eAction

For many years now I’ve said that I’m not much of a shopper. Meaning I don’t shop very often. But that’s because I’ve had almost zero income while I was caregiving for my parents. I fought temptation to feel sorry for myself, by simply not hanging out in stores any more than I had to.

Even when I went online in 1999, I stayed away from shopping sites because I knew I couldn’t afford to order/buy much. I focused on the things I could learn to do for free. I think I could write a book now on all that you CAN do to start a business on a shoestring too short to tie around your finger.

Despite all that, I am coming around to admit that I’ve learned to be a wise and frugal shopper, with self-discipline. This is a good thing to be! As I am focused more on growing my business and doing more things online, I discover that I am a shopper after all, but not so frequent and much smarter than spendthrifts who blow whatever they have on whatever strikes their fancy.

Recently I agreed to accept a free Online Mall with over 1000 stores. To look for whatever I thoughtfully want in these stores first, is a smart move. I can get rebates up to nearly half of the price of the item. There is much more selection than just what’s in my city, and I don’t have to get blisters on my feet, walking through three or four malls in my city. I can do my comparison shopping online, sitting right here in this chair.

In fact, the owners of this powerful mall are setting up a system whereby I can “load” a debit card and reload it when used up, to do all my shopping, including for groceries. This gives me discounts and rebates twice over. (I’m wondering if that gal, Ginny, has been down the path of my life ahead of me).

Surveys prove that online shopping is catching on like a world-wide epidemic, and for some people that’s bad news because they do NOT have the self-discipline to shop wisely. However, if you think of yourself as a frugal and careful shopper, then this is a great blessing. Here’s just a few basic advantages to start with; save on gas (no driving around), save time (all those frittered minutes in malls when you could be doing something productive), save money (because online stores offer better prices, and often free shipping, plus this mall provides rebates too), much greater, wider selection (even from outside your country), and you don’t have to carry your purchases home - they are delivered to your door!

Perhaps what we need now is a site or book to teach people how to become better shoppers, and to take advantage of these fringe benefits.

What do you think? Have you got shopping tips and lessons you could teach others? Have you ever thoughtfully looked at your shopping habits to know whether you have techniques that might helps someone else? If you do, let’s pool some and see if this works out to be a good idea.

If you were to hire the ideal employee, what would you look for? Or supposing you were going to train someone else to take up the skills that you have learned or taught yourself? What kind of person will you most like to be in that position?

I’ve started to think along these lines, and at the top of my list are four basic traits I will seek for in interviews.

1. Willing to learn and try new things.
I’ve run into some people that are so hung up on doing only that which they’ve done for years and years, that they are blind and resistant to learning anything new. Such a person would be a huge disappointment to me. A burden, in fact! In my initial interview I would look for clues that this prospect is willing to learn and try out new things with some eagerness.

2. Positive, cheerful, hopeful outlook.
A complainer is soon as old and bothersome as a festering open wound. I don’t want someone like that around. This person should see some possibilities, and be upbeat and cheerful at least most of the time. We can all get a bit down when things go wrong, but we need our coping skills in place, so we don’t stay there. If this person catches the vision and purpose of the job, and gets enthused, so much better.

3. Persistent, faithful, willing to stick-to-it-to-the-end.
Who likes to mop up a job after others have quit? I don’t, but I’ve had to do it often enough. My Mom made me finish the things I started, and it has become a way of life for me. If I’m to invest my hard-earned skills in someone else, I want that person to also finish what she starts. Much of life boils down to the boring details that have to be done for the over-all project to succeed. A person who pulls back or drops out when it comes to the slough-work is not likely to succeed on their own, and although I’m willing to help someone learn to be faithful to the end, I do NOT want to be stuck with someone who is going to leave all the grunt work to me. Better to discern this at the beginning and to not even let him start the job.

4. One who tries to be accurate, follow instructions, but able to admit mistakes.
There are always those who can appear to be tracking with you, and yet behind your back, they slack off, and get sloppy when they think you are not aware. No Sir, I’d rather they be honest and careful with the details all the way through. That’s not to say we don’t ever make a mistake. I know I do often enough. (Several times a day!) The important thing then is to be humble enough to admit it as soon as you catch it, and confess it to those involved. Then be ready to correct it if possible.

Sometimes only the employer or teacher is able to unravel a bad mistake. Even then, it’s best to stay nearby, not groveling in self-abnegation, but ready to learn from the mistake, so it never happens again. It may also mean suffering quietly if the superior has to vent some frustration.

Now a person with all these traits would be my ideal intern, disciple, or employee. I wonder what the chances are of finding this ideal person. Would you qualify for your ideals?

