If you’ve been trying to create a successful internet business but seem to be coming up against one challenge after another, still not making a profit, I highly recommend you watch this video.
In this video, leading copywriter and Internet marketer, Brett McFall, shares the key points for earning money from an Internet business.
The areas Brett covers seem so simple, yet often missed by so many people.
Grab yourself a cuppa and make time to watch this video today.
You may have heard of Stephen Covey’s best-seller, 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People. This is a great book and well worth reading for anyone who is keen to become more effective in both their business and personal lives.
But taking that book one step further is Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits For Managers: 
Managing Yourself, Leading Others, Unleashing Your Potential.
This is specifically for managers and was recommended to me by a friend about 18 months ago. Actually, he recommended it so highly he bought me the audio book. I listened to it at the time but decided to recap and go over it again last weekend.
Being an effective manager is not only good for your business, it’s also a highly regarded quality for integrating your business/work and family time, as well as useful within any community or sporting organisations you’re involved with.
So what are the 7 habits of effective managers?
Habit 1:
They are proactive. They demonstrate initiative and resourcefulness to get things done.
Habit 2:
They begin with the end in mind. They have a clear vision and that vision drives them on a daily basis.
Habit 3:
They put first things first. They execute superbly on the truly important goals and do not allow themselves to be sidetracked.
Habit 4:
They think win/win. They know how to help everyone win.
Habit 5:
They seek first to understand, then to be understood. They are superb listeners.
Habit 6:
They synergize. They solve problems creatively because they seek rich and varied input. They actively look for the new and better way to do things all of the time.
Habit 7:
They sharpen the saw. They continuously improve the productive capability of their people by knowing and leveraging their passions, talents and sense of purpose.
Some of these I was fortunate to have been taught in my early 20s by a supervisor at the time. I am very grateful that he was not only brilliant at managing our team, but he was open about why he made the decisions he did and about instilling those skills in each team member too. They have been extremely valuable for helping me run a successful small business for the last 14+ years.
If you’re keen to improve your own management skills then I recommend you read Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits For Managers.
(Click here to buy it from Amazon.com)
I’m sure you’ve heard so much advice recently about the power of social media sites and how you should be marketing your business with them.
You’ve got Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Digg, Tumblr, Stumbled Upon, Google Plus, Reddit, Pinterest and the list goes on (and on … and on … and on).
Good grief! After you’ve spent time on each of these social media sites each day, when are you meant to get any work done?
There’s no doubt about it … social media marketing is booming and is a fantastic marketing and brand-building strategy for small businesses, when used correctly.
However it should be considered one of your many marketing strategies, with a social media marketing plan making up a part of your business’ overall marketing plan.
As for which social media sites you need to be active on, I do not recommend joining every social media site you come across (and trust me, there’s literally 1000s of them!) Doing so means you’ll be spreading yourself too thin and in all honesty, not all of them are going to be relevant for your business.
What I suggest is that you find 5 or 10 social media sites that you feel comfortable with and where you’re likely to find relevant ‘contacts’. By contacts, this could be potential customers but it may also include potential colleagues, partners, mentors and other like-minded people you can learn from and share with.
Then, focus on building relationships with other members on those select sites. Remember, you’re looking for quality, not quantity. And you’re most definitely not there to sell and promote all the time.
You can find Social Media Managers now and many VAs (Virtual Assistants) also specialise in this area. So if you need help developing and implementing a plan for your business, I would encourage you to enlist the services of a professional to help you get this right.
You may even decide to outsource your social media marketing altogether. That is, you pay someone else to manage your business’ social media accounts on your behalf.
Or you may choose to develop a plan whereby you spend, let’s just say 30 minutes, each morning/afternoon on social media sites and then turn them off for the rest of the day. You’d be amazed how productive you can be during that 30 minutes if you know you have a deadline. Set an alarm if you need to.
And once you have a plan in place, it will be easier for you to connect with relevant people online, switch off to the distractions and reap the real benefits of social media.
The Best WordPress Plug-Ins
(According To Me!) 
From time to time I have written about a particular WordPress plug-in that I like but for this post, I thought I’d list 10 of my favourite WordPress plug-ins.
Now, these aren’t necessarily 10 plug-ins that I use on every WordPress site I build, nor the most important ones or the most functional (those will come in another post, very soon). Rather, these are just plug-ins that have really cool features that I LOVE!
Some are free, some are paid plug-ins, and others have a basic free version and a pro-version for a fee. But they are all extremely affordable and well worth the investment.
