Making connections online

I'm still contacting different writers around the world asking for articles and offering exposure. I've gotten back a good number of responses and many of them offer to send me more articles than I asked for and that's good also. A few did tell me that I could take whatever article that I wanted from a site where they have them posted. I'll gladly do that but I'm not just in it for the articles. I could go around the net cutting and pasting articles until I have enough to get noticed but I want to do more. By contacting the authors themselves I have an opportunity to build relationships and possible add contacts. One person put a link to my site on her newsletter so that her readers could visit my site. I told her that I would headline her on my page so that people would be more likely to visit her site. This exchange could be beneficial for the both of us and I'm excited about bringing more people into the ring of connections that I am building.

I Have No Idea What I'm Doing

I haven't told anybody that I know the full name of my website even though it has been online for almost a week. The reason is that I'm tracking everything I do to see if the marketing techniques can generate traffic. If I tell my friends and family about it, I know that they will visit the site more than once and I'll never really know if what I'm doing is paying off. I checked my web statistics today and I saw that I had about 27 visitors to my site. 7 of them were unique visitors. I'm not really expecting to receive any visitors yet because if nobody knows the site exist, how can they find it. I was reading up on this kind of stuff and I read that the search engines take time to find sites. And just because you have a site and submit it to Yahoo, Google, or MSN, that doesn't grantee that you will be listed. Imagine my surprise when I saw that one of my unique visitors found me from Live.com. They found me! Live.com is not as popular as Google or those other guys but since I only have a few articles and 3 quote pages, I'm just happy that they found me. The fun part about this building a website thing is the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm playing everything by ear and learning along the way. It's exciting to not know exactly what the next step is and then it comes to. For that step three more steps come you; and when you take those three, four come to you and on and on. I have faith that the things I am doing will pay off and the challange of creating new ways to insure success is also a motivator. When its all said and done I know I'll look back at these begining days and say man i can't beileve I did that.

Balancing My Life

They say if you want to accomplish any goal you should write it down. Because when you write your goal down then that means that it is clear in your mind. I think that writing your goals down in also good because it helps you stay focused on your goal. To me staying focused on a goal (especially a long term one) can be a goal within its self. I read recently in a book about how balance in life is important but impossible. The author claimed that even the most successful of people had at least one part of their lives that was a disaster. I guess that is true when you think about it. Many successful people usually have to sacrifice something for that success. But, that's not going to stop me from trying to balance my life. For the next few months I've decided to really focus on what my goals are. I want to be able to see them clearly in my mind. At the same time I want to create a more balanced life so that I am not dedicating all of my time to one part of my life. Friends, relationships, finance, and everything else will get equal importance overall. I know going into this I will sometimes have to choose one over the rest but I think that's a judgement call and I'll have to live with the results.

Potential To Success

I'm still taking six classes this summer and I seem to be handling the amount of work pretty well. On top of all that I've been doing, I am now launching a website called Potential2Success.com. It will have a lot of useful information about success, motivation, and self improvement. They say if you are going to build a website you should choose a topic you love. I love to see people improve their lives. Anytime I come across someone I knew I always like to hear how much they have improved their lives. Just yesterday I ran into someone I haven't seen for about six years. He told me that life is going good and that he is trying to go into public speaking. Since a big part of my self improvement came when I realized how much I loved speaking in public, I was excited to hear that he was also interested. I think hearing about others succeeding motivates me also. I can't wait to get the website off the ground so I can be involved in self improvement around the world.

Sometimes in life there are things that you just don't want to do because of how impossible they seem. I've been dragging my way through a full time job while taking classes at college so I can get my degree. Finally, when I realized that I was sabotaging myself and my success by taking a few classes here and there, I decided to go all out in order to finish. Instead of taking the one or two classes like I usually do, I am taking six this summer. Why does this seem impossible? For one reason I am not cutting any of my hours at work. In fact my hours may increase because of the lack of staffing. The second reason is that I'm a ex-procrastinator who sometimes falls back into his old ways. And because I use to chronically put things (especially difficult things) off until a later date, the classes I'm taking are among the hardest that are required. I hate coming up short in anything I do, and I don't plan on just making it through the semester. I want A's and B's. In order for me to make through this grueling summer I have to remove all distractions. Its also going to require an enormous amount of discipline. Because this is going to be a big step toward my goals in the future I will be posting a series of blog tracking my progress. Three months is a long time especially when you are working every second of it. Class starts May 7 2007. later

Dimples a Defect?

What is it about dimples that people love? There's something about a person with those slight or deep creases on the cheek that makes them more attractive. I was having conversation with a co-worker (who happens to sports a pair of those cheek accents herself) when she told me that a medical professional told her that dimples aren't necessarily inherited. Dimples are sometimes a form of defect in the tissue of the face similar to cellulite. I'm no doctor, but that sounds crazy to me. I searched for some information on the topic to see if i could find something to confirm what she had been told. I couldn't find anything but it made me think, what if dimples were a defect of some sort? I mean in every picture of a cute baby or a perfect smile usually includes some kind of slight indent in the cheek. This would really bring to light the fact that everything that we come across in life is really about perception. We are quick to look at something that happens to us in life and think that since its suppose to be a bad thing, then it must be a bad thing. You lose your job, or girlfriend or boyfriend, or fall on hard times and its the end of the world. But if you perceive them as that, then it may very well be the end. What if dimples are defects? It doesn't change the fact that they are attractive unless you look at them as defects. The next time something that "terrible" happens in your life, think of the person you know with dimples and remember that beauty can come from what is suppose to be defective.