Perfection can be the enemy of success seem controversial. Being a perfectionist can be one of the most destructive habits when it comes to the success of your business. The fear of not being able to do it right often stops people from even starting.

The truth is, almost nothing is done perfectly the first time. What's really important is your decision to act in order to get going and move in the direction you want to go.

1. Know what you are doing
2. Start what you have to do
3. Improve it until it's good
4. Review what you did
5. Polish it until it's very good

For instance:

Before your business makes a million, you need to make $100,000. Before that you need to make $10,000. And Before you make your first $10,000, you need to first make $1000. 

Many, fail because they are looking for the instant fix to fulfill their dreams instead of following a path of continuous improvements and accomplishments.

Success is built upon continuous learning. Your action controls your destiny.

When it comes to business, being efficient and effective is the ultimate goal. You can be efficient without being effective by doing things that don't matter. You can be effective but not efficient by doing something worthwhile, but taking too much time or having it cost too much.

What we need is to become both efficient and effective at the same time, for ourselves, and for our employees.

First Things First

The keyword here is prioritize. Every task has its own priority. When you make a list of things to do, assign a value to each one and identify the importance of each. Asking yourself the question "Do I have to do this right now?" is often a good practice to determine the importance of the specific task.

In fact, the 80/20 rule also applies here. 80 percent of your results will usually come from 20 percent of your efforts. Shocking? I think not. Find out what that is and focus on that 20 percent.

Utilize Technology

This is the reason why new technologies are being invented all the time - to improve our efficiency and effectiveness.

Have you ever wondered why some people seem to accomplish so much while others struggle along barely able to attend to their daily needs? Highly effective people usually fulfill their achievements with less work and effort than those who accomplish little.

Perhaps these highly effective people utilize some sort of technology, e.g. computer software(s), to help them to produce better results in less time.

For example, did you know...

• Increasing your monitor size could increase your productivity and efficiency up by 40%?
• Adding a secondary monitor could increase your productivity and efficiency up by 65%?
• Changing your seat and placing keyboard/mice in a comfort location could increase your productivity and efficiency up by 20%?
• Having a computer that runs fast could increase your productivity and efficiency up by 200% on average?

Be Organized

There is no such thing as a disorganized person, only the ones who choose not to organize themselves. Make things easier to find. Time spent looking for things is wasteful and completely unnecessary; in fact, it's frustrating most of the time.

Life is too short to spend looking for things. Agreed?

Write It Down

No one is perfect. And I believe many of us have already mastered the skill to forget things accidentally. That is one of the skills I wished I didn't become so good at it.

Write down notes, e.g. on sticky notes, and place them where you can easily access them. This will reduce the chances of you forgetting things that are of high priority.

When Are You Most Productive?

This is the question that you must ask yourself. Some people are highly productive in the morning, and some people are productive in the late evening. It's always better to work for 2 hours when you are highly productive than to work for 8 hours to come up with the same results.

Einstein once explained his Theory of Relativity in this way. "If you sit with a beautiful girl, two hours seem like two minutes. But if you sit on a hot stove, two minutes seem like two hours. That's relativity."

The results produced in an hour of focused, committed, high-intentioned activities can be hundreds of times more valuable than the same effort without these ingredients.

How Effective and Efficient Are You?

"I don't have to know how to do it, I just need to find someone who knows to do it for me."

For management perspective, a good manager doesn't have to know every job, only how to get other people to do them in efficient and cost-effective ways. For small businesses, that concept is a dangerous naive.

The truth is, most small businesses start out without hiring employees. You simply don't need the extra help until your business grows to a certain stage when extra help is needed. New small business owners often end up covering many different aspects of their businesses themselves.

Besides, let's say you are opening up an automobile repair shop and you don't know much about auto mechanics. How are you going to properly hire and supervise mechanics? You have absolutely no control over the quality of the services you business has to offer.

Know Your Business

A skilled, dedicated owner often can make a venture successful when others have failed. You have to know that your customers will exchange their money only for the conviction that you are giving them their money's worth. Which means that you will need to know what you are doing.

If you are looking to start a pasta business, you have to have good understanding in every aspect of pasta making, from mixing eggs and flour, flattening the dough, and slicing it into strips. If you run a restaurant business and the food isn't good, you are the one who either improves it or goes broke. Simple as that.

