Archive for the ‘success skills’ Category

For those of us who value the independent life of an entrepreneur, the path can sometimes be strewn with obstacles and hills to climb. If an entrepreneur is successful, the rewards are great – financial gain, the ability to make one’s own decisions, the option of spending more quality time with family and friends and a keen sense of personal accomplishment.

But success in entrepreneurship isn’t guaranteed anymore than success is guaranteed in any facet of business or life. Hard work is key, as is a thorough understanding of “how to play the game,” whatever that game is.

Experience and weathering rough seas counts for a lot on the journey to success, as does being willing to learn and adapt. There are some lessons that will help you on your journey to success.

Even if you already consider yourself a bona-fide success story, these lessons are worth reading. You might learn something new for gaining even more rewards in life:

Lesson One – Do work that you feel passionate about. Do work that you enjoy. Find a job, career, or niche that truly fulfills you. When you do this, your work won’t feel like work. It won’t be drudgery and because of that you’ll approach it with relish, not dread.

There’s great value in feeling energized by your work rather than overwhelmed, bored, or frustrated by it. When you wake up in the morning and look forward to your work day, you know you’ve got it figured out. Find something that fits your gifts and talents, and your own personality. This will make a world of difference in your level of success.

Lesson Two – Don’t be afraid of the bumps in the road and the obstacles. Don’t be afraid of the hard work. You’re going to run into problems here and there, and you’re going to have to use a lot of your own muscle to get your business up and running and keep it going. It’s all part of the process and even seasoned entrepreneurial veterans run into roadblocks sometimes. If you’re not willing to work hard and commit to the long haul, then an Internet business is not for you.

When problems crop up, do your best to solve them quickly and efficiently. Don’t hide from them. Problems and mistakes are all about learning and growing. If you have a problem or make a mistake, figure out what went wrong and how you can avoid it next time.

Lesson Three – Keep a positive attitude! Call it what you want – the Law of Attraction, the power of positive thinking, what goes around comes around, reaping what you sow – it’s all basically the same. Your positive attitude will pay off in positive results.

Be positive when things are going well, and don’t forget to have a grateful attitude. When things aren’t going well, rest assured that they will be good again soon. Smile, hold your head up and give yourself permission to work smart and hard and solve any problems that come your way. Share your positive attitude with your customers, target audience and business associates – it’s contagious and you will be remembered for it…in a good way!

Lesson Four – Be a friend. Pay attention to the people you meet online in forums and groups and on social networking sites. Pay attention to the people you meet face-to-face. Make yourself approachable so that others feel that you’re available to them for questions, help, or a quick chat.

Keep in mind that everyone you meet has a personal story as well as a business one. It never hurts to ask how an associate’s child is doing or send a quick “Happy Birthday” email or note. These things are remembered and appreciated.

Lesson Five – Set the right example. For entrepreneurs and Internet marketers, there are many opportunities to set a good or a bad example. One thing you should do is always operate with honesty and integrity.  

Offer products and services with true value, rather than re-hashed old news or outdated tools. Once your reputation is sullied, it’s twice as difficult to clean it up than it is to gain and maintain a good reputation from the onset. Always do the right thing, and expect the same from your customers and fellow entrepreneurs. Treat others with the respect that you want to be treated with.

Lesson Six – Give credit where it’s due. It’s rare that someone single-handedly becomes successful. Other people have lent a hand along the way. Always acknowledge those who have helped you when success comes your way. Give the people who were part of the process strong recognition. This creates a lot of valuable goodwill, as well as many more people happily willing to help you.

Lesson Seven – Share your good fortune. One mark of a truly successful person is that he or she knows they’re successful and wants to share that within their communities – the town where they live, causes and charities, and even online by giving help and guidance to other entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur who is successful is also generous.

This set of valuable lessons will help you find success and then share it with others. Remember that your success hinges on many factors, and none of them are luck! You make your own luck – it doesn’t fall in your lap.

Do something that energizes you – something you love!

Being willing to work hard and put in your time doing the menial tasks as well as the fun stuff is where it all starts. Standing up to your own fear and looking problems in the eye with a willingness to tackle anything that gets in your way is part of the process.

Don’t hesitate to ask for help from those who have been around for awhile, and when you feel discouraged, pick yourself up, hold your head up, and keep going. Be sincere in your friendship and desire to help others succeed. This is part of your overall success formula. Act with integrity and give credit to those who have helped you get where you are.

