Have you ever put something off? Something that you think would be a good idea, but you decide not to do it right now. And, you justify it to yourself by telling yourself that you’re waiting until the right time.
You’ll wait until you have more time. Until you retire. Until you have more money. Until… until… until…
Then what?
Often, nothing. That’s what.
Perhaps you’ve experienced it. Perhaps you yourself have done it. But it goes like this… A person has bought something and something went wrong. Maybe there was a problem with the card. Maybe the shopping cart system flaked out and caused some weird thing to happen. No “thank you” email gets sent, yada yada….
One of the absolute most important help mechanisms available today is the mastermind group. If you’re not a member of one, then I want you to drop everything right now and read this post. OK, everything dropped? Do I have your attention? OK, then. Let’s move forward… The idea of a mastermind group was…
Do you set up reasonable precautions for your business in the event of a major change in the economy or some kind of national event? That’s what I’d like to discuss today for a few minutes with you. This post is going to be a little bit different than the usual fare. But, I think…
If there is ONE issue that I hear from folks all the time about what’s getting in their way in business, it would be… OVERWHELM. And, going along with that is the idea of losing focus, not being certain what to do next, and generally just being flustered. When there are seemingly so many things…
Systems. It is on my mind. One of my big pushes in 2013 is to systematize things in my business as much as possible so as to automate them and/or make them take as little time as possible. It starts like this… I take some kind of task that I find needs to be done on a…
Anybody who makes it seem like the growth of their business was nice, linear, and strategic… is lying. It rarely goes that smoothly. And, we all make mistakes. Today’s reader question of the day comes from Jason Ulsrud, from The RSC Project. He asked: “Looking back when you started your online business, what 3 things…
If you haven’t heard, Google recently announced this Disavow tool inside the Webmaster Tools system and it basically allows you to make it so that Google does not count incoming links to your site from certain places. The idea is that when low quality links are affecting your rankings, you have the ability to get…
Do you spend your time tweeting, sharing, liking and pinning? All the “social media gurus” will tell you how important it is. But, then you’re sitting there looking at your old dusty blog and see that not much is happening. Traffic isn’t much to speak of. You have no time to create offers or products. You don’t have anything to build your list with. In fact, your email list building remains on your “Things I know I should do but don’t have the time” list.
Oh, but TWEETING… that shit is important!
Or so they’ll tell you.
I have been a heavy user of Evernote for over a year now. Today, I use Evernote as a digital extension of my own brain. I also use it as a digital filing system, complete with a scanner.
Many people I talk to, however, are still in that stage of wondering exactly what to do with Evernote. In some ways, it seems as if Evernote is a little like the initial days of using Twitter. We all go through that stage of wondering exactly what the hell to do with it. Then, if you persist, something eventually “clicks” and you “get it”.
The day is young and you have big plans.
Today, you’re going to be productive. You’re going to make the world your biatch.
By lunch, you realize that things have been a little delayed. But, you’ve still got a shot. So, after lunch, you’re really going to buckle down. This time you mean it.
Except, by the end of the day, you’re feeling a little disappointed in yourself. Because, once again…
It happens. Sometimes I get an email from a reader which sparks a bit of a rant. And that’s what happened this morning.
This person (who shall rename nameless, of course) was apparently on the verge of giving up on the entire notion of an online business. They said…
That headline was a saying I learned from my family. Despite the colorful language, the motto is a life lesson that all of us need to operate by.
See, too many people live their lives in a constant state of “someday, maybe I will….”. It doesn’t matter how that sentence ends (it is different for everybody), but one thing is common. It is a maybe. Not a yes or a no, but a maybe.
You’ve probably heard this before…
They say that it is a good idea to post to your blog every single day. They say that the more you post, the more Google will like you and that your audience will grow faster.
Some people don’t even start blogging or doing content marketing because they think it will be too demanding. They don’t have time, or so they think.
This whole online business space is a pretty interesting beast.
People everywhere want the outcome. They want the income stream that they control. They want the freedom from the 9-5 job.
But, then when it comes time to actually DO some of this stuff to make it happen, we all too often fall flat on our faces.
This comes in several typical forms, such as:
For most blogs, the life cycle of a blog post is pretty short. Unless you do a pretty good job with post SEO and it brings you long-term search traffic, your post which you worked so hard on will simply fall into the archives of your blog – never to be seen again.
What a waste! Because, I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of good stuff back in the archives of my blogs. And it is a real shame when they don’t serve me longer.
Well, there ARE things you can do in order to lengthen the life cycle of a blog post.
There are certain actions that you should try to execute before you hit the publish button on any blog post. Some of these actions are for readability, others for SEO purposes, others just for organization.
Having a checklist is of paramount importance.
I see too many bloggers who just brain dump into Wordpress and hit “Publish”. No strategy in mind – no nothing. Then, nobody comes. Not only that, if you had an opportunity to sit over the shoulders of most of your readers (if you have any), you’d find that most of them aren’t even reading your post at all. No comments. No tweets.
[insert cricket noises here]
So, what I’m going to do in this post is give you a checklist. I’ll go over it and give the reasons why each step is there.
Banner ads continue to be the de facto way to make money with a blog – or so it seems. But, the headline says it all: click-through rates on banners are typically pretty horrible.
This has an effect on everybody involved.
I’ve been on a little “office hack” roll lately.
First, it was my little feng shui remodeling. Then, I hung up a big whiteboard on a small budget. The office was shaping up pretty nicely, if I do say so myself.
But, then another idea hit me…
See, around the turn of the year, my lower back was bothering me. While eating like hell over the holidays probably didn’t help any, I also noticed something else…
So, I wanted a whiteboard. A big one to go into my new office. But, I didn’t want to get a second mortgage to afford it. I arrived at a solution. For less than 10% of the cost of a comparably sized whiteboard pre-built, I got the job done.
As we launch into 2012, many of us begin to think about our new year’s resolutions. And, if you’re on my mailing list, I gave some advice a few days ago about how to make sure those resolutions don’t end up in the dustbin of failed ideas.
Looking forward comes naturally. But, what about looking backwards? What about reflecting on the year we’re coming out of and seeing what you can LEARN from it to apply to the upcoming year?
So, I’m going to look back on 2011. And, here’s my take-aways…
I get asked this question fairly often.
Usually it is from somebody evaluating one of my products to buy. Sometimes it is from somebody who is seeking a solution and just looking for whatever is going to work for them.
Often, the question is something like this…
So, I got an email from a reader. This person will remain unnamed, but it spawned this blog post.
While I’m removing some of the text, this section is left unmodified. I’m going to BOLD the parts I want to focus on.
Most of us spend quite a bit of time in our office. Have you set it up to make it a space you actually want to be in?
I mean, look at it this way…
I like to have a nice bed because we spend around a third of our lives in it. If the average person is sleeping 7-8 hours per night, that’s a third of every day.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I spend about that much time in my home office every day, too. Not only that, this is where I MAKE MY MONEY. So, it is a pretty important space. And I imagine the situation is similar with YOUR office.
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