With so much hype built up around pre paid cell phone service and the barrage of media attention and advertisements given to cell phone service providers, choosing which plan to go with can be mind boggling. Pre paid cell phone service allows for flexibility that you simply can’t get with traditional cell phone providers.

Pre-paid cell phones don’t require a contract. Whether you keep your cell phone or not is completely up to you. Most require a recharge once every thirty or ninety days in order to maintain the same cell phone number.

Pre paid cell phones allow an individual to budget less per month for their cell phone service. While pre paid cell phones tend to cost more per minute, someone who chooses to use it sparingly can make their minutes stretch for less each month.

Pre-paid cell phones are excellent for people with credit problems that have difficulty getting traditional cell phone service, although fewer companies are requiring credit checks, some still do and they can hamper a person’s ability to purchase a cell phone service plan.

Pre paid cell phones are also an excellent choice for teenagers. They receive a cell phone allowance each month and it is impossible for them to run up a crazy cell phone bill. If they use all their allotted minutes in one week, then they learn to budget more carefully for the following month. Pre paid cell phone services teach teenagers responsibility and budgeting tactics, which are quite useful skills to have when they enter the real world.

Pre paid cell phones are a perfect choice for people in transition. Those who are only temporarily living in one area while waiting to move on to another area can avoid the issues of contracts and the hassle of getting their phone number changed once they land in their final destination.

Of course pre paid cell phones have their hang ups as well. You will lose the convenience of simply paying a bill and have to recharge the cell phone in order to continue using it, although most will allow you to use a credit or debit card in increments as low as $20. You will not have the option of being a little late on the cell phone bill when money gets tight since you have to pay for the service prior to utilizing it, but for some people that is a positive attribute.

The weather resources on the Internet are many and varied. They range from highly sophisticated dedicated sites to national newsfeeds that produce fairly comprehensive weather reports, to regional news organizations that feature weather as part of their online news service. These can be from TV and radio stations or local newspapers. In addition, the major search engines have a weather feature that allows you to consult for forecasts in your local area.

In all cases, however, their weather information is gathered principally from national sources – in almost all cases, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. We’re going to review here the principal dedicated weather sites online, and give a quick critique to what the search engines and national news sites provide.

Perhaps the best known dedicated commercial weather site is www.weather.com, a spin-off of the cable television network The Weather Channel. This website allows you to punch in your zip code for local weather, or a city/town name for some other location. The site will give you temperature readings, wind chill and precipitation forecasts. It will provide forecasts on an hour-by-hour basis, for the weekend, and will peer into the future with a ten-day forecast on one page. Graphics include satellite photos and Doppler radar representations of storm movements.

Much of this information is gathered from the NOAA’s National Weather Service website. Here you will find “official” U.S. weather, marine, fire and aviation forecasts, warnings, climate forecasts and information about meteorology at www.nws.noaa.gov/. The NOAA has a massive network of weather stations nationwide, providing readouts for highly localized areas. It’s also user friendly, with a wealth of visual information provided by satellites and other graphics tools. There is a vast amount of marine weather data available here as well.

The Weather Underground (www.wunderground.com) is a spin-off of the University of Michigan’s weather website. Weather Underground is a commercial site peppered with advertising that presents its forecasts based on zip code, city, or on a clickable U.S. map. It also has international forecasts – click by country – and a comprehensive list of maps on its home page that show national trends for such factors as temperature, wind, visibility, precipitation, snow depth, etc. Register with them and send ten dollars and they’ll email you your daily forecast.

The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s weather lab: http://cirrus.sprl.umich.edu/wxnet/ is among the pioneers of online weather products. Currently, they maintain a quality national weather forecast site – but perhaps their most valuable resource for weather addicts is their list of 300 links to weather related sites.

Intellicast (www.intellicast.com) is an advertiser supported national site that will also email you your daily forecast. Their site offers a clickable map and the usual categories of satellite and long range forecasts. Www.weather.org is another of the lesser national websites that is exclusively for weather. Their site has an interesting map of worldwide conditions that is constantly changing as the center of their homepage. Along with the usual localized and national weather feeds, the site offers weathercams, tides and currents, and commentary from the Farmers Almanac.

