Here are three themes from Harry Potter that are as relevant in the wizarding world as they are in the business world.

Loyalty is the most important trait- Harry Potter is loyal to his friends and loyal to his teachers. He knows where to place his loyalty and it never waivers. This loyalty is always returned. If you are loyal to your friends and colleagues, hell if you are loyal to everybody in your network, then karma suggests that you will get loyalty in return. That way, people are less likely to double cross and will be happier to do you a favour if you need one.

Teamwork is important for all success- The most successful people in life are not loners. They have a team behind them to help them with their success. Harry Potter has his close friends there to help him when he is in a bind. Even though he is a star and the most talented amongst them, Harry Potter would not have been successful without the help of his friends. As an entrepreneur, whilst you will want to take the lead with your business, you need to get a team behind you to help you reach your goals. This can be staff as well as a circle of mentors to help you achieve the results that you want to achieve.

The good guy always wins- Whilst the war between good and evil crosses 7 stories in Harry Potter, Harry wins all the battles and eventually wins the war. He will not compromise his values and yet still always wins. You cannot hope to take shortcuts or compromise your values and truly be successful in life. Whilst you may see some short-term results you will lose out in the end.

If you have not yet read the Harry Potter books or watched the movies, do yourself a favour. Do it with a critical eye and you will see the themes that I have mentioned above and how they can be utilized in our business.

• Palm shortcuts for the things you do most
• Touchscreen and full keyboard
• Microsoft® Windows Mobile® 6.1 Professional Edition
• Outlook® email with Microsoft® Direct Push Technology and HTML support1,2
• High-speed data with UMTS/HSDPA3
• Instant-on Wi-Fi button1
• GPS for navigation, turn-by-turn directions, and local search1
• Microsoft® Office Outlook® Mobile for Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks
• Edit native Microsoft® Word and Excel® documents4
• Open and view PowerPoint®, PDF, and ZIP files
• Use Internet Explorer® Mobile to search the web fast1
• Functions as a high-speed modem for your laptop5
• Personal email including Hotmail, Yahoo!, and Gmail1
• Chat-style view for SMS and MMS6
• Windows Media® Player Mobile for audio and video
• 2.0 megapixel camera with video capture

Source:
http://www.palm.com/asia/assets/pdf/products/ds_treopro.pdf

What others are saying

“The Palm Treo Pro is a smartphone destined to put a smile on the faces of many business people, and perhaps wipe that self-satisfied smirk off the mugs of BlackBerry and iPhone lovers. It’s been refreshing to see an attractively design Windows Mobile handset without resource-sucking interface modifications slowing down our experience. The battery life could be better and the keyboard is tricky to use, but these complaints haven’t managed to sully our time with the Pro. Those looking for a Windows Mobile handset to take care of business, who don’t care for showy glitz and flare, should consider the Palm Treo Pro.”

Source
http://www.cnet.com.au/palm-treo-pro-339291458.htm

What I think

If you don’t want to spend a fortune, but you want the features of a Smart Phone, then this phone may be for you. The Palm Treo Pro does not worry about all the bloated software of some of its contemporaries, it just works.

Get yours today. Contact me for the best deal available.

The team at Google have finally put together a guide as to what they see being important in terms of SEO.

Get your Google SEO Starter Guide here.

1. A product or service
2. Potential Customers who know you are selling a product or service, and
3. Potential customers who trust you enough to purchase from you.

I cannot reinforce the importance of point 3 enough. Whether you have an online or an offline business, people are more and more going online to find out what they can about you.

The thing about the World Wide Web and Google is that they may not just find your website. Other people may be talking about you, your company or your product. Do you know? Have you checked to see what others are saying?

There may be people making negative comments on forums or in blog posts and you may not even know about them. There would be nothing worse than just leaving these comments be as these can create doubt in people’s mind about the trustworthiness of you or your product. You do want your existing clients and customers to be happy, don’t you?

