Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Sharing Ideas
From time to time I like to share thoughts and information like this with my readers–
I got this one from Harvey Mackay’s Column This Week
ABCs of team building
By Harvey Mackay
A reader recently wrote to me about a column I penned several years ago, the ABCs of selling. She told me how often she used it and shared it with her colleagues.
Then she challenged me to come up with the ABCs of team-building, a topic that seems particularly popular in this era of reorganizations, layoffs and downsizing. The following concepts are what I consider the fundamentals of team-building:
A is for action. No team can function without a plan of action, even when the final outcome is to take no action at all.
B is for brainpower. If two heads are better than one, I would submit that a cohesive, well-assembled team should have enough brainpower to attack any project.
C is for cooperation and communication. Team members need to cooperate, even if they don’t necessarily agree. Clear communication is the roadmap to cooperation.
D is for dedication. As members of a team, you must be dedicated to the goals of the team, or you are on the wrong team.
E is for ears. Use your ears more than your mouth because listening skills are critical for team success.
F is for fun. Work should be fun, and working together is usually a lot more fun than working alone.
G is for the group effort. The motto needs to be “all for one and one for all” in order to be a real team.
H is for help. Ask for it if you need it, and offer it if someone else needs yours.
I is for the ideas that come from brainstorming and picking each others’ brains. Let the ideas flow and then choose those which hold the most potential.
J is for juggling. Combining all the company’s needs and desired results will often require a juggling act, but a competent team will be able to achieve that balance.
K is for kinetic — energetic, dynamic team members keep things moving.
L is for leadership. Every team needs a leader, and every leader needs to be able to depend on the team.
M is for motivation. Nothing motivates a team like trust placed in them by management to solve a problem.
N is for negotiate. Give and take is as important within a team as it is with outside clients.
O is for open mind. Team members need to be open to options they may not have considered, and willing to expand their perspectives to find the best answers.
P is for planning. A plan doesn’t need to be rigid to be effective, but it must provide enough direction to keep the team on course.
Q is for questions. Asking questions is the best path to finding solutions. Don’t be afraid of asking any question. If you don’t understand something, chances are others don’t either.
R is for results. The whole point of forming a team is to achieve results. The only variation on that theme is that the results may not be what had been originally anticipated.
S is for solutions, which differ from results in that there may be more than one solution to any given problem. Then the team can implement the best choice.
T is for time management. A well-managed team uses their meeting and planning time efficiently, and understands when it is time to finish the project.
U is for unity. Once a decision is made, the team needs to be unified to implement the plans. If the team can’t act as a unit, then it may be necessary to reconfigure the team.
V is for voice. Every team member has to have a voice in the proceedings, and it is up to the team leader to insure that all voices are heard.
W is for work ethic. Each member needs to complete the given assignments and should have confidence that others will demonstrate the same commitment.
X is the X factor — the chemistry that makes a team productive because all members are committed to the same goal.
Y is for yes — say it as often as you can. “Yes, I can help. Yes, that’s a good idea. Yes, let’s move ahead. Yes, we did it!”
Z is for zeal. Passion, eagerness and enthusiasm are contagious; share your zeal with the rest of your team.
Mackay’s Moral: The team you build will determine the business you build.
And this one from Jim Rohn–
The Ant Philosophy
Written by Jim Rohn
Over the years I’ve been teaching children about a simple but powerful concept – the ant philosophy. I think everybody should study ants. They have an amazing four- part philosophy, and here is the first part: ants never quit. That’s a good philosophy. If they’re headed somewhere and you try to stop them; they’ll look for another way. They’ll climb over, they’ll climb under, they’ll climb around. They keep looking for another way. What a neat philosophy, to never quit looking for a way to get where you’re supposed to go.
Second, ants think winter all summer. That’s an important perspective. You can’t be so naive as to think summer will last forever. So ants are gathering in their winter food in the middle of summer.
An ancient story says, “Don’t build your house on the sand in the summer.” Why do we need that advice? Because it is important to be realistic. In the summer, you’ve got to think storm. You’ve got to think rocks as you enjoy the sand and sun. Think ahead.
