Whether we call it a goal or aresolution, the New Year

seems to be the time most of usdecide to set a new course, changebad habits or start new, betterones. Who doesn't have a resolu-tion or goal that they make at thistime of year? The sad fact is,though, that resolutions last onlyuntil about February. Do you have lots of dreams and

ambitions? Too many goals canlead to confusion and to wastedtime. Instead of focusing on manydreams and goals, why not focuson just one or two? To achieve your goals you will

need to focus on them and one ofthe best ways to do that is by writ-ing down each goal.By writing down your goals you

can see exactly where you are withyour goal at any given time. Youcan see the point at which youstarted and where you are today.You will also be able to identifyany problem areas and then takesteps to overcome them. It helps to break down your pri-

mary goal or resolution into moremanageable steps. This is espe-cially important for any large goalssuch as saving for a new home orlosing a lot of weight. Less than 5% of people actually

write down their goals but studieshave shown that those who writeout their goals and resolutions seea much higher success rate. You don't have to share your

written goals with anyone. Writingthem down helps solidify them inyour mind and turns a dream intosomething that you are actuallyworking toward. Each day as you make progress

you will feel a sense of accomplish-ment. This helps to motivate youto continue and achieve more.Plus your mind sees that you are making progress and this increases your willpower. You understand that what you aredoing is not a waste of time or effort. As you write down your goals

you can identify which ones youwant to work on first. Decidewhich dream is most important

and make that your number onepriority. You can always start on anew goal once one is completed. Some dreams may be just that.

A dream. At least for now. Youmay, however, want to set a goalthat will help you reach that loftydream at some future point. Buy-ing that new home may seem likea lofty dream right now. But if youput smaller steps into action nowyou may view this as a more viablegoal for the next five years or so. Writing out your resolutions al-

lows you to always keep them insight. Of course you will makemistakes or go off in the wrong di-rection. What’s important is thatyou don’t give up. When things gowrong look for the reason why andlearn how to work around it. You’ll develop strength and

character from taking action andseeing yourself through to the at-tainment of your goals. Your ownlife experiences will be enhancedand you may just very well be serv-ing as a role model to someone elsestriving to achieve their own goals.

Published exclusively for Clients, Friends and Associates of Marty Marsh

Does Writing Out Your Resolutions Help?

JANUARY 2014 • #1.1

My Mission: To expand in abundance, success, and love every day, as I inspire and lead those around m

e to do the same.

Wise Words... Coming Up...“Do you want to

know who you are?Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and

define you.” U.S. founding father,

Thomas Jefferson

� Monthly Free Email MarketingClinic...Wed., Jan. 8th at 1:00pm Eastern. Details at...http://bit.ly/emailclinic

Watch your email for announce-ments about these free teleclasses:

� Free Class: Integrating EmailMarketing with Social Media

� Free Class: Blogging for Profit

Happy New Year!

Is it just me, or does it seem like the years aregetting shorter and shorter? Seems like onlya short while ago I was wishing for everyone tohave a happy 2013. Now it’s 2014 already!A couple of years ago, one of my mentors said

that when it comes to your business you’ll spend“the first year figuring it out, the second yearworking it out, and the third year rocking itout!” I didn’t believe her then but, at least in mycase, that has proved to be true — so far.It was about two years ago that I decided to

hit the re-start button on my business and tocompletely revamp the way I was doing things.And now that I’m on the leading edge of thatthird year, I’m ready to rock things out.As I’ve looked with a critical eye at both my

strengths and weaknesses, I’ve come to realizethat my greatest strength is in helping businesspeople get into action to grow their own busi-nesses. Which is one of the reasons that I’ve de-cided to start publishing this little newsletter.

Back when I was just a kid I published myfirst newsletter. I’ve been hooked ever since.My intention for this publication is to mix up

some good personal development stuffalong with some fun stuff and to pro-vide you with great business buildingadvice. Let’s rock out 2014 together.I’d love to hear from you, too. Emailme at marty@martymarsh.com.