Give something back. Offer your thoughts, opinions and encouragement in discussion groups and forums. In your own community share your success by volunteering your time and energy to help others.

A positive attitude and a willingness to work hard and help others is the foundation of entrepreneurial success. Without these, you might still find a degree of success, but when you keep all of them in the forefront, you’ll experience an even greater measure of success and fulfillment in your life.

Joe Kita, writer of, “Another Shot: How I Relived My Life in Less Than a Year” said that when he turned 40, he began to question how he had lived his life so far.

He made a list of “regrets” and then set out on a journey to relive them. One of Kita’s regrets was that he wasn’t already “filthy rich.” He hired a butler to serve him for a week for $1,000 and began to experience how it would feel to live the life of a wealthy person.

By the end of the week, Kita learned that he didn’t really enjoy having another person in his house. He discovered that he could feel like a wealthy man by creating his own luxuries – the ones that made him feel like a million dollars.

One by one, Kita attempted to relive his regrets and at the end of his journey he came away with a new understanding of what life is all about – and a blueprint on how to live the remainder of his life with absolutely no regrets.

Kita learned valuable lessons throughout the venture, and he eventually developed the motto, “Take an opportunity to be the driver in your life instead of the passenger.”

Are you the driver in your life – or are you simply being driven without your consent or, worse, against your will, in directions you don’t want to go? Whether or not you live your life filled with regrets depends on how you take charge and handle the present moments and how you go about mapping your future.

What Do You Want to Accomplish?

Short term goals are steps to achieve what you want your lifetime accomplishments to be. But don’t get mired down in setting goals and forget the big picture.

If one of your lifetime accomplishments is to write a novel, you’ll have to set short term goals that might involve finished a chapter per month – or attending writing seminars that may help you achieve your goal.

No matter how old you are or where you are in your life, you can choose to live the rest of your life with no regrets by seizing the life you have and making it the best it can be.

Some people have trouble identifying what their life goals should be. Here are some tips you might use to help recognize what you want your life’s accomplishments to be and how to reach them with no regrets:

Take charge – If you’re not living your life in a manner that you specifically choose, make a conscious decision to change.

Are people or circumstances keeping you from living the life you desire? If you feel that you have no control over daily hassles in your life, it’s probably true that you’re the passenger – not the driver in your life.

Taking charge of your life might upset the proverbial apple cart for awhile, but to know that the decisions you make are yours and no one else’s can be the first step to living your life with no regrets.

Develop a mission statement – If you don’t already have a mission statement for your business and personal life, make it a point to create one as soon as possible.

A mission statement will help identify your life’s desires and set your goals. You should create one for your business as well as your personal life. The statement should be one or two sentences and filled with lots of verbs – action words.

From the initial mission statement, you’ll be able to plot short-term goals that will help you reach the mission you’ve identified. There are many websites available that can guide you in creating a mission statement that truly reflects your life’s wishes.

Don’t tolerate undesirable conditions in your life – If something is bothering you about your life and preventing you from living it to the fullest – address it, fix it, and go on.

By all means, don’t ignore the problem(s) and attempt to push it under the rug or, worse, dwell on it and stress over it every day without finding a solution. Either of those strategies will make the problem bigger. It won’t go away by itself and you don’t want it to develop into a major regret of your life.

Take a different path – If you aren’t happy with the way your life is progressing now, try something else. Take some courses on subjects you’ve always enjoyed, but have never pursued.

For example, if you’re a television news junkie and read the Wall Street Journal from cover to cover, you may want to take a course in “Current Affairs.” A new way of looking at and thinking about things may point you in an entirely different direction in your life.

View past mistakes as learning experiences – Don’t spend time fussing about bad choices you’ve made in the past – that just makes them worse and wastes time.

All of your choices, even your mistakes, have made you what you are. If you keep making the same bad choice over and over, analyze it and attempt to figure out why you keep doing it.

After you’ve identified the reasons for the bad choices, take steps to repair the situation. If you allow bad choices or past mistakes to worsen, they will eventually become part of your life’s regrets rather than stepping stones to a life that you’re excited about and proud to live.

Sometimes, regrets in your past will raise up to slap you in the face and give you a wake up call to change. You may suddenly realize that your child is growing up and you’ve been oblivious to some of it due to stresses in your own life.

