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Month: March 2017
5 Ways to Conquer Stress When Life is Overwhelming You
You’re reading 5 Ways to Conquer Stress When Life is Overwhelming You, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
I get it, you’re overwhelmed.
You feel like you’re being pulled in every direction.
When you fall into bed at night you wonder where the day went.
You never get any time for yourself. You often give your last ounce of energy to the next person in line who requests another chunk of your precious time.
It’s frustrating.
You can’t cope with all this stress. You can’t help but wonder, will life always be like this?
You know you can’t go on like this for much longer.
Something has to change.
Have a look at these five stress busting strategies I use when life gets chaotic.
1. Say ‘Yes’ More Often
You’ve heard the advice before, just say no! Though sometimes saying no is more stressful than saying yes. If you’re like me, the thought of saying no to someone can trigger all sorts of uncomfortable feelings. Especially when you’re feeling stressed and vulnerable. You don’t want to offend anybody. You don’t want to burn bridges. After all, these people have helped you in the past so why shouldn’t you return the favor? I know the feeling. I found that during times of increased stress it has helped me to say yes, though with a limit.
“Yes, sure, I can pop over and help you with [INSERT FAVOR REQUEST] but I’ve only got thirty minutes to spare.”
By saying yes and including a time limit you remain in control of your time. You aren’t leaving yourself wide open to somebody who might think you have more time on your hands.
2. Don’t Meditate
It’s frustrating to try and sit down for fifteen minutes to meditate when the environment you’re in is noisy and disorderly. I have found it much more beneficial to actually stop meditating completely when life is more stressful than usual. You’ll find yourself feeding your stress by forcing yourself to meditate. If it isn’t going to happen, let it go. Instead, check in with your breathing and practice mindfulness as you go about your daily activities. Doing this for a few minutes a handful of times throughout the day feels much better than sitting for one longer meditation session.
3. Get Out of Bed Earlier
If you live in a chaotic household it’s no fun starting the day feeling stressed. It sets the tone for the rest of the day and leaves you feeling like you’re chasing your tail until bed time. The solution to this is simple. Rather than getting up at the same time as everybody else, get up earlier and use the time for yourself. This could be valuable time to journal, write a to-do list or simply be in silence. You’ll start the day feeling calmer and ready to tackle your priorities
4. Start Having ‘Quiet Time’
If like me you live in a busy and sometimes noisy environment consider implementing just thirty minutes of ‘quiet time’ into your daily routine. Silence can do wonders for reducing stress levels. Research studies conclude that exposure to sounds that are prologued and consistent increase stress levels significantly.
In our house we have decided, as a family, to have thirty minutes of silence every evening. That doesn’t mean you have to sit there staring at each other stifling silly giggles. Use the time productively. The children can either read a book or do some drawing whilst the adults of your household can simply sit with each other, read or just enjoy the moment with your eyes shut.
5. How to Defeat Stress: Render it Powerless!
The clock will never stop ticking. The situations you find yourself in won’t last forever. Everything is temporary. So let go of your frustrations and instead really feel and live what you are going through. Rather than being affected by your emotions stop and take some time to observe them. Flip stress on its head and use it in your favor. I find that when I’m experiencing a particularly stressful period of time, and when I accept that I cannot change the circumstance, I not only handle it a lot better I feel better. When you accept that you cannot control everything that is going on around you start to see it from a different perspective. You start to feel different about the situation and that, ultimately, renders it powerless. You can experience adversity without being affected by it. But it takes work.
There’s no doubt about it, stress sucks.
It’s overwhelming and draining.
When you’re pulled in every direction it feels like your existing, not living.
But you want to change that. And you can.
You can quit this toxic cycle of chaos and start living the calm life you desire.
Just pick one of the strategies above and use it consistently for the next week and see how you feel. Then add another. Over time you’ll start to notice how lighter and happier you feel.
But only you can make it happen.
I’m routing for you.
