Tim Ferris: The 4 Hour Work Week Review

The Four Hour Work Week is a partial autobiographical, mostly self-help book by Tim Ferris, detailing ways to create a ‘four hour work week’ by being an online entrepreneur.  The book has garnered rave reviews from some editors and mixed reviews from readers, so let’s take a look shall we?  What is Tim Ferris: The 4 Hour Work Week all about?

Tim Ferris is first and foremost, an online businessman, specializing in-you guessed it!-product selling.  He claims to have the knowledge that allows you to ultimately make up to 40K a week with only about 4 hours of work a week.  Sounds too good to be true…?

So, What’s the DEAL?

Tim Ferris’ system basically breaks down into DEAL:

Definition: Define what you want in life (Basically, write down your goals) and what you want and need to do to get there.  Build yourself a roadmap to success, a list of goals, a bucket list, whatever you want.

Elimination: Stop wasting your time with surfing the ‘net, checking your phone, writing e-mails, and the myriad of other distractions which plague so many newcomer entrepreneurs and contributes to their failure.

Automation: Learn how to outsource most of your hum-drum activities to virtual assistants for as cheap as possible.  This way, you can have someone else manage things like writing e-mails, taking phone calls and making appointments for you and whatever else would distract you from building your online business.

Liberation: Outsource everything you can and take more mini-vacations.  Eventually, quit your job altogether.  You shouldn’t need it anymore by this point anyway!

Does this all sound way to good too be true?

Many users have been very happy with this system; they were able to follow the steps, build online businesses and live fairly comfortable lives, free from their job.  Others take parts of the information found here and apply it well while still mixing in their own spin.  The information found in this book is largely general enough to apply to anyone at least in part, so there is something for everyone.

Still others though have been suspicious.  The idea of only spending four hours a week working sounds good, but the fact is that at least in the beginning, you will be logging in a lot more than four hours a week on your business and if you have several businesses rotating around as most successful entrepreneurs do, you will generally be working more than four hours a week.  It’ll be less than forty, but more than four.  Still others don’t want to outsource everything; they may not trust someone across the ocean with their personal information, they may have been burned by bad freelancers before, they may like some aspects of the work to do it themselves.  Finally, many people had problems with the ethics in the book and the idea of outsourcing everything on the principle that if everyone did that, nothing would get done.  (I guess there’s always mooks who’d rather work than lounge around).

Is This Book Worth It?!

Surprisingly, yes, despite the nay-sayers.  This book does contain some gems of wisdom, including where you can outsource successfully and how and why, some good ideas on how to market your particular product and plenty of motivation for you.  If you don’t mind using legal-but-grey-ethical-practices, this book has plenty of tips and tricks for you and by working through the steps and putting in the effort at the beginning, mixed with a good dose of luck, you too can have a four hour work week (or nearly).

This book seems to be best used though in conjunction with your own ideas and ethics in the online business world.  Not everyone is going to want (or need) a virtual assistant, not everyone will want to outsource their writing, coding and graphic work, and not everyone will want to do things like re-branding their product or throwing fake E-bay auctions for market research.  But everyone can take a boost of motivation (or laughter) from his life story and common sense ideas like eliminating the distractions in your life and defining what you want in life and work is always a good thing.

The Four Hour Work Week is yet another book detailing ways to be successful in making money online.  It has its humorous spots and has plenty of tips and tricks to minimize the amount of time you actually spend working.  Whether or not you actually have a four hour work week is largely up to luck and how much work you want to do yourself; much like the rest of the book, your best bet is to pick the things that seem like they’d work for you and leave the rest behind.

Worth the price?  Maybe, but you could take it out of the library too and save your money.  After all, one of the keys to any successful business online and off is spend little, make lots and that is one of the themes in this book too.  Pick it up for yourself if you’re interested in basic techniques for building online businesses or you just want to add some tweaks to your usual methods to make money online.

My Survey Review

Online surveys catch a lot of flak, largely because of the scams surrounding companies that sell you lists of survey sites without giving you much else when you could just find these sites on your own. Other survey sites have a bad reputation because they don’t give you much for your time; often the ‘chance in a draw to win an object’ is a favorite and you can never be quite certain if the whole thing is real or not. Happily there are some legitimate survey companies out there that pay in cash or in products and My Survey is one of them. This My Survey review will go over the perks and pitfalls of this particular survey company so that you can decide if My Survey is right for you.

