The Honda Way of Success

You know Honda? The engine company?

They have been quite successful in some years now, their key to success was failure. This amazing video is going to show you how they turned failures into a positive thing. This is definitely a video worth watching.

Key elements:

• Ideas
• Failures
• Chances
• Keep trying
• 1/100(0)

I actually saw this video in school, we were just about to finish the main topic in English, which was success. So our teacher showed us this. Great inspiration.

Please share your thoughts on this video in the comments. If you didn’t think that this is a good way to get success, then you should definitely tell why, I’d like to hear your opinions on this.

Best of 2009 on DaneBlogger

1. 10 Major Blogging Mistakes is the best, most retweeted post from this year. Perhaps also the best article – It is from my report, which should show some of the qualities from my report.

“How would you like to get into a room, with old pizzas (oh god, I’d love to have a pizza now!) and mess everywhere, and then you would have to sleep there?”

2. How to Increase Your Productivity in 6 Easy Steps, I really like this blog post. Because your really can learn from it and from within the comments. My readers definitely have shared some good tips there.

“I enjoy reading other blogs about blogging, Internet marketing and so on. I bet you do so to, with your niche, because that’s probably your passion.”

3.  How to Use White Papers to Build Your List, is the post where I describe the term “White paper” lots of people doesn’t know this term at all.. Something they should, definitely. White papers are very useful, for you and your readers.

“Brand yourself on every single page, you should not place an enormous logo or link on each page. You need to have a location at every page in the white paper, where people can identify you as the source for the knowledge.”

4. Examples of Social Proof in this post I’m giving some examples on how you can use social proof to your advantage.

“If you on Twitter have around 250 followers you will instantly think that 2,000 is many followers and even if you’re listed on 50 lists – you really start to see, that this guy is tweeting with value.”

5. What is The Real Difference Between Ebooks and Reports, is a post where I am giving my opinion on the difference between ebooks and reports. Then you can tell your readers what you’re giving away for free or selling.

“To be clear the reports give you the basic knowledge of the topic. The e-books teaches you how to use the basic knowledge.”

6. Increase Affiliate Sales by Implementing Two More Things in Your Selling, this is a “tutorial” on how you can increase affiliate sales. I like the methods, really. I haven’t seen them in use.

“If you offer your audience some bad stuff they will never ever gain trust to you and if they don’t trust you, you will not be able to sell them anything.”

7. Why You Comment on Other Blogs, is the only YouTube video that’s on this list. I think the principle in the video is the most important part of it all.. Really gold stuff I’m sharing here IMO.

“On one side you have promotion, on the other marketing”

8. How to Decide Your Blog Platform, this is my post where I simply say that I love WordPress and that I recommend other to use it, because it is so deadly simple etc.

“If you don’t want to code your web-design, yourself and neither want to outsource a web-designer to create your design and just want to pay for web hosting and domain name. I think you should go for WordPress with all the possible free WordPress designs.”

9. The Power of Social Proof in 4 Simple Steps, I give my audience a little “how-to” use social proof, in your advantage and well I explain it.

“He had a great sales page and everything was fine, but he had no testimonials, no text testimonials, no audio testimonials and finally no video testimonials. He have had some sales, but it really helped when he added some video testimonials. The videos were from people who liked his product, and talked about its niceness.”

10. 5 Ways to Get Easy Backlinks, in this post, I give you 5 ways to get backlinks and Google really appreciate backlinks!

“To guest post is really a good way to get backlinks and traffic, if you write great content people will click on the link back to your site.”

What’s Your Take?

Which blog post do you think is the best from DaneBlogger this year? Any of them listed, please let me know in the comments. Much appreciated!

How I Got Inspired to Run a Blog

I just uploaded a video to YouTube – Answering some questions about my blogging journey.

As I love to say: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Watch the video here:

10 Qualities a Startup Founder Should Have

From thousands of startups launched each day only 10% of them become successful and remaining 90% die within first two years of their launch. In this article I would be trying to explore the qualities which should be present in the startup founder to make his/her startup successful.