————
Russell is on a mission to simplify one million overwhelmed lives. He wants to help you gain control of your overwhelming and stressful life so you can live with more calm and fulfillment. Get the free toolkit 14 Ways to Create a Calm Life.
You’ve read 5 Ways to Conquer Stress When Life is Overwhelming You, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me
Bill Hayes’s boyfriend of eighteen years, Steve — “only forty-three” — had vanished, out of the blue and into a fatal heart attack, breaking Hayes’s heart. Hayes enters a ghostly dreamtime — liminal: not quite alive, not dead. “One day I met a man with the name of an angel,” Hayes writes. “We got to talking. Talking as balm. ‘You’re going to be fine,’ Emmanuel said right away. ‘Something bad always leads to something good . . . When my partner disappeared . . . ‘ and Hayes cuts in. ‘You said “disappeared.” ‘ He nodded. ‘That’s exactly how it feels for me.’ ”
Hayes is no innocent; he’s knocked around, but by disposition — and dint of vocation — he is open and vulnerable. He is a writer, a poet, a street photographer. He is fully feeling. “The night after he died, I found that a sliver of light from the streetlamp shone through the blinds just so and cast a single yellowy tendril across his pillow. It was the opposite of a shadow. Which is as clear a definition as I can come up with for the soul.”
”With morning, the light was gone.” Empty and agonized, soon it would be time to move to the next station. San Francisco was, New York City was to be: Insomniac City, where sleep goes to die, just the place for Mr. Restlessness. He lands in what New York criminally calls a “studio,” sized enough for a table, chair, and single mattress. Visitors sit on the floor: “This apartment should be illegal,” his friend Miguel says. “There must be some code somewhere that’s being broken.”
The city’s middle-of-the-night annoyances become Hayes’s sleepless familiars: the clip-clop of police-horse shoes, lovers’ sidewalk quarrels. “What is music to my ears may be intolerable to another’s. Life here is a John Cage score, dissonance made eloquent” (yes, he did say “music to my ears”). Hayes is still shell-shocked, but he’s a soldier, still damn-the-torpedoes open. He is grateful, courteous, and quick to tip his hat hello: “Kindness is repaid in unexpected ways,” he believes. “If you are lonely or bone-tired or blue, you need only come down from your perch and step outside. New York — which is to say, New Yorkers — will take care of you.” He loves the 2 a.m. burble from the outdoor seating at the French restaurant six flights down. “I discovered a phenomenon heretofore unknown to me: Laughter rises.”
Hayes turns out to be that particular kind of big-city denizen, the irrepressible soul who treats the pavement like a cocktail party. He approaches strangers if they appear to be doing something that strikes him. In his mind’s eye, this is neither discomfiting nor suicidal. He gathers those incidents and accidents that most of us have only heard in a song, experiences missed by being wary or the fear of being uncool. Sidewalks and subways are his hunting grounds. From a guy carrying fishing poles he learns that there are sharks in the Upper Bay. He promises a virginal, Sri Lankan cabbie that sex is everything he dreams it will be. From a homeless poet he learns the transit of Venus is taking place that week, an event “that only six times in recorded history have humans witnessed.” Underground, he marvels how the random sampling — the mash — tests our kindness and compatibility. “Is that not what civility is?”
Hayes stops people in the street and asks to take their photo: a cop, a vendor, two sisters. His black-and-white photographs dapple the chapters — chapters that are quick though composed, sometimes simply snatches from his journals. “We are eating outside. All at once, ‘Oh!’ he exclaims, seeing a firefly, Tinker Bell-like at our feet. ‘Isn’t it amazing!’ ‘Yes, but don’t — as I have told you before — eat one.’ ‘Ah, the dreaded death by firefly . . . ‘ O nods his head very seriously.”
