$500 Qassia dollars

http://awios.qassia.com/ – For a brief 12-hour period after joining Qassia, you get no less than $500 Qassia dollars per referral (the standard referral commission is $100).

Qassia Mission

The objective of this site is to allow website owners and webmasters to efficiently promote their web sites. Those promoting their websites on Qassia are rewarded with traffic and exposure for their websites in our web directory. The ultimate goal of this site is to obviate the need for link exchanges or submissions to web directories during the SEO (search engine optimization) process, and to instead focus website promotion activity on the development of original content.

What are your Big Five For Life?

Have you ever had the experience of suddenly having a new insight into something?

It could be during a heated conversation when you suddenly understand where the other person is coming from (and why they’re mad…) or sometimes you can ‘have the lights turned on’ when you’re listening to a particularly talented speaker.

It only took 15 pages into The Big Five for Life by John Strelecky for me to hit on a new way of looking at something.  This is a book that’s billed as a story about the greatest business leader to ever live and the ’secret’ to his success.  It’s not a typical business book by any stretch, but there are a lot of ideas that a business owner could use to increase their success.

One of the things that I love about what I’m doing now is that I need to read a lot of books, specifically business books.

• Many of them are extremely insightful and about as much fun to read as a statistics textbook.
• Many of them are painful to read and not very insightful.
• A very few of them are both enjoyable to read and leave you with great ideas.

The Big Five For Life belongs in that last category – read on to find out why!

Leadership Versus Management

There are literally hundreds of books on leadership and on management and probably a few hundred more on either the combination of the two traits or the differences between them.

My definition:  Leadership is about the ability to inspire others towards a goal or a vision, while management is about the skills to make sure that goal or vision can be reached.

So with that in mind, a major part of leadership is being able to develop, communicate and inspire people with a vision – or a Purpose For Existence, which is one of the key points out of this book.

Every business should have a clearly defined, simple Purpose for Existence (PFE) and if that business wants to be successful, then it should ONLY employ people that share that Purpose for Existence in their own life.

It’s not a new or unique idea, but it’s also one that’s not commonly practiced.  The author makes a very compelling business case for why it’s important and how it can drive profits and growth up by 20% or more (statistics and good ideas…!).

Other key insights

There are probably a dozen key things I took away from this book – some of them reinforcing things that I already believed (but stating them in a new and different way) and some of them really challenging my experience with how things are done – especially in the corporate world.

As an example, you don’t have to look very hard to find someone that will agree that their company’s success is due to the people that work at that company, but how many business leaders actually develop a culture that rewards and enables those employees to achieve their own life goals?  (The Big Five for Life are the Five things that would make your life complete).

Imagine a company where:

• The employees love to work there
• They believe in what the company is doing and buy into the bigger picture (PFE)
• The company leadership incorporates the employees into solutions
• The company purposefully helps employees achieve their personal goals

What kind of productivity can you get from people that love what they’re doing and who they’re doing it with?  How much harder do you work on a pet project or hobby at home than you would for just a mundane work effort?  How much likely are you to stay on with that company in the long run?  It’s not about making people happy, but about the bottom line – about profits!

How would you go about creating that kind of company?

There are also some great ideas on increasing profitability, how to determine if it’s worthwhile to invest money in certain projects, ideas on how to grow your business beyond the initial business – the story narrative makes it easy to demonstrate a lot of these ideas in more of a real world setting.

Downside to the book?

As you can tell, I got a lot of positive things out of the book, but I did come away with sort of a wistful feeling that it wasn’t about the real world.  Although there obviously are excellent companies out there, there are unfortunately not very many of them that could really create what’s described here.  In other words, actually putting all of these ideas to work seems like it would require the World’s Greatest Business Leader to pull it off.

Having said that, if you could get inspired and use even a couple of these ideas, you would be well ahead of the majority of businesses out there.

What was the insight I had on page 15?

It’s an early discussion the primary character has with the business leader on why it’s important to not only do what you want to be doing, but to be doing it NOW (not some later point).

The average person lives 28,200 days (about 77 years).

Imagine a history museum of your life, your 28,200 days with a display for every day of your life.  Would your museum show you doing things that were meaningful to you, things that you enjoyed and loved…or would 80% of your museum show you being miserable at work, hitting your head against the wall, generally hating life?

Powerful thought – isn’t it?

It was that clarification of the sense of urgency that we all feel at some point that made me stop reading and go ‘whoa’…!

