I remember sometime back listening to a conversation I heard at work between two colleagues who were discussing what they would do if they won the lottery. I listened with interest to this conversation as each told the other about all the great things they would do if they won a large sum of money. And as the conversation progressed, I could see that much of what they wanted to do, they could do right now if they really wanted to. They didn’t really need to win the lottery to achieve it.

So often you hear people discussing what they would do if they won the lottery or had the time to follow their dreams. In fact its something you hear constantly from people around you and it goes a bit like this…”when I win the lottery” or  “someday I’ll do it” or “when the kids are a little older” or when the “kids have left home” or “when I retire”.

You know when it all boils down to it, each of these statements is simply an excuse for not taking action because taking action may require a bit of effort or it might involve taking some risks. So, it’s much easier to just continue on day after day doing the same things over and over until eventually you get stuck in a rut and come to accept that you will never do all the things you really want to. At some stage you may even reach a point where you don’t even dream about doing these things anymore.

We are creatures of habit. This is both a good and a bad thing. Good because it means that a lot of those regular tasks we do can be done without even thinking about them. It’s like when you get in the car – you don’t think about how you are going to drive the car, it’s an automatic process because you have had years of practice. Unfortunately though, the bad is that your life can settle quite comfortably into a rut.  You know how it goes –  you wake up, get the kids ready for school, go to work, come home, make dinner, get the kids to bed, watch a bit of tv and go to bed.

Even the weekends become  a routine, you take the kids to soccer practice, go grocery shopping and if you are lucky maybe do something different like go to a movie or to dinner. Then on Monday you wake up and get the kids ready for school, go to work, come home, make dinner…and so it goes, on and on, day after day until the day you retire. And at that stage, your life has settled into its daily routine and as you are older you are not ready to take risks, so your retirement isn’t happy because you have lost the enthusiasm or the will to try new things and perhaps follow those long lost dreams.

Would you call this an extraordinary life? I wouldn’t. And don’t be blaming your kids here either, you can have a mundane life with or without kids.

If you want to have an extraordinary life then you need to start taking risks. The most successful people in life are the risk takers. This doesn’t mean taking stupid risks. Obviously you still need to do your research before taking on any risk but don’t go too crazy either….you can get bogged down with too much analysis and then you will start to focus on the negatives and that becomes scary, so eventually you decide its safer to stay at home and you never go anywhere or try anything new.

Now I am by no means an expert at this but I do have a tendency to take risks…  I’ve thrown in my job before I was making a decent income in order to work from home, I moved to a new city where I had no family or friends, I’ve gone overseas when I barely had enough to feed myself while I was away, I bought that ebook when I knew nothing about making money on the internet and it cost a staggering $197 and it could have all been just a scam.

Even as business partners, Wanda and I take a hell of a lot of risks – we have been overseas countless times, even though there have been times when we really weren’t making a huge amount of money from this business and funds were tight. We didn’t dwell on where the money was going to come from – we just booked our fares and off we went.  This is something we still do and now we only book our return airfare and book all other travel as we go when we are overseas. We  both have a can do attitude and truly believed  that we were going to succeed and so we live life accordingly. We could have said “someday we’ll go to Affiliate Summit” or “someday we’ll see the Colesseum” but instead we just did it.

Wanda has a quote from “The 4  Hour Work week” by Timothy Ferriss, on the wall in her office that sums it up nicely:

SOMEDAY

Is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.

If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually’

JUST DO IT

and correct course along the way.

Taking action and taking risks go hand in hand with being successful and having that extraordinary life. This doesn’t mean that you won’t fail. Failure is a part of life but the difference between those that succeed and those that fail is that those who succeed see failure as just being part of the road to success.

Don’t settle for less in life. We decided early on that we each wanted an extraordinary life, we don’t want our lives to be mundane and boring. We don’t want the 9 to 5 grind that most people take for granted and ultimately why we know that working online is the ultimate lifestyle…at least for us.

