butterfly This might help you!Hallo again, today I am offering you a butterfly of hope, with its gossamer thin wings, in weightless, soundless flight – but just as indispensable as the industrious bee – pollinating –  tiny, small beings doing BIG work. So never feel you don’t count. No matter how small and insignificant you feel, you matter and can make a BIG difference. Just look around you: do most people really look like the models and tycoons you see in the magazines?  Of course not. We all look different, doing different things. So there is MUCHO place, just for you!

I have so missed visiting with you. How are you? I hope that you are feeling okay, and not stressing too much to see the year coming to an end. Just think, it means a new beginning soon icon smile This might help you! You can start all fresh, like a shining new penny!

You know what helped me, finally?

I changed the questions I was asking!

Yep, that made for many an AHA! moment! You could perhaps try to look at:

  • How am I doing things online
  • What are the things I am doing
  • Where would I like to be
  • What would I like to be
  • What do I want my life to be like, every day
  • Why am I doing this
  • And most importantly, for WHOM am I doing this

Then you might try and change the way and the order in which you do things. Start your day online differently. Do what you like doing first. Be yourself, write or read what you would like to write and read. You will be told a lot (and very rightly so!) about discipline if you want to succeed in an online business. You need to buckle down, get rid of all distractions, don’t read e-mails, do first things first. This is priceless advice, but it just didn’t do it for me. Forcing myself just didn’t inspire me. Where was the excitement, the WOW!, the anticipation, the surprise of learning and discovery?

So I became aware that sometimes, for some of us, the order of things will be different, it will surely seem cock-eyed and skewed, but it will need to make sense to us first. When all is said and done, YOU are the one who needs to do this, YOU are the one who needs to find your niche, who needs to find your OWN way of learning and incorporating the ways of doing business online. Listen to your instincts, you have them for a very good reason icon smile This might help you!

When you then find all the elements you need in order to feel ready for starting this wonderful journey, when you feel you have the necessary know-how that makes it all come together for YOU, only then would the discipline makes sense, because then finally it won’t seem like a chore, as if you were sentenced to hard labour (haha), but you will WANT to do things, you will look forward to going online, working on your website, and ‘buckling down’.

What also helped me, in the end, is that after I discovered more or less what one needed to do in order to start a blog/website, I would set my goal to do just one single thing a day, to start off with. If I then managed to do this one thing right, I could do other things. But the concentration on the very next step, that worked for me. If I didn’t quite know how to proceed to do the next step, I would – yes, you guessed it! – google it. Tweak and change the search parameters until you get the information which makes things clearer to you.

Be yourself, find YOUR voice, there will ever only be one of you out there. And you know what? It will perhaps help you to concentrate on giving and helping others first. Some business owners can get right in there and just want to make money, money and more money. But others might benefit from first focusing on other’s welfare and building relationships, and not just seeing all online users as one giant credit card which will bring you untold fortunes.

You might also find it very difficult to find the right words in English, as this might not be your first language. This really is something which many people on forums worry about. Because words have many different meanings and you might mean one thing but the words end up saying something else! icon smile This might help you! You could try to keep the words simple and the sentences short. And I’m never without my trusty friends, my different dictionaries. Some are for synonyms, for word finding, a proper dictionary, for instance: Reader’s Digest Oxford Complete Wordfinder, Reader’s Digest Oxford Illustrated Dictionary, The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Roget’s International Thesaurus, Bilingual Dictionaries (for both Afrikaans and German to English, as we speak all 3), etc. You see where I’m going with this. We have really many of these!

But online today, you can find instant translation software as well, which is very cool and time saving. Reading English books really, really works, even if you just read comics or children’s books. The main idea is that your brain starts to recognize words and sentence structuring. My husband reads Asterix books, as he firstly enjoys the drawings and the humour tremendously, but he also says he learns about history at the same time! LOL.

You could also use more pictures – you know the old adage: a picture is worth a thousand words.

If you’re still looking for ways to make money online, I found this site, which you could look at, if you want to.

Some of what he offers is for sale, but much more is free.

Mal Keenon – Free Work At Home, SFI Internet Business Opportunity.

He will teach you and email you good stuff.

http://www.freeadvertz.com/work-at-home-free/

His main site is: http://www.freeadvertz.com/

There are just so many millions of opportunities being offered online today, and as we are all different and unique, there WILL be something for everyone. The only important thing is: DON”T GIVE UP. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. Ask, there are so many lovely helpful people online. But also remember: trust people with caution as well. Just be normally cautious, as you would be at your local shop, bar or restaurant.

Be vigilant, but also know that some people are great and are genuine. As I said, trust your instincts.

I will not be able to post articles a lot until the end of Jan 2011 (although I will really try my best to share with you as much as possible) as I will have extremely limited bandwidth until then, and will only be able to go online for very limited amounts of time. But I will use real life (can you believe it actually still exists? icon smile This might help you!  magazines, TV,  books and such to learn more which I will share with you. Yep, as Forrest Gump said: Life’s a box of chocolates!

You are OK. You are good enough. Enjoy what you can, endure what you have to and keep your sense of humor, your sense of the ridiculous and your sense of the divine.

Ursula