There are so many things involved with building wealth that it would take much more than one article to explain it all. So, we've put together a simple five-step guide to help you get a great start in building wealth for a lifetime.

Step 1: Set Specific Goals

Goal setting is a task that can be easily put off - especially when you are extremely busy in day-to-day activities. However, goal setting is the first and one of the most important steps you'll take to achieve wealth. Set both short-term and long-term goals. Short-term goals may be daily, weekly and monthly goals. These should reveal where you would like to be financially by a certain time in the near future.

Long-term goals include the amount of wealth you would like to accumulate within a year, two years, or maybe even five or ten years. Both types of goals are necessary to build wealth. Without goals, you are wondering blindly with no care or thought of what's ahead. This pattern of life is sure to leave you empty-handed!

Step 2: Create a Business Plan

Every successful business from the past and today started with a plan. Your business plan should illustrate where you are now, where you plan to be in the future, and how you're going to get there. Write these few notes down on paper. Then, fill in the blanks to create a rough business plan. It's easier than you think.

*Your current income

*Business profits and expenses (if you already own a business)

*Business budget (or personal budget if working for someone else)

*Capital needed upfront to promote and operate business

*Plans to acquire the capital needed (source of capital)

*Spending plan (promotions, supplies, inventory, online expenses, etc.)

*Expectations (What results do you expect from your initial efforts?)

Creating a business plan is a necessary step to build wealth through your own business. Even if you don't own a business, you should write down a similar plan to reach your personal wealth goals.

Step 3: Avoid Harmful Debt

Debt is the one of the key reasons many people never accumulate wealth. But remember, there are two types of debt: harmful debt and necessary debt. Harmful debt is the debt you create for things you do not need such as excessive shopping, luxury items, expensive cars that you can't afford, etc. Necessary debt is a debt most people must have to live, such as a mortgage, car loan (affordable), medical, college, etc. These debts are a part of life for most families and will be for many, many years. However, even these types of debts should be kept well within your income limitations. If you can only afford a $250/month car loan, then shop around until you find one at this price. Don't give in to the temptations and pressures to buy the fancier, more expensive car with a $450/month payment. It's not worth the risk!

You may ask, "I thought these steps were for building wealth?"

As it happens, debt is the opposite of wealth.  The more debt you have, the less wealth you will accumulate. You can't save money or invest money that belongs to someone else. If you earn $3,000 in income this month, but owe $2,000 in loans (before everyday living expenses), you can't possibly have extra money to save. You must either earn more or sell some items to pay off your debt. You should avoid this "debt trap" if you intend on building wealth for the future.

Another type of debt is one for your business. You may take out a small business loan to get things started or to promote your business. If you are uncertain about whether the business will bring profits, try to avoid business debt until you have tested it a while.

Step 4: Develop a Personal Plan

Above, you developed a business plan. Now it's time to create a personal plan. What tasks will you do daily to build wealth? Put yourself on a schedule and a strict budget. Work toward your goals daily by making a list of things to do and marking off each item on the list as you complete the tasks. In your budgeting, include a set amount of money you will put away in savings (savings account, IRA, stocks, bonds, etc.) If you plan to invest, be sure to diversify your investments. Choose only one or two high-risk investments and several "safer" investments such as mutual funds or bonds.

Step 5: Stay focused on the Goal, not the Circumstances

No matter what circumstances you find yourself in, keep your eyes on the wealth-building goal ahead. Even if sales are down in your business, don't stop dead in your tracks. Remember, businesses have ups and downs. If you remain steadfast toward your goal during the slow times, the busy times are bound to be much better than ever. Your income will grow and you will have the extra money needed to reach your wealth-building goals.

In a nutshell, building wealth does not happen over night with one get-rich-quick program. It happens with consistent labor toward the goals and tasks you have created. You can build wealth for your future if you do not waver from these basic truths that have worked for millions of others!

October 2, 2007. It’s a typical day at SEOhaus in the largest office located within the company’s 1400sqft. space, employees sit in a semi-circle around a cordless speaker phone.

"We need to really focus on improving our PR," a client says, his voice on speaker phone audible throughout the room.

"We can do that," one of the employees says, glancing down at the yellow legal pad on her lap. "Let’s come up with a solution."

Ten minutes later, when the meeting ends, the employees disperse to their respective offices, and the company’s owners, William Senn, 26, and William Canu, 25, take a short break from their hectic work schedules to share what it’s like being an entrepreneur under 30.

"We’re growing so fast," Canu says, leaning back in his office chair and glancing over his shoulder at the busy traffic below on Kettner Blvd. "It’s amazing."

The two Williams, who started SEOhaus from the proceeds of their last business venture's mail-order DVD rental service, have seen their company grow from a single room with two employees (themselves) to a small business with approximately ten full-time employees and growing. Next week, the company will move to a much larger office suite down the hall.

"We’re excited," says Senn, a former Google employee." The walls of the new office are being painted right now, and it (the move) is starting to feel official."

