Attaining Perfection

[reblogged from 2013]

Today in church we had a discussion about “attaining perfection” – and the presenter went to the sports analogy. Give examples of perfection in sports. The others in the room went to the classics. Pitching a no-hitter. A season with no losses. The usual suspects.

Striving for perfection

Of course, my mind went in the opposite direction from the no-hitter example. How about a baseball game where every single last hitter gets on base? Is that even possible? I really doubt it, though a baseball fan can totally comment below with stats for me. But as far as I see it, that game would still be in progress somewhere, right? Attaining perfection might not be so simple as that. What about golf? Is the hole in one the example of perfection? So ultimately, wouldn’t 18 hole in one’s in a row be the perfect example of attaining perfection? Golf fans: has it ever been done? in competition?

I love a perfect sunset

When I thought of my own examples for attaining perfection, I visualized sunsets. Flowers. Cliffs. I am reminded of a favorite movie quote about the culmination of the search for the perfect cherry blossom:

“Perfect … they are all … perfect” – Katsumoto, The Last Samurai

The reality of attaining perfection

While nature provides many excellent examples of perfection, we all fall quite short of this lofty goal. I think that in this case attaining doesn’t refer to the end result of “being” perfect, but rather the journey of “becoming” perfect. Stuff happens. True. We can’t control it. True. But we do have control over our emotions. Over our response to stuff that happens. We can look at the challenge and the potential for growth. We can step around or over the obstacles. Maybe even learn how to leap over them. And in the process strive for something better.

Summit of Orizaba in Mexico – highest volcano in North America

If you’ve been following my ebooks on Amazon, you’ll notice that I write openly about my failures. I keep plugging away though. I keep trying. I recently completed Orizaba, which I first attempted in miserable failure 5 years ago. I was too weak to go beyond 17,000′. This time I climbed it on my first acclimatization hike on March 5. My partner and I felt strong and well trained. In my opinion this is an example of attaining perfection.

I know that if you set your sights on a worthy goal and apply yourself, you too can be attaining perfection in your endeavors. Health, fitness, training, fat loss. I know you have it in you.

Who should you follow back on Twitter?

[reblogged from 2012]

If your Twitter activity is up where it should be, you’ll likely get some Followers before too long, sometimes in droves. If you wonder who to follow back, I have a few suggestions based on my own experiences. I actually should have named this one “who should you NOT follow back on Twitter”

Twitter Egg Avatar – several colors available – the default

First of all, never follow anyone back that you do not physically know until you go to their profile and skim their posts and mentions. Their profile image or avatar can tell you a few things about them. If they have the default Egg Avatar, it could be a warning, especially if they already have a lot of Tweets and Followers. If they only have a few of each, then it’s possible it’s a new account, but overall, with Social being what it is, they should have an avatar, hopefully a face.

Quote after quote – maybe a bot?

Another thing to consider is their Tweet quality. If it’s a few thousand quotes that might not be a good sign. As well, if it’s one after the other talking about getting more followers, that might not be good either.

3rd World Followers always make you look “genuine”

If you decide to follow someone relatively “benign” – those with 3000 quotes, or 3 Tweets and 6 Followers – expect to get an auto-generated DM (Direct Message) within seconds of Following them, often with something “To reward you for following me, here’s a link to something you will really like”.

Twitter DM for an amazing opportunity to reward me for following

These are probably not all that bad, and so long as you never click the link you’ll probably be okay and never hear from them again. Bots tend not to unfollow you, so it will add to your stats (if that’s important to you).

I highly recommend you do not follow back the 5,000 follower bots. For one thing Twitter really is all about authenticity, and if you are hooked up with these people, you’ll probably hate yourself for it later.

The quotes are pretty benign too, and if you want to fluff up your Tweet count and your activity stats, retweeting the occasional quote is pretty harmless, so long as it is meaningful to you and your followers.

Be careful – it’s a jungle out there 

Is Google Exact Match Domain Penalty Illogical?

[from October 2012]

Recently Google Spam Master Matt Cutts hinted that low-quality exact match domains could be penalized. This is aside from either Penguin or Panda, and as far as I know doesn’t yet have a cutesy animal name that starts with P, like Platypus.

