One of the biggest dilemmas I am faced with today is how can I achieve financial freedom so that I don’t “have” to work anymore and can enjoy my life and focus on building my wealth instead of just getting by.

It is hard when you have so many different paths that you can take, all of which are good and could present a good outcome. Because of all these options I feel frustrated because I don’t know what to do and I don’t know which path to take. I feel like the person in Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Less Travelled”.

I have one goal, and that is financial freedom for myself and my family. But as we all know there are many ways to get from A to B. If I want to get from Sydney To Melbourne I can get there a variety I ways. I can fly, drive, ride a bike, walk or go by boat. I can go via perth, take a straight line or even go around New Zealand if I want. They all take you to the same place.

Different ways either take longer or cost you more. It may be cheaper to ride a bike than to drive, but it is quicker to drive than to ride a bike. So you have to pay in time and money. Generally speaking the more money you spend the less time it takes.

My Dilemma

I want to achieve financial freedom quickly, without the use of a lot of my own money.

A doctor can achieve financial freedom quite quickly as they earn a lot of money and can thus invest it to produce a passive income. I have chosen to take the path of not educating myself professionally and working/investing to become financially free. Instead I have decided to educate myself financially in the hopes that I can use that education to produce financial freedom with less time and less money. Sounds like a big ask doesn’t it.

What Are My Options?

Looking at my options is like looking at the beach. Every option is a grain of sand, yet when you look at the beach you don’t see individual grains of sand, you see a shoreline. That is how I feel sometimes. Completely overwhelmed by my options that I don’t really see the options of take advantage of them.

So what are some of my options?

1. Full Time Work + Property

I could go and get a full time job and earn $40-$50k per year and I would be happy to do this. It would allow me to invest in property more easily as I would have a strong standing with the banks and have access to more capital. However, the problem this forms for me is that I work have to work 5 days per week to earn the same amount I am earning now and I only work 2-3 days casual and do freelance writing (which gives me time with my family).

It is something that I have definately not ruled out, but something that is more in the back of my mind as an alternatie solution. If I worked full time I would probably stop internet marketing and I would focus on building a property portfolio to generate passive income.

2. Part Time Work + Internet Marketing + Property

I could get a part time job working 4 days per week, instead of working casual. If I did this I would stop freelance writing and focus on internet marketing with a slow entry into property once my internet marketing income grew. My internet marketing income is already on the rise and I am seeing passive income from my internet marketing.

For example, I have a check for a few hundred dollars in the mail and I get monthly deposits into my bank account from my internet marketing sites. I guess if I did this the focus would be to just work and spend my spare time to slowly build up my internet marketing business so that I could eventually work for myself. Then I would look at investing in property to replace my internet marketing income and thus become financially free.

So far this seems to be one of the highest ranking options

3. Casual Work + Freelance Writing + Internet Marketing + (maybe) Property

Currently this is what I am doing. I am working casually which pays the rent and then I am earning income as a freelance writer, and I am trying to fit in some internet marketing in there as well (which I am failing at). The great thing about this option is that freelance writing has SO MUCH potential.

I hated english in school and now writing and reading are my 2 favourite pastimes. I am a great writer and I can earn good money as a freelance writer (and I do). My clients are extremely excited about my high quality of writing and are willing to pay good money for it. Freelance writing has the potential to grow even more as I do more and more copywriting.

Copywriting is writing sales pages and when you can write copy like I can you can easily make enough money to live off. My current problem is A) Finding the time to write amongst everything else that is going on and B) Building up my client base so that I have a steady stream of income.

This goal here would be to try to replace casual work with freelance writing (which I would love to do) and then do freelance writing full time and internet marketing in my spare time. Then as my freelance writing career grew, and as my internet marketing income grew I would invest in property and become financially free.

The biggest thing holding me back from doing this is fear mixed with a little bit of tiredness. Fear that I won’t be able to earn enough and that I might fair and tiredness from the stress of the fear

As I Write This It Is Becoming Clearer

Remember how I said that sometimes I feel like I have so many options that I get overwhelmed? Well now that I am writing this down it is becoming clearer to me.

