Most successful bloggers dream of writing a best selling book one day.

A book that will impact the lives of MILLIONS!

In this article best selling author Jerry Gillies reveals his own personal secrets on how to write a best selling book.

Jerry wrote the 2 Million selling best seller MONEYLOVE back in 1978 – in the days before the Internet and Amazon.

At a time when you could not fake your book into a “best seller”.

How I Raised Myself from Poverty to Prosperity With a Bestselling Book, plus 7 Secrets That Will Help You Do The Same

By Jerry Gillies

I am not declaring that I am smarter, or even a better writer than you.

In fact, I’d be willing to bet you are in better financial shape right now than I was then.

Two things, however, that led to my success:

1. An overwhelming belief that I had something valuable to say.
2. The willingness to drop everything else in my life, including an income, and focus all my energy and attention on writing.

I was barely getting by after quitting my job as a broadcast journalist in New York and moving to Miami. Then, Moneylove came out and hundreds of thousands of dollars started pouring in. This is not a unique or unusual story. Many writers have seen their fortunes dramatically improve following their first bestselling book.

In fact, there are few single events in life that can produce the results in cash, widespread recognition, and building a legacy than having a book hit the NY Times bestseller list. Being able to call yourself a bestselling author is just as prestigious, though not nearly as difficult to attain, as being able to call yourself an Academy Award-winning actor, or Nobel Prize winner.

In the process of moving from poverty to prosperity, I discovered some truths gathered during thirty years of being a bestselling author and knowing many authors even more successful than me. So, here are the seven secrets, the concepts, the strategies that produced two million sales for Moneylove.

How To Write A Best Selling Book Secret #1:

The Company You Keep

Most of us have heard this or a variation of it ‘You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.’

Well before Moneylove, I wrote a book called FRIENDS–The Power and Potential of The Company You Keep.

In that book, I focused on the importance to a happy and successful life of having what I termed a “supportive interpersonal environment.”

Since all writers need encouragement and praise, it is vital that the people around you can provide these benefits. Particularly, you need to include writers in your circle of friends. And specifically, if possible, writers who are published and more successful than you.

This is a big one you don’t hear about too much. Instead, you hear about how writers are mostly loners and isolated, therefore not available to you for mentoring and support. This is basically a Big Lie.

It is true that a majority of writers keep to themselves a lot, otherwise they wouldn’t get much writing done. But I luckily stumbled upon the fact that there are bestselling authors hanging out at a lot of specific places, and they are very friendly and approachable at those places. The advantage of getting to know some bestselling authors is that you will discover we are ordinary folk, and you fit in very well when we get together.

A bestselling millionaire author would much rather hang out with a beginning writer earning minimum wage as a waiter (while writing his or her book) than a banking tycoon or multimillionaire builder.

Best Selling Writers – Where Are They? How Do You Reach Them?

When I was doing interviews at NBC Radio in New York, I got to talk to a number of bestselling writers, but it wasn’t until I joined and became active in the Association for Humanistic Psychology that I had the opportunity to be in the company of lots of them. One amazing thing I discovered was that I was treated with the same welcoming energy and respect before I had written my first book as I was when sales of Moneylove started approaching their first million copies. And the lectures and workshops at AHP conventions were fascinating and gave me a lot of material for future books.

Next, I joined The National Speakers Association, thanks to Mark Victor Hansen, who invited me to my first NSA convention. Then, the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, where I got to know people like Ray Bradbury and Rita Mae Brown.

Finally, The Inside Edge, the famed leadership support group [Mastermind] that Jack Canfield, Louise Hay, Wayne Dyer, Norman Cousins, myself and Susan Jeffers helped found, and most of the board of advisors had written successful books.

There’s not enough room in this article to list all the advantages of hanging out with other authors.

A strategy you might explore is to get in touch with some successful authors and find out whether they attend any of the writers conferences or other professional associations, and, if so, whether they would be willing to meet with you for a chat.

Of course, if you have any bestselling authors in your city, you can contact them and ask for a personal interview. As a former newsman, I sometimes used this ploy and just asked a favorite author if I could interview them for a possible article or newsletter. Now we have blogs to serve that purpose. No matter how rich, famous, and busy a bestselling author is, they will rarely turn down a new writer who wants to spend a few minutes with them.

A perfect example of this comes from two of the bestselling authors in human history. They are also two longtime friends of mine, going back over thirty years, before they ever wrote or even thought of the first book in the bestselling series
of the 20th century, the Chicken Soup for The Soul series.

I first met Jack Canfield when I interviewed him for NBC. Mark Victor Hansen and I became friends after he wrote me a wonderful note telling me how much Moneylove had meant to him and had helped him become a prosperity teacher. They were both impressed with how successful Moneylove was.

The Chicken Soup for the Soul books, over 225 of them, which have sold half a billion copies in 47 languages, are collections of short true stories from teachers, workshop leaders, and ordinary people. Some of them are funny. Some are sad. But they all have an uplifting message. I’ve written five of the stories myself for three of the books over the years.

I think Jack and Mark would have been astonished, to know two things when we first talked about this first Chicken Soup book: One, how very very successful it would be, making them both millionaires many times over. Two, and maybe even a bigger surprise–they did not start out planning exactly this kind of book, of tales from mostly ordinary people out there.

