Posted by Mark B on under Other Useful Articles | 
Here is an excellent article by Aurelius Tijin that I hope you find helpful:
Slumps can be devastating. They can take an otherwise productive, happy person and reduce him to a lethargic, depressed, indifferent person.
If you’re in a slump right now, you know what I mean. You might have goals and dreams, but right now, they seem like a distant fantasy–unimportant and detached from reality.
And furthermore, when you think about it for long enough, you’re not sure what you’d even do if you were able to attain those dreams. Would your life really even be any better?
So what do you do? If you’re like most people, you take a break from all of your projects and aspirations. And you spend some time feeling depressed and indifferent to progress.
After a few weeks or months have passed, you exit your slump, but you do so very aware of how much time you’ve lost and how many opportunities you’ve forgone.
In the remainder of this guide, I’m going to help you to avoid that scenario. Instead of losing weeks or months to this slump or the next slump, you’re going to learn 21 ways to re-motivate yourself, refocus your life and goals, become happy and productive; and leave this slump in the distant past.
1. Take Action. Before you landed in this slump, you had goals, dreams, and lists of things you needed to do to accomplish them. At some point, you lost confidence in these ideas and stopped working on your projects and carrying out your dreams.
Well, it’s time to pursue those dreams once again. And you can do so by taking action. Ignore your feelings of lethargy and indifference and focus on making tangible progress. As you start checking things off of your “to do” list, you’ll feel better about yourself and the possibility of accomplishing your goals.
2. Ratchet Up Your Efforts. Working hard does not guarantee that you will accomplish your goals. But not working hard will undoubtedly ensure that you do not.
Be mindful of this when you’re deciding what to do for the day. Don’t simply drift along, waiting for your projects to make sense of themselves. Take control, make plans, and move towards them each day.
3. Pay Attention to People Who Have Succeeded. Just because someone else succeeded doesn’t mean you will. But it can provide a motivational example of path to your goal that has worked for someone else.
So, cast aside your doubts, stop telling yourself that you can’t do what others did–and instead take their examples for what they are: a source of inspiration and hope. And, most importantly, a means to get out of your slump.
4. Learn by Doing. If you’re faced with a complicated decision with no clear answer, one of the best ways you can move forward is to simply do, rather than thinking.
What do I mean by this? Instead of perseverating on the decision, pick one of the options in front of you; and move forward with your best effort to make it work.
If you fail ultimately, at least you can eliminate that path as a dead-end and then move forward with the other path.
5. Avoid Over-thinking. Thinking hard and carefully about many things is critical to success, but if taken to an extreme, it can become pathological. It can paralyze talented, driven individuals; and prevent them from attaining the success they would otherwise have.
So, next time you find yourself paralyzed by a decision, stop over-analyzing the situation–and just pick one path or the other.
6. Re-organize Your Work Area. No matter what you do, it’s always a good idea to have everything you need organized and within close reach. Re-organize your work area, so that it is a productive environment, rather than a sprawling, disorganized heap of documents.
7. Start Afresh. One frequent source of slumps is boredom. If you’re unhappy with your current routine, it may affect your ability to work and to accomplish your goals. Consider switching your daily routine to something new that excites you and motivates you to accomplish new things.
8. Reward Yourself. Surprisingly, slumps are very common among those who work hard. Why? Because, eventually they hit a wall, can’t figure out how to get around it, and keep working until they’re thoroughly burnt out and frazzled.
So, don’t do this. Set specific goals, accomplish them, and then reward yourself by taking the rest of the night off to relax. When you come back to your work, you’ll be happy and refreshed.
9. Visit a New Place. Instead of mindlessly chugging along with your daily route, break free and visit a new place. Take a drive to the beach or to a lake. Take a walk through the woods. Drive somewhere new and relaxing. Experience the small pleasures in life to demonstrate to yourself that there are reasons to move forward, to make progress, and to indulge in life.
10. Refocus Yourself. Slumps tend to make life feel unclear, unfocused, and pointless. Take some time to refocus yourself, re-think your aspirations, and decide what goals to keep and what goals to discard.
11. Schedule Things, Rather than Letting Things Happen to You. Don’t allow your schedule to morph into an unpredictable, unmanageable blob. Take the time to record things you need to do, schedule them into your life, and tend to them carefully. This is not only a good way to prevent disasters, but also to commit yourself to getting work done.
12. Physical Activity. The cause of slumps is not always or entirely psychological. In many cases, complacency and a lack of physical exercise can leave us in a mental fog. One cure for this problem is to get some vigorous exercise. Not only will it get your blood pumping and make your thoughts clearer, but it will also release endorphins, making you feel happy and more satisfied with your life and goals.
13. Eliminate Negative Thoughts. Skepticism and self-doubt are healthy when applied in moderation, but when they prevent you from achieving your goals, it may be time to reign them in. If you constantly find yourself doubting that you an accomplish something, instead re-direct your thoughts towards considering how you can accomplish it.
