Move In The Direction Of Your Dreams

Today we are living in the information age. Everything around us is changing so fast that most of the time we are aware of the change no sooner than the change is history. Today society is calling for us to adapt to the constantly changing environment. Those who act promptly, and see the change as an opportunity to learn, help, and grow are taking advantage of it. Others are simply being swayed around among the masses, and asking themselves the famous question, "What happened?"

Which group would you rather be a member of?
Would you rather be conscious, make use of the opportunities around you, constantly grow financially, and help others, or be the one who every now and then asks the question, "What happened?" ?

A lot of things happen today. People are being laid off, companies and businesses go bankrupt, people lose their income streams they've been relying on for a long time, etc.

If you don't make use of what's going on around you, and you can't interpret your situation in an empowering way, somebody else will. Today the opportunities last only for a short time, and favor only those who recognize them, and take proper action when they should. Others are just standing there, and watching in total astonishment. And some people have got used to the astonishment.

So where is your life headed in this hurricane?

Life is like a river. If you don't paddle in the direction of your strengths and dreams, you'll be taken away by the flow of water, and will end up most probably, where you don't want to.

You must have heard of the rat race. People work their whole lives only to find out in the end, that they have been working really hard for a whole lifetime for nothing. They have not pursued their passion, they have not been happy at all along the way, and they have obtained nothing in the end. Does that make any sense to you?

When you consciously direct your life in the direction of your true dreams, and really choose where you want to be somewhere down the road, you won't be swayed away by the currents. When you have a sense of direction, you choose consciously along the way, and make informed decisions.

So what is your passion?

What is the life you have always dreamed of, but never thought it was possible for you to have?

Do you let yourself to even dream of it anymore?

There are a thousand ways to attain your goals, no matter how big or unbelievable they might be, if you really know why you want to accomplish them. Your why is what guarantees you will not quit no matter what.

Here is a little exercise for you.

Take some time, and identify for yourself what your life would look like if it was perfect in every respect.

• How much money would you be earning every month?
• Where would you be living?
  
• What would your house look like?
  
• How much money would you have in the bank?
  
• etc

Try to describe every aspect of your life if it was totally perfect.

Done with the first part? Great!

Now try to figure out why you would want to have that kind of life. Why would you deserve to have all you describe above? This part tells you about your why. Your why must be some reason that is really important to you. It could be a cause you really support. It could be your family and your kids in particular, and the kind of living standard you want them to have, or whatever reason that really matters to YOU.

Don't put making this decision off. It's about YOUR life. Your life is worth 20 minutes of your time. Isn't it?

Don't ever give up on your dreams. Those are what make YOU unique, and stand out from the crowd. Good luck!