Here’s a Chicken Soup for the Soul story, which I don’t think has ever been told anywhere before, but I was there.

Shortly after meeting Mark Victor Hansen, he invited me as his guest to the annual convention of The National Speakers Association, being held that year in New Orleans. I didn’t know any of the professional speakers in the group, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover how many knew me through Moneylove. These included people like Zig Ziglar and Denis Waitley and Og Mandino. I became a member, and I then told Jack Canfield about the group and that I thought he’d enjoy it and gain some real value from being a member.

One of the great benefits of seeing all those great speakers in one place, seeing and hearing their best talks, one after the other over several days, was that we got to hear their best stories. Jack and Mark and I talked about the fact that every speaker had at least one killer story he or she told at the end of their talk.

It was either a funny or inspiring or poignantly moving story, sometimes all three.

I don’t know which of us thought of the idea first, but we began to discuss going to all these top speakers and collecting their killer stories for a book.

Jack and Mark took off with this idea as I got involved in other things, mostly traveling and doing workshops overseas. A problem came up that provides a valuable lesson for all authors.

That lesson is:

Since many of the most famous and successful speakers had just one powerful closing story they used for audiences all over, year after year, they were reluctant to allow them to be circulated more widely in a book. Also, some of them were the types of stories that had to be heard with an audience to be most effective. Their power and impact might be diminished by appearing in print.

So, Jack and Mark dramatically changed their focus. They realized that lots of people had great, moving, funny, inspiring stories. Stories from their own lives. And Chicken Soup for The Soul was born. They also deserve a lot of credit for their persistence and commitment (two more qualities any author needs), since that first Chicken Soup book was turned down by about 150 different publishers in the course of a year or so. Finally, the small Florida-based company, Health Communications, took it on. The rest is truly publishing history.

Some valuable lessons for all writers and potential bestselling authors in the experiences of Jack and Mark. But I think the most valuable one of all was that they were ready to turn on a dime when circumstances changed. They changed the criteria for the stories in the book itself, and they kept going when many another author would have given up after the first 10 or 50 or 100 rejections.

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
– Ray Bradbury

How To Write A Best Selling Book Secret #2:

Happy Talk About What You Do

Many writers giving advice say an author shouldn’t talk about what he or she is writing. It’s true that talking too much to too many people about your forthcoming book, article, or blog post can suck the energy out of any creative project. I agree with that premise, but do want accentuate the positive truth that you should be talking about what you are doing in your own life. Especially the stuff you plan to include in your book.

“You better make them care about what you think. It had better be quirky or perverse or thoughtful enough so that you hit some chord in them. Otherwise it doesn’t work. I mean we’ve all read pieces where we thought, ‘Oh, who gives a damn.’ ”
—Nora Ephron

My Own Happy Talk Experience

A lot of the success for me in writing and promoting Moneylove came from the fact that I was already talking about prosperity consciousness before I even pitched the book to a publisher. I had listened to some tapes of a man named Leonard Orr, who had an unusual concept. He said your attitudes about money itself dictated your financial results.

This excited and stimulated my creativity and I went to one of his evening seminars. I started to come up with strategies of my own to put his ideas into action. I had been doing lectures and workshops on communication and relationships. Now I threw in little tidbits about prosperity consciousness, and how I was using it in my own life.

People got enthusiastic, got results, and asked for more and the rest is all about the momentum that energy generated.

I love the song Happy Talk in the musical, South Pacific. Especially the opening:

Happy talk, keep talking happy talk,
Talk about things you’d like to do,

I would change the second line to: “Talk about things you do.” If you are passionate and excited about the subject of your book, or whatever you are writing, and have found the ideas are making a difference in your life, or the lives of anyone else, then talk about that–not the specifics of your actual book.

One great strategy to put this concept into practice is to prepare, before you even start writing your book, an actual thirty minute talk on the subject. This will also enable you to introduce your ideas and focus on the most important theme. You can even approach local organizations that book speakers about having you do your talk. Even if you do some free talks for charitable groups, churches and such, it’s a great marketing research tool.

This also helps with something all aspiring authors need to do. In today’s publishing world, an author needs to do a lot of the marketing and promotion himself. It is vital that you not only provide a great proposal or manuscript to a publisher, but also tell what audiences will buy the book and how you intend to reach them

How To Write A Best Selling Book Secret #3:

Start Immediately

“My advice is not to wait to be struck by an idea. If you’re a writer, you sit down and damn well decide to have an idea. That’s the way to get an idea.”
~ Andy Rooney

One of the first pieces of prosperity advice I put in Moneylove was from pioneering psychologist William James. He said that in order to change your life, you had to start immediately. So, let us consider this: you are probably not a bestselling author right now, or you wouldn’t be reading this article. What you want to therefore change is to become a bestseller author, at least to begin that process. Start immediately. Start writing, even if you’re not sure what you want to say.

If you are serious, begin to write at least one page a day. It doesn’t have to have a purpose or specific goal, but you have to do it with energy and without exception. Julia Cameron says in, The Artist’s Way, that you should wake up every morning and immediately write three pages. Some folks might find that too daunting. Do it if you can, but at the very least–one page. Once you have done this for a month, check out your first pages versus your latest pages and you will find the practice has made a difference. This will change your results whether you are wanting to write a book, a blog, persuasive emails, or clever Tweets.

