Before I get started, let me get one thing straight. This blog post is going to be misunderstood, I already know that. By no means am I trying to tell you to hang out with rich people just for their money, hang out with them because you truly see them as friends.

For a moment, think about your 5 closet friends. Take each of their salaries and add them up. Now divide that figure by 5.

That final number is going to be roughly how much money you’ll make each year. And if you are happy with that amount, that’s great… you can save yourself the trouble and stop reading this blog post.

But if you aren’t happy with your income, the best thing you can do is to start hanging out with richer people. And no, I don’t mean you should ditch your broke friends, but you should also make new friends who are more ambitious.

Here are some of the ways I was able to make money in 2009 by hanging out with successful people.

20% monthly returns in the stock market

Lets face it, making money in the stock market isn’t easy. For every success story there are thousands of failure stories.

At the beginning of the year a friend of mine, Andrew Warner, introduced me to Timothy Sykes. Tim is well known for trading penny stocks and although many people think he is a scam artist, he is actually helping the Average Joe make a lot of money.

A few months ago Tim came to visit me in Seattle. We hung out, I gave him some marketing advice and he proposed that I open up a $50,000 stock market account with Interactive Brokers. I did so and with the advice I got from Tim Alerts, I have been able to make roughly 15 to 20% returns on a monthly basis.

Investment opportunities

I have been presented with 13 serious investment opportunities this year and I have invested in 5 of them. All of these opportunities came from wealthy friends of mine. If I was not friends with them, I would have never been offered any of these opportunities.

Now granted, I can lose money in any of those investments, but so far all of them are looking good.

For example, one of them is a 296 unit apartment complex in Washington. I haven’t seen it and I don’t know much about real estate, but I am currently getting a 10% return on my money each year (hopefully it continues) and eventually when the complex sells I should get a 2x return on my investment.

Easy access to cash

I love buying distressed companies. They usually sell for less than what they are really worth and if you hold onto them for a few years you can make a decent return on your investment.

Over the course of the year I tried to buy a few distressed companies, but most of them didn’t go through.

Luckily enough, I had the opportunity to buy one in the 6 figure range, but I didn’t want to take on all of the risk. So I hit up one of my friends and he pulled together the majority of the money within a few days.

Free shares in successful startups

Well technically nothing is free, but a lot of my friends have been investing in startups for years. Although all of them won’t do well, a good portion of their companies are doing well.

Whenever they think there is a good company I can provide value to, usually through my marketing efforts, they introduce me to them. And although I may not be able to help all of the companies they introduce me to, I tend to join on as an advisor to the ones I can help.

As an advisor I usually give these companies advice whenever they ask me for it and in return I get shares in their company. Luckily for me, advising a handful of companies isn’t too time consuming, yet it allows me to have my hand in multiple cookie jars.

A wealth of advice

I don’t have a lot of money, so I can’t afford to lose it. And what you probably realize is that it is easier to lose money than it is to make it. And it isn’t through stupid things like gambling or ponzi schemes, but it is typically over business opportunities.

A dumb mistake can take you back to the days when you were broke and struggling. Luckily, my wealthy friends are smart and know the common mistakes that ignorant entrepreneurs like myself typically make.

Instead of them letting me make many of these mistakes, they try and stop me ahead of time. They are always watching out for my best interest… even when I don’t realize it.

Having friends like that is always valuable because once you make a bit of money, they’ll make sure that you don’t lose it and they’ll hopefully even help you make more money.

Conclusion

I know that this blog post may have sounded superficial, but everything I said it is true.

Don’t just go out there and force friendships with a ton of rich people because that won’t help you make more money. You have to build “real” friendships, which means that you need something in common with these people and more importantly you have to enjoy each others company.

Update: If you are having trouble meeting rich people, consider going to: local networking events, business seminars, conferences (you can volunteer and get in for free), country clubs, hotels or upscale bars, and the Internet (forums, websites, blogs, social networks).

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Okay friends, if you're among my top 5, text me your annual income numbers...

12 years after Titanic James Cameron is betting he can change forever the way you watch movies
Photo: Art Streiber

Inside the 3-D World of Avatar

5 Steps to Avatar: Reinventing Moviemaking

Inventing Effects to Create the Avatar Universe

In 1977, a 22-year-old truck driver named James Cameron went to see Star Wars with a pal. His friend enjoyed the movie; Cameron walked out of the theater ready to punch something. He was a college dropout and spent his days delivering school lunches in Southern California’s Orange County. But in his free time, he painted tiny models and wrote science fiction — stories set in galaxies far, far away. Now he was facing a deflating reality: He had been daydreaming about the kind of world that Lucas had just brought to life. Star Wars was the film he should have made.