Check this book out and share your comments here – I’d love to hear your thoughts about this and have someone to discuss it with.

Shawn Kinkade  www.aspirekc.com

What are your guiding principles?

photo by MumbleyJoe

Business Developers

Stand
In the place where you live
Now face north
Think about direction
Wonder why you haven’t before
Now stand
In the place where you work
Now face west
Think about the place where you live
Wonder why you haven’t before

REM – Stand

I had an interesting discussion today where the question was asked to me:

“If you could make $100,000 a year just for giving this type of presentation 5 times a week – would you be interested?”

(As a side note, this type of presentation was a reference to a network marketing type of product – I didn’t get all of the details, but it looked cleaner than some, but ultimately involved selling to friends, acquaintances and contacts).

Have you ever thought about what you do for a living and the money you make?

Just a guess, but if you’re like most people, you’ve at least considered it.

What would your answer to that question be?

Before I answered, I gave it some thought and…wait, I should back up just a bit and give some background…

What do you want to do?

I have probably spent more time on the topic of ‘What do you want to do with your life’ than most people.

By the way – great book on this topic is What Should I Do with My Life by Po Bronson.  He does a fascinating review of hundreds of people that have made significant life changes and presents dozens of them as individual case studies on how people have approached this issue and what their outcomes were.

The coolest part of the book is that although you can draw some broad conclusions, there’s more than enough diverse material to inspire lots of great discussions and thoughts.  It would have been much easier to lead to a simple conclusion (i.e. do what you love and the money will follow) but this paints a much more complete and realistic picture.

Anyway – as I was saying, I’ve given this a lot of thought in the last 4 or 5 years and although I haven’t reached any amazing epiphanies (one of the coolest words ever…!) or really even reached solid conclusions on what I should be doing, I have discovered a few guiding principles that I think are pretty important:

1.  Be yourself.

I’m sure this doesn’t qualify as groundbreaking news, but it is an important lesson that I wish I had really applied earlier in life.  I spent a fair amount of time doing things because I felt like I needed to chase an arbitrary definition of a career.

Don’t do that – figure out what’s important to you as a person and then figure out how to reflect that priority in what you do.  It’s about you, not your parents, your family, your friends, it has to be about you.

2.  Spend time with people you enjoy and that can help you grow.

I don’t think that I can overstate how important this is.

Life is way too short to spend any of it with people that bring you down.  People can do amazing things if they believe they can do amazing things – the importance of a positive mindset, some confidence and a little help along the way can make a huge difference.

If you suspect that you’re hanging out with people that are negative, try a new crowd for a while and see if your perspective improves.  If it’s you that’s negative, find some books, join some groups do something to get past that, because it’s poison.

3.  It’s never about the money.

This is the one that I really screwed up on.  It may not be true for everyone, but for me I’ve learned the hard way that it can’t be about the money.

As soon as it’s about the money, then everything else is going to fall by the wayside.  I’m not saying that money isn’t important, I’m saying that it can be the overriding reason for doing what you do.

Having said that, I know a lot of people that are content to get their time in and save their interests and passions for the weekends.  I did that for quite a while and it didn’t work for me.

So what would you say?

Back to the question at hand – I thought about it very briefly and answered “No. -  I wouldn’t be interested, even if the money was great and this really was a legitimate opportunity.”

For where I’m at now, it’s more important to find something I can get excited about.  Yes I want to make money but the primary driver is doing something I believe in – and although I don’t have it all figured out just yet, I truly enjoy helping people grow their business and be more successful.

I think for most successful business owners, there has to be an element of interest / desire / passion lighting the way for where they want to go.  The hours are too long, the work is too hard if you don’t have some sort of guiding principle to keep you moving forward.

Could you trade that in for a steady paycheck and a lot less interesting (and less stressful) work?  Understandably it happens all the time.

What would you do if you were offered a job doing something uninspiring but paid well?  Share your thoughts here – I’d love to hear them.

Shawn Kinkade    www.aspirekc.com

Simple Trick to Train Your Rabbit

http://epetsworld.blogspot.com/

Do you want to train your rabbit to do a simple and easy trick? This article is going to show you exactly how to get your rabbit to spin in a circle on command.

Spin in a circle!

This is a really fun trick to show to others. It gets laughs every time I show it to people. And it’s not too difficult to teach your bunny.

What you’ll need:
*Your rabbits favorite treat
*2 Servings of Patience

Okay! Ready? Let’s begin!