Other dedicated locations include www.AccuWeather.com and www.Weatherbug.com. Weatherbug offers downloadable software that provides your local weather forecast and weather report. Yahoo and Google both provide weather forecast features, as do the national news feeds. CNN.com/WEATHER will provide international weather news and five day forecasts by location. USA Today has global forecasts and information on meteorological topics such as global warming at: http://asp.usatoday.com/weather/weatherfront.aspx.

Finally, Unisys has chosen to showcase its Weather Processor analysis software package by building a website for global weather information at http://weather.unisys.com/. Not something you’d expect just looking at their main homepage. Apparently even people who do tech consulting and enterprise servers need to know if it’s going to rain.

So, how do you rate as a manager?

Do your employees and coworkers come to you freely for instruction and clarification or even with new ideas? Do you feel that your direction is carried out clearly and efficiently or do you have to bang your head against the wall to get your point across?

We all know that a team is only as good as its’ leader and your communication skills have a major impact on how effective a leader you are in business today.  Luckily, even if you are not a born communicator you can begin to acquire these skills by following some fairly simple rules and pointers:

Know Your Target Audience:

Different people require different types of engagement so adjust your style accordingly. It is important to understand the people with whom you are communicating and speak their “language”. This not only facilitates good communication but it also reflects your empathy and understanding of the other parties and their situation.

Network With Your Team:

Leaders gain the confidence of their employees by building up a personal rapport. We all respond well to charm and humor if it is genuine. A feel good message, if delivered constructively, can be an effective way to get a point across, especially if that point also contains an element of correction or reprimand. Don’t forget to also listen to

what the other person is saying. They are much more likely to absorb what you are saying if they also feel heard.

Keep The Message Simple:

A simple message without a lot of technical jargon easily grabs the attention of the target audience. Less is definitely more. Decide what points are important and stick to them. (Of course, if the points are technical then definitely include the jargon).

Be An Effective Listener First:

According to Dale Carnegie’s book, a timeless classic “How to win friends and influence people,” the golden rule of effective communication techniques is to listen firs. Understanding the needs of your employees and listening to them with undivided attention will earn you loyal team players. This not only helps in getting the job done faster but it makes it a much more rewarding experience for all involved. This will never hurt your business.

Take responsibility for message conveyed:

Don’t make the assumption that every person in a room will hear you in the same way. It is your responsibility as a leader to ensure that each person listening has clearly understood the message. We have all played enough “Broken Telephone” to know what can happen if a vague message get passed down the line.

Follow Up:

One way to make sure the message is well understood is to reiterate and follow up the original message in writing. You can also ask individuals to repeat the message as they understand it. “What did you take from that message” or “Can I answer any questions you have” would be great questions to ask.

Motivate the listener:

Effective leaders are those that motivate their employees through their interactions. By speaking with clarity and authority, you can give your listeners confidence in your abilities and motivate your employees to respond positively to your message. This in turn will help to build their own confidence and enthusiasm around the role they are playing on your team.

We all want to maximize the success and productivity of our business. Bad communication resulting in mixed messages, crossed wires and hard feelings is at best counter productive and can scuttle even the best laid plans. It quite simply is a luxury which no business can afford.

Learning to communicate more effectively as a leader can have a profound impact on the growth of your business and is sure to help to create a more dynamic and positive working environment.

Good ideas are easy but it is the leader who can get them across quickly and effectively who will make things happen.

After all, isn’t that what good leaders do?

Online businesses abounds the World Wide Web these days. Some who are very successful easily realize 6 figure profits while other are just managing to barely exist. One would wonder what could have caused this situation. Success of an online business could be attributed to the business acumen of the owner. But it is undeniable that other factors could have caused these circumstances.

The website design could be one of these factors. A carefully designed website is essential to the success of an online business. It should be able to give a lasting favorable impression to the visitor. “First impression is lasting” may be a cliché but it is undeniable that websites that have made an impression would cause customers to revisit. Every time these visitors would need products or information, they would return to the website time and again.

So what then should a webmaster do to be able to build the ideal website? First and foremost is to look for website creation programs. This is most useful for novice webmasters as this would make the creation of the website easier and faster. The use of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) would facilitate the building of a website since it is considered as the building block for all website structures.

The content of the website is an equally important factor that would entice customers to stay. A well-put website text would give the impression of being professional. To achieve this, you must ensure that the website is “airy” –meaning there’s a lot of white spaces in between text for easy reading. Proper page layout should also be considered. The width of the text column should be proportionate to the body text. Remember that wider columns are harder to read. Along with the right font size, the proper page layout, the correct grammar used will contribute to the professional look of a website.

