Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Dr WAYNE W. DYER was an internationally renowned author and speaker in the
fields of self-development and spiritual growth. He was the author of over
40 books, including 20 New York Times bestsellers.
“My purpose is to help people look at themselves and begin to shift their concepts"...said Wayne Dyer
Dr. Wayne Dyer is affectionately called the “father of motivation” by his fans.
His main message was that it is possible for every person to live an
extraordinary life. What’s more, it is possible for every person to
manifest their deepest desires — if they honor their inner divinity and
consciously choose to live from their “Highest Self.”
Why does your growth and development matter? It’s essential to
challenge and stretch yourself often, and not let yourself get stuck in a
job where you don’t feel like you are growing or learning.
There
is more potential inside each person than even they know. In a
fast-paced world with everyone wanting it now, in real-time, and a world
that is constantly evolving, its more important than ever to continue
to grow professionally and personally. Not only does intentional growth
and development have the potential to make you better at your job, it
can help you feel more fulfilled both in and out of the workplace.
Here are five steps to help you grow professionally even without the support of your company.
1. Take on new challenges.
It
can be risky, stressful and sometimes confusing, and it’s a perpetual
cycle, but it’s a great thing: this is how professionals and successful
companies survive. Sometimes it may seem that new problems crop up as
fast as you solve the old ones (sometimes faster!), but that just means
you are moving—that you are getting better and stronger. When an
opportunity approaches you, seize it!
2. Read.
Yep, it’s
that straightforward. Read informative articles from solid, respected
sources (if there are citations, you’re going the right direction.) Pick
up a book, in e- or paper format, or take an online class. Dedicate an
hour a day to read and gain more knowledge.
3. Invest in your learning.
There
are so many free webinars, on practically every subject imaginable.
Carve out some time each day (or each week) to watch a webinar or two.
Most are short, easy to understand, and don’t take huge pieces out of
your already busy life. Or, take a whole course! We love Coursera for learning online.
4. Get a mentor.
Look
around in your company for someone to mentor you. If one is not
available, reach out to thought leaders through LinkedIn or through a
connection. It’s important that you have a connection to the person you
seek. I always recommend searching for leaders in your industry through LinkedIn or an association/organization.
5. Surround yourself with like-minded peers.
See if there are Meetup groups
in your area. Make friends, collaborate, and have fun. It’s guaranteed
to be enriching. You can meet like-minded peers by attending a
networking event, joining a board, or through friends.
There is
always something you can improve on; make daily deposits into your
personal development bank and soon your bank account will grow.
Most people don’t start out as entrepreneurs. They choose to start their own business only after some level of work experience.
It
could be because they don’t like the idea of having a boss and want to
step out as their own. It could be because they learned critical skills
that enable them to be a leader in their own right. It could even be
because they came up with a great idea in the normal course of working.
Of
these three motivations stemming from an existing job (and of course,
there are always more), only one stems from the job being intolerable.
In the other cases, the job is fine, but entrepreneurship serves as a valuable alternative.
Because
stepping out as an entrepreneur is risky and staying with your current
job is safe, many potential entrepreneurs consider the idea of starting
their own business while maintaining their full-time jobs. This approach
doesn’t work for everyone, as it has some critical limitations, but it
also has some key appeals.
The benefits
First, and most
important, is the security factor. Leaving your current full-time job to
start your own business can be risky. You’ll be abandoning your post,
investing your own capital and potentially running on zero income for
the foreseeable future. If your business collapses or fails to generate
any meaningful momentum, you’ll be low on cash and without a job.
Keeping
your job while starting your own business is a way of hedging your
bets, granting you some guaranteed income as you work to develop your
business on the side. If you keep your job, you can quit at any time. If
you quit your job, it’s going to be difficult to get it back.
Keeping
your existing job also allows you to take advantage of company
resources for the benefit of your new enterprise.
Obviously, you can’t
take office supplies or tangible goods, but you can talk with your
bosses, co-workers and colleagues to get advice or partner with them to
develop certain areas of the business. You can even engage in professional networking to start building contacts for your new business.
The drawbacks
The
most obvious drawback is time. If you’re working full time, you won’t
have much time left over to pursue your own business. You’ll have to
force all your work in the company to weeknights and weekends, which are
typically harder times to do business. This means it will take a longer
time for you to get your business up and running, and you won’t be able
to give it your all for as long as you stay employed.
Second,
you’ll naturally consider your startup more of a hobby than a living,
and you’ll be less motivated to nurture it to fruition. Rather than
being motivated by the sink-or-swim nature of sole entrepreneurship,
your safety net will keep you from fully mentally investing in your
enterprise.
