The Refresh Orlando Heirs

The desire to consistently improve your life is one of your most fundamental needs. That feeling that comes from knowing that everyday you are becoming more is part of your nature. Knowing that you are affecting and improving your environment through your own influence is immensely satisfying. It is a key ingredient in living a happy and fulfilled life. At some level we are al pursuing success of some sort. We are constantly looking for ways to have more, to be more and to gain more, thinking that once we “have it all” we will be happy and life will be perfect. Then, we can take it easy and relax and just enjoy life.

This way of thinking, this mindset, acts like a virus that can “kill” you. If not emotionally then spiritually. Our modern culture is filled with numerous examples of top achievers who seemingly have everything but they are deeply unhappy and constantly have to battle with the challenges within their own character. They fail to grasp the true purpose of success. From it’s latin origin, the word success actually means “to advance” or “to progress” which implies that success is not “something” you get at the end but a process that has very little to do with the end result. From this point of view success is what will improve your life as it is what moves you forward to a better experience of life.

In their pursuit of a greater quality of life most people loose sight of the real reason why they actually want to be successful in the first place. It is never the “things” but rather the way you believe these things will make you feel once you’ve got them. Your success will be either obtainable or sustainable. Most of your desires will be obtainable within your lifetime but this no guarantee that you will be happy and fulfilled. When you strive for collecting and accumulating “things” you will experience very little fulfilment as you will always rely on something external to give you the feelings that you want to experience inside you; feelings that you believe will come from having what you pursue.

The real purpose of a goal is never to obtain something of material value but rather the qualities that you will gain as a person in your pursuit of the goal. For you to have success that is sustainable you must develop a new mindset; a mindset that focuses not on what you must do to get what you want, but on what you must become to attract that which you want. What you become is what you get to keep. When you shift your focus to developing your character, you can start to use goals and success as a means to an end instead of it being the end-all and be-all of life. You start to distance yourself from the need to have “stuff” in order to feel that sense of joy and fulfilment.

Knowing that you can be successful is not enough. You want the experience of success. You that feeling of success as a part of who you are as a person; as part of your character. When your success is obtainable, when you are able to collect the things, then your experience of success rarely lasts very long. There is no consistency in the experience. So often we see amazing success stories of young achievers that reach their all their goals in a short period of time, only to break down emotionally soon after. The reason is that they haven’t learned the key to lasting success which is the ability to create success in your life that is sustainable. Sustainable success is inexhaustible. It is consistent and takes care of itself. With the qualities and attributes that you learned through the experience of pursuing your goal you are able to re-create any achievement as you are the source.

The concept of obtainable and sustainable success is best illustrated with Aesop’s fable of the Goose and the Golden Egg. The goose as the source of the gold could consistently produce the gold, but the farmer out of his impatience and ignorance wanted it all and he wanted it now. So, he cut open the goose only to find out that there is nothing. The moral of the story is that you should nurture and develop yourself in order to sustain your happiness and success. If your focus is just on obtaining goals you will not get any more “golden eggs” as the real value is in what you become and how that makes you feel.

You can either obtain success or you can become it. The objective is the same but the mindset is very different. You can either get the “things” that will make you feel successful or you can become the source of your own success and fulfilment. You want lasting results and this will only come from your ability to create and re-create, on demand, that what you whish to experience during your time on earth. Adopting the mentality of creating lasting success, of becoming sustainable, starts with realizing that true success comes from giving and not getting. In the giving lies the “getting” in that what you give away is what you get to experience and your experience is what you get to keep forever. Ultimately, to sustain anything you must give and receive for this is the very nature of growth and life itself. Success is a feeling and in making that feeling part of who you are, you will never be without success and you will never be left wanting anything outside of you.

Let go of your need to obtain “stuff” and focus on the experience of life and the emotional content of your life. Improve yourself by pursuing goals that will make of you the kind of person that manifest that which you want most. That which you obtain will eventually disappear and loose its value. That which you sustain will grow and expand and continue to increase the quality of your magnificent life. Obtainable success is static and like anything in nature that does not grow it will eventually die.

