Derek Meyer

Happy Friday?!

Maybe some of you recall last summer I did an Olympic Triathlon. I have been thoroughly enjoying years of building friends and getting to know the staff of my local gym. However, I have never really lost any real weight or put on any additional muscle. Which I suppose is good. But in my mind its bad. I am about 20lbs over weight. A very athletic and healthy overweight. Couldnt tell if you looked at me. But at 6'1" 225lbs nobody should be walking around carrying this much weight unless your a runningback or tightend.

That being said, I have a grip of folks that are asking me to do CROSSFIT. A trendy new garage style workout that absolutely makes you want to puke after each workout. Its gruling. But only about 25 minutes long. However, you heart rate at 185bpm for 25 minutes is like running on the treadmill at level 10.5 for 25 minutes. In comparison.

Sounds hard. Yup. But, my dilemna is do I leave the comforts of my own gym, to venture out into the grueling world of this garage style workout? No pools, No gymnasium? No treadmills? No spin class?

After years of never truly losing weight, should I venture out into the world and test this trendy new idea????

I tested that theory on Christmas Eve and saw its potential. However, it costs more than my comfortable gym. But CROSSFIT, is like having a personal trainer at every workout. Plus, the idea of CROSSFIT is great. You are timed, your competitors are cheering you on and there is quite the close group that youm gain. So shouldnt that eliminate my need to be social at some point during my exercises.

I'll report back. Does anyone have any CROSSFIT feedback to give me?

Happy Friday!!!!

Derek

Happy New Year! Here are some crucial points for you new bloggers trying to get yourself up and running. We must continue to develop new trends, focus on our current ones and reflect on the challenges of the past. Blogging is critical to getting your name out there.

Courtesy of freefoto.com

Business blog is an incredible online marketing tool that saves you thousands of dollars but provides great business opportunities in just one click. Blogs are user-friendly, customized and flexible medium for disseminating useful information for effective positioning of your products in the market.


Companies engaging in business blogging have a definite edge over its competitors. Here are some advantages:

Word-of-Mouth. In a survey, there are currently 14 million blogs with 80,000 more being added each day and about 30 percent of the 50 million users are blog readers. Imagine how much gain your company will have, if your products are advertised through blogs. With Internet, information spreads so quickly especially if an impressive write-up goes with your product. Soon your blogs will be passed on to hundreds of possible customers.

Awareness and loyalty. Open communication with your customers creates trust and loyalty among them. Being there to respond to their questions and comments make them all the more willing to try your products and services.

Feedback. Blogs is good for product research and reviews. It would be easier to improve on your products if you observe your customers’ thinking and behavioral patterns. You can also take immediate action to your customers’ concerns.

Community halo-effect. Bloggers are reasonable, friendly and helpful. They are more than willing to create blogosphere of comments regarding your product. The only thing you have to do is embrace and take active part in the culture and your product will surely be considered in their next stop to the supermarket.


For better marketing results, actively promote your business blogs by submitting your blogs to blog search sites and directories. Do not forget to paste in with your blogs, your URL. Be sure that your blogs contain exclusive information with value and are always updated to keep readers popping in, read up your blog, move on to the next and click on again for updates.


Blog is like a setup booth in the biggest trade show on earth everyday. Marketing possibilities are just around the corner waiting to strike your sale scales up.


The Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds are important too in conjunction with your blogs to get the best benefits. Use effective keyword phrases to generate high ranking status in the search engine traffic. In this way you have better chances of people finding your website leading to your blogs. More traffic means more potential sales.


For this to be successful, you can use RSS for news update feeds which can be read through RSS reader application. This is a very useful tool for business and internet marketers as well.


If you are already convinced with the potentials of business blogs for marketing and targeting sales increase, your company is now ready to start blogging. But first, you have to be in tune with your company’s business objectives and determine if blogging will really help you achieve your goal.

1. Several blogs are dedicated to teaching people the do’s and don’ts of blogging, READ them! Include in your reading materials blogs that are consumer-based too to give you an idea.
2. Setup several test blogs right away.


If your initial try out with blogs worked well, you can now start setting up your blogs.

Study blog design. Blog hosting services provide pre-designed templates. But if you opt for paid blog service, you can ask your artist to design and layout your blog site to match the company’s identity and needs.
Choose a topic. Its good to have a line-up of topics you want for your blogs but be sure they are in consonance with your business objectives. This would be a test of your flexibility and open-mindedness since results may be going against the set objectives.

