Setting and Achieving Goals

I love this topic because it usually puts fire under my butt to get off of it and get my life back on track. Whether I need to clean my house, lose weight or write my next book, going back over my goals and re-evaluating my future is exciting. We can blame others, justify why we are not happy in our lives, or we can take responsibility for our lives, grab the wheel of this car called life and drive it to exactly where we want to go. Here is a list of ten things that have helped me live my dreams.

1. Stop the self-pity.

Stop the blaming. Stop the justifying. We all have problems. You are not alone. We can look at our lives as, "oh, poor me; I'm not where I should be." We can blame everybody around us. We can justify why our life sucks by saying things like, "if this hadn't happened, I'd be..." or "I'm not successful because..." It is time to stop the pity and take responsibility for your life.

2. Be honest with yourself.

This is so important because you will not achieve one goal without honesty. These are the types of questions to ask yourself:

* Would I rather have my finances in order making my life easier or would I rather go shopping when I feel down, have expensive coffee every morning, and spend my hard earned money on other people so I can look like a big shot?

* Would I rather feel good about myself by being fit, healthy and energetic or would I rather binge on junk food, spend hours in front of the TV and stay chubby because that is what others expect of me?

If you enjoy the chaos of juggling your money to pay bills and you enjoy your television programs and junk food, than keep it up, but still love and accept yourself for who you are.

3. List your desires.

Write down what you really want in your life. This is a powerful exercise. But remember, you are not writing down your mother's dream for you, or your husband's desires or even what your girlfriends think you should do with your life; this is about you and what you want. So, what do you want your life to look like realistically? Write it down. Now, if you could dream big, huge, what would your life look like? Both are important because sometimes the big dream or what we think we want doesn't look that appealing when it is written down on paper. Dreaming big helps us get to what is really important in our lives.

4. View your new life

Now you have stopped the pity party, you have gotten real with yourself and you have a clear idea of what you want your life to look like. Exciting isn't it? Now you are going to list the goals that will help you achieve your dream. For example, on your list of desires you wrote that you want to be ten pounds lighter. Where do you start? Maybe you used to enjoy working out to a DVD every morning, but your living room has become so cluttered that there is no room for you to exercise. Then one of your goals will be to clean and rearrange your living room so you have the room you need to exercise.

5. Make a list of possible obstacles.

It is very possible that you have set similar goals before. It is also possible that you have hit some roadblocks that discouraged you enough to give up on your goal. One thing that happens when we want to change our lives is that we run into barriers that we did not think about. These barriers will stop us form attaining our goals if we do not prepare ourselves. So write down your possible obstacles. For example, you are exercising every morning in your clean, rearranged living room and suddenly you are required to travel for work. Now what? You know that the hotel room will not have a DVD player; you are not even sure the hotel will have a gym. These are the types of problems you will face, so be ready. Do not let anything stop you from what you want. Being prepared in life will take you a long way.

6. Achievable tasks

Back to your list of goals, it is now time to break your goals down into achievable tasks. This is so fun, and it will make each goal feel within reach. For example, your goal is to pay off all of your credit card debt. Breaking this down might look like this:

* Use the internet to investigate financial expert advice and create a workable plan.

* Have a garage sale and get rid of items that I do not need; I'll put that money toward paying off my debt.

* Start doing freelance computer work to create extra income.

* And so on

Then you may want to break down that list; how do I have a garage sale? How do I start a side business? Breaking work down is not complicated and neither is achieving small tasks. So, when you start checking your list and notice how quickly you are getting things done, make sure you take some time to celebrate how awesome you are!

7. Get going

You have finished your lists, you have made note of your obstacles and you have a plan. It is now time to get to work.

8. Get help

Get help when you need it, and you will need it. I used to be so stubborn and thought I could do everything by myself. When I look back, every time I achieved something good in my life, I had many people to thank.

9. It's up to you

Remember, nobody can achieve your goals, but you. Nobody is going to come along and rescue you, but you. In my life today, I always have goals. I feel like if I am not achieving something, I am not really living. I have gone from being homeless and beat down to having much success in my life. It is not always easy, but it is always worth it. Rescue yourself; you can make your dreams come true.

