Keys to Content Creation

If you’re a coaching client, follow my teaching, or are a JimZboran.com member, you know my strategy for using a business blog as a key component of my step-by-step system for turning your interests, talents, and skills into a meaningful, rewarding, and successful full or part-time business.

A blog works on many more levels than just marketing to help create and build highly-valued and eagerly sought-after entrepreneurial endeavor. And I teach how to harness the full range of benefit that comes from a business blog.

So the infographic to the right is very important.

That’s because the strength of the key component of a business blog is high-quality content. That content is a vitally important part of providing highly valuable information to the prospects you are trying to reach so they eagerly seek it out.

Whether you’re just getting going and starting a blog for your business, or you’re already up and running and would like to improve your content offering, this infographic is for you.

The Keys to Content Creation is normally available only to JimZboran.com members, but I’m going to pull back the veil so you can benefit from it as well.

It’s a handy primer for you to get started out with, or it’s a nice point of reference to evaluate what you’re already doing.

Just click on the infographic image to the right and a new tab with just the image will open. Click on the image in the new tab and you’ll be able to see it full size (which is actually readable).

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask! The information is great, but it’s fantastic when you apply it expertly… so be sure to let me know if I can clarify any part of it. Also, please feel free to share your own favorite content creation keys or strategies.

Just post your questions or comments in the comment section below!

Choose your goals and your actions wisely. While the choices you make, and the value you work to bring to others, may seem inconsequential to you, they may have great impact on someone else. So be careful. And by the same token, be passionate about your goals and the actions you take to achieve them. While the value you bring to the table might seem like a small thing to you, it may mean opening up a whole new world for someone else.

Choose Wisely: You May Be the Whole World to Someone

Einstein Says: Shoot for Value, Not Success

Aim for success… or something else?

There are many, many people seeking to start their own business with the end goal of creating success for themselves. But that’s not the best goal to create long-term success in business or in life.

When you shoot for creating great value for other people and then deliver that great value through your business you are setting yourself up for success by setting your customers or clients up for success.

By shooting for value you create a win-win, long-term, highly-sought-after business and also create the best environment to experience success. You’re actually experiencing success… as a by-product of providing great value.

Achieve success by shooting for value.

Look at your current or planned business. Ask yourself, “why did I choose to do this?” If the answer is “money” you should rethink what you’re doing, or why you’re doing it.

You may be surprised to find that you aren’t actually doing it for money, even if you think you are. Look for the underlying reason… it’s probably something that you are excited about because it adds value.

You may even have decided to provide your product or service because you yourself experience the value of what you are now offering.

Focus on that value. Emphasize it. Brainstorm about the ways it enhances your customers or clients lives. Make sure you are constantly focusing on pursuing and providing maximum value in that way to everyone you do business with.

You’ll find that people will be willing to make you successful… because what you are offering them in exchange for money is more valuable to them than the money they are paying you.

Everyone wins! You have success and, more importantly, your customer or client has added value to their life by purchasing what you offer.

What is the focus of your business? How are you striving to add value to your customers or clients? Share your thoughts, experiences, or tips in the comments below!

Business sites get hacked everyday. Often, malicious code is inserted to infect the computers of your site visitors. Some of your visitors end up with bad things on their computer. Others, with protection in place, receive a warning before entering your site that scares them away. Eventually, your site ends up getting blacklisted from search engines until you clear up the problem.

It’s a common occurrence and just a reality of doing business on the internet. Certainly no reason to not have a site as it’s a simple matter to take simple precautions from the beginning and then have some sort of backup and monitoring system in place.

It has happened to me before and the clean-up process was not fun. And then I had to go back and get relisted with Google. In addition, as these things usually go, it came when I seemed to have the least available time to deal with the situation. But it was that type of situation that demanded an immediate response before going any further. So I laid everything I was doing down and focused on fixing the problem. Thankfully I had some systems in place that made the process of repair and rebuilding simpler.

I cover this topic elsewhere, but here is a handy and free tool that you should check out. It could become a part of a system that will prove to be invaluable to you and your business (and your sanity) someday. Here’s a handy link to a free security and blacklisting scan to check your website.

When you get to the site, click the “Free Scan” button, enter the URL of your website, wait a moment, and you get your report back. If you happen to be looking into this because you’ve already discovered a problem and are trying to fix it, you can click the “Get Clean” button and they can help you clean up the mess.

Sucuri Security is the leading provider of web-based integrity monitoring and malware detection solutions. Sucuri solutions are deployed remotely in a matter of minutes anywhere in the world, allowing their customers to immediately detect and remove web-based malware and monitor their internet presence. Sucuri’s web monitoring solution is used today by more than 18,000 sites worldwide.

In simple terms, they clean up the mess. If your site gets hacked, blacklisted or infected with malware, they’ll fix it for you. If your site is clean, they monitor it to let you know if a problem ever happens.