Remember the following safety measures in blogging:

• Legal issues are sometimes involved in blogging; it is safer to include disclaimers and limitations of liabilities;

• Corporate communication and legal department are responsible in educating the senior management on how blogs might affect business;

• Create blogging policies; set limits on who gets to blog and what information are allowed to be made public;

• Avoid outright marketing blog or you will shy away your readers;

• Make content updated, relevant and fresh;

• Reinforce the company’s core values; and encourage employees to use it.
  

• Start blogging and complete 20 posts before going to marketing.

• Begin marketing.

• Regularly monitor the coming ins and outs of readers and get updates. Then, measure your results.

• Adjust if needed. You can always play with your designs in the blog site as long as it remains to match the company’s identity.

• Strive to be consistent with your topic all the time.

• Try to have unrelated topics with general and broad appeal.

• Schedule updates regularly. Monday, Wednesday and Thursday would be best to update blogs.

Often people are intimidated by the idea of blogging. However, its a great marketing tool for anyone who is looking to grow their business and touch the lives of many people.

Blogging is a concept that started in late 90s. It used to be a way to comment an existing webpage, an opportunity for visitors and readers to react or voice out one’s opinion on the said page. What started as a single-sentence commentary has evolved into pages of personal take on just about anything and everything under the sun. As it continues to move forward, online advertising has tapped into the blog’s potential. Here are 5 reasons why you should use blogging as an Internet marketing tool.

1.Blogging is simple. The simplest way to get your piece on the net is through blogging. No skills are necessary… an average adult can read and type, or at least click a mouse. It’s like having a virtual piece of paper and you just write your ideas, experiences, new products, and hope that the truth behind your articles comes out and entice your reader to also try your product. If you have a PC and an Internet connection (who doesn’t?) then you can blog and advertise.

2. Blogging is authentic. In this day and age where advertising saturate our lives, we question the credibility of promoters’ claims. However, in blogs, real people share their real-life experiences, unscathed by paid advertising. Reading blogs about first-hand product use is like talking to people about their first-hand experience. You definitely want to buy a tried and tested product.

3. Blogging is free. Because blogging is yet to be proven as a mainstream online advertising media, most sites see it as something to augment current marketing tools and thus offer it for free. Any opportunity for free webtime is definitely a bonus especially to businesses that are starting up. Needless to say, paid blog pages can generate more income for your seriously growing business.

4. Blogging builds credibility. As you get more and more into writing your experiences on a particular product or industry, your readers come to realize that they can depend on your posts for their own information needs. As such, you become an expert on it; as a consequence, more readers visit your site and more bloggers link to your blogs. As companies and professional organizations notice the growth of your readership base, they may soon get in touch with you for advertising on your blog page, or make you an affiliate, which pays for every referral generated from your blog site.

5. Blogging builds your market. Unless you are a Hollywood star, chances are, only your Mom reads your posts. Mom has a lot of friends, so she lets her friends know how interesting your blog site is. But you need not depend on Mom to increase your readership base. Look into the following ways to build your market through blogging:

-By using your e-mail. Today, blogging is overcoming the e-mail’s popularity in quickly and effectively reaching and expanding a market. In this age of speed and quick access, logging in and downloading e-mail is simply taking longer than clicking into a blog site. Let them explore your site by using a short e-mail message as teaser to your blog site. If your e-mail is on an entirely different subject, use your e-mail signature to give a link to the site.

-By using subscription. An easy way to get your readers e-mail is to give them an opportunity to subscribe to your blogsite. Keep some exclusive information for your subscribers to entice readers to subscribe and give their e-mail address. Just be responsible in using their e-mail address, as the last thing you want is a comment on your blog that you are a spammer.

Articles Are The Quickest Way To Your Customers Trust

One way of promoting your website and service can be achieved for free. As an additional bonus, this “free” method can boost your sites and sales, doubling and even tripling your income.

Articles. One of the easiest ways to promote your website in order to generate traffic and increase your earnings.

How does this work?

Write articles relating to your website and submit them to “free content” submission sites. Easy to do, takes little time and can increase your website traffic, sales and of course, your income.

How can article writing boost traffic and income?

The article on the free content site contains a link to your own website. Readers, after reading your articles, may choose to click on the link and pay you an unexpected visit. Having them on the free content sites is also making these articles available to other webmasters who may wish to publish that article on their site.

