Kumar Gauraw is a Personal Branding & Social Media strategist helping entrepreneurs and skilled professionals achieve personal and professional success by developing leadership and leveraging the power of the Internet, Blogging and Social Media.
In a recent motivational seminar I attended, one of the top coaches from one of the top private franchisee businesses said from the stage that “Life isn’t fair.” He also added that “life isn’t supposed to be fair and that is what makes it so worth living.”
He was absolutely inspirational and ignited the spirits with his authentic talk. Everybody was moved. But I can’t forget a statement he made challenging the audience which went something along these lines:
If life hasn’t hit you yet folks, get ready because it will.
Most people today understand the value of personal branding. Most of us know that blogging is a powerful way to build a strong personal brand identity online. Yet, many people are not able to move ahead with their blogging strategy because of not knowing where to begin the journey.
I get questions about starting a website, starting a blog, and asking where to begin. People ask me if it takes a lot of time and money to start and manage a blog. Many people get excited and get started after talking to me, but they soon begin to fade away as they can’t keep up simply because they aren’t prepared.
Well, first of all, success in anything worthwhile requires work (sometimes, hard work depending on how big your goal is). But one thing is sure: success doesn’t happen by accident. You must know what you want to achieve, plan how you want to achieve what you want to achieve. And then, work the plan, persist with discipline and do not quit!
Website speed is one of the top concerns of every webmaster. Especially since the news came that search engines factor page load time for ranking websites, it has become even more critical aspect. And that's exactly where Content Delivery Networks (CDN) come into picture.
Speaking of CDN service providers, if you haven’t heard about CDN77 before, you are not alone. I didn’t know about them either, until I was approached by Jessica at CDN77 to try their services on one of my websites. Jessica offered me a free 14 day trial period. I agreed to try them on my Krishna World Wide Team website.
Although I am on a paid plan with MaxCDN until the end of this year, I wanted to find out a good alternative to MaxCDN in case I need. So, I started my trial and so far I am extremely happy with the website speed improvements I have seen.
Investing in my future is the first thing I had to learn when I started my journey as an entrepreneur. It was an obvious but difficult habit to cultivate as I did not have a business background. I did not understand the value of investing in the beginning.
However, with the help and support of my coach, I got over it and learnt to invest appropriately.
Long before I had this blog I learned that business owners need to think very differently than employees do. I needed to learn to think like a business owner if I intended to become one. Among many important things, relevant to this discussion, I needed to learn three important things:
Just a few days ago I had enabled the security feature in my Twitter account to require personal information to reset my password. That means, now Twitter asks my personal information along with my Twitter handle if I request to reset my password. Considering the number of hacking attempts being made on a daily basis these days, it was the least I could do to strengthen my account security.
Thanks to my awesome friend, Bill Butler who sent me a news link that Twitter introduced a two-factor login verification mechanism to tighten account security. Twitter is one of my favorite social media platforms and I definitely want to secure my account.
In an effort to thwart the malicious attempts of unscrupulous people to compromise your Twitter account by rampant email phishing schemes, Twitter has now launched the company's new security feature called login-verification, a form of two-factor authentication to better protect Twitter accounts.
[note background=”#F6F6F6″] This is a guest post by Professor Fernando Pargas, the author of the book Ending the Male Leadership Myth. He teaches management at James Madison University in Virginia. His specialties are international management, interpersonal skills and organizational behavior. You may connect with Professor Pargas on Google+. [/note]
Leadership, it’s such a powerful, yet overly used word in our society. We teach it in universities, not only as content in a business class, but entire semesters and workshops are dedicated to it.
Politicians have adopted it for their own needs: they criticize their opponent for his/her lack of “leadership” and bill themselves as great leaders. We men are particularly fond of the word; it was men who came to believe that simply by being male, we had a birth given right to it.
It was easy to research for my latest book examples of the use and misuse, understanding and misunderstanding of leadership, but it was harder to realize how much I too had bought into the misnomer of leadership. I wrote there that as an international executive in charge of establishing, opening, joint venturing or managing businesses around the world, I experienced this blind faith in leadership first-hand.
Brute Force Attacks on WordPress Websites have caused a lot of pain to webmasters and web hosting companies in recent weeks. If you’re using WordPress to power your website, you may be vulnerable to a new web-based attack that aims to hack your admin password.
The good news is you can do something about it. You can tighten your WordPress security to counter these attacks. But first, let’s understand these attacks a little better.
What Are Brute Force Attacks?
Brute Force Attacks are targeted to hack your WordPress Admin Dashboard. These attacks specifically target your WordPress website’s wp-login.php from a large number of IP addresses spread geographically around the world.
The use of social media marketing is on the rise. Everybody is talking about it. Companies are allocating larger budgets for social media marketing each year. Does that mean that TV advertisements are dead?
At a dinner recently, I happened to be part of this conversation with some of my friends in the marketing and advertising space. It was an interesting and insightful discourse. I want to share with you a few things about TV advertising that I learned that evening.
The Intent of Advertising
First of all, advertising isn’t intended to sell something or to have a call to action right away. People, who think that the intent of advertisements is to try to make them do something immediately, are wrong.
Why is it that some people seem to be succeeding at everything they do? Why do they move ahead by leaps and bounds while others, much more talented, it seems are not even getting anywhere?
The answer lies in the way we all approach things. Successful people have a plan and they back their plans with action while others either do not plan or don’t work their plan.
Success is a planned event. Success doesn't happen by accident. It does not happen because you found your mojo.
There is only one boss – the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else. ~Sam Walton
Reading success stories and learning from successful people has been one of my obsessions over the years. I’ve been particularly fascinated by the success story of one of most influential men of late 20th century, Sam Walton.
From a humble beginning, facing business challenges, learning from everyone and from failures, Sam Walton created a company that became the world’s largest retailer – Wal-Mart. With just a simple idea to help others save money so they could live better, he created Wal-Mart, the #1 retailer in the world.
