Archives 2024

Ever sat at your desk and thought that you would love to go freelance but didn?t know where to start? Maybe even been afraid that you didn?t have the freelance experience to make it as a new freelance professional?

The easiest way to go freelance and make it a success is to start small and utilize the power of the internet to do it by joining a freelance community.

There are many freelance communities out there to choose from including GoFreelance, Elance and Home Job Shop. They each provide ways to work both full or part-time on freelance jobs right from your own home for clients around the world.

GoFreelance is a great choice for those who are new to freelance work. For a very small fee, you can access hundreds of super cool jobs that anyone can do including taking pictures, virtual assistants, blogging, internet marketing, research and more. They also offer more specialized work for programmers, business professionals, and copywriters.

Elance and Home Job Shop are great resources for the more seasoned freelancer. They have many options to easily fill your schedule so you could quickly make freelance work your full-time job. Many freelance professionals find that they don?t even have to work as many freelance hours as they were previously working away from home in order to replace a full-time income.

So if you are looking for an easy way to get started, start with an online freelance community and just do it. The world of freelance work is right there on the internet just waiting for you to find it!

It took Thomas Edison over a thousand tries to get the light bulb just right. Yet how many of us give up if we don’t nail something perfectly the first time out? The best baseball hitters in the game fail approximately two out of every three times they step up to the plate. Still, how many of us won’t step up and try something new unless we can be assured of success first? The problem is how we think about ourselves in relation to failure and its consequences. In this article, I’m going to challenge you to change the way you think about failure, and, in the process, change the way you think about yourself.

Failure can be the fast track to success if you recognize and use it the right way. It’s all in how you choose to size it up. Following are five ways to think about failure, and how to manage it. Embracing these concepts will help insure your long-term success in all of your endeavors, both in business and in life.

1. Define failure as learning. When a toddler falls down, do we say, “Man, they really messed up!” or rather “Wonderful, they’re learning to walk!” Yet when we fall down – blow the sales pitch, get passed over for promotion, lose our jobs, for example – often we exclaim, “I failed!” Worse yet, we may define ourselves as failures. Better to view failure as a temporary and necessary step on the way to where you want to be. Just like falling down is a predictable and inevitable process for the toddler learning to walk, so too are occasional failures along the way to success in whatever you attempt. In fact, it’s hard to improve if you don’t fail, because failure delineates clearly where the opportunities for improvement lie. So, when you do fall down, don’t label yourself a failure. Instead, recover quickly from the temporary disappointment by asking “What can I learn from this? What worked and what didn’t? How can I do it better next time?” Then, follow the toddler’s example: get up with a smile on your face and try again, knowing you are better for the experience.
2. Manage expectations, yours and theirs. Sometimes the problem with failure lies in unrealistic expectations when trying something new. We expect everyone to embrace the new strategy after a single roll out meeting. We expect the new model-year car to perform as well as the old one that hadn’t changed for several years. We assume customers will flock to our latest and greatest product immediately. Rarely, however, are such scenarios the case. John Kotter tells us leaders exponentially under-communicate the need for change. Newly revised product lines often have bugs, and wary customers often have to be convinced over time that what we offer meets their needs and interests. Perception about failure on the back end can be reduced or eliminated by managing expectations on the front-end. Begin new ventures with optimism tempered by realism, and help your constituents – colleagues and customers – do the same. Anticipate there will be problems, and let everyone know you will be ready to solve them. That way, when problems do arise, they will help reinforce your credibility versus damage it. And, problems won’t lead you and others to assume you’ve failed. Rather, problems will be viewed for what they are – road signs pointing the way to progress.
3. Stop trying to be perfect. Sports psychologist Bob Rotella wrote a helpful little book called Golf is not a Game of Perfect. Golf is not a game of perfect, and neither is business nor just about any other venture you might imagine. Trying to be perfect can keep you from trying new and untested methods for reaching your goals. The valuable experiments that ultimately will lead to success will never happen if you are afraid to attempt them in the first place. In a vain attempt at perfection, we might freeze up and keep whatever natural talent we have from taking over. Rather than strive for perfection, strive for action; bold, resolute action in the direction of your goals. You can make mid-course corrections as you go, but you’ll never have the chance if you never get started. Aiming for perfection is fine; expecting it, however, is unrealistic. Let your unrealistic expectations of perfection go and your results will start to flow.
4. Manage fear before it manages you. Perhaps nothing holds us back as much as fear. Fear is our natural protection against threats to our physical survival. Too often however, fear gets triggered when physical survival is not an issue. No one is gong to die if his or her promotion doesn’t come through. Physical harm won’t follow if your idea gets shot down at a meeting. You won’t lose an appendage if you return from your sales call empty-handed (depending on your boss, that is!) Heck, even getting fired doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world. Just because fear often gets triggered in these situations doesn’t mean you have to succumb to it. Gather yourself, take a deep breath, tell yourself you’re okay, and go about taking your next step forward, whatever it may be. Don’t let your autonomic nervous system convince you’re about to get eaten by a tiger when you’re not. Learn to control your fear or it will end up controlling you.
5. Stay in the moment. What if? can be a very useful question for anticipating scenarios and stirring creativity. “What if we doubled market share next quarter? What if we could take the best aspects of our competitor’s products and roll them into ours? What if we could use our expertise to aid the less fortunate in our community?” Good questions all. Unfortunately, too often our internal dialogue goes more like this: “What if I say something dumb at the meeting and everyone laughs and decides I’m stupid? What if the economy takes a turn for the worse? What if we get bought out and I lose my job?” We begin to imagine negative What If scenarios and put so much mental energy into them that we have little left over for more positive endeavors, and failures mount. To counter this trend, notice when you are becoming anxious. Then, notice your thoughts. Likely, you have mentally raced ahead to some scary place that doesn’t exist. Bring yourself back to the here and now. Ask yourself, “What’s going on right here, right now?” It’s likely not nearly as bad as what you were imagining. Dealing with the realities of the moment will help you avoid creating unnecessary failures in the future.

