I had to create some business cards for a few of our businesses.

I needed some nice samples of business cards.

I’ve included some links to some sites that I was visiting:

I buy all Business Cards from VistaPrint.com. It’s pretty cheap.

1. Cool business card designs | creativebits
2. Cool business card designs, Part 2 | creativebits
3. Cool Business Cards | Inspiredology
4. Image results for cool business cards
5. 35 cool and inspirational business card designs | CrazyLeaf Design …
6. More Cool Business Cards - Business Card Layout & Design Part 3 …
7. list of 70 original and clever designs.
8. Visit our Show Off Gallery to see more Show Off Business Cards
9. Phrizbie Design Business Cards
10. 8 Smokin’ Hot Business Card Designs - FreelanceSwitch - The …
11. 42 Awesome Business Card Designs (With Links to 100s More)
12. 24 Creative Business Card Designs
13. 37 Business Cards - Best of June 2008
14. Cool business card designs
15. Design Inspiration Gallery
16. Business Cards Gallery

To sum this post up,

Do What Is Needed At All Times. Just DO it!

I’m going to talk a little about Self Discipline. I think, this is a very important topic to talk about.

Self Discipline is something that I need to work on.

I should set Monday-Friday 10am-6pm. Just like someone who would go to work 9-5 on the weekdays.

Which needs to be non-stop work or should be focused on money making activities to pay the bills.

The undisciplined are slaves to moods, appetites and passions.

-
Stephen R. Covey

The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.

- Vince Lombardi

The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you’re willing to work.

- Oprah Winfrey

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

- Calvin Coolidge

Definition: Self-discipline is the ability to get yourself to take action regardless of your emotional state.

The notes on the bottom are from Self-Discipline at StevePavlina.com

What Is Self-Discipline?

Imagine what you could accomplish if you could simply get yourself to follow through on your best intentions no matter what. Picture yourself saying to your body, “You’re overweight. Lose 20 pounds.” Without self-discipline that intention won’t become manifest. But with sufficient self-discipline, it’s a done deal. The pinnacle of self-discipline is when you reach the point that when you make a conscious decision, it’s virtually guaranteed you’ll follow through on it.

Self-discipline is one of many personal development tools available to you. Self-discipline can empower you to overcome any addiction or lose any amount of weight. It can wipe out procrastination, disorder, and ignorance. Within the domain of problems it can solve, self-discipline is simply unmatched. Moreover, it becomes a powerful teammate when combined with other tools like passion, goal-setting, and planning.

Building Self-Discipline

My philosophy of how to build self-discipline is best explained by an analogy. Self-discipline is like a muscle. The more you train it, the stronger you become. The less you train it, the weaker you become.

The five pillars of self-discipline are:

Acceptance, Willpower, Hard Work, Industry, and Persistence.

First Pillar - Acceptance

The first of the five pillars of self-discipline is acceptance. Acceptance means that you perceive reality accurately and consciously acknowledge what you perceive.

Just as there are different muscle groups which you train with different exercises, there are different areas of self-discipline: disciplined sleep, disciplined diet, disciplined work habits, disciplined communication, etc. It takes different exercises to build discipline in each area.

Without acceptance you get either ignorance or denial. With ignorance you simply don’t know how disciplined you are — you’ve probably never even thought about it. You don’t know that you don’t know. You’ll only have a fuzzy notion of what you can and can’t do. You’ll experience some easy successes and some dismal failures, but you’re more likely to blame the task or blame yourself instead of simply acknowledging that the “weight” was too heavy for you and that you need to become stronger.

When you’re in a state of denial about your level of discipline, you’re locked into a false view of reality. You’re either overly pessimistic or optimistic about your capabilities.

Pursing The Path, Example

I have personally reaped tremendous benefits from pursuing the path of self-discipline. When I was 20 years old, I lived in a small studio apartment, and my sleep hours were something like 4am to 1pm. My diet included lots of fast food and junk food. I didn’t exercise except for sometimes taking long walks. Getting the mail seemed like a significant accomplishment each day, and the highlight of my day was hanging out with friends. At the end of a month, I couldn’t really think of many salient events that occurred during the month. I had no job, no car, no income, no goals, no plans, and no real future. All I felt I had was a lot of problems that weren’t getting any better. I had no sense that I could control my path through life. I would simply wait for things to happen and then react to them.

But eventually I faced the reality that trying to wait out my life wasn’t working. If I was going to get anywhere, I was going to have to do something about it. And initially this meant tackling a lot of difficult challenges, but I overcame them and grew a lot stronger in a short period of time.

But eventually I faced the reality that trying to wait out my life wasn’t working. If I was going to get anywhere, I was going to have to do something about it. And initially this meant tackling a lot of difficult challenges, but I overcame them and grew a lot stronger in a short period of time.

