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5 Rules to Live By and 5 Rules for Living Life

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How to Happiness

Do You Rule Out Living Part of Your Life?

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She showed me her blog post about how she wasn’t doing enough. It listed out all of the things she was inspired to do now. Wow. She said she was going to read so many books; write so many blog posts, go to so many events; meet up with so many friends and family members; and excel at work.

So much commitment … I was wondering where the time was be alive.

Commitments are good things, especially those commitments we finally learn to make to ourselves. Yet, we can throw ourselves off course with commitments and rules until we lose sight of the spontaneous, growing, learning and living human beings we are.

5 Rules to Live By

Can we really make rules to live by? We need the right navigational skills, knowledge, and tools true enough, but making rules for life … Isn’t that sort of like making definitive rules about how to paddle the rapids or drive the back roads? Don’t we have to let the conditions of the rapids and the roads figure in on our choices?

Now, I’m not saying it’s not a good idea to have a few “rules of the road” to guide us. I’m saying we could do a lot fewer of them …
Of course, we need a few stretchable boundaries. A little definition gives us purpose and raises our expectations.
I’d never say take off without any idea of a destination. Gotta know where we’re going.
I’m not even thinking that we should disregard our method of transportation.
It’s even probably a good idea to choose the general route we might be taking …

But, we don’t need to determine how many miles that we’ll be moving while the sun shines, where we’ll be stopping to take a photo, or how long we’ll be swerving to miss an unfilled pothole. We don’t need to be portioning out the hours, minutes, and seconds we’ll be talking to, listening to, or sharing silence with people we love. To do that we need to know what we value and who we care about.

    Rule 1: Choose what you value and your values. Like it or not, what you value will define you and attract people who value the same stuff.

    Rule 2: Have time and energy for the people who are important to you. Enjoy their successes. Never let them fail. You’ll never fear them when you feel most lost.

    Rule 3: Have a destination in mind. It’s okay to change it a few times.

    Rule 4: Pick a suitable method of transportation. Don’t try to walk to an island or swim to the moon.

    Rule 5: Sketch out a logical starting route that suits you and takes you in the right direction. Often taking the first step is the hardest, so get started soon as you can. Every step takes you closer to where you’re going.

But … remember that humans don’t come with an instruction manual or a rule book for life.
We learn who we are by living our lives.
We’re each a one-of-a-kind experiment.
We all need a few rules of our own.

5 Rules for Living Life

As kids, we all looked forward to growing up for the chance to decide when to eat ice-cream for breakfast and other such stuff. Then we found out those decisions aren’t the ones that count. Even worse, we found out that the rules we thought were guides of our lives aren’t the same for everyone in this bigger universe.

The entire world population can’t meet to decide what makes a life worth living. Who’d be in charge? How would we pick?

Deciding the rules that make your life worth living is really up to you.

For the sake of conversation, here are a few rules you might try out. I think of them of as rules for living life. They’re all adaptable to any size, temperament, time line, location, or living conditions you might design.


    Rule 6: Permit yourself to leave space, time, energy, consciousness for unexpected new stuff.

    Rule 7: Learn new things from people who’ve been where you’re going, from people who’ve been places you’ve never imagined, from people who are like you and from people who are not.

    Rule 8: Find out as much as you can about what you’re good at and figure out how not to care about what you’re not.

    Rule 9: Remember old things that you thought you’d forgotten, especially what made you laugh when you were young.

    Rule 10: See, smell, hear, taste, and touch what the world has to offer — surprise yourself.

Be open to the opportunity that serendipity serves up. Experience ideas that grab your attention. Realize what challenges you and discover what problems you can solve. Choose a few rules for living that make this life your own.

Knowing where you’re going is irresistible.
Being alive while you go is even more irresistible than that.

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

How to Stop Common Workplace Accidents

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Jay Acker

Starting a small business is a huge undertaking. Not only do you have to worry about start-up capital, acquiring adequate space, creating a viable business model, and recruiting reliable employees, once the company is up and running, you also have to deal with the safety of your employees, customers, and clients. Although certain lines of work pose inherent workplace hazards, small business owners in every industry should take precautions to minimize the risk of accidents and injuries.

