I gotta admit, I use to be an entrepreneur snub.

What I meant by that was since I quit my job (and become J-O-B-less), I couldn’t Actually» understand folks who have jobs and enjoy them.  I was convinced those who say they enjoy their jobs were either:

1. Lying and fooling themselves
2. Cukoo in the head…

After all, how can anybody possibly enjoy working a 9-5 for someone else?

What They Have to Put Up With

I Mean, Seriously!

Look at what these folks have to put up with:

• The whole 9 to 5 thing, and sometimes having to work even more hours than that
• Sometimes having to work with folks they may not like…
• The stress of making deadlines and making ends meet
• Having to balance family and loved ones
• Keeping yourself sane by trying not to have to work TOO much
• And on and on and on

Wouldn’t these folks much rather do what I do?

• I mean, I only work… oh wait, f*, every waking moment.
• I sometimes have to work with folks whom I don’t like that much (luckily most of the folks I do work with are those whom I like).
• Damn, I have deadlines too – doh!
• And double-doh, I sometimes struggle to find that balance between work and spending time with loved ones
• And on and on and on…

But But But…

Here’s the thing though, I ENJOY what I do.

Case in point, when I was in Vegas for a week several months ago (yes, a friggin’ week in Vegas… wow) for a business trip with many other top marketers, I found myself brainstorming and masterminding with others.  It didn’t matter where we were at (at one point, we were chilling on top of Rio at Vodoo Lounge at 3 in the morning), what we were doing, and how absolutely exhausted, hung over, and some times… a bit tipsy we were.

We just LOVED what we do so much that it was second nature to us to always be thinking and always be progressing.  And it gets us absolutely excited to talk about what we do.

Here’s another case in point.  My sister and I recently went to Florida for several days for a marathon no...» .  During the time we were there, I’d have to make calls, take calls, send emails (via my iPhone while we are waiting in line) and do whatever it took to stay on top of my business.  Now, would my business have crashed and burned without my constant supervision and intervention while I was chilling in Disney World?  Of course not, but I did it because I wanted to and enjoyed it.

After the trip, my mom asked my sister how I was doing and my sister told her I was busy… REALLY busy.

BUT she also noted how much I enjoyed doing what I do, that I had true passion for my “work” if you will.

Let Me Ask You

Listen, I’ve come to respect folks who have jobs – realizing that some of them actually ENJOY their jobs.  They enjoy the challenge of it, they enjoy it because what they do is their passion, they enjoy whatever it is that they do because it gives them a sense of accomplishment, they enjoy it because it’s FUN.  I respect these folks as much as I respect folks who chooses a different path, the path of entrepreneurship.

But I also know this… there’s a ton of you out there who absolutely HATE your job.  You hate getting up in the morning to have to go to work.  You hate having to say goodbye to your kids and family.  You hate having to fight traffic.  You feel no sense of pride or passion for what you do.

What the hell are YOU doing?  You are being inauthentic and doing your job lacking integrity.

I know some of you do it because you don’t have a choice, or at least don’t THINK you have a choice.  Here’s the truth though, we ALL have choices.  Some are just harder to make than others and some takes more courage to make than others.

But ultimately it’s those folks who make their choices with absolute strength and conviction that end up achieving the dreams they’ve had since they were kids, and end up living the life they want and deserve.

So if you are not having FUN doing your job, maybe it’s time to reevaluate and do something different.  Good luck.

Raymond

You know what I love about what I do?

I get to have fun. I get to express myself. I get to BE myself.

When Ferny and I send out emails, we aren’t afraid to let our personalities show through (which, quite frankly, will offend a few).

Yes, we drink, yes we party, and yes, we say crass things… and yes, we DEFINITELY act like imbeciles at times. We like to have fun and we aren’t afraid to let our colleagues, clients, what-have-you know it.

In an industry where everyone is so busy copying everyone else and so busy pretending to be someone they are not, we think it’s a breath of fresh air to “just be yourself” (gawd, this sounds like sixth grade all over again).

After all… you are unique, just like everyone else

Our latest email exemplifies this, check it out (and be prepared since you MIGHT be offended.)

Email Subject: Deportation?! Crap…

Was He Threatening Us With Deportation?!

Hi,

Holy crap we just got a huge scare the other day…

It was early in the evening while we discussed business (over a few ‘cervezas’) when the phone in our office rang.

Slightly buzzed, we make the mistake of picking up and some crazy dude on the other line started rambling about how he knows who we are, what we’ve done, he knows who are friends are… and some other crazy stalker talk.

(Bear in mind that we had no clue who the heck this dude was at this point…)

Then he started talking about what sounds like getting us on a big boat and shipping us off towards Mexico…

What the Heck? This Guy is Trying Get Us DEPORTED??

