Conflicting Thought Patterns: Is Fear of being Unplugged a Sign of Impending Failure?

Conflicting Thought Patterns: Is Fear of being Unplugged a Sign of Impending Failure?

Maybe I'm just getting old but I don't care about a lot of the things I used to care about... like staying online no matter where I happen to be, or, having a spotless car, or an immaculately manicured lawn. Ok... so if you know me well, you know I've NEVER cared too much about one of those things!

What about business, what does this have to do with business? I spent some time thinking about people I'd worked with in the past, and which ones had succeeded and which ones had not... and I tried to find something that was common to each group. I found this tidbit: people who cannot unplug, who cannot isolate, are more likely to fail over time than those able to turn off the phone, email, social media, other distractions, and focus. This also parallels not obsessing on what others think of you or your ideas.

To some this sounds radical. To some it's scary to unplug.

Focus and unplug.
Focus on one thing and unplug as much as possible. No one starts off at the top. Too many of us try to juggle multiple major goals as if we are at the top and have the resources, staff, procedures, and experiences in place to do so.

Success builds success and therefore it's easier to add more and more successes as your successes compound. You get better at saying no, asking for help, surrounding yourself with the right people to help you succeed, etc. You get better at making decisions and identifying successful possibilities.

Saying No... is Hard...
Until you try it a few times. Keep your goals in mind and say no to additional projects, requests, and ideas that do not lead to your goals. You can't say no to everything, but successful people say no to a lot of things. Probably the more successful you are the more you say no. The unsuccessful tend to say yes to everything and are constantly overwhelmed and spread too thin (and constantly somewhat miserable).

Conflicting Thought Patterns (CTPs)
Most people have CTPs: Conflicting Thought Patterns (I think I just coined a new term!). The most common CTPs are about money, success, and relationships. For example a conflicting thought pattern: wanting more money while at the same time feeling contempt for those who have more money. A conflicting thought pattern for success: thinking you can't block out or unplug from the world UNTIL you're successful... i.e. once you're successful you'll have the ability to say "hold my calls" and "don't bother me" I'm working on something. Well color me stupid, but why not take that attitude now?

There are a lot of "gurus" out there teaching and coaching and counseling on this very problem of CTPs. It is known by a lot of names. CTPs are hidden little curses that can wreck your life. Some are innocently planted in you when you're very young, even as an infant. Some you germinate yourself as you bounce your way through life. Most of the time you're not aware of them, only their effects show. Even becoming aware of one does not make it go away. Sometimes you can change quickly, however, it can take years to change some thought patterns.

Start this New Year off looking under the hood for what makes you tick. Maybe you'll discover some small things about yourself you can change that will have a huge impact on your life!

Until next time,
Fred

P.S. My yard's a mess!

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Posted by Fred on January 9, 2012 | Printer-Friendly

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) & Protect IP Pending Bills

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) & Protect IP Pending Bills

Fear Makes People do Terrible Things...

What does a child or an emotionally immature person do when faced with the loss of something? They act out of fear. The entertainment industry has been acting like a spoiled child for years, trying to stop the inevitable wave of change that technology has birthed. In the golden age of the recording and film industries they had it all: money, power, and prestige. Wanting to maintain their status quo, they've let fear instead of innovation drive their actions. Instead of embracing change (you can't really stop it) these industries have slowly driven nail after nail into their own coffins. Now, they've used their power and influence to back two bills that have the potential to radically change the internet forever. These bills, if passed, will drive more death nails, but not just into the coffins of the supporting industries, but rather into the entire online community and economy. These are bad bills and must be stopped.

But Shouldn't we Stop Piracy?
Yes. Piracy has always been with us. Before the internet people made illegal copies of albums by recording them to cassette tapes. Whatever technology existed people took advantage of it. However, with each step up the technology ladder, as piracy became easier, so did the distribution channels and connectivity between these industries and consumers. Imagine where we'd be if these industries had embraced these channels instead of acting out of fear?