Love What You Do

It is a fact that the average small business owner spends more time with his entrepreneur journey than with his family. Truth hurts, I know. With that being said, it makes sense to be at least as careful about choosing your business as you are about picking your other half.

Only a few of us are lucky enough that we can meet someone on a blind date, settle down a week later, and have it all work out wonderfully. You can, of course, start your business as if you are on a blind date. And if you are lucky enough, you will succeed. But if you aren't, it only takes 1 failure to through you in debt.

In relationships, as in business, most of us make better decisions if we approach them with a little more care and preparation.

Do You Know Every Aspects of Your Business?

As a business owner, you need to make sure that you are not blinded by one aspect of your business that you overlook all others. Many new starters are so enamored with their "brilliant ideas" that they never bothered to think about the negatives factors that doomed their ventures from the start.

Let's say you love fixing computers. Running your own computer repair shop sounds like it would be great fun. Perhaps it would be, but if you see yourself constantly repairing computers all day, who is going to meet customers? who is going to answer the phones? and who is going to market your business? Every aspect of a business has to be carefully considered before one actually starts one. 

Continuous Learning

Some people want to become business owners because they want to be independent. Some start business ventures for personal fulfillment. Some do it for money, respect, or power. These are all good reasons to start business ventures. Unfortunately, while the potential for great success exists, so do many risks that lead to failures.

Starting and running a business is very hard and demanding work that requires a wide range of skills few people are born with. If you are planning to start a business, be sure to prepare yourself to learn and deal with all aspects of the business.

A friend of mine back in Vancouver, BC once told me the importance of having a sound business plan. At that time I was starting and running a local IT consulting business in Vancouver, BC. As an amateur I was, I did not understand the importance of a business plan to the growth of my business. Without a proper business plan, I still managed to make a decent income from the local IT consulting business. The business grew slowly but it was at least, a stable business.

However, if I had a proper business plan, I believe the business would have grew at a much faster speed.

What exactly is a Business Plan?

To avoid repeating myself, please reference: Your Business Plan, Your Business Blueprint

Now to elaborate more about the benefits of having a proper business plan, here is the list of 5 reasons why you need a business plan:

1. Helps You Get the Capital You Need

If you walk into a bank or an investor's office and try to get a loan in order to gain enough capital to start your business, you need to explain to them why you are a good investment. Most lenders or investors will require a written business plan before they will even consider your proposal seriously.

• Investors want to know if you really understand your business.
• Investors want to know if you have carefully thought through critical issues facing you as a business owner.

If you have a thoroughly thought out business and financial plan that demonstrates a good likelihood of success, and if you are persistent and passionate, you will find the capital you need.

2. Helps You to Decide to Proceed or Stop

You, as the prospective business owner, are the most important person you must convince the soundness of your proposal. When you write your business plan, you need to go through an extensive debate with yourself.

For example, you won't have a problem coming up with 10 reasons on why you should start the business that you have in mind. The first process that you go through is to convince yourself to start a business. And when you are thinking about writing a business plan, you have already convinced yourself to start a business.

However, the second step, for example, is to come up with 10 reasons on why you should not start the business that you have in mind. This process is particularly hard because you have to constantly switch perspectives and work out every little details of your business. The ultimate goal is, of course, to make it work.

A business plan is the written copy of every details of the debate that you go through, with yourself, or with your partners.

3. Gives You a Better Understanding of Your Business Concept

When you analyze the flow of your business from, for example:

• Getting enough capital
• Analyzing your competitors
• Developing products or services
• Marketing products or services
• Getting your first sale
• Stabilizing your business
• Hiring employees
• Expanding your business
• Defeating your competitors
• Becoming a corporate giant

You will get a much better understanding of how your business operates from time to time. If you know more about what's to come, you can better prepare yourself for your own benefits. This ability to fine tune your plans and business process increases your chances of success.

4. Improves Your Odds of Success - Survival of the Fittest

In the world of business, it's all about survival. Having a well developed business plan improves your odds of success. Many new, small businesses don't last very long. And many small businesses simply don't have a business plan. (I was one of them) Is that a coincidence?

The whole idea about writing a business plan is to be better prepared of what's to come down the road. The more effort you put into it, the better prepared you are.

