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Home Based Business Tips

by Mario Remedios on November 12, 2009

Running a home based business is one of the goals that many people have. However, like any other business there are ups and downs to running a business from home. For some the challenges faced were unexpected and if you do not plan yourself well you may find that you are unable to cope, depressed and negative about the whole experience. You will need to stay positive regardless of the ups and downs you experience in order to make it.

Among the challenges faced with a home based business are intrusions. Many times your family is unable to make the transition with you and can interrupt you constantly. Other daily interruptions such as the doorbell, television and a ringing phone can be a distraction. Because you are working from home, it is inevitable to have your home life intertwined with your business. You may have to stop and feed the baby or have one of your family members asking you to help them out when you are working. This can be very time consuming and frustrating and if you are not careful, you can easily miss your targets.

Perhaps the most challenging thing is getting the motivation to get up and work. Your mind is already conditioned that when you are at home you relax and watch television to unwind. You will have to re-program your mind by behaving as though you are going to your usual office. Get up early, take a shower, dress for work and then get busy doing just that. You will also have to deal with friends that want to drop in for coffee and a chat about the weather. Be gracious about it but let them know that you are working.

In order to stay positive and see success in your home business, you will need to plan ahead about the ups and downs that may occur. These may be financial difficulties as you go through the transition of having a regular paycheck to very little the first few months of starting your business. Secondly, get organized where time is concerned. Every business requires much input in the initial stages, so be ready invest time into it. Money is also another investment that you must consider. You need to make sure that you have the funds to take you through the transitional period.

Even though your family does not seem to think you are working, stay focused. Remove any distractions you may have and organize the space you will need to use as an office. Make sure that you have the equipment needed to run your office efficiently. This may include a printer, fax machine and the like. Running to Kinko’s every time you need to carry out these tasks may be very time consuming.

Finally, stay encouraged. Success is a journey and only those who are patient get to their destination. Understand that success will not come overnight and do your best to keep your dream alive. Do not overwork yourself though or you will suffer burn out. Be kind to your body, eat right and work out and you will find that you will be better able to stay positive no matter what.

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Network Marketing Mistakes

by Mario Remedios on November 12, 2009

If you just started with network marketing I’m sure you’re excited and looking forward to having your own business. You’ve heard all the hype and believed it all. You’ve spent a good amount of money with an opportunity you believe will give you a high return on investment. You think leads will fall from the sky and your business will grow effortlessly.

You are just totally happy for not having someone tell you what to do. Well, sorry to break it to you but you’ll soon come to realize that it’s not as easy as it looks and that maybe this might not be the best opportunity for you.

Below I will like to point out a few network marketing mistakes that most likely are hurting your business and then we’ll go back and see how we can improve your outlook:

1-No business plan in place

2-Believing that’s easy and for anybody

3-Not totally grasping the concept of selling. Yes, YOU ultimately have to sell to survive in that industry.

4-Not understanding the law of attraction marketing or fully applying its principles.

5-Running your business by chasing your friends and family

6-Not having a training system for your prospects

7-Making your primary business your only source of income

The above mistakes are some of the reasons why over 95% of network marketers fail in their businesses within their first year. The only way to overcome that though is by having a solid business and marketing plan in action.

Find the marketing aspects you enjoy the most and apply them to your business. Monitor your progress and change or improve your strategies as you deem reasonable. Start enjoying what you do and realize that selling is part of what network marketers do.

When I say selling I don’t mean you going up to your friends and family and ruining your relationships. I mean build relationships and trust through attraction marketing by providing helpful content and helping others, then the sales will come.

Those who enjoy helping others the most will become more successful in network marketing. You are going to have to work hard and smart in the beginning but as you start building credibility your business will start to grow.

Find a training platform for your team. Ultimately, people don’t join products or businesses they join leaders. Leaders that will help them with their own strategies and marketing needs.

Consider affiliate marketing on top of your primary business. This will allow you to make some money with those who aren’t interested in your main business.