Don’t wait to win the lottery in order to do all the things you want to do. Take action now to live an extraordinary life – it’s fun, its risky, its exhilarating but most of all its fulfilling.

My internet business gives me an extraordinary life and I am more than happy to take whatever action is required to keep it this way.

FINALLY RELEASED - Our complete guide to making money online by promoting Amazon products. Head over to the AMAZONIAN PROFIT PLAN website for all the latest info.

We were asked just recently to write up an interview for Famous Bloggers Club and today it finally went live. You can read the interview here: http://blog.newmediabloggers.com/affiliate-blog-online/

Famous Bloggers Club was an idea put together by Hesham from Zebida.com to highlight bloggers from around the internet in the make money online, SEO, blogging and social networking niches.  The club is exclusive and limited to only 100 members.

This is the philosophy behind Famous Bloggers Club:

FBC has been created for the sole purpose of unifying bloggers that are proactive, dedicated and committed in helping each other to prosper on the blogosphere. It is not by all means discriminatory, as we will gladly accept those who will abide by this code.

If you are proactive, dedicated, committed, honest, pro-Google and willing to help other bloggers, then you definitely meet the criteria and deserve to be a proud member of FBC.

Hesham has interviewed around 40 bloggers so far so it is well worth taking a look to see why they blog, whether they make any money blogging and a bit about how they got to where they are today.

Head over to the Famous Bloggers Club now to read our interview.

Today I was reading a blog post where one of the commenters mentioned a WordPress application for the iPhone/iPod Touch. This immediately caught my attention as not only do I love to blog but I also love using my iPod Touch. Just combine the two and I am in heaven…well maybe not in heaven but you get the point.

So of course as soon as I read that comment I went searching for the WordPress app on my iPod Touch. It wasn’t hard to find, simply type in WordPress and it is at the top of the list.

The application is free of course and simple to set up. Just type in your blog URL and password. You can also add more than one blog.

I love the clear interface on this. It is very intuitive so you won’t need to read a how-to to start writing up a blog post. In fact, I am writing this post using my iPod Touch and I have only been using this app for the past 5 minutes.

You can view and edit posts, pages and comments quite easily with this app. And images can be easily added.

Once you have finished your post you have the option of previewing it to make sure it all looks pretty and neat.

I have to say that I’m actually finding this a whole lot easier to use than my desktop computer.

This is a big winner for me. Highly recommended!

I’m a big fan of all things related to The Secret, The Law of Attraction and self improvement in general. So after reading The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D Wattles – a book written over 100 years ago – I started looking for anything I could find on the subject. That inevitably brought me to The SGR Program – it was a bit hard to miss actually because if you type ‘Science of Getting Rich’ into Google you invariably see it in the first page of results.

At the time, I wasn’t really interested in paying for a program as there’s so much content available for free on the net but I did sign up for his FREE 7 Lesson Course which I thought was excellent value considering it was free. Even so, I didn’t buy the main course after the 7 lessons were over.

But for some reason I kept finding the Bob Proctor course in my day to day surfing on the net so eventually I took it as a sign to give it a go.

So I’ve signed up and paid the $197 and am currently in the process of downloading all the mp3′s, transcripts and the ebook. There is a lot of information in here. It is going to take a while.

As I am only in the first stages of the program I am not going to write up a review today but instead wait until I get more into it….so stay tuned.

More Info

• You can sign up for the FREE 7 Day Course HERE

Leave Your Comment Below

Are you into the Science of Getting Rich or have used the SGR Program? If yes, please leave a comment below. I would love to hear what you have to say and I usually respond to most comments left on my blog.

Last week I started having problems sending emails to Yahoo email addresses. This started to become quite annoying and was starting to affect my online business. Whenever I sent an email it would bounce back and I would get the following message sent back:

5.1.0 – Unknown address error 554-’Message not allowed – [320]‘

I scoured the net looking for a solution but everyone kept saying that it was the ISP’s fault and that I should contact them to fix it. The only problem was that I didn’t really think it was my ISP’s problem only because I could send emails perfectly with my laptop. The problem only seemed to be occurring on my desktop PC.

