I was all excited about another trip to Las Vegas next week – when I found out the event had been canceled. Well, not exactly canceled – just moved.

Now if I had had my airline reservations, it could have been an expensive change to go to another city. But this was even easier – it’s going to be online!

That’s right! My good friend and mentor Armand Morin is going to host the annual Brave the Wave Wealth event online!

Now I could tell you that he actually stole my idea – I started offering Get It Done Weekends several years ago – offering hands-on workshops in the comfort of your home. But of course, the idea of an online seminar isn’t new.

Why this one is different is that it is generally a paid seminar. In fact I paid to attend the Authority event in Charlotte just a few months ago.

But this one is absolutely Without Cost! Sign up now!

And that’s where the trend comes in. Could this be the start of a new trend – offering quality webinars that we normally would have traveled to see – but offering them online at no cost to the attendees?

Frankly, I don’t think so. There’s a difference in offering a free webinar and offering a paid event. That’s what makes this so special. I suspect you won’t see it again.

My recommendation is to take advantage of it while it’s available this ONE time. Sign up today!

I’ll see you in the seminar!

Jeanette

P.S. I know every one of the speakers personally. And I can vouch for both their professionalism – and their content. You WILL learn a lot about how to build your wealth, regardless of the type of business you have right now. Join us!

Whether you’re setting a value on your time for a sales letter – or trying to figure out how much a personal project is “costing you” it’s important to know what your time is worth.

Now we’d all like to just plug our name into a magic calculator, along with our related experience and education, and have the machine tell us “Your Time is worth this amount.” But since that’s not going to happen, let’s consider alternatives.

Method 1: What You’re Paid

If you’re still working a job, it’s a fairly easy calculation to see what you’re paid per hour. Just take your annual salary and divide by 2000. That’s the average work hours per year.

Sure, that’s not really what you’re worth, because you’re being underpaid. But it will give you something to work with.

Method 2: Annual Income

If you’re self-employed, take your gross income for the year and divide by 2000. That’s your hourly earnings.

You can also rely on your “billing rate” for consulting. But for every hour you are paid a consulting fee, you also have preparation, marketing, and background hours. So it sounds good, but isn’t realistic, unless you’re paid that rate for 2000 hours per year.

Method 3: Market Comparison

If you’re new to your business and don’t have a track record, look around at your competition. What do they charge for an hour of consulting? What do their sales letters refer to when talking about their time value?

But you have to be careful with this approach. Just because your competitor or your mentor is charging a particular amount does not mean that your time is worth that amount. There’s the experience and education factor you have to consider before you can match their value.

A word of caution: You never want to put a value on your time that is more than you have actually gotten paid. Unless you’ve been paid that amount, you can’t say you charge that amount. This is particularly true in sales letters where you are subject to governmental regulations. It is better to understate, than to over-inflate your rates.

Method 4: Internal Rate

Finally, there is the internal number. This is the amount you pay yourself – in your head. Twenty years ago when I started consulting, I read that if you got paid $50 per hour you would make a hundred thousand per year. That sounded good to me at the time, so I decided to consider my time worth $50 per hour.

So if it took me 30 hours to create a product, it “cost” me $1500. If it took me 5 hours to write a sales letter it cost me $250. And so on.

As my actual worth has increased I’ve also increased my internal number. At the same time I’ve gained expertise and speed. So a product that used to take 30 hours to create can now be finished and ready for sale in 15. It still “costs” me more because my rate has more than doubled – but I can create more of them in the same amount of time.

Start applying your new “time value” to the things you’re doing in your business. For example, if you spend an hour surfing the net, how much did that cost? If you spend an hour playing a game in Facebook – what was that worth to you?

And a final word of caution, from personal experience. I have tried using my real billing rate, currently set at $450 per hour, for personal costs. It doesn’t work. “I’ll fix dinner but it will cost you $450″ doesn’t fly here at our house. Around here my rate is about $5 per hour. It just keeps you humble!

We had lunch at Rudy’s today. It’s a great Texas BBQ place with big ole picnic tables outside. Paper towels serve as “napkins” and the condiments are in a box on the table. You can smell the BBQ all through lunch – and if you sit in the right place, you can feel the barbeque, because that’s the pit fireplace. Overall, it’s a great experience – and one of my favorite barbeques.

It was during lunch that I noticed their motto: To become world famous by delighting one customer at a time.

And naturally I thought about how that applies to online business. WE need to be serving one customer at a time, regardless of how many are on our list, how many are coming to our blog or website, how many we sell. Because business comes down to serving one person at a time.

• So the next time you write a blog post, ask yourself – who is the ONE person I’m talking to?
• The next time you send an email broadcast, ask – who is the ONE person who is reading this?
• And the next time you create a product, ask – How can I better explain to ONE person why they need this product?

