Celebrate Your Success

Guest article by Michael Angier

“Those at the top of the mountain didn’t fall there.”
– Marcus Washling

An important element of the science of achievement is the need to celebrate our successes. It’s also one that’s easily ignored and even contradicted.

The problem for many of us is we never quite feel successful, because as soon as we reach one goal or pass a certain milestone, we’re already going after the next one. Too often, we don’t stop to revel in the feeling of accomplishment. We’re too focused on the next rung of the ladder – that’s if we’ve even noticed we’ve moved up another rung.

I’m not advocating resting on our laurels. I’m suggesting we truly experience the joy that comes from seeing our progress and accomplishing our objectives.

I recently completed and published a book called, 101 Best Ways to Get Ahead. It feels great to have it done, and I’m getting lots of accolades from people I respect and admire. It’s a good book. An easy read-both entertaining and informative.

But I find it a little too easy for me to look at ways I could have done it better. In doing so, I take away from my satisfaction-my sense of accomplishment and joy.

And I know I’m not alone in this process. The people I interview and coach share that they do the same thing. No job seems good enough. No achievement is great enough.

It’s the wrong focus. When we do this, we’re being ungrateful-we’re thwarting abundance.

We can always see ways we could have done it better or faster. But the truth is we did it. In my case, having published a book is clearly a milestone-something millions of people aspire to and yet only a few thousand actually achieve.

So I’m going to celebrate it. I’m going to indulge myself in feelings of triumph and success, and I’m going to resist the natural tendency to disparage my work or myself.

I keep a Win List. I find that listing the wins in my life-big and small-is more than therapeutic. And it’s a real pick-me-up to review the good things that have happened to me as well as the things I’ve made happen.

It keeps me grateful and it keeps me focused on the good stuff.

Celebrating our successes employs a universal law: when we appreciate what we have and what we’ve done, we find ourselves having more to appreciate.

What accomplishment can you celebrate? What milestones can you highlight or acknowledge? Your last promotion? Helping someone through a tough time? Winning that new contract? Losing those five pounds? Giving that presentation?

When you do these things, it anchors positive feelings into your consciousness and prepares you for more of the same. Like attracts like and your feelings are powerful magnets indeed.

About the Author:

http://SuccessNet.org

Top 5 Reasons Your Website Does NOT Make Money

Guest article by Brian Armstrong

So, you want to make money, eh? Welcome to the club. Just about anybody that has spent any time on the internet has thought about using the internet somehow to make money. If you have a site, or are considering starting a website, avoiding the following reasons lame website owners don’t make money on their website.

Reason 1: You forgot about marketing. When developing your idea and your product or service, you may tend to get carried away with the fact that you believe people will love your product as much as you do and see the features and benefits that you see. The problem with this is that your target audience won’t fall in love with your product if they don’t know about it. Very few products go “viral” with nothing more than word of mouth marketing. This means that you must develop a solid marketing plan if you expect your business to make it past the first year.

Reason 2: You’re too focused on the look and feel of your website. Some of the ugliest websites ever are making more money than your website. When I first started making websites, I would spend hours getting a template ready which usually included the graphics for the various pages. The problem was, these templates would never be just right and the websites would always be “under construction”. Don’t make the same mistakes I did. Your entire focus when it comes to the design should be setting up a website that doesn’t distract people from why they are there. I use templates with a light background and dark text. This makes the site easy to read.

Reason 3: Your website doesn’t sell. Your site should have one purpose which is to convert your visitors into buyers. Anything on the site that distracts your visitors from this purpose shouldn’t be on the site. Assuming you have analytics installed and have the ability to track visitors from one page to the next, you can track which components of your site help make sales and which distract from sales.

Reason 4: You don’t write any articles. Outside of paying for each visitor to your site through something like pay per click, writing articles is one of the very best ways to get traffic. Articles help with not only traffic from some of the larger article websites, but this also produces several links back to your website which is one of the main factors that determines where your website will rank within the search engines.

Reason 5: You don’t do pay-per-click advertising. Although there are a lot of ways to get traffic to a website, PPC is perhaps the best way to get targeted traffic and it’s a method of getting traffic that you can usually use consistency time and again that doesn’t rely on search engine algorithms changing and constant upkeep with content to the same extent that SEO requires.

There is no guarantee your business will be around in 1 year, let alone 5 or more. I know businesses that succeed in spite of themselves because their product is so amazing. Other businesses succeed because of superior marketing. The above mentioned reasons your internet business may not be around for long shouldn’t be overlooked. Following the advice in this article will increase not only your revenue over time, but will decrease the amount of time it takes to get that revenue flowing.

About the Author:

You can find several of Brian’s videos about internet business at YouTube.com. Brian also promotes affordable web hosting from his website 4bluehost.com.

The Basics of Affiliate Marketing

Guest article by Jo Sal and Nancy Jons

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make an extra income. Once you have everything all set up and ready to go, you can begin making an income from your efforts. Affiliate marketing is when someone else pays you a commission or a percentage of what you sell for them. For example, a coffee business may pay you 10% on all sales that you make for them. This is how it works:

When a business decides that they would like to have some help selling their product or service, they will then start an affiliate program. When they do this, they are allowing others to sign up and sell their products or a particular service that they are offering. The ones that sign up to the affiliate program have multiple ways that they can market the service or the product that we will get into later. However, the company that needs the help selling the product, will then give all of their affiliates a unique ID number that they can use in their links, and so that the company can see who the sale came from when a sale is made from an affiliate.

There are many different types of affiliate marketing programs. There are those that offer one time commissions off of a sale. Some of them might offer lifetime commissions, and others may pay just for leads that you can get them. Whether it is for a newsletter lead, or something else. Just having interested parties sign up for things for more information is another one.

The type of affiliate program that you choose to have is completely up to the person that is the owner of the business. They can decide the percentage, or flat rate that they are willing to pay for a sale or a lead. Then those interested can sign up and help them make sales and get leads for a certain amount of money.

Those signing up for affiliate marketing, and different programs to sell for others, can do this many ways. They can promote the services or the products on a website that is relevant to the affiliate programs that they are a part of. Or they can also promote them on a blog. Both of these are great ways to get traffic to your affiliate programs and make sales from them. Some even use email and newsletter marketing as a way to get sales for others as well. Which ever technique and way that you decide to use is up to you.

Once you have chosen the affiliate programs that you are wanting to market, you will then need to be sure to read all of the rules and stipulations for that program. Because all of them will be different. Some may not want their name used in the URL of your website, and some might also not want the particular product or service that you are selling for them used in the title tags for the page, or anywhere else on the page. Because of all of the different requirements and stipulations that you have to read, you may even need some software to help you sort it all out and decide which one is the best for you and your affiliate marketing business.

Choosing the affiliate marketing programs that you want to go with is not hard to do at all. Choose something that you know about, and that you can be known as an expert about. The more passionate you are about the service or product, the better, as it will shine through. Once you have all of your programs in place, check out SEO, and find out how to get your website up on the first page of the search engines. This is going to take hard work and determination, but you can do it.

Affiliate marketing is something that anyone can learn. Start out by reading a good ebook or blog by someone that is a pro for the best marketing tips and techniques that you can use. Learn from others that have done and accomplished what you are trying to do.

About the Authors:

Home Business Center is the best free resource for making money online with home business ideas, affiliate marketing and network marketing. It is also the godfather of some ideas about how to make money fast.