OK, let’s get going!

Before this job market started unravelling, I was working with affiliate marketing through my Maritime Heritage Project by offering books that would be for sale through Amazon.com. That affiliate marketing program has afforded additional income each month through book sales AND Amazon.com does all the fulfillment, so I don’t have to do anything but provide links. Now my affiliate marketing programs are becoming necessary to supplement my income so I can pay my mortgage!

I talk about affiliate programs in workshops each month, so it seemed worthwhile to post it here also. There’s a LOT of information and it can get overwhelming, but here are basics. If you are stuck finding full-time work, or if you just want additional income or a different path, then affiliate/vendor marketing may be for you. Just add items to your blog and/or eMails to family and friends.

Let’s look at the definitions, starting with the term vendor, which the dictionary defines as:

someone who exchanges goods or services for money. One that sells or vends: a street vendor; a vendor of software products on the Web. Simply put, this is the seller of any number of goods of any possible type. From topsoil to cars, new homes to pets, the person doing the selling is the vendor. Traditionally, he/she is selling goods that they may or may not have produced or manufactured themselves.

. . . and affiliate as:

anyone that has an agreement with a seller (vendor) to represent (sell) his or her product within the terms that the seller has dictated in exchange for remuneration (payment) of some type, normally a percentage of the sale.

This is the exciting part of doing business on the web . . . either as your main source of income or to supplement your “day” job. There are literally THOUSANDS of companies out there willing to PAY YOU to sell their products and services. All you do is introduce people to a vendor’s product, and we’ll show you how to do that too! The rate of commission paid to affiliates varies widely from vendor to vendor . . . from 3% all the way up to 75% or even higher.

HOW DOES THIS WORK?

Canon PowerShot Pro Series S3 IS 6MP with 12x Image Stabilized Zoom
I recommend the Canon PowerShot Pro on International Harbors (one of my sites). If you click on that image, you will be at my account at Amazon.com. If you
decide to purchase the Canon a commission automatically drops into my account. I don’t have to look up. If you pass on the camera, but purchase jackets or daypacks . . . same thing: the commission drops into my account.

Same with Expedia (this is through Commission Junction) . . . Click the Expedia logo, purchase your tickets, and The Maritime Heritage Project receives a nice commission check. (Given that the Project is a non-profit, this is a great way to support an important project and such purchases do not cost the buyer additional money as the commission is built into the price, just as it is if they go direct or through a travel agent. My family now books their travel through this process and it gives me additional funds to treat them to lunch or dinner!

In my experience, electronically delivered goods (intangible goods) such as ebooks, website memberships, etc., offer substantially higher commissions than hard goods (tangible goods). This is largely due to the fact that there are lower associated costs with electronically delivered goods. (stores on computer or diskette, endless supply, no additional production costs, etc.)

Please keep reading to learn how ClickBank and 1stPromotion make you an instant affiliate of approximately 5,400 vendors representing approximately 12,000 products! And YOU can make commissions on ALL of them. There are many affiliate-vendor opportunities out there through some very well known services. Some such as Commission Junction, Amazon, and 2Checkout deal with a mixed bag of goods, both tangible and intangible.

ClickBank is the #1 online provider of electronically delivered goods. They deal solely with electronically deliverable products and services. That’s all they handle. Nope, you can’t get a birdhouse or a backyard pond kit through ClickBank, but you could order plans on how to make your own. As a matter of fact, ClickBank currently offers thousands of the hottest-selling products and services and pays each affiliate up to 75% commission on each and every one of them! Now I know you are thinking, what is ClickBank’s interest in it?

Simple. It’s the same as for you: It’s money.

For every transaction that is performed through ClickBank, they’re paid a percentage or minimum transaction fee. In my mind, it’s well worth the expense. By handling all financial transactions, just think of the headaches they take away from both the vendor and the affiliate.

IF YOU WANT TO START NOW . . .

Or keep reading . . . 1stPromotion is a perfect vehicle to start your career with affiliate marketing. Through a single web page, not only do you instantly connect to ClickBank’s 5400 vendors and their 11,000 plus products, you can also profit from dozens of other affiliate programs – you have total control. A few top-rated programs already built-in to your Pro2 site are:

• Internet Marketing Center
• Ken Envoy’s 5 Pillar Program (SiteSell)
• Linden Method
• Native Remedies
• Push-Button Publishing
• Dropship Wholesalers
• and many more!

You can also add and promote ANY other affiliate program and product that you wish to on your Pro2 store. This is YOUR store, and you have total control over the products and the content of your site. Use the “Suggest A Product” or “Suggest A Program” links to add your favorite product or affiliate program right into our member’s product library and you could have thousands of other 1stPromotion store owners promoting it for you!

WANT INSTANT DETAILS?

