Are You A Winning Failure?

In all of my years of living I have experienced both winning and loosing. Even though my wins out weigh my failures, for some reason the failures tend to stick in my mind. I remember when I first got married I took pride in being a provider of my household. Within seven months of my marriage I lost my job. I struggled to survive and bring in money for my familly doing odd jobs until I found something else to bring in the income we once had. As time past, I could not find a job to make up for the loss of my income. Eventually, we lost the brand new house we were living in. I felt like a failure. Take away a man’s abillity to be a provider and theres a good chance you will destroy the inner man that drives him. After getting over that season in my life, by the grace of God I managed purchase FIVE more houses in a seven year span. Just win I saw myself as a winning failure I learned that failure is not loosing, but failing is refusing to get back up and try again. I heard a great man say once that failure is not failure but its the increase of wisdom in knowing what won’t work. One of the big things that hinders most of us from experiencing victory in accomplishing our goals is that we never develop the mindset to finish what we start. This is critical because along the pathway of reaching our goals we tend to run into road blocks and unsuspected challenges that if not dealt with properly, they have the abillity to crush our desires.

Today I want to welcome a guest blogger by the name of Bob Cox. Bob is a great motivator in pushing you to reach your goals. How to deal with obstacles that pop up along the way and press pass problems to reach prosperity. Put on your seatbelt and lock in. I think you will enjoy this one and learn something to make sure that this year puts you way past where you were last year this same time.

God Bless!!

5 Keys to Unlock Your “Completion Mentality” - the Door to Your Success

By Bob Cox

It is easy to get caught up in the supposed urgency of a situation. You start thinking, “I must get this done NOW or else.” But there are few times when you must do a task NOW. More often than not, it is a matter of making a good decision about when to do it.

Let’s say you discover that you have put about 5,000 miles on your car since your last oil change. You need to schedule an oil change. But you don’t need to do so this minute. The car won’t stop running right away. You have some time.

You know that it is a good idea to change your oil to keep your vehicle running as efficiently as possible. But the oil change is not so urgent that you must drop everything and run off to your neighborhood service station.

Keeping your car’s engine running properly is your motivation to change the oil regularly. By working this task into your schedule, your car will run smoothly, the engine will last longer, you won’t have to buy a new car for several years. If you didn’t have that motivation, you might push that non-urgent task to the bottom of your to-do list. You might even forget about it. It becomes non-urgent and non-important.

Your long-term goals are “non-urgent,” just like that oil change. But, like that oil change, they are important. You just need to find a way to motivate yourself to add those goal-setting tasks to your schedule and take action to complete them.

Here are five Motivation Keys you can use to activate your “completion mentality” and unlock the door to success:

KEY #1: KNOW WHY YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE THIS GOAL

Ask yourself about the “whys” behind your goals. Perhaps you are a runner and your goal is to win the next Boston Marathon. Why do you want to accomplish this goal? Is it the health benefits of getting into shape? Is it the possibility of meeting new people? Or do you simply want to be able to say you participated? No matter what your motivation, you still have to endure months of disciplined, rigorous training.

But picking the right motivation is crucial to whether you actually follow through. If your motivation is to get into shape, for instance, you might find it difficult to push past the point of “being in shape.” After all, you’ll be fit as a fiddle long before you are actually ready to compete. If you hit a snag - maybe a week of being sick with a cold - it will be easy to fall behind on that goal. “I’m already fit,” you might think. “Why push myself to train for a marathon when I’m already in shape?”

KEY #2: HAVE HIGH EXPECTATIONS

A personal sense of accomplishment is very motivating in and of itself.

About two years ago, I set out to get a private pilot’s license. Ever since I was a child, I dreamed of taking off into a clear blue sky. Once I turned that dream into a goal, I achieved it in eight months.

I do not come from an aeronautical or engineering background, so learning this new skill was incredibly challenging for me. However, I was highly motivated by my own personal expectations. And once I became a licensed private pilot, I was even more motivated to continue the process. (In flying we say, “Once you have your private pilot’s license, you now have a license to LEARN flying.”)

Challenges make us define our commitments and implement a “do what it takes” attitude. Stretching yourself expands your horizons.

I obtained my private pilot’s license after about 100 hours. I now have over 450 hours under my belt that include too many joyful memories to share in this message. Suffice it to say that none of those memories would have been possible had I not started with lessons… had I not kept going and going… and going. The simple desire to accomplish this lifelong goal was huge motivation for me, and it powered me forward.

Don’t underestimate the power of expectations. You have your own expectations of what you can accomplish. Plus, you have the combined expectations of your teachers, parents, friends, clients, employers, and colleagues. Research has shown that most people live up to these expectations. A sales manager who sets a higher standard than her counterpart will likely see greater production from her sales team than if she sets a lower standard. In other words, our motivation to meet the expectations of others - and those we have for ourselves - propels us to succeed.

KEY #3: KEEP UP A “CAN DO” ATTITUDE

Whatever you aspire to do, you must believe that you can do it. In reality, the bigger your goal, the bigger the obstacles you will face along the way. Having faith in yourself and your abilities is the key to success.

When you have a defeatist “I can’t do this” attitude, your negative expectations become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sure, you may not be able to accomplish your goal right this second. But remind yourself that every goal is a journey, with many steps along the way.

Harris Rosen, one of the inspirations for my program, The Billionaire Way, started his career as a front desk clerk after graduating from a prestigious hospitality school. If he had not set about acquiring additional skills (learning everything about running a hotel, for example), he would not have become the owner of Rosen Hotels and Resorts, the largest privately held hotel chain in the southeastern United States.

I am sure Harris had mornings when he woke up with doubts. Had he succumbed to those negative thoughts, he never could have achieved his goal.

