Archive for the 'Business' Category

Jul 07 2008

The Benefits Of Personal Time Management

Published by vagabondetteva under Business, Personal

by Louis Bonaventura

Time management is basically about being focused. The Pareto Principle, also known as the ‘80:20 Rule’, states that 80% of efforts that are not time managed or unfocused generates only 20% of the desired output.  However, 80% of the desired output can be generated using only 20% of a well time managed effort.

Although the ratio ‘80:20′ is only arbitrary, it is used to put emphasis on how much is lost or gained.

Some people view time management as a list of rules that involves scheduling of appointments, goal settings, thorough planning, creating to do lists and prioritizing.  These are the core basics of managing your time that should be understood to develop an efficient personal management skill. These basic skills can be fine tuned further to include the finer points of each skill that can give you that extra reserve to make the results you desire.

But there are more skills involved than just the core basics. Skills such as decision making, inherent abilities such as emotional intelligence and critical thinking are also essential to your personal growth.  Personal management involves everything you do. No matter how big or how small, everything counts.  Every new piece of knowledge you acquire, each new bit of advice you consider, each new skill you develop should be taken into consideration.

Having a balanced life-style should be the primary goal in maintaining your time management. This is the main aspect that many practitioners of personal time management fail to grasp.  Managing your time is about getting results, not about being busy.

The six areas that will be improved in anyone’s life are physical, intellectual, social, career, emotional and spiritual.

  1. The physical aspect involves having a healthy body, less stress and fatigue.
  2. The intellectual aspect involves learning and other mental growth activities.
  3. The social aspect involves developing personal or intimate relations and being an active contributor to society.
  4. The career aspect involves school and work.
  5. The emotional aspect involves appropriate feelings and desires and manifesting them.
  6. The spiritual aspect involves a personal quest for meaning.

Thoroughly planning and having a set of things to do for each of the key areas may not be very practical, but determining which area in your life is not being giving enough attention is part of managing your time.

Each area creates the whole you, if you are ignoring one area then you are ignoring an important part of yourself.  It also should not be so daunting a task. It is a very sensible and reasonable approach in solving problems big or small.

A great way of learning to manage your time and improving your personal life is to follow several basic activities.

  • One of them is to review your goals, whether it be immediate or long-term goals, often.   A way to do this is to keep a list that is always accessible to you.
  • Always determine which task is necessary or not necessary in achieving your goals and which activities are helping you maintain a balanced life style.
  • Each and every one of us has a peak time and a time when we slow down, these are our natural cycles. We should be able to distinguish that its time to do the difficult tasks when we are the sharpest.
  • Learn to say “No”. You actually see this advice often. Heed it even if it involves saying the word to family or friends.
  • Pat yourself at the back or just reward yourself in any manner for an effective result.
  • Try and get the cooperation from people around you who are actually benefiting from your efforts.
  • Don’t procrastinate. Attend to necessary things immediately. Make the main thing, the main thing!
  • Have a positive attitude and set yourself up for success. But be realistic in your approach in achieving your goals.
  • Have a record or journal of all your activities. This will help you get things in their proper perspective.

These are the few steps you initially take in becoming a well rounded individual. Personal time management is the art and science of building a better life.

From the moment you the integrate skills used to manage your time into your life, you have opened several options that can provide a broad spectrum of solutions to your personal growth and create more doors for opportunities to knock upon.

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Lou and Robin Bonaventura have been Professional Network Marketers for 4 years. Visit their Blogfor more information on how personal development can benefit you!

Article Source: Keyword Articles

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Jun 26 2008

5 Ways of Getting Repeat Traffic and Customers

Published by vagabondetteva under Business

By: Scott Miscall

Getting traffic to your web site is a time consuming task. If you have a business site, then after you get the visitors to your site, you must convert them into paying customers. This guide by a Kansas City Website Design team will help you achieve these important tasks.

