Have you ever felt that your life was a conveyor belt of ….
Go to school, graduate, get a good job with a good company, accumulate retirement savings, and use these to do everything you’d ever wanted to during your retirement?
If that’s what you’ve grown up expecting you may be in for a big surprise. Only 5 people in 100 who follow this route can look forward to a comfortable retirement. Are you shocked?
That means a whopping 95 out of 100 hardworking people who try to follow this route are going to have to rely on inadequate pensions, social security, and family assistance to live out their golden years. Not a happy picture.
Just take a look in your community to see how few retirees are financially independent. If you know any that are truly financially independent then you’ll probably find they did it on their own.
So, if you want to want financial independence what are your options?
You could pray that you’ll be one of the 1 in 180 million people who hits the lottery or you could inherit a fortune when your aged maiden aunt checks out. Another way could be a life of crime, but I warn you that your chances of reaching retirement age, let alone enjoying it, are really slim.
In reality there’s just one way you can ever be financially independent..
You have to do it on your own.
I’ve just read some fascinating statistics about age and self-employment:
“According to recent studies 22 percent of men and 14 percent of women over 65 are self-employed. That’s compared to just 7 percent for other age groups. According to a Vanderbilt University study the number of entrepreneurs in the USA age 45 to 64 will grow by 15 million by 2006. That’s compared to a 4 million decline for entrepreneurs age 25 to 44.”
And: “Self-employment among American workers increases with age, with the most dramatic jump occurring at age 65.”
Don’t worry help is at hand. With the advent of the Internet there’s a whole new world out there, and, most importantly, it’s a level playing field. (Finally I can say it…Size doesn’t count). There are more than 500 million consumers out there and with a good plan, you can learn to build your financial independence with your own online business.
Before you say “I can’t do it” let’s chuck out some of the most common reasons people give for not wanting to start an online business:
Objection #1: I'm not smart enough to have my own business.
This is unlikely to be true. Successful businesses are run by people with vastly different capabilities. Running your own business is about solving people’s problems and not about how smart you are.
Objection #2: I don't have the time it takes to start or grow an income source online.
Unless you’re already working 80 hours a week, you can probably find time to start building an online business. You’ll probably need to find 2 hours a day (14 hours a week) to successfully build your business. (Not too much is it?). It’s really all about organizing your time. How about using your commuting time to record ideas for a business?
Objection #3: I don't have the money it takes for a new business.
The cost of starting your online business needn’t be expensive – certainly less than starting a real world business. I’ve managed to get going for about $500, but believe I have wasted some of that.
Objection #4: I'm not an expert at anything.
No matter what your background there’s probably something you know that somebody else doesn’t. That makes you an expert to the other person. Just do some research and before long you’ll find that there’s something that you can teach others.
Objection #5: I have nothing to sell.
There are two parts to an online business a product and people wanting that product. You can sell other peoples products (just like real world) if you know what people want.
Objection #6: Someone is already doing what I want to do so it is useless trying to compete.
Of course other people are already doing the same thing but that’s true in the real world too. Just do it better. If there aren’t others doing the same thing you probably can’t make money out of it. Competition shows that there is a market for your product/idea.
Objection #7: The only people making money are people telling others how to make money.
When you start on the Internet Marketing route you’re desperate for information and in finding it you sign up with everyone offering to help you – these are the guys (and girls) offering their services as business advisers. They are not the only businesses on the ‘Net but they are the ones you’ll come into contact with first.
Objection #8: I've tried plenty of business opportunities with no success -- it's just not for me.
Maybe it's not, but chances are, your failure is from chasing different business opportunities, instead of building your own business from the ground up.
Objection #9: I'd need a top search engine ranking to get anywhere and that's almost impossible.
Search engine positioning is not the be all and end all. There are other ways to find traffic and customers.
Objection #10: I'd need a big advertising budget to get any results.
That’s simply not true, the ‘Net is the perfect place to do business with a small budget.
The greatest lie out there today is that, if you get a good job and slave away for 40 something years, your retirement years will be golden.
Are you living the Greatest Lie?
9 Amazingly Easy Ways To Writing Your Greatest Sales Letter Ever
It is very common that people who are new to Internet Marketing will face with difficulties writing their own sales copy – a job called copywriting. Nevertheless, it is amazingly easy if you follow these 9 easy ways:
1. Headline
The most important thing in a sales letter is the headline, it can’t be emphasized more. Use a red headline to grab attention. Make sure the headline is catchy, in bigger font, and preferably in the font Tahoma.
2. Attention
You need to start your sales copy by getting the prospects’ attention. After the headline does its job, you’ll need to get your prospects’ attention by telling them what they are seeing here. Tell them right away what they are getting in the sales letter they are reading now.
