Phoenix Education

5 Tips for Being Your Best at Work

Being your best at work means not only putting your best foot forward but also continually working to better yourself. This doesn’t always mean turning in the best project or attending all the professional developments. Keep reading to learn basic ways you can show up with your best at work every day.

Get to Know Your Colleagues

Learning about your colleagues has many benefits. You don’t have to be out to make friends, but learning about others can benefit you in many ways. First, it shows you care, and people like it when people are considerate. Second, it will help you find things in common that you can come back to when work gets tough. Finally, getting to know people will help you learn how to work better. Derek prefers exact instructions and asks lots of questions, while Suzy is a big-picture type of person who tends to skip over minor details. Getting to know means learning how to work better.

Don’t Be a Gossip

No one likes an office gossip, except maybe the other office gossip. Getting caught up in drama can be a distraction and can earn you a bad reputation with your coworkers and supervisors. You want to be someone that can be trusted with information. Keep your business to yourself and remember, loose lips sink ships.

Stretch Your Skill Set

Stretching your skills as well as learning new ones allows you to continue growing your tool bag. This will make you a more valuable team member and will help you if you ever decide to look for a new position elsewhere.

Become a Mentor

Mentoring can be done in and outside of the office. The new intern that is lost? Take that person under your wing and help them find their way. You will be a valuable friend and show that you are willing to help others. You can also do outreach in your profession in schools and other community programs.

Be a Friend

You don’t have to be BFFs with every person in the office but be friendly. Ask how others are doing, encourage, start a meal train if someone is sick or on parental leave. Not only will others appreciate and remember your kindness, but they will be willing to return the favor if the need arises.

Being your best at work is not something that you can achieve in a day. It’s a constant stream of small and conscious decisions that you will make daily. These decisions will build upon each other and allow you to create a work culture and life that will be fulfilling and beneficial.

5 Benefits of Becoming More Comfortable Expressing Your Emotions

“How are you?” has shifted from a point of conversation to a meaningless reflex. If you think about how many times you ask that question every day, you may realize it’s no longer achieving its point. “How are you?” could open up a can of worms. It could allow for meaningful discussion. It could give you the opportunity to talk about your psyche.

But so often, people respond like robots: “I’m good. How are you?” It becomes a pointless conversation –a mere exchange of wasted words. Instead, we could use it as an opportunity to get to know someone better or to express how we’re really feeling. There are many benefits of being comfortable with expressing your emotions; here are five of them!

Be Free (and Free Others, Too)

You don’t realise it, but when you stifle your emotions, you stifle your freedom. You should feel free to express yourself at every phase of life. As soon as you allow yourself to be comfortable with your true self and your true feelings, you open up the door for others to be comfortable with you, too.

Tear Down Your Fears

If you’re afraid of showing your emotions, stand up to them. Tell them that you’re not scared of them. Those feelings may be new and utterly foreign to you, but by confronting them, you’re tearing down the sense of fear.

Be Authentic to Yourself

The real “you” comes with all of the feelings and emotions you’re experiencing. Be true to that, and don’t let the feelings get in the way. You may feel like your true self is one that doesn’t come with baggage – that would be great, but no one is like that! We all come with good and bad points, and in order to honour the authentic “you,” you need to be able to express your emotions openly and honestly.

Add Flavour to Your Life

Believe it or not, being more honest and expressive can help you live life to the fullest more. It allows you to be you and to enjoy who you are more. If you’re stifling your feelings or being ashamed of them, you’re not living life to the fullest. Add flavour to your life by showing who you really are.

Get Closer to Others

Everyone feels emotions on different levels. No one knows precisely what you’re going through, but people can relate to some degree. When you open up to others, you get closer to them. You can bond over shared emotions, or you can ask them for advice on your situation. Either way, intimacy, and friendship is always enhanced when you’re able to open up more.

The next time someone says, “How are you?” think twice about your answer. Your reflex may be to say you’re good, but maybe if you tell them how you really are (exhausted, over-the-moon, nervous, excited, etc.), you’ll have a more in-depth conversation with them – and you’ll free yourself to be able to talk about how you really feel!

