Many rich people were never distracted by a desire to be rich. They were never obsessed about wanting to make money and wanting to become millionaires or billionaires. They were instead obsessed about wanting to be successful at their ambition; and the fortune they amassed in the process was just the reward for the time and effort they put into the journey taken from desiring success to achieving it.

People distracted by a desire to be rich and obsessed about wanting to make money but who have no ambition behind their obsession are unlikely to ever get their hands on the millions of dollars they desire. These are usually the people who are looking to get something for nothing. They are the ones who Google terms like, "get rich quick doing nothing".

In reality, you have a better chance of getting rich slowly working excruciatingly hard than of ever getting rich quickly doing nothing. But few people are interested in having to work excruciatingly hard even if there’s a possibility that the hard work might pay off in millions of dollars. They’d prefer to just spend a dollar on a lotto ticket every day and hope to eventually get lucky and win the millions they desire.

Being obsessed about making money can work for you if the obsession is accompanied by a fierce determination to do whatever it takes, within the law of course, to manifest the millions you desire. If you don’t have a willingness to work that is equal to the size of the fortune you hope to amass, you can expect to find yourself forever living amongst the dreamers and wishful thinkers, the lottery your only hope of one day becoming rich.

Modifying your obsession so that your goal becomes one to succeed at a specific ambition might be more helpful to you than focusing all your mental energy around thoughts of money. Just wanting money is not good enough. It’s not like you can go out and collect money like pebbles. Unless you plan on stealing it, money has to be earned; and even if you plan on stealing it, you need a plan for how you are going to steal it and the courage to do whatever is required of you to steal the amount of money you want, just as you need a plan for how you’re going to earn it and the courage to do whatever is required to earn the amount of money you want. So your time will be better spent figuring out a method by which you can obtain the money you desire.

Think of money as a fruit. Imagine that in order to have an abundance of this fruit you must necessarily have a tree for the fruit to sprout from. The tree comes before the fruit, but you can’t have the tree without first planting a seed. The seed comes before the tree. And you won’t have fruit instantly upon planting a seed. In fact, you have no guarantee your seed will sprout or that if it sprouts it will grow healthily and eventually become a tree that bears fruit. In that case, the more seeds you plant the better your chances; but how many ever seeds you plant, there are things you have to do once you plant the seeds to coax them to grow into healthy trees that will flower and bear fruit. You can’t just plant them and leave the rest to fate.

We all wish we had magic beans we could throw out a window that instantly sprout up and grow hundred dollar bills by the millions. People search the Internet every day looking for magic beans in the form of ideas for how they can make millions of dollars over night. Everybody wants to be rich; but not everybody has the patience or interest in growing a plant from seed to fruit. The fact is there are a number of roads that lead down a path to wealth. Some are shorter and surer than others, some are darker and more dangerous, some are long and winding and fraught with obstacles, and yet some take you to one dead end after another, like traveling through a labyrinth that has a single entrance and a single exit but no straight line from beginning to end. Rather you find yourself in a giant maze getting lost and frustrated at every turn. It would behoove you to know beforehand whether or not you have the fortitude to endure a journey through a maze or if, perhaps, a shorter, surer route might be right for you.

The trouble is, not every path is open to just anybody. If you can’t sing like Mariah Carey for example, becoming an overnight singing sensation and amassing a fortune before you’re 25 is not going to happen. If you’re shy of people and can’t bring yourself to going up to them and striking up a conversation, you probably won’t have much chance of becoming a wealthy salesman. If you don’t have a law degree becoming a wealthy attorney who specializes in high profile criminal defense cases like the OJ Simpson Trial isn’t a possibility. If you don’t have a cosmetic surgeon’s license you can’t expect to become plastic surgeon to the stars and amass your fortune that way. What path you take will need to be determined by your abilities as well as by what is suited to your personality type. Someone who quits easily when the going gets tough for example might not fare well in a maze.

So spend your time figuring out viable methods by which you might be able to achieve your goals. Then focus your time and energy on the journey rather than on the prize. The prize will be there for you to take if you succeed at completing the journey. So worry about completing the journey. And even then, take it step by step. Focus on the obstacles in front of you and on conquering them one at a time. Anguishing over how many obstacles there are and dreading having to surmount them all will only deplete you of mental energy; and no one has ever conquered Mount Everest under the influence of a drained mind.

