How To Monetize Your Social Media Followers

It has been the elephant in social media’s room ever since Facebook opened its business pages and corporations started to pile into Twitter. It is the question that prompts more embarrassed shuffling of feet and more mumbled mentions of the benefits of branding than a barn dance at a cattle farm.

How do you make money out of your followers?

That was always the goal of companies who built pages and created Twitter accounts, especially small firms with little need for PR. They wanted to extract cash from the followers their accounts were building up and when they tried, they found the results disappointing. Even when Dell, in the early days of Twitter, boasted that it had made $10 million out of its Twitter presence, critics were quick to point out that those were not new sales. The company’s customers were following the timeline for news and making purchases that they would have made anyway.

That might have been true but it is certainly true that monetizing social media followers directly is notoriously difficult.

Richard Millington is an expert in online communities. He has been able to list no less than nineteen different ways in which owners of forums and other community platforms can extract money from their members. 

From charging for premium services and offering affiliate products to organizing events and putting together focus groups for advertising companies, there is no shortage of ways to get cash from a crowd.

Few of those methods, though, apply to the business user of a social media site.

Advertising Does Not Pay On Social Media

Although various companies have tried to pay users to tweet ads, for the most part, the number of followers has to be high, the money has always been chump change, and the opportunities have been few.

You cannot charge for membership or offer premium services when you are using someone else’s platform, and as for organizing events, focus groups and selling merchandise on social media, in practice, you would probably make more money performing.

If you are looking for direct sales, then the most obvious and the most likely method is to make special offers to Facebook and Twitter followers. Even here, though, the difficulty of reaching followers whose timelines scroll dozens of other tweets every few minutes or whose news feeds are filtered by EdgeRank means that the conversion rate of follower numbers to sales figures would be embarrassingly low. There is a reason that affiliate sellers are still using one-page sales letters rather than putting links in tweets.

But that does not mean that you can never extract direct sales from your social media followers. It just means you have to be a little indirect. Thriller writer Martin Rees, for example, has been using his Twitter account to promote his free ebook about the death of Yasser Arafat. He sends readers to Amazon where they will also see his other books and read reviews. Other businesses send ebook readers to a download page where they have to enter their email address. That gives the business a chance to make all sorts of other offers through email marketing, a more effective channel for direct sales.

Social media is not the best platform for turning leads into customers. But it is a great platform for finding prospects, gathering them together, building their loyalty, and turning them into leads. That is when the business can really make money out of its followers.  The secret?  Building their loyalty.

http://blog.seoforsite.com/2014/02/28/how-to-monetize-your-social-media-followers/

Your Blog Can Earn You Money

If you have heard or read about other bloggers who rake in a killing with their blogs and you’re thinking about trying it too, you first need to know what sources there are for generating income. After you know what you need, then you need to decide if you have what it takes to actually make money with your blog.

 

1. Ads

 

Just like newspapers and magazines gain money from advertisers, you can do the same on your blog. Ads can be click-through text links, impression ads (image ads) or contextual. AdSense is definitely the most reliable and tends to be best source of income from ads. There are also others such as: Kontera, Value Click, Adgenta and AdBrite.

 

2. Affiliate Marketing

 

The only difference between affiliate marketing and regular ads is the way you are paid. The former pays a set price, while the latter pays commission based upon performance. So, if you get a lot of people clicking on your links who then buy the product, you will get paid more. Amazon has a good affiliate marketing opportunity and others include Commission Junction, AllPosters and LinkShare.

 

3. Continuity Programmes

 

This is a newer form of blog monetizing. Continuity programs pay the blogger a recurring amount to offer a service which people sign up for. Third Tribe Marketing offers a program like this.

 

4. Paid Blogging

 

Most companies will not pay you to write your own content unless you have massive traffic, loyal subscribers and a high search-ranking blog. However, there are many ways to get paid to blog for other businesses. ProBlogger is a job board just for this purpose, but there are plenty of freelance writing job boards with paid blogging jobs.

 

5. Product Sales

 

This can be something you create on your own or a product you sell for a separate business. eBooks can be a great way to not only supplement your other income, but they also provide extra value to your audience.

 

 

 

Do You Have What It Takes for Your Blog to Make Money?

 

You have probably heard this before: Anyone can make money from their blog. Well, yes and no. While it is true that it’s possible for anyone to monetize their blog, not everyone can actually make money from it. You can put up twenty-seven ads and join sixteen affiliate marketing groups which technically counts as “monetizing” your blog. This is no guarantee that you will actually make an income of any kind. Making significant money by blogging depends on the following things:

1. How Good Your Blog Is

 

If your blog is essentially an exercise in vanity where you publish all your terrible poetry and it offers value to no one except your two weird fans, you may as well try squeezing money out of a soggy paper bag.

2. How Shareable Your Blog Is

 

If you offer awesome information, are exceptionally funny or otherwise have a good quality blog, but you never have a single call to action and you never promote it, how are you going to increase your readership and traffic? Shareable also refers to other people sharing it. Be sure to use titles, content and images that can easily be shared. Set up social media buttons to encourage your audience to pass it along.

3. Is There a Demand or Audience for Your Blog?

 

This doesn’t mean “do you have 10 friends that will read your blog if you beg them?” It means, “is there purpose to your blog and does it appeal to a wide audience?” Think of your blog like a product. You may be writing some really cool stuff about giant-sized radishes that can cure hiccups, but how many people will care? A blog that reviews mobile apps for business and integrated marketing would appeal to a very large audience of corporate and private business owners.

4. Are You Willing to Work Hard for Your Audience?

 

If your blog satisfies all the first three things, but you don’t put much time or effort into your blog, it won’t generate a lot of income. For example, let’s say you join as an affiliate to market how to control backyard mosquitos, but you don’t put a lot of effort into selling mosquito repellants or promoting the company website. Maybe you use AdSense, but you think your blog will look like a mini-mall threw up on it if you use more than two or three per post.

Maybe you don’t take time to learn about your audience’s demographics and consequently do not have ads that market well to them. Maybe you get bored writing and start to publish lazy articles that don’t have a lot of value. These are all things that will sabotage your blog’s potential to bring in substantial income.

