money

3 Helpful Habits For Tracking Your Money

May 23, 2019 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Did you know that what you track is naturally going to expand?

No, checking your bank account every day won’t automatically add more money to it. That’s not the idea.

The idea is that by tracking your money every day, you get more creative with the different ways you can invest your existing money and make more money.

Money is something that I track every day because money gives you more choices. It certainly doesn’t give more happiness, but think about the extra choices a million dollars gives you.

If you want to go to Disney resorts more often, you can. If you want to invest more money and get more in return, you can. If you want to quit your job, you might be able to (depending on if you can consistently continue to make that million or if you just won the lottery).

While not guaranteed, it’s certainly easier to be happy with more money because of that choice factor.

I bring this up because not everyone likes to spend that much time looking at their money. Some people think it’s the root of all evil.

I’ll talk about tracking money shortly, but I want to clear something up.

Money is not the root of evil. The incorrect use of money by a relatively small group of people is the root of evil.

Going back to tracking our money, it’s important for us to do just that if we want to make more of it.

It’s also important for us to approach this with the right mindset. If you track it with the mindset of making sure you never lose too much money, you’re approaching money wrong.

However, if you track it with the mindset of what’s working and bringing in more money, you’re more likely to make more money.

With that said, it’s time for us to discuss the three ways that you can track your money.

#1: Log Into Your Money Accounts Every Day

Yes, every day…without missing a day. You should put your net worth right in front of your face every day. It will inspire you to make more money and think about the extra choices you will have.

Logging into your money accounts means logging into all of your bank and investment accounts.

To be quite honest, I almost never have over $100 in the bank. I quickly deploy my money for other uses such as growing my business or investing in stocks and eventually real estate.

This also stems from the fact that I’m 21 right now and it makes more sense for young people to invest more of my money because they can ride more ups and downs right now.

With that said, I still have a small amount of money invested in a Fidelity high yield bond market to act as a hedge for volatility.

And I bring up Fidelity intentionally. I log into Fidelity every day to see what my net worth looks like (note: I will even log in on days that the stock market is closed).

I’m not telling you to invest in the stock market. But I am telling you to have a way to invest your money. Whether it’s something as easy and risk free as CDs or something as risky as Bitcoin (I don’t invest in Bitcoin and don’t feel comfortable with that one), you need to invest your money.

Even if investing isn’t your thing and you’d rather create content for people, investing gives you the chance of making more money.

And more money creates more choices. You can use that extra money to get more exposure for your content or just have the peace of mind that your investments are paying off a chunk of your living expenses.

If you have tangible real estate assets or something similar, I would keep track of the ones you own and know their net worths. That will help you know your total net worth just by checking in each day.

The more you check in on your net worth, the more you’ll want to do stuff to change that number.

#2: Keep Track On A Spread Sheet

The biggest game changer for me has been keeping track of my money on a spread sheet. Each time I get extra book sales (or any other kind of sale), it gets added to that sheet as income for the month.

Using software like Apple Numbers or Microsoft Excel is the best way to go for tracking money on a spreadsheet.

I understand that this isn’t an easy skill and one you might not be interested in mastering (life gets super busy).

That’s why I am giving my entire spreadsheet away for free.

No, that doesn’t mean I’m revealing income numbers. Still not at that stage.

Instead, it’s a mock spreadsheet that you can edit to add your own data. You’ll also find instructions for how to use it.

You can get that free spreadsheet here.

#3: Track Individual Streams Of Income

No big company ever exclusively tracks money made and money lost…and neither should you. Part of tracking your money means seeing where most of your money comes from and what’s not giving you a big enough payoff.

It’s through tracking my income streams that I learned affiliate marketing is one of my top income streams. I have a few income streams picking up more steam, but affiliate marketing has been a reliable way for me to boost my income.

My free spreadsheet also makes this possible. It has a bunch of rows and columns that allow you to keep track of the monthly income you make from a variety of income streams.

In Conclusion

Tracking your money is essential for acquiring more of it. The key thing to understand about tracking money is that it changes your mindset. The people who track their money the most are less likely to spend out of control.

