Deep into 2017, how are those New Year’s Resolutions hopping?

Well, the half-way point of the 2017 has come and gone.

Have you given up on your New Year’s Resolution? It’s not too late:

The biggest problem with New Year’s resolutions is “bait and switch”.
Let me explain: a resolution is just something that you resolve to accomplish.

The only thing you need to do in order to have a resolution is just an inward resolve that you are going to do something.

A New Year’s resolution is just something that you resolve to do in the New Year.
And a year is a long time to achieve that.

It’s only the middle of the year, you guys. It’s not too late.
Resolve what you would like to accomplish this year.

Remember, it’s your resolution for this year, and the year is not over. Half of it’s still left!

Before we go there, let’s examine the quality of your New Year’s resolution.
In fact, before we do that, let’s define weather or not you even made a real resolution to begin with.

Here’s one example:

Resolving that you want to do push-ups every day for a year is not a good resolution.
That’s an “everyday resolution”, not a goal for the New Year as a whole.
Yes, you can do push-ups every day, but that’s not your New Year’s resolution… your New Year’s resolution should be your “why”.
Why do you want to do push-ups? To tone your upper body. That’s your New Years’ resolution: to tone your arms and “get fit”–or “fitter”.

As long as your upper body is toned and firm, you have met your New Year’s resolution.
Breaking that resolution down into Quarterly, monthly goals, etc., comes after the resolution.

Remember, you’re not resolving to do push-ups each day (or sit-ups, or whatever) You’re resolving to get a firm, fit upper bod this year.

Why do we set ourselves up for failure each year? It’s because we mistake a resolution with a daily goal.
Very few people who get a firmer upper body do pushups every single day without fail. That’s because life happens.

When we mistake a resolution for a goal, we quit the first time we hit a hard day. Oh. I missed pushups today. I “broke” my New Year’s resolution.
No you didn’t. You can still be “resolved”, as in determined, to achieve that goal.
Remember, a New Year’s resolution is just something you resolve to achieve this year.

Write down what you are resolved to accomplish BY THE END OF THE YEAR.

Break that down into Seasonal goals. For example, take an arm measurement and subtract it from what measurement you want your arms to be;
alright so now you know how many inches you need to put on (or take off) by Spring, Summer, Fall, until you have reached your goal.
So, decide how many inches or centimeters you need to add or increase each month (depending upon whether your are losing inches or building muscles), and develop an action plan.

Be sure your plan is realistic

If someone else shared with you the same plan that you have, would you think it was unreasonable? Be fair with yourself. A year is a long time, but it may not be enough time for your goal, so plan accordingly
Think about planning a plan, rather than just a vague absolute.
So what exactly is a “vague absolute”? Is that just an oxymoron?
Nope. See, most goals are really vague (like “be happy”) and absolute
As in “be happy every day”.

A better “resolution” would be “Find out what makes me happy, and then GO for it!”
After you do the first part, give yourself a week to plan out HOW to do it.
For example: this year, I want to be happy. I want to find out what makes me happy. And then, I want to do, every day, what it takes to make me happy.

Now, you need to know that just because you don’t meet your goal the first month, doesn’t mean that you won’t reach your goal by December 31st. When I first started doing push-ups, I could only do three (pathetic, I know…) But by the third day, I could do eight. By the end of the week, I was doing 20. At months end, I could do fifty.
See, sometimes your goals will wax and wane in spurts. Daily goals shouldn’t be something you beat yourself up over, because
A. they are not good indicators of your chance of success and B. they are not resolutions. You need over-all goals AND daily goals to help you get there.

Remember…you aren’t a failure if you miss a day or two (or three or four. Or even a whole month learning this stuff). You are only a failure if you stop trying to reach your YEARLY resolution.
Keep the end in mind and the daily goals will happen.

P.S. I just want to add, if your goal is to lose weight, you definately need all of the support that you can get. Weight loss is TOUGH! And, it takes TIME to lose tons of pounds. More about this in my next post

The Lonely Marketer’s Newsletter

Dear Marketer,

I know you. You are busy, frustrated, underpaid and underappreciated. You spend hours on the computer and you are lonely.
Some mornings, you wake up and pound on the keyboard wondering if it’s even worth it; if your dream will ever happen.

