Are Your Views On Money Holding You Back?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jul 2, 2011
A few days ago I introduced a guy to you named Brendon Burchard, who wrote a book I recommended called the Millionaire Messenger.
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Over the course of signing up for some of his free videos, I have had a chance to check out some of the comments after the videos. Most have thanked him for the information he’s given and have written that they felt inspired to look at things in a different way. But what has surprised me is how many people are put off because he talks about how much money he’s made in such a short period of time, saying it’s distasteful.
I often wonder if some of us are kept from success because of our beliefs about money. In another book I’ve talked about here, T. Harv Eker’s Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, he talks about how he would make a million, then lose a million, and how this pattern was perpetuated a few times before he realized that, because of how he was brought up, he was equating wealth with being evil, and since no one wants to be seen as evil he’d then lose it all each time. Once he came to grips with the inaccuracy of the belief he started holding onto his money and life improved dramatically.
Let’s get this one out of the way; there is no such phrase in anyone’s Bible that says “Money is the root of all evil.” No matter which Bible you believe (if you do), every time the statement is used in 1st Timothy, it begins “The love of money…”, and then goes on to explain what it means. Basically, it’s not the idea of having money or being wealthy it believes is evil, it’s how one gets that wealth that might be evil.
I don’t think anyone can gripe with that one. We’re allowed to applaud titans of industry who saw a lack of something, created what was missing, and made millions of dollars. Anyone who faults these people for filling a void, no matter what it is, and making lots of money from it is a hypocrite because all of us probably wish we could do the same thing. How many of us see something and say “man, I had that as a thought years ago; I wish I’d followed through on it”? I certainly do, and often; ugh.
The fact is that most of us don’t have a love affair with money; we can’t because we never seem to have enough of it If we did most people wouldn’t fall for the scams I talked about. We’d already have the money we needed and wouldn’t give these things a second look.
Think about it another way; why are there so many “make money now” blogs? Or so many posts, including many of my earlier ones, about making money in some fashion? Because we don’t have enough, and we want more.
Some of you have seen my buddy Sire and I debate the merits of those people who promote themselves and talk about themselves because they’ve made money, and they want you to know it. He sees it as bragging; I see it as telling it like it is. If I’ve succeeded I want to tell you I’ve succeeded and I want to tell you how I did it. Who wants to follow someone that hasn’t succeeded if the intention is to make money? And if we have the big name bloggers that we know have done it and achieved financial success, what’s so wrong with them letting us know about that success?
I say all of this as I celebrate my first $600 month blogging income. It may be a fluke but it was the next step up after mentioning my first $500 month some time ago. No, it’s not enough to live off just yet, but at least it’s moving forward. Of course I’m looking for other ways to make money because I have things I want to do, things I need to do. All of it takes money.
And if I have to find and listen to the guys who can tell me how much money they’ve made, I’ll do that.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Are You Missing The “Social” Part Of Social Media?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Mar 1, 2010
Okay, I get it. Twitter and Facebook can be used for business purposes. I know; I use them for business as well. Not that often, but obviously I do. Every blog post I write shows up on Twitter. One of my blogs shows up on Facebook every time I post. When I’m holding office hours I announce it on Twitter; never done it on Facebook, but I guess I should.
Yes, money can potentially be made from both Twitter and Facebook. But is that the only thing people can think of to do with it?
Remember when I wrote about Twit Cleaner a week ago? Man, that thing took off by storm. Not from my post, but from a lot of people who discovered it and decided to check things out. There were a lot of Twitter folks who suddenly saw their numbers drop drastically. I’m betting some of them have no idea why it happened, and think Twitter penalized them for something. Truthfully, all any of those people had to do was to look at their Twitter account every once in awhile and they’d have seen that many of their followers were talking about it, and looking through their accounts to see who was talking to them and who wasn’t.
Is it too much to ask for people to try to be social at least some of the time while they’re either on Twitter or Facebook? Do I have to keep repeating myself often enough on Twitter about not being selfish? Do I have to write my posts here and there about why Facebook seems to be lame as a social media entity?
I was reading another blog earlier today where a commenter wrote that people have no right to tell others how to use social media, and that if all he wants to do is use it to market his services and products that it’s his right. I don’t dispute that, though I hate it. What’s also people’s right is to be able to find a balance between being able to just talk to people and occasionally seeing something that they might be interested in that might also be an ad.
For instance, I’d have to say that I’ve gotten stricter in determining who I’m following when it comes to internet marketing or SEO topics. I don’t want to have to visit a site, then put my name and email address in to find out what something is about. Nope, not falling for that anymore; been on the internet way too long. These people are irksome enough to begin with, but on Twitter, since everything changes to a tiny URL, you never know where you’re going to end up.
Maybe I’m just being curmudgeonly; what are your thoughts on the social aspects of social media? Am I asking for too much?