Well I was . . . My brain was telling me things about our country that I didn’t believe possible. However, Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” echos many of my thoughts. If you haven’t seen it yet, please do. My family is concerned that the film will make me even more angry. I don’t think so . . . some of my anger stems from confusion. What the film will do is confirm that I haven’t lost my mind, but many of the leaders of this country have.

Naomi Klein, a reporter for The Nation, considers Michael Moore as “America’s Teacher,” because “the film is this incredible piece of old-style popular education. One of the things that my colleague at The Nation Bill Greider talks about is that we don’t do this kind of popular education anymore, that unions used to have budgets to do this kind of thing for their members, to just unpack economic theory and what’s going on in the world and make it accessible.” Quotes from her interview with Michael Moore.

Michael Moore: Obama, I think, realizes now that whatever he thought he was trying to do with bipartisanship or holding up the olive branch, that the other side has no interest in anything other than the total destruction of anything he has stood for or was going to try and do. So if [New York Congressman Anthony] Weiner or any of the other members of Congress want to step forward, now would be the time. And I certainly would be out there. I am out there. I mean, I would use this time right now to really rally people, because I think the majority of the country wants this.

and:

Michael Moore: But the third part of this is–and this is what I really have always admired about the right wing: they are organized, they are dedicated, they are up at the crack of dawn fighting their fight. And on our side, I don’t really see that kind of commitment.

When they were showing up at the town-hall meetings in August–those meetings are open to everyone. So where are the people from our side? And then I thought, Wow, it’s August. You ever try to organize anything on the left in August?

and

Michael Moore: In fact, I can tell you from my travels across the country while making the film and even in the last few weeks, there is something else that’s simmering beneath the surface. You can’t avoid the anger boiling over at some point when you have one in eight mortgages in delinquency or foreclosure, where there’s a foreclosure filing once every 7.5 seconds and the unemployment rate keeps growing. That will have its own tipping point.

And the scary thing about that is that historically, at times when that has happened, the right has been able to successfully manipulate those who have been beaten down and use their rage to support what they used to call fascism.

and

Michael Moore: . . . maybe I’m just a bit too optimistic here, but he (Obama) was raised by a single mother and grandparents and he did not grow up with money. And when he was fortunate enough to be able to go to Harvard and graduate from there, he didn’t then go and do something where he could become rich; he decides to go work in the inner city of Chicago.

Oh, and he decides to change his name back to what it was on the birth certificate–Barack. Not exactly the move of somebody who’s trying to become a politician. So he’s shown us, I think, in his lifetime many things about where his heart is, and he slipped up during the campaign and told Joe the Plumber that he believed in spreading the wealth.

and on Capitalism:

Michael Moore: Greed has been with human beings forever. We have a number of things in our species that you would call the dark side, and greed is one of them. If you don’t put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control. Capitalism does the opposite of that. It not only doesn’t really put any structure or restriction on it. It encourages it, it rewards it.

I’m asked this question every day, because people are pretty stunned at the end of the movie to hear me say that it should just be eliminated altogether. And they’re like, “Well, what’s wrong with making money? Why can’t I open a shoe store?”

And I realized that [because] we no longer teach economics in high school, they don’t really understand what any of it means.

The point is that when you have capitalism, capitalism encourages you to think of ways to make money or to make more money. And the judges never could have gotten the kickbacks had the county not privatized the juvenile hall. But because there’s been this big push in the past twenty or thirty years to privatize government services, take it out of our hands, put it in the hands of people whose only concern is their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders or to their own pockets, it has messed everything up . . .

But we spend eight to ten to twelve hours of our daily lives at work, where we have no say. I think when anthropologists dig us up 400 years from now–if we make it that far–they’re going to say, “Look at these people back then. They thought they were free. They called themselves a democracy, but they spent ten hours of every day in a totalitarian situation and they allowed the richest 1 percent to have more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined.

Truly they’re going to laugh at us the way we laugh at people 150 years ago who put leeches on people’s bodies to cure them.

The full story: The Nation

As for The Nation:

The Nation is America’s oldest weekly magazine and the most widely read journal of opinion. Founded in 1865,The Nation has long been regarded as one of the country’s definitive journalistic voices. Our contemporary writers include Naomi Klein, Gore Vidal, William Greider, Barbara Ehrenreich, Walter Mosley, Katha Pollitt, Bill Moyers, Patricia Williams, Eric Alterman, Katrina vanden Heuvel and “deadline poet” Calvin Trillin, while the Books & the Arts section features vibrant reviews of books and films, as well as poems and interviews. The Nation won the 2008 National Magazine Award for public interest journalism, and received two George Polk Awards for Joshua Kors’s exposé on the stunning denial of benefits to veterans returning from Iraq and Jeremy Scahill’s reporting on the Blackwater military contracting scandal. Our web presence, TheNation.com, is a heavily trafficked site with videos, podcasts, breaking political news, books and cultural coverage, and web-only exclusives that take the magazine’s commitment to public-interest journalism online.

