Hope you're having a great weekend!  I spent the day at a cyclocross event with my daughter.  For those of you not familiar with the sport, it is basically riding your bike through the mud, snow, and over and around obstacles.  The goal of any competition is to generally complete as many loops of the course as you can in the time alloted.  It's a crazy sport and my daughter is a crazy kid – fun though!

Anyway, onto the writing and marketing stuff….

Last week we talked a bit about 5 things you absolutely must have if you want your e-zine to be successful and I promised that there were a few more.  Here they are:

1.  Forward to a friend. 

This is a feature that publishers generally don't think much about but it can have great importance, especially if you offer an informative newsletter!  Don't just place your forward to a friend at the bottom of your newsletter as an afterthought, purposefully ask your readers to spread the word.  They like you and they'll do it. A simple message consistently included in each and every newsletter, preferably in the same place each time, that encourages recipients to  forward your newsletter to friends, family, and colleagues is all you need.  Word of mouth advertising is the best kind and any newsletter forwarded is great word of mouth advertising!

2.  Don't forget to link to your website, at least once.

Believe it or not, patio chair cushions can really help the bottom line for a business. And you can even use an analogy to how well chosen cushions can give you a leg up.

This may not be the strongest analogy in the world, but let's give it a shot…

When you go to an outdoor cafe or even some indoor restaurants, you sometimes think you are being tortured as customer. Why is that? Because the chairs are so darn uncomfortable!

Either the food should be really good, or you have to wonder if you will ever go back there again.

I'm a big advocate of spending time on things that are worth your time. That can be hard to do, since it seems easier just to do things ourselves rather than hire someone to do it for us. This is where mapping out the processes in your business can really pay off.

By knowing what you actually spend your time on during the day on a regular basis, you can hire and train someone to do that task for you. This doesn't have to be someone that comes into your office either. Nor does it have to be someone overseas. There are plenty of people who work from home that could take over some regular tasks for you.

These kinds of things run from answering the phone and processing customer orders to writing content for your web sites. Don't think you can afford it? Then check out the following article…

The web site took forever to load. When it did load, it looked awful. The revenue model appeared incomprehensible.

This was my first impression of MySpace.

Now MySpace is one of the most visted web sites on the internet.

I still think the site looks awful. But now at least I see how they make money.

Do you think that maybe "MySpace" had some growth issues when they got started? Did they have everything tweaked just perfectly on the first to maximize their popularity and revenue?

Of course not.

They had to work on it and get the bugs out. As network marketer (or "affiliate with leverage" as I like to think of it) you will likely run into problems you have little direct control over. Things like what the company's web site looks like or how fast it loads.

In this situation you can do two things: quit and miss out on a great opportunity; or work through the inevitable kinks and make the most effective business you can.

So, which is it?

Not so much of a recap this week, as a reminder for progress in your business. As long as you follow a process that you know produces the results you want, then the real secret is to keep working the process, even though some days it feels like you're not making progress.

How do you know if a process works? You need to trust your business coach, your upline, or whoever has developed the process you're following. This may even be yourself.

This video does not go into a lot of specifics, as it's really just an overview. There are a lot of things that we could drill further into, so let me know what you want more of! Just leave a comment on the blog and that will guide future video content. Have fun!

Working out of a home office can be an isolating experience. Certain personalities just can't handle it, while other do just fine. Personally, the transition from busy cubicle life with all the background noise and distractions to the relative quiet of the office in my home was pretty nice.

The situation has changed a bit with my additional role as a stay-at-home dad, but there's still a limited amount of personal contact with the "outside" world – and a definite lack of office colleagues. Except for my son of course, who at nearly 11 months of age has definite opinions how I should run my business. I'm just having challenges interpreting his advice.

There's quite a bit of buzz going around the internet marketing groups about tapping into the online social networks to promote our products and services. As with anything else, there are a good ways and bad ways to go about this. Since I want to go about it the "right" way, which provides real value to those networks, I've been doing some ongoing research on how best to do that.

I came across a post on conscientious marketing which doesn't really address the topic I was looking into, but it did make a point that stuck with me.

The delicate balance to achieve is to find a way to relate the positive experiences and benefits of the products without really getting in people's faces. What is the best route for "socially responsible marketing"?

Having been a student of network marketing and it's methods for years, I have seen, heard or read about many of the ups and downs in the industry. Right now we are in an interesting time where we see some major ups and downs simultaneously.

I'll get a couple of the downs out of the way right now:

Even though I do a lot of research and reading about network marketing and internet marketing, I still enjoy keeping up with engineering and technology. Just recently I was surprised to read in my IEEE Spectrum (the flagship magazine for the worldwide electrical and electronics engineering organization) a short article about engineers being recommended to start their own business.

The surprising part wasn't that engineers are striking out on thier own, that's actually not all that unusual. What caught my attention was that the article in this magazine was actually recommending starting a home business, rather than taking the more traditional route of raising capital, opening an office, hiring staff, managing clients, etc. The article gives a lot of good reasons on why this is a good idea.