Other days, you doubt your dream and doubt yourself, wondering if you are even doing the right steps to get there.

Once engaged in a “this is the big one” project, you shut yourself off for days from friends and family. Or, you do your work right in the living room, clicking and typing while family members hover over your shoulder, argue inches from you, and cats crawl on the keyboard.

If you have already hit “the big one” (as in, that winning online venture) you work for weeks tweaking and maintaining it. It consumes you.
If you haven’t found success yet, you work feverishly trying this new thing and that new approach, wondering if you should scrap it all and try a new project.

It isn’t easy starting at internet marketing, and it’s even harder doing it alone.
Which is why I started:

This isn’t one of those deals where you sign up for free marketing info and get a snippet of gobbledygook directing you off of your email to another site.
And this isn’t some teaser email that acts like it’s going to give you info, only to pitch its product.

These are purely inspirational and motivational.

The newsletters come about every two weeks, or whenever I have something important to say.

You can get it by signing up below:

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PREPARING FOR SUCCESS

The first step in Internet Marketing Success is choosing the right product.
If you choose the wrong product, you are wasting your time on everything else.

You need to sell a product that has a market. For example, if you were selling buggy whips, you wouldn’t be able to make very much money, unless you found a group of people who wanted buggy whips, and you would also need to find enough of these people to make it worth your time selling online.

Finding your “Target Market”

Your target market is just that group of people who want what you have. You need to find out who wants what you have, and then determine if there is an entire group of people who want it.
For example, if you were selling buggy whips, your target market would be the Amish. But since the Amish make most of their own products, you wouldn’t have much of a market to sell to.
What you need to do is find a product that has a big enough customer base for you to profit off of.

If you have a product that doesn’t have a large market, you can still make a profit off of them, provided there are enough people who want what you have. It doesn’t have to be a large group of people, just enough of them to make you a livable income
Here are some examples of products and their target markets:

• Electronics. Target market: Just about everyone
• Food. Target market: Everyone eats. You would have a market with everyone except maybe farmers. And even they tend to buy some of their food
• Soap— Almost everyone uses soap to wash their bodies with each day.
• Books—Although many people opt to use electronic devises for finding information, there will always be plenty of people who want to pick up an actual book to read.

Market Saturation

Now, just because a product has a large target market doesn’t mean that it’s the product you should choose to sell. Every single example I gave you above is about a product that has a large target market. However, the market is so large that there is very little room for you to muscle your way in and dominate the market. That’s called “market saturation”, and it’s why so many people fail at internet marketing: they pick a market that is so big, the competition is almost undefeatable.

What you want to do is to pick a product in a market that has a big enough customer base for you to profit from, but in a market that not a lot of people are selling in.

I hope that you have enjoyed this article.

Sign up below to be included in my circle, Guidelines for success. Members receive free weekly tips on how to prosper. Plus, it’s free.

 

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Giving your Business to God

Are you ready to tap into the biggest secret there is ever in Internet Marketing?

Are you ready to partner with the richest resource in the Universe?

are you looking for mystical secrets that will launch your business to the top? If you are, then it’s time to partner with God.

How does one partner with the Almighty? Is God really interested in my business? Does God have a plan for my business or does He even mind if I make it big online?

This ebook (and it’s free, by the way), covers all of these things.

And you don’t even need to leave your email address.

This author is deceased now, but he was a major leader in the Full Gospel Business Men’s association.

He offers this info free, so please don’t rip it off and sell it.

Is the vision worthy of you?

There was a man who was preaching a message to his audience.  All of the sudden, he stopped in the middle of his sermon and cried “Wait. Don’t jump! The answer is in your briefcase!”.

The preacher’s audience looked baffled, and he was as well. He honestly couldn’t tell you WHY he said what he said.

