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Now the girls would tell me that Stuie was pretty easy on the eye so I thought I had chosen a pretty good wingman. We thought we had all the moves covered and we had no trouble convincing girls to let us buy them drinks all night long. This was however where it ended.

One Saturday night we were getting ready to hit the town when my sister who in her day had she not been my sister would have fit very nicely into our target market asked us how we had been going. So when I told her how fantastically we had been going and girls were falling over themselves to go out with us she new straight up that I was lying.

She saw through us in a flash. She said “come on guys tell the truth, your not going to well are you.”

She told us we needed “presence”.

Stuie and I weren’t really sure what she was talking about, we thought maybe she was referring to the chocolate variety or the type you get from the florist. Unfortunately for us it wasn’t for some time that it finally clicked. Thirty years later and both Stuie and I very happily married we often have a laugh about how much money we wasted on drinks   and cloths when all we really needed was presence.

So what is “presence” and how do you get it? The dictionary says stuff like “the ability to project a sense of ease, poise, or self-assurance”, “the quality or manner of a person’s bearing before an audience” and “of noteworthy appearance or compelling personality” So all that does make sense and Stuie and I could see why the girls go for blokes with presence, but how do you get it? I’m still not sure.

Lately I have been doing a bit of blog hopping and I noticed that every now and then you would get onto a blog that had a compelling nature to it. One that you just cant help but read, you go from post to post to post, its an easy read and your just taking in all this information that you know is going to help you get further down the IM track. I realised that it was the bloggers “presence” that made the read so compelling. Something intangible, not one thing, many things, but nothing you could really put you finger on or copy.

I am pretty sure if you are a budding blogger the best thing that you can do is to seek out these bloggers with presence and involve your self in their blogs and in time, maybe not over night it will happen. You will be down the track looking back and you will realise that you have acquired that intangible quality, that thing that makes your blog a great read. Writer presence. The more you hang out in a particular environment the more you believe you belong and the more confidence you gain. Before you know it you are projecting “a sense of ease, poise and self assurance” that makes others think your a great read too.

Cheers

Dave

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The whole time I was thinking “I am getting behind on my Marketing with Alex stuff”. The disciplined process that I  promised myself I would follow had gone out the window. The longer I didn’t do anything the harder it became to do something, even when I had time. I started making really weak excuses for not doing the things that I knew  I should be doing and these were the things that would make a difference. The longer I wallowed in this mind set the harder it got to just “do something”. Anything, I knew I had to take action I just could’t get my mind to commit to it.

I realised that this mind set was not something that was unique to me, that there are probably many other people that just get swallowed by their day to day life and struggle finding the time to pursue there dreams. It made me think that if I can find a way to overcome this feeling, a simple process to follow to get back on track  and give me a safety net so that I knew that even if I did miss a day or too I was still in control and moving towards my goal others would be interested.

So it is in times of need we do some soul searching. What is the best thing to do when you are struggling? Go back to basics!

A little over a year ago now I did Mark Joyners Simpleology 101 and i have just gone back and started it again. I am back on track!

Its a free online program that helps you identify your goals and stay focused. It helps you organise yourself in a manner that actually causes you to believe you can achieve anything you want. It is a 20 day program that takes about 15 minutes a day that will change your habits, help you manage your time and stay on top of the things you need to do. In short you will find yourself achieving a days work in about 2 hours. How does it do this? Its all about focus. I am sure  I am not doing it justice, you really need to have a look for yourself and please give it a go with an open mind. You get free software that allows you to manage a daily target list, catch those dreams on a daily basis – you know the things that you say “wouldn’t it be great if…..!” It has a place you can keep track of all your great ideas or things you know you want to do but don’t have time for now. It helps you identify the things that are holding you back, the things you waste time on as well as the habits that you form that make you powerful.

Now I want to emphasise I don’t make anything if you take advantage of Simpleology 101. It is FREE and it is fantastic. I do however want my blog to be considered to be a place where you can get valuable information. Information that will propel you towards your goals. I also hope you will get to know me and see that I’m a pretty average sort of bloke and realise that if I can achieve my life dream so can you. If you have ever felt the way I’ve been feeling or just know that if you could achieve more in your day you will realise your goals sooner you need to have a look at this http://www.simpleology.com

For anyone that has had a look at my Goals and Planning page you will see that I have a pretty  significant task ahead of me if I am going to achieve my five year goal. I am in the process of doing my back plan so I have a meaningful path to follow. My back plan will virtually guarantee me success.

