Designing a website for conversion is something that every business owner cares about, if they are savvy and have a solid business goal for their sites.  Top gun internet marketers sell memberships and consulting services to people who want to get income online.  It is a good idea to have a mentor when you are starting out, for sure, but I wonder if there really is a one-size-fits-all approach to building an online business.  My instincts say no. 

As an Online Branding Consultant and website developer, I’ve been monitoring website tools and trends for years.  When my daily research introduced the idea that the color orange converted better than any other color, it seemed like a reasonable thing to try.  Within a few months, just about every site that I saw had an orange buy now or add to cart button.  Recently, this button has gotten much larger.   Does the image below look familar to you and did you feel compelled to press the button?  It took me 2 seconds to find one. 

One trend that I have no argument with at all is to use Wordpress website technology as the basis for a business and sales funnel.  The software is remarkable, easy to manage, and delivers great SEO benefits too.  Many top guns have migrated their sites to wordpress with good reason and anyone paying attention knows that Wordpress is much more than a blogging tool. 

Video capture pages are a very good idea and they have been for a long time.  However, there has been a disturbing trend with them recently.  The latest video marketing tactic is to enforce an opt in before one is granted access to the video.  This is a ploy to build a list, which I understand, but if you do this please manage your lists so you aren’t broadcasting the same message multiple times.  That is kind of irritating.  

Another rising video marketing trend is to put up content with no controls or information about duration.  I find to be both inconvenient and rude, and I know I’m not alone.  If it is off-putting, why does it convert?  Perhaps someone who is doing this and tracking results can enlighten us all. 

The OTO (one-time-offer) tactic has taken on new proportions of irritation.  When I opt in to something for free, I expect an obligatory up sell but is it really necessary to introduce two, three or more?  Newbie or not, I’m betting that I’m not the only person who loses patience and gives up.  It would be great to see the split testing results that support the claims of people who say this builds loyalty and increases sales.   

Please save us all from the disingenuous “fear of loss” call to action tactic.  If you aren’t sure what this means, it is the one that compels you to decide right now and threatens that, if you don’t, the offer will be lost forever.  If it really is a limited time offer then using this tactic doesn’t constitute coercion.  A high percentage of the time, however, the claim is not true.  How many times have you bought something because you were led to believe you needed to decide right away and found that same site months after the fact? 

When internet marketers began to sell products that teach how to target local business owners, it intrigued me.  I wondered if they really knew what they were talking about.  As it turns out, few internet marketers have ever dealt with offline business owners so please don’t expect them to teach you everything you need to know in order to succeed in this niche.  I’m not saying it isn’t a good idea but, trust me, it isn’t an automatic gateway to wealth. 

If you want to have credibility with a local business owner, you need more than a spiel and a ghost written book to hand to them at your first meeting.  You must understand THEIR business and be prepared to explain how you can help them improve their bottom line.

Think about the different businesses that you see in your neighborhood for a moment, excluding chains and franchises.  I doubt that the target market for an attorney, accountant, florist, or day spa lends itself to hype, being forced into opting in to view a video that has no controls on it, or the huge orange “add to cart” button.  Please let me know if you think I am wrong. 

Small busines owners understand their niche and they’re good at sensing deception or they don’t stay in business long..  You won’t know how to help them if you haven’t done your homework.  Customer acquisition costs are a factor to small business owners, as well as return on investment.  If you want to play in that field, make sure you understand business basics first.

The bottom line is this:

No internet marketing formula is one-size-fits-all.  

 Most of us don’t think twice about what is involved in maintaining the platforms the Social Networking and Social Bookmarking potpourri of sites that we use each day in our online businesses.  These days, the focus is mostly on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.  Other useful sites are LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Flickr, MySpace, and Last.fm … to name a few.  Then there are he multiple free email accounts we have. 

When it comes to our home computing environments, we unconsciously manage disk space every day.  If we have self-hosted blogs, we look for and choose hosting vendors who permit us to have unlimited storage for our websites.  Yet, we take the storage of our Tweets and posts for granted. 