An “exact match domain” is one in which the keyword is used as the domain name. A simple and almost meaningless example is for a company that sells yellow golf balls, and uses the domain “yellowgolfballs.com”. Supposedly, this is a suspect domain name, since it matches keywords that are logical for searching, and until now, was actually encouraged for your SEO marketing efforts. Some algorithm from Panda or Penguin would test the quality of the content on the site, and if it’s deemed low, would essentially ban it from search results.

A Real World Exact Match Domain Example

How does this apply to a realistic situation? Let’s go for the simplest example I can imagine. Ed the Plumber. Ed is a hypothetical local plumber who has been in the same town for twenty years. You’ve seen him driving around town in his big white van, labeled “Ed’s Plumbing”. You know who he is and what he is, and your family has been using him for two generations. One day at the dawn of the 21st Century Ed decides to get a website, and in the interest of simplicity, buys “edsplumbing.com” and has it painted on his truck. Like any other service industry professional, he lists what he does, what his service area is, what his hours are, and his general pricing structure, about ten pages on his website.

So is this a “Exact Match Domain”? What do you think people who are trying to find Ed’s phone number will type into the search box at Google? “Ed’s Plumbing” and that then becomes the keywords you are searching for, and blam, it’s an Exact Match Domain. So now let’s review the quality of the content. The list of a plumber’s services is probably fairly generic, and is probably almost word-for-word duplicated on thousands of sites, as are the hours, and probably a hundred businesses list the same geographic locations. Ed is probably pretty busy fixing pipes and stuff, so he’s not generating a dozen fresh, exciting articles each month on relevant exciting plumbing topics, like “advances in wax ring technology since 1952”. Not only that, but in all honesty, most everything in your house plumbing-wise hasn’t changed a lot in the last fifty years. The odds of constantly generating exciting fresh content are slim to none.

Inbound links? How is poor Ed supposed to get quality organic inbound links? Spamming blogs would probably work, if he could find some relevant home repair blogs, since relevance seems to now be important for inbound links, but then Ed is pretty busy doing pipe stuff. It’s not like a lot of people outside his town would stumble across Ed’s ten page site and put up links on their own – even with the wax ring articles. It’s especially not like the portal sites are doing all that well right now, which could give Ed a share of links with other plumbers for relevance mixed in with their spun articles.

So poor Ed, getting banned from Google, just because he has a valid site, with a valid URL, and a valid business, being searched for by valid customers using valid keywords. Illogical, don’t you think?

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Dumb Down the Product

A quick thought on “Dumbing Down” …

Rainbow Dash knows all about the best possible result

If you dumb something down to the level of the stupidest person in the room, can you simultaneously hope for the best possible result?

That would be nuts. I think this might apply equally to several types of endeavors. Education, science, business. Catch yourself dumbing down your product, and you’ll save yourself the hardship of putting out a less than desirable result.

Social Mistakes Make You Look Bad

Social Mistakes can ruin your day. Or your life. Or your business. You can make a total fool of yourself in a one second post that will haunt you forever. You can also sit in your cozy little basement room at Grandma’s ignorant of the tittering laughter that accompanies your every post or comment.

Classic Social Mistakes that you’ve probably heard of include using trending tweet tags to slip your advertising message into the million or so baby or death announcements associated with it. Scheduling automatic tweets that reference outside people places or events you have no control over. Pinning your entire product catalog in Pinterest, and a slew of others I’m sure you’ve probably already read about and heeded well.

Be very cautious when you’re obviously promoting a product

I’d like to point out a few of the really subtle dumbnesses, er, social mistakes I see all the time on Facebook.

Top Social Mistakes on Facebook:

Me-Me-Me: all your posts, all day, every day, are about you. Yeah, you’re cool enough to have figured out how to make a Facebook page. We got it, and were you aware how easy it is to unsubscribe?

You need to engage your audience. Make them think you know something about something besides your own glorious visage in the mirror. You need to post stuff that might be remotely affiliated with you, but doesn’t directly involve you. Guide services can post photos of other climbers climbing, weather reports, pretty cloud pictures, news stories from other countries – just interesting stuff for your fans to kill time and figure you have a broad perspective on things.

Just uncheck the boxes to see nothing at all in your timeline – they’ll never know

Sniper: every time someone posts anything about anything, comment as though you own them. This is like the Chinese Fortune Cookie ” .. in bed” gag. I should also call this the “that’s not what she said” social mistake.

