WealthStorm – Create Passive Income

Dear readers, we are blessed to be living in times of untold opportunity. Though the news media has bombarded us with dire warnings of a worsening economy there has never been a better time to start your own home based business.

If you aren’t at least a little bit skeptical of my claim then I urge you to stop reading now. As you’ll hear me say often on this website – there are those out there who would take advantage of your trust. If you find yourself believing claims that seem counterintuitive you need to slow down. Give yourself some time to think about what is being proposed and decide whether it makes sense. The best defense against scammers is a clear mind.

The rest of you likely think I’m crazy to advocate starting a home based business in this economic environment. I’m going to share with you four specific reasons why I think now is the right time to start a home based business. If you still find yourself unconvinced afterwards, leave me a comment – I’d love to hear your thoughts.

You’re Forced To Be A Good Steward

In more extravagant times you might be tempted to put a few thousand dollars upfront to invest in your business opportunity. You may even feel comfortable running your business at a loss for many months while you grow your customer base. Tough times don’t afford such a luxury. Creating a business in this environment forces you to effectively manage costs. When times are good again you’ll have a distinct advantage over competitors who start up in more prosperous times, and who haven’t yet learned this discipline.

Learn The Business, Cheaply

If you’re effectively managing your costs you are able to learn from your mistakes (and trust me, you’ll make mistakes) without breaking the bank. You’ll also be making most of your mistakes when the environment is unfavorable, meaning a lost opportunity would not have been as lucrative. You can get ahead of the competition. When the economy picks up they’ll be learning and making mistakes. You’ll already be proficient at your craft.

Old Niche’s Are Opening

Older more established competitors are cutting back or folding because their cost structure wasn’t built to handle such a severe downturn. This leaves many market’s underserved and open to new businesses. This is your chance to gain market share and set yourself up for more significant growth in the future. You can build momentum into the upswing.

People Are Crying Out For Opportunities

If you’ve been around those in the home based business for a while you’ll probably have heard about the fallacy of job security. Unlike in the past, companies no longer take care of employees for life. Many are cutting back on pensions and assigning work to the lowest bidder. As unemployment pushes upwards towards 10% this reality has begun to sink in.

People are desperate for work and desperate for financial security. If you’re in an industry that can offer a firm financial future YOU HAVE A LOT MORE POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS!

Where To From Here?

If you’re wondering whether a home based business is right for you I urge you to review the home based business resources here. If you’re in the network marketing industry and struggling to become profitable, learn proven strategies for succeeding in network marketing.

If you’re still not sure, subscribe to receive the latest updates. In my next article I’ll share with you the simplest and fastest way to create a firm financial footing.

Until next time – May you be blessed with abundance!

Over the last few months we’ve watched the economy lurch from one downturn to another. What started as a housing crisis has spread to our financial infrastructure and further – leaving no industry unscathed. Those nearing retirement have seen their hard earned savings disappear virtually overnight, leaving them with the prospect of spending the golden years of retirement greeting folks at the local Walmart.

For those in the work force things aren’t much better. Unemployment has reached levels unseen of for many decades, and even though some companies are trying desperately to do right by their employees layoffs are continuing and salaries are being frozen.

To top it all, many believe that any sunshine we see up ahead is the clear skies that come with the eye of the storm. Promising only a brief respite before the financial carnage continues.

It’s at times like these that one could be forgiven for thinking that financial freedom is beyond reach. So you hunker down, leaving dreams of financial freedom for another, better day.

You let the economy steal your financial freedom

To be sure, now is not the time to skimp on your duties at your place of employment. You should never trade a good job for the promises of financial freedom. All to often these promises come from charlatans who want nothing more than to take advantage of you. In an economic climate such as this you could find yourself out of work and needing the few thousand dollars you “invested” in the scam.

But if you hunker down you will miss out on the best opportunity to create wealth you’ll have in your lifetime. The Chinese word for crisis is composed of two components – opportunity and danger. It’s in these very times of crisis that the most lucrative opportunities can be found. Stocks are cheaper than they have been in decades, houses are going for fire sale prices and all but the most successful businesses are cutting back – leaving valuable market niche’s for the taking.