3. Interest
You’ve got your visitors’ attention, what you need to do next is start telling them a story and have them interested in what you have to offer. Interest them by mentioning what You have for Them – them, them, them, you’re always thinking of the benefit on Their side!
4. Desire
When they are ready to know what you want to offer them, then it is a good time to make them want it more. Mention how your product is able to change their lives, tell them how bad things can turn to good after getting your product – always remember that it’s about them, not you!
5. A Call To Action
Already have them thirst for your product deeply now? Great – you are now going to sell them the product. Urge them to buy your product, tell them that they must have this product of yours.
6. Long Copy
It is proven more than enough that direct sales letter with a long copy of a single page works the best to sell a product. This way you can list out everything your prospects need to know and wouldn’t let them have a moment to be confused at all. You get their attention, interest them, explain everything, get their desires out and Bam – sell them the product.
7. Testimonials
Nothing is better than a proof from people who have their lives changed because they purchased your product. By providing testimonials, you get a third party to support you and that urges your prospects into buying more easily. We rather purchase something people recommend, don’t we?
8. Clean and neat sales copy
You don’t want to clutter your sales copy with fancy colors, graphics and so on. It is important that your prospects focus more on your words, the texts rather than the design of your sales letter, color of the background etc.
9. Write a story
A good sales letter will need to hook its readers without fail. We are used to finishing a single task – in this case, a story since young. Ever watched an exciting movie and stopped in the middle because you need to accomplish some other things? It feels voided if you do so, right?
This is the same case, people will try and finish every story they read, especially an interesting one. If you can write a good story and keep your prospects hooked right down until the order button, you succeeded.
Best Internet Marketing Solutions Without Overspending & Bencivenga, Halbert And Lok: The 3 Greatest Copywriters In The World!
The Internet has made this world an open enterprise. It has become important for companies to further expand their market and their consumer targets. Engaging to Internet Marketing maybe a risk for people who wish to be involved with this type of business.
Ensure that most of your target consumers will surely acquire your product. Consider the best products which will definitely capture their interests and needs. This means that you need to identify specifically who these people are, their location and financial level in the society. Have a marketing knowledge and skill to achieve your goal in the field of Internet marketing.
At the present, you can use varied Internet Marketing Solutions that is being offered by companies which can be your tool for support to your consumers. This solution maybe email marketing, search engine optimization or creating web pages or sites. Since you need to maximize your return profit, you need to choose Internet Marketing Solutions that will help you achieve this. These marketing techniques will not cost much since they are very self-explanatory, thus, learned easily.
Email marketing is a common Internet marketing Solution. This is a cost effective way of communicating and interacting to your consumers, driving them to visit your website and check out your products. It may be in a way of marketing articles, leading them to forums or newsletters. A newsletter has an advantage of expanding your consumers as more and more sign up on it until you can have a bulk list of emails.
Another great Internet marketing solution is through websites. This is a good promotion strategy to employ since you can display all the necessary information for your target consumers. The website should capture their interest and be complete since every transaction, from inquiry to payments may take place. All correspondence that will be done online must be well-facilitated by the features of your website.
Another Internet marketing solution is search engine optimization. This is a type of service for your website that you can make use of in order to raise the number of visitors to your site. Once a consumer uses a search engine, your website will rank high in the list of searches which in return will increase your site's traffic.
Considering these Internet Marketing Solution, there are different companies offering software products containing one or all of these solutions. It would be a great opportunity to try one of these which will match your financial capability and expected return profit.
Bencivenga, Halbert And Lok: The 3 Greatest Copywriters In The World!
No other element of marketing will make your business succeed or fail faster than your copywriting. Good copywriting can earn you a fortune. Bad copywriting will sink your business faster than the Titanic!
However, rather than write an article on how to write great copy, we decided to let three of the greatest copywriters of all time show you how it's done.
Listed below are the links to the websites of Gary Bencivenga, Gary Halbert and Dan Lok. If you want to learn how to write great copy, we can assure you, nobody does it better than these three professionals. They are truly in a class by themselves!
We suggest you carefully study their work, word for word, read their newsletters and glean as much information as you can from their materials. You simply won't get a better or more valuable copywriting education anywhere. Here are the links. Enjoy!
The Caregiver’s Greatest Enemy
Being a caregiver for your aging mom or dad could be compared to a battle. This is even more so if you are caring for a loved one who is terminally ill. That is because the battle you are fighting will ultimately end in the passing of your loved one. But you are committed to their health, happiness and well being and to do all you can to make their golden years as peaceful and enjoyable if you can.
So what would you consider the greatest enemy you fight in this battle? It might be the battle to keep your parent’s medications up to date and to make sure she takes them every day without fail. It is a struggle to keep up with the prescriptions, the frequency of dosage and to make sure your elderly mom or dad stays on top of it too.