Introduction to My Survey

My Survey is one of the longest running survey companies around; it got its start long before the internet with mailed surveys and moved to the internet fairly easily. It is one of the only survey companies registered with the Better Business Bureau in the United States and has a solid reputation for delivering good services to customers and companies alike.

Surveys

The surveys received through My Surveys are easy to understand and do; they don’t get too bogged down in incessant, unnecessary questions and the system is quick. Steady users of this system often get between two and six surveys a week, some of them tiny, some of them huge. It’s important to do them all as the tiny surveys can sometimes lead to the big ones that pay out more.

Rewards System

Mention the words ‘points system’ in conjunction with rewards for doing surveys and many people head for the hills; it takes a rare company that does it properly and more often you end up with about 100 useless points and no surveys. My Surveys seems to do a good job of the system though; you can cash out your points for money, items or charitable donations and you get surveys fairly regularly so long as you have a normal sort of profile. Generally speaking, you’ll need a minimum of 500 survey points to start rewarding yourself (you can get 10 Airmile points or a five dollar Amazon gift card at this amount), but you’ll need a minimum of 1000 survey points for cash ($10.00).

It sounds like a lot, but you can get 60 survey points right now just for signing on and doing the first four surveys that let the company block you out. Having done them, I can verify that process took about ten minutes. Not bad!

Payout

Like most survey sites that pay out, it takes about four to six weeks to get your check/gift card/fun toy. Be patient!

Bad Things

It wouldn’t be fair to not point out the pitfalls with this site. First of all, the rewards are not extensive; you basically have a choice between cash, a few select gift cards (Amazon, Air Miles, Tim Horton’s, Petro Can, Chapters, Cineplex and Best Buy, all of which need varying amounts), and charitable donations. That’s pretty much it on the Canadian version. The American version probably has more, but of course you have to live in the States to take advantage of it.

Be prepared to treat this as extremely, extremely side income; most regular users only make about $15.00 a month because there aren’t nearly enough surveys available to make a good living (let alone enough time in the day to do them). And the points system is no better than other ones, but no worse either.

My Survey is a good way to earn some extra income monthly while at the same time letting your voice be heard to businesses. If you’re interested in taking surveys for money or other rewards, then My Survey is a good place to start and hopefully this my survey review has helped you.

WordPress Elegant Themes

When most people start blogging, they focus all of their energies on creating content for their blog that will attract readers and perhaps attract people to click on ads so the blogger can make a bit of money. However, choosing the right appearance for your blog is also very important. New readers will judge how well much time your blog is worth based on its appearance-the adage that you have eight seconds to hold the average web surfer’s attention holds true-and that means you need a good theme for your blog. There are plenty of free themes out there to use, but many of them tend towards generic. If you want something more vibrant and personal, then you should check out WordPress Elegant Themes.

The Elegant Themes set was created by Nick Roach who hosts an Elegant Themes club where members can peruse and use one of over sixty themes with more coming every month. What’s really cool about the WordPress elegant themes is that not only are they attractive, but they can be modified in order to suit your specific needs. And joining the club costs not a hundred dollars, not fifty, but thirty-nine dollars. When you compare this to the price to commission a website design (up to $3500 in some cases), you’ll see that you can save a ton of money which can then be put into other things.

Unwrapping your elegant themes will yield you some cool goodies. For example, you get your image and a bunch of fonts as a matter of course. You can take out the ‘Made by Elegant Themes’ link if you like, though of course the creator appreciates the kudos by leaving it in. Then some themes have other perks; for example, the Chameleon elegant theme changes skin color so you can adjust it to suit your needs. The My Cuisine theme features a template for menus you can post online if you own a restaurant or are blogging about one. And the InReview theme lets you create a site that is dead easy to navigate so you can review anything under the sun and keep it all together.

Is there anything bad to keep your eye on? Not really; the price tag may frighten off a few brand new bloggers, but for more experienced ones, it’s a bargain. And waiting for new themes every month may make you fidget; conversely, you may be tempted to change up every few weeks and confuse your readers! But as to the actual WordPress elegant themes, the creator has made something that is easy to use, eye catching, and ideal for any kind of blogger. If you want to make sure to rope your readers in and keep them, an Elegant theme from Nick Roach may be just the way for you to go.