Previously I was comfortable in a well-paying full time position with benefits (especially vacations — I had accumulated five weeks — count ‘em five — at The Chronicle. And when my daughter was born, I had accumulated four months of “sick leave,” which I was told I could/should take. I stayed home holding my precious baby for four months while receiving checks in the mail. Man, are those days gone!

So, rather than completely freak out at the lack of full-time positions after being laid off in December 2008, I started saying yes to people who need a part-time bookkeeper (which I’m not, but I do know Excel better than many people), or someone who needs a quick Web site (5 pages, $300, done in 7-10 days — need one? Contact me). Or my former employers (bless them) who realized they need my skills, but they don’t need them full time. They are now paying me more per hour than when I worked with them, but it is still less expensive than when I was full time, and I don’t have to put out the “open house” signs. (Sadly, the office plants are dying as I’m good with plants and the part-time person they have is not — I water them during office visits.)

So, if you are in this position, think about combining jobs/projects. I resisted it at first, but I’ve picked up several clients, money is coming in nicely, and I’m almost at the income level I had last December when I was laid off. Not quite, so some unemployment is also added to the mix, but it will be gone soon.

What’s this mix look like: Currently, I am working on budgets and writing the quarterly marketing report for a shopping center, handling the web site and property photos for a real estate agent, setting up web sites for commercial brokers, a ropes course in Sonoma, day spas, and one county supervisor (which is leading to lots of other work). I have stepped up my Web affiliate marketing programs, am going to become a practitioner of EFT (’cause I know beyond a doubt that we can change our patterns and programming, i.e. DNA), will see about giving lectures on cruise ships so I can travel free, will be teaching at College of Marin Extension Courses in Fall . . .

I’ll help you position for this if you wish through twice monthly meetings for MarinPro in San Rafael or in my upcoming class at College of Marin (more on this later — or eMail me). MarinPro is a group of amazing, highly-skilled, under-employed (unemployed) professionals. I enjoy the people there, feel badly that we are all in the same boat, know I’ve made lifetime friends through the meetings, etc. These people are so skilled, if you were sitting around with several million dollars and a fabulous idea thinking “Where on earth am I going to get the caliber of people I need to get this off the ground?”, well just contact Norma at EDD in San Rafael, ask her about MarinPro, and there’s your staff.

l feel a bit dizzy some days (which some friends of mine will tell you is quite normal for me), but it is working and I really like/appreciate the people I’m working for/with.

In a recent poll, reports International Living, New Zealand ranked ahead of Canada, Australia, France, the United Arab Emirates, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, China and the U.S. in a survey of British expatriates who were asked to name the most preferable country for relocation.

Of the 2,000 Britons surveyed, 86% say their lives are better than before they moved and 92% say they are happier, despite the poor economy. The émigrés say the combination of affordable real estate prices, agreeable tax system, and natural environment make New Zealand the best country in which to relocate.

Conducted by NatWest International, which provides global banking services.

And I’ll agree with them.

After visiting 24 countries, one of the few places I’ve found where I’d move to in a heartbeat would be Devonport, New Zealand. (The other two being Kyoto, Japan, and Nice on the Mediterranean coast of France.)

Not only does Devonport resemble Sausalito, California, it is across from Auckland in the same way Sausalito is across from San Francisco. And Devonport has some of the intellectual sensibilities of Berkeley. We found five bookshops, a library, a few pubs, a couple of excellent restaurants, and chic clothing stores withing a four block radius of the ferryboat landing.

We also stayed in one of the nicest hotels we’ve ever been in . . . The Hotel Majestic on the waterfront. I’m sure winters are brutal, so you grab books from the shops, cuddle up next to the fireplace and read.

Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao

How to Get What You Really Really Really Really Want [VHS]

Dr. Dyer gently guides you from ineffective confusion to becoming a self-actualized person. You can do just about anything you want. This book will help you let go of self-defeating mind-babble.

Excerpted from CIO.com, Examiner.com and other sources

The trend is that we, as individuals and companies, are increasingly relying on and using services and products that are “in the cloud” or cloud based. One survey by Pew Research asked, “By the year 2020, will we live in the cloud rather than on the desktop (computer)?” 71% of respondents agreed that by 2020 we will mostly live in the cloud, rather than the desktop.

It’s too bad that techies have to come up with new terms to confuse us. Cloud computing isn’t much different that hiring a part-time bookkeeper or typist or graphic designer who works in their home rather than in your office because you do not need and/or cannot afford a full-time assistant. Your work is on their computer and drawing boards, not yours. Projects in a cloud computing environment site on an external server and may include the use of outside personnel or just their software so that you do not have to purchase expensive software for every project.