I agree that piracy is bad and people who create web sites that distribute illegal copies of copyrighted material should be stopped. But not the way these bills propose to stop them. These bills require hosting companies to become police and give our government, and some private companies, the ability to take over the DNS system and easily shut down web sites.

Follow the Money...
Want to know what the real purpose is behind most legislation? Follow the money. Always follow the money. If you look at the companies and organizations supporting SOPA and Protect IP bills you'll see big companies, unions, and organizations. These bills will make it harder and more expensive for individuals and small businesses to do business on the internet. All aspects of having an online presence will cost much, much more.

The Inverse Is Sometimes Better...
The problem that lawmakers have is that they think figures for commerce and revenue are static. For example, if reports show $1,000,000 online sales last month, lawmakers think that they can add fees and taxes and create x dollars of revenue for the government. They fail to understand that if they burden the system with fees and taxes that people will purchase less, so instead of $1,000,000, perhaps the figure will drop to $800,000. So their planned government revenue will be lower than expected... then they'll want to increase taxes even more. And revenue will go down even more. The key is to reduce taxes and fees, even though it's counter intuitive to most elected officials thinking, and revenue will go up.

The same goes for regulations. Some laws and regulations are necessary. But each additional law and regulation causes more and more of a burden on businesses, primarily small businesses, until they can't survive. Only the large corporations and monopolies - who pushed the laws and regulations through - have the resources to comply.

Relevant Articles about SOPA and Protect IP:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-howard/sopa-information-2012_b_1166214.html.

http://youtu.be/ypbJzfGQ3CE.

http://gizmodo.com/5868545/the-stop-online-piracy-act-and-you-a-primer?tag=sopa.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/12/28/stopping-the-stop-online-piracy-act/.

http://gizmodo.com/5870241.

Contact Your Elected Officials.

Did a boycott of GoDaddy changed their position on SOPA?.

And this from my friend Ryan Healy: Why SOPA and PIPA Must Be Stopped.

Nuclear Option...
Some of the biggest web sites on the internet are considering a "nuclear option" to make more people aware of these bills: SOPA and Protect IP Nuclear Option!.

What can You Do?
Contact your elected officials and tell them you do not support these bills. I have and will continue to do so. It's our responsibility as citizens to tell our elected officials what we want and don't want put into law. If they don't listen then we elect someone else. Contact Your Elected Officials

Protect Our Freedom...
As pointed out to me by a respected internet marketer I'd asked to contribute to this article, there are much larger threats to our freedom such as the National Defense Bill that allows the military to arrest people in the USA and hold them without a trial... pretty scary stuff. Unfortunately that one has already passed. What can you do about it? The answer is the same; constantly let your elected officials know you don't want laws like this. It's our responsibility to be involved with our government - don't let freedom slip away.

Until Next Time,
Fred

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Posted by Fred on January 1, 2012 | Printer-Friendly

The Lost Art (and Appreciation) of Quality

The Lost Art (and Appreciation) of Quality

It's easy to make a broad statement such as "people used to care about quality but now they just don't"... but like most broad statements, it's only partially true.

Today there's a quality divide... it does not always follow income or wealth (but it usually does). The problem is that because of the race to the bottom by some retailers and marketers our choices of quality for some items is limited, hard-to-find, or non-existent. This same shortsightedness has led to a lot of less than desirable things... back in the days of video tape, the Beta format won out over VHS when Beta was higher quality.

There are numerous examples, think the Wal-Mart crowd vs. the Neiman Marcus crowd. You may be temped to think that the shopper at Wal-Mart would prefer to shop at Neiman Marcus... in some cases you would be correct, but in a lot of cases you would not.

This race to the bottom has led to generations of consumers that simply don't know any better. They don't know that laminated particleboard furniture you assemble at home is substandard to solid hardwood furniture with dovetail joints. They don't care that their shoes or electronics are made in a toxic fume laced factory in China by pregnant women and young girls. They simply care about price and nothing else.

