Focus and Concentration Can Help Your Online Business

Why do we need to be able to focus?

Being able to focus and concentrate all your energies to the task at hand helps you perform them better, faster and more efficiently. When working your business either offline or online this is essential. Unfortunately there is plenty to distract you online, from mindless surfing to checking emails, checking to see if anyone has bought from you or signed up to your lists.

Being able to concentrate and focus allows you to be more creative and imaginative; you’re able to visualize the end result, making your goals more reachable and achievable.

When you are fully focused and you are able to concentrate solely on that task at hand, you’ll find your mind is not clogged with useless, unwanted thoughts that keep you from your goals. You’re not letting worries and stress rule your life and keep you from true mind mastery. You are in control in every aspect of your life.

So what exactly is focus or concentration?

Concentrating means intense mental focusing on the task at hand and giving it your complete attention.

Many sports people have learnt how to focus their attention like a laser beam, hitting the mark every time. They don’t allow themselves to become distracted or confused. And they practice this intense focusing every day. Imagine if they got distracted because just before a match or race they began to think about what they might do tomorrow or whether they had locked the back door or turned off the cooker! They’d fall apart. These people are 100% focused on what they have to do in order to succeed – and so should you be!

The average person can concentrate to a certain degree, some of the time; but for the most part, our thoughts are scattered, with our minds racing from one thought to the next, not even in a logical progression. I call that ‘mental leapfrog.’ Many times, we can’t even remember how we got to a particular thought; we can’t follow the progression in our minds.

The MerriamWebster Dictionary describes concentration as a direction of attention to a single object. We need the ability to regulate our thoughts, to point them undeviatingly in a straight course.

What keeps you from concentrating on your many tasks? The simplest answer is that life itself can prohibit your ability to focus on a task, to the exclusion of everything else. Many people pride themselves on their ability to multitask, claiming they are highly productive every day. However,that’s still a split focus. Only a part of your attention is actually on each task; you are also thinking of all the other things you must accomplish and your mind races from one thing to another, helterskelter.

So what can stop you from becoming laser focused?

Your Enthusiasm for what you are doing: If you’re enthusiastic about a project, it makes it so much easier to keep your mind on the task at hand. You’ve probably discovered that if it’s a task you enjoy, it’s easy to motivate yourself to not only start a project, but also follow it through to completion. It’s hard to focus on a job if you do not enjoy it. You have to want to do it, to be willing to start that project and be willing to do what it takes to finish it. This is why you should always make sure that when you begin to work online (or offline) that you do something that you really are passionate about. When you are passionate about something it will seem less like work when you have to “work”

Your Skills: The skills that you bring to a task also influence your ability to concentrate. The more skilled you are, the easier it is to accomplish the task and the quicker you achieve results. Knowing how to do something increases your self confidence. This is going to be very important as you will want to make sure that if you don’t have the skills to do something that you outsource, rather than persist at doing something you are not good at and getting frustrated and defeated!

How you feel: Your emotional, physical, and psychological state has a huge influence on your ability to focus and concentrate on a particular task. If you find yourself distracted because you’re worried, or feeling ill or even just out of sorts, you’ll find it almost impossible to concentrate. Your mind constantly wanders away in search of the solution for whatever it is that’s bothering you.

Where you are: Your environment also has so much to do with your ability to concentrate and see a project through to completion. Most people are highly affected by too much noise, or heat or cold, or uncomfortable surroundings; even other people can be distracting and stressful to you and your ability to focus.

Elements that can distract you:

Amount of information being directed at you: – this includes everything from sounds around you, pictures on the wall, music you are listening to etc. The more information that is coming at you the more distracted you can become.

Ability to filter: – some people are oblivious to certain types of information, in effect they have chosen to filter out certain noises and longer hear them. If I ask you to listen to your breathing you will suddenly become aware of it and may find it difficult to now filter it out. Our minds have been programmed to filter out a lot of the information we are receiving and only pay attention to what is necessary. You want to start to be able to filter out all unnecessary information that is not needed when you working on a task.

Your attention span: – each person has a different attention span. It can be between 10 minutes to 50 minutes, after that your mind begins to wander and become distracted. Once you know your own attention span plan your day into blocks of time that suit you. You will then become more efficient. Many people may say but what if I have a short attention span – the simple answer to this is break your working day into 5 or 10 minute slots and focus for those 10 minutes on a task, then move on to something else, perhaps later get back to that task.