Before I was leaning more towards part time work 4 days per week, but now I am realising how much I LOVE to write and how exciting it would be to be a full time freelance writer.

Really option #3 would be the same as option #1 almost. Instead of working full time for a company and being paid as an employee I would be working full time for my clients and being paid for the work I do. I could keep this as a small business, or I could grow it and hire writers to work for me. There is so much potential in this.

Steps To Take

Now that I am starting to become clearer on my options I have a few steps to take. I need to firstly make the decision on the path that I am going to travel and I need to put all other paths out of my mind so that I can focus. I then need to say no to the other options so if more work comes up that doesn’t fit in with my chosen profession then I need to say no!

Then I need to focus. I need to focus on the job at hand and forget about all the other opportunities that are out there. I need to ask God to bless my decision and the path that I have chosen to take and I need to walk it.

I need to burn my boats as well. Burning your boats is an expression of burning all your other options so that you are forced to take the path you have traveled. Whatever I decide I need to burn my other boats and drive myself forward.

Thank you to my blog for letting me get all this out. Getting things down on paper (or in this case on my blog) really helps me clarify things. It is strange that I don’t do it more often.

[UPDATE - Adding 1,000 people a day will likely get your account suspended with Twitter. To avoid this add around 300 per day, and don't mass unfollow people quickly. For me I would have a week off following people to do one mass unfollow....then start following again. This makes growing your account a bit slower but is still a great way to grow your account quickly]

I have set myself a BHAG – A Big Hairy Audacious Goal – to get 50,000 twitter followers by 1/1/11 and to make loads of money from those twitter followers.

Currently I have about 5,400 twitter followers and this is growing every single day. But it is time to up the anti and to increase my twitter followers by 10 times that amount. In the mean time I may as well starting making a bucketload of money from my new found twitter fame.

So How Can You Actually Grow Your Twitter Following By 50,000 In Just 6 Months?

It is actually a lot easier than you might think. All it takes is a little diligence and some hard work…or you can outsource these tasks for as little as $1/hour using ODesk. It is really easy and almost anyone can do it.

Step 1 – Find A Twitter User With 50,000 Followers Who Is Following The Same Amount of People

By finding a twitter user with 50,000 followers who is also following 50,000 this means that they autofollow everyone who follows them. It also means there is a good chance that all of their followers will autofollow anyone who follows them.

If you want to follow more than 50,000 then find a few users with 50,000 followers each. Or find a user with over 100,000 followers who is also following 100,000 people.

Step 2 – Everyday Follow 1,000 of Those Followers

Everyday twitter allows you to follow 1,000 people. So everyday you need to follow 1,000 people. The chances are that most of the people you follow will follow you back.

This is painful work, and who has a couple of hours to spend everyday for 6 months? I certainly don’t…that is why step 3 is so important.

Step 3 – Outsource Following Tasks For $1/hour
Instead of trying to follow 1,000 people a day yourself you can outsource this task on ODesk for as little as $1/hour. It wouldn’t take more than 2 hours per day to do this…that’s $2/day.

The awesome thing about outsourcing is that because you are paying someone to do it, they will do it everyday without fail. Meaning you could grow your twitter following by more than 182,000 followers in 6 months…and it will only cost you around $350. (182 days x 1,000 follows per day = 182,000). Once you reach 50,000 followers it will likely only take you a few tweets to make your $350 back, because a huge twitter following is a money making machine.

Now not everyone you follow will follow you back, but that is alright. Of 182,000 that you follow in 6 months time it is very likely that at least 50,000 people will follow you back. Those that don’t follow you; you auto-unfollow all of them at once using one of the many tools out there

Click Here To Sign Up For ODesk For Free

So Now That I Am Growing My Twitter Following How Do I Make Money From It?

There are a few different ways to make money with your list.

1. Sponsored Tweets
Sponsored Tweets is a website that allows you to sell a tweet. This means advertisers can pay you to write a tweet about their product.