4 Powerful Ways to Imagine Your Success into Reality

Everyone has big dreams. Everyone wants to be successful. Maybe you see yourself making an Oscars acceptance speech or winning the Nobel Prize. Perhaps you want to be a successful entrepreneur or an elite athlete.

Whether you want to be winning an Olympic medal or making your first million, you can use the power of visualization to make your dreams of success a reality.

Picture Yourself Winning

Just wanting to be successful isn’t enough. You have to be able to taste your success. Picture yourself being offered that promotion, being congratulated by friends and family, seeing your new business cards.

Make your success as real and detailed as you can. How good does it feel?

Find Your Trigger

Finding your own personal success trigger can be a powerful way to keep the momentum going and your energy high. Write down your big goal, whether it’s winning an Oscar or scholarship, or running your own business. Make it a positive statement that is straightforward and concise. For example, “I will be promoted to Vice President next year.”

Look at your trigger statement every day. Maybe make it your computer wallpaper or your smartphone’s lock screen. When Jim Carrey was a young actor trying to make it big, he famously wrote himself a $10million check dated far into the future. When that day came, he was offered $10million for his role in Dumb and Dumber.

Remember that story when you see your trigger statement and think of how good it will feel to achieve your goal.

Create A Vision Board

Vision boards help to make your dreams concrete. You can use pictures, photos, affirmations, and quotes to create a picture of the life you want.

A vision board can be a poster, a Pinterest board, a whiteboard, or a journal. Make you sure you keep your vision board where you can see it every day and add to it when you need to or when you find a new photo or quote that really speaks to you.

Feed Your Dream

You can make your visualization even more potent by nourishing it with positivity. Don’t put all the good feelings in the future but feed your dream with happy memories. Think of times when you felt happy, successful, and content with your life.

These positive images reinforce to your mind that you have already proven you can have a happy, fulfilled life. Keep negativity at bay by reminding yourself that you have done it, you are doing it, you can do it!

3 Truths About Being Kind We Need to Re-Remember

It might surprise you to hear that being kind isn’t just good for the other person, it’s good for you too! Skeptical? There is good scientific evidence to show that living up to the adage of doing unto others as you would have them do to you is one of the best things you can do for yourself! It lowers your blood pressure, improves your mood, and acts as a natural anti-depressant by boosting the serotonin levels in your brain.

So, what can you do to stay in the right frame of mind to be kind? After all, being kind isn’t always easy. Some days you want to grit your teeth and just grouse at the world. And there are some people it’s tough to be kind to. How can you change your approach to life to be as kind as you can? Here are three truths to remember when you’re tempted to be unkind.

Remember what you can control and what you can’t

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

It’s a fact of life that other people can be rude, thoughtless, irritating, and even mean. They have opinions you don’t agree with. You can’t change or control any of that. But you can control how you react. Kindness is always the best option for you and the other guy. Take a deep breath, count to ten, and bite back that retort or putdown. Practice being kind, and soon it will be second nature.

Anger doesn’t help

Reacting with anger doesn’t do anything to resolve a bad situation. Anger makes you feel terrible. It’s likely to escalate things and won’t get you the result you want. Even worse, anger can lead to all sorts of physical problems, from headaches to high blood pressure, sleep problems, and digestive issues. A lifetime habit of anger can even lead to a stroke or a heart attack. Recognize the potential to get angry and take a step back.

Kindness is always the right option

Whatever the situation, you will never go wrong if you’re kind. Kindness also makes you an inspiring leader, a role model for others. Making the choice to be kind in the face of frustration, even provocation, shows that conflict is not inevitable. Giving in to childish feelings of needing to be right or get what you want all the time is easy. But it breeds discontent and won’t win you any friends.

Kindness breeds a more detached attitude to life, it encourages positive emotions and will help to make you and the people around you calmer, happier, and more energized.

Build Your Own Mailing List… Even Though You’re an Affiliate!

Today, I want to share with you one of the biggest mistakes affiliates make. I want to share this with you so you won’t make the same mistake:

The one major mistake many affiliates make is NOT setting up a list!

