Getting Out of The Rut

The vast majority of people are in the comfortable yet unfulfilled middle of society. They haven't accomplished their dreams and goals. They have failed to become wealthy, or live in their dream home or have fantastic relationships.

However as unfulfilled as they are they haven't hit rock bottom. They have jobs and they have pretty normal families. They go on vacation once or twice a year. They might even have a good amount in savings but they're still a slave to employment, addictions (sugar, alcohol, hard drugs, fast food, you name it) they are chained down.

We need to make the distinction that they aren't impoverished by any means. They aren't struggling for survival. They are stuck in a rut of mediocrity.

In many ways getting from mediocre to successful is harder than getting from complete failure to success. In many ways going from unfulfilled middle class to the fulfilled successful class is more difficult than going from impoverished to successful.

It is incredibly difficult to break out of the rut of satisfactory comfort.

So how do you do it? Our initial reaction is to go put in some massive about of work or expend tons of effort. This is wrong. All your work will go to naught if you don't have the right mind set. You need to get your head straight first before you put forth the effort.

The main reason those in the middle don't get out their rut is because of fear. The have accomplished a degree of success in life and so they have something to lose. If they fail they reason that they stand to lose something. So they're paralyzed and frozen in inaction.

those who are in poverty, those who have already experienced rock bottom understand what the worst is. they have lived it and therefor know that there is very little to fear. These people have less fear and are more willing to act.

so how do you destroy the fear festering in your soul without having to go rock-bottom?

You have to train your mind.

habits make a man. So to change a man you need to change his habits. To change yourself you need to change your habits. Whether its adding new ones stopping old or both (ideally) you must change your habits if you are to change yourself and your circumstances.

There are several basic things you can do to get motivated and build momentum.

Write down you goals in perfect detail. describe as much as you can about yourself as a success. what personality traits are different? what do you look like? Where do you live? What do you drive? what kind of people do you surround yourself with?

After you've written this down set aside some time every day to visualize it and add to it according to your desires. As you envision your perfect life the actions needed to realize it will be made much easier and you'll have energy and drive.

The next step is creating momentum. You need to pick one or several of your goals to focus on and commit to yourself that you'll accomplish a little bit every day toward that goal. After a week you'll have gained momentum and it will get easier and easier until before you know it you'll have accomplished your goal.

Thrive Learning Institute is here to help you change your mindset so that you too can enjoy the abundant life of your choosing. The coaches will help in every aspect of your progression and will see you through to the end. which of course will only be the beginning of your new life.

Thrive Learning Institute - "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell

Persistence is, by far, the most important factor in determining your success. How badly do you want it. How long are you willing to stick with it?

Malcolm Gladwell poses a provocative question in Outliers: why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? Challenging our cherished belief of the "self-made man," he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don't arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: "they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot."

Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, "some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky."

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell seeks to disabuse us of the notion that genius and greatness are predominantly a function of innate ability and IQ. He rightly notes that while IQ is certainly a contributor, it reaches a "point of diminishing returns" after a while: once people score about 130, IQ becomes less important and "intangibles" (my term) become more important.

"Outliers" has consistently been a New York Times bestseller ever since it was released in late 2008.

Thrive Learning Institute - How to Use Blogs to Promote Your Website

At Thrive Learning Institute we are all about finding new innovative ways to market your online business and blogs are an awesome, free way to do that. In this article we'll take you through 4 basic steps to get you up and blogging in no time.

Step 1: Learning About Blogging
A "blog" is an online journal, a place where people can share their ideas, interests, and advice by writing postings every two or three days. The word "blog" comes from two words, combined: "Web log".

Begin learning about blogging by looking over your products and seeing if there are any particular themes or topics. For example, if you're selling some fishing poles and reels, then "Fishing" would be the topic of those two sites. Next, go to Google.com and search for the theme and the word "blog". In our example here, you'd search for "Fishing Blog".

Google will return with a list of a lot of blogs that deal with that particular topic. You'll simply click into each one, one at a time, and begin reading what those bloggers have written on that topic. This will help you to understand better what blogging and "the bloggosphere" (the network of blogs) is all about. Reading other people's blogs will be an ongoing part of your promotional efforts for your website.