Every piece of content must be stored somewhere.  In the early days of email, I was part of a group who studied email etiquette with interest.  We discussed computing capacity issues, like storage, too.  A friend of mine, who worked for EMC, wrote a fascinating white paper about the exponential growth of data storage.  Her predictions have been exceeded by mounds and mounds and mounds of data.  None of us foresaw the advent of micro-blogging in 1985, let alone text messaging on a cell phone!   

Recent research by IDC revealed that our digital universe grew by 62% during the last year alone.  The stunning amount of storage online at the time of the study was 800,000 petabytes, a measure better described at this link.  In short, it is one million gigabytes.  By the end of 2010, it is predicted that there will be 1.2 zettabytes online.  A zettabyte, incidentally, is roughly half a million times the entire collections of all the academic libraries in the United States.  Whew!  And I’m worrying about a few gigabytes around here.   

Computers and the internet have made our lives easier, much more public and availed methods to get income online for some of us too.  Pages upon pages of material sifted and listed, categorized and presented for our reading pleasure with a few keystrokes and a button click.  Since our content is cached and stored online indefinitely, one begins to wonder if our content will outlive our grandchildren.  Who can say?

It’s Mother’s Day in the United States.  This is a holiday reserved for the women who gave us our lives and, if you are as fortunate as me, the person who believed in us so much that we knew we could never fail.  Today, I will tell you some of the most memorable stories that I have about a remarkable woman who was my mother, my mentor, and my friend. 

My mother was born in 1926, which means she grew up during the depression.  She was the oldest in a family of 12 children and, because times were difficult, her father expected her to quit school so she could help earn money to feed the family.  Mom didn’t honor that request for she knew it would inhibit her future possibilities.  At the age of 15, the same year that World War II began, she left her family and moved into a girl’s home so she could finish high school and make something more of her life.  Her courage and focus were quite admirable. 

Perhaps one of the bravest things that my mother decided to do was to have a career other than being a homemaker.  I know this doesn’t sound amazing at all these days but, during the 50’s, this was not popular.  Many of  the suburban housewives whispered among themselves about how she was neglecting her duties as a mother and a wife.  Some of those women even prohibited their children from being friends with my sister and me but, in my eyes, nothing could have been further from the truth!  Mom and Dad explained that she was going to work so we could have greater oppotunities.  Her working created income opportunities for me around the house, which taught me to be enterprising, industrious and responsible.

Mom took a job as a secretary, which was about the only position that women were allowed to have at that time.  Within a couple of years, she was promoted to the position of Wholesale Buyer which caused a bit of conflict within the secretarial pool. My mother loved what she did, and she was quite good at it too.   Twice a year, she would travel to New York City and negotiate large purchases for her company.  I got to tag along with her a couple of times.  Having the chance to see her at work was nothing short of inspirational.  She was well-respected and a tenacious negotiator.   

One of the fondest memories that I have of her is a reaction she had to an editorial in the local paper.  Some man had written that women should not work outside the home and, if they did, that they should stick to “jobs for women” and stay out of the more challenging business roles because men were better suited for those sorts of positions. 

Mom had a fit!  She went straight to her typewriter and prepared a response that was published by the paper.  This created quite a stir in the family, since she had used her married name on the letter.  I will never forget listening in on a debate between my mother and grandfather, who was unhappy that she had used “his” name on such a controversial subject.  She stunned him to silence when she retorted, “It’s my name too!”   In that moment, she taught me that it was OK to stand up for what you believed in and be who you are, regardless of the circumstances.  Remarkable!

I’m chuckling as I write this … and experiencing a little emotion too.  I miss my mother very much.   

Although Mom didn’t always agree with my ideas as a youth, she never told me I was wrong.  In the truest sense of the word, she mentored me by discussing the pros and cons, just as she would with any adult.  Those conversations always ended with her telling me that she trusted my judgment, which was empowering.  I got to test my strategies and, if something didn’t work out the way I expected, she never said, “I told you so.”  She would offer her advise and recommend solutions but it was always up to me to decide what path to choose.  That was her greatest gift to me.  Over the years, her strength became my will. 

