Diary on Wealth creation in a Depression

An illuminating Business Breakfast

The following is a summary of the post with the same title found in my site johnreason.com. It is based on notes that I took at a Business breakfast hosted by Arise Church in Christchurch, New Zealand this year (2009). The speaker was pastor Neil Smith from Planetshakers Church in Melbourne, Australia. His teaching was very illuminating and I thought could bear a wider audience so am sharing the high points here with this blog’s readers.

The message was directed to Christians, but I believe that you will find something useful here even if you are a person of another faith or no faith. Whether you work for somebody or work from home, ideas are important in advancing your business, whether your business is to sell you skills to a boss (i.e you are an employee (see how Robert Kiyosaki differentiates employees from three other main work quadrants), or you have an online home business or internet marketing affiliate program such as I follow, or a Christian home based business or have bought some sort of franchise in your quest to break out of the rat race.

Here follows a summary of the first part of the message:

Why are you in Business?

• When you go to work you don’t just “go to work” (as though it was something separate from your Calling).

• You go to do what God has called you to do. Christian business people are not just here to “resource the Kingdom”{i.e pay tithes and offerings to their churches}.
• Ask the question: WHY are you in business? A good book to read on this is “The E-Myth Revisited: why most Small Businesses don’t work and What to do about it” by Michael Gerber . It is a technical business book which asks the question just posed.

Business is about creating

Creativity in business

Business is in essence about creating. A by-product is that you prosper.

• Seriously wealthy people look for creative ideas, and don’t {in their private social time}talk about money.

• One creative idea can make all the difference to your business.

Pastor Smith gave the example of a businessman he knows in a certain Asian city who had one creative idea about the marshy real estate in a certain Asian city’s harbour entrance. He noticed none of the big ships entered a particular harbor entrance and on enquiring into it a bit  further was told that the waterway was too shallow and needed to be dredged.  The businessman also noticed the many acres of swampy land sitting idle in the area contiguous to the waterway.  He offered to dredge the waterway for nothing if he could have the swamp land, which the city authorities gladly agreed to.  Later on this “useless” land acquired for the price of dredging the canal became very valuable and he made many millions from it.

Creativity comes from God

What was this man’s “wealth creation strategy”?

• Every Monday he fasts and prays-he does not “go to work”

• on Tuesday he and his team of business associates pray through what he felt God says to him on the previous day.
• Then they have a meeting.
• They have recognized that creativity comes from God.  And they have recognized that creativity comes from WHO you are (your “Being”) rather than how BUSY you are (your “doing”).
• In the business community today many people suffer from some kind of mental problem because of stress.
  
• Stopping doing what you are doing and taking time out to re-evaluate (in this case pray through) your goals is healthy
  

We need to recognize as business people that we are conduits delivering a concept to someone else. The truth of “Calling” is knowing what is in you -and letting it flow out of you.

These notes will be continued in a future post. You are always welcome to leave comments or suggestions, and consider bookmarking it.

Have a great day!

John Reason,
Salesman, teacher, Article Writer, Internet Marketer.
© 2009-2010

Get E-myth here
or for U.K or European readers click here.
Australasian readers click here

Just finished reading the online chapters of Robert Kiyosaki (of “richdad” fame)’s latest book, “Conspiracy of the Rich“ which was published online as well as in the bookstores.  I found myself agreeing with him on many things apart from his dissection of the well known (and oft-misquoted) Bible phrase “For the love of money is the root of all evil”.(1 Tim 6:10)

Is it the love of money, or ignorance of money, that is the root of all evil?

Robert Kiyosaki

Kiyosaki asks the question whether it was love of money or the ignorance of it that was the root of all evil. It’s clear he thinks the latter is the cause, and bewails the dire lack of teaching on financial literacy in our schools. Ergo, it’s as though we are to infer scripture is incorrect at that point. I have to disagree with Mr Kiyosaki. We have plenty of current circumstantial evidence to support the original biblical text i.e it is the LOVE of money that is at the root of all evil. Ask Bernie Madoff, and his victims. Greed is everywhere from the small-town chancer to those movers and shakers who control the economies of nations.  It is amazing how individuals by their greed have been responsible for Boom-Bust situations throughout history-see “The Ascent of Money”.

Money is important;it is not evil-it is a neutral substance

I think he asks many valid questions but this is the wrong question. It is not whether it is the love of money or the ignorance thereof that is the root of evil. The question(s) for Christians, and those who still have a moral framework, is whether money is important in life, whether Money is intrinsically evil, and if not, how best to put it to use in this life? Believe it or not, many Christians still have this view that money is evil because of a simple misquote of the scripture mentioned-you hear “money is the root of all evil“which is not what the text says- as well as a failure to understand the prosperity that is inherently promised to those in a covenant with God. I have studied Bible and money as a theme, both privately and in Bible College, so I simply share my opinion. I do not have space in this post to give a detailed exegesis on the subject, but suffice it to say that I can categorically affirm that God is more than ok with Christians having money-even prospering.