5. Helps You to Keep on Track

A written business plan gives you a clear course toward the future and makes your decision making easier in the events of emergencies. Many business owners spend countless hours and effort dealing with emergencies simply because they haven't learned how to plan ahead. The keyword here is also "preparation".

The question is... Do You Have a sound Business Plan?

[Click here to view the full PDF]

SAM takes the advertiser step-by-step to complete the purchase order. From selecting the right package to making a PayPal payment, SAM guides the advertiser professionally and automatically. To fight against spammers, SAM is built with a Captcha spam protection feature.

Once when the purchase order is submitted by the advertiser, the webmaster will be able to approve the purchase order in the SAM's backend administration panel. The webmaster confirms the payment from the advertiser and approves the purchase order. An approved text or image ad order will automatically go live on the website with the corresponding HTML ad code.

Over the weekend I took my PHP / MySQL programming to the next level. I've developed an ad management system and it is called the "Simple Ad Management", short for "SAM".

Simple Ad Management is a web-based content management system that allows web masters to take complete control over the ads displaying on their websites. With SAM, advertisers are able to advertise on websites via a professional and user-friendly process. Web masters are able to sell unlimited number of ad spots (text and image), paid posts, and sponsored reviews on unlimited number of websites.

Business Minder's Ad centre is powered by SAM!

We believe in our own products and we support our own products by using them ourselves.

The advertiser page can be found here: Advertise with Business Minder

If you wish to learn more about this ad management system, there is an online demo. See below.

Features at a Glance

• Own your own advertising centre.
• Sell unlimited number of text links, ads, sponsored reviews, and paid posts on unlimited number of website(s).
• Professional and user-friendly advertiser website that shows advertisers step-by-step from choosing an ad package to finalizing the order.
• Receive payments via PayPal.
• Approve ads before they go live.
• Customized Content Management System in the administration panel to allow modifications to various pages of the advertiser website.
• Professional and user-friendly administration panel to give you complete control over your Ad system.
• Plug-n-play scripts to show ads beautifully on all major browsers.
• Automatically appends your ClickBank affiliate ID to the footer link. So that you'll earn affiliate income from people who purchase SAM through your website. 
• Captcha enabled to fight against spams.

Username: admin

Password: admin

(Advertiser's View Here)

Review Copies Available!

This software is not free but review copies are available to people who meet the following requirements:

• You should already have an established website with quality content and established community.
• You know how to create a MySQL database.
• You know how to import a *.SQL file to a MySQL database via phpMyAdmin.

Contact us directly if you wish to apply for a review copy.

More and more companies are beginning to realize the need and the value of online help desk solutions. When visitors or clients go to your website and have questions or issues about your services or products, you need to direct them to places where they can get the answers they seek.

Knowledge base (or FAQ) is a good option

Knowledge base is a database of frequently asked questions. When people have questions on your website, the first place they go to is the knowledge base, or the FAQ page.

There is a problem with this strategy. What if your knowledge base does not offer the answers to the questions people have? They walk away, unsatisfied.

And of course, if you include all the answers to all possible questions people might have in your knowledge base, your knowledge base becomes too complex and hard to manage; it loses its purpose of answering "frequently" asked questions.

Also, there are people who simply don't have time (lazy) or aren't technical savvy enough to look for the answers to their questions.

Help Desk Interacts with Your Web Visitors and Initiate Relationships

The purpose of Help Desk is to offer an alternative help option and keep your visitors or clients from walking away unsatisfied.

[Click Here to View the full PDF]

Help desk is an essential part of any growing business. Investing in a good help desk solution will do wonders for your business, both internally to your office staff, and externally to your visitors or clients. Because this is a systematic way of providing support, it increases the efficiency and effectiveness of your customer support.

The faster and more efficiently you can provide solutions to the problems of customers and employees, the more satisfied they would be.

A loan, for example, may have its interest compounded every month: in this case, a loan with $100 principal and 10% interest per month would have a balance of $110 (+$10, 10% of 100) at the end of the first month. At the end of the second month, assuming the same interest rate, it would have a balance of $121 (+$11, 10% of 110).

I've made an illustration of how interest compounding over time can make a huge difference in your investment.

