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Gong Xi Fa Cai – Happy New Year

February 14, 2010 | No comments

Happy New Year!

February 14 is not only Valentine’s Day, a celebration of love and joy, but this year, it is also the date of Chinese New Year (or Spring Festival). The year of the white metal tiger, by the Chinese calendar, year 4708 brings an urging to be decisive and to take action.

With that in mind, I’m offering a New Year’s Special!

From February 14 till February 28, the last day of the New Year Celebration, I’m offering 2 hours of private, focused 1 on 1 coaching for the price of 1! That’s a savings of $150!

Contact me now to schedule your spot. I only have room for 5 people at this price. This is the time to take that step you said you were going to take January 1. Find your dreams, let’s make them happen together!

5 Questions To Ask Customers, Partners and Yourself

February 11, 2010 | No comments

Inspired by John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing’s post, 5 Questions You Should Ask Every Customer, and a contest post at Tungle, it made me think. I’d really like your comments.

1. What made you decide to start following Living A Created Life?

2. What’s one thing we do better than any other site  out there?

3. What’s one thing we could do to create a better experience for you?

4. Do you refer Created Life Strategies to others? If yes, why?

5. What would you Google to find a site like Created Life Strategies?

Not only are these good to ask your customers, (and I would really love it if you would comment to answer them for me), but these questions are also good to ask of yourself, your friends and your relationships!

1. What made you choose to start a relationship with me?

2. What’s one thing I do better than any other site  out there?

3. What’s one thing I can do to create a better experience for you?

4. Do you positively talk about me to others? If yes, why? What do you say?

5. What things would you do to find someone like me?

I mentioned in my Laws for Success #6, Ask, Ask, Ask that it’s really important to ask questions. How else are you going to know what other people are thinking? I know I’m personally still working on that mindreading thing, but have not perfected it yet, so I always like to ask questions.

Let me know your thoughts about this site, about the people you asked the questions of, or just anything you want to share with us.

Thanks, I really would like your feedback.

That Thing In Your Hand Is A Phone

February 8, 2010 | No comments

With all the technology advances and the “latest toys” being touted everywhere, the telephone has become everything to many. It’s a camera, a music player, a web browser, a connection to social networking sites, a portable file cabinet for information, and all sorts of other applications. But here’s the thing — underneath all the fun stuff added on, it’s still a communication device to use for one on one personal contact!
With all the pressures of Social Networking — Facebook, Linked In, Biznik, Ning, Xing, Twitter, Plurk, and more than I can list here, how many times do you just pick up the phone and call someone to touch base and tell them you’d like their business?

For years it was the only way to do that, now it’s foreign to many. I have one client who tells me that although they MUST have the latest and greatest phone out there, they never make any calls on it. They wouldn’t know where to start if they had to talk to someone on the phone! Have we lost that skill?

Oh, and another thing to think about – with all the phone services offering free national calling, do we still need 800 numbers? They cost us for every minute used. A few years ago, they were required as a business tool but now seem pretty superfluous and an earmark of a bygone era. What do you think?

Need to know versus reply to all

February 6, 2010 | No comments

Help stamp out “Reply To All”. I’ve been reading a number of articles lately about this subject. This has long been a closely held belief of my own. It wastes time, bandwidth and frustrates the heck out of the receiver when there’s no need for it.

The latest is a video by Tim Sanders from Yahoo who says,

The more inexperienced you are on email or the more senior you are at a company the more likely you are to use “reply to all” to reply to every email you get including ones from one person in the first place!

Replying to all has been a dangerous practice for many years as has blatant forwarding. How many times have you received an email that has been forwarded to you and it contains every email address from everyone who has ever seen it as you scroll down to find the original message? This is a spam goldmine, folks! Not only that, but back in the early days of email (waaaaaaay back in the late ’80’s) I remember reading an article about a really cool way to build your list – just add a “bcc” to yourself onto an email that has an intriguing story, offer, ad or picture, and you will be forwarded on along and receive any and all addresses that the other people send your original message to.

Believe it or not!

Now, this particular function in email has been outlawed, though, if you can read through the original headers to your emails, (in some programs it’s called show full headers”) you can occasionally still  see where an email has been as well as where it hopes to go.

Another blogger, Jake Kuramoto on AppsLab,  says

So, today, my inbox was choked with about 30 messages all in the same thread. It was one of those ironic spam threads where at least 75% of the replies were unsubs or stern reminders not to reply to all, some of them in all caps, sent of course, to the whole list.

As far as I’m concerned, receiving emails that do not require action on my part or teach me something is a waste of my time. I average 400 emails a day as it is that I need to stay on top of. I’d much rather receive a couple of lines updating me on the final result of a conversation than all the chatter along the way.

So the next time you’re tempted to hit the “reply to all” button on your email program, think twice and resist the urge!

Firefox 3.6 launched – finally our loyalty rewarded

January 14, 2010 | No comments

If any of you are fans of Mozilla’s Firefox browser (I most certainly am), the upgrade we’ve been waiting for is just around the corner. The beta version is out, and the final version is said to be just about ready.

The choice for many bloggers, power users, and WordPress fans, Firefox 3.6, code named Namoroka, resolves a lot of the issues many users and bloggers were having with the most recent update, and adds some fantastic features that will benefit all users.

Among the changes, according to Mozilla’s site are:

Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate is built on Mozilla’s Gecko 1.9.2 web rendering platform, which has been under development for several months and contains many improvements for web developers, Add-on developers and users. This version is also faster and more responsive than previous versions, and has been optimized to run on small device operating systems such as Windows CE and Maemo.

Developers can find out about all the changes and new features at the Mozilla Developer Center.

The final release of this version is due out in a few more days, but I just had to download the beta.

One of the things I really liked about installing/upgrading to the new version was the communication available. It stopped and let me know which add-ons probably wouldn’t work before it installed the upgrade. This is different from the last two updates and I liked it. Not only that, but I didn’t need an IT professional standing over my shoulder or a how-to document the size of the Los Angeles phonebook to do it. Super easy, two clicks, anyone can do this.

I’m also thrilled with the Personas option they’ve added. Not that this is an option critical to the running of the browser, but I’m really happy to find a way to skin the browser to reflect me and my tastes. The only downside I found was that with some of the gorgeous designs available, you can’t read the rest of the stuff on your browser bar, so you have to be careful which one you use.

Mozilla also has released a new version of Thunderbird. So far the jury’s still out on that one. I’m still exploring the changes.

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