It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, so why not add your smiling face to all your comments!  Not only will this make your comment stand out from the sea of comments who have ‘alien’ or ‘blank’ featureless photos, but you will be more relatable.  After all, nobody likes to do business or be friends with an alien… or do you??  

So, let’s turn that blank, featureless photo into a winning commentary.  You will be blown away by how simple and quick this is to do.  Here’s how to add that Personal Touch…

So, head over to http://www.gravatar.com and sign up for a free account.  Then, I would love for you to share your first gravatar comment post down below and let me know if you found this training useful in one of the many ways to start branding yourself.

Some final tips:

1. Make sure your smiling in your photo.  It is a statistical fact that your picture will be more attractive to others if you present yourself showing your pearly whites.

2. When you do add a comment on your friend’s or professional colleague’s blogs, make sure you are leaving a valuable comment and that you are contributing to the conversation.

Don’t forget to share this post with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, or any of the other social communities out there by using the Twitter icon at the top of this post or the Facebook, Digg, and Bookmark & Share buttons below.  Your friends and followers will appreciate you for showing them!  Thanks to all of you for your continued support!

Dedicated To Your Success,

There are a variety of reasons to attend conferences and events that are related to your industry.  It’s not always about the information presented, but here are my 5 top benefits you’ll receive when attending the next event.

To summarize in writing:

1.  Networking ~ it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. You may have heard this before; but your net worth is typically the average of your 5 closest friends’ net worth.  So, the question is… who do you hang around with?  How would your net worth change if you started hanging out with millionaires or even billionaires?  Find out what’s working for other successful entrepreneurs in your industry. Find out what’s working for other successful entrepreneurs in your industry.  Make friends with likeminded people who can share their experiences with you.  These relationships will be invaluable to you.

2.  Branding ~ your business and yourself as a professional and expert in your industry.  By networking and attending enough conferences while maintaining a positive web presence on the internet, you will become one of the people that other people in your industry want to get to know.

3.  Commitment ~ mainly to yourself and your business, but also to others in the industry, your peers, your colleagues, your team members, the top producers, the co-founders or owners of the business.  Making a commitment to learning and educating yourself and taking the commitment to your business’ success seriously.

4.  Education ~ the actual knowledge you will walk away with that can propel your business forward.  You will always hear about the latest technology and developments from the top experts or producers in your field.  The conferences that provide good quality information will always give you great fuel for your marketing campaigns or other business ventures.

5.  Rejuvenate ~ take some extra days to relax and enjoy the life and path you’ve chosen.  Take the time to let all the new information you’ve just learned sink in, and focus on what direction or which step to take next.

When you make the decision to attend a networking event, you can expect your business to soar to new levels.  It is a statistical fact that those who do not attend a company event in their first 90 days of business, typically end up floundering and not making it.  Can you afford to let this happen?  How dedicated and committed are you to seeing your business succeed?

Please share with me and others your reasons and the benefits you’ve found while attending your companies events from the ones I’ve mentioned above or any new ones!

See you at the next event!

P.S. ~ Here’s a fun little video I did 15 minutes before I was to leave the resort in Boca Raton, Florida.  A little goofy but you can see the beautiful blue waters in the background.

Why Should You Get An API Key?

A WordPress.com API Key is needed when you want to activate and install some plugins for your self-hosted WordPress blog.  One of these plugins that I highly recommend is Akismet.  Akismet eliminates most of the spam comments.  A “must have” for any blog.  This plugin is typically already installed on your WordPress blog, but needs an API Key to activate it.

How To Get A WordPress.com API Key

You can get a free WordPress.com API Key when you sign up for an account at WordPress.com.  The first thing you need to do is go to WordPress.com/Signup to register your free WordPress.com account.

If you are currently using a self-hosted blog, you only need to check the ‘Just a username, please’ circle.

After you have signed up, you will receive the API Key in the Welcome email from WordPress.com.

Didn’t get the email?  No problem, you can get the API Key in your WordPress.com account. Login at WordPress.com Global Dashboard and goto your Profile.  Your API Key is right at the top of the screen above ‘Personal Options’.

I hope this post was of value to you.  I’d love to hear your feedback, so make sure you leave a comment down below with your thoughts or questions and don’t forget to Tweet this to your followers!