Working
on your startup can also have a negative impact on your performance at
your full-time job. If you find yourself distracted with new ideas or
staying up all night to complete work on some facet of the business, you
won’t be able to give your full attention to your job.
Eventually,
your employers will notice, and you could wind up losing your safety
net altogether. Or, if you can juggle both entrepreneurship and a
full-time job, your family and personal lives may suffer. After all, if
your only time to work on your side business is on weeknights and
weekends, when will you spend time with friends and family? It’s a
major burden to take on both at once.
Conclusion
There are
clear advantages and disadvantages to starting a business while
employed. But as long as you can reasonably manage both, I would have to
give the slight edge to retaining employment while starting a business.
There is a study that suggests entrepreneurs who start a business while still employed tend
to do better than those that don’t, but these results might be
suggestive of a hidden variable, such as risk aversion, that leads both
to this decision and to entrepreneurial success. Personally, I went the
route of starting my business on the side while still working as a
full-time employee elsewhere. It’s difficult, but doable.
If you do proceed to start a business under your current employer, be sure to adhere to the following best practices:
Don’t do any entrepreneurial work on company time. This could burn a major bridge and leave you without a job.
Be open about your intentions with your supervisors. The last thing you want is for them to find out by happenstance.
Don’t sabotage yourself. If your business demands more work, either quit your job and go full time, or find additional help.
Keep it balanced. Don’t burn yourself out, and don’t allow your performance to slip.
Go out there and explore the current needs of the market. Look for
loopholes in current situations like weight loss and anti-aging, or
certain gaps in popular product lines. Do not just focus on social
networks like Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. Go beyond a singular “high
risk” platform to obtain more chances of succeeding.
2. Foster Authorship
Be the expert that everyone wanted. You can do so by building a
professional website showcasing your “expertise.” Build on trust and
confidence. In the online world of business, trustworthiness and
reliability go beyond any formal certification or degree.
3. Automate
Make use of new technologies. People look for convenience when
shopping for products or goods online as well as in gathering solutions
to their issues. There is a vast supply of online tools that you can
use to aid in this need. Website forums, automated order and delivery
protocols, secured yet user-friendly payment system, and other
customized solution will help generate revenue for your business 24/7
year-round.
4. Outsource
Outsourcing is one key element in a cost-efficient online business.
Tap virtual assistants online. Sites like iWriter or oDesk or
Elance.com are great sources of staff with specialized skills in
accounting, database management, webhosting, article writing, and so
on. Try to delegate ministerial functions while you concentrate on core
competencies of your business.
5. Connect and Link
Reach out and foster a connection with your online audience. Hear
out their sentiments in building a much credible content for your
website. Products reviews, blog comments, discussion boards,
testimonials and case studies are great sources of information for you
to bank on.
6. Scalability
Adapt successfully to increasing demands. Finding a lucrative niche,
build your authorship around it and infuse this with a proactive
system via automation. Make use of customer feedback to create
successful promotion tactics and achieve sure success.
7. Finding Sustainable Means
Look for a sustainable way to earn money. Do not rely on a single
productivity scheme. Look for ways that will generate recurring revenues
to your business. Make use of renewable subscriptions and other
sustainable point-of-sales. Develop a stable and enduring customer base
via sustainable efforts like newsletters, advice or support.
These aspects may look simple and easy, but be reminded that there
is nothing straightforward about online entrepreneurship. Make your
quest for success in the online world a way of life. Learn to handle
complexities and solve problems without leaving out the fun side of it.
Find a balance doing what you love and making money, all at the same
time. The Internet has continually accumulated quite a number of online
millionaires and billionaires – and you can be next.
Internet marketing is something that any type of business must
consider. It has been going on for years and it doesn’t look like it
will stop. Unfortunately, there are still many small business owners who
neglect this strategy to improve their business.
Time and money are usually the hindrance they’re not making an online
presence. Others, however, don’t care whether or not they have Internet
marketing strategy. But the reality is that their customers care. To be
relevant in today’s marketplace, having an online presence is a must.
On the other hand, those business owners who have embraced Internet
marketing failed to boost their revenue. That’s probably because their
strategies don’t have these features:
Purpose
You can start writing articles now and publish them on your website
and other blogs. But starting a content marketing without a plan or
purpose will cause you to fail. If your content marketing doesn’t have a
clear purpose, then you’ll sure have no goal, direction and audience.
