Financial Independence: What Is It? Why Should You Want It?

“True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”– Franklin D. Roosevelt

Twice a year, on January 1 and July 1, I review and revise my goals. When I think about Seven Years to Seven Figures — an important part of my life — I think about you and what I want for you this coming year. Here is what I came up with … You should be able to enjoy your life — whatever life you choose — without having a shroud of money-related problems over you at all times.

You should be able to quit your job if and when you want and start doing whatever it is you’ve been dreaming of doing.

You should feel confident that if something unexpected happens — an accident or illness in the family — you can take care of it.

I don’t want you to be rich, unless you want to be rich. I want you to have choices. That’s what financial independence means. Being able to choose or change your paths in life. Not being dependent on someone you don’t trust or don’t like. Having the power to take care of yourself and your loved ones. It doesn’t take a million dollars to do that. All it takes is a passive income that’s large enough to pay for your basic bills — housing, food, utilities, education, and entertainment.

Passive income — that’s the key. Passive income means income that you don’t have to spend 40 hours a week generating. It’s the income you get from your stocks, bonds, real estate, or a share in an income-producing business.

The traditional path to financial independence went something like this: Get a job with a good (preferably large) business and work hard for 40 years. Then retire on your pension and savings. You can still do that today, but it’s difficult. For one thing, there are very few businesses — large or small — that can offer you secure lifetime employment. For another thing, the cost of living is going up faster than average wage increases. Most people in the world who are strictly employees have been getting poorer, not richer, these past 20 years.

To become financially independent today, you are better off developing some kind of second income. That may be part-time consulting. Or a financially valuable skill that you can practice on the weekends, such as copywriting, resume writing, or graphic design. Or a side business like direct marketing. 

The idea is to add a second income to the income you currently have and to invest that second income in something safe and reliable that will give you passive income.

My recommendations for safe and reliable sources of passive income are bonds and real estate. The advantage of real estate is that you can generally get a much higher yield (ROI) from it than you can from bonds.

Your initial goal — in terms of becoming financially independent — is to generate passive income equal to the income you have now. If, for example, you are currently making (after taxes) $40,000 a year and that $40,000 is enough to cover your basic needs (as outlined above), your goal should be an after-tax passive income of $40,000.

To generate that much with bonds, you’d need about $800,000 in savings. To make that much with real estate, you’d need to have between $300,000 and $400,000 invested in income-producing properties. (Now you can see why I like real estate — even though it requires more work than holding bonds.)

Saving that amount of money may seem very difficult right now. But many of the people who have taken my advice about developing a side income were able to become financially independent much sooner than they expected. (All hit the mark in less than six years.)

Surprise Bonus: Once you’ve achieved financial independence, you can (and probably should) quit your job — even if you are years and years away from retirement age. The reason is that getting from financial independence to wealth is just a matter of doing more of the same thing. Not necessarily putting in a ton of extra hours but just doing more of what you like to do.

You should be able to enjoy the freedom of financial independence too. Every day in every message, I make sure that there is at least one bit of advice that will help you achieve that goal.

And every day I try to say something — or publish something that someone else has said — that will inspire you to get, and stay, on your own path to financial independence. No one cares as much about your financial future as you do. Use Seven Years to Seven Figures to help you and you’ll have helped me achieve my No. 1 SY2SF goal.$

[Do you know how Facebook and Google became the most powerful companies in the world?

It’s NOT helping you share pics of last night’s dinner...
It’s NOT searching for drunken cat videos…

And it’s DEFINITELY NOT about free Gmail accounts.
 

The simple truth is Facebook and Google SELL TRAFFIC.

They SELL TRAFFIC to business owners, and that advertising revenue alone has turned them into billion dollar companies.
 

Traffic is the most valuable commodity on the Internet, and that will never change.
 

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Don’t Trick Your Prospects: A Marketing Lesson From the Movies

The purpose of a great headline is to get your readers’ attention. And the purpose of the remainder of your sales letter is to get your readers to buy your product or service.

But if there is a disconnect between what the copy promises and what the product delivers, you’re going to have dissatisfied customers who feel betrayed.

Result: You end up spinning your business’s wheels, trying to constantly replenish your customer base. You’re losing them out the side door as fast as you’re bringing them in the front.

A few years ago, I read an interesting article in The New York Times about something similar that happens in the movie business. David Pogue wrote about how excited he was when he saw a trailer for the film National Treasure… but very disappointed when he saw the film and it bore little resemblance to the trailer.

Shortly after saying something to that effect in the paper, Pogue received a surprisingly candid note from the film’s director, Jon Turteltaub.

Turteltaub explained that the trailers are often put together LONG before the movie’s final edits. In fact, they’re sometimes finalized when filming is barely half complete. That means there’s a good chance for the more-than-occasional disconnect.

But that’s only the unintended consequence. Turteltaub hinted that sometimes darker forces are at work.