The first thing you are going to need to do is get your rabbit into an ideal environment. Be sure there are no distractions.

Distractions will only make it harder to teach your rabbit. Rabbits are very sensitive to smells so be sure not to spray perfume and such.

Step 1
The first step is going to be easy. Show your rabbit the treat.

Step 2
After showing your rabbit the treat, start spinning it around your rabbit. Your rabbit will be confused at first. When your rabbit successfully follows your hand spinning around, give your rabbit the treat.

This is the beginning of training your rabbit to do the trick.

Step 3
Continue to have your rabbit follow you around spinning.

Step 4
Now, remove the treat and see if your rabbit spins. Do the motion of spinning but don’t have the treat in your hand. If your rabbit doesn’t do the trick, don’t reward him.

Step 5
The key to having your rabbit do this constantly is a special psychological tactic. That’s basically it!

By Frank Hazen

Excellent Firefox Plugins/ Add-ons for SEO & Webmasters

http://soft-911.net

Which browser do you use? Which is the best browser? These are some of the common question which many people asked me.

Well as a SEO specialist my answer is very obvious…”FIREFOX” , though all browsers are important for graphic & web designers as they have to check their design, work & functionality on each & every browser. They have to check the compatibility of the site on each.

Anyways..I really like FireFox because it has many great Plugings that makes my work easy & helps in quick SEO analysis.
If you are an expert or just starting to learn SEO, these Firefox plugins are great. I use the majority of these SEO Firefox plugins on a daily basis, if not more often.
Here’s a listing of the best plugins available for SEO work:

Mahalo Share: Share and recommend Web pages across many different services; recommend a link once and have it automatically posted to any of Twitter, del.icio.us, MySpace, Ma.gnolia, Jaiku, your Tumblr blog, Facebook, Pownce, StumbleUpon, Mahalo, Faves, or Google Bookmarks.

Clipmarks: Your clips are saved on clipmarks.com and can easily be syndicated to FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook or other sites. You can also post anything you clip directly to your blog (supports WordPress, Blogger, Typepad and more) or send it directly to friends or co-workers via email. Your clip collection is accessible from any computer with an internet connection, including your iPhone, Blackberry, or other mobile device.

SeoQuake: Seoquake is a Mozilla Firefox extension aimed primarily at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. General set of parameters consists of such parameters as:

Google PR (Google PageRank of current page)

Google Index (Number of indexed pages. Google version)

Google link (Number of links, pointed to the current page. Google version (Except links from concerned domain))

And similar parameters for many other search engines (Yahoo, MNS, Yandex, Rambler, Baidu) and some other miscellaneous parameters.

LinkChecker: Check the validity of links on any webpage.

SEOpen 0.8: Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimization, including Google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more. All features are available by right-clicking on an open area of a web page, or by using the included toolbar.

Search Synchronizer 1.3.0.3: Synchronizes the firefox searchbox 16 default search engines, and the ability for you to add more!
So when you search for something from the google website, for example, the firefox searchbox shall automatically show that search. Works with:
-Google
-Yahoo
-MSN
-Ask.com
-and 12 others!

SearchStatus 1.25: Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.

RankQuest SEO Toolbar 3.9.2: RankQuest SEO(Search Engine Optimization) Toolbar provides you quick access to more than 30 intuitive SEO tools. Alexa Rank and Page Rank provided by Alexa and Google respectively ensure the popularity of the site. Once you download and install the SEO Toolbar you are only one or two clicks away from carrying out most of your day to day SEO operations.

FireFTP 0.99.1: FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.

About This Site 1.1: One-click access to web site metadata – traffic, related and linked pages, and more – added to the Tools menu and context menu.

Page validator 0.3.3: Validates a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service. This is a simple extension that will work only for online pages.

SEO Link Analysis 1.0.3: Adds display of PageRank, linktext and nofollow links to external links in Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft Webmaster Portal

Google Global 2.0.1: Google Global allows users to see organic and paid Google search results as they appear in different countries, cities, regions, ZIP codes and IP addresses.

Google Pagerank Status 0.9.3: Display the google pagerank in your browser’s status bar.

Web Developer 1.1.6: Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

StumbleUpon 3.23: With StumbleUpon you can also connect with friends and share your discoveries, meet people that have similar interests, and check out what other people are discovering.