Her independent style and tireless encouragements are factors that still motivate me today.  Her belief in me allowed me to rely on my good instincts, which has been the basis for every decision that I’ve made in my career.  She taught me to disregard the nay-sayers and follow my own path.  This is  something you will feel in many of my articles and it is one of the primary reasons that  GetIncomeBlog.com was launched in 2008. 

Whether I am writing about following your passions or shutting out the noise around you so you can try something new, my message is always the same; Believe in Yourself first.  It isn’t always comfortable to follow the road less traveled but, if you believe in yourself and your abilities, the pot holes on your path are never so deep that the axle will break on your carriage.   

Mom’s resilience never ceased to amaze me.  Up until the day she went into a coma, a week before her death, my mother’s mind remained sharp, she never doubted my ability to succeed, and she was a good friend to me.  I was blessed to have her in my life. 

So, this one is for you, Mom! 

Normally, we associate creativity with artists who apply their craft in written communications, visual arts, or music.  But, if we strictly define creativity as artistic talent, we fail to appreciate how it is involved in the apparently mundane aspects of our lives.  That is really a shame, for nothing of life is truly mundane. 

An acceptable definition for creativity is having the ability to find solutions where none are apparent.  This is often seen with children who are learning something new.  Less obvious are the toiling movers who manage to fit your heirloom dining room table through a narrow hallway without destroying the furniture or the walls, which is certainly admirable. 

In business, creativity is characterized as thinking outside the box, creative problem solving, and maybe even critical thinking.  Has your business creativity ever been stifled by colleagues or clients?  Have you ever inadvertently stifled them?  There are so many ways this can happen, and this article exposes a few of them. 

You Want it When?

During my corporate days, I had an image of a person beneath a thumbscrew with a caption that read: 

Turn it again you SOB!  I work well under pressure!

The poster was irreverent and got many laughs but there really was no truth in it.  The fact of the matter is, people don’t perform as creatively when severe deadlines are imposed.  While the tasks may be completed on time and satisfactorily, there is kind of a hangover after the fact for those involved that can literally immobilize them for days after the effort is over. 

Time pressure disrupts one’s ability to fully engage themselves in the solution.  True creativity requires an incubation period.  In my business, premium rates are applied to “rush” projects for good reason.  When we come to terms on delivery dates and pricing, another dark side can be introduced by anxious people.  Folks who are in a panic with a high need to feel in control can upset the creative flow with interruptions.  To avoid this possible problem, I’ve learned to suggest a date in advance for status updates. 

Please Put Your Weapons Away

With morbid fascination, I’ve observed threats that some people have  imposed in an effort to inspire.  This was more or less a daily fact of life on the job in the information technology industry.  As a Realtor®, a client’s posturing that they would withdraw their listings didn’t motivate me to change anything about the marketing plan we had agreed to at the time we wrote our contract and the listing still sold within the pricing and terms we had set forth at that time. 

These days, as an internet entrepreneur, oppressive behavior serves as a signal that it might be time to fire the client.  Proceeding with people whose projects are fraught with self-serving drama is rarely worth the effort involved in their high maintenance, although some empathy and discussion can sometimes alleviate the  problem.  Yet, if someone wants to be a unhappy, they want to be unhappy and it is never worth entering into a battle of wills.  Let them be right and move on. 

If we enjoy what we’re doing, getting out of bed in the morning is never a chore.  Happy liaisons are not only much more fun.  Working with joyful people induces higher creativity for everyone involved. 

Roles and Responsibilities

Casting a stereotype, based a limited perception about the skills involved in that role, can be limiting for the individual contributor and dangerous for the type-caster.  Consider your bookkeeper, for example.  The joke associated with creative financing is well known to us all but, when your accountant suggests a financing solution that you’ve never heard of before and it helps you to forward a business goal, their creativity is a huge asset to your business. 