Jesus spoke more on money than on heaven and hell combined. Why? Because it is clear from Biblical texts (e.g the Parable of the Talents) that your money represents your Life and what you do with it represents who you are. So money is not evil. Money is immensely important. Christians and religious people lose out when they separate spiritual from physical and say “money isn’t important”. God is interested in both. Money itself is neutral-it can be used for great and glorious purposes or for evil purposes. It takes on the character of its owners.

Poor financial education is a modern evil: it is bad for for all but the rich

What Robert Kiyosaki is right in saying in his book Rich Dad’s Conspiracy of the Rich: The 8 New Rules of Money is that lack of financial education is a bad, even evil, thing. As he says in his introduction to the book “One of the causes of this financial crisis is that most people do not know the difference between good financial advice from bad financial advice. Most people cannot tell the difference between a good financial advisor from a con man. Most people cannot tell the difference between a good investment from a bad one. Most people go to school so that they can get a good job, work hard, pay taxes…and hand over any extra money to a financial planner-or an expert like Bernie Madoff.” He then also points out something very relevant to today with people losing their houses, and a point he made in his seminal book Rich Dad, Poor Dad.  “Most people are in trouble today because they believed their home was an asset, when it was really a liability.”

So one of the conclusions one draws from this book is that those with financial literacy will not so easily fall prey to dishonest or deceived financial advisers. I don’t know if I would go so far as Kiyosaki and suggest the above are tools of the uber-rich in that they sell products like mutual funds which make the rich richer but do not make you much richer;but I do know enough about the Financial Services industries in countries like the U.K, where I briefly practised as a financial adviser, that the salesmen of financial products often know nothing about investment or business themselves, and live off pay check to pay check whilst advising people of wealth and means. Whether one can believe that there is a “conspiracy” from reading this book is hard to say. Kiyosaki admits that conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen, but then seems to freely opine that there is a conspiracy of the rich today. Ironically Kiyosaki himself is a rich man but he has become so by shrewd investments, helping people through educating them on financial matters, and because he had a “rich Dad”, someone who mentored him on financial matters. He made mistakes, but he used those mistakes to learn from and teach others;also he was able to discern the wood from the trees in the world of financial instruments and jargon, which most of us are not.

The Federal Reserve

For example (and this is something I did know already) most people do not know that the Federal Reserve in America, is neither federal, nor American, and it doesn’t have much reserves, and is not a bank. As he says “Once the Fed was in place, there were two sets of rules when it came to money: One set of rules for people who work for money and another set of rules for the rich who print money“.

I do not have Kiyosaki’s financial knowledge but I do share with him the belief (which I have held for the last fifteen years) that we are headed for a Depression (hence the title of my blog); that the causes of the great depression are similar to those of the recent economic downturn, and reading books like this will help you prepare for it.  Whether there is a “conspiracy” of the rich I doubt personally-I think the rich (like the poor) generally gravitate to their own kind, without consciously “conspiring” to do so, but you can click HERE for “Conspiracy of the Rich” to draw your own conclusions.

For a look at other useful Wealth creation books (including “Conspiracy of the Rich“,check out this site

John Reason,

Salesman, teacher, article writer, Internet Marketer.

© 2010

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Wikipedia defines Search engine optimization (or SEO for short) as:” the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.”)

Techniques are used to attract people to your site.

I mentioned keywords and meta tags in the last post.  Nothing wrong in using these, provided you don’t overdo it.  It’s a great idea to put keywords in your “URL” ( The web site address: this is found by the  URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, assigned to it ) for example, and in the first few lines of your article or blog post.  And use keywords in your H1 or main Headline tags.  Use them in the Meta tags (An HTML tag placed in the head section of a web page. The tag provides additional information that is not displayed on the page itself ) but don’t stuff them in willy-nilly.  Like I said, stay away from “Black Hat SEO” (for more info on that see my last post on Web positioning

Where to look for keywords in your web positioning strategy

The first place to look for keywords is to explore the marketplace for ideas for “Seed keywords”.  e.g Clickbank.  By going to Clickbank you can look for products there.  Each product serves a market, so it’s a good starting place.  You can also look for current trends in your local magazine rack, or other media channels.  Once you have a generalized phrase you’re interested in, use a tool like Google Keywords tool (which you can Google to find), select the language you want your results displayed in, and click on “Get keyword ideas”.   After that, scroll down to “Additional Keywords to be Considered” and look for phrases with a high enough Search count (over 100000) and that are relevant to your first keyword (which may be a phrase e.g “building a hen house”), and select up to five of these.

Use a good keyword research tool

The next step is to put the phrase or phrases you have just identified in to a proper Keyword research tool that can filter and sort information quickly.  A good tool that I have been recommended on the AFFILOBLUEPRINT Affiliate marketing course, and that I recommend,  is Market Samurai. You can filter by clicking on your “Keyword Research” tab to get results on Organic traffic, Adwords traffic, Competition and Commerciality.

