Happy as You Want to Be

Almost everyone has heard the hit single ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ by Bobby McFerrin. The song has a very catchy way of conveying its message of being happy to everyone..

Living a happy, resilient and optimistic life is wonderful, and is also very good for your health. Being happy actually protects you from the damaging effects that stress unleashes at us. Stress is actually linked to top causes of death such as heart disease, cancer and stroke.

To be happy is relatively easy, just decide to be a happy person. Abraham Lincoln observed that most people for most of the time can choose how happy or stressed, how relaxed or troubled, how bright or dull their outlook to be. The choice is simple really, choose to be happy.

There are several ways by which you can do this.

Being grateful for what you have is essential.  We have so much to be thankful for. Thank the taxi driver for bringing you home safely, thank the cook for a wonderful dinner and thank the guy who cleans your windows. Also thank the mailman for bringing you your mail, thank the policeman for making your place safe and thank God for being alive.

Watching or listening to the News is often extremely stressful. Get less of it. Some people just can’t start their day without their daily dose of news. Try and think about it, 99% of the news we hear or read is bad news. Starting or ending the day with bad news does not seem to be a sensible thing to do.

A religious connection is also recommended. Being part of a religious group with its singing, sacraments, chanting, prayers and meditations foster inner peace.

Manage your time. Time is invaluable and too important to waste. Time management can be viewed  as a list of rules that involves scheduling, setting goals, planning, creating lists of things to do and prioritizing. These basic skills once mastered will give you that extra reserve to achieve the results you desire.

Laugh and laugh heartily everyday.  Heard a good joke? Tell your friends or family about it. As they also say -’Laughter is the best medicine’.

Express your feelings, affections, friendship and passion to people around you. They will most likely reciprocate your actions. Try not to keep pent up anger as this is quite harmful to your health. Instead find ways of expressing your anger in a way that will not cause more injury or hurt to yourself or anyone else.

Working hard brings tremendous personal satisfaction. It gives a feeling of being competent in finishing our tasks. Accomplishments are necessary for all of us, they give us a sense of value. Work on things that you feel worthy of your time.

Learning is a joyful exercise. Try and learn something new everyday.  Learning also makes us expand and broaden our horizons. And could also give us more opportunities in the future.

Run, jog, walk and do other things that your body was made for. Feel alive.

Avoid exposure to negative elements like loud noises, toxins and hazardous places.

These are the few simple things you can do everyday to be happy.

And always remember the quote from Abraham Lincoln, he says that, “Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

Life With Woody Allen

Woody Allen has this to say:

1. “Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.”

2. “I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it’s the government.”

3. “There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?”

4. “Love is the answer, but while you’re waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty interesting questions.”

5. “A fast word about oral contraception. I asked a girl to go to bed with me, she said ‘no’.”

6. “Basically my wife was immature. I’d be at home in the bath and she’d come in and sink my boats.”

7. “I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

8. “I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.”

9. “If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.”

10. “The talent for being happy is appreciating and liking what you have, instead of what you don’t have.”

Sunday, July 27, 2008

I can’t believe it’s Sunday already.

Had a blast yesterday at a family reunion that went well into the wee hours of the night.  Sitting around telling old stories over Molsons was a ton of fun.  (Especially since it was me doing most of the gabbing!

Ran into a cousin of mine there (Dan Connelly) who is an absolute genius when it comes to prospering through frugality.

When we were both younger I just thought him as a bit eccentric.  But now that I see the end results of his efforts I have to really give him a salute.  The man is a genius when it comes to saving money,

We talked a little bit last night about getting all his money saving (and growing) tips into an eBook that can be shared with others. But to be honest we talked about doing just that at the last reunion so who knows if we will actually get around to birthing the project.

After I crush this Gatorade and bag of BBQ chips to replenish my fluid and sodium levels Cathy and I are taking the rugrats to a nearby nature park to help them burn off some extra energy on the trails.

Later I’ll be adding some content to this blog that I have been working on getting ready for publication.  So make sure to stop by later tonight to check out what I posted.