InsiderSoul Proprietor

Join Marty on the 2ndWednesday of everymonth for your FREEEmail Marketing Clinic.Short lesson and a chance to askany email or ecommerce marketingrelated questions you have.

For more information, visit...

The Email MarketingDoctor is IN!

emailmarketingclinic.com

Iam focused on completing im-portant tasks because they havethe most impact on the quality ofmy life. By completing tasks ontime and to the best of my ability,I give myself the best opportunityto have a full and rich life.

I am able to focus on the ben-efits of any task and find thatit makes completing themmuch easier.

Success is largely dependent ondoing things that others are un-willing to do. I always pay my billson time. I tell the important peoplein my life that I love them. I ampunctual and reliable.

I make a list of the important tasksI need to complete, which helpsme get them done. I have a short

list of priorities for each day. I amfree of the need to engage in unim-portant tasks.

Life is short, and I choose tospend my time focusing onthe things that are importantto me.

My determination gets me throughthe times when I am struggling tofollow through. I am capable offinding a solution to any task thatpresents a challenge.

Today, I am focused on completingthe most important tasks in mylife. I am grateful for the benefits Ireceive when I see these thingsthrough to completion. I am deter-mined.

Self-Reflection Questions:

1. What are the 3 most importanttasks I have hanging over myhead right now?

2. What steps do I need to take tocomplete these tasks?

3. What resources do I have avail-able to deal with these tasks?

For Reflection...I have the determination to complete important tasks.

Next Clinic is:Wed., January 8, 20141:00 pm Eastern Timehttp://bit.ly/emailclinic

®Bright Idea

Make sure you are making the bestuse of your outgoing voicemail mes-sage. Mention a special offer or aservice that you provide. Invite thecaller to follow you on Twitter. Always invite callers to visit your web-site after they leave their message.

Do You TakeTime for Fun?

Getting things done is impor-tant, but having leisure time is

just as important — maybe moreso. People who don’t regularly taketime out for themselves may sufferfrom everything from heart prob-lems to weight gain. Adults often put their own fun

far down on their list of prioritiesbecause they feel guilty taking timefor themselves. But, Keeping your-self in the best mental and physicalcondition can give you more timewith those you love.

Your Own Leisure Time — Inyour 20s, your idea of fun mayhave been spending time in night-clubs, and today it may be hikingwith your family. The key to hav-ing fun is to know what is fun toyou at this point in your life. It isn’tnecessary to keep the same hob-bies for decades simply out ofhabit. There may be somethingnew that you will love doing. Tryout several new things to see whatyou like. Once you discover some-thing that brings you personal enjoyment, you can begin to regu-larly incorporate it into your life.

Schedule It Into Your Day —No matter what you find fun, it’spossible to inject a little of it intothe tightest of schedules. If youlove watching movies, watch halfone day and half the next if neces-sary. If you love reading, give your-self 20 minutes to read and relaxbefore you have to start your day.Find a way to engage in fun activi-ties at least two days each week.

7 Steps to Creating anEmail Marketing Strategy

Having a strategy is an important function in every emailmarketing campaign. If you want to have a productive

and profitable campaign, writing out your strategy will help.

1. Define Your Goal— Is your goal to get more people tofollow you on Twitter, or to get more people to visit your web-site, or to get more people to buy xyz product? Each campaignwill have its own goal.

2. Determine Your Content — Your content will depend on your goal. Regardless of the goal the content shouldbe valuable, engaging, and useful to your target audience. Itshould always have relevance for them.

3. Design Layout— Choose the layout of your campaignkeeping in mind the brand you’ve already developed. You mayalso choose that you’ll use HTML design or you may choose touse only text — or TXT.

4. Determine Frequency — Decide how often you’ll sendout messages and when. Whatever you choose it should remainconsistent. The more consistent you are the more your audiencewill respond positively.

5. Determine Monetization— If your goal is to send outa weekly newsletter then you should also figure out a way tomonetize your newsletter via advertisements or product rec-ommendations within it. If the goal is to promote a productthat you will earn money from, then your monetization plan islikely already covered.

6. Quantify Success — While creating your goals youshould be very specific so that you know what constitutes yourdefinition of success. How much money do you want to makeevery time you send out an email message?