10. Choose to succeed.

Achieving your goals is a choice just like happiness is a choice. Choose both!

How to Self Publish a Book, 10 Money Saving Secrets

Here are ten great tips to successful self-publishing:

Hire a student or a virtual assistant to edit and format your book. Professional editors cost a lot of money but they play a vital role in the process of making your book great. College students and stay at home parents can be a significant resource if you are on a budget.

Even better, ask a detailed family member or friend to go through your book word by word for errors. A second or third pair of eyes is always good book writing business.

Hire a student to design your book’s cover or contribute to the graphics inside. You can also hire students to design your website – you will be amazed what they can do!

E-publish your book for the most cost effective means of production and delivery.

If you absolutely must print, print your book in small quantities to keep your inventory low. You will save money on printing and storage.

Typeset your book yourself. Printers will charge you hundreds of dollars to typeset your book, why pay that money when you can do it yourself? Simply ask them what format it needs to be delivered in, example PDF, and then create the typeset copy.

Keep your book fulfillment in-house, do it yourself. You will save money in shipping costs and postage and you will make sure that people receive undamaged copies of your books!

Book promotion can be expensive. Cut costs by partnering with other relevant websites to promote your book in exchange for promoting theirs. This kind of trade works well for books that compliment each other. For example a book about how to raise healthy children might partner well with a recipe book for child friendly foods.

Use free online promotion tools like email, article posting, and press release distribution.

Take advantage of open source software products to create your book. Online you can find free software products that range from word processing programs to programs that will capture images or photos on your computer. Open source software can save you literally thousands of dollars in book production expenses.

15 reasons to choose Internet Marketing/Affiliate Marketing

Here are 15 great reasons:

1. YOU decide your income.

2. YOU are your own Boss.

3. YOUR income is directly proportional to your efforts.

4. YOUR income grows exponentially more when compared to other businesses for the same amount of effort.

5. YOU build a long term income stream.

6. YOU Develop it, Stabilize it and Forget IT..But the money keeps flowing in.

7. YOU always have scope for improvement every other day you wake up.

8. YOUR website will work for you when you sleep.

9. YOU get to master a field and in due course become a product owner and earn even more.

10. YOU get satisfied in helping other people follow your strategies and earn.

11. YOU will love what you do and the challenges that comes on its way.

12. YOU will earn a lot and make a fortune for you and your family.

13. YOUR business reach millions of people by sitting in front of your computer.

14. YOU really need not spend thousands of dollars to know the business or to start earning.

15. YOU need not own a product to market!!!.

So ,what is required?

The listed 15 points are very much the top list of internet marketing advantages. What is required from your end to really make these 15 true in your business?

Undoubtedly EFFORT. Yes, as in any business or work you do here also you need effort and untiring effort in the initial periods. The real advantage of this business is, the initial effort you put towards your success will come till the end. Yes, its true as mentioned in point #6 you develop it, stabilize it and forget it. Develop it stands for initial phase where you develop from scratch, this is a real challenge and once you get that right the remaining process is a walk in roses. Stabilizing it stands for giving it great tuning to stand out from the crowd and bringing success. Once you get the strings right move to the last phase. Forget it, but wait you cannot just forget it. What I meant was just spend very little time on your stabilized internet business to just fine tune here and there and get more profits from there on.

Have fun choosing Internet marketing and, in specific, affiliate marketing as a beginner to see good money and great career in the comfort of home. But be careful about huge promises given on the internet. Have a safe and excellent career.

What You Need To Know - Multi Level Marketing

Multi Level Marketing has been around since the 1950's. It's as old as the hills and just as crumby! If you are looking for a way to make money from a home based business and you're considering an Multi Level Marketing MLM opportunity, please read this report and I hope that my words will dhow you the big picture of what Multi Level Marketing MLM is all about.