Cloud computing is a computing model, not a technology. In this model of computing, all the servers, networks, applications and other elements related to data centers are made available to IT and end users via the Internet, in a way that allows IT to buy only the type and amount of computing services that they need. The cloud model differs from traditional outsourcers in that customers don’t hand over their own IT resources to be managed. Instead they plug into the “cloud” for infrastructure services, platform (operating system) services, or software services (such as SaaS apps), treating the “cloud” much as they would an internal data center or computer providing the same functions.

. . . Between 1993 – 2000 we saw hype around web technologies, intranets and building applications for client-server and the internet. During this time, I’m sure we remember the dramatic increase in jobs relating to these company needs. Also during this time many unfortunate hiring decisions were made due the lack of any official training in the needed areas.

This graph illustrates a 200,000% increase in cloud computing jobs in about an 18 months period of time. Main areas of growth — all of which need intensive training (so start now) are:

1. Cloud Computing Architect. These individuals are in demand who can assist companies with the overall architecture of this project as assess which applications or processes would even make sense being put into the cloud. Big picture. Knows architecture like the back of their hands.
2. The Cloud Project Manager: As the name implies, these individuals are in demand after the feasibility studies have been completed and can see the movement of data from the enterprise and replicate into the cloud identically.
3. The Cloud Systems Integrator: These individuals are the front line granular, hands-on, application builders, data managers, and knowing the vendors well enough to get from cloud to cloud in the event it becomes necessary.

The reality I think we need to come to terms with is that over the last decade we have built large monolithic systems with servers handling only one application or process and are terribly underutilized and far too expensive.

These jobs are in high demand and are available to the right candidates, which means knowing systems; I’m surprised at how many people do not know much about the Internet and the power of the Web at this late date — we are 30 years into this and many business owners just don’t get it.

What I hope is those of us who what to play in this sandbox do our homework first; then go out and make our employers proud, more agile, more cost effective, and oh yes, put a lot of cash in our own pockets.

It’s been awhile since I check what’s going on in the “top careers” world.

Here’s the latest — from eLearning Newwork News,
January 26th, 2010

After the struggle of the financial crisis and following recession, many U.S. workers are searching for stable, well-paying jobs in which to transition. The employment landscape has changed, leaving many U.S. workers wondering where to search for the best jobs.

“What used to be great jobs are now only so-so,” says Marcus Varner, job market analyst at ClassesandCareers.com, a free career information service. “Job security is much more important to today’s workers than it was 2 years ago.”

Fortunately, with a degree and some groundwork, U.S. workers can transition into careers in any of these jobs. Courtesy of ClassesandCareers.com, here are America’s five Best Jobs:

1. Systems Engineer – Merge high demand with high-level decision-making and you have the number one pick. Systems Engineers enjoy responsibility and taking on companies’ top projects. Oh, and the $100,000+ salaries are a perk, too.
2. College Professor – With great retirement benefits, holidays and summers off, and the bliss of tenure, college professors have it made. They teach students and research and write articles and books concerning their field. With a master’s degree, average assistant professors start at $64,000 a year.
3. Nurse Practitioner – With average salaries at $63,172 a year, NPs have it good. Demand for NPs keeps growing with the health industry, and it shows no signs of slowing. To start, NPs need only about 5 years of schooling.
4. IT Project Manager – True, they have to put up with long hours and daunting challenges. But, with only a bachelor’s degree, IT project managers enjoy a huge amount of job security. And the sky’s the limit: chief technology officers on average earn $300,000 annually.
5. Certified Public Accountant – To stay on the right side of the law, every company needs a CPA. After 5 to 6 years of schooling, CPAs start at $45,000 per year. And it’s all upward from there.

Marin County has decided to combine the offices of sheriff and coroner. That makes little sense to many of us . . . unless the coroner also takes on the duties of sheriff. It seems impossible that it could or would go the other way around.

Our vote is for Kenneth Holmes.

An article from the Marin IJ of March 12, 2010 (by Nels Johnson)

The June 8 ballot perked up Friday as contests developed for several top Civic Center posts, with Coroner Ken Holmes challenging Sheriff Robert Doyle to fill the consolidated post of sheriff-coroner . . .

Holmes, who has served the county for 36 years as an investigator and administrator, said in a statement issued by his campaign aide, Marc O’Hara, that he is seeking election to the consolidated post of sheriff-coroner because “Marin deserves a public servant of national reputation, a leader whose professional commitment to running our sheriff’s-coroner office is absolutely unquestioned.”

Holmes added, “We need a law enforcement leader whose skill and experience match the challenges of 21st Century crime-fighting.”

Holmes, who oversees six employees and a budget of about $1.2 million, adamantly opposed a move by county supervisors consolidating his elected post with that of the elected sheriff’s office, which oversees about 300 employees and a $50 million budget. Supervisors concluded the reorganization would curb costs.

