How to Stay Focussed in a Distracting World
By Lorraine Pirihi
What are you focussing on achieving in your business in the next 90 days?
Do you have any idea? If you don’t then you better come up with a goal or outcome otherwise you may find that another 3 months has passed you by and you’re no further ahead than where you are right now.
When you’ve got a clear focus, you can easily say ‘no’ to activities and people who distract you.
Simple things like turning email and mobiles off, closing the door, working elsewhere and only having what you need to on your desk all help to stay focussed, however there’s often other areas that take you off track. ..and that you can be completely oblivious to!
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Growing Your Business with Online Marketing
By Enzo F. Cesario
As a business owner, you know that one of the keys to a successful year is promoting your business. No matter what size your business is, marketing and promotion need to be addressed. Marketing has become a daunting task with the increasing number of online start-up businesses.
And now, along with the traditional offline marketing methods, there are many online marketing tools and methods available.
Online Marketing is also known as Internet Advertising, web marketing, web advertising or e-marketing.
There are many benefits to marketing your business online. Here are a few.
Lowering Your Costs
A recent eMarketer article sites that “in the wake of the global economic downturn, marketers worldwide are shifting more of their budgets into cheaper, more-measurable categories. In most cases, that means online.”
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Making Money With Clickbank - Stop Getting Only Half The Story
By Brandon Weavers
Even if you’ve got the simplest job on the planet…
I don’t care if you’re washing dishes or flipping burgers.
Heck, even if you’re a roadside fruit seller…
All of those jobs are much more complicated than making money from Clickbank.
I know that for a fact…
Let me tell you a story about how I found that out…
About 8 weeks ago, I decided to take the plunge into Clickbank.
I’d always heard that it was easy to get started, and I had some free time so I thought I’d finally give it a shot. I mean, I’d had some success online in the past, and I thought I was finally ready.
So I just sat down one day at my kitchen table, fired up the old laptop, and started searching the Clickbank Marketplace for products to promote…
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Internet Telephone Calls: VoIP Basics
By Nermine Shaker
You’ve seen the commercials and read the news advertisements for telephone service using your computer: very cheap monthly fees; make all the calls you want; keep your telephone number forever; and voice quality as good as a landline. You’ve heard the claims and you’ve heard the term “VoIP.” Here’s the scoop.
VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol and it does what the name suggests - it transmits voice data using IP packets over the Internet. It is also called Internet Telephony. It’s easier to understand VoIP if you know a little about our telephone system - PSTN (the Public Switched Telephone Network) and a little about the Internet.
Your traditional landline transmits calls through copper or fiber cables in the ground or on telephone poles with a cable connected to your home. When someone makes a call, one continuous route is made between the two phones and the information flows continuously in this loop. As you know from paying your bills, the longer the route, the more expensive the call.
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Clean Your Office and Get Back Six Weeks of Time!
By Rochelle Melander
The Wall Street Journal reported that people lose as much as six weeks a year just searching for information. Can you afford that kind of time loss? No one can. Yes, you can work in chaos—but you are going to lose time and focus. You will work more efficiently when your workspace is clutter free. Start by committing yourself to a clean desktop. You cannot think about big ideas if your desktop is full of action items. Here’s how to make your office clutter free right now.
1. Move (or move out) Keepsakes. Keepsakes can be just as distracting as stacks of work—and they need to be dusted! Move half of your keepsakes out of your office. Cindy Arlinsky, founder of Organizing Matters suggests moving the remainder of your keepsakes off your desk and onto walls or shelves.
2. Move the Tools. So what else do you keep on your desk—an electronic pencil sharpener, paper clips, and a stapler? Gayle Goddard, The Clutter Fairy, says, “If you have a bunch of office tools on the desk that you use less than once a day, get them off the desk. Put them in a file cabinet or on a bookcase or in a closet.” Keep only your most essential office tools on your desk.
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For Word of Mouth Marketing, Make Sure Your New Company Name is Sayable
By Marcia Yudkin
Take it from someone who often has to rescue someone from mispronunciation or suffer silently when someone reads my last name out loud for the first time: There is huge value in having a name that people can look at and have no doubt about how to pronounce.