In other words, to make decent money from your blog, you have to work at it like a normal job. This is not a “make-lots-of-money-but-without-having-to-do-any-work” thing. It also helps to know about SEO (search engine optimization), how to build web traffic, how to increase your online visibility and other web savvy strategies. If you have great content but have no idea what backlinks or SERPs mean, you may want to think about partnering with someone who does.

http://www.socialmediafrontiers.com/2014/03/5-ways-to-make-money-from-your-blog.html#more

Affiliate Marketing Growing Up In 2014

Affiliate marketing is stagnant and ripe for innovation. In-content “affiliate” or “performance” marketing — driving traffic through product links embedded in original content — is one of the oldest business models on the web and it has barely changed in a decade. This year, 2014, change is emerging.

A new affiliate exchange, bringing merchants and publishers together to buy and sell clicks in real time, launched in the summer of 2013. This new content-driven commerce exchange is picking up steam. As a result of this exchange and others like it, publishers will unlock billions of dollars in revenues in the next five years. Merchants will be able to reliably and predictably buy product specific content-driven commerce clicks on demand and at scale.

Affiliate marketing is plagued by a reputation for fraud. It is also dominated by coupon sites that often do little more for merchants than create margin pressure. Equally problematic, affiliate marketing suffers from mind boggling fragmentation and complexity. Tens of thousands of merchant programs are spread across dozens of affiliate networks in the US alone. Much of the work required of publishers for earning from clicks they drive to merchants remains manual and error prone. Until recently, real- time bidding for contextually-relevant product placements within original content hasn’t been possible.

Sites like the New York Times don’t monetize through affiliate marketing not out of high-minded editorial integrity but because old school affiliate marketing isn’t worth the trouble. For these reasons, affiliate marketing has never achieved the economies of scale of either search or display advertising.

In 2014, this has all started to change. A combination of big data, Natural Language Processing, and powerful predictive analytics has automated away the complexity. These technologies sound complex. In fact, they simplify all of the messy pieces that comprise creating, pricing, and filling affiliate inventory in a rational two-sided marketplace. Both the buyers (online merchants) and the sellers (online publishers) of affiliate clicks are benefiting.

This has allowed for the emergence of the first ever content-driven commerce exchange. In this exchange publishers auction clicks on product links embedded in their content to the highest bidder that sells the product (A Nikon D5300 camera is the same camera if you buy it at BestBuy or on Amazon). By bidding to buy these in-content shopping clicks, merchants are winning more sales. At scale, this shift will boost publishers’ commerce-based revenues by double-digit to triple-digit percentages. Online merchants finally gain reliable, predictable access to commerce driven by trusted content and the aggregated audience of in market shoppers.

The drivers for this change are self-evident to every online publisher. Today, publishers sell clicks on product mentions embedded in their original content with no idea how much the average click yields in revenue. They cannot keep track of changes in commission structures across dozens of affiliate networks or direct performance marketing relationships with merchants. They cannot predict in advance whether traffic to one online merchant will convert at a higher rate than traffic to another.

Publishers should not be expected to build sophisticated models to predict which merchant will pay the most for, let’s say, a German visitor on a mobile phone clicking on a deep link to a pair of dress shoes. The results are woeful inefficiency. A publisher trying to manage affiliate marketing manually is lucky to monetize a third of their commerce clicks, and at rates that drastically undervalue their worth. This is a classic yield management problem, long ago solved for both search and display.

Merchants also suffer. There is no unified marketplace, no NASDAQ or DoubleClick or AdWords for clicks from content. Today, merchants must navigate the existing universe of sophisticated click traffickers. These include the classic affiliate networks, comparison shopping engines and countless other niche players. Successful integration into an affiliate network is neither easy nor fast. As a result, switching costs are high. In the end, merchants that need to buy extra shopping clicks struggle to find them.

The solution for affiliate clicks is a platform where big data trains ever-smarter models that drive advertising automation. What humans see as chaos — a pool of content and clicks fragmented across a giant mass of affiliate networks — computers see as data — normalized, structured, relational data.

This allows software to create linkages between content sites and commerce sites and to price those linkages efficiently. This efficiency will place the best merchant offers on clicks delivered by the publishers with the best audience. Today, the best models can automatically identify product mentions with high precision. Predictive pricing models select the most economically rational link based on factors such as commission fee structure and merchant conversion rates. Software automatically embeds that link, routing traffic to the most competitive retailer.

The first content-driven commerce exchange opened for business in June. Every day, it auctions off thousands of clicks on product mentions to eager merchants. Publishers see earnings per click that were 200% to 300% higher, on average, as compared to clicks not flowing through the exchange. A number of merchants eagerly jumped in to gain access to one of the largest aggregated pools of content-driven shoppers on the Web today. Most importantly, the whole process was orderly and painless on both sides. It’s the future of content-driven commerce and it’s inevitable.

http://www.webpronews.com/2014-the-year-affiliate-marketing-grows-up-2014-03 

Organic Facebook Marketing Tips From The Pros

 

Facebook has become quite a conundrum for many marketers. For years, companies of all sizes have invested in organic and paid efforts to grow their Facebook fans. The “like” served as an opt-in for consumers to receive brand messages sent “organically”.

But over the past few years, Facebook has diminished the organic reach of brand fan page messages to a thin percent of the total opt-in whole. Now the only option to reach fans is to pay for Facebook advertising which can be hit or miss and leaves organic reach all but non-existent.

For companies without large ad budgets, this is obviously a challenge. Luckily, there are options! Here are tips from our latest Social Media Marketing eBook featuring some of the top Facebook marketing experts. They offer insight that can help you regain and optimize some of your organic traction.

Andrea Vahl- @andreavahl
Social Media Coach, Author

The New Facebook Marketing

For marketers looking to adjust to Facebook’s new algorithm changes and decreased organic reach, a shift in mindset is needed.

Think of Facebook as a subscription-based marketing service vs. a free platform.

Facebook ads on an ongoing basis are inevitable. Divide your monthly Facebook ad spend between boosting posts for increased reach and ads to drive traffic directly to your website.

Spend a small amount on increasing your fan base as well. None of this ad spend needs to break the bank.

Work on effective ads so that you spend as little as possible for the biggest bang.

Mari Smith – @marismith
Social Media Consultant, Speaker, Trainer, Author

Amp Up Facebook Organic Reach

Consider increasing the frequency of your Facebook Page posts to boost your organic reach.

If you typically post 2x a day, try doubling that to 4x.

Make sure your posts are top QUALITY, relevant and timely. Include periodic invitations to sign up for offers, but craft the wording in a warm, personal way that your audience can connect with. Plus, engage at every opportunity.