Sheriff Doyle, asked to comment on the unusual political spectacle of two Civic Center elected officials seeking the same job, predicted Holmes’ candidacy would be dashed because the code requires sheriff candidates to serve as peace officers. “He’s not a peace officer and he’s not qualified,” Doyle said.

(DL Note: But, then, a peace officer is NOT qualified to serve as coroner, so we don’t understand that comment at all.)

But Registrar of Voters Elaine Ginnold said Holmes met ballot qualifications for the post when he presented an advanced certificate awarded him by the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST). The document, dated March 11, 2010, says Holmes “fulfilled the requirements for character, education, training and experience” as prescribed by state code.

“On the face of it, based on the document, he’s qualified,” Ginnold said. Doyle continued to press the issue, saying, “I don’t think he’s ever been a peace officer . . . ”

The Coroner’s Duties

The Coroner’s Office is responsible for investigating the cause and manner of death of all sudden or unexpected deaths within the county, or natural deaths where the person has not been seen under the close care of a physician. The office is also responsible for identifying any unknown decedent and locating the next-of-kin, and preserving all criminal and/or civil evidence, and personal assets and estates.

Government Code Section 27491 mandates that the County Coroner will inquire into and determine the circumstances, manner and cause of all deaths (except those under a physician’s care within the 20 days prior to death) that occur within the Coroner’s jurisdiction.

The department has made a concentrated effort to increase community outreach in the area of grief counseling, community-based adult and juvenile substance abuse prevention program, and elder care and elder abuse prevention in homes and care facilities.

The County does not have a central forensics facility (morgue). The Coroner has informal arrangements with several private mortuaries in the county, and these private facilities are used for the autopsies that the Coroner is required to conduct.

An Over of Coroner Offices in California

The most recent counties in California to consolidate the elected offices of Coroner and Sheriff are Tehama, Santa Clara, San Bernardino and Solano. Reasons include that coroner departments are typically unheard of, meaning knowledge of the complicated duties are unknown.

The California counties that consolidated these two offices

What next!?

The recent recession has people asking themselves where they need to be in case the economy takes a turn for the worse again. American workers are scrambling to make sure they don’t end up in the same situation multiple times.

Getting an education in a recession-proof industry is a good idea. The key is to choose a field that people will always need. Although people will not always be spending money at shopping malls, they will always get sick, go to school, pay taxes or use public utilities. (And many people stay close to home by eating out locally and going to movies.)

Several industries reported to typically thrive during a slow economy:

1. Health care: People will continue to get sick – oftentimes even more during a recession because of stresss and/or becasue they don’t have the money to take better care of themselves. The Bureau of Statistics projects that health care jobs will grow by 50 percent in the next 8 years.
2. Food/Groceries: People have to eat and the last time I remember an economically stressed time, family and friends spent lots of time together enjoying pot luck dinners and camaraderie. It was a great time, actually.
3. Utilities: Consumers may cut back on usage, but they will never stop using heat and water. Also, this industry grows as people look for more efficiency as a way to save energy. The growth over the next 10 years in employment is expected to be 6.3 percent.
4. Accounting: Companies and people look for someone to keep them on track during tight times. The personal finance industry will grow 41 percent over the next decade.
5. Computer and technology: The world has turned digital and jobs in technology are growing. Network and software engineers can expect to see 53 percent employment growth in the next 8 years.
6. Education: Children will always be in school and many people choose to return to school in order to find a better job in a slow economy. Post-secondary teacher employment will increase 22 percent and primary education by 13 percent.
7. International business: Despite a bad local economy, other nations may not be hurting as bad (although some are showing signs of economic issues, i.e. Dubai.
8. Funerals: Sadly, people still die … usually more people die because of a lack of money for health insurance or personal health care.
9. Federal government: Government services tend to increase in times of recession.
10. Sales: Sales people never have to worry about a job. There is always stuff to be sold, especially as some business try to push through a recession. Sales jobs will increase by 23 percent in the near future.
11. Military: The military’s arms are always open to people. They offer great benefits even during hard times.

Stay Focused on Your Core Genius
by Jack Canfield

I believe you have inside of you a core genius . . . some one thing that you love to do, and do so well, that you hardly feel like doing anything else. It’s effortless for you and a whole lot of fun. And if you could make money doing it, you’d make it your lifetime’s work.

In most cases, your Core Genius is directly tied to your passions and life-purpose.

Successful people believe this, too. That’s why they put their core genius first. They focus on it—and delegate everything else to other people on their team.

For me, my core genius lies in the area of teaching, training, coaching and motivating. Another core genius is writing and compiling books. Over my 35 year career, I have written, co-authored, compiled and edited more than 150 books, and I love to do it! I do it well, and people report that they get great value from it.

Compare that to the other people in the world who go through life doing everything, even those tasks they’re bad at or that could be done more cheaply, better, and faster by someone else.