14. Challenge Yourself to Accomplish Something New. If you find yourself repeating the same tasks on a daily basis, you may become bored and complacent. Find ways to challenge yourself–for instance, by seeing whether you can do some task in half the amount of time–so that you engage your work and goals, rather than becoming indifferent to them.
15. Create Artificial Scarcity. Most people work best when they have no other choice. When that project is due in two days, you buckle down, stay focused, and get it done. But one week before that, you probably sat in front of the computer, “working” on it, but truly got very little accomplished.
Next time, start on the project later, rather than sooner. Save that extra time when you wouldn’t really be working to do something fun and refreshing.
16. Change Your Diet. Another frequent cause of “slumps” is diet. If you find your busy schedule forcing you into an unhealthy diet that causes you to put on weight and feel sluggish, put an end to it immediately. Not only will this help you physically, but it will help you to avoid the mental and emotional burden that comes with weight gain and unhealthy eating.
17. Spend a Day to Improve Your Productivity. Hard work isn’t the only ingredient in success. Another critical component is productivity. You can think about productivity as the amount you accomplish in each hour. So, spend an afternoon or even a full day figuring out how you can be more productive. This might simply mean re-arranging your filing cabinet or learning how to use certain programs on your computer better.
18. Simplify Your Goals. It’s often easy to convince ourselves that our goals have to be complicated and hard to achieve. But it many cases, there are achievable, simple goals that are still very desirable. So, take some time to decide whether you can make your goals clearer, simpler, and easier to attain.
19. Take the Path of Least Resistance. Instead of taking the path you think you “should take” or “ought to take,” instead focus on what paths cause the fewest problems and present the fewest challenges. If you can find and exploit these paths, you’ll save yourself time and make it easier to finish what you set out to do.
20. Sleep More. Many hard-working individuals whip themselves up into a frenzy; and convince themselves that they should never stop working. When taken to an extreme, this can be very detrimental to their goals. Keep this in mind when deciding whether to go to sleep or to keep working late into the night. If you don’t sleep, you might get more done tonight, but you’ll definitely be tired and get less done tomorrow. So go to sleep and come back refreshed tomorrow.
21. Make an Effort to Learn from Others. Rather than always focusing on your own stories and struggles, make a concerted effort to truly understand other people and their daily trials. Learn from them, absorb their stories, and use them to motivate yourself.
No matter how depressed and indifferent you feel right now, you have the capabilities to break out of your slump. You have 21 different ways in which you can do it. It’s just a matter of taking a handful of them, living by them on a daily basis, and pushing forward.
So, don’t let your slump get the best of you. Reclaim your career, your family life, your goals, your aspirations, and your hunger for new and challenging experiences. Leave this slump in your past; and return to your productive, happy life.
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Posted by Mark B on November 17, 2009 under Other Useful Articles |
As a full time internet professional, I use various methods of generating income from my websites. Multiple streams of income is the key to being successful long term, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.
So in addition to the various affiliate marketing websites I run, I also use google adsense in the pages to squeeze as much money from my sites as possible.
If you use adsense, here are a few tips to help you maximise your income from them, provided by Kalena Jordan and Addme.com.
Google AdSense – http://www.google.com/adsense – is fast becoming the preferred way for people to earn an income online. Forget eBay and multiple affiliate programs. Whether you are a work-at-home mom trying to make a little extra cash or an Internet entrepreneur with hundreds of monetized websites, AdSense is truly the easiest way to earn money.
Simply sign up for a free account, grab your ad code and paste it in your site. But here’s the amazing thing – no matter how much money AdSense is making for you right now, a few simple tweaks can increase that amount considerably. And I should know, after learning about these tricks, I more than doubled my AdSense commissions!
The self-proclaimed AdSense gurus and experts are sharing this insider knowledge, for a fee.
You can learn all these secrets from them, as long as you buy their e-book, sign up for their seminar or purchase their newsletter. But I’m going to share all their AdSense tricks for free. Here they are:
1) Color code your ads to match your web site palette *exactly*. Don’t use frames around your ads. Instead, in the AdSense code generation interface, make sure you choose the same color as your page background for the ad frame and the ad background.
When choosing the ad heading colors, match them to the *exact* color of your page headings. Use the exact same ad background shade as your page background. Use the exact same ad text font and color as the text on your pages. You can see an example of this color-matching on my Search Engine Advice Blog at – http://www.searchenginecollege.com/blog.htm – notice the 4 link ad unit at the top and the skyscraper text ad unit on the left hand side under the heading Ads by Google as you scroll down the page? The link and text colors are identical to the color palette used throughout the rest of the page.
Near enough is NOT good enough. If you can’t quite get the color matching right, use Google’s built in color palette together with the RGB to HEX or vice versa color converter on this page – http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Style. That handy little tool was a life saver for me.
This is probably the one single tweak that made the most difference to my commission levels.