Now Ferny (“FERNANDO”) is definitely getting worried and me being Chinese, I’m not really too fond of boats either…

Talk about a freakin’ buzz kill.

We asked, “Who the hell is this?”

That’s when the crazy dude slowed down, paused for a moment (perhaps realizing that we had already had a few beers) and said, “Dudes, it’s Steve Schuitt, Tube Ninja.”

Ooohhh! PHEW!

“You mean the dude isn’t from immigration?”, Ferny asked.

After some nervous laughs (and cursing Steve in our respective native languages), we figured out what Steve was trying to tell us.

Apparently, Steve and his business partner, Ryan Dunn, are planning one kickbutt event where some of the top experts in our industry will get together and:

1. Share some of their online fortune making strategies
2. Party with you
3. Network and mastermind with folks such as yourself
4. Party with you

And not necessarily in that order.

He invited us to be instructors at this event and told us there will be a full bar and well… how can we refuse, right?

So Here’s What We Want You to Do Right Now

Click on the link below to watch a short 6 minute movie trailer that Ryan and Steve put together about this event to get an idea of the craziness that will go down…

>> Insanity MLM Biz Builder Cruise 2010 <<

Be sure you fill out your email address on the right afterward though since there’s a nice little surprise waiting for you when you do.

To good and prosperous times in 2010,

Raymond & Ferny
P.S. Ferny & I are both citizens of the good ol’ US of A… but we still don’t like being told we are going to be shipped off to Mexico, unless we know they are going to let us back in. We Love America.

Funny Responses

Of course, like I said earlier, some folks will get offended or take it the wrong way. It’s okay, you can’t please everyone. Here are a couple of the funny Read:» responses we got back:

Response #1

Mexico is my country of origin. I invite you to look it up in a map to find out that Mexico is not only part of America but of North America as well. If you ask me, Mexico is a GREAT country. (Terrorist free, panic free, paranoya free, amigos welcome… you know) The US has nothing on us. Thank you.

Signed,

Ms. I Also Emigrated From Mexico

Response #2

This is ____ and I am a contractor with the FBI and I know the whole inner workings of the federal government. If you want
I’ll get my IRS buddies after then the FBI will seize their assets and padlock their building. That is downright nasty. They don’t
have any heart problems do they. I’m sorry to hear you are a US citizen, beccause America is ruined by lobbyist and politicians on the take. My family is seven generations in Pennsylvania and I’m 55 and hurts me to see how socialistic this country has become. We should have left our adopted Chinese daughter as a Chinese daughter and the government couldn’t do shit while she’s under her green card. Me, I’m looking to become a Swiss citizen because I am German. You haven’t seen America going done the toilet like I have and millions of Americans. The ship is turning and your native countries are piking up steam while our steam engine has lost speed.

Signed,

Mr. I am Just Angry. Period.

Some people are funny

Raymond Fong

Google is...

So all the hooplah recently has to do with not just getting Google Slapped… but getting Google BANNED (a.k.a. chewed up, spat out, then stomped on…)

Ouch!

There’s still a fair amount of mystery and confusion surrounding the reasons why Google would not just slap you (which was confusing as it is) but why they’d flat out ban you.  I mean, it just seems like if you are making money with AdWords (which means you are making Google money), they ban you… OMGWTFBBQ right?

One of my clients forwarded me the email he received from Google as to why he might have gotten banned and I figure this might be good to share with you (maybe it’ll help prevent you from getting banned).  Check it out below.

As to those of you who HAVE gotten banned, I’d love to hear the reason why you think you got banned, please share in the comment section!

Here goes the email:

======================

Subject: Your Google AdWords account has been disabled
Reply-To: LPQ-Support@google.com

Dear advertiser,

We are writing to let you know that your Google AdWords account has been disabled due to one or more serious violations of our advertising policies related to Landing Page and Site Quality.  As a result, your ads will no longer run through the Google AdWords system and we are unable to accept advertising from you in the future.  Please note that future accounts you open will also be disabled.

As part of our commitment to making the AdWords experience safe and effective for our users and our advertisers, we routinely review the landing pages that our advertisers promote through our search and content networks.  If we find that an advertiser has submitted a landing page that egregiously violates our policies, we reserve the right to take immediate account-level action.

Landing pages advertised via AdWords must have relevant, original content, and must be transparent about the nature of the business being promoted. Further, advertising certain types of sites will lead to immediate account disabling.  These types of sites include, but are not limited to:

• Sites that charge users or collect personal information in exchange for a product that is never delivered
• Sites that charge for “free” software
• Sites that trick users into paying for fake or poor-quality content
• Sites that charge users for information that makes unrealistic promises of financial or personal gain
• Sites that install malware software on a visitor’s computer

Please note that this action is related to sites that have recently been advertised through your account.  In a review of your account history, we found that your account had submitted a least one site that egregiously violated our advertising policies.  Although you may have removed these sites since our latest review, advertisers that have a history of promoting these types of sites are still subject to account-level disabling.