They simply can’t find the time to focus on their core genius because they fail to delegate even the most menial of tasks.

When you delegate the grunt work—the things you hate doing or those tasks that are so painful, you end up putting them off—you get to concentrate on what you love to do. You free up your time so that you can be more productive. And you get to enjoy life more.

So why is delegating routine tasks and unwanted projects so difficult for most people?

Surprisingly, most people are afraid of looking wasteful or being judged as being above everyone else. They are afraid to give up control or reluctant to spend the money to pay for help. Deep down, most people simply don’t want to let go.

Others (potentially you) have simply fallen into the habit of doing everything themselves. “It’s too time-consuming to explain it to someone,” you say. “I can do it more quickly and better myself anyway.” But can you?

Delegate Completely!

If you’re a professional earning $75 per hour and you pay a neighborhood kid $10 an hour to cut the grass, you save the effort of doing it yourself on the weekend and gain one extra hour when you could profit by $65. Of course, while one hour does’t seem like much, multiply that by 52 weekends a year and you discover you’Ave gained 52 hours a year at $65 per hour —or an extra $3,380 in potential earnings.

Similarly, if you’re a real estate agent, you need to list houses, gather information for the multiple listings, attend open houses, do showings, put keys in lock boxes, write offers and make appointments. And, if you’re lucky, you eventually get to close a deal.

But let’s say that you’re the best closer in the area.

Why would you want to waste your time writing listings, doing lead generation, placing lock boxes, and making videos of the property when you could have a staff of colleagues and assistants doing all that, thus freeing you up to do more closing? Instead of doing just one deal a week, you could be doing three deals because you had delegated what you’re less good at.

One of the strategies I use and teach is complete delegation. It simply means that you delegate a task once and completely – rather than delegating it each time it needs to be done.

When my niece came to stay with us one year while she attended the local community college, we made a complete delegation – the grocery shopping. We told her she could have unlimited use of our van if she would buy the groceries every week. We provided her with a list of staples that we always want in the house (eggs, butter, milk, ketchup, and so on), and her job was to check every week and replace anything that was running low.

In addition, my wife planned meals and let her know which items she wanted for the main courses (fish, chicken, broccoli, avocados, and so on). The task was delegated once and saved us hundreds of hours that year that could be devoted to writing, exercise, family time, and recreation.

Most entrepreneurs spend less than 30% of their time focusing on their core genius and unique abilities.

In fact, by the time they’ve launched a business, it often seems entrepreneurs are doing everything but the one thing they went into business for in the first place.

Many salespeople, for example, spend more time on account administration than they do on the phone or in the field making sales, when they could hire a part-time administrator (or share the cost with another salesperson) to do this time-consuming detail work. In most cases, in a fraction of the time it would take them and at a fraction of the cost.

Most female executives spend too much time running their household, when they could easily and inexpensively delegate this task to a cleaning service or part-time mother’s helper, freeing them to focus on their career or spend more quality time with their family.

Don’t let this be your fate!

Identify your core genius, then delegate completely to free up more time to focus on what you love to do.

I believe that you can trade, barter, pay for and find volunteer help to do almost everything you don’t want to do, leaving you to do what you are best at – and which will ultimately make you the most money and bring you the most happiness.

From Monster.com
by John Rossheim
Monster Senior Contributing Writer

The economy is sputtering, and companies say they will make nothing but perfect-10 hires. Meanwhile, Baby Boomers are retiring by the millions — and everyone wants to be a millionaire, not a wage earner. Where does all this leave employers and workers in their never-ending struggle to tip the balance in the American labor market?

From the perspective of an annual survey commissioned by staffing firm Manpower, these dynamics yield a number of occupations for which openings are hard to fill.

Among white-collar jobs, the following positions make Manpower’s 10 Hardest Jobs to Fill list:

• engineers
• technicians
• sales reps
• accountants
• IT staff

On the blue-collar side

• the list includes machinists and machine operators,
• skilled tradespeople
• mechanics
• laborers
• production operators

But labor-market power is shifting toward employers as the economy continues to soften. While in Manpower’s 2007 survey of 2,000 US firms 41 percent of employers reported difficulties filling positions, the 2008 tally found only about half that percentage of companies — 22 percent — reported recruitment was a struggle.

This should come as no surprise, given that American employers shed about a quarter of a million jobs in the first four months of 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

And many experts, especially labor advocates, take issue with the Manpower study’s conclusion that all these occupations are in shortage.
So if you work in one of these occupations — or want to — what’s the real story? Let’s take a look at the survey results and get some perspective on what the shortages really mean.

White-Collar Occupations Blow in the Winds of Economic Change

Even as thousands of IT jobs continue to be offshored each year, demand for software developers, systems engineers and network administrators is strong, according to the Manpower survey.

“One of the challenges that IT departments face is finding people who are well-rounded, can communicate with the lines of business and can manage,” says Melanie Holmes, a vice president at Manpower North America.