If you haven’t previously seen what other people are saying about you out in internet-land, I would suggest you open up a new tab or window, go to google and get searching. Search for your company name, your product name, and then your name.

Also, set up feeds and notifications so that you get notified any time someone mentions your name or your product name. Some great services for this include:

• Bloglines (www.bloglines.com) – Bloglines gives you an easy web-based platform to monitor updates from other blogs in your niche.
• Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) – Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Go for as it happens so you can see if there is a crisis developing. You will have to learn to scan pages to see which are important, which should be filed away and read later and those pages that can be ignored.

Forums are a great way to communicate with and influence your target audiences. They are a place where a plethora of individuals from your target audience gather together to discuss issues. As such, forums are also a great way to identify and monitor issues you may face.

If you are going to participate in an audience, you need to follow these rules.

1. Lurk first in the forum and see what other people are saying and how things run.
2. Make sure you follow the rules. A forum is a privately owned website, not a democracy. There are rules you need to follow to participate in any forum
3. Don’t preach to people in a forum. Speak to them as equals- even if you think they are stupid. Also, avoid fights- this makes you look stupid and a web page can be permanent.
4. Don’t lie. Online, if you lie, you will get caught.
5. If you are going to make a comment in a forum, make sure yo quote the relevant post you are replying to.

Blogs

Do you have a Blog? If not, why not. A blog gives you the opportunity to establish contact directly with your audience, bypassing traditional media outlets. Blogs are great because they are a platform that provides you with instantaneous publishing as well as the opportunity to receive instantaneous feedback from your audiences or target customers.

A note of caution: Do not use your blog to just publish your press releases. Use your blog to engage in two way conversation with your audience. Give them the opportunity to leave comments, and reply to any comments that are left.

Another question that is often asked is whether you should moderate comments. This is a tough question to answer. You should delete spam, and any commentary that is illegal or defamatory, You should not however just delete comments that are negative to your organisation. You should engage these people in conversation.

How to Read a Business Book.
1. Decide, before you start, that you’re going to change three things about what you do all day at work. Then, as you’re reading, find the three things and do it. The goal of the reading, then, isn’t to persuade you to change, it’s to help you choose what to change.
2. If you’re going to invest a valuable asset (like time), go ahead and make it productive. Use a postit or two, or some index cards or a highlighter. Not to write down stuff so you can forget it later, but to create marching orders. It’s simple: if three weeks go by and you haven’t taken action on what you’ve written down, you wasted your time.
3. It’s not about you, it’s about the next person. The single best use of a business book is to help someone else. Sharing what you read, handing the book to a person who needs it… pushing those around you to get in sync and to take action–that’s the main reason it’s a book, not a video or a seminar. A book is a souvenir and a container and a motivator and an easily leveraged tool. Hoarding books makes them worth less, not more.

I think this could be timely, and useful, for those of us who sometimes make a habit of reading ebooks for enjoyment and not necessarily getting enough from our reading.

Cheers,

Hamish

If you didn’t purchase it then, you should definitely check out his site now.

He has some posts summarising some of the key points to come out of his book.

His post today is one that I really liked. Here is some of it for you:

In his book The Boron Letters, Gary Halbert writes about one of the lessons he teaches on selling. He asks his students, ‘If you and I both owned a hamburger stand and we were in a contest to sell the most hamburgers, what advantages would you most like to have on your side?’

The answers are predictable — the best meat, the best location, the lowest prices. Gary tells his students they can have all these advantages, but the advantage he wants will ensure that he whips the pants off them. What does he want? A starving crowd.

Go, visit! Now and regularly. You will learn a lot from Pete.

He also has a habit of reinforcing the things you need to do that you may have forgotten about.

The Internet Marketing Inner Circle is a group of some of the most successful marketers online. Many of them have got together what I am happy to call “The eBook of the year!” The title is pretty clear. It consists of 20 chapters, written by 20 different successful online business people. They are the best in the industry. All chapters have been checked and verified to ensure that you can truly make $100 per day if you implemented the techniques in each chapter.
Of all the material covered in this book, there are other resources (often more expensive) that you can buy. Some of these are good, some of these are utter crap. I’d still recommend that you go with this one. 247 pages for only $27.

