Rich Twin Poor Twin

2007 – what a crazy year. We started the year out strong; our passive income was around 5 times our salaries as professional electrical engineers. As I mentioned in my previous post, the real spark that made this into a reality was through constant visualization of what we wanted and keeping our goals in our minds. Once you do that, you will start making decisions small and large in tune with the path to getting whatever it is you want. One of the first actions that we took (that we thought was small and insignificant at the time) was to model our adsense placement from high trafficked sites and from bloggers talking about how much they earned with adsense. Even though it was a small action and we SHOULD have done it years ago, it really never occurred to us to JUST DO IT until we were hungry enough to increase our passive income. You see, it’s really not how hard you work but the effectiveness of your actions and decisions in reaching your goals. And a lot of those actions and decisions are actually governed by your sub consciousness and uncontrollable events and people that are attracted to you.

Things were going well and it was almost a routine. We did our 9-5, came home, checked our stats and worked on our sites for an hour or two every night. We were at the point where we were deciding and planning on how and when to quit our day jobs – our professional careers, something that we were trained for much of our lives. But something always kept us back. Our jobs were actually pretty cushy and relaxing compared to some we knew about from our friends and family. Then the unthinkable happened – we got banned from adsense which was the majority of our online passive income at the time. Can you imagine? Getting a steady $x,xxx per day in passive income to almost NOTHING? To say the least we were hurt – bad. It was not even about the money, it was the questioning, the unknown of what to do now? How can we get back the income we were generating from our business?

This was around June and for about 2 whole months we were depressed. I have never been depressed like that in my LIFE. It is the sort of thing you only read about and yes the symptoms written about it are true – loss of appetite, deep sadness, weight loss, etc. I did not want to talk to anyone, reply to any emails, or do anything. I just did my 9-5, came home, and slept.

The first thing we did was try to work hard to fix it. To find an alternative – what a waste of time. Life was just telling us to move on. We went outside every day after work and just ran and really asked ourselves what it is we wanted and what it was we “had” when we were banking with adsense. You know what? We found out that we still had it and always will have it. It’s the ability to create anything we wanted, feeling free, being free, being grateful, and just enjoying life – Knowing that somehow someway we were going to make it.

Within 5 months from the day we lost almost everything, we were able to bring our passive income streams back to where they were and more and quit our day jobs. From this experience, I know that in order to be rich, I must be grateful, humble, enjoy life, never give up, and respect others – in other words I need to keep learning, growing, and becoming a better person.

Here is a common question from those who start blogs and want to monetize them correctly. We haven’t really tried to monetize this blog but think that the same monetization methods work for blogs as in any website. Here is the question from Thuy

“I guess my question to you is do you consider 6 months too much time to waste on building traffic to a single site? How long did it take you to generate money? Do you think that I should consider this sports blog of mine to be a failure? Should I move onto the next idea and scrap this one?”

The good thing is that you are taking action. A lot of people know all of this or are constantly searching for the How-to’s to make money online but they really do not take action.
From my experience, you probably learned a lot from that one site. Honestly, a site is never finished and should always be improved for traffic, content, etc. I think that you can see that you really can not “get rich” by working hard yourself – you need to leverage your time and money – If you want the blog updated often, have you considered finding a writer for it? I know that writing content takes a lot of time – at least for us. It looks like your traffic generation method is ineffective also or not producing the results you want. Have you tried link exchanges? paying for traffic? contests? there are many ways to generate traffic but it is vital to do so. PPC or pay per click is one of the most effective method of generating targeted traffic. If you do not have an Adwords and YSM account yet, go get them.
After you have traffic, you can monetize the traffic with different methods like adsense, ypn, affiliate promotions, selling your own product (test by selling on ebay first and gathering email contacts from your blog telling them of your planned product and check the buying potential). The most profitable and stable monetization method is having your own products to sell because you control almost everything – however you need to deal with customer service, product creation, branding, etc – you need a team to help basically. The other monetization method that is probably more profitable and stable is selling private ads on your blog. The easiest monetization method in my opinion is Adsense and CPM ads from sites like ValueClickMedia.com which pays per 1000 impressions – however, the profit is not as high or consistent as having your own product, and you have no real control over your revenue.

We have about 300 domains now and each one when we bought it at the time seemed to be a good idea. Only about 15 of them have “full” sites on them we have updated regularly. Yes you can probably move on and maintain this site but I suggest you continue to get traffic to that site and keep learning from it.

We’re 25 years old and sometimes I wonder why we are trying so hard to get rich so fast sometimes. And the answer is because it is possible and easy to do if you have decided to do so. Now is really a good time to try to get rich. A lot of people just don’t care about trying to make money nor even want to think about. If I ask these guys what they want or what goals they have they usually do not have a solid answer. I just wonder what they have on their minds most o the time. I also see a lot of these guys who have a ton of raw skills. And when they ask me how to make money this is usually how it goes:

“How do I make more money?” They would ask. I will reply with: “Oh, start a business.” and then they would say: “Yea I heard that already. But what do I do? and don’t give me that baloney saying to ‘follow what I like to do’ because I do not know what I like doing and do not have the time to think about that. Maybe I can get rich slowly.”

Basically excuses to start trying, taking a chance, trying something new, thinking for themselves for once, and hell just taking control of their own lives.

But I think that making money is just a game. Many people are just too afraid to take the first step or to play their first round in the”game” because they might lose. Schools, teachers, and parents have a lot to do with this but I don’t want to talk about this right now. It might sound like bullshit but you really have to fail in order to succeed. Unlike school, the answers are not in a book, and your grades are not determined on how well you can memorize answers before an exam. You also need a strong reason why you are playing the game and playing to win.