Yours in knowledge,

Now I know that sounds like a crazy statement.  Believe me, I was wary when I read it as well.  How could the greatest nation…the greatest power on earth possibly be bankrupt??  Not possible, just couldn’t be…all thoughts that went through my head.  But, Porter Stansberry has an extensive reputation in the forensic financial arena, and his penetrating insight for future debacles has been well written about and discussed in many affluent boardrooms.  He was the first person to say that GM was going bankrupt.  The stock was in the 30′s when he first published his views a few years ago.

Below is Porter’s most recent (and his best) update on why America is bankrupt.  Yes, it’s true that America is paying their bills right now, but so was GM before they officially filed for bankruptcy.

This guy doesn’t hold back punches, shoots straight from the hip, and tells it like he sees it!!  Take it for what it’s worth.  Choose to believe it or not.  For in America and other democratic societies, we have that option…to think what we want and to say what we want.  I’m of the belief that we should all take the time to grow personally by learning and reading what others opinions are and then discussing them further.  So, on that note, please enjoy this article and let me know your thoughts afterwards!

What OBAMA!’s Budget Doesn’t Mention

By Porter Stansberry

Nobody likes bad news.

A few years ago, I got in hot water by insisting General Motors was bankrupt. Supporters of the company (whether investors or unionized employees) got mad at me and said I was exaggerating. They rightly pointed out GM was still servicing its debts and was still owned by its equity holders. Thus, technically at least, GM wasn’t bankrupt.

In order to avoid any unnecessary litigiousness, I began to write in parody, pretending to be the chairman of General Motors and warning of the company’s impending bankruptcy. One of the few ways you can still speak unpleasant truths in America is by using – or pretending to use – humor. That’s why, for example, Chris Rock and Bill Cosby are our most poignant commentators on race relations and why John Stewart is perhaps our most insightful news commentator.

Meanwhile, the bankruptcy of General Motors was far from a laughing matter.

GM had no conceivable way to repay its debts. It was even borrowing money to pay for the interest expense on its existing debts.

Monitoring the company closely between 2006 and 2009 taught me quite a bit about willful self-deception. Here are the three key traits I look for now in companies facing major financial stress…

No. 1. There’s never any real tally of the total amount owed. GM used byzantine accounting to hide the truth of its deteriorating fiscal condition for nearly 20 years. It was impossible for any outside analyst to get an accurate, consolidated account of GM’s total debt.

No. 2. None of the company’s “turnaround” plans include any efforts to actually repay principal amounts owed.

No. 3. The company’s spending is out of control. In GM’s case, it was also rife with fraud and absurdity – like, for example, its jobs bank where people were paid not to work.

If you don’t know how much you owe, if you make no attempt to ever repay your debts, and if your spending is out of control, there’s no way to avoid bankruptcy. In retrospect, these facts seem so plain and obvious. But who else was warning about GM? No one.

I bring this up to you today because the exact same things are now true about the United States of America.

We don’t know how much we owe. We don’t have any plan to repay our debt. And our spending is still completely out of control…

OBAMA! has sent a new budget to Congress. It contains several provisions that will make people unhappy. Taxes are going up on the rich. They’re going up on private-equity firms and hedge funds. They’re going up on oil and gas companies. And they’re going up on multinational companies.

These new taxes are what you’ll see people arguing about. They are what the politicians will complain and campaign about. Nobody wants to pay the costs of government, so that’s the easy sell. But the taxes aren’t the real problem with OBAMA!’s budget…

The real problem is that government spending is literally out of control.

The government is going to reduce its so-called “discretionary” spending by a grand total of $200 billion. Only about $1.4 trillion of the government’s $3.8 trillion budget is discretionary. The rest is legally required, thanks to unfunded entitlement programs, like Medicare. So right now, far less than half of the government’s annual budget can legally be restrained.

Meanwhile, there’s no accurate tally of the government’s debt. Supposedly, we owe around $12 trillion. This number is so large that it is meaningless. What does it really mean? According to the IRS, almost 143 million people filed tax returns in 2007 (the most recently reported year).

Of these people, roughly 96 million paid something in taxes – even one penny. Thus, technically, you could say there are basically 100 million taxpayers in the United States. Dividing the total debt ($12 trillion) by the number of taxpayers, you can see our total debt is actually $120,000 per taxpayer. How many people do you know can afford an additional $120,000 in debt?

And the truth is, the $12 trillion figure is only a down payment on our actual debts.