This is a great away to annoy a lot of people in a hurry. In case you don’t understand, here’s a purely hypothetical example of one of these social mistakes and the type of doo it can result in.

Bob: I just got my first hole in one today!
BadCompany: That’s probably because you were wearing your BadCompany Velcro Metatarsal Sling.
Bob: Um, no, I practiced a lot.
BadCompany: There’s nothing like a BadCompany Velcro Metatarsal Sling on the green.
Bob: I don’t even have that POS sling, I only followed you to win a freaking t-shirt
BadCompany: if you wear the BadCompany Velcro Metatarsal Sling, you’ll stop being so cranky

Oblivious. Yeah. Please, let people just have fun and don’t troll their posts. Like stuff, compliment people, grieve when they do, celebrate when they do, and don’t try to manipulate it into a shining marketing moment. It’s their moment, let them have it.

Don’t set anything on autopilot – makes you look not only dumb, but lazy

Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell: yeah, you’re a big important company, or rock star celebrity. You can ignore all your messages, emails, comments, and other attempts at close and personal contact. You earned your right to be above the riff-raff, right?

Sadly, ignoring everyone while posting links to your stuff to buy, and pics of your stuff or your entourage, is not engagement. Really, look it up – engagement is not one-way. This is one of the social mistakes that can actually be most costly in the long run. You can’t check your messages once a year. You can’t ignore people who may be trying to give you money. It’s not profitable. You don’t have to agree with everyone, and even a simple “Thank you for your comments and support” will do wonders for your image.

If you can’t deal with these simple little suggestions, consider outsourcing your social marketing. Hiring a community manager is a viable option, allowing you to focus on what you do best to make
money and doing the best you can to support your fan base. If you’d like to learn more about social etiquette – one of the best books I can recommend to avoid social mistakes would be “UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging” a total classic in the art of engagement, though it’s Twitter specific. Another recommended book, though only available for pre-order is Gary Vaynerchuck’s “The Thank You Economy” which has been the topic of talks at several high-visibility social media conferences.

Fun with the Sochi Mascots at SVO in Moscow

Do yourself, your company, and your social network a huge favor, and learn how to be responsible in your communities. I’ve written a very simple guide to Pinterest: Do-it-yourself Social Marketing: Pinterest with a simple plan to promote your business subtly without triggering anyone’s anti-marketing filters.

Drop me a line or comment if you have any thoughts you’d like to share. Thanks 

Steal an iPad tagged image on Facebook

See the photo on Facebook about how to steal an iPad? I mean get a free iPad because of a broken shopping cart? The pic is usually tagged with a few hundred “friends” so it will show up in a lot of feeds. It explains that the online store has a broken shopping cart and forgets to ask for money. The door to the store is wide open.

Steal an iPad and get ripped off

This is a lot like your neighbor going out for errands and forgetting to lock their door. Well, the door is open, so it’s okay to steal an iPad from your neighbors. Right? This is social engineering for scamming. People who want to steal are easy to steal from. It’s easy to con a con man, as the saying goes. I won’t be testing it out, but it’s likely that the site runs you through a bunch of rounds of 20 questions, and sure enough, doesn’t ask for money. They have installed spyware, keylogging software, or have enough of your info to sell your identity. Of course your iPad will never show up. They just wanted to know if you would like to steal an iPad.

Hannum brought a lawsuit against Barnum for calling his giant a fake. When it came to trial, Hull stepped forward and confessed that the Cardiff Giant was a hoax and the entire story. The judge ruled that Barnum could not be sued for calling Hannum’s giant a fake since it was a fake after all. Thereafter, Hannum’s name was lost to history while Barnum was left with the misplaced stigma of being the one to say “There’s a sucker born every minute.” History Buff

How to not steal an iPad

Untag yourself from these images, and unfriend or block the person who tagged you. Don’t believe nonsense like this. If you were to purposefully go to a broken shopping cart, knowing it was broken, and “purchase” anything, you could be prosecuted for your attempt to steal an iPad.

Never get so busy

Making a living, you forget to make a life

Klout for Social Media Metrics

Klout is one of my favorite measurement tools to gauge the effectiveness of my own social media marketing efforts. I also use Klout to plan my engagement strategy on Twitter. I'll show you more about that in an upcoming video, but here is a brief introduction to Klout, how to use it for the first-timer.