  1. Title and Content: The title on your web pages should reflect your theme and also must include the best keywords. A title which includes your best keywords increases favorably the search engine optimization (SEO) process. Content is King! Great content will bring more visitors, create more back-links to your pages, and increase the popularity of the site. Update your content regularly, and provide quality information. Allow your visitors to comment on the content. Visitors love to leave comments and often come back to see the responses. Always filter out unwanted or junk comments.
  2. Call To Action: A call to action should be present on each web page. You should make available a free newsletter or provide link to utility products on the page to encourage your visitors to sign up for the information. Put your contact information and phone number or your email address on the page so visitors can easily be in touch with you.
  3. Regular Updates: Regular updates, especially if you have a blog site, will induce the search engine spiders to visit your site more frequently. A regularly updated site is good for visitors and the search engines alike, whereas a static site that is not updated for long periods lose their rank and traffic. Always update your web pages and add more interesting content and products. This will boost the traffic and repeat visits. More traffic means a better search engine ranking too.
  4. Free Offers and Recommendations: Your visitors will love your web site for the freebies and recommendations they receive. Regularly give away good quality products, information, and recommendations freely. This may just boost your web revenues too, because people are also known to purchase your products along with getting the free items.
  5. Convert Visitors To Leads: You should aim to convert the visitors into customers. You should also make the customers and visitors come back to your site often for more purchases. For that, you need a great content, many good items to sell, and more importantly — presence of an opt-in lead capture form on your page. You can increase the conversion rate significantly by testing and making your lead capture form more efficient. Removing the navigation links from the page can also keep the visitor on the sales page for a longer duration. Visitors are afraid to give their email details to strangers, especially online pages that they are visiting for the first time. To win their trust, you can add a link to your privacy policy page. This can do wonders to the confidence of your visitors, and also do wonders to your conversion rate!

You can add customer testimonials on the page to win the visitor’s trust and it might just induce him to buy the product. Any free product or service give-away will add to the overall value of your product or service. Then by following-up with the leads, you’ll be able to keep in touch with those leads and can give them the details of the latest information and sell more products.

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Author Resource:-> Wmoadv.com is a Kansas City Web Site Design company the specializes in web development, creative design solutions and result oriented strategic SEO services.

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Jun 19 2008

Why Online Newsletters Are Critical For A Successful Internet Marketing Strategy

Published by vagabondetteva under Marketing

By: Bob Withers

Online newsletters are used for multiple reasons and in multiple ways. Online newsletters are used to increase sales to current and new customers and generate new leads. They are gaining in popularity and for good reason. They are a great way to build and manage effective relationships with your customers and they are an effective fast and affordable method of communicating to your target audience on a regular basis.

Online newsletters are formatted for your Web site and are usually delivered via email, however, some are sent as HTML pages located on a web site. They are contained within your website and offer a great way of keeping your website fresh and up to date. Online newsletters are a great way to gain instant market feedback either through surveys or by response to articles.

Newsletters are a way to lock in your consumers and remind them on a periodic basis of the value you provide. Newsletters once required expensive printing and mailing costs, but today’s online newsletters have changed the rules of the game. They have four times the readership of a traditional ad and can be instantly delivered to readers throughout the world.

Online newsletters give you reasons to send potential customers emails packed with informative articles and, of course, one or more carefully crafted sales messages. They are great for building trust and relationships online if your newsletter provides regular, quality content which your subscribers can really use. Newsletters allow individuals and groups to control messaging and deliver it with great precision to a target audience.

Online newsletters are often made available free of charge to subscribers who complete a short profile and they produce targeted leads as a result. As the number of Internet surfers using the Web for gathering information and making purchases increased, many businesses began using online newsletters to promote company Web sites, products, and services. Businesses also use them to provide information and as an additional source of revenue through advertising.

As well as being environmentally friendly, online newsletters save the publisher time and cut costs by reducing postage, paper, and other supplies costs. Along with being less expensive and easier to produce, online newsletters can also reach a much larger customer base. While many newsletters exist solely as an information source and do not utilize advertising, many others are published as a source of revenue.

With an increasing number of online newsletters in circulation and online traffic increasing, businesses began viewing the electronic medium as an attractive place to advertise. In fact, advertising in online newsletters is often more effective than placing a banner ad on a Web site. According to Forrester Research, advertisements in email newsletters had an average response rate of 18 percent in 2000, versus a banner ad click through rate of less than one percent.

Online newsletters are considered to be the best marketing tool to promote small business over the World Wide Web. They are an internet phenomenon and they can be crucial to the success of your enterprise. Newsletters have been, and continue to be, one of the most efficient marketing and communication tools used by both small and large companies alike.

