Like climbing a mountain or going through a video game, you will have to go through different levels in the game of making money. Like a Madden 2010 strategy guide, your boy is here to give you some insights into the 5 Levels of a Hustler before you make your first play. With strategy and vision, you will be able to level up.

The 5 Levels

When you first start out in the game you are doing a hell of a lot. It takes you months to get projects off the ground, weeks of networking, days of planning, and hours of hustling to make even the simplest of tasks happen (like setting up a website, or opening a hotwing stand). For every 500 sentences you speak or write, maybe one will be heard. For every 100 people that you follow on twitter, only 5 follow you back – and 2 of them are network marketers. This is called Level 1. Its where EVERYBODY starts out, and there is no shame in being at level one. Hey, gotta pay your dues. The only shame comes from staying at level one – you will work yourself to death or quit.

Then, after youve been grinding for awhile, something happens – people start to respect your hustle. This is Level 2 of the game. Your website stats jump from 1 reader to 60 to 600 per day. Every other Tweet you send is retweeted by 10 people. Cats start filling up your barber chairs and you start moving hotwings by the dozen.You start actually making a living from your hustles, and you are officially working for yourself. You can afford to quit your day job and work your hustle exclusively. As good as it feels to break the bonds of your corporate pimp (and if you have a “job”, youre a corporate ho!) you are still only a Level 2 Hustler – you still gotta ho yourself out to keep money coming in.

At Level 3, you go from “working for yourself” to being an employer. Other people move your wings for you, other people manage your website and report to you first thing in the morning – every morning. You hire college kids to work your wing stand. You manage employees. This level comes with its own headaches (managing payroll all by yourself, filing taxes all by yourself, dealing with employees suddenly quitting or setting your kitchen on fire), but the biggest advantage is that you are in the Captains chair. You are the pimp. People work for you, not the other way around, and you will start to experience time freedom – one of the most valuable freedoms there are.

Level 4 is when life starts to get good. You expand operations, create franchises, and build a business empire.  Instead of hiring employees, you hire people to manage your entire operations – they hire and fire, order goods, take care of repairs, manage website eCommerce, and deposit your mutha-effin money. You dont have to deal with employees – you deal with professionals that you mentor and lead. You pimp pimps. You have a full staff of lawyers, accountants, analysts, brokers, and researchers to ensure everything flows smoothly. A great book that talks about becoming a Level 4 Hustler is E-Myth Mastery: The Seven Essential Disciplines for Building a World Class Company

At Level 5, you are a God amongst men. Your full time job is to manage and spend your money, or do whatever it is you choose to do. Not only are you completely free, but you are completely in control and can instead focus on building generational wealth. Your enterprises work fine whether or not you are there, and you can hand over the reigns of CEO to somebody else (Note: you still retain influence over the direction of your company by becoming the company’s Chairman).

Noe that you know where you can go, dont get discouraged at Level 1! The point of this post is to let you know that it gets easier as you go up, but you have got to learn to WORK SMARTER. In my next post I will give you 10 shortcuts to get to my level and above. Until then, check out my new eBook, The Evolution of a Hustler (to the left!) and make sure you subscribe! Have a Merry Christmas, and I will be at you with a brand new post on the 29th!

Popularity: 22% [?]

This is an important repost from Seth Godin’s blog. I normally don’t repost other peoples content unless they guest blog, but this is so important to everybody trying to sell something (which if you are a hustler, this means you!) that I felt it necessary.

Think like me, agree with me

When you’re trying to sell your idea, it’s natural to assume that the people you’re selling to think the way you do. If you can only show them the facts and stories that led you to believe what you believe, then of course they’ll end up where you are… believing.

The problem, of course, is that people don’t always think like you.

Go watch some videos of people of different political ideologies talking about why they support a candidate other than your candidate. These people are stupid! They can’t conjugate an idea, they have no factual basis for their beliefs, they are clueless, they are ideologues, they are parroting a talking head who knows even less than they do! (And those epithets apply to anyone you disagree with, of course). In fact, they’re saying the same thing about you.

Same goes for diehard fans of the other brand, or worse, the clueless who should be using your solution, but don’t even care enough to use your competitor’s product.

If they only thought like you, of course, and knew what you know, then there wouldn’t be a problem.

The challenge doesn’t lie in getting them to know what you know. It won’t help. The challenge lies in helping them see your idea through their lens, not yours. If you study the way religions and political movements spread, you can see that this is exactly how it works. Marketers of successful ideas rarely market the facts. Instead, they market stories that match the worldview of the people being marketed to.

[There's an alternative, one that you might want to think hard about: perhaps you should only market your idea to people who already think the way you do. After all, you're not running for president, you don't need a majority. Screen people by their behavior (what they read, what they buy, how they act) and only tell your story to the people who will embrace it. That's a lot easier to do that than it's ever been before.]

Popularity: 10% [?]

I was talking to my man Charles CZA Sweet over at 10facets.com last night and he asked about the results of Mission 1

“Didnt I post them already?” I asked

“Uhh, no. You didnt.”

Oops. So here are the overdue results from the mission, which was starting with $20 or less, to flip your money over the course of a month. The winner was Booker, from TGTMONEY.COM, and he droips some great knowledge that all of us can use, so bookmark this ish, and if you have a site, try it out.