Klout Introduction Video

Klout Social Media Metrics
How to uses Klout to measure and increase your social media metrics for performance social marketing. Let me know if you need more of this training.
Posted by Your Community Managers on Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Screenshot from the video:

Pinterest Pinning for Fast Twitter Engagement

Here's how I got some extremely fast Twitter engagement by using Pinterest. In this example I pinned several pins, pretty quickly. The difference between now and last time though was that I did it during a proven fast response time from my demographic. Just a minute laterI have 20+ follows, retweets, favorites, and list adds on Twitter. I can train you to get the same results. 

Register HERE and I'll send you more info on upcoming training sessions. Many of them are also free. Get the most bang for the buck and let's get started ASAP.

Pinterest Pinning for Twitter Engagement

Here's a perfect example of how to get more engagement on Twitter using Pinterest. In this example I do a search for the keyword "LinkedIn" and pin a quick handful of pins, then a few minutes later check and I have about a dozen retweets, favorites, and list adds on Twitter. I didn't even do this during a prime timeslot for my demographic. It works people, and I can show you how you can get the same results. Register HERE and I'll send you more info on upcoming training sessions. Many of them are also free.

Pinterest Engagement Training - 15 targeted Pins in 3 minutes.

You don't need hours a day to manage your own small or home business on social media. Here's a quick demonstration of the power of Pinterest to encourage your followers, taken from my Social Media 300 Training Program. If you want more, be sure to subscribe to the website

"YourCommunityManagers.com" HERE 

I'll let you know when the next sessions start or hook you up with a personalized private consultation.

Law of Attraction: You get what you ask for

Podcast HERE

"And yet that’s how we react in real life. We sow onions and expect roses. We sow negative thoughts in our mind (onions) and expect good things (roses) to come out! We fool ourselves! And we blame others. We look for who can possibly be the fault of that (usually we blame the parents or the husband/wife for what goes wrong in our life). And then we cry and say we don’t have any luck in our lives. We look at the neighbour and think he’s lucky because he has roses in his garden, and we wonder what we did to the world to deserve only onions in our garden!" [Listen for More]

Subscribe on iTunes [CLICK HERE]

Blogging for Profit or Just Wasting Time?

Here's the scoop on my Facebook Page:

The Email You Probably Missed. I just sent out an email to my subscribers with some great tips on the first essential...
Posted by Your Community Managers on Sunday, July 12, 2015

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If you want more info on it, click the link to the FULL EMAIL HERE

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Be sure to click the SUBSCRIBE button at top left if you want to be sure not to miss the rest of the series and qualify for a super deal you can't afford to miss.

Hard at work in my home office. "Let It Go" affirmation reminder on my bracelet.

If you want a "Let It Go" or custom engraved affirmation reminder bracelet CHECK IT OUT HERE

3 Keys to Greater Productivity - Part 1

My email subscribers got a treat recently when I sent them the beginning of a series of free training tips "The 3 Keys to Greater Productivity" and the response has been off the charts already. You need to get in on the ground floor with this one, so make sure you subscribe to the newsletter yourself so you can be sure to get the next in the series the second it gets sent.

The 3 Keys to Greater Productivity - Get Part 1 Now

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3 Keys to Greater Productivity

Part One of Three: Scheduling

Whether you have a business that is based out of your home, or if you want to maximize your efforts at your job, there are 3 basic concepts that will ensure your success.

By learning about and embracing these 3 simple – and free – success techniques you will not only increase your productivity, but you will maintain your sanity as well!

Scheduling

Yes, you are busy. Everyone is busy these days. From stay at home parents who raise children full-time, all the way up through CEO’s of billion-dollar companies, everyone is busy. However, everyone has the same 24 hours every day to get things done, so keep that in mind if you have the habit of thinking that your situation is different from anyone else’s.

When it comes to scheduling all of the things that are on your daily or weekly to-do list, writing down the master list of things that you want to accomplish is the absolutely mission-critical first step...

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[[ CLICK FOR MORE ]]

Be sure to stay in the loop so you can get first shot at an amazing offer on Time Management and Goal Setting Training You Can Live With. No BS Success Training is coming to you.