Affiliates will often send traffic that they generated to affiliate links, rather than a list. When they do this, they are unknowingly making a bet that visitor will buy on first contact. Unfortunately, this is generally not the case.

Visitors often need to be warmed up to a product – through the course of multiple visits and additional information – before they are willing to purchase from a person or a business. This is where building a list comes into play.

By building a list, affiliates can fix this problem. Additionally, they can retain traffic, warm it up, and then direct it to different purchases in the future. This means that it isn’t a one-shot deal: instead, they can attempt to sell the same person multiple products over the course of time.

Now, in order to do this successfully, the affiliate in question must purchase the necessary tools. I personally suggest using http://www.aweber.com for the actual auto responder service or mailchimp.

Aweber is relatively inexpensive ($20/mo.) and comes with a formidable range of services, including spam checkers and macros. Best of all, it is whitelisted by many email clients and boasts a delivery rate of 99%.

This service will not only manage your list, but it will also help you build it. It includes free tools that allow you to create web forms, pop-ups, and hover-ins – all of which can be used to increase your opt-in rate.

Now, in addition to purchasing the auto responder service, you will need to setup your own site if you do not already own one. If you already own a related site, you can simply add your opt in form to a page on your existing site. If not, I suggest purchasing cheap domain and hosting and using this to host your list forms. http://www.27hosting.com currently offers some of the cheapest hosting available on the market.

Once you have your site and your auto responder setup, there are only two steps left: the first is building a course of some sort that is related to the affiliate products you will sell; and the second is creating an opt-in form that converts.

The first part is relatively easy. Start by determining your topic and then outline it over the course of five to seven days. Remember that everything should be written as if you are talking to a person, rather than as if you were writing a formal article.

If you don’t feel comfortable writing these articles yourself, you can always hire a ghostwriter at http://www.elance.com or Fiverr.com for $5-15 per issue, depending on the size.

Once you have created your auto responder series, you will want to feed it into your auto responder, setup advertisements in the text for the affiliate product you are planning to sell, and then create an opt-in form for your list.

Once you have setup your opt-in form, the only remaining step is to drive various traffic sources to your opt-in list, collect their email addresses – and then wait for the commissions to roll in!

Generate Traffic and Affiliate Sales with Free Viral Reports

Did you know that the free viral report is quite possibly the most deadly weapon in an affiliate marketer’s arsenal? Get some free PLR here.

It allows him or her to quickly multiply his or her efforts while slashing down on marketing costs. All the marketer has to do is develop a viral report for little or no cost, embed an affiliate link in said report, and then find various avenues of distribution that will ensure that the report is perpetuated as far as possible – from group to group to group.

Now, with this being said, when it comes to developing free viral reports, a considerable amount of precise calculation and back-end system setup is needed. Simply jotting down garbage, tossing in an affiliate link, and then attempting to send it to everyone you know in .txt format isn’t likely to gain you anything; nor is it likely to multiply your efforts by inducing other marketers to redistribute the report for you.

Instead, you must start from a different point. You must determine what topic people are looking for related to your specific affiliate product.

For instance, do they need more information about the product itself? Do they need to know how to use that product effectively? Whatever your angle happens to be, make sure that it lines up with the wants of your customers and also ties in nicely with your affiliate product.

Next, create the actual viral report and embed your affiliate link in multiple places. If you have a site and a list, you may want to instead post a link to your list – and then use back-end mechanisms to make the sale.

Your last step is to actually ensure that this viral report:

Gets into as many people’s hands as humanly possible; and
Gets into the hands of people who will definitely redistribute it to others without charging any fees. This is where the art of free viral report distribution comes into play.

A good way to distribute your viral report is to create a buzz on forums. You will want to discuss some specific experience you had related to the topic you will cover in the report – and you will want to do it well in advance of your release date.

You will then want to start talking up your release – and also explain that the report will be completely free. Furthermore, you may want to even start locking people in for immediate distribution via email by getting them to join a list. To learn more about viral marketing through this method, you may want to check out some of the case studies at the following URL: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/.

