There are currently over one hundred thousand texts on the market that deal with the concept of leadership development, and this number is continually rising.
When to Hire an SEO Agency
The name of our presentation today is HELP! My Website is a Ghost Town. This presentation is targeting small business owners and non-profits who are at the place where they are considering hiring an SEO company. They might not know how much traffic they are currently getting, and they probably don’t know how much traffic their competition’s websites are getting.
You can have the most beautiful website in the world, but if nobody is going to it, you might as well have no website at all. The subtitle here is How to bring your website back from the dead or When to hire an SEO company.
Does hiring an agency make sense for you at this time? If, for some reason, we reach the end of the presentation and you determine that—based on what I told you—you’re not a candidate for hiring an SEO company, I am going to give you a resource that has over a 100 ideas for driving traffic to your websites.
Sound good? Cool. Let’s get started.
Why Market Online?
What we care about as small business owners is helping people; we are in business to provide a service or product that elevates others in some way; improves their quality of life in some way. Obviously, if we are not in business with that in mind, then we are going to be out of business pretty soon.
Now, when we do this, it needs to be sustainable. We need to be able to trade our services or products for money, and if we are not making more this year than we did last year, we are contracting as a business (i.e. we are not expanding, but contracting, and so we are going out of business.)
Marketing 101 tells us in order to grow a company or business, you need to have more exposure. More exposure online will lead into more clicks, more sets of eyes in front of your web pages, looking at your products, services, your brand, your cause (whatever it is) and those clicks will convert into sales, leads, phone calls, emails or whatever your conversion is—whatever you are trying to track, whatever you are trying to convince people to do—you need more exposure in order to get more folks to do it.
Being easier to find online is one of the way you’re going to expand on your exposure.
Making a Safe Investment
We all care about making an investment, whether stock, bonds, mutual funds, or, in this case, our marketing. When making a investment, we want to see a return. We don’t want to make investment that loses; nobody wants that. It’s not a good feeling to lose on an investment, so success here is what we are targeting.
Some of our challenges in the market place are going to be our competitors; we are not alone in the market place, we are not usually the only one offering our service or the product. There are other folks that the market can turn to and so we are vying with that group of people for the same customers and their money. You can sometimes partner with your competitor (and that’s good,) but that’s an entirely different presentation, so think of your competitors as competitors for now.
Falling behind and becoming obsolete is something you need to watch out for and avoid. Being hard to find can also can also cost you. Obviously, if your competitor is in the top spots of Google.com, they’re making money. If you are on page 4 in Google, you’re likely making considerably less money though your website than your competitors are in positions 1, 2 or 3 on Google for the same key phrase. There are competitors; you are not only fighting in the local market place, in real time, but you also compete online.
Competing online is important, and getting the top spot in Google and the other search engines is important for your business. We’re talking about a 24/7/365 salesperson who can deliver your message—details about your product or service—all the time without you being there to do it. That’s fantastic! If you are not leveraging your website and your rank in the search engines, you’re missing out.
Does Hiring an SEO Agency Make Sense for You?
Scenario #1: Hot Dogs
Say you have the best hotdog stand in town. This is your business and you want to expand it so you go to a local internet marketing company who specializes in search engine optimization (search engine marketing) and playing the Google game. So you go to these folks and they say, “Alright Mr./Ms. Customer, you can pay us somewhere between $500, 1,000 to $10,000 (you can pay a lot for search engine marketing company;) you will pay us $800 a month and we are going to bring you 100 more people each week to your website.”
You say “Great! I love you! A hundred more people a week!” The conversion rate must be around five per cent, so now you got another five hotdog sales each week so that means after those five hotdog sales—after you pay for the hotdog, buns, ketchup and mustard, onions and all that—you net about $20.
Did you win or fail on that proposition?
I’ll wager you failed. This does not in any way cover the cost of the agency, even if they were only charging $500 a month (which is low.)
Yes, you can kind of console yourself by saying, “Well I’m considering it a branding and marketing expense,” and it certainly is, but search engine marketing is one of the few marketing expenses you’re going to make in this world that can actually pay you a dividend back. It’s one of the truly self-sustaining marketing channels.
A lot of the other marketing channels may work, or they may not. With search engine marketing you can tell whether or not it’s working by the amount of clicks and phone calls you are receiving. If you ask people who call how did they find your company and they say, “Oh, I found you on your website after I did a search in Google,” that’s when you know it’s working.
