Dominate Your Local Market!

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233 years ago, on a steamy summer day in Philadelphia, 56 men changed the course of human history, then went out for a drink. It is the courage of these individuals, who placed their value even before their lives that we celebrate today.

If you’ve never read their handiwork, the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, here’s your chance. Take a few minutes and read it through. It is truly an amazing document.

Read more…

From Lindsey Olivares and Ringling College of Art and Design via Daily Motion – a little video to help make your day!

by James McCarthy for OnlineOrganizing.com

Our goal is to succeed, to win business competitions in order to maximize our profits or expand our market “presence”, to produce successful new products or services, or to achieve personal goals. Success is defining the desired future and then creating that future. We succeed consistently by thinking and acting STRATEGICALLY. Strategy is all about minimizing risk while maximizing reward; or put another way, it is about making sure that the ODDS for success are stacked in your favor.

LOOKING AT THE BIG PICTURE

It is about achieving LONG-TERM success — not about winning a single account, having one single successful new product launch, or coming out on top in a single competition. Long-term success means taking advantage of opportunity after opportunity and distributing resources correctly to ensure continued success. Winning one account and going bankrupt thereafter is of no avail unless the single new account ensures permanent success — which it almost never does.

WHAT STRATEGY IS AND ISN’T

We sometimes think that strategy is a LUXURY, something to be done once every few years in order to have a “strategic plan.” Most people think that it is a process you must go through once a year, to produce a really big document; that few people will understand, and that will go on the shelf so you can get on with the real job of running your business. Nothing could be further from the truth. Strategy is the literal LIFEBLOOD of your business. Trying to do business in today’s environment without a strategy is like playing Russian roulette with your future.

BUILDING THE HABIT

Looking ahead is a DAILY requirement and probably the most important function of a leader, business owner, or individual entrepreneur, for it is strategy that allows your day-to-day activities to have any kind of payoff and to be worthwhile. Strategy is a necessity whether you are doing business in the traditional “brick and mortar” world, or in the digital world of the Internet. Many people believe that strategy is simply scaling up TACTICAL activity; more e-products, better blocking and tackling, more sales calls. Great strategy can succeed in the absence of great tactics, but great tactics, in the absence of even mediocre strategy, are unlikely to lead to victory.

INVOLVE EVERYONE

Strategy, then, is the number one RESPONSIBILITY of all business owners, leaders, and entrepreneurs, whether engaged in on-line or off-line businesses — if they fail to take their strategy responsibilities seriously, they are greatly diminishing their overall chances for success. Strategy, however, is not just of interest to business owners, but it is-or should be-of interest to everyone involved in the business, from employees, to affiliates to internal, or outsourced resources. To the extent that everyone knows the strategy and takes part in building it, each person is far more likely to make the right tactical decisions that arise on a daily — or more frequent — basis.

COMING IN FIRST

The business that makes strategic thinking and execution part and parcel of its daily existence is the company that is most likely to SUCCEED, even if doesn’t have the best product or service available.

Certified Professional Management Consultant Jim McCarthy currently works in Oceanside, CA with his wife, Career Consultant Barbara McCarthy.

Content provided by OnlineOrganizing.com — offering “a world of organizing solutions!” Visit www.onlineorganizing.com for organizing products, free tips, a speakers bureau, get a referral for a Professional Organizer near you, or get some help starting and running your own organizing business.

Filling out forms by hand on a clipboard. Having to interrupt the job to drive back to the office for something like a missing work order. Such time-consuming tasks are a thing of the past with the complete range of mobile office features that Ford Work Solutions™ provides.

Full mobile office functionality

A 4-gigabyte computer, developed by Magneti Marelli and powered by Microsoft® Auto, makes your Ford pickup or van a full-functioning mobile office.

Open a word processing or spreadsheet document, generate invoices, or perform a variety of other business tasks – all on a bright, high-resolution 6.5” in-dash screen with wireless keyboard. Load and back up files with the built-in USB port or SD memory card slot. Make prints on an available Ford-certified, Bluetooth®-enabled wireless inkjet printer. And that’s just for starters.

High-speed Internet access

Full Internet connectivity with all your favorite sites is available right from your vehicle with the available high-speed Sprint® Mobile Broadband Network.

Watch the video and read more »

“In the race to be better and best, lest we forget to just be.”
~Unknown

Just being…what a wonderful way of saying, STOP, and take time for today. Saturate yourself in the time you’ve been given right here, right now. Because you know what? This moment, right now, is unique to your life and you can never come back to it.

When our life is in its final hours, will we regret not taking more time to “just being”? Just being there to savor more sunsets; just being alone with our thoughts; just being, surrounded by beautiful music; or just being with those we love so dearly.

