How to Become Debt Free ~ 5 Easy Steps

It’s pretty easy to get discouraged about money these days.  All you have to do is watch the news or maybe look at your 401k package. I’m sure there are quite a few of you who would like to know how to become debt free when you can barely manage your monthly mortgage payment.

You may have come online hoping to find the magic pill to cure all of your financial woes. Let me tell you right now there is NO magic pill.  There’s nothing outside of yourself that is going to solve your financial problems. However, if you are ready, willing and able to put in some effort and be consistent there is definitely hope.

5 Steps To Become Debt Free Quickly

1. Make a decision.  This is very important, and something many people overlook. You have to make a decision, set an intention, create a goal. All of these things give your brain the notification that you are working toward something and not just surfing the net.

When making a decision or setting a goal you should make it a little outside your comfort zone so it is big and exciting and will keep you working toward it’s accomplishment.  Don’t however, make your goal so big that it is completely unrealistic.  In the beginning it may be hard to tell what is too big, and what isn’t. To get started it might be smart to take your debt and decide on either an amount to pay toward it each month or a date it will be paid off.

Amy Bass of The Niche Blogger is a great example of this. She set a goal to have her 72,000 dollars of debt paid off in two years, solely from making money online. She started off as a complete beginner knowing nothing about internet marketing or how to make money online. This is a big goal, but it is completely attainable. It’s big enough to keep her moving forward, but not so big that it makes her give up. (We’ll hear more about Amy in a minute)

2. Choose a Strategy. So you’ve made the decision to make money online. NOW WHAT??? There are a million people, tons of Gurus all telling you to do this and make a million bucks over night. How do you know what to do, or even how to do it.

I remember when I first got online I was pulled in so many different directions. I tried so many different things. I bought all the ebooks thinking this was going to be the “one big thing” that makes me money online.

Let me tell you, the only thing that stopped me from making money in the beginning was that I kept buying book after book. If I had stuck to any one strategy I would have been in great shape. Most of the solid plans out there will work if you work them.

What I do know is over all these many years I keep coming back to a couple things; Squidoo and Blogging. Those are the two things that have remained constant in all of this.

So how do you choose a strategy to stick with? I suggest you find someone online ~ a blogger you enjoy reading, and someone who seems to be working to help out the new people and listen to what they recommend. Listen to what they do.  Follow their lead, if they are successful and you can feel confident you have found a winning strategy.

Now I’m NOT talking about the A-list bloggers, they are not looking out for your best interest. The chances you following in their footsteps and becoming an A-list blogger is next to nill. And even if you did it would be a very long process and you wouldn’t see any money for quite some time.

I am talking about bloggers like me, PotPieGirl, there are tons of them out there.  Take a look at the list of blogs included in The Best WAHM Blog contest I was in.  They are out there, you just have to look.

Squidoo is a great way to get started online, because it’s free. I made my first online dollar at Squidoo and continue to make an excellent income from Squidoo every month to this day.  If you are strapped for cash this is the best way to get started as it doesn’t cost you anything.

There are so many great how to squidoo books out there, and believe me I have read most if not all of them. My favorite by far is One Week Marketing. It not only shows you how to do squidoo but how to put it together to create an entire campaign that will make you money.

When it comes to blogging, this is a little more long term strategy. Not that it will take you long term to make money, but it will take you a bit more time to put this strategy into action. This will be an ongoing process.  Blogging can be free if you choose to start your blog on a free platform, however, for best results you should host your own blog, which will cost you a few dollars a month.

There are so many different kinds of blogs, when you set out to make money with blogging realize you are not going to just throw up a blog and talk about your kids and family. This kind of blog will not make you any money. You will want to set up a “niche blog” a blog about a specific topic, using specific keywords and other strategies to get traffic and make you money.

So how do you know how to do that when you first get started?

3. Find someone successful in your chosen strategy. This is step 3. I know for a fact, if I had been able to or even known to find someone ~ affordable ~ please, don’t spend thousands of dollars to get “guru advice” ~ the angle of  my learning curve would have been much less steep.

I still follow this advice to this day. If I try a new strategy I will find someone who’s doing it successfully to follow.

Let’s look at my two favorite things to do online, and see who there is to follow out there.

Squidoo ~ If you choose Squidoo as your means to make money, I highly suggest you pick up One Week Marketing.  If you are looking for someone to take you step by step through the entire marketing plan, from how to open a squidoo account to how to build a niche site based on your One Week Marketing campaign I suggest LearnItStepbyStep.com.

In the interest of full disclosure that is my site. It is a membership site I recently opened with a good friend/partner of mine. The number of questions I was getting from people trying to work their way through One Week Marketing made me realize there was a bit of an information gap between assumed knowledge and actual knowledge to complete the strategies in One Week Marketing.