The third part of the ant philosophy is that ants think summer all winter. That is so important. During the winter, ants remind themselves, “This won’t last long; we’ll soon be out of here.” And the first warm day, the ants are out. If it turns cold again, they’ll dive back down, but then they come out the first warm day. They can’t wait to get out.
And here’s the last part of the ant philosophy. How much will an ant gather during the summer to prepare for the winter? All that he possibly can. What an incredible philosophy, the “all-that-you-possibly-can” philosophy.
Wow, what a great seminar to attend – the ant seminar. Never give up, look ahead, stay positive and do all you can.
To Your Success,
Jim Rohn
and Me–Follow the thoughts with focused action–and have a great day everyone!
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What drives creativity?
I got this from Harvey Mackay’s Column This Week, and wanted to pass it along to all of my readers–
enjoy!
What drives creativity?
By Harvey Mackay
Imagine if you could turn on creativity like starting a car, rev the engine to get up to speed, cruise along in the fast lane, and then park it in the garage until you needed it again. Is there anything you couldn’t accomplish?
We’ve all had days when the engine stalls, the tire is flat or road construction brings traffic to a screeching halt. Nothing seems to get us going.
You can’t always sit around and wait for inspiration to strike. Amateurs wait for inspiration. The real pros get up and go to work. They understand that you are not born with creativity … and you have to cultivate creativity on an ongoing basis. Here are some ideas:
* Keep a journal. Record ideas as soon as they come to you by keeping a notebook close at hand all the time. A real notebook, not a digital one, is best, allowing you to make sketches and drawings, but anything that lets you capture your thoughts will work. When you need to charge up your creativity, search your notebook for ideas and examples.
* Search your environment for inspiration. Artists find inspiration in many unlikely places. If looking at the same four walls every day limits your perspective, add some elements that help you see things in a new way — pictures, plants, books, even toys.
* Question everything. Ask “why” and “how” to determine if there’s a better way to solve a problem. Another favorite question of mine: “What’s missing?”
* Turn problems around. Switch gears by looking for the opposite of what you want. Exploring how you could make a bad situation worse can sometimes tell you what not to do. Looking for a bad idea may lead you to a good one.
* Combine random elements. Try this exercise: Look at two items on your desk right now and figure out a way to put them together. A clock radio and a coffee mug, for instance, could be turned into a coffee mug with a clock on it, maybe at the bottom. This won’t necessarily generate a useful idea, but it will train your mind to see different possibilities.
* Recruit a partner. Bounce ideas off another person–someone you’re comfortable with, but someone who will challenge you when necessary. With another person involved, you’re not limited to your own experience and perspective.
* Read something totally different than usual. Too often, we find ourselves looking at the same newspapers, trade publications, blogs and the like. Pick up a murder mystery, a gardening book, a Shakespeare volume or anything that will teach you something you didn’t know anything about.
* Tolerate failure. Expect to make some mistakes when you try new and different approaches. Sometimes colossal failures lead to spectacular successes.
* Listen to your “inner child.” Ever notice how kids are unafraid to take gigantic risks or make outlandish statements when confronted with a problem? They haven’t been trained yet to take the safe approach. Even if their ideas aren’t fully developed, their dreams are big enough to take chances.
* Relax your mind. Give your subconscious a chance to work by turning your brain off from time to time. Don’t focus on work or solving problems constantly. Take time to exercise and relax, and give yourself permission to think about other things. A tired mind won’t generate fresh ideas.
Many good ideas have been discovered because someone poked around in an outside industry or discipline, and applied what he found to his own field. For example, football coach Knute Rockne got the idea for his “four horsemen” backfield shift while watching a burlesque chorus routine. Dan Bricklin took the “spreadsheet” concept from accounting and turned it into VisiCalc, the program that helped create the microcomputer software industry. World War I military designers borrowed from the cubist art of Picasso and Braque to create more effective camouflage patterns for tanks and guns.
Certainly no one would question Pablo Picasso’s creativity, and much of his inspiration came from his mother at a young age. According to the artist, “My mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll become a general. If you become a monk you’ll end up as the Pope.’ Instead, I became an artist and wound up as Picasso.”
