How I got free advice from a dozen millionaires (and 1 future billionaire)

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance” by Derek Bok

An investment in your own education will always provide the greatest ROI. This past weekend I was able to get free advice from a dozen millionaires by investing in myself.

What is NAMS?

From February 6^th thru February 9^th I attended the NAMS 11 convention in Atlanta, GA. NAMS stands for Novice to Advanced Marketing System. Some people claim NAMS means Niche Affiliate Marketing System.

It is a different experience attending NAMS vs attending the Warrior Forum Event, JVZoo Event or JVAlert Live. The primary difference is it is designed to provide value to attendees regardless of their level of experience with Internet Marketing.

There are four tracks of learning at NAMS. They are appropriately called Level 100, Level 200, Level 300 and Level 400. Here is the description of each level:

• Level 100 – Not made any sales yet online but I’m intrigued
• Level 200 – Made some money but have no clue why sales happen when they do
• Level 300 – Making Money online and working my butt off
• Level 400 – Cash is rolling in and doing this full time

Each day there are 3 slots for courses that you can attend. There is a course for each level in all 3 slots. This allows you to select the course that corresponds to your level of expertise.

This was my first time attending NAMS and I must say that this format is what makes it a better convention than anything else I have attended. In other conventions you have a speaker and everyone listens to that one speaker. That speaker might speak on a topic that you are not interested in or that you are not at a level to implement what they are teaching. This leaves you feeling the convention was a waste. You will not get this experience at NAMS.

Here is a list of the courses that you could attend at NAMS.

The other benefit for attending NAMS is the caliber of the teachers that attend. You have some of the most successful Internet Marketers like Alex Mandossian, Jeff Herring, Joel Comm, Nicole Dean, Justin Popovich, Jason Fladlien, Ray Edwards and Kathleen Gage plus many, many more.

The Hidden Costs of Attending Conventions

Every convention has a price to attend. The cost to attend NAMS was only $297. Pretty reasonable when you consider some conventions can cost several thousand dollars to attend.

There are other costs involved besides the price of entrance. There is the cost of a hotel for 3 nights at $99 per night. With taxes the cost was actually $111.95 per night x 3 nights. Total cost for hotel was $335.85.

Another hidden cost is taking vacation from work. One of my two biggest goals in life is to join the Traveler’s Century Club whose membership requires visiting at least 100 countries.

I travel extensively and last year in August I went on holiday to England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Isle of Man and Northern Ireland. The problem is this trip exhausted all the vacation time I get each year at my job.

For me to take off from work on Thursday, Friday and the following Monday would have to be unpaid leave. I earn $209.61 per day. Total cost for unpaid vacation is $209.61 x 3 = $628.83.

Since I live in Atlanta I did not have to pay for airfare to travel to the convention. I do not include the cost of food because even if I did not attend I would have still incurred food costs.

Here is the actual cost to attend this convention:

$297.00  cost of ticket
$335.85  cost of hotel
$628.83  cost of unpaid vacation
$1,261.68

Free Advice From a Dozen Millionaires

As you can see from above I am already over $1.2k in the hole before ever attending NAMS. Lots of people never attend conferences because of the costs involved. If that is your mindset then re-read the quote at the beginning of this article:

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance” by Derek Bok

NAMS conference runs from Friday to Monday. There is an optional mastermind event Thursday afternoon. During the mastermind event a dozen instructors (all millionaires) took the stage to talk to the attendees.

Each one talked about their background and what path or paths they took to become millionaires. After they finished we took a short fifteen minute break.

After the break each instructor was asked to provide their one biggest tip that they could share with the audience. It is not every day that you get a chance to pick the brains of very successful people. Here I was sitting there in an optional event getting tidbits of wisdom from millionaires.

The sharing of their one best tip started with a show of hands of everyone who has ever had their servers hacked. EVERY ONE OF THE SPEAKERS HAD THEIR WEBSITES ATTACKED! Every one of them. Several people in the audience also raised their hands.

When asked how long it took to recover their website after being hacked, the average response was 3-4 days. Several people said that they were never able to recover their website and did not have backups so they lost everything.

So from this one question I got my very first bit of advice from millionaires. First and foremost make sure that you have a really challenging password for your website. The recommendation was that the password is 8-12 characters long and it has upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters.

The consensus was to make your password something that even you could not remember. They recommended that you use either RoboForm or LastPass to keep track of your passwords. I personally use RoboForm and can swear by its effectiveness in remembering passwords.

Even though I use RoboForm daily, I learned about the generate password feature found in this product. You can configure it so that it will automatically generate very strong password using your own criteria.

Right after the conference I spent about 2 ½ hours going through and changing the passwords on every website I own or that I regularly visit like Facebook, my bank, Squidoo and my credit card accounts. Now they all have new 12 character long passwords that even I cannot remember. The tradeoff is that I can’t login to my checking account using the app on my phone since I don’t remember the password anymore!

If you are not using either LastPass or RoboForm, here is something to consider before selecting one. If you hire a VA to do work for you then you want to use LastPass. LastPass gives you the option to change the password on every account where you have shared the password with someone else. RoboForm does not have this option. If you do not have a VA then it is a coin toss on which one you use.

Another tidbit was to change the admin Userid on your WordPress websites to something else. Anybody that wants to hack into your server is going to try and guess a password for admin since that is the default. If you change you admin Userid to something else like foolhackers, then they will be trying to hack into your website using a Userid that does not exist so they will not succeed.

To show you how valuable that series of tidbits were for me, the week after NAMS there is a concerted effort to hack into WordPress websites in the US. Wordfence reported that the activity was 10 times greater than normal. I had already gone in and changed all of my admin userids to something else and given them all new 12 character long passwords. Many of my websites were hit with people trying to guess the admin password. Without this tidbit of advice and my taking action on it would probably have resulted in one or more of my website being hacked. This tidbit alone was worth gold to me.

Another tidbit referenced a website called eyejot.com. This website allows you to create instant email videos. This allows you to send a video in email to users. Many people will watch a video instead of reading a long email so you can have better interaction with your list this way.

The number one website recommended for project management of teams is Asana. When asked how many of the instructors used Asana, every hand except one went up. Several instructors also recommended Basecamp. Two instructors that had used both Basecamp and Asana said they preferred Asana.

How many of you get too many emails? I think everyone falls into that category. Then check out the website unroll.me. They will take all the emails that you are subscribed to and combine them into a single email they call the “rollup.” This allows you to only read one email daily instead of several hundred.

How to Profit from Attending Conferences

One of the tidbits came from Kathleen Gage who said that the first person that put together all of these tidbits in an e-book format then she would buy it for $20. One of the attendees had her computer and was typing in all the information into her computer. She took action and compiled it into a PDF document and sure enough Kathleen Gage purchased it for $20.

By taking action Debbie profited greatly from attending this conference. During the three day event she sold over $700 of her report of the tips from millionaires. By this time she is probably sold over $800. When you consider it costs only $200 to attend NAMS (if you purchase an early bird ticket) then she made enough money to attend the next four NAMS for FREE! When compared to my cost to attend the event she has almost covered the entire cost of attending.

Even though I attended the event and wrote everything down the old fashion way with pen and paper, I purchased a copy. Debbie put together a very nice 15 page document of all the tips from millionaires. If you are interested in getting all of the tips from NAMS without having to pay over $1.2k to attend, you can purchase Debbie’s report below for $20.