The Pix Pixy

When I began my networking journey, I attended any and all networking events as time permitted. Every event was fair game! Today I am much more strategic in my networking endeavors. I discovered which events and organizations gave me the best return on my investment of time as well as how to be an effective, caring networker.

In order to know where to begin you must first understand what networking is and why it is important to grow your business. Networking in its purest form is simply talking to people, making connections and developing rapport to grow our circle of influence. Business networking is essentially the same except that our primary objective in business networking is to help us grow our businesses. For most of us, building a network means meeting people we can do business with or who will do business with us, or refer people who will do business with us, are our ultimate goals.

In fact, some of the best networks are those created by people who own and run their own businesses. When you create valuable networking relationships, you build them on a foundation of mutual trust, sharing knowledge, experiences and resources to help one another grow your businesses by either referring one another or doing business directly with one another.

It works like this: If you do a good job, one customer might tell three to five of her colleagues, family and friends about you. Whereas, when you build a network of say 10 to 20 strong advocates, they may each tell only one person about your, however your “exposure” is now more than doubled - With the right network, the ultimate in “word of mouth” marketing takes place. You promote your network, and your network promotes you.

Have you ever attended a BNI or Le Tip or other form of structured networking groups? Perhaps you are already a member of a similar group. If not, you might consider becoming involved in one to the fastest growing business networking concepts around. These groups invite business professionals to join on an exclusive basis. That means, that if you are a chiropractor and become a member of one of these groups, no other chiropractor will be invited or allowed to join.

These groups have regularly scheduled meetings (anywhere from monthly to weekly) with a list of rules and objectives to which you must abide. In some cases, a minimum number of referrals is required to participate. In others, simply doing business with one or more in the network is all that is asked of he members. However, keep in mind that for this type of networking to be worthwhile for all parties, each must make every effort to do business with other members of the group.

If this form of structured networking isn’t for you, there are other options for finding potential networking venues and partners. Here are some ideas to help you on your way to networking success.

a. Develop a joiners mentality. By that I mean, don’t just sign up to get our name on a roster. REALLY JOIN. Get involved. Participate in discussions, events and BE VISIBLE. The saying “out of sight, is out of mind,” holds true when it comes to networking. I have been involved in groups and decided to take a hiatus from attending for 2 to 3 months (and sometimes more) only to have people come up to me and tell me they forgot the name of my business so they had to find someone else either through a friend or through the local phone book. BUMMER!

b. Attend networking functions. These can include Chambers of Commerce meetings, after hours socials, ad hoc committees and special events task forces.

c. Get involved in a community service group such as Kiwanis, Lions, Jaycees, etc.

d. Volunteer with a non-profit organization, whose mission you are passionate about and believe in. People who have similar passions will want to do business with you.

e. Host events - I started an event called Goddess Gatherings more than 2 years ago in my home. It is an intimate gathering of women (8 max.) who share a common interest and/or wish to expand their own circles. I invite women who do not yet know one another although they may be familiar with their names. These women are women in my circle of influence either directly or indirectly (they are either members of the 22 groups I belong to and attend regularly or they are part of a circle within these groups). I might invite a “surprise” guest who can entertain the women - such as a masseuse or tarot card reader- or feature a business such as a jeweler or make-up artist. This helps make for a memorable evening and the women either start their own Gathering or look forward to being invited to another gathering hosted by either myself of one of the women in attendance.

f. Look for ways to cross-promote with businesses that complement yours. For instance, a spa might join with a health food store or restaurant and promote their products and services for staying healthy. A salon might join a florist to promote weddings or proms and a realtor might join with a mortgage broker to promote a “one-stop” experience for home buyers.

g. Interview others. A great way for me to network is to interview women for projects I am working on. Since most people are flattered when you ask their opinion about something or experiences in life, this has been a great means of increasing my own circle for various reasons. I might interview a woman (or even a man) about an article or book I am writing, or a seminar I am developing. People love to share their stories. I tape the interview (with their permission, of course) and give them a copy afterwards. It helps to have a list of questions ready prior to the interview, however, unless they insist, I don’t give them the questions ahead of time. I have done these interviews via phone, email as well as in person. Many of the women have since.

h. Join an online business or social networking community such as MeetUp, Ryze, Max-in-Common, Linkd In, Open BC, to name a few,. These groups have subgroups made up of people with a specific focus and similar interests. Or you can join a non-specific group to gain more knowledge, exposure and contacts.