Leadership Characteristics And Traits

If you pay close attention to what is going on around you, you will notice common trends in society. These trends keep repeating themselves in every society at all times, and many of them have survived from the time human beings came into existence.
Some businesses do better than others in certain localities. Some people do better than others having the same businesses. Some people have better lives than others in the same society. Some just want to get rid of their problems, and never even let themselves dream about having a better life. Some people already have good lives, but they constantly work on improving every aspect of their lives. And many more common trends you notice in society.
Why do you think some make more money than those who have the same business, having the same customers, at exactly the same time, and under the very same circumstances?
Why do you think some are more successful than others in their personal lives? You might reply that they have more money than others. But where did they get the money from in the first place, and how did they manage to maintain it in these risky times? Were they all born with a silver spoon in their mouths?
Once you have the right answer to these questions, you will have as much money, happiness, and success as they have, or even more, and you may start to think about doing something no one has ever done before.
All the sentences above and their true meaning could be labeled as leadership and those who manage to do so are called leaders.
The good news is that all leaders have had certain qualities, character traits, or skills in common, and they are all learnable. With a little bit of persistence and trying, anyone can learn those skills, and be a leader themselves.
Although learning anything is easy and anyone can learn anything, being a leader is not very easy. You have to walk your talk to be a leader. You already realize that the best way to teach something is by doing it yourself. It takes discipline, determination, persistence, and perseverance to achieve anything in life. But how is it that some people have dedicated a large portion of their lives to specific causes, if not their whole lives, to achieve something, realizing in the beginning that although it was so hard to achieve what they set out for, they would not be benefited much, if at all they could achieve their objectives after a long time. They had very good and strong reasons for doing what they had to do, a reason that really made all the sense in the world to them. You cannot be a leader unless you have a great reason for yourself to start something. That reason is your why. Your why helps you to hang in there when it gets too hard to go forward, or to hold your ground. It is simply the reason why you will not quit no matter what.
You must have heard of the law of cause and effect. It simply states that for every action there is a reaction. With regards to the topic under discussion here, it says that success is not an accident. Financial success, for instance, is the result of doing certain things or causes, in a certain way, over and over again, until you get the results, or the effects, that you desire.
The good news is that nature is neutral. It does not play favorites. You could generalize the concept of nature here, to the marketplace, the society, or even the economy. They do not care who you are, what you are, or where you come from. As long as you take the same actions that others have taken before, and have attained some specific results, you as well will get those specific results, if you do not tamper with the order, and with the totality of them.
Whether you like it or not, you are going to get the results that your current actions are causing you to get. Consciously or unconsciously, you are already taking a specific set of actions, in a specific order, on a day-to-day basis. If you like the results you are getting now, keep doing what you have been doing, and if not, change the causes, and you will change your results. This is simply how the law of cause and effect works in your life.
Many people sell themselves short, and cause themselves underachievement and lack of financial success for the simple reason that they think those who are doing better than them, are actually better than them. This is simply not the case. Nobody is better than you, and nobody is smarter than you.
The fact is that most successful people, let’s say in this case, the financially successful, are average people, with average educations, working at average jobs, living in average neighborhoods, in average houses, and driving average cars, but they have found what the financially successful do, and they have done the same things over and over again, until they have attained the results they were after. Once you do the same things, you too will begin to have the results you want to have sometime down the road.
There are simple principles that have been used, tested, and proven over a long period of time, maybe since the time human beings came into existence, and if you learn them, and apply them to your life, your life will change forever. Learning those principles is easy. You can learn them just as you learned to ride a bicycle, or drive a car. Remember that you did not learn how to ride a bicycle upon your first try. You kept trying and trying until you got it right. You never gave up for the simple reason that you believed you could do it. Failure was not an option. Is that not true?
There are 21 principles of success:
Dream big dreams.
Develop a clear sense of direction.
See yourself as self-employed.
Do what you love to do.
Commit to excellence.
Develop a workaholic mentality.
Dedicate yourself to lifelong learning.
Always save a percentage of your monthly income, and try to increase the percentage over time.
Learn every detail of your business.
Dedicate yourself to serving others.
Be impeccably honest.
Set priority on your activities and concentrate single-mindedly on one thing at a time.
Develop a reputation for speed and dependability.
Be prepared to climb from peak to peak in your life, and in your career.
Practice self-discipline.
Unlock your inborn creativity.
Surround yourself with the right people.
Take excellent care of your physical health.
Be decisive and action-oriented.
Never consider the possibility of failure.
Back everything you do with the twin qualities of persistence and determination.
Every single one of the above qualities must be learned and practiced on a day-to-day basis until they are second nature to you, like breathing in and breathing out. Remember that life is all about sacrificing what is less important for what is more important, and also sacrificing what is important for what is urgent. We cannot try to achieve everything all at once, but we can try and accomplish what is really important right now. The only thing you need to do is to learn to manage yourself in time, and make the best use of your life.
I hope there has been something new for you in this article. Thank you for your attention. Stay tuned.

Who Is John Azh?