We live in a "disposable" age, where a good portion of the population is content paying for inferior goods and services.

What's My Point?

I'm glad you asked because I was starting to get off track!

My point is that when you're creating your products, web site, sales pages, marketing material, etc. you need to understand which segment you're selling to. You can't mix them up. You'll fail if you do. For someone only interested in the best price, you have to only prove that your product or service is good enough and that your price is the best. For the person interested in quality, you have to prove you have extraordinary quality, better then the other guy's product or service.

It's rare that one product or service would have both the highest quality and the lowest price - in that case you should raise the price! There are a lot of quality oriented consumers that will bypass a low priced product even if it was the best product simply because the price was too low. Too often price is directly associated to quality (no matter if it's a correct assumption or not) so don't try to fight that association.

Update (10/11/2011) Seth Godin posted a great article that I relate to this article. Seth is talking about not shutting off the conversation between a customer or patron and a business, but I see it as quality of caring. You either care and open up the conversation, or, you don't care and shut off the conversation. It's all about quality and quality starts with caring... about yourself and the other person. Here's his post: Open Conversations (or Close Them)

Until next time,
Fred

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Posted by Fred on September 29, 2011 | Printer-Friendly

Knowledge without Wisdom is Dangerous.

Knowledge without Wisdom is Dangerous.

Knowledge without wisdom is dangerous.

This all too evident with governments.

It's also all too evident with businesses trying to save money and get ahead by hiring young and/or inexperienced (cheap) people in key, or even less than key, positions.

Knowledge with wisdom is unstoppable, unconquerable, and unfortunately rare.

It also cost more if you're trying to hire it - but it's almost always well worth it.

Until next time,
Fred

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Posted by Fred on August 2, 2011 | Printer-Friendly

11 Reasons You're Failing

11 Reasons You're Failing

I want to do great things and make a positive impact on other people's lives.
I want to be one of those people that other people look at and ask how on earth does he get all that done... and still write his wife love songs?

This post is going to be a post I look back to each week to make sure that I'm making progress in the direction I want to go.

Take Care of Yourself First!
Like the safety warning you receive when flying (to put the air mask on yourself first and your children second), you have to take care of yourself first. This means physically and mentally. This is not easy if you have children, a job, or any other responsibility! But it's critical that you do. If you're married, getting your wife or husband on board with this makes it a lot easier. Encourage each other to workout and eat healthy.

Unless you can help yourself no one will expect, or trust, you to help them.
You can't really imagine the disheveled drunk from the street corner walking into the Whitehouse and telling the President and Congress how to solve the debt problem (although he could do a better job than the current fiasco administration I'm sure)... You can't help anyone else until you can help yourself.

11 Reasons We Fail
God has given us everything we need to succeed... I'm not kidding, it's really true.
If we're struggling then we're have one, or more, of the following issues... at times I think I suffer from all 11!

1. We don't believe that we can - I call this the Eeyore syndrome.
2. We are filled with fear (related to #1). The thing about fear is that it usually does not appear as fear. It's usually masked behind well thought-out and polished sets of reasons and excuses. This also shows up as "we don't believe we deserve it".
3. We have underlying problems that are eating away at us. Financial, relationship, health, you name it. If we're not facing or dealing with it, then it's festering and fermenting and souring our subconscious. This undermines anything and everything we're trying to do. We may not be able to solve the problems, but the minute we start facing them we start making progress.
4. We don't see the resources and raw materials that we have available to us. This can be physical as well as thoughts and ideas (creativity).
5. We see the resources and raw materials we have, but don't see the path to use them.
6. We ignore God's plan in favor of our own: we want to be a ballerina and we weigh 350lbs and have bad knees (see paragraph about taking care of yourself!). If we're constantly feeling like a salmon swimming upstream then we're probably not doing what we're supposed to be doing with our life.
7. We are slaves to bad, detrimental, or time-wasting habits.
8. We are selfish.
9. We ignore or don't ask for help and guidance.
10. We listen to the wrong people. Satan succeeds by confusion and division... and he's very, very good at it. What? You don't think Satan is involved. Wrong. Evil is real: it does not want you to succeed and create anything good for yourself or the world - lest of all help other people succeed and create something good for the world.
11. We care about what people think or who gets the credit.

