Tag Archives: Success

Success Tips for Entrepreneurs: You Can Do It!

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Success TipsSince coming online as an entrepreneur in 2006 I’ve made a study of successful people and what they do to achieve and maintain ongoing success. The success tips I want to share with you here are based on my informal, non-scientific research, as well as on the results I have been able to achieve over the years. Here are some things to think about in your own process…

Focus on commitment, not motivation – Motivational speaker Jim Rohn said that “Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going”. This continues to be true for me in my personal life as well as my business. I commit to achieving a goal, and then I get myself into the habit of doing what I need in order to see it through. This is exactly how I have written fourteen books, become a sought after speaker, and achieved many goals that were beyond my wildest dreams.

This week I’m in Santa Barbara for the International Film Festival, and once again I have the opportunity to spend time with some of the most successful actors, screenwriters, directors, producers, and other industry professionals. Time and again they share their own story and the success tips they continue to use to further theirSuccess Tips - Entrepreneurs art and career.

They speak about seeking knowledge, not results, which means they are looking at the bigger, overall picture instead of only what is right in front of them. For example, when Casey Affleck set out to achieve success in his life, acting was only one thing he considered. Once he had some experience under his belt, he dedicated himself to learning his craft, which included acting on the stage as well as in film and television. He also did work behind the camera as a way to round himself out. The knowledge he continues to gain serves him well, instead of only focusing on the immediate results.

Make the journey a fun one.  Instead of worrying or thinking about what could happen that would not bring you the results you are looking for, have fun with everything you learn and do. My writing is an excellent example of that. I could have easily compared myself to others, but instead I chose to keep my head down and write for thirty minutes to an hour each day. It’s been a fun process to turn myself into a writer over the past decade.

Get rid of stagnating thoughts by focusing on the positive. This is always a good idea, and success tips seem to leave this step out much of the time. No good will come from thoughts of failure and you want to stay in control of these types of thoughts.

Use your imagination to stay loose, creative, and free. It wasn’t until I came online in 2006 that I began to think of myself as a creative person. A big part of this process has been to allow my imagination to roam free and to know that anything and everything is possible in our world and life experience.

Eliminate distractions whenever possible. I demand absolute quiet while I am writing each morning. When you are focused and have clarity as to your goals, you will not want to be distracted until you have finished the task or activity you are working on. Get used to the idea of being alone with your thoughts for some period of time each day.

Don’t rely on others to make your success possible. As children we are dependent upon the adults around us to help us succeed with even the tiniest of goals. As an adult, take full responsibility for your success and be willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen.

Take regular “down time” to renew, refresh, and rejuvenate your mind and body. This will be unique to you and may well change over time. Make appointments with yourself to get out of your head and have some new experiences with a fresh perspective.

I hope these success tips have been helpful to you as an entrepreneur. Here is another article I wrote about setting and achieving goals as an entrepreneur that you may find valuable to your process. I’d welcome the opportunity to answer your questions and to discuss this topic further.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, online marketing strategist, bestselling author, and international speaker on the topics of entrepreneurship and inner game mind shifts. Let’s connect to see how I may best serve you in the near future. And please be sure to check out my Internet Marketing Six Pack training course.

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How to Define and Achieve Success on Your Own Terms

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Achieve SuccessYour Journey to Achieve Success

Success is one of those abstract concepts that is difficult to define. It will mean something different to everyone you ask, and may change dramatically over the course of your life. Yet we all seek this on some level and will go to great lengths to achieve success.

In my own life the idea of success has evolved over my lifetime. As a teenager it meant doing well in school, getting along with friends and family, and planning a future where I could reach my full potential. And if the opposite of success is called failure, then I did a good job of avoiding more than a handshake acquaintance there.

As a twenty-something I redefined  and explored how I would achieve success in the workplace and with my young family. Everything got more dramatic during this time as job opportunities were lost, children got sick, and finances were tight. Yet I never considered myself to be failing as long as my life balanced itself on a plus side after each incident.

By the time I reached my thirties I had settled into a complacency that worked for me. I believed that many opportunities had disappeared due to my age and circumstances and that settling for “good enough” would have to be my mantra. But I wasn’t complaining, as more of my friends had achieved much less than myself than those who had more.

I would have to say that for forties were the most challenging decade I had experienced to date. My belief system allowed for very little in the way of dreaming about ways to achieve success in my life going forward. Everything I had settled for during my thirties was dragging me down now. This applied to my relationships, career, and goals I had hoped to accomplish by this time in my life. But I took full responsibility for my situation. No one had forced me to do anything I didn’t want to do. Every day I told myself that the life I had on that day was the result of my thoughts and actions in days and years past. This was just how it was going to be.

Then something interesting began to happen as I approached my fiftieth birthday. What if I didn’t have to live this life any longer? What if I could do something to change it all and live the life I had dreamed of as a younger person? I set out on a quest to discover what I really wanted and what options were available to me. I woke up one day during April of 2005 and felt like the weight of the world was off my shoulders and that I could do anything I wanted to do with the remainder of my life. I could finally achieve success because I was willing to pursue my dreams and goals!