Some movie stars with upwards of 1.5 million followers charge around $8,000 for one tweet. Who needs to ever work again if just one tweet will make you that much money!!! Just 5 tweets a year and you would be well ahead of the average wage of Australia/America.

But with 50,000 followers you could probably make around $50-$100/tweet from Sponsored Tweets. Do that once per day and you will be making $18,000-$37,000 per year just from Sponsored Tweets.

Click Here To Sign Up For Sponsored Tweets Today And Starting Making Money

2. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is another great way to make money by tweeting. Instead of being paid to tweet you write a tweet with an affiliate link in it. Everyone who signs up for your affiliate offer through the link in your tweet makes you money.

John Chow has approximately 55,000 followers and he made over $4,000 from one tweet just by posting about an affiliate offer.

Market Leverage and Motive Interactive are two affiliate networks that have some pretty good offers. You don’t even have to sell anything to make money because some offers pay you a small amount (around $1) for every person that enters their email address.

Get just 1% of your 50,000 followers to sign up for one of these offers (remember they don’t even have to buy anything) and you have made $500.

You can also market products that people buy. Some products on Market Leverage pay you $80 and the customer only buys the product for $30. Get just 1% of your 50,000 followers to buy this product and BAM you just made $40,000.

Affiliate marketing had a lot of potential on twitter. Just write your affiliate tweets as you would write any other tweet and try not to make it look like spam.

3. Email Marketing
I love making money from email marketing and to me a large email list is always going to be better than a large twitter list. So why not use twitter to grow your email marketing list?

To get 5,000 email subscribers can be hard. But if you build up a twitter following of just 50,000 followers (which will be easy) then you only need 10% to subscribe and you have will have a email list teeming with potential. Keep outsourcing your twitter building using ODesk and soon you could have over 300,000 twitter followers, which could build a MASSIVE email marketing list.

Offer your twitter followers a variety of free stuff (different offers will attract different people and increase your chances of more subscribers). Then set up a bunch of email autoresponder messages with Aweber and let the emails market affiliate products for you.

For best results use the emails to market both your own products and affiliate products. It is also a good idea to writing teaching emails and teach people how to do things, and then recommend them products.

Aweber is awesome because you can run your entire email marketing campaign on autopilot. You write the emails once and when someone signs up Aweber send out the emails (in order) for you. So you can literally make money while you sleep.

Click Here to sign up for Aweber for $1

4. Website Traffic
You can use twitter to drive traffic to your blog, website of squeeze page. I use a plugin called Tweetly Updator, which automatically updates my twitter account whenever I publish a new post on my blog. This generally sends a small influx of people to my blog.

I am sure that when I have 50,000 followers instead of 5,000 I will get a lot more people coming to my blog through twitter. Economies of scale

5. Sell Your List

I have never done it myself, but I am sure that you could create targeted twitter followings and sell them to people.

As you can see, growing your twitter list to 50,000 in 6 months is not only easy, but it can be very beneficial and bring in a fair bit of extra income. That extra income could pay off the credit card, pay off your home faster, pay for a holiday or a night out, or completely fund your lifestyle and give you the freedom to do whatever you want. It is your choice.

Everyday you waste is a day you are missing out on an abundance of income from twitter. So get cracking. Go to ODesk and get a worker for $1/hour who will build your list for you.

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One of the things I have found with hosting is that you will always have some problems with your site from time to time, no matter who you are with. Having a good support system allows you to fix your problem quickly and get on with your day to day business.

Well I just got home from work so I am in bed on my iPhone and I have this problem. So I log onto Hostgator support on my iPhone and select the chat option. Within one minute I was chatting with someone from support WHILE I WAS ON MY IPHONE!!! Talk about an amazing support system. In no time my problem was fixed and my site up and running.

Hostgator support system rocks and it is for that sole reason I would recommend them to anyone setting up a new blog or website.

For a $9.94 discount on your hosting use the coupon code RYANMCLEAN or BESTHOSTING. You can’t go wrong with Hostgator and I would highly recommend them.

I love it when things work!

At the moment I am trying to focus on continuing to build my passive income. I can proudly say that I have a nice little passive income online, earning me money whether I work or not. But the ultimate goal is to have a full time passive income.