Building a Lot of Traffic to Your Web Site Through Free Classifieds

There are many ways you can promote your online business. In fact, if you do not engage in maybe every way possible to promote your business online, someone else will. Your goal as an entrepreneur is to try every legitimate way possible to let others know about your business opportunity, and invite them to it.
One of the ways you can promote your business online is "Free Classifieds" There are many websites that offer this service free of charge. They accept your advertisement or banner, and show it on their web site.
People can search for anything on the Internet through search engines. But they hardly can specify some criteria such as proximity, area, age, pricing, etc. They are given the freedom to search having any of the criteria above on classified directories.
Free ads provide a great method for building traffic to your web site. Moreover, in case of classifieds, the person who searches for information on the classified directory, and finds their way to your ad, is predisposed to buying your service or product, and so the hardest part of your job in selling is automatically done. You do not have to pitch them on your product. They have already decided that they need what you have advertised, and it is very likely that you will sell without much efforts on your part. Even if they are not really sure yet, they can find their way to your web site, or blog, and you will sell your product once they have known you better through the relationship you build through the services you offer as a part of your marketing strategy.
Writing ads is a very demanding craft and needs you to understand how the ad is sold and who you audience exactly is. If the ad is going to be sold based on the number of words you use, you probably want to avoid using words like "the", or "a" in you ad body. Also, if your audience is the better educated segment of the society, or the market, you want to use a proper version of the language, in a way that it is appealing to them. No matter who your audience, or what your pricing method is, you want to use as few words as you can, as long as the word scarcity does not create any confusion to the reader.
Most often than not, the reader reads the first few words of your ad, and if it grabs their attention based on what they are looking for, they keep on reading until they hit the point where they learn the ad is not about what they are looking for. So you want to start with the words that really grabs their attention, and then following that point, you want to engage the reader in a way that, they will not stop reading until they have reached the end of the ad. No matter how much attention you pay to the choice of your words, and how experienced you are at writing ads, there are many readers that realize the ad is not related to them, and switch to another one somewhere in between. You do not have to worry about this, since you have no control over it.
Okay, at this point, you know how to craft your ads. But how can you maximize your chances of your advertisement converting for you? Human beings are, to a great extent, influenced by their emotions. You want to use this aspect of being a human being, which is not a bad thing, and use it to your own advantage. As we mentioned earlier, the reader has already decided on what they are looking for, and most probably do not need to be reasoned with, specially considering the fact that you don't have much space to work with. But still, based on the psychology of the people looking for the business opportunity you present, you could use the words that would trigger those emotions, and then propose a solution to the problem in you ad body. This really works well, if you know what type of people you are targeting, and what their typical problems are. For instance, there are many people who are making a lot of money every year, but they are so busy, and do get to spend much time with their families. So if your business opportunity is say, Internet Marketing, which is basically a work from home type of job, you could introduce the problem of them not spending much time with their families in the beginning, and then present your business opportunity as a solution to their problem. Or some people do not like waking up early in the morning, or they would like to work according to their own schedule, etc. All these potential problems could contribute to your ads catering to specific groups of people.
I hope this article has been of value to you. Thank you for your attention.

Free Leads Using Google SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - Attracting high caliber, high value leads from Google

Part 1- Introduction

Here is part 1 of the series that I am going to write about SEO, and how you can use it to generate leads for your online business free of cost. This is merely an introduction, and the purpose of it, is to help you get the big picture, and understand the whole story. Do not worry if you do not understand some part of what you read. We then are going to go through each part in detail, so you can take action on each part, and optimize your blog or web site. In this article, you can substitute the word “blog” with “web site”, and vice versa wherever you want. I had to write this article this way, so the article directories would accept my article, and would not object on excessive use of certain keywords. SEO is a very powerful strategy, and if you do it right, you can automate your business, and your business keeps running pretty much on its own, even when you are on a vacation or when you are sleeping at night. Okay, let’s get started.

SEO is a traffic strategy to achieve higher search rankings on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.
As you know, people search for what they want on Google, and Google returns the results for their search criteria. Google shows the search results according to some rules and regulations they have, and the keywords specified. If you know about their rules, and how to use them to your advantage, you can have your landing page shown on top of the search results. Once you do this, people searching for a business opportunity that matches yours according to their keywords and Google’s rules, they will get to know about you, and your business, and if they decide that it is beneficial to them, they will join your business.