Enter O. Oliver Sacks — The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, Island of the Colorblind, Hallucinations: that Oliver Sacks — had sent Hayes a letter praising his book The Anatomist, a pitch-perfectly, disarmingly Sacksian card: “I meant to write a blurb [but] got distracted and forgot.” They subsequently met in New York and started a correspondence. Hayes looked him up when he got to New York, eight years ago now. Sacks exuded innocence and vulnerability, protected only by his aura of brilliance. He took Hayes to his favorite haunts — the botanical gardens, the mineralogy collection at the American Museum of Natural History — and told him stories about the periodic table. Sacks fell in love for the first time, well into his seventy-fifth year.
Sacks experiences his first passionate kiss on his seventy-sixth birthday. Hayes: “After I kiss him for a long time, exploring his mouth and lips with my tongue, he has a look of utter surprise on his face, eyes still closed: ‘Is that what kissing is, or is that something you’ve invented.’ ”
Their relationship is charming and charmed — words here stripped clean and in amplitude. Sacks is murderously shy, and to witness how he emerges from this cocoon is wonderful. He is pulsing with life, his curiosity on some faraway astral plane: “Do you sometimes catch yourself thinking?” he asks. “Those special occasions when the mind takes off — and you can watch it. It’s largely autonomous, but autonomous on your behalf.” Hayes takes him to see some skateboarders. “They may not have read Euclid, but they know it all.” They sip wine from the bottle on their rooftop. There is a moment when Hayes catches Sacks, who is slowly going deaf and blind, trying to snip an uneven edge off a sheet of paper. “He was missing it entirely, scissoring the air very, very gently.”
This is a memoir, so a lot of other things work their way into and out of the story: Ali and his head shop; Ilona, the ninety-five-year-old, orange-haired, foot-long-eyelashed artist who draws Hayes’s right eye (“She told me she’d drawn Tennessee Williams’s eye once.”); the moving man who never moves; incidents and accidents. And there is the “cancer arising from the pigment cells in his right eye,” a recurrence of a melanoma that had by this point metastasized throughout Sacks’s body. You both read and watch, from Hayes many portraits, the vanishing of Oliver. He is such a brick. A journal entry from four months before Sacks dies: “O, when I accidentally dropped a carton of cherry tomatoes on the floor. ‘How pretty! Do it again!’ So I do.” When all Sacks can eat is gefilte fish, they have a taste test between Russ & Daughters and Murray’s. And Hayes is a brick, too. There, and aware that he had not only fallen in love, “it was something more, something I had never experienced before. I adored him.” It’s the kind of adoration that glows invitingly, like a warm, lighted window passed on a nighttime walk through a sleeping city.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2lVesJg
Abby Geni and Mathew Desmond Are the 2016 Discover Great New Writes Award Winners
This afternoon, the winners of the 2016 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers® Awards were announced in a ceremony in New York City. The awards are presented annually in recognition of literary excellence. The six finalists for the Discover Great New Writers Awards were chosen by two panels of noted authors from the 42 titles handpicked by our booksellers for the Discover Great New Writers program in 2016.
First Place, Fiction: Abby Geni, The Lightkeepers
A young woman finds herself at the center of a murder mystery and surrounded by an unreliable cast of characters on a remote archipelago in Abby Geni’s sublime debut novel. (Counterpoint/PGW)
First Place, Nonfiction: Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Matthew Desmond’s reportage puts human faces on an overlooked but real national crisis, presenting a mix of Americans telling their own stories about poverty and eviction.
Second Place, Fiction: Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi’s indelible novel follows two branches of a family—one in America and the other in Africa–over 300 years. (Alfred A. Knopf/Penguin Random House)
Second Place, Nonfiction: Hope Jahren, Lab Girl
As a rule, people live among plants but they don’t really see them. Hope Jahren’s spirited memoir sprouts the vibrant story of a life studying trees, flowers, seeds and soil — and takes readers deep into the hidden wonders of the biosphere. (Alfred A.Knopf/Penguin Random House)
Third Place, Fiction: Jung Yun, Shelter
How much do we really owe our family — and what do we owe ourselves? These are the questions at the heart of Jung Yun’s provocative debut novel, which unfolds from a household’s financial crisis into a gripping saga of violence, its causes and aftershocks. (Picador/Macmillan)
Third Place, Nonfiction: Patrick Phillips, Blood at the Root
Patrick Phillips brings to life an ugly and harrowing episode of American history in this meticulously researched and powerfully written history of his hometown, and the violence that kept the community all white, well into the 1990s. (W.W. Norton)
The first place winners in Fiction and Nonfiction each receive a $30,000 prize and a year of marketing and merchandising support from Barnes & Noble. Second and third place winners are awarded prizes of $15,000 and $7500, respectively.
