5 Secrets Of Setting And Reaching Your Weight Loss Goals

Good intentions for weight loss are wonderful. Like a whole lot of folks, I swore I would start to exercise more, go on a diet, and lose those extra pesky pounds for good. Months later, I’m still deciding on the ‘best’ diet for me, and paying the monthly gym dues for visits that I am ‘just about’ to get around to. What’s the hold up? I had the best of intentions to lose weight and keep it off. I never got started. According to the experts, I failed because I didn’t have a specific, workable, weight loss plan. Studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people with firm action plans were more likely to engage in goal driven behavior, (eg.weight loss). In my case, I wanted to lose weight and start a healthier lifestyle. But as you can guess, this isn’t as easy as just writing down “Lose weight and exercise more”, and sticking it on the bathroom mirror.

Developing an action plan is a process you must go through, really think about, clearly visualizing what you want. By answering the following questions, you can create your own weight loss and exercise action plan.

What are my goals? What, exactly, do I want to achieve? Get those ideas out of your head and on to paper. That helps to make them concrete and doable. Who doesn’t like checking off lists when they get done?

There are five specific things you should keep in mind when writing down all of your weight loss goals:

1. Make your goals specific. Don’t say you ‘need to lose weight’ or I’m ‘going to lose weight’, say you will do it. For example: “I will lose 15 lbs and take a walk every evening.”

2. Make your excercise and weight loss goals measurable and specific. ‘I’ll walk on the treadmill three times a week for a half hour at a speed of 3.5 miles an hour’.

3. Write down your chosen goals. Create both short term and long term goals for losing weight. Keep a chart or journal to track progress and give yourself some encouragement as you reach your weight loss milestones.

4. Set deadlines. Make your weight loss goals not only measurable, but time specific. Set your weight and exercise goals realistically. It’s hard to pursue goals that can never be attained. Unrealistic goals that never seem to be reached can add to your stress level.

5. Give yourself emotional reasons for continuing to lose weight. What moves you to action? Imagine your feelings when you succeed. What will your reward for achievement be? Write it down and plan for it.

When should you begin? How about right now! It’s decision time. You can continue to dream about a healthier life style, starting to lose weight and looking better, or you can do something about it today. You can stay stuck in your rut, or you can make a change. You can put off your happiness until another day, or you can begin doing positive things now, that you know you are capable of doing.

The choice is yours. It’s easy to fall into the trap of ’someday.’ Someday I’ll lose those extra pounds, but right now I have so many other things to take care o’f. The truth is, you will always have things to take care of, people to see, and places to go. You have to make time for a better life for yourself because you are worth it.

Now that you know how to set up a specific, goal oriented, weight loss action plan, there is nothing stopping you!

For more info on Goals & Goal Setting visit:
http://www.bruisedonion.com/guide/goal%20setting/

7 Essential Steps to Web Site Promotion

Web Site promotion should be the major part of your web site
marketing plan. It’s not enough just to design a beautiful web
site and put in on the Net. Promoting your web site has to be
done constantly if you want to get a continuous stream of
traffic to it. If you don’t drive traffic to your web site, your
online business venture will soon fail.

1. Create a web site marketing plan – if you fail to plan then
you default to a plan for failure. When designing your web site,
create a plan on how to market it as well. Try to put yourself
in your customers shoes when doing this. It’s too easy to just
view your web site from your own perspective. You need to have a
clear vision for your business, goals (short and long term) you
wish to achieve and the strategies of how you will accomplish
them.

2. Define your target market – many online marketers promote
their web site aimlessly in a field which is too large i.e. they
may use bulk mailing as one of their promotion strategies. Of
course you may get some visitors but the chances are you will
not make many sales. Why? You have not narrowed your field of
customers and targeted them. If you sold Cadillacs online for
instance, you are not randomly going to market to every person
on the Net. Your target market may be previous owners of
cadillacs, or people who routinely purchase luxury American
cars.

Getting targeted customers to your web site, will increase sales,
because they will have more interest in your product or service
than marketing to a general audience.

3. Use several promotion strategies – don’t just stick to one
form of promotion because you never know which one will work the
best for you. If you use many channels i.e. search engines,
email marketing, forums, writing articles etc you have a greater
chance of getting more traffic to your web site.