The Law of Attraction and Affirmations - Emails You Missed

In case you missed it, I sent out an email to my Fitness Group: Lose Weight Gain Muscle about the Law of Attraction and how Affirmations can give you the boost you need to crank up the volume on success in all your goals. It works for everything, and not just losing fat faster, or gaining more muscle.

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Here's some of the story you missed:

To affirm means to declare what is already present. It is the same with creating and using affirmations to attract or to transform the things which we desire. 

When you create an affirmation you are declaring to yourself and the universe that the desire is already created. As you continue to repeat these affirmations you are also holding your thoughts clearing with intense focus on the creation that you have made.

Affirmations serve many purposes when trying to manifest the things you want. Applying the law of attraction can be hard when you try diligently to maintain positive uplifting thoughts. It’s almost impossible to monitor your thoughts twenty four hours a day but when you create clear affirmations with details they become a great tool in controlling your thoughts and in turn influencing the law of attraction in your favor.

Here are three ways to use affirmations with your law of attraction practice to get great results...

CLICK FOR MORE

This is my Lose Weight Gain Muscle Newsletter List - if you want more success faster in losing weight while building cut and well defined muscles that you can be proud of, be sure to click the "SUBSCRIBE" button in the upper left corner.

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The Trouble With Tech Industry Jobs

The Tech Industry has undergone a major shift in the way applicants are screened and hired. Back in the early days you wanted to know if they had some skills, but the most important were

• get the job done
• willing to adapt to your development style
• basically understand the concept of development

Now, most of the tech jobs are actually filling a space in a cubicle, cranking away at malformed, ugly code that's not even in the language you know because it's in a framework that uses a non-intuitive syntax, and it's cleaned up by testing apps and pre-processor apps so the coder wouldn't know if it worked or not, the way they wrote it.

Ironically though, when they interview you, they ask a slew of irrelevant questions, most of which actually don't have an answer, or perhaps have answers they don't even know.

Q: List all the ways to restart SAMBA from the command line
A: Depends on the distribution, probably at least 20 different, negating the "all the ways"

Q: A server has a CPU at 98% with only two running apps. What do you do?
A: Check the logs and turn off the apps.

And the worst setup is having you do a test exercise. There is almost no way to get this one right. Watch the video below to see what I mean...

Can you pass a pre-employment pop-quiz?
Posted by Summit Success on Friday, May 15, 2015

Still wasting money on social media marketing? Watch this

Social Media Marketing Secret Program

Still wasting money on social media marketing? Old school methods won't work like they used to. Get up to speed with a free online training session. Watch the rest http://yourcommunitymanagers.com/SocialMarketingMastersVideoOne
Posted by Your Community Managers on Thursday, April 16, 2015

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New Program Coming Soon for Social Media Marketing

Doing last minute edits on my newest presentation - become a Social Media Master with weekly video training programs....

Posted by Your Community Managers on Thursday, April 2, 2015

Free Engagement Training Video Is Now Live - Register and Learn

Stop! Don't waste another penny on social media marketing. Watch this...

Free Engagement Training Video:

Post by Summit Success.

Register Now at http://yourcommunitymanagers.com/SMM-Engagement-Secrets

If you're not seeing the engagement you expect on your social media marketing efforts, this is the video for you that will teach you the 5 skills you need to start using right now to see higher quality engagement in all your Social Media Marketing (SMM).

Pop Quiz - How Much do you Know about Twitter?

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Post by Summit Success.

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Social Marketing and Small Business Frustration?

Succeed in your social goals for your business now.

If you own a small business, are a sole proprietor, network marketer, or work for one of the previous, then please, check out this video introducing the Social Marketing 300 training series. The next video in the series will be “Practical Engagement” and offer a handful of tips, tricks, and suggestions that you can use immediately to start seeing more and better engagement for your small business if you but take a few seconds to implement the strategies presented.

Social Marketing for Small Business Preview:

Social Media and Small Business - Preview from Charles Miske on Vimeo.

You should take another few seconds to register, so that you can be sure not to miss “Practical Engagement” coming out in about a week.

REGISTER HERE

Transcript Download:

Social Marketing 300 – Preview Transcript

#Motivation and #Inspiration #quote from Zig Ziglar