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Personal Development Tips That Can Get You Out Of Your Slump

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Many people exercise self help. Rather than trying professional methods, people resort to trying to use their own personal thinking to eliminate problems in their lives and make themselves better people. The harder the personal problem, the harder it is to practice self help. If you wish to use self help to eliminate a problem, then read the advice in this article.

A great self help tip is to write down everything you like about yourself. Sometimes depressed people develop such a powerful, negative view of themselves because they can only see what they don’t like. Writing down a list of what you like about yourself can help you see yourself in a different, more positive light.

To get your finances back on track, develop a budget and a plan. Reaching your financial goals can help you to avoid problems later down the road, pertaining to money and your overall well-being. Set a budget for yourself on a monthly basis and stick to it. Once you are comfortable and can pay off all of your expenses, then you can figure in emergency funds and eventually “splurge.”

Influence your moods with food. Eat more complex carbs to help curb anxiety. To increase your alertness, add more protein and foodsd rich in essential fatty acids. White fish and salmon are great foods for this. To lift your spirits, add foods like turkey, lettuce and salmon to benefit from the protein and naturally-occuring tryptophan.

It is true that money cannot actually buy you happiness. It can, however, supplement you with things that can lead to your happiness. For example, it may make you happy to own your own home business. By buying things like a new desk or a new computer to do this, you are supplementing your happiness using money. Your happiness should never depend on new things, at the same time, happiness is not lnked to an austere existence either. Just aim for a nice balance.

Furthermore, lots of people use self help. They use self help as an improvement alternative to professional help. Self help becomes more difficult to practice as problems become more difficult. If you follow the advice provided in this article, then you can use self help to eliminate difficult problems in your life.

Affiliate Marketing Techniques: Understanding the Basics

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If you have decided to make more money online with affiliate links.  There are a few things you need to know. One of the most effect ways is through email marketing.  Of course you’re going to need to build a list of people to send emails to first.  Here are a few ideas to get people to join your email list.

Customers who make a purchase from your site may also be interested in joining your mailing list. Promote your email list by creating a web page that showcases the type of material a subscriber would receive.

Also, make it easy for someone to sign up. You should never ask for a customer’s personal information. Only ask for a name and email address. Make sure to tell your customers that belonging to your mailing list will provide them with valuable information and discounts. Give your emails interesting subject lines, and communicate with your customers on a regular basis. Personalize your messages with a software program. If people see their own name in the subject line, they will be more apt to open the email. Try to put in quality information, including recent company changes, relevant product links and discounts or promotions. To increase subscription rates, let your customers know that subscribers get special deals. Thank your customers, and inform them when you have sales on similar products or services.

 

Understanding your customers will let you know what they are seeking. Younger audiences will be more open to making contact through social networking sites and less likely to respond well to email marketing. Try to find out what your rivals are doing, visit their page, get emails from them, and learn! Ask your customers to complete short surveys so that you can learn more about them. Remember what product you are providing when advertising on social networks. If your customers might not want to reveal that they use a certain product, they may be reluctant to interact with you through Facebook. To find the best strategy you should understand your audience.

 

It is imperative that you keep track of your client’s needs so that your affiliate marketing campaigns are always well targeted. It is important to get yourself established in the market, but be sure to take into consideration the needs and interests of your clients. Evaluate any comments they make, both good and bad, and then aim to provide what your clients are interested in seeing. This will keep the customers you already have happy and help attract new customers.

 

Competition Analysis

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Now you have successfully signed a new client for your offline marketing services. The first step to starting a new campaign is the competition analysis. The big secret about SEO, PPC, Video Marketing or any service that you offer is that you only have to be better than the competition. That’s it, you don’t have to create ads that convert at 30% or have the best SEO in the world you only have to beat local competitors.  This training will help you through your competition analysis.

This training is relies on a lot of tools. Most of the information can be found out using free alternatives however to get the most accurate and up to date information it is worth investing in the tools mentioned. Also all of the tools mentioned come with some type of free trial take advantage of them for free while you get new clients!