Once you have begun building a forum buzz for the report, you will want to go to e-zine owners in your particular niche and ask them if they are interested in getting a free report on whichever subject you are marketing. The distribution effect will multiply, subsequently multiplying your sales.

Additionally, you may want to check out http://www.viralPDF.com, which is an excellent tool you can use to create the actual viral reports.

Try this method – Using Traffic Exchanges to Promote Affiliate Programs

If you’re unfamiliar with exchanges, you will want to read this over carefully and consider printing it out:

One of the best ways in which you can promote affiliate programs is through various traffic exchanges. Almost all well-defined, robust niches on the Internet have some form of traffic exchange. For instance, casinos, gaming sites, niche forums, and Internet marketing sites all have some form of traffic exchange system. IM, in particular, has dozens of exchanges.

A traffic exchange can serve multiple functions; however, in most cases, it does two important things:

It allows you to surf sites, gain credits, and then cash in those credits; and
It allows you to put banners or dynamically-generated link boxes on your site that will generate credits, which you can then cash in. Cashing in credits, with most exchanges, results in a certain amount of traffic being drive to your site via the exchange site or via banners on other sites that are members of the exchange.

A good place to start when working with traffic exchanges is to determine which ones are most reputable and which ones have reasonable point systems. For instance, some traffic exchanges allow users to cheat and some have bad systems of exchange, which heavily favor paying members over non-members. You will want to find the best possible exchange given the amount of money you are willing to spend and the product you are marketing.

Have a look at the following sites, which list top traffic exchanges. Additionally, you may want to talk to friends to see if any particular exchange has worked well for them:

http://www.paramind.net/paramindtrafficexchanges.html

http://www.trafficexchangelist.com/

Once you have selected an optimal exchange, you will want to determine the best way in which you can use it to maximize the amount of high-quality traffic you extract from it.

You will want to answer the following questions to aid yourself in determining this: do I earn credits from impressions or clicks? And do I lose credits based on impressions or clicks?

This is important to ask, as different exchanges have different policies on this issue. If you lose credits based on impressions, you will want to make sure that you get the absolute largest amount of clicks per impressions. This will involve over-hyping your ads and creating flashy banners (if they allow them).

In contrast, if you are getting charged per click, you will want to make sure your ads ONLY appeal to the most interested buyers. Whichever route you take, make sure that it is matched up with a model for maximum revenue generation.

The last thing you will want to consider when using a traffic exchange is precisely what you should promote.

You already have a product in mind – probably an affiliate product – but how will you promote it?

Will you direct visitors to the affiliate page?

Will you direct them to a page on your site, which features the product?

Or will you direct them to an opt-in form, which will capture their information and then coax them into buying over a period of time?

I personally suggest doing the last or the second – and avoiding the first whenever possible.

Has anyone tried this? Give me some feedback

The Cheapest, Fastest Way to Advertise on the Internet: Forum Posting

Posting on forums is one of the cheapest and fastest ways in which you can advertise affiliates products on the Internet. However, in order to do this successfully, you must do a number of things carefully.

Warning! Simply starting a thread that contains an affiliate link might be a good way to get banned from a particular forum board, but it will never be a good way to make sales.

The general procedure involves making multiple posts on a forum board before you even setup a signature file, which includes a link to your site. Even if the particular forum you are using does not specifically mandate this, you will want to do this, anyway, as it will increase your credibility – which is your real goal.

You can start by finding a number of forums for your particular niche or marketing angle. You can find massive lists of forums at the following two URLs:

http://www.big-boards.com/

http://board123.com/forum_directory.php

The first resource is currently the largest forum directory on the Internet. The second resource contains lesser directories, but includes some that are not listed on Big Boards.

Now, once you have selected a number of directories that match your specific marketing angle and affiliate product, you will want to investigate to determine whether or not they have excess rules regulating signature files.

For instance, some sites do not allow any links in signature files; others, by contrast, allow links, but do not allow any commercial links. Make sure you know what the rules are before you post. Otherwise, you are simply setting yourself up to be banned from the forum.