1. Know his stuff: – Startup founder should have the skills which he/she is planning to offer to his clients. If your venture is related to web design services, then as a founder you should know how to design a professional website. The Startups which depends completely on their employees have high probability of Failure as compared to others.

2. Love his work: – Many founders lose their interest and focus after some time and start looking for other options. The main reason behind this is not getting the desired results as expected. Your startup should be related to work which you always love to do so that you can’t lose your Focus easily.

3. Have a Vision: – You should have vision in your mind where you want to take your business after few years. Businesses without any Goal to achieve can’t grow. You have to set both long-term and short-term goals which will motivate you and help you to grow.

4. Ability to Manage Cash Flow: – Cash Flow is like Blood for your Business. You need Funds to keep your startup alive so you should know how to convince investors to generate funds and to manage the available funds in most efficient way.

5. Enjoys meeting with People: – A successful startup founder should know how to develop networks online and offline. He should enjoy doing interaction with his target audience. More relations you are going to develop, the more revenues you will generate.

6.Time Management Skills: – As a founder, you have lot to do in very less time and it could be very difficult because there is nobody to monitor you.  Divide your tasks on basis of their priorities and allocate fix amount of time to them. Remember a minute spent in organizing things means an hour saved.

7. Strong enough to take Risks: – We all know the “No Risk, No Gain” Principle. If you are founder then you have to take risks at various phases of your venture and you have to be strong enough to do this. Always remain ready to learn from your Failures and then try again. Thomas Edison once said “I did not fail I found 2000 ways not to make a light bulb”

8. Ability to Sale and Negotiate: – Selling here does not mean selling product to customer but it means the ability to persuade people and getting them to do what you want them to do. The other skill you should have is skill to negotiate. You have to negotiate with your clients, business partners etc many times to get great deals.

9.Long learner: – When technology is changing every day you should be always ready to learn new things and keep your skills up to date to satisfy your customer requirements.

10. Patience: – Patience is the key to success and we all know that Every Business needs time to attract customers and to generate revenues. Put your ideas in to action and wait to see results. If you are looking for quick overnight success then launching a startup is not good option for you.

Rudo Malequin works as Internet Marketing Executive for Fortepromo which creates customized promotional products for startups that help them to promote their brand in market.

6 Ways to Be Circled and Not Squared

I got this idea of this blog post when I was at work last night.. I saw a board that was formed as a square. And then a circled-formed bread basket, but that’s a completely different story. Let’s jump straight to this blog post.

This is a blog post on how to stand out from the crowd. And you will look different from the other bloggers/marketers in your niche. In this case difference is good. So when you stand out from the crowd you are circled, when you follow the stream of marketers/bloggers you are squared.

It’s all about being circled.

1. Start a Blog

If you are in a offline or online business and your business do not have a blog, you should start on now. IMO starting a blog is probably the main marketing you should do online. If you want to be very social (ie. use social media) you have to have a central location to send people to, with all your content.

What blog platform?

2. Develop an Outstanding Brand

Branding is huge. My brand is DaneBlogger, start your own brand. Darren Rowse’s brand is ProBlogger. Almost every successful Internet marketer is having a brand, lots of people doesn’t think that a brand is needed. You can definitely live without a brand. But, a brand is easier to remember than, a name.

People tend to call me Dane, as of DaneBlogger.. It’s like my nickname, just bear in mind that my name is Mikkel Juhl, but if you like, just call me Dane, because that’s like my nickname.

3. Use E-mail Marketing to Stay in Front

Email Marketing ins’t dead, far from, it will give you an edge over the competition if it’s done right. You can see some stuff about email marketing at this blog.

4. Network With Your Customers

Be on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, wherever your customers are located, be there interact, build a strong bound to them. They liked to be interacted with.. Anyway, here’s how to dominate your niche using Twitter. Be social, and whenever there’s coming a new social media up, join and see if it has a future, it may have.

5. Give Value. Receive Second

(This is probably one of the best advices I have for you)

You should really expect nothing in return, and just give them value first, regardless of whether they will buy your products or not.

Maybe start with a free product and then when they’ve read the awesome product you will be able to sell.