Drafting a thorough employment manual is a great place to start in an effort to create a safe working environment. Research suggests that careful planning can drastically reduce the incidence of workplace accidents. Therefore, before you launch your next business venture, consider these common injuries and the various ways a safety manual can help you address them.

1. Vehicle Accidents

If any employees drive during working hours for company business, or if any employees use company cars, a very specific policy concerning the operation of motor vehicles is imperative. First, prudent employers should scrutinize job applicants’ driving records before entrusting them with access to company vehicles. Company car policies should also emphasize the dangers of using cell phones and texting behind the wheel.

In addition, an effective safety manual will clearly outline the protocol for dealing with any sort of vehicle accident. That protocol should involve calling 911, gathering information from other individuals at the scene of the accident, and notifying the appropriate members of company management immediately after the accident occurs.

2. Workplace Violence

Employee-on-employee violence accounts for a staggering number of serious workplace injuries. Therefore, the employee manual for any reputable small business must stress the company’s zero tolerance policy on workplace violence. To prevent on-the-job physical altercations, some companies implement dispute resolution procedures. Under such policies, employees who are not getting along can try to settle their differences with the assistance of an impartial mediator. Safety manuals should also require staff members report incidents of violence or suspicious circumstances that suggest a dispute may be brewing.

3. Injuries from Overexertion

It’s no surprise that employees charged with regular heavy lifting are prone to various physical ailments, often focused on the lower back. However, even sedentary office workers can suffer injuries from overexerting themselves if they lift, carry, or pull an object in an unsafe manner. Because the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has not outlined definitive restrictions on the maximum weight an employee can safely lift, small businesses should encourage their employees to use good judgment when faced with moving items in the workplace. Companies should also have tools, such as hand trucks or dollies, on-site to aid the staff in moving heavy objects.

Safety manuals typically require employees who strain a muscle at work to immediately report the incident to a supervisor. Thereafter, management should assess the situation and direct the employee to consult medical attention if appropriate. Permitting injured employees to continue working only risks exacerbating the situation.

4. Repetitive Motion Disorders

When an employee repeats the same motions daily, whether it be typing at a computer or grabbing items on an assembly line, they are at risk for repetitive motion injuries such as tendonitis, bursitis, and carpal tunnel syndrome. A good safety manual will require these at-risk employees to take adequate breaks to give their muscles time to rest periodically throughout the day.

5. Slip and Fall Accidents

Accidents involving falling, slipping and tripping are a part of life. They happen everywhere, so creating a fall-free workplace would likely be a fruitless effort. However, taking precautions to reduce the incidence of injuries resulting from such accidents is a viable and important goal. Company safety policies include a hazard assessment process to identify loose cords, footing and poorly lit areas and take steps to correct them. Wet floors and untethered cords or wires, for example, deserve immediate attention, and employees must be encouraged to report unsafe conditions to manaegment.

6. Machine Related Injuries

Use of industrial machinery has led to some of the most gruesome and deadly workplace injuries around the globe. Therefore, companies must provide extensive formal training to employees before allowing them to operate dangerous equipment. If you use machinery requiring specialized training, include in the manual that employees without documented training are not allowed to operate it.

Safety-related education in this context should emphasize the importance of refraining from wearing loose closing and jewelry while operating machinery. Similarly, hair must always be restrained. Those items can easily get caught in the machinery, which often leads to devastating injuries.

A company safety manual is not only a legal requirement to provide to employees, it’s a tool for a business owner to understand the risks and potential hazards they might encounter on the job. By considering these early in the process of setting up your company, some hazards can even be mitigated. Do the best for your business. Keep it safe.

Author’s Bio:
Jay Acker runs safetyservicescompany.com the teams who make safety manuals, videos, posters, training kits and other items for safety training.

