Working ON the Business, Not IN it

It is very easy to work in your business. In fact, taking care of the day to day operations is vitally important to staying in business.

However, it is just as important to work on your business.

The good news is that it can take less time to work on your business than in it. I recommend my clients to take one afternoon a month and answer five basic questions that could make a huge difference in the success of their endeavors. They are: Why are you doing what you are doing? What are your core values? What is your mission? What is your strategic vision? And, what is your strategy? Knowing the answers to these questions is so important that I have created a series of free webinar/workshops (I call them Webishops) to help entrepreneurs at www.webishops.com. These Success Planning Webishops help you to answer each of those five questions, and each on only takes 20 minutes to watch. It is only by working on your business that you will find the new opportunities that are waiting for you.

My dream job

What I love most about being an entrepreneur

is that I can follow my heart. I spent the better part of two decades working for major corporations in the IT industry. During that time, there were many things I had to do because I would lose my job if I did not do it, but they went against my personal core values. These were not illegal, just actions meant to line corporate profits before benefitting the customer. Now, as an entrepreneur, I can set my businesses up from the start with the same core values I have rather than following the core values of someone else.

Action Steps

The word “goals” almost makes your chest tighten and stress levels rise.

The knowledge of so many past goals that have failed may even lower your self-confidence.

So stop making goals.

Create a vision for your future instead. What do you want to be able to say/do/feel about yourself that you cannot say/do/feel now? Get as specific as you can. Don’t just say “I want to lose weight,” nobody likes to lose anyway. Turn it to a positive, like “I want to be able to fit into size ** jeans,” or “I want to eat 2 healthy meals a day and work out 3 days a week.” Don’t make your vision out of reach.
After you have your vision down, create action steps. What is one small thing you can change now to get one step closer to your vision? Is it changing one junk food snack into something healthier? Is it planning a 10 minute workout once a week? Start small. All the past failures may have eroded your confidence. Small successes will help to build it back up.
And if it doesn’t work, don’t consider it a failure. Figure out what went wrong, what you can do to overcome that, and try again. As long as you keep trying, you are not failing.

I Hear You – What does it mean to be a leader?

The word leader has been getting some mixed definitions lately.

A leader is simply a person who has influence over other people. A leader is not necessarily a manager. A manager is a person who is hired to manage employees. Anyone can be a leader, but it is not easy to be a good leader. A good leader will listen to the advice of the other people in the group and act on that advice. Of course, you cannot please everyone all the time, but a good leader will always do what is best for the group in general. And the only way to find out the needs of the group is to listen.

Learn more Introvert Leader skills by reading .

Book: Timeless SEO Secrets

The book Timeless SEO Secrets that Search Engines Don’t Want You To Know About is now available at Amazon.com and Smashwords.

Dr. Ty Belknap has been working with computers since 1982. He was a networking engineer for companies such as Compaq, Hewlett Packard, and Microsoft.
He first started optimizing web sites in 1995 (before it was called SEO). In 2002, he broke away from Corporate America and started his first web design and internet marketing company. Since then, he has successfully put over 3,000 keywords onto page one of the search engines for almost 200 different industries.
In Timeless SEO Secrets, you will learn how to utilize the power of blogs, domain names, web sites, hosting, and much more to propel your web site to the top of the search engines, Without Knowing How to Code. Find out what the King of the Jungle is in SEO; learn several SEO myths, and much more in this no-fluff eBook.
Whether you are a web designer, SEO expert, internet marketer, or know little about the internet, you can use these secrets to get to the top of the search engines.
Do you run a business that has nothing to do with the internet? Use these tips to guide your SEO professional, and to check to make sure they are doing their job.

Tips for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Being an entrepreneur myself, and having run a web development business for almost two decades, I have seen many ecommerce businesses come and go. And, with the statistics from the Small Business Administration that say up to 85% of all businesses have been failing within 18 months of starting, the odds are against entrepreneurs.

But there are steps entrepreneurs can take to better those odds.

Introvert entrepreneurs, read my book .

Perfect is the bane of good enough

We all like to have things just right.

But perfection is the bane of good enough. It is almost impossible for anything to be perfect, so ask yourself why you are obsessing over things that others may not even notice. If you are trying to impress someone, is perfection worth the stress it creates? Or do you intentionally nit-pick everything so you can avoid certain people that show up? What is behind the perfectionism? What would life look like if you did not have the need to make everything perfect? Would it ruin your day; or would it actually give you the chance to relax and enjoy it more?

Measuring Content Marketing Success

How is your content marketing coming along?

It has been interesting trying to gauge metrics with so many different sources across multiple web sites, and no one metric works for everything. We use Google Analytics for our general web sites. It works well, but Google has recently started charging for advanced metrics so the days of free statistics are gone there. We also have metrics provided by our hosting (www.koolwebhosting.com, another part of the Port Bell Consulting Experience), and our webinars have their own metrics. Using all three, we can gauge who read, watched, or listened to our content and where they came from.

If this is starting to sound complicated, your are right, it can be. Contact us if you would like help gauging your content, or other, marketing efforts.