When starting a business, it can be tempting to work all the time. We want to get ahead, and we know that our success depends almost completely on us. But it is essential to give ourselves some time for rest and relaxation on a regular basis.

All Work and No Play

We’ve all heard the saying, “All work and no play makes Johnny a dull, dull boy.” It’s true that we’re not much fun to be around when we’re strictly business all the time. Work is an important part of our lives, but the fun stuff is important as well.

One of the top reasons that people choose to start their own businesses is so that they can choose their hours. Some want to spend more time with their families, while others have hobbies that they enjoy participating in on a regular basis. But once they get started, they sometimes lose sight of that in favor of growing the business.

If you find yourself working constantly, step back for a moment and think about what you’re missing. You may find that it’s the same things that you wanted to go into business so that you wouldn’t have to miss. If so, schedule some time for those things and don’t let anything get in the way of it.

Working Too Hard Can Be Counterproductive

It takes a lot of hard work to get a business off the ground. In the beginning, many business owners put in long hours in an attempt to get ahead. While putting in some overtime is often necessary, working 60 hours a week every week can be detrimental to our success.

We need some time off to recharge our batteries and attend to other things. Working too hard for too long can affect our concentration, as can worrying about other things that need to be done outside of work. So it is important to schedule time off in order to keep ourselves focused.

Scheduling Time Off When You Don’t Live By a Schedule

Scheduling can be a difficult thing when you’re in business. There are times when you need to work around your clients, and deadlines may necessitate working on a day that you would normally take off. But it is important to schedule some time off every week.

If you find yourself working when you had planned to rest and relax, try to reschedule just like you would if a work-related matter had to be postponed. Getting your work done is essential to your success, but so is taking time for rest and recreation.

ShareThis

How can exercise be good for business, you ask? For starters, it helps us to be healthier overall, resulting in fewer sick days. It also makes us feel better about ourselves. And it improves our motivation.

How Can Exercise Affect Motivation?

Starting a regular exercise routine takes discipline. Sometimes it’s hard to get started, but once we’ve made ourselves do it a few times, we begin to look forward to it. Working out produces its own motivation. This motivation tends to carry over into other areas of life as well, including our work.

Exercise also works wonders for mental clarity. It makes our bodies healthier, which in turn allows our minds to function better. It doesn’t take long at all to see the effects.

Even short walks can do amazing things for our minds. When we get frustrated or burned out at work, taking a brisk walk can help us blow off steam and take our minds off of the situation long enough to help us regain our focus. And the exercise itself gets our blood circulating, resulting in more oxygen and glucose to the brain.

How Can I Find Time to Exercise?

Busy businesspeople often have a hard time fitting exercise into their schedules. But the benefits of working out regularly can increase our efficiency, giving us more time for other things. The hardest part is getting started.

Working out early in the morning provides a great start to your day. It increases alertness and improves our mood. Exercising early also lets us get it over with so that we don’t have to worry about fitting in a workout later.

After the work day is over is a common time for people to exercise. Working out in the evenings is good for you, but it’s important not to do it too late. Exercising less than two or three hours before bedtime can affect your sleep, and sleep deprivation is detrimental to motivation.

If you can’t seem to fit exercise in before or after work, you could start small with mini-workouts during lunch or break time. This will allow you to begin feeling the benefits of exercise, and it can increase your energy levels and efficiency. You may find that the added motivation and energy allows you to get more work done in less time, and then you can start working out before or after work.

Exercise can do wonderful things for mental clarity, motivation, and attitude. All of these benefits can positively affect your business. So why not give working out a try?

ShareThis

Sometimes long hours are a necessity. But if we don’t take breaks, it’s easy to get burned out. Our brains don’t work as well, and rather than helping our business by working hard, we can actually harm it.

How Often Do I Need a Break?

If we work for someone else, we generally get a break every two hours. That’s a good rule of thumb. Sometimes we may not get a break quite that often, but if we go for several hours without a break, it can start affecting the quality of our work.

One of the perks of being self-employed is that we don’t have to stick to a strict break schedule. If we come to a stopping point, we can go ahead and take a break even if it’s not time yet. If we have appointments or important errands to run, we can adjust our breaks accordingly. But it’s important to make sure that we don’t work too long of a stretch without taking a break.

If you’re working on a difficult project and begin to get tired or frustrated, a break could be just what the doctor ordered. A break doesn’t have to be particularly long to be effective. Five minutes out of the office could be all you need to feel as good as new.

How Can I Get the Most Out of My Break?

If you are about to blow a gasket, sitting silently during your break may only make things worse. Getting your mind off of what’s bothering you for a few minutes will help more. Here are some ways you can do that:

* Taking a brisk walk can help you blow off steam and clear your head.
* Reading a chapter from a favorite book or an article from a magazine that interests you can renew your focus.
* If you are a crafter, you could work on your latest project for a few minutes.
* If you’re hopelessly swamped with work and don’t feel that you have time for a break, you could at least switch to a less stressful activity for a short time.
* If all else fails, play a game on your cell phone or the Internet. Just don’t get so wrapped up in it that you forget to get back to work.

