As a spiritually-minded home business woman I am aware that we create our own reality and that everything that we see in the material world had its genesis first in the mind as a thought. I understand that intellectually, but lately I have been going back and forth with a client of mine who is a spiritual teacher about getting things done. She is an intuitive who reads energy with startling accuracy. Her approach to life and business is that she only wants to do those things that are all ease, joy and glory for her.

Conversely, I come from a long line of nose-to-the-grindstone, hard working, high-achieving women. I have so many ideas, I’ve got a ton of energy and enthusiasm and I enjoy my work. Because I work at home, lately the lines between work and home life have become blurred and I admit to have been overdoing it a bit in the work department.

So she and I have been going back and forth essentially about doing verses being. She revels in being the space and channeling source energy and all of that ‘woo woo’ stuff, while I figure if I sit around all day in the lotus position being the space they will come and take my car and my furniture away!

But there is a happy medium, and it’s called taking inspired action. Inspired action flows from an open, receptive mind that is centered and grounded and tuned in to Source energy. Inspired action flows from a mind that is open to all of the infinite possibilities.

When you are taking inspired action you feel good–almost orgasmic and you get into ‘the zone’ or you feel like you’re in ‘the flow’ of life and your true greatness is really able to shine through.

Inspired action is not plowing ahead, to-do list in hand, with a furrowed brow and sleeves rolled up. It’s not doing what you think you should do, have to do, or need to do. Many of those things are simply things that we have been trained into believing that we should do in order to get results. Well, don’t ’should’ on yourself any longer.

Working hard, plowing ahead and burning the midnight oil puts you in a place of stress and gives you a knot in the pit of your tummy. Success does not come at the price of ulcers and exhaustion.

Now I am learning to lighten up. I have discovered that taking time out to meditate in the middle of the day actually gives me more energy and brings clarity to my day. Being open and remaining in question about all of the infinite possibilities available to me on a given day helps to keep my perspective as broad as possible.

When I see what’s ahead with my ego-centered, finite eyes, my instinct is to attack the obstacles that stand between where I am and where I want to be with an axe. But when I take a moment and open myself up to the infinite possibilities, the Universe, which sees all, can guide me and inspire me to maybe make one phone call or respond to one email that will crumble those obstacles with minimal effort.

I am a control-freak perfectionist, so the thought of not marching forth to “git ‘er done,” each day makes me break out in hives, but I am learning now to slow it down, breathe and be open to the infinite possibilities. You should try it. Inspired action feels absolutely yummy, and you’ll accomplish far more almost effortlessly.

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Your opt-in email list is the nerve center of your online business. Whether you are a blogger, an affiliate marketer or a freelance online content producer like me, you must build your own contact list of prospective customers if you have not already done so.

But it’s not enough to just gather up those emails and sit on them like they are going to hatch. Each one of those emails is your direct contact with a person who has visited your website, seen what you had to offer and liked it enough to give up their contact information. They have agreed to continue to receive emails from you, so go ahead and communicate with them.

Your list is only valuable to you when you foster a warm relationship with them. Take off your ’sales’ hat and put on your, ‘getting to know you’ hat. If you want to be able to send promotional offers you must first create a mutually beneficial relationship with them by providing value.

This afternoon I joined a fabulous webinar put on by Janet Legere, who was talking about, How To Write Auto-Responder Letters. Here are a few tips that I learned from her on this content-rich webinar:

Your goal is to get your opt-in members to begin to know, like and trust you more, so be real, be authentic and engaging with them.

Janet and her husband Don do these free training webinars at noon on Saturdays, so I recommend that you scoot on over to her blog, http://janetlegere.com, right now and sign up for her email list so that you can get a link to sign up for her next webinar.

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An important key to successful online marketing is to keep in mind that, despite what your mother always told you, it really is all about you. In order to rise above the sheer volume, and the noise of the marketplace, you must find an effective way to communicate to the world–or at least to your target market–what valuable solution you provide.

But in order for the world or your market to get how valuable and just plain awesome you are, you’ve got to believe it yourself. You’ve heard it said countless times that everything is energy. You radiate energy that vibrates at a particular level. If you are confident, secure and full of joy you are radiating at a higher level, and as that famous Law of Attraction states, you will attract others to you who are vibrating at a compatible level.

