It has been said that it takes 21 days of consistent action to change a behavior or create a new habit. Often times we want something different but old tapes continue to play in our head that keep us from reaching our goals and dreams. This can range from trying to drop 10 lbs to gaining the courage to start your work at home business.
The truth is going from an employee to an entrepreneur can be a little scary. However one of the ways to reduce fear and increase success is to lean on the wisdom and experience of others who have been successful in life.
Some may be famous and others not. Nevertheless, the wisdom if you choose to listen can help you create a paradigm shift in thinking which the foundation to massive success. I have always loved to listen to the champions that have gone before.
Here are 21 quotes that I have thought about often and used to inspire me to down size my boss and it can do the same for you.
1. Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to. ---Alan Keightley
Were you told to go to school and get a good job? I was. While I know my mother meant well and thought she was preparing me tobe able to have access to the pearly gates of success she could not know how things would change.
However, I knew that I wanted more? How about you? Remember, you don’t have to settle for 60 hour work weeks, 30 minute commutes, your kids in day care or relocating for the promise of career advancement. You don’t have to be part of the grind…the rat race.
2. You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. --- Mike Murdock
Are you afraid to get started? It may seem overwhelming but if you focus on simply daily actions the big goals take care of themselves.
3. No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals ---. Brian Tracy
Get help right out the gate. Find a mentor, coach, mastermind or become a part a community that will help to support you in your success. You want to become a life long learner. Attend seminars and boot camps in your specialized area knowledge. When you learn from people who have been successful and you model their activities you will get their results.
4. By stretching yourself beyond your perceived level of confidence you accelerate your development of competence. --- Michael J. Gelb
The only way to gain confidence in a certain area is to take action. It is in the action you will start to have small victories which will increase your level of success.
5. If you don't program yourself, life will program you! ---Les Brown
Don’t let other people make decision for your life. If you have no plan on you will create wealth during your working years your employer will. Have no retirement plan? You don’t the government to be your strategy. Remember, it’s your life and it’s now or never.
6. There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them. ---Denis Waitley
No matter what your current conditions are you have the opportunity to change them. However, this only can happen if you take total responsible for the direction of your life. If you don’t like where you are forgive yourself and focus on solutions. Don’t focus on problems or why you think something can’t happen. Start to ask powerful questions the answers will start to appear.
7. Everything you need you already have. You are complete right now, you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else. Your completeness must be understood by you and experienced in your thoughts as your own personal reality. --- Dr. Wayne Dyer
8. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. Who are we NOT to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in us all. ---Marianne Williamson
When I first heard this quote it brought tears to my eyes. What talent or gift do you have that you are allowing fear to rob you from achieving? Doing what you were called to do it is bigger than you. You are unique and sharing your gift with someone could make a difference in their life. Are you playing it too small? Are staying in a job that doesn’t stretch you? What can you do to make a difference?
9. You'll see things "you never knew you never knew." --- Disney's Pocahontas
The journey and pursuit of freedom allows you to see the world in a different way than others. As you grow you will naturally see opportunities that others can not see. Jason Oman author of Conversation with Millionaires calls it “Money Goggles.” Even if you were in a pitch black room you will have infrared vision in the area of creating opportunities to make money.
10. A different world cannot be built by indifferent people. ---Peter Marshall
You can’t have what you want in life by being indifferent. Successful people are passionate and sometimes radical in pursuit of their dreams. Don’t allow yourself to be in environments that discourage you.
11. What is it that you like doing? If you don’t like it, get out of it, because you’ll be lousy at it. You don’t have to stay with a job for the rest of your life, because if you don’t like it you’ll never be successful in it. ---Lee Iacocca
Why would you ever spend most of your waking hours doing something that you don’t like? The key to success is finding something you love to and set the standard for excellence.
12. Simply making consistent investments in our self-education and knowledge banks pays major dividends throughout our lives. --- Jim Rohn
The self-education I have pursued after college has been my greatest return on investment. There is something to be said when you develop skills that you know will support you in any economy. Specialized knowledge applied with all out massive results will yield hefty financial and emotional rewards.
