On Another gem from “Grow Rich! : With Peace of Mind” by Napoleon Hill.

This one is particularly appropriate today, since it is my second-to-last day at my current job.

A job that is past opens a new door to the future. Suppose you have lost your job through no fault of your own. Suppose, then, you nurse a great resentment and a festering hatred of your former employer who was so unjust to you.

[…]

What if you are questioned about your former employer? Say noting bad about him! What was bad must always stay in the past and never be allowed to hinder the future.

Jobs also seem to be favorite spots in which to grow grudges. Of course you have rights and it is no part of success or peace of mind to allow yourself to be stepped upon. Many little scratches in human relations, however, are nothing but that, just little scratches, and need not be reacted to as though they were deep wounds.

[…]

But a nursed grudge is a viper in the bosom. It is a treasured negative, and you not only let it take away your peace of mind, you also encourage the formation of ulcers and many other ailments which the mind can inflict upon the body. Close the door!

It is wonderful and gratifying to see how the habit of closing the door upon the past becomes one of the greatest of sustaining habits. It helps you take possession of your own mind and condition it for the attainment of any purpose you desire.

-p.30

Technorati Tags: napoleon hill, peace of mind, personal development, self help

On The Warrior Forum, one suggestion was to read and learn from the classic sales and personal development books. Taking the advice, I dove right into “Grow Rich! : With Peace of Mind” by Napoleon Hill. It really is a great book, and I can see that so much modern “self-help” got its start with this one.

One paragraph from the book really spoke to me as a marketer and a budding entrepreneur. It speaks directly to motivation & money-guilt in a refreshingly direct manner.

Is there a definite connection between being wealthy and having peace of mind? There is a connection, but it is not absolute. There certainly are poor people who have peace of mind; but they are far more rare than folklore would have us believe. You need not be a millionaire, but without sufficient money you are cut off from much in life that sustains the spirit. If you are continually worrying about where your next meal is to come from - when you’ll be able to get your shoes repaired - how you are going to pay your dentist bull - how many more years your how can go without paint - you have no peace of mind. If your lack of funds forces you to live in a shabby neighborhood so that you constantly worry about the influence upon your children, you have no peace of mind. If you cannot occasionally buy and cherish something that is beautiful - if you cannot afford a vacation you really enjoy - if you cannot partake of a motion picture or a stage show which you know is very much worthwhile - your mind does not have the chance to satisfy itself. Money brings much good into your life and much that nobody should have to do without.

Technorati Tags: napoleon hill, personal development, peace of mind

I spent last week retooling most of my web properties to include ads. It paid off! I’m quite pleased with my first week earnings, and now I’m thirsty for more. I’m going to start focusing on building my traffic more quickly.

Paul Stamatiou has taken the time to write up his tips to boost blog traffic, and I’m going to be implementing and testing them across the board on all my sites. In summary, they are:

• Usability
  
  The site should have style, according to Paul. This article suggests otherwise, that fast-loading ugly sites sell equally as well. I’m going to have to split-test this. I do plan to make sure that every site has an easy way to contact me and to find out more about me.
• Content
  
  Stay away from reblogging, have a strong sense of your site focus. This article notwithstanding, I think I do a very good job with this already. It is just so boring to add a “me too” voice to every thing, just for the sake of adding posts. Every site of mine is focused on something that interests me. In fact, I think the focus makes it easier to come up with topics, not harder.
• Technorati
  
  Use Technorati to tag posts. I do this on every blog, and it nets a fair number of hits, especially for current hot-button items.
• Blog Rings & Networks
  
  I’ve written about this on my article 5 one time site promotion tips that pay off big. I try to make my sites as easy as possible to find when you are searching for things I’ve written about. Adding myself to such sites as IceRocket makes this ever more straightforward.
• Use FeedBurner
  
  Make it easier for people to subscribe to your feed, and for you to track how many are subscribed.
• Use a dedicated domain name
  
  I already do. I’ve never been tempted by the free services. I’m just too addicted to control. It is so easy to set up a hosting account! Use the signup code “ZEFAMILY25″ and get $25 off any subscription to Dreamhost. Last time I looked that makes the minimum price about $30 per year for the basic fully hosted acount. Dreamhost will even install Wordpress for you.
• Learn about your readers
  
  Use stat tracking packages to do this. Paul likes Mint for this, but I just use AWStats, which I think may be more accurate, since it is server-side. You need a fully-hosted environment for that, of course.
• Try to get linked on popular sites
  
  He suggest trying to get linked on sites like del.icio.us or Digg. Really any a-list link will help immeasurably.