Make a point of attending one new networking event a month just to “check it out.” Make a list of the people you know, the organizations you have heard and read about and the companies who currently do business with you. These are all great resources to tap into to find new venues to network. Get the local newspaper and look at the organizations and businesses hosting events to which the public is invited. Attend them.

The best networking begins with planning and taking action. Being strategic in your planning is important to your ultimate success as an effective, caring networker.

If you are interested in sharing your networking success stories, drop me a note to heidi@speakingwithspirit.com. It would be an honor to interview you. Who knows, your story could be the subject of one of my articles, or you could even write your own.. Looking forward to hearing from you. Here’s to your success in building your network.

© 2005 - Heidi Richards is the author of The PMS Principles, Powerful Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business and 7 other books. She is also the Founder & CEO of the Women’s ECommerce Association, International http://www.WECAI.org (pronounced wee-kī) - an Internet organization that “Helps Women Do Business on the WEB.” Basic Membership is FREE. Ms. Richards can be reached at Heidi@speakingwithspirit.com or heidi@wecai.org.

Moving to Spain is a big step and there are a number of things that need to be well thought-out before heading out and purchasing or renting a home in Spain. If you are going to purchase a home then there are a number of things to consider. If you are a homeowner are you going to sell it and use the funds to buy your new Spanish property or keep it and rent it out? The second option is worth bearing in mind if you think you may want to return to your present country at some point in the future. If you are going to purchase a property in Spain then it’s worth getting expert advice. A good lawyer or Spanish mortgage adviser will check any property to see if there are any issues that the seller or Estate agent may not want you to know.

You are going to want to check to see what the laws are in your native country. There are some countries that will make you pay income tax just because you are a citizen whether you are working in the country or not provided that you own property or have assets within that country. Selling property and liquidating assets may be something to consider.

You are also going to need to consider work, transportation, cost of living differences as well as language. If you do not already know Spanish it is a very good idea to learn before you move or a soon as you get there. Check to see if there is a local dialect. For example Catalan and not Castilian Spanish is the first language in Barcelona and surrounding Catalonia. You also may want to consider things like health insurance. There are two options depending on status and this can be a major consideration. You are also going to need to consider things like how to get your things to Spain, how to get to Spain yourself and how to make sure any pets you have make the trip successfully. In some instances such as moving from one country in Europe to Span there may not be as much difficulty as you might experience if you are coming from an outside of Europe country.

The most annoying part of a receding hair line for guys is that there is no cure. Baldness has been a big issue for blokes in the country but there are awesome treatments that might stop further baldness. Hair Loss treatments are available from Advanced Hair Studio.

There is a lotion based treatment for hair loss called Minoxidil that could be taken in capsule or topical lotion form and might often help gents regrow their hair and prevent further hair loss. The hair loss lotion comes in a variety of strengths with 5 percent being the most popular. The hair loss treatment is used under the supervision of a trained professional and should be made aware that the baldness treatment is not a wonderful miracle cure. However, the excellent success of this loss of hair treatment is approx two thirds. The hair loss treatment course is a minimum of 2 months before brilliant results might often show and all females are recommended to stay on the hair loss treatment for at least 9 months.

For women that don?t see any hair growth with the hair loss treatment they could try hair plugs. Transplant surgery is a long term solution and involves moving the hair follicles on the scalp to minimise bald areas. Hair surgery can be expensive and involves a medical procedure so may not be for every girl.

In part 1 of this article series on marketing with blogs, I discussed the reasons why blogs are excellent tools for marketing.

