The most valuable thing you own

Here’s another great article by Alexander Green

Many years ago I worked for a man who is perhaps the most charismatic individual I’ve ever known.

He was successful in business, gracious, funny, generous, and smart. He was thoughtful too, always inquiring about my family or how things were going.

He was wealthy, well educated and well traveled. Whenever you bumped into him, it seemed, he was returning from some exotic trip where he had rubbed elbows with Oprah Winfrey or Tom Cruise.

He impressed men. He charmed women. Everyone wanted to be like him. There was only one drawback.

You couldn’t always trust him.

I’m not suggesting he was a thief or a crook. He wasn’t. But he had personal credibility issues.

He would tell you he was going to do something and not follow through. His stories were often so exaggerated that they bore little relationship to reality. 

And if the measure of the man is in small matters, he often came up short. For instance, he would sometimes invite a group of us to his private club for a round of golf. He would pick up the tab for everyone’s greens fees, cart fees, lunch and drinks. And then cheat like the dickens to win the five-dollar Nassau we were playing.

It was ridiculous.

Over time these ethical lapses affected his business. He never broke contracts or the law. But he operated in grey areas, sometimes treating long-time employees shabbily or using hardball tactics to get his way with business partners.

Eventually, I had a falling out with him and left the company. Looking back I still shake my head. He was such a great guy in so many ways. Yet no matter what someone has going for him in the plus column, nothing compensates for a lack of personal integrity. 

In the world of personal and business relationships, reputation is everything. In some ways, it is the most valuable thing you own.

“Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson two centuries ago.

Reputations, of course, aren’t always entirely accurate. But they are a necessary shortcut. It takes time – sometimes years – to truly know someone’s character. Decisions and judgments must often be made much sooner. So we depend on reputations.

Whether you’re making a new friend or business contact, seeking a new love-interest or applying for a new job, nothing can help or hurt your prospects more than your reputation.

In a sense, your reputation is your ambassador. Every day it is out there circulating, knocking on doors, joining in conversations, arriving well before you do and paving the way – for good or ill.

Your reputation affects the way the world perceives and interprets much of what you do. A couple hundred years ago, a man would challenge another to a duel if he felt his integrity had been insulted. Reputation was beyond value. A serious slight could not be allowed to stand.

In reality, of course, your reputation is only what others imagine you are. Your character is what you truly are. In my experience, however, long-standing reputations are generally pretty accurate – and good ones are almost impossible to manufacture. People are too smart for that.

As Emerson said, “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

Our deeds define us, not our words. If we wish to burnish our reputation, we have to work on our character. Not a bad idea, either. This is an area, if we are honest with ourselves, where we all could use a little home improvement.

Building character means taking responsibility, being accountable and treating others with fairness and respect, especially those who can do nothing for us in return. 

Even then, reputations are built painstakingly, one step at a time. That’s why we should never participate in malicious gossip. You don’t want to inflict unwarranted damage on someone else’s reputation.

And no one ever raised his own reputation by lowering someone else’s. Quite the opposite, in fact. As the German writer Jean Paul Richter observed, “A man never discloses his character so clearly as when he describes another’s.”

Every day, without being consciously aware of it, each of us is enhancing or diminishing our reputation through our actions. Those actions, in turn, are determined by the quality of our thoughts.

As Charles Reader famously said, “Sow a thought, and you reap an act; sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.”

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus was pithier. He simply said that character is destiny. His words are as true today as when he wrote them 2,500 years ago.

Our destiny is fixed when we hold ourselves to a higher standard, follow the dictates of conscience, and do the right thing – especially when another path would be so much easier.

Or, as investor Warren Buffett once remarked, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

Stumbling On Happiness

Here’s an interesting write out by Alexander Green on the meaning of happiness and how it affects the society as a whole.
The recent decline in home values and the stock market – not to mention corporate and municipal bond markets – has left most investors with less than they had a year ago.

To meet their long-term investment goals, many will have to spend less and save more than they originally planned.