You may have read this beautiful poem, but even if you have, it’s worth re-reading…often.

First I was dying to finish high school
and start college. And then I was dying to
finish college and start working.
And then I was dying to marry and
have children. And then I was dying for my children
to grow old enough so I could go back to work.
And then I was dying to retire.
And now I am dying…
and suddenly realize that I forgot to live.
~Source Unknown

With thanks to SimpleTruths.com

Don’t forget… Daylight Saving Time starts this Sunday (March 8). Before you go to bed on Saturday night, turn your clocks ahead one hour. The sun will set at 7:40 PM here in Danville. Sunrise and sunset will be 11 hours and 40 minutes apart. What will you do with YOUR extra hour of daylight?

What did Wallace Wattles have to say about “hard times” back in 1910 and what does it mean for you today?

“Never speak of the times as being hard or of business conditions as being doubtful. Times may be hard and business doubtful for those who are on the competitive plane, but they can never be so for YOU.

“YOU can create what you want, and YOU are above fear.

“When others are having hard times and poor business, YOU will find your greatest opportunities.

“Train yourself to think of and to look upon the world as something which is becoming, which is growing…”

And that’s just for starters! To find out more of the “how to” and other details, re-read Chapter 16 of The Science of Getting Rich.

(Then read it AGAIN if you need to!)

Get your FREE copy of The Science of Getting Rich here.

Some reflections on the New Year

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
- Bill Vaughan

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.
- Benjamin Franklin

New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday.
- Charles Lamb

Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.
- Hal Borland

New Year’s eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights.
- Hamilton Wright Mabie

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.
- Oprah Winfrey

Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past.
- Henry Ward Beecher

New Year’s Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving [the road to] hell with them as usual.
- Mark Twain

We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.
- Edith Lovejoy Pierce

Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.
- Mark Twain

People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New Year, but they really should be worried about what they eat between the New Year and Christmas.
- Author Unknown

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
- Oscar Wilde

New Year’s Eve, where auld acquaintance be forgot. Unless, of course, those tests come back positive.
- Jay Leno

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.
- G.K. Chesterton

Every man regards his own life as the New Year’s Eve of time.
- Jean Paul Richter

And my personal favorite…

May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.
- Joey Adams

There was an excellent thread on the Warrior Forum today about what spam really is. I thought “jensrsa” made some great points in his reply, so I am posting it here:

It doesn’t really matter what the content is. It doesn’t matter what you “think” spam is.

Spam filters are basically anti-business, not anti-spam so, if you know how to frame your emails you’ll get through. if you don’t you will be blocked

Here are the basic “rules” courtesy of sitesell:

Some of the most obvious negatives to avoid in your e-mails…

• The excessive use of ALL CAPS in the subject line and message body of your e-mail.
• The use of trigger words like “free” (used alone, or in combination with any number of words like “trial,” “money,” “quote,” “sample,” “membership,” “access,” and so on), “sex,” “XXX,” “spam,” “$$$,” “checks,” “money orders,” “extra income,” “as seen on TV,” and so on. Even using seemingly harmless words like “search engine listings,” “cable converter”, and “reverses aging” will penalize your e-mail, so you must be exceptionally vigilant in the analysis of your SpamCheck report.
• The excessive use of punctuation “!!!”

… and finally, a very special thing NOT to do…

• If you think of using a trick to avoid detection (like putting a * in certain words to disguise them or adding 50 spaces in your subject to push a code out of sight), it’s only a matter of time until you are ESPECIALLY determined to be a spammer. Because “normal business people” don’t use tricks — they just do business.

On the other hand, there are certain elements of an e-mail that qualify it as being “bona fide” correspondence. With that said…
Here are some tips for staying on the “good” side of the various spam checkers, filters, etc. that stand between your e-mail and your reader’s INBOX. Use as many of these “good triggers” as possible, to prove that yours is a real, justifiable mailing…

• Use of the words “news”, “newsletter”, or “list” in your subject line
• Indication of publishing frequency in the subject line — weekly, daily, monthly
• Inclusion of date of newsletter in the subject
• Inclusion of the issue number in the subject line
• Make sure your newsletter has some substance — when was the last time you saw spam that had more than a few lines of text?

Above and beyond that, use your own common sense. You know what spam looks like — do not make your e-zine look like spam. And you know what a “VALID, GOOD” e-zine looks like — that should be your role model! And especially…

… NO TRICKS. Just do your business and keep it real.

Posted by jensrsa
http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/9794-what-spam.html

“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. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. 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 everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

by Marianne Williamson
from A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles

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