Here are several starting immediately strategies I’ve given in my Writing A Bestseller workshops along with personal coaching clients:

Write a simple and clear sentence that explains what your book is about.

If you have such a clear command of your purpose in writing a book (or anything) that you can convey its essence in a single sentence, you are starting out way ahead of most authors.

Write the copy for your book’s jacket.

For the research necessary to do this, you will have to go to the library or a bookstore and check out the jacket copy on hardcover books, particularly the side flaps. Writing your own version of this for your own book can provide momentum, even if what you write now won’t accurately describe your finished manuscript.

Start doing what I call Sampling Your Future Success.

I did this by cutting out a copy of the NY Times bestseller list, and typing Moneylove on the list before putting it on my bulletin board.

In addition to a proposal or manuscript, you need to have a clear idea of who your audience is and how they can be reached If you have a blog with thousands of hits, that’s an easy one.

I also always visualize myself appearing on a major talk show and imagine what questions the host (I use Oprah a lot, since I actually was a guest on her show) will ask, and how I would respond.

How To Write A Best Selling Book Secret #4:

Capture the readers attention with your opening lines

One way to always guarantee you will intrigue, attract, interest, and capture the attention of a reader is to become a master of the opening line, or even the opening several lines.

Even before you fully write your book (or even a blog post) getting the opening clarified and clear in your head is essential.

I don’t know about you, but when I am browsing through books in a bookstore, the library, or online, I always check out the beginning sentences. The first words either trigger a desire in me to read more, or they don’t. In Moneylove, my opening lines in the Introduction were:

“You deserve to be rich, and you can be rich. MONEYLOVE can help you have a life of abundance, filled with love and creativity and, incidentally, all the cash you want.”

I call this, beginning the begin!

Business experts doing a lot of market research and psychologists doing a lot of studies, have both reached the same conclusion, that first minute of contact is vital. It’s that minute that determines the progress of any interaction–personal or professional.

Widely considered the best opening line in literature is Jane Austen’s for Pride and Prejudice:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

This sentence lets the reader know what kind of a book he or she has chosen. It sets a tone.

And here’s a shocking truth about being a bestselling author: you can learn as much or more about good writing from reading really great opening lines from books, as you can from almost any college course on writing. And this is the best time in history to do this, because you can find those openings online without having to go to a library or bookstore. If you put into your search engine a request such as “great opening lines in books,” or: “the best literary opening lines,” you will gain access to an unlimited stream of the best ones out there.

In nonfiction, look at the opening line of the foreword to Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich:

“The Thirteen Steps to Riches described in this book offer the shortest dependable philosophy of individual achievement ever presented for the benefit of the man or woman who is searching for a definite goal,”

How To Write A Best Selling Book Secret #5:

The Short and Sweet of It

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
– Henry David Thoreau

Short words and short sentences are pretty much norm now in most writing courses, but when I first started talking about this in the 1970s, the standard was flowery language and complex sentences, except for a few brilliant writers who knew this secret. That it is no longer a secret is pretty much due to one man, Rudolf Flesch (see Secret Seven below for more on him).

As you can see by my opening for this article, I do not always follow the popular advice to keep sentences short. Sometimes long is more expressive. Sometimes a few long sentences interspersed with a lot of short ones can create a pleasing rhythm. Back and forth. A master of this quality in her writing is Harper Lee. Her opening for, To Kill a Mockingbird, is a brilliant example of mixing short sentences and long flowing ones. She didn’t go for flash or shock, but simply started with the kind of statement a child might make,

“When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”

Look at how simply Harper Lee conveys the life of a sleepy old Southern town in very few words. “There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and nothing to buy it with.”

To Kill a Mocking Bird, one of my very favorite books, is the epitomé of clear and simple writing. As the best books in fiction or nonfiction always do, an author should create a dialogue with the reader that resembles a good friend telling a good story.

In terms of cutting down on wordage, I have had any number of successful nonfiction and fiction writers tell me that one of the most important disciplines any writer can master is to take a paragraph or sentence, or even a page, that you really are in love with, and cut it from your manuscript.

I had a whole chapter left out of Moneylove when I got the final galleys prior to it going to the printing presses. The book originally had seven chapters, and my editor, Herb Katz, without telling me, cut a whole chapter out because he felt it didn’t fit with the other chapters. After a while, I was forced to agree with him, but not until I had ranted and raved for a week or two.

Writing can be like music. There are high notes. There are low notes. And once in a while, there are no notes, as you pause to let the mind breathe between paragraphs.

A Warning Note:

If most of the writing you have done has been of an academic sort while taking college courses, you will be at a disadvantage in writing for a larger mainstream audience. Most readers today are most comfortable with a 5th grade level of vocabulary, and anything more may go right over their heads.

How To Write A Best Selling Book Secret #6:

Become a One Trick Pony

This cliché phrase is often used in a pejorative way, to describe someone who has only one talent or skill and nothing more to offer once that is displayed or presented. However, for a writer starting out, it can be a valuable strategy, No matter how many subjects you have mastered and how many tricks you possess, It’s useful to appear as if you are a supreme master, a real expert about one important subject.