Feel free to post me back and tell me how your weekend has gone so far.  Anything exciting happening?  Will talk with you soon.  Stay safe and happy!

– Matt LaClear 877-899-2346

Generating Revenue With Good Web Design Planning

For anything to work well, care must be taken to make firm, workable plans to execute it and the same goes for website designs. With a well thought out website design, you will be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you. In fact, many websites turn into online wasteland because they are not well planned and do not get a single visitor. Gradually, the webmaster will not be motivated to update it anymore and it turns into wasted cyberspace.

The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you want to gain any income from the site. Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks. For example, you might have a “food” section, an “accommodation” section and an “entertainment” section for a tourism site. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking for further information.

When you have a broader, better-defined scope of themes for your website, you can sell space on your pages to people interested in advertising on your page. You can also earn from programs like Google’s Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing if people surf to those themed pages and click on the ads. For this very reason, the advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so a themed page fits that criteria perfectly.

As Internet advertising bears more results than ads on magazines or offline media. Hence, start tapping in on this lucrative stream of profit right away!

5 Ways to Keep Visitors Coming Back

A lot of successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. So, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox
When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a blog
Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys
Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games
Just imagine how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content
Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something to read on your site. This is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, but this is also the least carried out one because of the laziness of webmasters. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

5 Important Rules in Website Design

When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages — Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They
normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements — Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have simple and clear navigation — You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is — When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your home page — If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed. I f you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

Frugal Marketing for Entrepreneurs

How many e-mail messages do you send everyday? You’re probable missing out on a simple, inexpensive marketing tool. Seize the opportunity to promote your business to a highly targeted market without spending a dime by utilizing your e-mail signature line.

If your email signature line only contains your name and contact information, you’re missing out on advertising to e-mail recipients that have opted for communications from you.

These people are key members of your unofficial marketing network. They are your prospects, clients, press contacts and colleagues and your signature line is the perfect, unobtrusive space for a unique promotional pitch.

Try these tactics to turn your “sign-offs” into sales:
* Highlight what your company offers.
* Offer an incentive for recipients taken a specified action.
* Use the associated web address for the incentive, if it’s also on your site.
* Give better visual positioning to the promotion rather than contact info.
* Play with eye-catching fonts and colors.
* Use less than 64 characters/line so that words don’t wrap to a new line.
* Write a “signature” for different categories of recipients.
* Change your signature copy frequently.
* Never miss a chance to get your product or company noticed.

Another thing that many entrepreneurs don’t think about is the letters they send out. They are merely accepted as solving a problem or answering a need, when you can carry the e-mail idea over into every piece of mail you generate.

On the company letterhead simply add a line at the bottom of page 1. It could be a “tag line” of sorts made up of a slogan that “brands” your services or business. Try to come up with something unique so that every time it’s heard the prospect thinks of you.

Examples of this would be, “Good to the last drop,” which of course is Maxwell House Coffee. “Finger-lickin’ good,” which is KFC chicken, and so on. You get the message of what I’m saying. Play around with this until you come up with a pearl that is uniquely you.

If your business/service does not lend itself to this idea, then focus on increasing your credibility by using a “membership” tag line. For instance a funeral home would be less than tasteful using the line, “Our clients are dying to visit us;” but they COULD use the line “Members of Undertakers Assoc. of America” at the foot of their letterhead. This establishes immediate credibility in the mind of the recipient, even if the letter they received was a direct mail advertising letter.

When you’re an entrepreneur in today’s marketplace you have to be inventive and creative to buck the “big boys” on the block. I suggest that every entrepreneur read about the life of P.T. Barnum to get a better understanding of a truly great entrepreneur.

It isn’t always the almighty dollar that gets the best advertising for our business; it’s the best IDEA that makes you stand out in the crowd.

Gas Prices Got Your Bottom Line?

If you’re a small business or entrepreneur you can bet your bottom dollar that the high gas prices are affecting you. It probably will be your “bottom dollar” too!