It’s just something that won’t give you result. To have a purpose for your online marketing campaign, you should know
about the content you’ll create to fit your broad market and how it’ll
affect the growth of your business.
Audience
If you have a purpose of your internet marketing plan but you don’t
know who you’re marketing for, then you’re still going to fail. Your content marketing is for your audience. It’s not just for your
brand. And in order to survive, you must have an audience that reads and
interacts with your content.
To know who your content is for, you should start creating a user
persona. Think about that one person that you’re trying to sell your
products. That person has a name, age and location, as well as likes and
dislikes. From there, you can create content with that person in mind.
What’s great about knowing your audience is that you can be sure he/she
(along with thousands of users) will convert.
Message
Now, that you know your audience, you should know what your message
is saying. The message that you would want to convey can be the driving
force to provide more content to your audience.
To have a clear message to your audience, you should understand your
business. Take a look at your mission statement. Then, jot down your
core message. Tell about how the message can help your potential
customers. Afterwards, write your secondary messages that must be
related to your core message.
Consistency
You can’t just write one to two posts and stop. This will kill your
online marketing campaign. Internet marketing requires consistency to
generate real traffic. Remember that search engines rank pages based on
their history authority and fresh content. Your fresh content will stack
the SERP with great value.
If you’re not producing fresh content on a regular basis, you’ll soon
be losing great traffic, no matter how popular your brand is.
To help you write more content for your website, you should go back,
again and again, to your company’s message and list potential topics out
of it. It takes a lot of time to create regular content. If you can’t
handle it, you may consider hiring someone to help you out.
Link
This is for SEO. Each content you create must be integrated with the
rest of your site. But some companies failed to gather more traffic
because they don’t have internal linking strategy.
The good thing is that internal linking isn’t that difficult. You just
need to create links from one page of your site to another. For every
content you make, add a link to some of your other posts that are
relevant to your readers.
Keywords
They’re necessary for every content marketing campaign. But many
failed in this part because they usually cram their content with
keywords. They thought that they could trick search engines into making
their site or posts into the top search results. What you can do is to start researching for keywords. Use them for every content that you make as long as it makes sense.
Social Content Internet Marketing
No one will know that you’ve created a post like that if you don’t
promote your content. Because it’s meant for people, you should share it
with others. That is, if you really want to have a steady incoming
traffic growth.
The most popular channels that you can promote your content to will include Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc. No matter what your content is all
about and what channels you’re using, spreading the latest post you
have to as far and as wide as possible can give you significant traffic
to your website.
Sales
The other purpose of creating content is to sell to your readers.
Content can drive conversions. If you don’t have conversions, then your
content marketing is a failure. To resolve this, you should consider
adding calls to action to get sales.
However, when you make calls to action, they must not be annoying or
obnoxious. Else, you’ll still fail. No one will buy your product or sign
up to your service.
Investing on Content Marketing
Yes, it’s an investment. It’s a valuable investment that may or may
not help your business grow. You should consider spending your
hard-earned dollars to online marketing. This would help you spend more
time planning on how to run your business while you make money.
Conclusion
When you’re still in doubt about having a content marketing campaign,
you should realize that consumers have several choices these days. Your
campaign will be a constant reminder to them that you do exist.
The best way to reach you is online. For that reason, it’s
essential that you are consistently and efficiently using your online
marketing campaign to make sales and gain more customers. Your customers
are highly likely to be online all the time.
Thus, you need to spread your brand online by utilizing those
strategies that we’ve mentioned above. Implement those rules firmly to
your site and you’ll soon see success in your content marketing.
Trying to determine the best way to market your business online can
be overwhelming. It seems there are countless different ways to attract
peoples’ attention, but unless you know how to execute any of them
properly then standing out online can be virtually impossible.
In this
blog I’ll show you seven ways you can break down your Internet marketing
so that you can try and determine more clearly which avenues may suit
you the best.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a
type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or
more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s
own marketing efforts. If you have your own products but aren’t
great at sales, affiliate marketing is a great way to get other people
to do your selling for you without employing a single person. Take a
look at sites such as Click Bank, Commission Junction and Epic
Advertising to see what other people are selling as affiliate products,
and get a sense of if there is a good market for your product. This
works the other way too – so if you’re desperate to get selling online
but don’t have anything to sell you can sign up as an affiliate for
other brands and receive a commission for everything you sell.