With fuel prices spiking and oil and natural gas exploration heating up, demand for petroleum engineers is rising. Offshoring notwithstanding, “engineering is going to be around for awhile,” says Holmes. “Oil companies have employees averaging in their late 40s.”

Eisenbrey says EPI data shows labor shortages in a number of white-collar niches, from healthcare workers to librarians, farm managers, engineering managers and environmental scientists.

Some Blue-Collar Jobs Go Unfilled Even as Their Numbers Drop

Even after decades of manufacturing decline, employment of machinists is expected to drop by 3 percent between 2006 and 2016, according to the BLS.

“We’re at the very beginning of that decline; we haven’t necessarily gotten there yet,” says Holmes. “Even if machinists are declining, applicants are in short supply. Kids are not getting excited about going to tech and vocational schools.”

Labor advocates paint a different picture. “Employers are still not willing to pay what’s required,” says Eisenbrey. “It’s a shortage only at the rate that employers want to pay.”

The skilled trades, especially in construction, rank high among blue-collar jobs that are hard to fill, according to the Manpower survey. Carpenters, welders, plumbers, electricians and masons are in demand, the survey says.

But Eisenbrey questions the validity of these conclusions. “It doesn’t make sense that jobs for construction workers and laborers are hard to fill,” he says. “Wages are declining in most of these occupations; 365,000 of those workers have been laid off in the last 12 months.” In April 2008, as the housing crisis played out, construction employment declined by 61,000 jobs, according to preliminary data from the BLS.

Even in our digital age, stuff still needs to get from here to there, whether the trip is across the warehouse floor or around the world. That’s why jobs for laborers such as freight, stock and materials handlers are projected to increase by almost a quarter of a million positions from 2004 to 2014, according to the BLS. Many of these jobs require few skills but pay $12 to $15 an hour, about double the federal minimum wage, which is set to rise to $6.55 from $5.85 on July 24, 2008.

The following is excerpted from an article by Steenie Harvey published in International Living magazine. Because this is how I travel, my trips are often a write-off and they also often cover themselves from a combination of free services and/or income from publishing articles.

Also, when you write, you are often invited into the most unusual places. During a summer session at Oxford University (on vacation from The San Francisco Chronicle), I was invited to visit Christ Church to visit the quarters of the mathematics lecturer Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Behind the Reverend Dodgson’s offices was a walled-in garden where Dean Liddell’s daughter, Alice, often played while her cat sat atop the wall surveying the surroundings. Under his pen name, Lewis Carroll, he write a story, purportedly based in Alice and her cat: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. This visit remains a highlight of my life and came about because I publish pieces here and there now and then.

If you’ve been to Ecuador, you probably know about Otavalo’s textiles, Cotacachi’s leatherworkers, and San Antonio’s woodcarvers. But did you investigate Chordeleg’s silversmiths?

Or experience Ciclopaseo? Every second Sunday, more than six miles of Quito’s streets are given over to cyclists, rollerbladers, and joggers (visitors can rent bikes). Free concerts and events like aerobics take place in squares and parks along the route.

To me, that sounds like an offbeat story for a cycling magazine . . .

Think like a writer and vacations will probably become more enriching. Setting your own agenda is adventurous, certainly—but you could also turn your travel finds into cash.

Editors often want short pieces about a quirky restaurant, place to stay, money-saving idea, a curious activity or attraction . . . a good-value tour . . . the perfect beach.

Think about what makes an unusual snippet—the kind that makes you say, “I didn’t know about that. I must see/do/try it.”

Now, I’m not promising instant riches. Although it often leads to juicy commissions, writing “postcards” won’t deliver a fortune. Not initially. Many magazines pay only $50 to $100 for a short piece.

Yet say you wrote 10 of these little postcards. (And once you know how, they’re really easy to knock out.)

In the September issue of the International Living, the author presents five story ideas that could be turned into cash . . .

10 Skills Developers will Need in the Next Five Years
Date: April 1st, 2009
Author: Justin James

With the recent changes in the economy, a lot of developers are focused on their short-term job prospects . . . it’s important to make sure that you get the most bang for your buck when it comes to taking the time and energy to learn new skills.

Here is our list of 10 skills you should be learning right now to make sure that your resume is relevant for the next five years. The list is hardly exhaustive, and there are huge swaths of the industry it won’t cover (mainframe developers, for example). Nonetheless, for average mainstream development, you can’t go wrong learning at least seven of these skills:

1: One of the “Big Three” (.NET, Java, PHP): Unless there is a radical shift in the development world (akin to an asteroid hitting Redmond), most developers will need to know at least one of the Big Three development systems — .NET (VB.NET or C#), Java, or PHP — for the near future. It’s not enough to know the core languages, either. As projects encompass more and more disparate functionality, you’ll need to know the associated frameworks and libraries more deeply.