Regardless of what the politicians are telling us, and regardless whether you deliver your products to the client or not the price of fuel is affecting you. It’s affecting your business because it’s affecting the consumer – your consumers.

In a recent survey done by the National Retail Federation they state, “Whether gas prices pose a fiscal or psychological concern consumers are affected regardless of income.”

Some interesting stats show that from the number of adults nationwide16.4% delayed a major purchase such as cars, TV, or furniture. Dining out has been reduced by 25.2%, 31.2% decreased vacation travel plans, 17.3% are spending less on groceries, and 23.7% are spending less on clothing.

That equates to the fact that restaurants, travel agencies, motel/hotels, car dealers, furniture stores, and retail clothing stores are all going to be affected by gas prices. If any one of those listed is the business you’re doing, then your bottom line of profits is definitely affected. The interesting part of all that is that it didn’t matter if those polled were in the $50K+ income bracket or less than $50K, the results were the same.

The only distinction seemed to be that adults in the age bracket of 45-54 years of age had the highest percentages but with the same outcome. For instance of the 25.2% of adults that reduced dining out, 28.6% of them were in that age bracket, and so on down the line. The survey also noted that 70% of the consumers of that age group were impacted by higher gas prices.

As you might have guessed, when these survey figures were broken down by region the West was higher in all categories than the NE, Mid-West, or Southern regions. Still only 5.7% of us have increased carpooling.

It’s a fact, whether we like it or not, that every penny spent on gasoline is a penny kept from retailers. Looking beyond just the retail industry, what about the service business. The cost of doing business for a repairman is going to increase as the expense for gasoline increases, and ultimately his prices will reflect that increase. It doesn’t matter whether he’s doing electrical, roofing, renovating, plumbing, whatever service drives up to your home is going to cost more in the long run.

Ultimately, as the domino effect goes into play, those who can least afford price increases will be the hardest hit. Seniors and retirees on fixed incomes just have to suck it up and bear the price increases. As the survey pollsters have said income levels didn’t vary results of choices, it still varies the ability to handle the domino effects. If income remains stationery but prices rise, there’s definitely an affect on those with fixed incomes.

For the entrepreneur to overcome the situation it requires some really extreme methods. Following are some tips to keep your expenses down:

* Order supplies online, anticipating a price increase, and have them delivered to you.
* Research your competitors online and save the gas.
* Group doing an errand or two when they’re in the vicinity of a scheduled client meeting.
* Do more of your business by mail, email, or on the internet. You can do just about anything from paying a vendor to transferring funds from one bank account to another on the internet, and you don’t use any gas. The only time you have to go to the bank is to make a deposit.
* If you conduct business at Trade Shows and have to travel find ways to cut corners. Carpool to the airport with a colleague or even a nearby competitor. (You’re both going to be doing business at the same show anyway.) Perhaps, you can combine two trips with only one return home after the second trip. Perhaps putting an ad in the Trade Show program can save you making a trip. (You could use that plan for the less important trade show.)
* Consider whether media advertising for your business would be cheaper than what you’ve been doing in person considering gas prices.

That’s just a few ideas to get those little gray cells working. After all, as an entrepreneur you’ve done marketing on a shoestring before. I’m sure you can come up with at least ten more ideas than I’ve given you. You might also want to check out the web site: http://autos.msn.com/everyday/gasstations.aspx?=(put in your zip code)

At that site you can find the cheapest gas prices in your area. I’d venture to say that these rankings change daily, so check it out when you need gas.

Best Regards,

Matt LaClear

Make Real Money From Home Podcast Series — Episode 1

If you’re looking to learn how to market your home business the right way this audio series I am recording with Damian Colden who is good friend of mine would be a good place for you to start! In it we cover the right ways as well as wrong ways to marketing a home business.

Go ahead and listen in by clicking this link: http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-23087/TS-134340.mp3

Matt LaClear & Chris Miller Conversation 1

If you’re a real estate agent looking to boost your business then you need to start differentiating yourself from your competition. This short audio will give you tips on how to do just that!

Go ahead and listen in by clicking this link: http://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22233/TS-132177.mp3