Having business goals that are in opposition to your personal goals is a sure fire way to feel burnt out in both aspects of your life. You will lose your passion for business, and will feel disappointed more often than not. To ensure that your business and personal goals are in sync, every business owner should ask themselves the following questions:

What Are Your Primary Business Goals?

What do you want your business to achieve in the upcoming months? In the upcoming years? Would you like to hire more employees? Would you like to open a second location? Increase your web presence? Whatever it may be, determine your business goals that are of highest priority to you.

How Will You Achieve Your Goals?

Create a game plan for how you see to make those business goals become a reality. Be sure to create milestones within each goal you set so that each goal you set seems more achievable.

What Are Your Primary Personal Goals?

What personal needs do you need to meet? Would you like to spend more time with your family? Attend more social outings? Or simply spend more time working on your own personal fitness and health? Regardless of what you feel you need to do for yourself in the upcoming months and year, be sure to create a list of those most important to you.

How Will You Achieve Your Personal Goals?

Just like with your business goals, create a game plan for how you intend to achieve your personal goals.

Are Your Plans of Action In Sync?

Once you have determined how you plan to achieve both your personal and professional goals, see how well both game plans overlap. You may find that one requires much more of your time and greater sacrifices than the other. If that is the case, see if you can’t uncover other, less intrusive ways to accomplish your goals.

If you realize that your company needs to have a stronger social media platform presence, but know that doing so will force you to sacrifice even more time with your family, consider hiring a digital marketing agency to handle your accounts. While it will cost your business a bit more, which may lead your revenue to grow more slowly, you will ultimately be able to meet both your personal and professional goals – allowing you to lead a happier and more well-balanced life.

While sacrifices always have to be made in order to own your own business, your personal sacrifices should never have to be so great that you are ultimately unhappy in life. Having a balanced personal and professional life is what keeps a good entrepreneur a happy entrepreneur. So if you are finding yourself struggling in your life, consider reassessing your personal and professional goals and see if there isn’t a better way to achieve them both in a more in sync way.

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Here’s one of those deals that cost very little but is worth a lot. If you’re into developing niche websites, then a striking cars niche blog package could be a good starting point for a very popular blog that is all ready to be monetized. The built-in Amazon store means once you set your affiliate id and send traffic to your shiny new blog, you can start earning affiliate commissions in this lucrative niche.

Amazon is just one of the monetizing methods you can use with this package. You can add other affiliate banners or even your Google AdSense code. The package includes a pre-built page that uses the plugin TubePress. All of the options can be easily accessed and edited in the theme’s options page, making this a great instant money-making blog. The WordPress Cars Niche Blog Package is a complete solution for those of you interested in running your own website without needing design skills or technical know-how.

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Today I’d like to share a video with you that combines upbeat music with some really great quotes that will surely help you feel like there’s nothing you can’t accomplish. Or at least that’s the reason I’m posting it here for you to watch. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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I’m using a very plain theme for the mobile version of this site: Carrington Mobile by Crowd Favorite. It does the job for now, until I get around to customizing it a little bit more. That will be another project to complete in the not to distant future.

I know I posted a while back that I thought the Internet should be viewed on a large screen, but businesses that don’t have mobile versions of their sites are going to be losing out eventually, as more and more busy people access the Internet with their devices. This trend is not going to go away anytime soon.

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So what, you may think. Crime should be punished and I agree.

But let’s say, for example, that one of my advertisers, or someone I link to is committing copyright infringement, this new law would mean they could shut down or at least blacklist my site, even if I had no idea about any of it. They could even try to charge me with facilitating copyright infringement just by virtue of linking to the sites. They could shut down my website ClassicRockLover.com if one of the videos I embedded on that blog is a copyright infringement, even though I had the permission from YouTube to embed it. For that matter, they could even try to shut down YouTube, because it allowed the video in the first place, though Google, unlike me, has a great legal team and I think there would be a very interesting legal battle.

But my point is, this new law could simply cripple the Internet. And as much as I think copyright infringement is wrong, in my humble opinion, they should put more effort into shutting down child porn sites, stopping identity theft, and locating those idiots who create viruses and trojans. This new law is quite simply over the top and many online groups are completely against it and are protesting it.

