I was searching the blogosphere last night, looking for other motivational blogs. What I found was a lot of (apparently) unmotivated motivators. The majority of the blogs I looked at hadn’t been updated in over six months. Kind of hard to keep other people motivated if you can’t find the motivation to keep your blog updated!

On the one hand, most blogs fail. Most people tend to give up on blogging after a while. You would tend to think that motivational blogs might have a better fate, after all, experts on motivation should be able to keep themselves motivated, no? But, they are people nonetheless, and even the best of us can lose sight of things, or move on to other things.

At any rate, while external sources of motivation can be helpful (and sometimes much needed!), you have to have your own internal motivation. Otherwise, what happens when your motivator becomes unmotivated? If you don’t have your own self motivation–your own intrinsic motivation–then you’re dependent upon others for it! Motivation is not something you want to outsource!

You could buy some motivational posters and hang them around your home or office if you suffer from a lack of internal motivation, but depending on pictures and inspiring quotes is not the best form of encouragement. Mind you, that’s not to say that it’s not good. Posters and quotes and so on can provide a lot of support, especially those times when you’re feeling down.

But, still you don’t want to depend upon extrinsic motivation. You want something a little closer to your heart, like your dreams and your goals.

So, the question is, what motivates you? What is your dream, and what have you done toward achieving that dream?

Okay, three questions, though your motivation and your dream may be the same thing, or not. So, we’ll call it two and a half questions. And, let’s put those in bold so they stand out:

1. What motivates you?
2. What is your dream (if different)?
3. What have you done toward achieving that dream?

Don’t answer here! Nope, blog it! Answer these questions in a post on your own blog, and link to this post. Also, leave a comment on this post when you have done that.

Why Write about Your Motivation?

Well, how about money for a motivating factor?

How much? I’ll get to that in a minute. First, the rules.

1. You must answer the aforementioned three questions in a post on your own blog.
2. You must link to this blog post in your blog post.
3. You must leave a comment on this blog post telling me when you’ve done that and including a link to your blog post.
4. If you have multiple blogs, you may post once on each one, but you’ll probably want to write something different on each one.
5. Each entry (as described above) will count as two entries.
6. If you were referred to this drawing by another blog, make sure you mention that blog’s name in your comment.
7. Each referral counts as one entry, but only if the entrant mentions your blog, because I’m not going to go into having to track them all.
8. Friday, March 7th, 2008 will be the last day for this. Then, I will count all the entries and draw a winner on the weekend of March 8-9.
9. Void where prohibited. You must be able to accept a PayPal payment. So, if you’re in a country not served by PayPal, sorry. Any applicable taxes are the responsibility of the winner. And, I reserve the right to retroactively apply any legal stuff I should have included but didn’t know I should have.
10. Drawing is null and void if there are fewer than five entrants. (Note that’s “entrants,” not “entries.” That means that five or more different people must enter.)

The Prize.

How much is the prize? Well, first of all, I will have a follow-up post in which I will link to all the entries. So, at minimum, you’re getting a linkback. That’ll hold true even if there are fewer than five entrants.

• If there are five or more entrants, the prize will be $5.00 (five dollars).
• If there are ten or more entrants, the prize will be $10.00 (ten dollars).
• If there are twenty-five or more entrants, the prize will be $25.00 (twenty-five dollars).
• If there are fifty or more entrants, the prize will be $50.00 (fifty dollars).
• $50.00 (fifty dollars) will be the maximum prize.

Note: All amounts are in U.S. dollars.

There you go. I am giving you a good motivation to not only enter but to also encourage your own readers to enter as well. The more entrants, the more you can win!

As far as money winners go, there can be only one! Only one person will win the money. But, everyone is a winner in a sense, because everyone will get a linkback!

So, everyone…

Believe. Act. Achieve!

While doing some keyword searching, I came across a phrase that had 3401 searches in January 2007: “motivation yblagulous.”

Since that’s an odd word, I was curious as to whether it might have been someone’s name, or perhaps there was some motivational blog or website calling itself Yblagulous, which would fit in with some of the odd Web 2.0 names out there.