Multi Level Marketing offers everything from water softeners to vitamins and anything else that can't sell in retail stores. Think about this, if the product had true value wouldn't it be on the shelf at a retail super store? If you had the patent and copyright on a great useable product would you sell it through major store chains or go to the effort of selling it door to door and cold selling? Of course you would sign the contract to put the product in stores. It's been my experience that MLM doesn't offer products that are worth continuing to pay a monthly fee.

The lack of real products is just the tip of the ice burg. Multi Level Marketing opportunities seem to be as far behind the times when it comes to marketing as they are when it comes to their products. Your upline will suggest that you purchase leads and spend all day cold calling, passing out flyers, attend conferences in various cities and other low response and low success rate tactics.

The primary tactic they teach members is "the 3 Foot Rule". I absolutely hate the concept of this particular rule. The 3 foot rule means that everyone who you come in contact within 3 feet of, you must pitch your business to them. I can not phantom hanging out with my friends and constantly pitching them on some vitamin or magic juice. Those who do this technique find that their friends develop a 10 feet rule. I other words they say "stay 10 feet away from that guy!"

I have been earning money from home for several years and never once have I used the 3 feet rule. When I'm out and about it's my time. If I had to tell everybody about my business it would seem like over time to me.

The Multi Level Marketing payment structures are created to make those at the top and the owner of the MLM rich. All the payment plans are matrices which usually are binary payment plans. Plenty of legs but little profit! Another bad thing about Multi Level Marketing payment plans is that they require monthly payments. Believe me or ignore this, it's up to you, but monthly fees guarantee dropouts.

I'll wrap this post up by saying this; If you want to spend years pouring your time and money into a business which offers very small payouts in hopes of future profit, then Multi Level Marketing is for you!

Top Money Makers for Bloggers

Over the course of my time as a blogger, I’ve looked into numerous ways of making my efforts work for me. A great many bloggers choose not to use their blog in this way and I fully respect their decisions for this. However, I believe, if done conscientiously, you can use your blog as a way to supplement your teaching income while still providing a valuable source of information and entertainment for your readers. Here are a few of the ways I use, all of which are free to sign up for:

Smorty is a service that allows you to make money from your blog by writing opinion articles about available advertiser campaigns. It’s free to sign up and opportunities are sent directly to your personal admin panel and email account. Turn your daily blog updates into money: between 5 and 20 minutes of writing could be sending money directly to your PayPal account after posts are approved. You can apply with multiple blogs to write more opinions and receive more payments.

BidVertiser is basically a clone of Adsense, You can display BidVertiser text ads on your website or blog, get paid for every click and have the payments sent directly to your PayPal account. The big advantage of this service is that you only need to reach ten dollars before you get paid.

Sponsored Reviews works on a similar basis to Smorty, in that you earn cash by writing honest reviews about our advertiser's products and services. Of course, you get the chance to write reviews in your own tone and style, and gear them to your audience's interest. The advantage of this service is that you can look through a large list of campaigns and choose the ones that best suit the subject of your blog.

Adbrite is another service working along similar lines to Adsense, but also allowing you to place adverts on video clips and pictures.

Again, another website that lets you get paid for blogging. You write about web sites, products, services, and companies and earn cash for providing your opinion and valuable feedback to advertisers. This one requires that your blog has quite a high level of traffic.

How Much Time Does Your Staff Spend Selling?

While doing a small seminar last week I noticed that only one company in the room actually had a sales department. The rest actually thought they did - and probably would say they did - but when we analysed the situation, they realised they had effectively misplaced their sales department a few years ago and hadn't noticed.

This led us to the realisation that sales departments can be inadvertently misappropriated and closed. This, naturally, is extremely detrimental to any business because a business without a sales department is just a ghost of what it could be.

Has your Sales department disappeared or been misplaced? Here are a few ways for you to find out.

A Time Analysis

One of the companies at the seminar was made up of the owner and four salespeople. On paper, it would appear that this is a large sales force. However, a time analysis revealed that all but one spent just 10% of their time (about four hours per week) on sales. The rest of their time, they did service and sales of other products, paperwork, service calls etc. This example shows that counting heads is not as accurate as counting hours. I suggest you take an accurate count of the amount of time each employee spends on sales activities such as prospecting and doing demos. The result may surprise you. How much time is your sales department actually selling?

