Posts tagged Business Consulting
Making Money Online and Your First Goal
Jul 8th
“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am going to share with you, my faithful readers, a great goal to consider: How about setting a goal to make $250 dollars per month from your online business? How does that goal sound? Does it sound small? I hope so – I want it to sound small and achievable – doable, and yet there is a great reason why to choose this goal for your Internet business.
(Now, I know that many of my readers are not based in the United States and $250 USA dollars may not have any meaning for you. Let me try to find kind of a way to translate this into virtually any kind of money: In the USA, the minimum wage for most workers is around $7.00 per hour. At $7.00 per hour, $250 dollars equals about 36 hours of work – nearly a full work-week of 40 hours here. $7.00 per hour is the kind of wage that most people right out of high school will probably start at – without any particular speciality skills. So for you, whatever someone working an entry level job for 36 hours can expect to earn – that should be your initial monthly monetary goal. Does that make sense?)
Now, why $250 dollars per month? In study after study of families and individuals in the United States that end up declaring bankruptcy or become financially insolvent, the amount that they are short each and every month that finally builds and destroys their finances and credit, is around $250 per month. Interesting huh? For the vast majority of people, if they had a consistent additional $250 dollars per month of income, they could stay afloat financially. That is a great goal and a great starting place!
Now I know that the Internet is full of get rich quick schemes and some of these might even be real – let me repeat the might. Most of them are not real or they are certainly not sustainable. What I want you to consider is getting to a real and consistent and sustainable additional $250 per month from your Internet business. (If you are already way past this amount, and I know that some of you are, then consider what I talk about here from the standpoint of making your income more consistent and more sustainable. From past experience income that rapidly builds without a solid foundation can also rapidly decrease and that is no fun!)
There is another great reason to choose $250 dollars per month (or your local equivalent) from your online business as a great starting place. Once you are making a consistent $250 per month, you will have already built a great foundation that will let you move up rapidly and consistently from there. How long will this take? Come back next time and we’ll talk about that.
By the way, I have also set this goal for myself. Although I already make much more than this amount from my blog – in terms of getting hired to speak and coach, I do not currently make any income from my blog from product sales – so that is my initial goal – to make a consistent $250 each and every month from product sales and together, we will go over every step to make this happen.
Till next time…Jack
“Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.” ~John Quincy Adams
Have you come on board?
Jun 15th
“Suddenly, it seems as though all the world’s a-twitter.” ~ Newsweek
Okay, I’ll admit it. I was skeptical and I should have started sooner. I am by nature a early adopter of new technology, but in the case of Twitter, I just did not see how I could fit one more thing into my schedule. And for Twitter, I needed to fit a bunch of little things into my daily schedule and what was it going to do for me? It turns out that it could do a great deal. Within less than 3 days of joining Twitter and making just a few entries, I got hired for a speaking gig directly as a result of Twitter. Wow! Double Wow!
So, now I am a believer and if you are not already using Twitter, and your business has some internet component, then it is time for you to become a believer as well. I’m not going to go into the nuts and bolts of how to use Twitter – I’m just learning myself and I know there are many much more qualified people out there writing great information. Just go look for them. I will give you just a few links:
You can sign up for your own free Twitter account here.
You can follow me here as I learn about Twitter and grow my coaching and writing business.
You can follow Biz Stone, one of the cofounders of Twitter here.
That’s it for this blog entry. I have tons of great writing to get done this week. Very exciting!
Till next time…Jack
“Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app.” ~ TIME Magazine
What Do You Do When You Don’t Succeed?
Jun 4th
“Fall seven times, stand up eight”. ~Japanese Proverb
Last time I started to talk about what I do when I have set a goal – a result with a deadline – and I fail to achieve it. I might have achieved part of the goal – within the time that I had allocated, or perhaps I didn’t achieve any of the goal. Either way, what I do next is critical.
I’m going to start first by talking about what I don’t do.
- I don’t beat myself up.
- I don’t tell myself that I’m a failure.
- I don’t make myself feel terrible.
- I don’t make excuses (although I do look for reasons and patterns).
- I don’t quit.
- I don’t blame anyone else (even if they were involved).
All of these items involve negative motivation and although I recognize and use the power of negative motivation – moving away from something that you don’t want, I don’t start here when I am looking at goals that I failed to achieve in the time that I had given them to be achieved.
So what do I do and what do I coach my clients to do? Come back next time and we will start to give you a nice clean and highly effective pattern to model. Bye the way, how many of you have seen the Disney movie Meet the Robinsons? If you haven’t, go find it. I you have seen it, watch it again and look for the empowering beliefs and great self-talk that is nested into this movie. I just love it!
I was saddened to read today about the death of the American actor David Carradine. When I was a young man looking for role models, the show Kung Fu staring David Carradine was a favorite of mine. I still own much of my love of helping people and many of my empowering beliefs to this show. Thanks David (and of course the show’s writers and producers). You can read more about David here and here.
Till next time…Jack
“He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else”. ~Benjamin Franklin
Your Vision of the Future Part Three
Jan 21st
“Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.” ~Mark Twain
How did you do with the inventory of your dreams? Was it fun to write them down? How were the timelines? Did you find that most of your goals were many years away? If so, then go back now and add some shorter term goals – goals that you can create in the next year or two. Perhaps you found that most of your goals were things that you intended to complete in the near future – in this case go back and add some long term goals. These long term goals are in some ways your mission – what you are really here to accomplish in your lifetime.
That is all that you need to do today – just go and make sure that you a good mix of short term goals (things that you intend to accomplish in the next year or so), medium term goals (three to five years for completion) and finally long term goals (five years to twenty years or more). One last comment, if you aren’t excited by your goals, go back and rewrite them. Your goals should excite you when you read them. If they aren’t exciting, then you are not being honest with yourself about what you really want.
Till next time…Jack
“What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn’t have done it. Who was it who said, “Blessed is the man who has found his work”? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work–not somebody else’s work. The work that is really a man’s own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man’s work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.” ~Mark Twain
Could “A Simple Twist” Enhance Your Company’s Results?
Jun 30th
“Things do not change; we change.” ~Henry David Thoreau
Questions. I love a good question. Good questions take my brain in new directions and put me into different and useful perspectives. Let me ask you a few questions today:
- How is your company doing this year? Is it doing all that you want or need?
- When was the last time that you evaluated how you and your company perform critical tasks?
- When was the last time that you brought in an outside (not already part of your company culture) trainer or consultant?
- Did you know that there is a very strong correlation between you and your company’s commitment to ongoing training (especially outside training) and the ultimate success of your company?
I asked you these questions today to “prime you” for a testimonial. I had the pleasure of sharing the stage earlier this year with an outstanding trainer and consultant: Tim Murray of “A Simple Twist”. Tim immediately grabbed the attention of the audience, entertained the heck out of them, gave them some memorable new ideas and left them energized. He can breathe new life into material that you already need your employees to learn and he comes already equipped with a great breadth of timely and critical trainings that it would serve you and your employees very well indeed to see. If your budget permits, do yourself and your future a favor, and have a conversation with Tim about what he can do for you. More >