Technorati Tags: blogging, traffic boosting, advice

My top five favorite forum sites for marketing and such:

• Warrior Forum - A marketing based forum, refreshingly likely to give real help and examples instead of constantly telling people to learn it for themselves. It has a couple innovative features, including “buy a warrior a beer”, and “Special Offers Forum” where you find discounts “especially for warriors”.
• Digital Point Forums - Huge and active. This site is a daily read for me. It covers SEO, Adsense, Marketing, General Business, and has a funny underground section.
• Abestweb - “Where the affiliate community comes together”. Focused on affiliates, with great threads such as which affiliate programs actually pay out what they owe, and which ones have “problems”.
• WebHostingTalk - Talks about hosting and all the issues around that. Excellent thoughts and breaking information from people who’ve been around a long while, and who know what they are talking about.
• Fat Wallet - This is a “deal site”, where people who get a kick out of marginal deals come to play. If you are fast and lucky, you can find some incredible deals from this site. I use it more to see which was the deals are falling right now. New stuff shows up here very fast.

I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about Marketing and site design. It is not natural for me yet, and I have an immense amount to learn.

a lot of programmers might not spend as much time, since the topic seems so simple. That’s exactly the point, it is simple, so it is hard to understand all the ramifications. The guys in Call To Action put it much better than me:

As Allen Weiss explains in his article, it’s hard to really understand simple ideas. In fact, it’s often harder than remembering complicated ideas. With complicate ideas, like those in mathematics, software coding, and finance, we tend to really “get it” because we spend so much time trying to understand the ideas.

With simpler ideas we tend to spend little energy (often because we think that it warrants little energy to understand) and often mistakenly think that we understand something because it appears to be simple.

In a lot of ways marketing is simple. For example, the basic ideas behind branding are actually very few. Still, people like to see these same ideas presented in thousands of different ways. People want thousands of different examples that expose the same basic idea — isn’t this a waste of time and money?

The reason for this seemingly strange inefficiency is that marketing is based on tacit know-how. Tacit know-how is difficult to write down and can only be learned by doing. Learning to play an instrument is based on tacit know-how, as is learning to cook and virtually every other practice that requires reading/learning and then doing (many, many times) before you really understand it.

- P.41

This book is full of quotable sections, that’s the great part about reading books written by professional speakers. My second gem from “No B.S. Wealth Attraction for Entrepreneurs” (Dan Kennedy) is from his chapter titled “Passion.” It is a welcome counterpoint to the oft-heard “alternative wisdom.”

“There’s Also a popular metaphysical idea - don’t pursue money, pursue passion. Pfui. […]

The very unbusinesslike arrangement would be: passion, purpose, market, market demand, money. Pursue your passion, indulge your purpose or mission, with no regard for a market or market demand, and hope to attract wealth. I again say to you that hope is not a strategy.

The business arrangement would be: market, market demand, purpose, passion, money. Identify a viable, preferably underserved market, determine market demand (what it wants most and will pay for), then align your purpose, and do something for the market that you can feel passionately about.”

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, dan kennedy

I just finished reading my latest marketing/entrepreneur book, “No B.S. Wealth Attraction for Entrepreneurs”, by Dan Kennedy. This is the first book I’ve read by him, and I am impressed.

He certainly didn’t offend me, though it seems to me that he prides himself on being blunt and usually offending people in some way. That’s OK, I’m hard to offend. In fact, the quote I’m sharing in this post is one of his more-likely-to-offend.

“If I wake up three mornings thinking about you and I’m not having sex with you, you’ve got to go. P. 160

I think that sums up one part of the attitude he displays in this book. You have to be clear in vision, you cannot be scattered, or allow others to distract you, or to "vampire" your time.

Technorati Tags: dan kennedy, time vampires