This article is published with the permission of the author, Deon Du Plessis. He is the founder of The Self Improvement Gym, and author (in)action, a groundbreaking new action guide on eliminating procrastination. For more of his in-depth insights into personal development and access to his free self improvement library visit http://www.The Self Improvement – Gym.com

We all hate e-mail spam, right? I even have the coolest software program that will help you combat spam and actually bounces the spam e-mail straight back to the user. (http://www.mailwasher.net)

However, one thing that we often fail to admit (except in private) is the importance of permission e-mail marketing, where the members of your mailing list have given you permission to contact them, or where they’re past customers of yours. Obviously, these e-mail lists are always opt-out, so if someone chooses not to continue receiving information from you, they can easily get removed from the list.

Many of you know that I write monthly articles for Planet Ocean Publications, which (in my opinion) is one of the best sources for up-to-date information in the search engine industry. Their monthly online publication, Search Engine News, is second to none, and if you don’t subscribe to it, you’re missing out on tips and strategies that could make an amazing difference in your search engine optimization work. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Planet Ocean, here’s their URL. http://www.searchenginehelp.com/moreinfo/

Stephen Mahaney is the editor of Planet Ocean, and he’s easily one of the top marketing guru’s on the Internet. I spent several hours on the phone with him recently, and he told me that Time Magazine wrote an article in their November 3 edition that dealt with the importance and impact of permission e-mail marketing.

There are a couple of quotes straight from the magazine:

“E-mail marketing is fast, effective and dirt cheap — a godsend for marketers in an economy that has crunched advertising budgets.”

“. . . the humble medium of e-mail is blossoming while flashier forms of Internet advertising are going the way of the Pets.com sock puppet.”

“Little wonder that old-line companies like Ford and Procter & Gamble are joining early users of targeted e-mail pitches like Amazon.com and J. Crew.”

Can we trust Time Magazine? I do believe we can! They’re a highly trusted magazine and have been for years and years. Time is clearly going on the record of saying that permission e-mail marketing is one of the most valuable means of making sales on the Internet, but only if done properly.

In the words of Stephen Mahaney, “If you have yet to ‘correctly’ integrate ‘permission email marketing’ into your online business plan, then you risk being thwarted by your competitors that do. It’s just that plain and simple.”

So, while spam e-mail should always remain locked tightly in a closet (NEVER to be let out), permission e-mail marketing is a crucial way for you to keep in touch with your customers and those interested in your products or services.

Let’s look at five effective permission e-mail marketing strategies, tips that many Webmasters fail to do, and they ultimately lose business because of it.

1. If someone writes for information on your goods or services, save those e-mail addresses! Remember that sales aren’t always made the first time someone hears of a service or product. One trusted source told me that you have to hear about a product, service, or company at least twenty times before you begin to trust that company enough to do business with them.

2. Set up an online form where people can sign up with their names and e-mail addresses to receive a copy of your monthly or quarterly newsletter or updates to your site, or to ask you questions. Have the information go straight into a database that contains the e-mail addresses of everyone who has written to you for information. Then, create a newsletter that is not just a sales pitch for your products and services. Offer valuable tips to your potential customers. Give the newsletter true value, and those potential customers will begin to look forward to hearing from you. Then, when it’s time for them to purchase the types of goods or services that you offer, who do you think they’ll go to? The company they can trust: you!

3. Respond to your e-mail or to the questions asked on the form within 24 hours, if not sooner. When people go online looking for something, they usually send e-mail out to 5-6 companies. If your company is the first to respond, and if you’ve taken the time to answer the questions professionally and thoughtfully, you’ll have a jump over those other companies, many of which won’t even answer the e-mail at all.

4. Always provide a way to “opt-out” of your e-mail list. Make it very clear how your subscribers can choose not to receive the newsletter or e-mail any longer, and then immediately unsubscribe them when they write to you. Remember: having permission to send the e-mail in the first place by only adding those who have contacted you and expressed an interest in your product, and giving those people a way to get off your mailing list, will differentiate you from the millions of e-mail spammers that have given e-mail marketing such a bad name.