Mackay’s Moral: To get what you’ve never had, you must do what you’ve never done.
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Creating A Real Estate Website To Attract More Clients
Everyone nowadays expects every authentic business to own a website, plus real estate investing. We live in a web era and before most people can perform business with you, they may first prefer to find out about you.
And what better place to study you than your real estate investing website? Such an online site be obliged to serve two purposes – inform site visitors what you do and convey you additional business.
Most real estate traders do not know if they need a site or not and run their business without one. So is an online site essential for your business?
No matter what model you use, your business must be fueled by a constant flow of effective deals, plus a healthy cash flow. Often times, most deals come from motivated sellers, individuals who have difficulties and are obliged to get rid of their house or they lose it, such as in foreclosure.
An internet site that pre-educates motivated sellers is thus essential, one that shows them how you work and convinces them you’ve got options to their house requirements. Because of this, they see you as the only person who should purchase their house.
And not using a website, you are likely to find yourself having to answer similar doubts time and again and needlessly talking to sellers whose homes you will never buy for the reason that they have got no revenue potential.
A real estate investment web site pre-screens and pre-negotiates with motivated seller, so you merely pursue beneficial deals and omit the time wasters.
When advertising homes, the most winning investors sell their assets to an already existing list of house buyers (buyers list). This is often collected through their website.
Even without a buyers list, an online site aids in marketing your assets together with comparable revenue, photos, video virtual tours, contracts from where they can make a proposal, and so on.
Most significantly, an effective internet site for selling houses may even expose your property to more prospective buyers if it allows potential buyers to convey it to their associates, and share your assets on social networking media like Twitter, Facebook and all that. This may exponentially raise chances of fast sale while simultaneously constructing your buyers list.
Successful real estate investing must be also fueled by a readily available supply of cheap cash. An online site meant for captivating private money investors will most likely magnetize more assets than you’re looking for your business.
Private moneylenders are folks that have money to invest, and would like to earn better profits than they can on CDs and bank interest rates. Their expenditure is financed by the property, not you, or your credit.
With customary mortgage and hard moneylenders tightening their under-writing policies, private money is presently one of the best and easiest methods to support your real estate deals.
An online site for enticing private money investors is therefore necessary – and can probably furnish you with more assets for your deals than you can finish.
Eventually, your real estate investment business tend to be more triumphant after you have a real estate investing web page, regardless of which business kind you take on, where you buy homes, promote houses, wholesale houses, rent houses and even commercial real estate investing.
Keywords: Real Estate,Home,Finance,Investing,houses,business,House,Various,Unsorted,Business,Finance,Home,Real Estate,Business
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Search Engines And Human Readers: Which Is More Important?
Article: SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is something that many webmasters are now obsessing over. Many web site owners are spending countless hours tweaking and modifying their web sites, adding keyword rich content, and spending hours obtaining back links, so that their site will rank higher in search engines.
It is true that over 90% of all web surfers use search engines to visit sites on a regular basis, but should web masters and web site designers build and tweak sites for search engines, or for their visitors?
The answer to this question is that when you build a web site, you are not targeting web search engine crawlers; rather, you are targeting people and human visitors. Hence, you should build a web site for humans, not for search engines.
The whole purpose to create a web site is so that you can get traffic. Without traffic, a web site is worthless. No matter how many features and how functional your site is, without traffic, your design and functionality do not matter.
What is the big risk here?
Although search engines can help bring in traffic, web sites that are designed for search engines are often not designed for human visitors and all the traffic that your web site gets will be worthless. Visitors will visit and then soon leave your web site and not return again. Return visitors are critical for the success of any web site.
How can you know that your SEO-offers are not optimal?
Luckily for us, our giant search engine (Google) provides us with an adequate tool to see whether we need to optimize your SEO-efforts. This tool is free and it is called “Google-Analytics”. Through this tool, you need to check 2 main parameters, “bounce rate” and “unique visitors”. Bounce rate indicates the number of visitors who quit your website as soon as they landed there. A bounce rate below 5% is fine, but if it is more than 5%, then you should check your content.