Pay Per Click
Pay per click (PPC), is an internet advertising
model used to direct traffic to websites, in which advertisers pay when
the ad is clicked. PPC is an excellent way to get your advert
seen by people, and because you only pay for those who actually click
your link it means that you can be reasonably sure that you are only
paying for people who are interested in what you have. Tools such as
Google Adwords allow you to research relevant keywords to make sure that
you are choosing terms that people are searching. A good rule of thumb
is that longer keyword phrases allow better targeting and therefore
cheaper clicks.
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the Deliberate Organization of your website so it shows up in the search engine results. There
are a lot of so –called SEO experts around who will promise to get your
business to the top of the search engines. Whilst SEO does make this
possible, there is usually a lot more to it and if you want your
business to rank for a highly competitive term it’s unlikely that you
will find yourself in the number one position overnight. Search Engines
employ some of the smartest computer scientists in the world and they
don’t want to be tricked! For this reason it’s far better to take a quality approach to SEO. Create
content that is relevant to keywords and phrases that your customers
use, again, you can check Google Adwords to see how many people use
certain phrases to make sure they’ll benefit you. It’s also important to
get other sites to link to you to show that people appreciate your
content and want to share it. Good SEO is an ongoing job but will come
into its own in the long run when high quality visitors start to find
your site.
Video Marketing
Video is one of the fastest
growing areas of online marketing. Not only is it popular with people
who prefer watching to reading, it allows you enormous flexibility to
present your business in a way that just isn’t possible through words
alone. YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google,
and it’s free to host your videos there as well as many other video
sites. Facebook now also encourages videos to be uploaded directly to
your timeline there so that they play automatically in your followers’
news feeds. The possibilities of using video
are really quite extraordinary and a lot can be achieved without
investing in expensive equipment, making it easily accessible even for
small businesses.
Social Media Marketing
One of the huge
advantages to Social Media Marketing is that if is free to use even for
business accounts, meaning you can put your business in front of its
ideal customers who spend their time on social media over and above
anything else. Most social media platforms also allow some level of paid
advertising so that you can reach even more potential customers, often
for a far lower cost than through other forms of online advertising such
as PPC.
For many, the main cost of Social Media Marketing is the
time it takes, as the whole point of the platform is to be social rather
than to sell. In fact, most social media users are averse to
advertising, what they want is a one-to-one relationship. Business that
do well on social media do well because they are social. Links,
photographs, video and blog posts all do well to help build your
relationships, they also help you build credibility and expertise so
that when people are ready to buy they will remember your business
because they have been gently reminded of your name every time they’ve
seen or liked a link on Social Media.
Content Marketing
Content
is the word used to describe the articles, posts, videos, images, and
anything else that makes up the substance of your web page.
Websites
rich in content are seen as trust-able, the more you have to say on a
subject, the more you must know about it, therefore you can show
yourself to be an authority or an expert. If you have a website for your
business, you should have a blog section there that you update
regularly. Look for ways that you can use the content of your website or
blog to market your business so that when people read your page you are
giving them something they want – knowledge – and subtly pointing out
that you can offer them more.
Look for ways to get your content in
front of as many people as possible, because the more who see it and
visit your site, the more it increases the chances of your content being
shared and seen by even more people. Good content will also help with
your SEO. If you’re not sure where to start with sharing your content,
try some of the popular submission sites such as e-zine,
Business2Community or look for something similar that serves your
particular niche.
Online Advertising
This term includes
other types of online advert that you see, such as Banner Ads and Text
links Many of these fall under a PPC category, but istead of being on
search engines they’re on other websites. One of the best things about
online adverts is that if something works, you can quickly scale it up
to a bigger audience.
If it doesn’t work you can tweak it or turn it
off. Typically though, you’ll need to be prepared to do persistent
testing and constant optimization to get it right and as there is no
such thing as a test environment, you could be throwing your own money
away on adverts that don’t hit the spot with your audience. Unless you
are confident with what you are doing it’s usually best to try out
other, simpler avenues first before you transfer your learnings to the
wider world of online ads.
In conclusion, you might find it best
to choose one or two channels of internet marketing and master them
first before you move on to the next. If you’re a complete beginner,
Social Media, Video Marketing and blogs are a great introduction and
most forgiving to mistakes. They also provide a great learning curve in
the form of user feedback and comments – great for asking questions to
your audience and getting a direct response.
A huge benefit to
internet marketing is that you can track everything – and you should. If
you analyze what you are doing you will know where you are getting your
best returns so that you can put more effort into that area and
increase the return even more.
The first rule of marketing is knowing
your numbers!
No-one gets their marketing strategy right first
time, or second or third. Keep going, keep tracking your progress and
don’t expect perfection.