The inclusion of the About Us page is important for the growth of an online business. The About Us page would give information about the company, the year and place of establishment; the growth as well as the base of operation. The Contact Us page is where you give your email address so that customers will be able to contact you whenever they want your service or they would want some points to be clarified. The Contact Us page will also serve as a suggestion box where you get to know the feedback of the customers about your online business.

Site navigation is another vital factor to the creation of a good website. To entice visitors to stay, they should be afforded with easy navigation tools. Placing relevant links to your website will be useful to the readers who are searching for information.

All these practical tips to make a good website are useless if the customers or readers will not be enticed to stay because the page is slow loading. Most website owners are taking this factor for granted. They have made attractive and colorful websites with all the graphics, banners and animations not knowing that this could cause a browser to crash or for the page to load slowly. In this instance creating the best website will be futile as this would defeat the purpose of attracting visitors.

Pay Per Click (PC) advertising places you in the driver’s seat when it comes to advertising. It is truly one of the most cost effective means of advertising on the Internet. PPC also provides the opportunity to recast your advertising in a very short period of time.

Minimum Words = Maximum Impact

It is often much easier to write more words than it is to boil down your thoughts into one small phrase. With PPC advertising you need to learn the skill of condensing.

Some of the PPC companies have unique rules that may make it even harder to come up with a PPC slogan that is helpful to you in marketing your product or service.

Some businesses hire SEO firms to develop their PPC advertising and often find a solid answer to achieving their advertising strategy. There is a process of developing a title and then writing the ad itself. In all, you will find you have very few characters to deal with so it is important to refrain from being long-winded.

Learning the skills of writing clear and appropriate copy for PPC advertising is possible and finding the appropriate keywords will ultimately help in driving customers to your website. As with all marketing techniques you may choose to gain help from someone experienced in the field of SEO, but may ultimately bring the development and decisions back in house once you feel confident enough in developing the PPC advertising on your own.

Because the PPC process requires a bidding process you may also want to take some time to learn how much money is appropriate to pay for bringing clients to your website. You also need to come to terms with how much money you are willing to spend. You will need to learn the purchasing habits of your target consumer. All of these considerations go into making PPC advertising work for you and your marketing goals.

PPC advertising is generally unobtrusive and should always be linked to information that bears a resemblance to the product or service you are offering. That is the beauty of PPC advertising. It provides a very specific target so you have the greatest opportunity to tape into motivated prospects.

Be careful in the selection of keywords, though. Weak keywords or keywords that are too vague can result in click-throughs that may have thought your site was something different. In the end it wastes the time of the prospect and causes you to pay for an ad with no impact. As you continue to use PPC you will learn what keywords work and which ones don’t. Indeed all of life is a mixture of trial and error.

For many online visitors it is no secret that the small ads they encounter are Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. It is estimated that only 20% of site visitors will actually click on these ads.

The good news is these ads are targeted and should be viewed by those who actually have an interest in the product or service you provide.

The basic premise of PPC advertising is to allow you to bid on keywords that are directly related to the product or service you provide. Costs for popular keywords can be expensive, so using keywords with varying suffixes may be a way to keep costs down.

The two primary reasons individuals use PPC advertising is 1) they have not optimized their website and are using PPC to gain new customers, 2) they are looking for a short term boost in site visitors with the hope of a solid return on investment (ROI).

In the first scenario the business needs to seriously look at their website and find ways to make it more attractive to both customers as well as search engines. In the second scenario the business may find some value in a short-term advertising blitz.

One potential negative in PPC advertising is that many individuals have an understanding of how this type of advertising works and may intentionally make you pay for a click that has no meaning. In other words, what some online users are doing is clicking on the ads and backing out and moving on to the next one. They realize someone is paying for the click so their actions are essentially the end result of a game designed to make the business owner pay more in PPC fees. While this may not be the norm, you should be aware that this activity can and does take place.

There is some strategy involved in making PPC advertising work for you, but the best case scenario is to rely on PPC as little as you can while doing everything you can to make your website search engine friendly.