The Number Of Sales Presentations

Another way to measure the size of your sales department is a game I call "Count The Presentations". Take an accurate count with customer names of the presentations or sales visits performed last week. First, calculate how many presentations is a day's work in your industry. If you sell complex products to businesses, it could be one per day. If you sell in-home to consumers, it could be two per day. If you sell by phone, it could be 30 per day. Take your total presentation that should be done each day and divide by the number of presentations per day that should be done. The number you get from tthis formula represents the real number pof salespeople on your team. If it is less than you expected, you need to hire or refocus your current team on sales.

The Hours Of Operation

It's a proven fact that customers prefer to buy when they are too busy. We actually do a lot, lot better when we make it easy for the customer to buy. So for most consumers that means evenings and weekends are the prime selling time. Business people don't want visitors at their busiest times and restaurants want no salespeople during their peak traffic periods. Does your sales staff work these prime selling hours or are the stuck with the old nine-to-five mentality?

One good way to see how much actual selling is going on is to see what percentage of prime selling time your team is in the field. If you set the "golden selling time" as 5 to 9 Monday to Thursday and Saturday, that is a total of 24 hours per week. Measure what percentage of those hours your staff is out selling and you have a good measure of the percentage of a sales force you actually have. If you have 4 salespeople who are in the field 50% of those hours, I believe you will find you should discount the size of your sales force by 50%.

It is also interesting to me that many companies who struggle in sales have new recruits and part timers working the best sales hours. This is a serious handicap to success. It just doesn't pay to have your experienced and talented staff in when fewer customers come by and your least experienced and successful team on the floor when most buyers come in.

Call Back Success

Another measurement of sales success is the number of sales generated each week from calling prospects who did not buy at their initial appointment and getting another chance to get the sale get the sale. Good companies add about 15% to total sales from call backs. If your percentage is less, you are leaving money on the table that could be in your pocket. For example, my wife and I visited a large retail store yesterday but did not buy anything. Could a call from a manager,  asking why, get us back in? Yes, it could. Further, they would find out from the call why we did not buy. This would allow them to make decisions from actual (and valuable) customer feed back.

Focus & Importance

Another interesting measure of your sales department is the focus of your company and the importance of sales. If you company believes that anything other than presentations and sales is important today, you don't have a sales department. If the first question on everyone's mind today is how many did we present and sell last yesterday, how many will we do today, you have a sales department. If that is the last thing on the minds of your staff, you do not. Ask each of your staff members what is the most important thing on their minds today. The result may surprise you. If the answer is anything but presenting and selling, you will benefit from changes.

Sales Or Customer Dis-Service?

Another interesting measurement of your sales department, is its membership. Is anyone a full time salesperson? Just as important, is EVERYONE focused on selling? Do you keep track of the number of appointments generated per call-in? Do you train your entire staff on how to use calls to generate sales? Does your delivery staff call on neighbors of your customers to see if they your products or services? Do your techs ask customers if they have any other needs? If not, these staff members are overhead when they could be an important part of your sales department.

If you take these tests and find you have misplaced your sales department in the years since you opened for business, now is the time to take steps. Without sales, a company withers and dies. You have the power to direct every member of your team to sell every day. Costs do not rise from focusing on sales but income rises dramatically. No matter how many sales you make each month without a sales department, you deserve to sell a lot more.

I strongly suggest you keep this article and take these measurements monthly to see if you are making progress. The funny thing about sales departments is the moment you take your focus of them they begin to disappear.

Don't be oblivious to the gold around you

What could be your easiest and most profitable promotion may be lying there, right under your nose.

It seems that nearly every small business owner I talk to is constantly looking for new customers. Despite the fact that more emphasis should be put on your existing clients than finding new, there is a formula you can follow to attract more than enough new ones.

First, open your eyes! As much as I personally dislike all the negativity in most newspapers, there are hundreds of potential story ideas and promotional themes you could use.