Competition

To begin I will assume that you have already done your keyword research. If so then you are ready to begin some general competition analysis. For starters it’s important for you to identify the top online competition for your clients. There is a distinct difference between your client’s physical competition and online competition. You have to find the competitors in your client’s area that are dominating the internet. It will typically consist of 2-5 different companies depending on the area.

To do this we will be using the online marketing tool  Semrush. This is an online tool that shows ranking and PPC analysis based off websites and/or keywords you enter. With this one tool you can find out valuable information about the top ranking websites for your client’s top keywords. Visit the tools website and simply enter some of your primary keywords, you will start to notice the same sites appearing regularly. These are your client’s online competition. You simply need to record these top online competitors so you can further analyze their online strategies.

Backlink Analysis

The next step in your competition research will consist of Backlink Analysis. Here you will find the sources that your competitors are using to achieve high rankings. For your backliink analysis you can use SEOMoz Opensite Explorer. This is an excellent tool for you to quickly and easily find what type of backlinks your client’s offline competition is using. You can get an exclusive 90 day free trail of the tool. You also get membership access where you can speak with other SEO’s and learn more about latest Google trends.

When doing your backlink analysis you will be looking for the overall link building strategy the competition has used to achieve high rankings. Some things you can look for include:

  • Link building strategy
  • Backlink sources
  • Anchor text used
  • Top backlink sources (news sites, guess post other prominent sites etc.)

Once you have a general sense of your competitors top backlink sources you can begin to get equivalent backlinks for your clients. Since your competitors websites’ are ranking well for ideal keywords then you can assume that getting similar backlinks will help your clients site rank too.

Social Media Analysis

With the last Google updates, Google has made it clear that a high value is placed on social signals. With that in mind you have to find out what your top competitors are doing on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn Google+ and YouTube. You need to get a general sense of what they are doing on these networks and how to generate user engagement. If you can clearly define and understand how competitors leverage social media to benefit rankings (and bottom line) then you can begin to implement similar strategies for you clients.

PPC Analysis

The last step for any strong competition analysis is discovering your competition’s PPC campaigns. This will be beneficial even if you don’t offer PPC as one of your services. For the part of the competition analysis you will need to use another online marketing tool and that is Keyword Spy. With this tool you will be able to see the exact PPC ads competitors were using and how effective they were. With this type of information you can quickly develop your own PPC campaign using the ads that are PROVEN to work.

What if you don’t offer pay per click services how can a PPC analysis help you? Well PPC rely heavily on the copy that used to attract readers and take some sort of action. With a quick analysis of your competitor’s ads you can see the wording that prompted user to take action and apply it to your clients site. This alone can greatly increase click through rates and new leads for you clients.

What’s Next

Take the information within this training and start applying it to some of the competitor in your area. You can use a good competition analysis even if you don’t have any clients. A good competition analysis can be the valued added proposition you offer prospect when you meet with them! Be sure to include every section covered in this training and develop the best competition analysis possible. Finally remember to use the tools mentioned as well to get the most accurate and useful information possible for your analysis.

Contacting Prospects over the Phone

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“The golden rule for every business man is this: Put yourself in your customer’s place.”

Orison Swett Marden

The Basics

At this point you should have a good list of prospects that you are ready to contact. Over the next few days we will cover multiple approaches to contacting said prospects. Before doing so there are a few principles that apply no matter what contact method you choose. This training will cover the basic principles to consider when contacting small business owners.

Know Thy Customer

The most important point is that you should know your prospects. Obviously the level of information that you need to know about a prospects varies depending on what form of contact you are using. However the fact remains that the more you know the better. Business owners are constantly inundated by marketing company’s all fighting for their business. Therefore the more information you can learn about a business the more personalized your approach. Personalizing your marketing efforts will make everything you do a lot more effective.

Secondly you should get to know your prospects pain points. What is it about their business that you can help improve upon? It is not as simple as “make more money” but what specific problems do they have that your offline services can solve. When you know this information you will be able to present your prospects with a solution!

Finally you must learn to speak their language. The only business owner that cares about Click Through Rates, Title Tags, Optimized Mobile Landing pages is YOU! These things are important but to the average business owners it doesn’t mean much. You have to be able to explain your services in a way that a business owner can understand.