Once you've seen what blogging is all about, it's also helpful to understand that internet marketing is all about what are called "inbound links". That means that you want to get links TO your site from as many other relevant sites on the internet as possible. Not only does that bring you traffic, but it also means you'll be found by the search engines quicker and you'll rank higher. Blogging provides the opportunity for you to do that in two ways: Using other people's blogs, and creating your own blog.

Step 2: Posting Comments

In the process of reading other people's blogs, you'll find an occasional blog entry that catches your attention, inspires you, or makes you think something. When you do, click to post a comment. Leave your own opinion (politely and respectfully, if you disagree) and experiences that relate to what the blogger is writing about. Don't just say, "Nice blog!" or "Me, too!" Add to the conversation. When you post these comments, there is often a place where you can leave your website address, creating a linkback to one of your relevant product sites. This is a great way to start to create traffic and attention to your websites.
Step 3: Creating Your Own Blog

Creating your own blog will allow you to establish inbound links to your website, and and help you to draw traffic to it. Begin, again, by looking over your products and seeing if there are any particular themes or topics. If your website is well-centered around a good niche, this should be pretty obvious. Choose the topic of your blogs. Remember that you'll want to write in this blog every two to three days, so you'll want to have a theme that you can write about often.

Go to Blogger.com, create an account, and create a blog in that account. Make a note of the address(es) of the blog(s) you create, so you can send them to your coach, and use them in your promotion.

Step 4: Blogging

Begin by writing a blog entry in each blog. A blog entry should have:

1. Anywhere from 250 to 500 words. That's just a guideline. Nobody's counting!
2. Good, usable information that relates to the theme of the website's products. It's important to not just write sales copy about the product. That's called blogspam, and Blogger might actually pull the offending blog off the web. If you're not sure what to write about, you can read what other bloggers are writing about that same topic and get ideas and information to re-write into your own blog.
3. Lots of good keywords that your audience is searching for. See Dropship Benchmark #3 for good information on how to discover good keywords.
4. Links to your website. If you're writing about the theme of the products, you could mention a particular product in the blog entry, and create a link to it. Make sure that the text that becomes the link includes some of your good keywords!
5. Links to other people's blogs that gave you ideas. It's not only OK to link to other people's websites and blogs, it's a good idea. Then go back to their sites, and leave a message that you mentioned them. They'll probably link back to you, so their readers can see what you said about them!
6. Links to any of your other blogs or websites!

Continue by writing more blog entries, creating more links, posting more comments in other people's blogs and being active in the bloggosphere!

For more tips and advice From Thrive Learning Institute browse our archives.

Thrive Learning Institute - Find Products on Clickbank

Thrive Learning Institute recommends Clickbank as one of the most complete providers of information products through affiliate programs available on the internet today. The first thing to do is to go and set up an account.

1. Go to Clickbank.com.

2. There will be lots of options there on the main page to explore. There are two large areas, one labeled "Affiliate" and one labeled "Vendor". A vendor is someone who has an information product to sell, like an eBook they've written. An affiliate is someone looking to make money promoting other people's products. That's you! In the "Affiliates" box, click "Learn More"

3. You can scroll through the tutorial overview that appears on the left. On the right, click "Sign Up".

4. Fill out the forms and complete the signup and verification process.


Once you have an account setup, the next step is to go into the Clickbank market place and begin looking for products that relate to your topics. There are two basic approaches to this, and they're both valuable.

1. Literal Thinking - In this approach, you'll be looking for products that directly relate to the topics and the keywords/keyphrases that you researched in the previous benchmark. If your topic is "Organic Vegetable Gardening", then you're going to be looking for products that teach all about organic vegetable gardening. You'll probably get more visitors converting into buyers this way, because by the time they search out your site, you know they're interested. However, it can sometimes be tricky to match the products to a niche exactly.