4. Promote continuously – if you want to drive constant traffic
to your web site, you must promote it continuously. Web traffic
is the lifeblood of your online business. For example, you could
constantly optimize your web pages for the search engines,
resubmit them if needed, visit discussion forums every day and
write an article for online publications every two weeks.

5. Calculate your return on investment (ROI) – this means
keeping track of how much money you invested in your marketing
plan and what profit you received in return. This will avoid
wasting large sums of money thrown aimlessly into advertising.

If you calculate it takes 100 visitors to your web site to
generate one sale and with each sale you make $10, then you
shouldn’t spend more than 10 cents to get each targeted visitor
and still make a profit.

In order to know which aspects of your marketing campaign bring
the most visitors, you must be able to monitor visitor activity
to your web pages.

6. Analyze your web site traffic – by analyzing your web site
traffic, you can determine what marketing strategies are
successful. You can then change them as necessary, to boost the
sales or services from your site.

Your analysis may include what keywords your visitors are using
to find your web site, which web pages are the most popular and
where your visitors are coming from. These are essential
statistics you should know, instead of blindly promoting your
web site and hoping for the best.

7. Test, monitor and track your results – to run an effective
online marketing campaign, you need to constantly test what
works and what doesn’t. Tracking the response to an ad may cause
you to refine it until it generates a great return on the money
you invested. Once your results are satisfactory, you can then
roll out your ads on a larger scale and spend greater sums of
money.

You should also monitor your site in the search engines, so you
can optimize your web pages for higher search engine rankings.
This will attract more visitors which leads to higher profits.

Web site promotion strategies will differ for everyone, and will
depend a lot on your product, web site and your personality. Try
everything you can, record the results, and see what works for
you.

For more tips and advice about Forums visit:
http://www.bruisedonion.com/guide/forums/

10 Benefits Of Opening An eBay Store

Whether you are just getting started or are an experienced eBay Power Seller, having an eBay Store is a wonderful way to reach potential customers you may not get through eBay auctions.

Here are some benefits having an eBay Store can provide your business:

1. More Profits – According to eBay, sellers with eBay Stores see an average of 25% increase in their total sales within three months of opening store. You will also save on listing fees since store fees are significantly lower than auction fees on eBay. EBay also offers storeowners promotional offers and free subscriptions to some of its services.

2. Regular Customers – People who buy from your eBay Store are more likely to turn into regular customers if you provide excellent customer service after the sale.

3. Professionalism and Credibility – A professional looking eBay Store makes you look more professional as an on-line seller. An image of professionalism adds to your credibility in customer’s minds. As an added benefit, an eBay Store gives you access to eBay’s Business Resource Center, where you can download templates for professional looking business cards and much more.

4. Save Time – eBay Store special features, such as longer listing periods and automatic re-listing, will save you time.

5. You Have Your Own Website – When you open an eBay Store you have a unique
URL you can promote both on and off eBay. Your eBay Store will be picked up by
search engines just like other websites are.

6. You Can Personalize Your eBay Store – With eBay store customization features you can control the look and feel of your store. You can create up to 20 categories to fit your individual inventory. Buyers will see what you want them to see, how you want them to see it.

7. Your eBay Store Has It’s Own Search Engine – Include your own Search box in your store and buyers will be able to find exactly what they are looking for when they are in the buying mood.

8. Special Promotional Tools – With an eBay Store you can cross promote other items you choose to buyers and you can choose what items to cross promote. You also get access to eBay Stores Email Marketing Tool – a great way to keep in touch with your customers. Additionally, if your store qualifies, you receive free monthly eBay Keyword listings.

9. Free Monthly Reporting – All storeowners receive free monthly sales reports that recap your sales activity by category. You get information such as monthly gross sales, conversion rates, number of buyers, etc. Plus, if you have a Featured or Anchor Store, you receive overall eBay marketplace data to benchmark your sales against other eBay sellers. With Accounting Assistant, you can export date from your eBay and PayPal accounts directly into QuickBooks.

