The Science of Getting Rich is one of the more interesting books in the genre of creating wealth. Most of the books in this class are usually semi autobiographical and are mostly filled with anecdotal, and sometimes completely b.s. coated stories that the author uses to get his message across. Also, most of these books are written in abstract, with the authors not exactly living what they preach, but instead making their fortune from telling others to live what they are selling. Wallace Wattles isn’t quite the same thing from what I’ve read about the man.

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of information available on the internet about the man himself. Basically he was born right before the civil war and for the most part, pretty much lived in poverty himself for most of his life. He then met George D. Herron who had quite the impact on his life. He returned to his family basically with a new religion of sorts, and decided to write books to spread his word. The Science of Getting Rich is one of those books.

This is a very exestensial view of attaining wealth. More precisely, this book (in a round about way) is about the power of the mind and positive thought. The premise of The Science of Getting Rich revolves around 3 rules. They are:

There is a thinking stuff from which all things are made, and which, in its original state, permeates, penetrates and fills the interspaces of the universe.

A thought, in this substance, produces the thing that is imaged by the thought.

Man can form things in his thought, and, by impressing his thought upon formless substance, can cause the thing he thinks about to be created.

Again, this is pretty much the power of the mind at work. I for one do believe what Mr. Wattles is saying and most people who have studied or experienced success in any form will most likely agree with the above statements. No matter what your wish, whether it be great wealth, a house, fitness, whatever all starts with a goal. A goal forms the basis for a ‘map’ of sorts, to get you to where you want to be. You cant get to your destination if you don’t have a map. This is pretty much what Wattles is trying to convey in his book. If you boil down the message he is trying to get out, its that your mind is your greatest tool in attaining what you want in life, basically because (and here’s where he sort of goes off the beaten path with these kind of books) God really wants you to be rich. He wants you to be rich so that you can leave a full and productive life. Now how are you going to argue with God?

If you create a clear, precise and detailed image of what you wish to attain, you will act in ‘A Certain Way’ (this is a phrase used over and over in the book), and he is correct. The ‘Certain Way’ is the outcome of you keeping your goal clear in your mind and because you have that clear detailed image, your thinking and your actions make you do things that lead up to your goal. The more detailed the image and the tighter you hold it, the faster that goal is accomplished.
Mr Wattle’s vision on this, is a little out of left field. He explains the reason for the goal being attained in this manner isnt really because of your actions per se, but because you have planted your idea in ‘The Thinking Stuff’ that permeates that universe, and that stuff is moving the things required for you to complete your goal or attain your vision to you.

Delivery aside, the message is still a solid one.

I like this book for a couple reasons. For one, W. Wattles was a man who spent his life in poverty, only gaining any kind of success later in life, after he had started to spread his message, using the very same approach he was trying to sell to everyone else. By his own daughter’s word, he became a well known and successful writer because he set that as his goal, and in his mind, he was that successful writer..it just took a little while for everyone else to realize it. He walked it like he talked it. I also like this book because its not your standard regurgitated garbage that you see in most of the personal finance sections of the bookstore. Also, interestingly enough, if you notice, most of the books in the bookstores today on this very subject, pull most of their inspiration if not direct text from authors around the turn of the 20th century, like Wattles.

The books is a good read, and very interesting point of view. Just remember that he is speaking metaphorically throughout a lot of the book and he’s not really as crazy as he may seem.

     I am always interested and sometimes even impressed with the ideas that people come up with online to create income. Here is one of them: The Million Dollar Wiki. This is actually a pretty simple idea, and often, its the simple ones that do the best.

     The Million Dollar Wiki is basically just a webhost..but a very simple one. For $100, you can buy a page on the wiki to increase your web presence, kick off an ad campaign or just get your info out to the masses. Basically, you buy a ‘word’ in the wiki and post your info on the page. You own the page for the life of the site. The site is owned and maintained by Graham Langdon, a 21 year old senior from the University of Connecticut. Mr. Langdon has big plans for the site apparently and plans on it being in service for many years to come.

       So the bottom line is, you are going to pay $100 for a page on a maintained site, that is probably going to be so SEO friendly its not even funny. You own the page for the life of the site (atleast 15 years) and can make changes to it yourself. In my opinion, its a great idea and probably a pretty wise investment for any website.

     On Mr. Langdon’s end, he’s been up since 8/7/07 (as of today, that’s 21 days). According to his site, he’s sold 417 pages at $100 apiece, that’s $41,700 in 21 days, or just a little under $2000 a day. Not a bad first month.