Are You Using Social Media For Promotion?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 12, 2009
This is the first of a two part series on social media. The first article is asking if you’re using social media to promote yourself, whatever that “self” is supposed to be. The second article will be asking how are you doing it, and it’ll be more than just asking which sites you’re going to. Of course I’ll be telling some of my stuff also, but with the opening, I now give myself a place to do an internal link once I’ve written both posts. Method to the madness; and so we begin.
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By now, everyone should know what I mean by social media, but I’m not going to take any chances. Social media is where people have the opportunity to interact with each other within a controlled environment of some type. Actually, back in the day, we used bulletin board systems to talk to each other, and in many ways that was the earliest bit of social media out there. Then we had early chat rooms, and Usenet, which was a lot of fun initially.
The problems were interesting back then. You could only spend 30 minutes to an hour on bulletin board systems before you got kicked off. Chat rooms weren’t close to being private, and one night I tried talking to over 30 people at the same time for almost 2 hours; never did that again. Usenet was interesting, but sometimes it took too long, got strangely heated, you’d see posts in multiple groups, and eventually it got taken over by pornographers and spammers.
Today’s social media seems to be more social, strange at that sounds. Instant messaging is more personal. Websites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Ryze can be more personal, with options of being more participatory. Second Life actually allows you to be something else entirely different. And Twitter is instantaneous gratification if you want it, and that actually works best if you care to build up relationships. To a degree, blogging in today’s world is also a form of social media, because fewer people are using blogs as diaries, instead either talking about issues, points of views, or selling something such as products or their business knowledge. And of course there are forums I also belong to.
I participate in all of the above except Second Life. There were other sites I had joined, but none of them really did anything for me. Even Ryze isn’t doing much for me these days, as I’ve cut back from my high ever of 11 groups to only one. However, the other sites are doing some interesting things for me, as long as I’m participating in some of the processes that I’m being afforded.
Now, can I say I’ve made any money from any of them just yet? Not definitely, that’s for sure. Well, I’ve made a little bit from blogging, so I do have to throw that in there. I got a speaking engagement once because of my business blog. Two of my blogs have generated a little bit of Adsense money, and this blog actually got a sale of a CJ product once. And I negotiated a writing assignment with a couple of people through IM (instant messaging for the uninitiated), which means I made money there also. And Digital Point forum has garnered me a few clients that I still have as far as writing goes.
As for promotion, Twitter has gotten me quite a few interviews. Both my business blog and this one got me other interviews. Though this blog lost its PR (page rank), it’s still looking pretty good on Alexa, though I still want to crack that 100,000 number one of these days. I mentioned all those followers on Twitter, and I’ve talked to many of those people, including Guy Kawasaki, whose book I helped edit, then got a signed copy of.
And I continue to try to figure out more ways I can use these different social media opportunities. So, I ask once more; are you using social media for promotion?
Stuff You Probably Missed
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 20, 2008
Like most blogs, this one has gone through a bunch of changes since the first post, which was pretty lame; heck, most people’s first posts are pretty lame. My writing style has definitely changed, but it also changed with my business blog. I tend to believe that, as writers and bloggers, we’re allowed to go through style changes, because when we’re true to ourselves, our readers can feel it.
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I have some interesting plans for this blog. Some of the things you see on the sides are changing, or have changed, and there’s more to come. I plan on putting together a set of my favorite blog posts, and hopefully continue updating it as I go along. I’ve already mentioned in the last post that I’m putting together a series on writing a book and the rest of the process; the first installment of that series will commence tomorrow morning, while I’m at a meeting; talk about pre-posting. I will probably be putting together a set of all my posts that have some sort of video on them; I’ll need to think about that one a bit more. I’m probably going to be adding something called Scratch Back at some point, which does on the concept of a “tip jar”, where people can pay for a nofollow link on your site to honor your blog or blog posts while advertising themselves and their websites. Of course, I’m getting the idea of this one from Lynn Terry and John Dilbeck (man, I feel like I’m becoming a promoter for John; I think one of you other guys needs to do something special lol).
There’s things coming, and I figure this blog will always evolve. However, even before I hit my regular stride, there were some posts of mine that I thought were either pretty good or pretty entertaining for one reason or another, and pretty much no one except Sire (yeah, Sire got his plug also) saw any of them. Now that’s what friends are for! Anyway, I wanted to highlight here 5 of my favorite posts from early on that you probably never saw, along with 5 of my favorite posts that contained videos. However, when it came down to it, the videos were easy to do, but my favorite 5 has turned into my favorite 7. So, here we go, highlighting 12 posts of mine that I hope all of you will go and take a look at; you can even leave a comment if you wish to. And, along with some other things I’ve done, I’m thinking this is something those of you who have either older blogs or lots of previous content, should do from time to time. Sometimes, it’s hard for our new readers to know what meant a lot to you.
