Social Media Networking and the pace of business continues to change. Today it is changing daily. How do you keep up with change? My father taught me, the day you stop learning is the day you die. He believed and lived that until he drew his last breath.

Recent studies show that successful people are voracious readers and learners. Gone are the days of coasting. We’ve all done it, we know others who have coasted, and today we probably know people…hopefully no family members that are coasting. Right?

I’m too old, I’m too young, I’m too tired, I’m too out of shape, I’m not educated, I’m to ______ you fill in the blank.

Some of us have attended graduation ceremonies this month and others will attend in the next few weeks. It could be a family member, relative, spouse, parent, or a close friend you know. The question becomes, will they stop learning? Will we stop learning and growing? We will fulfill our dreams?

Tips to Reclaim Your Edge

1. Be Positive – By being positive the majority of the time, good will result. Avoid negative thinking and people. Make a decision today that you will attract positive, good things into your life!

2. Take Action – Sitting around hoping, wishing that things will change and get better isn’t the right formula. Take baby steps today, every positive action will give you a more confident feeling. Continue to build on that feeling each day. Focus on the end result.

3. Set goals and objectives – Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement. Whether it’s settings goals in life, business or in Social Media Marketing, goals will propel you forward. A person without goals is like a ship without a rudder, drifting aimlessly and always in danger of ending up on the rocks. Carve out some time today to reflect and set some goals. Be very clear about your goals and objectives, however be Flexible about the process of getting there.

4. Learn – Learn a new skill, learn a new Social Media Network. Learn new techniques, learn to be an early adopter, gain first mover advantage. Read, Study, go back to school, attend workshops, attend seminars. Learn and apply!!! The knowledge you gain will instill confidence, confidence will instill enthusiasm and enthusiasm is contagious!

5. Be Productive – All of us have 24 hours in the day, yet others accomplish so much in the same time. Why? They ask themselves continually, what is the best use of my time right now! Use these Social Media Marketing tools to be more productive.

Thomas Carlyle wrote that “a man with a half volition goes back and forth and makes no progress on even the smoothest road, whereas a person with a full volition moves ahead steadily no matter how difficult the path.”

What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail?

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   Blair Evan Ball

   Founder/CEO Prepare1

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Ella Wheeler Wilcox gave evidence of her understanding of the power of the subconscious mind when she wrote:

“You never can tell what a thought will do
In bringing you hate or love—
For thoughts are things, and their airy wings
Are swifter than carrier doves.
They follow the law of the universe—
Each thing creates its kind,
And they speed O’er the track to bring you back
Whatever went out from your mind.”

Why do so many fail to reach their goals in business and life?

It has been documented that most of us use less than 10% of our capacity. Our life experiences have shaped our thoughts and habits over the years. Some are good, while others are bad. We are the one’s who choose. We are the one’s who can replace bad habits with good habits and change our direction in life.

The subconscious mind is more susceptible to influence by impulses of thought mixed with “feeling” or emotion, than by those originating solely in the reasoning portion of the mind. In fact, there is much evidence to support the theory, that ONLY emotionalized thoughts have any ACTION influence upon the subconscious mind. It is a well known fact that emotion or feeling, rules the majority of people.

Have you ever talked to or observed someone that is positive who attracts good things into their lives?

There are seven major positive emotions, and seven major negative emotions. The negatives voluntarily inject themselves into our thoughts, yet we must be proactive in our positive thoughts daily in order to influence our desired outcome in business and life.

THE SEVEN MAJOR POSITIVE EMOTIONS

• The emotion of DESIRE
• The emotion of FAITH
• The emotion of LOVE
• The emotion of SEX
• The emotion of ENTHUSIASM
• The emotion of ROMANCE
• The emotion of HOPE

THE SEVEN MAJOR NEGATIVE EMOTIONS

(To be avoided)

• The emotion of FEAR
• The emotion of JEALOUSY
• The emotion of HATRED
• The emotion of REVENGE
• The emotion of GREED
• The emotion of SUPERSTITION
• The emotion of ANGER

Positive and negative emotions cannot occupy the mind at the same time. One or the other must dominate. It is your responsibility to make sure that positive emotions constitute the dominating influence of your mind. Here the law of HABIT will come to your aid.

Form the habit of applying and using the positive emotions! Eventually, they will dominate your mind so completely, that the negatives cannot enter in.

Join us for one of our upcoming Social Media Marketing Workshops. Learn first hand, how to succeed in business and life using these tools.

