Browsing the archives for the online enterprise tag

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A Life Purpose, A Goal and A Plan: Three Steps Towards an Authentic Life

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27 Aug, 2009
Anne Bolender Edwards
Alternative Lifestyles, Baby Boomers, Lifestyle Design Skills, Location Independent Professionals, Transformation, Travel

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“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice.
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cheshire Cat.
“I don’t much are where —” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cheshire Cat.
“— so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.

Lewis Carol, Alice in Wonderland…….

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I love that quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In fact, I have probably lived that quote far too many times in my life. Movement became the benchmark through which I gauged progress in my life – as long as I was moving forward, I was getting somewhere and making progress, or at least that is what I used to think.

Then I started learning about life purpose and how to find my life purpose – that quality or passion that I wanted to center my life around. That ‘thing’ that I wanted to build a career on, or spend time studying, or spend time doing. That ‘thing’ would make me feel like I was accomplishing something with my life and not just going somewhere; anywhere!

OK, so I’m not the only person that is seeking to identify their life’s purpose. Seems that there are a few other baby boomers, and Gen Y’ers that are currently searching to define their life’s purpose.

There are numerous techniques that people use to explore and identify their life’s purpose. Many techniques involve answering questions, like the one’s below.

10 Questions That Can Help You Discover Your Life’s Purpose:

source: florindasdesigns Flickr, Cretive Commons

source: florindasdesigns Flickr, Cretive Commons

  1. What do you love to do, whether in your spare time or at work?
  2. What parts of your present job or life activities do you thoroughly enjoy?
  3. What do you naturally do well?
  4. What are your ten greatest successes to date (in your eyes)?
  5. Is there a cause about which you feel passionate?
  6. What are the ten most important lessons you have learned in your life?
  7. Are there some issues or perceived problems that have occurred over and over again?
  8. What do you daydream about doing?
  9. Imagine you are writing your epitaph? What things do you want to be remembered for at the end of your life?
  10. What would you do if you know you could not fail? What would it take to achieve that?

There is another technique that I really enjoy using to identify topics that I am interested in, but that could be because I am more than just a little bit book obsessed. Try spending some time wandering around a large book store. What topics are attracting your attention? History? Architecture? Travel? Look for a pattern in what book topics attract your attention.

You can also look at the books you own. What topics have interested you enough that you have actually bought books about the topic – and spent time reading them?

And you can look at what magazines you subscribe to. What are the topics of the articles that caught your attention and you enjoyed reading?

Once you have all of this information collected, see what patterns you can identify, what topics keep popping up. These common interests and patterns will point towards your life’s purpose and will help you set life goals, help you design your lifestyle, or help you maneuver through a major life transition.

With your life’s purpose, a goal and a plan in hand, you can begin building your best life. Or at least that is what I plan on doing :-)

TTFN

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If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!

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This article was originally published on my other blog Ageless Explorer, on July 17th, 2009, under the title Would You Tell Me Please, Which Way I Ought To Go From Here

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Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog: Useful and Unique Content

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3 Jul, 2009
Anne Bolender Edwards
Designing A Blog, Online Business, Technical Skills

Completed So Far:

I now have a list of powerful keywords that I will be effectively scattering through my website. However, as effective as keywords are, every successful blog/website needs quality content. Two characteristics of quality content is that the content is both useful and unique. So, the next task is to start developing some useful and unique content.
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New Developments:

Regardless of what other search engine optimization techniques you use,  having quality content on  your blog is an absolute ‘must have’.

Although quality content generally consists of content that is well written (with correct spelling and grammar), it is, in fact, much more than that. Think of the websites and blogs that you regularly visit. Why do you keep going back to those sites? Usually visitors keep returning to sites, or sign up for subscriptions to the site’s email newsletter or RSS feed, because they find the information on the site useful to them, in one way or another. For example, the site entertains them, or it solves a problem they have, or it helps them learn how to do something, etc.

