I read an article on the power of dominant thought a long time ago.  I don’t remember where it came from or who wrote it.  However, it has been a tool that I have used in my life to get me where I am today and I thought I would share the concept with you.

The concept is simple, but don’t underestimate the power of it.  The basic premise is that whatever thought dominates your brain most of the time is a goal that you will eventually accomplish.  How long it takes to accomplish depends on your resources and the goal, but it will eventually happen.

The idea is that whatever your dominant though is, you will regularly take steps toward it and thus setting yourself up to achieve the goal.

Do you want to save money?  Make this your dominant thought and you will be more frugal in your daily life.  Want to lose weight?  Make this your dominant thought and every time you pick up a menu this will be on your mind.

When I set making money as my dominant thought, I quickly see a rise in profit and income.  However, when my dominant thought fades more toward restoring my 1963 Impala, I see my income level decrease.

The trick is to find a long term goal, and work to make that your dominant thought until the goal is accomplished.  Switching between goals often conflicts and hampers your progress toward completing them.

The latest HitWise ratings are out and Google strengthens their lead in the search engine market. 

In all fairness, this doesn’t include AOL for some reason.  However, when targetting search engines, you must keep in mind that google gets twice as many searches as the other top 3 combined. 

This data just strengthens my opinion that you should target Google and spend all of your time on it, and just fall where you may in the other engines until your Google rankings are in line and you have time to work on the other engines. 

According to the latest Hitwise ratings, here is how the following top search engines rank:

John Cow is having a competition with Garry Conn to see who can generate the most revenue by selling a blog.  They will each build a new blog, promote it, and put it on the block for sale at Site Point.  The blog selling for the most wins!  They have ramped up the contents with lots of prizes and incentives for you to follow. 

If you are interested in learning more about blog promotion, be sure to check out and follow the Cow vs Conn contest page.

I understand the concepts of making money online.  I’m working on building my portfolio to prove that.  However, where I still have a lot to learn and discover is the business side of making everything work.  After following quite a few SEOs and affiliate marketers on Twitter, I am intrigued by how seemingly different many of their businesses operate even though they are in the same or a similar industry. 

Some of them seem to be loners, doing everything themselves or outsourcing everything.  Others have more traditional businesses with central offices and full time staff. 

As I try to find the right setup for my business, I am wanting to learn more about how these professional, successful individuals view and run their businesses.  To learn more, I am going to submit 10 questions to  a list of successful individuals in the SEO/Affiliate Marketing industry asking them questions about their business and employees.  Hopefully, we can both find some ideas as to how to structure our companies as we become more successful and grow. 

The questions I intend on asking are:

1. What is the main long-term focus of your online business?
2. How many full time and part time employees do you have and what roles do they play in your business (developer, copy writers, designers, etc)?
3. If you had to start over again from scratch, what would be the first position you would hire someone full-time for and why?
4. Do your employees work in a central office, or are they “virtual”. 
5. How are your full-time employees compensated (if any): hourly, salary, other.
6. Now that your business is successful, what role do you currently play?  Are you still hands-on building projects, a manager, a big ideas guy, just an overseer, etc?
7. On average, how many hours per week do you currently spend working?
8. On average, how much time do you spend writing a typical blog post. 
9. In your opinion, what is your strongest characteristic that has allow you to become successful in this market where others have failed?
10. Name one other person in your industry that you look up to and describe why.

Let’s see how many responses we actually receive.