All Entries Tagged With: "entrepreneur ideas"
Persistence Is The Key, Remember your “Why”
Two to three weeks is what it takes to make or break a habit, they say. What happens when the excitement dies down. It’s so easy to get caught in the excitement of a new business. As an entrepreneur, I have to stay in my zone and not let the excitement of the business die down. As anything that we put our minds to do gets old, so will owning a business. Many business owners will get discouraged, at first, when they don’t see the profits coming in.
One thing that is key for many entrepreneurs is write down your "Why" when making the decision to start your own business. Could it be financial security? Could it be to have more free time? Whatever your reason for seeking out entrepreneurship, take out the time to write down your why. Having your why is essential because it is so encouraging to go back and look at your reason for starting your business venture.
It is important to remain encouraged and be persistent. One of my favorite saying is consistency creates results. It take more than two or three weeks of doing something to see results. I would relate owning your own business to making a decision to have a child. When you have a child you have to take so much into consideration. You have to ask yourself, am I ready? Am I at a place in my life where I can devote a lot of time and attention to this business? Am I ready to make financial investments into this business?
If you have to follow-up on your customer base or prospect be diligent and following up with them consistently. Have a set plan every day of what you will be doing and how long you will be doing it. Although, in network marketing for instance, many things happen spontaneously. You will get calls from your prospects or your customers and sometimes you have to stop and take the call. It’s important to keep in mind to have a set plan for your time. Being organized and managing your time well will cut down on much of the stress of business operation.
Many entrepreneurs will realize the responsibility of owning a business only once they get well into the business and will become overwhelmed. I am here to encourage you to be persistent. 
Keep your why in a place where you can easily access it. After looking over your why you will be reminded of why you made the decision to start your business venture. Do not allow your efforts to get laxed. Make a conscious decision to work diligently in every area and avenue of your business and keep in mind the goal that you are trying to achieve. By keeping a good mind set and staying positive you will see much progress and then will you achieve your ultimate goal.
To your success,
Jarrod Clark
Why Should You Host Your Blog?
I have had a couple scares with my blog and I know the horrible feeling of loosing all of the blogs. Fortunately for me, the point at where I lost my blogs, I was within only the first month of starting my blog, so I didn’t loose much but the feeling was nonetheless very uneasy. The fault was none other than my own, due to an attempt to upgrade my blog site. I apparently tampered with some of the configurations in the control panel of my blog hosting site. In other words I’ve done something that I shouldn’t have done.
This blog is a spin off from a previous blog post of mine, "The Benefit of Backing Up Your Blog." In the risk of sounding redundant, I will skip the whole reprimand about how you should save a back-up copy of all your blog posts. Although it’s a good idea, I will not elaborate on that idea. I will allow you to take a look at that blog post to get an understanding on why you should back-up your blog and the benefit of doing so.
It was from this mistake that I learned to seek guidance next time I make an attempt to upgrade my blog. I realize that the learning process of developing a blog is in experimenting and trying things out. All of the changes that are done to my blog are done by me, I don’t have a webmaster.
That said, WordPress is a very safe and convenient resource for blogging. And hosting your WordPress blog is the best thing that you can do. If I can use an analogy to describe the importance of hosting your blog site, I would say that the difference between hosting your blog and using a non-hosted blog is the difference between owning an insured restaurant verses owning an un-insured restaurant.
If your restaurant burns down overnight the insurance will pay to have it rebuilt, however if you own an un-insured restaurant, which most restaurant owners are too smart not to have insurance, the cost of the rebuilding will be your out of pocket expense, thats if you decide to rebuild.
There are many people who own free, non-hosted, blog sites and there are some very successful non-hosted blogs with very worthwhile content on them. Blogger.com is free to sign up, however Blogger.com is an example of a non-hosted site. It doesn’t allow outside hosting capabilities. There are many stories of people who have had there content taken down by the Blogger.com due to unknown reasons. This is where the benefit of hosting your blog comes in hand.
WordPress is free to use as well and it allows you to sign up for free. However, the great thing about WordPress is that it allows external hosting capabilities. By personally hosting your blog through an external hosting site, you have total control over your blog. Where as with blogger for instance, the company has the option of removing your blogs at their discretion. When you host your own WordPress blog, you have total control of your blogs, WordPress can’t remove content from an external hosted blog.
