my own business since I had an “attitude adjustment”. I spend my business time studying productivity, time management and enhancing relationships that I have.

I now find that I am happier and more peaceful than I have ever been in my life. When I focus on my family, I am with my family. When it is time for business, I make sure I am focused and spend my time doing things that will set the foundation for the future.

Since I have quit, my business has transformed and I am working less and making more money than I have ever had, all from a little attitude adjustment and some refocusing.

So what is holding you back? What thing can you change that will not only make you more money but also increase your general happiness and quality of life? Leave your comment below.

Lance

Tell your tweeps about this post…

Notice: Only 73 More Comments Will Be Allowed in This Blog Post...