This will give me financial freedom and I will have the decision whether I want to work or whether I want to do other things. And as big as this goal may sound I want to achieve it in 4 years with almost no money behind me. Here’s how:

Creating A System That Works For Me

I am currently in the process of creating a system and systems that works for me. My systems are really simple and use technology to operate on autopilot. All I need to do is set them up and then drive traffic.

My system works like this.

Create a series of autoresponder emails through Aweber (trying to make a years worth of weekly emails. Each email markets products that I take a commission for.

Then drive traffic to a squeeze page and get people to sign up for my email newsletter.

It is really that simple. Once I set up the system all I need to do is drive traffic and the system works for me. When I get enough income I can outsource the traffic creating through ODesk or by using PPC and then it becomes completely passive income.

Building Multiple Systems

I only really keyed into this “build the system then drive traffic” a couple of weeks ago. I have know it for ages but never really done it.

I am now doing the hardest part, building the systems. This week I built the front end for Rich Academy, which is a free 50 page ebook. Then I will probably spend the next few weeks completing that system by writing up my 52 weeks worth of emails.

Then I will go on a build another system on Cash Flow Investor with a free ebook, 2 paid products and 52 weeks worth of emails. This will probably take me about a month.

All This Work For No Results

I am building the two systems because they will intertwine and build off each other. But the problem with building the systems is that you don’t make any money while you build them. I will have to wait till after they are built (when I focus on traffic generation) to really start to see some results.

But once they are created I know without a doubt in my mind that this system will work well for me.

In The Mean Time

In the mean time I will fund my family by working, freelance writing and copywriting. Writing can earn me up to $400/day and copy writing has huge potential…so the good thing is I won’t be starving while building my retirement income.

The End Goal That Makes It All Worthwhile

The end goal that will make all this worthwhile is a full time passive income online. Not just a passive income that makes me a bit of extra money, but something that will fund my lifestyle completely!

Then I can spend my days with my family, and spend my time focusing on growing my passive income…without being distracted by money troubles.

All Possible By A System

Aweber allows me to create this system. Then once I have created it I can use the power of FOCUS to focus on generating loads and loads of traffic to my sites (funneling people into my systems). This focus will produce great results, which will hopefully make me a lot of money.

This is my basic plan (at the moment) to achieve financial freedom in the next 4 years. Do you have a plan?

Today I was reading my 4 month old baby daughter a book on my iPhone and showing her a bunch of flash cards.

With new technology coming out every day making our lives simpler and more complicated at the same time, the need for paper is becoming smaller and smaller. Look at the changes that have happened or are happening:

• Email replaced snail mail
• Sales pages replaced sales letters
• Advertising online replaced flyers
• Blogs and other news sites replaced newspapers
• The iPad, Kindle and other Ebook readers are replacing books
• Digital cameras replaced printed photos

We are moving towards being a paperless society, and I have been thinking about making the ultimate leap and going paperless. I mean not keeping any bit of paper I don’t need.

There are some pieces of paper you can’t avoid keeping. I have to keep the registration slip for my car, there are some receipts I need to keep and some bits of paper are practical to keep (like my trust deeds etc). But the idea of removing every bit of paper from my desk, my bag and my house is very enticing.

I am definately considering it and want to make the move either this year or next year. Man it would feel good to purge myself of all paper.

So how could you do it? I wrote down a few things I would do to make the move to paperless.

Create An E-Filing Cabinet On Your Compuer
Create a folder on my computer and scan all the important documents I need.

Most important documents you don’t need hard copies of. Bank statements, health care info, superannuation statements, car receipts, school reports etc. For most of these things a scanned copy in a filing cabinet on your desktop would suffice.

Back Everything Up
I would get Mobile Me and back everything up so that if my computer died I would still have everything. I would also get an external hard drive too.

Replace Books With The iPad
I would get an iPad with iBooks and replace all my books with the iPad. All my books would be in one place and there would be no paper

Import DVDs onto Computer
Let’s face it, DVDs are on their way out. I would convert all my DVDs into digital files and store them on a hard drive that was connected to my TV so I could watch whatever I wanted when I wanted.