This is not easy. As the economist Adam Smith wrote in “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776:

“The desire for food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach; but the desire of the conveniences and ornaments of building, dress, equipage, and household furniture, seems to have no limit or certain boundary.”

In the coming economic downturn, many of us will be unable to afford all the things we want. That will pinch. But should it make us unhappy?

It depends. But for most of us, the answer is a resounding no.

As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert writes in “Stumbling On Happiness”:

“Economists and psychologists have spent decades studying the relation between wealth and happiness, and they have generally concluded that wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but that it does little to increase happiness thereafter. Americans who earn $50,000 per year are much happier than those who earn $10,000 per year, but Americans who earn $5 million per year are not much happier than those who earn $100,000 per year. People who live in poor nations are much less happy than people who live in moderately wealthy nations, but people who live in moderately wealthy nations are not much less happy than people who live in extremely wealthy nations. Economists explain that wealth has ‘declining marginal utility,’ which is a fancy way of saying that it hurts to be hungry, cold, sick, tired, and scared, but once you’ve bought your way out of these burdens, the rest of your money is an increasingly useless pile of paper.”

If this is true, why are so many people out there busting their humps for more?

For some, it is the pursuit of financial independence, a worthy goal. But for others, the answer lies in their increasingly materialistic ways.

We all must consume to survive, of course. But when consumerism becomes an end in itself, when it overruns more important ideals, provides the measure of our success, or corrodes our capacity to know truth, see beauty or feel love, our lives are diminished.

Some will argue that for economies to flourish, we need rampant consumerism. It is consumers’ insatiable hunger for more stuff that fuels the economic engine.

In many ways, this is true. In fact, the notion itself is hardly new. In 1759, Adam Smith wrote in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”:

“The pleasures of wealth and greatness … strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it … It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.”

Notice that Smith, the father of free markets, refers to the endless pursuit of more as “this deception.” He recognized that the needs of a vibrant economy and the requirements for us to be happy as individuals are not the same.

Studies show that the riches and material goods we desire – should we have the good fortune to acquire them – won’t necessarily make us happier. Yet we often imagine they will, even when experience teaches us otherwise.

Walk into your local auto dealership, for example, and check out the cars in the show room. They look sharp. They smell good. The tires have been blackened. The exteriors have been waxed and polished and Windexed until they gleam. In short, we are seduced by their newness.

And even though we know that a new automobile is perhaps the world’s fastest-depreciating asset – and within weeks we will be mindlessly traveling from point A to B without a second thought about our vehicle’s make or model – we plunk for one.

As my grandmother used to say, “Most people can’t tell the difference between what they want and what they need.”

(This remark, incidentally, was generally directed toward me – and my latest two-dollar object of fascination – at F.W. Woolworth’s.)

Look around today and you’ll have no problem finding folks with plenty of neat things: big cars, fancy boats, the latest electronic gadgets and all sorts of expensive “bling.” They seem to have it all.

What you may not realize is how many of them are two payments from the edge…

Yet some middle-class Americans remain obsessed with what they don’t have. To some, it just doesn’t seem right – doesn’t seem fair – that others have so much more than they do.

But as political satirist P.J. O’Rourke observed:

“I have a 10 year old at home, and she is always saying, ‘That’s not fair.’ When she says that, I say, ‘Honey, you’re cute; that’s not fair. Your family is pretty well off; that’s not fair. You were born in America; that’s not fair. Honey, you had better pray to God that things don’t start getting fair for you.’” Carpe Diem,

Taking Your PLR Products To The Next Level

More often than not you probably have bought a set of Private Label Rights products that are doing nothing more than accumulating virtual dust on your computer.  You can still breathe life into your old PLR products by simply thinking outside of the box.

 

Depending upon the rights you own will determine what you can and cannot do with your content.

If you’re fortunate enough to own Unrestricted Private Label Rights you can fully alter the content and credit yourself as the author.

 

You can re-work your content as an MP3 audio recording which elevates you above everyone else selling the exact same content as everyone else.