One of the bestselling authors I had some impact on was Spencer Johnson. Spencer has been kind enough to tell me my two hour seminar on writing a bestseller at the National Speakers Association really made a difference in his approach to writing. What he was doing with corporate clients was teaching them the value of praising employees, in a very short amount of time. This one minute praise technique led to the huge bestseller he wrote with management expert Kenneth Blanchard, The One-Minute Manager, which has sold over thirteen million copies. Spencer Johnson went on to write the bestselling, Who Moved My Cheese, as well as the ValueTales series of children’s books.

Spencer Johnson is obviously a very creative writer who has lots of ideas for books, but his first effort was so successful because rather than just come up with a book he thought would sell, he focused on what he was already doing. And once he became a master of that one idea, he and his co-author, Ken Blanchard, came up with the add-ons of One Minute Goals and One Minute Reprimands. They thus became three-trick ponies and much more.

Louise Hay is another multi-million copy bestselling author who started out with one trick, which led to You Can Heal Your Life — over 50 million sold and counting.

I remember back in the early 1980s, Louise, her assistant, Julie, and I sitting in a hot tub in the backyard of her rented house in Santa Monica. She had produced a cult classic, You Can Heal Your Body. A small booklet, it was beloved by the holistic health community. But Louise had delayed turning this material into a full-length book, even though she had a publishing contract to do so. A lot of our conversation focused on trying to motivate Louise to finish the book. I can assure you that, at that moment, Louise did not have a clue, or even a dream, about being a bestselling author. And she certainly could not have foreseen that she would create a large publishing empire (Hay House) and influence and help millions of people around the world. And it all grew out of her original idea that certain emotions trigger certain illnesses and symptoms. For a one trick pony, Louise Hay certainly picked the right trick.

We were friends, so I wouldn’t have even thought about charging her for the coaching I did in and out of that hot tub. I earned a lot more money than any coaching fees would have produced, however, as she mentions Moneylove very favorably in You Can Heal Your Life. This led to thousands of sales for me.

Often, when you want to be focusing on an upcoming book project, no matter how multi-dimensional you are–no matter how many tricks you have up your sleeve–it is best to focus on a single strong subject or theme. For an aspiring bestselling author, multitasking can be a mental vampire, sucking the energy out of the big idea you have.

How To Write A Best Selling Book Secret #7:

Bookworm Your Way to Success

A simple truth: your success as a writer of books is affected by your reading habits.

Ask any successful author…

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed quickly, to trap them before they escape.”
—Ray Bradbury

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” Stephen King

“I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.”
Samuel Johnson

I don’t know any good and successful writers who don’t surround themselves with books, both fiction and nonfiction.

I have long asserted that fiction is important to read, especially for those who have limited themselves to nonfiction. I have had a number of professional speakers and motivational teachers say they only read nonfiction because that’s information they need for their careers. Wrong!

Fiction is important because novelists are some of the great thinkers and philosophers about the human condition. I have learned more about life and people from novels than from any nonfiction books on the subject. There are parts of the brain that are stimulated and enriched by reading fiction that no other method seems to duplicate.

I also have never met a successful author who didn’t have a few favorite books on writing.

So, here are my seven favorites on being a better writer:

1. The Elements of Style…by Strunk and White. This is the classic on writing style that almost every writer of note has a copy of. It is an enduring masterpiece whether you are writing a nonfiction book, a novel, an article or blog post.

2. The Artist’s Way…by Julia Cameron. A book not just about writing but an instruction manual on training your mind to be more creatively productive.

3. On Writing Well—by William Zinsser –This addresses directly the problem most beginning writers have with too many words, sentences and paragraphs that are just too long. And Zinsser demonstrates how it should be done by his own crisp,clear, simple writing style.

4. The Art of Readable Writing—by Rudolf Flesch. You might as well start with this classic from 1949, though almost any of Flesch’s books on speaking and writing plainly and clearly are well worth reading. This was the very first book I read on writing, as a high school student. It may just be the single book that most influenced my writing style. Flesch was also the author of the iconic bestseller, Why Johnny Can’t Read.

5. Bird by Bird—by Anne Lamott. One of the most outrageous and down-to-earth and funny books you’ll find on the subject of writing. She is one of my very favorite writers, and unusual in that she has had bestsellers both on the fiction and nonfiction lists.

6. Zen in the Art of Writing – by Ray Bradbury. The late genius created this collection of essays on writing and creativity. A lot of the material was introduced during his annual opening night lecture at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, where we were both on the faculty. I was proud to be his friend and for him to be my generous mentor. Those of you familiar with my Moneylove philosophy will understand why I love this book. While many writers talk and write about how difficult and lonely writing is, Ray thought writing was more fun than anything else. He said, “If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer.”

7. Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writer’s Manual – by Rita Mae Brown. While still in her twenties, she wrote Rubyfruit Jungle, a novel about growing up as a lesbian in the South. Rita Mae is also one of my all-time favorite authors, and listening to her erudite lectures at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference was a delight and powerful learning experience.