So, here we go:
This was an early post talking about How Affiliate Marketing Works
This was my take on the dust up that came about when Joel Comm released the latest version of Adsense Secrets and along with it came a continuity option that was hidden, which I was glad I read about before I went ahead and bought the book.
Before I started talking more about internet marketing so much, I asked the questionHow Far Are You Willing To Go For Promotion
Later on, I decided to follow the previous post up by asking How Far Will You Go To Brand Yourself> after attending a local marketing seminar
I wrote this gripe post asking Is It Easy To Comment On Your Blog after wanting to post a comment on some blogs and having them either wanting me to register to make comments or search all over the place to see if there’s a way to leave comments.
Of course, one can’t always talk about marketing online; sometimes you have to talk about offline marketing also
This was probably one of those important and oddly motivational posts asking people How Big Are You Ready For, because most people want to be rich, but many people really aren’t ready for it if it came.
That’s the serious stuff; stuff that wasn’t so serious includes:
One of my favorite TV clips of all time was Harry Belafonte on the Muppet Show singing Turn The World Around
I found this intriguing; people always learn things better when it’s attached to music, and that includes Rapping About Web Design
I don’t know how many people remember this little goofy kid who did this screaming rant that he filmed and put up on YouTube when Britney Spears was going through her meltdown phase. I’m betting that you would be just as entertained by watching this
Man, if you needed a boost in the early 90′s, there was no other song that quite got you there than singing 2 Legit 2 Quit
This last one was just so funny that I really didn’t have to write anything, because no one ever saw it coming
There you go; twelve posts of mine that I hope you’ll go back and take a look at. And even if you don’t, I figure I just gave myself some link love; I’d best not hear any of those comments about “loving myself”. 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
How Far Are You Willing To Go For Promotion?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 23, 2008
A friend of mine Sue Tosto, a relationship coach, recently wrote a post in her blog titled What Kind Of Attention Do You Want. Her basic lament is how these days one goes onto a site such as Facebook or MySpace and sees these young girls barely dressed and wondering if that’s really how they want to project themselves.
I’ve been reading things lately where both men and women are losing the opportunity for getting some pretty good jobs because more and more companies are hiring someone whose responsibility it is to go online and look for information on these applicants, and they’re going to sites like those above and not liking what they see, and turning down those applicants. It’s not only about qualifications anymore, especially as the web has given everyone the opportunity to express themselves in whatever fashion they so choose. Not only that, but as we learned from the Miss New Jersey situation last year, setting those pictures up as private means literally nothing anymore. I have enough knowledge to be able to figure my way into a lot of things; I just don’t (cough).
I think about that sort of thing all the time as I work towards promoting all of my businesses. In Hollywood, agents may say that any publicity is good publicity, but most of us don’t have the luxury of trying to recover from negative publicity, especially when it gets out to a large audience. And, truth be told, negative publicity doesn’t mean you did anything wrong either; some marketing ideas just don’t work.
For instance, think about your image of a lawyer. Now try to think of that same lawyer wearing baggy sweats and a baseball cap. Now imagine you’re in deep trouble of some sort, and need a very good lawyer to get you out of trouble. Who are you going to when you need help? If you didn’t already know the guy in sweats, you’re going to someone who looks the part, right? If you saw a commercial on TV from a lawyer wearing sweats and a baseball cap and he or she was telling you how good their law firm is, how much credibility do you think that would carry, whether it was true or not? Memorable, sure, but credible?
For my “day time career”, there’s a certain standard that’s expected for me in order to get contracts. Consulting has its own set of rules, and the kiss of death would be to decide to be far away from the norm. I already have an uphill battle, being one of a very few minorities who do what I do, so the last thing I can afford is to be seen as too much of a radical or party guy, both of which aren’t my nature, but on my business blog I will tackle issues that I won’t address here.
I met one guy locally who’s a millionaire, and he was telling a group of us some of the things he’s done over the years in promoting his businesses. Some of those things make good business sense; some of them would basically end the careers of the rest of us.
So, let’s relate this to being online. We all want traffic and visitors, and we all want to be credible. At the same time, all of us knows that if we can find a way to stand out from the crown that we might increase the number of our visitors even more, because people might want to see what the heck you’re going to do next. Now, Rich Jerk might be able to get away with abusing visitors, but most of us can’t do that sort of thing. We also can’t, or shouldn’t, have all sorts of bells and whistles when people visit our site, because those things get really irritating. I talked a couple of posts ago about how much I hate popups, but something else I can’t stand is either music or video automatically playing when I visit a site; irritating as sin. I also don’t like flash start up pages; get me to the content quickly.
So, how far will you go in promoting your business or blog in order to achieve a substantial online status? How far should you go? What kind of attention do you want? Hey, that’s how we started, isn’t it? 
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I'm Just Sharing is where I share my thoughts on internet marketing, writing, blogging and many other things. You never know what I'll be posting on. So keep coming back, read, enjoy, and buy something! ;)