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   Blair Evan Ball

   Founder/CEO Prepare1

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Social Media Marketing today, allows you and your team to be your own media company. For the first time in the history of marketing you get to control the content of

• Who
• What
• Where
• When
• Why

It’s not to say that you have total control, but you do have and play a significant role in writing your own Branding Story. Exciting and exhilarating on one hand, daunting on the other.

• What do I write about?
• How do I engage?
• Who do I target?
• What social platform do I use?
• Photos? Videos?
• What are the right keywords?
• Is my website optimized for search?
• Am I taking advantage of Google+ Local?

First, these are tools that change, and some change weekly. Some will be replaced and others will go away. When the changes come I don’t get the memo…do you? We are left trying to figure out where Facebook moved the button’s or Timeline, or Twitter just added video, LinkedIn changed their profile setting’s.

In today’s fast paced Social Media world, there are critical skills you need to succeed.

SKILLS NEEDED

1. Be very clear about your goals and objectives.
2. Be FLEXIBLE about the process.
3. Psychology: Uncovering what motivates your customers.
4. Ability to take and utilize engaging photographs. Video’s are quickly being adopted for business.
5. Ability to increase fan/client engagement through questions, humor, information, discounts.
6. Copywriting: Knowing how to communicate those motivations in the best way.
7. The Headline: how to grab attention and hold their interest.
8. Ability to Analyze: Test, experiment, measure and iterate. Use Google Analytics or Facebook Insights.
9. Strategy Implementation. Without a strategy 76% of you will fail in Social Media.
10. Consistency and a Regimen. Ability to keep going when you do not see immediate results. Everything is cumulative!!!

What other Social Media skills do you think are necessary in order to succeed today?

Join us for one of our upcoming Social Media Marketing Workshops. Learn first hand, and how to amplify your brand!

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   Blair Evan Ball

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Mix enthusiasm with your work and it will not seem hard or monotonous.  Enthusiasm will so energize your entire body that you can get along with less than half the usual amount of sleep and at the same time it will enable you to perform from two to three times as much wok as you usually perform in a given period, without fatigue.

Conversely, if you lack enthusiasm, if you are just trying to get bye, then minutes will seem like hours, and hours will seem like days.

It begins by doing the work or rendering the service which one likes best. The happy person is the one who dreams of heights of achievement that are yet unattained.

 How Enthusiasm Will Affect Others

• Suggestion – The principle through which your words and your acts influence others.
• State of Mind – When you are enthusiastic over the goods and services you are offering, your state of mind becomes obvious to all who hear you, by the tone of your voice.
• What you say – Your words may convey one thing, but the tone of your voice conveys something entirely different.
• Neutrality – Once the other person has become open and receptive to your enthusiasm, they will be more eager to do business with you by buying your products and services.

No man or women can afford to express, through words or acts, that which is not in harmony with his/her own beliefs, and if he/she does so he must pay by the loss of his/her ability to influence others.

To become successful you must be a person of action. Merely to “know” is not sufficient. It is necessary both to know and do.

Who knows what your level of Enthusiasm will do for you, others and your business.

Join us for one of our upcoming Social Media Marketing Workshops, starting the week of April 22nd.

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   Blair Evan Ball

   Founder/CEO Prepare1

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THREE FEET FROM GOLD

This is a story I’ve read some time ago in Napoleon Hills book Think and Grow Rich. It’s a classic lesson in persistence, overcoming obstacles and never giving up. In the post I’ll share excerpts from the book and this time honored principle.

Many people and business owners deal with obstacles everyday. Every failure is a blessing in disguise, providing it teaches some needed lesson one could not have learned without it.

One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat. Every person is guilty of this mistake at one time or another. We see it in life, we see it in sports, we see it in business, and we see it in utilizing new marketing tools such as Social Media Marketing.

DIG AND GROW RICH

An uncle of R. U. Darby was caught by the “gold fever” in the gold-rush days, and went west to DIG AND GROW RICH. He had never heard that more gold has been mined from the brains of men than has ever been taken from the earth. He staked a claim and went to work with pick and shovel. The going was hard, but his lust for gold was definite.

• Why are you working so hard?
• What is your definite goal and purpose in life?
• Could you be Three Feet from Gold?
  

After weeks of labor, he was rewarded by the discovery of the shining ore. He needed machinery to bring the ore to the surface.

Quietly, he covered up the mine, retraced his footsteps to his home in Williamsburg, Maryland, told his relatives and a few neighbors of the “strike.” They got together money for the needed machinery, had it shipped. The uncle and Darby went back to work the mine.

The first car of ore was mined, and shipped to a smelter. The returns proved they had one of the richest mines in Colorado! A few more cars of that ore would clear the debts. Then would come the big killing in profits.

Down went the drills! Up went the hopes of Darby and Uncle!

