Everyday Bliss For Women In Leadership

I am honored to have been asked by Blogmeister and Podcasting Guru Andy Wibbels, to be one of an experienced cadre of successful small business people giving advice "from the trenches", via podcast at www.bizslap.com.

Listen from your plain vanilla desktop audio processor, or download the podcast feed via several different directories. It’s all here at www.bizslap.com. Even if you’re NOT in business, do listen my slap "What the Hell were you thinking?!" on the futility of selling ice to Eskimos and other marketing self-sabotage techniques. I’m really talking about The Power of Intention and practical ways to make it work, for you Wayne Dyer fans in the audience. Click the Grey Icon for my podcast, and the Red Icon for full BizSlap Feed, comin’ to ya fresh as a cheeky young monkey twice a week:

*SMACK!* You’ve officially been BizSlapped!

PS: For French readers and the Francophiles among us: A Very Happy Bastille Day

As most of you know, I used EFT to get past my sugar cravings easily and effectively. I even taught an EFT class a couple of years ago to a group of sugarholics led by Connie Bennett,  coordinator of the "Sugar Shocked!" community and anti-sugar maven. It was a great course, and the people were so eager to get over their sugar cravings that energy therapies were just the add-on to the fabulous techniques Connie teaches.

Now I see courtesy of BlogFather Andy Wibbels, that Connie has started her own blog: http://www.sugarshockblog.com/. It’s full of great information on how to kick sugar, the absolute evil that refined sugars do to our bodies and ways to eat and live without disease. Especially if you’re a menopausal or peri-menopausal woman, you need to get the sugar out of your diet to live a truly sweeter life. Check  it out!

Well, this is a fine kettle of fish for we internet businesspeople, much of whose business is to provide value to our opt-in newsletter subscribers. Laws enacted in states outside my own may have the ability to shut down any small business person who sends out email newsletters.  Check out the Marketing Sherpa’s observations - newsletter authors, beware!

Summary:

Blech! Two new state laws come into effect tomorrow, Friday, July 1st, both:

-> Directly impact permission mailers -> Carry nasty penalties -> Launch new state Do Not Email registries -> Are *not* circumvented by CAN-SPAM compliance

Types of marketers affected include: financial services, matchmaking services, alcohol & tobacco, grown-up content, etc.   

Plus, individuals can bring lawsuits if they think you’re breaking the new laws … so you’re not protected by possibly sluggish state enforcement.

Here’s our practical FAQ for permission emailers including links to the text of both laws…

Read the whole thing at MarketingSherpa.com. Be aware though, this page will only be up for a week or so!

D.L. Byron of Blog Business Summit has some interesting things to say about the state of the blogosphere. If you’re using your blog as a marketing tool, to gain passive revenue (hey, EFT Bloggers - this means you!) and especially, revenue by text advertising, you’ll want to give the below a good read. Ad feeds in RSS - something we were discussing over at EasyBake Weblogs not long ago. Cross-posted the below there as well. If you’re making a lot of your income through advertising, you may want to pay heed to this:

Earlier this week, Keith removed ads from his RSS feeds because they weren’t generating any revenue. Roger Johansson removed them as well. A problem with ads in feeds is that they’re not contextual (see Slashdot’s feed for an example). Adsense for feeds has much better text matching and text ads work, when they get the user to their goal. But in RSS, the goal is to read the feed, not specifically find a product or topic.

Headlines, blurbs, links

If others find that RSS ads aren’t working, we may also see bloggers returning to summary posts in RSS because they’ll want to drive readers to their sites and ads. Summaries v. full posts in RSS has been debated at length. Where some argue that design is secondary to the text and want the full post, others argue that the text is meant to be read in the context of the site and RSS is good for headlines, blurbs, links. NY Times and BBC News continue to offer summary posts, as noted by Dave Winer in his response to a comment from Calcanis on RSS ads. Winer also notes that, “RSS itself is an advertising medium,� because its driving readers to the site where the ads are. I haven’t seen this yet, but a visual, interstitial ad between the “read more� in your RSS and web page maybe coming. . .

::: More :::

I just commented over on the E-Mediator Blog in response to their queries about authenticity and genuineness. You might like to read this comment, it has a lot to do with how I perceive a coach and mentor needs to conduct themselves in the world and particularly on their blog, where written record is made, even if you erase prior entries (thanx to Google caching and related phenomenae). The Truth is simultaneously a virus, the best defense and the most interesting of all possible stories. It is also malleable, suggestible and prone to distortion depending upon viewpoint. Care to comment on this? Be my guest! 

In the wake of my comment spammer of last week, I had a lot of sympathetic email from beginning bloggers who have suffered spam comments at their blogs. I also found Adam Kelsey’s "Comment Spam Manifesto" and agree with it (click the link and consider putting its principles to work on your blog). To quote:

"…spammers have turned their attention to weblogs and comment forms. In order to increase search engine rankings you are posting advertisements to our Web pages. What you failed to understand is that bloggers are smarter, better connected, and more technologically savvy than the average email user. We control the medium that you are now attempting to exploit. You’ve picked a fight with us and it’s a fight you cannot win.

We have complained amongst ourselves, tried technological solutions, and tried to understand the nature of comment spam. And we are done. We now intend to fight back. Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome. If the purpose behind your comment is to advertise yourself, your Web site, or a product that you are affiliated with, that comment is spam and will not be tolerated."