6. Get Your Own Theme, or A Premium Theme

This is relatively important. If you buy a premium theme of WordPress, you will be seen as serious. Because you want to pay for your blog. If you get you own design, you will be able to build a brand from that theme. The theme can follow you everywhere.

Hope you enjoyed todays blog post.

The Productivity of The 80/20 Rule

80/20 rule also called Paretovs principle, should be used by any reasonable person, both as a personal tool and business tool.

80/20 argues that the smallest proportion of all causes, all inputs and all the action usually leads to the largest proportion of all outcomes, outputs or rewards.

In other words, this means that 80 percent of your work results come from 20 percent of the time you work.

Or a company, 80 percent of all errors caused 20 percent of error types. It will therefore be able to remove 80% of the errors in a production by eliminating 20% of error types. Thought-provoking, but is that right?

It was the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who in 1897 discovered an interesting context. He accidentally discovered the link between wealth distribution and income distribution in England. He found out that most of the assets and income belonged to a minority among selected groups.

This was perhaps not surprising, but first there was a stable mathematical relationship between the proportion of people and amount of income or wealth in these groups.

It turned out that if 20 percent of the group owned 80 percent of the property, one could reasonably assume that  10% had such. 65% of the assets, and 5% had 50%. The main message is not percentages, but the fact that the wealth distribution in the group were predictable imbalance.

In our World

Now it becomes really exciting, because if you look closely at other phenomena here on earth, you will discover the same imbalance.

• Approx. 20 percent of the criminals is responsible for approx. 80% of the crime.
• 20% of drivers cause 80% of the accidents.
• 20% of those who marry, 80% in the divorce statistics.
• 20% of children receive 80% of the available educational qualifications.
• In your home will be 20% of your carpets exposed to 80% of wear.
• 20% of your clothes will be in use 80% of the time.
• The combustion engine is a great tribute to the 80/20 rule, because 80% of energy wasted during combustion, and only 20% reaches the wheels.

The link between the 80/20 rule and chaos theory is the question of imbalance. The two theories argue both that the universe is out of balance, ie. that cause and effect are rarely associated in a balanced manner. Much of what happens is irrelevant, and yet there are always some forces that have an impact that goes far beyond their numbers.

The man behind the quality revolution, the American engineer Joseph Moses Juran, 1950-1990, used the Pareto rule and the “rule of the vital few” in the quest for higher productivity. His big idea was to apply the 80/20 rule, together with other statistical methods to eliminate the quality defect and improve the reliability and value of products.

None of the leading American industries was interested in Jurans theories. In 1953 he was invited to hold a lecture in Japan, and here he met a receptive audience. He stayed to work for various Japanese companies to transform the qualitative value of their goods.

Juran was first taken seriously in the West after 1970 when the Japanese threat to American industry was a reality.

How can you use the 80/20 rule in your everyday life?

Do not read a book from beginning to end (unless you read it for your enjoyment). You can find out what a book contains, in very short time. Read the first conclusion, then the preface, and then the conclusion again. Then you can delve into the more interesting sections.

• Want to make a career, so concentrate on 20% of the main issues.
• It is better to be in the right place than to be clever and hardworking.
• It is better to focus on results rather than inputs.
• Look for shortcuts instead of walking the beaten path.
• Exercise control over their lives with the least possible effort.
• Be selective, not comprehensive.
• Aim excellence in a few areas rather than a good performance in many.
• Delegate as much as possible in everyday life and let yourself spur of the tax system in this area, rather than feel punished (use gardeners, mechanics, interior designers and other specialists, rather than doing it yourself).
• Choose your career and your employer with special care and employing about possible other than to be employed.
• Only do the things you do best and that you enjoy most.
• See into life behind the structure to uncover ironies and quirks.
• Think about the areas in which 20% of the effort could lead to 80% of the results.
• Relax, work less and determine a limited number of high-value targets, where 80/20 rule will work for you, rather than trying to exploit any opportunity.
• Make the most of the “lucky” moments in life when you are at a creative peak and the fate guarantee success.