But I emailed the support section of my internet service provider anyway just in case they knew something I didn’t. It wasn’t surprising when they came back and said that they couldn’t see a problem at their end.

So I put up with the problem for another few days and finally got my brother (who knows a lot more about computers than I do) to take a look.

Within a few minutes he had solved the problem and it was so simple. The date on my computer had been changed at some point and was showing a month ahead. This would have meant that any emails that I sent out would have been date stamped a month in the future. Obviously the Yahoo mail system doesn’t like this and so it bounced back my emails.

So problem solved and I am back to sending emails again.

Hopefully this will help anyone with the same problem.

Some time back we were having trouble with one of our blogs losing its search rankings and we decided that maybe it was because Google didn’t like the number of affiliate links on the site. We had an affiliate link on just about every blog post and some blog posts had more than one.

So we decided that one way of solving this was to add the nofollow tag to each affiliate link. I’m not really sure whether this did the trick or not as a number of other factors came into play at the time to boost our rankings again but even so we continue to add nofollow as normal practice each time we add an affiliate link.

For those who at this point are wondering what the hec nofollow is, take a look at our detailed blog post on this subject – What is dofollow and nofollow?

So how do you go about adding nofollow to an affiliate link?

There are two ways actually. The first is a manual approach and the second automatic…well probably not totally automatic but it is a bit easier than the manual method.

Manual Method

This method is quite simple but does involve you playing around with the code. Now I am going to assume that you have already had a play around with HTML code at some point otherwise you probably wouldn’t know how to add the code for your affiliate links. If you are new to WordPress however you may be wondering just where the code is hidden.

In WordPress it is found under the HTML tab. So when you are typing a blog post look up a little and you will see the HTML tab sitting just above the text box to the right.

Once you click on that tab you will see all the HTML code for the post your are writing. This is where you can insert the code for your affiliate links.

Now that you have found the code you need to add the nofollow tag. Locate your affiliate link code in the html and then insert the nofollow tag which is rel=”nofollow”  just after the url. So it will look something like this:

<a href=”http://www.afflilatesite.com?AID=12345″ rel=”nofollow”>Text Goes Here</a>

The affiliate code may look a bit different to the above but just look for the http link in the code and pop your nofollow tag just after it.

Automatic Method

This method I like because I don’t have to play around with the code. This involves using a plugin called TinyMCE Advanced.  To upload this plugin to your WordPress blog take the following steps:

1. Click on Plugins–>Add New from the left hand side menu bar on your WordPress Dasboard. This may be in a different location depending on the version of WordPress you are using so you may need to look around for it. If you have a really old version of WordPress then you will need to upload the TinyMCE plugin using a program like Filezilla.

2. In the search field type in ‘tinymce’ and click Search Plugins. The TinyMce Advanced plugin will most likely be the first one in the list of results but if not, just take a look down the list until you see it.

3. Once you have find it in the list click the INSTALL link on the right hand side of the screen. This will install and activate the plugin for you.

4. The plugin will now be displayed in your menu on the left hand side of your dashboard. Scroll down and you will find it listed under the Settings option. If you can’t see it then the plugin probably isn’t activiated. If so, click on Plugins—>Installed and you will see the plugin in the list on that page. Simply click the Activate link to activate it.

5. You can go in and configure it if you like as TinyMCE has a lot of cool features but for the sake of what we are trying to achieve here you really don’t need to.

So now that you have installed the plugin you are ready to use it. To do this you simply click on the ADD NEW post link and start creating a post. You then add an affiliate link in your post which will display as a hyperlink – something like this –> Buy an Ipod.

Highlight that link with your mouse and then click on the Insert/edit Link icon on your tool bar just above your post.

You should now have a pop-up menu on your screen. Click the ‘Advance’ tab on that pop-up and then the ‘Relationship Page to Target’ drop-down box. You will see ’nofollow’ as one of the options. Just click that and then click Update. The ‘nofollow’ attribute should now be added to your affiliate link.