Some of the benefits of SEO are:
-Free targeted traffic to your web site
-Free ongoing leads, traffic, and customers
-Millions of dollars in free traffic available
-Difficult for competition to compete with you

When you search for something on Google, you get a screen that has two major parts to it:
1- The right hand side of the screen, which is where the results for the Google AdSense appears. This is a paid advertising strategy through which you can find a lot of leads. You would have to pay per click to use this service from Google, and so it is called, "PPC"
2- The left hand side of the screen, which is called the organic search results. This is where Google shows you the results for the pages they have indexed in their directories, and it's free of cost. The pages those links point to, have not paid for this service at all. The purpose of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is to get Google to show your blog in those search engine results through the ways you are going to learn from these series of articles.

Researchers have studied human eye attention area on a computer screen, and they have found that the upper left hand side corner of the screen is the place that gets the most attention when somebody looks at a computer screen, and that is the free service that Google offers- SEO.
Since people might misuse this free service if they knew about Google's algorithm of showing web search results, even Google employees do not know how the search engine works. But there are a few points that if you know them, you can have your page/blog/website shown on the first page over time.

Let's go through some of the characteristics of PPC, and SEO, and compare them to each other. Here are some of the characteristics of PPC:
- PPC costs money- $0.03- $10.00 per click
- PPC needs ongoing maintenance
- Others can knock you off of the first ranking simply by paying more than you do.
- You could get instant traffic through PPC.
- PPC forces you to optimize for conversions because you actually have to pay for it.


And here are some of the characteristics of SEO:
Traffic through SEO is free, and you could rank for high value keywords.
It's difficult for others to overtake your position since they need to know SEO better than you, and that is what most of the marketers don't really know.
Through SEO, you would get passive ongoing traffic, but it takes some time to build your campaign. You would not have immediate results, but the results last for a relatively longer time or even for a lifetime.
You would generally get more traffic through SEO than you would get through PPC.

There are three parts to SEO that if you learn them, and do them diligently and consistently, you will get the results in a short amount of time relatively depending upon how you apply them, and how consistent you are. They are as follows:
1- Your keywords
You should research your keywords, and find the keywords that actually convert for you. You also need to understand the intent behind the typical keywords that people use to search for the information they are looking for. You want to focus on the keywords that convert into traffic, leads, and money for you. The 80/20 rule for keywords is that only 20% of the market keywords will convert. If you find a handful of the 20%, you will dominate your market.
2- The content of your web log
The content of your blog/site is very important in that, the search engines determine how important and informative your blog is based on their criteria. You should be very careful about your content, Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, and your blog organization. Google considers those who search for information as their customers. They want to serve them in the best way they can. So Google pays close attention to giving their customers exactly what they are looking for. If someone went to Google, searched for something, and got the results not relative to what they searched for, they would probably not go back to Google for searching for anything again, if that happened a couple of times.
3- Links from other blogs
Incoming links from other blogs/web sites are also very important. Google has to make sure that the link has come from a blog/site that has similar content as there is in your site, and also the ranking of the referrer blog is important.
Also you should use the relevant anchor text to link to the content in your blog. “Anchor Text” is the text that is used in the body of the link. It is actually what you see, read, and click on, when you want to go to some other page. The link should point to what it is supposed to refer to, according to the meaning of the text in the link.

There are different levels of SEO:
1- Rank for your name
When people find their way to your landing page, and they want to buy from you, they definitely will search for your name. They want to know who you are, and what you have been doing online. They want to know what kind of person they are going to work with. So you definitely want to let them know that you are a real person, and you have something to give them, teach them, or they can solve at least one of their problems through you. Build your online presence.
2- Rank for Company/people's names (We will discuss this later)
3- Rank for generic industry terms (We will discuss this later)

If you use SEO to promote your business, you should keep the following points in mind:
1- Do not write any negative content.
2- Do not bash anyone.
3- Be helpful, and add value to people.
4- Write constructive reviews.
5- Comment on news, rumors, or gossip in your industry.
6- Do your research, and be intelligent about the comments and keywords you use to promote your business.

When you write content, keep the following points in mind:
1- Do not promote your opportunity.
2- Do not be biased; be objective.
3- Your goal is to be an information center.

In regards to generating the leads, the following points may help you:
1- Have an opt-in box in your side bar and make a compelling offer.
2- Or simply place a banner in your sidebar to your capture page.