You may choose your own favorite books about writing, there certainly are hundreds, perhaps thousands, to select from, and maybe a friend or teacher or writer you know has recommended one or more. For me, these seven books contain the essential information I want and need to practice my craft, though I have read and collected many others over the years.

How To Write A Best Selling Book – Bonus:

It always astonishes me how many writers don’t know what a tremendous resource the magazine, Publishers Weekly, can be. It’s the trade publication for the publishing industry and aimed at publishers, editors, bookstores, and literary agents. If you are serious about writing a bestseller, it is a must-read. Or I should say it’s a must-browse. With hundreds of pages every week, actually reading the whole thing would be overwhelming.

Publishers Weekly will help you keep up with what books are coming out, which authors just got a big advance, how social media is promoting book sales, and whether an editor you were thinking of sending your book proposal to has just left and gone to another publishing house. For me, however, the best part of PW is the review section, with nonfiction as a separate category. In those mini-reviews, you will find books you wouldn’t know about otherwise, books that aren’t to be found in your local bookstore or library. I’ve lost count of how many books I’ve ordered after first reading about them in Publishers Weekly.
It is more than worth your while to check out this little-known publication (among the public, including writers). Your local library probably has a copy, and most bookstores do. You can therefore check it out at no cost.

I cannot imagine any writer who follows all seven secrets will have any difficulty in creating at least one huge bestseller. Go forth and prove me right!

About Jerry Gillies

Jerry Gillies passed away late 2015.

Jerry was one of the first prosperity teachers of modern times – writing International Best seller: MONEYLOVE in 1978 –  His reach and influence was considerable. Although Jerry is no longer here in body, he will always remain in the hearts & souls of the people whose lives he’s touched over his 75 years on this earth.

IncomeDiary is honored to feature a number of posts and an interview with Jerry.

The post 7 Secrets To Writing A Best Selling Book That Sold 2 Million Copies! appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

This post is part of our MoneyLove series. In part #1, we talked about why you should love money. In this article, we’ll talk about how to get more of it. How to get Prosperity!

A Moneylove Approach to Playing Larger and Winning Bigger

Doing is being.
To have done’s not enough.
To stuff yourself with doing — that’s the game.
To name yourself each hour by what’s done,
To tabulate your time at sunset’s gun
And find yourself in acts
You could not know before the facts.

The above is just the first part of Ray Bradbury’s poem, Doing Is Being. Ray showed the poem to me before it was even published in the early 1980s, sitting under a tree among the rolling seaside hills at the Santa Barbara Writers’ Conference, where we were both members of the faculty, though he was one of the celebrity keynoters and I just taught some classes in nonfiction writing.

I loved the phrase, “To stuff yourself with doing.” As I have found true with so many creative geniuses, Ray had a grand generosity of spirit, and gave me permission to use the poem in my book, Psychological Immortality, even before his own poetry book containing it was released.

It struck such a deep chord in me because I always believed the best teaching came through developing experiential techniques. I pioneered a lot of these in workshops I led for the adventurous Association for Humanistic Psychology. I also taught them to other authors who were brilliant speakers or counselors, but didn’t think in experiential models. People like Louise Hay, Mark Victor Hansen, and Wayne Dyer.

This is why I think so many of my Moneylove ideas have stood the test of time, and new ones I am regularly creating still have impact in the world. Though I call the following list, 10 principles, they are really action-oriented strategies, all requiring that someone adopting any or all of them, do something or change something they are doing. It doesn’t even really matter if taking one of these specific action steps is the right or ideal one to explore. Just the taking action itself is shaking things up, transforming the equation, “to find yourself in acts you could not know before the facts.” To do, and therefore to be.

1. Start Immediately

Nothing dissipates a great business idea like delay. The most promising prosperity-producing business plans can scatter like smoke through too much pondering and indecision, or talking about it. I am not suggesting that you have to start big, or do it all overnight. Rather, baby steps are often a good way to build the momentum to manifest your dream results. It’s important that you begin doing something that will serve your specific idea and start putting it into a physical form. This may indeed become a false start, so don’t expend too much energy on it initially, but create some kind of movement toward what you envision that idea becoming.

This is not a brand new idea. At the very beginning of Moneylove, I quote pioneering psychologist, William James, who said that to change one’s life you must “start immediately.” And even though some scholars dispute whether the famous “begin it now” quote originated with Goethe, it certainly predates James: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

In a similar vein, one of my mentors and friends, Bob Schwartz, founder of the School for Entrepreneurs at Tarrytown, New York, used to say that a major factor in business success is what you do “when the rubber hits the road.” Even the most luxurious, high-powered car won’t get you anywhere with a burned-out starter.

2. The Law of Subtraction

This is simply to focus on being more discerning, more selective, more aware of what really matters. In other words, being more discriminating in your choices.
There is so much stuff pouring out in this era of instant access to just about everything, so much information bombarding us, we have to make a much more intentional, concentrated effort to pick out the truly valuable and worthwhile from all the clutter.

One of the best explanations of this came over a hundred years ago from Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, when he had Holmes explain to Watson his own particular take on what information to take in and what to leave out:

“The mind is like an attic, you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out.”