Breaks are important because they allow us to recharge our batteries so that we can be more productive. Taking them at regular intervals can help us avoid burnout. And when we are stressed out, a short break can improve our outlook and allow us to see things more clearly.

ShareThis

Even with life getting unexpectedly busy, as it so often does the site is not fairing too badly and it’s getting about 20 - 30 visits per day with the great results we’ve been getting in the SERPs on several keywords. Here we are with 909 Inlinks already. Not too shabby.

Aside from using 30 Minute Backlinks the only other promotion this URL has received is two or three blog posts on my own blogs. I will be adding some more promotion methods to it in the future. First I’m going to make some tweaks to the sales copy and move on from there.

ShareThis

ClickBank accounts cannot be used for the sole purpose of collecting rebates or otherwise extending credit to yourself or others. In compliance with US law, ClickBank will withhold payment of any account balance until it contains standing sales made with 5 or more different credit card numbers, including at least one Visa card, and one MasterCard. PayPal purchases do not count toward the minimum.

The bold is mine for emphasis…. Paypal payments to not count!?! Yipes. I don’t know about you, but when I’m shopping for digital products I generally pay from PayPal balance. In fact, I leave a good chunk of money in my PayPal account every single month just for that reason! I use it to buy stock images, pay for PLR memberships, pick up the latest and greatest internet marketing goodies, and, and, and.

I’m bringing this up because I know quite a few people that have been waiting months to reach that Customer Distribution Requirement (CDR) to receive their first Clickbank check by mail. It’s a bit tricky since it’s so specific.

For example, what if you’ve had $900 worth of commissions earned in your first month, but all the customers paid either with PayPal or Visa. No one used a Mastercard, therefore your balance would still be held until someone came along and purchased with a Mastercard.

At first my scenario may sound unlikely, but take a moment to think about. Let’s say you’re promoting a product that gives you a $45 commission on each sale. You only need 20 sales of that product to make $900. That’s not so bad right?

You could have a large list to work with already, but this might be the first time you promoted a product that went through Clickbank for the payment and delivery method. I’m sure the waiting is very frustrating, and I can only imagine how many emails Clickbank gets from people that are waiting for their commission checks wondering why they haven’t been sent yet.

So, what are your thoughts on the Clickbank CDR? Are you one of the waiting folks, or did you not even know this little tidbit of policy existed?

Technorati Tags: clickbank, affiliate program, cdr

ShareThis

That’s not to say that you have to buy yourself a new car for every goal you achieve. That could get rather expensive. But the reward should be appropriate considering how lofty the goal was and how much achieving it impacted your business.

Small Rewards for Small Goals

Every goal doesn’t have to be a huge accomplishment. Smaller goals keep us motivated until we can reach more significant milestones. This is especially important when getting started. It may take a while to build the momentum necessary to attain loftier goals, and we need to reward ourselves for the smaller things in order to remain focused on achieving the larger ones.

Smaller goals can be the steps necessary to achieve a larger goal. For example, your big goal may be to have a certain number of clients in 6 months. Breaking this up into gaining 1/6 of that number each month could give you a monthly goal to work for.

Deciding ahead of time what your reward will be can give you an extra incentive. For small goals, you could pick out a purse or a pair of shoes you’ve had your eye on. Putting a picture of the reward up on your office wall will serve to remind you what you can look forward to if you meet your goal.

Big Rewards for Big Goals

When you reach your larger goals, you will have even more to celebrate, so your reward should be a big deal. Think of a big-ticket item that you have wanted for a long time, or perhaps a trip for yourself and your spouse or family.

The larger reward will require some advance planning. It’s important to be sure you’ll be able to afford it once you’ve achieved the goal in question. If you reach the goal and are not able to get the reward you had your heart set on, that will lead to disappointment. And disappointment does nothing to motivate or boost morale.

Once you’ve determined that the reward is feasible, you could put up pictures to remind yourself of it just as you do with the smaller rewards. This gives you incentive to work harder to achieve your goals in both the short term and the long term.

Setting goals is important to a business, but rewarding ourselves for attaining them is equally important. By giving ourselves something to look forward to, we can motivate ourselves to reach for the stars. Once we get there, we will be ready to aim even higher so that we can continue to reward ourselves.

ShareThis

Sale includes:
3 premium domains - bakeryscents.com, bakeryscents.net, and bakeryscent.com
Custom Site template
1 month hosting
Site has PR of 1 with very little posting

This site has not had the time taken with it that was meant. Imagine how well you can do with just a little more effort. PR1 with such little effort put forth right now means that it is an incredible domain. Focus your posts and your affiliate or company links and your new site is golden.