7. Evaluate— Choose specific times in which to evaluateyour progress so that if something is not working it can betweaked. Keep a spreadsheet so you can discover trends.

This assumes you’ve already built your list. If you don’t yet havea list, you could develop your strategy first, then start buildingyour list accordingly.

Most business owners and marketers rely on email as theirmain marketing strategy and on which all their other mar-keting is built. Email marketing can work beautifully if it isdone the right way. I can help you plan the best email strat-egy for your unique business. Call me at 760-835-3854 orsend an email to marty@martymarsh.com. Yes, my help isaffordable! Plus, we can get you going fast!

2� JANUARY 2014 ©2014 martymarsh.com • 760-835-3854 • marty@martymarsh.com

Joel Osteen: Every rig

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start to overrid

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Marketing That Works!

Make a big splash at yournext networking event

Oddball and Special Occasion

Marketing CalendarJANUARYPersonal Self-Defense Awareness MonthInternational Creativity MonthFinancial Wellness MonthNational Mentoring MonthCleanup Your Computer MonthNational Thank You MonthBe Kind to Food Servers MonthGet Organized MonthGet a Balanced Life Month

FEBRUARYNational Time Management MonthMarijuana Awareness MonthNational Cherry MonthNational Wedding MonthValentine’s Day (is February 14th)Spunky Old Broads MonthNational Laugh Friendly MonthNational Black History MonthNational Condom Month

MARCHCredit Education MonthInternational Expect Success MonthNational Craft MonthOptimism MonthSpiritual Wellness MonthWomen’s History MonthNational Nutrition MonthNational On-Hold MonthInternational Mirth MonthInternational Ideas MonthInternational Listening Awareness MonthColorectal Cancer Awareness Month

SOURCE: http://www.brownielocks.com/

©2014 martymarsh.com • 760-835-3854 • marty@martymarsh.com JANUARY 2014 � 3

How to ConquerShiny-ObjectSyndrome

How many times have youopened your email, clicked on

a link and found yourself, hourslater, still lurking around the Inter-net, often with less money in yourbank account? One more shinynew program guaranteed to be thebe-all-to-end-all holy grail of busi-ness success?

Many of my colleagues tend toshare this “shiny object” trait. Weeach have more programs than wewill ever listen to (and never bene-fit from); all bought in a momentof excitement that this new thing isexactly what we needed to solveour business and marketing woes.

If this sounds like you, too, mymentor, Jimmy D. Brown, has asolution for this and it’s a goodone. But it will likely take everyounce of willpower you possess tomake it work.

Any time you are tempted to buyyet another program, first, stopand move your mouse away fromthe “buy button.” Then bookmarkthe sales page and wait until Friday rolls around before makinga decision to buy. If it’s Fridaywhen you’re looking, wait until thenext Friday before you make thedecision to buy — or not.

Chances are that by the time Friday comes around you’ll havecooled off enough to either just say“no” or to make a better decision.

Sir Ken Robinson: If you

’re not prepared to be wrong, you

’ll never com

e up with anything original.

Most business owners I know havea real love-hate thing about going

to networking events. (Me, too.)

Every marketing guru and book outthere, though, tells you that networkingevents can be the key to you landingclients on a regular basis.

But for most of us, going around aroom, glad-handing, and spouting offour prepared elevator speech just feelsphony. And too often, that means we goto these events and stand on the side-lines sipping a drink and just hoping itwill all be over soon.

Your ideal prospect might be in thatroom somewhere, but finding them justseems too hard and too scary.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could justconnect with everyone there all at onceand have everyone know who you areand what you do?

There are 3 things you can do to makethis happen:

1. At the events I attend, people are in-vited to introduce themselves by com-ing up front and telling everyone whothey are and what they do. People arealso invited to share success stories ifthey’ve worked with someone in thegroup. Now this may terrify you, but Isuggest that you just practice before-hand and have a good, even rough, ideaof what you want to say and get upthere and say it.