Here are the six common qualities I’ve found among the entrepreneurs I
try to model myself after. This isn’t the definitive list nor the only
important qualities. These are just the ones I think you can take the
most away from right now. With each quality, I’ll show you a successful
entrepreneur that possesses it and how you emulate them and apply that
quality today.
1. Perseverance
Arianna Huffington faced rejection after rejection when trying to publish her second book, After Reason. However, Arianna did not give up. When she was 23 years old, she was rejected by 36 publishers before her book was finally published.
Years later, in 2003, Arianna ran for governor of California in the California gubernatorial recall race. However, after seeing only 2 percent support in early polls,
Arianna dropped out of the race. Despite this, and seeing the power of
the internet through her fundraising campaign, two years later she
launched HuffingtonPost.com, which later sold to AOL.com in 2011 for $315 million.
My mother said failure was a stepping stone to success
Arianna understood the importance of perseverance despite her
failures and roadblocks. A successful entrepreneur knows that failures
and rejections are not signs for stopping but instead signs to keep
pushing forward and persevering.
Begin looking at failures and roadblocks as learning experiences and
stepping stones. Remember that if it were easy, everyone would do it.
You will encounter failures, setbacks and other obstacles. But
that’s okay. Persevering despite the struggle is one of the most
rewarding experiences for entrepreneurs.
2. Self-Improvement and Always Learning
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, is known for being someone
who learns very fast. Before Elon Musk started the SpaceX program,
according to Esquire’s interview, he read and consumed as many rocketry and propulsion books as possible to learn how to build rockets. When Elon Musk participated in an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit, one user asked how Elon is capable of learning so much in such a short amount of time. Elon replied
“one bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a
semantic tree—make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e.
the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or
there is nothing for them to hang on to.”
I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re
constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it
better. I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly
think about how you could be doing things better and questioning
yourself.
Even with Elon’s success with PayPal and Tesla, and all of his
accumulated experience, he understood he would have to learn about
rockets and rocket propulsion systems if he wanted to be a competent
leader of a space flight company.
Successful entrepreneurs strive to learn more. A part of this is
realizing that no matter how successful you are or how much you think
you might know, there’s always an opportunity to learn more and work on
your personal growth.
Start reading more, listening to more podcasts, and watching more
YouTube videos on subjects that can help grow your business. Put
together a regiment and daily routine where you set aside an hour a day
to work on yourself and becoming a more knowledgeable entrepreneur.
3. Risk-Taker
Bill Gates risked his future when he dropped out of Harvard when only 20 years old, to co-found the software company, Microsoft.
From Bill Gates’ book, “Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System”,
Bill describes his risk-taking as “to win big, sometimes you have to
take big risks. Big bets mean big failures as well as successes. Today,
looking back, it’s easy to believe that Microsoft’s current success was
inevitable. But at the time we made our big bets, including starting the
company as the first personal computer software firm, most people
thought we would fail.”
Business is a money game with few rules and a lot of risk.
What are the things you are most afraid of doing that has the
potential to grow your business the most or put you on the most direct
path to where you want to be? One way to overcome the fear of taking
risks is simply through exposure. Entrepreneur.com suggests surrounding yourself with other risk-takers.
To break out of your comfort zone, and start taking more risks with
your business, spend more time with people who encourage you, not the
ones who think you will fail.
4. Leadership
Howard Schultz’s leadership helped quickly turn Starbucks around when
it was on the brink of failure in 2008, during a massive recession. In
an interview with London Business Forum,
Howard Schultz talked a lot about leadership and what it took for him
to revive Starbucks. One of the most notable things Howard says in this
interview is “leaders need to be decisive, and you have to be willing to
make decisions without perfect information.”
Leadership means being decisive and executing on the things that lead
to the growth and betterment of your business. If you have employees or
people that you work with, part of being a leader is also explaining
how and why the decision is made. Taking initiative and taking responsibility (and ownership of
problems) are two things you can start doing now to work to develop your
leadership skills.
5. Hustle and Tremendous Work Ethic
Even while Oprah Winfrey hosted The Oprah Winfrey Show, she
was not shy to take on other projects. She appeared in 12 movies and
cameoed and produced dozens of other TV shows, movies and documentaries.
Oprah took on many different projects, all while keeping her show at
the top of TV ratings and winning awards, including 9 Daytime Emmys for Outstanding Talk Show.