Instead, I found this site: Dr-Mikes-Maths.Com.

Apparently, “yblagulous” was part of a Web Experiment he did. The experiment was done in “September” but I don’t see any indication of year. Nor was part 3 of the experiment concluded, so far as I have been able to find.

Anyway, the experiment revealed some of the automatically generated content sites out there, which we would today refer to as scraper sites. No human (well, except for me, maybe) would write about Yblagulous. A human would be unlikely to do a site around “yblagulous baby names,” as a person would recognize such a phrase was nonsense or would investigate the word further and discover it was nonsense.

Now, how yblagulous jumped from baby names to motivation is a different story. Then again, those scraper sites frequently generate rubbish, sometimes amusingly so, such as a site that mentions that naturalists will enjoy their “precise” information on “motivation yblagulous.” Okay.

Way back in November, Ann of A Nice Place in the Sun awarded me the BeTheBlog award.

The BeTheBlog award was created by Me and My Drum who describes it thusly: “…I think that really sums up what a successful blogger does. And what I mean by successful is that they make it their own, stay with it, are interactive with their readers, and just plain have fun.”

Selectees can grab their award in their choice of colors here.

Here are my selectees:

• Mike of Mike Folan dot Com
• Pete of My GPS Camera Phone
• Terence of the Internet Entrepreneur Diary

Congratulations!

Thursday Thirteen is a fairly popular meme, but sometimes it can be difficult to come up with thirteen things.

However, who says you have to use base-10 math?

In a quaternary math system, for example, 13 would be seven. So, that shaves off six things from your list. You can still call it a Thursday 13. Heck, you can call it a Thursday Thirteen if you want.

You see, people make assumptions. Most people don’t know (or remember) that there are other math systems. As the saying goes, there are 10 types of people in the world: those that know binary and those that don’t.

In base-5 math, 13 would be equal to eight in base-10 math.

Just be wary of hexadecimal, like my last week’s Thursday Thirteen, where 13 is equal to seventeen.

But, even there, you have the advantage. If you want to do more than thirteen, use a multi-decimal math system. Heck, you could use base-20 math where 13 would be equal to twenty-three.

You see, it’s not really cheating; it is thinking outside the box! And, often success depends upon not thinking like everyone else does.

So, stretch your horizons, and those of your readers, by using something other than base-10 math for your next Thursday Thirteen!

Sabrina posted a great meme today: “What early (before you were 10 years old) ideas did you have about money or finance that turned out to be totally (and amusingly) wrong?”

I’m going to do the same meme, the same way. If you’re reading this, consider yourself tagged. You don’t have to do a blog post and linkback; just leave a comment to this post. Easy!

If you want to see my answer, you’ll have to check Sabrina’s blog.

Everyone who responds here in the comments will get some link love!

I know that some of you don’t read John Chow’s site every day, but, even if you do, here’s a post that’s worth a first or second look: “Earn Money Online Just by Showing Up.” True, it’s not quite that easy, but you have little to no chance of success if you throw in the towel too soon or go about things halfway.

I pretty much manage to do #1, but am not quite there yet with #2. Numbers 3 through 5, well, I guess I need to work harder!

And, don’t forget that the root of all evil, John Chow, is giving away an $80 Waterman pen from the promotional pens maker, 1234Pens.com. To enter, you just have to blog about it, like this. Feeling a little deja vu?

Get your cameras ready!

Tonight, starting around 10:00 p.m. EST, there will be a full lunar eclipse visible in the Americas. People in portions of Europe and western Africa will also be able to see it.

This will be the last lunar eclipse for two and a half years. The next one will be in December 2010.

There is more information from NASA here: Total Lunar Eclipse.

Have you ever noticed that some of the most popular articles that get passed around are the ones that tell you things you already know?

Well, hopefully, this will be one of those, as I share some tips you already know.

Find a Bunch of Fools. If you can find some fools, it is not too difficult to separate them from their money. In fact, I won’t even make any suggestions as anyone with a modicum of creativity can easily develop some fool-proof methods. On the one hand, this may be the least ethical method of earning money. On the other hand, if they willingly fork over their cash without any force or deception on your part, perhaps you may be ethically okay.