A few acronyms for you:

SEOT: is the SEO Traffic and is the number of estimated clicks a website would receive each day for this search phrase, if it were ranked at no.1 on Google’s organic listings;

SEOC: is the SEO Competition, or number of competing pages in Google for a particular keyword phrase.

SEOV: is what the traffic is worth if you would were ranked at position #1 on Google. It’s what you would have to pay in AdWORDS for that amount of traffic for that keyword. Therefore it’s a measure of what that free traffic you get is worth so you can decide if doing SEO for that keyword is worth it.

With this Market Samurai tool you can cut through a lot of unnecessary work in your SEO efforts-and, let me tell you, there’s far too much work as it is!  You will zero in on keywords that have a decent search rate (200+), which equates to an SEOT of 84+; use the PBR (“Phrase to Broad”) tab-which either gives you the broad results that come back on your keyword (e.g “building coops for poultry” might be one, and is obviously not a good match,or you can narrow it down to the exact keyword you want e.g “Building a hen house”); also you will want to put an SEOV of $100 and above, because it is important to be working in a market where people are spending money;and  an SEOC of under 100,000 is advisable, otherwise there will just be too much competition around your keyword.

You’re wanting to find a niche, and then build a site round that niche. Market Samurai will help you optimize your keywords, and the “Affiloblueprint” will help you on the way to your SEO optimization and web positioning success.

Have a great day!

John Reason,
Brit currently living in New Zealand.
Salesman, teacher, article writer, Internet Marketer.
© 2009
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Click Here For Affiloblueprint

RELATED READING:”SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION for DUMMIES”

Search Engine Optimization All-in-One For Dummies

For U.K and European readers Click Here for Search Engine Optimization For Dummies

Web positioning:the quest for Page Ranking

If you’ve been involved in Search Engine Optimization, Web positioning or internet marketing for any length of time you realize the importance of Page Ranking (getting your site pages ranked as high as possible by the Search Engines), in order to get more traffic which in turn creates greater profitability.

“Black Hat” S.E.O

As with any other human endeavour there are the right, acceptable and honest strategies to do something (“White Hat” strategies in the SEO context)-or ,more precisely, strategies that follow Search Engine stipulations and rules; and then those that don’t:the dubious, unethical and downright dishonest ways of getting people to come to your site and have your page rank artificially inflated- these are known as “Black Hat SEO”, for obvious reasons.

Keyword Stuffing

Confusingly, some of the bigger search engines do allow a number of web sites to operate counter to the stated rules. I do not know enough about the subject to comment more, but I have learned that “keyword stuffing” is one of the older black hat tricks-where the “meta tags”, and other tags are crowded with the keyword and synonyms to a ridiculous level. But now this is easily decipherable by search engines looking for “spam” sites. In fact, they look for cyclic activity and posting of content that makes little sense, its only purpose to repeat a number of keywords over and over again.

Duplicate Content And Cloned Pages

Sean Rasmussen in his Internet marketing forum that I joined as a newbie only a few short months ago warns in an article he entitles “Avoid Spamming the Search Engines” :

“Another way for your website to be viewed as spam is to post the same content on more than one page. An occurrence metric used by search engines can find duplicate content pretty quickly. For a true spammer, this is done in order to increase the amount of content with the same keywords and achieve a higher page ranking. For an innocent site owner, this is pure laziness.

Similarly, cloned pages could be seen as a problem. Spammers do this to inundate the net with their keyword-stuffed content. It could also occur if you are trying to get a site online quickly and clone your pages before making adjustments – never a good idea as it could cost you a lot of time in the Google sandbox.”

Link Farms

Another Black hat technique Sean mentions is Paid Links, or paying to get  links to your site.  Getting a lot of inbound and outbound links is one primary way a web page can be selected by the Search Engines for a higher Page Rank, if there are many links.  Black Hat practitioners pay what is called “link farms” to get these links. Wikipedia see here defines these as :”a link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other site in the group. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services. A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine (sometimes called spamdexing or spamexing). Other link exchange systems are designed to allow individual websites to selectively exchange links with other relevant websites and are not considered a form of spamdexing.”

Conclusion: write good content and keep keyword density down

He concludes with a piece of advice I will pass on .  He says the way to avoid being censured is to “write quality content and keep keywords to an overall density of less than 3%(italics mine). This is not an exact figure applicable in every circumstance, but it does fit with the amount of keywords you would naturally expect to find in a well-written article.”

Surprise surprise!  When I was interested in submitting manuscripts for books I came to the same conclusion : too much material out there, whether in the Book publishing arena or Internet marketing  is spammy, badly written and /or downright useless.

If you would like to learn more about Affiliate Marketing and Web Positioning and you are an “S.E.O Dummie” like me, I recommend Sean Rasmussen’s “Year of the Affiliate” e-book which you can get simply by clicking below.

John Reason,
Brit currently living in New Zealand.
Salesman, teacher, article writer, Internet Marketer.
© 2009
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Click on the image to check out the Year of the affiliate e-book!