People who track their money become smart spenders and only put their money towards investments and experiences.

What were your thoughts on this list? Do you track your money through additional means? Sound off in the comments below.

5 Reasons Why Most People Don’t Make Enough Money

November 20, 2015 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Money. It’s something that we think about. Some of us think about it too often, but we all think about it one way or the other. Many people aspire to earn full-time incomes and have financial independence.

Sure enough, not everyone earns a full-time income. And not all of the people who make a full-time income do so with a smile. Making a full-time income by doing what you love to do involves putting in the work. However, there are common pitfalls that prevent most people from making enough money. Here are the big five:

#1: They Only Want The Money For The Sake Of Having It

Don’t think about having money for the sake of having money. Instead, think of what the money you are after would give you. Think about the financial independence, the ability to buy more things, and the ability to use your money to make the world a better place.

Most people don’t establish a strong WHY for making the money. Making money for the sake of making it isn’t good enough. Financial independence is a start, but you can dig deeper. What would financial independence allow you to do that you can’t do now?

The deeper you go, the more fuel you will add to the fire. Soon enough, you will approach your work with more motivation than before.

#2: Money Is At The Forefront Of Everything

The moment you put money at the forefront of everything else is the moment you don’t get as much of it. Some people in the desperate scramble to make revenue may create subpar products and charge high prices for them. They want the money immediately, so quantity and high prices seem like the logical option—at least on the surface.

Providing value is more important than having a quantity of products. Building the relationship between you and your customers in which you focus on helping the customer is more valuable than building the relationship just for the sake of making money.

If you only engage with your audience to get their dollar bills, then they will catch on. If you engage with your audience because you actually care for them, then the people in your audience will be more likely to buy your products.

#3: Doubt

It is too common for people who aren’t making money to doubt themselves. They blame their lack of expertise and/or certain circumstances that prevent them from making money. Blaming in this regard results in you staying in the pit of despair for a longer period of time.

Doubting yourself will hinder your progress and keep you in that pit longer. The only way to get out of that pit is by climbing out of it. Just ask The Dark Knight.

#4: They Aren’t Putting In The Right Work

Whether willing or unwilling, the people who don’t make enough money often are not putting in enough productive work. We are good at putting in work, but productive work is a different story.

Most people like to believe that all work is productive. However, that is not the case. Certain work that you do is just busy work that takes time out of your day. As my social media audience grew larger, continuing the growth became busy work. My social media audience was growing but my income was not changing.

As a result, I focused all of my attention on Twitter and eventually outsourced most of the activity on all of my social networks.

Now I focus more of my time on creating and marketing my training courses.

In our constantly busy lives, we put in a lot of work. Creating the distinction between busy work and productive work allows you to identify where you need to spend your time.

Spending time on one activity means sacrificing some of the time you could have spent on another activity. This is the economic concept of an opportunity cost. You could be losing out on the opportunity of a lifetime because you are not utilizing your time wisely.

Sometimes, we know what we must do to move forward, but we don’t find the time to make it happen in our schedules. Don’t be that person.

#5: Exploration Without Commitment

If your strategy is to pursue shiny object after shiny object, then prepare for disappointment. Many people fall prey to shiny object syndrome in which they do a lot of exploration but don’t commit to anything.

It’s like shopping at Macy’s for two hours without buying any clothing. It’s like spending two hours looking for the best trails in your area but then not running on any of those trails. Basically, it’s a waste of time.

You need to do some exploration to find the right opportunity for you. However, you must also drop the anchor when you find an opportunity that appeals to you.

You don’t have to drop the anchor many times, but you have to drop it eventually. I don’t drop the anchor often. The first time I truly dropped the anchor was when I decided to focus most of my time on Twitter. Over 250,000 followers later, I am happy that I temporarily ditched all of my other social media accounts.

In Conclusion

For better or for worse, we think about money. If we could earn a dollar every time we thought of money, some of us would be millionaires just for that.

We want money, but in order to get what we are looking for, our thinking pattern must change. Instead of making money just for the sake of making money, go deep and ask yourself what the money would do for you.