Humanize your LinkedIn Profile

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Rosemary O’Neill

Your LinkedIn profile can be a powerful calling card, even if you’re not looking for a new job. It will often show up on the first page of search results for your name in Google (try it), so why not take a moment to give it some personality?

Who’s searching for you?

In my case, I received two different invitations to speak at events after adding “speaker” to my LinkedIn profile. Coincidence? I also found out that my company had been highlighted on a “companies to watch” list based on the work we put into our corporate LinkedIn presence.

Both your personal and your corporate LinkedIn pages should reflect your style, personality, tone, and mission. Donâ’t make the mistake of using “corporate-speak” in your profile summary (unless you talk that way, in which case…stop it).

We’re all there to do business

Recent updates have made LinkedIn more visually appealing and more user-friendly, which may mean that more people are taking a second look. After all, Liz told you four years ago to start taking advantage of LinkedIn’s secret superpowers.


Humanize Your LinkedIn Profile

What are you waiting for?

Humanize your LinkedIn Profile

Grab those eyeballs with some LinkedIn profile bells and whistles:

  • Use your own tone of voice in your profile summary, and tell your story
  • Fill in the Volunteer Experience section; it makes you a whole person
  • Try adding the ReadingList app to show what books you’re reading
  • Add the SlideShare Presentation app and upload your marketing “deck”
  • Don’t forget to ask for recommendations when it’s appropriate, human voices on your profile are very compelling (be generous with your own recommendations too)
  • Try hard to include photo or video with your status updates

LinkedIn has said that they are working on enhancements to the company pages too, so start thinking about how you might spiff up your corporate presence as well!

Is your LinkedIn profile telling your story with pizzazz?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

The 5 Pillars Of Successful List Building

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Gerald Gigerl

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Marketing and List Building Online

Today I will introduce you to the 5 pillars of successful list building, the main factors that can make or break your wealth.

It has to be mentioned that most online marketers have a wrong idea about what marketing online really means. Marketing is war, marketing is testing and marketing is about being the best.

To be good in list building you have to put in at least hundreds of hours to become good at driving traffic, split testing, creating products and writing email campaigns.

There are no shortcuts in making this work and as long as you are not trying to find a way around the hard work, you are not getting into any trouble.

The 5 Pillars Of Successful List Building

Let’s have a look at the 5 pillars of successful list building.

Pillar #1: Niche Selection

Unbelievable but true, I think there are way too many people who get into a niche that they don’t like and are comfortable with. Your goal is to spend enough time researching a market that is big enough and has substantial equity to making your business worthwhile.

Never enter a market that you are not passionate about because in most cases you will “quit” before you ever realize success. When things are tough, the only thing that keeps you going is your drive, passion and goals.

Pay attention to what kind of market you enter as well as how much demand there is. It’s easier to succeed in an already booming market than it is to achieve substantial results in a developing market. It takes more money, energy and time to reach breakthrough success in a “fresh market”.

Pillar #2: Business Model

Your business model is the single most important success factor for your chosen market/niche. As for pretty much everything else there are two options: You choose to create your own business model or you decide to go with an already successful business model.

What is actually meant by creating or following a business model? Basically, you have a very clear plan on how you do everything such as what kind of products you promote, what kind of bonuses you offer, what kind of OTOs (One Time Offers) you offer, optimizing squeeze pages, running split tests using Google Analytics/Experiments, creating email campaigns and much more.

While this might be exactly what you are doing for “planning”, all these skills can only be learned in the process of DOING. Yes, you have to have a plan on how to drive traffic and market your products, but without a strict discipline of doing exactly that, you are just wasting your efforts for planning.

It takes insane amounts of sweat to make anything work. The best you can do to reach your list building goal is to work as hard and smart as you possibly can.

Pillar #3: Squeeze Page Optimization

This is the step where you start making real money really soon if you are putting in consistent effort to make it work.

A squeeze page is a page where a person leaves the email address to get a free gift. The main goal is to drive as much targeted traffic to your squeeze page as possible and convert the traffic as good as possible.

The opt-in rate is mainly determined on how persuasive your sales page is, meaning how people perceive the value you are offering. To get the highest opt-in rate possible, you have to test titles, value proposition, colors, free products and much more.