Fast forward fourteen years, and it’s like night and day. I get up at 5am each morning. I exercise six days a week. I eat a purely vegan diet with lots of fresh vegetables. My home office is well organized. My physical inbox and my email inbox are both empty. I’m married with two kids and live in a nice house. A binder sits on my desk with my written goals and detailed plans to achieve them, and several of my 2005 goals have already been accomplished. I’ve never been more clear about what I wanted, and I’m doing what I love. I know I’m making a difference.

None of this just happened. It was intentional. And it certainly didn’t happen overnight. It took a lot of years of hard work. It’s still hard work, but I’ve become a lot stronger such that things that would have been insurmountable for me at age 20 are easy today, which means I can tackle bigger challenges and therefore achieve even better results. If I had tried to do everything I’m doing now when I was 20, I would have failed utterly. 20-year old Steve wouldn’t have been able to handle it, not even for one day. But for 34-year old Steve, it’s easy. And what’s really exciting for me is to think of what 48-year old Steve will be able to accomplish… relative to my life path of course, not anyone else’s.

I want you to be impressed by what you can accomplish over the next 5-10 years if you progressively build your self-discipline. It will not be easy, but it will be worth it. The first step is to openly accept where you are right now, whether you feel good about it or not. Surrender yourself to what you have to work with — maybe it isn’t fair, but it is what it is. And you won’t get any stronger until you accept where you are right now.

What Is Willpower?

Willpower is your ability to set a course of action and say, “Engage!”

Willpower provides an intensely powerful yet temporary boost. Think of it as a one-shot thruster. It burns out quickly, but if directed intelligently, it can provide the burst you need to overcome inertia and create momentum.

Willpower does work. But in order to take full advantage of it, you must learn what it can and cannot do. People who say willpower doesn’t work are trying to use it in a way that’s beyond its capabilities.

Willpower is the spearhead of self-discipline.

Hard Work Defined

Hard work — yet another dirty word.

My definition of hard work is that which challenges you.

Being healthy is hard work. Finding and maintaining a successful relationship is hard work. Raising kids is hard work. Getting organized is hard work. Setting goals, making plans to achieve them, and staying on track is hard work. Even being happy is hard work (true happiness that comes from high self-esteem, not the fake kind that comes from denial and escapism).

Hard work goes hand-in-hand with acceptance. One of the things you must accept are those areas of your life that won’t succumb to anything less than hard work. Perhaps you’ve had no luck finding a fulfilling relationship. Maybe the only way it’s going to happen is if you accept you’re going to have to do what you’ve been avoiding. Perhaps you want to lose weight. Maybe it’s time to accept that the path to your goal requires disciplined diet and exercise (both hard work). Perhaps you want to increase your income. Maybe you should accept that the only way it will happen is with a lot of hard work.

Your life will reach a whole new level when you stop avoiding and fearing hard work and simply surrender to it. Make it your ally instead of your enemy. It’s a potent tool to have on your side.

Industry is working hard. In contrast to hard work, being industrious doesn’t necessarily mean doing work that’s challenging or difficult. It simply means putting in the time. You can be industrious doing easy work or hard work.

Imagine you have a baby. You’ll spend a lot of time changing diapers. But that isn’t really hard work — it’s just a matter of doing it over and over many times each day.

In life there are many tasks that aren’t necessarily difficult, but they collectively require a significant time investment. If you don’t discipline yourself to stay on top of them, they can make a big mess of your life. Just think of all the little things you need to do: shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry, taxes, paying bills, home maintenance, childcare, etc. And this is just for home — if you include work the list grows even longer. These things may not reach your A-list for importance, but they still need to be done.

Self-discipline requires that you develop the capacity to put in the time where it’s needed. A lot of messes are created when we refuse to put in the time to do what needs to be done — and to do it correctly. Such messes range from a messy desk or cluttered email inbox all the way down to an Enron or Worldcom. Big mess or small mess — take your pick. Either way a significant contributing factor is the refusal to do what needs to be done.

Sometimes it’s clear what needs to be done. Sometimes it isn’t clear at all. But ignoring the mess won’t help no matter what. If you don’t know what needs to be done, the first step is to figure it out. This may require you to seek out information and educate yourself. In order to launch this blog last year, I had to figure out how to do it. I took time to educate myself by reading other blogs and evaluating various blogging tools. It wasn’t difficult for me, but it required a significant time investment.

Finally we got them unpacked last weekend and took care of a few other home repairs that had been on the back burner as well.

It wasn’t difficult or costly to do these things. It was simply a matter of time to get them done. It didn’t require much skill or brainpower. All we had to do was just accept that they needed to be done, take a few minutes to figure out how to do them, and then do them.

