In my experience, I would say that most Holiday lighting companies are small (2-4 employees) and only have the ability to handle a limited amount of customers each year.

Once some installation companies establish core clients after their first year, many of them don’t even market. Their business comes from previous jobs or referrals from current clients, which usually is made up of neighbors, family and friends.

Each holiday season, you will find that more calls come in than can ever be fulfilled. I have found this to be a very common complaint from Christmas lighting installers: too much business! I can’t think of any other industry that has a problem turning down customers!

During the first week of December, things get really busy any calls start pouring in. I have found myself telling people that I can’t leave my house for less than a minimum of $400. Lighting services are in such demand that people are really willing to pay an arm and a leg to have it done.

Growth is the goal and most important aspect to your new business. Be careful though because you don’t want it to grow so quickly that you find yourself overwhelmed. This will only lead to a series of problems that will have a negative impact on your business. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Only make commitments that you can keep. Never say you will do something and not follow through. Your reputation is your most valuable asset and you should protect it at all costs.

Take this business one job at a time and don’t be afraid to tell a client that you are booked.

Things tend to get very busy and there is only so much you will be able to handle on your own. It may be hard at first to turn down jobs, but be aware that there is always next year.
Keep a database of names, numbers, and email addresses. Even if you don’t get to them this year, you will be able to contact them earlier in the season next year to ensure that they become a client.

Make sure that you take down as many details as possible about your clients and contacts. Names, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, how they found you, job description, and price quote are all important to have in a database. The more organized you keep your business, the more efficient you become and the more profits you make.
You should have a good handle on your strengths and weaknesses as a worker and a business owner. If you don’t, you will soon learn them.

Owning a business will teach you a lot about yourself. By knowing your skills and what you bring to the table, you will be able to take advantage of many opportunities that will make your business as efficient as possible.

Bill Tincu makes $50,000 every holiday season by simply running his own Christmas Light Installation Business. For more information on starting a holiday lighting business, visit: Christmas-Kings.com

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Money- It’s the universal currency that all civilized human beings are familiar with. So what is money? Or precisely, How do you “see” money?

Money means differently to everyone.

It can represent power and authority.

A measurement of success or contribution.

Maybe happiness?

Perhaps, some see it as only a piece of paper and they earn it just so that they can carry on with their lives. Once it’s finished spent, they’ll work again to earn it.

Now that you KNOW what money is, consider the difference between money and wealth. Money relates to your income where else wealth is define on the assets you have and how they’re being used.

True wealth has nothing to do with how much money you have in your bank or the car you drive. It’s the sense of well-being, knowing you are ‘rich’ – it does not need to be seen by anyone but just you.

As how many people view money in different ways, power, authority, happiness and so on – some also sees it as a ‘relationship’. Clarifying your relationship with money will determine whether money’s your master or slave – who’s controling who.

So is your relationship with money is something stressful or a healthy one?

You see, if it’s giving you negative impact, no wonder you’re not striking gold. Simply because your unconscious mind will ‘prevent’ you from pain and push it away. You’ve heard about this a million time so I’m not going to write more about it.

The only way for you to know the answer is to look in the mirror and face the truth – because all of us hated or feared money at one time or another in our life.

When I was broke, money means a lot to me but that does not means I like it. Because the lack of it, I suffered ‘pain’. I was broke. But noted that I was never poor. You can take my money away and make me broke, but I will strive to stand up and play the game of money again – and win because I now know how’s the game is being played. So the only way to overcome disassociation with money is to “ACCEPT” money into your life without fear or shame.

So if you want to be financially wealthy, don’t just sit and practice ‘law of attraction’? It’s more than that.

Here’s the combination to attract money:

Right Mindset + Right Attitude + A Solid Plan + Proven Techniques + Taking Actions = $$$ Into Your Pocket

Right mindset could be how to attract money into your life.

Attitude? You can start with being patient to obtain wealth.

Solid plan will mean knowing what you want to achieve and how you’re going to get there.

Techniques are yours to choose.

Taking actions need no explanatory and this is the part that most failed.

So what does money means to you and how you make it to be on your side? Your homework for today is to know this and it’ll definitely make you become a richer person.

——————————————-
Patric Chan is an international speaker, author and the founder of The Success Trace Private Membership. Find out what are his other success strategies and get free gifts from Patric at Success Trace.