Again, because my business hours are sacrificed for cleaning up Dad’s estate, I can only give updates on my personal situation;

1. Well, one is a business item. I was able to meet with a committee last week and now have a paying web designer contract for their society. That’s for one night a week.

2. An auctioneer is to come this afternoon to assess Dad’s estate stuff for sale. That will allow several other things to move forward. But I am still hoping a couple of others will come so we can pick the best one.

3. My siblings and I had a family auction weekend before last, and I was able to buy up all the furniture I will need for just $103. Wonderful!

4. I feel stronger physically for all the extra physical work I’m doing. That’s worth something too.

5. I’m starting to get my first missionary letter out to friends and relatives.

This is a busy week - no, a very busy month! So I won’t take time for a full-length feature article. Just a quick report to let you know how this miracle is coming along.

1. the owner is still holding the dream house for me, but not open to a rent-to-own deal.

2.Social Services sent a couple of checks last week, and seem to plan another, but say that they will stop as soon as I get my inheritance.

3. My friends Ron and Shirley looked over that house, and agreed it has potential, but it will take some work.

4. There is an acceptable offer on Dad’s house, but we’re waiting for an auctioneer’s estimate of the rest of Dad’s stuff.

5. I am now officially a missionary with Western Tract Mission, Inc., for whom I have volunteered for about 8 years. This means donors and regular givers to my support can receive income tax deductible receipts as it is a registered non-profit organization.

6. This weekend my brother and his wife are coming, and I believe we can organize at family auction, at which I hope to buy some furniture at a low price.

7. The timing of these things day by day is impressive. My heart swells with joy and gratitude to God!

The 23 1/2 years I have just completed as my parents’ live-in caregiver were a gift of time to them and to the Lord. Some people who have been watching me, seem to have coloured me with the kind of subtle disdain they have for a lowly milk-maid. They do not realize that I’ve been a home manager, and that caregiving calls for all kinds of nursing and diplomacy skills. Nor do they know about all the hours I’ve spent improving my mind, and teaching myself business and office skills, and even more, web-design and marketing skills too.

Without positive feedback, even I can begin to think of myself as less capable than I really am. So first I’ve had to struggle with defining what my true needs and next steps will be.

Fortunately, I’ve been a dreamer for years, and often visualize whole business scenarios as vividly as if I’d invented a new world empire for a novel. I do have an outline for what I want to do.

A. Move to a small wee house in the city and settle in.
- continue my current business schedule from my office/living room.
B. Start short weekend courses in computers to earn immediate cash
C. Develop my 4 month internship courses
- get financial help from city program
- train some tutors to teach small clusters of 4 students/interns
D. Once they function smoothly, back off to start new companies, or write books.

I believe that since the Lord called me to this caregiver role, without pay besides the lowly room and food, so He will also provide me with my next home, and it will be suitable and agreeable to me. The problem seems to arise when others don’t think I’m capable of owning a home, and they think it’s foolish to expect God to provide me $48,000 for it when I have nothing saved for it.

Through various conversations, and much prayer and thought, it is becoming clearer to me, that we are not all speaking the same language. I have a vision of what is to come, and I have a faith that the same Lord, who has answered countless prayers for me in the past will deal with this need too.

But these friends to whom I refer, only see me as a naive and foolish woman who doesn’t know what she’s getting into. They want to steer me to safer waters.

“Go apply for low income housing, and social assistance.”

“You can’t handle the expenses of a house!”

” Run a business? Just get a job - here’s one for 3 days a week.”

It’s time to lift my head and say, “Excuse me! I’ve already seen God act on my behalf with little smaller miracles pointing to the larger one;

1. It was friends who told me of the little house unlisted, right next to them, going for sale.
2. The owner said he was willing to wait for me to get the funds to buy it at $48,000.
3. There are NONE available any more at anything under $90,000!
4. I checked out Social Assistance, and I qualify for transitional help, including rent, utilities, phone, groceries and medical coverage.
5. The man I respect and wanted to come see it with me, has agreed to do so on Monday.
6. I believe the owner will agree to a temporary rent-to-own deal until my inheritance comes through.
7. The asking price of Dad’s house is going up as it is listed, so my inheritance will be larger!
8. A mission with whom I’ve been volunteering for years is planning to make me a part-time missionary and possibly set up a designated House Fund. This means people can give me gifts and be officially receipted.
9. The timing of these things day by day is impressive.
10. I find my heart brimming with a joy and confidence that it will all work out. Especially when I find passages such as this in my morning’s Bible reading;

“May those who delight in my vindication shout for joy and gladness; may they always say, “The LORD be exalted, who delights in the well-being of his servant.”
(Psalm 35:27 NIV)

Recently a number of people from church have dropped by to visit. Ostensibly to offer condolences on the death of my Dad, for whom I was a live-in caregiver many years. When I invite them into the living room and they see my desk, they are often amazed, and wonder at what I do with my time, or “what do you do for a living?” they ask.