As you go deep and motivate yourself to make more money, remind yourself that money is a good servant but a bad master. Don’t let the thought of making money become the forefront of everything that you will do. Your work will be less enjoyable and you will think more about what you don’t have than what you actually have. When we focus on what we do not have, we get discouraged.

Making money does require putting in the work, but it also requires approaching money-making with a different perspective from the traditional one.

Which of these reasons resonates with you the most? Did I miss any reasons why people don’t make enough money? Have any tips to share? Sound off in the comments section below.

7 Tasks That You Must Fulfill Before You Get Another Like Or Follower

July 20, 2015 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

Who wouldn’t want more likes and followers? The primary goal of using social media from a business standpoint is to grow a large, targeted audience of people who will engage with our content. However, this primary goal is insufficient for generating a full-time income. Having a large, targeted social media audience will help you towards achieving a full-time income, but when talking about an income, other elements come into play.

Not only do other elements beyond social media come into play, but the way you use social media and present yourself also affect how successful your brand becomes. It is great to get likes and followers, but what are they worth? What type of impact do they have on your brand? We must ask ourselves what happens after we accumulate the likes and followers. We must ask ourselves how we can use our time on social media more productively. We must ask ourselves what tasks we must fulfill before we get another like or follower. These are the big seven.

#1: Know Your Niche

The most important thing to do before you get another like or follower is to know what your niche is. This is a basic step, and many people with decent sized audiences know what niche they are in. If you already know your niche, you should skim through this section and head over to the second method. However, if you do not know what your niche is, it is time to discover which niche is the best one for you. The best niche you can choose for yourself is a combination of these factors:

Passion for potential niche
Knowledge about potential niche
Willingness to constantly learn more about potential niche

You should choose a niche that fits into all three of these factors. Those are the ideal niches that present the easiest choice for pure domination. Remember that in your lifetime, you can do anything. You can be anything from a motivational speaker to an expert on gadgets if that’s your style. Once you identify your niche, you must build your social media audience around that niche.

#2: Know Your Customers

Once you know what your niche is, it is easier to know who your customers are. Your customers are the people who buy your products and make your entire journey possible from a monetary point of view. Not only do your customers make the continuation of your brand possible, but knowing their specific needs will allow you to create better products that better serve your customers. Knowing your customers all comes down to knowing your targeted audience, and knowing your targeted audience all comes down to two simple questions:

“What is my brand’s purpose? What type of people would be interested in my brand’s purpose?”

The more specific you are when you identify your brand’s purpose, the easier it will be for you to know who your customers are. If your brand’s purpose is too vague, then you won’t grow a strong customer base. If you own a restaurant, then your purpose shouldn’t be just to feed people. In that case, your targeted audience would be anyone who eats, which initially sounds good because everyone eats food, but with many options, people won’t notice you. Instead of presenting yourself as the ideal choice for everyone, you must get specific. Is your restaurant an all-vegan restaurant? Does the Wi-Fi Free experience allow real-life conversations to develop? You may not own a restaurant, but you need to ask yourself those types of questions for your brand, regardless of what your niche is.

#3: Create A Better Posting Plan

The way you post your content affects how your audience sees you as an individual and how often your audience sees your content. Publishing posts daily is completely different from publishing one post per month. You must post content on your social networks several times per day, but if you publish 10 posts in five minutes, then you are bound to annoy your audience. The workaround is to create a better posting plan which consists of the following:

Scheduling posts. If you are looking for a way to schedule posts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a Google+ page among other options, then look no farther than HootSuite. The HootSuite Pro feature makes it easier to schedule content in bulk. I can literally schedule over 100 tweets in just six clicks.
Posting content made to spread. Each social networks has a different set of rules based on users’ experiences that determines what spreadable content is. However, almost all of the viral content posted on social media contain pictures. You can use the free, easy-to-use tool called Canva to create stunning pictures. I use Canva for hundreds of pictures that appear on this blog.
Knowing when to post. Facebook Insights allow you to discover when the highest percentage of your audiences is on Facebook while Tweriod is the equivalent for Twitter. Schedule your posts to get published at the times you know when the highest percentage of your audience is on that social network so your posts get the optimal level of engagement.