It got him so angry he bought himself some cheap movie equipment and started trying to figure out how Lucas had done it. He infuriated his wife by setting up blindingly bright lights in the living room and rolling a camera along a track to practice dolly shots. He spent days scouring the USC library, reading everything he could about special effects. He became, in his own words, “completely obsessed.”

He quickly realized that he was going to need some money, so he persuaded a group of local dentists to invest $20,000 in what he billed as his version of Star Wars. He and a friend wrote a script called Xenogenesis and used the money to shoot a 12-minute segment that featured a stop-motion fight scene between an alien robot and a woman operating a massive exoskeleton. (The combatants were models that Cameron had meticulously assembled.)

The plan was to use the clip to get a studio to back a full-length feature film. But after peddling it around Hollywood for months, Cameron came up empty and temporarily shelved his ambition to trump Lucas.

The effort did yield something worthwhile: a job with B-movie king Roger Corman. Hired to build miniature spaceships for the film Battle Beyond the Stars, Cameron worked his way up to become one of Corman’s visual effects specialists. In 1981, he made it to the director’s chair, overseeing a schlocky horror picture, Piranha II: The Spawning.

One night, after a Piranha editing session, Cameron went to sleep with a fever and dreamed that he saw a robot clawing its way toward a cowering woman. The image stuck. Within a year, Cameron used it as the basis for a script about a cyborg assassin sent back in time to kill the mother of a future rebel leader.

This time, he wouldn’t need any dentists. The story was so compelling, he was able to persuade a small film financing company to let him direct the picture. When it was released in 1984, The Terminator established Arnold Schwarzenegger as a huge star, and James Cameron, onetime truck driver, suddenly became a top-tier director.

Over the next 10 years, Cameron helmed a series of daring films, including Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and True Lies. Generating $1.1 billion in worldwide box office revenue, they gave Cameron the kind of clout he needed to revisit his dream of making an interstellar epic. So in 1995, he wrote an 82-page treatment about a paralyzed soldier’s virtual quest on a faraway planet after Earth becomes a bleak wasteland. The alien world, called Pandora, is populated by the Na’vi, fierce 10-foot-tall blue humanoids with catlike faces and reptilian tails. Pandora’s atmosphere is so toxic to humans that scientists grow genetically engineered versions of the Na’vi, so-called avatars that can be linked to a human’s consciousness, allowing complete remote control of the creature’s body. Cameron thought that this project — titled Avatar — could be his next blockbuster. That is, the one after he finished a little adventure-romance about a ship that hits an iceberg.

Titanic, of course, went on to become the highest-grossing movie of all time. It won 11 Oscars, including best picture and best director. Cameron could now make any film he wanted. So what did he do?

He disappeared.

Cameron would not release another Hollywood film for 12 years. He made a few underwater documentaries and did some producing, but he was largely out of the public eye. For most of that time, he rarely mentioned Avatar and said little about his directing plans.

But now, finally, he’s back. On December 18, Avatar arrives in theaters. This time, Cameron, who turned 55 this year, didn’t need to build half an ocean liner on the Mexican coast as he did with Titanic, so why did it take one of the most powerful men in Hollywood so long to come out with a single film? In part, the answer is that it’s not easy to out-Lucas George Lucas. Cameron needed to invent a suite of moviemaking technologies, push theaters nationwide to retool, and imagine every detail of an alien world. But there’s more to it than that. To really understand why Avatar took so long to reach the screen, we need to look back at the making of Titanic.

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okay, now i wanna see Avatar... after reading this article...

I really think you’re offbase here. Google wants ad revenue and ad revenue is generated by content generators.

Yelp, relative to other sites with a lot of paid content producers, generates content extremely cost effectively because they’ve established a feedback loop amongst free content contributors that are extremely passionate and evangelistic. Remember: Less than 50 people are paid to write content on Yelp. (They’re actually geography managers) The rest of their million plus content contributors do so FOR FREE.

Additionally, Yelp is the #1 review & opinion site in the world. And it’s very clear from recent events that Google wants to get into the “local business market”, particularly with their QR code efforts to drive more traffic to their search engine & ad serving properties.
http://www.tech...l-maps-qr-code/

I think Yelp got an opportunity the save their independence – where it came from I don’t know – but ultimately, this opportunity came in the form of revenue attach strategies, monetary infusion, …

…anything that would keep Google Ads from invading the otherwise clean & fresh Yelp interface… anything that would continue the work that’s been done to develop community through their “Elite” program and their “Community Managers”, all of which I suspect would have been toast under Google if the past history of their acquisitions tells us anything… anything that would allow the Yelp brand & Yelp management staff to survive assimilation and ultimately, deconstruction, because I’ve heard that Yelp’s offices is a really ultra-fun place to work.