EasyBiz Income

Remember Aesop’s fable of The Tortoise and The Hare? Both were in a race, and the hare dashed off to an incredible start. He became complacent, and even arrogant to the point where he took a nap, thinking that he could wake up and still beat the tortoise. When the hare woke up, he dashed as fast as he could to the finish line only to find the tortoise celebrating victory.

As an entrepreneur, you may feel a bit intimated by your competition when they seem to have an explosive start, just like the hare. However, my mentor told me that there is one principle anyone can follow if you want to win anything, including beating your competition who may have more experience and higher skill level than you. That principle is consistency.

There are many entrepreneurs who start off explosively. They seem to taste a lot of success early on and may sometimes brag about their accomplishments, which could frustrate their competitors who may not have had such a strong start. For whatever reason, however, they may lose their intensity and commitment after a while. Meanwhile, the other entrepreneurs, who may not have had a strong start, would start catching up and eventual overtake the guy who had the explosive start, just like how the tortoise overtook the hare. The main discipline they practiced was consistency.

Inconsistency is one major killer of dreams, and it’s perhaps the main reason why many people fail to achieve their goals. They spend a great deal of time planning and executing, but when they lack consistency, things start to fall apart. People show inconsistency when they start slacking off and become complacent when they rest on their laurels. Others perhaps feel burnout or exhaustion because they expended all their energy in the beginning and did not factor in a time period for proper rest.

If you want to succeed and win the game, stay consistent. If you are making 5 prospecting calls a day, don’t stop when one of your calls converts into business. Sure, take a few moments to savor the victory, but don’t celebrate by slacking off and putting off those prospecting calls for a few weeks. It’s hard to get back into your rhythm, and you lose the results those few weeks could have produced. You would have also killed momentum, which would take a lot of time, effort and energy to reproduce.

So don’t worry if your competition starts off ahead, and you start to feel like you’re not accomplishing anything. What matters the most is how you continue. If you stay consistent, just like the tortoise, you will beat out your talented competition (the hare) in the long run.

Kris de Leon is an Internet Entrepreneur, Small Business Consultant, and Attraction Marketing mentor. To learn more about checking for consistency and how to apply it, check out some skills training videos on Attraction Marketing.
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Increase Your Innovation and Profits by Playing Hooky!

Would you like to increase your chances of business success by 350%? The good news is that you can!

Before you start working harder or learning the latest business theories so you can work smarter, try something different. You can increase your chances of success by as much as 350% by being more innovative and uncovering dramatically different ways to look at your business and develop your product or service. (***footnote #1)

In any economy, this is good news. Even better news is that one highly effective way to increase your innovation ability is by playing hooky from your normal business activities and learning how to have a Visioning Day.

A Visioning Day is a time you set aside to remove yourself from your normal work and home life and expand your personal experiences and your thinking. It is a time where you specifically do not try to answer the challenges you face in building a great business and instead focus solely on developing your ability to listen and engage.

The best Visioning Days occur when you stretch yourself and do something entirely new.Taking the time to get new perspectives and input, while giving up conscious focus on your business projects, allows your creative mind the input and uninterrupted time necessary to generate new and innovative solutions.

Visioning Days can help all business people at all stages of business. Sometimes they are even the impetus for starting a successful business. When Frank, a franchise product manager for a major food chain, was laid off, he did not know what his next step would be. His wife, a day spa buff, suggested he take a Visioning Day at a local spa.

Although Frank liked the relaxing services at the spa, he was bothered by the lack of business organization and consistent service. The experience got him thinking and he discovered a need within the salon and day spa industry for the kind of pre-formulated manuals and systems he had specialized in creating when he worked in franchising.

What Frank was able to create was dramatically different for the spa industry: a computer program and set of manuals that capitalized on the best that franchising has to offer, while still allowing individual spa owners to remain independent and unique in their vision. Although the content was not particularly different from the franchising manuals that exist in other industries, marketing it to an emerging industry that had little exposure to the ideas was different–different enough to make Frank a wealthy business man in a short period of time.

Visioning Days work for small scale operations that are struggling as well as they work for new ventures. Sometimes the worse a situation looks, and the less time and energy you feel you have to spare for a Visioning Day, the more you need one.

A few years ago, Edna, a dog breeder and owner of a successful local boarding kennel, found herself in a difficult position. Her love of people and of animals had long since been buried under a mountain of work and details to manage. What was once a joy had become tedious; a venture that originally provided a sense of freedom had turned into a burden and a trap.

To make matters worse, business was no longer booming, and in fact, profits and opportunities were starting to decline. Serious financial hardship loomed on the horizon and everything Edna was doing to reenergize sales and save her business was failing. The harder she worked to solve the problem, the worse things seemed to get. What Edna didn’t know at the time was that she didn’t need to work harder. What she needed to do was play hooky.

