The Dart Maker Blog

Yep, it is that time of year again! Time to moan and groan about the weight we gained over the holidays as we resolve to lose it all in the New Year! If memories of failed New Year’s resolutions are haunting you, it is time you found the right resolution for 2005.

The reason that most New Year’s Resolutions fail is that they are too extreme or time consuming. Who is really going to give up all sweets or stick to sweating in the gym for hours each day? What you need this year is a New Year’s Resolution that is simple enough to become a part of your daily life, and will lead to long term weight loss. Read on for five simple yet effective New Year’s Resolutions for you to choose from.

Resolution #1: Drink a large glass of water before each meal.

This simple action will save you mountains of calories in the coming year! By filling your stomach with water right before you eat you reduce your chances of overeating during the meal. Drinking more water is also healthy for all of your body functions, including converting body fat into usable energy.

Resolution #2: Wait 20 minutes before deciding on seconds.

Do you remember the last time you were uncomfortably full after a meal? Chances are that you were hungry and, rather than stopping when you were satisfied, you overate. In the same way that your body tells you when you are hungry, it also has a way of telling you when you are full. The catch is that it takes about 20 minutes for your brain to get the message from your stomach that you have eaten enough. What you eat during that 20 minutes is extra food that your body doesn’t need. Next time that you are in the middle of a meal contemplating getting yourself seconds, allow 20 minutes to pass before you decided if you still need the extra food. Chances are that your brain will get the “full” message and you will pass on the extra calories!

Resolution #3: Walk or Jog in the morning.

Did you know that going on a 15 minutes walk right after waking contributes to weight loss? Getting out of bed 15 minutes earlier, lacing up your tennis shoes, and simply walking around the block will lead to fat burn and lost pounds! When you get up and move first thing in the morning, before breakfast, your body is more likely to used stored fat as energy. Weight loss is supposed to be harder than this, right?

Resolution #4: Obey the No Food Three Hours Before Bed Rule.

Eating a snack after dinner is a widely held habit. Although food always seems to taste better right before bed, it is also more prone to stick with you when eaten late at night. It has been proven that not eating three hours before bed reduces fat storage throughout the night. If you go to bed at 10pm, finish eating for the day no later than 7pm. Once you have made this a habit you will be ecstatic over the long-term weight loss!

Resolution #5: Spice up you Workouts with Circuit Training

Are your workouts consisting of the same exercises in the same order at the same weight? If you find yourself falling into a rut at the gym give circuit training a try. Start by doing one set of your first exercise and then moving on to do one set of your second exercise. After you have done every exercise once, start again from the top! If you want to burn extra calories add 5 minutes on a bike between each set. Get creative and add new exercises into your circuits, and your workouts will be fun and energizing!

Now all you have to do is pick one of these New Year’s Resolutions, make it a part of your daily life, and watch as the pounds fall off in 2005!

Diana Keuilian, author, ACE certified Personal Trainer, and co-founder of HitechTrainer.com offers online personal training and nutrition programs that fit your budget and schedule. Whether your goal is to lose weight, firm and tone, or to build muscle, HitechTrainer.com will build a custom designed program just for you.
Visit: http://www.hitechtrainer.com/ and begin meeting your fitness goals today!

What is the concept of marriage? As young women growing up we dream of finding our prince charming and getting married. This has been the myth since the beginning of time.

Marriage is a relationship between individuals which has formed the foundation for most families according to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. In the early years marriage was the center of a loving and lasting relationship for a man and a woman. It was a mountain of a big deal. When you got married it was like celebrating and a party to bless the reunion for two very in love people. Marriage was the bomb and then some.

I’m a romance reader and I believe in finding the right man and living happily ever after. I look and search for my soul mate. I know he’s right around the corner, and when God is ready for me to have him, then the search will be worth it.

I was married at eighteen years of age, and I have to admit I was still a baby at heart. I had no idea what was going on in the world. I was just smitten with my husband and wanted the fairy tale dream of being married.

