When I first started the Money Gym, and wrote the “Financial Intelligence 101″ tips, that grew into The Money Gym ebook, one of the most popular sections was the Property Investing Section.  Everyone wanted to know about investing in, and making money from property.

In the early days, when we used to host the Money Gym workshops at The Acacia, my much loved boutique hotel and my latest venture into property investing, we used to cover “The Top 10 Ways To Make Money In Property” and we used to simply tell people about them, they used to go off and investigate the one they liked the sound of, then we would coach them from there.

However, one day, a couple of guys came along who blew most of our “Top 10″ out of the water. 

Out of “Top 10 Ways To Make Money In Property” only three of them remain.  Which ones?  Aha, you will have to wait for the next few days to find out that!

After we heard about how these guys invested in property, we simply couldn’t, in all good conscience, just tell folks how they COULD invest in property, but we felt we then had to share how we felt people SHOULD invest in property.

Now this went right against all accepted coaching law and wisdom, I can tell you!

But hey ho!  Wealth coaching has always been different - a mix of training, mentoring and coaching, rather than pure coaching itself.

At The Money Gym, we aim to save you time, money, and stop you making expensive mistakes.

Mistakes like I made with buying that hotel in the first place.  If these two guys, my mates Greg and Andy, had been around in 2003, there is NO WAY they would have let me buy it.  They would have stopped me making THAT half million pound mistake.

Side note:  You will see in this week’s ezine, I talk about the difference between “failure” and a “mistake” and it’s an important distinction to make if you are an entrepreneur.  Essentially, a failure is something that can bury you but you can learn from your mistakes.

That hotel was a mistake - some would definately see it as a failure - but I choose now to see it as a mistake.  A very large one true….. 

One that taught me a VERY LARGE LESSON!  In fact, SEVERAL very large lessons.

I will never forget the moment in the garden of The Acacia, when Greg or Andy uttered the immortal words that made me realise that buying it had been a mistake and told me why.

1.  This hotel will never make you the amount of profit that would make all the work you put into it, worth it.
2.  You have a lot of your own money in this business and you will struggle to ever get it out.
3.  When you have had enough and you do want to sell it, nobody will buy it, unless you find someone as daft as you were, to buy it in the first place.

Hmmmmm…..

They like straight talking, those two.  And that is one of the things I most value about Greg & Andy. So many people won’t tell you what you need to hear.  Nobody around me in those days did, that’s for sure.  Hence the mistakes.

So, five years on, here we are, still making mistakes but not so many, and certainly not failing, and together with Steve and Judith, two more straight talkers, they are still two of my closest friends and mentors.  Whenever I want some advice about business and life, I go straight to Greg, and to Andy for property market / business marketing / creative / internet input.

So you can imagine how thrilled I am that Greg still comes to London, to present for The Money Gym on property investing.

I can’t imagine how much longer he will do that, as we are pretty much the only presenting he does outside their own Open Days.

He’s coming to the Southwark Rose on 14th June and really, you should be there. 

* If you have questions about the current property market, you should be there.

* If you have questions about your business proposition, you should be there.

* If you just want to see a down to earth, authentic, funny, FANTASTIC speaker, you should be there.

* If you want to recharge your wealth creation batteries, and hang out with some like minded people, you should be there.

That’s five “shoulds” in five lines, I’m about to get struck off the Eurocoach List!

Book your place here - still some Early Birds left as I’m late promoting this due to half term.

http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/MGPresents/property2.htm

See you there!

Nicola

p.s.  Greg always sells out fast so get your space booked now.

Tags: Highway #1 : Business Success, Highway #3 : Property Investing, Success Thinking by Nicola Cairncross
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Following on from my blog posting yesterday, giving you some simple resources to get you started online, here are a couple more, along with news of an exciting and totally fr*ee webinar I’m hosting tomorrow morning (Friday) at 11am, with Tim Brocklehurst, genius list builder extraordinaire!

Resource 1:

Yesterday we covered the need for a website or blog, to allow people to find you, and find out who you are, what you do, what you recommend (via an affiliate link) and most importantly, what you can do for them. 

You would be amazed how easy and cheap it is to set up a professional search engine friendly blog and we recommend Typepad for starters.  If you want the most economic package with the best features, you will need the middle package and you can get a free trial here

http://viralurl.com/moneygym/typepad

Resource 2: 

The internet marketing section of The Money Gym ebook is a good place to start with the basics, and you can get that at no charge, just by subscribing to our 101 Wealth Tips on the site.  However, as a reader of our blog, if you have lost or deleted it or don’t want to wait for the internet module to arrive, you can download the whole 101 tips here as a zipped up file. 

[Read more →]

Tags: Wealth Coach Diaries by Nicola Cairncross
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Money Gym Club Member Yvonne Halling has written a great article over at her blog at Well Heeled Diva’s about how tragically ill-equipped kids are to go out into the big wide world and survive financially….

“Sitting having dinner the other night with my 17 year old daughter and her boyfriend, I was listening to them talking about their lives. Both at college and looking for part-time jobs to supplement their life-style, they were bemoaning the fact that neither of them had any idea how to make money. And it’s the same for their friends too. They’re all broke and miserable. They have been taught at school to be employees - being paid what someone else thinks your worth.

In the 21st century, simply not knowing how to make money will become a serious problem, and it’s already started.