5. Take time in creating your subject line for your e-mail marketing campaign. Make sure it doesn’t sound “spammy” in any way. Including your name or company name is a possibility, as well as describing the focus of the e-mail. With these new e-mail programs that combat spam, if you use a subject line like, “We’ve got GREAT news for you!” or “Hi, Friend!,” you can expect the e-mail to be deleted without ever making it to your potential customer.

How can you learn effective permission e-mail marketing strategies?

Stephen Mahaney attributes much of his online success to effective permission e-mail marketing. He’s even gone so far as to write a course on the subject, which I’ve personally reviewed. It offers a step-by-step approach on how to create an effective permission e-mail marketing list and how to market to that list. The course even comes packaged with a full version software program for merging each message with the people on your list so they’ll each get a personalized e-mail.

So, with Time Magazine pushing the importance of e-mail marketing to the forefront of marketing online, here’s information about Stephen’s “Business Guide to Permission Email Marketing” course and software: http://www.email-solutions.com/moreinfo/

How effective is permission e-mail marketing?

Traditionally, permission e-mail marketing campaigns result in a significantly higher response rate than traditional direct marketing or other forms of online advertising, such as banner ads. According to FindMoreBuyers.com, the response rate for a typical permission e-mail marketing campaign is 4-12%, where as the response rate for a banner ad is .5-1%. Quite a difference. http://findmorebuyers.com/page.cfm/205

According to Emarketer.com, DoubleClick projects that e-mail marketing budgets will increase by 17.0% in 2002, which is nearly twice the rate of other types of online marketing, which are expected to gain 9.0%. TV, print and radio budgets are all expected to decrease. Not only that, DoubleClick reports that 61% of marketers plan to increase their e-mail marketing budget in 2002.

Forrester Research estimates that the total spending for e-mail marketing services in the United States will reach $2 billion by the end of this year. http://www.emarketer.com/products/report.php ?email_mktg&PHPSESSID=f564eda06be98116905028b857b834c4

So, hit while the iron is hot, and permission e-mail marketing is certainly “hot” right now! Learn how to use it effectively, and then watch those profits increase! http://www.email-solutions.com/moreinfo/

About the Author

Robin Nobles, Director of Training, Academy of Web Specialists, (http://www.academywebspecialists.com) has trained several thousand people in her online search engine marketing courses. She also teaches 4-day hands on search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe with Search Engine Workshops (http://www.searchengineworkshops.com).

The world is going digital and people are crazy bout the hi-tech gadgets available in the market. But significantly paving the way is one of the hottest consumer products of the 21st century - the digital camera. Most people want to capture and store their precious moment forever in a form of pictures. And photography plays an important role in this business.

Digital photography has evolved over the past few years into a highly affordable luxury that some could not be without and cannot afford to loose it. If you are new to the world of digital cameras, let Office Shop Direct be your guide to their large array of product specifications.

Price ranges are a very big consideration and are mainly based on high-end specifications such as resolution, compression and zoom options. Cutting corners on some of these details will save you in the long run, but you should be sure what you are missing out on before you make that decision.

Important Items to Keep in Mind about Digital Camera Technology:

Interpolation is a method in which a camera will fill in the color holes in the pixels of a picture by estimating color blends. While this can improve resolution, it will also reduce the sharpness and contrast of a picture. Never get a camera that is low in resolution but high in interpolation if you want sharp bright pictures.

Compression routines are the way the picture is stored digitally. Some companies maintain their own proprietary compression method, and this can make sharing images difficult. JPEG is the standard, but also as with most standards can have less clarity in a picture. Consider cameras that also offer the ability to print off images at no compression for best results.

SLR is short for single-lens reflex viewfinder. Many cameras have two views: that which the user sees to set up the shot, and that which the camera sees. If you have an SLR camera both what you see and what the camera shoots are lined up as one, and not slightly off on a different angle.

Having an amazing photo shot is easy; following the above mentioned important tips will surely give you an exceptional picture. Capture your best moment with best digital camera and quality printing application.