Then something happened! The vein of gold ore disappeared! They had come to the end of the rainbow, and the pot of gold was no longer there! They drilled on, desperately trying to pick up the vein again—all to no avail.

Finally, they decided to QUIT.

They sold the machinery to a junk man for a few hundred dollars, and took the train back home.This junk man called in a mining engineer to look at the mine and do a little calculating. The engineer advised that the project had failed, because the owners were not familiar with “fault lines.”

• His calculations showed that the vein would be found JUST THREE FEET FROM WHERE THE DARBYS HAD STOPPED DRILLING!

That is exactly where it was found!

The “Junk” man took millions of dollars in ore from the mine, because he knew enough to seek expert counsel before giving up.

Most of the money which went into the machinery was procured through the efforts of R. U. Darby, who was then a very young man. The money came from his relatives and neighbors, because of their faith in him. He paid back every dollar of it, although he was years in doing so.

Long afterward, Mr. Darby recouped his loss many times over, when he made the discovery that DESIRE can be transmuted into gold. The discovery came after he went into the business of selling life insurance.

Remembering that he lost a huge fortune, because he STOPPED three feet from gold, Darby profited by the experience in his chosen work, by the simple method of saying to himself, “I stopped three feet from gold, but I will never stop because men say ‘no’ when I ask them to buy insurance.”

Darby is one of a small group of fewer than fifty men who sell more than a million dollars in life insurance annually. He owes his “stickability” to the lesson he learned from his “quitability” in the gold mining business.

Before success comes in any man’s life, he is sure to meet with much temporary defeat, and, perhaps, some failure. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and most logical thing to do is to QUIT. That is exactly what the majority of people do.

More than five hundred of the most successful men this country has ever known, told the author their greatest success came just one step beyond the point at which defeat had overtaken them.

• Failure is a trickster with a keen sense of irony and cunning. It takes great delight in tripping one when success is almost within reach.

Who knows…You might be Three Feet from Gold right now, and are thinking of quitting. Don’t

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Blair Evan Ball

   Founder/CEO Prepare1

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 Mobile is exploding, people of all ages are using mobile to shop for products and services daily.

Do you have a mobile presence?

Do you have the pulse on the mobile generation?

Small Businesses are realizing that mobile is “NOW”, not “tomorrow” – early adopters will win, and late adopters will fall further behind.

 Where should your small business jump in?

1. Have a Mobile Site.

2. Optimize the site for Mobile.

3. Consider Mobile advertisements.

4. Allow consumers to pay with a mobile app such as Square or PayPal. These devices can be attached to your mobile phone to accept payments right on the spot.

Mobile Marketing Statistics

• Globally mobile outnumbers people.
• iPhone sales outpace births.
• 90% of all Tweets from Twitter are mobile.
• Companies are spending less than 1% on mobile.
• 70% of mobile searches lead to action in one hour.
• Google Mobile searches are up 400%.
• GEO positioning, marketing by your location is up 81% Year over Year.
• More than 1/3 of all photos taken are now on a smartphone.
• By 2014 Mobile Internet usage should overtake desktop usage.
• 200 Million YouTube views daily on a mobile phone.
• Last years teens increased their data consumption by 240%. Just ask any parent who has to pay their mobile bill.

People are spending more time on their mobile phones than ever before. This new Social Media Marketing world consists of terms like smartphones, SEO, mobile sites, geolocation, and social marketing. As individuals and owners we have to understand these new types of consumers and how best to reach them. Technologies like geolocation and mobile tagging can help us better understand the mobile consumer and deliver more relevant messages.

How do you plan to use Mobile going forward?

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  The Power of Clarity

Perhaps the most important word in business and personal success is the word “clarity.”

It’s easy in today’s world to get distracted, taking you off course.

You must be absolutely clear about who you are as a person, and what you are trying to do or accomplish in your business or work. You must develop the habit of thinking carefully about every detail of your business life, and then take the time to achieve absolute clarity in several different areas.

1. A Vision

Begin with your vision.

• What is your vision for you?
• What is your vision for your ideal business future?
• If you could wave a magic wand and make you or your business perfect in every way, what would it look like?

 “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

In business terms, this means that where there is no clear, positive, uplifting vision for the business, people eventually lose their enthusiasm and commitment and simply go through the motions of operating the business day by day.

You need a vision for you and your business.

2. A Mission

• What is your mission for you?
• What is your mission for your business?

A mission is always defined in terms of what you want to accomplish with your business for your customers.

3. A Measure

• A mission always contains a measure of some kind.
• Determine whether or not your mission has been completed. Adjust accordingly.

4. A Purpose

• What is your purpose for living?
• What is the purpose for your business?