#4: Look Over Your Social Media Profile

Looking at your social media profile and making sure you are proud of what you see is a way to gain verification that you are on the right path. Not only do you gain verification about your path (or if not, you’ll have an idea of what needs to be changed), but in a rapidly moving world, many things are bound to change in the next six months for your brand. Maybe you won an award that you could mention in your social media bio. Maybe you acquired another hobby worth mentioning, and mentioning your hobbies on social media is not so bad. Maybe you changed your brand’s logo or want a cooler background picture. Maybe your bio needs to be re-polished. By checking your social media profile once per month and making changes where they need to be made, you will always reflect up-to-date information within your social media profile. You don’t want to change your brand’s picture, bio, or background just for the sake of doing it because that affects your brand’s recognition. If Apple constantly changed its logo, it would be more difficult for customers to remember the brand. Only make a change when a change is necessary.

#5: Get Your Email List Straightened Out

If you are going to do one thing before you get another like or follower, you must straighten out your email list and choose which paid service you will use. I use iContact to build and manage my email list, but MailChimp, Aweber, and Constant Contact are three other worthy options among the pool of efficient emailing services. You must choose a service that allows you to send custom emails to your subscribers (in other words, not just the RSS Reader type of emails) and enables autoresponders. Autoresponders allow you to build the relationship between you and your subscribers which will increase the chances of someone buying one of your products. If you want to go the extra mile and get more subscribers from your social media efforts, create a landing page (I use Optimize Press for mine. Here is an example of a landing page) that collects email addresses. Then, promote that landing page to your social media audience every day. If you wish to promote your landing page to your social media audience every day, then you must schedule numerous posts per day so you don’t appear to be over promoting your landing page.

#6: Have At Least One Method To Generate Revenue

Social media won’t generate much direct revenue for your brand, but social media is great at generating traffic that can lead to more revenue. You can lead the people within your social media audience to your landing page, your blog, and in rare cases, your product sales page. You want your social media audience to generate a high ROI, and in order to get that ROI, you must lead people to places where you can potentially make revenue for every transaction that takes place.

#7: Procrastinate Less Often On Social Media

Social media is the least expensive method I have come across to generate a massive audience, but it can also take away a large portion of our time. Never before has their been a double-edged sword like this for business owners. If you procrastinate less often on social media, you will have more time to create products, write blog posts, and grow your audience.

The first step to reducing procrastination on social media is to identify what causes you to procrastinate in the first place. Knowing the problem is the first step towards finding a solution. The second step is to do something about it. I found myself reading through the trending topics often. The solution for me was to only read the first five posts about a trending topic so I know what happened. I also spend less time looking at the trending topics because I do more of my social media activities on HootSuite nowadays, and HootSuite does not have a trending topics section for me to get distracted by.

In Conclusion

Every business wants a larger audience, but what are you going to do with your audience? How will you become successful once you get the large audience? What most people do not realize is that a big audience does not guarantee success. You need to have a big audience of people who appreciate what you do and are willing to pay their money for your expertise and/or product. You must also use your time more effectively and specialize in what you do so you get the right results in the right areas.

What are your thoughts on these seven tasks? Which task do you think is the most necessary? Do you have an 8th task that you believe everyone must do before getting their next like or follower? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

Earning VS Winning

April 9, 2013 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

There is a HUGE difference between earning money and winning money. Winning money requires good fortune or as other people would like to describe it, luck. Winning money can rarely be done on a consistent basis, and those winnings do get spent somehow. Winners may think their winnings are 10 time more than they really are and throw money away. Soon those winnings start to disappear, but earnings never disappear. It takes work to get earnings, not pure luck. Working to earn money will give you a greater value for what money is really worth and how limited it truly is. When I earn money, I am always happy, but that’s not because I see the hundreds of dollars moving to my Paypal account, but instead, I am seeing all of my hard work pay off. When you are an earner, it’s not about the money you earn, but it’s about becoming independent and able to thrive on your own.