Put in the Time

There are many problems in life where the solution is largely a brainless time investment. If your email inbox is overloaded, this is not a challenging problem. Believe me — there are bigger challenges in life than handling old correspondence. I guarantee you have the brainpower to handle it. Getting your email inbox to empty is purely a matter of time. Maybe it will take you several hours to do it. If it’s worth several hours to get it done, then put in the time. Maybe enjoy some relaxing music as you do. Otherwise just hit Ctrl-A followed by Delete, and be done with it.

How many problems do you have on your to do list right now that can be solved with the simple application of industry? Sometimes you don’t need to be particularly creative or clever about it — a brute force solution will do. But it’s easy to get stuck in a pattern of wishing that a brute force solution wasn’t necessary. It’s tedious. It’s boring. It’s not that important anyway. And yet it still needs to be done.

By all means if you can find a way to avoid a time-consuming solution and find a faster or better way to bypass or eliminate the problem, take advantage of it. Delegate it, delete it — do whatever you can to remove the time burden. But if you know it’s something that won’t get done except via your personal time investment, like the ornery boxes in my home that refused to self-unpack, then just accept it and get it off your plate. Don’t complain. Don’t whine. Just do it.

Develop Your Personal Productivity

Disciplining yourself to be industrious allows you to squeeze more value out of your time. When you pursue the path of developing your personal productivity, it may cause you some days of hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing, but it does eventually pay off. I think many people are attracted to the idea of becoming more productive out of basic common sense. It doesn’t take much brainpower to figure out that if you use your time more efficiently, you’ll complete more tasks, and therefore you’ll accumulate results faster. Personal productivity allows you to create enough space in your life to do all the things you feel you should be doing: eat healthy, exercise, work hard, deepen relationships, have a wonderful social life, and make a difference. Otherwise, something has to give. Without a high level of personal productivity, you’ll likely have to give up something that’s important to you. You have conflicts between health and work, work and family, family and friends. Industry can give you the ability to enjoy all of these things, so you don’t have to choose work over family or vice versa. You can have both.

What Is Persistence?

Persistence is the fifth and final pillar of self-discipline.

Persistence is the ability to maintain action regardless of your feelings. You press on even when you feel like quitting.

When you work on any big goal, your motivation will wax and wane like waves hitting the shore. Sometimes you’ll feel motivated; sometimes you won’t. But it’s not your motivation that will produce results — it’s your action. Persistence allows you to keep taking action even when you don’t feel motivated to do so, and therefore you keep accumulating results.

Persistence will ultimately provide its own motivation. If you simply keep taking action, you’ll eventually get results, and results can be very motivating. For example, you may become a lot more enthusiastic about dieting and exercising once you’ve lost those first 10 pounds and feel your clothes fitting more loosely.

When to Give Up

Should you always persist and never give up? Certainly not. Sometimes giving up is clearly the best option.

In order to make room for new goals, we have to delete or complete old ones. And sometimes new goals are so compelling and inspiring that there’s no time to complete old ones — they have to be abandoned half-finished. I’ve always found it uncomfortable to do this, but I know it’s necessary.

Links

1. How to Build Self-Discipline
2. Self-Discipline

Been working on my ppc campaigns lately, to try and get some campaigns up and running before I start really taking this blog seriously.

I really need to be more productive throughout the day. I will be taking notes and listing sites that I visited which had articles or tips on being more productive with my time.

I’d like to get a lot more things done, which I currently am not getting done.

You want your 1 year of time, to count for 2-3 years for an average persons effort into their own life.

To accomplish, this you must and always be productive throughout the whole year.

Being self-employed, this can be a challenge. Since their is no Boss telling you, what to do.

Although, being human. It is very easy to be lazy. (at least for myself)

KEY: Productive - Attention is put towards, area where the biggest returns are gained.

Tips for Learning To Become Productive.
*Do NOTHING but WHAT is on your TO-DO LIST!

1. Get Up from the Computer for Breaks (Do Chores, Laundry, Errands.)
2. Take 5 Minutes Start of the Day to Evaluate Tasks.
3. Prioritize. List Most Critical Tasks in a 8-12 Hour Work Day. List Estimated Times.
4. Categorize Tasks up to 4 Categories:
   - high profit/urgent
   - high profit/not urgent
   - low profit/urgent and
   - low profit/not urgent
5. 100% Focused. In The Zone, Flow State, Concentration
6. Action: Do one thing and get it finished. 1 Task at a Time.
7. Action: 60 Min Time Zones, Old 60min Kitchen Timer.
8. Weekly Reviews
9. Set Weekly Milestones
10. Evening Debrief, Shut Down Computer.
11. Delegate as much as you can.