Great examples to study include: Richard Branson, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, KLM, and Sprint.



Amy Porterfield – @amyporterfield
Social Media Consultant, Speaker

It’s All About the List

The energy of your business is directly tied to your email list.

Facebook ads are one of the most powerful lead generating platforms for small businesses today. Specifically, “Page Post ads” that drive traffic to a free, valuable giveaway (such as a free video training, eBook, or cheat sheet) are extremely effective.

These ads are inexpensive, highly-targeted and can be completely automated.

It may take a little trial and error, but once you find that sweet spot where your ads are consistently producing results, you’ll be hooked!

Dennis Yu – @dennisyu
CTO, BlitzMetrics

Social Media Force Multiplier

Social media marketing, email marketing, and website retargeting are all the same thing.

You’re following around users who have visited you, regardless of whether the tracking mechanism is a pixel, email address or Facebook user id.

Consider multiplying upon your strengths by getting your email subscribers to be fans, your fans to to visit your site, your web visitors to be fans, your web visitors to be email subscribers and so forth.

Try Facebook Website Custom Audiences and Google Remarketing and you’ll be on your way.

You can get even more Social Media Marketing tips from our SMMW14 eBook here.

As the organic approach in other areas from SEO to public relations to content marketing have undergone shifts, so too has Social Media Marketing and Facebook marketing in particular. Modern marketers must adapt and continuously refine and optimize their approach. Optimization isn’t just relevant for tactics, but for how you approach marketing as well. This is the core of how we approach social media at our agency and the blogging on the topic we do here.

How have you adapted to changes in Facebook’s news feed and treatment of brand fan page content? What tips and insights would you add?

Top Image: Shutterstock & CleanSocialIcons

http://www.toprankblog.com/2014/03/facebook-marketing-tips/ 

How To Make Money Online

5 Ways To Increase Traffic With Pinterest!

Pinterest drives a huge amount of traffic. The traffic that Pinterest sends to websites and blogs is also up 56.2% from a year ago.

However too many business and brands are making mistakes when it comes to Pinterest SEO. What that means is they’re not fully optimizing their Pinterest account. As a result they miss tons of traffic that should be theirs.

Lots of social media managers rush to pin their hearts out, but miss the fact that applying proper SEO tactics in several areas will make a big difference for getting found on Pinterest.

Each board and pin you create has to be contain relevant keywords to get a high ranking from Pinterest’s internal search algorithm.

Just like with Google, the goal is to have your Pinterest page and boards rank on the first page of search results for your keywords.

Pinterest users (read: your prospective customers) search for inspiration on Pinterest by typing keywords into their search bars. To get your Pinterest page, boards, or pins from your site to come up on the first page of results, use specific keywords + Pinterest category names whenever possible. This will increase your chances of being found and followed on Pinterest.

Here are the 5 Ways to Increase Traffic With Pinterest SEO:

1. Username

Your username should include more than just your business name since most people will not search Pinterest for your business or company name unless you’re a big blue chip brand name like American Eagle, Target, or Nordstrom.

For example: if you’re an interior designer and your business name is “Cindy Smith,” choose a username like “interiordesign.” Since that’s a popular keyword people type into their search bars on Pinterest. If that username is taken then keep trying other keywords related to interior design, or your type of business.

2. Profile Name

Just like with the username, your profile name should include your business name or personal brand name + a key word.

For example: if you’re a spa and your company name is “Breathe,” use “Breathe Day Spa” as your profile name. If you’re a medical spa then you can be more specific and use “Breath Medical Spa.”

An optimized Pinterest page that uses keywords in the profile name.

Both day spa and medical spa are keywords people browsing Pinterest would use in their searches.

3. About Section

Search optimizing yoru About section on Pinterest is simple:

- Describe what makes your Business unique and a call to action (sign-up, call us, etc).

- Use a keyword that matches a Pinterest category in each sentence.

4. Board Title Names

The key to a successful Pinterest board title is not trying to be too clever. Save your creativity for the images themselves. For example: if you have a board of cheesecake recipes, don’t name it “My Cheesy Creations.” Remember that board names are indexed by Google too so you want to keep the board names obvious and simple. In this case “Cheesecake Recipes” would do fine.

5. Board Description

You have ample space here, so select several keywords carefully and use them throughout your board several times each to increase your Pinterest SEO.

Think through what Pinterest users expect to find on your board and why pinners should follow your board. Spell it out clearly, then add a call to action.

The example below is from one of my own boards. I choose Pinterest and Pinterest Expert as keywords. I wove them into the board description so if someone types “Pinterest Expert” into the search box I know I’ve done what I can appear as high as possible in the results.

Another best practice is to look back and apply these Pinterest SEO tactics to your older boards. I can say from experience that the time spent is soooo worth it.

http://blog.piqora.com/5-ways-to-increase-your-traffic-with-pinterest-seo-that-you-can-implement-immediately/

Top 5 Business Ideas For Beginners

You are out of work and can’t find a job. You really, really, hate the job you have now and want to change but there just isn’t anything out there you’ll be happy with. You have two kids in college and need some extra income to pay tuition. You are retired and the Social Security you were promised when you began working is not enough to live on. You need a change and you need more money. What can you do? You have two choices: you can either join millions of others searching for jobs that just aren’t there or you can do what I did… start your own home based business.

If not now, when? That is the question I asked myself and you should too. There has never been a better time to start your own business. Companies are downsizing but the work still needs to be done. This means they are outsourcing the work. Want to sell something, maybe some handmade crafts or homemade chocolate covered grasshoppers? There is a global market available right at your fingertips. Goods, services, information, whatever you have, the market is just waiting to be tapped. All you need to do is go after it.

Look at me for example, both my significant other and I were out of work and job prospects were slim so I decided to do something I had wanted to do for a long time, I took the step and started my own home business. Now I am a freelancer, which is much better than the freeloader I was while out of work. In my case, I decided to pursue my passion which is writing and editing. You can do the same with your passion too.

How to Start a Business: First Steps

 

 

 
If you want to start your own business, you should begin with these three simple steps:

• Make sure running your own business is for you by using our resource How to Start a Business. Some people aren’t cut out to run their own businesses, see if it is for you.
• Decide what business you want to get into with Discover Your Calling. What are you called to do? Remember if you aren’t doing something you like, then it will be too much like work. If you are doing something you love, you’ll be happy.
• Stop procrastinating, get off your butt and do it.