On the other side, unique visitors indicate how many “unique” visitors visited your website. Of course, it is fine to get new visitors to your website, but you should also check the number of the returning visitors to see, if you have loyal web surfers.
What should you do then?
In case found out that your SEO-efforts need to be further optimized, then do not panic. Just think of how to enjoy your visitors, rather than thinking all the time of getting back links to your website. This way, your visitors will stay longer and most probably they will buy from you.
One more tip that can help you a lot is to check the match between the keyword of your website and the articles written there. For example, a visitor who typed the keyword “student loans in California” will never be happy to find articles about “finance tips”. Adding to this, make sure that your website is of a high value. Avoid adding pop-ups and silly ads on your website; otherwise, your visitors will never invest the time browsing your articles.
Are you still searching for the best answers about the best search engine optimization consulting? Discover now for FREE how to turn your efforts to skyrocket your empire to improve search engine ranking.
Keywords: SEO
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How to Use Article Marketing to Build Your List – My Top Ten Tips
Here’s a Great post from a ‘Zen Master’ marketer–and all around cool lady.
Use the tips–profit and prosper.
How to Use Article Marketing to Build Your List – My Top Ten Tips
by Ellen Britt
“The phrase “article marketing” can be a bit confusing the first time you hear it, as it seems to suggest that you are writing articles and then somehow selling them.
Actually, when you do article marketing, you are not selling your articles at all, you are giving them away for free. In fact, the more articles you give away, the greater you will benefit! Let’s get a closer look at how this works, then I’ll give you ten of my best tips to build your list with articles and take your article marketing to the next level.
Here’s the basic idea: you write an article between 400 and 800 words on a topic of interest to your target market. That article should be informative and educational, but “incomplete.” In other words, although you provide your reader with information that is useful and relevant to the topic, your reader should be left wanting more information.
You then place a resource box at the bottom of the article, along with a live link to your website, inviting the reader to come over to your website for more information.
Once the article is ready, you publish your article on places such as your blog and at article directories, which are clearinghouses for articles on almost every topic imaginable.
People come to the article directories and read your articles and a percentage of those readers will click back to your website from your resource box and opt-in to get more information, building your list in the process.
Here are ten of my best article marketing tips to help you get up to speed…
One: Increase the speed of your article writing by using an informal outline: topic, brainstorm points you want to be sure to cover, expand on each point, pull the article together with an introduction and conclusion.
Two: Re-read your article several times over a couple of days. You will be pleasantly surprised how letting an article “mellow” for awhile can help you to see how to improve it.
Three: Put your article writing on an auto-pilot schedule. Pick a day of the week that is your article writing day. If you do your best work early in the morning, then block off that time, or whatever time is best for you, to do your writing. Each month, brainstorm a set of article topics. This way, when you sit down to write, you already have the topic in mind. This will save you a lot of time and unnecessary headaches.
Four: Ask yourself what are the ten most frequently asked questions that my customers or subscribers ask me? Then address each one of these questions in a separate article.
Five: Use “List” articles when you are having trouble coming up with a topic. Examples: 3 Proven Methods for ______, How to ____ In 5 Easy Steps, The Top 10 Reasons People Don’t Succeed At _____, and so forth.
Six: Look in magazines related to your niche for article ideas. You don’t need to look at the actual articles, just jot down the titles and go from there!
Seven: Re-purpose your article content for more mileage. Reworked articles can be posted on your blod and you can record them to use as podcasts. These audios can even be paired with a slideshow and submitted to video sharing sites such as YouTube.
Eight: Avoid targeting the same keywords every time in all your articles. Overuse of keywords may alert Google that you are trying to game the system.
Nine: Consider turning a series of your articles into an informative ecourse as a gift for opting in to your email list.
Ten: “How To” articles are very popular with readers and with the search engines because how-to information on nearly every niche topic is exactly what they are searching for!
The key to excellent results with article marketing is consistency and quality. If you take action, start writing and apply the Ten Tips, you will get results.”
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