Archive for the ‘Lloyd’s Rants & Observations’ Category

If you are like me and suffer with ADD (Attention deficit disorder), apparently there are millions of us, then completing one task before going onto the next is a challenge.

Those that do not have it tend to find working with those that do frustrating, to say the least. We tend to lose interest in things very quickly, have poor memories and do not like getting into detail. Just give us the facts, the bottom line. Can we or cant we?

For me, my mind works at 100 miles per hour and I come up with some amazing ideas, even if I do say so myself. I can solve problems quickly and easily, with almost lightning speed, where others spend days going into the detail and never coming up with any solutions.

Now, there are times when this is good and times when it is not so good. If there was a problem on a lunar mission and peoples lives were at stake then I imagine my slap dash approach may not be  welcomed. However, for your every day problem, where the lives of others is not an issue then my get things done attitude is a real assett!

There I go again, digressing from my main topic another common problem with us ADD suffers.

So, my point is how do we stay on track and get things done. I have tried writing lists, keeping a diary and numerous other ways to ensure I stay on track but very few of these work for me.

I have got better over the years and I do use a project management system for all my staff which takes so much will power on my behalf you would not believe it.

The one surefire way to get things done on time is to make yourself accountable to someone other than yourself.

If you work for someone else then this is not an issue because you have accountability to your boss, you have to perform and be seen to do so otherwise you will be out of  job. However, if you work for yourself then there is nobody there to crack the whip and I believe that we ALL need some to be accountable to as it definitely improves our performance. Well it does mine anyway.

It can be a friend, your partner or your mentor, (if you don’t have a mentor, get one they really make a difference) By letting them know what you intend to do and when you intend to do it by.

Since using someone to hold me accountable, I find it so much easier to focus on that one thing until complete.

It is fair to say it is a trick of the mind but it works.

If you are having a problem getting things done try it. You can even use me if you like, email me with what you want to get done and I will stay on top of you cajoling and pestering you until it is complete.

Until next time.

Happy Christmas From The Hester Family

We hope you have a great Christmas and enjoyed our video message.

I have now removed it and will put up a new one next year

I just wanted to say Happy Christmas and a very happy new year to everyone that reads this and I wanted to thank you for all of your emails and messages. I appreciate it a lot. I hope I have been of help to some of you and made a difference.

I am going to try and do more in the New Year by way of basic SEO information for you guys to help you get top results easily.As I have often said it is not difficult and you do not need to be a brain surgeon or super technical wizz to get results. You just need a methodical approach and a system and bobs your uncle

Also, I am going to finish my start smart method which will help those of you that are procrastinating and don’t know what to do to make money online. It should give you guidance and a strategy to follow.

It is not difficult if you do the research first and choose wisely what you are going to do before you jump in with both feet, or fly from one guru millionaire maker promise to the next.

You need to make a commitment and do each part in order and have patience. (do as I say not as I do on that one   )

2009 has been an adventure for us as a family and we have had a great time.

2010 is going to be a good year, I can feel it in my waters. We are off traveling a bit next year. Australia, Malaysia, Vietnam and maybe the good old US of A. So loads of good things to look forward to.

Life is an adventure and every day a blessing so enjoy it relax and have fun.

An old friend of mine used to say life is all about having fun and making money and, the more money you  mak the more fun you can have. So, lets make some money and have some fun.

Happy Christmas once again and here’s to a successful 2010.

Best wishes from

Lloyd, Sharon, Katie, Daniel & Morgan

You know, for many years I looked at monetary wealth as a measure of success. A big house, a nice car tasty clothes. Recently I have re-evaluated my thinking.

We live in Bali which for those that do not know is a small Indonesian Island in the Indian Ocean. It is 9,000 miles from the UK and about 2 hours by plane north of Australia.

Bali is a beautiful place with so much culture and history. The people of Bali are friendly and warm and welcome you into their homes. My wife and I go for a walk in the mornings after the kids have gone to school and sometimes it is difficult to pick up the pace as people stop and talk to us every few hundred yards. Those that don’t stop give us the biggest smile and it is clear that they mean it.

Very few of them are cash rich however, they are rich in so many ways. They are nearly always happy, genuinely happy. They are nearly always surrounded by family and friends. They look after and care for each other.

There is an old homeless guy down the road from our house, that guy is fed and watered more times a day than I am. All from the generosity of people that have nothing of value to give apart from food and kindness. I suppose that is the point. The value of this kindness is so much more than money can buy.

So many people are out for what they can get striving for cash and the trappings that this cash brings. Yet it is funny that the things that give us the most pleasure cost nothing but a little time. Swimming and playing in the pool with the kids, walking on the beach with my wife or having a coffee and laughing about the funny things the kids say and do.  Watching the sun go down at night or rise in the morning. I Read this all back and it sounds soppy but it is true.