I will say this in Blogger’s defense, there have been many successful blogs that have come about through Blogger. Many blogs have been in existence for many years now through Blogger. Blogger won’t remove your blog for no reason, they have terms and conditions that they have to abide by. If you breach the terms and conditions they will remove your blog site. If you own a blog through Blogger, make sure you read the terms and conditions and make sure you are abiding by them.
I would encourage you that if you are into serious blogging, it is a good idea to host your blog site. It gives you the assurance and total control of the existence of your blogs. I personally use Hostgator to host my blog and I pay about $7.98 per month and it is well worth it. I simply view it as as added insurance for my blog. To find a list of web hosting sites go to webhostingfever.com.
To Your Success,
Jarrod Clark
Writer’s Block Anyone?
Formulating a topic for today’s article isn’t easy and it isn’t a come by night thing. Many writers will tell you it’s not easy to just sit down at your PC and start typing award winning articles. In fact as a beginning blogger topics can seem redundant.
Yes it is true that even some of the greatest article writers have the case of writer’s block. However, many of the greatest
writers have taken out time in the beginning to discipline themselves to write everyday about anything. As an aspiring blogger, I can voucher for the fact that beginning stages can be difficult when it comes to forking up the topics that will feed your audience and make a difference in their lives. It has been said that if you do at least some writing everyday you will improve the right side of your brain, also known as the creative part. It doesn’t have to be a full blown out article and it doesn’t have to be perfect. I’ve learn that if you try to produce a perfect article on the first draft you will only frustrate yourself and it doesn’t help your creativity.
Just Write
When you sit down and write, do just that… WRITE! It doesn’t have to be formatted correctly or it doesn’t have to have to perfect structure. You might even have grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, don’t focus on those, yet just write about a main idea and focus on that idea. I am a musician and I remember the days when I first started playing drums, it wasn’t something that I learned over night. Making music, or any other craft for that matter, is a skill that has to be practiced. It takes time to improve on your craft.
It’s A Craft Too…
That said, blogging is something that requires practice. Writing is a craft such as being a musician, painting masterpieces or anything that takes skill. It takes practice and diligence to become a pro blogger. 
Mozart was a great genius and composer but nonetheless, for the genius that he was, he didn’t become the skilled musician that he was overnight, it took practice, discipline and diligence to achieve that level of success.
I want to encourage you and to take out sometime to write just a little everyday. Don’t feel like you have to finished the article, you can write a half article if that’s all you can fork up, just write something. Don’t attempt to publish your first draft. Come back the next day and try to improve on that first draft. As the day progresses, write down blogging topics that come to your mind. It doesn’t have to be all business oriented it could be personal topics, topics centered around politics anything. When as you get better at blogging about anything, your creativity will open up with content and topics in ways you never deemed possible.
To your success,
Jarrod Clark
MySpace Entrepreneurs Growing Their Friends List
As an entrepreneur, I see the value in marketing on MySpace. MySpace is a great resource for networking with others and building relationships. I use MySpace to do a great deal of marketing and I used to use the old traditional way of adding friends by going and individually clicking on individual profiles and placing my add requests. As you well know, this can take an extremely long time especially when you’re trying to reach the masses and grow your friends list to an outstanding number.
I have come across a great software program called FriendBlasterPro. Personally I was fascinated when it was demonstrated to me. It is free to download. The way it works is that you log onto MySpace, through the FriendBlaster Pro software, and once you’re on you can immediately begin adding friends by clicking on browse, just as you would the traditional way. Once you get to the browse screen you can edit and change your criteria to match the type of profiles you want to add, location, gender etc, and click send. FriendBlasterPro will then automatically begin gathering the IDs of all of the profiles in the browse window of MySpace. You can click start and it will automatically add all of the gathered IDs.This is an amazing software program as it will save you time and allow you to add more friends to your friends lists.