2. Lateral Thinking - In this approach, you step back from your niche a little bit, and look for products that relate to a slightly broader topic, to a wider audience. In our example, you might search for products in "Organic Gardening", or "Vegetable Gardening". Be careful not to get too broad, or you will find yourself swimming in a sea of competition, and all that wonderful keyword research you did will be wasted.


Whether you do one or the other, or a combination of both, the process is the same. Go to the Clickbank main page, and click on the "Marketplace" link at the top. You'll be presented with a search page, where you'll input your keywords and begin searching for good products.

An important part of analyzing the Clickbank products is understanding the metrics listed underneath each listing. Here's a key to help you interpret what each of those numbers mean:

1. $/Sale -The actual amount you will earn per sale. Every time a visitor to your site clicks through and buys this product, you'll make this much money. Ideally you will want around $20-$25 a sale, or more.

2. Future $ - Some products have recurring fees that the customer pays, like a membership. When there are recurring costs, there are also recurring commissions. This is really good for you, because each sale you make can become a residual income as that customer continues to maintain their membership.

3. Total $/Sale - The percentage of the sale that is your commission. Look for at least 50%.

4. %Redf - The amount of sales coming from ClickBank affiliates.

5. Grav - "Gravity" A weighted scale representing how many people were paid by this program in the last 8 weeks. Basically, this ClickBank metric represents the popularity. The higher, the better. If you can find products related to your niche that are above 70, that's excellent. There are many products that are newer, that are good, that haven't had time to build up their gravity yet. Try to get the highest gravity you can in your niche topic.

For more tips and how-to's from Thrive Learning Institute read more posts.

Thrive Learning Institute - "Show more options" tab

Recently Google has come out with a little tab that you can click on with the text "show more options" and at Thrive Learning Institute having multiple options is paramount. When you click on this link you'll see a side bar pop up to the left side of the screen that has a few different options.

One of my favorite options is the Wonder wheel. This is a great tool to use for brainstorming keywords and topics to write about for a blog, to create a niche website around and to analyze competition. When you click on the wonder wheel option a wheel will appear in the middle of the screen that contains your keyword and then on a number of spokes coming out of the main wheel there will be related more long-tail keywords connected to it. This is great because you can see variations of the keyword you may not have thought of before.

Additionally you can click on one of the related terms and that will then become the main wheel and you can see terms related to that one. So you can "drill down" as many in the internet marketing world say and find unique little niches that you can exploit and profit from.

A few other features in this side par that i really like are the forums link and the videos link. If you need to find some forums to get involved in with your niche all you need to do is type in your keyword come tot he "show more options" tab and click on "forums" and a list of all the forums talking about your niche will come up. This a great way to get involved in your community fast and easy.

The Video link is also good because generally there will be less competition for videos than for text and many times you'll be able to find keywords that don't have ANY videos indexed for it. You can then quickly whip out some videos and get ranking highly for your keyword with those videos and start driving traffic to your website. There are more options on the "show more options" tab but I'll let you explore those for yourself ;)

Read more from Thrive Learning Institute to get yourself a better understanding of our philosophy and how to make money online.

Thrive Learning Institute - SEO Tips

The Value of Linking

Thrive Learning Institute teaches that essentially, all of marketing on the internet comes down to one thing: Inbound Links. These are links that people can click on to come to your website from some other place, like another site, a directory, an article, a search engine, or even an email. There are three ways that links are important:

Direct clicking - If a visitor to another website sees that there's a link to your site, there's an opportunity for them to click through to you. It then stands to reason that the more links you have out on the net pointing to you, the more traffic they'll send. An addition benefit is that this traffic gets directly to your site, bypassing the search engines completely.

Search engine ranking - Search engines, especially Google, check to see how many other sites and other pages are linking to yours. They equate this with importance and popularity, and if you have a lot of links, you'll get ranked higher. Getting lots of quality links is called "Off-site SEO".

Search engine indexing - Search engines have programs (called, "spiders", "crawlers", and "robots") that regularly scour the internet, looking for more sites to add to their listings, and looking to update the listings of the sites they already have. The more and better links you have coming to your site, the faster you'll get added to the search engines, and the more often your site will be updated in their listings.