“For me,” said Turteltaub, “the biggest problem that comes up is when the trailers and TV spots don’t reflect the essence of the movie they are selling. You see that a LOT. The studio often feels that the movie they made isn’t a movie they can sell… so they sell it as a different movie. That can help fill seats on opening weekend, but it usually backfires. Personally, I think that’s what happened with Sweeney Todd. Perhaps they didn’t want anyone to know it was bloody, gory, and a musical. So they hid that. What happens is that the wrong audience sees the movie on opening weekend, and the word of mouth is all wrong. Great movies can get lost because of this.”

Here’s the lesson: If you find out late that your product isn’t going to appeal to your market, don’t be tempted to just put a new spin on the advertising. You’ve got to do the hard work of making the product fulfill your prospect’s needs, as you promised in your promotion.$

[Do you know how Facebook and Google became the most powerful companies in the world?

It’s NOT helping you share pics of last night’s dinner...
It’s NOT searching for drunken cat videos…

And it’s DEFINITELY NOT about free Gmail accounts.
 

The simple truth is Facebook and Google SELL TRAFFIC.

They SELL TRAFFIC to business owners, and that advertising revenue alone has turned them into billion dollar companies.
 

Traffic is the most valuable commodity on the Internet, and that will never change.
 

This is why using the Traffic Authority business system is the ultimate way to make extra income in your business…

Click here to watch the video and start your own premium traffic business today!]

Develop Your Advertising Like A Blockbuster Movie

“Less is more.” – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

If you want to come up with breakthrough advertising ideas, it can help to practice a technique filmmakers use to develop blockbuster movies. The technique — which is applied to the movie’s essential idea — is called “high concept.” A movie has a high concept when its core idea is intriguing, powerful, and easy to understand.

Example: An asteroid the size of Texas is hurtling toward earth. “That’s high concept,” says James Bonnet, writing for The Writers Store e-zine. “Everyone knows exactly what that means. It arouses an emotional response, and, in just 10 words, everyone knows what the movie is about.”

The same thing could be said of a really good advertising campaign. It is built around a single, strong idea, one that is exciting, intriguing, and easy to understand.

Some copywriters and creative agencies prefer advertising that is more complex. For them, promotional ideas should be smart and eccentric or perhaps brilliant and unconventional. The thought that one of their campaigns could (or should) be reduced to a catchy phrase is disgraceful.

Yet, most of the best advertising is simple — and for a very good reason. For advertising to click, it has to appeal to what people are ALREADY thinking and feeling. The great advertising campaigns are those that “tip” a pre-existing social demand. This is true of all sorts of advertising — commercial, political, and cultural. Consider these cultural successes of the recent past:

* Power to the people!

* To each according to his needs; from each according to his ability.

* All you need is love.

The purpose of advertising is to stimulate buying — usually as much as possible in a given market. To create a flurry of interest in something, you have to say something that is easily understood. Yes, it has to be strong. Yes, it has to be intriguing. But most of all, it has to be understood.

When messages are simple, they travel fast. When they are complex, they get clogged up in the communications channel.

Back to the movie business …

Here’s how James Bonnet explains the way a typical high concept makes its way to the light:

“For example — in the ’70s, there was a very popular 90-minute TV show called ‘MacMillan and Wife,’ which starred Rock Hudson and Susan St. James. Steven Bochco, whom you’ve no doubt heard of because of shows like ‘NYPD Blue,’ was the story editor. Julie Epstein introduced me to Leonard Stern, the executive producer, who referred me to Bochco, who had never seen my work and had no idea what I could do. We had a meeting and discussed a couple of ideas, but nothing happened.

“Then one day, while I was in my kitchen making some coffee, a thought popped into my head — and on an impulse, I called Bochco.

“‘What’ve you got?’ he asked, after the usual amenities.

“‘Susan gets lost in the Bermuda Triangle.’

“‘I love it,’ he said. ‘I’ll get back to you.’

“Ten minutes later, he called me back and said: ‘I hope you can write. You’ve got a deal.’

“Now, as it turned out, Bochco had called the producer, who loved it and told Bochco to call their contact at NBC. Bochco called the contact, the contact called his superior and pitched it to him. Then the contact called Bochco back, and Bochco called me. All within less than 10 minutes. It was the highest-paying show on television, and at that moment ‘Susan gets lost in the Bermuda Triangle’ was the sum total of what I knew about that story idea.”

That’s what you want to happen with your advertising campaign. You want it to be instantly liked and passed on. To be instantly liked, something must be instantly understood. Ask yourself: “What is the high concept of my advertising campaign? Is it instantly intriguing? Instantly attractive? Instantly understandable?”

If it isn’t all of those things, you might want to test something that is truly high concept.

[Do you know how Facebook and Google became the most powerful companies in the world?

It’s NOT helping you share pics of last night’s dinner...
It’s NOT searching for drunken cat videos…

And it’s DEFINITELY NOT about free Gmail accounts.
 

The simple truth is Facebook and Google SELL TRAFFIC.

They SELL TRAFFIC to business owners, and that advertising revenue alone has turned them into billion dollar companies.
 

Traffic is the most valuable commodity on the Internet, and that will never change.
 

This is why using the Traffic Authority business system is the ultimate way to make extra income in your business…

Click here to watch the video and start your own premium traffic business today!]