The 2016 Discover Award Judges for Fiction:
Wiley Cash is the New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Discover Great New Writers selection A Land More Kind Than Home and This Dark Road to Mercy. His third novel is forthcoming from William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. Wiley is writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Fiction and Nonfiction Writing at Southern New Hampshire University.
Benjamin Percy is the author of three novels, two story collections, and a craft book, including The Dead Lands, Red Moon (a Discover Great New Writers selection), and Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction. His fourth novel, The Dark Net, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017. His fiction and nonfiction have been published by Esquire, GQ, Time, Men’s Journal, Outside, The Wall Street Journal and The Paris Review. He also writes the Green Arrow and Teen Titans series at DC Comics.
Emma Straub is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Modern Lovers, The Vacationers, and the Discover pick Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, and the short story collection Other People We Married. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Vogue, New York Magazine, Tin House, The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, and The Paris Review Daily, and she is a contributing writer to Rookie.
The 2016 Discover Award Judges for Nonfiction:
Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of fifteen books. Her 2003 memoir, She’s Not There: a Life in Two Genders was the first bestselling book by a transgender American. Her new novel, Long Black Veil is forthcoming from Penguin Random House in 2017. She is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University; serves as the national co-chair of the Board of Directors of GLAAD; and is a Contributing Opinion Writer for Op/Ed page of The New York Times.
Sloane Crosley is the author of The New York Times bestselling essay collections, I Was Told There’d Be Cake (also a finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor) and How Did You Get This Number, as well as the bestselling novel, The Clasp. Her work has appeared in Esquire, GQ, Playboy, Elle, W, The New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, and on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” She was the inaugural columnist for The New York Times Op-Ed “Townies” series, and is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Interview Magazine.
Brando Skyhorse is the author of a novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, which was a Discover Great New Writers selection,and received both the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters Take This Man: A Memoir was named by Kirkus Reviews as one the Best Nonfiction Books of the year. He is currently co-editing an anthology on passing, forthcoming from Beacon Press. Skyhorse has taught at New York University, George Washington University, and Wesleyan University. He joined the Bennington College faculty in 2016.
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2mxZTPC
5 Exercises to Improve Posture and Mobility for Seniors
Are you looking for posture exercises for seniors?
Poor posture can affect moving around, walking and daily activities because it’s directly related to balance and function. In the long run, bad posture can lead to back pain and joint pain in your hips and knees.
Seniors can perform many posture exercises during leisure time with the assistance of a respite caregiver from home care. If your loved one is sitting on a chair watching TV, he or she can do these exercises during the commercials. If they’re on the computer, they can take a break every five minutes for a posture exercise.
We’ve put together an array of exercises to help you target these postures more easily. Keep in mind, these are designed specifically for seniors.
Arms Up
This exercise corrects shoulder posture and aids in breathing.
For the arms up exercise, seniors would have to start with their arms down. Then they would have to raise them to shoulder height. The seniors are then instructed to squeeze their shoulder blades together and then return to a neutral spine with arms down.
Spinal Extension
This exercise can improve posture for those who find themselves slouching or keeping their chin down. As the name implies, this is an awesome exercise for the spine.
During this exercise, they are advised to inhale and sit up as tall as possible. Then they are allowed to relax and exhale.
Chin tuck and jut
Sometimes it is easy to loose good posture while sitting in a chair. Ideally, the vertebrae should be stacked.