Stay tuned for more SEO tips from Thrive Learning Institute.

Thrive Learning Institute Spurs Entrepreneurship

For Thrive Learning Institute, promoting entrepreneurship is a sure fire way of over-coming the suffering economy and fostering self-sufficiency and personal responsibility, all things needed to ensure a prosperous and happy country.

There are many different kind of people in the world with a huge array of differing talents and skills. An inspection of the differing details found amongst humans can reveal staggering extremes and bizarre cultures which can seem worlds apart. However once we get our hands out of the contrasts and into the comparisons the insights to be had can change the course of a life just by their comprehension.

Basic to all humans is the unrelenting need to create something of worth. From simple tools to the ceiling of the Sistine chapel Humans have always found a way to create something that brings enjoyment and added productivity to life.

In today's culture creativity is being snuffed out in at alarming rates. One of the tell tale signs of a famine of creativity is declining rates of entrepreneurship. The greatness of America rode on the backs of freedom loving creative people who produced products that rewarded society who in turn rewarded their makers.

in this time of economic crisis we need now, more than ever, a new influx of innovative, visionary entrepreneurs to revitalize the deteriorating trait of creativity and in turn revitalize the suffering economy. Prosperity is driven by human creativity and the most essential entrepreneurial trait is creativity.

Thrive Learning Institute is focused on the nurturing and mentoring of aspiring entrepreneurs. We are optimistic that these are people who will carry the economy out of its fragile state and back into a robust, thriving and hopeful world. The clients who come to us have inspiring vision and a salt of the earth work ethic that is so desperately needed.

The proliferation of the internet has broken down almost all barriers of entry to getting into business and can often cost as little as $10 for a domain name and $5/month to host your website on the internet. Once you're their the entrepreneurial possibilities are endless and its up to your creativity and work ethic to provide society with a solution to a problem which they in turn will reward you for.

Thrive Learning Institute provides world class coaching on three main business models (among several others): Affiliate Marketing, Drop Shipping and selling on Ebay. These business models are extremely easy to get into and will wet the appetite of anyone looking to make money for themselves and not for someone else. The principles of success in this models are the principles of success in for every business and once mastered they will open the world to you.

Affiliate Marketing: This business model is very simple and very easy to get into. However because of its ease competition is high but certainly not insurmountable. When you're and affiliate marketer you affiliate with people and /or businesses who own products and promote their products. For every sale you generate you get a percentage of the sale price. With this model you learn to master the art and mechanics of marketing. There are infinite things to learn from affiliate marketing that will stay with you for the rest of your life. Additionally the potential profits of affiliate marketing are huge. Many people have made fortunes just by promoting other peoples products.

Some other benefits of the affiliate model are the fact you don't need a product, employees or have a boss. You don't need to worry about customer service either so its a very hands free way of making money.

Drop Shipping: This business model will introduce you to working with manufacturers and distributors. As you work with them you'll learn how to set up systems for shipping products and communicating with the providers. You'll also be introduced to the world of customer service which can make or break your business.

Drop shipping will give you much better returns than affiliate marketing obviously because you're the one going straight to the manufacturer or distributor to provide the product to your customers. This a great next step in your entrepreneurship education.

Selling on eBay: eBay is an easy, small-scale way to get into business. Although its hard to build a business you can eventually sell through eBay its awesome to use as training wheels and if you're not worried about building a business you can sell you can make tons of money on eBay too. I know a guy who was pulling in $35,000 in sales every month just from eBay. He also decided to quit because for him it just turned into another job.

With these three basic avenues to take Thrive Learning Institute will guide you as you begin learning how to unleash your creativity in a way that will benefit society and yourself in huge ways. Entrepreneurship can be learned and mastered and is not in any way something you're born with. As you learn these powerful principles your creativity will be unleashed on the world and you'll never want to go back to the drudgery of employment again.

The economy needs you. We need your ingenuity if we're going to pull out of this mess. We, at Thrive Learning Institute, are confident you can become a creative, productive entrepreneur and live the life of your dreams.