A while later, he found out why.  While taking a train home from a business trip, another man, a lonely man, contemplating taking his life, decided to first listen to a tape his loved one had packed away for him. He thought it was an “inspirational tape”, not necessarily a sermon.

Actually, it was both. Here’s why. When the lonely business man started that tape, he heard it played at exactly the point where it said, “Wait. Don’t jump! The answer is in your briefcase”.

He went to his briefcase and found that the one he loved had also packed away a Bible.

————

(um, okay, soooo, like what does that have to do with my vision?)

This morning I felt prompted to add this little “aside” to my vision casting sermon.

{Let me know if it helped anyone out there}.

Suicide is never the answer. People who attempt suicide have lost all hope.

I am convinced that all they need is a dream. But not just any dream, rather, a dream that is worthy of THEM!

Yes, you heard that right! Your dream must be worthy of YOU, I didn’t say worthy of God. I said, your dream must be worthy of you.

Please don’t think that I am being sacrilegious here: you are a precious person made in the image of God and He doesn’t want you wasting any of your time down here.

I say “worthy of you” because I run into so many people whose only vision seems to be working at fast food or some other minimum wage jobs. And I’m not talking about young people just getting started in the workforce. Every day, I run into people my age, in my town, whom I worked with after high school, in various fast food restaurants. And they are still working there today!

No, not as a cashier, but as an assistant of some sort. Yet they aren’t making any serious money at McDonalds, years later. And I want to shake them and ask them, “Is this really all you want out of life?” I mean, they just never move up and on.

In case no one told you, God doesn’t give out dull, mediocre dreams.

God gives us fantastic, awe-inspiring dreams.

And most people have forgotten what they used to dream about!

I think that is because, most people get older, and in their “wisdom”  begin to discount their dream as impractical.

Yet, that very dream that you had, in the very beginning, probably wasn’t practical at all! It most likely was bigger than you, and seemed unachievable.

So before we go into how to make your dream happen, let’s find out a few things about your dream.

Now, I’d like you to take moment to seriously reflect on your original dream. Relax for a moment and let yourself go back in your mind to the first really really big dream you ever had.

Ok, like the biggest one ever.

Now, what happened to that dream? Are you back now to the biggest dream you have ever had? I hope you are. Because we are going to be talking later about how to actionably get there, to your dream.

Now, write down your dream.

Spend all day thinking about it, even if it seems ridiculous.

How do I know my dream is a good dream?

I think when people ask me this, what they really are saying is, How do I know that my dream is worthy of me?

See you are an awesome, fully loaded person who is capable of getting heavenly downloads.

You’ve been made in God’s image, and He is awesome! As an awesome individual, you really need to run your dream through some filters to see if it’s a dream that is worthy of you. Here are the questions you need to ask yourself

1.  Is this dream bigger than me?  In other words, is this a dream that is going to challenge, inspire and push you? If your dream is too easy, it may be better classified as a goal.
2. Am I willing to commit my whole life to this dream?  If your dream is having a mansion on the hill, are you willing to devote your whole life to that? Only you can decide.
3. Is this dream going to help others?  You have been designed by your creator to solve someone’s problem, and to be a blessing to your fellow man. If your dream doesn’t do this, you won’t feel fulfilled.
4. Have I asked my Creator about this dream (and really listened……)
5. Do I even like this dream.  See, some people (ok, alot of them) grow up thinking that they are supposed to want to be wealthy. And believe me, I am all for that. But they make wealth their dream. Money isn’t really want you want, it’s what money can buy that enriches us. We’ve all heard of the hermit who died and left a million dollars in his ratty mattress. What was he saving for? Rather than viewing money as a tool to purchase things to enrich his life and others, it’s purpose had become meaningless; Money had become an idol to him.
6. Will this dream make me happy, and satisfy me?  If this dream doesn’t make your heart sing at the thought of coming true, then it’s not the one. And if you don’t know your Creator, NO dream will make you feel happy. All of us have a God shaped hole that no dream can fill, only He can

Jesus,  come in my heart and fill my God shaped hole.

Amen. Talk to you tomorrow:)