The difficult bit here is finding a sufficient number of fools, or one wealthy fool, from which you can earn a decent income. Mind you, we all joke about how stupid people are and the dumbing down of society in general, and we see people all the time spending money on junk that isn’t worth it, yet it still seems hard to find a sufficient number of fools to give their money to you instead of the other guy.

For one thing, the other guy has slick marketing you can’t afford. You can’t afford to run TV ads, especially during prime time, so what shot do you have at getting the foolish masses to mail you checks?

While fools are plentiful, they do seem scarce when you need them. They’re scattered everywhere and, without the resources to reach them where they live (i.e., in front of the TV), it’s going to be an uphill battle trying to secure your income on the cash-dispensing fools among us.

Clearly, we need a better approach.

Create Something of Value. You can build a career out of selling nothing but junk, but it’s not easy. If you’re highly skilled at marketing, your odds are better. But, for the rest of us, in order to achieve some level of success, we need to create something of value.

Mind you, you may lose some of your foolish customers this way. Some fools just cannot recognize quality when they see it, and would rather spend hundreds of dollars on something that will break two years from now than spend a couple hundred dollars on something that will last a lifetime.

Although, you cannot judge them too harshly. They were probably raised in a disposable society where you simply toss things that are broken, instead of fixing them, or throw perfectly functional things away simply because they’re not the right color or style anymore. If you have the storage space, you could pick these items up from the curb and sell them for big bucks a few years from now when they become collectibles. Remember that when you begin seeing some nice looking analog TVs sitting curbside in your neighborhood. Today’s trash is tomorrow’s treasure.

But, I suppose I have digressed a bit, after all, you want to make money now, not years from now. You might want to reconsider that mentality and plan for both the short term and the long term. Oh, sure, you could believe that the world is going to come to an end any day now, but, if you’re wrong, you don’t want to be living in a van down by the river ten years from now when the world did not end and you ran out of cash.

So, what you need to do to separate people from their money is to create something of value. It can be a product or a service. You’re creative. What can you design, do or build that will make someone else’s life easier or better? Or, what existing product can you do a better job of selling and promoting than the next guy? It need not be something new; it can be something old. Heck, even in economic downswings, people still need to eat. There are plenty of opportunities and it is beyond the scope of this post to find that niche for you.

Go ahead and do some research. I’ll wait…

Okay, now that you have figured out your offering, how do you go about separating people from their money and buying it from you? Even with a solid product with a great value, it can be difficult to convince people of the value of that product, especially if they are in a foolish mind that day.

There must be an easier way, no?

And there is.

What you need to do is to offer them something that’s of greater value than the money they are parting with. Most people talk about having a fair exchange, but that’s something that’s difficult to get. Everyone wants a deal! They only talk about having a fair exchange when they’ve been shortchanged on deals in the past.

But, what everyone wants is a good deal for them. You need to offer them something that’s of greater value than what they’re giving you. Don’t tell them that, though! Don’t give them sob stories about how they’re ripping you off and all that. That’ll just make you sound like a slick salesperson, and they won’t believe you.

No, you need to convince them that what you’re offering is worth more than what they’re giving you, but in such a way that they think that you don’t know that what you’re offering is worth more than what you think it is.

That’s not to say that you’re going to try to trick them or anything. No, no, no. That would go back to the first point, and you can’t have a steady business relying exclusively on fools. No, you really have to give them something of value so that, even long after the sale, they still believe that they got the upper hand in the deal–that, if anything, they ripped you off, not the other way around.

Then, they’ll be back for more!

That’s why you’ll see add-ons for many products. Buy now, and get these free reports! Buy now, and get a year’s worth of refills! And so on.

You can add something to the deal that is inexpensive for you, but a great value for them. Imagine the refills cost you $10 and you normally sell them for $20. You can offer them as an add-on for $10 or, if the product markup is good, for free. The buyer saves $10-$20, plus shipping charges and the hassle of ordering later on.

