StayWealthy.com

Who is wealthy? Is it the person who earns $1 million dollars annually with $1 million in net worth or is it the person who earns $24,000 annually with a $1 million networth? Let’s find out…

Thomas Stanley and William Danko, author of The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy, created a formula to help you determine whether you are indeed wealthy based on your income. The formula is as follows:

(Age x pretax annual household income from all sources except inheritances)/10

This formula is what your expected wealth should be. So for instance, Jane is 34 years old. She earns pre-tax $120k annually and has investments which give her $20k income every year, she also inherited $300k from her parents. What is Jane’s expected wealth?

Her expected wealth is $476,000 (34 x $140k/ 10). This means if Jane has a networth of around $476,000, she is well on track or an “average accumulator of wealth (AAW)” . If Jane has less than $238,000 (one-half of $476,000 ), then Jane is considered an “under accumulator of wealth (UAW)”. However, if jane has more than $952,000 (double her expected wealth), then Jane is considered a “prodigious accumulator of wealth (PAW)”.

Which category are you in? AAW, UAW or PAW? If you are not in the PAW category, how do you get there? To learn how, I highly recommend reading The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy

Audiobook Version (See below for text version)

Upon buying this book, I’d say I’ve passed one of the criterion of being a millionaire. Frugal. I bought this book at Payless Bookshop at RM13 (that’s about USD$4) when the normal retail price is about RM40 (around USD$11).

The Millionaire Next Door showcases the surprising facts of millionaires. You’d be really surprised to learn where millionaires live, where they shop, how do they invest, what cars they own, how they become rich and so on. These facts are based on thorough research by two professors, Thomas J. Stanley and William D Danko. For a person like me that usually finds numbers, percentages and comparisons boring actually found this a very interesting read, I especially love the chapters on “Economic Outpatient Care”.

Economic Outpatient Care (EOC) refers to substantial economic gifts some parents give their children and grandchildren. I’ve always wondered whether children of the rich will turn out spoilt like Paris Hilton or business smart like Ivanka Trump, The Millionaire Next Door mentions that economic outpatients do not accumulate as much wealth as their parents. The parents giving economic gifts do not have as much wealth as the parents whose children are financially independent. In this connection, the children who receives substantial economic gifts generally accumulates less wealth than those who do not or receive fewer economic gifts.

The main point of this book is that the millionaires are maybe your next door neighbour who are inconspicuous with their wealth, in fact, that’s probably why they are rich in the first place. So the next time you see a person driving the latest BMW series or has an enormous home, you can’t really judge whether they are rich till you look at their numbers. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is building wealth or who has no money sense at all .

Get the text version:

Credit cards, Debit cards, paypal… but cashless Monopoly?

Parker has ditched their colourful paper money and partnered with Visa to come up with a debit card and a card reader for all future editions of the Monopoly games.

“We started looking at what Monopoly would look like if we designed it today,” said Chris Weatherhead, a Britain.-based spokesman for Hasbro Inc., which makes the best-selling board game. “We noticed consumers are using debit cards, carrying around cash a lot less.”

I guess coming up with this idea isn’t that bad at all since many youngsters have racked up debt with plastic money, it’s about time there’s a game that teaches how to use plastic cash properly. I’m going to miss counting the money, guessing how much money my opponents have and showing off my brick of monopoly cash.

If you hate the debit card idea, don’t fret because you can still print the monopoly money at the Monopoly website.

>On 2 July, I exchanged 18 links
3 July, 8 links
6 July, 1 link
10 July, 22 links
11 July, 12 links
12 July, 9 links
15 July, links

Notice that the amount of links I exchanged reduce from 2nd to 6th July, but on 10th July I exchanged the most. No, it’s not because I was procrastinating (well, maybe a little). Before the 6th, I was using a manual way of looking for sites to exchange it with. This is done by searching the 3 major search engines (yahoo, google, msn) using the following search keyphrase:

“Add a link” + “your keyword”
“Add a site” + “your keyword”
“Add URL” + “your keyword”
“Add an URL” + “your keyword”
“Submit a link” + “your keyword”
“Submit a site” + “your keyword(s)”
“Submit URL” + “your keyword(s)”
“Submit an URL” + “your keyword(s)”
“Suggest a link” + “your keyword”
“Suggest a site” + “your keywords”
“Suggest URL” + “your keyword(s)”
“Suggest an URL” + “your keyword”
“Your Region” + “Add url” + directory
“your keywords” + “directory”
“your keywords” + “directories”
keyword reciprocal + directory
keyword exchange + directory
keyword add site + directory
keyword resources + directory
keyword links + directory
“your industry” +add url,
“related sites” + your keyword
“related urls” + your keyword

Apparently, the result of this search has turned up a lot of splogs (spam blogs) that scraps the search engine results with their keywords so that they can score higher with ranks. Some also added “add your site” on their page to mislead people that they are a directory/link exchange site.

I needed some other solution to exchange links, and I found a great software just to do that… a backlink analyzer software. I used the backlink analyzer software from Aaron Wall’s collection of free SEO tools. The trick is, I search for the keyword I want to rank for and from the top 10 search engine results… I take my competitor’s web address and input into the software to see what backlinks these competitors of mine has. And from there, I just follow my competitor’s tracks. Wherever they added their link, I add mine too.

So far, I’ve done about 70+ link exchanges and 100+ auto directory submission. I figured I have to get some one-way text links somehow (meaning that the other site links to me without requiring me linking back) otherwise, I have to build hideous pages full of links. So I made about 300+ manual submissions to directories using AllSubmitter, but I’ll bet that only about 5% of my links will be listed on these directories or site I’ve exchanged my link with.

At the moment, yahoo shows that I have 22 sites linking back to me. I’m going to build sites selling other products from More Niche because I think I should diversify. This is the first affiliate program I’ve seen that provides a team of web designers, SEO experts and programmers to provide support for free. Simply amazing!

We want to learn how to close sales, don’t we?
I assume you want a better life, don’t you?
Philby Sellmore presents tips and techniques on better sales and motivation. This is pretty funny and it’s also how some sales people get us to say “yes”.

It’s funny how people react to certain words or phrases. I don’t write sales copy much (a.k.a copywriting a.k.a. writing to sell), but I love writing attention-grabbing-headlines. I practice this a lot with MSN Messenger chat software thanks to its ease of changing nicknames, you can certainly try writing attention grabbing headlines that triggers a response. I’ve tried headlines from philosophical, funny to confusing.

An example of a confusing headline on MSN Messenger:

“Error: Username cannot be displayed”

or recently on this blog:

“Me, the Viagra seller”

It certainly strikes people’s curiousity when they see the word “viagra seller” on a personal finance blog, and to prove my point… it took only 5 days for it to become the #2 Most Popular article on this website compared to other popular pages that has been on the site for months.

So what’s so important about grabbing people’s eyeballs you say? Hello?? Wake up! It’s all around you, magazine ads, newspapers, tv ads and most importantly… internet ads. Do you see the “ads by gooooooogle” on this website? These advertisements are trying to get you to click on them by making attention grabbing headlines. So if you want to advertise your website or advertise ANYTHING, you had better learn how to grab people’s attention. Fortunately, it’s easy to learn and you can try it out right now using your MSN Messenger for free. But for in-depth information, I highly recommend:

Make Your Words Sell!

I only did two trades this month and I made 2 mistakes in a row hehe. My telechart’s scans resulted in stocks that didn’t fit my trading system’s criteria most of the time this month, so I didn’t have to trade every day (and have more time to work on my websites).

For DGX, I made a limit order when I’m suppose to make a stop order on the 8th June, so the contract was sold at a small loss as soon as the market opened. I was pretty angry with myself because the stock was going the direction I wanted after I made that mistake .

For SWN… it was more of a lucky mistake, after a long wait (it felt long coz it was making losses most of the days), SWN finally profited so I limited 2 orders at $6 and had 15% trailing loss on all 3 contracts and went to sleep because I thought the stock won’t move that much to trigger both orders. Sure enough, both orders were executed and left me short selling 2 calls (I believe it’s called naked calls). Fortunately the next trading day SWN went down the hills and I sold at a $120 profit. Phew!