You can’t go back in time and relive the moments you’ve missed with your child, but you can make it a priority to take full advantage of the time you have left before he or she leaves the nest.

You may regret that you didn’t spend more time taking your business in a different direction than the one you chose. Use this revelation as a catalyst to spur you on to trying another path that you know will be a positive move for your business.

George Eliot once wrote, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” Take time to reevaluate past lessons and put them to work for you rather than regretting them for the rest of your life. Live the remainder of your life with passion and the knowledge.

It’s been said that golf is an 80% mental and 20% physical sport. It’s similar to the way Internet marketers build their businesses. The planning and strategic stages take a lot of time, while the actual task list is quickly implemented once a plan is in place.

Golfers have several strategies they have to put into play during a single round of 18 holes. They have their tee shots, fairway strategies, decisions to make around the green, and a way to sink the putt once they are close. Regardless of where they are on a hole, golfers know one thing has to remain constant – they have to follow through with the shot.

As an Internet marketer, you know how distracting this business can be. There are always new “secret ways to make money” popping up on the ‘net. It’s hard to stay focused on following through with what you’re doing because you’re anxious to make money, and if a buzz is circulating about something you’re not doing, you instinctively want to abandon your efforts and jump on the bandwagon.

Keep Your Eye on the Ball

Golfers keep their head down and their eyes on the ball. They can’t be concerned about where Ted’s ball landed or if the people watching the game are admiring them or laughing at their stance.

You have to stay focused on your tasks as well. Don’t get tied down to trends and who’s doing what – all of that will be history tomorrow. You’re building your own business from the ground floor up, so you have to do it one brick at a time.

Create a detailed strategy for your business and then have a spreadsheet of tasks you need to do each day. For instance, you might have a column for your blog, one for your PPC efforts, and another for product development. Each column should be broken down into daily tasks, such as “conduct keyword research with GoodKeywords tool,” or “Split test headline on PPC campaign #1.”

If it helps, assign an amount of time and a timeframe for each task. As you finish a task, delete it from or cross it out on your to-do list and you’ll feel great about making progress toward your goals. If you don’t think this is how most of the gurus have made their mark on the Internet, then you haven’t done your research.

Imagine Your Success

When a golfer approaches a ball, takes a stance, and gets ready to swing, he’s not thinking about what’s going to happen if he flubs it. He has to think of where the shot is about to land – on the green or in the middle of the fairway.He pictures his swing as smooth-flowing, not one where he accidentally hits the ground two inches behind the ball and ruins a shot.

How do you imagine your own success? Are you waking up each morning to consider how much you have to do – overwhelming yourself from the minute your feet hit the floor, or are you looking into the future (even later in the day) to imagine how good it will be to accomplish everything you need to get done?

As you sit down at your desk to work, imagine the finished product you’re working on – the completed eBook, the 10,000+ membership site, or the #1 spot on the Search Engine Results Pages. Seeing it will help it come to fruition.

Don’t Let Fears Interrupt Your Follow-Through

Even professional golfers sometimes let certain things creep into their consciousness that cause their swing to falter. If they’re faced with an obstacle like a water hazard and are unsure of the club they should choose, it can make them swing differently, overcompensating for the mistake they knew they made when they picked the club.

Have confidence in your choices. If you make a mistake, stop and correct it instead of continuing in the wrong direction. You’ll know something’s wrong because your inner voice will be trying to get your attention and turn your focus toward a better choice.

Listen to that inner voice. As you move through your day, make sure you follow through on the tasks you have listed, the plans you have developed, and the success you are seeking.

Once you gain the confidence you need to make decisions you are comfortable with, you will start to notice that your success is becoming more streamlined and easier to achieve than when you were drowning in self-doubt.

As the story goes, there was once a tiny mouse that was caught in the jaws of a mighty lion – king of the jungle. The mouse begged the lion to let him go, saying that one day, he might be able to help the lion out of a jamb.

The lion, not ravenous for food at the time, was amused at the idea, so he let the mouse go, not giving it a second thought. Some time later, the mouse was scurrying around the jungle floor when he caught sight of the lion – trapped in the net of a hunter.

The mouse approached the lion and as promised, saved his life by gnawing through the ropes and freeing the king of the jungle, proving that sometimes, little friends can serve big purposes.

Don’t Be Afraid of Your Competitors – Help Them

The story of the lion and the mouse can be applied to many of life’s situations. But in business, and especially on the Internet, it’s a fable to take to heart when developing the right kinds of relationships.

