All work and no play makes a man what? Boring, maybe. Burned out, for sure. Even workaholics – perhaps especially them – will eventually reach a point wherein they just can’t function properly anymore because of an imbalance in their professional and personal lives. Before you even get there, why not take a little time to take stock of your situation and get out of the burn out lane?

First, identify what adds to your stress. There is always something – it can be work-related or familial. Whatever these things are, pinpoint them first so that you can find solutions.

Second, delegate tasks. If there are certain tasks that add to your stress, see if you can assign them to staff members whom you trust and who are skilled. If you have no staff members, then you might want to consider outsourcing certain tasks. This will certainly save you a lot of time AND stress.

Third, set aside time for yourself. Remember my last post? Taking a vacation can be good for your business and yourself. It does not even have to be a vacation; a little “me” time will do the trick. Say, on Friday afternoons you can go play basketball. Or maybe spend some time fishing. Whatever it is that helps you relax, make sure that it is part of your routine.

Fourth, keep yourself challenged. I have heard it said that sometimes, people get burned out because they’re bored. It may seem ironic, but if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. If you’re in this boat, then I suggest looking for something challenging, something new, to keep you on your toes.

The summer period is almost over. Have you taken a break from your business? I know that I may not be making sense to some of you, but believe me, taking a vacation might actually do you – and your business – more good rather than if you stayed at work all throughout the summer months.

How so? We all know how running a business – no matter what size it is – can take its toll. The daily stress of having to deal with every little detail in the business, not to mention all the responsibility on the owner’s shoulders, is certainly not good on even the toughest of people. As such, taking breaks from work is a very important thing.

Even if you own your business, you cannot expect yourself to be at the top of your game if you work at least 12 hours day, 7 days a week. Even if you decrease those figures to 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, you will still be headed for burn out.

As such, going on vacation should really be on your list. It does not even have to be a “grand” vacation. You can opt for a “stay-cation,” wherein you do not travel to go on a break. The bottom line is that you UNPLUG yourself during this period.

Stay away from your mobile phone, from your laptop, from the Internet – anything that might tempt you to check up on how business is doing. Give yourself this work-free time. You deserve and need it; and so does your business.

Photo courtesy of feministing

To celebrate the launch of its new Small Business site AT&T is launching a contest for small businesses and the winner get a complete business make-over from AT&T. First I obviously must disclaim that I live in the UK and can’t use AT&T myself, but I have one of those shiny iPhones nevertheless.

Myself I have been running small businesses for pretty much my complete professional career and have several times rebooted businesses as well. Often I have been in the situation that I wanted to improve a company I owned or managed but whether didn’t know how to do or didn’t have the financial possibilities to do so.

In the first situation, stubborn as I usually was, most of times I looked for a typical sell out option and tried to sell on the company because I was too proud to ask other people for advice. I should have known better and I think the fact that big companies such as AT&T are available to assist small business owners is a great opportunity.
If back then I knew what I know now, I would gladly have grabbed every occasion to get advice and guidance from professionals instead of getting stuck myself in a cul-de-sack, not seeing the forest trough the trees.

Other times it would have been great if I had a little more financial leeway to improve the infrastructure and logistics of my companies. Most of time IT was a big burden and too expensive to be run professionally. Often I would have dreamed of being able to offer my employees a nice laptop or even a professionally maintained email server and I guess that’s where AT&T comes in for you.

Next to the complete business makeover AT&T also offers smartphones to winners and several other subscriptions based prizes. All you have to do is submit a 2minutes video and tell AT&T how they could possibly improve your business.

You can visit the AT&T Small Business InSite contest page here.

The Contextual Partnership Plugin For WordPress Provides Free Advertising To Help Promote Your Blog & Get You Noticed…

If you’re looking for an effective solution to help get your blog noticed then the Contextual Partnership Plugin for WordPress bloggers could be well worth consideration. Perhaps the most attractive aspect is that there is no cost involved.

According to the developers the plugin is designed to;

Drive more targeted visitors to your blog (or blogs) by strategically linking your blog to and from other bloggers participating in the network. The exact method used to achieve this remains confidential but apparently it’s not a basic reciprocal link exchange – nor the more common 3 way linking arrangement often seen between bloggers.

Enhance the user experience for your blog visitors by providing them with links to other high quality blogs for further information on subjects of interest (and it can do this without you actually loosing the visitor which is a great feature).

Indirectly increase your search engine rankings by building highly relevant incoming links to your blog for keyword terms you define, related to your own niche market.

Not a bad indirect benefit at all.

To better understand how the network works, first you need to know what a “contextual link” actually is. A contextual link is simply a link “within content” of a blog post and “within context” of specific keyword terms in that post. For example the term “dog training” found within a blog post becomes a link out to another blog (related to “dog training”) within the network. Contextual Links are found all over the internet – bloggers interlink their own pages contextually, there are paid advertising programs that allow you to place contextual advertising links and earn per click, and bloggers naturally link out to other websites they find useful “contextually” as well.

This is the key to the “Contextual Partnership”. When you install and setup the WordPress Plugin, you’re asked to provide the URL’s you wish to advertise on other partners blogs, and the keyword terms you want those blogs to use to link back to your own. When a match is found within the network for the keyword terms you provide (and assuming it meets with the Contextual Partnership’s strategic linking methodology), a link back to your blog is assigned, and your account has a credit removed.
The amount of credits your account holds appears to be directly related to the number of links you’re providing to other partners in the network for the keyword terms they themselves are looking to use to advertise. Apparently for every link you provide for another partner, you earn 1 credit. That 1 credit is then “cashed in” to assign a link back to your own blog from other partners whenever a match is found for your own keyword terms. So if you already have 100 posts in your blog, and each of those pages finds a match to provide a link to another partner, then technically you could receive 100 incoming links to your blog as soon as you’ve been approved to participate in the partnership. You also continually earn more points and incoming links as you continue to blog and add more posts just like you usually do.

That’s the basic overview and you’ll find more specific information on the plugin website including details of many features not mentioned here (like the ability to select specifically which blog posts you want to include – or nor include in the network)…

http://www.contextualpartnership.com

Uptake by the blogger community seems to have been extremely good and this new service looks to become very popular. In the first two weeks of launch the partnership already had over 54,000 individual places to place links throughout the network, and within the first 4 weeks over 10,000 advertising links had been allocated between network partners. This is most likely a result to how easy it is to actually setup the plugin and participate – it literally takes 5 minutes to install and setup – although approval can take anywhere from 24-72 hours depending on the moderation queue as only high quality blogs are accepted to participate to keep out the splogs and spammers.
This seems to be one of those services worth giving a shot for a few months, and by the looks of things the developers have some exciting new features in the pipeline to make things even more effective for partners in the future.

You can find out full details and download the plugin below…

http://www.contextualpartnership.com

Or alternatively you can download the plugin directly from WordPress…

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contextual-partnership-link-exchange-plugin/