I had been a teacher for twenty years, and now I was ready to be a student again. And not in the traditional, formal sense, but in the sense of becoming a student of life. I sought out people who could be of help to me. They recommended books I should read, places I should go, and more people I should connect with now that I was thinking differently. Within two months a whole new world had opened up to me and I could see my future much more clearly now.

Within a year I had resigned from the school district I was working for, turned my best real estate clients over to others who could better serve them, and embarked on a journey and path I am still exploring each day. Also, I became a writer along the way, something I had long given up on as a way to achieve success in my life.

I now know that I could have made these drastic changes to my life at any point along the way. But not believing it was possible kept me imprisoned. I was like the elephant in the circus who does not try to escape, even though the chain has not been connected to a stake for many years. The prison was of my own making, and once I realized I was free the doors began to open rapidly. You can do the same thing, and the way to achieve success is to define it for yourself.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, online marketing strategist, bestselling author, and international speaker on the topics of entrepreneurship and inner game mind shifts. Let’s connect to see how I may best serve you in the near future.

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Time Management and Productivity for Optimal Success

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Time Management and ProductivityTime Management and Productivity

If we all have the same twenty-four hours each day, why then are some people able to accomplish so much more than others? That is the eternal question, and I believe each of us has the ability to answer it on our terms when it comes to time management and productivity.

When I set out to write a book on this topic (Time Management Strategies for Entrepreneurs), I took a hard look at my own life experience around these concepts of time management and productivity. After careful examination it seemed to me that I only became expert in these areas after coming online to start my business in 2006. Up until that time in my life I struggled with finding the time to do what I needed, being as productive as I wanted, and being able to honestly say that I had the time to do some of the things that would bring me joy in my life.

Perhaps the responsibility of becoming an entrepreneur later in life was part of the story in my case. After floundering for my first couple of months online, I created a strict schedule for myself and developed the discipline necessary to stay on task each day. This schedule called for working seven days a week, with two of the days – Wednesday and Sunday – being more like half days. Before I went to sleep each night I had already written out my tasks and goals for the next day on a mini legal pad I kept next to my computer. This was where I wrote out what needed to be done and who should do it as a “dynamic to-do list”. This enabled me to hit the ground running when I began each morning.

Will this strategy work for you? You won’t know until you try. I suggest that you first make a list of everything you need to do over the next several days. Then prioritize your list. Now look to see which items on your list can be better accomplished by someone else, at least this time. Then decide what actually doesn’t need to be done this week at all. The items you are left with are the ones that only you can do and must become your primary focus for the day until they are completed.

Over time you will learn how to keep this dynamic list rolling right along without as much effort. Experience and consistency with this system will turn you into something of an expert on time management and productivity. You will also be able to accomplish tasks more quickly if you are organized in this way. For example, it used to take me an hour and a half to write an article or a blog post. These days I can easily do this every single day in less than half of that amount of time. I’m also more skilled at delegating tasks and activities I simply do not need to be a part of, such as shopping for dog food or going to the post office. Learn to manage your time and work more efficiently and anything is possible in your life and business.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, bestselling author, international speaker, and online marketing strategist. Let’s connect to see how I may best serve you in the near future.

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Fear of Success and Failure in Life and Business

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Fear of SuccessDo You Have the Fear of Success or Failure?

I grew up in a family based on the principle of fear. There was fear of the dentist, fear of flying, fear of being embarrassed, and basically, fear of failure. This precluded us from trying most things, as the probability of failure increases with each new thing you attempt to do. Fear of success was not even possible because of the other fears that took precedence.

But when I was twelve years old and had a tooth ache, I overcame the fear and called the dentist to make my own appointment. The fear of continued pain was enough to make me minimize the fear of dentists my family had instilled in me. And the whole thing turned out just fine.

It was at this point that I began to question the thoughts, beliefs, and values I had been raised with. What if there was nothing to fear at all? What if I could attempt anything I wanted, with only the natural and rational risk associated with it.

For the first time in my young life I felt truly alive and ready to chase my dreams.

Now I would love to tell you that this felling stayed with me until this day, but that is not the truth. Instead, fear began to creep back into my mind almost immediately. It has been a lifelong challenge to deal with my fears and keep them at bay. But it is worth every moment that I am able to push through and accomplish my dreams and goals.

What are you afraid of? Can you pinpoint a time in your life when someone said or did something that struck fear deep inside of you? Sometimes these experiences are so deeply ingrained in our subconscious minds that we cannot remember what happened.

I would urge you to spend time every day working on dissipating fear in your life. Typically we have fears around failure, sickness, death, aging, and disappointment. Work on your fears one by one and see what you can do to alleviate the pain they cause you, as well as the missed opportunities.

Where it may be almost impossible to eliminate fear completely, it is most definitely possible to think of fears in a rational way. For example, when I wanted to start my online business at age fifty I was fearful of failure in a big way. So I spent some time thinking through each of the scenarios I had fear around and decided to go for it.

Then I learned about a new fear – fear of success. What if I achieved everything I set out to accomplish? What then?