Toodles,

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If you’re ready to enter the world of blogging, you have lots of options available to you.  One is Blogger.

Blogger is a simple and easy way to get started for free.  It’s a service provided by Google and geared toward beginners.  This is a good option if you are new to the world of blogging.

Wordpress is also free and extremely flexible.  It builds your entire site for you, allows you to use or modify existing designs and lets you create as many categories as you choose.  It also integrates RSS (more on this in a moment) into your site automatically.

Another option is Movable Type.  This publishing system is the most popular business publishing platform and has many features a system such as Blogger lacks.  This is a more professional program and is a paid service.

Typepad is an alternative paid blogging service.  They host many of the world’s most popular blogs and are easy to use.

It doesn’t matter which service you choose.  The important thing is to pick one and get a blog started as soon as possible.  But unless your blog posts contain a combination of certain components, you can not and should not expect it to become a viral blog.

People simply won’t talk about blogs that bore them, so you must give people something to talk about.  You do that by keeping these five things in mind when writing your blog posts:

• Candor:  be blunt, bold and truthful. Say exactly what you mean without trying to “beat around the bush.”  When you’re honest and straightforward, people know exactly what to expect from you.  They may not always agree, but they will respect you for your frankness.
• Urgency:  be in demand NOW. Create a sense of urgency within your posts by being the first to break a news story within your niche, introduce a new product or interview an expert.  Give people a reason to visit your blog immediately.
• Timeliness:  be relevant. Keep up with the news of the day in the world, in your area and especially in your niche.  Know the current trends and use your posts to enter the conversations people are already having.  No one wants to read an outdated blog.
• Concise:  be brief and to the point. Your readers don’t have time to scroll through pages and pages of content.  They’re in a hurry AND have lots of other sites to choose from.  But if you can save them time by getting straight to your point within a few paragraphs, they’ll keep coming to you for information.
• Controversy:  be different. Challenge the status quo.  Talk about issues others in your niche are afraid to discuss.  The best way to generate traffic is to stir people’s emotions, especially when those emotions are anger and fear.

If your blog posts contain at least four of these five components, you are creating the right kind of content that has the power to attract massive traffic to your website.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Glen Hopkins is Best Selling Author, Information Marketer, Speaker, And Consultant. Glen specializes in teaching struggling entrepreneurs how to turn their small Online businesses into thriving money machines using specific systems that will allow you to work less and earn more. Get over $753.58 worth of his products for FREE.

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Do you believe that someone without any internet marketing experience can make money online in less than a week?

You see, I’m a strong believer that it’s ALWAYS important to build an internet business that can generate income– not just about making money online.

And as a matter of fact, I get annoyed when anyone asks me a question like…

“Can you teach me how to make money online in a week?”

In my mindset, its ‘hard’ to make money online for a newbie and it’ll take at least 6 weeks to get on the right track. I even think that it’s already ‘wrong’ in the first place to have that kind of silly hope.

**BUT**… I realized how I’m shutting myself and my client’s possibilities because I’m being a Smart Alec. I’m being ignorant. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to make money online without spending the time to learn and putting effort, AND wanting to see income in your Paypal within a couple of days.

It is possible and I can prove it to you. No list, no product, no JVs, no nothing.

The only concern is this– you just got to know how to differentiate a real business and the process of making money online.

An internet business is a platform to make money online. But making money online does not mean you have an internet business.

When you want to make money on the internet, there are two ways to go about it.

The first one is to build a real internet business as mentioned earlier. In this method, normally, you’ll select the niche market based on your current expertise, what you like or if it’s your hobby. The strategy for this is to dominate the sub-niche of the pursued niche market and grow it ‘deep’.

Or build an internet business based on your million-dollar idea like the next facebook.com or something.

The other one is to break the ‘rule’ of building a real business by setting up as many ‘income generators’ as you can on the internet. For instance, putting up ads to promote affiliate programs. As you can see, this is really quick because it doesn’t require any product creation or even a website.

The game for this is simple too– the more you can put up on the internet, the higher the chance of success and the richer you’ll be. The internet marketing game is very simple to play- the more ‘presence’ you can have on the internet, the more money you’ll start to see.