10. The First 30 Days Are Free – eBay offers a free 30-day trial.

For more tips and info about eBay visit:
http://www.bruisedonion.com/guide/ebay/

Protecting Your Computer from Adware and Spyware

Recently, while checking our company web site statistics, we noticed a number of referrals from gambling and pornography sites. Since we are certain these types of sites would not house links to us, we investigated further and determined that some of our faithful visitors may be the victims of adware or spyware.

What is adware?

Adware, in it’s most sinister incarnation, is a program that runs on your computer (like a virus) and occassionally pops up ads or redirects your browser to websites you had not chosen to visit.

What is spyware?

Spyware is software that collects personal information from you without your knowledge or permission. The information spyware collects can range from all the web sites you visit to sensitive information including user names and passwords.

How can I make sure I don’t get these on my computer?

* Never download programs or files from a website you don’t know and trust.
* Never open email attachments unless you know what they are. If you receive an email from a friend, but the text is strange and you don’t know what the attachment is do not open it. Write to your friend and make sure they sent the email.
* Keep an antivirus program running on your computer at all times.

For more info and tips on computers and Downloads visit:
http://www.bruisedonion.com/guide/downloads/

3 Tips You Can Use Right Now to Improve Your Web sites Usability

Studies done by Jakob Nielson the man touted as the, “King of usability” by Internet Magazine showed that people do not read on the web like they would normally read offline.

So what does this mean to you and why should you care?

Visitors to your web sites are in a rush, they want the information you promised and they want it NOW.

If they don’t get the information they want they will leave and this means you lose the sale, the opt-in or whatever action you want the visitor to take while at your site.

The following 3 tips will help you give your visitors what they want and in a way that will increase your web sites usability.

1. Concise Text

By keeping your paragraphs down to one single idea you can help speed up how your visitor absorbs your information.

For example, instead of:

“In today’s market place many people tend to become overwhelmed with the over hyped and highly charged writing that most web sites employ to gain visitors business. This causes people to be turned off by the sites language and ultimately they will click the back button on their browser and leave.”

Why not say,

“Today more than ever people are turned off by over hyped marketing language of websites they visit and because of this frustration they will end up leaving your site.”

See how that short, to the point paragraph says the same thing but quicker?

Go through your home page first and take out long, multiple thought paragraphs and edit them down to be precise. One idea per paragraph once you finish your thought (in 3-4 lines) start another paragraph.

2. Scannable Text

Web site users do not read online text. They scan it.

Use short bold text, for example in the form of a hyperlink, to make important information stick out from the page.

Bullet lists are an invaluable tool as well. Put your important sets of words in bullets. For example instead of,

“You will learn how to create your own web site, design pages that load faster, pick the right color scheme, and improve your sites navigation.”

Use this,

“You will learn:

How to create your own web site

Design pages that load faster

Pick the right color scheme

And improve your sites navigation.”

Use Subheadings through out the page.

As you go through your pages pick out the important points and put them in heading tags. Heading 2 and 3 work the best but the heading 1 tag will also work.

This will break the page up for the reader and they will be able to get the information they want simply by scanning your pages.

3. Be Objective

Far to many web sites are “me” oriented. In other words your site is about making money for you and you want your visitor to stay at your site and buy from you.

So what do you do?

You force them to stay at your site even if they are not interested in your product or service any longer.

Doing this only serves to damage your reputation and cause visitors to leave with a bad taste in their mouth.

Being objective means putting links to other related sites through out your web pages and allowing the visitor the free will to either stay at your site or leave and find the information they are looking for somewhere else.

In the end this is not a bad thing because you, as the site owner, can direct them to the sites you want them to go to.

However, seeding your pages with a bunch of recommendations to other sales sites is not the smartest way to do this.

Offer them free information along with sites that you receive compensation from as well.

This way you are being objective and offering your visitor valuable information they can use at the same time.

In Conclusion

Take a few days and walk through your web site and find the long paragraphs and make them more concise.

Bold important text, create subheadings for extremely important points and create more bullet lists where needed.

Finally, add more out bound links to your information and show them you are objective and care about their needs.

Internet users are getting tired of the hype and they are speaking out with their browser’s back button.

By taking the time to make these changes you will improve your sites usability and your visitors will thank you for it by doing business with you.

For more Website Design help visit:
http://www.bruisedonion.com/guide/design/

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