Financial Incentives May Not Be The Answer

A study on business creativity suggested that tying compensation to overall team results isn’t necessarily the ticket for inducing higher creativity OR better solutions.  In fact, the study’s results demonstrated that people who were focused on bonuses were less productive than those who worked for the love of the effort. 

Although there is a somewhat common belief that people will work harder if they are rewarded through performance incentives, concerns about negative compensation effects lead people to risk aversion, which ultimately affects creativity.  Ranging outside the norms of what is imagined is an outcome of being truly interested in the effort at hand, knowing that it’s OK to try anything that has potential to work, and believing that one’s suggestions are taken seriously and that their contributions are valued. 

How this Relates to VirtuallyMarj.com

As a Wordpress website designer,  the truth in the tagline at Codex is not lost on me.  Even though most people will never truly appreciate the elegance of some of the code they use, which the tagline describes as poetry, one’s ability to envision and develop it certainly requires a special sort of creativity. 

Personally, I get much more satisfaction out of consulting with clients, who have come to me for help with their marketing and branding strategies, and seeing the light bulb illuminate.  This happens when our discussions unearth something about their pursuits that is not obvious to them because they are too close to the proverbial forest to see the trees.  That is fun! 

Right Brained or Left Brained … Does It Matter to Creativity?

Our right brains influence our creativity, so science says.  Here’s a place for you to take a test, if knowing your brain’s preference is important to you.

I’ve known remarkably creative people whose claim to fame was clearly left brained.  The most renowned example is a former real estate client and friend of mine, Leo Hurwicz, who achieved Nobel Laureate status for his Economics Theory at the age of 90.  It was a privilege to know him and and memories of our talks are truly treasures for me. 

His special skill was mathematics, which is clearly left-brained and analytical.  Yet, his creativity allowed him to see beyond the equations and develop a theory that explained financial markets and ultimately garnered world-wide recognition. 

So, the moral of the story is to not hold yourself back if you are left-brained by nature.  Creativity is the product of what you believe is possible for you to do and it is nurtured by an environment where your ideas can expand to reality … regardless of your brain’s bias or your assigned role.

When you decide to work with a client, your business relationship has potential to develop into a friendship.  This can be very rewarding, as long as the boundaries between friendship and business are established and maintained. 

Very few people understand how awkward it can be when questions they are asking begin to encroach on the time you had set aside to relax.  Under most circumstances, gentle reminders that you are “off the clock” will be enough.  Conscientious people will never ask you to work for free and there is no reason to feel guilty about accepting compensation in exchange for your expertise. 

Here are a few gray areas that you may have encountered:

1. Someone expects you to do something for them which is a service for which clients normally pay.
2. You’ve earned an affiliate commission because someone clicked on your link and that person treats it as if they are owed services in exchange.
3. Sudden demands for a “finder’s fee” months after an introduction.
4. Promising future work for reduced fees.

Expecting Free Help

We’ve all hit financial speed bumps.  My first response to someone who asks me to work for free so they can preserve their cash is to suggest that they need to adjust their mindset.  This sounds brutal but it isn’t.  We are what we believe and, if we believe we are broke, we are broke! 

Many philosophies, including the Law of Attraction, conceptualize thought as energy that attracts like-kind energy.  If your thoughts are trained on what you lack, you will attract more of that.  In other words, your lack will increase.  This is so stupidly simple, yet so difficult to master! 

Placating your associate’s fears by working for free is a choice that you make based on whether or not the time commitment will put your real business obligations at risk.  We all like to help people out but, if you do, recognize that it can be a slippery slope.  Like silencing your barking dog with a treat reinforces bad behavior, your associate may expect that you will continue to work for them for free. 

Leveraging Affiliate Commissions

You’ve taken the time to set up accounts and establish affiliate relationships for products or services that you want to recommend.  Affiliate earnings are intended to be passive.  Thus, any expectation that you will provide services in exchange for an affiliate commission you’ve earned is flawed logic.  All that person did was click a link to buy something of value that they wanted. 