The good thing about this method compared to the first one is you have minimal risk and you’ll start seeing income as you go along.

BUT THERE’S A PROBLEM– you desperately need speed. If you don’t use software or hire people to do the mechanical work for you, you just can’t put up enough ‘income generators’ on the internet. My point is, forget about this option if you’re going to do manually – it’s just too much work.

But the ultimate business strategy is to combine both options.

Here’s how it works – send traffic to the affiliate program by using Google Adwords and see how many clicks you can get. In some profitable niches, you can get thousands of clicks at dirt cheap.

If this is happening, then you should start diverting these visitors to your own landing page (instead of sending the traffic directly to the affiliate program) and get them to subscribe into your list. Bam. Now you get to promote the same affiliate program to your list as many times as you want and keep on promoting other products for maximum profit.

If you’re getting good commission for a particular affiliate program and you kind of like that niche market, you can consider creating your own product to sell then.

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After marketing online for the past 5 years and spoken in 11 countries as an authority of internet marketing, Patric Chan has uncovered a proven system how you can make money online as fast as in a week or less. He used to sell The Instant Sale Secrets System for $97 but now he’s giving it away for 100% FREE!

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By Jimmy D. Brown

If I had only known, I wouldn’t have made these mistakes.  But I did.

For such a small word, “if” sure does cause a lot of problems, doesn’t it?

“If I had not turned off the alarm clock, I wouldn’t have overslept.”

“If I had paid attention to what my wife said, I would have not shrunk my 100% cotton shirt three sizes too small.”

“If I would have taken the time to fuel up, my car wouldn’t have run out of gas out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“If I had charged up the battery on my mobile phone, then I would be able to call AAA to bring me some gas out here in the middle of nowhere!”

See what I mean?

“If” is such a tiny word.

But it’s like dynamite.  It packs a lot of punch.

For me, as I teach (and learn myself!) about viral eBooks, the phrase is this:

“If I had only known, I wouldn’t have made these mistakes.”

You see, I made MANY costly mistakes in my early viral eBooks.  Mistakes that are *literally* costing me thousands of dollars in profits right now.

And there is nothing I can do to change them.

Once you set a viral eBook into motion, it’s impossible to get it back and make corrections to things ya screwed up on.

Man, if I could go back into time and change some things.

I have learned the hard way some things you DON’T want to do with viral ebooks.

That’s what we’re going to take a look at here.

I’ve made ‘em all.

You don’t have to.

Don’t do this…

1. Never use any link inside the content that you can’t control.

I learned the hard way that you should always use redirect links from your own domain when putting any kind of link inside your ebook.

For example:  most people insert their affiliate link for an affiliate offer inside the ebook that they have put together.  The one that was given to them by the affiliate program owner.

Instead, you want to link to a page at your site that refreshes and redirects the visitor to your assigned affiliate link.  Something like this… http://www.yourdomain.com/brainstorm.html

This is important so you can CHANGE the link anytime you want to in the future.

For example:  If I decided to no longer use ClickBank to handle my affiliate program and went with a different affiliate tracking link, what happens to the thousands of copies of your viral eBook that are in place with that old affiliate link in there?

They become obsolete, unusable and unprofitable.

Or, suppose you are linking to a dating service that goes out of business?  What now?

Your links are toast.  They are worthless to you.

With a redirect link you can easily adjust the target page and send the traffic to a different dating service, or to a page at your site. With a redirect link the changes are made at YOUR SITE, which you remain in control of regardless of what happens with the products and services that you linked to.

Even if you change hosts or servers, you still remain in control.

You don’t have to make changes to all of those eBooks — which would be impossible to do — you simply make a 2 minute change at your site.

I can’t tell you how many dead links are in some of my earlier ebooks that continue to give me headaches as people email me saying, “Jimmy, you’ve got a dead link here … can you give the correct link?”

It creates a lot of extra work in answering emails and certainly is throwing away potential profit for the countless people who never bother to ask for an updated link.

So, never use any link inside the content that you can’t control.

Always use redirect links.

2. Another thing is you want to avoid using dated information by providing too specific details.

Affiliate program A may not be offering that free 30 day trial offer very much longer.

The price for admission to that special site may not always be $29.95.

That site that was “just released last week” may have become an all-time classic by the time Bob reads your viral ebook two years after it was released.