Fear and negativity limit your imagination and ability to “look outside the box.” Inspire and motivate yourself by maintaining a ” can do” attitude.

KEY #4: TAKE A LOOK AT THE LARGER PICTURE

Winning a sales contest or receiving a bonus is an incentive to achieve … but only in the short term. The key to sustaining your progress over the long haul is to have a larger picture of what you want to accomplish.

Let’s say your 2008 health goal is to lose 10 pounds. But that’s only a short-term, one-year goal. Your “larger picture” goal may be to keep healthy so you can live longer, which will allow you to spend more time with your spouse, children, and grandchildren. To travel the world like you always wanted to… to live out your retirement without heart problems or diabetes.

Focusing on the “larger picture” will get you over the inevitable low points you’ll encounter on your path to success.

KEY #5: TAKE ACTION

Only YOU can decide to be motivated. Nobody else has that power. Accomplishing your goals begins with your decision to take action. Yes, fear and lack of confidence can creep into your mindset. And, yes, those things can extinguish your motivation. Toss them out. Choose to be positive. Then take action. You’ll find that taking even a single small step toward accomplishing a goal will motivate you to take the next step.

You may be scared, but push on ahead into that joint venture or new job and see where it takes you. What’s the worst that can happen?

6 Motivating Questions to Ask Yourself

As you work toward your goals, ask yourself:

• Am I willing to challenge myself to reach this goal?
• Can I leverage my “ordinary” skills into extraordinary results?
• Do I know the “bigger picture” of what I want to achieve with this goal?
• Am I clear on why I want to accomplish this goal?
• Will I choose a “can do” attitude while pursuing this goal?
• Can I dig a little deeper to make this goal happen?

Answer these questions honestly and make a commitment to take action. This will put the “oil” in your motivational engine that will sustain your journey to success.

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Your website’s ranking on search engines is a key element
of your overall marketing strategy, and there are key ways to
improve your link popularity and notariety through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by a host of
dishonest webateers seeking to improve their link
popularity by playing tricks on search engines.

However, the good news is that search engines have figured this out.
They now on guard for “spam” pages and sites that have
increased their rankings by artificial methods. Once a
search engines tracks down this type of site, that site is
demoted in page ranking or completely removed from the search
engine’s index. Who wants that? No one!!!

The bad news is that some high quality sites being mistaken for these web page criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in
the “spam” net and tossed from a search engine’s index,
even though you have done nothing to deserve such harsh
treatment. But there are things you can do - and things you
should be sure NOT to do - which will prevent this kind of
misperception.

Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you
are linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning
website ranking, and virtually all search engines on the
Internet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go about
increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you
must be extremely careful about which sites you choose
to link to. Google will accasionally imposes penalties on sites
that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of
artificially boosting their link popularity. They have
actually labeled these links “bad neighborhoods.”

The good thing is that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. But you must check, and
double-check, all the links that are active on your links
page to make sure you haven’t linked to a bad neighborhood.

The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages
you have linked to have been penalized. The most direct way
to do this is to download the Google toolbar at
http://toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most
pages are given a “Pagerank” which is represented by a
sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.

Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the
scale. This is especially important when the scale is
completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages
have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you
may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be
difficult to recover from the infection.

There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose
scale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale.
These sites have not been penalized, and their links may
grow in value and popularity. However, do make sure that
you closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain that
at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have
linked up to them from your links page.

Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to
artificially boost their link popularity is the use of
hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web
pages as a factor in forming their rankings, which means
that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you
have more of an opportunity to increase your search engine
ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of
keywords.

Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding
their keywords in such a way so that they are invisible to
any visitors to their site. For example, they have used the
keywords but made them the same color as the background
color of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords on
a white background. You cannot see these words with the
human eye - but the eye of search engine spider can spot
them easily! A spider is the program search engines use to
index web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it
goes back and boosts that page’s link ranking.

Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but
search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a
search engine perceive the use of hidden text - splat! the
page is penalized.

The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit
overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For
example, if the background color of your page is gray, and
you have placed gray text inside a black box, the spider
will only take note of the gray text and assume you are
employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty,
simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same color
to text as the background color of the page - ever!

Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is
called “keyword stuffing.” It is important to have your
keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you
can go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to please
those spiders. A search engine uses what is called
“Keyphrase Density” to determine if a site is trying to
artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of
keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search
engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a
keyword before it decides you have overdone it and
penalizes your site.

This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass
without sounding as if you are stuttering - unless your
keyword is part of your company name. If this is the case,
it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keyword
is “renters insurance,” be sure you don’t use this phrase
in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so
that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not
repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword
should never appear in more than half the sentences on the
page.

The final potential risk factor is known as “cloaking.” To
those of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should
be easy to understand. For the rest of you?cloaking is when
the server directs a visitor to one page and a search
engine spider to a different page. The page the spider sees
is “cloaked” because it is invisible to regular traffic,
and deliberately set-up to raise the site’s search engine
ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything
it needs to rocket that page’s ranking to the top of the
list.

It is natural that search engines have responded to this
act of deception with extreme enmity, imposing steep
penalties on these sites. The problem on your end is that
sometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such as
prevention against the theft of code, often referred to as
“pagejacking.” This kind of shielding is unnecessary these
days due to the use of “off page” elements, such as link
popularity, that cannot be stolen.

To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is
aware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure
the webmaster understands that cloaking of any kind will
put your website at great risk.

Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link
popularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligent
to avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitor
your site closely and avoid any appearance of artificially
boosting your rankings.

search ranking
google
yahoo
SEO/SEM
Page Rank
PR
Turbo Tagger

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