With Bill Gates net worth at $56 billion, the aspiring rich are dreaming of billions as opposed to millions nowadays. It’s no longer who wants to be a millionaire, but who wants to be a billionaire. Today’s richest people measure their net worth in the thousands to tens of thousands of millions, and Bill Gates’s is leading the pack with more than fifty-thousand million dollars to his name. (Fifty thousand million dollars is the equivalent of 50 billion)

A billionaire is, according to wordnet.princeton.edu, "a very rich person whose material wealth is valued at more than a billion dollars ", or as wikipedia defines it, "A billionaire is a person who has a net worth of at least one billion units of currency, such as United States Dollars (USD), Pounds or Euros."

Top billionaires (reported by Forbes)

Click here to view the 2007 billionaires list

Someone wrote to me asking me to share any tips and tricks I know that might help him make more money from Google AdSense. He wrote:

I’m very frustrated. I’ve been trying to make money with Google adsense but can’t seem to make more than a few cents a day. I read where there’s people making thousands a day. If I could make thousands a day that would be great, but I don’t expect to make that kind of money. I get bummed out when I read about these people making that kind of money because I’m finishing most days with just a few cents. If I finish a day with more than a dollar it’s a good day for me which is obviously ridiculous. I want to know how I can at least come out with $25 - $50 a day. I figure if people are making thousands a day, twenty-five bucks can’t be that much to hope for. Any suggestions?

First of all let me say that I fully understand the frustrations of the gentleman who wrote to me, but as I wrote back to inform him, there are plenty of reliable sources on the web for AdSense tips and tricks compiled by individuals who have successfully utilized these tips and tricks. I do not consider it appropriate that I should attempt to give expert advice about something in which I do not have expert knowledge. Nevertheless I did share the details of my own personal experiences. I remember some time ago I was trying to figure out how to make more money as an AdSense publisher. While brainstorming, it occurred to me that the reason I was making so little money, was that the competition for keywords related to my site’s content was very small; and because the competition was small, the monetary value of a click amounted to pennies at the end of the day.

Before I began to ponder this mystery of why I was making next to nothing, I had no idea that there were people making a business out of building websites around competitive keywords for which they could potentially make upwards of $30 from one click. I had not built my websites for the purpose of capitalizing on Google AdSense. This is perhaps one of the key areas in which AdSense money makers differ from those of us who continually struggle to make a couple of bucks from the Google ads we publish on our websites.

Because we did not build our website with the idea in mind of using it to profit from Google AdSense, we did not factor in such considerations as whether our site was targeting high paying keywords or not. Google AdSense was just something we added as a possible way of monetizing our website. The site wasn’t built for the purpose of making money from Google.

As a former AdWords advertiser, I’m a little bit uncomfortable with the idea of having people building websites that specifically aim to make money off of me. However in those cases where an actual, useful website is built around a high paying keyword and the people who are clicking through are actually interested in the product/service they click through to get information about, everybody stands to win. The advertiser actually benefits by having other people doing his marketing for him indirectly, because the owner of the website has to get people to the website in fairly large numbers in order to turn clicks into thousands of dollars per day.

Admittedly, if you’re targeting keywords that pay $30 per click, you only need between 33 - 35 clicks per day to make yourself $1000 per day; and you can get that without needing a million page views per day. But its not quite so easy to become a grandmaster of the high paying AdSense keyword chess game. The average Adsense publisher isn’t someone who is in the business of playing Adsense Chess. Like the gentleman who wrote to me, most AdSense publishers are people with websites who just want to make a little extra on the side with Google ads. They didn’t come out trying to become Google AdSense millionaires. But the more they hear about people getting hundred-thousand-dollar checks from Google on a monthly basis, the more dissatisfied they become with having to wait 5-6 months before they manage to accumulate the requisite $100 in AdSense earnings that qualifies them to receive a check from Google.

If you already have a website and you find you’re not making very much money even though you’re getting a few clicks, the problem might be that your site’s content is not built around highly competitive keywords. This means that your AdSense earnings per click can be fractions of a penny to just a few pennies; so even if you are getting up to 100 clicks per day, you can still finish a day with under $3.00. Look at this chart that shows how 100 clicks can be profitable or not depending on the value of the keywords being targeted:

Getting 100 clicks per day, however, is not quite so easy for smaller publishers, many of whom can barely manage to get 100 visitors per day. If only 1% of your visitors can be expected to click on your Google ads, then with 100 visitors to your site per day, you’re looking at 1 click. The value of that 1 click will depend on the value of the keyword behind it. Certainly it’s possible for someone to make more from 1 click than someone else makes from 100 clicks. But you would need to be targeting high paying keywords if you hope to profit from a single click. If you’re bringing in less than 100 visitors per day and you hope to make money as a Google AdSense publisher, you probably need to start assessing the value of your website as far as Google sees it when analyzing your content to determine what ads to display. You want the ads to have as high a pay value as possible so that you can still make a few bucks even if you only get a few clicks per day. This next chart shows how 2 clicks per day can be profitable or not depending on the value of the keywords being targeted:

Obviously you can make money from AdSense a number of different ways. Which way will be effective for you will be dependent on factors unique to your situation. You might not be able to attract higher paying keywords based on your site content for example, and changing your content might not be possible. In that case you need more clicks to make more money, which means you need more traffic. Or maybe you have the traffic but you’re not getting the clicks, so your issue then becomes one of how to get your visitors to click on your ads, which shifts the discussion to placement and presentation of ads. For more in depth information and more qualified advice, I recommend this resource: Greywolf’s SEO Blog - Google Adsense Tips, Tricks, and Secrets

Markus Frind, CEO of plentyoffish.com who has earned millions as a google adsense publisher, states in his blog that “Any Idiot Can Make millions off Google”. Frind’s online dating site plentyoffish.com is one of the top 10 online dating sites, competing with giants like yahoo personals and match.com while providing its service 100% free of charge to members. Frind’s website gets over 600 million page views per month, which is undoubtedly easier to turn into millions of adsense dollars than a thousand or so page views per month. Presumably, Frind is not talking to idiots who are completely clueless how to get their site traffic to such impressive numbers like his plentyoffish.com generates.

By no means can you hope to make millions as a Google adsense publisher if your website barely manages 500 page views per day. And you are not guaranteed to make millions by having a site that generates hundreds of thousands of page views per day. Obviously the more traffic you have the better your chances of making money as a Google adsense publisher; but if you’re barely getting any traffic, you shouldn’t get too excited by a statement like “Any idiot can make millions off Google”. By all means keep the thought in the back of your mind while you focus on figuring out how to bring the traffic to your site that you can potentially turn into millions of adsense dollars.

Making money online seems like its a piece of cake for some people. Markus Frind deserves all the credit for recognizing that he could make money operating a truly 100% free dating site. I’ve dabbled in the online dating business thing myself. I was an online dating software vendor for a few years. I created an online dating software product back in 1999/2000 and made a living exclusively off sales of my dating software until 2004 when I gave up all rights to the software to a programmer I’d hired to rewrite it for me. I had actually written the software for my own use and still use it to operate a couple of dating sites of my own.

I actually remember seeing plentyoffish.com ads a few years back and thinking, yes, I admit, here’s yet another new dating site that’s going to soon find out that there’s no more room at the inn. Little did I know that the owner of this site had a different plan for how he was going to make his money from the plan that the majority of online dating site owners had for themselves-to get rich by having millions of people paying them money every month to be members of their dating site. I had already seen the writing on the wall myself. The top dating sites were monopolizing the search engines. They were all over the television. They were in newspapers in every major city. They were all over the radio. They had millions of members, and the millions of new dating sites that were being started by clueless dreamers simply had no chance. In response to the question I found myself being frequently asked by customers buying my dating software, “Can you really make money in online dating?” I wrote an article on etown21.com, one of the first websites I owned that has since gone out of operation. The article addressed the question and focussed on how you “might” still be able to make some small change from operating niche websites. I never had the foresight myself, as Markus Frind did, to recognize the money making potential in offering a dating service entirely free of charge to members and capitalizing on advertising programs like Google adsense.

No doubt plenty of other people have tried to duplicate Markus Frind’s success, but the newbies will face the same dilemma faced by the millions who tried to jump on the match.com, adultfriendfinder, yahoo personals and other big dating site bandwagonsoon. They will come to find out that in order to have a remote chance of becoming a giant, you need to be the first or one of the first, and that in order to have a chance of even becoming average, you need to come in on the action long before the well runs dry.

So Frind says any idiot can make millions off Google. Well, sure, if you can come up with a way to bring people to your website in large numbers. And typically, people flock to where they can get things for free as Frind can attest. And the better the quality of whatever product or service you’re giving away, the more likely information about your product or service will spread.

But great money making ideas are not so easy to come by. Many of us rack our brain for years trying to figure out clever ways to make money, to get rich, to turn the Internet into a virtual cash machine that spits out hundreds of thousands per day into our bank account; but most of us are focussed on trying to duplicate something that is already being done by so many that we almost have no hope of getting rich doing it, unless we can find a way to do it differently.

If you want to become a Google adsense millionaire you need a website that gets millions of page views, or multiple websites that combine for millions of page views, at least as a starting point. I’m not so sure that any idiot can build a high traffic website; so, if you need a high traffic website to make millions from Google adsense (or at least to have a chance of making millions), and if it isn’t the case that any idiot can build a high traffic website; then arguably, not any idiot can make millions off Google.