You can review our Advertising Policies, including our Landing Page and Site Quality guidelines, by visiting: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guidelines.cs
You may also review the complete AdWords Terms & Conditions here: https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder
In addition, our FAQ about Account Disablings can be found here: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164786

If you have additional questions or concerns not addressed by our policies or help center, you can contact support by replying to this email.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords team

=====================

Raymond Fong

I am reading Psycho Cybernetics (well, technically listening to the audio CD).

It’s pretty fascinating and I’d recommend you to give it a good read/listen.

One discussed topic that kept ranging in my head, and one which I want to share with you here, is the concept that too many of us live in our past.  Too many of us beat ourselves up too much when we fail, and we let those past failures affect us too much for far too long.

A prime example has to do with professional athletes.  What makes a great wide receiver on a NFL team, among other things, is his uncanny ability to forget about the perfect pass he just dropped.  What makes a great golfer like Tiger Woods is his willingness to let go of the easy shot he just mucked up. I started this post...»   And on and on and on…

What Makes Them so Special?

See, these top caliber athletes don’t let what happened in the past affect them, no matter whether what happened were a year ago or just mere seconds ago.  They don’t dwell on the mistakes they made in the past, instead, they focus on their strengths and the opportunities in the near future for them to showcase those strengths.

They don’t think about what they do NOT want to be or do… instead, they focus on what they WANT to do and WANT to be.

You see, your mind can’t interpret any “do not wants”, it just interprets everything you envision as a “want”.

It’s sort of like this… you are riding a bike and you see an obstacle in your way that you want to avoid (so you don’t end up doing a face plant).  Well, if you focus on the obstacle thinking “must avoid this, must avoid this”, it’s almost a sure-bet you are going to automatically drift towards the obstacle and run smack into it.

However, if you instead focus on the road ahead, on the path you DO WANT to follow (to naturally avoid the obstacle), you’ll naturally follow that path and avoid that obstacle!

This is your mind taking what you envision (and not able to discern your “do not want” but instead, treat everything you envision as “want”) and making it into a reality.

So if an athlete was to focus on his last dropped shot or missed shot and how he wishes to NOT do it again, you can bet that he will do it again and again.  This is why top athletes have that uncanny ability to let go of the past mistakes and instead, focus on the future he wishes to create for himself (and his team).

What About You?

Are you leaving with some regrets in your life you have a difficult time letting go?  +/-»   Are you living in the past?  Do you think to yourself, “I’ll never do THAT again?”

Stop.

Don’t think about the mistake you wish to never make; instead, focus on the mistake life you want to lead.  Don’t think about the person you wish to never be; instead, focus on being the person you WANT to be.

Raymond Fong

Hey hey!

I know it’s been a long time since I last posted.  As always, being a secret ninja warrior keeps me busy…well, that and I just finished my first triathlon

visited my folks up in Seattle

took Bubba (our SEO dog) out to chase seagulls on the beach for the first time

That's a seagull up top... and the tiny dot is Bubba desparately trying to catch up...

and of course… the re-launch of SEO Networker.

But, here I am taking a little breather just so I can talk to you

Since I last wrote, there’s been an important change with the Google algorithm that I want to share with you concerning the “nofollow” tag.  In case you’re unfamiliar with the “nofollow” tag, it is a HTML tag that you can embed in your html links to “No Follow” specific links…  And yes, I just used the darn word in its own definition – fux pas I know!  Let me explain.

NoFollow & PageRank

So you should know something about PageRank right?  If you don’t (AND don’t know about the “nofollow” tag then by gawd, visit SEO Networker and opt in to get some free lessons on fundamentals of SEO.)  In a nutshell (and this is oversimplifying it) Google “grades” your webpage on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the “best”.

Now, where “nofollow” links come in is that Google looks at your outbound links and determines that each outbound link on that page is sort of like you “lending” your PR to those pages you are linking to.  The more pages you link out, the more of your PageRank you have to divide by so the less each link is “worth” in terms of SEO value.

So if you webpage A has 1,000 links one of which links to webpage B…  To website B, that link isn’t worth as much as if webpage A only had two links.  With me?

Well, folks use to be able to mold their outbound linking (i.e. they can decide whom to pass their PageRank/SEO juice to) by putting the “nofollow” tags on those links they DON’T care about.

For example, let’s say I want to link to SEO Networker and on the same page, link to CNN.  Well, I don’t care about SEOing CNN but I do care about passing my PR to SEO Networker, so I’d nofollow CNN to make all of my PR go to SEO Networker.

Well, that USE to be the case.