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is all about the art of achieving increased traffic, presence, and page rankings (i.e. higher search results) for a website, and this is achieved by a variety of different methods, including, but not limited to: building links, writing and marketing SEO content articles, social bookmarking, and web design.

"SEOhaus is a boutique firm," Senn explains, "We specialize in customized services, and our employees are very good at what they do."

SEOhaus and it’s twenty-something owners, represent a growing trend in American business: young entrepreneurs making an impact in their respective industries and developing successful businesses before their 30th birthday.

Their generation, known as Generation Y (1981-1995) is a generation of young entrepreneurs. The online publication Inc.com recently released the list of the "thirty coolest entrepreneurs under thirty," profiling individuals who began their own companies---some while still living in their parent’s houses, and have seen them grow exponentially in only a few short years.

Many people love what they do. I would like to talk about the passion for graphic arts. The persons who have worked for many years in the printing industry, the persons who had professional achievements in graphic arts certainly became fascinated by this field.

You can feel how passion envelops you when you start liking it: the smell of printing ink, the smell of glue in the folding box gluing machine, the sound of cylinders of printing presses, the sound of die-cutters.

You see an offer for a sheetfed printing machine and you remember how printers beat the sheets to prepare them for printing, how they adjust the inking with the help of ink level control devices for ink units, how they check the colour density of the raster.

When graphic arts are your life, you can read one of the many online books thinking how it would look like if it were a printed book. The cover would be laminated, bright or matt, or it could be UV varnished. You would feel the smell of the heated adhesive of the book back gluing and back lining machines, you would see how the folding machine brings the large printing sheets to the small book format, you would feel the smell of fresh print when you browse through a book that has just been taken out of the production line.

You go to the supermarket and while you put the products in the shopping basket you lean to read the label of the jam jar. You look carefully to see if it is printed only with process colours: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black  and you wonder whether it is varnished or not. Is it flexographic or offset printing? How many colour groups had the printing machine? Was the ink ecologic or not?

In the morning, you buy a newspaper to read. You are immersed in the titles of articles, but after some pages, your fingers turn black. You are fascinated by the smell of fresh print, but some questions spin in your head. What type of ink did the persons who printed the newspaper use? Was the web press of coldset or heatset type?

You receive the phone bill at home and you notice every time how exquisitely is the logo of the phone company printed. How beautiful the printing is! What is the contribution of the printer and of the machine for printing envelopes?  The label is printed so beautifully so that you get easier over the value of the invoice in the envelope even if it is quite high.

When you buy a pack of medicines from the drugstore you can notice the metallic foil applied on the box and you remember the equipment that did it, you can hear the noise made by the die-cutting equipment, you can see the boxes on the band in the gluing machine.

You receive a magazine advertising several products at promotional prices and you notice that the raster is a bit loaded and the pictures are not clear enough. You wonder if it is due to the pre-press when files were processed or something happened in the printing press.

All these mean passion, being committed to the printing field. You start liking the printing industry so much that you want to share the feeling with other people. How could you do this better than via the internet?

What if it is a virtual world, what if you see a picture or some details from a printing press? You can still feel the smell of ink.

Tracking down the identity of an unknown caller is not as hard as you might think. Although you could find out the information you want for free, a lot of your success will depend on luck. It is far easier to get a membership at a private reverse cell phone directory because you are guaranteed to get what you want -- owner details, like name, address and wireless service carrier.

People need to lookup phone number details for a variety of reasons. Whether you are concerned about the kids your teenager has been hanging out with, or need to stop a very annoying prank caller, or even need to stop a harassing stalker, conducting a reverse cell phone trace is a very legitimate means of investigating a questionable person -- especially if you suspect your significant other may be cheating on you.

But again, in order to find out an unknown person's identity for free, you're going to have to be lucky. The only way you can find his or her private information is if they have willingly put it up on the Internet. That way, you can find it by doing a search with their phone number on the major search engines, like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Otherwise, your only option is to make a small investment with a real cell phone database that allows you to conduct reverse lookups on virtually any phone number.

The reason that you can't find cell phone details online for free is because of the transitory nature of a cell phone number's life span. People are always changing cell numbers, and as a result they are just too difficult to track on a consistent basis (for free). Maintaining an accurate and up-to-date cell phone database is simply too difficult and costs too much money for it to be available online for free. People are also worried about having their phone numbers out in the open for telemarketers to exploit, so the government has made it very difficult for people to uncover cell phone number details.

But don't worry, accurate and current reverse cell phone number lookup directories do exist and are very affordable. The best ones will allow you to purchase a lifetime membership for unlimited searches, or, if you don't feel the need for unlimited access, you can make a smaller investment for just one lookup. They will allow you to do a free preliminary search to see if the information you are seeking is available in their database, at which point you can decide whether or not you want to get it.

Businesses around the world are being bombarded with sophisticated threats against their data and communications networks every day.