2) Try not to use the traditional horizontal banner style or leaderboard image ads because people are blind to them.
3) Use Google’s own AdSense optimization tips at https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html and visual heat map to assist you in deciding where on your page to place your AdSense ad code.
4) Research competitive keywords using a keyword research tool such as Keyword Discovery at http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/ or grab a list of the most popular keywords from various sources and use them in your web site pages where relevant. This article – http://searchenginewatch.com/facts/article.php/2156041 – is a good source of frequently searched keywords. Targeting popular keywords should trigger AdSense ads on your pages that utilize those keywords. The more popular the keyword or phrase, the higher AdWords advertisers are generally willing to pay per click for it so the higher your commission on those clicks.
5) Incorporate the AdSense code into your page so that the ads look like a regular part of your site. You can see an example on this Internet Dating Stories site – http://www.lovestory.com.au/ – where link ads are incorporated within the regular left hand navigation of the site under the heading “Feature Links”.
6) Use Google’s new 4 and 5 link ad units wherever possible. They seem to have a much higher Click Through Rate (CTR) than regular ad styles. You can view all the AdSense ad formats at https://www.google.com/adsense/adformats.
7) Place arrows or images next to your ads to draw attention to them. You can see two different versions of on this search engine article library page – http://www.searchenginecollege.com/articles/article-library.htm – at the top (where a pointing hand directs your eye to the ad) and the bottom where 3 images draw your attention to each of the three AdSense ads.
Use the full allowance of multiple AdSense ads on each of your pages – 3 regular AdSense ads, plus 1 link unit. Use careful placement of these ads so they blend into your site and don’t distract from your content. Clever use of this allowance can be seen on this page about bad Internet dating stories – http://www.lovestory.com.au/bad-stories.htm – where you see:
- 1 horizontal 4 link ad unit towards the top of the page under the first paragraph.
- 1 vertical skyscraper text ad unit about halfway down the left hand side under “Sponsor Links”.
- 1 vertical skyscraper image ad unit down the left hand side under “Sponsor Links”.
- 1 horizontal text banner unit at the bottom of the page with images above each ad to draw attention to them.
You can also include 1 AdSense referral button in addition to the 3 other units.
9) Tailor your page content to a particular niche or focus. Page content that is tailored towards a specific theme is more likely to trigger AdWords ads that closely match the content and are therefore more likely to interest your visitors and inspire them to click.
Don’t create pages merely for the sake of placing AdSense ads. Visitors (and search engines) can see through this ruse in an instant.
10) Use custom Ad Channels for each of your ad placements, for example, “Top 5 Link Unit Blue Palette” or “Left Side Navigation Image Skyscraper” etc. Tweak, track and measure the success of each of these custom channels so you know what gives you the highest CTR. Some ad formats and colors will work better than others, but you won’t know which until you test, test and test some more!
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| About the AuthorKalena Jordan manages Search Engine College – an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects. |
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Posted by Mark B on November 12, 2009 under Marks Blog Posts |
I have covered quite a few workable opportunities for you on the pages and posts of this blog. The main theme in all of them though, is selling a genuine product or service that people WANT to buy. No money games or schemes.
The most simple of all online businesses you could set up to build LONG TERM income is often overlooked by most people.
Ask yourself a question. What are the 2 things that EVERYONE who has a website of any size or description MUST have?
Answer? A domain name and a hosting account.
This goes for businesses or individuals, without a domain name and a hosting account you cannot have a presence on the web. And imagine how many businesses and individuals have websites? Or put it another way, how many websites are there at the moment? I couldn’t give you an exact figure but it is HUGE, massive, and growing every day.
Every single website will have a domain name and will need hosting. Just look in your town. How many businesses have websites? How many individuals?
Sure, many of them will already have domains registered and will have hosting accounts. But standards of hosting vary greatly, and so do costs. I recently spoke to a friend who runs a small business and has a website to promote it. He was paying over £100 a year for a very basic hosting account. I saved him 50% by switching to my hosting business and still made a profit – and he got a better service!
Also consider what other online income streams you may be looking at yourself. If you need to register a domain name or buy hosting, why not do it from your own hosting business and get it cheaper?
Can you see the potential here?
You can save money on the services you need yourself AND grow an income by offering the service to others. Promote the service online from your website or just drop a few leaflets to local businesses, speak to people and let them know about your service. There are all sorts of ways to promote a service that EVERYONE needs.
So how do you set up your own hosting business? Is it expensive? Do you need a lot of equipment and technical knowledge?
NO! – It is FREE and you everything is taken care of for you!
You can get a reseller account for one of the best hosting companies absolutely free. You can offer a service second to none, and I have tried a lot of hosts so I know these really are excellent. You will get your own website to promote the service FREE, and you can set your own prices for the services they offer!
NOW can you see the potential?
With this you can literally start earning today.
Click on the banner below to see my reseller site, then click the small ‘reseller’ link on the left to register for FREE.