In no particular order, here are 10 WordPress Plug-ins I recommend you check out:
1. Super Affiliate Plug-in (SAP) – This isn’t just for affiliate sites though.
This is a plug-in I install on all my WordPress sites by default. It combines a number of useful features, including a Privacy Policy and Terms of Use templates, Robots Meta (for easily adding meta code to any pages you DO NOT want the search engines to index), some cool graphics, and much more. Watch my video demo on the Super Affiliate Plug-in here.
2. WP Google Maps – This Plug-in makes it so easy to add a Google Map to your WordPress site. There’s a free version that allows a fair bit of customisation, or if you want more options and features you can purchase the Pro version for just a few dollars. The free version has been sufficient for my needs but it’s great to know the extra options are available at a very affordable cost.
3. WishList Member – There are now a few membership site plug-ins available but this one is still my favourite. I love that you can have so many options and, best of all for my requirements, that you can ‘drip-feed’ content so easily.
4. Easy Timer – The Easy Timer plug-in allows you to add a countdown timer to your sites. This is extremely useful if you have an event or launch of some sort and want to count down to when it begins.
5. Ultimate Marketer’s Toolkit – I love how easy this plug-in makes it to add popular formatting options and graphics to your WordPress pages, including highlighting text and images like the one below. You can read more about this plug-in in my recent post here.
6. Sexy Bookmarks – There are a lot of social media plug-ins available and several that I really like. However, Sexy Bookmarks is my favourite. I love the way it looks, plus you have various customisation options and can pick and choose which social media site buttons you want to display on your Pages and/or Posts.
I wasn’t sure about including Sexy Bookmarks in this list of recommended plug-ins as it’s currently been removed from the WordPress.org plug-ins while the Shareaholic team make some changes and improvements to it. But if you go to this page you’ll find the link to the current version of the .zip file to download.
I haven’t posted that link here as it’s best to do direct to this page on Shareaholic’s site for their most recent updates.
Image only - shown smaller than actual size
7. Simple-Press Forum – If you’re considering adding a forum to your WordPress site, make sure you check out this plug-in. At the time I stumbled across this plug-in, I’d just forked out a couple of hundred dollars for another forum program … and it wasn’t able to do what we needed it to.
Not only has Simple-Press Forum been able to do everything I wanted it to, it was pretty easy to install and configure and the support team are brilliant if ever you do need help with it.
8. WP Squeeze Page – Again, don’t let the name fool you. This isn’t just handy for making squeeze pages. Apart from its other useful features, the main thing I like about this plug-in is that you can create a page on your site that doesn’t have the same header and sidebar, etc, as the rest of the site. That’s may not excite everyone, but there are times when this has been very useful for me.
9. Max Buttons – Another excellent, free plug-in, Max Buttons allows you to easily create buttons – like the one below – to add to your WordPress sites.
10. WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart – There are some really great eCommerce and shopping cart plug-ins available, but if you’re looking for something that’s free, easy to set up and – most importantly – easy for your customers to use, make sure you try the WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart plug-in.
There’s absolutely no doubt that there’s plenty of really cool plug-ins available. But there are also some important rules you need to remember if you are like me and get excited by how easy these plug-ins make it to add all these brilliant features to your site:
1. No matter how ‘cool’ a plug-in is, consider whether you really need it before installing it. I mean, do you REALLY need it?
Honestly, there’s no point adding cool features to your site if they don’t meet a purpose, especially if there’s any chance they may distract or annoy your visitors. So before installing a new plug-in, ask yourself if it’s going to make the experience better for your
visitors.
Or is it going to make it easier for you to manage the site?
If you can’t answer a definite yes to one of these questions, perhaps leave it off for now.
2. Remember also that the more plug-ins you add and customisation you do to your WordPress site, the more chance there is of there being incompatibility and other technical and/or display problems.
So go back to the last point and ask yourself, “Is this really necessary?”
3. Only ever install, update or configure one plug-in at a time. Then check your site in detail to make sure everything seems to be functioning correctly.
If you install, update or configure multiple plug-ins at once and there is an error with your site, it’s more difficult to go back and check which plug-in might have caused the problem.
That said … enjoy playing with your new plug-ins!
This video is an interview with Will Smith, where he shares his beliefs in why he is so successful. It’s only goes for a few minutes but I recommend you watch it if you’re keen to learn how to be the best you can be … a leader in your field.
Interestingly, in this interview, Will mentions that his favourite book is The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. This is also one of my favourite books and one I highly recommend reading.