If you understand at all what this law really means, you should protest it too or at least spread awareness about it on Facebook, Twitter, your blogs. I’m not American, so I can’t write to my Congressmen, but my American friends can. And to my American friends I say this: I really like you all, but your politicians suck (except for Ron Paul). And the heavy-handedness of your American foreign policies is going to bite you in the butt – yet again.

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First of all, it is very rare that a theme won’t work with any WordPress upgrades. I have old themes that I developed in 2006 and 2007 that still work perfectly fine. They are just missing the threaded comments. That’s all. Not such a big deal, right?

Plugin compatibility is quite another challenge when upgrading WordPress. I have found that every plugin I use still works fine, though, and I tend to keep everything up to date.

But one visit to the WordPress support forums is enough to realize that I am very fortunate. Because there are always many people who have problems with upgrades.

I often wonder whether some of their woes are caused by crappy web hosting providers running out of resources to host robust database-driven web sites and last year I mentioned that switching to a web host that has LiteSpeed, made all the difference in the world to me. After all, this blog is 6 years old. That’s a lot of content and database queries. So I needed a more stable hosting solution.

Enough about web hosting and let’s get back to the question of whether or not to upgrade your WordPress version. My personal opinion is that no matter what glitches you may run into, always upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. Most often, upgrades include security fixes that are really important – more important than if your favorite plugin works.

Plugins are great to have but isn’t your site’s security more important? Always backup your blog’s database before an upgrade, so that if something drastic happens, you can always revert back fairly easily.

WordPress is still, in my humble opinion, the best open source software for the web ever released. Don’t neglect the little maintenance issues, and you too will have a a great website that will serve you and your site’s visitors for years and years.

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In 2012, I am not expecting doom and gloom, the end of days, or any other scary prediction. I believe that I will continue my spiritual path and that many other people in the world will awaken to their own spirituality, and they will all understand, as I do now, that nothing matters but love and the freedom to live our own lives in peace, harmony, and dignity.

I have complete faith in the inherent goodness in all humanity while others continually try to paint humanity as mostly evil, for bad stuff always sells more, doesn’t it?

Why are people so attracted to the dark side?

And the answer is because we must all face the dark side in each of us, and determine the correct way to live. It is one thing to watch violent movies or play violent games – it is quite another thing to act in a violent manner in our real lives.

So despite all the doom and gloom in 2011 – the failing economy, the violence, the dirty politics that never seems to end, the corruption, all that bullshit – it just doesn’t matter. For the truth is the world is awakening. And I have great hope for our world in 2012 and beyond. There is nothing whatsoever to fear and a lot to look forward to.

In short, I am at peace with what has transpired in my world in 2011. I see a lot of new beginnings in 2012. I am excited. Are you?

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Click here to view the embedded video.

cheers!

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For now, I hope you enjoy my seasonal message to you:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Because a business blog is a new approach for most organizations to reach out and advertise themselves, they are not absolutely sure what the best way to do it is. This is not a 30 second commercial that will air once in awhile, but a constant posting that will be a available to the world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, on the internet.

Most believe they need to explain about their business organization so the public will get to know them. That’s very true, but there is so much more. Just having an informative website is not enough to get the targeted traffic you need for it to benefit your business. This is when using a 3rd party blog consultant to help you launch your business blog is beneficial.

Third party blog consultants know how to help your organization put its best foot forward, so to speak. They will advise you on such things as the landing page or home page is critical to attracting the attention of the surfers on the internet. If visitors arrive at your site and don’t like what they see instantly, they will leave for another site. That is why first impressions are critical to attracting and keeping your target audience interested in staying on your site. This can be easily done when you are offering what the visitors are looking for, but how do you get them to visit your site?

The key benefit of hiring a 3rd party blog consultant is that they will help you get your site noticed. They are the experts in internet marketing. The use of pay per click ads is well known, but the ads have to be placed in the correct area for them to be effective, plus most people ignore them. That’s one of the reasons why article marketing is so effective.

With the creation of new articles pertaining to your business which will be of interest to your target audience, you will be able to supply them with needed facts and information. Then, submitting these articles where your target audience will find them, will make it easy for them to find you. Article marketing is also an easy way to create backlinks so your website will rise in the SERP’s for your specific keywords, enabling you to gain that necessary traffic to help your business.

Operating a business blog is much more than just opening up a site and saying, “I am here, visit me”. The public have to know you exist and be able to find you, for it to benefit your organization.

Guest post by Rich Hill.

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