He swept me off my feet in everyway possible, and I was so lucky and blessed to have found this man. Little did I know that it takes more than love to sustain a marriage? Love is the center of a being, and it prevents you from divorcing so fast. I think love conquers all obstacles in our path, but it doesn’t pay the rent or the mortgage.

I was thrilled when I got married because I was still living in my fairy tale in the land of fantasy. I didn’t know what marriage was about or the mechanics of it. My husband was only three years older than me, so he was still wet behind the ears too. We celebrated our first couple of years still on the honeymoon that we never had, basking in the after glow of our love for each other. It was heaven and then some.

We had a ball getting to know each other. The next three years we moved onto the basic ingredient of our marriage and this is where the reality slowly stomped over our hearts. We begin to see that our personalities were getting on each other nerves, and we fought more than we made love.

I was a Taurus and he was a Gemini, so I couldn’t figure out what personality he would be in until the morning. Was he a Dr. Jekyll or a Mr. Hyde? Mr. Hyde was evil, loud and with a difficult personality, so I liked it when he was Dr. Jekyll. I loved the process of being married. I was also in accordance with the rules and regulations of the marriage syndrome, so I wasn’t about to give up on my marriage. I had to take my husband for better and for worse, and he had to take me the same way.

Marriage is a compromise, and a witness to being in love. We welcomed a daughter to our family and it brought us closer, but we had our own individualities, and that lasted for ten years; divorce was on the horizon, also. It was time to be alone. The love wasn’t enough to sustain our marriage.

As a divorce woman I missed being married, and envy some of the couples who have been married for eleven and forty years. My parents were married for thirty years when my mother passed away. If I ever tried marriage again, this time I’d be a little knowledgeable and I’ll understand the rules and regulations of being married. I know the scope of being with someone and putting up with their faults. I know I have plenty of faults, and if someone is willing to put up with me, then I should give them an academy award and a million dollars.

The perks of being married are:

1. You truly love someone and you literally want to spend the duration of your life with him/her.

2. Someone loves you.

3. You don’t have to worry about dating.

4. You have the gorgeous ring.

5. You have someone to talk to, listen to, and go places with, and do things with.

6. You can make love all you want.

7. You are a couple.

8. You’re no longer single.

The perks of not being married:

1. You are single with no man.

2. The dating scene is a nightmare waiting to happen.

3. You can’t trust men.

4. Making love is tested, and protection is the name of the game.

5. Living together is a prospect.

6. Love and romance is difficult to find.

7. That engagement/wedding ring that you had been waiting for at least for two to five years has yet to make an appearance on your ring finger.

If I had to make a choice between being married and single; at this point in my life, I like being single because I don’t want to be bothered with anyone. I know myself, and it’s best that I live with myself. I’m at the age where I just don’t trust a man, and I just don’t want to be bothered.

On the other hand I miss love and romance, and just being with someone. I want the ball and the chain and run with it. I want to be a couple. Will I get married again? I don’t think so, but the fairy tale is the concept of what we think marriage is. When we come down to earth and realize that marriage is real life, then we are awakened by a thunderstorm of reality. Let’s get out of fantasy land because the real world is a bitch!

I am a lover of books, and addicted to writing. Please visit my website at http://www.freewebs.com/jcarolann and check out my debut novel, “I CONFESS and EVERYTHING AND MORE”.

Many internet marketing techniques are somewhat akin to throwing a dollar bill out on the street with your phone number written on it. The person who finds the money may come in and spend it at your store if you leave it right outside the door, or they may notice the phone number written on the bill and call to see whose number was written on the money. Either way, the link to getting your dollar back and adding more cash to it is pretty slim. Most people will see the dollar, put it in their pocket, and continue on with whatever it was they were thinking about before they found the currency.