Next, take the list of forums you have created – that are both relevant to your topic and allow commercial links – and begin developing a reputation on those forums. Post regularly, avoid meaningless fights and flaming, and contribute useful, on-target information to discussions. In a matter of 1-2 weeks, you will have developed a reputation, provided that the forum receives a considerable amount of traffic.

Once you have developed a good reputation, you will want to begin advertising through your forum signature. Ideally, you will want to include some eye-catching assortment of colors, symbols, and words in your signature.

This will draw people’s attention. You will then want to link them to something other than an affiliate page – whether it be a page you created to sell an affiliate product or an auto responder course used to capture email addresses.

Remember to repeat this process in all applicable forums. Look for high traffic forums that allow commercial link posting in signature files – and that also happen to fit with your specific audience-targeting and marketing angle goals.

Next, create a reputation. Last, add your signature in some attractive way that draws visitors’ attention, but is also likely to convert them into interested clickers. You will find that this form of advertising pays off considerably – and does so faster than other methods available.

Sharing ideas and posts

Happy Monday everyone!

People have asked me about the source for my posts. Well like I said, it is my intention to share things as I explore the whole world of Internet and Online Businesses and ideas. I have completed many online courses over the past decade, many of them linked to my ‘day job’ – I am a High School Physics Teacher. I have also fallen for many of the ‘get rich quick’ programmes, that turn out to be a lot of cheap nothings that require hundreds or thousands of dollars to upgrade and ‘fully automate’.

As a result I have also collected a ton of PLR material. PLR – Private Label Rights – means books, ebooks, software, courses etc that I have bought or been given, and for which I can sell them, share parts or basically use them as I see fit, within the PLR License agreement. Man of the articles I have on here are sections from that ton of material, tweaked and illustrated by me.

Sometimes I just check spelling – some of the PLR has never been checked! And I don’t just mean the difference between UK and US English spellings. There is often a host of grammatical errors, usually around your and you’re or there, their and they’re or were, wear and we’re. I’m not a grammar freak but sometimes these basic errors annoy me.

At other times I find references to websites or products that no longer exist, so I edit them out and find an alternative, if possible. This is relatively easy with an ebook, not so easy with a video course.

In many of the blogs I share I have taken an original post and reworked it, though this can be very time consuming. I recently came across a site which will rewrite an article or paragraph or even a sentence – Articlerewriterstool.com – which offers an interesting alternative approach to using PLR or e-zine articles. I must try it soon!

I know a lot of people out there are looking for articles to put into their blog. How can you do it?

Write – it’s fun.

There are many people willing to write for you on Fiverr.com.

I would recommend collecting PLR and using the content in your blog – though make sure you read it before publishing.

There is a lot of free PLR out there – just Google it.

I get a lot of mine from Surefirewealth.com. I have a Gold membership so can download everything for free. Some is for personal use only (always learning) and much of it comes with a PLR licence. You can become a free member and download lots of PLR for nothing. Check it out.

As i said, people have asked where I get my articles. I hope this is a good explanation. Write to me for more advice if you want.

Thoughts from Randy Gage – Denial

I follow Randy on his blogs and podcasts. He has a lot to say about mindset and prosperity, something we should all be interested in. Every week I get an email he calls “Friday Filosophy”. I felt I wanted to share this one as many people are in denial about so many things – have you read the Conspiracy Theories about the Global Pandemic?

From Randy –“Here’s my weekly dispatch to you, exploring a subject that I’m thinking about – that you may want to think about as well. And what I’m thinking right now is denial.

More specifically, the ability of humans to stay in denial no matter how formidable the contrary evidence is. They can deny they’re an addict, deny their sexuality, even deny science, evidence and facts when those things disprove something they desperately want to believe.

We’re all pros at justifying, validating, and pandering to our biases. We see things through filters and sometimes we so desperately want to believe something, that we let the filters deceive us. Question for you…

What is the one thing that you’re certain you have come out of denial on, and now view in true perspective?

Really think this through, because if you’re like most people, that’s the area you’re still in denial on.

That’s what I’m thinking about. Hit me up on Twitter and let me know what’s on your mind.

This Week’s Prosperity Livestream:

Create Money Security

I’ll be sharing the “first principles” of wealth building.

Find the details here.