Buy it here.

As the title suggests, the book shows you 20 ways to make $100 per day online. Most of these will be able to be done straight away by the internet newbie, some may take a little bit of research and learning. But even if you only buy it to use half the resources, is $27 really that bad?

My personal favourite chapter is Bev Clement’s chapter on Ghostwriting. She shares with you some important tips on ghostwriting and how to break in to this industry. I also liked ‘Patrick Pretty’s’ chapter on branding. Whilst this is not really a business idea, utilizing the tips mentioned in this chapter can help boost your income by $100 per day. . There are also some good tips on eBay selling and trend marketing. This book has something for everybody looking to run their own business online.

Buy 20 Ways To Make $100 Per Day Online here.

Contributors- Willie Crawford, Dr Mani, Bev Clement, Patrick Pretty, Case Stevens, Kenth Nasstrom, David Schwartz, AnneMarie Callan, Michael Badger, Jim & Doris McKiel, Jeremy Estes, Michelle Brouse, Michael Savoie, Jack Bastide, Gary Knuckles, Thea Swafford, Scott & Sharlene Raven & Daniel Taylor.

Get your copy here.

Remember those show-biz tryouts where some poor hopeful sidles onto the stage and starts to sing?

What is the one word that strikes despair into their hearts as it reverberates around the auditorium?

“NEXT!”

That is the director speaking and denotes that it is time to cut your losses and get off the stage so that he can get on with his job.

For the director, there is no emotion attached to the word. It is just a punctuation mark. A line that is drawn to separate one moment from the next – one failure from the possibility of finding success … next.

We need to learn to yell ‘NEXT!’ a but more often.

So much of our life is taken up by struggling on with things that if we stop for a second and admit to reality, we know for absolute certain are never going to bring us success.

We need to draw a line under some of that stuff before our emotions, our energies and our potential for success gets so clogged up with things that can only bring us down.

That isn’t to say that we should bounce from one thing to another, shouting ‘next!’ all day long. It is vital that we give each of our endeavors the chance to succeed – and sometimes that success takes its own sweet time!

But when it is absolutely clear that no further progress can be made, when the singer is so bad that even the band can’t drown him out, then put on your director’s hat, dust off that big old hook that will come in from the side of the stage and yell in the loudest voice you can bellow:

“NEXT!”

Think about it!

Pete Williams hasn’t rested on his laurels after selling the ‘G. his next venture was into the telecommunications industry with his marketing company “On Hold Advertising,” and in November 2006 Pete released his book “How to turn your million-dollar idea into a reality.”

Whilst not presenting new or ground-breaking information in his book, Pete creates a blueprint of tried and successful steps in starting a business your way, and the steps you need to follow to fruition. He also provides you with links to information sources on the Web as well as providing bonus offers exclusively available to the readers of his book. But by far the best aspect of Pete’s book is how he presents his information in an easily readable and thoroughly enjoyable way.

As a reader of Pete’s book you would gain information and ideas about the following:

• Techniques on converting your idea’s into actions and how to make the most of every opportunity,
• Overcoming your fears and learning from your mistakes,
• How to turn your idea’s into a viable business opportunity,
• How to make a name for yourself,
• Setting goals to ensure business success and how to go about business planning,
• Effective marketing and publicity techniques, the difference between advertising and publicity, and how each will make your business received,
• Influence factors in making your business successful, and
• The importance of networking and ensuring that you get an effective and supportive team behind you.

Pete’s book should be in the reference collection of any budding entrepreneur. It lays out, from start to finish, a program that can help you on your road to success. He also gives you links to many resources that will be extremely valuable in starting your business venture.

If you are interested in learning more about Pete or his book visit his website Preneur Marketing. You can sign up to his newsletter and receive a free chapter of his book here.