The Cost
I estimate the cost to be:
2 x Wireless hardrives = $1,200
1 x iPad = $600
Repurchasing Book Collection = $3,000

So really it would cost me about $5,000 to go completely paperless….if I could afford it then I would do it in a heartbeat.

The other day I visited this cute second hand book store and I bought the Robert Kiyosaki book “The Cashflow Quadrant”.

The book talks about the different ways to earn an income (as an employee, self employed, business owner and investor) and talks about the best way to move towards financial freedom.

I have read the book before but it is good to refresh my memory and get re-inspired to achieve financial freedom.

How To Achieve Financial Freedom
Robert recommends that the best way for most people to achieve financial freedom is to start to generate money by owning an automated business first (one that brings you money whether you work or not) and then invest that money to make more money.

This is encouraging for me to hear. As I do not currently have the money to invest (in property) to achieve financial freedom that way I have been focusing on building my automated business in my spare time (while working as an employee and being self employed).

My automated business is quite simple really. I collect email subscribers and send them automated messaged using Aweber. I am good at collecting subscribers but not as good at converting them into cha-Ching.

A Little Frustrated
At the moment, reading the book, I am a little frustrated. I want to spend time building up my passive income, but time seems quite hard to come by at the moment. I also don’t yet know how much I make per subscriber so I can’t spend money to build my list quicker.

So at the moment I am juggling earning a good income, paying off some debt and saving some money (or trying to) and still having some free time to develop my passive income. I am not the best juggler yet.

Light At The End Of The Tunnel
My list is making money…that is the good news. It isn’t costing me anything but is making me money every month. The system is there I just need to build on it to make it more profitable before I scale it up to include more subscribers and more customers.

So there is light at the end of the tunnel. I know what I have to do, but finding the time and energy to do it while paying all the bills is the hard part.

This is just a personal rant because I couldn’t read the book, get all fired up, and then just go to sleep. I had to get my mind on paper.

Over the past few years I have built up a pretty sizeable email list and at times I have made decent money from this list. When I ran the full time blog SmarterWealth.net I could easily make $100 per product review because of the size of my list.

I run my list through Aweber, which is an email marketing tool, and Aweber allows you to send out automatic emails to my subscribers. So when someone signs up for my list (for example by using the form in the sidebar of this blog) then emails are sent out to them automatically.

Recently I updated my series of emails and I wrote about 20 emails that taught people basic concepts about wealth and thinking the way rich people think. But I wasn’t making any money from any of my emails. Then the other day I realised why:

I didn’t mention any products or have any advertising in any of my emails. No mention of products = no sales = no commissions. How dumb have I been. My list has been growing, and all the while I have been getting poorer because I haven’t been making any money from my life.

Starting Afresh and Making Some Money
So I have decide to start changing my emails one at a time. Whenever I want to start something new I always want to delete everything that is old and just write everything completely new.

But at the moment with family/work/freelance writing/everything else I don’t exactly have the time to delete and rewrite 20 emails in one day (or even one week). My other emails aren’t bad, they just don’t serve their purpose. So over the next few months I will be replacing them one by one with teaching emails.

These emails will be helpful but they will also mention products that will help people to achieve their financial goals. I won’t be spamming people, all of the products I market will be helping people to achieve their financial goals for a fraction of the price of say a mutual fund manager or a stock broker.

Why I Think This Has Clout Over All The Other Ideas In My Brain
As an entrepreneur I have many ideas rattling around in my brain, so why is this idea worth writing a blog post about?

I guess what makes this idea so good is that it can generate me a passive income. I can and am already making money online through freelance writing and writing sales copy, I don’t need another source of income that will make more work for me. My email list is already there, and it is already growing on autopilot, so I may as well take advantage of that fact.

Also, because emails can be sent out automatically, this has the potential to generate me passive income through affiliate sales and sales of my own products. This means I will be able to make money without having to work and I can then drop back on my working hours and spend more time with my family.