*Know Your Best Working Time
*No Excuses
*Never Let Yourself Procrastinate

Links & Articles

1. The Secret To Being Productive at Instigatorblog.com
   
2. 14 Tips to Get More Done in Less Time at internetducttape.com
3. My contribution to The Ultimate Guide to Productivity Group Writing Project at finandom.com
4. My Productivity Secret - The Joy of Flow State at chrisg.com
5. How To Stay Focused For Greater Productivity at dmiracle.com
6. Ultimate Guide to Productivity at demystifyingtechnologoy.blogspot.com
7. Zugunruhe Ultimate Guide to Productivity: Time Budgets at zugenruhecoaching.typepad.com

Print Screen doesn’t necessarily take a picture of the whole page.

Check out the website, http://www.screengrab.org/ and it’s used to take pictures of the whole page.

Got to use Firefox with it.

Thanks to steven from tracking202 for the link

Yes, You can. Their are different templates that you can choose from depending on what you are using it for.

If you want;

WordPress Templates - Search Google - Free WordPress Templates
Joomla Templates - Search Google - Free Joomla Templates
HTML/CSS Templates - Search Google - Free CSS Templates

Here are a few sites where you can find some nice CSS Templates;

• http://www.freecsstemplates.com/templates.html
• http://www.templateworld.com/free_templates.html
• http://www.freecsstemplates.org/css-templates/
• http://www.free-css-templates.com/

Here’s a nice tip that I wanted to put on my blog. This is called, “CSS Tip: CSS Image Hover Opacity Effect”.

I use this for quick mouseovers when I am to lazy to actually create it in Photoshop.

CSS Code [This goes above (/head)]:

<style type="text/css">

.toggleopacity img{
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=50);
-moz-opacity: 0.5;
}

.toggleopacity:hover img{
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=100);
-moz-opacity: 1;
}

</style>

HTML Code [Where You Want This Effect On]:

<a class="toggleopacity" href="LINK FOR IMAGE">
<img src="IMAGE URL" border="0" />
</a>

Comment, if you have any problems with the script.

The stats for my current system is:

Microsoft Windows XP
Intel(R) Core (TM)2 Quad CPU
Q6600 @ 2.40GHZ
2.40GHZ, 3.00 GB of Ram

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 512 - Video Card

I want to upgrade it to Dual Boot,

Windows XP
Windows Vista

and from my 4GB RAM to 8GB RAM.

I also plan on getting a flexible keyboard. Need an Anti-Virus Program.

Hopefully, this will speed things up.

In Affiliate Marketing, tracking your keywords is a must.

By knowing more about your keywords. You can find out, what exact keywords are converting well for you.

You can also find out which keywords aren’t converting at a profit and either pause or delete that campaign.

What should I use for Keyword Tracking? You may ask.

The best and easiest way I think to setup your Keyword Tracking for your PPC Campaigns would be to use Wes Mahler’s Tracking Software called Tracking202.com

I have met Wes Mahler in person at the Affiliate Summit West 2008 in Las Vegas. He’s a great guy and is very dedicated to making Tracking202.com a very well known Tracking Tool for Affiliates. Wes & The T202 Team are planning on creating additional useful tools for affiliates. They’re second project is called Export202.com, Which exports your current campaign into either of the 3 networks. I will write a more detailed post on Export202.com once I use it.

I am currently using Tracking202.com for all my PPC Campaigns and this has been very helpful for me.

Tracking202.com is 100% FREE and has already MANY Features for the 2 months it has been online.

They have worked hard on creating Online Video Tutorials to use their software. You should check these out, they explain every detail perfectly.

This PPC Affiliate Tracking Software, is the control panel to view all your stats from all your PPC Networks & Affiliate Networks.

Which organizes it all in one central location, instead of having to login manually to each one site.

The Most Important Feature in this tracking tool is it’s ability to Track Keywords and Keyword Conversions.

What is this exactly?
Tracking Keywords - You want to know which keywords (kw’s you bid on ppc search engines), triggered the visitors to go to your website.
Keyword Conversions - Tracking202.com will tell you how much you Spend & Made from each keyword, so you can further analyze your campaign data.

By knowing and tracking your results from your campaigns.

This allows you to Increase Profits and or Increase/Decrease your PPC Spending.

A List of the Features of Tracking202.com

• Ability to Add All Your Campaign Information
  • PPC Accounts, Affiliate Networks, Affiliate Campaigns, Landing Pages, Text Ads
• Ability to Generate Tracking Links
  • Get LP Code, Get Text Ad Code
• Overview
  • 
  • You can get automatic stats & color graphs with tons of different options on how to view things.
• Analyze
  • Analyze Keywords In Depth
• Visitors
  • Analyze Your Visitors
• Spy
  • Real Time Spy on Your Visitor

Thats just a brief preview of the features, they have many features that’s too much to list.

Go take a look at Tracking202.com & Sign Up.

It will help you track & monitor your campaigns.

Don’t forget to check the Tracking202.com Videos to further understand how to use T202.

Watch Tracking202.com Videos