Edna had to overcome a great deal of resistance in order to take time away from her demanding business and start taking Visioning Days, but the results were remarkable. The second Visioning Day she tried led to a total re-invention of her business and a dramatic increase in both her profits and her personal freedom.

For this Visioning Day, Edna chose to take a tour of homes a local interior designer was conducting in a nearby neighborhood. During the tour she was struck by how often her fellow tour participants would comment that while they loved what they were seeing, it would never work in their own homes. Curious, she began to ask why. What she discovered is that two or three of her fellow participants had dogs that were too destructive to be left alone in a newly redecorated home for long hours while their owners were at work.

An entirely new question emerged for Edna. What if, instead of taking care of people’s animals while they were away on vacation, she took care of them while people were at work? Edna realized that doggy daycare was a service attractive to busy professionals but entirely unavailable in her area. She also realized that by specializing in doggy daycare, she could reduce the feeding and energy costs associated with keeping animals overnight, and that she could arrange a doggy daycare business in a way that allowed her to take weekends and holidays–her busiest and most stressful times for years–for herself.

This simple innovation allowed Edna to establish her business in a unique and profitable niche, recharge her personal batteries, and increase her profits. And it came from simply getting out of her business as she knew it and taking a fresh look at the world. As Edna put it, “I was so used to thinking about how to serve the customers I had, that I completely forgot to ask what kind of customers I wanted and how could I serve them instead.”

Take a Visioning Day—The Benefits Will Make You Glad You Did

As Edna discovered, Visioning Days have many kinds of benefits. They can help entrepreneurs step back from concerns about operations and think like someone working on a business instead of working in one.

Visioning Days help overworked and stressed-out individuals stop overworking and obsessing, and instead help them synthesize what they already know and see the resources and solutions they may already have.

Visioning Days stimulate new thinking with new senses and often allow innovators to create new product or service ideas by “borrowing” a concept or custom from one industry and applying it to another.

Because of the focus on having new experiences and meeting new people, Visioning Days can help develop social courage and grace and increase one’s overall sense of personal resiliency.

Visioning Days can introduce entrepreneurs and business people to a new and possibly unexpected source of networking contacts.

Seven Steps To Creating Your Own Visioning Day Experience

Now that the benefits of taking a Visioning Day are clear, let’s talk about the steps to follow to create one for yourself.

1) Clear your calendar for a whole day. Effective visioning requires time to unwind and get into the experience, and time to integrate and let things settle after it. Plan on at least 12 hours without obligations or interruptions.

2) Plan one Visioning Day for yourself every quarter, whether you think you need one or not.

3) Spend the day on your own. Do not invite friends, colleagues, or family. They will require social attention and may unconsciously hold you to old ways of thinking. Be prepared to be alone and or meet entirely new people on your Visioning Day.

4) Do something that is entirely new for you. Taking a Visioning Day is not the same as simply taking time off to recharge your batteries. A Visioning Day gives you time to challenge yourself and build innovation skills. Consider doing something you would never “normally” do, or learning about something that you have had very little knowledge or feel interested in. The point is not to find a new career or a new hobby, the point is to be exposed to entirely new experiences.

5) Get every part of you engaged. Try to learn something and seek out experiences that engage all of your senses. Instead of just reading about a new topic, go to a new place. Instead of watching a demonstration, try a hands-on experiment.

6) Don’t expect too much at first. It may take four or five Visioning Days before you see a real impact on your resilience and innovation. You will see the impact, though, if you keep on doing it and make occasional visioning a way of life and a part of your ongoing business development.

7) Take the time to write down your observations. Ask yourself what assumptions the people you met were making, and what skills and processes they took for granted. You might discover thinking approaches, skills, and processes that can be transplanted into your business. Applying old ideas in a new way is the heart of innovation.

So go ahead, PLAY HOOKY! It just might lead to more fun, more profits and greater innovation. You’ve got nothing to lose, and a whole world of experience to gain.

Mari Geasair is a writer, trainer and coach specializing in helping small business owners and information service professionals make more profits with less stress. Visit her website at www.authenticprosperityclub.com for a variety of tools to help you make the journey to success easier and more fun. There you will find self assessments, audio trainings, and other free resources on Small Business and Creative Prosperity.