Scenario #2: Dermatologist
Now say you are a dermatologist and you go to the same search engine marketing company and they are especially lazy today and say “Mr./Ms. Customer we’ll get you a 100 more people per month into your website.”
Say this company is a dog! They just cannot market a website to save their lives, so they scratch out 100 more people to your website a month. That extra 25 clicks a week are awful so they go through this at 5% conversion rate just like we saw before. You are getting five new clients per month. Now, due to the nature of your business you are netting $200-1000 per client, right?
What do you say? Does that win or fail?
I would say that wins! Due the types of clients you take in, the increase in business does more than cover the cost of the SEO agency.
Let’s SEO Review
A few things to go over here: 5% conversion rate is a little conservative, especially when it comes to a local search.
Most Google traffic can convert better than that when you are doing a local search, so if you are doing a search for heat and cooling companies for your local area, or lumber for your local area, it’s likely that if they find you they are going to give you a call because they are looking for a heating or cooling company or something along those lines.
This depends on your niche. It also depends on your targeted key terms. If you target key phrases and nobody is looking for those key phrases, good for you. You can pay a lot of money and dominate key phrases that nobody is doing a search on.
We have had people want to do this before. We warned them and then we ranked them for those key phrases. Once they got in there and they realized they were not getting any clicks, we asked them, “So what are your other targets? Where else do you want to show up?”
Then we walked them though a proper keyword analysis and they got a sense that “It’s very good that I ranked for this, but gosh yeah, let’s target this other one too.”
Some industries are more SEO-savvy. If you are in the middle of the desert, you are probably going to dominate to your local area for whatever your key phrase is, since there’s probably not a lot of competition in the marketplace.
In larger, more metropolitan areas, you might have more competitions, and again here it depends how search engine marketing-savvy they are. If they are not terribly savvy, then they are not going to be engaging in the search engine optimization practices that would help them gain more solid rankings. As soon as you start bumping up your “armor” as it were, you are going to find you are climbing the rankings very quickly.
So success online depends on your niche. It depends on the key phrases you’re selecting. It depends on lots of different factors. Usually, in local places, we can get up to 10-11% conversion or higher.
Again it depends on a lot of factors.
Final Questions to Ask Yourself
Are you on page 2 or higher on your target key phrase?
If you are already on page 1, you might have already hired an SEO company to help out, or your industry might be weak as far as SEO savvy.
If you are on page 2… or page 3… or 4… or 50… or 60… or 80… you might as well not exist. You’re probably getting very few phone calls, few email inquiries, and if you are hungry for it—if you want to be easily found online—then you might want to seriously consider hiring an SEO company.
Furthermore, do you even want more paying costumers? This is not a smart-Alec question, necessarily. I’m not trying to be a smart-Alec when I ask it. Some folks are in the place with their business where they are maxed out. If you are maxed out, or you are humming along and you are content with the amount of business you have, you are not obviously going to be in interested in marketing further and therefore gaining more paying costumers.
At the end of the day, when it comes down to hiring an SEO company, it’s really about turning this ghost town website you might have—you might have spent thousands of dollars on it and yet when you finally do get Google Analytics installed (or any analytics software installed)—you see how much traffic you are not getting. You see where your rankings aren’t or where your competition is.
Get Started
We have two different ways if you think you’re ready to dive into SEO. We have flat-rate SEO pricing on some of our plans, and we just brought on a performance-based SEO plan where you pay a small entry fee then you don’t pay again until we start ranking you on the key phrases we help you select. So that’s very competitive and we are still piloting it. We just released the pay-for-performance SEO plan recently, so forgive the video if we have cancelled the program by the time you get to us, but for now we have the two different marketing plans for business.
In closing, whether you have three staff people or 300 staff people, remember: If your lifetime value per client can merit hiring a search engine marketing agency, you probably want to do it, because frankly, being at the top of Google can mean a lot of activity, a lot more leads and a lot more sales or donations or souls saved.
That it, folks! I’m Matthew Schoenherr of Levaire. Have questions? Leave them in the comments below!
7 Search Engine Marketing Tips
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of generating traffic and improving visibility of a webpage on search engine rankings. It is the process of making a website more robot-friendly. With evolving technology, digitized content has become the norm. Individuals have shifted from hard copies to digital content. Firms are taking the digital route and opting for content marketing techniques in order to promote their products and build brand value. In this context, SEM holds greater relevance and it is crucial for organizations to understand how SME functions in order to make full use of its potential.