For example if you are offering SEO services the absolute worst approach you can take is the following…. “Hi, I’m Heidi with XYZ Company. I have been involved in internet marketing for 4 years and I have made over 200 successful websites. I can help you rank your site #1 on Google with Search Engine Optimization.” Before you even finish the business owner has probably stopped paying attention and decided to not work with you.

What Works For You

You are about to get a crash course in lead generation methods. I did this specifically, to show you every possible way of sparking interest from your prospects. Once you know and test the different options you can rank the different options that work best for you. You can have the best services possible but if your lead generation is ineffective then it won’t matter much. I don’t want to force one lead generation on you that you don’t feel comfortable with because you are the one that will have to contact the prospects. After this training you will be able to use create a lead generation strategy to help deliver the best possible results.

Tracking & Following

You should already have a large number of prospects ready to contact. Now imagine contacting half via email, sending 20 direct mail pieces, 100 cold calls and 10 PPC leads over the next several days. That is a lot to keep up with for anyone. Therefore it is vital that you develop a system for tracking your lead generation efforts. Personally I have an excel file with multiple tabs that separate my lead generation efforts. On this sheet I include the following:

  • business contact information
  • services offered
  • contact date
  • results
  • follow up info
  • specific lead generation info (script used, subject line, variations, etc.)

Now I can easily see what the status is of different lead generation efforts I recently used.

Tracking your lead generation efforts also makes it easier to split test different lead generation methods. You can compare the time and effort needed for each method and which is most effective. Obviously if you know which is most effective you can invest more time using that particular method. You can also split test different aspects of your lead generation methods. For example if your primary lead generation method is cold emailing then you can test different subject lines or different landing pages. All of the information you can gather is helpful because it enables you to work smarter…. not harder!

Lastly the most important aspect of any type of lead generation is the FOLLOW UP. I would estimate that approximately 95% of the time after your initial lead generation contact you will have to perform some type of follow up. The follow up can be anything a friendly meeting reminder via email, a report that is sent, a postcard or even a follow up meeting to sign contracts. Also there is a chance that you didn’t get in contact with your prospect the first time you tried to contact them, does that mean you should give up? Absolutely not, it just means you need to follow up, maybe using a different contact medium or contacting at a different time.

What’s Next

It is time to get ready to contact your prospect and start generating some real leads for your offline business. Make sure you know some general information about your prospects and depending on the lead generation method you choose. I will show the top lead generation methods I use for my offline business but you have to choose the method(s) that you are most comfortable with. Finally be prepared to track and follow up on all of your lead generation efforts.

 

Trials and adversity happen in everyone’s lives

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Trials and adversity happen in everyone’s lives. These storms might seem like barriers to expression, but they can be an invitation to dance in the rain!

 

 

“Life isn’t about waiting for

the storms to pass.

It’s about learning to

dance in the rain.” 

t’s easy to get down when life starts to rain on you. But, when you’re standing out in the rain, getting soaked, you still have a choice. Either you can let the storm drag you down, or get up and Dance!


 

 

 

 

“Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when the storm comes.“

-Alexandre Dumas in “The Count of Monte Cristo”

Change your thoughts

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Henry Ford said: “Whether you think you can

or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

 

The thoughts, emotions and actions that lead to your current results are in your past. Don’t beat yourself up because of where you are now, instead use that energy to effect a change. Whatcould you do if all that energy was re-directed?

 

Cause an interrupt in your old patterns. The easiest place to begin creating a new result is in your thoughts.

You Deserve to Take a Break

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Your work matters. But sometimes, the best way to do better at work is to take some time off. Studies have shown that people (business owners or employees) performance improves when they take breaks. This works in the short term (called the serial position effect) and in the long term (according to multiple studies). Are you one of those who take advantage of this benefit? Or are you one of the people who keeps working harder until you wear out and shut down? Take quick breaks to regroup your thoughts and relax… then achieve even more!

Vacations are disappearing in corporate america. As the business world speeds up, employees and employers are working harder, often to the point of over working. Many think being in the office or available 24/7 makes them better workers or the company grow faster.

But the reality is that people need vacations. A well-rested, vacation-taking person is more productive and more successful.

 

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