This is a question, that up until this summer, I have struggled with. It’s like hitting the wall and then finding a way to break through.

The answer, in short, is nothing. Nothing.

I haven’t had personal discussions with each of these people, heck, they probably don’t even know that I exist! But I’ve watched them, I’ve bought their stuff, I’ve studied their methods and read between the lines. One step short of an internet stalker, I’ve lurked and learned how they do what they do. I don’t claim to know all of their secrets, but one thing that I do know, they are no different than me.

The key to their success is that they work hard, they produce absolutely amazing material for every one of their readers and they really, really care about people.

I’ve never shied away from hard work and I know that I really care about people. I can’t say that I always produce content on the level of amazing, but I work hard and practice and develop myself so that I get better at it every day.

The Choice

All that is left is my mindset. I have to make a determination, a conscious decision, to do something beyond what I normally do. It sounds so cliche to go beyond your comfort zone, but that isn’t my point at all. It’s the choice that is the difference.

A lot of you might be in the same boat, so think about the fact that it’s all a matter of choice. It costs next to nothing to put yourself out there and create something awesome.

If you are in doubt, go check out Chris Guillebeau, Charlie Gilkey and Johnny B Truant. Each one of them awesome in their own corner of the internet and each one well worth learning from.

The Plan

1. Decide to do something
2. Think it through enough
3. Make it happen
4. Do it consistently
5. Make sure others know you’re doing it, and that you help them

After a ridiculously fast response from Chris Brogan, I’ve updated my list to reflect his suggestions which are extremely important to not overlook. Thanks, Chris!

It took me a few days to figure out what was going on, but after I learned what he was doing, it was pretty amazing to sit back and watch the students unravel and fight back on the offensive against their ideals. Near the end of the semester he made a presentation to hammer home his main point of the entire class. He had an acronym:

• CULTURE
• RELIGION
• ADVERTISING
• MEDIA
• PARENTS
• EDUCATION
• RELATIONSHIPS

Each of these CRAMPERS influence our perception of people, business and the world in general. You can’t deny the impact that each of these has on your life.

My professor attempted to instill critical thinking in my class by doing everything he could to rattle our cages, to make us question the status quo and fortify our positions. It was brilliant.

My challenge to you is to Decramp.

That doesn’t mean you need to abandon all those things that you know and love, but you should question everything so that you can excel at anything you do. Understand your position inside and out so that you can make intelligent arguments and persuasive explanations.

Here’s the deal: Discipline is what separates most average work, average success and, really, average everything from greatness.

There is a lot to be said for knowing when you are most productive. Charlie Gilkey has a great resource on Heatmapping Your Productivity, but at the same time, you can only be productive if you choose to do something each and every day. That choice eventually becomes a habit, but every day before that takes discipline.

I struggle with discipline. It is so much easier to just let things happen. I have all kinds of excuses, all kinds of reasons why I don’t need to do anything to advance myself today. But I know that if I sit back and do nothing, I’ll lay my head down on my pillow and beat myself up over all the things I should have done. Discipline is really a mind-game. It takes a lot of will power to overcome the lizard brain, so, if you find yourself going to bed and constantly thinking about how you should have done this or that, here are a couple of practical ways to help your mind with discipline:

1. Write your goals down + keep them somewhere you see them consistently! I find notecards are great for this. In fact, the picture for this post is on my corkboard right now to remind myself to do something every day. Something concrete. That something is this blog post.
2. Set reminders. You need to keep a calendar, either online or in a notebook or something, but set reminders. If you are bad about remembering to look at your calendar, set a reminder that will email or text you. 37Signals have created some awesome products that do just that. I use Backpack {affiliate link} to keep track of a lot of different stuff, but the reminders feature is really cool. I can literally “set it and forget it”.
3. Get an accountability partner. This one sounds cheesy, but it is probably the most effective. As humans, we don’t like to let ourselves down, but we certainly don’t like to let other people down. Find someone who you can work with to keep you accountable. A teacher, a mentor even a colleague work great. The best part about it is, you learn a ton from the other person and you have the natural tendency to ratchet each other up.

How do you do it? What other tips and tricks do you find useful in staying disciplined.

My goal is to make something happen every day when it comes to all of my other ventures and ideas, and I am happy to say that very soon, I will have some new information to present and a couple of new ideas to share with you.

Two types of people.

