Timothy Ferriss - The 4-Hour Workweek - Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich - Expanded and Updated

eLance (www.elance.com) (877–435–2623)

Craigslist (www.craigslist.org)

LIFESTYLE DESIGN IN ACTION

I’m a U.S. citizen and it was impossible for my friends and relatives to track me down by phone. Enter Skype In. It’s not new but allows you to lease a fixed U.S. (or other country) phone number which then forwards to your Skype account. About $60/year. Within Skype you can then set up call forwarding to ring you at your local number. You pay the rate as if you were calling from the United States to wherever you are. I’ve used this in about 40 countries and it works like a treat. The call quality is usually great and the convenience is amazing. http://www.skype.com/allfeatures/onlinenumber/. A caveat is to always, ALWAYS get a local SIM card for your unlocked GSM phone. Roaming is for amateurs. A local SIM also gets you GPRS, Edge, or 3G. Sometimes even free Wifi. Cheers, —TY KROLL

Basically I try to keep all of my tools online so that if my laptop gets stolen, I can buy a new one and have everything up and running within 24 hours. Here are a few of the tools I use on a regular basis:

RememberTheMilk.com has been really crucial to me keeping on top of my daily tasks.

Freshbooks.com for online invoicing

Highrise (http://www.highrisehq.com/) for online CRM

Dropbox (getdropbox.com) for easy file sharing/automatic backup of critical files while on the road

TrueCrypt (truecrypt.org) for keeping your laptop data secure while on the road. [Tim comment: This can also be used with a USB flash drive, and another cool feature—it provides two levels of “plausible deniability” (hidden volumes, etc.) if someone forces you to reveal the password.]

PBwiki.com-Wiki site that helps me keep on top of the notes and ideas that I collect as I go through life.

FogBugz on Demand: http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBUGZ/IntrotoOnDemand.html. It’s a “bug tracker” aimed at software development companies, but I use it every day for both personal and business tasks. It’s almost like a VA, as you can route your mail through it and it will help you sort it and keep track of it. It has great features to track e-mails, and there’s a free version for two users (me + VA!). —RB CARTER

A really useful service is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. With a small investment in time or money, a business that requires hundreds of people doing small bits of defined work becomes possible for extraordinarily low work-per-unit costs. Examples include the search for Steve Fosset (literally thousands of people looked at satellite photos that would have overwhelmed SAR agencies) and a trouble-ticket business that utilizes qualified labor all over the world (see Amazon.com/webservices). I am not an owner nor do I have any stake in Amazon—but I have used their services and some are trans forming when it comes to muse creation. Cheers, —J MARYMEE

FAST TO MARKET

The fastest way to market with a product idea is: Registera.com. Get hosting from dathorn.com [a cheap reseller account, like www.domainsinseconds.com]. With two clicks set up a wordpress blog. Apply a theme to it. Add your content and a buy now button. The buy now button links to an enter e-mail address, phone number, etc., page. The user then clicks a continue to PayPal button. This automatically e-mails me their details, but then shows the user a message stating that the link to PayPal is currently not working. I use this to determine how many sales I would have achieved. I use Google ads to drive traffic … I calculate theoretical ROI (ideally using Google analytics). If after a week or two I can see a positive ROI that’s worth my effort I create or outsource the creation of the product (emag, PDF, whatever). I set it all up with a working link to PayPal, and then retrospectively send a message to the users who already tried to buy. Normally within hours I’ve got all my money back, and the cash starts to roll. An example is the DIY public relations pack at www.mybusinesspr.com.au. Great work of the 4HWW … looking forward to the next edition. Regards, MATT SCHMIDT

39. http://news.com.com/2100–1017–269594.html?legacy=cnet.

40. It can be illegal to charge customers prior to shipment—so we will not charge customers—but it is still common practice. Why do so many commercials state “allow three to four weeks for delivery” if it only takes three to five days for a shipment to get from New York to California? It gives the companies time to manufacture product and use customers’ credit card payments to finance it. Clever but often against the law.

41. This applies to Sherwood and not Johanna.

42. How did I come up with the most successful BodyQUICK headline (“The Fastest Way to Increase Power and Speed Guaranteed”)? I borrowed it from the longest-running, and thus most profitable, Rosetta Stone headline: “The Fastest Way to Learn a Language Guaranteed. (tm)” Reinventing the wheel is expensive—become an astute observer of what is already working and adapt it. I keep a folder of all print and direct mail advertising that compels me to call a number or visit a website, and I use www.delicious.com to bookmark websites that convince me to provide my e-mail address or make a purchase.

43. Sherwood includes shipping and handling prior to the final order page so that people don’t finalize the order just to confirm total pricing. He wants his “orders” to reflect real orders and not price checkers.

44. If you are rolling out after a successful test or building a large e-mail database, tools like www.aweber.com in the resources are better at scaling.

45. Keeping in mind that 100 specific terms at $0.10 per click will perform better than 10 broad terms at $1.00 per click, the more you spend, and thus the more traffic you drive, the more statistically valid the results will be. If budget permits, increase the number of related terms and daily expenditure so that the entire PPC test costs $500–1,000.

46. This is a checking account for receiving credit card payments.

47. Set this up using services detailed at the end of this chapter and the next.

48. See the online bonus chapter on www.fourhourblog.com to understand all of these terms in context. Search “Jedi Mind Tricks.”

49. “Paper trading” refers to setting an imaginary budget, “purchasing” stocks (writing their current values on a piece of paper), and then tracking their performance over time to see how your investment would have done had it been for real. It is a no-risk method for honing investment skills before putting skin in the game.