Everything you do, and everyting you create and put out into the world is totally infused with your energy. Therefore, your clients and customers are either drawn to your energy or they are not drawn to it. This is important to keep in mind when you are doing Internet marketing online because if you are not getting the results you desire, you might take a step back and look at your energy and your vibration.

Are you up and eager and excited, or are you feeling down, desperate and frustrated? You can have the most beautiful, visually appealing website with fabulous copy, but if you are not coming from a place of being confident in your value, your contribution and your unique gifts that energy will keep your ideal clients away.

Remember that you are the sparkle that draws traffic, customers and clients to you. What are you doing to make your visitors enjoy their visit to your website or blog? How are you making it fun for your customers and clients to do business with you?

Successful online marketing begins and ends with you. Be radiant. Be passionate, heck, be freaking awesome and take the necessary, consistent, bold action steps and watch your website begin to sizzle.

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With thousands of journalists having lost their jobs as the global economy as a whole and the publishing industry in particular under go major shifts, many writers are turning to Freelance writing as a way to earn a living. But one of the challenges of making your income by providing a service is that when you are not doing client work you are not getting paid. The nature of the service business is that there will be lean times when you don’t get enough assignments from clients, and other times when it seems like you might need to sub-contract out some of your work.

For those freelancers who are striving to find a way to be free of the tyranny of trading time for dollars there are many opportunities on the Internet to create additional passive income streams that can generate income for you while you pursue the work you love. Eventually, you may be able to build these income streams to the point where you can actually work less and enjoy life more without losing income. Let’s take a look at three options:

Create Niche websites
Choose a topic that you are knowledgeable about and passionate about and create a blog on that topic. Do some research to narrow down some core keywords and focus your content on those keywords. Create a rich variety of content including video that goes deep within your narrowly defined niche. For example, rather than writing about womens shoes, you might choose a few specific designers, or styles to cover.

In between client assignments you can create content for your own site. As your following grows you can start to sell advertising and generate some revenues in that way.

Creating a blog widens your exposure, helps you begin to establish a platform and can serve as an example of your work for future clients.

Create your own information products
Take your passion and knowledge about your topic and write an eBook, a video tutorial series, or a podcast. First create a valuable, informative eBook that solves a problem or supplies useful information and give it away in exchange for your visitors’ name and email address. Once they are signed up to your email list you can continue to communicate with them sharing more content and offers to buy products or services in your niche.

Sell PLR rights to your articles
Another great way to create passive income is to write up sets of articles between 450 and 550 words on a particular topic and sell Private Label Rights (PLR) to them. People buy PLR products and then re-purpose that content for their websites, blogs and information products. It saves them the time of researching and writing the content themselves and you get to do the work once and get paid every time you sell another batch of articles.

So, if you’re a freelancer who has experienced those ‘feast or famine’ days, try setting up some additional income streams to help tide you over and maybe eventually replace some of your regular income.

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I have actually had an account at Twitter.com since August of 2006. I was in Ed Dale’s famous, 30 Day Challenge, and he was raving about the potential that Twitter held for engaging with our audience, building a following and sending traffic to our blogs. However, there was one small problem. There were not enough people on Twitter yet who ‘got it,’ so, I had about a dozen followers for about six months.

Flash forward to today when I have almost 2,000 follower. I find Twitter to be a fabulous marketing tool. I get lots of traffic from it, I am able to spread the word about what I’m up to and I’ve developed a community of friends there where we chat and re-tweet each others posts.

I do not use any of those apps that auto-tweets for me, although it would save me a lot of time. I don’t spend more than about 30 minutes all together over the course of a day on Twitter. I often send some tweets in the morning and then I sprinkle them in throughout the afternoon. I check my @replies and see if any of my peeps have anything that needs re-tweeting.

In my estimation, I send about a dozen or so tweets a day, unless I am trying to get a lot of exposure for something like a webinar or teleseminar. Then I might send a few more.

So, yes, I’m a Twitter fan. I try to keep it real, and yes I tweet about what I’m cooking, what I’m eating, what I’m writing, and when I find inspirational quotes. I tweet about what’s happening in my world–for instance right now I’m a bit snowed in as we’ve received about 24″ or so of snow this weekend and I haven’t got a shovel to dig my car out. . .

My Twitter handle is: @evelynwrites. Follow me.

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I’ve been a member of a fabulous network of business women, created by LaShanda Henry, for a couple of years now. It’s called, Black Business Women Online, and this is an incredible group of powerful, driven, female entrepreneurs who are making things happen.