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO, as it is popularly known) is the process of improving a website’s visibility so that it appears more prominently in the unpaid search results of a search engine. The SEO process uses keywords in order to make a website more relevant to search queries. By using SEO effectively, organizations can generate more traffic to their websites, thereby gaining more exposure for their messages, products and services.
SEM and SEO, though are relatively new concepts in the past decade, have gained great significance in the world of search engines. A site is ranked based on the keyword density and selection, which is turn determines the relevance of the site to the search query keyed in by the user. Using SEO, organizations use a myriad of techniques to build backlinks to their pages from other credible sources in order to increase their own page rank. Even though Google depreciated its importance in 2012, link-building still holds a lot of prominence in the world of SEO and SEM.
Here are several tips and tricks employed by webmasters to increase traffic and visibility of a webpage.
Some of the most commonly used tips and tricks in SEM are:
1. Pay Per Click
Pay Per Click (PPC) (tracked by Cost Per Click) is a paid method of advertising, used to drive traffic to a website where organizations pay ad publishers when their ad is clicked by users. In a pay per click campaign, keywords relevant to the context and the target market are selected to increase the visibility of a website. Websites that use PPC marketing, route traffic to a site when a keyword query matches a user’s search query. One of the drawbacks of the PPC is the high possibility for click fraud, where automated robots are used to increase click count, thereby increasing the traffic and revenue generated from a website.
2. Cost Per Impression
The display of an ad to a user browsing a webpage is called an impression. Cost Per Impression (CPI) is an SEM technique related to web traffic, where advertisers pay every time an advertisement is displayed. CPI is used to assess the effectiveness and profitability of online search engine marketing. The advantage of CPI over PPC is its immunity to click fraud. Hence, the traffic numbers derived from CPI analytics are considered more reliable when compared to PPC analytics.
3. Paid Listings
Organizations may use paid listings from search engine hosting companies (think Google and Facebook) in order to increase the visibility and increase traffic. Paid listings help agencies increase their page traffic and rank through inorganic means, which is especially helpful to organizations or ad campaigns just getting launched. Established organizations that have developed a level of credibility may not choose to invest in paid listings as they may already enjoy regular traffic.
4. Catchy Domain Names
It is easy to understand how using catchy domain names increases the market’s ability to recall a brand. Domain names—when combined with the right keywords—can lead to boosted traffic, more click-throughs and higher conversions. Search engine marketing tips that include finding the right domain names can lead to organic traffic that may be difficult to get under normal circumstances.
5. Content Priority
Credible content relevant to the user is a best way to divert traffic to a webpage. Solid content that is well-written and informative while being free of rambling, keyword-stuffed blathering, is sure to (eventually) show up in organic search results. For organizations focusing less on organic ways of growing traffic to a website, however, PPC and CPI are still tried and tested ways of increasing traffic to a webpage quickly.
6. Using SEO-Friendly URLs
Similar to using catchy domain names, SEO-friendly URLs are also dependable techniques employed to increase traffic to a webpage. Marketing using keyword-targeted URLs may produce favorable results over a period of time. But this technique may not be helpful in increasing traffic suddenly. All organic ways of increasing traffic work over a period of time and do not usually lead to sudden increases in web traffic.
7. Tags and Meta Descriptions
Using tags and meta descriptions is a smart way of implementing SEM strategies. Though URLs and domain names do not provide the luxury of using lengthy phrases with the desired keyword density, tags and meta tags act as additional searchable text that can be fine-tuned according to the desired keyword density. Keyword-targeted tags can increase the visibility of a site in an organic search which increases the trustworthiness of a particular site. Including title and alt tags for every web page will also increase the chances for high page rank due to the increased keyword relevance and density.
Go Forth
All said and done, search engine marketing is a dynamic concept which employs SEO as one of the cornerstones behind increasing user traffic. SEO techniques such as choosing the proper keywords, ensuring content matches your audience and developing credible backlinks from other websites are sure to produce results over time. In a hurry? PPC and CPI can speed your message, product or service to market. Use these techniques over time to build external links, build your traffic and grow your following and you will be effectively using SEM techniques. God bless!