Can you really make money in online dating

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Let’s face it. Some of us are not going to finish 2007 with a net worth in the millions. That might be our goal, and we might plan to go after our goal with a fierce determination, but 2008 will find us once again googling terms like: make your first million, become rich fast, make millions, make more money. And we’ll be back reading the same old variations on the “Think and Grow Rich” theme, wondering why it apparently works for others but not for us. The reality of the matter is, you need more than just the desire to be rich and the discipline to apply the strategies outlined in whatever TAGR(Think and Grow Rich) formula you are following. If you’re trying to sell a product or service for which there are hardly any buyers, no amount of positive thinking and creative visualization is going to help you become rich selling that product or service honestly. In addition to having the desire and the discipline to do what is necessary to achieve wealth, you also need to have a viable means by which you plan to get rich.

How long have you been trying to get rich yourself? Long enough that you might be rich now if you had been focussed on accumulating wealth over time and focussed your search on finding practical and reliable ways to grow money and build wealth instead of looking for ways to make a million dollars fast, and ways to get rich overnight doing nothing?

If you’re 50 now and have been distracted by thoughts of making millions since you were 20, how much money do you think you might have now, had you religiously invested part of your weekly income in an IRA account for example? If you’re 20 now and thinking who wants to wait 3 or 4 decades to become a millionaire, you might consider that 3 or 4 decades from now you might still be looking for ways to “get rich fast”. At least if you’re growing your money in the meantime while looking for ways to get rich before you’re too old to enjoy your money, you might just find yourself able to retire in style.

The idea isn’t to stop focusing on trying to make money now. If your ambition is to become a millionaire you should keep after your dreams; but in the meantime, it can’t hurt to think down the road.
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A Guide to IRA Accounts
by: John Mussi

An Individual Retirement Account (or IRA) is a retirement plan account that provides some tax advantages for retirement savings. There are a number of different types of IRA accounts, some being employer provided plans and others you set up yourself.

Traditional IRA

In a traditional IRA, the money is deposited before being taxed. It accumulates tax free on earnings until being withdrawn at retirement, at which point the money is taxed.

Since the money is contributed before taxes, you take a tax deduction for it (some exceptions), then let it grow until retirement. So, when you retire (presumably in a lower tax bracket) the money is taxed.

The main restriction on this one is that your annual contributions are only tax deductible if you’re not covered by a pension, 401K, or any other retirement plan where you work. You can contribute only certain amounts per person into a Traditional IRA each year if you’re under age 50, or slightly more if you’re over age 50.

SEP IRA

A SEP IRA is a provision that allows an employer (typically a small business or self-employed individual) to make retirement plan contributions into a Traditional IRA established in the employee’s name, instead of to a pension fund account in the company’s name.

SIMPLE IRA

A simple IRA is a simplified employee pension plan that allows both employer and employee contributions, similar to a 401(k), but with lower contribution limits and simpler (and thus less costly) administration. Although it is termed an IRA, it is treated separately.

Education IRA

In the past, Education IRAs were fairly low brow with a very low maximum contribution. As of 2002, however, these investments became really useful by allowing you to contribute a much larger amount per child per year (subject to some income limitations). The money goes into a custodial account for benefit of the child to pay his/her qualifying education expenses.

Also, you can now use an Education IRA to pay for any kind of education, public or private, grade school, high school or college. It can also be used to pay for virtually any education-related expense, too tuition, fees, books, supplies, room and board, uniforms all that stuff.

Some rules to remember

Most retirement plans can be rolled into IRAs after meeting certain criteria, and most retirement plans can accept funds from an IRA. There are a few things that cannot be funded into an IRA, however. They include collectibles including valuable coins or life insurance. IRAs cannot generally hold real estate unless it is held as a form of security such as a real estate investment trust (REIT), or if the IRA is held by a custodian who makes all transactions. There are certain special restrictions on real estate held in an IRA, and IRA’s are exempt from most bankruptcy proceedings. /p>

Unlike 401(k) accounts, borrowing against IRAs is generally not allowed. However, the rules regarding IRAs allow assets in them to be transferred from one account to another. This can be used to temporarily “borrow” money from the IRA, once per year. The money must be placed in another IRA account within 60 days to qualify as an “indirect rollover” and avoid taxes and penalties.

If you open an IRA account at your place of employment, most will allow you to keep the account even after you no longer work for them. Be sure to check with your employer on all policies concerning your IRA and whether or not the account will remain active after your employment has been terminated.

Copyright © John Mussi