Five Low Cost Small Business Ideas:

You’ve decided you want to strike out on your own, what should you do? Here are five low to no cost small business ideas to choose from. The beauty of all five of them is they can be done either full or part time. They cost little or nothing to start and you can be like me and never have to leave the house (unless you want to).

1.     Start a Freelance Business:

 

 

Freelancers are hot right now. Well, I’m not hot, but maybe if I lose a few pounds and find some hair I could be. When I say hot, I mean in total demand. The possibilities are endless for freelancing: Writing, Information Technology, Web Design, Editing, Social Marketing, Programming, Graphic Design, whatever you want to do you can make it happen. Finding freelance work is easy; it just takes a little patience, a computer and an internet connection. Everything you need to get started is in our online course: Freelancing for Beginners. You can work from home, the beach, the library or your favorite donut shop, and the money you can earn is limited only by how hard you want to work.

2.     Sell Online:

 

 

Here is another opportunity to earn money: working from home, selling online. There are several ways you can do this. We all know about eBay and other online auctions and an even easier way is to open an online store. It is easier than you might think and you can decide if you want to handle product or have someone else do the dirty work and just collect the money.

The two most well-known online stores are eBay and Amazon. Both have been around for years, each with their good points and bad points. We have two online learning opportunities for you to look at: You Can Learn to Sell on eBay or Learn How to Sell on Amazon are taught by our experts and will have you up and running in no time. There are other ways to sell products online as well. If you are a person who is good at crafts, you can go to a place like Etsy.com and set up an online store there. You can also sell antiques or other items as well. What I like about this site is you set the price; it is not an auction site like eBay (although eBay also has a storefront option). Yahoo! Store is another online market place which is becoming more popular. Decide what you want to sell, find a place to purchase the item wholesale and go for it. You never need to see, touch, taste or smell the product, just watch your bank account grow.

3.     Blogging, Websites, and Affiliate Marketing:

While each of these can be a category by itself, they really are all linked together. If you are going to start a blog you need affiliate marketing in order to make money (unless you have something to sell). The same goes for a website, if there is nothing for a viewer to buy, while they may love your website or blog, you won’t make money. And affiliate marketing by itself, I guess would be okay, but would anyone come to your website only to shop?

The great thing about affiliate marketing is you don’t need to handle any product; you can link to a website such as Amazon, and pick out what you want to sell (or install widgets for daily deals, etc.) or use Google AdSense and let them pick the ads based on your content. There are other affiliate marketing programs as well, research them all and pick the one (or ones) that work best for you. Just remember don’t overdo it, the biggest turn-off on a blog or website is too many ads. Getting up to speed quickly with affiliate marketing is easy with this course: Affiliate Marketing for Noobs (I had to look up noobs too).

If you want to try blogging, all you need is something to blog about and you are off. This is one of the easier and more importantly (at least for me) cheaper ways to make money. You can start a blog for nothing on sites like WordPress or Blogger, get a free domain name (although I would suggest purchasing one) start an affiliate marketing program and type away. Try our Blogging Success Program and get started today. Can’t write worth a damn? That’s okay; we can help there as well with Becoming a Writer and our Blog Writing Workshop.

Websites can also be profitable and are easy (and inexpensive) to start. There are many companies out there who will build and design your website, but you can also do it yourself. With a little training you would be surprised what you can do, and again, for next to nothing. WordPress for Beginners is a great place to start.

4.     Social Media Marketing:

 

 

This is one of the fastest growing online businesses out there right now. It involves using social media to bring people to your website, blog or business. Everyone you know has Facebook right? Twitter? LinkedIn? Myspace? (Okay that was a test since Myspace is lost in space.) Each one of these presents an opportunity for marketing a business, whether it is your own, or someone else’s. There are tons of small businesses out there that may have a Facebook page, a Twitter account or one of the many other social media platforms and not know how to use it. Sure you could teach them but the problem is most business owners don’t have the time to either learn or use it. Have you ever tried posting to Facebook while making an omelet? Trust me; iPhones just don’t work the same after having been beat into eggs, cheese, spinach and bacon. Social media marketing involves promoting a business through tweets and posts.

With a course like Social Media Marketing for Businesses, you can quickly become an expert in the field and sell this expertise to others. As hard as it has always been for me to believe, people will actually pay you for what you know and can do for them.

5.     Write and Publish and EBook:

 

 

Last but by no means least, is another one of those jobs you thought you could never do: writing and publishing books. EBooks are becoming more and more popular and if you can write, you can publish an EBook. Actually, you don’t even have to know how to write, (I am proof of that) you can use voice recognition software to do the heavy lifting for you. You can take a subject you love and turn it into a book for little or even no money. For example in How to Become a Bestselling Author on Amazon Kindle you can learn what over 2,000 others have and sell a boatload of books.

Non-fiction books are always good, as I said above; people are willing to pay for what you know. Take your knowledge and write a book about it. After you write and publish your book, you can use what you have learned about websites, blogging, affiliate marketing, social media marketing and even freelancing to sell the darn thing.

Tips for Success:

 

 

While I can’t guarantee you will be successful at running your own business, I can give you some tips which should help you.

• Knowledge is the key: Learn all you can about the business you want to start. The internet is full of information that can help you. Any of the links in this article are great places to start.
• You get out what you put in: Don’t expect to sit back and watch the money roll in, at least not right away. You have to work at it. Whatever business you get into, whether on this list or something else, you will need to hustle. As much as we all would like it if customers would come right to us, this won’t happen right away. You will need to market your business, you will need to persevere, you will need to keep knocking on doors and it will come.
• Don’t give up: Give yourself and your business a chance to succeed. Being patient is important and you have to give your business time. Even if you have a unique idea that no one else has thought of, it will take time to catch on. You have to establish a name for yourself, find customers, do the work, and it can get very frustrating. I am still developing my business and I have been at it over a year. It will come, be patient.
• Don’t quit the day job: As tempting as it will be to leave the day job, don’t make any rash decisions. If you are out of work you have nothing to lose, but if you are already working you still need to pay the rent and mortgage, feed the dog, and the bar tab. In this case get the business going well enough so you can make up what you will lose from your current job. A good goal to shoot for would be have at least a year’s expenses saved before you fully leave. And remember there will be times when business is slow, be ready for them.
• Don’t be afraid to fail: Finally, don’t be afraid to fail. Even if you learn all you can, knock on all the doors and do excellent work, you still might fail. It happens. I failed at one business and it stinks, but it happens. Let go and move on to the next.  At least you are one step ahead of where I was when I failed, you are reading this and there are a lot of resources you can use.

