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A Word on Personal Development:

Change Leads to Learning and Inspiration

Is it time to change something? Train yourself to accept and implement change. Try eating with your left hand, wearing your watch on the other wrist, and holding your phone to the other ear. Move the furniture around, drive a different route to work, wear a different color, and eat a new food.

Amazing things happen when you force change on yourself. You awaken different parts of your brain that allow you to be more creative and find solutions that previously eluded you. This is one of many reasons why change leads to more inspiration. Change also trains you to deal with life challenges that have the tendency to derail most people. Change is constant and those who know how to best adapt are able to succeed. Not only do you need to be trained to adapt to change but you need to be trained to create it. It may seem silly to to practice changing on the simple things in your life, but creating instinctive abilities is never time poorly spent.

Financial Tip

Do you have the data to make good decisions? When I talk to friends and clients about their financial situation I almost always discover that they don't have enough information and data to make any intelligible financial decisions or plans.

Where can you get the data? Try using a tool like Mint. Mint.com is owned by Intuit (the company who does quickbooks and quicken) and is a free service. You connect all your bank accounts to the service and it imports all of your transactions automatically and categorizes them accordingly. While this is not the best or most detailed method it is free and automatic giving you live time data whenever you need it. Mint also allows you to set budgets for specific spending categories and to create goals for savings etc.

If Mint isn't for you that is fine, but you need to put a system in place to keep track of all your income and expenses so you have a clear idea for normal spending. Achieving any growth means understanding both how to increase income and reduce expenses.

Online Marketing 101

How to really track your return on investment. What action truly drives your business? Is your business more built around foot traffic, phone calls, or online checkout? Understanding the real call to action is the first step in determining how you can measure your return on your advertising investments.

If your business is driven by phone calls you may want to consider enlisting a call tracking service that allows you clearly see where your phone calls are coming from. Call tracking numbers can be generated for each of your ad campaigns to show you with great transparency which campaigns generate the phone calls. In addition to tracking the quantity of calls, most of the service providers in the space also provide call recording options to help you monitor the quality of the calls. Read More About Call Tracking Here.

If your business is driven by online actions or checkout then you may consider implementing an affiliate software system. An affiliate program will allow you to attach trackers to the URLs of each ad campaign you run. This will not just allow you to see where the traffic is coming from, but also more clearly see which traffic source is driving the purchase or other action you want. This type of tracking can also be done with some wizard work with Google Analytics but an affiliate program has the added benefit of allowing you to offer an additional source of revenue to those who want to help you advocate your product or service.

The Best Book I've Read Recently

Recently I finished my reading of I recently completed reading "Your Best Just Got Better" by Jason Womack. This book is full of golden nuggets of productivity and personal growth. When the author says, Work Smarter, Think Bigger, and Make More; it means that with all seriousness. The book flows together to help readers move through a progressive education designed to take you from the beginning to the end. At the same time each section stands alone to give you actionable insights to make you better at what you do.

Also, Jason's sincerity comes right through the pages. You can tell that he cares about his clients and he cares about helping the reader grow. I've been reading personal development books for a very long time but there are still new ideas in this book and lots of good reminders.

One of my favorite insights is the idea of writing down ideal days. Jason suggests that you envision what a perfect day for you would look like. Write it down. I've heard this before but never taken the time to do that. Jason mentioned in the book that he has written down 100s of ideal days and lived many of them. This may sound a little silly but in context of what the book teaches it makes perfect sense.

I also love Jason's suggestion of pondering and creating an inventory of "I'm At My Best When." When you truly understand what factors lead you to be at your best you can start to manufacture greater productivity.

Read this book and you will learn these and 100 other great ideas to make you better than you are right now.

Jacob S Paulsen is an accomplished internet marketing professional. His specialties include SEO, SEM, Blogging, Email Marketing, and Social Media. In addition to enjoying full time employment with Entravision Communications, Jacob's business, JP Squared Consulting Inc., provides various services and tools for today's entrepreneurs.

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