     As an added feature, you can resell your pages. Let’s say you buy ‘cars’ as a page for $100. You build up some good traffic and get a lot of hits on the page. You can resell your page, and all its traffic to someone else for (most likely) a substantial profit. Many people have bought pages and immediately put them up for sale for 10 times what they paid for them.

       Personally, I see this as a great thing…possibly even a ‘milestone’ of sorts in the realm of marketing on the Internet. Wiki’s could easily and quickly become the ‘Free for all’ page for this day, and it wouldnt suprise me if wiki’s became standard fare for every website that pops up as a revenue generator.

       Ok, apparently I’m very hard-headed. I can now freely admit that since I have now been given undeniable proof that I was dead wrong about something. I have never been a huge fan of the sites, or systems used to rate blogs, usually referred to as social bookmarking.  I don’t know why, they just always seemed like a lot of b.s. for not a lot of return. Well, I have now taken a different view on this thanks to Stumbleupon.com.

     There are many similar sites out there such as technorati , del.cio.us, or digg. Stumbleupon is similar, in the respect that it allows you to search blogs and websites for relevant content. In that aspect, they, like technorati, are vying for a slice of google’s pie..and a large pie it is. Where stumbleupon.com starts to stray from the beaten path (which is a good thing) is that they also are working in a really good social networking aspect, as well as a system that allows you to rate any blog or webpage on the net, not just ones that have signed up with their service or had their page somehow imbedded in a directory for the site. Pretty cool in my opinion.

 How does this relate to monetizing your blog? 
     A site (or system)  that mixes blogging, with myspace, with general surfing, pretty much hits every demographic of internet user in one form or another. The only thing that would solidly lock the concept into a complete wall to wall demographic ‘blanket’ is the addition of a dedicated video section, complete with an adult directory.  So it stands to reason, that the traffic to a site that holds atleast some interest to almost everyone on the Internet at any given time, will be substantial. When it comes to traffic on the net, its sort of like the old addage about getting a great job - ‘It’s not what you know, its who you know’. In a site like these that are a constant churn of traffic, all it takes is a single mention in the right spot to make a large ripple effect of traffic and ultimately generating income for a blog or website that has the right system’s in place to capitalize on that traffic.

      Here’s an example.

     I was checking on the site’s statistics the other day and noticed a HUGE amount (in relative terms for a small blog like this) of traffic coming from stumbleupon. I had never really paid attention to the site, and was pretty sure I had never signed up on the site, so I started tracking down where the traffic was suddenly coming from. I tracked the source down to one entry, on one site on stumbleupon from a user named Marisa11. Apparently Marisa (I don’t know her real name) surfed across DB and just put in a one line comment into the stumbleupon network. I can’t find it exactly because I don’t know how to navigate the software, but it was something to the effect of ‘well written, good job’ and just that 1 line review resulted in 46% of the paltry monthly traffic on the site at this point, or:

*Unique Visitors - 133
*Average time on the site - 1:44
*Average page visits 1.70

That one line blurb created that response, overthrowing the previous months’ traffic leader, blogexplosion.com. Pretty impressive if you ask me. I’m now putting more input into networking with this site and watch to see the effect.

Marisa11, if you happen to notice an increase in referrer’s from here and surf by this post to investigate, say Hi..and thanks for the review!

Make Money Taking Surveys
     Who hasn’t seen an ad like this?  Usually, it ends up being a website where you can make money (or prizes) for signing up for a site and taking a survey. It has been my experience that 9 times out of 10, these are pop-up laden sites that seem to have an effect on time itself because a ‘quick 5 minute survey’ ends up turning into a 2 hour interrogation about everything from what kind of underwear that you purchase to the type of depends your grandma wears. I have only seen a rare few that actually pay out what they say, and have only seem to know people that ‘know a guy who knows a guy’ that wins like an Xbox 360 or whatever other exotic gift that only seem to be won by everyone else. Well, cashcrate.com seem’s to have built the better mousetrap for people that want to do this. Cashcrate is sort of like a clearing house for surveys. There are couple differences that cashcrate brings to the game.

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     Making money by blogging is the goal of many bloggers. There are many people out there in the blogosphere that make quite a substantial amount of income doing nothing more than blogging. A couple notables are John Chow, Shoemoney, and Problogger. There are many more out there, but these are the ones that come to mind. These are guys (or groups) that make a substantial amount of money every month with their blogs. There are no ’secrets’ to blogging, but there are techniques that can help you maximize your blogs income. Before you start, you need to decide if producing income from your blog is your intention. If you want, and expect, to make income with your blog, it takes work. Blogs are not some magic money tree that you just throw on a host and the money starts rolling in. Think of them more like a garden, that needs tended regularly and requires attention if you expect output. Some people have no intention or are only mildly interested in making money with their blog. If that is your intention, the time, effort and sometimes aggrivation that goes into setting up the various processes to get your blog rolling in the right direction might not be worth it to you. But if you have already decided that blogging is how you want to make some income, or you just want to get your already established website making a little extra cheese for you, the following information will be helpful to you.