What a beautiful way of expressing the problem of information overload. Essayist Lance Morrow, also did a great dissertation on this subject, in Time magazine, saying:

“The mind takes its shape from what it holds, and therefore, Zen-like, sometimes grows more graceful because of what it has kept out.”

And so it is true, that it is often what you subtract that is as important or even more so than what you attract.
And this brings me to one of my favorite affirmations, which many people have used as a guideline to help decide what to let in and what to keep out:

“If it doesn’t bring me profit, pleasure, or knowledge, it isn’t worth doing.”

If you simply make a list, with headings for Profit, Pleasure, Knowledge, and put down all the things now happening in your life, all the things you are now paying attention to, and seeing where they fit in this trio of categories, you would begin to get more of a sense of what belongs in a successful, dynamic life and what doesn’t. How many of these things actually fulfill two or three of the criteria? Obviously, your life is more dynamic and creative and has more potential when more of the things you do give you profit, pleasure, and knowledge.

3. Your Ninety Day Trial Period – Prosperity

This is a take-action strategy that many coaching clients have credited with quick and powerful results in their creative and financial lives. In this whirlwind life many of us experience, with so many choices, so many ways we can be in the world and use our various skills and talents, it is essential to set certain boundaries, and this is an easy one that seems to work well for everyone who tries it.

Very simply, whenever you have more than one important choice–and this works in your professional life as well as your personal situation–you pick one of those choices and commit to giving it your all–your total focus, energy, and time for the next ninety days. In most such activities or projects, ninety days is enough time to know whether this was the right decision for you. If it still feels right after ninety days, you keep doing it. If you can see that it is not nearly producing the results you expected, let it go and move on to your next choice. If you are applying this to a creative activity, there’s a good chance that you might have wasted a year under the normal circumstances of deciding whether or not it works for you. With this strategy, you get to check out four projects or decisions in that same year.

4. More Than Their Money’s Worth

This is such a basic marketing concept that it often amazes me why people don’t adopt it as their personal credo. When I first started marketing myself as a speaker and workshop leader, and then started producing my prosperity audio program, I always had as my main foundational tone the idea of giving my audience, “More than their money’s worth.”

And here’s an important part of that–don’t tell them that is your intention until you deliver their first order and they can confirm you are indeed delivering something more valuable than the amount they are giving you. IncomeDiary.com is a great example of taking this even further. In chats with Internet entrepreneurs and bloggers, time and again, these online masters have almost awestruck regard for Michael Dunlop and what he has done by starting out giving huge amounts of valuable free information. It isn’t complicated, but it is brilliant. By building personal relationships with the best and brightest bloggers and online marketing masters and content providers, Michael has been able to give away what many other bloggers and entrepreneurs charge for. Talk about giving people more than their money’s worth!

5. Your Next Big Thing

When I met Wally Schirra in the green room of a television talk show in the mid-1980s, I think astronauts were a bigger deal than they’ve become in recent years. As one of the original 7 Mercury astronauts, Wally was as big a deal as there could be in that realm.

So I asked this American space hero a pretty obvious question: “After soaring to the heights of space, wasn’t it a big letdown to come back down to earth and eventually become a businessman?” Wally laughed and said he did get that question a lot, usually accompanied by arched eyebrows. He said he had always thought he would like to try some kind of business venture once he retired from space. He said his father, also a pilot, told him when he was very young that one should always know what they wanted to do next after achieving their primary dream. Wally also told me that he was the only one of the original 7 astronauts who had a clear idea of what he wanted to do once he retired from the space program.

So what about you? Do you have an idea of what you might want to do next if and when you reach your current major aspiration?

It’s a simple matter of saying to yourself, “When I get there, I know where my next “there” is. Knowing what you will want to do next after finishing with what  you are doing now is a tremendous source of inner peace and invigorates one’s sense of purpose.

6. Your Powerful Voice

In terms of speaking out to the world and your actual physical voice, whether you want your audience to learn something from what you are saying, or buy something you are selling, a strong, clear, tonally pleasing, well modulated, and consistent voice can make a huge difference in how your message is received by others.

Many studies have shown that in the corporate world and most other professional realms, the man or woman with a pleasing, strong voice has a big advantage.

And here’s the good news. Your voice is not a locked-in physical attribute. It is an instrument, and can be trained to be much more effective and attractive. It just takes a basic course, many of which are available online, and daily, steady practice. The results will come fast and it can be a lifelong practice that will produce many personal and professional benefits.

I put both the writing voice and speaking voice under the same heading because they do have an impact on each other. The best writing comes when the writer is able to speak directly into the keyboard as if he or she was having a conversation with the reader. I always encouraged students in my writing classes to “Speak through your fingers.” Clarity, individual style, and a pleasing rhythm are major factors in successful writing and speaking.

7. Be Open But Very Picky

This principle was actually inspired by a novelty button I once bought that said in big, bold letters, “I’M AVAILABLE,” and below in smaller letters, “BUT VERY PICKY.” At the time, I was a member of The Inside Edge, a leadership support group that met early Tuesday mornings at the Beverly Hills Hotel. My fellow board members included Jack Canfield, Louise Hay, Wayne Dyer, Stuart Wilde and the membership consisted of workshop leaders, authors, movie people, musicians, and a lot of smart, successful, beautiful women. I got the button to wear at meetings, and only a couple of weeks went by before a beautiful woman named Jessica, who was intrigued by the button and the fact I had the nerve to wear it, approached me. We started dating and ended up in a very lovely relationship. The experience got me to thinking that good things come to us in all areas of our lives when we follow that mantra, “I am available, but very picky.”