It’s important to remember that being highly focused and able to concentrate on one important event or goal can change your whole world, and bring about anything you desire. The moment you concentrate and focus on a goal, you begin to take steps to accomplish that goal. The more focused you become, the faster you will move towards completion of that goal.What will break your concentration and focus:

Distractions: – these can broken down into external (outside noise, the temperature, bad lighting etc), or internal. Internal distractions are when you begin to think you might be thirsty or that you would like something to eat. Once you begin to think about things in your mind you can become very distracted very easily. You may even find your internal critic (that voice that can give you negative advice) telling you that you are wasting your time.

If you begin to loose focus then it’s time to take action – get up and begin t move, take a break, have a cup of coffee or go outside for a breath of fresh air – you must stop these negative thoughts.

Ensure you are working in an area that is free of distractions and comfortable. This will get you into a better state of mind which will allow you to focus more Make sure you know what you are doing!

At this point it’s essential to emphasize that you must know what you are doing when you sit down to do something. That seems a strange statement to make however you need to know what task you are doing and why you are doing it – what the end goal is. Knowing the wider context of what you re doing and why you re doing it is going to help you really focus – as you know what the end result is.

When is the best time for you to work?

Some people will find that the morning is the best time for them to work. For others it is night time. Whatever works for you make sure you work at the time that suits you. If you feel that you can work best late at night then use this time to work. Don’t get disheartened if some days you don’ feel that that time is the best time. This happens, when it does make sure that you move on and don’t force yourself to try to complete an article or design a site or promote your business as this will just frustrate you.


Richard Butler is a business life consultant who helps people set up and market their websites.

Getting Into The Right Frame of Mind

You ever have one of those days that things don't go right for you. You're in a bad frame of mind and everything goes wrong?

We've all had them. You nearly expect everything to go wrong so it actually does! Being in the right frame of mind is so important.

Here's something you can do, if you start to think, today's an awful day, just say no, right now is awful but it's going to get better, and it will!

I've often said this to people, they say they're having an awful morning, and when I say it's just a bad moment, they kinda go oh yeah you're right and then the bad day is over!

When I need to get into a good frame of mind I use music, I find it really pumps me up. I don't let one bad event in the day dictate my whole day. If I find that it has happened I use the music to get me back into a good frame of mind.

When working online or for yourself, you have to be able to get into the right frame of mind, as it's your business! You have to be in the frame of mind that says success is mine, I can do it.

In forthcoming articles we'll look at how you can get into this frame of mind - and it's so important for you as a person who is working online.

To your success

Richard Butler is a business life consultant who helps people set up and market their websites.

Be a Possibility Thinker

Whenever you are faced with problems, what do you do?
How do you view it? Is it something that is destructive? Something that could
make a person fail?

There are several approaches a person can take when faced with problems:

1.) They Run away
2.) They Hide
3.) They make themselves believe they failed.
4.) They stop dreaming
5.) It takes times before they think of solutions.

Are problems really destructive?
Probably yes, if you don't look for solutions, right?

If you view problems like this, then you are just part of the 95% of people who view
problems in a wrong manner...

Believe me, problems are destructive only if you view it that way...
Take a moment, and think of top companies for you..

Lets take Microsoft ME operating system for this example!

Yes, Microsoft are one of the biggest companies worldwide.. Companies like this make
sure that every product or services they sell to the public are beneficial and helpful. But there is one time that it also had a problem with its product Windows Millenium Edition. There are certain issues and bugs concerning it, right?

But in this sense, does Microsoft view it as something destructive? NO they did not..

That's the reason why there is an XP afterwards..and it is what satisfy the users of
microsoft... They shifted the problem to a possibility of making their services better!

The same thing can be applied by you...problems come and go, you cannot hide from
those problems and you can't even live your life without having1problems..

FACE YOUR PROBLEMS!

THERE are a lot of possibilities to solve every problem we have. Look at every problem
as a way to grow and learn. Remember if you're not thinking about a solution, then
you're thinking about the problem.

BE A POSSIBILITY THINKER!

Richard Butler is a business life consultant who helps people set up and market their websites.