 So lets get started!…

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     Like the I-Phone could get any better? Yes, it can. The hard working hackers of the world have come up with an NES emulator for your I-Phone. What does that mean to you? NES games on your I-Phone (such as Mario). Here’s a quick Youtube video so you can enjoy all that I-Phone Goodness!

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) — Do bloggers need their own Norma Rae?

In a move that might make some people scratch their heads, a loosely formed coalition of left-leaning bloggers are trying to band together to form a labor union they hope will help them receive health insurance, conduct collective bargaining or even set professional standards.

Seven of the eight leading Democratic presidential candidates attended the Yearly Kos Convention’s Presidential Leadership Forum in Chicago, Illinois.

The effort is an extension of the blogosphere’s growing power and presence, especially within the political realm, and for many, evokes memories of the early labor organization of freelance writers in the early 1980s.

Organizers hope a bloggers’ labor group will not only showcase the growing professionalism of the Web-based writers, but also the importance of their roles in candidates’ campaigns.

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Google Analitics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that a webmaster can optimize his/her AdWords advertisement and marketing campaigns through the use of GA’s analysis of where the visitors came from, how long they stayed on the website and their geographical position.

I signed the site up on GA just to check it out. Its free to sign up. It takes about 24 hours or so for the GA site to gather information about your website and provide it to you in a wide range of formats. At first, I pretty much thought that the GA site didnt really offer anything that my host didn’t already offer. I was wrong.

Google Analytics has a truckload of useful information about your site, your visitors, and your content. What does this do for you? Well, the GA site gets down to specifics about your users. What browser they are using, when they surf through, and interestingly enough, exactly what country as well as city that your audience is coming from. This is extremely useful if you are using google adwords so you can fine tune your advertising campaign.

Is this a good tool for you? Some host’s provide similar services, though I doubt that it has the same depth. I would say that its a good service and very useful tool for any webmaster…especially since its free

Site: http://www.google.com/analytics/
Blog: http://analytics.blogspot.com/

     There are a few things that you have to consider with your site and how SEO will help, that goes beyond search engines, keywords or even meta tags. Technical issues can be a HUGE factor when it comes to getting ranked. I’ll go over a few that I know, and I’m sure that there are more that I’m not aware of. If anyone has any input on this, please let me know.

      One of the first things to check is a code to text ratio of your site. Obviously you need to have more text than code for it to be considered a legitmate site. There is a tool at seochat.com to help with this. http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/code-to-text-ratio/ aptly named, the code-to-text ratio tool. The code to text ratio on a page is something that is used by search engines to calculate relevancy of a page, and therefore what your ranking should be.

     The next technical issue is keyword density.  Some preach that key word density should be between 3% and 7%, some say up to 12%. Too high and you trigger over-optimization alarms with search engines, and if you’re too low, then its probably going to be judged as less relevant for those keywords you are using, and that can get you a bad rating by a search engine as well. 

     Is your site WC3 compliant? Some think that Google is partial to WC3 compliant pages, though its not been technically proven. Overally being WC3 compliant is a good thing for you because it makes sure that your page is seen pretty similar in all browsers. There is a tool to check this with located here

      Is your content original. Most search engines will penalize you for having content that is copied from somewhere else. So it’s to do the occasional search and see what comes up, its also good not to plagerize or cut and paste.

These tips should get you a little better ranking. I know that doing this stuff can be a little hard, and about as much fun as a bikini wax in the snow, but in the long run, that little bit of time will make your efforts worthwhile.

     Ok, so now you know what SEO is, what the benefits are, and what some of the B.S. that surrounds the topic is all about. So how to get started? Well, this is where the notion of ‘SEO is easy!’ sort of goes out the window. Properly optimizing your webpage/site/blog for search engines isnt rocket science, but it does take a bit of forethought and planning.

    For simplicity, I’m going to break this down into 4 main categories:

• Meta-tags and Optimization (on page)
• Technincal Issues
• Linking
• Other Issues

     I don’t really want to go into exactly what you should specifically use for keywords, because quite honestly that is a whole different article, or 5, and I don’t want to bore people to death any more than SEO stuff already does But the Meta-tags and optimization section should give you an idea of how and where to use the tags once you have decided on them.

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