Showing posts with label Productivity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Productivity. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

When Passion and Complacency Collide: Tips to Get Out of the Funk

Complacency Kills

Have you lost the passion for writing and blogging? Maybe you’ve been doing it awhile and don’t feel the same drive as you did when you first started. Sometimes we start out passionate about a topic, but that passion can turn into complacency and later lead to lethargy.

Before we get into some tips to either keep your passion alive or revive a lost passion let’s cover the definition of these terms.

The dictionary defines complacency as:

a feeling of quiet pleasure or security, often while unaware of some potential danger, defect, or the like; self-satisfaction or smug satisfaction with an existing situation, condition, etc.

If you’ve ever been on a construction site you may have seen signs that read, “Complacency Kills.” What this means is that by getting too comfortable with your daily routine you often make mistakes. In the construction business these mistakes can be deadly. Complacency in your blogging or online business may not physically harm anyone, but it can lead to death—death of your business.

The dictionary defines passion as:

any powerful or compelling emotion or feeling, as love or hate.

You love blogging, you love your business, but sometimes the passion just isn’t there, especially if you’ve been doing it for a long time. Maybe you still go through the motions but your content often reflects how passionate you are. Maybe it’s gotten dull and boring to your readers. A lack of passion for your business can lead to lethargy—which is death in itself.

The dictionary defines lethargy as:

the quality or state of being drowsy and dull, listless and unenergetic, or indifferent and lazy; apathetic or sluggish inactivity.

Once you reach that stage in this cycle it may seem impossible to ever get your passion back. These tips will help you to avoid reaching the lethargic stage and may help you pull out of the funk if you’ve already reached it.

1. Take a break. You can either take some time away from your work completely or if you’re running a blog do fewer posts each week. If you blog daily, make an announcement that you’ll only be blogging two or three times per week.

If you feel the need to completely walk away for awhile, look at tips 2 and 3 to keep your blog updated with new content.

2. Hire a writer. If your budget, allows you can hire a writer to write a couple of posts each week. This will give you more time to kick back or to work on traffic and promotions instead of writing all the time.

3. Ask for guest bloggers. Having people guest blog for you is an excellent way to free up some of your writing time, add fresh content while maintaining a good posting schedule and it also helps someone else gain exposure to their blog as well as yours.

4. Spin. I don’t mean spin class. I’m talking about reinventing yourself or your brand. Get creative and make it exciting again. Add a little twist to your current brand.

5. Support Team. Create your own support team – surround yourself with only positive, supportive people, in an environment that fosters creativity – like a forum or social network. Offer your help to those people. Sometimes focusing on helping someone else come up with creative ideas will also spark your own ideas about your own business.

Prevention is always the best choice when you feel yourself waning from having passion about your blog and business. No matter how passionate you may be, you can still lose your excitement. If you’re aware this is happening, just take some of the steps above to prevent becoming lethargic about it. Outsource some of your work if you can or need to. Get involved with like minded people and draw inspiration from their passion. Do something! Even if you need to take a few weeks off, do it. You can set your blog to auto-post while you’re away.

Things can keep running smoothly even when you need a break.

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Tuesday, November 30, 2010

How to Monetize Your Website While Keeping Your Visitors Interested

Most website owners create and maintain their sites for the purpose of making money. Maintaining a website requires hard work. Since website owners have to pay for website hosting services, it is important for them to make money while providing valuable information to their visitors. However, some people who run websites don’t know how to properly go about this without compromising their viewers.

People surf the Internet either for business or for leisure and it can be incredibly frustrating to have to deal with countless advertisements about topics that don’t even concern them or the topic they are reading about. While your main priority is to make money, you should still take your visitors into consideration. After all, they are the reason that your website continues to exist. Listed below are some tips on how you can monetize your website without driving away your visitors:

Post Advertisements that are Relevant to their Interests

Since you can easily make money off advertisements, you don’t necessarily have to give them up just to avoid alienating your visitors. You just have to be strategic about the kind of advertisements you place on your website.

If you post advertisements that are relevant to your visitors, there is also a higher chance for you to earn more, as they will most likely be encouraged to check out the products being promoted on your website’s ads. Just make sure that the ads posted on your site are related to the content you provide for your visitors.