One Last Thing:

It has never been easier to begin a business. For almost no money, you can start a business and market it around the world. You can work from home; you can work full time or part time. You can start your business while still working at your current job, the one you hate, and get to the point where you can sing Johnny Paycheck’s anthem “Take This Job and Shove it” to your boss. You can get up in the morning undressed (well unless of course you are going to Skype with someone).

All you need is the desire, the patience, a can-do attitude and the will to succeed to do it. So what the heck are you waiting for? Get moving!

https://www.udemy.com/blog/business-ideas-for-beginners/

 

What's The Best Home Business?

 In finding the best home based business for someone who dreams of being an entrepreneur, there is no hard and fast list of “bests.” One entrepreneur’s best home based business idea is another entrepreneur’s worst. So much depends on what that business owner-hopeful enjoys doing, knows how to do, and has some of the resources already in place for. Other considerations in determining the best home based business are what the desired market will bear – what the competition is, and how saturated the market is.

The best way for someone who wants a home based business to start is to determine what she or he loves – what she looks forward to doing, what makes the time fly by for him, what she would gladly spend many hours of every day accomplishing. The next step is for the owner-to-be to assess his or her training, skills and knowledge of various industries. Putting the dream list with the skills list should indicate some crossover. Those things that end up on both lists are great indicators of the best home based business type for this business owner to-be. If, for example, a veterinarian’s assistant is tired of making very little money working for someone else, braving the 30 minute crawl along the highway commute, but really loves those horses that her employer cares for. She might well be a great candidate for a riding school proprietorship, a horse farm, or a grooming facility.

The business owner has to determine that the business will make money. Questions the entrepreneur has to ask himself are “Who will be my customers? Why will they choose my service? How often will they need my services – what will make them repeat customers? Who is the competition? How can I vary my services from the competition – i.e., what might be my niche? And, what should I charge for my services (based on what others are charging in the market area)?

Part of determining what to charge is determining expenses that must be paid to stay in business. Once the entrepreneur determines the price that will be competitive she or he must find out if that asking price will bring in a profit. If the price that must be placed on the product to make a profit after expenses is too high to be competitive in the market the choices are to change the market or change the product. If it doesn’t make the company money, it’s not the best home based business.

PS: This is the ultimate advice at the end of my articles: seeking residual income is the best way to start a work from home business:

Earn Residual Income. This is where you can truly leverage other people and time to free you to do what you want in your life, and life the lifestyle you want to live!

http://mattremorino.com/best-businesses-home/ 

The 10 Worst Habits Holding You Back From Success

The path of success is often littered by our own trash, obstacles that we place ourselves. Habits, by definition are behaviors that are so ingrained that we no longer become conscious of them; actions that turn into autopilot. The power of habit is severely under-recognized as driving force toward success. When the incredible Brian Tracy was asked about the key to success, he replied, “Successful people are simply those with successful habits.”

While there are many people that possess many successful habits, these habits are being undermined by toxic habits- it is taking one step forward but then two steps back. Breaking the bad habit could be the game-changer that you are desperately needing.

Here are 10 of the worst habits that are holding you back from success:

 1. Waiting for the ‘right’ moment

How many times have you said, “I’m just going to wait until I have enough money saved up,” or “I need to research more.” As the Chinese proverb goes, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

Stop waiting for the unicorn and take the bull by the horns now. Any action is better than no action.

2. The approval of others

While it is important to receive validation for your work, constantly seeking that pat on the back from others will get you nowhere. Do not feed into the ego of your ever-needy self-esteem. It is nice to receive good comments on your work. But do not mix up what is good for the ego for what is good for your productivity.

3. The need to always be perfect

Perfectionism is crippling. By all means strive for excellence and seek to produce the best product you are able to deliver. But spending far too much time on any task can become detrimental when you have people waiting for you to deliver. If your work meets their expectations, then drop the product. If you exceed it, even better. But do not keep them waiting too long. You could spend an eternity improving a product.

4. Giving too much respect

Even Einstein made mistakes. Just because someone is in a prominent position, it does not mean they have all the answers. This habit cripples many people who listen to ‘respectable’ figures who are in a completely different field to them.

How many times have you seen an actor endorsing a product they know nothing about and people listening just because they are famous? Terrible habit.

5. Germophobia

It should not only be great leaders that aren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty, but anyone striving after success. Getting your hands dirty means engaging in a task that is outside of your responsibility.

Win the respect of others by doing something beyond your duty.

6. Not learning from people ‘less’ than you

Pride is like putting poison into your own glass of water. Great knowledge can come from anyone. But if you simply shut someone off because they do not have a PhD or they are not a CEO, you are potentially robbing yourself of a golden nugget. You never know what kind of experience a person has or who the person may be connected with.

7. Rushing the last look

You are so excited with finishing your work that you just want to ship it straight out the door without giving it a final once-over. This is the Achilles Heel for most writers. But what separates a good writer from an average writer is patience- many writers will let an article sit overnight and then make more edits in the morning before sending it. This applies for other industries also, take time to give it one last thorough check. Even get someone else to have a look before you ship or hit the send button.

8. Not being vulnerable

It is easy to feel the need to put on a mask in your career, particularly if you are in leadership. No doubt there is a clear line that needs to be drawn between employers and employees. But you need to take off the iron suit every now and then.

Admit to making mistakes, make apologies when you are in the wrong. You will be respected.

9. Too stubborn to let go

While grit, tenacity, and perseverance are all great qualities, they can be crippling when they are directed toward the wrong goal. This is difficult with any project that you have poured your heart and soul into. But if it is not profitable nor bringing you closer to your goal, then you need to recognize when you are being stubborn and let go. Treat any humiliation like water off a duck’s back and direct your energy toward the next project.

10. The contentment plateau

There is a dark side to being satisfied with your work and accomplishments. Being content and comfortable is the enemy of improvement. Take time during your journey to stop and smell the roses, but do not let be left standing there when the roses are long gone.

Keep setting the bar higher. Knock down a goal, celebrate it, move on.