Earlier this week LaShanda put out a request for articles to be published in a new, free eBook called, “Get Your Business Straight: Black Business Advice from Black Business Women.” I jumped right on it and wrote up an article and submitted it. I got word today that my article was accepted, and it’s been included in the ’sneak peek’ edition that was just released today.

So, I invite you to download a FREE copy and read my article and the other articles inside. If you are a business woman, I invite you to join BBWO where you will meet a great group of professional, driven women who also happen to be a lot of fun to hang out with.

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I created this slide-show video for one of my clients using http://www.animoto.com. If you have not yet tried this website for creating beautiful slide-show presentation videos you’re totally missing out.

Please take a second and watch this video and leave a comment if you would. Thank you!

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Many of us go through an annual ritual of setting personal goals, or setting business goals at the beginning of the year. We call then New Year’s resolutions and we have every intention of realizing these goals, but somehow they end up falling off the radar screen and before you know it you’re back to your old, familiar habits.

This is nothing new, but as we begin this New Year and new decade maybe you want to try something new. Maybe this year you would actually like to achieve your goals.

The great painter, Pablo Picasso once said, “Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and
upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.”

With that being said, let’s look at some tips and strategies for taking those goals off of the paper and into your life where you can vigorously act upon them.

You can find goal setting workshops in most personal development programs; you can find free goal setting software and websites online. It does not really matter what kind of goal setting strategy you use. Once you have compiled a list of personal, spiritual and financial goals, your next step is going to be writing out why it is crucial that you achieve those goals within the specified time frame.

If you don’t convince yourself of why you must achieve those goals you will not have enough of an emotional investment in accomplishing them. Simply making a list on paper is easy to do and also easy to discard when things get challenging.

Now we are going to bring those goals into your daily life by breaking them up into small chunks and adding them to your daily to-do list or task list.

Take one of your goals that you would like to accomplish within the next six months. Let’s say you’d like to lose that last ten pounds. You will now backwards engineer your goal and break it up into tasks that you can add to your daily calendar. Here are some of the things that you might want to do in order to lose weight:

• Clear the junk foods out of your house

• Choose a weight loss program that fits your lifestyle

• Hire a weight loss coach or counselor

• Buy a weight loss journal

• Re-new your gym membership

You would make a list such as this for each of your goals and then take the time to add them to your calendar. If you’ve got an iphone or another smart phone you can download apps that will support your setting and achieving your goals. At the end of each day you will be able to tick off the things you completed and move forward those things that you were unable to complete. Keep track of your victories and celebrate when you achieve them. This will cause you to want to continue to strive towards your goals even more.

• Keep your goals where you can see them every day.

• Create a vision board

• Create a slideshow video using images that represent the achievement of your goals

• Build in rewards for when you achieve minor and major milestones.

• Be accountable to someone for your goals.

• Listen to motivational and educational programs that will encourage you to achieve your goals.

• Believe in yourself and your ability to get from where you are to where you’d like to be.

• Encourage someone else who is struggling.

So, now you have some ideas for taking your goals and putting legs on them. Pick one of these ideas and implement it right now. Interact with your goals every day until you achieve them. Focus your laser-targeted attention on your goals and they will become a reality.

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2009 was a fantastic year for me in my business. As I end this year I am taking the time to create a deliberate intention for how I plan to move my business forward in 2010. I have been using a variety of tools to accomplish this task including one of Tony Robbins’ goal setting workshops to set some global goals that cover all aspects of my life, I am using Khama Anku’s DVD program, How to Build Your Business from the Ground Up, to put the finishing touches on my new business plan, and I am using La Shanda Henry’s, Create Your 2010 Action Plan to reflect on how my business went last year and how I would like to see it grow and move to the next level in the year to come.

It’s been fascinating to look at the numbers and really see where my business saw growth and where things could use some help. I’m also updating my marketing plan to include more of the marketing strategies that worked for me and some new ideas that I’d like to try in an effort to expand my reach and my visibility online.

If you have not yet created your 2010 action plan there’s still time. You can visit, to download your free copy of Create Your 2010 Action Plan. Because I have an affiliate relationship with La Shanda Henry, if you follow this link I’ve provided and you purchase any of the other excellent products that she has available, I will receive a commission. This is just one of the ways that I generate revenue in my business.

I believe that if you want to achieve a goal, the first step is to create a plan for how you will achieve it. I applaud you on taking the first step. So, here’s to an even more exciting 2010!

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