Most business people hate this time of year and hate dealing with doing their taxes. Most “average” people with a J.O.B. love this time of year because they think of it as time for getting their “free” play money. They don’t realize that it was their money in the first place that the government took from them and is only giving back a small portion of it.

I wish withholding tax didn’t exist and everyone would have to actually write a check this time of the year to the government. It would give a big wake up call to a majority of Americans in realizing how much of their paycheck goes to the government. The truth is, most people wouldn’t have the money to pay it and there would be a large outcry about how high taxes are and there would by scrutiny of where every tax dollar is spent. It would be a very good thing to happen to the country. However, the IRS knows this too and that is why the system is the way it is and most people don’t know any better.

Entrepreneurs and business people of all kinds understand the way the tax system works since we must pay estimated taxes and all kinds of employment taxes (if we have employees) as well as setting up employee social security, withholding, and other taxes. It can be a big headache. But that is a just part of doing business and another reason why the other 98% of people don’t get into business for themselves.

Having said all of that, one of my goals every year is to pay more taxes. I hate paying taxes and don’t want to increase paying taxes for any reason other than it means my income is increasing. Of course, it could also mean the tax system or rates changed for the worse even with my income staying the same. But in general, if I am paying more taxes, my income increased. So, I hope my taxes go up every year based on my income going up every year.

Do you want to pay more taxes because you are generating a lot more income? I wouldn’t mind paying an additional $100,000 per year in taxes if it means my income increased by $250,000. I would still be ahead by $150,000.

- Hill Robertson

I love to observe people. I really enjoy watching how people react to different situations and what type of attitude they have. One of my favorite times to do this is around Christmas time when the malls are flooded with people rushing around to get the hottest toy for their kids of the perfect gift for their spouse. It brings out the best and worst in people.

I like to go to the local mall and sit in the food court area. I usually get honey chicken with fried rice at the Chinese place. They use to have awesome wontons there but they got rid of them once they changed ownership. Anyway, I’ll sit there and nibble away while observing people complain about the long lines or that the one specific gift they came to get was sold out. Usually, the attitude that is displayed with these type of comments is a very negative attitude that points the finger at everyone else. Their attitude doesn’t make the lines any shorter or help them find the sold out gift. All it does is make everyone else around them more negative.

If you look carefully enough, you will see the more positive site of people too. While I sit there savoring my last few grains of fried rice, I see happy people with positive attitudes and a smile on their face as they enjoy the time of the year and enjoy spending time with family. They have to wait in the same long lines and don’t get that sold out gift but they have the proper perspective and they are upbeat and positive. They make people around them happier.

So, people are characterized by their attitude. What is your attitude? Are you portraying a positive or negative attitude to others? Do your customers dread calling you because you are grumpy and have a bad attitude? If so, they may not be your customers very long and they certainly won’t recommend you to anyone else. Or, do your customers enjoy talking with you because you have a positive attitude and they feel better about themselves after having a conversation with you? If so, they will be long lasting customers and they will recommend you to others they know and your business will grow.

Remember, business is all about people. Without people, you have no business. With a bad attitude, you have no business. Everyone has an attitude the portray - whether good or bad. Your relationships will be based on attitude. Be sure you have a positive one if you want a successful business and a happy life.

So I spent about 30 minutes the other day writing a new blog entry. I did all of the normal things I do for each. I quickly wrote it without losing my train of thought just to get the content down before I forgot it. Then, I previewed it by clicking on the preview link (in another tab of my Firefox browser). I saw a few spelling errors and a couple of things I wanted to explain a little better so I clicked on the edit button to go back to the Wordpress administration area of my blog and made the changes. After checking a few more things and updating the entry to my liking, I posted the blog article. Everything looked good on the blog and I was ready to move on. I started browsing around other sites and doing my normal routine. Then, I came back to my blog and found my new blog entry was GONE! What in the world happened? I knew I had posted it. Where did it go? Did I accidentally delete it? Did I save it instead of publishing it? What went wrong?

I went back to my blog admin area and found the article still there but in a “saved” state and not published. Was I going crazy? I knew I had published it. Well, it was pretty late at night (actually early in the morning) so I guess I could have made a mistake. So, I published it again and everything looked fine. Until…… A few minutes later, my post vanished again. Now I’m getting really confused. I went back to the admin area and the same thing had happened. So, I went to my saved entries and then republished it once again. Then, I realized what was happening…..