For example, nobody really knows how much more money Fannie and Freddie will require. (My bet is $500 billion each – or $1 trillion.) On Christmas Eve, when no one was looking, Congress approved unlimited funding for the two national mortgage banks.

And that’s far from the only “off-budget” item. We have committed to fighting two civil wars – in Iraq and Afghanistan. The costs are likely to be $50 billion or so next year alone. How much over the next 10 years? Maybe $1 trillion? Or maybe more. And there’s a new “jobs package” that’s estimated to cost $76 billion next year with another $25 billion to bail out cash-strapped state governments.

Even if you only looked at the dollar amounts that have been budgeted today and you ignored all of the rest of the growth of future entitlement spending, you’ll discover that we actually owe something around $20 trillion right now.

And if $20 trillion is the real number, then the amount owed by taxpayers is actually $200,000 each. Of course, that’s if you’re counting all of the taxpayers. Most people, though, pay almost nothing in taxes. Unless you’re earning more than $50,000 per year, you’re not really contributing to the tax receipts. Roughly 50 million folks are in this category. These people pay less than 10% of all income tax receipts. So you shouldn’t count on them to repay much, if any, of these debts – they can’t.

What’s the real per-capita number? My best estimate – just on the money we actually owe today – is $400,000 per taxpayer. At a reasonable (6%) rate of interest that’s $24,000 each – just to pay the interest on these debts each year. How many people do you know that could afford $24,000 a year in higher taxes? How many people can afford additional debts of $400,000?

My point? Our government is bankrupt – right now, today. Sure, it might still have access to the credit markets. And yes, since it owes dollars, it can always simply print more. I realize the government can’t go bankrupt they way GM did. Our bondholders won’t end up getting title to our national parks and the strategic petroleum reserve. No, that’s not going to happen.

What will happen?

I can’t say for certain. But here’s what I know: It’s not a good idea for the world’s largest debtor and the world’s strongest military power to go broke. Bad things happen in democracies when the government goes broke. At the very least, our creditors will demand much higher interest rates and abandon the use of our currency. That’s going to devastate our standard of living.

These facts and figures should cause you to wake up and think about what you’re doing with your savings. Here’s a hint: Don’t save dollars. And don’t count on whatever the government has promised to you, whether it is a retirement or medical care. The government is bankrupt. It won’t be able to deliver.

————————————-

If we are to believe what Mr. Stansberry has told us, then we can see that inflation…not deflation, is a considerable concern in our future.  It also explains why interest rates will go much higher, the middle class will become non-existant, and the US dollar will continue to fall.

Don’t forget to leave a comment.  I value your feedback!

Your friends may get some value from this article as well, so please share it with them by using the Facebook and Twitter buttons at the top right of this post and thanks again for reading!

Yours in knowledge,

When you ‘ping’, you notify blog indexing services that you have made an update on your blog.

Why is Pinging Important?

In order for your blogging efforts to be extremely effective, you will want to make sure the content on your blog is syndicated properly.  There are many different ways to do this and pinging is one of them.

Ping-o-matic is used automatically by WordPress when you install it, but there are others you should take advantage of.  Use the following list to make sure your content is represented by these services.

• http://rpc.pingomatic.com
• http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
• http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
• http://ping.myblog.jp
• http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
• http://bblog.com/ping.php

How Do You Install These?

It’s really easy!!  In WordPress, click on ‘Settings’ in admin, then ‘Writing’, and paste them into ‘Update Services’ at the bottom of the page.  Click ‘Save Changes’ and you are in business.  Now WordPress will notify these services automatically.

Dedicated to your success,

If you are familiar with pinging services you already know that there are plenty more pinging services available than the ones listed above.  This list is researched and optimized for efficiency.  Credit for the research goes to Instant Info Online.  You can check out the research here.

P.S. If you enjoyed this article today and thought it was informative, then don’t forget to share this with your friends by using the ‘Bookmark & Share’ button below and share with your Twitter followers by using the ‘Retweet’ button above.  Also, please let me know your thoughts as well….I enjoy hearing your comments!

It is simply a fact that when you develop unshakable self-confidence, your whole world will change for the better.

You’ll have the confidence to take whatever steps necessary to earn more money and enjoy a higher standard of living.  You’ll be more powerful and persuasive with other people.  And you’ll be more popular and likable.