8. Compliments as a Powerful Prosperity Resource

As we go through life, we receive many compliments. These can become a powerful motivating force in your life, and tell you all you need to know about your perfect path and purpose. One of my personal favorite strategies and one that I get a lot of compliments on from readers, listeners, coaching clients, and workshop participants is my Compliment Bulletin Board. Whenever someone pays me a compliment, either professional or personal, that feels especially good, I ask them to put it in writing and sign it. I keep my board in a prominent place in my office, as well as a copy on my computer desktop.

I actually just received an email with a compliment from one of my Moneylove Club audio subscribers: “I feel my life has already taken a turn for the better.” I will print and pin it, but in the meantime it resides on my desktop. There’s something I like about that phrase, “A turn for the better.” My subscriber is a professor and writer and her simple compliment has already provided an energy boost as I am recuperating from a case of food poisoning which had dramatically slowed me down this past week.

A turn for the better. A direction we can all aspire to, wouldn’t you agree?

9. Say What You Are Going to Do and Then Do It

I got this phrase from my friend, Maria Nemeth, Ph.D., author of The Energy of Money. I find Maria’s work a perfect complement to my own and she has become a mentor and this has become a core phrase in my life. She says, “Making and keeping promises moves you along your path.

My life has definitely taken a turn for the better since I activated a decision to always say what I am going to do and then actually do it. An important piece of this is to only spend time with and do business with people who meet this same high standard. It sounds simple, but in execution, many people fall by the wayside. There is such a temptation to take on more than we can faithfully execute with so many choices and temptations out there,

I don’t like the phrase “I can’t afford it.” when applied to one’s money situation, but the one place I do use it in bolstering my own prosperity consciousness is to say to myself, “I am moving toward always saying what I will do and then doing it, and can’t afford the energy or effort to spend time with anyone who isn’t doing the same.” A life filled with broken promises in either direction is simply a broken life.

10. Leave Room for Surprises, Opportunities, New Adventures

To my way of thinking, there is a hierarchy of success. It is a high level indeed to be doing work you love doing and feel is important and rewarding. However, I reserve an even higher position for those who can always answer with a resounding “Yes!” the question, “Have you left room in your life for something or someone new and wonderful to show up?”

Warm and prosperous regards,

Jerry

Special Note:

Jerry Gillies passed away late 2015.

Jerry Gillies was a mentor to millions of people around the world. Although Jerry is no longer here in body, he will always remain in the hearts & souls of the people whose lives he’s touched over his 75 years on this earth.

The post 10 Prosperity Conscious Principles for More Business Profit appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

The most provocative and controversial aspect of my two million copy bestselling book, Moneylove, is its title. When I first wrote it, in 1978, most people thought money and love were polar opposites. I was a pioneer in suggesting that loving your money was the path to getting a lot more of it.

My concept of Moneylove is not about accumulating huge hoards of cash, or obsessing over money. It’s about loving yourself enough to produce the money you deserve, loving your work so you can more easily and happily produce wealth, and being a more loving person so that other people will be attracted to you and to whatever ideas, products, or services you offer.

Love is the most powerful emotion human beings feel, and emotion has a lot to do with the results you get in life. There are probably a lot of millionaires who don’t love money, but the ones who seem to be happiest and most fulfilled–creatively, personally, in business, and in terms of making a difference in the world, exude their love and passion for what they do and the success they achieve. When I say they love money, I don’t mean they lust after it, or are even motivated by it…they do what they do because they love doing it, and other people–who are after all, the source of all our money, are attracted to that positive energy, and therefore are happy to give them lots of money. Super Wealthy people like the late Steve Jobs, or Richard Branson, or Oprah, or Jeff Bezos of Amazon, or new billionaire Sara Blakely, the creator of Spanx….are driven by their love for what they do. They don’t hate money or think it’s an evil force–they enjoy the fruits of their labors, and they love everything about what they do in the world, include creating great wealth.

Here are seven great reasons why you should love money.

Great Reason #1

You should love money because it is the way the world lets you know you are on the right path.

Great Reason #2

You should love money because all the world loves a lover, and people will be
attracted to you and what you are offering when you exude that love energy. The message you want to send the world is:

“I am filled with love for my work, my life, and my constantly increasing prosperity, and everyone likes to be near me and buy what I am offering.”

Great Reason #3

You should love money because the alternative sucks. Hating or even mildly disliking money leads to poverty and unhappy frustration.

Great Reason #4

You should love money because it buys you the freedom and time to love
everything and everyone else in your life. This means saying to yourself (try it):
“I have a great life because I can afford to own my time and have the freedom to do what I want when I want and with whom I want to do it.”

Great Reason #5.

You should love money because it allows you to amplify and multiply your
positive impact on the world. Your personal prosperity proclamation for this one:
“I love the difference I can make because of my financial success.”