13. Finding your purpose may be a lifelong pursuit or you may have discovered it when you were 5 years old. There’s no absolute timeline for anyone. That’s a good reason never to give up, to keep on discovering things every day. --- Donald Trump
If you have not discovered your life’s purpose don’t be hard on yourself. Start to ask yourself questions and enter into a discovery process. Allow yourself to dream without concerns of how you will get it done. Every time you think you have found the answer did a little deeper with more questions. Rarely are your true goals, purpose and desires on the surface of your soul. Often times they have been put away for safe keeping to protect yourself from disappointment. Keep discovering new things until your purpose is crystal clear.
14. What material success does is provide you with the ability to concentrate on other things that really matter. And that is being able to make a difference, not only in your own life, but in other people's lives. ---Oprah Winfrey
When you get the money out of the way your world expands even greater. Oprah exemplifies this principle. She now looks for ways to help others in everything she does. Whether it is giving more support to your family or contributing to a worthy cause, having freedom as a work from home entrepreneur will allow you make your mark in the world.
15. The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows; it is what the man or woman is able to do. --- Booker T. Washington
So what can you create and add value to the world? I love this quote because it demonstrates very clearly that what matters are results at the end of the day. Don’t get caught up in theories. Make sure you are constantly taking action that moves you towards a specific goal.
16. There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction. --- John F. Kennedy
Are you so afraid to fail that you just can’t get out of the box? Don’t be. Many people have “failed” their way to million dollar empires. It is better to do something and be wrong then to do nothing at all. When you choose to do nothing someone else usually makes a decision that impacts you and you ending up doing something you don’t want to do.
17. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for circumstances they want. --George Bernard Shaw
There is no such thing as luck. You create the luck by working and preparing for the opportunity. When you start to put yourself out there the universe gives back. Make sure you are clear of your intentions and then go and make it happen.
19. It's not the hours you put in your work that counts, it's the work you put in your hours. --- Sam Ewing
You have the same 24 hours in the day as Bills Gate and Oprah. Don’t sabotage yourself by saying, “Well they can do it because their rich.” Unless you inherit wealth there is a price that everyone has to pay. You don’t have to work all day at your work from empire. However, you must consistently put time in if you want success.
20. You must do the thing you think you cannot do. --- Eleanor
Roosevelt.
One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself is to do something you think you can not do. It doesn’t have to be something huge. A simple action of courage goes a long in adding to your confidence in every area of your life.
21. You will never leave where you are, until you decide where you'd rather be. --- Dexter Yager
Until you know your purpose you will be at risk for staying in a job that slowly eats away at you. Why? You simply don’t have a strong enough goal to leave your current job. When the goal is strong enough you will search to find the answers.
21 Quotes You Can Use To Inspire Yourself to Fire Your Boss and Build Wealth at Home
10 Tips To Build Better Sites For You Or Your Customers - part 1
1 - Easiest to guess: idea. A good idea is almost 100% success. If You think best graphics or best animations are the keys You are wrong. People come to You because You've got the information they want or they search. Think of it: build an another site with the same content or build a site with a new content? Don't You want to be first? Don't want to give something new to potential customers? Even don't You want to earn some money for Your time and informations or products? Find Your niche and be the one in it. Let the people come to You.
2 - First look - very important. If I enter a site which has dark colors I'm out and never get back. OK, I return only if that site sells or promotes some kind of dark movie or horror books etc. i like or search for. But dark background isn't good idea for ordinary sites. People doesn't want to look at black sites because they pushes off. People want to look at bright sites with cool colors but not aggressive to them.
3 - Animations - irritate or not? Yes. Another important element. I like sites with flash animations but not too aggressive and not in full screen mode hiding the rest of site. I prefer small amount of animations. They should be tiny and integral parts of site. Also they must have a "skip" button to pass intro and get to proper site. Of course animations can be huge but only if they have some photos of products You sell or promote. Interactive catalog is good but flying dog chasing motocat isn't good if You don't sell pet accessories...