It doesn’t matter how new to the scene you are or how green you may be at building websites or generating an impressive amount of traffic. What matters is that you have something to give back to the community, which can serve to help you when you need it most.

Money can be a great obstacle to those starting out in Internet marketing. Most people are trying to do it on a shoestring budget, so you must have something to barter with and build friendships upon.

Maybe you’re trying to launch a graphic design service site but have no  testimonials or sample customer applications to show in your portfolio. Approach someone who is recognized as a powerful influence and offer to design a free eBook cover in exchange for a link and a testimonial.

If someone emails you and is very helpful without you having to ask, do something kind in return to show your appreciation. Maybe they helped walk you through the setup of your blog. Thank them by writing an article they can distribute to article directories to drive traffic to their site.

Sometimes these networking opportunities can help you develop a Joint Venture relationship at a later date. If you prove your worth as a newcomer, then people will be more willing to give you a chance at leveraging their list or their expertise than if you came on board and tried to jump into the fray without paying your dues.

Calling in a Favor When You Need It

After you’ve had a chance or two to show that your opinion is worthy, that you are serious about ‘net marketing, and that you want to develop good  relationships, you’ll be able to call upon those who you once helped out when the time comes that you need assistance.

Don’t be afraid to ask others whenever you need their help to get ahead. Despite what you might believe, in the Internet marketing industry, competitors do more to help each other out than they do to destroy their competition. Most people understand that there is enough potential business to go around…many, many times.

Make sure you don’t continuously take without giving back. This can cause you to burn many bridges, which could have paved the path to your ultimate financial security one day.

Whether you’re a mighty lion in your niche or are feeling like a mouse among giants, take time to reach out and offer help and value to the online community, and your reputation will serve as a viral marketing tool for you.

Daydreaming and doing something toward the betterment of your life are two totally different things. One gets you places, while the other spins in circles within your own mind. Online marketers want to reach the rung of success on the  ladder they’re climbing, but some of them often get hung up on one of the bottom rungs.

Those that can’t move higher are the ones that get stuck in daydreaming mode.  Everyone has a tendency to ponder the “bag full of riches” they could have in their hands once they’ve reached success. It’s normal to see an opportunity and stop and think about what this could mean to you and your family.

Something you’re pursing might provide your child’s college education, help you build your dream home, or deliver peace of mind and financial security for years to come. It sometimes inspires you to take action.

There’s nothing wrong with daydreaming, but in order to reach your ultimate success and hold on to that dream, you’ll need to do something about it. Staying in thought mode won’t get you anyplace, but putting those thoughts into action and becoming a doer will.

Walt Disney himself once said, “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” Walt Disney made fame and fortune with the Disney Empire we’re all familiar with today.

How do you suppose he got there? Did he daydream his way to a worldwide brand, or take action to promote and build a recognizable brand that would turn into a household name? In his case, it was a little of both – but the point is, he got out and made his daydreams come true.

Online marketers can reach the same success in their own way if only they would realize there’s a time and place for thinking, and a schedule for doing. It can be tough, since it’s easier to dream about success than it is to actually reach it.

Sitting around thinking about this strategy and that new tool or gadget won’t deliver profits in your pocket. Any successful marketer will tell you that they reached success by envisioning the life they wanted and then acting on it.

They concentrate on the strategies they want to implement in their business and find ways to make them work. After a lot of hard work and dedication, they’re then rewarded with the lifestyle they’ve always dreamed about.

Even a beginning online marketer can be side by side with the so-called gurus if they get themselves out of the dreaming stage that has them stuck in what can be like quicksand. All you need is a little motivation to get you going.

Put your dreams on paper and stick it where you’ll see them every day. Use those dreams as your goals, not as your distractions. Break those goals down into baby steps with specific dates of when you will accomplish them. Then you can cross that milestone off your list as you achieve it.

You can even use a chart with a picture of a ladder with rungs on it. Each time you meet one of the baby steps, you can move a token of some kind up one rung on the ladder you have on your chart.

For example, if your goal is to get 1 million visitors to your site, you would break that down into baby steps. One step could be to get a website up and running. When that’s done, move up a rung on that ladder.

Keep going until that token has reached the top rung, which would be your ultimate goal for your business. When you’ve reached the top rung of each of the ladders of your goals, then you can truly hold onto that “bag of riches” you daydreamed.