Unleash the self-confidence you already have!  But first, I want to tell you about the key differences between people with high self-esteem and low self-esteem, according to researchers:  

People with high self-esteem…

• Usually see other people in a better light…
• Expect other people to like and accept them…
• Perform better in high pressure situations, and do better
  work when the standards are high…
• Feel confident and secure enough to shrug off negative
  comments from others…

On the other hand, people with low self-esteem…

• Frequently dislike others…
• Expect that other people will dislike and reject them…
• Have trouble performing under pressure, and find it hard to
  work in demanding environments…
• Are more vulnerable to negative comments and reactions
  from others…

These tendencies can spill over into all areas of a person’s life and the consequences are huge. That’s why self-esteem is a critical factor – it’s one of those make-or-break variables that has the power to transform your life, for good or bad.  High self-esteem is a little like a magic spell that works in any number of situations.

So how can you get the self-esteem that leads to unshakable self-confidence?

The first thing is that it is not something you can get in a bottle.  Secondly and far more important, it is not about imitating someone else or “acting” like you have it.

It’s about feeling the safety to tap into your authentic self (who you really are) not what other people expect you to be.

Most of us somewhere along the way lose ourselves.  Perceived disapproval from parents, peers, coaches and teachers can cause a denial of your true self at a young age.  It’s kind of like building a wall.

Then we do all types of self improvement work, sales and business training, tape listening, etc…

We improve but nothing has true power unless it is authentic.

Only authentic self-esteem leads to the kind of unshakable self-confidence of the successful top 1%.

Look for your ‘Authentic Power’…

Your Authentic Power will help provide the safety and comfort so that you can access the part inside of you that is responsible for your inner most drive.

Improve your mindset to develop your self-esteem, and then to create self-confidence.

The key is to YOU finding and developing the mindset that will allow you to blow through your competition in your own way.

Be well,
Nicole

P.S.  If you’re struggling in any area of your life, personal or professional, it’s possible that your problems are just symptoms of a bigger problem: low self-esteem.  Find a way to improve your self-esteem, and you can expect things to start improving in lots of ways.

You’re so excited!  You’ve just joined an income opportunity that’s going to make you a lot of money.  You’re dreaming of your next vacation.  You’re thinking about quitting your job.  You can’t wait to get started.  You want to make your money back…the money you’ve invested to become a part of the team.  You’ve seen people making money…okay…you’re ready!  But…wait a second…what’s next?

What do you have to do first?  You think about it for awhile.  Oh yeah…people.  You need people to show them you’re opportunity.  Second, how do you get those people or leads?  You could purchase those leads.  But, it’s expensive and you just spent all your money on the program.  So…what do you do next?

Well…it doesn’t make sense to let your investment go to waste, so you decide to plunk some more dough into advertising and getting paid leads (I don’t recommend buying leads…these are never the better quality leads).  Most opportunities out there are driven by numbers, meaning the more people you show your opportunity to, the more people you will have sign up.  Therefore, if you want to get your investment back, you may have to show quite a few people.  Now that you have paid for your leads, what’s next?  (CarbonCopyPRO will show you how to get leads for free or low-cost to suit your budget).

Most people will not make any decisions to join on their first visit to your site.  They may need to review it a few times before they make a decision.  So now, you wait.  You hope someone joins you.  And, you wait some more.  It’s easy to get disappointed because you’ve just spent all your money and seen little to no results.  You decide to spend more money on some paid leads, and wait again.  This cycle goes on for awhile until you run out of money.  You may have had some people sign up for your opportunity, but you find most of your profits are going back into marketing.  This is ridiculous!  WOW!!!  This is the #1 reason people fail!!!

So…what if there was a way to get rid of that reason?  What if you didn’t have to put all of the money you make into advertising and buying leads?  That would be fantastic!  Well…here it is…it is called a self-funded proposal.  This is a marketing system that is driven to pay you for the leads even before they join your business.  CarbonCopyPRO is a marketing system with an integrated self-funded proposal built into it.

Most people fail at this business because they don’t know what’s next.  Either there is insufficient training provided by the company or a lack of options.  The internet is a big, scary world to a lot of people.  You need support and advice along the way!  CarbonCopyPRO has some of the best training from the best leaders in the industry all at your fingertips so that you can access it anywhere, anytime.  You will be in business for yourself but not by yourself!!  Isn’t that reassuring to know you are a part of a team where we help each other out?  CarbonCopyPRO is a community of others helping everyone else.  Afterall, the internet is an $8 billion dollar industry and there is enough room for us all to play on the same playground!

Dedicated to your Success,

Nicole