Heres what he sent me:

Ok well as stated above the mission is to start with $20 or less, and then flip the money over the course of the month. I took a less conventional path with this which I was not even sure if it would work, but felt this would be a good time to test it out.

Being the person who likes to analyze the rules and find ways to bend them, I took a closer look at the mission stated. It says to start with “$20 or less” well I started with less alright. In fact I started with $0. I started with $0 and ended with $24.14. I did this by leveraging two things:

1. My blog
2. Clickbank

The process I used is quite lengthy so I will go into detail about the methods I used. The actual process I learned from another blog I follow so I cannot take full credit from it. To begin, I searched Clickbank and looked through the marketplace. My searches were for products by their name “i.e. xbox, abs, cell phone, etc…”. I concentrated on products within the Top 30 and that had a grav that was over 50. I compiled a list of products after viewing their pitch page and decided which ones I wanted to advertise.

After the list was compiled, I went over to Google Adwords to use their keyword tool and come up with some keywords to market with. That way I do not have to come up with keywords on my own and can get an idea of what people were actually searching for. Next I went to labs.wordtracker.com/keyword-questions/ to see what questions were being asked around that keyword. With that information I was able to determine if it would be wise to advertise the products on my list or to find some more with a decent amount of search traffic.

With keywords in hand and questions being asked about the keywords I now had to make a blog entry answering the questions. But I did not actually have to write each blog entry nor did I have to learn about the question to post a correct answer. What I did was use wikiHow.com. I typed in the main keyword of my products and found answers to the questions I made a list of. Once I read through the answer and verified that it was a decent article, I decided to use the article on my blog. The glory with wikiHow is they have a feature where you can easily embed articles to your sites or blogs by clicking a link near the bottom of the article. They supply you with HTML code to paste in your blog and it is as easy as that.

Once the articles were on my site answering the questions, I posted Clickbank ads on those posts that had to do with the question. Example would be the question “How to fix Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death” and then I would answer the question via wikiHow and post the Clickbank product advertising an eBook explaining how to fix it. The key to the article is you want to find an answer that answers the question just enough to make it look as you know about the topic but not enough to fully send them on their way.

Also I post-dated all of these posts for a couple reasons. One I did not want these under my recent post on my site simply because these entries were solely for advertising purposes. The second reason was because I wanted to give the impression the answer was up for a decent amount of time. Not too old to not be relevant but not too young to not be time tested.
So to recap I had a question, keywords based on that question, an answer, and a product that was relevant to all of the above. All that was left was for me to drive traffic to the post on my site. I submitted the posts to Digg and other directories and answered a few questions on Yahoo Answers with links back to my page.

Out of the many articles posted, two of the products converted to sales. One product was advertising the Xbox 360 eBook and another for a cell phone membership site that brought my total income generated to $24.14.

This process takes a bit of time to get off the ground and is not a get rich over night type deal but did generate income. The better ability to drive traffic will result in more sales.

Popularity: 25% [?]

This is the second of the Guest Post Free-For-All’s from one of the most influential bloggers and podcasters in the game, Freeman of Rise and Grind Fame.  This cat gives you game straight from the streets – no complicated concepts, no sucking up to the government for handouts, no shuck and jive.

Do It All, All The Time!

By Freeman – Rise and Grind

When you finally get to the top just know it ain’t over. I mean that to say you know you have to elevate your game, you know you have to be organized, you know you have to stay on guard, you know you have to stay in shape, you know you have to eat right, you know you have to get good rest, you know you have to enjoy your life, you know you have to maintain relationships and you know you have to keep recognizing and knowing things before others know them. The thing that really tests who you are made of is the fact that you have to do it all.

This is the exact reason why most cats who are this way take month long vacations or end up selling the company. It’s hard to stay at a high level of efficiency balancing everything. This is why cats have those personal assistants because I would love to have someone run to Brooklyn and get me a cheesecake from Juniors too. This is why these cats usually overdo it at a party because unlike the regular cats who say TGIF after a 9 to 5 these cats are saying TGABJIF (God Allah Buddha and Jehovah) after a 90 to 150 hour work week.

I face this right now as we speak because I thought I could take a break
but without me pressing on the gas my own company is not doing what it
should. As I sit here looking out my window I glance at people and wonder
if I can ever go back to having a simple life where I just have a beer at
happy hour without thinking about what I need to do tomorrow, this week,
this month and this year. I wonder if I can ever stop my brain from
looking for opportunities in everything from better walking shoes to even
a automatic dog washer.

See I remember when I started and I was so happy from making money that I
barely got any sleep. I remember saying this is what it takes to be on top
and I’m all in. It was indeed exciting when the chips really started
rolling in and I was staring at the checks thinking I don’t deserve it. I
remember partying in Manhattan looking around thinking this is a long way
from Compton. I remember flying so much on a plane that I started knowing
Alan Alda (TV show Mash) personally as we caught the same planes from
East to West then back in 7 days.

So as I return to the Grind aka the Hustle aka The Place where Chips are
made I have learned a valuable lesson. You can take a break from making
money but not too long because the cost of being the Boss is I have to Do
It All, All The Time!

If you want to contribute a guest post, hit me up at ceo@arthurpledger.com. The best post by December 21 wins a free copy of my upcoming eBook, so dont be shy.

Popularity: 13% [?]