Far too many businesses consider PPC advertising the primary way they will reach sales objectives, but the truth is the results are short term and always based on you ability to continue to feed the PPC monster (who really likes your cash). This is why optimizing your site makes so much sense. When you are able to significantly improve your site rankings through quality Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques you will likely find a better overall result with minimized long-term costs.

Selecting the right power tool for you is a lot like selecting a car.  Should it be the big-heavy-duty model or the sleek-portable one?  Would it be the electricity guzzling one or the more practical model?  Scouring through the displays of your neighborhood hardware store can give you a headache on what should be the right brand and capacity to choose from.

The Power Tool
First of all you must consider on the quality of the brand that you want to buy.  An easy hint on this is on the warranty card, the longer the warranty duration, the better it is.  The next one is to consider the accessories.  Do the accessories fit on other brands?  For example if you’re going to buy an angle grinder, check if it fits on any other disks brands so you will not be having a hard time finding a replacement.  The third consideration should be the spare parts and the after sales services.  Power tools have a lot of moving and mechanical parts that tend to wear over time, specifically carbon brushes, which are the most common parts that will wear out.

The Power for the tool
By now, you must have selected the right brand which suits you.  The next thing would be the power inside the tool.  This time practicality should be on your mind, if you will be using it for home use, try buying a less powerful one since common household structures are not that tough.

The Size of the tool
In this category, the size of the tool is usually proportional to the power of the tool.  Try to measure the area or any opening on where you will be using your tool.  If you have constricted space then it would be hard for you to maneuver the tool.

Plugged or Unplugged
It now common for power tools to be wireless or on that fact, battery operated.  Having a battery operated tool can be a bit expensive over the AC one because of the batteries that come with it.  Another downside to this is that it has a lot less power than what its AC counterpart posses.  But then again if your work area has no AC outlet available near by, this could be a problem for you.

Tools for that business
If you will be using these power tools as an aide for your business, buy the industrial type.  Since you will be using this very often and this can be a lifetime engagement between you and your tools, buy the best of the best and consider this as an investment.  Forecast on what projects you will be doing in the future so that you won’t keep on upgrading your tools.

I’m sure you’ve had this experience: you’re driving down the road, listening to the radio, and suddenly you’re transported back to a memory from ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. A song, maybe not even a great song, or a song you particularly liked very much back then comes on the radio. Maybe it reminds you of a time when you were in love, or when you were heartbroken, or when you were having the time of your life with friends.

You drift back into your memories to that girlfriend or boyfriend, remembering that first date or the date you really wanted.

I was about sixteen years old when I met my first wife. The song ‘Twenty-five or Six to Four’ by Chicago was popular at the time. When that song comes on the radio still, to this day, I’m transported back to my new Toyota Celica GT, driving through the Columbia Gorge off to my girlfriends house, full of excitement that I was going to be able to spend time with her. When I put myself in the memory, I’m driving east on 84. The car smells new. Chicago is playing on the radio. I’m full of anticipation and power and a thrill to be alive.

I’m taken back thirty years. . . okay, a little more than thirty years, to a crystal clear memory, to a palpable feeling.

You might even have an ‘our song’ with your significant other, that’s the song where when you both hear it, you say, ‘oh, that’s our song’. Or maybe you’ve had one in the past that you can remember.

What is this? And what does it have to do with persuasion?

It’s called anchoring and anchoring has everything to do with persuasion. Music has the ability to put you in intense emotional states. These emotional states are connected with the stimulus of the memory. They travel through neuro-pathways of emotions and memories that words and language cannot. And sometimes music affects us so intensely that we want to share it with others, but a song that touches me deeply may not touch you as deeply. It’s extraordinarily individual and powerful. Aldous Huxley said, ‘After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.’ We’re constantly exposed to things that we have been conditioned to react to. It’s often been said that we are far more reactive than proactive. The human brain is really more on automatic pilot than it is a conscious device. We think we’re conscious. We have a vested interest in thinking that. But we’re really not.

Most of our activities in life are habitual. At our deepest core are things we do completely automatically. As an example, how long can you pay conscious attention to your breathing? Seconds? Minutes? Maybe if you’re into meditation, you can sit for an hour and simply focus on your breath. But you certainly don’t do it twenty-four hours a day. You can’t. You have to sleep.

For persuasion purposes, the key is to elicit emotion and move it to it’s peak. Then we pair that peak emotion with a stimulus which is unique so that every time we want to elicit that peak emotion, we fire off that stimulus to remind them of that state.