Just an example is one of my favorite games that I still play online to relax is Warcraft 3. I picked that game up about 1 year ago after I thought I really mastered another game (Counter-Strike) and was looking for a new challenge. Well I started playing 2 v 2 games online right from the start when I got the game. I LOST 13 times in a row before getting my first victory. Right now I’m pretty damn good in the game. I play solely with the Human race and usually give newer players tips on playing. The secret to my skills in that game are from my loses or failures – over 1,000 now.

The same principles can be applied to making money online. There are a lot of ways to make money online but you have to pick one and really decide to master it before moving on. Here is a tip: fail faster – force yourself to fail faster – play more and more and continue learning. Keep what you want to do after you have mastered the game or reached the level you want close to you at all times. Everyone is different. Some people try to master a game for fame, others want to make fun of people after their skills improve, others enjoy the challenge, others master it to teach others, others just love the game and love playing it. Whatever the reason, find it first and be truthful to yourself.

I received a suggestion from a reader to offer mentorship to people to maximize their adsense profits today. This is a good suggestion and one which we already have experience with. This idea was actually one of the first things I thought about and did when we started making a decent amount of money through adsense about 2 years ago and we had even written a book on making money online.

I remember the first time I showed a friend our adsense accounts. His first words were: “Teach me” after the initial disbelief. But after we told him the “secrets”, it seemed like he did not think he could do it and just wanted us to do all the work for him and just collect the Adsense earnings. I believe all the information that is needed to generate revenue from adsense has probably been written about in blogs, books, or in forums. But it ultimately comes back to the individual and how much he wants it. Knowing what to do and then actually executing the actions necessary is not easy. I think the other main reason we stopped doing it and selling our book was due to greed and fear. We were greedy and feared what would happen if we taught too many people. Maybe in the future we’ll rebrand the book and start selling it again.

Lately I’ve been re-reading some of Robert’s books to rekindle some motivation and hunger. I also plan to go to one of Robert’s seminars. My twin and I first saw Robert Kiyosaki on TV doing a promotion on a Sunday afternoon. We were about 18 years old and I didn’t even know his name back then, but still remember that it was him. I remember watching maybe 5 minutes of his show with my family. My older brother was flipping through the channels and we were surprised that an Asian man was speaking on a channel so we stayed on the channel. My dad said something like : “Hey what does this Asian guy have to say?” telling my older brother to stay on the channel. After about 2 minutes, and when money and finances were mentioned my dad said to change the channel and that it was a scam of some sort. And said something along the lines of: “This guy is trying to sell stuff. Go change it.” I didn’t hear or read any books from Robert Kiyosaki until many years later.

At that time I was trying to “hack at it” and make some extra cash on the side. I had graduated from college and had been working for about 8 months. As mentioned in previous posts, I was reading and listening to “gurus” about trying to master money. I had already heard of Robert’s famous book: “Rich Dad Poor Dad” but did not pick it up. Maybe because my dad’s words were still in the back of my mind, but I had some feeling that it was just another “get rich quick” book. I can’t say when but at some point I just started reading anything I could get my hands on about money and finances. About 30 or so books later, I was just browsing on Amazon.com and saw “Rich Dad Poor Dad” on the best selling list. It turned out to be what I was searching for. After reading Robert’s books, listening to his tapes, playing his games, I had the knowledge, motivation, and mindset to reaching my financial goals but had no real experience. If you are currently at the stage where you know what you must do in order to reach your goals, but just lack the experience, have comfort that you will make it if you just start. It is never too late to begin your own journey to financial independence.

It’s been 2 months now since we have stopped receiving 5 digit monthly checks from google AdSense. Being banned from AdSense litterally felt like losing an arm, there’s just no words to describe it and it ranks as the number one worst day in my life so far. It reminded me of one Star Trek: the next Generation episode where Counselor Deanna Troi loses her Betazoid powers and she says something along the lines of “How do you people live like this?” Our passive income dropped to almost Zero. The good news is that when you’re that down, you can only go up. Since then I have been trying, thinking, and working on alot of ways to replace the lost online passive income. I’ve tried CPA networks, CPC networks, worked on serveral personal sites, bought up some small sites to test niches, and started some major projects for our programmers. It will be a while before we break four digit income days again and it will not be easy, but I also know it will not be that hard. For those of you who have adsense, be grateful that you have the ability to make money online with adsense. But even though making money with adsense may be very simple, do not get lazy and do not make the same mistake we did of depending solely on adsense for passive income.

Having been schooled for most of our lives and Engineering being engrained into our heads through high school and College, our minds are wired to solve problems by constantly thinking about them until we actually do. Solving the problem is actually easy to do. The hard part is finding the root cause thats causing the problem and then maning up to do what it takes to solve it. We were the type of kids in school that talked about exam questions after the tests had been taken hours and even days before. We actually memorized problems and tried to figure out if we put the right answers on the papers. Our friends back then thought we were nuts for doing that.

People we talk to have just said to let the loss or setback go and just move on. Our progress for a comeback is really really bad because we did not let go of it yet and can not until we go back and find the root of the problem – its just in our nature.  It is also a lesson that was just meant to be learned. Yea people say diverisfy, diverisfy, diverisfy, but that is not the root cause that led to our setback. If one is to keep asking WHY? he can see it is not the cause of the loss or setback. It is good advice though. After days of thinking and asking the question WHY? we have come to see the major flaws in how we thought, acted, in our systems, and in our business. The next step is to solve these problems on our existing systems and carry them through to future ones.

Below is an illustration of how asking the question WHY can help you find the root cause of your problems. It is usually asking 5 whys but you can do more or less to get to the root of your problem. Take care in not going too far because God, religion, pursuit of happiness, and existance and purpose will probably be mentioned or appear. Then you got a whole new set of questions.