This site is for sale for only $85. The longer I keep it, the more posts I will need to put up and the more the price will go up as I load it with a newsletter and more. Get in on the ground floor!

ShareThis

Then after the first 9 days we were already seeing results with 133 inlinks…

And today here we are with 553 inlinks to the Cheesecake sales page, some decent rankings in the SERPs that I did not expect at all and a steady little trickle of growing traffic.

Remember our original review using 30 Minute Backlinks and linking right here to Easy Wahm? At the time of that review we were just shy of 2,000 and as of today we are at 4,304. I think we’re headed in the right direction and I’m really excited about it.

30 Minute Backlinks has given me an easy solution to building backlinks and growing even the newest of websites with ease.

ShareThis

First we made it three columns to eliminate the need for a lot of scrolling down the page. We made the content area a little wider (it’s 800 px now) to accommodate the three columns, and rearranged the logo to go straight across. We added a light colored background using the accent color in the logo design, and matched the titles of the individual sections to the main font color in the logo.

Just these few simple changes made a huge difference as you can see here with these full length screenshots. This was a fun project to work on. Angela was great to work with, she communicated her idea to me really well and everything went so smoothly.

You can click on the images to see a larger version:

There you have it. Shiny and new! Are you ready to have your site made over too? Send me an email or leave me a comment here and we’ll work out the details!

ShareThis

http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/268129.html

I have a high-traffic technology blog that is in need of a staff writer. This is a long-term opportunity with the potential for pay increases down the road.
http://www.pcfastlane.com/

As staff writer, you would be responsible for posting 2-3 times per day about technology news topics. I would show you where to get the news. Each post would need to be 200-400 words (depending on the news) and contain at least one image. Applicants should be comfortable with technology, and already reading technology blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget. Those applying should be able to work with little supervision, and a good sense of humor wouldn’t hurt either.

Payment will be made weekly and be around $50.00 USD via PayPal. Along with your bid, please state how many posts you can make per week. *Preference will be given to applicants with previous experience working for Internet publications and blogs and who also live in the United States.*

Besides weekly pay, the staff writer will also receive a pcfastlane.com email and a blurb about him/her on the staff page.

WordPress Blogger / SEO Expert wanted at Hostgator

http://jobs.problogger.net/view/1338

Description

SEOhosting.com (a division of HostGator) is searching for a a few blog writers who understand and can write on topics covering:

- General SEO
- Search Engine Marketing
- Social Media

Basically we want to cover topics that our readers/clients would find helpful in their SEO efforts.

Post quantity is not as important as quality, as we’re looking for unique and informative content to draw readers in and keep them coming back.

Position is either paid (per post to start) or writer can be compensated in other ways (link backs, traffic, hosting, etc) depending on the writer.

( http://seohosting.com/blog )
How to apply

Please send at least one writing sample of past work on any of the listed topics to chad@hostgator.com

Daily Cleaning Blogger

http://jobs.problogger.net/view/1336

Description

http://www.greatcleaners.com/cleaning-secrets.html

How would you like to write for the Arm & Hammer brand? Or OxiClean, Kaboom, Orange Glo or Brillo?

Jill’s Cleaning Secrets is a collection of articles dedicated to cleaning tips and advice for today’s woman. From the hard charging corporate executive to the stay-at-home mom (or possibly somewhere in between) our blog is meant to help empower women with time saving tips and secrets to make housekeeping - and life in general - a little more sweet.

We have an immediate need for an established writer to fill our Daily Cleaning Blogger position and produce meaningful content. While we only have a few articles available on the site, we are currently transitioning to a daily blog format. We are looking for the best of the best - someone who is not new to the space and understands how to incorporate product plugs and branding messages while at the same time bringing the reader back with witty anecdotes and interesting stories from real life.

The qualified applicant will be an established blogger with an understanding of the importance of shouting out to other relevant blogs for the purpose of link exchanges. Must be HTML literate and able to incorporate additional content such as graphics and video into your work. This is a commitment to provide 7 publishable entries every week.

How to apply

Please send 2-3 blog entries or samples of your writing to:

james @ marinermarketing dot net

Graphic Designer for Identity Program

http://chicago.craigslist.org/nch/med/689681694.html

New eco-friendly, hip nail lounge looking for graphic designer to quote on a complete identity program: logo, business cards, letterhead, simple (4 page) website, etc. We need something that is simple, feminine and elegant. Please send low resolution samples/links to your work. Thank you!

Freelance Writer for Company Blog

http://performancing.com/blogger-jobs/looking-freelance-writer-company-blog

We are a small web design/development firm searching for a freelance writer who can write 1-5 posts per week about web marketing, seo, email marketing, web design, etc

Technorati Tags: work at home, job leads, wahm, blogging jobs

ShareThis