4 - Navigation - where's my hotel? People don't want search for anything else they looking for. Where's navigation bar? Where's site-map? Where's the coolest window cleaner I'm looking for? How can I buy it? Hello?! Damn... and never get back to You. The answer for that is simple: give him/her a search-box, FAQ, instructions "how to find", "how to buy", "how to search" etc. Think that the customers don't want to think about what, where, how etc. and You have to give them an answer to their hands. Maybe this is rude to say: "everybody are idiots" but that's a fact: they are lazy and don't want to search more they are have to...
5 - Functionality - how big is a cart? Every site must be functional. Several links and no FAQ? I'm out. Be Your first customer who's entering Your site. What do You see? Do You know everything what, where, how? What do You do if cart is full? What if You didn't find what You looking for? Is there a wishlist? Or mail-contact? Or online service? Think of it. Maybe You find there are many things to change, maybe not. Be a YourSite.com beta tester today to avoid mistakes and build better functionality.
Branding to Build Your Business
What is branding? Branding in short is the practice of using your business name and logo in marketing communications allowing for the consumer to better recognize you for what products you offer in the market place.
Branding does more than create recognition however, branding builds trust and loyalty among the consumer market allowing you to penetrate future markets with new product offerings more successfully. Successful branding campaigns can expect more sustained customer relationships and sales over longer periods of time than companies not implementing branding strategies.
The largest and most successful companies in the world all have used branding in their marketing communications building their brand equities into billions of dollars. Tide, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nestle, Ford, Boeing, Kellogs, and many more have all successfully built their brand to the point where consumers know them by heart and trust their products enough to purchase them without debate to the safety or quality of the product.
Branding is a long term strategy for any business but should be strategized and implemented into marketing communications from the very beginning. If your a small brick and mortar business in a small town or city you should still follow branding strategies just the same as if you were a national franchise or corporation. There is no excuse to not use a branding strategy for your business and that includes small e-commerce websites. If you own a business, you need to brand.
Starting a branding strategy does not entail a giant budget or advertising campaign if your low on company funds. You can start small in various different ways, some ways you may have already started using.
1.)Voice mail – Every business has a voice mail for when there is nobody there to answer. Make sure you use your company name in the voice mail twice. Once in the introduction and secondly in the end.
An example might be “Hello, you have reached 1.) Company Z. We're sorry but we are unable to answer your call at this time, please leave us your name and number and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you for calling 2.) Company Z. Have a great day.”
This reinforces your company name building recognition helping condition consumers and customers to remember your name from all the other names out there and that is what you want to do in ALL communications.
2.)Mail Communication – This section will apply to email as well. Use your company name and logo at the top of all letter heads including email. Reinforce your company name in the signature area after your messages as well. Example:
Sincerely,
Bob Smith
Company Z, Inc.
www.companyz.com
Constant reinforcing of your brand is crucial to the life of your business and once again you see the use of the company name used twice. Once in the Letterhead and once after the signature. Beginning and end.
3.)Phone Numbers – Local or national, a custom number can help do wonders when it comes to sales call centers or retail locations. While finding a custom vanity toll free number can prove to be somewhat costly, you can still use local vanity numbers for your location even if your a national business. You won't always have a short business name but by using industry words mixed with abbreviations for your company you can help reinforce brand image just the same. Be creative and you may find some easy and fun ways to implement your company name or niche into an easily recognizable phone number.
4.)Advertising – In all advertising focus on how to include your company name and logo. Audio advertisements use your name twice. Once in the beginning and once at the end minimally. Display and television ads always make sure you company name or logo is always present and visible. Display ads will include online banner advertising as well. Contextual advertising always use your company home page in the visible URL section to simplify the viewing of your company name. The extension of the URL should not be present as it will distract the eyes from the home page name.
There are many other ways to add branding strategies into your marketing communications, just remember that every mention of your company name is another way to reinforce company image to the consumer bringing recognition for your industry equaling into future sales. Anything that involves your company communication to consumers, businesses, employees, press, peers, etc. should always be branded. You will find that a good branding strategy can carry your business a long way and strengthen your company for future markets and endeavors.