In simple terms if you are back planning you start out at your destination, living your dream and achieving your goal then you work backwards and write down every logical step that must come before the one above it. Then depending on the magnitude of your  task you will eventually write down the very next thing you need to do to move from where you are now to your goal. We actually use this technique with out realising it every time we go to an appointment, work or anywhere we have to at a certain time. Say work at 8.00am. The night before we estimate the driving time form home to work, identify the things we have to do before we leave i.e. bathe, breakfast, iron clothes etc. We estimate a time for each task and work back to the time we have to set the alarm clock. We know if we follow our plan we are giving ourselves the best chance of achieving our goals.

Check my Goals and Planning page, soon I will have my back plan posted to achieve my goal

I guess where Im heading with this post is that sometimes despite the best planning, burning desire and an unwavering approach life sometimes  gets very complicated and your IM tasks can get pushed down the list, particularly if you are at the stage where you are still working a regular job to pay the bills. It is so important that you don’t use this as an excuse to give up. Don’t get down on yourself for not ticking of all the items on your to do list. Just recognise that life gets like that and you work through your busy periods and get back on the process as soon as you can. When you do have limited time make sure you focus on the things that will make the biggest difference. So when you do your back plan identify the critical tasks and the time frames that you need to achieve these in and when life gets hectic put the time that you do have into those critical jobs.

For me I need Simpleology 101!

Talk soon

Dave Jeffreys

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How to Utilize the Free Google Keywords Tool

If you are new to internet marketing and in particular niche marketing, you will definitely want to use the free tool from Google – Google Keywords. The entire google system works around the use of keywords, i.e the specific words people type into the google search to find the particular service or product they are after. Google keeps a database of these searches and you can access this data for free. You will want to use keywords in the body of the articles, blog posts  and descriptions of your youtube videos. It will help to rank both your videos and website.

To start go to the following address:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The following information will show on your screen. The first thing you need to do is select the region or area you would like to search, by pressing the edit button. I generally have mine set to Australia as that is where I tend to be interested. You can basically choose any country around the globe or all countries and territories. For the purpose of this exercise I will change it to the United States

The next step is to type in the keyword you are interested in and then the security code. I also like to generate keywords by descriptive words and phrases, you will see this option directly below the area where you choose your region.

Google will then list the keywords and phrases as well as search values. For this example I will use the keywords ‘Kids Arts’. You will see in the example below that in the U.S. there is a search value of 368 000. This is a very high search value, you can also be guaranteed that it will also have a very high competition value.

To find out exactly what the competition value is, open another browser window or tab. Type in the keywords, in this case ‘kids art’. You will see that there is a very high competition value. You really don’t want to be competing with this level of competition. The competition value you are looking for is ideally around 500 000 or less.

The next step is to then go back and check the competition value for other long tail key words related to the initial key word. For example ‘Kids art caddy’. If you are smart you should be able to rank fairly easily in this particular niche with the long tail keywords ‘kids art caddy’.

The next step is to then go back and check the competition value. In this case it is a very low value. If you are smart you should be able to rank fairly easily in this particular niche with the long tail keywords ‘kids art caddy’.

So just to summarize, you are looking for a search value between 100-500 and competition value around 500 000. It’s as simple as that.

Feel free to add any info I might have missed. It would also be great if you could let me if this has been valuable info. Please leave a comment.

Cheers

Dave

Google Keywords – A Useful Free Tool

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 Dave Jeffreys from Australia here. I am Married to Melanie and we have a 4 week old son named Will.

 10 years ago I was in a well paid corporate job wishing 5 out of every 7 days of my life away. I knew things had to change!

But how? The answer was to take action. 

Was this easy? No! I was bogged down with 2 questions. What else can I do? What if I fail?

The change came for me in realizing that the answer to those two questions were not really important and that the most important thing was to take action – any action.

I now live in a small sea side tourist village and work from home. We have a web based business printing other peoples images on to artists canvas. I enjoy my life and things would look pretty good from the out side. Trouble is having taken action to change my life in the past I now know that anything is possible.

Some years after leaving the corporate job Melanie and I found ourselves running a 47ft charter catamaran in the Caribbean. The dream job for us.

This gave us a small taste of what is possible. If you dare to dream and work towards making your dreams reality anything is possible.

Now we have a dream of owning our own 50 ft catamaran and spending  6 months of every year sailing to exotic locations all around the world. I am impatient by nature so I want to do this sooner rather than later. I think in 3 to 5 years its achievable.

So,we dare to dream, we have a plan,  and we are taking action. 

Just so that you know that I am not really any different to you I am going to post a short video that will show you where I live, where I work and let you meet my wife Melanie and son Will. You will see that in every way I am facing the same hurdles, battles and constraints that many of you are dealing with.

After you see my video you will most likely ask “How can this guy really believe he can achieve this goal in that time frame”

In this blog I am going to attempt to share the  experiences  that have changed our mind set, the things we have done and the things we are going to do to make our dream reality. Hopefully our journey will inspire you to grab hold of your dream and make it reality.

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