Nofollow No More… Sort Of

Well just recently, for whatever reason, Google decided to disallow SEOists from playing this game.  They changed the nofollow tag such that no matter if you nofollow a link or not, that link still counts against your overall PageRank/SEO juice passing of the webpage.  That means in the example of linking to both SEO Networker and CNN, it doesn’t matter if I nofollow the link to CNN, the mere fact that I have a link to CNN on that page diminishes the PageRank I am passing off to SEO Networker.

However, because of the nofollow, CNN will NOT benefit from the linking.  Bizarre huh?

There are a lot of implications to this change along with strategies people are advocating to get around this change including using iFrame and JavaScript…  But I am not going to get into that.  Instead, I want to talk to you about something very Wordpress specific, and that has to do with pingbacks.

To Pingback or Not?

Pingback is where if someone links to one of your posts or pages on your Wordpress site, it alerts you in your comment section that someone has referred to your post and linked to it.  This helps encourage discussions etc.  Well, here’s the catch, pingbacks sets a link back to the person who linked to your post/page.

As you can see in the example above, there’s a link that goes out to the site that linked to my post.

That didn’t use to be a problem because the comments are by default nofollowed.  But now, with this silly change done by Google, you can see how each pingback results in diminished outbound linking power of your page. 

So what I did was turn off automatic pingback (by logging into your Wordpress backoffice, going to Settings -> Discussion, and uncheck “Allow link notification…”) and I approve and reject pingbacks manually.  What I mean by that is I don’t reject all pingbacks.  If I really like the website linking to me and think that it adds value, I leave it in.  If that pingback adds social proof to me and my blog, I leave it in.  If it’s someone I like/trust/do business with, whatever, I leave it in.

You get the point.  Start being wary of how you are linking OUT from your webpages.

Hope that helped and please feel free to leave comments and ask questions

Raymond

Ahhh… hearing stories of how I am able to help transform someone’s life (for the better) makes me feel good about myself

Click here to view the embedded video.

To learn how Adam was able to literally create $21,000+ for his family in 4 1/2 months using what we taught him in SEO Networker, go check out:

To Helping Others,

Raymond

I get a kick out of seeing TOP-Notch-ACE-Uber marketing schemes like this one:

Earn 6 Figures My Pinky Toe...

I mean seriously?

Now now… before we all jump on this person’s case and list of everything that’s wrong with this picture, let’s think of the positive possibilities.

1. The person may really be filthy rich and just hired a bunch of 12 year olds to make up signs and run around town posting these things (oh, and the number OF COURSE goes to some sophisticated automated system…)
2. The person wants to bridge the gap between his wealthy self and the poor folks who are going to call him, that’s why he devised this devious marketing strategy – you know, so folks can relate to him/her better
3. The person does this as a favor to the unsuspecting folks who do call – you see, the person may be actually a Samaritan who lectures those folks who call on the important lesson of being wary of “Get Rich Quick Schemes”

Ahhh who am I kidding, odds are…

The person is nowhere close to making six figures and will NEVER make six figures doing this type of stuff.  Poor soul – someone should show him/her Attraction Marketing

Raymond Fong

P.S. On another note, a buddy of mine did call, left a message, but the person never called back.  Maybe it's because...»

the person can tell there were 3 other guys in the car at the time giggling like school girls Powered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.3+

Here’s a video that goes to show that just about anything has a chance at being a “good idea”… even if it’s a horrible and pointless idea (like “show off what you bought” ).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Enjoy

Raymond Fong

Ya know… clichés are cliché for a reason – there are elements of truth to them.

Here’s one, “It’s not how many times you fall down but how many times you get back up.”

In business and in life, it’s always those who choose to get back up, no matter the cost, that find ultimate success, and… dare I say, happiness?  Those are the folks who rise above mediocrity – never mind the amount of ridicule and pain he may have had to endure striving to be exceptional.

The fact that he failed doesn’t phase him – he does not dwell on the failure and does not define himself by those failures.  In fact, he defines himself by how he overcomes those minor setbacks and focuses on how he can learn and grow from them.

Much power is it to the man who’s able to humble himself during those times of weakness and darkness, during those times when nothing seems to be going right and all hope seem lost.  Much power to the man who’s able to look within himself for the cause of those failings and to grow from them.

Self awareness must take place before self transformation can take place.

And believe me, we should all strive for self transformation – like a caterpillar to a gorgeous emperor butterfly – from who we are today, to somebody better tomorrow.

But also believe me this… while many of us may understand the need and desire for self transformation, few of us understand the need for self awareness – the uncanny and scary process of looking ourselves in the mirror and seeing the ugliest side of us, the side we are ashamed of, the side that’s holding us back from success, the side that’s been lying to us, that’s been hiding the ultimate truth from us.

So I implore you, when you fall, get up.  And beyond that, understand why you fell, understand what you did to contribute to that failure as opposed to looking for excuses and casting blame on other factors.  Learn from your failures, grow from them and you shall prosper.

Raymond Fong