The process of convincing others is vast, and we briefly touched upon a few ways to begin that process in yesterday’s post. As a recap: Write articles, answer questions, and help others. Those are all really strong ways to get the message out that you know what you are talking about, and in time, others will think of you as an expert in that area.

Ah, but there are sometimes shortcuts in life, and there actually is a shortcut for this as well. You see, you can gain “instant authority status” if the right person or publication calls you an expert. You could wake up one morning, skim through the new posts in your feed reader, and suddenly find some famous blogger has called you an authority! Trust me, once this happens, the world suddenly thinks of you as an authority too. And if some publication like the NY Times, for example, refers to you as an expert in one of their news stories, you’re on your way to authority paradise.

Obviously, not everyone is lucky enough to have that scenario happen, but it DOES happen. And you can help make it happen. There are things you can do to get the attention of those big-wig influencers, and we’ll discuss those ways in a later post. In the meantime, however, start the process of positioning yourself as an authority in your field. Write articles, guest post, answer questions on the big Q&A sites (like Yahoo Answers), and help people in subject-related forums that are looking for advice. Get your name out into the world as someone with knowledge in your field. It will be well worth your efforts.

Next time: How to nudge the big-wigs so that you can get one of them to label you as an authority.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: authority, expert, influencers, the NY Times, Yahoo
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I use Zuula 100% of the time as my web search engine, but I also love it for image search as well. And now that they’ve added even more image engines to the list, it’s great! Want me to prove to you that you shouldn’t be relying on just one image search engine? Ok!

The first thing you’ll notice about Zuula’s image search is that there are 10 engines all nicely laid out in tabs, so you can quickly click from one to another. Here’s a reduced screenshot of the 10 tabs (hard to read, I know, but it had to be reduced to fit).

The tabs listed are Google, Yahoo, MSN, Pixsy, Flickr, Stockxchng, Photobucket, Picasa, SmugMug, and Exalead. (I’ve arranged the tabs in the order I preferred – you can rearrange your tabs in any order you want).

Now let’s say you’d only searched on Google for the term “daylilies”. This is what you’d see.

Not very exciting, and very likely, not what you were looking for. Now scan down the screenshots of what each of the other search engines found for the term “daylilies”. Look at what you would have missed out on seeing if you hadn’t used Zuula to search!

And THAT’S why you shouldn’t limit your searching to just one search engine.

*just a little search tip o’ the day from me to you

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2008. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Google, image search, image search engine, little search tip, search engine, search engines, web search engine, Yahoo
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Of course, there’s no real way for me to know that you’ve subscribed to my blog, so I’ll just have to trust you when you say you did. Simply tell me you subscribed by using the contact form below, and I’ll get an invite out to you.

Oh, and here’s my own Mash page.

Mash no longer exists.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Mash, social networking space, Yahoo
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Let’s handle the last doubts first. You don’t know anything about either the sport of football or the game of Fantasy Football. That’s perfectly fine. Perhaps with some knowledge, you could hope to actually win the game at the end of the season, but for our purposes, winning isn’t really one of the goals. One of the goals is simply playing the game and learning to make decisions based on value judgments and risk factors. Another goal is learning how to deal with competitors so that you actually end up cooperating with your competition in an effort to help each of you further yourselves in the game. Simply participating in the game, regardless of your previous knowledge, will be of benefit.

So now that we know you don’t need to have any in-depth knowledge of either football or Fantasy Football, let me explain why I suggest you play Fantasy Football if you are starting to work from your home.

• Working from home does involve a lot of solitary time, however, if you don’t put together a team of people that you can rely on to help propel you towards the end goal, you will find it extremely difficult to get there on your own. You will be the one responsible for choosing who those people are, based on their skills and proven abilities.
• You’ll need to make decisions based on risk factors and you’ll need to be ready to reverse those decisions and take a different path if things don’t work out as planned.
• You’ll need to keep an eye on your competition and make adjustments to your own plans based on what your competitors are doing.
• You’ll sometimes need to cooperate with some of your competition in order to collectively compete with the strongest teams in your niche.