On a final note, Samuel Johnson gives a great warning on the crucial need to break detrimental habits – “The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” If you are suffering from any of these 10 toxic habits, then you need to nip it in the bud today.

http://addicted2success.com/success-advice/the-10-worst-habits-holding-you-back-from-success/

Want To Make A Successful YouTube Video?

In his book Entrepreneur Magazine's Ultimate Guide to YouTube for Business, marketing and public relations consultant Jason Rich show you how to master the secrets of successful "YouTubers" and put your brand, product or service in front of millions of potential viewers. In this edited excerpt, the author outlines some common elements of successful, small-business focused videos.

                                                                                 Image credit: breakcom.tumblr.com   

No perfect formula exists for creating a successful YouTube video. What works for one company in order to reach a specific audience will not necessarily work for another. However, if you analyze other successful videos on YouTube, particularly videos produced by your competitors or that target the same audience you’re striving to reach, you’ll probably discover some common elements.Many popular videos produced by small businesses and entrepreneurs typically have some or all of the following traits and production elements:

• The video is short and to the point. Try to keep your videos under three minutes in length.

• Within the first few seconds of the video, what the video is about and what it offers are quickly and   clearly explained to the viewer.

• The video’s call to action is incorporated into the video near the very beginning, and then repeated   several times within the video, including near the very end. The call to action begins by stating what     reward the viewer receives for following through and completing the call to action.

• The video somehow incorporates contact information for the person or organization that created it. 

This can be done using voice-overs, statements by the people featured within your video, 

 titles/captions, and/or annotations or links embedded within the video itself.

• The video is targeted to a very specific audience and has a specific goal or objective.

• The content of the video is somehow unique and tries to set itself apart from the other videos on       YouTube.

• The video offers information that the viewer perceives as useful, informative, entertaining, highly       engaging, educational or somehow directly relevant to what they’re looking for, want or need.

• In terms of production quality, the video is professional-looking and offers good quality sound.

• The video uses some type of background music.

• The video offers clearly defined and easy-to-understand information that the viewer doesn’t have to wait too long to receive. The information is not buried in clutter or hidden by eye candy or audio that can be distracting or confusing to the viewer. For example, animated shots or scene transitions are not overused, and the background music is set at a proper level and is appropriate to the content.

• The look and messaging within the video is consistent with the company’s brand and reputation.

• The title of the video is appropriate, descriptive and directly to the point. When someone sees the video’s title, they immediately have a good idea what the video is about and what they can expect from it. This is supported by a carefully worded description and accompanied by a carefully selected group of relevant tags and keywords.

With these common traits in mind, as you explore YouTube for yourself, you’ll easily discover very popular videos that follow none of these suggestions and offer a truly unique or vastly different approach. There are no hard-core rules to follow, because video production is a highly creative endeavor. Focus on originality and ways you can communicate your core message as quickly and easily as possible to your intended audience.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/230273

Increase Your Website Opt-Ins With Freebies That Really Matter To Your Visitor

Most of you know by now that you do have to entice your visitor to sign up with a freebie of some sort. Free newsletters, downloads and special reports used to be the ticket, but no more. As your wife probably knows, there is a wide value between gifts. Are you handing out something of real value or trying to disguise a broom as a special Anniversary gift?

When it comes to freebies on the Internet, the value is determined by what problem it solves in the mind of the visitor. It's not about how large it is, how many pages it is, how much it cost to write it, what you used to sell it for, or even how relevant it is to the visitor. Just like anything for sales or free on the Internet (or even in physical locations) it needs to be a solution to the problem that the visitor was seeking information for. Not only that, it needs to solve the problem immediately, not in three hours or three weeks.

People search the Internet for solutions. The problem can be anything from living with cancer to losing weight for diabetics to where to find the closest dentist. Your one job as a website owner, is to be the solution to that problem. Your opt-in freebie is the catalyst of conversion: the one thing that the visitor has to have to move forward. If they don't sign up for the freebie, they'll find somewhere else to go.

They will spend very little time reading your Bio, browsing around the site or meandering through your products like they would a brick-and-mortar store. The Internet mentality is completely different. You have to direct their attention to certain parts of the site. You have to make it easy for them to get around. The opt-in freebie has to be so fantastic and valuable to solving the problem at hand, that the visitor is scared to leave the site without signing up.

How do you find out these things? First, you have to understand your visitor more than you think you already do. Based on how the visitor got to your website, there are clues as to what they were really looking for that you have to decipher.

An example of a site I built was to sell jewelry to customers through affiliate links: they bought the jewelry, I made the commission. Using a keyword strategy my traffic was through the roof almost immediately. I had more website traffic within three months than on some sites I had owned for years. I wrote articles about the trends in fashion jewelry to attract visitors and would sell them the exact jewelry I had been writing about through direct links on the site to retail outlets. I sat back and waited for the cash to roll in - but it never came. No sales. I couldn't figure out why.

I decided to ask my website visitors (who were numbering over 20,000 a month at this point) exactly why they were coming and not buying anything. Using survey software, I asked important questions such as "who are you?" and "what kind of information are you looking for?" I was very surprised that my website visitors were not at all who I thought they were.

Are you sure you know who is visiting your site? If your conversions are slow, they may be someone else entirely than you believed. Until you identify the problem you are supposed to be offing the solution to, you're wasting your time.

Building trust and credibility online can be a daunting task, but connecting with your prospect emotionally is the key. Helping people is why you're really in this business. You want to make the world a better place. You deserve this free 166 page copywriting secrets ebook that explains how to build raving fans from your website visitors.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Colin_Martin

http://ezinearticles.com/?Increase-Your-Website-Opt-Ins-With-Freebies-That-Really-Matter-To-Your-Visitor&id=8144477

Oops! How Mistakes Can Propel Your Business Forward

Mistakes are part of life. Everyone does things they regret or finds out later that they should have done something else. That’s just as true for business. Oops! With the right attitude and perspective, mistakes in your online business can be the fuel that propels you forward.

Have you ever had thoughts like:

“If only I had chosen a different shopping cart system. My customers wouldn’t have been so confused and I would have sold a ton of products.”

“I wish I would have known how to make a decent sales page. I lost the opportunity to reach all of those people when I was mentioned in the article on that big blog.”

“Why did I throw all that money away on that training program? I wish I would have bought Product B.”