The other factor that most, if not all, successful sites have is that they are unique – the personality of the author shines through. So, if you have a natural laid-back attitude, let it come through in your site’s content, but if you don’t, then don’t force it. If you have a great sense of humor, let the content of your site reflect that, but, again, if you don’t then don’t force it. Write your content in the style that reflects how you would naturally hold a conversation.

Below are 10 tips that can help you create useful and unique content:

  1. use your own ‘voice’ – make your blog unique by letting your personality through, don’t try to copy someone else’s blog
  2. know your audience – know what their interest’s are, what problems they are trying to solve, what they are trying to learn more about, etc.
  3. be entertaining – people won’t read dry, academic materials
  4. be educational – create how-to articles and posts
  5. be informative – provide useful information on a topic
  6. be practical – provide interviews, case studies, and profiles
  7. provide breaking news – keep people up-to-date with what’s going on in your area of expertise
  8. create a sense of community – ask questions, solicit feedback, generate comments
  9. be inspirational
  10. be controversial

When you create quality content, a great idea is to use both your posts and your pages in tandem to generate the kind of content that keeps people coming back to your site, not just reading your posts on from their email. This is particularly useful if you have affiliate connections on your site, or are selling your own e-books or information packages from your site.

One way of doing this is to create posts that are relatively short, between 250 and 500 words or so. These posts could contain, for example, a brief introduction to an idea or a topic that is more fully discussed in an article that you have published on one of your site’s pages. You could then link the post to the article on one of your site’s page. (Search engine bots and spiders like internal links – more on this in a later post.) The article could be either a static page, or a Word document or .pdf file that you have published on a page. This way, too, the static pages remain ‘evergreen’ - they are easily available as stand alone content that keeps readers coming back to your site to read, while the dynamic posts can be more topical or controversial in nature.

If you are interested in exploring the type of content that can be found on very successful sites, then check out the Technorati website at: http://www.technorati.com, for a list of the Top 100 blogs (based on popularity). Interesting that most of these blogs are informative, useful and unique blogs.
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Next Step:

The structure and format used when writing for the Web is quite different than the structure and format used when writing for other media. The next post, to be published on Monday, will list some of these unique structure and formatting features that writing for blogs and websites require.

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If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!

If you liked this post, you can read this series on Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog from the beginning by going to the Introduction post.

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Search Engine Optimizing Your Blog: Introduction

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23 Jun, 2009
Anne Bolender Edwards
Designing A Blog, Online Business, Technical Skills

Completed So Far:

My Blog is now live with a proper URL, I have planned what content I want to put on it over the next few months, and I am now at the point where I want to start developing the content.

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New Developments:

Before I could start working full-tilt on writing and preparing content, I needed to know a bit about Search Engine Optimization, and how to use SEO techniques to help draw visitors to this blog.

Here's a relaxing picture you can come back to if this post starts to overwhelm

It is important to relax when you are learning new skills, particularly when they are as frustrating to learn as developing a blog ;-)

The reason to learn about and use search engine optimization is so that search engine spiders and bots can find, evaluate and rank your website or blog.

When someone does a online search, say on Google or Yahoo!, they usually end up with pages of results listing masses of websites, but only clicking on links to websites they find posted on the first 10 or so results pages. The more optimized your site is, the higher it will be ranked by search engines. This means that your site is more likely to end up on the first couple pages of the search engine’s results when someone searches on the keywords you have used to optimize your site with.

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Resources:

The resources I used for learning about Search Engine Optimization include:

  • the SEO Copywriting Success program from the American Writers and Artists Institute (AWAI), located at http://www.awaionline.com. This program’s format includes a set of DVD’s, a workbook and a textbook. The program goes into copywriting a little bit, but the bulk of the information is about SEO skills and techniques. The information is easy to understand and use – even for an absolute beginner.

  • ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, by Darren Rowse & Chris Garrett. This book continues to amaze me with the amount of excellent information it provides.
  • I also used the Search Engine Optimization for Dummies (3rd edition) book, written by Peter Kent, and have Google-searched for information I wasn’t sure of. Both of these resources are also excellent.