I have been working with Squidoo since 2007, and have been making a decent income from Squidoo for quite some time. I am a Giant squid, meaning I have been recognized by the Squidoo community as someone who has built over 50 quality lenses. I am friends with PotPieGirl (who wrote One Week Marketing) and she gives her seal of approval to LearnItStepbyStep.  If you need step by step help it is a great place to go.

Niche Blogging ~ Let’s talk about Amy Bass when it comes to niche blogging. Amy Bass set her goal in 2007 to pay off her debt by working online. Thus far she has already paid off over 61 THOUSAND dollars of that debt working online and doing niche blogging. She is a very successful person when it comes to niche blogging.

She is also an amazing teacher. She created The Niche Blogger to help people who wanted to learn to do exactly what she was doing to make money online. She takes you through every step of the process to create a profitable niche blog.  The Niche Blogger is very reasonably priced, and you can pay by the month or you can pay a one time lifetime fee. The lifetime is definitely worth the price. She shares tricks and secrets I had no idea about and I’ve been blogging for quite some time.

She is friendly and easy to interact with, and answers “newbie” questions with respect and compassion. She is quick to answer questions left on the site and if you need a little extra she also offers personal coaching. In the coaching she will help you with all of your questions directly pertaining to the specifics of your site.

Whether you choose to go with Squidoo or with niche blogging I think you will have made a wise decision in moving your financial situation into a better place. However, just making a decision to do something does nothing for your bank account, which brings us to the next step.

4. Take Action EVERY Day

This is not going to happen on its own.  YOU are going to have to take action. You are responsible for doing the things that need to be done to create the wealth from these two systems.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you have to be chained to your computer 10 hours a day (although if you followed these plans and spent that kind of time, you’d be out of debt in no time), what I am saying is you have to take “income producing” action every day.

Not just on the third Thursday of the month when you feel like it might be fun. This is a business, and if you want to be successful you must put in the time. Now if you have a full time job and only have an hour a day, then you better make sure that hour is spent solely on income producing activities. That does not mean checking email, posting to twitter, instant messaging with people. It means completing tasks that will bring you closer to the completion of your One Week Marketing Campaign or your Niche Blog.

I chose both of these programs because they are set up in daily lessons, which can help make it very easy. There is something specific to do each day. That will help you stay focused and complete your daily actions.

At LearnItStepbyStep.com we provide you with a daily goal, and a  daily action to accomplish that goal. It is very clear cut what needs to be done on any given day of the program. If you just follow through you will succeed.

Amy has The Niche Blogger set up quite similarly. She goes day by day and each day has something that needs to be done.

A word of warning, and this comes from personal experience.  Reading through the month of information with not make you any money.  I joined The Niche Blogger when it first opened. There was only one post coming out a day. Then it was quite easy to take action on the daily post. The second month there was more information already available when I got to the second month. I found it much harder to implement instead of just read ahead to see what was going to happen next.

Just READING WILL NOT MAKE YOU MONEY. You have to implement. We decided to only provide a week’s worth of posts at a time at LearnItStepbyStep.com to help combat this problem and help people “have” to take action.

I just can’t stress enough how important actually DOING it is going to be. This brings me to one other point I want to make about “doing it”. Avoid the “shiny things”. You know the exquisitely crafted emails and sales pages of the gurus and wanna be gurus telling you for no work at all you can earn a million dollars while you sleep? Yeah you know them, you’ve probably been wasting your money on them for a while now. Each time you get distracted, read another ebook, you take yourself farther and farter away from your goal. Each time you lose focus and decide to just try this, or just try that, you take yourself farther away from your goal. I’m telling you how to become debt free right now ~ stick to one thing, and follow through.

Ok, off my shiny things soap box, and on to my last point.

5. Follow Through an Entire Plan

This is crucial. There are some fun parts of internet marketing that are creative, and inspiring. There are some parts of internet marketing that are mind numbing, repetitive, and just plain boring. They ALL have to be done.

I can’t tell you have many times I’ve heard someone say “My lens was doing well for a week or two and then it just fell off to no where.” My first question is did you do days 3-7 in the One Week Marketing plan?  99% of the time the answer is no or not all of it.  Well it just doesn’t work that way. You can’t just do the fun parts and expect to have success. You can’t just throw  up a squidoo lens or fill a blog with content and then do nothing else and expect it to fly on its own.

You have to complete ALL of ANY program you decide to follow. The person writing it wrote it that way because that’s the way that works. If you want to succeed you have to follow through to completion, it’s just how it works. Luckily with either of the programs I have suggested you will have help and encourgement along the way, but ultimately it will be up to you to make the choices necessary to achieve success. It is absolutely doable. Just look at Amy ~ she’s paid off over 60k in about a year and a half. That may seem insurmountable to you, but it’s not.

If you follow the steps I’ve outlined you too will know not only how to beceme debt free, but with some consistency and action you will BE debt free.