This exercise helps old folks maintain a neutral spine while sitting.
For the chin tuck and jut, the elderly have to tuck their chin into chest, then jut it forward. Make sure your loved one is sitting on a chair and has a relaxed spine. During the exercise, the seniors should lift their ribs and breathe normally.
Shoulder circles
If you think a senior’s shoulders are angling forward due to slouching, this exercise will help put them back in place.
For this exercise, your elder needs to sit up tall, lifting the ribs. Raise only shoulders up slowly and then lower. Make sure to continue breathing normally.
Wall tilts
This exercise helps correct the posture of your loved one’s lower back, and it will strengthen pelvis and buttock muscles.
Wall tilts are done with the back against a wall. The elderly need to place a hand behind their back and try to flatten it to create pressure on their hand, and then relax it. If the exercise is too difficult to do standing up, your loved can try it sitting down.
Share these posture exercises for seniors or their loved ones who can make use of them! Good posture helps alleviate pain and discomfort so give these a try. There are posture corrector products available in the market to help maintain postures, but always consult your chiropractor before using it.
The post 5 Exercises to Improve Posture and Mobility for Seniors appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
Las Vegas – Nevada – USA (by Sergey Galyonkin)
Las Vegas – Nevada – USA (by Sergey Galyonkin)
How to pick locks and break padlocks
Why I’m Always in a Hurry, & What I’m Doing About It
By Leo Babauta
I’ve come to realize, more and more, that I’m always rushing.
I rush from one task to the next, rush through eating my food, impatient for meditation to be over, rushing through reading something, rushing to get somewhere, anxious to get a task or project finished.
What’s the deal? This coming from a guy who has written a lot about slowing down and savoring, about being present, about single-tasking?
As always, when I write these articles, they’re as much a reminder to myself about what I’ve found to work as they are a reminder to all of you. I’ve found them to work, but that doesn’t mean I always remember to practice them. It doesn’t mean I’m perfect, by any means.
So what is going on? Why do I hurry so much?
I’ve been reflecting on this, and the answer seems to be that my mind has a tendency towards greed. This isn’t greed in the sense that I want a lot of wealth … but my mind finds something it likes and it wants more. Always more.
Some examples of greed:
- I like chocolate (or wine, or coffee, or cookies) and I crave it, and want more even if I just had a bite of it.
- I am doing a task but also want to do 20 more tasks, because I want to do as much as possible. Wanting to do more and more, to do everything, is a good example of the mind’s tendency to greed.
- When I learn, I want to learn everything about a topic. I’ll look up every book I can find, every blog post or article, every podcast or video, every forum post, and want to read all of it. Of course, I can’t possibly read all of it now, but I want to. I’ll buy 10 books but jump around from one to the next, not finishing any of them.
- When I travel to a new city, I want to see it all — all the best sights, all the best vegan restaurants, all the best bookstores and museums and experiences. I can’t possibly, but I’ll do my best to fit all the best stuff into the small container of my trip, and research it for weeks.
- When I’m going about my day, I try to fit as much as possible into it: not only all my tasks, but spending time with the wife, reading with the kids, working out and meditating and doing yoga and going for a walk and reading and learning online and answering all my emails, watching all the best TV shows and films, and checking all the forums and news and blogs and more and more.
I rush around, trying to fit all of that in. I’m trying to maximize every day, every trip, every event, every moment. I’m trying to get everything possible out of life.
This comes from a good heart — I appreciate the briefness of life, and I appreciate its brilliance, and I want all of it in the short time I have left here. That’s not a bad thing, wanting more of life.
But what is the result of always wanting more, always wanting to maximize? It’s rushing, grabbing onto everything, never having enough, never being satisfied, never actually stopping to enjoy, not really appreciating each moment because I’m greedy for more great moments.
Indulging in this greediness for more, this maximizing everything, doesn’t satisfy it. It just creates more wanting for more.