Until next time,
Fred

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Posted by Fred on August 1, 2011 | Printer-Friendly

How to Change Your Life in 30 Days?

I recently read a short eBook that I found to be very, very engaging and powerful. I put it on my iPad and plan to read it a few more times and refer back to it often. That's how good it is!

The title is "30 Days to Change Your Life" and it's written by Mark Harrison. Mark has put together some incredible insights on how to effect change in our lives.

It's an easy book to read. Mark has laid it out with 30 short chapters with the idea of reading a chapter a day... right... I just kept on reading and finished it in about 3 days!

Mark builds his ideas by drawing from various cultures and religions and adding in personal experiences and stories. The result is a very positive and uplifting guide to help the reader find and identify areas and actions in their everyday life that can, and will, effect change. I can't recommend this book strongly enough!

Click here to learn more and to purchase Mark's book: 30 Days to Change Your Life.
(note: this is an affiliate link - however I would, and do, recommend the book regardless)

Personally, I don't think Mark's charging enough for this book; his message is easily worth several times the price!

Until Next Time,
Fred

P.S. Please take a moment if you haven't already and "like" my Blue Solar Water Facebook Fan Page: Blue-Solar-Water - I really appreciate it!

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Posted by Fred on April 15, 2011 | Printer-Friendly

Barney Fife Chases the SEO Bandits at J.C. Penny

Barney Fife and the NY Times Chase the SEO Bandits at J.C. Penny

The NY Times published an article on February 13th (the 12th online) titled The Dirty Little Secrets of Search by David Segal, that lambasted J.C. Penny for a massive paid link campaign. This included playing elementary school tattle-tale and reporting their "findings" to Google - which in turn got J.C. Penny's search engine rankings flushed down the toilet.

To me, and probably a lot of other SEO experts, the article is a joke. The condescending tone alone was enough to make me almost not read it.

There are flaws in their "investigation" but come on; they didn't investigate Obama this much... had they, maybe our country wouldn't be swirling around, and around, heading down the toilet. I don't think all the "expert" SEO opinions in the article are accurate... more on that at the end of this post.

Evidently Segal was irate that J.C. Penny was ranking so high for so many items they sold, and brought in an expert to do some research on why. This expert found that J.C. Penny had been buying links to boost their SEO rankings. Something Google says is against their rules.

The article refers to link buying as "Black Hat". That's a joke. If anything, it's little off white or gray: nowhere, I repeat nowhere near black. People that actually know and use black hat techniques would laugh at the whole article.

Woops...
Segal should have done a little more homework on some of the sites he quotes in the first few paragraphs of his article. As he's naming various things like dresses, bedding, sweater dresses, etc. and questioning if J.C. Penny is really the best web site in the world for that product, he links to sites HE thinks should rank better... the problem is, he links to at least one site that buys links! Yep! You got it. And he gave them a no-follow link from the N.Y. Times to boot... I'll take one of those please! I spent maybe 5 minutes and found the rug site he links to has what appears to be paid links in link directories.

J.C. Penny denied they were buying links, but subsequently fired their SEO firm. The SEO firm should have used other methods to build links and kept the paid links at a minimum. I'm sure J.C. Penny was paying big dollars to this SEO firm and the firm was being lazy and obviously didn't take the best care of their client.

Buying links is common... my guess is Segal or someone at NY Times had a beef with J.C. Penny, or, owns a company that J.C. Penny was out ranking.