It turned out that I had one of my browser tabs still opened on my Wordpress blog in the admin area (for writing) on the new blog entry. One of the features of Wordpress is an autosave feature that automatically saves your blog entry at regular intervals as you are writing it so if something happens while you are writing your entry, you will not lose all of your work. This is what was causing the problem. Even though I published my article (in another browser tab), when the refresh cycle came around in the other tab, it would “autosave” the article back to a saved state instead of a published state. Also, if I had made any edits to the article in another tab, the could have gotten lost when this browser tab autosaved.

So, be sure you do not do the same thing with your blog. It can really be mind boggling and frustrating when it happens if you don’t realize what is going on when your blog entries mysteriously start vanishing. Do all of your work in one browser and with just one tab without opening other ones. Or, if you like using multiple browser windows and tabs, be sure to keep track of them and don’t fall into the same trap.

- Hill Robertson

Many people I know seem to live by the motto of “working for the weekend”. They go to their JOB Monday through Friday and put in their time. They practically proclaim that they have no fun and don’t really “live” until the weekend comes and they don’t have to work.

People with job mentality tend to think a JOB is the way to success. They either jump from job to job every few years looking for happiness and maybe a little bit more pay or they work hours and hours of free overtime trying to impress their management to rise up the corporate ladder thinking that it is a path to success. They never really think about building their own business and creating their own success and freedom. They typically think that anyone that becomes successful in their own business had different circumstances than them or had some advantage that allowed them to be successful.

Why just work for the weekend when you can work for freedom? You can have the freedom to do what you want to do when you want to do it. If you can eliminate the things and activities that are robbing you of your valuable time and you focus on things that can make you productive and successful, you can determine your success in life whether it be monetary, physical, or spiritual. It is your choice. You can make the decision and take the action to make any of your wildest dreams come true. Make wise choices.

So, are you working for the weekend or are you working for freedom?

- Hill Robertson

We seem to be taught our entire life that to be successful, you need to get an education, earn a degree, and get a job . However, getting a job is not going to let you achieve financial freedom. It will barely keep you treading water until some unexpected expense comes up that wipes you out. Not only that, but a lot of your time is taken away from you. As many entrepreneurs will tell you, J.O.B. stands for “just over broke”. It is just enough to get by.

Sure, you may be able to survive working a typical JOB and then plopping on the couch to watch some mindless brain numbing television. But you will probably work like that your entire life and retire with almost nothing and just barely surviving. You have the choice to work at a JOB and live with these results. Or, you can start your own business and work it consistently until you are financially free and can do what you want when you want. You can even do it while you still work at a JOB.

Think a little bit about what your future expenses may be. Do you have kids? What will their education expenses be? Do you have girls that one day may have wedding expenses that you are expected to pay? Have you thought about what kind of taxes you may have to pay? (They seem to go up every year whether federal, state, property, or anything else the government decides to tax). As for me, my kids go to a private school and my tuition keeps skyrocketing every year. If I only had a J.O.B., I would not be able to even afford the tuition, much less save for college or anything else.

I’m sure your pocket book is getting too light too fast right now with gasoline well over 3 dollars per gallon. Also, many of the basic food necessities have jumped in price as well. Just the normal living expenses have been climbing and the dollar is weakening. What are you doing to combat it? Are you trading more of your time for money? Many people that I know are just working extra hours for a little bit more pay. However, they don’t usually realize that they may be paying more taxes on the overtime and getting less take home pay per hour. Back to my main point; the time is much more valuable than the money.

If your time is invested wisely in your own business and the right systems are put in place, you can make MUCH more money than at a JOB. You can also build it where you invest the time creating a product or service ONCE and continue to get paid without having to put in more work. This is the essence of a freedom mentality instead of JOB mentality. My biggest successes in business have been my service businesses where I spend my focused work efforts creating the product. Then, it is just a matter of making it available, writing good copy (which I am admittedly not very good at yet), and getting traffic. After that, the sales start coming in and the money comes in every month. I’m generating a very generous income without even being good at writing copy. I’m still learning the ropes in this area. The point is, you don’t have to be great or even good at everything to make money. Just start your business and work at it. You will make mistakes but you will learn as you go. You will get better and better. I didn’t know squat when I started, but I learned along the way and it has paid off. I’m still learning in a lot of areas (and will never be an expert at everything).

Don’t live your life thinking you must have a good J.O.B. to be successful. That is what we are taught but it is not a path to freedom. Stop trading your time for money. A J.O.B. is a path to slavery to your employer - until they don’t need you anymore…. Start a business of your own and pave your path to financial freedom.