Keep Advertisements to a Minimum

Some websites are studded with advertisements, it can be very difficult to find the content. Keep in mind that the purpose of your site is to provide content and not to promote advertisements. When posting advertisements, you can keep them on the sides of the page. You can use all sides if you want but try to avoid the center if you can, as this can be incredibly annoying for your visitors. Sidebars are useful for containing ads.

Promote Products and Services that You have Tried Yourself

You cannot promote something and rave about how amazing it is if you haven’t even tried it yet. You have to make sure that you try out everything you promote. By doing this, you can easily sell the product, since you are speaking from experience. Your visitors are most likely going to notice when you are lying so if you want to be more factual about your promotions, try the products first.

Label Affiliate Links

If you want to add affiliate links to your site, label them. It is better to label them for what they are rather than risk losing your frequent visitors. You can add affiliate links at the very bottom of your site.

If you try to mask these links as something else, your visitors would most likely be annoyed. If you want them to keep their confidence in you, be honest about the links you place on your site.

Keep Your Ads Simple

Ads that are presented in very large images, banners and GIFs can be incredibly annoying. Since no one clicks these ads on purpose anyway, except for when they accidentally click on it because of how large it is, don’t bother with them. These ads wont make you any real money. In fact, you may end up losing visitors because of them. Just keep your ads simple and clean.

Monetizing your website is important but you also have to value your visitors, as they are the reason you are highly in demand for ads anyway. By following the aforementioned tips, you can make money effectively while keeping your visitors interested.

Andre Conferido has been in the internet marketing business for over 5 years mainly doing “niche blogging”. Andre is also a writer at the make money online blog http://www.carlocab.com.

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Wednesday, October 13, 2010

How Not To Follow Up After a Conference

I’ve been attending blogging conferences since 2007. Through conferences I’ve been able to meet some amazing people. However, through my own ineptitude I’ve not done a great job of following up with everyone that I’ve met. The photo above is an actual box that I have filled with missed opportunity, missed connections and missed business opportunities. Some business cards are over 3 years old. Might be a little late to follow up with those folks. So here is my surefire guide on How to Screw up Follow Up.

Step One – Collect cards like Pokemon
Some conference attendees are whipping out business cards and collecting them all like crazy. I’ve been in a group of people having a great conversation and then someone comes up and hands you their card out of nowhere. Will you remember that person at all? Will you follow up with that person? Most likely not. So, the key to follow up is to actually meet people and talk to them, make a connection and then exchange cards. You do not have to collect them all. More meaningful connections make for much better follow up.

Step Two – Glance at the card and shove it in your pocket.
Taking a business card and shoving it in your pocket after a cursory glance will be a way in which to immediately forget the person who gave it to you. When someone hands you their business card take a good look at it. is there something interesting that you can talk to the person about? There should be something on that card that you can ask a question about. People love to talk about themselves so give them a chance to do it. So don’t just take the card and put it away, try and make that mental connection, if you don’t then it is unlikely that you will actually follow up.

Step Three – Try and remember everything in your head.
When you are at a conference you are going to meet so many people and trying to keep everyone straight in your head is an incredibly futile task. After you meet someone and take their business card you should make some notes for yourself. Make a few notes directly on their card. This will give you reminders as to who the person is when it comes time to follow up.

Step Four – Go home, put the cards in a box and hide it away. You’ll get to them in a few weeks. Really, you will.
If you stick everything into a box and leave it there waiting for a the right moment to hit you to follow up then you will never do it. The box above has three years of cards that I was going to follow up on in a couple weeks. As you can see that never happened.

So How Do You effectively Follow Up?
When you get home take a stack of 5 -10 cards, open up your e-mail program and enter all the card info into a new contact. Also write in the notes that you made about the conversation that you had with the person. Then write them a follow up email reminding them about the conversation that you had and how much you enjoyed it. Repeat until your giant stack of business cards are gone. Do this within 2 weeks of the conference just not the first day you are back unless you can schedule the e-mail to go out a day or two after the conference. Many people are dealing with their own thing and playing catch up the moment that they return from a conference so don’t get lost in the shuffle.

Additional Tips.
When you add the new person as a contact put them in a group for that conference so you can pull up everyone that you met at a specific conference. Make sure that you add in notes that you want to remember about that person, likes, dislikes and the like.

Hopefully your conference experience will be a fruitful place to make meaningful connections with great new people.

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