Need help? See our SEO plans, EMAIL US! »
The Basics of Designing a Personal Website or Blogging Site
If you have ever considered creating your own personal website or personal homepage but do not have a clue of where to start, there are only five key components to get one up and running. Creating a website is not a mysterious or challenging task but one that requires a step-by-step process.
Building a website does not need to be an overwhelming experience. With the right tools and direction, anyone can develop a site without confusion. Incorporating the basics of good website design, by making a plan, can have anyone published on the Internet within hours.
The Basics of a Good Website
To develop a successful website the individual must first clearly identify the goal of the site, and the audience that will be visiting. In addition, the site must be simple to navigate and aesthetically pleasing, and filled with valuable content. In essence, a successful site will contain:
- Value – Even a personal site must have value to the reader. It must contain compelling content that is within easy sight for any visitor to find.
- A Clearly Identified Objective – The site cannot be just a mishmash of content. It should be focused on a clearly identified objective. As a cohesive focused site, it may display photos, provide data, answer questions or even sell products or services.
- Simple Navigation – Once a visitor lands on the page they must be able to move around simply. This usually entails an uncluttered environment and proven navigational tabs located in intuitive locations, such as a navigation bar at the top, or clickable links on the left or right sidebars.
What’s the Plan?
Before starting the process of creating the site, it is imperative to make a plan. Create a list of all the contents it will contain including text, graphic images, and videos. Part of the plan should include a navigational scheme and a hierarchical schematic so that all content can be easily located on subsection pages, or on the home page.
Layout and Design
There are two basic ways to develop the layout and design. The first requires the concept of a visual theme that remains constant on every page. The designer should implement alignment procedures so that all content fits either in a sidebar or in the basic field in the center of the page. All elements should be grouped together. All text should be incorporated with a contrasting background color, and the font size should be weighed properly with the size and dimensions of the page. All visual images should be utilized properly and incorporated within the fields of content.
The second, and easiest, way to handle the layout and design is to download a pre-design quality styled WordPress theme that incorporates all the essential elements. The hundreds of available WordPress themes (templates) make web design an easy task. The download will include fully customized tools to change the color, font and alignment instantly. They are designed in a variety of styles from professional, medical, business, law, entertainment, music, restaurants, and clubs, along with personal pages and even styles for children. Simply download and install a template through the WordPress platform and have the website up and running within minutes.
Creating Webpages
After determining the best plan for layout and design, it is time to create web pages. Using a WordPress web hosting platform, content can be easily copy and pasted from Microsoft Word or other word processor. When uploading an HTML file created through a word processor, coding is not required or necessary. Any image or photograph saved as a JPEG file, or converted into one, can be uploaded to a website immediately. Many word processors have graphics editors that can cut, crop and manipulate images before uploading. Any GIF file, such as those that contain illustrations, text and line art, can also be uploaded immediately to the website.
Publishing Your Web Site
Probably the most confusing part of creating a personal website or personal homepage is where it will be located on the Internet. However, it is no great mystery. It simply needs to be located at a hosting site. There are free hosting sites available including WordPress.com, and self-hosting sites too, like those at WordPress.org. Free sites typically do not require the purchase of a domain name. They will usually incorporate the user name into the site name. An example of an incorporated username would be “myusername.wordpress.com.” Most self-hosted websites require a purchase domain name so that online visitors can find the location of the personal site.
There is much more to know about promoting the website or blogging site through SEO (search engine optimization) and online marketing tools. However, constructing and publishing a website does not require hiring a developer or web designer. Many online sites, like WordPress, offer WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) features with web designing editors that make building and publishing a site very simple.
About the author
Anny Solway is a dedicated writer at ThemeFuse – a leader in premium WordPress themes. She likes to discover new ideas about internet marketing, social media and blogging.
How to Use Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking can be described as a way of sharing online content through internet bookmarks. It is a link building strategy that has gained prominence in recent years. Through social bookmarking, users can store links online and use or share them as they like. Online content in the form of web links is shared among a group of people—a community of users with similar interests. Social bookmarking allows links to be submitted by users, offering to promote those personal links through bookmarking. Due to digitization of content and the advent of blogs and information sharing sites like Wikipedia, the marketing strategy known as search engine optimization (SEO) (or popularly known as search engine marketing (SEM)) has gained significance over the past few years.