Regrets Are Good Encouragements

According to Answers.com, a regret is a feeling of disappointment or distress about something that one wishes could be different. Normally, people regret about things that they should have done but perhaps did not. But since they did not have a chance, their present and future was been very different.

A good example are students! During school, most of them play around, chat with friends, mingle with new schoolmates thus forgetting about the value of studying. What happens is that after graduation, they all regret and say "what if".

What if they studied?
What if they did their assignments
What if they became active on class discussions and recitations?
What if they revised well for their examinations?

There are so many "what if's" but they cannot bring back they school days. The past is past
and they need to start forgetting their regrets, and start facing their future.

Even in business, they are so many "what if's". Many say that we don't need to think about our regrets because it makes us feel negative instead of being positive. I'd rather think different! I love thinking of those regrets I had before. You know why? I my view regrets are encouraging words for me. I don't think of them as negative thoughts. Though its feels bad to think of those regrets, on the other hand, they are good because you can use them to push you forward. On a personal level I have developed a success mindset by looking at my regrets and using them to push me up and forward to my goals. In fact, instead of staying as a mediocre, I commit myself to success to prevent having those regrets again in the future.

Think of your past regrets, who knows, you might feel the urgency to succeed more, right?


Richard Butler is a life and business coach and runs a weekly motivational newsletter which you can find out more about here:
http://www.richardbutlerthesuccesscoach.com/motivate-me-now.html

Offline Internet Marketing Seminars Can Make Money

Did you know that the majority of people online are not making money? Though many are knowledgeable and skillful, a very small percentage make money online. In reality much of the information sold online is really the same, but just changed around according to the writing style of each individual. Those who are well known online will often be able to sell more products even if your product is better. People know them so they trust them.

The people who became popular did so thru hard work and marketing. They became popular because they were the first to make people say "wow" about their products and the information they sell. Even though they may have undertake search engine marketing, such as directory submissions and press releases what made them popular is the "buzz" they created. You have to create your own buzz.

Now, if you are one of those who still want to create success for your life. Think from a new perspective. For example, a friend of mine "Terry Telford" started selling his own book in book stores worldwide. Take note, his book is still about marketing though he is trying to shift the mindset of people that they can buy real books and not ebooks alone. Believe me, he succeeded with this and he now has a published book under his belt which ads even more credibility than just a downloadble book. Now the question is, what's can yo do?

Did you know that offline marketing seminars are a great place for you to make some extra income? This is very different from internet marketing conferences which is targeted for internet marketers. What I'm trying to say is that you can start organizing a seminar that will cater to individuals who don't know about online marketing. If their are coaches whose business is booming online, you can be an offline coach which on the other hand is better. You know why? Because personal coaching can be more valuable than email coaching, right?

Look back to the "old world" of offline marketing and take the skills that you have and use them offline!

Richard Butler is a trained Practioner of NLP, certified by Dr Richard Bandler and a qualified Life and Business Coach. He had worked with clients from the four corners of the globe.

OBSERVE, DON'T JUST LISTEN!

This may be a very direct statement but I believe most people fail not because they themselves are failures but rather they tend to follow what other people say. Look at the amount of self help book that have been populating the offline and online bookstores. There are a lot of "success secrets" being told, in fact there are many authors who claim that they achieved success based on certain principles they discovered. In reality, they many just got the same ideas and principles from one source. People do not plagiarize, that's why most of this self help products are highly revised and more often are combined with the other persons ideas.

Though they are somehow helpful, I still don't recommend that you read them all. People spend a lot of their money by purchasing self help products instead of investing their money for business purposes. Let me tell you that you don't need to just all of them. The best thing you can do is to observe why people succeed. Again, there are so many who claim about success principles and we don't even know if they are all true or not. It is time for all of us to think wisely.

I've studied success for a number of years and the one thing I realized is that we need to observe how other people succeed. We don't need to confuse ourselves with numerous success principles and tips. It is far more advisable to analyze other peoples lives. Like reading their success stories! I'm sure many learn from the life of one of the most wealthiest person in the world, "Bill Gates". You know what, it will be better if you buy their stories than other marketed principles. There life testimonies and experiences can be far more encouraging which can make you think like them.

To some it up, don't just listen, spend more on observation!