When you keep the focus on one person at a time, like Rudy’s, you’ll become world-famous!

If someone asked you how hard you work when you’re working for an employer, what would you say?

If a large company hired you to work on a week-long consulting project and paid you a hefty fee when it was finished – how many hours per day would you work to finish the project?

When I was an elearning consultant I was often hired by large companies to come to their location and work for a week to establish their elearning portal and training program. During the time I was onsite, I was working 10,12, sometimes 16 hours a day. I was totally focused on the task. Because we knew we had a week to get it done.

Those were the client’s expectations. And I knew there was a great reward at the end.

I turned off my cell phone. I would have turned off text messages if they had invented them at that time! I only checked my messages and email in the evenings.

I took care of myself physically, taking planned breaks, walking around to freshen my mind, and eating at regular intervals. And I drank a lot of caffeine. (Okay, you knew there had to be a vice in there!)

The point is I was 100% focused on the outcome. And I was willing to work very hard for a short time because I knew the rewards would be there.

This was all brought back to me recently as I spent a week onsite for a client – just like the old days. But in this case it was an internet marketing client. I spent 8-10 hours a day looking at sales materials, writing autoresponders, and generally fixing up their sales and support process.

And that’s when it occurred to me – I haven’t been working for ME as hard as I worked for THEM!

Sometimes I don’t “get around” to writing a full autoresponder sequence. Sometimes I don’t revisit older products that can be updated and repurposed. Sometimes I don’t streamline and document all of my processes. And many times I don’t focus 100% on a single task until it’s finished. In short, sometimes I get lazy with my own business.

So now it’s your turn. Are you working on your own business – as if you were a paid consultant? Would you pay YOU big bucks to do the work you’re doing?

We’ll talk about WHY you aren’t working as hard for you in an upcoming post. For now, share – are you working as hard for yourself as you would if someone else were paying you?

Now that I’ve decided to host the next 30-day Blog Challenge (June 1-30), I want to start gathering ideas of what goes into a great blog challenge.

Obviously Connie Ragen Green has set the bar pretty high, inspiring a LOT of people along the way. But can we take it even higher in June?

That’s where I need your help.

What have you loved about the blog challenge?

What would you like to see added to the blog challenge?

How far ahead of time should you know about it?

Do you want “educational” messages on how to maximize your blog for the blog challenge – or would you prefer just keeping it simple?

What do you DO after the blog challenge ends that keeps the energy in your blog?

What types of outcomes can others expect from participating in a blog challenge?

Remember, I’m new to all of this and am just getting in on the tail end of the 30 days, so I need all of the ideas you can share. Thanks for all of the encouragement!

For years, I thought that I and everything I did needed to be perfect. After all, my parents had told me I was a “perfect” child. Just because I was over 40 didn’t mean that anything needed to change!

So I’d write an article in less than 30 minutes – then spend 3 days editing it. Even then it would sit on my hard drive for another week or two, just “aging” like a fine wine – as if that would make it even better. Finally, several weeks after my quick 30-minute article was ready, I would submit it to an article distribution service – then sweat for weeks in fear someone might find fault with it.

Of course, I know “no one” else has ever had that experience!

So how much is perfectionsim costing you? After all, if you persist and insist on everything being perfect, it will take you 20 times longer to get the word out about your product; 20 times longer to create the product; and 400 times longer to make a profit! You see, the pain of perfectionism is exponential.

So how do you get over your perfectionism? Share your ideas here and we’ll all conquer this together!

One of the challenges we all face is the negative input around us. It was brought home to me today as I sat in a waiting room. Some of the comments I heard included:

“You just can’t win.”

“There’s never a solution.”

“I can’t believe how bad it is. Let me tell you…”

“That never works out.”

And I was there less than 10 minutes! I can tell you, I was depressed by the time they called my name for my escape.

Turns out I’ve gotten spoiled hanging around positive people all the time. People who are excited about life. Going somewhere. Have a dream. Sharing good news and great thoughts.

And those are exactly the type of people YOU want to be around as you’re building your online business. Starting a business from scratch is a lot of hard work and it’s tempting to become discouraged. That’s why it’s so important to be surrounded by positive.

If you’re surrounded by negativity all the time, it’s a challenge to find the positive. That’s why I love entrepreneurs – especially the ones online.

So where do you find the positive input you need to keep pursuing your dream? Right here, online. You’ll find many of them making comments below. You’ll find links to their blogs and websites. You’ll find them in groups like the Blog Challenge.

Because birds of a feather DO flock together. And positive people want to spend time with other positive people. Whether we do it online – or at live events – join us! Your life will be better for it.