Even after the series finale of The Oprah Winfrey Show in
2011, Oprah continued to be a media mogul with her own
television network, Oxygen, her own channel, OWN, a magazine, a website,
a XM satellite radio channel and several more movies and television
show cameos.
The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you’re willing to work.
Success requires a little bit of grit and hustle. In Oprah’s case,
her success came from how she built up her personal brand. She hustled
to put herself on nearly every channel available to her without
sacrificing quality.
How many platforms can you put your business and brand on? Get active
and use the channels available, to bring awareness to your brand. Go out there and work for it. Don’t be passive or wait for the
traffic to come to you. You need to go out there and proactively market
your product and proactively make a name for yourself. Nobody is
responsible for your success besides you.
6. Focus
When Steve Jobs returned to a failing Apple in 1996, he saw that
Apple was losing focus on what made them successful and great. By 1997,
Steve reduced Apple’s product line from 350 to just 10.
At a developer’s conference in 1997, Steve Jobs was quoted as saying
“When you think about focusing, you think ‘Well, focusing is about
saying yes.’ No! Focusing is about saying no.”
Around this time, Steve Jobs had to make a lot of tough decisions to
kill off a lot of the products and projects Apple was involved in.
Apple’s poor management caused the company to spread itself out too
thin. Steve noticed this and began to focus the company which inevitably
helped Apple be the powerhouse brand and company that it is today.
Successful entrepreneurs know the importance of focusing and not
spreading themselves out too thin or allowing their business to lose
focus from its’ original vision.
Take time to step outside of yourself and your business and see where
you have started to lose focus. A simple strategy to employ is to keep
it simple. Focus on making the best one product instead of making 10
“okay” products. Focus on growing the best ecommerce business in one
industry instead of trying to decently serve several niches.
Stand on the Shoulders of Giants
You don’t have to adopt all of these qualities today, just the ones
you resonated the most with. Does your business feel unfocused? Work on
your focus. Are you not grinding enough? Start hustling more to get your
business and products out there.
Entrepreneurs are not born with these qualities, they learn and adopt
them through mentors, influencers and their own personal experience.
You can start today to do the same to be a better entrepreneur and
business leader.
Let me know which quality resonated the most with you in the comments
below. If you feel like there’s an important entrepreneurial quality
that I missed, let me know as well. I engage and respond with all
comments.
Since the whole point of this article is to help you make the most of your time and career, I won’t waste words here.
All three of these techniques work well, but you should pick the one that best fits your personality and personal situation:
1. The Repeat Test Take a piece of paper or a spreadsheet, and make a column of numbers representing the hours of the day that you are awake. Mine goes 7, 8, 9, 10 11, 12… and all the way back to 11. Leave enough room for a wider column to the right of the first one.
At the top of every hour, stop for one minute and consider how you spent the past hour. Was it useful or a waste of time? Would you repeat the same action again, or are you frustrated that it was an incredible waste of time?
Now jot a few words next to the number that represents that hour. You might write: ran six miles, feel fantastic. On the other hand, you could observe: dept. meeting accomplished nothing… 30 people is too many.
Be careful not to let this exercise transform you into a selfish jerk; sometimes wonderful uses of your time are inefficient and require patience and/or generosity. For example, after I met with a young assistant, I wrote: it took three tries, but was worth it; Dave gets it now.
You can use this technique to improve your own performance. If you make the mistake of dominating a meeting and offending others, you might write: I need to listen a LOT more.
Try this for a couple of days, and see how it works. At the very least, you will gain immediate insight into the ways that you use your time.
If you keep at this, The Repeat Test will give you a valuable record of how you spent your week, month or year. In my experience, it is much more useful to have a What I Did list than a To Do list. The former is based in reality, while the latter is often a pipe dream.
2. Take 10 at the Hour For some, The Repeat Test is too judgmental; they don’t feel comfortable evaluating every meeting and personal interaction. If this describes you, try this technique that is utterly non-judgmental.
At the top of every hour, take 10 long, slow deep breaths. While you do this, clear your mind of everything. Don’t analyze your day, and don’t start spinning your plans about what you are going to do three minutes from now. Just stop.
The benefits of Take 10 don’t occur while you are pausing, so don’t expect immediate miracles. But I find that after such a break, my stress level shrinks and good ideas tend to pop into my head. And, yes, sometimes it becomes clear to me that I am using entirely the wrong tactics to get what I want.
3. Go Slower This may be the most counter-intuitive advice you have ever received: by going slower, you can save time.
Instead of rushing to send a cryptic email that results in three or four back-and-forth exchanges before the other person understands your intent… go slower and compose a clear and complete message that the other person understands the first time.