2. Provide a door prize. You get recog-nized for your generosity as the prize isawarded, and you can connect with thewinner later as a follow up. It’s alwaysbest if you can give something awaythat relates to your business, but if abottle of wine is easier, do that. The keyis in getting the recognition no matterwhat you provide.

3. Create a “gift” bag and put on thetable with all the brochures and busi-ness cards. I got this idea at a recentmixer I attended and a woman repre-senting a funeral home did this. She puther brochure, business card, and somecandy in a gift bag with a sticker on theoutside that told who she was, what shecould do for you, and all her contact info.

I’m going to try this with a Mardi Grastheme. You could do any kind of themesuch as the Chinese New Year, Valen-tines, St. Patrick’s Day and others.

A great resource for goodies to go inyour “gift” bag is Oriental TradingCompany. They offer all kinds of funthings to include in your bag (On theweb at: www.OrientalTrading.com) Besure to include your business card anda brochure if you have one. I’ll be in-cluding my latest NewsCard along witha Mardi Gras mask, gold coins, andother fun favors. I’ll be taking 50 ofthese bags and putting them on thebrochure table at the event just beforeMardi Gras time.

January Focus: BLOGGING

Blog posts come in many differ-ent forms and lengths. If youwant to keep your blog fresh andinteresting, you should post often.One to three times a week is best.Creating different types of blog

posts will keep your audience in-terested. It will also keep you frombeing bored with your blog.Whether you are blogging to makemoney directly from the blog oryou’re blogging to drive traffic toone of your own programs or per-haps to an affiliate product, youshould know about these five kindsof blog posts.

1. Review blog postsReview blog posts can help youmonetize your blog. When you re-view a product and include an af-filiate link, you’ll make acommission off of each sale gener-ated with that affiliate link. Review blog posts should coversome of the major plusses — andminuses — of the product. Even ifyou loved the product, you should

5 Different ‘Kinds’ Of Blog Postskeep your review balanced bymentioning a few things that couldhave been improved. Your audi-ence will appreciate your honestyand be more likely to trust yourrecommendation.Note: If you’re going to review

products, programs or services foraffiliate commissions, you reallymust buy and use the productyourself before making your recommendation.

2. Quick tipsQuick tips are great “in between”posts since they are so short; nor-mally between 100 and 250 words.If there’s a great bit of informationthat you want to share with yourniche but it doesn’t really warranta full blog post, you can post aquick tip. The tip should be focused on one key area of yourniche. For example, “How toGrease a Muffin Pan” is a perfectquick tip article for a cooking blog.

3. ListsBlog readers love lists! If you lookat the most popular blogs you’ll seethat they make good use of thesetypes of blog posts. You can makelists fit any niche topic imaginable.They are great ways to convey in-formation online because they caneasily be scanned by web readerswho like to skim over information.You can create resource lists that

will help your readers find infor-mation on your niche. You can alsocreate lists of different ways to ac-complish a goal in a niche, like “5Ways to Drive Traffic to Your SalesLetter.” The possibilities are end-less. (Did you notice that this arti-cle is a list?)

4. InterviewsAlthough interviews require somepreparation, they can be very valu-able to your blog. You can inter-view someone in your niche andshare the results of the interviewwith your blog readers. This willnot only help provide valuable con-tent for your blog, but you can alsogenerate more traffic going to yourblog. Likely, the person whom youare interviewing will publicize theevent on their blog and around the’net which will bring more — new— traffic back to you.

5. How-to postsLike quick tips, how-to posts helpyou provide valuable informationto your readers. However, unlikequick tips, these posts go intomuch more detail on a certaintopic. Some how-to posts are evenseparated out into two- or three-part courses. For ideas on what tocreate your how-to posts about,look at the most frequently askedquestions in your niche and develop posts around those topics.

4� JANUARY 2014 ©2014 martymarsh.com • 760-835-3854 • marty@martymarsh.com

A blog without readers is pretty much useless. If you’ve beenblogging for a while and have only been getting a trickle

of viewers to your posts, you need to put a traffic building planinto action. Building traffic is as much of an important skill tobloggers as is writing quality posts. Most bloggers are terrific atcreating content but don’t know a thing about building traffic.Here is a quick guide to some of the most popular — and most effective — traffic building techniques.