That’s just one example. The point is to offer your customer something of greater value than the money they are parting with. It’s hard to part with your money, even when you know you’re getting a fair price. But, if you know you’re getting a great deal, it’s so much easier to hand that money over, isn’t it?

Because you’re still thinking of money. You’re thinking how much money you are saving in the long run by spending this amount of money now. Makes it easier to justify the purchase to yourself, and makes your wallet a little looser.

That’s the type of response you want from your customers! Once again, though, I should point out that you really must have a great offer. Someone who gets a good deal will tell a friend; someone who gets ripped off will tell 10 friends, their family, their co-workers and possibly the 5 o’clock news.

So, there you go. Start separating!

Every day, I post to my Tumblr mini-blog. If you’re not checking it out daily, or subscribed to it in your RSS feed reader, you’re missing out.

I keep it limited to a single one-liner each day, and only post once a day, so it’s not going to overwhelm you.

Here are the links:

• Direct Link to dcrTumbles
• Subscribe to dcrTumbles RSS feed

Remember, a new one-liner is posted daily. Some days are better than others, so you’ll want to make sure you don’t miss any of my best posts!

Last week, I listed four things I wanted to get done for the week.

The first was to finish a client’s website. I did that last Wednesday, which was pretty quick, at least with regard to my task list.

Next was to clear off my computer’s desktop. Haven’t done that yet. Made it worse, in fact.

Third was to remove an old computer from my desk. Did not complete that, but did make some headway. I organized (to some degree) the files on the computer, so that I can archive them to CD and delete them from the hard drives. The time-consuming bit is that I actually used this computer as a network backup drive, as well as extra storage space. Most of that is on a hard drive that is easily removed, and my initial thought was to simply move that to my other computer. Well, seeing that all the slots in the other computer are filled, I cannot do that. I could put it in an external drive case, but the drive may be soldered onto the expansion card that it’s on, but maybe not. In either case, before I mess around with it, I’d like to at least back it up. So, that item is still in progress.

On the other hand, I did clean off a bunch of the stuff that was stacked on top of the computer (a tower case), so at least there is that done. Mostly.

Fourth was to organize the miscellaneous notes that were all over aforementioned computer’s keyboard. That is mostly done, just need to stick them in some envelopes for organization, which I’ll get at the office today. Some of the stuff I am still trying to think of a better way to organize, but at least they are out of the way for now.

So, here are my goals for this week:

1. Finish archiving files and move the old computer off my desk.
2. Take product photo for my eCommerce site and put it on the site. I have had the “models” sitting on my file cabinet for a long, long time. It’s time to take their picture and put it on the site!
3. Setup printer/scanner. Shouldn’t be too hard. Once the old computer is off the desk, I can put the printer/scanner in its place and plug it in.
4. Do some work on the redesign for my flagship website. Started on it a bit a couple weeks ago, but I need to work on it further. It will share some of the templates of my eCommerce site, so it’s like working on two things at once. I know the eCommerce site is going to take me longer to complete, so at least I can have the flagship site running full speed again, and get some ad revenue coming in from it. It’s not been updated in almost three years, so the ad revenue has taken a deep downturn, as well as traffic.
5. Start getting things together for my antiques blog.

Speaking of my antiques’ blog, y’all left me to my own devices here. I asked you for suggestions for a name, but y’all left me hanging. So, retroyears it is then!

So, I was checking my blog stats yesterday, and up pops a new search phrase someone used to find my blog: “how to act creepy.” Currently, in Google, this blog comes in at #8 in that search. I don’t know how I became a source on how to act creepy, but it would explain the apparently special magnetism I possess that repels women whilst attracting creepy people.

Usually, I am the one to argue in favor of giving your readers what they want, but I just don’t think people need lessons on how to be creepy. There are enough creepy people out there, and I’m not aware of any University of Creepiness out there, so they seem to be doing just fine on their own without any form of diploma granting them graduate creepy status. Though, if you do want to try to outcreep the next guy, walk up to a stranger sometime and smell the small of their back. It’s creepy and I don’t think I’ve seen that done before, so you’ll be original at least.