Most local Balinese people here do not seem to be that interested in monetary wealth. They work hard, have enough food for the family to eat and spend so much time laughing and chatting with each other. They are relaxed and happy with each other and the joy the their family and friends bring to each other.

I think I know who has got it right!

I have 7 kids, four from my first marriage. I missed so much of the eldest four growing up and, try as you might, you grow apart. I lost something that was so valuable and no amount of money can bring back those years and lost moments or remake those connections ;-( .

So what is the point of these ramblings you may ask….?

Well, when you are sat at your computer tapping away doing what you think is important you should take a minute and maybe you will find the time to go and read the kids a story or play on the Wii or playstation for a bit, or sit down and talk with them for a bit. Make the wife / girlfriend / husband / boyfriend a coffee or pour a glass of wine and ask them about their day. cos one day so much faster than you can imagine the kids will be all grown up and living a life of their own and you will be left wondering where all the time went. You will have all the money you want but you cannot buy time.

Burt Reynolds said I have been happy rich and happy poor but I got to tell you rich is better.

I suppose we all need to work out what being rich is and ask the question.. How rich am I?

As A Young boy I spent many happy hours playing on my grandmothers gramaphone.

She had a great collection of records that have stayed with me all my life.

My sister recently sent me a link she had found on your tube, to one of them that I used to sing all the time. It is called my boomerang wont come back..

It was written and sung by an English comedian called Charlie Drake.

Although it is a really silly song there is a lesson in it that really sums up the difference between success and failure.

The song is about this boy called Mack being kicked out of his village because of his failure to get his boomerang to come back. 

My boomerang won’t come back,
I’ve waved the thing all over the place,
Practised till I was black in the face,
I’m a big disgrace to the Aborigine race,
My boomerang won’t come back.

If this song is not about taking action I dont know what is.

If you want your boomerang to come back then first you got to thow it!

How many times have I actually spent so much time waving my boomerang about and not actually throwing it.

Call it procrastination, paralysis by analsys or what ever you like, but unless you throw your boomerang it will never come back.

Take action and things start to happen.
Take MASSIVE action and things will start to fly

.

Well it took a while longer to get this theme designed but it is done now. I hope you like it.

I have decided that I am going to add a lot of the SEO Training as well as tips and tricks on here as well as my ramblings and witty prose.

It was going to all be on my new website  which is under development and will be announced soon.

So not only do we have a new theme, with a better security system and an automated backup, you will also be getting much more information and help to get your pages ranked.

So watch this space and come back soon.

Well, Can you believe it. I was hacked. Now I know why they call it hacked.. Cos I was sure hacked off.

They actually hit two of my sites and I can believe that they managed to get in. Or, more importantly why. These are obviously skilled individuals with a talent, why waste their time hitting me when they could actually do something useful and earn money or something like that?

It is beyond me.

Apparently, they got in through my theme somehow.

Anyway, I will generate a new one and get it up as soon as possible as this one is a bit bright

I actually setup the backup for my site but it had not been activated. OOPS.. Anyway, it is all working now so hopefully I will be all safe and secure..

lets see eh?

Question: How do you eat an elephant?

Answer: One bite at a time.

Now, before you animal lovers get all upset and accuse me of animal cruelty, I am not talking about actually eating an elephant.

I am speaking metaphorically  of course! In fact, I am on a diet and therefore trying to eat as few animals as possible at the minute.

It refers to a way to of achieving large or long term goals or to help complete large tasks.

As I have mentioned before I suffer from ADD (attention deficit disorder) and have done since I was a child. This means that I have trouble concentrating on one thing, get easily distracted and therefore tend to have quite a few things on the go at once.

Some of the projects I am involved in are very big and at the start, after my initial excitement, can begin to seem daunting. The end seems so far away they it can be difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

If a job appears too big then I used to tend to put it off and lose interest in in it. This resulted in so many things getting started and never getting finished.

Then one day I found a system, and it enabled me to take on and complete massive jobs and get them done in record time. This system also helps you work on many different projects at once and get them done.

I call it chunking. I chunk everything down to manageable pieces. IT is really simple.

When I start a new project I write down the initial idea and start to make a list of what is involved and all the things that need to be done. I usually start with the main things and create headings, then I add items under each heading. I write as many things as I can.

Once I get started and come up with the main headings I then find it quite easy to come up and list everything that is needed to be done to complete the whole project.

I also discovered that, in a lot of cases, the steps were identical for a lot of my projects and tasks.  This means that the more I use this system the easier it gets.