The definition of purpose answers the question of “why” you are in business in the first place.

5. A Marketing and Sales Focus

Every business is essentially a marketing organization. The famous management advisor Peter Drucker says that the role of the manager is to innovate and market, because these are the only two activities that create and keep customers, and ultimately generate financial results

• Spend time daily on those activities involve marketing. Social Media Marketing   Personally and professionally businesses are gaining new customers and sales. 90% of people today are searching online for products, services and reviews. You must have a presence, or risk falling behind your competition.
• Think daily what could I do to make my products and services more attractive to more customers.
• Develop Positive Habits.

Develop the habit of moving quickly on opportunities or problems, and of doing things quickly that satisfy your customers. Large companies tend to move more slowly, but entrepreneurs have the advantage of speed. Today in our society, time is a critical element of decision making in buying any product or service. The faster you can serve your customers, the more valuable and attractive they will consider you to be.

What are some other key’s you have found to add clarity to your life or you professional career?

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Blair Evan Ball

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14 Social Media Marketing Tools 

1. HootSuite — A way to manage your social networks all in one place.
2. Google Keep – New note-taking service
3. SlideShare – Now owned by LinkedIn, has 60+ million users per month. Offers users the ability to upload and share publicly or privately PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Adobe PDF Portfolios.
4. Pocket – Put articles, videos or pretty much anything into Pocket. You can save and tag content from anywhere (your smartphone, tablet or computer) to your Pocket account. Save directly from your browser or from apps like Twitter, Flipboard, Pulse and Zite.
5. Bit.ly – Do more with your links. The new way to bookmark, organize, and share the things you care about online.
6. Buffer – Be awesome on social media. Easily add great articles, pictures and videos to your Buffer and we automatically share them for you through the day!
7. Wufoo’s - HTML form builder helps you create online web forms. Use our web form creator to power your contact forms, online surveys, and event registrations.
8. PopupDomination – Get 500% More Email Subscribers: Right Now
9. Scoopit – Share ideas that matter on beautiful topic pages. Cut through the noise on Social Media.
10. Tweetbot - is a Twitter app that allows you to do everything you can do on any other Twitter app with an extra killer feature: the ability to filter out tweets.
11. Video SEO for WordPress Plugin - It will index the videos you embed on your site for you.
12. Feedly – With Google Reader going away July 1st, this is a good alternative. The better way to organize, read and share the content of your favorite sites.
13. AudioAcrobat – is easiest way to stream audio. Produce and publish great audio to your Web site and emails. Create your own online radio show.
14. MailVU – allows users to send free video email with self destruct feature. Get a free account. Record up to 10 minutes and play on iPhone, Android and other smart phones.

What other Social Media tools have you found helpful in your business?

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   Today the rules have changed.

SPEED RULES

Gone are the days of resting on our laurels.

The traditional PR model-sticking closely to a preset script and campaign timeline-no longer works the way it used to. Public discourse now moves so fast and so dynamically that all it takes is a single afternoon to blast the wheels off someone’s laboriously crafted narrative.

Enter Newsjacking: the process by which you inject your ideas or angles into breaking news, in real-time, in order to generate media coverage for yourself or your business.

So if you are seeking to to further your own brand, personally or professionally, then newsjacking might be the way to change the game.

Be cautious though about what news you want associated with your brand.

It creates a level playing field-literally anyone can newsjack-but, that new level favors players who are…

• Observant of what is going on daily.
• Quick and Nimble to react.
• Skilled at communicating, using the right Social Media Platforms.

It’s a powerful tool that can be used to throw off your competition or simply ride the coattails off the news momentum to further your own ends.

The old traditional “outbound” approach – sending a press release or PR pitch to hundreds of journalists via email doesn’t work so well in a world of instant communications.

The new way to reach members of the media uses the NEW “inbound” PR – creating content that journalists are looking for as they write breaking news stories. This technique of Newsjacking,  I believe was coined by the speaker/author David Meerman Scott. He has written an e-book called Newsjacking sold on Amazon.

So How do you Find Your Own News

You need to set a regime of monitoring media daily through the following:

• Blogs
• Influential people you follow
• Journalists
• Trade Publications
• Local Businesses
• Local Associations
• Local News
• RSS feeds
• Business Journals
• Social Media channels like Twitter

I’m a big fan of Twitter and it’s powerful way to stay on top of breaking news. Use Twitter monitoring tools like Hootsuite which I use. Others use Tweetdeck, however set them up to monitor key phrases that relate to your business.

Here’s a great graphic by David Meerman Scott about “How to Newsjack.”

 What ideas do you have around Newsjacking?

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