I urge you not to miss out on this opportunity to start your own home based business. If you do so in a thoughtful, responsible manner your efforts through the crisis will be rewarded many times over. In my next article I’ll let you know specifically why now is the right time to start a home based business. Click here to subscribe and make sure you don’t miss out on this valuable information.

Until next time, may you be blessed with abundance.

Over the last year almost everyone has had their investment portfolio ravaged by market declines. Stocks have lost almost 50% of their value in developed countries, even more in some emerging markets and if you listen to some stock market prognosticators you could believe that the worst is yet to come.

One could be tempted to pull their money out of the stock market and hide it under a mattress. This is a perfectly reasonable response if you’re simply following your emotions. I consider myself an “aggressive growth” investor – willing to take risks in the pursuit of more robust long term returns – but watching my portfolio deteriorate by almost 50% has surely tested my resolve. I know, intellectually, based on history and research, that the absolute worst thing to do is get out of the market now.

Dividend Paying Stocks Are Once Again Hot

I don’t mean their share prices are doing well – they’re in the tank along with everyone else. Good, solid companies are paying out dividends of 4%, 5% – even as high as 7%. Meaning that there is now a unique opportunity to get paid while you wait for the stock market recovery. It seems like this is the best of both worlds – what’s the catch?

It’s important to realize that just because a stock is a large blue chip company it doesn’t mean they can’t go bankrupt and take the value of your investment down to zero with it. The Detroit auto makers (who have hefty dividends right now) should serve as a good real world example. They aren’t bankrupt, but only for the grace of the US Government.

A divident is not guaranteed – many large company’s recently cut their dividends. The juicy 5% dividend could end up being a paltry 2% within a few months. In particular be weary of companies paying out a large percentage of their earnings in dividends – they’re more likely to cut the dividend as sales slow.

You’ve heard it said that if something is too good to be true, it is. This applies to dividends as well. If you find companies with large dividends – 12%, 15% or even higher, be extra careful before investing in them. Very high dividend payouts are usually the result of a recent stock slide (as we’ve just had), and aren’t usually sustainable.

Finding a few good companies with solid dividends is a great way to create passive investment income!

If you turn on the news you’ll hear an endless series of talking heads and prognosticators discuss the “economic crisis”. On and on you’ll hear about the credit crunch, sub-prime mortgage mess and then some or another bailout designed to get us out of this disaster.

It seems that with every passing week more and more people are losing their jobs, their homes and their hope. Even those of us who are in a relatively secure position financially are starting to wonder, ‘will I be next?’. In some of my darker moments I wonder, ‘Can the stock market actually go to zero?’. The theoretical answer, of course, is yes. It is possible that every company in the US goes bankrupt, the currency devalues to keep up with Zimbabwe, we default on foreign debt and civil war breaks out.

Possible, but about as likely as a wall street executive passing up a bonus – that is to say, highly unlikely. This country has weathered far more severe recessions, even the great depression of the 1930s without complete collapse. Odds are we will do the same this time around.

The proimise of an eventual recovery and return to prosperity is small comfort to anyone who is struggling to pay the bills. Harv Eker, renowned author and self-improvement coach advises that you emphatically declare that ‘the’ economy is not ‘your’ economy. The external circumstances do not define your personal economy or your ability to create value and wealth. Yet many of us fall into the trap of believing it does.

Our inner wealth measure is so finely calibrated to circumstances that we miss out on opportunities. In fact the current economic crisis provides unprecedented opportunities to start a new and profitable business. Many competitors are running and hiding. Cutting costs and focusing on how to survive. As a new entrepreneur with a lower cost structure you have a distinct advantage in building market share. If you start now you’ll be well prepared for when the economy recovers again.

If you’re finding it hard to break out of the slump, I highly endorse Harv’s book ‘Secrets of the Millionaire Mind‘ and his three day seminar ‘The Millionaire Mind Intensive‘. Each of them will revitatlize your economic outlook and set you on the path for prosperity!