In the rare instance that someone insists they could have purchased the same product on their own, it may be their way of inducing guilt.  Don’t fall for it.  If you are like me, you have not overpriced your services to begin with and you’re worth every penny. 

Does this mean you should not offer affiliate links to clients and friends?  If you do, ensure that you disclose the fact that you will earn an affiliate commission and that it is their choice to purchase elsewhere. 

What Finders Fees?

True Story:  A year or so back, a “friend” asserted that he was owed 25% of everything that I had earned since we met.  This came out of nowhere so I was stunned when I realized he was serious. 

I explained that I would never have agreed to referral fees of that magnitude without having a formal contract in place.  This fell on dead ears.  His rage and desperation, coupled with some other observations about his online behavior, created an awkwardness that ultimately ended our friendship. 

Expecting Immediate and Repeated Help

Most people admire my intuitive grasp of technology.  I will always answer quick questions but, if I know that a request will take more time than I have available, it must be postponed.  When I find a solution, I take the time to carefully explain exactly what solved the problem, in layman’s terms, so people can more become self-sufficient. 

Some folks repeatedly return for help with the same things.  I don’t mind re-explaining but, if I can’t drop everything at the moment of their request, enduring unfounded accusations or complaints is unacceptable.  My rule is no tolerance for such bad behavior. 

Beware of Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

One client relationship relationship evolved into spending a lot of time exchanging ideas about Wordpress website design, CSS and Photoshop techniques.  Those sessions always began when they would ask a “quick question.”  Since my associate already had some skills, it didn’t occur to me that I was providing information they planned to use to start a new and competing business.  When they announced their plans, they invited me to become a resource, with the provision that I could not use my own business name or offer a link to my website.  I declined and wished them luck. 

The tactic of promising “future work” for a discounted rate is the proverbial Pandora’s Box.  In my experience, such requests better serve the requester.  In one extreme case, my willingness to work in this way resulted in many delinquent invoice payments and their expectation that the delayed payments would not compromise the development schedule for the project.   This particular client also neglected to mention very time-consuming development requirements at the time we settled on price and refused to discuss additional compensation.  When their behavior turned into abuse, they were summarily fired with no regrets … at least on my part.   

Choose to NOT Diminish the Value of Your Expertise

We all have unique skills to offer in professional liaisons.  The confidence you gain through exceeding customer expectations can lead to business expansion.  When your clients trust you, they will naturally recommend you who their friends and colleagues.  Referrals from such sources are the best kind of business.

Perhaps I am the exception but it perturbs me that the long and predictable sales letter page is being replaced by an optin form leading to a long-winded video which has no details about its length and takes way too long to arrive at a point. 

This trend reminds me of a desert character that I met recently on an outing.  Although the dialogue was entertaining, this person spent an hour telling my friend and I what he was going to tell us AFTER he told us why he was going to tell us what he was going to tell us.  Of course, we were free to leave at anytime but he seemed to have a need to tell his story, and I wanted to give him a chance.  In the end, it was a circular and one-sided discussion and he never really told us anything.  :D

But it was interesting to behold… 

Time is a non-renewable resource

How we spend our time each day is one of our more important decisions.  An email or link sent through Skype sometimes elevates my interest .  When the destination turns out to be a video landing page that provides no text to scan, the journey is predictable.  Someone is going to try to sell me something. 

While it is entirely possible that what they have to sell is something that I want or need, what is the benefit of biding my time through more than 30 minutes of self-aggrandizing dialogue, waiting to hear the price and being forced to endure so much “ but wait … there’s more” yammering? 

deep discount or inventory liquidation?

People don’t like to be convinced of something’s worth.  Idle curiosity led me to computing the discount of the bonus items for the most recent Video Sales Letter so I could report it to you.  The add-ons for this particular Video Sales Letter offer were “conservatively” valued at $38,731.  Yet, this internet marketer was willing to “give” them to me for $1,997.  That’s nice, but is it believable?   