The only way you can really test all those factors is by driving ongoing, highly targeted traffic to your squeeze page(s).

IMPORTANT NOTE: The message you spread on your squeeze page for your free information product should be consistent. Don’t give people information that is not accurate just to make them subscribe to your email list. The information on your squeeze page must be in congruence with your product.

If your message is providing wrong information, you will get a higher unsubscribe rate than you ever thought possible before. Therefore, your message (value proposition) needs to be consistent to attract targeted customers to your products.

Pillar #4: Traffic Generation

Traffic generation is something that you should never get sick of. There is unimaginable amount of equity in driving traffic to your squeeze page(s). The more ongoing traffic you are able to drive to your capture pages, the more possibilities you have to split test.

Some typical traffic generation methods include forum marketing, free product offers, SEO, PPC, social media, video marketing, article marketing, ad swaps, solo ads, JV giveaways and webinars.

You should never get stuck with one traffic generation method but focus on more techniques to drive high quality traffic.

Pillar #5: Email Marketing

Under email marketing goes everything that you do within your autoresponder. You have got to learn how to set up email campaigns, write newsletters, promote products and much more.

If you decide to market the best-selling products from an affiliate network like ClickBank, many vendors will have email campaigns ready for the promotion of their product. All you need to do is to simple copy and paste their prewritten email campaigns into your autoresponder follow up emails.

If you are promoting your own products you will always have to write your own email campaigns.

No matter what product you decide to promote make sure to keep a stable relationship between your list and you. Don’t bombard your list by sending several emails a day promoting different products all the time.

You want to build and sustain trust.. The best way to do that is by giving your list immense value in the form of free products, free reports, free articles and so on.

Now that you know the 5 pillars of successful list building, you can start producing amazing results for your business!

Author’s Bio:
Gerald Gigerl is a product creator, lead generation and affiliate marketing expert. Gerald creates information products on how to drive massive traffic to your website and generate up to 75 “product hungry” leads a day! If you are really serious about making massive amounts of money online you can learn more about Gerald here: The Affiliate Traffic Pro .

How to use Pinterest for a Commercial Website with Few Images

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Marcela De Vivo

As Pinterest, the picture and board-based social networking site, has exploded in popularity. Many businesses have been scrambling to use it to drive customers to their websites.

For ecommerce businesses this has not been much of a challenge due to the product and photo-based nature of their websites. They can create relevant boards and promote their products with elegant and sharable photos, driving a lot of traffic — and hopefully purchases — to their website. By interlacing their own product images with other interesting and relevant images, they can create appealing Pinterest boards that drive user engagement.

What about the rest of us?

How to use Pinterest for a Commercial Website with Few Images

Many businesses that operate online are not product-based or may not have a lot of photos to work with. Are they simply out of luck when it comes to Pinterest, or are there creative ways to use this network to drive customer engagement and traffic?

Fortunately, as creative social media SEOs and marketers, we proudly proclaim that all hope is not lost! There are a lot of ways you can use Pinterest to interact with your customer base, even if you’re not a photo-centric business.

Inspirational and Motivational Images

If your business has a motivational or inspirational purpose behind it, you can use Pinterest to share these values with your customers. If you haven’t noticed that motivational images have been exploding around the internet, it’s time to open your eyes.

These types of images — a beautiful picture with inspirational text overlaid on top — are some of the most shared images on the internet. They spread through Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter like wildfire and can be very effective drivers of traffic.

Pick out some values that your company stands for and turn them into motivational images. Throw them up on Pinterest boards and share them via all of your social networks. If you do your job properly you should see a positive response.

You can use a tool like PicMonkey to edit your images, add text, and make them fun and easy to share. You may also choose to add your watermark to improve your branding.

Curating Pins From Your Niche

If you can’t make the above strategy work, you can always act as the gatherer of information for your niche. There is ALWAYS value in aggregating all of the content related to your niche and organizing it into neatly consumable boards on Pinterest. A few websites have had major success using this technique. The best part: you don’t have to OWN or CREATE any of the content yourself!