I in turn am astonished that they don’t know. I wasn’t trying to keep it a secret. I assure them that I’m a very busy business woman. I run it all from the computer. Then I try to explain it to them, until their eyes glaze over and they notice their watches and have to be going.

Some really care about me and want to know more, but - how do I condense it all into a short answer they can understand and digest?

So I’ve begun to think that what I really need is a brochure or folded card on which all my answers are carefully placed and they can take it home and read it over a few times, and even pass it on, if they don’t need my services.

That’s what I’ve been working on this morning. It took longer than I first thought, but I’ve polished it quite a bit, and though I want to wait a day or so to make sure I don’t catch more mistakes on it, I do believe this 4.5″ x 11″ card folded three into thirds with a front and three inside panels, should do the trick.

Right now I’m doing test print runs. At first I was using an off-white creamy paper with a linen weave that I thought look quite warm and classic. However on the side with the most weave, my photo doesn’t come out clear. So I’ve just tried with plain white cardstock and that looks much better.

The colour printer allows me to add some coloured graphics to break up the text a bit and illustrate it.

I believe most people can skim over this information in 30 seconds or less and find their questions answered, and links to go online to look for more. I even had room to mention my main affiliate link. I’ll need to carry some of these in my purse for a while and see how they go over, but it strikes me as a suitable answer to the problem - how to tell people about our business and make sure they take our special links with them. Be sure to slant your work description so it tells them what you could do for them!

You don’t need a great deal of desktop publishing skill to figure something like this out. The only consideration is what kind of paper are you able to work with? Then you find ways to adapt the idea to suit your situation and business info.

They say everybody should have a 30 second elevator speech ready for when someone asks what you do. I found that this helped me condense my many ventures into a more compact message and space. I like room fro my creative imagination. But with time I may learn to condense this some more.

Feel free to work with the idea for yourself.

Dr. Ken Evoy has written an excellent, in-depth article on this topic in his ezine, The EDGE # 083. I’d like to highlight just a few of these suggestions as I think we all need to be reminded of them from time to time. I’ll do this in my own words, however.

There is a Digital Millennium Copyright Act which protects the material that you produce for your web site. Although you or I might not stoop to copying from others’ sites, there are immoral people who have no qualms about this. The better your Intellectual Property is, the more likely it is that someone will copy-paste your text and even your graphics on their website. To a certain degree this is a very back-handed compliment to you.

On the other hand, it is wrong, and can cause some problems so you need to know how to proceed when you get to the “Now I must take Action” point. If the violation is vague you might be stuck, but you can take steps to ensure that each situation is more black and white, and that you have documentation to prove your ownership of your own materials.

1. Start a Documentation file. Put in it;
a record of your site ownership, and what shows up at WhoIs for your domain
proof of payment for your domain and hosting
backup your site and put it on a CD - file that CD
do that backup and filing of the CD again every 3-6 months.

2. At the bottom of every web page, put a copyright notice like this; (c) 2001-2007 Ruth Marlene Friesen - All Rights Reserved (If you put it in an includes file you can update it by making one change to the includes file and every page will be updated at once when you upload it).

Confronting Culprits

It is a good idea to do regularly searches on your keywords to see how you rank in the search engines. That is usually when you will discover some other site that is suspiciously like yours. Check it out, and if you are ready to confront the culprit, prepare a polite but firm email to the offending party, explaining who you are, and your site, and that they have taken your material without your permission. Ask them to take it down.

If those pages do not disappear fairly swiftly, you write another polite but firm email to their ISP or hosting provider. State that you have documentation to prove you are the rightful owner of that intellectual property, and ask them to remove the offending site. If they ask to see your documentation send them copies of it. Generally though, they don’t want trouble and will remove the site that stole your material.

Google has a site where you can check to see if any other site is copying your material. http://www.copyscape.com/ But do remember that you may have quoted your own material when you listed your site on some directories. So don’t get all uptight until you are sure it is truly a theft.

Your next resort would be to complain to the search engines, but they advise to be sure it is true theft of your web pages and content, and not must a quote that may even be in your favour and drive traffic to your site.

It really pays to be cool and collected, and not go off in 40 directions when you discover this kind of thing. But if you have taken steps to protect your intellectual property, then if it does have to go to litigation to be resolved, at least you are sure of winning your case.

Perhaps this is not necessary, but let me add one more thing. Make sure that you don’t steal yourself. Sure as anything, the opposing side will try hard to find evidence that you’ve been guilty of the some plagiarism too.

Is your “free” website with an unregistered domain not making you money, even though you’ve put all kinds of work into it?

