What is your Money Creation Model?

It's easy to make a few bucks here and there. If you want to make an impressive amount of money, however, the game is completely different.

You have to start with the preliminary stages. The worst thing you can do is waste your own time. When you work for yourself, your time is the most valuable thing you have. Before you choose to invest your time in anything you need to do some analysis on the concept or idea.

Will your investment of time and effort yield a reasonable return? This is the first question you need to ask yourself. When you come up with an idea, it's important to be realistic about the amount of time and effort required for each dollar you make. It's a delicate balance but you need a good return.

Have a plan. You'll never reach a destination if you don't have directions. Developing a plan will help you know where you're going but, more importantly, it will allow you to gauge your current progress. This will allow you to determine what products/services/clients/customers are valuable and which are a drain. Get rid of the worthless elements and focus more on the profitable ones.

You need to eliminate the competition. A lot of people fall into the trap of competing on their competitor's level. This creates nothing but struggle and frustration for you. Someone might look at the field I'm currently in and think I have a lot of competition. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have no competition. No one, no one in the world, does what I do. No one offers what I offer. You need to be unique and leave your competition struggling to catch up to you.

These three suggestions have been major factors in my success. You can apply these to literally anything you might do and experience far more success than others who seem to be doing the same thing.

Run a cost/effort/time vs profit analysis on every idea.
Create a plan based around the most profitable idea.
Eliminate the competition through uniqueness and quality.