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Basically, there are four basic aspects to SEO-ing that bloggers should be aware of, and make good use of:

  1. keywords and keyphrases
  2. developing excellent content
  3. links, links, and more links
  4. advanced keyword and keyphrase strategies

Clicking on any of the highlighted sub-titles will take you directly to that post.

These four topics involve a lot of information, so to prevent you, dear readers, from getting a headache, I am going to further split these four topics into a couple of sections each, and post them individually on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays over the next couple of weeks.

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Next Step:

The first post in this series will be on Friday will focus on selecting the keywords and keyphrases that will start to bring traffic to your blog.

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If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!

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Tweaking Your Blog

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22 Jun, 2009
Anne Bolender Edwards
Designing A Blog, Online Business, Technical Skills

Completed So Far:

So far, I have decided on how I want to monetize my blog and have begun developing a blog that will support the sale of information products. I have also sourced a number of resources that I can use to help me develop my virtual business, but have already run into my first little snag.

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New Developments:

In running a critical eye over my blog, I very quickly realized that I would need to put some major effort into it before I could even begin thinking about marketing issues and plans. So over the past couple of days I focused on three things:

  1. I renamed and slightly refocused the blog;
  2. I migrated the blog over to wordpress.org; and
  3. I began planning and developing content.

1) Renaming and Refocusing The Blog: The original name of this blog was Boomer Nomads, which was fine because the major audience I am focusing on is baby boomers. However, in planning the content I realized that the practical information works for anyone at any age – hence the change in name to Ageless Nomads.

There will still be some material on the blog that focuses specifically on baby boomers. This material will address unique issues and circumstances faced by baby boomers, for example, my articles Boomers as Entrepreneurs, and What is This “Third Age” Thingie? begin to look at some boomer-specific issues.

The other reason for the name change is that I am also working on a second blog, Ageless Explorer that looks at a number of other lifestyle design issues (e.g. dealing with major lifestyle transitions; preparing for retirement; finding a purpose and a passion, etc).

The path less well taken

The path less well taken

2) Moving the Blog to wordpress.org: Wordpress.com has some real advantages when you are learning to create a blog, and works great for a personal blog. It’s easy to get started on, easy to use, offers a good selection of functions and it’s free. For a business blog, however, it’s limited in what it can do. Wordpress.org, on the other hand, offers functions that are perfect for a business – and is still relatively inexpensive and easy to use.

I am a techno-phobe and am constantly concerned about getting in over my head with stuff like this, so I called on my tech-guy (my son) to act as my go-to person in case I ran into any difficulties. My concern was that everything I had read about getting started on wordpress.org talked about having to download the program onto your computer, then setting up an account with an online server, then creating your blog. But nothing ever stepped you through the whole process.

As it turns out, if you use one of the hosts recommended by wordpress.org, or any online host that already runs wordpress.org on their servers, you don’t need to download anything onto your computer. All you need to do is to set up an account with the online server (I used BlueHost only because it was one of the hosting services listed on wordpress.org), pay for the account (mine cost less that $85 US per year), click on one button (your hosting service will tell you which one), fill in two or three little bits of information including the username and password you want to use for the account, and the blog is up and running. It was really, really easy!!

The original wordpress.org blog theme that is created is a very plain theme, so you will probably want to change it fairly quickly to something a bit more pleasant to look at. Over 800 free themes can be found on wordpress.org (just click on the “Extend” tab, and then on the “Themes Directory” link), which you can just download and then import into your blog. This process creates a unique theme gallery for your blog that you can use to preview the themes you like while deciding on which one you want to use. Scads of other free and purchased themes are available online – you can do a Google search to find thousands of theme sites.

The first big theme-related question for me was whether to go with a theme that was search engine optimized or not. I chose not to go with an SEO-ed theme mostly because I didn’t like the look of any of the ones I saw. For me, having the blog look nice was important. Most SEO aspects, like keywords and links, can be added quite easily. However, changing the look and layout of the blog is not something I am comfortable with doing – yet.