1. Get social! Social networking and blogging go hand inhand. Your blog posts can be distributed across social networkingchannels in many different ways. Sign up for Twitter and tweetabout your posts as soon as they are added to your blog. Updateyour Facebook status with a link to your new blog posts. (if youblog on the Wordpress platform, there are widgets that can beinstalled that will submit your posts automatically to Facebook.)Remember, that in order for social networking to be effective,you need to participate and interact with other people on yourlist. If you visit their links and respond to their updates, they’llbe likely to do the same for you.

2. Get noticed! Find blogs in your niche and start followingtheir posts. Make sure to add insightful and interesting com-ments on their posts. Not only will the blog owner take noticeand visit your blog, other commenters will visit your blog to getmore of your great insight into the topic. Don’t spread yourselftoo thin with blog commenting, but make it a point to commenton a few related blogs each week.

3. Get good use out of your RSS feed! RSS feeds are away to syndicate your blog’s content so that it is sent to manydifferent people in their own blog readers or on their own sites.Most blogging platforms have RSS feeds automatically includedbut you can add a lot more functionality to your feed by using afree service like FeedBurner.com. With FeedBurner you can addthings like sharing the feed via e-mail to your feed so it will pullin new readers and encourage previous visitors to come back tothe blog again.

4. Get articles in directories!You can attract traffic to yourblog by tweaking some of your popular posts and adding themto article directories. You can post your popular posts as articleswith a link back to your blog in many different article directories.Not only will you get a valuable backlink but your article mayalso be used by ezine owners which will bring you more traffic.Next Month’s Focus will be on: Content Marketing

Easy Ways To GetTraffic To Your Blog

Be sure to visit... martymarsh.com/bloggingfor more information about how toturn your blog into a marketing andmoney-making tool. I’ll be addingnew blogging-related content therethroughout the month of January.

Paul Theroux: I ca

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Let me help you make itsimple and fun to do whatyou really want to do...Just being in business for yourself is a challenge, period. And being in business for yourself and going it alone is an even bigger challenge.And for years, I did just that. I figured, “Hey, I’m a smart guy, I can dothis all by myself.”

So while it is true that I’m probably smart enough to do all this businessstuff on my own, I finally discovered how much more simple my lifecould become when I reached out for some help. So I signed on to becoached by not just one, but two, of the biggest names in the businesscoaching world today.

I spent a boatload of money to find myself. To discover what it is I’mtruly good at, re I want to spend my time, and what I want to do. Butthe biggest thing of all? I discovered who I don’t want to be and how Idon’t want to manage my business. It was worth every penny.

3 big things I learned: (1) You shouldn’t have to re-mortgage yourhouse or go into debt to get help from someone; (2) one-size-fits-all coaching programs just don’t work for me (or anybody that Iknow); and (3) I have to be true to myself and to my values.

Which is why I’ve completely restructured my business so I canserve more people at an affordable rate, be true to my values,and go to bed at night knowing I helped good people get betterat what they do. If it’s time you could use some help, let’s chat.

What do you need help to do?� Get more clients and make more money?� Create an effective email marketing program?� Set up a follow-up system that doesn’t make youseem pushy, annoying or too salesy?

� Figure out your niche and how best to let those people know who you are and what you do?

� Discover your best profit centers?� Discover what it is you and your business aremeant to accomplish?

� Create a complete Stay-in-Touch MarketingPlan that you can easily put to work

throughout the year?� Brainstorm ideas? Talk things out?

Then let’s chat about whatever it is. No obligation. No hard-sell.

www.TimeWithMarty.com

Phone: 760-835-3854Email: marty@martymarsh.com

MartyMarshSoulProprietor

©2014 martymarsh.com • 760-835-3854 • marty@martymarsh.com JANUARY 2014 � 5

I spent a boatload of money to find myself. To discover what it is I’m bestat, where and with whom I want to spend my time, and what I want todo. But the biggest thing of all? I discovered who I don’t want to be andhow I don’t want to manage my business. It was worth every penny.