You want to make certain that you stay away from information that is too specific that can easily become irrelevant.

Again, I get emails all the time griping about inconsistent prices because I put a price for the Profits Vault membership into one of my early viral ebooks and that price is no longer valid.

Hasn’t been for almost two years.

I’ve even gotten ugly emails accusing me of fraud and false advertising, with threats to turn me in to the attorney general and all kinds of nonsense.

So, be careful that you don’t date your viral ebook if you can avoid it.

3. Another no-no is to never put any information into your ebook that you don’t want all over the world.

These things travel folks and they can be global in a matter of days and certainly over time you can easily have a worldwide audience.

I made the mistake of putting my cell phone number in one of my earlier ebooks because everyone claimed that if I didn’t have my contact information in there,  no one would buy from me… which is nonsense I might add.

Anyway, I started getting all kinds of calls at all hours of the day.

What was 3:00 in the afternoon in the Philippines was 3:00 in the morning where I live.

So, it was a nuisance.

Kind of a funny story came out of it.

I disconnected that number, of course, and got a new one.  That was almost 2 years ago.

Well, about a month or so ago I had a lady email me and she was hopping mad.

Apparently, she had ordered a cellular phone and got my old number… and folks were still calling!

She told me that she was getting calls from England and all over looking for me and they were running her cellular bill up with charges.

She wanted me to do something about it and all I could do was tell her “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do”

With viral marketing, it’s pretty much unstoppable, which is why it is so effective.  It keeps spreading and it’s hard to stop the growth once it gets going.

So, never put anything into your ebook that you don’t want the world to know and  use.

4.  Another thing is this … always have your carriers do the branding.

You want to automate the process as much as possible.

Again, I learned the hard way.

Early on, before there were all of these branding tools available, I hand customized each ebook.

And as they began to spread, the customization requests grew to be way too much for me to handle.  I was spending most of my day putting together these customized viral ebooks for each new person that requested a copy.

That had to change and so now I use branding tools and branding instructions.  I give them to anyone who wants to customize the ebook and I let THEM do the work.

Keeps me out of the loop completely.

So, unless you have some specific reason to do it yourself, place that responsibility onto the ones who want to distribute the viral ebooks.

5. One more thing I want to share.  Always launch new browser windows with your links in your ebooks.

Whenever you link to a site within your viral eBook content, always remember to code that link to launch a new browser window when the reader clicks on it. I learned this the hard way.  There are many scripts involved in the order-taking process at online credit card processing sites.

And many of those have caused glitches in the eBook due to the software the eBook was created with and it crashes the eBook, making it impossible to order.

So, what happens is this.

You do your job well.  The content is great.  You’ve got a hungry customer waiting to buy.

They click on a recommended product link.  They arrive at the site still inside your eBook window.  They click on the order link and the entire thing shuts down.  I mean completely shuts down the ebook and website altogether.

And, in some cases, it even crashes the computer. You just lost a customer because two sets of code didn’t like each other.

That has happened to me on MANY different occasions in some of my early ebooks.

Now, all of my links launch new browser windows OUTSIDE of the ebook if you click on a link inside the ebook. All you need to do is insert a simple line of code into your links inside the eBook.  The code looks like this…

Target=”Resource Window”

Now when someone clicks on your link, a new browser window will launch outside of the eBook itself before taking them to the website.  Now, you’re safe. EVERY link in your eBook should have this code.  You can thank me later.

(NOTE: IF you are using a PDF maker for your ebooks, you should be fine with your links.)

Viral eBooks are tremendous tools.  But, there are also some pitfalls associated with them.

I’ve just shared five of the mistakes that I have made.

There is just no way of measuring how much profit I have lost over the years due to those errors.

There wasn’t a manual available to tell me how to do it.  History hadn’t really been recorded at that time to tell me what to stay away from and what to make sure I did in order to protect myself from problems.

So, you’re getting something that I didn’t have.

Aren’t ya happy?

In all seriousness, don’t make the mistakes that I made.

History doesn’t need to repeat itself on this one.

Want to learn a NEW viral ebook strategy that isn’t outdated and overused? Check out “How To Get Free Traffic With PLR Reports“. You’ll learn a great way to get free traffic to any site you choose with free “private label rights” reports.

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