The way you think about money can have a huge influence on your ability to create wealth. Poverty mentality is a mindset that people develop over time based on a strong belief that they will never have enough money. This mindset is driven by fear and can cause poor financial decision-making.

Here are some common characteristics of poverty mentality:

• Being constantly worried about money or thinking about it often. People with a poverty mentality spend a lot of time thinking about their lack of money, wishing they had more, and being envious of people who have more money than them.
• Having a strong dislike of ‘rich’ people, yet wanting to have what they have. This can lead to reckless acts where, as soon as money is acquired, it is spent on luxuries. This is self-sabotaging behaviour which makes it difficult for someone with a poverty mentality to accumulate money.
• Making decisions based on fear. This can often lead to financial loss. For example, fearful people can be afraid to set up direct debits for bills in case they don’t have enough money in their account when the bills are due. This in turn means they can be late in paying their bills and incur penalties or miss out on discounts.
• Thinking small rather than thinking big. Small goals lead to small outcomes. Big goals require an optimistic attitude and willingness to take risk whereas small goals arise from pessimism and fear.

Poverty mentality is commonly found in people who have experienced poverty in childhood. It is a barrier to enjoying happiness and financial security. The remedy is to find ways of changing beliefs about money and focusing on what you have rather than what you don’t have; a process which sometimes requires assistance from a counsellor.

Well…

If you have a look at the current financial mess we are still in and look at the major players who caused this then its a dumb question.

I have been Forex trading for a couple of years now and one thing I can tell you is that females on the whole are bloody good at trading and investing overall. They stick to the rules of play, they don’t bring ego to the trades and they trade with no emotion (aye?) – yep no emotion.

One of my trader mates – ‘The Blonde Trader‘ helps me with my trading providing sound advice such as; stick to the rules, practice what you were taught, think before you act, apply your risk calculations to the trade etc… And most of the times I try to follow her success but my damn ego gets in the way sometimes.

Females on the whole have copped a lot of flak through the ages but when they do get a chance at applying themselves they leave us males in the dust. Of course we are better at some things than females but those skills mostly involve beating each other to death.

Our director is female and has lead our business to be one of the top email marketing and social media marketing businesses in New Zealand. She also invests very wisely so her husband can spend all of the profit!

Anyway – if you are interested in Forex trading ladies and will be in Sydney 8th March please check out the woman’s only open day at Knowledge to Action. They taught me and when I use their strategies I make money so I do recommend them. Read more about it here=> Women in Forex Workshop.

Read the full article here: How To Improve Online Marketing

SEO or search engine optimization is all about where you rank for your search option and localized SEO refers to the ranking when you use keywords that use the business location in the keyword search. There are various ways you can move up the rankings, the top five are; Keywords, site optimizing, original and fresh content, building back links and using article marketing.

Read the full article here: The Five Essentials For Local SEO

One of the best ways to get ahead financially is to pay off your mortgage as soon as possible. The first step towards doing this is to create more surplus income; that is, the difference between what you spend and what you earn. This means either cutting back on your expenses or finding ways to increase your income.

Next, look at how your mortgage is structured. There are a number of factors to consider, including the term of the mortgage, the frequency of repayments, whether the interest rate is fixed or floating, and the type of mortgage you have. The most common types of mortgage are table mortgages where you pay back both principal and interest, lines of credit (or revolving credit) and interest-only mortgages.

There are two ways to use your surplus income to pay off your mortgage quicker. The first, and easiest way, is to increase both the frequency and the amount of your repayments.

If your interest rate is fixed, check with your bank as to how to avoid paying penalties for earlier repayment. The second way is to use a combination of a small line of credit and table mortgages which have either a fixed or floating rate.

Save as much as you can into your line of credit in the knowledge you can draw down the funds again if necessary. Once the balance in your line of credit is zero, draw all or most of the funds down and pay off a chunk of your table mortgage. If your table mortgage has a fixed interest rate, the repayment should be done when the fixed rate period ends. This process can be repeated until your mortgage is gone.

The keys to success are good saving, structuring your mortgages correctly and staying focused on achieving your goal.

The cost of customer acquisition is high when you use traditional marketing channels. For every ten prospects you may turn one into a customer. Using social networks the ratio is a lot higher and maybe as high as one in fifty e.g. for every 50 prospects you may convert one into a customer. The good news is you can use systems to reduce the actual marketing cost when using social networks to market your business and get return on your investment.

Read the full article here: Reduce the Cost of Converting Prospects into Customers

Read the full article here: Planned Email Communications for Business Success

In the harsh world of economics, the value of a person is not difficult to quantify. In simple terms, the value of a person at a given point in time is based future earnings, which is the number of hours the person is able to work for the remainder of their life, multiplied by the hourly rate the person is capable of earning.

There is a common saying; ‘time is money’ and there is no doubt the two are inextricably linked. The corollary is that the income you earn from personal effort is determined by how you manage your time as well as by how you manage the hourly rate you earn.

Without getting too complicated, let’s look at this in a bit more detail. One of the first things to be aware of is that people are more likely to waste time than money. The irony is, because time is money, wasting time is equivalent to wasting money. Unfortunately, time is limited.

If your income comes only from personal effort, there is an absolute limit to what you can earn in your lifetime. Super wealthy people are those who find ways to make money without being dependent on personal effort, for example by setting up a business which makes money out of other people’s effort, borrowing to invest, or selling intellectual property.