 

Converting that content to audio CD affords you the opportunity to sell it as a physical product.  You can charge more as people tend to view physical products as higher value.  Your CD can be used as a trust builder with your customers and a sampler for a high-ticket item up sell.

 

Here’s a way you can use your inventory of Private Label Right’s products or if you don’t yet have a collection of your own, search the internet for one.

 

You can have a fully-fledged business without creating your own products by selling your PLR products directly from your web site.  You can create articles tightly focused around your PLR niche to passively drive traffic to a squeeze page offering a free report.  Once they commit to being a subscriber you can then work your products into your emails.  Remember it’s a game of give and take, you don’t want to be feeding your prospects with nothing other than sales pitches.  Give them a reason to stay on your list, balance your sales letters with great quality content and freebies and they’ll happily hang around for the long haul.

 

If you really want to get creative and do more than what the average PLR reseller is doing.

 

Why not take your collection of PLR products and create a web business centering around your PLR niche.  Purchase a new domain name and hosting, display your products on the site where people can download them.

 

Upload all the images, graphics and product downloads to the server your site is hosted with and then sell it as a business on auction sites, Craigslist, or free advertising forums.  You’re selling it as an actually business, because it is.  It’s not an affiliate opportunity but a legitimate business that you own and can hand over the reigns to.  That’s the ultimate power that a business owner has, they call the shots and have full control over what they’re offering.

 

This is appealing because it’s a fully fledged business that customers can purchase and instantly jump into the driving seat without having to do all the ground work of researching, sourcing and purchasing all the products.  You see people love shortcuts, why do you think PLR is so popular?, it allows you to create a product without all the hard work and involvement that usually goes into product creation.  Make it easy for people, make it clear and simple and they’ll take you up on your offer.  Do not ever skimp on quality, don’t set up some cheesy looking free site for the sake of making a quick buck and passing it off as poor excuse for a product, make it quality and they’ll be interested in your future offers because they know you have their interests at heart.

 

When it comes to selling your ready-made business, all you have to do is hand over the domain and hosting to them once you receive payment, they can substitute your payment details for theirs.  You could even take it for a test drive to begin with, drive traffic and sales so that you have conversion rates and proof of performance which will ultimately sell your business.

 

Why stop there?  Why not offer to continue hosting for them for a monthly fee?, it removes the hassle of having to change over to an alternate hosting account and the few days they have to wait for the changes to take effect, depending upon their own selected hosting provider. 

 

Imagine making a passive $5/month, that’s $60/year for doing nothing.  There are hosting companies that allow you to buy bulk from them for $40/month for 100 hosting accounts.  Get 8 clients and that’s fully paid, any more than that and it’s pure profit, and like I said “passive”, recurring income, income you didn’t have to spend time and money getting.  What if you sold 20 sites, that’s $100/month in hosting fees alone that’s $1,200/year.  What if you charged $10/month, that’s $2,400/year for the same amount of clients?  The sky’s the limit.

 

So don’t forget, make things as easy as possible, people will often do what they think they are capable of, not what they really are.  People are more than capable of building their own websites, but that usually takes time and involves a learning curve.  Most people will do whatever is easier and so will pay to bypass this stage.  So there’s your market gap between people who want a web site yet don’t want to commit the time to learning who still dream of having their own online business without all the hassle of setting one up.  Do it for them and for a lot less time and money it takes to get one created from scratch for thousands by a web designer and you’ll never have a shortage of customers. 

 

If you yourself don’t know how to create a web business of your own, it’s the nuts and bolts of online business so it pays to learn this skill.

 

Back to ready made businesses, these things have a market and sell, I’ve seen pet sites, golf sites, hobby and craft sites sell for anywhere between $200 and $1,000 and up.  If you have a supporting track record of performance you can get much more.

 

So there really is money to be made with PLR and the rewards are phenomenal if you think a little outside the box.  So write 10 ways you can sell your PLR content, take the best 5 to begin with and run with it.