For some reason the list normally comes out of my head in the order which it is required to be done. (which maybe means that I am more organised than I first thought?) However, it is not about getting it all in order at this stage, it is about getting it all down on paper and out of your head.

This list then becomes my master to do list. I then prioritise them  (by project and then task) I then have a number of lists for all of the work that needs to be done for every project I am involved in. Next, I mark all of the tasks that I am going to delegate or outsource, which is quite a lot. Then

I got to say that this has made a real difference to my stress levels. I used to get a knotted feeling in my stomach when I thought about the mountain of work and things that needed to be done, it all seemed so undo-able, putting it down on paper removes all of that stress and I get a feeling of achievement just by doing this one thing.

I then choose items from the various project master lists and add them to my daily task list. I then get stuck in and TRY not to vary or move from this list. This is not as easy as you might think, for me anyway, but it makes such a huge difference I cannot tell you.

The other thing is that I can get so much more done.

There are so many time and project management systems out there, I have read so many books on them but a lot of them are very complicated and long winded and involve all manner of software programs and timers and, and, and. !

My system is very simple write it all down in detail, put it in order then do it. How easy is that?

It really is amazing that something so easy and simple to do can make such a huge difference to my working day.

Now I am off to swim with the dolphins and enjoy some of the free time that my chunking system has enabled me to do.

I woke up the other morning, which is always a good sign in my book. The sun was shining and the sky was blue ( I feel a poem coming on) and it felt like it was going to be a good day.

That was of course, until I discovered that one of my main hosting accounts had crashed. How wrong could a man be? Now, in the big scheme of things, with global warming, ongoing wars and famine, my problems pale into insignificance. However, in my small World this was a major headache, not least because whilst I know I should backup my websites regularly, I don’t!

I KNOW I am not the only one who has this stupidity affliction, playing Russian Roulette with my business, but that does not make me feel any better I have to say.

IT turns out that the server was dead as a Dodo, deceased, no longer living, totally knackered.

What amazed me was that the hosting company took five days to put it right. FIVE days I spend a fair bit of money and MORE importantly my valuable time promoting my websites. How can it take so long for a hosting company to rectify such a cataclysmic event like that?

When a hosting company says 99.8% up time does that mean up and running or messed up? in the case of this company I say messed up. I am not going to mention any names as it would not be fair. Actually, who cares about fair, losing five days of revenue and the number of visitors I lost over those days does not bare thinking about. It almost has me in tears.

The company www.cyberhostpro.com took it all in their stride and showed very little concern for my stress and worries. OR loss of earnings.

Luckily for me I have several hosting companies and a number of servers. phew…

This server has at least 40 sites on although not all of them are money sites, it really annoyed me at the lack of urgency that the company seemed to have. They said in their email that they would probably move the migration forward.. Probably.. Can you believe that?

Anyway, all is well that ends well as my grandfather used to say just before he got hit by a number 33 bus.

It made me realise how important it is to have a backup of all of your money sites. What makes me really stupid it the fact that most of my sites these days are wordpress based, it is so easy to add a backup plugin which saves it all, and even emails it to you if you ask nicely.

A fool learns by his own mistakes and a wise man/woman (dont want to be sexist) learns from the mistakes of others.

So learn from this fool and add an automated backup of your website now…..

As we all know testing is the key to success and recently created a post with a word that was unique to me. A word that no one else would use. It was testingalotlloyd.

Now initally is was picked up by technorati within minutes but was soon dropped for some reason. Over time things have moved quite a bit and we then saw digg have it at the number one and two positions for a while.

Rather than post an image, I suggest you do a search for the term testingalotlloyd and see for yourself who ranks first. It was actually this site for a while www.lloydhester.com but as I type this it is now mixx.com at number one position.

Here are the websites as they are at present.

1. www.Mixx.com
2. www.lloydhester.com
3. www.jumptags.com
4. www.digg.com
5. www.mister-wong.com
6. www.twitter.com ( a tweet from www.lloydhester.com)

The interesting thing is that it is not been ranked by a lot of the sites that you might think it would be. It seems to have settled and given the fact that my website is pinged by pingoat, pingomatic as well as a number of others. It is also sent to the bookmarking sites by a paid subscription to onlywire. I was surprised that it has not been found at places like stumleupon and others that we all believe are the ones to go for.

It goes to show that a lot of these gurus do not know what they are talking about

Why not try it for yourself. Create a word unique to you and then post it to your favorite bookmarking sites and ping it and see what happens.

You will then know where to post your blogs and webs pages in future. mixx, jumptags and mr wong are a real shocker. But I make sure that I bookmark to these sites every time I make a post.

Interesting eh?