Playing Fantasy Football is usually free, so there’s no risk involved other than a little of your time. There are plenty of leagues available for sign up. I play in a league through Yahoo! but where doesn’t matter. I’d suggest asking some of your football-crazed friends if they are involved in a league that has open spots for new teams. Once you find a league to join, create your fantasy team and get ready for the draft.

What’s the draft? That’s the day all the teams in the league get to choose players for their teams. You are choosing from the list of all of the real players in the real NFL football league, and creating your fantasy team (your pretend dream team) from those players. Of course the other teams in the league will be hoping to snag the same great players as you, so there’s a bit of luck and skill involved. You each take turns making a choice, so that’s where luck comes into play. There’s always a bit of luck involved in business as well, so you may as well learn how to deal with both the good and bad luck that comes your way. The skill involves deciding who to choose in the first place, and in what order. Should you grab your favorite quarterback first, or get the best running back possible? Or maybe you should grab the best defense before someone else does? Even if you don’t know anything about the game or the players, you can use the vast amounts of stats and information available to make your choices. This gives you good experience in making decisions based on past performance and future possibilities.

Draft day is exciting, but the game lasts all season long. You’ve ended up with a team of players who, in reality, are playing for different teams. As each player finishes a game each week, his stats will help determine how well your fantasy team ends up in your fantasy league’s rankings. In the real world, some of your players may get injured or have some other complication that would render them useless for your fantasy team. You’ll need to be able to adjust when those situations arise. Do you have a backup player? Do you need to court one of your competitors and see if you can arrange for a trade? Maybe your competitor has a spare player in the position you need, and you have someone he’d love to trade for. This is where your negotiation skills come into play, and your ability to create win-win situations even with your fiercest competitors.

Fantasy Football is a lot of fun, but it also develops skills that are needed in the real world for your home-based business success. In the future, I’ll talk more in detail about building a team of people that will help propel your success, but for now, go play Fantasy Football and get a taste of what’s to come.

Good luck and have fun!

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: backup player, business lessons, competition, fantasy football, Fantasy Football league, favorite quarterback, football, Football league, National Football League, NFL, player, risk factors, running back, spare player, value judgments, Yahoo
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You simply embed the Plugoo widget into your site and your users can chat with you when you are available. And although you’ll be using your regular IM client, the visitor won’t know your real IM address. The visitors don’t have to set up anything or have anything already installed. They simply type into the widget on your site. Although I haven’t activated Plugoo on this site yet, here’s a screenshot of what the widget would look like if I did. (I chose the color, but you can configure the color to your liking). (Remember, this is just a screenshot, it’s not live).

This is a great way to connect with your users. Get your own Plugoo here, or read more about it at the Plugoo FAQs.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: AIM, chat, Google, IM, Messenger, Plugoo, site visitors, Yahoo
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First head on over to PortableApps.com. You’ll be able to get just about any type of software, ALL FOR FREE, and all available as a small portable application that you can take along with you wherever you go. There are lots of choices. You can either just grab their suite, which comes with the most popular apps ready to go, or you can pick and choose.

I’m starting with their Base edition, which gives me just the essentials with the PortableApps menu, backup system, and utilities. Then I downloaded the following apps that I either use on a regular basis (the full editions), or will use just because they offer a portable edition.

7-Zip (open .zip files)
FileZilla (FTP)
Firefox (browser)
Thunderbird (email client)
Gimp (image editor)
KeePass (password manager)
Miranda (Instant Messenging for MSN and Yahoo)
OpenOffice (Open source alternative to MS Office)

There are TONS more apps to choose from, and you can get all the information you need about it all on the PortableApps site. If you need even more portable apps than that site offers, you can see a larger list here, and a list of portable games here.

I’m looking forward to trying this out. I’d love to be less dependent upon my computer’s whims. I’d also love to be able to take all my important apps, settings, and data with me when I travel. We’ll see if this will work for me or not.

Have you tried this? If so, please let me know what you think. If not, and you decide to try it along with me, come back and let me know how it goes.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: First head, image editor, Miranda, password manager, portable apps, PortableApps, thumb drive, usb flash drive, Yahoo
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.