As enterprises invest heavily in fortifying their IT infrastructures and enforcing comprehensive and constantly upgraded security policies against malicious code attacks, another home-grown threat - the mobile workforce - is opening the floodgates to compromised enterprise data and corporate network contamination.

Though mobile working offers gains in commercial and operational value, enterprise security policies often stifle the effectiveness and productivity of mobile workforce devices.

Here we examine why best of breed softwares, in isolation, are not able to provide the mobile workforce and their laptops with the same high level security afforded to office based workers.

Two lines of defence in a protected corporate environment

Currently organisations anticipate, detect, and prevent threats from laptops attacks via a layered approach.

This is coupled with centralized, uncompromising IT policy which overrides an individual’s control over his/her own laptop.

As IT departments prioritise corporate IT governance, their primary method of effectively enforcing organizational security policies is by controlling all networking components.

When connecting to the Internet from within the corporate network, laptop users are protected by two lines of defence:

A comprehensive set of IT security appliances running secured and hardened Operating Systems, and security software including firewalls, Intrusion Prevention/Detection System, antivirus, antispyware, antispam, and content filtering, all of which are completely controlled by the respective corporate IT organization.

Personal firewall and antivirus software installed on the user’s laptop and controlled by the user.

In addition, when laptops are within the protective corporate environment, the organization’s IT department can exercise full and consistent control over (and visibility of) any device, which is a critical operational consideration. This means the IT team can:

consistently update respective laptops with data, policies, etc.

monitor the entire network effectively vis-?-vis the status of all network components.

Outside the safe zone

Once a laptop starts 'roaming' outside the enterprise governed network, the 2-line defence system no longer applies, as the laptop is essentially no longer protected by the corporate security appliances layer, and is exclusively dependent on the security software installed on the local operating system.

The roaming laptop is exposed to potential threats from nearby wireless and wireline devices (in hotels, business lounges, airports, WiFi at Internet Cafes, etc.).

These threats signify a danger far beyond the scope of the individual laptop, as intrusive code may proceed to use the laptop as a platform for breaching corporate security, once the laptop had returned to its base, and is connected to the network.

Relying solely on the best of breed software on the laptop is flawed due to:

Operating System Inherent Vulnerabilities - by definition, security software running on Windows is subject to inherent Windows vulnerabilities, effectively exposing personal firewall and antivirus applications to malicious content attacks.

Unknown Threats – the security software can only defend against known threats. By the time these threats are added to the knowledge base, it may be too late.

Immediate Damage - malicious content executes directly on the platform to be protected, rather than on a security appliance designed to filter the content and serve as a buffer.

Managing Security Level – making sure all the computers have installed the latest security updates and enforcing a unified security policy can be very difficult. When the computers themselves are at the frontline, these security weaknesses can be disastrous to the entire network. In other words, it’s “all or nothing”, either the entire network is secured or nothing is secured.

Consequently, many organizations adopt tough security policies prohibiting most wireless networking options (significantly limiting user productivity and remote computing freedom), or imposing strict, costly and difficult to enforce cleansing procedures for laptops that return from the “field”.

Best of breed software made mobile

A growing number of CSOs have decided to place computers behind a robust security gateway, usually a dedicated security appliance, to counteract the current weaknesses in laptop security.

Unlike PCs, these appliances are equipped with hardened operating systems that do not have security holes, “back-doors”, or unsecured layers. They are designed with a single purpose, to provide security.

The fact that these security appliances are hardware-based and not software-based provides the following advantages:

Cannot be uninstalled – security attacks often start by targeting the security software, and trying to uninstall it or to stop its activity.

Software-based security solutions, as any software program includes an uninstall option that can be targeted.

In contrast, appliance-based security cannot be uninstalled as it is hard coded into the hardware.

Non-writable memory - hardware-based solutions manage the memory in a restricted and controlled manner. Security appliances can prohibit access to its memory, providing greater protection against attacks on the security mechanism.

The use of hardware allows the combination of a comprehensive set of security solutions in a single device.

Hardware also allows the combination of best-of-breed enterprise-class solutions with proprietary developments working on both the lower and higher levels (e.g. packet and network level, application level etc.).

In addition, the well known tension between users and IT managers over their computing freedom can be overcome via hardware.

On one hand, users want to have complete freedom when using their computers, while on the other hand, IT managers try to enforce security policies (e.g. banning the use of P2P software).

By using a security appliance, IT managers solve the conflict between the user’s desire for computing freedom and the IT manager’s desire to control and enforce security policies.

With software, policy is part of the laptop or computer, whereas through an appliance security policy can be enforced outside the laptop and the user has complete freedom inside the safe computing environment.

In conclusion, to provide corporate level security for laptops operating outside the safe office environment, CSOs should consider layered security architecture on a hardware appliance.

A dedicated appliance can hold all of the best of breed security softwares, and is able to re-introduce the two lines of defense enjoyed by office based PCs.

By introducing a security gateway, should security be breached, the damage stops at the gateway.