Bookmark Duplicate Detector 0.6.4: Detects Duplicate Bookmarks when bookmarks are added and specify where the previous URL is. You can also search and delete duplicates URL already in your Bookmarks.

del.icio.us Complete 1.3: del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.

This extension is not only a sidebar it provides an excellent post dialog as well.
Social Media for Firefox : A submission on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or Delicious is sometimes a good candidate for submission to the others. This add-on makes saves you the time of checking if an item has already been submitted by showing vote counts right on the home pages of these social bookmarking sites.

In addition, vote counts are shown in the Firefox status bar as you move from page to page again saving you the trouble of going through the bookmarking process if someone has beat you to it.

Compete.com: The Compete Toolbar automatically creates three alerts for every web site you visit:

Trust Scores: help you experience a safer web by warning you of potentially malicious (spyware, phishing) web sites

Site Profiles: tell you how popular the web site is, its rank, and how fast it is growing

Deal Light: automatically lights up if there are any special promotions or coupons that can save you money on the web site.

I am sure these plugins will increase your SEO efficiency.

Petiquette for Summer Entertaining

Humans are not the only ones who look forward to summer. Imagine warm weather from your pet’s perspective – long walks in parks full of green grass and interesting aromas for dogs, and hours of bird-watching from a sunny window for cats. It’s also fun for pets to be part of the festivities when their human “parents” do some summer entertaining. However the definition of a party for a furry friend is very different from that of its care takers.

How do you include the furry members of the family into summer entertaining without turning a backyard barbecue into a doggie food free-for-all or the evening dinner party into a feline hissy fit? By carefully planning and managing your pet’s interactions with guests and preparing for the big day, it is possible to keep Fluffy or Fido an enjoyable part of your celebration, says Charlotte Reed, pet care expert and author of “The Miss Fido Manners Complete Book of Dog Etiquette”.

“Petiquette for summer entertaining is a fine balancing act, but one that offers significant rewards for you and your pets,” Reed says. “Your guests can enjoy the presence of a well-behaved pet and a fresh, odor-free home.”

Here are Reed’s tips for making summer entertaining as enjoyable as possible for your pets and your guests:

1. Make your pets’ presence known.

While most summer guests will likely know your pet status, some may not, especially if they are recent acquaintances or first-time visitors to your home. Be sure to alert guests to what type of pets you have at home at the time you invite them to visit. From strong allergies to pet hair aversions, there are many reasons why guests may want to know ahead of time what furry friends will be at the party.

2. Freshen and clean.

Bathe and groom your pet before the summer party. “It’s very common for pet owners to become so used to their pet’s aromas that they don’t even notice them anymore,” Reed says. “But your guests likely will, especially when they come into your home from fun in the sun outdoors.”

In addition to helping your pet clean up, be sure to freshen your home as well. Vacuum carpets, fabric upholstery and drapes just a few hours before guests arrive. Use a pet odor elimination product, like Febreze Air Effects Pet Odor Eliminator, to remove pet odors from the air. “Avoid products that simply cover up pet odors with stronger scents. Febreze actually eliminates pet odor and replaces it with a light, refreshing scent,” Reed says.

3. The ABCs of introductions and interaction.

First impressions mean a lot. “If your dog jumps up on people every time he meets them, he won’t be giving a good impression,” Reed says. If your dog has a tendency to jump, work with him for several weeks before the party to train him to sit and lay. As guests arrive, keep your pet on a leash and personally introduce him to each new guest. Encourage guests to interact with him calmly and firmly so that he doesn’t forget his manners in the excitement of meeting someone new.

Likewise, if your pet is simply not that social, don’t force her to interact with guests. Allow cats to retreat to their favorite hiding spot – few felines are into the party scene. And if your dog seems stressed by the attention and action, allow him some quiet time in a private place. “There’s no point in forcing your pet to interact with your guests if he or she doesn’t want to,” Reed says.

4. Fend off food fights.

Food discipline should start long before the party, Reed advises. “You may think your dog’s begging eyes are adorable and irresistible, but few things are more unappetizing to house guests than a pet begging for food,” she says. Train your pet not to beg at the table. And if he or she simply can’t break the habit, then confine him to quarters when the food is served.

Discourage guests from feeding pets tidbits or table treats. “The last thing you want is a pet with an upset stomach because he ate too much human food,” Reed says.

Febreze Air Effects Pet Odor Eliminator is available in grocery and drug stores nationwide. To learn more, visit www.febreze.com.

Courtesy of ARAcontent