If you haven’t figured it out already, most people fall into one of two categories when it comes to business. One is the type that has all of the book smarts in the world and can crunch numbers on ROI faster than you can ask for the definition of the term. The other end of the spectrum are those people that have it. The knack. Everything seems to fall into their lap. They can walk into a room of strangers and know everyone by the end of the hour. Ultimately, both of these types of people can be successful, but they will never reach their full potential without striking a proper balance. That balance is the Art of Business.

How do I strike a balance?

I’m glad you asked. It’s not as hard as you might think, but I won’t lie, it does take hard work. If you came here looking for a quick and easy way to make money, forget it. I’m all about making your business work. The Art of Business is a process in creating new habits, stretching yourself to perform in ways you didn’t think you could and continually learning new things. It’s taking charge of every variable and tilting the playing field in your direction.

Subscribe to my RSS Feed or get updates via Email. It’s gonna be awesome.

Wrong. But, you’re a lot closer than you think.

Growth on the internet comes by being easily found. Real Estate agents preach: Location, Location, Location. Take that principle and apply it to Google. Location, Location, Location. 1st page? 2nd page? 3rd page?!

Search Engine Optimization is key in getting found online. SEO is a major component of taking your business online, and arguably the most important key to being found. A lot of business owners think that a SEO consultant is a must, and consultant means big money. No doubt, SEO consultants are beneficial, but as entrepreneurs and small business owners, we need something instantly available and at a lower cost than a consultant to get us started. Enter Scribe SEO.

Scribe takes the guesswork out of blogging. As an entrepreneur and small business owner, SEO is really the last thing you want to be thinking about.

Here’s how it works:

1. Go to Scribe SEO and sign up. You can even take a free test drive.
2. Install the plugin.
3. Write a new blog post, click on “Analyze” and away it goes.
4. Review the results and tweak.

I’ve been using it and have been very impressed with its speed and how much better it has made my writing in general. If you have a website, you need to check it out. Scribe SEO will benefit every aspect of your content.

Disclaimer: The links in this post are affiliate links. I get paid if you sign up. I would love it if you would, but you certainly don’t have to.

All over my wonderful home state of Oklahoma working on Opveon and some book publishing (not mine) with my parents. It’s been crazy and almost all of my time has been devoted to hands-on work, but I’m getting back in the groove of being online.

What’s up with the redesign?

I’m finicky, and I like to keep things fresh. Headway helps me do that. I also wanted to reinvent what my site was about and start a new venture.

Why the Art of Business?

Conventional wisdom about running a business is either thrown out the window or clung to like a lifesaver. Modern ideas are shunned or embraced and there needs to be a balance between the two. That is the Art of Business.

What’s next?

A lot of really great information and some consulting. I’m interested in what you want to know about business too. I’m open to ideas and suggestions so make sure to let me know what you want to hear about.

This was originally posted on HeadwayHQ.com. David Wang has been doing a great job with his site and walkthroughs! Check out his site and make certain to subscribe to his RSS feed to keep up with Headway happenings. Hit him up on Twitter @blogjunkie too.

We’ve got a great thing going with the Headway theme, but there is a little bit of external setup that needs to be done in order to get things working as smoothly as possible and have the ability to track your progress.

After you have installed Headway and activated it, you’ll notice that you have a few new options in the Appearance tab.

Headway Configuration – SEO, Twitter Integration, Backend Options

Headway Design – Colors, Typography, Size, etc. IE: Look & Feel

Headway Layout Editor – Llay out pages and elements. Headway’s bread and butter.

Headway Easy Hooks – Great explanation at HeadwayHQ.com.

These tabs let you control virtually every aspect of Headway and its functioning. I want to focus on the Headway Configuration tab to get you started with the backend options that will make your site very useful. Many of you who have a site already have this information at hand, but to those newbies out there, this is your guide.

When you first click on the Headway Configuration tab, you are greeted with a page full of empty boxes under General Options.

For the Feed URL, go to feedburner.google.com log in with your current Google account or get a new one, and follow the steps to set up a new RSS feed. When you are done, copy the feed URL and paste it in this box.

If you have anything special that needs to run in Header Scripts, paste that in here.

The Footer Scripts area is where you want to past your Google Analytics tracking code or any other statistics software code. If you don’t have a Google Analytics account go to google.com/analytics/ and, again, sign in or sign up with your Google account. Follow the directions to set up tracking for your account. When you get to the end, copy the tracking code, then paste it here.

GZIP Compression is usually fine to leave on unless you know your host does not like it.