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Author Resource:-> Bob Withers is a professional sales and marketing person with over twenty years in the field. He has also turned his sights on network marketing to apply his trade. If you want to get in touch with Bob or learn more about sales and marketing please visit:

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Jun 10 2008

Tell A Friend Scripts Drive Viral Traffic Fast

Published by vagabondetteva under Marketing

by Tyler James Ellison

More and more webmasters have the recurring dilemma on how to increase the flow of traffic in the websites. During the past few years many methods that been developed to solve this predicament. While most of them would work there are those that would not make even a small impact.

One of the methods that have spawned many success stories in driving traffic into websites is viral marketing. Viral marketing makes use of the tendency of a person to share something to find informative, entertaining or amazing.

Many companies bank on this behavior to spread their products and increase the popularity of their company or their website. Viral marketing makes use of many mediums in enticing this behavior. It might be in the form of an interesting story, an addicting flash game, an amusing video and many others that may catch a person’s fancy.

This ingenious form of marketing is typically low cost and is a wonderful tool for any company to utilize. The benefit greatly overshadows the cost or efforts to initialize this marketing scheme. Any website would greatly benefit with viral marketing.

Tell A Friend Script

One of the easiest methods in viral marketing is using a tell a friend script. This is a simple programming script that you can attach to your website. Generally, tell a friend scripts are installed in pages where a media is placed so that a person can easily send the media to any of his friends or his family members.

The basic concept of a tell a friend script is a script wherein a person may input his name, e-mail address, the recipient’s e-mail address and send the media to the intended recipient much like an e-mail with an attachment. As the recipient receives the e-mail he wouldn’t think of the mail a spam mail because he would see the sender’s name as someone he or she knows and trust.

Tell a friend scripts greatly eliminate the chances of being blocked because they use the information inputted by the sender. This allows for wider spreading of this marketing method. It can be quite sneaky but it is very effective.

With the e-mail sent and opened the sent media will either be read, viewed or played. Also along with the mail would be a brief description of the company or site that sponsors the media sent. This allows for the introduction of either the site, company name or its products. The along with it is another tell a friend script.

Then the process begins again. As more people use the tell a friend script, more and more people will know of the existence of the sponsoring company or site. People who read the ads inside the mail who liked what they see would go and click on the link and visit the site. This drives traffic into the site resulting to great number of potential customers.

Script Availability

A tell a friend script is very simple and does not require a complicated method of programming. In fact, you can copy paste a script and simply put it on an intended page. Finding one is even simpler. All you have to do is go to a search engine and type in the search box “tell a friend script” then press enter or click go.

In the search results page you will see many links that will direct you to a site where you can get a tell a friend script. It would just be a simple matter of looking and searching for the script and copying it to your intended web page.

With a tell a friend script viral marketing strategy you can drive traffic into your site which could potentially spell profits. This is a simple harmless script that offers great benefits for low cost paired with great creativity and foresight.

It is imperative that you have patience in using a scrip like this. If your chosen media doesn’t get the mileage that is expected of it, it may take some time before it gets spread or shared. But surely many people will see your ads and there is great probability that they will visit your site increasing your traffic flow.

Tyler Ellison is a successful entrepreneur who teaches the Free Fully Automated Traffic System and encourages others to join the community at Little Guy Co-op .

Article Source: Keyword Articles

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Jun 04 2008

Are You True To Your Word?

Published by vagabondetteva under Business

by Jennifer Lavoie

Do you act with integrity? Most people when confronted with this question will state firmly that YES, they have integrity. They don’t promise things they can’t deliver and their word is their bond.

But are you true to the promises you make to yourself?

Most people who fail in their business-building dreams are so busy keeping promises to others that they back burner the promise they made to themselves … the promise of more money, more time freedom and a better life. So why do we all do it?

There are two reasons I’ve uncovered through coaching business associates. See if any of them resonate, and be honest with yourself.

1. I am too busy doing X, Y or Z. You can insert almost anything here. Many people keep themselves so busy doing what can only be described as busy work that they have no time to do anything else.

Here’s the reality: if you make your business a priority, everyone can find 1 hour a day or 10 hours a week to dedicate to a business. Sometimes being busy allows you to avoid doing the things you need to do to make your business profitable.