Great Reason #6

You should love money because is it is the only inanimate object capable of
loving you back.

“I love money and money loves me.”

Great Reason #7

You should love money for the sheer fun and joy of playing with it, spending it,
and sharing it. As Sara Blakely, the youngest self-made female billionaire in history, puts it: ”Money is fun to make, fun to spend and fun to give away!”

At this point in my treatise, are you convinced that money and love belong together in our lexicon of essential aspects of life?

These two vital parts of any happy and fulfilled life share incalculable common traits.

Here are just ten of them for you to ponder.

1. Energy. Perhaps the most important thing money and love have in common is that they both involve energy, in many instances, the same energy. An energy we create inside our deepest selves and then project out to others. When you’re in the presence of someone actually emanating this energy, you can feel it, and it is very hard to resist. Why would you even want to try?

2. Communication. Equally important in having a successful, happy and fulfilling relationship, and in having lots of money flow into your life. Warren Buffet has said that communication is the key to his being one of the richest people in the world:

“You can get an MBA, but if you improve your communication skills, I will guarantee you that you will earn 50% more over your lifetime.”

3. Other People. We get our love and our money from other people. These are often ignored when so called prosperity teachers talk about The Law of Attraction. And one of the highest manifestations of success is to have other people love to give you money.

This is one of my favorite personal affirmations: “People love to give me money.”

There are no limits to what you can accomplish in life when other people give you what you want in terms of love, money, acknowledgement, advice, opportunity and support–and those are exactly the people you will attract when you project a loving energy, a loving personality, a love of what you do.

4. Painful Loss. Losing a major loved one, or having a big loss in business
can be devastating, And your reaction to that loss can be the direct result of how easily you believe you can replace either that loved one, or that money in your life.

In both love and money, your capacity for resilience–the ability to bounce back from a loss or setback–determines your level of fulfillment, joy and positive results.

5. Showing Off. Both money and love often lead to this. We are proud to have others know we have someone wonderful, attractive, sexy, and charming who loves us or proud that we have achieved lots of financial success. In both areas we sometimes go overboard in showing off to others. And this can lead to resentment.

Here’s a prosperity secret: the more people who enjoy and applaud your success rather than resent it, the more likely you are to keep increasing that success.

6. Addiction. You can become addicted to love, and you can become addicted to money, to the point where you obsess about either day and night.

As my late friend and mentor, Ken Keyes Jr., said in his bestselling book, The Handbook to Higher Consciousness,” an addiction is any desire so strong that not achieving it makes you upset, angry, or depressed. Here’s something to ponder. Ken Keyes Jr. also said, “You are receiving a signal or a warning to get rid of some addiction in your life every time you feel emotionally uncomfortable or out-of-sorts.” Ken was not saying you had to get rid of something you strongly desire, but suggested instead that you upgrade it from an addiction or compulsive attachment to a preference for that certain something.

I am not obsessed with making lots of money and getting a lot richer, but I definitely prefer it to the alternative.

7. Old Stuff. In both money and love, we have old history, old beliefs, even old myths that get in the way of our achieving greater success right now.

In love, we may be holding onto a fantasy about what the perfect partner will look and act like. Often these fantasy beliefs came from our parents or other significant people in our early years. In terms of earning money, many people are still holding onto the old belief that you will achieve your highest potential in terms of earnings if you find a company to work for, are a loyal and hardworking employee for forty years, and retire with your gold watch and a generous pension to begin a life of leisure. This construct or concept is filled with an amazing number of stereotypical myths. I’m not sure this fantasy was ever true for most people, but certainly in today’s totally transformed economy, the best response one can offer up for that idea is FC or Fat Chance.

Having a sense of lack about love or money in your life might be a message telling you to look at the path you have chosen. When you do this, you might find it resembles an obstacle course, littered with large bags of old stuff.

8. Forgiveness. The degree to which you are holding on to anger or sadness about
something that happened in your love life or your work life is the degree to which you may be living a limited and constrained life. Here’s a secret about forgiveness: It’s not about being a nice person or making the other person feel good. It’s about freeing yourself from those energy-draining limitations and constraints.

9. Stinginess. You can be a tightwad with your money or your love.
What you hold onto tightly gets crushed, diminished, or eliminated entirely. What you freely use and share with others gets enhanced and expanded.

10. Feelings. Money and love share emotional amplitude. We all have strong emotions
that can be triggered in these two areas of our existence. In both money and love,
it’s not about achieving a specific goal–earning a certain amount in a certain way, or
finding a person to love who meets very detailed criteria. No, it’s about how the results
you do achieve make you feel. What we are all really looking for is the feeling we imagine we will have if that special someone shows up–or the feeling we will have when unlimited cash windfalls arrive.

One of my favorite affirmations that covers both desires is:

“I Am Rich and Lovable.”

warm and prosperous regards,

Jerry

Special Note:

Jerry Gillies passed away late 2015.

Jerry Gillies was a mentor to millions of people around the world. Although Jerry is no longer here in body, he will always remain in the hearts & souls of the people whose lives he’s touched over his 75 years on this earth.

The post LOVING MONEY – Why You Should Love Money appeared first on How To Make Money Online.