Favicons are the little avatars or logos that show up next to your site’s URL in web browers. If you have one, link to its URL location here. If not, follow the Headway instructions and get one at favicon.cc.

The Affiliate Link section is if you want to make money by people clicking on your Headway footer link and purchasing the theme at the Headway site. Make sure to put your correct link here. If you don’t have one, you can always use mine.

We’ll move on to the SEO tab.

As the note says, you can pretty much leave everything alone unless you really know what you are doing. The only sections that you must be aware of are near the bottom. Under META Content make certain to fill in the Home Description and Home Keywords boxes.

Search engines and social media sharing sites (like Digg and del.icio.us) use this information to help disseminate your site. It’s important that you choose a concise description for your home page. Think about what humans will search for when looking for your content. Enter that hear and keep it around 150 characters.

In the Keywords section, utilize the same principles as above. Short, concise and relevant. Enter 10-15 keywords that people will search for. The description and keywords box should have some overlap in their content, but don’t just copy and paste your description into your keywords box.

That’s it. That should help you be able to attract and track visitors to your site. Now the rest is up to you with content and networking.

Jason Wietholter is an entrepreneur and social media/multimedia specialist. You can find his personal website at http://jasonwietholter.com and lurking about the internets on Twitter @jasonwietholter.

In person, you spend time asking questions and developing an understanding of what exactly is being communicated. Online, you can spend time leaving comments on blog posts, following up via Twitter and discussing topics in forums. This is great as it helps you get to know the meaning of specific posts, and others can join in on the conversation providing real community involvement helping you get noticed.

How does this help my online reputation and SEO?

It helps your reputation and your own SEO by providing a useful resource for others to read. Think about it. You leave a comment and leave a link to your site. If you provided something of value to the conversation, either by posing a clarification question or expounding on the original post, you’ve provided something of value and other readers will consider checking up on you. Now, this won’t necessarily, directly increase your SEO performance just by posting a comment, but, it will likely get you visitors, if you provide enough value, the blog owner may get in contact with you or even write a post about your comment and link to your site. Now we’re talking.

Take it one step further and get involved outside of blog posts on Twitter or Facebook. Even though not everything is indexed by Google and others, the conversation value and pass-along value transmitted through these services offers a significant amount of benefit to your online reputation. And, as always, more hits means better SEO and more publicity across other people’s blogs and Twitter accounts as well as their Facebook pages. That brings me to another point which I will cover in another post in the near future: Social Networks pass information based on trust.  A link or piece of information passed through a trusted friend is much more likely to get clicked than a link all by itself. Social networks hold massive amounts of power in this respect.

So get involved!

Read blog posts, post comments, share information via Twitter. Become a fan of something on Facebook and create content that is valuable to others. If you give you will receive. It will take some effort, but the internet is a world-wide community of people looking to share something. Content is king. Contribute and get noticed.

That’s a humongous amount of people. Now don’t make the mistake of reading those two statistics as the same. Three out of four of all Americans use Social Technology. Two-thirds of the global base of internet users visit Social Networks. 230 million people in the U.S. and nearly 4.5 billion people worldwide visit and interact through Social Media. That is your audience!

That’s right, email has come crashing down as the number four behemoth of online activities. Social Media is more active and more instant, growing at 3x the rate of every other activity that you and I do online. Forwarded emails are now being replaced by ReTweets. An unlimited text box full of spaced out text and attached files has been superceded by 140 characters and instant upload and commenting. We’re all about instantaneous, efficient exchange of information. It’s only been recently that Viral marketing has become a major marketing outlet. Browsing endlessly has been replaced by searching Google and Social Media sites.

We’ve advanced throughout history in our abilities to communicate. Social Media is one more advance because everyone has a voice. It used to be that just those with the resources to write a book or the ability to cover the news could have any opinion that would reach any substantial number of people. Now, you and I can reach millions at any time without bounds. Social Media really is a beefed up form of word of mouth. Think about it: If you share with 10 friends, who share with 10 friends, who share with 10 friends, all in a matter of one or two minutes, you’ve reach a crowd of 1000 people. It only took you 100+ characters and thirty seconds. That is power.

Yes, Yoda is the wise one. Social Media is a force. Don’t mess with it, don’t defy it, embrace it. Now you know what Social Media is and why you should care. Stay tuned to for more in depth analysis and explanation. I want to hear what you have to say. Let me know by leaving a comment or Contacting Me. Don’t forget to read Part 1 or watch the entire presentation here.