Here is the direct link: Compound Interest Calculator

Please note that this tool is only a demonstration of how compound interest works. The results in real life will vary depending on:

• How frequent interest is calculated. The tool calculates interest annually.
• ROI at the time of interest calculation.

Please also keep in mind that the value of your investment depends on inflation and currency.

As a result, the widget codes need to be changed.

Please update your widget codes. They can be found here.

We appreciate your support and understanding, and apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused.

(source: IAB and PriceWaterhouseCoopers 2009)

As compared to Q1 of 2008, $5.745 billion, Q1 of 2009 shows a 5% decline over the same period in 2008.

For that we can conclude that Internet is not immune to the overall economic conditions.

Q4 of 2008 is the peak of online advertising revenue to date.

If we look carefully at the trend, we can see that the online advertising revenue for Q4 of 2008 is approx. $6.19 billion, which is the peak in the history of online advertising to date.

That is very interesting. The global economic conditions have been declining since the start of the recession late 2007.

Online ad revenue did decline from Q4 of 2007 to Q2 of 2008. Then it started to grow and reached the peak in Q4 of 2008.

Internet industry did not decline at the same rate compared with other industries.

Let's compared Internet advertising with offline advertising for now.

• IPG, InterPublic Gruop in London, parent company of media agency initiative and ad shop Lowe, suffered a 23.9% drop in UK revenue in Q1 2009. UK revenue totalled $111.5 million in Q1 2009, down $35 million from the same period in 2008.
• Outdoor advertising in UK experienced a 19.3% year on year (Q1 2009 vs Q1 2008) fall in ad spend, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association in UK.
• The Newspaper Association of America reported a 28.28% year on year (Q1 2009 vs. Q1 2008) revenue drop, which calculates to be $2.6 billion drop.

In fact, if we look at growth of newspaper print ad sales from 2006 to date...

Now if you compare the two graphs above... it will become clear that:

People are moving from offline advertising to online advertising!

The main reason behind the growth of Internet advertising revenue and the decline of various offline advertising revenue is "technology".

References:

• Recession, the Start of a New Era
• Blame Technology for Eliminating the Middle Class

The decline of web advertising revenue in Q1 2009 is expected.

During the global economic crisis, web advertising revenue did not decline like other offline advertising services simply because technology and the web are the catalysts that are driving the global recession; they are not victims of the recession. 

Companies finally realize the importance of leveraging technology and the web for the growth of their businesses. Which explains the continuous growth of web advertising revenue and the continuous decline of offline advertising revenue; companies are redirecting their energy to focus more on the web.

But since consumers are being affected by the global recession (mostly the "Middle Class"), the amount of cash flow in any industry has been declining. People are simply running out of money to purchase online.

Web advertising is cost-effective and has a lot of potential to bring out great results. In 2008, many businesses changed their marketing tactics to utilize various Internet marketing strategies. Which caused the growth of web advertising revenue from Q2 to Q4 of 2009. However, they did not receive the results anticipated due to the decrease of cash flow in general. As a result, they started to cut their web advertising budgets, which caused the decline from Q4 of 2008 to Q1 of 2009.

Don't Panic

The slight year on year decline in web advertising revenue does not translates to web advertising being ineffective. Web advertising will continue to be a cost-effective marketing strategy. After all, people (in U.S. alone) are still willing to pay $5.48 billion in web advertising as of Q1 of 2009.

"Interactive advertising has taken its rightful place as a fixture on marketing plans across sectors, which means we aren't immune to broader economic trends," said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. "Nevertheless, consumers are spending more and more time with interactive media. For this, and other reasons, interactive media continues to gain share of marketing spend. We’re confident that growth will resume as the U.S. economic climate improves. Interactive advertising is the most accountable way to reach consumers—and in this economy, digital media will be a core component of any successful marketing campaign."

David Silverman, PwC Assurance partner, echoed the observation that interactive advertising has been less affected by economic conditions than other media.

"Current economic conditions are clearly challenging," Silverman said. "Nonetheless, interactive media continues to consume a larger piece of the overall advertising pie."

If you stay on top of technology and the web, you will be less affected by the global economic crisis. That, is really what gives you the advantage over your competitors, isn't it?

Aaron

Web Growth Analyst