If you earn a high hourly rate, spending your time doing things that someone else can do at a lower hourly rate is not effective use of your time and lowers your potential income. If you earn a low hourly rate, it is worth spending time to look at ways of increasing your hourly rate through study, training or finding alternative work.

The ultimate winning strategy is to find ways of making income without using personal effort.

Everyone in business knows that it is good advice to write a plan. Yet many of us don’t know where to start and quickly get too busy at the beginning of each new year to set aside the time to get anything useful committed to paper, let alone actually implemented.

There are those of us who don’t plan at all, some who write plans and then file them to collect dust, and others who write a plan and then diligently get everything in order to get it implemented and measured. Have you met any of these people? They seem very few and far between.

In fact I met a business person once who repeatedly denied having a plan and then after an hour of talking pulled three plans off his shelf! None of them had been implemented and they had each cost him consulting fees to get them written. He had been too embarrassed to admit that he had done lots of planning but that the plans had just collected dust.

I must say though that this particular businessman is now very successful and writes himself a one page plan every year which he pins onto the wall next to his desk so that he focuses on the things that matter.

A good plan saves you time and money

Your plan does not need to be very technical, highly detailed, 92 pages long or even well formatted and presented. A simple hand written list of key decisions can make a huge difference to your personal and business life and performance.

Planning:

• Helps you focus on the things that really make a difference
• Helps you prioritise your activities
• Helps you to predict change and then respond effectively to it
• Manages your time and resources more efficiently
• Provides direction and focus to your staff and your supporters
• Prevents crises in your business
• Means you spend less time fire fighting
• Gets you ahead of the game and ahead of your competition

Having a good plan frees you up to work smarter; to concentrate on the things that really will make a difference rather than just being busy, to bring your people together and to achieve better performance and greater efficiency. It gives you much better control of what you are doing.

You know you have a good plan when it includes the key business decisions that you then refer to on a regular basis to manage your business. A good plan tells you what you will do and what you won’t do. It gives you boundaries and guidelines for managing and driving your business.

A good plan is also a flexible plan. We all know things change at lightening speed and staying still is a recipe for getting left behind. New opportunities come up all the time and you need to consider them seriously in light of your objectives for the year. You need to be responsive to change.

Charles Darwin was probably thinking of a plant or animal species when he said,

“It’s not the strongest who survive
Nor the most intelligent
But the ones most responsive to change”

But he could just as easily have been referring to businesses and the people who run them!

Your plan will change as your business and industry changes and grows. You will test different things, learn new things, find new technologies, meet new people and the market will change under your feet. So don’t worry if your decisions aren’t perfect at this point, they can always be reviewed and updated later.

Breathe a little life into your plan

Having a plan is one thing but it is completely useless and a waste of time if you do not put it into action. Statistics say 90% of strategy fails because of poor execution.

There seem to be several little things you can do to make it easier to put your plan into practice:

1. Ask a trusted adviser to help you build your plan and to make you accountable for its implementation. Use your adviser as a sounding board and to help remove roadblocks along the way, but don’t give them the whole job.
2. If you work with someone on your plan, make sure you do your share. Do the thinking yourself, do your own research and own the decisions you make. You need to OWN this plan, you need to know it, and you need to have complete buy in.
3. Have a copy of your plan tucked away in your bag or on your Smartphone and add to it all the time. Scribble on it with notes of progress, make comments, add ideas etc. Keep it fresh and alive.
4. Break it into achievable chunks, weekly goals, daily actions or whatever helps you to always be moving in the right direction.
5. Review progress often and record progress on your plan.
6. Share your plan with others – your staff, your family, your advisers – and be accountable to each other. Be mindful however that a good plan contains confidential information that would be very useful to your competitors. Keep it safe.
7. Build it into your weekly/fortnightly team meetings and if you do not have regular team meetings in your company then make this one of the first things you commit to doing this year. If the response is “We are never all together,” then make it a rule that the team meeting goes ahead each week/ fortnight at a set time regardless of how many team members are available. Make it a priority
8. Each week ask yourself and your team “What is the one thing you can do this week to drive this business toward our goals?”

The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today
- Elbert Hubbard

Regardless of the shape your business is in, now is the perfect time to get started on planning for the next twelve months.

Setting your financial goals is not a simply a process of deciding how much money you need. Examples of common financial goals are:

• To save $5,000 over the next year
• To save $500,000 for retirement
• To have a passive income of $50,000 a year

Goals such as these are unlikely to be achieved. That’s because money has no intrinsic value; its value comes from what it is used for. Unless you are clear about what purpose money serves in your life, you will never be motivated to accumulate it.

Finding your purpose is simply a matter of asking yourself ‘why’. For example, the reason why you have a goal of $50,000 passive income a year might be ‘to achieve financial independence’ . Now ask yourself why financial independence is important. The answer might be ‘to have financial security’. In turn, the reason why financial security is important may be ‘to provide for my family’.

The trick is, to keep asking yourself ‘why’, until such time as your discover what is fundamentally important to you. Ultimately, you may uncover higher level objectives such as pride, satisfaction and personal fulfillment. These are the things that will motivate you to achieve your financial goals.

For most people, lasting satisfaction and fulfillment come not from possessions but from intangibles such as relationships with family and friends, good health, or broadening your life experience through education and travel.

When you truly understand what motivates you and what you want to achieve in life, rewrite your financial goals to include how much money you need and why, for example, ‘to achieve financial security and independence through having a passive income of $50,000 a year’. Writing your goals in this way makes them much more meaningful and powerful and more likely to be achieved.