If you are quick with a calculator, you’ve already determined that this is a 94.8% discount.  I’m fairly certain that opting into this offer would have led multiple upsells and an offer to have a trial membership with on-going fees of $97 a month, or more.  I’ve seen it before. 

But here is my point:  Liquidation sales are not a new idea.   In fact, Russell Brunson just had one and he didn’t pretend it was anything other than it was.  I truly admired that. 

ambiguity, logic and the law of averages

During the dialogue, the marketer informed us that his secrets had only been released to a handful of people who had proven to him, during 8 months of trialing his methods, that what he had found was not a fluke. 

What is a handful to an internet marketing millionaire with a huge list?  If the handful of people privy to the software and techniques have an 8-month head start, is there a prayer that these “hand selected niches” can be still penetrated and leveraged? 

Even though I’m basically an optimist, this sort of talk makes me skeptical.  I learned in the racquetball court that timing and position are everything in life.  In other words, creating the money-making idea or being part of the cadre of founders is the place to be if you really want to be if you want to cash in on something. 

If you are invited through a mass mailing, you are not in that group.  Applying their techniques to your current tactics has potential to improve your sales but please stick with your own niches.  Those “hand selected” niches are highly likely to be saturated. 

Passionate Pursuits

My viewpoint is that wealth will follow the pursuit of something that you already are interested in and will enjoy working with every day.  Using that base formula, your marketing, whether or not it is a Video Sales Letter, will genuinely convey your enthusiasm and have greater potential to become viral.  Your time spent researching the niche is time that you would be spending anyway because it is interesting to you.  Your targeted list is easy to acquire and grow because you are interacting with people naturally already, through Twitter, Facebook,LinkedIn and your blog. 

Identify those things that you truly enjoy and focus on what you like to do anyway and don’t invest yourself in the outcome.  It will come to you without a struggle if you maintain focus and don’t allow yourself to become distracted by the noise around you and frivilos get rich quick schemes.

PLR Websites are a tool used by internet marketers as a way to get your site online quickly, complete with content.  If you’ve ever worked with them in the past and have an interest in learning the underlying technologies that make a website work, the instructions and a little time are more than adequate. 

Everyone working on the internet must be aware of the rising popularity of Wordpress.   If you aren’t, feel free to contact me to learn more about how you can leverage this amazing software for your websites, beyond the traditional blog. 

Under the Covers

 Wordpress Websites require knowledge of more than simple HTML to set up correctly.  Wordpress is a Content Management System (CMS) that uses databases for content storage and PHP scripts to access that content for presentation on a website.  Learning how things all work together can be a rewarding journey if you like knowing how things work.  If you have limited experience with technology and become impatient when things don’t go as expected, your project can be less than fun.

 The whole idea of PLR is that you can purchase content, slightly modify it, and put it up as your own.  This permits the ability to begin creating a web presence with a minimum of effort and can also save on expense of hiring someone who can adequately translate your vision into a functional website for a product or service launch.  If your goal is to monetize a site quickly and you lack the base technical skills you need to read into the instructions,  you are likely to be confounded by a PLR Wordpress Website purchase.

 PLR products will give you all of the information that you need about installation, usage and reselling privileges.  There are some generalized guidelines but PLR products do have differences so reading the license for your new software is advisable.

 Wordpress Database and Security Matters

A simple Wordpress installation creates 11 tables, at this time.  Wordpress requires that certain things are set up in order for the software to operate correctly.  These specialized data are stored in various tables within the site database.  The list of items includes a site URL and blog URL, if it is different.

 While reviewing the installation script for a recent project, I saw that the PLR Product had altered the standard Wordpress Installation script, apparently in an effort to bypass the need to make these changes in the database.  All things being equal, uploading the database export to the destination database on my client’s servers was easy.  As I analyzed the data that was stored in the tables, however, I realized that the instructions lacked very important information for truly owning the site and its data.

 Another observation that I made about the setup script was that it didn’t follow secure Wordpress Website installation practices that have been recommended for more than two years.  As we are all painfully aware, website security is critical … especially if it is a source of income for you.