Why don’t they teach this in school? You’d think in this day and age, they’d include just maybe one class a week on ‘How to make money’ wouldn’t you? Why not? Maybe because the teachers themselves have no idea how to make money, so how could they ……………………

READ MORE HERE >>>>

Tags: Success Thinking by Nicola Cairncross
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The Money Gym members are throwing down an internet challenge says Money Gym coach Marion Ryan!  Nowadays, we are always hearing about the big bucks that can be made on the internet, millions of dollars/pounds in one day sometimes, and the concept of making money while you sleep is an exciting one - if true!

Sitting at home in our jim-jams eating bagels and left-over Easter eggs, watching Jeremy Kyle on the telly and stopping only briefly to see how many more sales have pinged into our Paypal account.  Wouldn’t that be nice?

Just one ebook sale per day @ £20, from one one-page website, would make us an extra £7300 a year - enough for a new car or a couple of nice holidays.  Two or three ebooks doing the same would make £21,900 - nearly a full time wage.  The beauty of the internet is that you do the work once, and the money keeps coming.  Imagine if you could spend a month putting up one ebook for sale - by the end of the year, you would be making £87,600 per annum.

There’s a problem though. The reality, for many of us is that we make a tenner here, twenty quid there, but most people never get much further than that in our pursuit of passive income. 

Founder of The Money Gym Nicola Cairncross, who has built a six-figure business marketed entirely online, and who once made £14,000 in one weekend from one email, tells us she knows exactly why that is: 

* We aren’t prepared to focus our attention in one place, on one thing, for long enough to make it work.

Nicola says if we just focus on one thing – one information product, one niche or one passionate interest – and take consistent regular action we can make ourselves some passive income online, and having done it once, can replicate those results over and over.   This action would include

* Creating a web presence – a sales page, a brochure site, a blog.  All of them preferably

* Capturing visitors’ details, encouraging them to subscribe to ezines (online newsletters)

* Turning them into raving fans by providing regular, maybe even daily, valuable content

* Having a system to automate the selling of our product till we make a profit

* Replicating the process.

As Nicola says, “like creating wealth, making money online is simple but it’s not easy, you have to get off your “assets”, learn new skills and take some action”. 

To encourage - or even bully! their Money Gym members, to success, Nicola and Judith, her partner, have decided to set up an Internet Challenge for any of us who are sick of diddling about in this “Wealth Highway Lane” on a rusty old bike with a punctured tyre and broken bell and would like to trade up to a moped, a Harley or a Porsche.  Something that will always need a bit of maintenance and some petrol but then just watch it go…

The Money Gym are incentivising their new Silver members and supporting them in the Challenge by giving them free lifetime access to Nicola’s 12-Step Internet Marketing Home Study Course - which retails for £1450 - and membership of a private email support group.  This will provide encouragement, resources and a kick up the backside! 

Your investment £27.50 a month (minimum one year), your return will be the support and knowledge to create a passive income online for life.

So if you’d like to join us for a three-month personal challenge to up the stakes on our internet passive income game then you should visit http://www.TheMoneyGymClub.com and join the club at Silver Level using the promotional code InternetChallenge.

Then, join the private Google group and do a search for “internet challenge” and you can read all the back discussions and get involved right now!

Tags: Highway #1 : Business Success, Highway #2 : Internet Marketing, Success Thinking by Nicola Cairncross
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Nicola Cairncross recommends:  If you want to get control of your money, and discover whether you are going in the right direction financially, I highly recommend the Cashflow chapter in The Money Gym ebook (see pic on right for link).

There are two elements to good financial control;  one is to keep on top of and manage your cashflow, and the second is to take a quarterly snapshot of your assets, liabilities, income, outgoings, and overall net worth.  Both of these can be easy to do, with the right (simple) tools. 

Do not disappear up your own derrieres with details, on this one folks!  Remember what one of my first financial mentors, Gill Fielding always says, the best deals can be worked out on the back of a fag packet,and so it is with keeping control of your finances.

On the spreadsheet front, the one on P12 of the book is the old one we used to use, and it’s very good still.  But we now use a different one for our own accounts, one given to us by Greg Ballard of Passive Investments (www.AskNicolaCairncross.com/Recommends/Passive in case you don’t know them - I’m happy to take advice from someone who can take £10k on a credit card and turn it into over £30 million in property in just 10 years!!)

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Tags: Success Thinking by Nicola Cairncross
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If you are supplying a service such as coaching or website design, you urgently need to read this article! Cara Williams sounds a note of caution…..she says:

“I’m a freelance web designer and I recently had an experience with a client using PayPal as a payment method which I think more freelancers need to be aware of.

Mistake #1: I didn’t research my client.

In February last year, a potential client emailed me and said he’d seen my site in a CSS design showcase and asked me to quote for a project he had. I spent a lot of time helping him through the jargon and helping him lay a good foundation for a successful web project by defining his ideas of what he wanted the site to achieve. After lots of the usual emails back and forth, he then abruptly emailed and said “This is on hold sorry”. He disappeared for a couple of months and then made contact again only after he said he’d “wasted 4 weeks with the last designer”. Now I know obviously this should have sent a few alarm bells ringing, and with hindsight being 20/20, I should have questioned and done a bit of research on this client before I made the decision to accept the job.

Mistake #2: I accepted credit card payments via PayPal.

As the client was in New York and I was in Brisbane, Australia, I thought I’d better be cautious let him know up front that I’ll require payment at regular intervals. First, a small deposit up-front, then only at key stages when work has been completed and approved. I chose PayPal as the payment method for as an easy and secure way of transferring the funds internationally…..

READ MORE HERE >>>

Tags: Highway #1 : Business Success, Highway #2 : Internet Marketing by Nicola Cairncross
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