Richard Butler is a trained Practioner of NLP, certified by Dr Richard Bandler and a qualified Life and Business Coach. He had worked with clients from the four corners of the globe.

Why Do You Need An Affiliate Manager?

First and foremost, what is an affiliate manager? In terms of online marketing, an affiliate manager is a person who looks after recruiting affiliates. He or she will create promotional materials, seek out top affiliates and train them, and look after all aspects of affiliate marketing. Many Internet marketers don't hire affiliate managers because most of them spend more on hiring, web designers, web developers, customer support, etc. However an affiliate manager can really make a difference.

Affiliate managers are basically people who can handle recruit and manage affiliates and produce good results. It's not just about searching for affiliates, but rather on producing more income from every web project that is undertaken. As I've learned from my online marketing studies, marketers should not hire people who do not contribute to an increase in profits. So if you hire a writer, make sure he can produce sales copy, an ebook, report, news letter etc. Now, talking about affiliate managers, as marketer you should not hire one for the purpose of creating a list of affiliates, rather you should hire them to produce income for your business.

I will be honest with you, it only takes a few hours to get a good list of affiliates with their corresponding home address and emails. What's next after getting their emails? This is where affiliate managers come in. Affiliate managers, ensure that affiliates function as planned. In short, affiliates should provide profits.

One model of affiliate manager is as follows: hire them on a per project basis and or share profits with them. You may not have a project out every month, so you may only wish to hire them during the final stages of the project. Remember an affiliate manager sitting around doing nothing is not making you money. You can also pay them on the profit share model. Thus if you make $100,000 from a launch you share 10% of that with your affiliate manager, after all they did help you achieve that figure. This also makes them hungry to work harder, as they know there is no ceiling on their earnings.

Whether you like or not, you need an affiliate manager. Yes you can handle the search for affiliates on your own. But more than that, you can't. For example, as a marketer, can you still include in your schedule, website management, affiliate management, article management, product creation etc? Of course, sometimes you can for small time businesses, but if you think about your future, you need to hire people and outsource some tasks that will allow you to plan more to achieve ultimate success on your business.

Don't think twice. Hire an Affiliate Manager!
Why think if they can create more income for you, right?

Richard Butler is a trained Practioner of NLP, certified by Dr Richard Bandler and a qualified Life and Business Coach. He had worked with clients from the four corners of the globe.

Twitter Can Help You Find Business Partners

To be honest, I was not a huge fan of twitter before. I did neglect it and didn't even spend a single minute browsing it. But then I had a thought, what's with twitter that makes people s0 fond of using it? It is not like other social sites: friendster, myspace, facebook etc. To be honest it's really simple to use but so many people use it.

Then it happened, one beautiful morning, I for some reason thought of visiting that site. To my amazement, it truly can make a difference. First of all, it helps build a persons popularity and credibility. I was intrigued with the "follow me on twitter" logo I was seeing, when I analyzed it, I realized that it was very useful. You know why? When you follow a certain twitter user, it puts a link back to your twitter page - plus your picture will appear there. You will be listed on the other persons "following page". IN short, the more people you follow, the more chances that you have to get more link backs to your twitter.

Every twitter user has their personal reason why they subscribed to it. Each person may have different answers but above all the reasons, I value twitter the most is because it has the capability to connect you to people that share the same interests as you. Yes you can simply search for possible business partners. Like in my case, I am a life and success coach, I can simply search in http://www.twellow.com, with keywords like life coach or success coach to find twitter users related to it. There will be thousands of them, you just need enough time to view their twitter, their websites to know which ones you can effectively work with.

There is not much effort required, you can do it once or twice but its enough to help you find a person whom you can share your possible future success. Why not try searching for business partners on twitter?

Worst Case Scenario On Social Bookmarking

Recently I heard some people say that bookmarking your own site is the worst thing you could ever do to your site. If social bookmarking has been a trend to generate backlinks, I guess this can be a great damage to ones website.



Here is what most people do:



1.) They subscribe to as many bookmarking sites as possible.

2.) Then after subscription, they try to bookmark every page of their websites or every new post on their blogs.

3.) They try to create as many new pages so that they can bookmark more, thus having more backlinks.