If they do, your article will include a link back to your site. And anyone who reads the article on that site can still click on the link to visit your site.

As the list of your published articles grow larger, and more and more of them are appearing on different websites, the total number of links to your site increases also. Major search engines are placing a lot of significance on incoming links to websites so they can determine the importance of a certain site.

The more incoming links the website has, the more importance search engines attaches to it. This will then increase your website’s placement in the search results.

If your site is into promoting a product or service, the links that your articles have achieved will mean more potential customers for you. Even if visitors only browse through, you never know if they might be in need of what you are offering in the future.

There are also those who already have specific things they need on their mind but cannot decide yet between the many choices online. Chances are, they may stumble upon one of your articles, gets interested by the contents you wrote, go to your site and became enticed by your promotions. See how easy that is?

Search engines do not just index the websites, they also index published articles. They also index any article that is written about your own website’s topic. So once someone searches for that same topic, the list of results will have your site or may even show the articles that you have written.

And to think, no effort on your part was used to bring them to your site. Just your published articles and the search engines.

It is no wonder why many webmasters are suddenly reviving their old writing styles and taking time to write more articles about their site than doing other means of promotion.

Getting their site known is easier if they have articles increasing their links and traffic and making it accessible for visitors searching the internet. Since many people are now taking their buying needs online, having your site on the search engines through your articles is one way of letting them know about you and your business.

The good thing with articles is that you can write about things that people would want to know about. This can be achieved in the lightest mood but professional manner, with a little not-so-obvious sales pitch added.

If you think about it, only a few minutes of your time is spent on writing one article and submitting to free content site. In the shortest span of time also, those are distributed to more sites than you can think of. Even before you know what is happening, you are getting more visitors than you previously had.

If you think you are wasting your time writing these articles, fast forward to the time when you will see them printed and wide-spread on the internet. Not to mention the sudden attention and interest that people are giving your website and your products or services.

Try writing some articles and you will be assured of the sudden surge in site traffic, link popularity and interest. Before you know it, you will be doubling and even tripling your earnings.

Nothing like getting benefits for something you got for free.

The Right Attitudes to Achieve Your Goals -

If you want to be truly successful in how you achieve your goals, then you need to harbor the right habits and attitudes that will keep you on track. There are a number of good traits you have to keep for life to discover that more opportunities and good things are bound to happen, if only you allow these. Here are some of the features that great people had.

Being Industrious

Hard work always pays off. There is no single famous individual person in history who achieved several goals in life without working it off. Being industrious means working harder than anyone else, studying more than anyone else and even suffering more than anyone else. You have to understand the importance of delayed gratification as you work towards your ultimate goal. To begin hard work, you can begin by fixing your schedule, writing down tasks and functions of the day and finding the right people and resources that can assist you. Keep in mind that you have to be as independent as possible to finish more in the long term.

Discipline and Consistency

Discipline is what separates the leaders from the followers. If you truly want to make changes in your life, you have to understand doing things even if you do not want to at times, and maintaining excellent quality and optimum performance each time. Being consistent is intertwined with patience, wherein you continue performing well, regardless of the situations and hindrances, to render the results you want in the end.

Discipline and consistency are also interrelated, in the sense that discipline breeds consistency. If you continue practicing good habits and sticking to the functions that lead to your main goal, you will find it easier to do over time. You will change as an entire person and experience the opportunities that come with being dedicated.

Resilience

Problems are a part of every man's life, but it is the resilient person who always prevails and achieves their goals. You need to learn from your past mistakes and convert these into more productive actions the next time. Learn to pick yourself up after each fall and put in double effort to become better. Some of the most successful people, as well as those who truly left a mark in history are known to have faced big difficulties and resentment before they let others understand their own way of doing things.

Optimism

You need to stay positive about your situation, regardless of the problems that you face. It is vital that you stay optimistic and always believe that you will get to your goal, no matter what. If you tell yourself that you will reach it sooner, chances are you will. It might help to believe in the powers of the Universal Law of Attraction which draws opportunities toward you just the way you intend to, and in the right intensity as you desired.

Patience

Some goals are very big and will take time to accomplish. Do not allow yourself to think that some goals are just too huge to be possible. Be specific and set goals that are attainable to your current situation and start working to achieve these. You can break it down into smaller tasks that are much easier to do within the given timeframe that you have.