 A new user of Wordpress, who may have been misled into believing it is a one-click install would not have known what to look for, let alone how to change it. 

Wordpress Setup

 No one that I know puts up  a website, Wordpress or otherwise, just for the sake of having a website alone.  At least I hope not!    The whole idea of having a website is that you want traffic to your site so you can share some specialized knowledge, build authority in a niche or campaign about products and services that you might be offering.  Once again, knowing what settings affect the visibility of your new Wordpress website are the key.

 The PLR software package that needed to be installed did not have the privacy settings nor ping list optimized for broad access to the new site.  Indeed, the website was up as predicted but nothing in the installation instructions addressed these critical and necessary changes so it could be found through organic searches and paid advertising campaigns. 

 The Virtually Marj Service team uses standardized procedure for optimizing settings, as well as a standard list of plugins for analyzing and improving traffic to the site.  This is our “secret sauce” so I won’t be laying all of that out for you here but if you’d like to know more about that, you can contact me. 

To PLR or Not to PLR, that is the question

 PLR Products are a great way to jumpstart your business and website and it is wonderful that people take the time to create them.  As with all business decisions, choosing the “right tool for the job” is an important step along the way.  As for PLR Wordpress Websites, they are not recommended for people who do not have the underlying skills to read into the instructions or who don’t have staff to make them work properly as a business building tool

We all set Goals in some form.  At the time we establish them, they feel exciting and new.  Sometimes are goals are set with a purpose of diverging from our ordinary daily lives.  These sorts of ideas enthuse us, no matter what they are related to. 

One such goal could be to branch out in your business.  Many pursue the goal of passive income and this doesn’t always entail joining a business opportunity or MLM, thank goodness.    The difficulty that exists, however, is that you can become swept  away by your primary income-earning activities because you enjoy what you do, have built a reliable reputation and you like the people with whom you are working. 

My primary business is project based.  A very high percentage of that business is returning customers with new projects.  If the experience of working with them in the past was mutually beneficial, as well as being fun, I have no qualms about taking on their requests.  On the other hand, there are some clients whose projects I can’t wait to finish and with whom I will not work again. 

New projects and cash flow are great to have, and hard to say no to.  But, with only 24-hours in a day, you begin to wonder if you are spreading yourself too tasks to forego are the ones that aren’t producing income for you yet .  It is true that you can outsource some aspects of your business but, when YOU ARE THE COMMODITY that people are seeking, you ultimately must decide if you want to decline new business so you can stick with your business building plans. 

This is what I lovingly refer to as a Creative Conundrum. 

The best strategy that I’ve found for achieving balance between what I have and what I want is to list all of the things that I want to do, as well as the things that I must do, on a schedule of some sort.  Don’t forget to set aside “me” time. 

Blocking time is not a new concept but it works.  In fact, this was the basis of Steven Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.   Among other things, Covey recommended establishing your task list, prioritizing those tasks and checking them off or updating their status on a daily basis. 

A little more tedious, but also helpful, is keeping some sort of log on how your time is being spent.  If you do this for a week or so, you will notice patterns in your days and where you are spending time that takes away from your business building or income generating activities. 

Once you have a handle on how your time is being spent, you are in a position to determine what you can spend less time on, or possibly stop doing, so you have more time to pursue your creative goals.   Those are the things that you really wanted to do when you imagined them, right?

Yep!  It happened again today.  I was invited by a Skype friend to look into a free program.  Their claim was that it was free to join and I would not have to pay anything to earn money.  I’ve been around the internet long enough to not believe claims of overnight wealth and to distrust “free” joins but I indulged their request to click on the link anyway. 

Non-English Landing Page

The first thing that I noticed was that the page was in German.  I have a toolbar installed that allows me to instantly translate to English so this wasn’t a huge issue. 

Analyzing the Offer

The first sentence on the landing page was a disclaimer: 

This is no joke and no dream … You get paid money, because investors want to distribute funds.