In this article I outline some tips on using your blog as a good vehicle for your marketing communications.

Tip # 1: Choose The Topic Of Your Blog Well

Make sure you are targeting the right audience for your products. You might love golf, but you can’t use it to sell your products unless they’re meant for golfers.

You generally wouldn’t write about something like golf on a marketing blog, unless you’re using it as a metaphor.

Pick the topic that will attract the right audience - people who are looking for your products, but more importantly, people who are willing to actually spend money on them.

If you’re not an expert on your topic, but are learning about it, blog about your learning process. There’s no shame in being a learner, in admitting that you don’t know everything.

In fact your journey could even teach others who are learning and help them relate to your experiences. Products you recommend would then be easy to sell to this group because you’ve established the emotional connection that makes selling easier.

Tip #2: Spend Some Time Learning The Basics Of Blogging

You need to learn how to use your blogging software, and which blog engine or service will give you the results you need. Decide how much time you want to spend on your blog.

Hire a blogging coach or buy a blogging tutorial. Spend some time learning about trackbacks, pingpacks, keywords and how to use them, linking, blogging etiquette.

When you know how to use the tools that are available to you, it becomes that much easier to focus on your goals and save time in the actual process of blogging.

Tip # 3: Don’t Sell

When you start writing a blog, forget about selling. Too many people use their blog like a sales letter. Those people just don’t “get it.” That’s not what a blog is about at all.

Blogs are about communicating - connecting with your audience. Use your blog to build relationships with your audience. State your opinions whether they are popular or not. Politically-correct or not.

A while ago I wrote an article on this titled “It’s a Blog, Not a Sales Letter” in which I recommend using your blog for branding yourself, building your reputation and communicating with your audience - and not just for making a sale.
http://www.blog-maniac.com/blog-sales-letter.htm

As marketers we aim to sell. But when you blog, you have to forget about selling and focus on sharing.

That doesn’t mean you give away all your secrets on your blog. But it does mean that you should not use your blog for in-your-face marketing.

Your readers will be very put off if all they read on your blog is one sales pitch after another. People are not stupid. They know when they’re being sold.

The most unobtrusive way to sell is to write reviews about products and link to them, mention products in passing, write articles or tips and recommend products (yours or other people’s) and services on your blog.

Part 3 of this article series discusses more tips on using your blog to market your products and services online.
http://www.blog-maniac.com/marketing-with-blogs3.htm

Priya Shah is a partner in the search engine marketing firm, SEO & More and writes an online marketing blog. Request the detailed version of this whitepaper Boost Your Search Engine Visibility With Blogs And RSS here.

This article may be reprinted as long as the resource box is left intact and all links are hyperlinked.

One most important way to help increase web traffic is by link development. A typical way is by link exchange which is not a good practice especially if you are exchanging links with sites with unrelated topic. Your ranking will not benefit or even get harm by SE if you have a website about dogs but exchange links with an online casino. Search Engines will detect that and knows that you are doing unnatural link exchange.

blog - add value to your website
Now it comes another way of smart link building - blogging. You can create a blog and write related topics about your website. You can posts links to your website pages, of couse dont make it appear that you are ad marketing your website.

Index your website quickly
blogger.com is a best place to create your blog as it is owned by google. All blogs in blogger.com are automatically included into the crawler. You dont need to submit your blog to google to ask for inclusion. In this way if you have a new website and wish to be indexed by google in a quick way, conside creating a blog there !

More backlinks
You may choose to host your blog in your own domain, or you can let them host it for you. In either case you are probably using another subdomain (e.g. blog.yoursite.com, yoursite.blogspot.com). Search engine sees subdomains as separate websites. So any links from the blog to your main website would be valuable and not counted as internal links. This naturally increases your SERP.

More Traffic
People like to see blogs, as they are more human. Keep your blog content fresh and frequently updated. This can grant you a new source of traffic. Dont underestimate the traffic that a blog can bring you. If you have a product related page, it is strongly suggested you write comments and some product reviews on your blog.