What does it take? Very little

Here are some headlines from my local paper today:


Total smoke ban on Tories' agenda

Good as Golden - Globes set stage for Oscar showdowns "Meryl Streep won her sixth Golden Globe, this one as best actress in a musical or comedy for The Devil Wears Prada"

Flames riding gusher of support thanks to hot economy

City building boom fuels national record

Blockbuster Video: "The Illusionist" top rental

Each one of these could be a potential reason to be in touch with your clients to promote your products and services.

This may seem a little abstract to you right now, but it is one of the keys to marketing success... the ability to see beyond the obvious and look for magical themes for your promotions.

For example:

Total smoke ban on Tories' agenda they want to ban smoking in all bars and restaurants.

Sounds good to me! I am an ex-smoker and the thought of being able to go out to a bar or restaurant without having to smell or breathe second hand smoke works for me.

Potential theme idea I could run: My 5 Year Anniversary and a BIG Thank You to the Tories!

October 2001 I took the plunge and quit smoking and haven't looked back. I don't miss the smell, taste, expense, or feeling period. And in honor of the big smoke ban taking place in our fine city I want to extend to you a special offer.

Bring in the coupon below, and for my 5th year smoke free you can buy one product (anyone of them in our showroom) and get a second one for only 5 CENTS! That's right a nickel sale. 5 cents for your second item no catch as long as the second item is of equivalent or lesser value. Good for 5 days from today.


One other theme idea I could run:

Good as Golden - Globes set stage for Oscar showdowns - "Meryl Streep won her sixth Golden Globe, this one as best actress in a musical or comedy for The Devil Wears Prada."

Promotion: Let's say I run a marketing consultation business.

My ad: Local Entrepreneur Challenges Local Business Owners with the Devilish Marketing Platinum Awards Ceremony. Announcing the first annual award for the most outlandish and daring marketing promotions in use by small businesses. If your marketing is "edgy" or is considered by many to be risqué this is for you.

These are just off the cuff ideas you would definitely put more time into your own. But the key is look at what the media is talking about and piggyback on their efforts.

Find a hot topic write a related hot promotion then make sure all your local media knows what you are doing (as well as national and international media). If you do it right, you will get exposure and you will make more money.

I dare you! Try it.

How Residual Income Opportunities can Help you Make Money

Let's face it, we all are in the need for more money most of the time. Whether it's to buy a new car or a house, we all have experienced the difference between our desires and our financial situation. If we are ever going to live a life free from financial constraint, then we will need more money in the form of residual income.

So, how do we generate that extra income?

You have to work more to make more money nowadays. Either you get a new job that brings a much higher income or you just have to get a second job. Today, people are now working two jobs in order to make more money. However, this seriously limits the amount of money you are going to make even though you are working those two jobs. Imagine this, the amount of money that you are going to make will all depend on your skills and qualifications and more importantly on the amount of time that you will be able to dedicate. This is why it is more lucrative to focus on a residual income opportunity.

Residual income - also known as passive income - is a type of income that'll bring you money even if you do not work continuously for it. This means the residual income will keep on coming in. You have more free time to try to find new ideas to earn even more money. In this article two types of residual income will be discussed, reality real life and online residual income.

In real life, you could be earning extra income with many opportunities. For instance, you can have some stocks and bonds at the stock exchange that could be bringing you income in the form of interests and dividends while you are at rest. Alternatively, you can be earning money from the licensing of one of your products. Residual income is much more common than some may think in real life, but you certainly will need some sort of initial investment at the very beginning.

How to earn residual income online?

If you are searching to find a residual income opportunity and earn a residual income for the first time then the Internet is the place to begin. This is so because of the number of opportunities that are available. For example, if you have a website that has many visitors, you can be earning big with advertisements and affiliates program. In fact, there are numerous online residual income opportunities that exist and it is only to you to find out the one that most suit you.

Residual income is highly recommended for all those that are looking to break free from financial constraint. Most certainly, you will have to make some investment in the first place either in the form of money and capital or in the form of time and effort. However, once set up, you will have nothing or very little to do. You can then sit back and enjoy the dollars rolling in.