Indulging isn’t helpful. Staying with the feeling of wanting more, wanting to maximize, wanting to rush, wanting to do it all … that’s more helpful. Stay with the feeling, Leo, don’t indulge it.
Don’t try to do it all, but instead be here now.
Don’t rush, but appreciate the moments in between things as just as important as the next thing.
Don’t try to maximize, but instead practice letting go. Let go of greedy tendencies, let go of whatever you’re clinging to (having it all, doing it all), let go of the urge to rush.
Whenever there’s a tendency towards greed, counter it with generosity.
The Practice of Generosity
What does generosity have to do with hurrying and trying to maximize every day? In one sense, generosity might be giving money or possessions to people who need it, or giving help wherever needed, when possible. But that’s just one sense of generosity.
Generosity is any way that we turn away from our self-centered view and start turning towards others. It could be as simple as turning towards another person in our life and trying to see what they need, rather than focusing on what we want to get out of life.
Or it could be turning towards that person and giving them the gift of our full attention. Really try to be present, with an open heart, trying to understand and hear the person. This is the spirit of generosity.
When doing something alone, the spirit of generosity can be turned to each moment — giving that moment the full gift of our attention, seeing it fully and opening our heart to it. This is a salve to the usual spirit of needing more, more, more, of wanting to satisfy me, me, me.
I’m trying to practice the spirit of generosity, whenever I notice my greedy mind wanting everything, wanting more, wanting to get the most out of every day. Instead, I turn to this moment, each person, each activity, and give it the loving gift of my wholehearted attention.
The Average Joe’s Guide To Setting Up An Online Business
E-commerce can be a minefield to the average Joe. Many big decisions need to be made, from deciding what to sell to how you can start setting up an online business. But, don’t let the online world scare you. With the following tips, you will be well on your way to creating your own successful business.
Refining, Designing And Sourcing Your Product
There are lots of options when embarking on a career in e-commerce these days. You can design your product, employ a third-party company to do this for you or source stock and mark up the price to make a profit.
It doesn’t matter how you go about obtaining your product. What’s more important is that you take your time to make the right decisions.
The D.I.Y. Approach
Product design can be a long and arduous process. But, if you want to offer a unique and valuable product or service to your customers and succeed with your online business, then you need to be ready to do your homework.
Pro tip: To launch an online business with a self-designed and prototyped product, your product needs to be refined to meet the needs of your audience. This should involve rigorous product testing.
GoldieBlox is one good example. It has taken the children’s toy industry by storm with products designed to encourage young girls to pursue an interest in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
These construction toys were designed to overcome the societal obstacles that can afflict girls in early childhood development and make them believe that STEM subjects are off limits to them.
Shopify entrepreneur and founder Debbie Sterling divulged that, to get her product right, she embarked on a long process of prototype testing and tweaking with focus groups to test on small children. Sterling created crude prototypes of her early designs and she employed children of differing age groups to play with them, observing them as they did.
Each focus group revealed new things to change about her products. One of her discoveries was that female children get frustrated with asymmetrical construction toys. As a result, she tweaked her designs to feature only symmetrical slots.
Debbie’s experiences teach us that all products need multiple levels of refinement and testing to ensure that they successfully fill a niche in the market and meet a customer’s needs.
Third Party Design
Third party design can be a great way to get your product ready to prototype or manufacture quickly. This method of design can speed up the process of getting your product ready to market in your online store and allow you to focus solely on marketing it and making sales.
Services, such as Viral Style, enable you to design your unique, personalized garments online, set your price and use their services to market the product through email placements and social media.
Here’s how it works:
- You need to create your garment with the online design suite
- Set a price at which you wish to sell your product online
- Utilize Viral Style’s marketing services to gain exposure for your product
- Collect a percentage of each design’s sales as a profit
However, this kind of design model is not without its drawbacks. For example, Viral Style takes a percentage of each sale for their service.
Despite this, by speeding up the product design process, third party designing services is still a good tool, especially since it can make your business more accessible to people.
Buying In Your Product
Is creating or designing a product not so appealing? If this is your concern, you should consider becoming an online merchant.