You can also set it to automatically send everyone in your friends list a comment and it will do that automatically as well. The only thing I dislike and this is more of a MySpace security policy, is many profiles have the captcha code that MySpace requires. However, you have the option of modifying the settings to skip the profiles that have the captcha code required setting. I really like this software and it has really worked for me. I was able to boost my profile friends list from zero to about 500-600 within just a few days of creating my profile on MySpace which I found to be impressive. This is a helpful tool for many entrepreneurs who are using MySpace as a means to market themselves and their business.
FriendBlasterPro has an unregistered demo which will allow you to download and use it for free. The only thing about the unregistered demo is that you can only add 50 people a day. I wound up upgrading from the unregistered demo, which was free to use, to the registered version which I made a one time purchase of $29.95. This version will allow you to add up to 400 profiles per day with only 1 account, or you can get the unlimited version which is $59.95. This version will allow you to add as many account as you would like and add 400 profiles per day, per account, which is very helpful for those serious entrepreneurs who would like the added benefit of adding 400 profiles per day for multiple accounts.
To learn more about FriendBlasterPro Click on on the banner below.
5 Steps for better business development
In the hustle and bustle of the everyday business ventures, sometimes it’s easy to loose focus and get disorganized. You may find yourself getting wrapped up in one particular task and loose focus of time. Proper time management is one of the key essentials to business success.
Setting a set time or a time limit for your everyday tasks is effective time management practice. Proper time management cuts down on the stress of everyday business tasks. The following are steps to help cut down on the stress of business operation.
Give yourself a specific time to do your daily tasks.
One of the pros of being an entrepreneur is having the free time to be able to do what you want when you want to do it. However, one of the important things of being an entrepreneur and working for yourself is being able to manage yourself. When you were, or if you are still working a day job, you would wake up in the morning in an effort to get to work on time.
Why?
Because being on time indicates that you value your job. The same thing applies when you’re working for yourself and managing your own business. You have to be able to manage your time effectively. As you wake up to start you business day, make a list of the tasks that you have ahead of you for the day and the times to start those tasks and the ending times for those tasks.
Organization is key.
There is nothing worse than coming to a disorganized work space and trying to progress to the next level. The way you start your business sets the tone for the way the business will fair out. If you start out disorganized then chances are it will be a complete mess and turn out to be a very stressful venture. Organize your work space in a way to where everything you need is easily accessible. Disorganization can be an indication of lack of self discipline so make a point organize your workspace and your time better.
Do not procrastinate.
Procrastination ties in heavily with step 1. Sometimes meeting deadlines can be a stressful thing. Much of the stress that comes with meeting a deadline is procrastination. I must say once more, one of the many perks of owning your own business is the time freedom you get. I’m reminded of many times when I was younger, if I was given a particular homework assignment. Many times, if it was a big assignment, we were given ample time to complete that assignment. After weeks have gone by I would always say to myself, “I’ll get on it tomorrow or next week…” then tomorrow became the next day and next week became the week after next and… next thing I knew… the assignment was due in a couple days! I would try to make all the last minute stops to do the homework assignment.
Many times it wasn’t that the assignment was hard it was just that I tried to cram a few days worth of work down to a 1 or 2 day time frame and it was very stressful. As I got older I’ve overcome my procrastination and I’ve come to realize that spreading out my tasks evenly over the time that I’m given to complete them is so much easier. Make an effort to apply a small amount of time to your tasks daily and you will see a world of difference in the stress level of your business.
Rest, Rest, Rest!
It is often said that the body requires 8-9 hours of sleep a night to be up to full operation. It’s very easy to get caught up in taking advantage of as many hours a day as possible. Over a period of time getting a lack of sleep can take a toll on the human body. You may find yourself feeling groggy and restless during the day and you will not be able to function at your fullest potential. Make a choice every night to get to bed at a good time so that you will wake up refreshed and ready to start a new business day full of excitement.
Make good habits.
I heard a saying that everything that you do on a daily basis is centered around the habits that you make. Evaluate your habits and make a choice to become better at everything that you do, whether it’s your personal life or business life take the time out to do everything to make your life less stressful, more ethical and more fulfilling.
Take time out for yourself and evaluate what you do on a daily basis. Continue to keep a positive mind set and have a “CAN DO” mentality. By applying these steps you will not only see a difference in the way you function but you will see much improvement in your business. Remember to keep the big picture in mind and always strive to do your best.