SEO is the process of increasing the visibility of a web page or web content by analyzing how search engines respond to certain search criteria and fine-tuning web content accordingly in order to gain better rankings. Social bookmarking is one of the many SEM techniques used by webmasters in order to promote web content and to increase their visibility in search engine results.
The component in the basic foundation of SEO is a concept known as backlinking or inbound linking. Backlinks are incoming links to a webpage. Search engines like Google assign PageRank (a metric of authority) to a website or webpage, based on the number and quality of backlinks. Higher the number and/or quality the backlinks, the greater the visibility and better the ranking of the webpage in search results. In this context, social bookmarking plays an important role in increasing the traffic to a webpage by way of backlinks. Social bookmarking is a way of promoting backlinks to webpage by sharing those links with a group of like-minded people who share the same tastes and interests. In short, social bookmarking is an effective way of generating serious traffic to a webpage by way of promoting the webpage with relevant and sensible content.
A new trend, link-exchanging, is fast catching up with webmasters. As the name indicates, it is the process of exchanging links with another website or webpage in order to generate backlinks which ultimately translates to more web traffic. Social bookmarking has a danger of falling prey to link-exchanging. Link-exchanging sometimes leads to spamming as the primary motive of link-exchanging is to generate more backlinks rather than to help online users by providing quality content relevant to the search being performed.
Search engines—having identified this trend—keep a tab on the quality of the backlinks and the number of backlinks being generated to a particular webpage over a period of time. Sudden increases in the number of backlinks or a pattern that leaves a footprint of link-exchanges could possibly lead to penalization or could result in backlinks from bad websites that may adversely affect the quality and rankings of a genuine webpage.
One smart way of getting around this problem is to use authority links for social bookmarking purposes. Authority links have a certain power that is less dependent upon of Google’s PageRank or other Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) criteria. Authority links are links from websites that enjoy higher trust and credibility among the online user community. Links from these webpages tend to be harder to get and the presence of these links will usually create a spike in traffic to a webpage.
In order to provide quality search results, search engines and companies hosting search engines identify patterns and penalize webpages that increase their backlinks through inorganic means (like buying backlinks or spamming bookmarking websites with irrelevant links and content.) Social bookmarking provides users the advantage of camouflaging backlinks to personal web pages, among thousands of other backlinks related to particular topic of interest, in order to increase traffic without getting penalized. Since social bookmarking patterns are difficult to identify and trace (so far.. that will likely change at some point) webmasters are adopting this method of sharing links in order to increase traffic to their website the inorganic way.
Some of the popular social bookmarking sites are:
- Digg: A social content website that combines social bookmarking with blogging and provides users a variety of useful content spanning across various topics.
- Del.ici.ous: A popular social bookmarking site that allows users to classify links and share them online.
- StumbleUpon: A well-accepted social bookmarking site that encourages users to browse and highlight pages of interest, allowing them to rate photos, videos, new articles and other web pages.
- Reddit: A unique site that allows users to rank links posted by other users. This allows users to pick and follow quality content from among the shared links to other webpages.
- Slashdot: A science and technology related website that features current affairs related to the technology domain.
- Blinklist: A slightly different bookmarking site that permits users to save links immediately and add meta tags to the saved links in order to identify and retrieve them quickly at a later point in time.
- Pinterest: Another popular bookmarking site that allows users to save links, photos, videos and a lot of other private content that can eventually be shared with the online community using a series of “pinboards”.
Hopefully by now, you understand social bookmarking is a trend that is fast catching up with the online user community and it has long been adopted by SEO agencies. Rated as one of the best tools to increase webpage traffic, social bookmarking and sharing content online should definitely be one of the tools your SEO company uses in their repertoire for increasing traffic to your website.
Improve Your Cash Flow
Last week, I received a call from one of our web hosting resellers. Seems his credit card was being declined for his monthly web hosting reseller account. He apologized and asked if we could defer the payment a couple weeks. “Cash flow problems,” he said. Money was running tight while he waited for a client payment to arrive.
Of course, I told him it would be no problem. He has been a friend and reliable client for years.
As a fellow entrepreneur, I can certainly understand “cash flow problems,” especially when clients are slow to pay their bills. Vendors, employees and contractors all still (oddly) expect to be paid even if the money for that project hasn’t come in on the front end. At the same time, I guess I was a little surprised since this marketer has been in business for many years.