Are you doing a lot of “money making activities” but not seeing any results? Are you following “expert advice” that seems to work for everyone but you? If so, you’re probably frustrated to the point of giving up. You’ve screamed internally that “it’s impossible to make money on the Internet”, or “Network marketing doesn’t work anymore”.

I think I know what you’re doing wrong. Intimately.

The age old adage is that if it can’t be measured it can’t be improved. The same applies to creating passive income. If you’re not achieving the success you want it’s because you’re not following the tried and true formula for success. Many guru’s have taught this in some fashion, and books have been written that describe the success formula in many different ways. Anthony Robbins even terms this the “ultimate success formula”.

What is it? The formula for success for anything you want in life boils down to doing these five things

1. Decide what you want to achieve
2. Create a plan for achieving it
3. Take action based on that plan
4. Notice what’s working and do more of that
5. Notice what’s not working and do less of that

It’s pretty simple really. I’m going to guess that if you’ve really worked hard to create passive income that you breezed through steps 1-3 without a problem. Just by doing that you’re already ahead of most of the rest of the world, but as you’ve probably noticed – that’s not good enough!

A few months ago I was trying everything to succeed. I was taking action, but I wasn’t seeing the results I wanted, so I changed what I was doing. Yet still no results – so I’d change what I was doing again. You guessed it, still to no avail! I felt like I was chasing my tail.

I was doing everything but applying my intelligence to step 4. Notice what’s working and do more of that. I thought I was measuring results – after all, sales are direct results that are easy to measure. And I was doing a great job measuring that: $0…$0…$0… you get the picture.

It was disheartening. I didn’t realize at the time that I wasn’t measuring the right things.

Lets take an example to illustrate. Say you want to setup a website to generate income by selling affiliate products. You setup your website, hook up Clickbank, begin promoting some great affiliate products and… nothing happens.

So you try a writing some articles, or advertising on Google. Nothing. So you try writing a few blogs posts. Still not a single sale.

You’re measuring the wrong thing! Sales is a great thing to measure once you’re making some, but until you make one you have absolutely no idea what is working. You have nothing to say you should switch tactics. For all you know you have a winning strategy that just needs some time to play out.

The trick is to find something more granular to measure, so you can detect progress sooner, and apply steps 4. and 5. intelligently. What are some of the things you could measure earlier on? How about traffic to your website. Or your position in search engines for a particular keyword. Or your page rank. Or the number of inlinks. There are dozens of things you can measure before the sale that can help you make a smart changes and avoid running in circles.

So how do you achieve a greater level of success today?

Define a crisp set of metrics to measure. Make sure that these metrics are valuable both in the short term, and as an indicator of your ultimate success. Use metrics as early as possible to figure out what’s working and what’s not. Most of all, keep learning and improving!

Welcome, and thank you for taking the time to invest in your financial future. I know how difficult it can be to make a significant investment in any area of your life. Whether it’s your health, spending more time with family or connecting with your creator. We all have so many competing priorities in life that spending time focusing on any one has become a luxury.

I originally intended this web site to be a resource for those looking to succeed in network marketing, as you can see by my introductory post when I first started the site. Since I began my study of network marketing I’ve learnt a few important lessons about creating financial freedom.

The first – and in hindsight – obvious lesson I learnt is that it’s not about network marketing. It’s not about any particular company, their products or their compensation plan.

Think about it for a second – why do people get started in network marketing? Surely not out of a deep desire to lose their friends and face rejection by total strangers. By far the most common reason is to make some additional income. The exciting promise behind network marketing is not just that you can make a few extra dollars a month, but that you can build a business that will eventually run itself.

You can create passive income

That’s when I realized that networking marketing is just a means to an end. It is a way to create passive income. A very good way, but not the only way. There are many, many other ways to create streams of passive income.

Again, welcome – I look forward to sharing what I’ve learnt and what I’m learning with you about creating passive income.

I wish you every success on this journey.

Saddle up!