If you have to begin by telling stressing the fact that your incredible program is really incredible and go on to suggest that investors want to give away their money, I’m immediately suspicious.  Investors want to leverage their money by investing in things which will earn them money.  At least that is what I’ve learned… 

The landing page encouraged me to read the terms and conditions, although I would have done that anyway before filling in any forms.  It’s called due diligence.   

Free Isn’t Always Free

The second paragraph on the Terms and Conditions page said this: 

Once you receive the gift, you have to pay into this program.

I didn’t need to read any further.  Clearly, if payment is required to benefit from the program, it isn’t free. 

I responded to my Skype pal by copying and pasting that text into our chat window.  I added that I was a conscientious objector of cash gifting programs and that having to pay into it made it clear to mea that it wasn’t free.  I thought that would be the end of it but they replied that I had misunderstood. 

I re-copied and pasted the same text into our chat window and told them, in addition, that there was nothing ambiguous about the phrase: YOU have to pay into this program. 

Denial of the Facts in Front of You 

My Skype pal protested by saying that “no one had explained this” to them.  I suggested that reading the fine print before joining anything, free or not, is a personal responsibility … and it is! 

Are you entitled to a do-over if you sign a contract that binds you to a commitment you didn’t understand just because you expected it to be explained to you?  If you are of legal age, the answer to that question is no. 

I’ve worked in a business where contracts were necessary to proceed.  I would spend no less than an hour going over the terms and conditions that my clients would be obligated to once they put pen to paper.  I took pains to explain what their obligations were, as well as the authority they were granting to me as their agent.  I never put paperwork in front of someone who might later claim diminished capacity because they had had a few drinks.  I scheduled the meeting for another time and instructed them to hold off on the beers until after we were finished. 

Not everyone will do this … especially if they are promoting a get-rich-quick-and-easy internet program. 

Money for Nothing? 

Call me old fashioned or jaded, but I’m not of the mindset that money will flow into your bank accounts without applying some effort. 

When I was new to online marketing tactics, I got suckered into things.  We all do.  Once I abandoned the belief that the hype was more than it was and began to focus on things that I enjoyed doing anyway, which could earn income for me, my life has been simplified and I’m having a lot more fun too. 

Many of the people whom I used to communicate with on a daily basis are still chasing the dream of instant wealth and fly-by-night programs.  For them, and for those of you who pursue similar things, I wish you the best of luck and encourage you to return and post your results to my blog. 

There are no Magic Wealth Pills.  The recipe for business success is the same:

1. List the things that you are interested in doing
2. Analyze those things to determine if their might be a market for you to leverage
3. Construct a plan for pursuing that business
4. Devise a list of measurements you can use to validate your success
5. Determine the best approach for marketing and promotion
6. Follow your plan and monitor results
7. Know when to revise or abandon the plan and try the next thing on YOUR list

For those of you who may have missed me, please accept my apologies for having neglected my blog for so long, .  The thrill of operating your own business comes complete with the opportunity cost of having to keep your nose to the grindstone, at times. 

There are some clients whose expressions of gratitude almost makes you feel guilty about getting paid for the job.  I have recently had that experience. 

Here is a quote from a rave that one of my clients just wrote on their blog, about the service they received from me: 

If you are blogger, you know that  your site is not unlike your child.  And when your child is sick, you tend to stop functioning.  You want answers.  You want certainty.  You want experts.  And we got absolutely none of that from our hosting provider Network Solutions.  From Network Solutions we got ticket numbers, escalation promises, and false assurances.  So we panicked and called in the real expert.

Virtually Marj. Wordpress developer extraordinaire.

We love Virtually Marj for the following reasons:

She knows her stuff

She delivers exactly what she promises on time.

She is a human being.

I swear that I blushed when I read what they wrote.    If you want to see this post on their site, visit MothersofBrothers. 

Even though their praise is directed at me, the three things that they noted are essential to anyone’s  success in business so it bears repeating. 

If you don’t pretend to be good at something that you aren’t, are clear about deliverables and time frames, and  remember to  be yourself, you have a recipe for success.