The greatest enemy you fight might be financial concerns with the rising cost of rent, food and medical care. Keeping your retired parent’s bills paid and anticipating if they can pay them next month and next year is source of constant worry for you as their caregiver.
But there is one enemy that is bigger than all of these. And the source of this enemy is not the economy or the retirement center or even in something going on with your parent at all. It is an enemy that seeks to hurt you and take you out of the picture. And that enemy is resentment.
Resentment can get into your mind and cause you to begin brooding about things before you even know its happening. But it’s an insidious enemy because if that resentment comes to full fruit, it will damage your willingness and ability to take care of your aging parent and seriously hurt your ability to be a caregiver at all. And if your loved one loses you as his or her primary caregiver, that is the worst loss they can endure because you are the one holding everything together for them.
Some of the resentment might be toward the systems that are supposed to help your parent. The Social Security and Medicare systems are constantly changing and becoming more complex each time some politician decides to use Social Security as a political tool. Resentment can also build up toward the facility where your parent is living if you feel your dad or mom are not getting the kind of care they need.
But the worst kinds of resentment are those you feel toward your siblings or toward the very aging parent that you are there to help. This is a serious problem because if you come to resent those you love the most, that resentment can go very deep and seriously hurt your ability to continue in the struggle to help your parent all you can. It’s easy to resent your siblings because you may have the job of primary caregiver just because you didn’t move far away. But the resentment you feel toward your aging parent is so easy to give in to because it comes from how needy they are and that often that senior citizen seems demanding and ungrateful for what you are trying to do.
So to beat resentment, you have to go back to why you are doing this in the first place. You are not doing it for your siblings and you are not even doing it for the senior himself to be honest about it. You are doing it because they took care of you when you were little and because it’s the right thing to do. And as long as you stay grounded to what is the real purpose of this mission, then you can fight this war and win it for yourself, for your parent and for everyone that loves him or her as well.
The Greatest Loss of Them All
Perhaps the hardest task you will ever be faced with is to help one of your parents cope with the loss of her spouse. Naturally, this is going to be a traumatic time for the whole family because as much as mom lost her husband and the father of her children, you have lost your daddy and you have grief yourself. So how do you help your mom and grandma to your kids get through this very difficult transition?
It will be a time when you will need the understanding and support of your spouse and kids as well. And just as the grief you are coping with in yourself and in your now widowed mother is difficult, you also have to be strong and brave for your children as well.
This is the purpose of the funeral because through the good words of the minister, those not as close to the family feel closure that this good life has gone on to his reward. If your dad was ill and going through a lot of discomfort, there is often a sense of relief that he is no longer suffering. And if the family is strong in a religious faith, that assurance of the afterlife is a source of comfort as well.
Only you will be able to gauge how much support or comfort your widowed mother needs in the days just after the passing. It’s important to remember that grief surfaces in strange ways. Many times the real deep grief does not surface at the funeral or even in the days just after as family stays around to be close and go through group processing of the loss of a loved one.
It’s when family goes home and the routine of daily life sets in that you should plan to be very accessible to your parent. That is when the emotions of grief will surface in the quiet and privacy of the home. It might be advisable in this kind of situation that you live with the grieving parent for period of a week or two to help with the transition.
Another thing about grief is that it is selfish. While we put a noble face on it and say we are grieving “for” the lost one, the truth is the grief is really for the one who remains because it is she who has to learn to go through life’s routines without that spouse. By being present during mealtime and those little moments of the day, you can “talk through” the different times when your widowed parent remembers that the dearly departed was part of this part of life.
There will be a lot of rebuilding during those first months of being alone. So you as caregiver can help that transition by not letting the times of loneliness be so long between visits. Obviously, your parent will eventually have to learn to get through the rituals of life alone. But be there for her so that transition is not so jarring.
But even if your parents was stoic at the funeral and only shows a happy face to the grandkids, there will come a time when she has to cry. Be there for her. Don’t try to come up with any “comforting words.” Just being present, maybe doing the dishes or pouring each of you a glass of wine can be the biggest comfort you can provide.
Finally talk about the dearly departed. Ministers know the value of talking about the fun, interesting and wonderful things about the dearly departed. It is a way of reminding ourselves that he didn’t really go away. The memory of him will be here forever in your hearts. So take some evenings and sit down with that box of family photos and go through them with the widowed parent and laugh about the different events of your family history when you were just a little squirt and mom and dad were young and good looking kids themselves.
The joy of these times will be tremendously healing for the grieving senior citizen and for you too. But by going through grief, healing, closure and moving on together, you bond with your parent and lay the groundwork for the important care giving challenges you and she will face together in the months and years to come. But you will face them and you will conquer them because you are going to do it together.