What we have covered so far was the mindset behind SEO. Now we are going to cover some technical aspects of SEO:

The content that you use in your blog, and the way you organize it, are very important in your page ranking with regards to Google. The following points are of great importance:
1- Use your keywords in:
- Title Tags
- Meta Descriptions
- Header Tags
- Your Articles/ Content
2- Do not spam as it will not help you. Try to spread your keyword out all over your content, and use a variety of them.

On organizing your blog, it is important to know that when you organize your blog properly, it is much easier for Google, as well as your readers to find the information they are looking for. Think of your whole blog/web site as a compartment you use to keep the different folders containing your bills. You would not mix your bills all together, or put a mortgage bill in the category that was related to your "electric bills"
You want to have categories, and then sub-categories, that would break the information to digestible pieces, so people can find their way easily through your blog. Also if you do that, it is easier for Google to decide what your blog is all about, and rank it accordingly.

On linking to your blog/web site, pay attention to the following:
1- Create as many inbound links to your blog as you can. Think of links as votes your blog as an entity gets. The more votes an entity gets, the more credibility it has among those who know them, which in this case, would be Google. When Google realizes that you have many links to your blog, they decide that your blog/web site is important to others, simply because they have linked to it, and so they will rank it much higher in their own ranking system.
2- Google wants to know if you trade links with other blogs/sites, or it is just that other blogs link to your blog. If a blog links to yours, and you link back to that blog, which is called a "reciprocal link", you will still be ranked higher, but it is always better to have only inbound links from other blogs wherever possible.
3- Google puts weight on the quality of the link. They decide according to the following criteria:
- Where is the link coming from? Social Media web sites, other blogs, article directories, etc.
- Where is the link pointing to?
- Is the link relevant to the page it points to?

I hope you have found something of value in this article. As I mentioned earlier, it was just an introduction, and I will discuss each aspect of this topic in detail in subsequent articles. If you want to read the rest of this series, please go to my blog below. Thanks for your attention.

The Underlying Principle of Article Marketing

Writing an article, called “article marketing”, is one of the great ways by which you can educate your potential customers, add value to them, and help them know you better. It also can help you have credibility among your followers, and place yourself as an expert in your field.
Most people today believe in reading someone else’s article, rewording it, and publishing it as your own. That would certainly be accepted at many article directories. They would be approved, and if you know Google well, using some of those tricks done as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you could place your links at the very top of the search engine results people would search for. That would certainly be alright. But that kind of article would not show “you”, your personality, and more importantly, who you really are.
As you know, people don’t buy your products or services; they buy “you”, who you are as a person. If anybody anywhere in the world had a product or some service of any kind, and offered it at one thirds the actual market price, nobody would buy from them if they were not sure about the authenticity of the person offering the product or service. You might even have noticed that people would rather buy from the person they trust and have worked with for a while, even if they knew they could buy it somewhere else even at a price much lower than that. So, only getting high rankings on Google pages does not count.
People could actually find their way to your landing page from Google, and still not buy from you, simply because they did not like you as a person, or they did not know you at all.
Apart from the page formatting and structuring, dos and don’ts, those who really know what they are talking about, have done their research, and really want to educate their visitors and reader, usually thrive. Tricks work sometimes, but as you know, get rich quick programs usually expire even sooner than people using them get rich. Thank you for your attention.

How To Ping Your Blog

How would you let the search engines or other directories know that you have updated you blog? For example you have posted a new article or even some people have commented on an existing article. You want to let the search engines know that you have updated your blogs and that those changes should be reflected in their indexes, so if someone searches for what you have posted, your update shows up.
There are some services on the Internet that do this for you. You could go to http://pingomatic.com or http://pingoat.com and there are many more services that do the same thing for you.
It is important to know that you should ping your web site or blog only when some changes have been made to it. If you overdo it, you may be ignored by some of the services, and they may not accept any pings from your address.
When you go to any of the services above, there are three fields you need to fill in so you can ping you blog. “Blog name”, “Blog URL”, and “XML Feed” “XML Feed” is usually optional but you can fill in that one as well. It is actually the RSS Feed of your blog. You can find its address if you right click on the RSS icon on your blog.
Happy pinging….