For those that don’t know what a Trifecta is it is a betting term usually in horse racing where you pick the top 3 in order and you win a lot of money.  This is difficult to do but when you hit it you get a nice payday.

So what this have to do with Making Money Online.  I came across this great article on Yaro’s site where he talks about who makes more money.

• Author’s
• Blogger’s
• Internet Market’s

He goes in to each but the real answer is all of the above.  So in order to have the most success you need to constantly be working on building your own make money online trifecta.  You need to author and create unique valuable content and products.  You need blog to build you brand and authority.  You need to learn and work on internet marketing to build you business and sell products.

When I looked to get back in to the Computer industry 10 years ago I had my own trifecta plan that I carried out over the course of 4 years which resulted in me landing at the top of my field for a large global fortune 500 company.

Here how it did it with computers.

I came up with my plan by looking at the online job posting.  I looked at the skill set and requirements for the jobs and money I desired. Back then if you were looking to make more then 50K in IT you had to have the following three things.  Certifications, 3-5 years Experience and a Degree.  This became my trifecta for my professional career as a IT PRO.

Since I had been bartending while taking college classes for the prior 6-7 years I had no current professional experience in IT.  I signed for some crash IT certification courses and started with the certification path so I could get an entry level job.  After completing a few of these I found an entry level job.  I finished my certifications and then enrolled in a online college program and took advantage of my company educational plan to cover my expenses.  I was also able to jump a couple jobs to land myself some nice increase during this time.  After completing my Degree I had now had my trifecta and was able to apply for jobs like the original ones I had set out to build my career around.  I ended up landing a better job making about 10,000 dollars more a year.

Here is how I am going to do it with my own online business.

For my online business here is my trifecta.  Create unique content which I can turn in to and developed info products, blog to build authority, connect with others, tell my story and learn more about how the internet works.  Think like an internet marketer business owner.  If you look at most that are making money online they have mastered mixing all these skill sets together or at least a combination of two.  You will only get so far if you focus on each one alone.

As I look toward next year I am really excited as this year I have really started to just scratch the surface with each of these area’s.  I have spend a ton of time learning about internet marketing now is the time for doing.  Trail and error, start swinging the bat more and more.  With my blog I learned all about wordpress and setting it up mixing in social media and so much more.  I learned that running a blog is a lot a work.  For the unique content side I have experimented with everything from written word, audio and video.  I read about 1500 e-books and watched and listen to countless hours of audio and video.  I understand what everyone else does now it time to build my own content and see how good of marketer I can become.

To sum this all up if your looking to have the most success making money online you need to be sure to looking at those that do it and see what skill they have to get it done.  Then once you identify those skill you need to learn and do them.  For me it is all about running like a business, finding the right mix of marketing and creating my own unique content and products.  You can learn about others that do this as I talk about them as I find them and follow me as I blog about my online journey.

I personally enjoy learning new things do you?  Every year I set out to really learn or master one new skill or goal for the last 10 years most of what I done has been in IT field.  I started with getting my Microsoft Certifications and then moved on to Cisco an eventual completed my degree in Engineering Management after about 10 years of trying.  The last 5 years I set out to learn more specialized skill within my current field of work, HTML, Scripting, Security, Unix, SQL, Java, Websphere, Business Process Modeling to name a few.  This last year I decided that I was going to try something different I set up to learn Internet Marketing.  I will get in to more detail in another post about my approach to this.

Why is it important that we continue to learn?

Because as humans, we are learning machines.  We are most alive and functioning closest to our potential when we are learning, adapting, adjusting, and finding new ways, approaches and techniques to improve our lives (or the lives of others) in some way.

I believe in the above statements.  They are as true as any other statement I could write here.  But rather than talking about the philosophy of humankind, let me get much more pragmatic.

Change and Learning

Change is all around us.  Some say the rate of change is increasing, but whether that is true or not, this is definitely a fact in our business lives.  Products change, Customers change, process and policies change.  We are put on a new team, we are entering new markets, and we have set new goals.  In all parts of our daily professional lives change surrounds us.

In order for us to cope with that change, we need to be willing and able to change.  And learning is a key component in developing that ability.

So when I talk about continuous learning or life long learning, I’m not suggesting everyone needs to take a course at their local college, or go back to school for a new degree.  Continuous learning is an attitude and a set of behaviors that allow us to succeed in our ever-changing environment, and is the best lever we have to turn who we are today into who we want to be tomorrow.  Change requires learning and conversely, there is no learning without change.

So if life long learning doesn’t necessarily mean the “professional college student” and doesn’t require us to be the person who was always asking questions in every class we ever attended, what are the behaviors that make up a true continuous or life long learner?