Realize that if you enjoy a stable income and can’t stick to your own working plan without having anybody telling you what to do, network marketing might not be for you. In this case, get a job. There is absolutely nothing wrong with working for someone else. All that really matters is you, you have to be happy, you have to enjoy what you do in order to succeed.

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Why I Changed to Thesis

by Mario Remedios on November 12, 2009

Back in October of ‘08 when I started my personal blog I jumped from blog theme to blog theme. I was never really happy with any of the ones I found. I knew that to get a real good theme I had to pay for it. But then, since I was beginning in the blogging world I wanted to get the free ones. You could check out the different free themes available at wordpress.org.

Transition to UBD Moneymaker

Then I went from the free themes offered to the UBD Moneymaker Theme by Unique Blog Designs & Phillip van Coller. You can get their theme for free by subscribing to their newsletter at www.uniqueblogdesigns.com. Needless to say, this is a great theme. I really liked how easy it was to use and the fact that it gave my site a nice professional look. You can also upgrade by paying a minimal fee and have the rights to tweak and change the theme to your like.

Intro to Thesis

After a few months once again I was feeling the need to change the design. I could have paid for the UBD Moneymaker Theme upgrade or get a complete new look. I did a lot of research as to what others were saying regarding different themes and concluded Thesis would be a perfect fit for me. I realized the potential that thesis carries for SEO and the look of your blog.

Purchase Options

Thesis offers two theme purchase options, personal and developer. The personal option gives you the right to upload the theme for only one site at a cost of $87 while the developer allows you to upload to unlimited sites and some other additional benefits you could find by visiting the theme’s site. Due to the fact that I own several sites, I ended up buying the developer’s option. So trust me, I’ll be using it gladly.

Flexibility

It didn’t take me long to fall in love with Thesis. Yes, indeed, I’m in love with how easy it is to use. I love the fact that I don’t have to deal with silly html codes or anything of that sort to change the look of my blog when I want to. In fact, I wish I would have jumped to Thesis earlier when I started blogging. Back then, I knew nothing about html coding or how to manage a blog at all. Experimenting with other design looks by going into the codes really wasted me some valuable time. Remember, time is money.

From the Thesis options’ panel, you can add your syndication feed url from Feedburner, add header and footer scripts. This is actually helpful in case you want to include your Google analytics code to track your site’s performance and traffic. You can also add Meta description and Meta keywords for your homepage which will certainly help with SEO and change your display options, navigation menu, and much more.

From the Thesis Design options’ panel you could change the font and sizes for basically your whole site. In addition, you could change and customize your site’s layout, adjust your teasers which allow you to customize however you want your articles to look, etc.

You also have access to the support forum with over 5,000 webmasters plus the Thesis support and development team. It doesn’t matter if you have a question about SEO, the theme installation process, or miscellaneous not thesis related, whatever it is, the forum is there to help you along and get your questions answered. All of a sudden, you are part of a community of people willing to help and network.

Thesis comes with a nice white plain and simple design background. However, if you would like to have a specific design, you’ll have access to qualified Thesis-specific designers that are willing and able to make your version of Thesis unique to you for a reasonable price.

SEO Optimization & Benefits

I basically just discussed Thesis’ flexibility with customization and design. Let’s now dig into why this user-friendly SEO-Optimized Wordpress Framework is more than just a theme and how it can help you in your SEO endeavors.

The way search engines rank your site is basically by analyzing your HTML codes to find relevant content that tells them what your site is all about. Sites that have errors embedded within their codes, make it much harder for the search engines to figure out what they are all about and most likely stay invisible to the searches or lose placement and traffic to other sites that are better optimized. Search engines and Google love clean valid codes and thus if you have this, you’ll be benefiting from higher ranking and more targeted traffic. Why work harder when you can work smarter.

What you’ll find with the majority of Wordpress themes is not a very good job when it comes to coding and design whether you pay or not for them. In other words, the codes detected by the search engines are linked to the design elements of your site with other themes. Changing the design around on your blog will certainly compromise how clean your site looks to Google and other search engines.