I live in Central Florida and we had the massive power outage all over the central and southern part of the state. The outage made national news. About 8 power plants were down for a few hours. One of the biggest issues with the power outage was the loss of power to many traffic lights. There were many accidents due to the powerless traffic lights. There was also a lot of traffic congestion causing many commute delays.

One thing I realized even more in this situation was how people feel about their passion or their J.O.B. Without fail, everyone that I talked to about the power outages with a JOB was either glad the power was out at their job so they didn’t have to work any more the rest of the day. Or, if the power was on where they worked, they wished it would go out for them so they didn’t have to work.

On the other hand, everyone that I talked to about the power outages that ran their own business and had a passion for what they do were glad they didn’t lose power so their work was not interrupted and they could continue to improve their business. Or, if their power was out, they couldn’t wait for it to come back on so they could get back to running their business that they loved. In fact, many of them that lost power were still working their business in ways that they didn’t need power.

You can really see the difference between those with JOB mentality and those with a freedom mentality. You can also see how people’s passions drive them to have a better business in times like this. It is really fascinating to see what really comes out of people when faced with challenges.

What do you do when the power goes out? Do you use it as an excuse to be lazy or do you look for ways to make the most of the time and still get things done?

- Hill Robertson

Submitting your blog to blog carnivals is one of the best ways to get quality targeted traffic to your blog. I am launching a new type of blog carnival submission service. It is a “pay per post” type of service. It is not a subscription service. This allows you to pick and choose the blog posts that you want to submit to the carnivals and when you want to submit them.

You can get it here:

http://hillrobertson.com/BlogCarnivalSubmissionService

All you have to do is purchase a submission and submit your blog post info in a simple form. Then, just wait for your information to be submitted to various blog carnivals that are related to the topic of your post. You will start to see your links posted to carnivals as they are issued. The links will start trickling in. The more submissions you make, the more links you get.

My service also allows you to stand out by giving you the option to add your own remarks about the blog post. This can be a summary or some sort of “teaser” to get readers to click on your link. This can be a very big advantage over the other blogs posted to the carnivals because most other blog links will just have the minimum information required.

Start sending quality traffic to your blog with my blog carnival submission service by clicking on the following link:

http://hillrobertson.com/BlogCarnivalSubmissionService

Submit your blog posts now.

- Hill Robertson

There really are an unlimited amount of ways you can make money on the internet legally, morally, and ethically. There are a lot of scams out there but there are also plenty of good ways to make money. The problem so many people have is there is too much - too many choices. Is this the problem you have?

It is easy to get paralyzed into doing nothing because you don’t know which path to choose. I have done the same thing many times before. As an entrepreneur, I constantly have money making ideas going through my head. They could all probably make good money, but I will catch myself not even getting started on one because I keep thinking what else I can do that would be even better. The reality is, until action is taken to actually turn the idea into a product, create the copy, and sell it, it is going to make absolutely zero dollars no matter what other “better” ideas are floating around my head. Do you do the same thing?

Until I learned to take an idea and just run with it until it is complete, I kept jumping from one thing to another. It is also easier to just focus on one product and get it done. You will be able to produce every product quicker when you focus on it. Then, once it is done, you can move on to the next “better” product. You will never have a perfect product. So stop waiting until it is perfect.

Just pick an idea for a product that you are passionate about and focus on it until it is complete. Sure, you may make some mistakes along the way but that is how you learn to make the next one even better. You won’t succeed without making some mistakes along the way anyway. So go ahead and get a bunch of “mistakes” under your belt so you can be closer to achieving your goals of success!

- Hill Robertson

Did you miss the password for the last post? Sorry…..

The passwords for private (protected) posts are sent to my subscribers that are subscribed via email (not external RSS readers). They get sent out prior to the private posts.

If you want the password for future private postings, please subscribe at the top right of this page so you will get future notifications. If you do, you will also get other benefits such as early product launches and/or discounts as well as extra little tid bits here and there.

All you need to do is enter your first name and your primary email address. I will NEVER sell or give your information to anyone. I hate spam myself with a passion since I host websites and have web/email servers all over the country and I know what a pain it is dealing with it. You’ll want to use your primary email address to hopefully avoid spam filters that drop so much of the valid mail these days (especially to free email accounts).

You can always cancel your subscription at any time if you want to quit getting emails.

Go ahead and sign up if you haven’t already……….. Do it now.

- Hill Robertson