Archives for April 2013

Practical tips for exercise

April 8, 2013 by

In exercise-tipstoday’s busy lifestyle it can often be a struggle to find the time to eat a healthful diet and to exercise.

The good news is that there are a few simple and practical tips that you can follow to try to make sure that you keep your quest for a healthier lifestyle on track.

 When it comes to exercise, the trick is to start slow and then build momentum. You need to be able to pace yourself in order to make sure that you do not exhaust yourself and then give up your new regimen because you find it to be too hard within the first few days or the first week.

You should start by setting a goal that you wish to achieve, but rather than overextending yourself and trying to do too much too soon, break this goal down into a plan that has specific activities to do on certain days.

Begin by exercising two or three days a week, and then when you have had time to adjust to this, slowly increase the number of days on your schedule.

Filed Under: ezine

One More Degree

April 8, 2013 by

push-yourselfCan you keep pushing with one more degree of strength or endure one more minute of hard, focused work? You sure can, and that one degree can make a world of difference. Improving by a single degree can be exactly what you need to explode your business and really accelerate your profits.

You might be on the verge of incredible success and profits, but unaware of it, so push it one more degree. Success often comes down to just that one, little bit more.

There are a number of things you can do to push your business just one more degree in order to be successful and really get what you want.

 

  • Can you add just a little more value to what your company already offers?
  • Can you answer your customers’ calls or emails a little quicker?
  • Can you deliver your product or service a little faster?
  • Can you donate a little more each week to a good cause?
  • Can you help or be nice to just one person each day of the week?

Make a commitment to yourself to start pushing one more degree—in your business, in your relationships, and in every area of your life. You will be amazed at the difference that it makes across the board. The return on every extra degree is incredible.

The small improvements you make will improve your business and bottom line, but most importantly, they’ll improve your life.

Filed Under: ezine

Why Creating a Monthly Newsletter Is Like a Day on the Show Gold Rush

April 8, 2013 by

gold-rushI have developed a bit of an unnatural relationship with the show Gold Rush. After watching Todd, Jack, Dakota Fred and Parker through two and a bit seasons all I can say is I take perverse pleasure in watching a train wreck happen. Gold Rush is also a touching story about America’s pioneering spirit and rediscovering the American Dream. (Or more darkly: Then they dug for their gold till the land was forsaken and wrote it all down as the progress of man.)

Through two seasons, the three mining camps talk big and then struggle. They don’t seem to know why. Their business simply put, is dropping ‘pay dirt’ into a ‘wash plant’ and gold comes out of the wash plant a long with a whole lot of mud.

All three camps have refined the operation so that there is very little efficiency they can gain. There isn’t too much gold being lost in the tailing’s. So to make more money they want to run more ‘yards of dirt’ through their wash plants.

The plot of every episode involves a breakdown of some vital piece of equipment preventing this activity, causing as much swearing and tantrums as an episode of Geordie Shore. Why this show is a train wreck is the crews are only “dimly pre-aware” that if their wash plant isn’t running and there isn’t gold bearing dirt being dropped in it they aren’t making money. And they never take any preventative measures to keep everything running.

When production stops the crew is losing money in actual fact – not just not making money. In Alaska, you can only mine for about 140 days a year before everything freezes over – so lost production is really expensive. (Captain Super Nerd can work it out but who wants a maths lesson?)

What the show can’t reveal in prime time is the impact of those losses.

For those of us with newsletters to get out every month we feel a similar impact – if you leave everything to the last minute you are in effect eating into time to work on next month’s newsletter. (Kind of like a really short gold mining season) Then it all seems to go to hell in hand basket.

We have some clients who want to do part of their newsletter themselves – it is a lot of hard work. We encourage it because when a client is actively involved with their newsletter the results are much better. The problem is one or two have gotten behind and it often takes an intervention to get them back on track.

Basically if you have to put off doing something for one month’s newsletter it becomes twice the work to get back on track. You need to do two newsletters in order to get back to even. A relative mountain of work. And to be honest unless you actually like writing – doing two newsletters at once is about as much fun as a root canal.

Our most successful clients have actually become good students of our system – keeping their production calendars with them so that all their article ideas end up in the same place. Asking for help early when they get stuck.

Filed Under: Blog, ezine