Another friend and I were discussing things that don’t work in a web business, and in that dialogue, I realized that certain points are true and need to be re-stated from time to time so that they register with newcomers. Well, more experienced online marketers need this review too.

If you hope to make any money online, focus on a site about your own passion and get a chunk of your knowledge into a digital form, an e-book or software so you can market your own thing.

Choose affiliate programs in line with your theme, but treat them as bits of decoration you put on your site. Don’t hold your breath that you’ll make lots of money with that until your site is getting thousands of visits a day. That’s when the affiliate programs start to pay off, when 10 out of 1000 click on one of those little ad links each day and one of those 10 buys. That’s when you’ll be glad you signed up and instialled your coded links.

If you are just starting out with a new site, work AdSense into all your pages. That will bring you income before any of affiliate checks ever arrive.

The final and most important key is to build a good site with sought-after information, and with carefully crafted meta tags (title, description, and keywords) and see that the search engines know about it. Once they do, you can focus on corresponding with all your new clients and customers!

This is where SiteBuildIt shines. The system to which you subscribe annually, guides you through the brainstorming of a good theme and finding content for your site. Then it automatically submits your pages to the search engines, and keeps doing so at whatever frequency each SE permits. In no time you have those high traffic figures.

Don’t believe me? Check out their success stories and if your computer is able to see U-tube videos, you should probably be able to handle the both goofy and serious “I Love my SBI!” short videos. People are coming up with the craziest ideas, and in SBI they work! Yours should too.

First go read this news item: ABCnews.go.com/

and, an example of one who was charged with a similar crime finally being absolved: news.zdnet.co.uk/

When you’ve read those, come back to read Fred’s response.

What both of these articles confuse is the difference between a PC and an OS (operating system). Just like many people confuse the church BUILDING with the Church (a congregation of people), they fail to understand that Windows is NOT a Personal Computer (PC). It is an operating system. There are several other operating systems available today. With the exception of the Apple Mac OS X, most are free. ALL of them are MORE secure than Windows!! The journalist uses the term PC when he should be saying Windows. Both PCs ran WINDOWS, notorious for its lack of security and vulnerability. Microsoft’s “Dirty Little Secret” is that Windows is IMPOSSIBLE to make secure to any acceptable level by untrained people, and the security holes found in the newly released VISTA indicates that there won’t be much of a change in that tradition. PROFESSIONAL system admins have a lot of trouble making Windows secure (IF at all), what chance do you or your kids have?!

In a recent article the technical reporter for the New York Times did NOT recommend connecting Windows to the Internet!

A Windows computer should never be connected to the Internet. It is NOT IF it will get infected, only WHEN. One survey showed that 11% of the 630 million Windows computers in the USA are continually pumping out zombies, spambots, spam mail, trojans and keyboard loggers. Linux and Open Source software powers 70% of the Internet and Windows powers 28%. Yet, virtually ALL of the malware, that is 100%!, comes from compromised Windows Internet servers.

I’ve been running Linux for over 10 years. For most of that time, my Linux powered PCs have been connected to the internet via a broadband connection (RoadRunner). Yet, in ALL of that time, my computers have never been infected nor have they been hacked into. Hundreds of thousands of emails containing malware have bounced off my email client. I’ve even played with some of them to see what makes them tick, but they cannot automatically infect my Linux OS they way they can a Windows OS.

Because Linux was designed as a SECURE multi-user networking operating system from its beginning its security, speed and stability FAR surpasses ANY version of Windows ever released, INCLUDING Vista. IF you run Linux on your PC it won’t become a DoS launch pad. It won’t become a spambot and spammail server. And, it won’t be downloading illicit materials onto your harddrive because of infections by Trojans…..period!

Keep your kid(s) out of jail. Put Linux on his/her PC!!

Let me recommend openSUSE or KUbuntu…….openSUSE being the VERY MUCH prefered choice. You can purchase a “LiveCD” from several Internet websites or you can download an ISO file(s) (image) to burn a DVD or CDs. Go to: OpenSuse.org. All “LiveCD”s are a bootable disk that you can run entirely from your DVD/CDROM drive WITHOUT touching your Windows installation. OR, after it has booted up into the LiveCD mode, you can chose the install icon and install it on your hard disk.

If you need help, there are plenty of elists and forums to get assistance, but you really MUST/SHOULD be rid of the evil beast that is MickySoft!!

Fred Miller, Lansing, NY

Have you discovered the new online craze for social bookmarking? Maybe you’re still struggling to figure out how to save your Favourites or Bookmarks in your Internet Explorer, Netscape, or Firefox. That’s a good place to keep your own favourite links, and it is smart to put them in folders and sub-folders so you have all your links well organized. Social bookmarking is where you share your favourite links with friends or the rest of the world by listing them on s