It may seem valuable but in the end it's not. Yes, you can have many backlinks from social bookmarks on the other hand, it consumes more of your time. Instead of thinking and planning, you do bookmarking. Try conducting a search on social bookmarking issues and there you will learn that many websites had been banned on social sites because of spamming.



You know why? People tend to bookmark any information from their website although its not valuable. Normally, they write a few sentence or a phrase to build the webpage to be bookmarked, though the truth is, the content is worthless.



To give you good explanation about social bookmarks, it is not intended for personal usage. It was created so that you can inform people about a certain site you visited which exceeds your satisfaction and expectation that's why you are making it popular online through social sites. Unfortunately, people are bookmarking their own websites to gain traffic. In short, it defeats the real purpose why social sites exist.



The point here is, let bookmarking sites function as planned, not as a spamming tool. In case, you want to promote your website on social sites, just make sure that it is worthy for peoples viewing. Don't ever use it to advertise. Use it to inform people about things they should probably learn from.



Again, social bookmarking sites are not spamming tools. It was intended like a search engine.

Richard Butler is a trained Practioner of NLP, certified by Dr Richard Bandler and a qualified Life and Business Coach. He had worked with clients from the four corners of the globe.

Why Do You Need Article Marketing?

Just lately I heard a group of people online discussing article marketing. They said that it is time consuming and has been over used, in fact the market is saturated with articles. Yes, I would agree that a lot of people are continuously writing and submitting articles every week. But is this a reason for you to stop?

First and foremost, you have your own niche to target for your articles. I assume you wouldn't write for the general public, its absurd. As an internet marketer, you need to write for targeted, specific groups and individuals, not for all. In fact, it is the professional way to do marketing. Before you start writing, make sure that there are people who need information that you can provide. Believe me, you will not want to write articles and then find that no one is interested! So to maximize your effort, write articles coming from in demand topics, topics which are being discussed in forums and on blogs.

My advice is ... don't stop! You know why? Even if there are many articles being written, still the number of web users is also increasing everyday. Also now with the “global recession" more people spend more time on the internet, in fact more and more people now rely on it.

One thing that holds many people back is that they are afraid to write - don't be afraid to write. Be confident about what you write and who you are. In this kind of competition, what you need to do is to be on "Top", not to stop!

Again, I encourage you to do article marketing because a lot of people need the information you have. For example, if encyclopedias were popular before in terms of valuable information, then search engines are more in demand nowadays. There are still many surfers searching for new information everyday.

Remember when you write an article it might not be an original idea but your own writing
style may be of interest to a lot of people.


Richard Butler is a trained Practioner of NLP, certified by Dr Richard Bandler and a qualified Life and Business Coach. He had worked with clients from the four corners of the globe.

Enhance Your Focus

Focus is not something that is within you. It is a state of mind. People need focus, without that plans they will gone astray. For business people and internet marketers, focus is what they need whenever they think of new opportunities. But it should not stop there.

The problem with some business owners is that once they have started a business, there focus change and most of them think of new opportunities to pursue. Yes there is nothing wrong on searching for new opportunities but take note, in business you need total focus. Once you started a business, your focus should not change and it should enhance as well.

Here's what normally happens: An internet marketer creates a websites, and once it generates some income, the focus shifts on searching for new opportunities thus making the previous website stagnant and not being developed anymore. No Focus!

Again there is nothing wrong with opportunities. Just don't neglect the fact that your commitment to every website you created does not change. In fact, don't stop planning its marketing campaigns. Also don't stop from dreaming that every website you own can be further developed in the future thus providing you more income streams.

Always remember, focus is state of mind and don't ever remove it in your mind. Enhance it always so that you will not be mislead by false opportunities.

Take note: You need to put this lesson into practice. Sooner or later you'll be having as many websites as possible. Do you know the saying, the ones who are faithful with little could be faithful with much? Same holds true in this case. If you can't handle few websites because of lack of focus, they you would probably can't handle many in the future. It is never too late, you can still catch up and change everything.


Richard Butler is a trained Practioner of NLP, certified by Dr Richard Bandler and a qualified Life and Business Coach. He had worked with clients from the four corners of the globe.

He runs websites like:
http://www.richardbutlerthesuccesscoach.com
http://www.coachingfundamentals.com
http://www.iclickuniversity.com