My Retirement Fund
I like to think of my email subscriber list as my retirement fund. Over time I am growing it by putting a little bit of time and effort into it here and there but mostly I am letting it grow on it’s own. Eventually it will earn enough money to pay for my lifestyle and I will be able to officially retire.

Making This Massive
Once these emails are written (the ones that market products) I can then begin to work out my average cost per subscriber. So if I get 100 new subscribers and make $100 from them then each subscriber is worth $1.

Once I have worked out my cost per subscriber I can then kick things into high gear and as long as I am not spending more than $1 to get a new subscriber I am either breaking even or making a profit. So I can start spending money to grow my list and make more money…this will be when my retirement fund really starts working for me.

Do You Have A Retirement Fund?
No I am not talking about a traditionally retirement fund, I am talking about one that can generate your passive income NOW so that you can quit or cut back on work and still live the life you are living (and afford to live it). My retirement fund is growing and it is costing me ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to grow it. My return on investment is infinity because it doesn’t cost me anything.

If you want to grow your retirement fund like me then I have the deal for you. You can sign up for Aweber for just $1 for the first month. You can try this out for JUST $1!!! What do you have to lose? Start building a retirement fund (aka an email subscriber list) so you can retire early like I will.

From now on I will be posting my weekly email newsletters that I write so that I can give my email subscribers quick reference to emails that have been written in the past. You can view all the past emails by clicking on the “Email Newsletters” Category in the sidebar.

ps. Some of the formatting gets mixed up in the move from email to my blog. For best results sign up for my email newsletter!!!

I was at work today (at the chemist) and some how we got talking about high school and the marks we got. In my final year I got a UAI of 94.65, which is very good (it means I’m smart) and the girls at work were saying I could do anything.

Trying to sound the least amount of cocky possible I know that I am very smart. If I wanted to I could do physics, psychology, pharmacy, Scientology, or any other kind of ology that needs a big brain and a fancy degree. But my response to the girls was that I am already doing what I want to be doing.

At heart I am a family man through and through. Instead of using my smarts (at this point in time) to get a degree and make a lot of money I am using my smarts to do exactly what I want to do, that is, starting a family.

Also, on the money side of things, I am using my smarts as an entrepreneur. I really enjoy starting businesses. Sure, I am not amazing at it yet…but I am learning heaps and constantly growing smart and smarter (and slowly earning more and more money from it). Currently I am freelance writing and copywriting full time. With the writing and working at the chemist I am earning decent money, not amazing but decent.

Why Don’t You Get A Career?

A lot of people ask (and if they don’t ask they wonder) why I haven’t gone and got myself a career. Because I easily could, I could go to uni and do almost any uni course I wanted and I could study to be something and then launch a good solid career and earn a bucket load of money (if I had to do this I would become a psychologist and they earn loads). Some might think I am scared, or maybe I am lazy, or maybe I am just odd.

The reason I do business is because it is a game, there is a huge element of fun to it. It is fun trying new things and new ways to make money, it is fun trying to turn an idea into a viable business, it is fun waking up (like I did this morning) and reading an email telling me I just earned $50 in my sleep.

I could do a career, but the element of the game isn’t there. I look at the old fart businessmen like Rupert Murdoch, Mr “Westfield Shopping Town”, James Packer and the other Billionaires and I can see they are in their element. Some are in their 70′s and 80′s and charging on. They don’t work for money, when you have 5 Billion to your name making more money isn’t a top priority. They do it because this is their fun, this is their game. That is where I can see myself when I am 70.

So in answer to the question “What Do I Want To Do With My Life?” the answer is three fold

1. Be a Family Man and have a bus load of kids and be an awesome dad and raise an awesome family. There is nothing more important than this.

2. Be a businessman and entrepreneur. Start businesses, build businesses, run businesses and sell businesses. Business is the game and money is how you keep score.

3. Ministry. I am a christian and serving God is extremely important to me. I want to use my skills as a family man and entrepreneur to impact my community and make a positive impact. How positive an impact do you think you could make with $5 Billion?

I wonder what you want to do with your life.