That’s why I shook my head sadly when I saw the following line in a magazine ad:
“Vovici [vo-vee-see] - the future of online surveys”
For English speakers, pronouncing the company name “Vovici” is totally unintuitive. One uncertainty would be bad enough, but it actually has four trouble spots for someone seeing the name and trying to pronounce it. The “o” could be long or short, the first “i” could be long or short, the emphasis could belong on either the first or the second syllable, and the “c” could be pronounced either like an “s” or like “ch,” as in Latin.
But if you instruct people how to pronounce it, as in this magazine ad, isn’t that OK? No, not unless you have the budget to make that pronunciation famous through radio or television ads. You’ll constantly be fighting several handicaps.
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Organizing Tips for Working Women: Technology: To Buy or Not To Buy; That is the Question
By Patty Kreamer, Certified Professional Organizer®
How do you deal with technologies that are supposed to save you time and money, but often don’t?
Technology is a double-edged sword when it comes to making life simpler and saving time. While it may do both of these things, there is a dark side. As working women, we feel compelled to fill that newly-saved time with even more things to do, thus complicating our lives rather than simplifying them.
Before you purchase any type of new technology, ask yourself, “Do I NEED this item?” Or “Do I WANT this item?” If I purchased every piece of technology that I WANTED, I’d need a new building in which to store it all!
Women have to be careful when we bring anything into our lives, but technology requires even more caution. There are several reasons for this:
- Technology is costly.
- Technology usually becomes obsolete as soon as you get it home.
- You may not be getting everything you need.
- You may be getting way more than you’ll ever need!
- There may be learning time and ongoing maintenance involved.
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How Often Should I Email My List?: Tips to Make the Right Decision for YOUR Business
By Alice Seba, Teacher at Email Marketing Reform School
Have you ever worried if you’re emailing your list too often? Have you had nightmares about losing subscribers, getting angry hate email and other horrible things?
You’re most certainly not alone. There is always a great debate on how much one should email their list. Some will boldly state appropriate intervals, but I haven’t a clue how anyone figures they can put out a blanket frequency rate for all lists, across all markets.
The fact of the matter is – there is no one size fits all for every email list, but here are some guidelines…
Stay in the Mind of Your Prospects & Customers
Your goal in email marketing is to keep your business in the minds of your prospects and customers. You also want to your readers to consider you the go-to source for information you share and the products you sell. If you email to infrequently, that could become problematic as they’ll just forget about you.
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Google Docs Makes Your Documents & Presentations Portable
By Merle
One of the things I love about Google is that they’re constantly coming up with new inventions. Not just content to be the king of the search engines - they actually have a full house of powerful tools and gadgets.
Have you ever been traveling, at work or maybe a friend’s house, and wished you had access to a Word document, Power Point presentation, or Excel spreadsheet that was at home on your hard drive? This actually happened to me, which is when I found and fell in love with Google Docs. http://www.google.com/docs
Imagine having access to your documents from anywhere, with just a computer and Internet access. Google docs is compatible with Microsoft Office so it can handle any of your existing documents, but even if you don’t own it, now you don’t have to. Google Docs is a full fledged word processor, presentation creator and spreadsheet maker all rolled into one. No need to buy and install expensive software that takes up valuable hard drive space. This online beauty can do it all for you, even offering an extensive array of templates at your disposal.
All docs created with Google can be exported and saved to your computer in these formats: Doc, ODS, ODT, PDF, RTF, even HTMLO. This makes it easy to save the finished product to your hard drive and print them out later. It even includes a “print preview” feature if you need to check your formatting.
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When (and When NOT) to Charge for Your Info Products
By Judy Murdoch
One of my clients recently asked me whether she should charge for a series of tip sheets she created for families traveling with young children. Great question.
There’s quite a bit of confusion around whether you should sell or give away your information products. About half the advice I hear favors giving information away for free. The other half favors charging.
The truth is, sometimes you should give information and resources away and sometimes you should sell them. The real question is WHEN to charge and when not to.
In this article, I’ll give you some guidelines around when to charge and when to give information away.
Start with What Your Business Needs Now
Asking where your business is at and what you need to be successful is a great place to begin.
Every business needs customers, right? So let’s look at how strangers become customers. They go through three stages:
~ Stage One: Visibility (V)
To become a customer a person first needs to know your product exists. You become visible by getting your product and marketing message in front of people who fit your ideal customer description.
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