Online Business “If Only’s” and “Shoulda’s”

The online home business “if only’s” and “shoulda’s” can get pretty painful. They say that hindsight is 20/20, and it’s easy to fall into kicking yourself for past decisions. A big enough dose of regret can make you fearful and discouraged.

The antidote? Accept where you are in this moment and own your responsibility. Drop the pointing finger and the careful explanations for your current circumstances. Sure, acknowledge that things didn’t go so great with a former business coach, take note of the failed marketing campaign and admit your self-sabotage. But instead of staying in that space, looking back and lamenting “Woe is me,” learn from each experience. Squeeze out every lesson you can, then get back on the road.

What Others Think About Our Mistakes

We may think that people are watching us, jeering at our perceived failure and judging us. Maybe there’s some truth in that. Maybe your competitors are feeling a little smug. You know what? They’re so busy with their own stuff that your success or failure is just a momentary distraction and ego trip. They won’t come to your funeral someday and they don’t love your family and friends. So why plan your life and business around them, and allow your fear of them to paralyze you?

As long as you focus on business mistakes you’ve made in the past, you’re moving backwards. When you make a decision to man up and stay present, you’re on your way to change and new ideas and the next thing.

“Comparison is the thief of joy.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Successful People Make Mistakes

Successful people have made mistakes—usually a LOT of them. They just fail forward by picking themselves up quickly, learning from the situation and getting back on the journey. As tempting as it is to throw a pity party and berate yourself for what didn’t work out, don’t look in the mirror too long. Shake off the regret and stop pointing fingers to blame others. It is what it is, and it’s likely that this little detour is an important part of your success story.

Look at mistakes—and their cost—as part of your business education. You’re paying tuition for the lessons, just like you would for a college class. Learn the lessons well, say “Next!” and move on as a smarter business owner.

Remember that your brain was designed to learn and develop new skills. Every time you make a mistake, choose to focus on the lesson, not the embarrassment or dismay. Rather than getting stuck and discouraged in the regret, pull up your socks and get back to work.

Shake off the mistake, get back in the game and look forward to what’s ahead. Give yourself grace. Spend time with some people who cheer you on and don’t let you get away with self-pity. Before long, you’ll find that your “Oops!” was a necessary part of the journey to your business success!

http://kimgarst.com/oops-how-mistakes-can-propel-your-business-forward

How To Overcome Discouragement & Become Unstoppable In Your Internet Business

If you have been trying to build a successful internet business for any length of time, you have probably experienced discouragement in some capacity. Preparing for tech changes, finding markets, exc is easy. But no one can prepare you for how to deal with discouragement while trying to get your internet business growing.

When I was working away on growing my internet business, I really did not experience massive amounts of discouragement until I went full-time. Then at that point, it was like everything started to go wrong with what I was doing & for the first time in my adult life I felt depressed and discouraged.

There were days where all I could do was simply check my stats then my email, then my merchant account, then my stats, then my email then my merchant account. That was the cycle of many of my days because of the simple fact that I was discouraged.

The problem was, I had no idea why I was so frustrated and depressed. And you know what? I bet that is how you feel sometimes while your building your internet business…

I’ve been able to consult with 400+ internet business owners (one-on-one) and I can tell you that almost all of them were dealing with this issue and it was sucking the life out of their potential success and business growth.

The problem with discouragement is you think your all alone, you don’t understand what is going on & you feel like a total idiot for feeling like an idiot and being depressed! Talk about a problem! (-:

When I was dealing with this issue in my life, my productivity was really bad, I had no energy and I started to gain weight. I tried motivating myself by reading more self help books & doing the usual things that your taught to do to make yourself feel better & nothing seemed to work!

After a season of this, I started to come around and make some progress in this area of my life. It was only years later that I have been able to figure out why I had such an issue with this and how to prevent it from happening again and potentially destroying my business.

Here’s Why I Got So Discouraged While Building My Internet Business:

First – I Compared Myself To The “Guru’s” I Was Following:

I would buy a product or something and then think that I should somehow get the same results as the person selling that product to me. I figured that if they were doing it, I should be able to get 400 top 10 rankings within the hour too… Then when I could not duplicate the results of the guru’s that I was following I would get really down on myself and buy more stuff which led me to repeat the cycle.

Second – I Had Unrealistic Expectations For My Internet Business:

I somehow figured that I should be able to do better then every single other person who was doing better then me and who was making more money then I was. I somehow figured that if person XYZ was making $200,000 a month – I should be able to do the same thing as well & be able to do it in 1/2 the time they did it in.

I would then create completely unrealistic goals for myself and have expectations that were out of this world. I figured I should be able to rank my sites in the top 10 for the most competitive keywords within weeks of trying. Then when I never achieved the results that I said I should achieve – I would get discouraged, think it was my fault and then eventually quit that project.

Third – I Focused On Instant Results For My Internet Business:

I figured that I should get instant results from everything that I tried. My sites should grow fast, rankings should come overnight, my products should convert right away & I should be able to make each niche market make me $10k a month within the first month.

And what I would do was work from a panic mindset and rush everything. So I always felt that I was behind, never on track and always letting myself down. And what happened was – I DID let myself down and it created discouragement.

Fourth – I Focused Only On The Money:

Now, money is a big part of business and you need it. But the problem was that I focused on it all the time! And when you do that, you never make enough, fast enough and nothing is ever profitable enough. Not only that, by focusing on money all the time you tend to only do things that you think will give you the quick buck.

And you know what happens when you focus on the quick buck! It’s the hardest one to get and it leaves the quickest! By focusing on money to much I was always looking for a quick way to get more traffic, some “secret” that I could leverage to have more success & easy ways to make easy money.

Fifth – I Tried To Control The Things I Could Not Control:

It’s easy to confuse what you can control and what you can’t control within your internet business. You can’t control your rankings, traffic volume, conversion rates or monthly income. You can do things to increase or decrease those numbers but you can’t control them.

And it’s very easy to think you can & that is what I used to do. I’d check my SEO rankings 5 times a day, check my stats all the time, exc. Then when my sales where up, I’d be happy and take my foot off the gas pedal because things were going really good. Then if things went bad, it’d get mad and work really hard.

Sixth – I Tried To Do To Much At Once:

When your starting out with your internet business it is very easy to do everything all at the same time and hope that it is going to work for you. I was using every single traffic source possible, testing every single strategy I could find, listening to every conference call, webinar, exc.

