Making the Most of Spring

Some pollen snuck its way up my nose the other day, I sneezed, spring had announced its presence. How was your winter? Great, crappy, somewhere in-between? What’s the game plan for the Easter season, more of the same? Let’s hope not.

The beauty of routine is derived from the way we get extraordinary tasks done effortlessly. How did the dogs consume that 40lb bag of food in a week? One heaping stainless steel bowl at a time, that’s how. An uglier side of routine is the way it defeats our creativity, undermines our risk taking ability, and shuts down our extracurricular ambitions, Cantonese lessons anyone?

Make this spring as productive as it is different from any other spring in the past by embracing what I call bonus time.

Bonus time is that short glimpse of time before you go to bed and when you wake up that belongs entirely to you. I recall a story the pastor of my church told a few years back about how he finds 5 am the absolute perfect time to talk to God. No interruptions from others via phone, email, or in person gave this preacher the perfect time to connect with the Lord.

Devine inspiration is a funny thing, turns out at 5 am much can get done. So too is the case at 1 am. If you often end up on the losing end when battling for your time throughout the day, use these bonus spaces of time as your place to do what you so badly want to do.

New SEO Book Outline

New SEO, new era SEO, the new era of SEO, all are possibilities for title of my new book detailing the latest strategies, in, you guessed it, the world of SEO. For those that care about gaining and maintaining a presence in Google, and prefer straight talk instead of bibble babble posturing like most of these SEO firms offer, here is a short outline of what you can expect from the new book.

The format-

To call this a book is more than generous. It’s more like a workbook, or a guide, maybe a guidebook? It’s a short, to the point, use it, write notes in the margins, and then pass it on to a friend when done type packet of information. Each chapter of this opus will address a given newly minted SEO technique in the following three ways

-What It Is

-Why It Works

-Do It Yourself Tips

The crux of the piece-

How to Rank Quickly in Google for Little to No Money

Intro-

Why A New Era of SEO

Cost should not be an issue

Time to rank should be much faster than before

Focus should be on Google exclusively

Chapter 1-

Blog Comments Followers Allowed

Chapter 2-

Social Network Assets Robust Web Footprints

Chapter 3-

Frequently Updated Blog Content

Chapter 4-

Video Tags, Titles, and Distribution Methods

Chapter 5-

Selective Article Links

Chapter 6-

Everything Google

Chapter 7-

CMS Websites

Chapter 8-

Press Releases with Free PR Directories

Chapter 9-

Video Distribution Intelligently

Chapter 10-

AdWords For SEO

Conclusion and summary

As people become more sophisticated at searching things online SEO becomes easier for the business owner.

You no longer have to think in terms of ranking for a singular phrase, think longtail for easy obtainable results.

Regional businesses have the easiest ability to rank out of everyone.

A lot if not all the ideas in this report are available to you for free and can be done by you for free, or very little cost.

Coming in the near future to your favorite online bookstores.

Simplicity by Coffee Maker

The other day I was asked an odd question, what’s your favorite coffee maker? Maybe the question arose because the person asking it knew what a coffee freak I am. For those that don’t know, I run my business out of a glorified coffee shop. My taste in coffee often is quenched by strong bold blends. I like Kona, and Colombian. I enjoy multiple cups a day every day. My coffee brewer of choice? A $7 red coffee maker I picked up from Target a year ago.

This cool red coffee maker stands out in my otherwise black appliance filled kitchen. The design, while nice, is not what makes this coffee brewing machine so special. The simplicity of the machine is what makes it such a notable piece of mechanics. When asked to explain why I liked this cheap coffee maker from target so much my answer was as enthusiastic as it was immediate; it’s simple to use I explained.

This coffee making contraption has a single button that functions as both the on/off switch and the brew switch. When the machine is on it brews, when off it doesn’t. It’s as simple as that. Creating great websites is a lot like replicating the genius of design and function this machine so eloquently displays day after day.

Make your website do everything it needs to do in the absolute fewest steps possible. Let it stand out among the others by allowing for great design and colors on the page. And finally, make it affordable, whatever it is, the spirit of the internet is rooted deeply in affordability, so make your pitch one that focuses on value. Follow these rules when building a website and success will surely start to drip your way.

Measuring Momentum

Momentum in sports is everything, the more you practice the better you play in the game. In school momentum is incredibly important, the more you study for that history test the more likely you are to remember the answers to the toughest questions on it. Momentum in business, big surprise, is just as important.

Running a company is as much about championing momentum as it is anything else. If you’re a small business, make sure to share your momentum building goals with everyone on your team. If you’re a big organization, delegate to managers and stakeholders to share the same momentum building messages you’ve shared with them for so long. Make sure those messages go to every other member of the organization.

Without someone creating measurable goals of success regularly in a business, and delivering consistent praise upon achieving them a company might as well shut the lights off for good. Business today is competitive, as so many scholars have already noted, but in the information age it’s less about being the bear and more the fox. Being clever, especially online works wonders. You no longer have to spend a fortune to have the momentum building tools the big guys use.

Try to understand how people relate to one and other, and, gasp, relate to you. Find out what works and what doesn’t when it comes to creating a momentum building standard, and then pursue building it as fast as humanly possible. Whether it is a set of weekly goals, monthly goals, or simply a daily client satisfaction meter, anything that can show positive momentum is worth implementing.

Just as we feel warmer looking at a rising thermometer on a cold day, so do we feel more productive when we see the winds of progress lift the sails of our slowly rising vessel as it recovers from the recession.

Postscript-

Several months ago I became sick of not being able to illustrate to our team members how dramatically our daily sales reflected upon the health of our business. With no real way to share sensitive data such as our daily sales on regular basis via off the shelf web programs, I had one created.

One week later we were the proud owners of a website that updates our daily sales numbers in real time and translates them into an easy to follow line chart. All members of our home office have this chart on their desktops throughout the day, solidifying their ability to take part in the swings of our company momentum. When we miss a sales goal for the day we all share in the burden of making sure the next day it is reached. When we surpass our sales goal we all know it in real time, often causing for lighter moods around the office. Our future growth is not assured by this measure, but our understanding of it and full participation in it is.