Is Organic SERP Boosted by Massive PPC?
The Times article also questions if there's a link between J.C. Penny's massive paid advertising spend on Google and their seemingly unnatural high search rankings. I think there is a correlation, however, I also think it's a subtle side effect not an intentional benefit rewarded by Google. Google is not God. Google is not infallible. Getting massive traffic from paid ads probably triggers an increase in organic rankings, but it's probably not much of an increase at all. I don't believe that Google rewards big advertisers by giving them a big jolt of organic ranking caffeine. But if they do, it's their business. They say they don't, so I believe them. If they do, then they shouldn't say they don't and that's the extent of it.

My Take...
My take on this "investigation" is: Get a Life! Go investigate something important and let Google police their own company and rankings. It reminds me of Barney Fife blowing something way out of proportion and making a big deal over nothing - and locking up the whole town.

After all, J.C. Penny actually sells the products they ranked for - there was no trickery, you could actually get what you were looking for... and that's the point of searching for something.

I don't agree with all the SEO "expertise" that's bantered around in this article - something I address in SEO Secrets - there are a lot of experts who state this or that, but when I've tested these things, they don't actually matter, or, even worse, will hurt your rankings... in this article I didn't read anything that would hurt rankings, but I did read a few things that they claim to matter that do not.

Until next time,
Fred

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Posted by Fred on February 17, 2011 | Printer-Friendly

Have You Been Slapped by the Google Ranking Adjustment?

How has Google's Ranking Algorithm Adjustment Impacted You?

What, you didn't know they changed something? A lot of internet business marketing types get all upset anytime Google changes (or noticeably changes) their ranking algorithms. The truth is Google tweaks their rankings on a regular basis, sometimes they make public some of the changes, other times they do not. Below is an official link detailing some of the changes in this latest update that has a lot of Internet Marketers in a Tizzy:

Google Search and Search Engine Spam

As for me, I'm happy!

Why? Because as I'll show you, a lot of my sites have improved in ranking. The ranking for this blog has suffered in recent months, not because of anything Google has done, but because I've not been posting on a frequent basis like I used to, and that matters in a competitive environment.

So why are some people complaining and reeling while I'm happy? Because I practice what I preach, and I preach what I practice.

Google and other search engines are in the business of dishing up what people are looking for. Give Google garbage to dish up and you'll get slapped. Maybe you will get your garbage ranked well for a while, but eventually you'll get ranked where you should be and that's way back in the pack.

This latest update dealt with garbage and getting it out of the search results.

Recent months have brought the spotlight on Google for some questionable search results in some areas. One person who sold eyeglasses had found if he treated his customers with distain and anger, practically stalking them in some cases, he would get enough bad posts and comments that it kept his rankings high... and kept business pouring in... not exactly what Google set out to create.

Other items that were getting bad press were sites that were automated sites that "scrape" or copy content from other sites. These sites are generally not very human usable and low quality.

There's nothing wrong with copying content - a huge part of the benefit of the Business of the Internet is the ability to do just that. In fact, at the end of each of my blog post is a statement specifically giving you permission to copy and use this content - provided you keep the source, author, and link back intact.

A lot of high quality, very helpful sites copy content from other sites, either in whole or in part. It's all about quality and value to the user.

And that's the secret to maintaining good, consistent rankings: it's all about quality and value to the user. There are a lot of other factors too, but without a quality base you're open to being slapped around a lot.

Sometimes people follow bad advice (either free or paid for) and end up turning what would have been good work into something that gets flagged as spammy by the search engines. For example, if you're worry about keyword density while writing your web or blog content, then you need some better advice: www.pqSEO.com.

Here's one example of a site that is a small site, has unique, quality content... look at the jump in ranking position for Google on 1/27:

Until next time,
Fred

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Posted by Fred on February 3, 2011 | Printer-Friendly

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