I was killing myself and my mind was a mess because I was over-consuming information and could not mentally digest it and implement it fast enough. And because of this I got discouraged and my results suffered.

The happy ending is that I eventually overcame all these frustrations and got better.

But this is not about me – it’s about YOU! If you don’t deal with this then no amount of traffic is going to fix your business because your going to implode yourself and never actually succeed.

Here’s How You Can Overcome Discouragement & Become UNSTOPPABLE

In Your Internet Business

First – STOP Comparing Yourself To Other People Online:

Look… Your YOU and you need to be okay with being you and accept the fact that you have done some dumb things in your life that you might regret. Move on… Stop looking at every other guru and internet marketer and wonder why it is that they are so successful and your not.

Can I tell you a secret? Most people tell you what they want you to hear and see. Misery does not sell very well – so when it comes to comparing yourself to guru’s and others, you have to realize that most people only let you see the good part of their lives.

So your essentially comparing your “misery” with their “highlight real”…

Don’t do it! They are who they are and you are who you are. The more you focus on YOU, the more your going to discover your unique gifts and strengths and start focusing on them to really grow your business.

For example: I always wanted to be good at SEO and would look at everyone else who was doing it and want to be them. But you know what? I sucked at SEO… I hated every minute of it. So I focused on doing what I could do best and built my business around that.

Then over time the SEO took care of itself through outsourcing, link baiting and other strategies that were easy. And in the end I was able to get lots of SEO traffic and everything else because I focused on my strengths and focused on who I was.

Second – Set A REALISTIC  Time Frame For Your Expectations For Your Internet Business:

The reality is that you want to live a bigger life then you are right now. Your not doing this internet marketing stuff because you want less out of your life and want to struggle. It’s important to think big, shoot for the moon and all that other great stuff.

But the bottom line is that you have to have a realistic time frame for getting the results that you want to get. The problem with predicting results in your internet business is that if you have never made $10,000 a month on a consistent basis you have no clue how long it is going to take you to get to that amount of monthly income.

So don’t set yourself up for failure by giving yourself mental deadlines. Just do what is right, do the best you can and let the results take care of themselves. If you do this, your focus will always be on creating, adding value and figuring out how to get to the next level.

Third – Stop Focusing On Instant Results:

Internet marketing is THE WORST fuel you can have when it comes to thinking about instant results. You can check your stats, analytics, email, sales & SEO rankings all day long. And when things are going good it is like a shot of energy. But when things go bad it’s like a punch in the stomach.

So, don’t even look at the scoreboard. I check my stats usually once per week. Why? Because if you check them daily your going to get caught in an emotional roller coaster and you’ll never be able to get out of it. The great thing about checking things once a week is that I can see trends.

I don’t have to be so focused on what is happening day to day as I can see how things are going week to week. And when you do that it evens out the ups and downs in sales and traffic. Also, if your not always thinking about your results, you can be mentally freed up to focus on doing the right things to create results.

Four – Stop Trying To Do To Much When Your Still Part-Time:

I see this all the time with people who are not yet full-time in their internet businesses. They are in 4 markets, using 10 traffic strategies and making NOTHING! I wrote a whole blog post on this issue and you can see it here:  How To Finally Go Full Time In Your Internet Business

But the bottom line is that you have to realize you can’t do everything at the same time when your on a limited budget and don’t have any staff. You need to have ONE traffic strategy, ONE market & ONE sales funnel when you are starting out in your business.

Once you can make enough to live on by doing that, then start expanding and diversifying. But if you can’t get a reasonable income out of one market/traffic strategy/sales funnel then your doing something wrong. You’d never start an offline “real business” by doing stupid things you do on the internet.

You’d never become a real estate agent, stock broker & buy a fast food franchise all at the same time. That would be just stupid! So don’t do it online!

Fifth – Be More Strategic About How You Consume Information:

Once you get going with your internet marketing business you can get completely buried with great information as well as lots of garbage… You could literally sit for hours a day and surf forum posts, read blogs, buy products and read emails about how to grow your internet business and get more traffic to your site.

Not to mention reading massive amounts of books, listening to endless amounts of podcasts & audio training programs. Eventually you get completely overloaded and don’t know what to do next. So what you need to do is make sure you are focused on being very strategic in how you consume information.

In most cases, more information just gives you more confidence and makes you feel better about yourself. But in the end, it does not help you because you get so much of it in your head that you don’t know how to process it all. And then you end up getting discouraged and don’t know what to do next so you sit there and don’t do anything.

Cut back on the emails that you read & become laser focused on reading only what you know will help you right now. Forget about interesting stuff that you think will help you down the road. You need to focus on NOW…

Sixth – Take Better Care Of Yourself:

One of the things that happens when your trying to build your internet business is you can easily start to neglect your body in terms of sleep, exercise and eating right. It’s easy to get in the zone of just working so you can get your internet business up to the level that you want it to and then start focusing on those other things like your health.

But here’s the problem – those days never come! Not only that, the better you take care of yourself physically – the faster you will bounce back from discouragement as well as experience it A LOT LESS…

I HATE the gym… Just hate it… Not only that, I absolutely despise eating healthy. But it is the one thing that makes everything work better. I am ruthless about what I eat & I exercise at least 5 times a week without exception. Not only that, I get up at 4:40 am everyday except Sunday when I sleep in till 5:30(ish).

I also include spending time in the Bible and having a set time every day where I just focus on my spiritual life. For me, I take about 1 hour a day and do this. Even when I was still doing both my internet business and my other career (being a pastor) I always maintained this discipline and never regretted it!

THIS IS IMPORTANT: If you want to become unstoppable and get to your goals A LOT faster your going to have to make sure you take care of your engine. I 100% believe there is a direct coloration between healthy living and success in your business.

You feel better, you can concentrate more, your more awake, less sugar lows, less emotional issues & you’ll have WAY MORE energy.

The Bottom Line:

If you can just focus on doing the above 6 things and start implementing them back into your life your going to feel a lot better and your results should start to increase. There is nothing that will kill your success online like discouragement will… But if you can focus and become “unstoppable” your going to get to where you want and need to go a lot faster.

You want to become unstoppable and have more success? Then do the things “average people” online are not willing to do & become the type of person they are not willing to become. It takes time to get results, but I can tell you – it’s worth it! To read more:

http://www.jasonnyback.com/how-to-become-unstoppable/