To your success,
Jarrod Clark
10 Must Have Web Sites for Online Marketing
Provided here is a compilation of useful sites that I refer to often within my daily online business ventures. By sharing these sites it is my sincere hope and desire to shed some light for entrepreneurs in the areas of online marketing, web site optimization and site advertising. Here are a list of a few websites:
1) Freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
This is a great site for searching keyword phrases that are highly searched. This site is great because it highlights the most used keyword phrases in connection with a single keyword. I go here often when I’m keyword brainstorming and searching for a host of particular keyword phrases.
![Tel Aviv Traffic [Incoming]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3100/2325123820_421321c015_m.jpg "Entrepreneur Ideas Image")
2) Alexa.com
This is an extraordinary site that will give you a ranking based on the incoming traffic that your site receives. This is a great site to refer to when building your traffic and attempting to achieve a higher ranking to your site.
3) Directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com/
Directory Submitter is a great software program. It is free to download and easy to use. With Directorysubmitter you can input your information such as your name, website name, title of your site, description of your site and a few other variables only one time and DirectorySubmitter will provide hundreds of free sites where you can submit your website for free. DirectorySubmitter makes it much easier for you by automatically submitting your information into these sites and all you have to do is click send. Go here and take a look at the video and it will give you a short tutorial on how to use Directory Submitter and how it can benefit you in getting free one way links to your site.
4) Articlesubmitter.imwishlist.com/
Article Submitter works in the same way Directory Submitter does except you’re submitting your articles to online article directories. Like Directory Submitter it’s a great tool to attract viewers to view your content and to your website. With Article Submitter, you only have to input your site and article information once and Article Submitter will provide you with hundreds of Article Directories for you to choose from. All you have to do is pick which sites you want to submit your article to and Article Directory will automatically submit your information then you’ll just hit send. Just that easy. Go here to download and view a short tutorial video on how to use Article Submitter and how it can also benefit you in gaining exposure to your articles.
This site gives you a free downloadable google toolbar that can be placed at the top of your internet browser. It’s very helpful because it gives you the google page rank of every page you visit. It has a google search bar there so you don’t have to go to google’s home page to search for a term you can just key it into the toolbar and it will take you strait to the SERP listings. I use it and I have found it to be a very good resource.
Link Popularity is the total number of websites that link to your site. LinkPopularity.com is a great tool for finding what sites are linking to your website or your competitors websites. Go here and scroll down to the bottom and key in the website you want to analyze backlinks.
7) "SEO Made Easy" free ebook
Through out many of my blogs I’ve mentioned Brad Callen’s free ebook "SEO Made Easy." It’s a wonderful tool for webmasters or bloggers who are optimizing your pages. The link to download the free ebook "SEO Made Easy" is http://www.homebiz-direct.com/SEO-made-easy.html.
8 WordPress.org Blog sites are one of the many ways to voice your thoughts on certain ideas or topics. Many bloggers will blog to gain an audience in an attempt to expose their personal life, politics, business, or an effort to market their business online. WordPress.org is a free site that gives you access to a more secure blog site which gives you more tools and freedom than some of the many well known blog sites such as blogger.com and others. WordPress also offers many plugins that you can download for free at: Wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ However with WordPress you will need to host your blog.
9) Hostgator.com Hostgator.com is a hosting site that supports WordPress. It offers a hosting plan for about $4.95/month which in my opinion is well worth it due to the security that you get that some of the free blogging sites don’t offer. Just as an FYI, for $7.95/month you can host an unlimited number of sites through hostgator.com.
10)online-income-101.com/series/becomea/blogger.html
For those of you who have tried Wordpress.org or are in the process of setting up your blog, the above link features outstanding hands-on tutorial videos that take you step by step on how to set up your blog. I know for me, in the process of setting up my blog the tutorial videos just mentioned were very helpful. I have found all of these sites to be conducive in my daily online business ventures. I was fascinated by how useful these sites were and thought I’d put them on here and provide awareness for many entrepreneurs. Many of these sites are are well known but for someone who is just starting these tools could be a lifesaver. And indeed… that is what my ultimate reason for starting this blog is to provide awareness and help smooth out some of the rough edges in this long but well worth it journey of online marketing.
To your success,
Jarrod Clark