Make sure you schedule a weekly scan in to your calendar. Also be sure to make regular backups of your site. You want to find out about these problems as fast as possible, and you want back up files available and up-to-date at hand.

If hackers are something you are especially concerned about (after all, it could put your business down-and-out, not to mention getting your customers or clients angry with you) you might want to have your site(s) scanned more often.

Rather than doing this manually, you should consider subscribing to a service that does it for you, like Sucuri.

Credits: “Hacker” Image: chanpipat

It’s all here in this short interview!

Entrepreneurial legend and world’s foremost sales and leadership expert Harvey Mackay gives some excellent advice for entrepreneurs in this interview conducted by Chris Brogan.

This interview is loaded with key points of experienced entrepreneurial success!

This is where Harvey has arrived in his entrepreneurial outlook after decades of experience. Why not pick up your entrepreneurial journey from where he is now?

It’s very telling that so many have the same aspirations of being in business for themselves. Entrepreneurship seems to be a very human endeavor.

As pointed out in a previous post, I constantly meet new people that share the same desire to be in business for themselves. They want to earn a great living while adding great value to other people’s lives by offering great products or services.

Sadly, few actually move being the dreaming stage. That’s a shame because they are holding back something of value to the world around them. In so doing, they are holding back the value they can bring to themselves and their families.

When you take something of value that you create or do and present it to others in order for them to add that value to their own lives you benefit yourself. That includes money, but the rewards go much further. I think it gets in touch with the nature of our humanity.

You owe it to yourself and your loved ones to be all you can be… and that includes bringing your unique talents and gifts to bear on the world for others.

You have been equipped to do that. Some would even say you have been commissioned to do that. But at very least, you have the human quality of desiring to create things that add value to your own life and that can add value to the lives of others.

The rewards for finding something valuable to other people, packaging it, and then getting that package into their hands have proven to be tremendous to those that have done it effectively. I call that three step process the “entrepreneurship process.”

Fortunes have been made and great advancements for humankind have been made by countless individuals with the boldness to travel that path. In fact, probably all advancements for mankind have been either directly or indirectly made by the entrepreneurship process.

So why do so few actually realize their dreams? Why don’t they make a difference to others, and thereby to themselves? Why do they sell themselves out in return for a pittance and a padlocked existence? The reasons are many. They pretty much all boil down to: they don’t know.

They don’t know that they can. They don’t know how. They don’t know what they are capable of doing. They don’t know a hundred little things that all add up to living a life dictated to them by others… those either caught in the hamster wheel or those profiting from the turning of the wheels by the hamsters they keep alive and dependent with peanuts.

It took me years, literally decades, to find out what I didn’t know about being a successful entrepreneur and living life on my own terms. And that was with a passion for entrepreneurship!

Most people will never find that out. Not because it is difficult or a secret. It’s just that for most of us there have been too few good examples and teaching for us to find our own way to successful business ownership. It’s not our fault.

But we’ll still pay the price… in terms of our happiness, accomplishment, contentment, even our very lives… for staying ignorant.

That’s why I teach people how to turn their talent into income. It is to help them discover the greatness that is within them as human beings. It is to help them discover how to bring that greatness to improve the lives of those around them. It is to ultimately make an uncommon difference in the lives of others while living an uncommon life myself.

How about you? What’s your passion? Have you discovered yet your unique talents and interests that you can turn into highly-valuable strengths and skills that improve the lives of others? Have you packaged that so that others can get it for themselves? Have you made others aware it is available to them?

Those are the types of answers I help people find through my blog, coaching, and educational materials. Where are you at in the entrepreneurial process? Let me know… I’d love to hear and learn from your story! Leave a comment below…

And remember… Let’s make something great happen for ourselves by making something great happen for others!

It seems I’ve “always” had a passion for entrepreneurship. At least since my pre-teen years anyway. It is a very basic part of me.

Over the years I’ve found many, many others with that very same aspiration. My passion is not so uncommon (though most stop at the dream, or aspiration, stage).

And it turns out many of us also share the same reasons driving their desire to become entrepreneurs.

Among the reasons I’ve found behind a passion for being a business owner:

• The prospect of financial freedom.
• The possibility of earning far (FAR!) more than could possibly be earned in a wage-earning or salaried job. (Getting off the trading-dollars-for-hours hamster wheel.)
• The independence to choose working hours, conditions, and locations.
• Desire to be the boss.
• The respect that comes from having accomplished something important.
• The satisfaction of having done something important and having done it well.
• The rewarding experience of having brought something of value and significance to the lives of others.
• The adventure, strategy, and challenge of making something happen the a relatively few others do in life.

It was all those reasons that led me to become a serial-entrepreneur over the years.

How about you? What reasons do you have for wanting to be in business for yourself? Share them in the comments below!

And remember… Let’s make something great happen for ourselves by making something great happen for others!