And then you’ll get slapped, kicked or arrested and hopefully you’ll learn an important lesson that complete strangers just don’t want to be creeped out by the likes of you. People you know would rather not be all creeped out either. Do try to control yourself.

In any case, what I will offer is some advice on how not to be creepy in your journeys through the blogosphere.

1. Squelch Your Personality Quirks. Normally, you should be yourself, but there are times when maybe you just ought to put a sock in it. For example, if you have a tendency to call people “honey-bun,” even complete strangers, you might want to put a filter in your eMail program that automatically changes “honey-bun” to something like “you.” That way, “Thanks a bunch, honey-bun!” will become “Thanks a bunch, you!” which will be a lot less creepy to the recipient of your eMail. Better yet, use the person’s name.

   Mind you, there are exceptions. You should perhaps try to write in one voice. If you commonly refer to your readers as “honey-bun” in your blog posts, then a blogger who receives an eMail from you calling them “honey-bun” will understand that it’s just part of your personality. That’s a good kind of consistency, and, if referring to your readers by some cute pet name helps you build a relationship with your readers and grow your blog, there’s nothing wrong with that.

   The problem enters when you treat your blog and your eMail separately. If you call your readers “dear readers” or something like that in your blog, but then address them as “honey-bun” in your private eMails, that’s something that may turn readers off. They–especially those outside the Southern United States–may think you’re thinking you have a closer relationship than what you do.

   Which is a nice segue into my next tip…

2. Don’t Advance Your Relationship Too Quickly. Someone with whom you’ve only exchanged two eMails or one eMails or none at all is not your lifelong buddy. Acting like you’ve been friends for ages, when you’ve never met or spoken on the phone or exchanged more than one or two eMails, is creepy. You may feel that, because they’ve shared intimate parts of their lives in their blogs, you know them better than many of your real life friends. And, you could very well be right. I’ve been involved in blogging for less than a year, and I know more things about some of you than I know about some people that I’ve known for years!

   However, you can’t let that give you the impression that you have a closer relationship with them than what you really do. And, for goodness’ sake, don’t start thinking (or referring) to someone of the opposite sex who shares your interests and with whom you’ve exchanged a couple eMails as your “girlfriend” or “boyfriend!” That’s just pushing the envelope in terms of creepiness!

   I know, it can be confusing for some people. It’s like watching TV and thinking the characters are real people. Most of us know that they are fictional characters. While bloggers are, for the most part, not fictional characters, you still have to recognize that, like TV, you’re just a viewer in many of the events of which you read. And knowing does not equal participating.

   You can’t assume because a celebrity posed for a photo with you that you’re lifelong friends, nor can you assume that because a blogger sent you a kind word and shared some personal insight, that you’re lifelong friends either.

   That’s not to say that you cannot form friendships online, only that you can’t assume there is a friendship before, well, before there actually is one!

   And, that all segues nicely into the last bit…

3. Watch Your Tongue! Another thing to be careful of is what you say. You may read someone’s blog post. You may feel that you share those same sentiments. You may even feel that you’re just meant to be together, that this other blogger is your long lost soulmate that you’ve been searching for all these years. Surely, you will end up married and have beautiful children together. Three children, and you’ll name the boy Sven. And the twin girls will be Hailey and Amber. But, Anya and Amber would be okay too. And, you’ll buy a nice house with a fenced-in backyard so the kids and the dog can run around and play and you don’t have to worry about them getting into traffic. The dog will be named Spot, of course. And the cat, well, Mimi will just stay indoors, on her special bed with the pawprints on it. No, her name will be Princess. Or Princess Mimi. Or Princess Leia because you and your beloved both like Star Wars. And, the wedding will have been beautiful…

   Even so, even knowing the future so well, it’s not a good idea to propose marriage in the first comment you leave on your future betrothed one’s blog. Probably not a good idea to ask for a date either, especially if you live in different countries. Or, if your beloved is a freshman in college and you live in a rest home.

   Think before you comment. Really.

So, there you are. How many blog posts do I wrap up with “So, there you are?” I should count them sometime. Or not. At any rate, so, there you are. Now, you know how not to be a creepy blogger.

Maybe.