2. FEAR. While many people don’t admit to the fear, many are afraid of being ridiculed or criticized for their attempts to build a business or they are afraid of failing. Often, people will say they are “too busy to work at the business right now” but the reality is that they are afraid.

If you are in a business, or you are planning to start one, you need to make a promise to yourself (and show integrity in your dealing with that promise.) Promise to give it your all. To dedicate time to your business every day and not allow other commitments to infringe on your business building efforts.

Here’s a tip for keeping focused on your priorities. Every day, create a list of critical and trivial activities. The only things that go on your critical list are the top four things that will lead you to reaching your ultimate goal (of financial freedom). If you are in a business, it could be talking to 2 new prospects every day. You need to do the things on your critical list before anything on your trivial list. If the day ends and you haven’t done the trivial things, you can head to bed. If your day is done and you haven’t done the critical, better carve out a little more time.

Here’s another tip. Don’t turn on the TV or pick up a book until the critical list is complete.

Remember this list is not a to do list. It is a list of the things you need to do every day to get your business on the right foot and you are taking baby steps towards your ultimate goal.

Be true to your word, especially when you are making a promise to yourself and you will be more likely to be successful.

~~~~~

Jennifer Lavoie is a home-based business coach. http://www.retirefree.ws

Article Source: Keyword Articles

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Jun 03 2008

How To Find Time For Yourself

Published by vagabondetteva under Business

by Kevin Sinclair

In this hectic world that we live in, it can be hard to find time to do the things that you really enjoy. Sometimes it may seem like all you ever get done is chores, going to work and performing tasks for other people. But while these things can take up an overwhelming portion of your time, it is extremely important that you find time for yourself as well. But how can you find time for yourself when there are already so many other demands for your time?

Finding time for you is a matter of setting priorities. If you don’t carve out time from your day to do things you enjoy to relax, you just simply won’t get to do it at all. And if you allow it to happen, other people’s wants and needs will take all of your time and energy until there is nothing left over for you.

The first step to making yourself a priority is to schedule time each and every day for activities that you enjoy. You don’t have to schedule hours; 15 to 20 minutes is just fine if that is all you can spare. Once you have scheduled some alone time, do not let anything else interrupt it. View it as you would an appointment with a doctor or a dinner date with a trusted friend. When other demands for your time arise, don’t be afraid to say that you have plans. You wouldn’t allow an errand that your sister wants you to run take precedence over a work-related meeting; don’t let it take precedence over your time for yourself either.

Once you have scheduled an appointment with yourself, make sure that your family knows that you will not be available during this time. If you have young children, you can lock yourself in your bedroom and put a sign on the door that says how long you will be gone. Ask your partner to keep the children occupied during this time with the promise that you will do the same for him/her. If your family is older, tell them under no circumstances are you to be disturbed.

Carving out time for yourself means that you will have to learn to say no. You might have to ignore phone calls and you will probably have to let some responsibilities and tasks slide. This is where delegation comes in handy. Let the kids clean the kitchen while you take a hot bath after dinner. Let your brother run the errand for your sister. Just don’t let someone else steal that precious time away from you.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that there won’t be circumstances that arise that will tempt you to forget about the time that you promised yourself. There will always be obstacles, but it is how you handle these obstacles that make the difference in the end. If you always give into pressure, then people around you will learn that they can get you to do what they want with a little bit of pressure. Be firm, be consistent; they will get the hint and leave you alone.

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Kevin Sinclair is the publisher and editor of besuccessfulnews.com, a site that provides information and articles on how to succeed in your own home or small business.

Article Source: Keyword Articles

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Jun 02 2008

Welcome Reader’s Digest Readers

Published by vagabondetteva under Business

Imagine my surprise and excitement this morning when I discovered that my post on 106 Organizations That Are Changing the World made the front page of the Reader’s Digest website on their Daily Five list.

I wanted to take a moment to welcome you and thank you for visiting my blog. I hope you find it useful.

This also seems to be a good time to announce an upcoming blog series. Each month I will profile a different non-profit/do-gooder organization. I will outline their history, goals and let readers know how to get involved. So, if you work with a non-profit and would like to be profiled, please leave me a comment. I will add your organization to the Even More Great Organizations list and I’ll send you a questionnaire for the profile.

Thanks again for stopping by and I hope you come back!

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