Instead of rushing out a report that triggers alarm bells across your business… go slower and “socialize” your conclusions before you release the report, giving others the opportunity to influence – and understand – your conclusions.
Instead of rushing to furnish your apartment, buy a new house or plan a vacation… go slower and figure out what will really make you happy over the long run.
It takes far less time to do something right the first time, than to suffer through countless rushed efforts.
Treat time as the most precious of all gifts, because it is.
Let’s face it, if you’re in business, you’re probably in the
business of making money. As the old saying goes, sometimes you gotta
spend money to make money; and that’s 100% correct, but there’s another
great saying: “sometimes the best things in life are free”. Deep down, we all love FREE.
And because we all love free, I’ve chosen 7 very useful tools for
online entrepreneurs that are 100% free to use and can offer a ton of
value despite the $0 price tag. Let’s take a look!
This gets position one on my list because it saved me from a serious
bout of email marketing rage a few months back. You see, when trying to
deliver an ebook via AWeber I was met with an issue where the size of my
attachment was too large. I tried to fiddle with the file size without
success and so did what any other guy struggling with a technical issue
would do… I turned to Google for help! Like the mind-reader it is,
Google delivered me just the tool I was needing… SmallPDF.com. This app compresses your PDF in the cloud for free to a perfect size
that is still good quality. Got a file that needs to be quickly reduced
in size? Upload it to SmallPDF.com and let the free software go to work and reduce that file size right before your eyes!
I struggle with title suggestions and because I hold many contributor
accounts, I sometimes struggle with topic ideas. Hubspot’s topic
generator is often featured in these type of lists and for good reason… I
can almost guarantee that you’ll come up with a new blog post idea, or a
cool title by using it. As it suggests, just – Fill in the fields with
terms (preferably nouns) that you’d like to write about, and it will
come up with a selection of relevant blog post titles in a matter of
seconds!
Visme is a free, simple-to-use online drag-and-drop presentation and
data visualization software. If you are using infographics as a way to
present your online content visually, or for the fantastic SEO benefits
that infographics can provide, Visme is worth checking out for sure. My
buddy Sean from ListFitness.com just had an infographic he created recently picked up by HuffingtonPost.ca
and scores of other sites, which is a huge benefit from an SEO
perspective. Producing content beyond simple written format is one of
the keys to creating buzz around your online properties nowadays, so
Visme is one to consider for your visual content needs. See it in action here.
Sometimes I’ll come across a sweet looking site that is clearly a
WordPress site (my CMS of choice) and I’d love to know the theme they’re
using. Ever experience the same? If so, just copy the URL and paste
into WhatWPThemeIsThat.com and you’ll be presented with the theme and a list of the plugins they’re using on their site. Pretty cool!
While we’re on the subject of snooping on what other people are
doing, I play in the SEO world where you quite often learn the most
valuable information by checking on what competitors are up to. If you
want to snoop around to see what other sites a competitor might own,
perhaps get a bit of a feel for what other niches you could possible
enter, just take advantage of SameID’s 5 free searches per day. SameID will retrieve data using ID types such Analytics, Adsense,
Amazon affiliate/product, Clickbank affiliate/product, Addthis and also
IP address to serve a list of website potentially owned by the same
person.
I was recently introduced to this and it is amazing. It has many
genuine uses, but if spying on your competitors to get an edge is up
your alley, just pop a competitor into BuiltWith and see what gets
returned! Wondering what theme, widgets, and plugins they’re using?
It’ll tell you that. Wondering how they’re monetizing? It’ll tell you
that. Curious about their email marketing software of choice? Yep,
that’s given to you. Seriously, pop a competitor into the BuiltWith and
you’ll understand exactly why this gem is in my list.
Finding decent images can be a pain. I have a paid subscription to DepositPhotos.com
but occasionally I reach my daily limit of photo downloads just as I’m
about to hit publish on a post and I need an image right now. Enter PhotoPin.com.
What I like about this site is that it has decent images and makes
attributing that image very simple with copy and paste HTML for
attribution. Worth checking out.
There you have it, 7 internet marketing tools that are 100% free to use that really are too good not to use (and SHARE)!
“Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.” – Bruce Lee “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through
experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision
cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” – Helen Keller “You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe “Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson “Good character is not formed in a week or a month. It is created
little by little, day by day. Protracted and patient effort is needed to
develop good character.” – Heraclitus “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In
fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who
you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” – Maya Angelou “Character isn’t something you were born with and can’t change, like
your fingerprints. It’s something you weren’t born with and must take
responsibility for forming.” – Jim Rohn “A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.” – James Allen “Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.” – Benjamin Disraeli “Talent is a gift, but character is a choice.” – John C. Maxwell “Character is like a tree and reputation its shadow. The shadow is what we think it is and the tree is the real thing.” – Abraham Lincoln “Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because
your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely
what others think you are.” – John Wooden “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” – Abraham Lincoln “Everyone tries to define this thing called, character. It’s not hard. Character is doing what’s right when nobody’s looking.” – Unknown “Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.” – Will Rogers “Character and personal force are the only investments that are worth anything.” – Walt Whitman “Character building begins in our infancy and continues until death.” – Eleanor Roosevelt “Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.” – Joan Didion “I never had a policy; I have just tried to do my very best each and every day.” – Abraham Lincoln “What comes out of you when you are squeezed is what is inside of you.” – Wayne W. Dyer “You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.” – Henry David Thoreau “Your reputation is in the hands of others. That’s what the
reputation is. You can’t control that. The only thing you can control is
your character.” – Wayne W. Dyer “One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: ‘To rise above little things’.” – John Burroughs “My goal in life is to be as good of a person my dog already thinks I am.” – Unknown “Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.” – George Bernard Shaw “When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost.” – Billy Graham “You’ve got to learn to survive a defeat. That’s when you develop character.” – Richard Nixon “Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths,
but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.” – Anne Frank “People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson “Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.” – James A. Michener
Half of the world's estimated online population now check in to the social networking giant Facebook at least once a month.
Facebook said the number of people who use it at least monthly grew 13% to 1.49 billion in the three months to the end of June.
The number is equal to half of the estimated three billion people who use the internet worldwide.
Of those users, it said well over half, 65%, were now accessing Facebook daily.
The rise in monthly active users helped drive second quarter revenue up 39% year-on-year to $4.04bn (£2.6bn).
Mobile advertising revenue was the biggest factor, accounting for more than three quarters of the total.
In the US, the company said people were now spending more than one out of every five minutes on their smartphones on Facebook.
'Strong quarter'
"They're keeping people hooked.
"But
as well as keeping an eye on the short term gains they're also keeping
an eye on the long term so they're future proofing themselves - it's
clear this is an organisational imperative," Forrester analyst
Erna
Alfred Liousas told the BBC.
Despite what Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg said was a "strong quarter", its shares fell more than 3% in after hours trading.
Facebook
shares, which are currently trading at around $97 a share, have risen
24% so far this year, easily beating the 7.9% rise in the Nasdaq over
the same period.
Analysts said the share price drop was linked to
the high expectations for the firm, which typically tends to beat
forecasts, as well as concern over its high expenses.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said video and gaming would be "huge"
Higher spending
Facebook said that costs and expenditures for the quarter had surged by 82% to a hefty $2.8bn.
As
a result, net income fell 9.1% to $719m - equal to 25 cents a share -
but the firm said if various expenses were excluded earnings would have
been 50 cents a share.
Mr Zuckerberg said the costs reflected
"ongoing investments and improvements" it had made, such as its new data
centre in Texas, which had helped reduced crashes on the network.
The
social network giant warned in April that expenses could rise by up to
65% due to various investments in new staff, changes aimed at improving
mobile revenue and the cost of improving products such as messaging
service WhatsApp and photo-sharing app Instagram.
But it said expenses would now be lower than expected, at up to 60% higher.
Facebook also highlighted the increasing importance of video, saying that usage continued to grow.
And it said it would start selling its Oculus Rift 3D headset in the first three months of next year.
"3D content is the obvious next thing after video.
"Video
will be huge, gaming will be huge. Once you start to get a critical
mass we can get a social app which we are more specialised in," said Mr
Zuckerberg.
Analysis: Dave Lee, North America technology reporter, San Francisco
Mark Zuckerberg could be forgiven for cursing Wall Street under his breath.
The
social network's share price has dropped - despite beating expectations
in revenue, mobile advertising, growth and almost every other measure a
web service can offer as a sign of good health.
But investors and
analysts don't like the look of the company's costs and expenses:
$2.76bn for the quarter, up from $1.5bn this time last year.
The
company is investing heavily, in data centres and new methods of getting
people online, which investors understand, but there is unease over the
sheer size of the extra spending.
But given Twitter's problems
earlier in the week, where it admitted user growth is desperately slow,
the fact that Facebook, the world's biggest social network, is still
piling on new users… that's impressive.