Well said, Adam.  If you have also been a victim of comment spam and don’t know what to do about it, continue reading this post to find out what comment spam is and precisely how to combat it…

Read the rest of this entry »

Commenting on one of my previous entries, a person seeking to advertise their own website posted this: "I have found EFT quite useful, but I suspect it is better to use in conjunction with a tried and tested method like CBT. "

The comment was made with a "click this thinly-disguised advertisement for my website" author name and URL. And incredibly, this same comment was repeated at another blog I moderate. Sorry, that’s considered comment spam and is not allowed here. If you want to come back and make a high-quality comment using your real name and not an advertisement, you’re welcome to do so.

And in response to your assertion, with your advertisement leading to a site for Anxiety therapy, you must be aware that anxiety and fear are mediated by a portion of the brain known as the amygdala. The amygdala is extraordinarily resistant to logic, talk-therapy and behaviorism, but uniquely malleable when treated with Emotional Freedom Techniques or any other meridian variant of Energy Psychology, which bypass logic and "reason" to enact direct change on the attendant neurology. You can read more about this at the ACEP website, in Ron Ruden’s brilliant article on "Why Energy Psychology (Tapping) Works, from a Western Perspective" or:

A Neurological Basis for the Observed Peripheral Sensory Modulation of Emotional Responses (click title to be taken directly to this article)

Ruden is a medical doctor as well as psychiatrist and knows from whence he speaks. This article is forthcoming in Charles Figley’s acclaimed Traumatology Journal for the docs and therapists in the audience.

In addition to the Ruden research, I can refer you to Joaquin Andrade and David Feinstein’s research entitled Preliminary Report on the first Large-Scale Study of Energy Psychology. Click the title to be taken to this report at EFT creator Gary Craig’s website.

From this report, I quote:

At one-year follow-up, the patients receiving tapping treatments were less prone to relapse or partial relapse than those receiving CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy)/medication, as indicated by the independent raters’ assessments and corroborated by brain imaging and neurotransmitter profiles. In a related pilot study by the same team, the length of treatment was substantially shorter with energy therapy and related methods than with CBT/medication (mean = 3 sessions vs. mean = 15 sessions).

That’s pretty darned impressive. Even more so is that people can learn these amazingly simple therapies themselves, with little to no prior knowledge, and be very successful in their application.

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. It is wise to be well informed. And keep spam commenting out of it - not a worthy or attractive thing for you or your business. Active intelligent discussion though? Bring it on!

Just a note for those kind souls who read this blog regularly: We sold our house! Yep, it looks like it’s really going through this time. This is the third buyer we’ve had. Looked like it had gone twice before but capriciousness and just plain dirty dealings characterized those broken contracts. Yikes! I had no idea people were willing to behave so dishonorably in what should be simple transactions. Both previous buyers signed contracts with us only to break them giving flimsy excuses. We later found out that both of these parties kept looking for properties after they’d signed contracts with us and the one party it turns out, had signed contracts with TWO other home-sellers! (and they talk about the sellers being dishonest!) How nasty is that?

Either you like the house, buy it and keep to the deal, or you don’t make a bid in the first place. People make plans on the strength of such contracts. We did, and had looked feverishly for houses to rent. Thank goodness both ersatz buyers backed out before we had signed a rental contracts. Our third and hopefully final buyer loves the house, is delighted with what I did with the gardens (an English country manor paradise complete with an herb corner, thirteen fruit trees and eleven different rose varietals) and is very eager to move in. Escrow closes soon, very soon. Thank goodness.

So we are in this very interesting place where we are looking, looking, looking for the right place to rent for awhile. Impossible to think of buying given only 15 days to find a place, but have a line on several good looking properties…if we can only get there before they’re snatched up! It’s being made doubly hard by having to do this during Easter week (Happy Easter to all those who celebrate it, and Happy Ostara and Vernal Equinox to those who celebrate those holidays!) when people are traditionally out of town and otherwise engaged at the weekend.

Given the above, and the fact that I can now only find my computer through a maze of boxes-in-process-of-being-packed, I thought I should serve a reminder of why posts at this blog have been a bit thin in the last month and for the next couple of weeks. I’ll post when I can, but it’s not going to be a priority.

Wish us luck, folks! And I’ll be back when I’m back…

Much Love and Many Blessings, Maryam

Coaches, Biz Entrepreneurs and others interested in shifting out of "glide" and getting business DONE - Join myself and Andy Wibbels for a FREE

"E-Commerce Integrity Day"

If you’ve delayed, put off or successfully managed to ignore:

• doing your E-commerce research
• signing up for an autoresponder
• getting a merchant account
• getting your product line into a fulfillment house
• or procrastinated about ANY other details of putting your business on auto-pilot…

Bring your "to-do" list, and join us for four solid hours of integrity, hard work, (and some laughs) and GET IT DONE! We’ll be calling in between five and ten minutes at the top of each hour. The first call is to establish your "Integrity Point" - what you’re pledging to accomplish during this time. The middle two calls will be check in and support, and we’ll celebrate our successes in the last call. And if you’re having trouble motivating yourself, Maryam will share a quick energy technique or two to help get you over the hump.

Date: Saturday, March 20th, 2005 Time: 10am - 2pm Pacific / 1pm - 5pm Eastern / 6pm - 10pm UK Bridge: 712-824-4200 PIN: 271030

See you there!

Warmly, Andy and Maryam

http://easybakeweblogs.com http://certifiedenergycoach.org