For the very first time in my life I was able to set most of my fears aside and get on with the work of creating something that meant so much to me. Yes, there were still times during that first year where both the fear of success and the fear of failure crept into my mind, but I quickly moved past these thoughts and got back to work.

I would love to hear your thoughts on fears of any kind.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, an Online Marketing Strategist, bestselling author, and international speaker. Let’s connect further and see how we may work together in the near future.

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Repurposing Content to Jump Start Your Success

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Repurposing ContentRepurposing content you create for your online business through blogging is the ultimate method of jump starting your success. After all, what better reason can you have for creating content regularly than to monetize it in ways that will also serve your target audience? So if you have been writing posts endlessly and are now ready to turn them into a variety of information products, online courses, presentations, guides, and even a book, then keep reading.

The first step is to make an honest evaluation of where you are right now with your blogging. If you are like me, then you have a couple of thousand blog posts that cover the various topics you discuss. But more than likely you are newer to this content marketing strategy of blogging and have fewer posts to choose from. In either case, assess which topics related to your niche you have already written, and from those which ones have gotten you the most traction with your readers.

Next, start brainstorming a list of what your target audience wants and needs from you on your topic. For example, the people who come to me tend to be new or newer entrepreneurs who want to build an online business they can run from home. So my posts are around this topic, and the many topics that come from it after someone gets started as an online entrepreneur. My goal in creating content is to answer questions and solve problems that arise once someone has launched their business.

After that, look at the content you have already created and think about how you can package it into products, courses, and books. My first book came from fifty posts I wrote on this blog back in 2010. Huge Profits with a Tiny List: 50 Ways to Use Relationship Marketing to Increase Your Bottom Line continues to be a bestseller and people from around the world write to me to ask more questions and to share their success stories. My other books also contain material I have repurposed from my live presentations, podcasts, videos, and more.

You may wish to start small by repurposing content from your blog into a short report. Combine three or more posts on a specific topic into a report that would be beneficial and of interest to a segment of your audience. If I were to do this I might be repurposing content I had previously written on the topics of affiliate marketing, content marketing, information products, or small business marketing. This would enable my reader to have more details at their fingertips on the specific area they wanted to focus on and learn more about right now.

The next logical step would be to repurpose the short report into audio recordings, and my podcast is perfect for that purpose. Then I would create a series of videos to close the loop on the different learning modalities.

Now it would be time to present this information in person, either at a local event I’m invited to or to a larger one where I am either hosting, attending, or presenting my information. You can start small with this part of the process, if necessary and then move up to larger venues. I became a public speaker by putting myself out there and being willing to skin my knees in the process. These days it’s difficult to get a microphone out of my hands once I have it. It all gets easier over time.

The final step in repurposing content, in my opinion, is to create online courses with your material. These courses may be taught live at first, and then put into home study for a longer period of time. I call my first live training Season One, then put it into Home Study, and then teach Season Two at a later date. You can see one of my most popular online training courses at Really Simple Content Marketing. Season Three will be coming soon.

Asking people to make a purchase from you is a big step, and a necessary one. Remember that someone must buy something in order for you to earn money. After you do this a few times start offering a membership site for recurring revenue. This allows you to get paid over and over again each month for serving the people who come to you for advice and training. It’s an excellent model, and very lucrative as well.

The best advice I can give you on this important topic of repurposing content is to jump in and get started. The idea of creating content once and then repurposing it over and over again is a solid marketing strategy that will serve you well as an online entrepreneur.

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Get Organized: Your Success Depends on It!

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eliminate clutterMy very first mentor was Raymond Aaron, a man for whom I have the highest respect and am still in touch with to this day. The year was 2005 and he instructed all of his mentees to “clean up our messes!” Whether these were piles of papers all over the floor or desk or relationships gone awry, Raymond advocated spending time on a weekly basis to eliminate the messes that conflicted with your ability to achieve your personal and business goals.

Recently I was reading a post by Cynthia Charleen entitled Clutter or Organizing – Which is Your Challenge? and it brought back memories of the work I had done with Raymond all those years ago. Here is an excerpt from that post:

“Is your problem clutter or organizing? Clutter is having too much. Whether it is physical items or the untouchables such as too much to do, they are both clutter. Organizing refers to having these items where they fit best. Stuff needs a place to call home and needs to be there to be organized.

Do you have more things than you need to live a normal life with reasonable comfort? I work with clients on a regular basis whose main issue comes from having too much stuff. Consider clearing out the excess and sharing with people who don’t have enough.”

Clutter is no longer a problem for me. I live in two cities and travel extensively as well, so I’ve become accustomed to tossing anything I won’t use again and do not need. If something does still have value I donate it t one of the charities I work with. Organization can still be a challenge as I change the way I file and continue moving towards a totally “paper free” business.

Cynthia states that “you will discover productivity and focus increase when you work and live in an organized space that is free from excess and clutter.” I agree completely with this statement and will take it one step further…

Eliminate clutter in your home and office environment, get organized to the point that others call you a “neat freak” and enjoy renewed creativity and higher level thoughts that will catapult you to success. This is all related to your “inner game” and how you approach every situation in your life. Yes, that’s how important this topic is and I’d love to hear about your own experiences in the comments below.

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