Obviously we’re not going to elicit our client’s musical tastes, and play songs that are attached to their happy or special memories, but if you can understand this concept, you understand how anchoring works. The example of ‘our song’ is the concept of anchoring in a nutshell.

This information can be used in this way with clients: elicit their strongest emotional states, i.e. their criteria. When someone tells you their highest criteria, they are tapping into emotion. They feel it. And when this happens, simply pair it with a unique stimulus.

Stay tuned for future articles on anchoring as one of the most important tools in your persuasion toolbox.

If you’re a frequent visitor to chat forums, you can use them to your advantage without worrying about spamming anyone. That doesn’t mean that you have to go in there with the sole intention of promoting your business; but there are a few things that you can do in a subtle way that can possibly land you some new customers. It can be one of the easiest ways in the world to draw business to your website, and you don’t even have to do any work to accomplish it.

Most chat forums allow registered users to add a signature line underneath their name. This information shows up each time you post a message to the forum, and can be advantageous to someone who is looking for any of your products and services. Some forum posters don’t bother looking at the websites of users unless they are regular users of the forum, and then they might get curious. Another thing is, if there was a discussion and you just happened to mention that you have a website, some people may decide to check it out just out of curiosity. It doesn’t matter why they chose to do it, the important thing is that you provided enough interest to make someone want to check your website in order to obtain more information.

Another way a chat forum may help you draw traffic to your website is to casually weave your business into conversations, as appropriate. For example, if you distribute parts for race cars, and someone is discussing where to find a particular part, and you know that you can get it for the poster at a better price than he has been quoted, you can casually mention that your company has that part at a lower price and let the poster make the decision to go to your website or to ask you the question specifically. You don’t want to make yourself a nuisance, or you will find that the forum owner or moderator will remove you from the forum. Some don’t care but others are very choosy about the subjects that are discussed in the forum, especially if it’s a specialized subject forum.

A third way to bring in business using a chat forum is to search for one that is specific to the type of products or services you provide. Although this may not always be possible, it’s an avenue worth researching. It will definitely allow you more freedom in saying things that will draw attention to your website than a generalized forum. The key is to get the word out that you have a business and what it involves so that you generate enough interest for posters in the forum to want to visit. You don’t want to blatantly advertise unless the forum was created for that purpose. You just want to drop subtle hints and indirect invitations to visit your website.

If you wish to be set apart from the crowd and get noticed for what you do, then it is almost an axiom that you should be disciplined and be able to make the most of what you currently have.

As a worker, your most valuable asset is yourself, and how you manage yourself will determine whether you will be in the next wave of promotions or the next wave of firings.

Here are some of good work habits that will set you apart:

Think positively. In business, there will always be people who only see the difficulties involved in any undertaking. In contrast, there are those people who only see the possibilities and potential of any given venture.

If you had to choose between the two, choose the latter attitude – it will bring you greater results. While you should not turn a blind eye to potential problems – indeed, you should plan to either avoid them or deal with them – you should not hold a pessimistic view of the world either.

This will only lessen your productivity and possibly spread an unwanted attitude among the people with whom you work with.

Plan your day ahead of time. When one is not aware of what needs to be done during the day, the day tends to be wasted in non-productive tasks.

But if one has a plan of action to follow, it becomes easier to mobilize the energy that is needed to make the day a success. Each evening before you go to bed, list down the five most important things that you must accomplish the following day.

Then, work on (and finish) the most important item before moving on to the second one. This will ensure that you will work on the most significant of your tasks and get a high-value return on your time.

Remember the 80/20 Principle. The 80/20 principle (also known as Pareto’s rule), was first formulated by the Italian thinker Vilfredo Pareto.

As applied to personal productivity, it postulates that 80% of your results come from only 20% of your efforts, and that 20% of your results are the product of 80% of your effort

Basically, the 80/20 principle states that we are usually inefficient. We do not devote as much time and energy as we should to our most important tasks.

Instead, we try to do everything ourselves, even though we may not be very competent in some tasks. If you wish to improve your productivity at work, analyze what it is you do that can make a dramatic impact on the growth of your company, and propose to your superiors that you be allowed to do that one thing.

If you chose an area wherein you can make a real contribution, your boss will not mind your level of specialization.