2: Rich Internet Applications (RIAs): Love it or hate it, in the last few years, Flash is suddenly being used for more than just animations of politicians singing goofy songs. Flash has also sprouted additional functionality in the form or Flex and AIR. Flash’s competitors, such as JavaFx and Silverlight, are also upping the ante on features and performance. To make things even more complicated, HTML 5 is incorporating all sorts of RIA functionality, including database connectivity, and putting the formal W3C stamp on AJAX. In the near future, being an RIA pro will be a key resume differentiator.

3: Web development is not going away anytime soon. Many developers have been content to lay back and ignore the Web or to just stick to “the basics” their framework provides them with. But companies have been demanding more and more who really know how to work with the underlying technology at a “hand code” level. So bone up on JavaScript, CSS, and HTML to succeed over the next five years.

4: Web services: REST or SOAP? JSON or XML? While the choices and the answers depend on the project, it’s getting increasingly difficult to be a developer (even one not writing Web applications) without consuming or creating a Web service. Even areas that used to be ODBC, COM, or RPC domains are now being transitioned to Web services of some variety. Developers who can’t work with Web services will find themselves relegated to legacy and maintenance roles.

5: Soft skills: One trend that has been going for quite some time is the increasing visibility of IT within and outside the enterprise. Developers are being brought into more and more non-development meetings and processes to provide feedback. For example, the CFO can’t change the accounting rules without working with IT to update the systems. And an operations manager can’t change a call center process without IT updating the CRM workflow. Likewise, customers often need to work directly with the development teams to make sure that their needs are met. Will every developer need to go to Toastmasters or study How to Win Friends and Influence People? No. But the developers who do will be much more valuable to their employers — and highly sought after in the job market.

6: One dynamic and/or functional programming language like Ruby, Python, F#, and Groovy still aren’t quite mainstream – but the ideas in them are. For example, the LINQ system in Microsoft’s .NET is a direct descendent of functional programming techniques. Both Ruby and Python are becoming hot in some sectors, thanks to the Rails framework and Silverlight, respectively. Learning one of these languages won’t just improve your resume, though; it will expand your horizons. Every top-flight developer I’ve met recommends learning at least one dynamic or functional programming language to learn new ways of thinking.

7: Agile methodologies: When Agile first hit mainstream awareness, it seemed to be some sort of knee-jerk reaction to tradition, throwing away the controls and standards in favor of anarchy. But as time went on, the ideas behind Agile became both better defined and better expressed. Many shops are either adopting Agile or running proof-of-concept experiments with Agile. While Agile is not the ultimate panacea for project failure, it does indeed have a place on many projects. Developers with a proven track record of understanding and succeeding in Agile environments will be in increasingly high demand over the next few years.

8: Domain knowledge: Hand-in-hand with Agile methodologies, development teams are increasingly being viewed as partners in the definition of projects. This means that developers who understand the problem domain are able to contribute to the project in a highly visible, valuable way. With Agile, a developer who can say, “From here, we can also add this functionality fairly easily, and it will get us a lot of value,” or “Gee, that requirement really doesn’t match the usage patterns our logs show” will excel. As much as many developers resist the idea of having to know anything about the problem domain at all, it is undeniable that increasing numbers of organizations prefer (if not require) developers to at least understand the basics.

9: Development “hygiene”: A few years ago, many (if not most) shops did not have access to bug tracking systems, version control, and other such tools; it was just the developers and their IDE of choice. But thanks to the development of new, integrated stacks, like the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, and the explosion in availability of high quality, open source environments, organizations without these tools are becoming much less common. Developers must know more than just how to check code in and out of source control or how to use the VM system to build test environments. They need to have a rigorous habit of hygiene in place to make sure that they are properly coordinating with their teams. “Code cowboys” who store everything on a personal USB drive, don’t document which changes correspond to which task item, and so on, are unwelcome in more traditional shops and even more unwelcome in Agile environments, which rely on a tight coordination between team members to operate.

10: Mobile development: The late 1990s saw Web development rise to mainstream acceptance and then begin to marginalize traditional desktop applications in many areas. In 2008, mobile development left the launch pad, and over the next five years, it will become increasingly important. There are, of course, different approaches to mobile development: Web applications designed to work on mobile devices, RIAs aimed at that market, and applications that run directly on the devices. Regardless of which of these paths you choose, adding mobile development to your skill set will ensure that you are in demand for the future.

Finally: 10 Things . . . the newsletter! Get the key facts on a wide range of technologies, techniques, strategies, and skills with the help of the concise need-to-know lists featured in TechRepublic’s 10 Things newsletter, delivered every Friday.

Justin James is an employee of Levit & James, Inc. in a multi-disciplinary role that combines programming, network management, and systems administration. He has been blogging at TechRepublic since 2005. Read his full bio and profile.