This is where Thesis stepped in and changed the perspective of this issue. What they did instead was to separate the html code from the design makeup. Now you can go ahead and customize your design however you want without fear of damaging or changing the html codes of your site ever again.

In addition to the separation of the html coding from the design makeup as an additional boost to your SEO efforts, thesis offers a built-in option in your Wordpress posting area where you can properly optimize your content for the search results. All you have to do is include a custom title tag, meta description, and meta tags for each post and wait for the traffic to start knocking at your door.

Final Thoughts

After reviewing what others were saying about the Thesis theme and understanding the potentials discussed above, I had no doubt in my mind that this is the theme I’ll keep for a while. What else can I ask for such a small investment? I even have unlimited future updates for free as part of my purchase.

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The Art of Effective Selling

by Mario Remedios on November 10, 2009

Have you ever wondered how some people are able to close sales after sales with almost no effort on their side? Have you noticed how others struggle to do the same? Are you one of them?

If so, don’t worry, I’m about to reveal to you exactly what these very successful salespeople are doing that you and others are probably not. It’s called “the art of effective selling” which translates simply to “the art of not selling.” Say what? Yes, you read it right, I wrote “the art of not selling.”

Those on top don’t sell, they put themselves in the position to help others, they give the impression that they are industry leaders in a specific niche by providing lots of helpful content and they are experts at applying attraction marketing techniques.

They give out lots of free things, for example, they give their readers and fans the chance for them to subscribe to their newsletters. They offer them prizes and incentives for being loyal followers. They create communities and build trust. Exactly “trust” for them is much more important than selling.

Selling becomes the end product. They don’t really worry about making money, they don’t because they flow with an abundance mentality. For them building trust and confidence is more important than making a sale.

They have a cool appearance and they don’t look desperate. They don’t look desperate because they understand that by helping others and building trust, they create a group of people that will buy from them time after time repeatedly, instead of just once.

Think about it, would you buy something from someone who is blatantly selling or would you buy it from that “one” person who has helped you build your business and has offered you several incentives over a period of time? Come on, I challenge you, answer that question.

I bet, you would rather go with the latter. I would too, as a matter of fact, I mostly buy from those who help me not those who sell. The top salespeople have others actually approaching them and asking them to sell to them. Yes, it might sound silly, but psychologically we don’t like to be sold and we are inclined to want to help those who help us.

With that said, I want to give you some final advice: if you want to make endless sales and build a group of loyal customers, stop selling and start positioning yourself as a solution by helping those you ultimately want to sell to. That’s the key to attraction marketing which many still don’t understand or apply.

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How to Increase Your Default PHP Setting for Your Blog

by Mario Remedios on November 10, 2009

Last week I ran out of memory with my blog. If I wanted to update a page I would constantly get the following error:

“Fatal Error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 30720 bytes)…”

In this case what you have to do is simply increase your default PHP setting which could be 12M or 32M. This is pretty easy to do if you have access to your PHP.INI file. This file is usually found in the “public_html/directory.”

In my case I didn’t have it so I had to create it. Contact your webhost provider if you have issues or questions regarding how to do this. It might be a good idea to run a backup of your blog before you make any changes. I use bluehost so I’ll be showing you exactly what I did to create a PHP file and increase my memory from 32M to 64M.

Sign in to your bluehost control panel and scroll down to the “PHP Config” icon located in the “Software/Services” section as indicated below and click to open the file:

Ensure your bluehost php configuration is set on “PHP5 (Single php.ini)” and save changes:

Scroll further down and click on “Install PHP.INI Master File”:

After installing the PHP.INI Master File you need to find it in your public_html/directory and then right click, select to rename the file from “php.ini.default” to “php.ini:”

Then click on edit, hit the “Control/F” keys at the same time and type to find “memory.” Once you find where the memory limit line is, simply increase from 32M to 64M depending on how much space you need. Hit save changes and log out.