I’m glad you asked.

The Behaviors

There are some common threads among those who actively are learning and growing as professionals (and humans).  Life-long, continuous learners:

• Have a beginner’s mindset. If you approach anything with the mindset of an expert, you will learn nothing.  With the expert’s mind, you are looking for confirmation and validation of what you already know.  A beginner on the other hand, looks constantly for one new tidbit, one or more ways to expand on their current expertise.  In other words, expert or not, they don’t think that way, because they know that only with a open, beginners mind, can they benefit from the learning opportunity.
• Make connections. Continuous learners do that.  They continue to think about what they have learned in one part of their life and how it relates to and connects with challenges, problems, opportunities and situations that occur in other parts of their life.
• Are flexible and adaptable.  Learning requires change, so continuous learners realize that they must be willing to adapt and change if they want to grow.
• Are always learning something.  Continuous learners learn new things “just because.”  They’ve always wanted to play guitar, so they take lessons.  They want to ride a unicycle, so they try it.  They learn how to quilt.  They learn a new language. These people don’t invest the time required just so they can play “Love Me Tender” or say “good morning” in Chinese.  They also do it because they realize that our brains are like muscles.  The more we exercise them the stronger they will be.
• Are continuously curious. One of the most powerful learning questions we use is “Why?”  Why is the question of the curious.  Continuous learners remain curious about people, places, important and mundane things as well.  By cultivating their curiosity they are adding to their knowledge and perspective, while exercising an important part of our learning brain at the same time.
• Learn in multiple ways. In school we learned in a relatively limited number of ways, which unfortunately leaves some people with a limited view of learning.  Continuous learns know that they can learn by reading, by listening, by trying, through others, with a mentor, etc. (etc.!)
• Teach others. Something magical happens when you teach someone something – you suddenly understand it better yourself.  Continuous learners teach others not just to help the other person (or to show them how much they know) but because they know it helps them deepen their mastery of their own learning.

How to Use This List

Now that you have read this far I hope you are convinced of how valuable it can be to be a more active learner.  You have also read a list of characteristics.  Now that you have read that list of characteristics, I’d like you to read it again.  As you read it ask yourself these questions:

·    How well do I stack up against these behaviors?

·    Which ones would I like to get better at?

·    Who do I know that is exceptionally good at each of these characteristics?

·    How can I learn these traits and habits from those I know who are better at them than I?

Your answers to these four questions (and the action that you take) will put you on the road to being a more continuous and life-long learner.

Enjoy your journey.

Wow, hard to believe it been eight months since I launched The Money Cult.  For those that are new and haven’t seen this before each month I take some time to review the previous month and recap what I learned, accomplished and how I am feeling about my site before the next month begins.

First I would really like to say I am sorry to everyone and myself for slacking the last two months but I am officially out of my funk.  I am not sure exactly what happed but basically I stop putting in the time and effort and my blog almost died.  Enough with that lets move on to review which will be a little on the negative side but you can’t always report the good.  This should help me document my mistakes and finally put this behind me so I can move on.

So here is what happened after working early morning and late nights  everyday for the last 6-9 months I just stopped doing everything.  If you looked at how I was finding time to spend on my business it wasn’t something that was sustainable.  I would get up at 5:15am and work on things till 7:00am got to work and then be back on them at 9:30pm till 12:00pm most of the time. This wasn’t everyday but most of the days I would spend at least 2-3 hours on this stuff.

This is not something that anyone can sustain for a long period of time the only result will be burnout which is exactly what happened to me.  So what am I going to do differently.  I going to limit the time I spend and try to have more a a schedule for working on this blog.  I hope that the results will be that I can accomplish more by being more focused during that time.  I not going to push myself so hard and just realize that with consistent efforts and time good things will happen.  I think part of my problem was I had some unrealistic expectations.

Lessons learned from last month that still hold true.

I don’t have much to say here other then I learned a lot about the effects of burnout and what can happen to your blog if you stop.  Take my advice and learn from me on this.  Make sure you have some content stored for a rainy day.  I lost a lot of traffic and readers which I hope I can recover by taken a unplanned break.

State of Mind

The last two months were difficult for me however I look forward to the future and upcoming year.  I am excited that get back at it and really want to spend the month of December doing the following.  I will finally get around to switching to more professional looking wordpress theme and recapping my 1st year of my attempt to become an internet marketer.  This should be a good serious of post most of what I have talked about to this day is really the last 3-6 months but before I started blogging regularly here I was doing a lot of learning and experimenting.  I think others that are starting out can learn from this so I will share.

Month End totals