It may be a little naïve of me to think some of the following business strategies can insulate small business owners from “cash flow problems.” After all, it only takes one unforeseen act of God to wipe out a budget. Still, these techniques have helped us weather the tougher times caused by recession, bad-apple clients, inflation and client attrition. I offer them to you so they might inspire you to do the same if you’re not already.
1. Establish the Rainy Day Fund
Just like you want to have three to six months of savings in your personal bank account, you also want to keep at least three to six months savings in your business savings account. (You have a business savings or backup checking account, right?)
Put aside a percentage into this savings account and don’t touch it! This is not your tax withholdings account, your marketing account or your slush fund. This is emergency-only savings designed to bring you what financial guru, Dave Ramsey, calls “financial peace.”
2. Diversify Your Clients
Relying upon one type of customer can spell trouble if something blows up, legislation changes, or the marketplace shifts. This danger is further magnified if you rely primarily upon one big customer.
Try to groom a client base that offers some diversity in its members. For instance, you may say you focus entirely upon the nonprofit community. That’s all well and good, but you may also find great clients in the government and corporate settings. I certainly wouldn’t turn them away if they are a fit for your services.
Yes, there is a benefit to catering to a niche. Absolutely. However, you can ask any automobile part manufacturer in Michigan if it’s a good idea to keep all your eggs in one basket and I’ll bet you hear otherwise.
3. Diversify Your Offerings
Want to know how to diversify your client portfolio? Diversify your offerings (and tell people about it; more on that in a moment.)
It’s likely you do more than one thing well, offer more than one great product or can fulfill more than one specific need. For example, when I first started Dreamscape Multimedia, we provided only web design services. Of course, we still needed to host our clients’ websites somewhere, so we chose a local web host in Michigan.
Unfortunately, the web host wasn’t the most reliable. About the third time our clients’ sites went down, we began shopping for a new web hosting company. It was then that we came to the conclusion we needed to host our own websites. The rest is history.
Since then, we’ve also branched into search engine optimization (SEO) and Internet marketing. After all, what good is a beautiful website if no one sees it? We now have clients of all three types: web design, web hosting and SEO. Some folks only want one service, while others want all three.
Offering three different types of web services allows us to fulfill a more complete spectrum of online marketing needs. The clients only have one web company to deal with and our relationship with them is stronger for it.
4. Recurring Revenue Streams
Another strategy that can keep you afloat during the lean times is recurring revenue. When you have subscription, membership, affiliate or other payments coming in every month, month after month, this can go a long way toward your bottom line. For us, that’s the web hosting and search engine marketing sides of our business.
Web hosting carries a monthly or annual fee, just like any telephone, cable or power utility. When combined with other renewing products like SSL certificates and domain name registration, offering web hosting service helps us keep a better handle on the health and security of our clients’ websites while ensuring a steady, predictable stream of income.
Our web hosting affiliate program is yet another way we grow our hosting business while sharing the recurring web hosting revenue with folks who bring us those same web accounts; our affiliates in the Prosperity referral program.
Finally, on the Internet marketing front, we receive a similar steady cash flow (so long as our clients continue to see their sites rank at the top of the first page of Google.)
5. Search Engine Marketing
Lastly, if you’ve been in business for a while, hopefully you’ve been investing in promoting your website. Getting to the top of the Google search engine results (SERPs) is paramount to keeping your sales pipeline full, regardless of whether you have dedicated salespeople out there selling you to the marketplace.
I’ve known small business owners to fuss over redesigning their websites every couple years. If your site doesn’t see any web traffic, the right kind of web traffic, or any conversions, what’s the point? (Well—you’re satisfying your own ego, I guess. Hopefully that form of emotional ROI makes those time-consuming overhauls worth it.)
A regular schedule of search engine marketing (SEM) activities is just what the doctor ordered to get your 24/7/365 salesperson (known as your website) working for you instead of the other way around.
Afterglow
Well, there you have it. There are five strategies for insulating your small business against cash flow problems. Here’s a final one:
Remember you get more of what you put your attention on. Focus on the work you have and the direction you wish to go and you’ll get more of that. Focus on your lack of business and you’ll find more lack. Feel gratitude for the clients and blessings you’ve been given. Do your best to be a wise steward of the resources and clients in your care and you’ll be trusted with more.
Employ these principles in your business and I believe you will be rewarded. Sure, you’ll still occasionally be tested, but learning and applying these tips will help you pass those “tests” with a little more ease and grace.
In support of your efforts,
Matt