Copyright 2010, Mari Geasair, All Rights Reserved

*** footnote: Based on a study by J. H. Davidson as reported in the Harvard Business Review (April-May 1976) and confirmed by research from Doug Hall as described in Jump Start Your Business Brain, copyright 2001 by Eureka! Institute (p. 131). Back To Top

Mari Geasaircan help you create more profits with less stress! She has coached hundreds of small business owners and owned five successful businesses of her own. To find out how to join her for a FREE weekly podcast on building authentic success visit: http://www.authenticprosperityclub.com/
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One of the biggest challenges facing people today that are looking for a legitimate get rich quick scheme is that many of them are not aware of the multiple tactics that scam artists use to persuade people to buy into their offers.  The ones who never bought a money making opportunity are going to be the easy victims while the others who have already wasted thousands of dollars are going to be a little wiser and not fall for their over hyped sales pitches. It is proven that those who have made the most mistakes are going to be more cautious than the ones who haven’t got involved.

Want proof?

If you are reading this article right now,  I am pretty sure that you have bought into a “Envelope Stuffing Money Making” program that guaranteed you so-called instant riches.  I know I have.  The sales letter is really misleading because it is very appetizing to your ears.

Fact: Sales letters Never Reveal The Additional Hidden Costs Behind Their Get Rich Quick Scams

The sales letter never mentions anything about the money that you have to put up yourself for the costs of printing the sales flyers with your so-called distributorship ID code that you have to mail out to people on your mailing list.  This mailing list is also an additional cost you have pay on top of your “envelope stuffing” membership.

If you take the time to really read the sales letter,  the promoter doesn’t really tell you that you are in essence paying to join an affiliate program in order to promote their products via mail order.  And they are leveraging the efforts of others (victims) just to save on the cost of postage.

The typical sales letter begins with a statement of how you can make $1.00 for every envelope you stuff.  And the more you stuff, the more you make.  They never reveal the hidden truth where you have to mail out the envelopes to people on your mailing list and generate a sale in order to make $1.00.

Another Important Fact: There Are Literally Millions of People Who Still Believe In The Hype That You Can Make Money Without Selling Anything

Now you are wondering why would people continue to fall for these get rich quick schemes that don’t work?  Why don’t they take the time to ask this real important question: How can you make money without having to sell anything? Hello?  In order to make money, you have to sell something.  Many victims of get rich quick scams overlook this very important fundamental principle.

I remember when I forked over my hard earned money for their envelope stuffing program,  I never bothered to ask myself that question.  I guess I was blinded by the hypnotic excitement of stuffing a thousand envelopes a day to make a $1,000 dollars a day.  This all happened during my teenage years.  I have truly wisened up over the years. 

To save yourself the money losing misery of falling for any kind of get rich quick schemes that don’t work,  visit my website by clicking get rich quick schemes that work and learn more about a proven fast money making system that puts $777 dollars in your pocket within two months.  I don’t know about you, but to me,  anything over $700 in two months is pretty close to get rich quick as you can get. Read the information on my website including watching the video presentation to verify for yourself that it is truly as close a legitimate get rich quick scheme as you can get.

Billy Ying Ching is a home business consultant and mentor who specializes in providing serious entrepreneurs the necessary survival skills in internet marketing, copywriting, blogging, WordPress web design, and telephone prospecting to build a profitable online business in your target market.

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Whether you are running a craft blog or a traditional website there are certain craft business basics that you should be following if you want to succeed. One of them is making your site “sticky” – making your potential craft customers want to stay – or come back often.

Interesting information is important, of course. As is nice clear design and easy navigation. People have very short attention spans online so if they can’t find what they’re looking for quickly they’re off… probably to your competitor!

But even if you have a bright, fun, interesting craft blog which engages your visitor and makes them want to come back, there’s a high chance that they won’t. Even those that think they will, might well not. Haven’t you done exactly that yourself? Said you’ll go back to a site later – but then not bookmarked it or got distracted by something else, never to return?

So your craft business has lots of visitors that might well have bought from you… but didn’t. What’s more you have no way of knowing who they were. To some extent that’s business life. If you had a real-world store you would have lots of people visit who never came back. But what if you could encourage them to do exactly that? What if you could do so relatively easily?

What your craft business needs is a newsletter or e-mailing list. They’re relatively easy to set up (all you need to do is copy and paste a bit of code), very low cost and they allow you to contact your potential and existing customers with news and special offers as often as you like. Your visitor doesn’t need to come back to you – you can go to them!

It’s not a system to be abused though. Your craft business is just one of many trying to grab your customers’ attention and lots of other people want that email address for marketing purposes. You have to offer something of value in exchange – a discount perhaps, or a free gift – and then you have to provide them with useful information and ongoing value, otherwise they’ll feel you are only interesting in “selling” to them.

Of course we all know that selling to them is precisely what you are trying to do – you just have to be a bit cute about it! Make your newsletter subscriber feel valued and important, give them a sense of exclusivity and your craft business hasn’t just hooked a visitor it has gained a valuable, loyal, repeat customer.

For more details about setting up that vital newsletter visit Craft Business Basics. At the same time you can pick up your free copy of the highly acclaimed ebook Craft Success Online.
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