Once the theme was selected, I spent some time familiarizing myself with the basic functions, including finding how to use the “Text” widget to begin developing an affinity program with Amazon.ca/ Amazon.com. OK, so adding a proper eBookStore is something I still have to work on :-)

3) Planning and Developing Content: Now that the blog is up and running on wordpress.org my next step was to begin planning and developing content. My goal was to make sure that there is a good amount of content on the blog and that I know what other content I want to develop before I begin marketing. This way I know that when the marketing begins to provide results, there will be enough content here for people to begin exploring and hopefully come back to. I have also planned the content for this blog to overlap somewhat with my other blog (Ageless Explorer) which will, hopefully, benefit both blogs.

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Next Step:

My goal for Wednesday’s post is to explore how to Search Engine Optimize the blog and it’s contents. I figure I might as well begin developing the content with search engines in mind right from the very beginning.

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If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!

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Resources to Begin Building an Online Enterprise With

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17 Jun, 2009
annebolender
Online Business, Technical Skills, Travel

There is scads of resources available to anyone who is looking to build an online business. You just need to browse through Amazon.com, or through any local bookstore to see masses of “Build it and they will come” books on becoming a virtual entrepreneur.

And then there’s the Internet – there’s a new expert being born every day, with most promising untold riches for little or no effort.

Fortunately, mixed in with this lot are some really knowledgeable experts and some really great books.

But how can you tell if the material is worth even the cost of the paper needed to print it out, or the effort required to go to the bookstore to buy the book??

Well, in most cases, you can’t tell if the material is any good just by looking at it, or by reading a summary of it. But there is a way to help reduce your choice, with a resulting increase in your chances of finding materials that right for you and for what you want to accomplish.

For me, I am starting an online business from scratch, and am at the very beginning of the process.  The objective of my business is to sell educational information products and perhaps offer a bit of coaching. My target audience is basically any individual that is interested in designing a lifestyle that is supported by a virtual, or online, enterprise. However, because of the unique issues and situations that baby boomers face, special focus will be given to this niche audience.

What I have decided to do is to focus on resources that were being created by, created for, or extensively used by entrepreneurs with similar goals and objectives. However, because I will also be giving special attention to baby boomers, its unlikely that I will be able to find many resources for this specific audience, so I will be looking at the location independent professional lifestyle in general. As a result, I have chosen to focus on the following resources that should be able to help me get started developing the skills I need for this endeavor to be a success.

By focusing on materials produced by someone in the field you intend to set up your enterprise in, you should be able to find at least some useful information. You can always refocus the material to suit specific characteristics that your target audience has.

The first skill I want to develop is to gain an understanding of how I want to monetize my website. There are at least a couple of models that can be followed, for example, you can go after joint ventures (you sell someone else’s product, and they sell yours); you can build a strong affiliate-based business; or you can sell products through drop-shipping; etc.

The monetization model I have chosen to follow is the one used by Chris Guillebeau. Chris is a writer, blogger and world traveler, and supports his lifestyle through selling information products from his blog, and through freelance writing.  Chris’ excellent “How-to” guides are available from his “The Art Of Non-Conformity” blog, located on the  http://www.chrisguillebeau.com website/blog.

The second skill I need to work on is to learn how to build and develop a really good blog/website. There are a couple of resources that I will be using for this:
1.    ProBloggers: Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett have published several excellent and popular resources that I will be using. The first is their book: Problogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income (who could resist a book with a title like this ☺). Their second resource is an email program they developed recently, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog (they have recently expanded this program into an ebook and offer it for sale on their website). Their third resource is their website/email posts that are available at http://www.problogger.net.
2.    In addition to the ProBlogger information, I will be also be using two programs that I purchased from the American Writers and Artists Institute (AWAI), located online at http://www.awaionline.com:

a.) SEO Copywriting Success
b.) How to Write Your Own Money-Making Websites

My game plan is to follow the ProBloggers book and the 31-day Build a Better Blog program to begin with, using information from the two AWAI programs as needed.

I will let you know in my next post, which will be posted Monday June 22, how things are going.

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If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!

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