Come to my blog at http://make-money-online.softbath.net for more SEO tips.
Also visits http://ezine.softbath.net for ezine articles about internet marketing

So you’ve paid off the loan, and the mortgage, done the renovations, the paperwork and now your home is finally your own house. You can’t help feeling, however, that you aren’t quite ready to sit back and rest easy. What if someone breaks into your house, damages and steals your property? What can you do to safeguard your space against burglary?

For a medium or large residence, surveillance just might be a good idea. Before you start picturing Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez in Stakeout, let’s define our terms.

Surveillance is, quite simply, the process of monitoring people, objects or processes for conformity to certain expected norms. More specifically, it consists of monitoring for deviations from safe, non-threatening behaviour. It may or may not interest you to know that, in French, the word means ‘watching over’.

Surveillance includes any form of observation from afar by means of technological devices. This refers to phone tapping, directional microphones, bugs, subminiature cameras, closed-circuit television or CCTV, GPS tracking, airborne or satellite reconnaissance as well as computer and internet surveillance.

CCTV is perhaps the most relevant device for you, as a homeowner, so let’s look at it in some more detail.

CCTV consists of a camera, or cameras, linked up for the purpose of surveillance. The cameras are all directly liked and viewable through monitor screens. CCTV was first pressed into service to help watch against bank robbers, but the applications have increased to the point where the technology is easy to use, and relatively affordable enough to be used in home security set-ups.

CCTV is supposed to aid in crime fighting in two ways -deterrence and detection.

It’s assumed that the presence of clearly visible cameras in an particular location would serve to scare of would-be thieves. But the criminal mentality is notoriously hard to fathom, and this isn’t always the case. Interestingly though, CCTV systems do seem to be most effective as safeguards against car theft. Still, it’s worth assuming that the presence of a CCTV system should put off a fair number of would-be burglars.

CCTV has made a remarkable difference to crime detection, that’s for sure. Several prominent murder cases worldwide were solved with the aid of CCTV footage, and CCTV has also been useful in locating missing persons and runaways. Look at it this way - if it comes to the worst, and your house is burglarised, CCTV footage can provide crucial clues to the police and help in capturing the criminals and recovering your belongings.

CCTV technology has developed to the point where you can use wireless or USB still cameras to take high-resolution pictures at intervals. You can either program the cameras to take pictures on a time-lapse basis or to be triggered by unexpected motion. The quality of these images is superior to other surveillance cameras, and provides investigators with a wealth of useful detail. Models like Canon’s S2iS, Nikon’s P1 or Kodak’s Easyshare One are all affordable and reliable options. You can easily download these images onto your PC and share them with the authorities, all in a matter of seconds.

This is in fact the best option for you as a homeowner. Traditional CCTV is more adept at providing a flow of images to be constantly monitored by security personnel, while this new technique, dubbed Closed Circuit Digital Photography (CCDP) does not require around-the-clock observation, and produces high-quality images that can be used in the event of a burglary. As in the case of CCTV, it is worth considering that the presence of a surveillance system will itself serve as some amount of deterrent, if clearly indicated.

Used in conjunction with motion sensors, as well as anti-burglary devices such as alarms, high fences, trap wires and the like CCDP can form the basis for an effective and reliable home surveillance system. One that lets you finally kick back and relax in the comfort and security of your own home!

Brian G Turner is an advisor with Pakatak Security & Surveillance, and also moderates at the Security Talk forums, which provides free advice on home and business security.