Being a merchant requires spending time doing a lot of research to ensure that you find the best quality products at the lowest price and then mark them up to make a profit.
Here are some ways you could source products and set up an online business:
Find a simple accessory niche – Merchants make most of their profits on the accompanying accessories to their products. These accessories, such as HDMI cables and phone cases, are less price-sensitive. Despite this, merchants can still make the same profit on an HDMI cable as they would do on a TV.
Consumable/ disposable and subscription products – These products often lead to repeat business, which is great for any merchant. If your product is regularly ordered, you could be on your way to generating a sustainable profit. Consider running a subscription service for guaranteed periodic sales.
Gaps in the online shelves – Perusing the online stock levels of products on Amazon or Ebay is often a good idea. Products which are consistently out of stock are a great business opportunity for you.
Be relentless: test your product, or do your research until you get it right. See our previous article on why your business ideas most likely need a little work.
Setting Up Shop
So, now that you’ve made or found your niche product, how do you get the ball rolling?
Here are some important points to consider when you are selecting which method to adopt in selling your product online:
The ability to showcase your products and brand through attractive imagery: Promote your products and brand with unique imagery, including crisp, high definition photos or infographics.
A clearly designed buyer’s journey: An easy to use online interface is required to convert your page visits into sales and avoid shopping cart abandonment
Communications with customers are key: Make the most of the online world by using calls-to-action to capture email addresses and click-through buttons to gain social media follows. You can then use social media and newsletters to advertise your products and get your brand heard.
Content value exchange is important: Linking your online store to your brand’s social media and offering other content, such as a blog, can be very useful. Your customers will be more likely to give you their contact details or business if you inform or entertain them.
Strategize your platform: Ebay, Amazon or Etsy are all fantastic ways to sell products online. However, if you want more control over the buyer’s journey, you should consider an all-in e-commerce platform.
See Also: How Online Blogging Is Influencing Business Trends
Marketing Your brand: Authenticity Is Key
A brand story is the foundation of any growth strategy.
Making your brand story clear and engaging with your customers is a great way to make your online business stand out from the crowd. You can also try giving your products and services a human face.
Invest In Your Brand Story
Your brand story should include:
- The reason your company came to be
- What motivates you and your team to come to work each day
- An inside look at your company
High Brew Coffee, for example, engage their customers with an excellent brand story of their online store. The coffee retailer’s website boasts the story of how the founders first came to conceptualize the brand.
Their website even hosts a short animated video which transforms their story into stylized visual content. This is in keeping with their brand image and creates an emotional connection with the consumer.
The experience of buying from them is not like buying from a stranger as their brand story has put a face to the name High Brew Coffee.
See Also: 5 Smart Ways to Boost Brand Awareness
Take Aways
Setting up an online business has never been easier but there are a few things you need to do before you set up your shop:
Refine your product: Whether it has been handcrafted or purchased online, make sure that your product fills a niche in the online market that guarantees sales.
Sell your products the right way for you: With so many options out there, it is worth doing your research to find the right way to sell your products online. Consider an e-commerce platform for greater control.
Be authentic: Let your customers know what’s special about your company by expressing your brand story and offering a face to your brand’s name.
Are you considering setting up your own online business? What lessons will you take away from it? Let us know in the comments.
The post The Average Joe’s Guide To Setting Up An Online Business appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
The Iditarod National Historic Trail in Alaska encompasses a…
The Iditarod National Historic Trail in Alaska encompasses a 1,500-mile system of winter trails that first connected ancient Alaska Native villages, opened up Alaska for the gold rush and now plays a vital role for travel and recreation. Maintained by the Bureau of Land Management, the trail is now mostly closely identified with the famous annual sled dog race. The race, which started this weekend, challenges the racer and the 21 dog team with harsh conditions across rugged, but beautiful terrain. Photo by Kevin Keeler, Bureau of Land Management (@mypubliclands).
Sig Nordal 