It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.

Now on to my point.  I think the people who have been spewing advice on how to cut corners this holiday season and how to pinch pennies have actually been talking non-stop for the past decade on this subject and don’t actually seem to be making any real change in anyone’s life for the better.  The reason is that cutting spending and reducing expenses is the evil little cousin to making money or accomplishing capital accumulation as my buddy Todd likes to say.  It is a slippery slope that many will get you on by convincing you that by reducing your expenses, lowering your overhead and cutting back will actually make you wealthier in the long run.  It just isn’t so.

Making money is a totally different skill and takes a completely different focus than cutting back and reducing expenses.  It doesn’t matter how much you saved by NOT paying interest on your credit cards or how much you saved by NOT buying that Xbox 360, it is not the same as making more money and depositing it into your bank account.  The logic goes something like this… if I pay extra on my mortgage, I’ll pay it off faster.  By paying it off faster, I’ll pay less interest expense to own my home.  By paying less interest, it’s like making that much because I would have had to pay it and now I don’t.  The problem is, let’s say you pay off your mortgage early and you save from paying $150,000 in interest.  If it’s like making $150,000 since you didn’t have to pay it, where is the $150,000 you claim to have made?  It’s not in your bank account like it would be if you really did make $150,000.

So what does all of this have to do with holiday spending?  It’s a long way to say that instead of focusing on what you can’t buy, think about how to make more money in the next few weeks to afford buying what you really want and not have this overhanging guilt that you bought something you couldn’t afford and that you should just be grateful for what you have and that living within your means is meant to reduce your expenses, not increase your income.

So what can you do to get extra income in the next few weeks?  A brilliant book I read a few months ago by Loral Langemeier goes over this.  It’s called ‘Creating A Cash Machine For Life’ and walks you step by step down the path of creating more income with skills you already have and getting cashflow in 7 weeks or less, sometimes even as fast as 7 days!  Loral understands the reality that cutting expenses is not the way to wealth and actually has a whole series of books focused on creating wealth and increasing income, because when this happens, expenses get covered and you have extra to stash away for your long term needs.

Even without the book you can come up with a handful of ideas to generate a few hundred to even a few thousand dollars to cover those mad rushes in the stores to fulfill your family’s every demand.  So start asking yourself ‘how can I make an extra $250 this weekend that would be fun for me to do?’ instead of convincing yourself to not spend and enforce massive amounts of self discipline to boot.

I finished it a few days before going to a Dan Kennedy seminar in Atlanta on marketing and Ferrazzi recommends becoming a Conference Commando when attending seminars and not just going to learn, but to make great connections with others that are there.  I didn’t have time to implement many of the strategies, but did make a hit list of who I wanted to get to know that I thought would be there.  With my focus on networking I walked into the room the first day where there were about 550 people and I ended up sitting next to a Billionaire from Australia named Anne McKevitt!!  Nobody knew who she was and I ended up taking her to lunch (and I picked up the tab, too!) and picking her brain for a full hour, one on one.  She had made it in the UK as their Martha Stewart equivalent and sold her product lines company in ‘05 for $970M.  We chatted throughout the conference for the following couple days and I gleaned a wealth of knowledge from her.  Another person I connected with was Mark Victor Hansen’s publicist who is a brilliant woman who can get to anyone in the media.  We had lunch and dinner together and she is a huge fan of our new venture we’re launching (website coming soon) and wants to help publicize it when the time is right.

Needless to say, his advice paid off in spades and that was just one of a thousand ideas and practices that he has perfected in his career.  The thing I appreciated most about his view on networking is that it’s all about relationships and building friendships through the process.  I agree that the personal life/business life separation is a joke and we all do business with people we like and trust.

To top off the great seminar, I emailed Keith while waiting to catch my plane home (most CEO’s and small business owners email is simply their name@theircompanydomain.com) to let him know of my success and thoughts on the book.  I used one of his strategies and said I’d like to interview him for a newsletter we’re doing for a mastermind group I’m in that is focused on marketing for small businesses.  He recommends interviewing people you want to meet that you think are ‘out of your league’ because everyone loves to be interviewed.  He emailed back in less than 5 minutes that Saturday afternoon and set me up with his editor to interview for the piece.  It wasn’t him, but I got a ton of info from the editor and am building ties with their organization through the process.  It worked like a charm.

The book is great for anyone (wanting a better job, a big sale, to get into that group you want to be part of, to find a mentor, etc) and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

What makes me qualified to create a financial revolution?  I’d say it’s the way my brain is wired.  First, being the grandson of a brilliant mathemetician helps make the numbers easier to see.  Then getting a Master’s in Business Administration that was focused on Entrepreneurship helped shape the way I view money, cashflow and the idea of wealth creation.  Finally, owning a Mortgage Brokerage www.towermort.com for the past three years that helps create financial strategies for our clients real estate needs and networking with the top minds in the nation about wealth creation has really been the catalyst for wanting to effect change in how everyone views and treats money.  All this leads to my passion for revolutionizing the financial lives of everyone that cares to.

We will pull this off through multiple methods, one of which being this blog, others though business and charity.  I hope to share my views, and those of the brilliante people I’ve studied, on important areas of our everyday financial lives.  These can include your credit score, credit cards, what a mortgage really does for you, sound strategies for real estate investing, what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur (as I figure it out one step at a time), and finally what it means to amass wealth for more than just living like a rock star and how to change the world with what you’ve been given.

You can subscribe to the right or just check back as you like to see what’s been added as I strive to add enlightening thoughts and ideas every week.