Wealth and Wisdom

Ok, maybe the title was a bit over the top. That doesn’t detract from the truth, it doesn’t make it less valid, and it doesn’t lessen the importance of this basic personal development truth:

You need to take responsibility for your life.

Everything that happens to you, good and bad, can be traced back to your choices.

Sometimes this is obvious. My boss says something I don’t like so I punch him in the face. The result…I get fired (and maybe spend some quality time in the county lockup).

Other times it is more subtle. For example, you have a coworker that is usually late in turning in their part of a project. Do you confront them? Do you (professionally) say anything to them at the beginning of the project? Most people just let it slide to avoid the conflict. Guess what, your inaction is a choice that affects the outcome.

Tags: Life balance

At Wealth and Wisdom we are always on the lookout for topics that interest our readers. This week we review the book Bailout Riches by Bill Bartmann.

Bailout Riches is a how to guide for making money with the new government bailouts such as the Tarp or RTC. Two decades ago (during the last bailout) he went from being deeply in debt to becoming a billionaire by buying bad loans for pennies on the dollar. He would buy the bad debt for say 2 cents on the dollar and work to recover 6 cents on the dollar. In the book he lays out the entire plan from obtaining the bad debt to the collection process. This is not a get rich quick book! The process he explains will take a good deal of time and effort but it made him a billionaire.

Mr. Bartmann’s business system will not suit everyone but he is living proof it can be done. He points out this opportunity will only be around for a few years while the banks and government work through all this bad debt. If you are looking to make some money off all these government bailouts time is of the essence - you need to act now! Bailout Riches will give you a blueprint for one route to take to make some money from the current economic situation.

I’m sure there will be other opportunities that come up from the government bailouts. We will cover them as they arise.

Bailout Riches!: How Everyday Investors Can Make a Fortune Buying Bad Loans for Pennies on the Dollar

Tags: Bad Debt, Bad Loans, Bailout, Bill Bartmann, Business System, Current Economic Situation, Making Money, Rtc, Tarp

Bear with my. My title will make sense as you read the post!

Lately I’ve been working on Wealth and Wisdom a lot. Some of it was to improve our interface. A lot of it is to grow our subscriber base.

One area we have been working on is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). As I’ve implemented several things one thing jumps out at me…

Most blogs use nofollow tags on their comments

Of the 15 or 20 blogs I checked, only one had comments that didn’t use nofollow tags (thanks Pat, we appreciate it).

Nofollow tags prevent the search engines from following the link. The link owner gets no credit for it and it doesn’t contribute to their search engine ranking. While this effectively eliminates the spam issue it punishes legitimate commenters. One big reason people comment is for the link juice.

The spam problem

I understand why the search engines and the blogging platforms make this their default setting. Comment spam is a major issue. While spam filters like Akismet do a great job with obvious spam, the subtle spam comments get through.

What do I mean by subtle? It’s the comment that is generic and complementary. “Great blog. I just came across you and will be adding you to my reading list.”

These comments are harder to find. I had a bunch sprinkled through my blog and had to go back and delete them. How do you know when it’s spam and not just a complement? Copy the comment and paste it into google search. If you come up with hundreds (or hundreds of thousands) of results, the comment is spam. Report it!

Take a stand

We bloggers need to take a stand. Take back your blog. The answer to comment spam is vigilance by bloggers, not  by indiscriminant nofollow tag use.

At Wealth and Wisdom we proudly use follow tags on all our comments. If your comment contributes to our community you will get full search engine credit.

I’m calling on all bloggers to do the same. It’s easy to do. If you use wordpress there are several plugins to allow follow tags. I personally use Nofollow Case by Case, but there are several others that are highly rated.

Tags: Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines, Spam Filters, Spam Issue, Spam Problem

Or how to stop sounding like a pompous ass

I had to shake my head. Apropos, paradigm, myopic, maligned, rapier like,fondled,terminological exactitude. What was he thinking? It would have been bad enough if he was speaking to a panel of executives. In this case the words were inappropriate. After all, he was an announcer calling a hockey game.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe having a large and diverse vocabulary to be an asset. I believe that it is part of what determines how far you go in life.

I just also know that you have to speak the same language as your audience

This is sales (or public speaking) 101. Don’t talk above or below your audiance. Only use a $10 word if it better describes the situation. Above all don’t make your listener need a dictionary to understand you!

Tags: Audiance, Audience, Dictionary, Entrepreneurship, Exactitude, Hockey Game, Listener, Paradigm, Pompous Ass, Rapier, Vocabulary

We should have known better.

We hired a friend to do some administrative tasks at Wealth and Wisdom (and a couple of our other businesses). On the surface it seemed like a great idea. Ed was more than qualified to do the work. While I’m pretty good at spreadsheets and databases he made me look like a rank amateur. To do what we wanted would have taken me a couple months because of the learning curve.

On the surface it was win – win. He needed a bit of extra cash and loved playing with databases and spreadsheets. I was too busy between my day job, Wealth and Wisdom, writing our book, etc…

Then the problems started

The biggest challenge was that it was a bigger priority to me than for Ed. It was important to our business and our book launch. We had deadlines we were trying to meet. It was money out of my pocket and revenue lost every week the schedule slipped.

Ed had different priorities. First was his day job. He was the go to guy at work and his boss always tossed him the critical projects. This took up a ton of his time. Then there was his social life. What little time he had left was spent on Call of Duty.

Unfortunately, our project was at the bottom of his list. The end result was that progress was non-existent.

Let’s be clear. This is my fault.

I view this as my responsibility. I chose to give his the project even though I knew how busy he was. He assured me that he would take it seriously but I knew him well enough I should have questioned this. Also, any time you have a project (or an employee) their performance is your responsibility. It doesn’t mean that they don’t share the responsibility but in the end it rests on your shoulders.

What did I learn from this experience?

• I need to set up better reporting when I outsource. I did a good job defining the project. I even did a good job setting a deadline. Where I failed was that I never set up regular updates. Several weeks would go by before we would ask “what is the status.”
• Don’t just hire based on a skill set. You also need to look at the person and hire someone that will get the job done on time and on budget. Ed’s was without question skilled. He was a good person. The problem was that he wasn’t mature enough to take on the project and he wasn’t willing to make it a priority.
• Projects need to be a priority to all parties. Ed had too many priorities. They were all more important than the project.
• Be careful hiring friends and family. People will tell you that the best business relationships are based on friendships. What usually gets left out is that these friendships are almost always of a business nature. In fact, they often grow out of business interactions, not the other way around.

Hiring Friends and family can be a big mistake. They often take liberties that they wouldn’t with strangers. It can also be messy if you need to sever the business side of the relationship. It’s also hard for you to be firm and demanding to friends and family.

In our case it was hard to push for results. Not only were we friends with him, we knew his whole family. If we weren’t careful it could have done irreparable damage to a whole chain of friendships. That being said, several months had gone by without much progress. What should have taken a couple weeks was pushing several months with no end in site.

In the end we found a simpler solution and canceled the project. It help resolve the situation and made it easier to preserve our friendship. We paid him out for his time and we all moved on.

Tags: Entrepreneurship