A Final Word
If fear of failure is holding you back from pursuing your dreams or accomplishing your goals, challenge yourself to think again. Specifically, rethink how you think about failure itself, and its relationship to your self-concept. Often, failure is the first and necessary step toward discovering our fortune; it points the way to success. Perhaps Henry Ford put it best: “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”

When you think of censorship online most times you will think of sites that contain criminal or illegal material on them. Many well respected sites including YouTube and WordPress are actually being blocked around the world by an increasing number of countries. But why are they being blocked? As hard as it is to believe, it?s due to the fact that these types of sites promote and encourage the use of free speech among their users. This does not always go over well with some people seeing as no matter where you go you will always find someone with a contrasting outlook to your own.

These actions are not all that surprising. The people in charge of certain countries would quickly create a list of blocked websites for their country. While people living in these area?s most times are used to this form of censorship, it makes performing these action no less pathetic. I have experienced it first hand with family and friends that reside in Turkey. Even though Turkey is a wonderful place to live that has a great heritage and many proud traditions, the main ISP for the country has begun to create an ever growing list of blocked and banned websites.

Personally, I have no problems with a country that chooses to block illegal and blatantly dangerous sites. That said my personal preference is that they take the website down and proceed to charge the owner, but internationally this is not an easy thing to do. The fact is sites that have become banned in Turkey have become a growing concern among the people of this democratic, secular state.

The reasoning behind sites such as You Tube and WordPress is that some of them contain what can be considered ?dangerous? religious and anti-religious messages. A favorite author of mine, Oxford Biologist Richard Dawkins had his website banned due to comments he made about a book written by a famous Turkish writer about Creationism (The idea that man was created 6000 years ago and was not the product of evolution). No matter what your religious views are, banning sites such as these is a hard blow to the idea of Freedom of Speech. In essence it says ?If you don?t agree with our religious views, we will block you.? Several other faiths from around the world including Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and many different forms of Christianity will also be involved in future banns.