Don’t get me wrong — this isn’t stealing. You’re going to pin and repin related content into boards that are organized. This way anyone interested in your niche can go to one place on Pinterest — yours — to get all of the information that they need.

Final Thoughts

Remember that Pinterest is just another social network. It’s not going to be the end-all of your social media strategies. It’s just another arrow in your quiver when it comes to delivering value to your customers and gaining their attention and hopefully their business!

Author’s Bio:
Marcela De Vivo is a freelance writer helping webmasters find the right tools to promote their websites online. She loves to connect on social media so be sure to follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

How to Get the Best People to Support Your Cause, Project, or Idea

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Help Me!!


BigStock: What’s the Best Way
to Say “Help Me, Please”?

Ever wonder why some folks seem to have a slew of people ready to help them achieve their goals? Is their cause, idea, or project really better? Do they really know better people? Or is it the way they ask?

On September 22-23, I’m speaking at Pitch Refinery. Check out the agenda for the interactive event that proves

“Every business has a story…

how you tell it makes all the

difference.”

If you get a chance to be there, you’ll find the power of story to move people to action faster, easier, and more meaningfully.

How to Convince the Best People to Support Your Cause, Project, or Idea

In my role at the Pitch Refinery event, I’ll be outlining How to Leading Passionate Employees and Clients — How to get everyone who helps your business involved in sharing your best true story so that your business thrives. In that context, I’ll be talking about five steps to enlisting help on any cause project or idea.

In the spirit if a sneak preview, I’m sharing them here.

  1. Build your network before you need it. We might be on a team or leading one. We might be new to the industry. Maybe we’ve been working alone on a stealth project. Whatever our situation, success means we’ll need the help of others getting to know our story and sharing it. We’re better together than we are alone. As early as you can, share what you’re doing. Vvalue the people who take interest and invite the best them to get close so that they become part of the story too.
  2. Talk about them, not you. Every writer, teacher and storyteller knows that the opening of of a story is more than just information, it’s the moment that establishes a connection with the audience — the people we want to reach. Get to know what moves the people who love you. Get to know what wastes their tiem. Then when you reach out to ask for help you can start with them, not you. That will turn your offer from

    “We are a ___ that is trying to [stop world hunger] by ___. Akimi is a child parses out her rice each night so that it will last longer. You can help make those meals last longer.
    into
    “We’ve all had that horrible, deep pit in the stomach feeling of working on an empty stomach. It changes how we see the world. It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to live with that empty feeling for months, but some do. Imagine how that sets their world view.

  3. Come out from behind the curtain. A true collaboration, an invitation to participate in building something great, cannot occur if we stay in our office, hold our territory, or hide behind our website expecting others to show up while we tell them what to do for us. Come out when you reach out. Show your “face.” Say hello before you ask and get to know who you’re asking. Build a relationship so that people understand that you want their participation not just their money or their time. And so that they see that participation goes both ways.
  4. Turn the pitch into an invitation. The reason most requests offers, and asks, are requested is because the size of the “ask” is far greater than the foundation of trust we’ve built. Trust is built through proof that I’m safe to have faith in you. To establish trust most quickly, show the people you want to help you that you see, hear, and understand them by building an invitation that is easy to accept because it fits seamlessly into their lives, saves them time, and offers and outcome that has meaning to them.
  5. Celebrate your heroes. Allow for mutation. Leave room for ideas that are bigger, better, easier, and more meaningful than your own. Listen to those who start to participate. Invite the best to be hands-on and minds-on with what you’re doing. It’s not if you build it they will come. It’s if they build it they will bring their friends.

People whose offers always get great participation have figured something out. They focus on how to make supporting their cause, project, or idea easier, faster, and more meaningful for the best people to participate. Do the same by concentrating on the people, not the brilliance of the idea or cause. It’s not a pitch or promotion. It’s leadership — building something we can’t build alone.

What are you doing to invite people to support your cause, project or idea?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!