Spy listening devices are more common than one might think.
In fact, there is a wide variety of people who make use of spy
listening devices in order to find out the information they need
to know. These listening devices (some of them used in covert
operations) are perfectly legal, and it is even possible for you
to make use of them on information gathering forays of your own.
The most obvious set of people who use spy listening devices are
law enforcement and other government types. It is probably no
surprise to you that the police, F.B.I. and C.I.A. make use of
covert listening devices as they perform surveillance. The
Department of Homeland Security also makes use of these devices,
as does the military. Even though possessing these devices is
not against the law, these law enforcement agencies are required
to jump through some legal hoops when they want to use them in
conjunction with investigating civilians. Of course, in other
countries and in times of war, sometimes the listening devices
are used without as many stringent regulations. Other
professionals who use spy listening devices include private
investigators (P.I.) and bounty hunters. P.I.s uses them to
gather information for clients. Most of the time it is evidence
for use in civil court cases. Bounty hunters may make use of
listening devices to help them gather information on the
whereabouts of their quarry. In either case, true professionals
make use of equipment that is the best they can afford, and that
will help them do their jobs. Finally, it is possible for you to
use spy listening devices. If you are looking to gather
information about someone, or even if you just want to protect
yourself by making sure all transactions and important
conversations are recorded, you can use listening devices to
make sure you have all the right information that you need.
These devices are perfectly legal, and there are a variety of
them available. They range from small little devices that look
like pens to large listening devices that you can point at a
location and listen in from 300 yards away. (c) 2005 Copyright
www.spyassociates.com. This article is about: Spy Listening
Devices.

We have all heard that networking works and it is one of the best ways to get new business for your company. Professionals, consultants and so many types of folks enjoy the networking process and develop long-term relationships with those they meet.

They refer them business and the others reciprocate in returning business to them. What a great way to do business too. If you ask a long-standing business person;

“How do you get most of their business” or “Where does most of your business come from” more often or not or at least 80% of the time they will say most of our business comes from word-of-mouth or referrals.

Well then when you ask me why does networking work? It should be obvious that it starts a whirlwind of activity and gets the word-of-mouth advertising cloud forming into a tropical storm. If you do a lot of networking and you help other network too then you will find your tropical storm turning into a category five Hurricane that your competition never fully expected and that is why networking works so well.

What do I know about networking? Well let’s just say I started my company real small and grew it into a multi-state operation and the largest company of its kind in the world and yes most of our business was from word-of-mouth and referrals. So, consider all this in 2006.

“Lance Winslow” - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

Past life regression, aka PLR, should discover the reasons why we have problems with friends in our current life or why we are concerned of certain situations. You have family around you in your current life that you will have remarkably met before, just imagine being competent to learn what happened and what your relationship was to them at that time and lift blocks that plague you in your current lifetime and even uncover talents and bring them into your current lifetime. Past lifetime regression is terrific.

When you are having a past lifetime regression session you would regress to the lifetime you would most need to learn about in your current lifetime. This is magnificent and should explain an amazing deal about your present lifetime and help you would to go forward with your life with a greater understanding of yourself, your life and the friends around you.

You will also identify why you are the person that you are, now that is tremendous. If you revel in nature perhaps you were once a farmer, if you like to travel perhaps you were a traveller. Instead of minimising our strengths we acknowledge every single one of them.

Each experience is magnificent and unique. Other people have unearthed places they?d lived in before and just knew where to go. Visit AnneJirsch.com for Regression Therapy.

Has the power gone out at your house? Has your refrigerator stopped working during the night? Do you have concerns regarding the stuff you had in your freezer?

Relax ,in that case you can use some easy tips for handling food safely.

Through the food away when it is thawed or warmed to room temperature. Throw it out if it has been sitting at room temperature for longer than two hours.

Largely thawed food that is still cold should be cooked immediately. The cooked foods can either be consumed or put in the refrigerator to eat later.

You may notice ice crystals on your food and if so, it’s okay to freeze it again. If you don’t have a freezer to put it in, make sure to get some dry ice and put it in a cooler. The food will need to be cooked, because it won’t last as long as with a normal freezer.

If you notice any food with even a little freezer burn, you need to throw it away.

Storms and accidents will always cause power outages; however, you can use preparation to be ready for whatever happens.
If your existing fridge or freezer has seen better days, the best advice that anyone can give you is you invest in a new one. If you have the space, you should certainly consider a large American Style fridge freezer. This can make a dramatic change to any kitchen. A variety of American refrigerators and freezers from many suppliers are listed on this site.