Personally, I strongly dislike the idea of censorship. Apprehending those individuals that spread malice and evil by any means, but the ideals behind freedom of speech is a treasured asset to many that is being slowly taken away from the people of Turkey. So what can you do to bypass these constraints and get access to blocked websites? This is most commonly achieved using a proxy server. The ISP has a list of bans that it filters and enforces blocking predetermined websites due to their content. Using a proxy server to see a banned website fools the ISP into believing the content is coming from the proxy server, not the server that is blocked.

It may be in a slightly different place from one web browser to another, but most times you will find the section you can put a proxy server into under the Internet Options –> Connections –> LAN Connections Area. When you have successfully placed a valid proxy in this section, any request to view a website will first go to the proxy server and then to the actual website you wanted to look at. The process is reversed on the return trip back to your computer.

Using this easy to do trick will work most times allowing you to see the website even with the ban in place. You do have to be cautious when using a free proxy server when doing this, paying attention to the information you are providing. ?Free Proxy Servers? you find listed on the internet are most times unsecured servers being used without the owners knowing and at times are even hacked servers used to collect your private data. Taking the risk of identity theft just to watch You Tube videos is not worth it. Even so, as the list of blocked websites in countries around the world like Turkey gets bigger, you?re going to find more people looking for ways to get access to banned sites.

Is your to-do list keeping you up at night? Are you counting tasks rather than sheep to fall asleep?

1. Wade through emails – 2. Finalize the presentation for tomorrow?s meeting – 3. Get handouts ready for Wednesday?s meeting – 4. Make follow up calls zzz – 5. Schedule sales meeting zzzzzz – 6. Buy anniversary gift. – 7. Call my kids.zzzzzzzz

If it?s been a long time since you laid your head down on the pillow at night without a care in the world, rest assured ? there is hope. You can have sanity and sleep, too.

When business worries and personal commitments get to be too much, you need to get help. Businesses owners are faced with more and more challenges every day?finding clients, keeping clients, creating products, article and press release distribution, social networking, and the economy. So if you?re spending more of your time on administrative tasks or just plain spinning your wheels going no where fast, it?s time to make a change. It?s time to partner with a Virtual Assistant.

So what exactly is a Virtual Assistant and what can one do for you?

A virtual assistant, or VA, is an independent business professional who among many things, can help overwhelmed business owners handle administrative tasks so they can remain focused on their business. Utilizing the latest technology your Virtual Assistant can manage your social networks, write press releases and correspondence, tweak or create a presentation, make travel arrangements, be your own personal concierge, write letters, follow up on trade show leads, handle literature fulfillment, and even prepare your expense and call reports. The possibilities are endless once you start to see how many tasks you really can delegate.

“I don’t know what I’d do without my Virtual Assistant. As a sales professional who works out of my home and travels extensively I don’t have an on-site staff to keep things moving. I can rely on my VA to prepare marketing materials, organize my contacts, send out letters, and keep me on track with special projects. Delegating routine tasks and special projects to my Virtual Assistant allows me to spend more time growing the business,” says Mark Loudenslager, VP of Sales.

Partnering with a virtual assistant affords you the luxury of spending more time in front of your clients and less time behind your desk. Because virtual assistants are independent professionals they come equipped with their own office, their own equipment, the latest software programs, and the know how of running a successful business. They don’t, however, come equipped with added expenses like payroll taxes, expensive benefit packages, paid vacations, holiday pay, or “free time” (that you pay for) for talking to co-workers. They’re only there when you need them. Sometimes they’re even there when you don’t think you need them!

Virtual Assistants are also invaluable in helping to keep your business from being lost among its many competitors or overlooked because of lack of professionalism. Amidst the Internet and Social Networking craze, millions of email exchanges, and web and teleconferencing many professionals have literally ?lost sight? of their clients. In a day and age where we thrive on customer relationship management, personal sales calls have taken a back seat to technology. Further, today?s economy has forced more layoffs and corporate downsizing, which has impacted the availability of internal support systems and other such resources. The lack of internal resources has forced companies to rely on already overburdened staff to pick up the slack. Staff such as sales people who are now spending more time doing administrative tasks than they are generating sales. Where does the madness end?

It?s time to wake up and get back in the field. Get ahead of the competition and you won?t find yourself saying, ?Oops, I could have had a VA!?