Balance after exit trades made in June: $3,920.19 (+11.20%)

* After commissions, SEC fees, interest earned, non-resident alien withholding

Total profit for the month: +34.05%
Average profit for the month: +11.35%

I finally bought the domain name for my pharma site (Re: Me, the Viagra Seller), since I’m starting the site from scratch while I fire away as many questions as I can to other affiliates. I probably should make this a nice case study for all of you. Anyway, I have successfully merged the wordpress with my pharma site after several days of struggling with the php code. I had a lot of problems with displaying the dynamic page titles on my merchant’s page, but I’m just glad this is all solved. I shall start on posting articles every day and exchanging 50 links every day.

For on page search engine optimzation.. I had followed step 2 of my own methods which I have written an article on (click here for the article). I asked whether I should bold every keyword I’m targetting…. which is about 3 or 4 phrases, but Chris said making one keyphrase bold should be enough. So I’ve made my main keyphrase bold.

After talking to a new friend I met (who has also been in this industry for years) about link development, I realized I didn’t know much about link development… here’s the gist of it that Sandis (affiliate manager for MoreNiche) shared with me:

Anchor text for your links (meaning the words that link to your site) should contain the keywords you are targetting. The keyword should not always be the same otherwise it’ll look very artificial to the search engines. You should have different variants of your keywords as your anchor text, e.g. if you are targetting “portable satellite dish” then you should have variants such as “buy cheap portable satellite dish”, “cheapest portable satellite dish”, “order cheap portable satellite dish here”, “low-priced portable satellite dish”, etc. Search for “portable satellite dish” on google, yahoo or msn and find out how many links point to the top 10 sites, if your competitor has 100 links pointing to them then you should exchange more than 100 links for that keyword. You have to optimize not only homepage but also internal pages.

Other resources of interest:
Google Webmaster Guidelines
Google Ranking Factors – SEO checklist

I really like this advertisement. I don’t know which company made this, but it serves as a wake-up call for most who doesn’t know what they are missing. This presentation summarizes the great potential of the internet and it’s not too late to get in.

It seems options trading has stolen the limelight for this website, it’s not surprising since I update the options trading section more often than the affiliate marketing section. I haven’t been dabbling much on it since I’ve spent most of my nights on options. It was easy to just buy low, sell high compared to affiliate marketing which has all sorts of factors that determines the sales. The highest commission I’ve made so far this year is in April and since then it has stopped performing. That was just one of the affiliate programs that I concentrated on. Since I’ve figured out the part on how to make capital gains, it’s time to work on my passive income…

I’m working on a new project which deals with generic phamaceutical drugs, my pharma merchant is currently concentrating on generic viagra but they are slowly introducing more generic drugs (cholestrol, diet pill, etc). I bought some keyword targetted articles for $1 each from Chris who had hired writers for his previous pharmaceutical website, he’s stopped promoting his pharmacy site because his merchant stopped selling to US residents. Before the discontinuance of the US market, he made $400 a week from his pharma site alone. I guess, partly, I didn’t buy these articles alone… it came with some lessons I could learn from him. Compared to others, he doesn’t mind sharing his internet marketing wisdom.

I worked on a template for my own pharma site which merges the merchant’s template codes with WordPress. I spent about 2 to 3 days working on the codes and figuring out which does what (because I’m not very good with PHP) and I’m very satisfied with the final site. Having wordpress as a partial backbone of the website will help with search engine optimization since pinging is extremely useful to inform the search engines of new content and to encourage the search engines’ spiders to crawl my website. Currently, I’m just waiting for Chris to come online to give me more pointers after reviewing my website.

Interestingly, he told me that having sites with the same articles are not duplicate content as long as the template is different. This is something opposite of what I’ve heard on most SEO forums. Here are some stuff which I found interesting about him:

- He uses all white hat techniques
- He hires people to write articles and his blogs (I wish I have the money to do that)
- He put himself through college with the money he made from the internet
- He works for an online casino, also something to do with search engine marketing
- He’s going to do a demonstration on PPC (Pay-per-click) advertising using $2500 on Google Adwords promoting affiliate programs that sell physical products.