There are lots of reasons to think that people will be interested in what you have to offer on your web site if you can only find ways to get them to stop by for a look. Unfortunately, when it comes to random site traffic, there are many more people looking for ways to sell something, or get something for free than there are people who are seriously searching for ways to purchase products and services by scanning through a sea of information. Internet business can be very tricky. One might spend a lot of money trying to build traffic, only to learn that hundreds or thousands of visitors are coming and going on web sites without doing one penny’s worth of business. As a platform for providing goods and services, the internet is a wonderful way to service targeted customers, but it is also a difficult medium to use for measuring and creating targeted customers.

One reason for this problem can be seen in understanding the stages of making a sale. In the real world, information about products and services are part of a package of tools that are used to move people from curious, to interested, to sold. Taking customers through these steps is rarely accomplished by simply providing information for them to absorb on their own. With most successful businesses on and off the web, the power of having good information must be augmented by a skilled interaction between people. It is the methods used by people delivering good information that actually results in successfully accomplishing a sale. Information alone cannot find out what motivates a customer to look at a product or service, and it cannot detect what thoughts or objections a person may have about engaging with a company.

The power of interaction between people to create and exploit a target market can be easily missed by businesses that do nothing but create a web site as the primary approach to creating business. Even with so-called turn key internet businesses, somebody has engaged in personal interaction at some stage of the process, and must continue to do something to keep the business growing and alive. Creating free downloads of products and information can have some positive impact on web based customers if the products are readily available, cleverly presented, and offer clear benefits to the end users. Certainly, offering a line of minimal resistance to getting your information into potential customer’s hands is one vital step toward building a relationship with them. Yet, even promotional offers without interaction can present some less than obvious drawbacks.

To illustrate the proper value of promotional items, consider the following analogy. Suppose you have decided to create some promotional pens with your company name written on them to give away free to potential customers. Once the product has been delivered to your business, you decide to take the boxes of pens, put them out on the sidewalk for anyone who comes along to take for free. The only interaction you have with your promotion is to come back to the spot where you dropped the pens every morning to see if there are any pens left in the boxes. It does not take much imagination to recognize that this sort of planning would be a waste of time and money. Your campaign would be far more successful if you gave the pens to your sales staff and had them personally deliver a pen to people working in the companies that do business with you on a regular basis.

If you are trying to build an internet business with no customers, chances are that all the free promotional items in the world will not have much impact if you do not have people involved with promoting your promotion. Unless you can go out and find people who want what you have to offer, and use creative ways to have someone personally convince them to come to your business to get it, the process of conducting a random access internet venture will continue to provide a never ending source of puzzlement and frustration. Your best bet for a thriving internet site is to create a channel for people to convince people to come to your business and become impressed with the information you have to share. It is far more valuable to have a skilled salesman walking a potential customer through the information on your website than it is to let customers wander around on their own with nobody to talk with about what they are seeing. The same concept holds true if you have engaged, loyal customers telling their friends about your business, and showing them how to get hooked up with you. Either way, it is people rather than pure information that will get your business off the ground, and you must find a way to get that personal interaction started. Choose the right tools to equip the audience you are building with an effective way to spread the word, and the motivation to keep the ball rolling.

Director of Software Concepts
BHO Technologists - LittleTek Center
Teaching computers to work with people. We make software more fun for everyone. Stop by for a visit to our web site, and see what a difference ITL technology makes!
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Almost every website on the Internet has one goal in mind: how to make money fast - at the lowest cost possible. In fact, my website - googlingprofit.com - has making money on the Internet for a theme.

The purpose of this article is to share with budding webmasters and those intending to make their presence felt on the world wide web, the lessons learned from the early successes of Amazon.com - the online store founded by Jeff Bezos - one of the business leaders in today’s Information age.

Here are the lessons learned from Jeff Bezos’ early successes with Amazon.com - which I hope will be of valuable help to you.

Lesson One: Have a Goal
You must have a goal. From the moment Jeff Bezos envisioned to make his presence felt on the Internet, he spared nothing to attain his goal.

Lay down and make known in clear fashion your goal to every stake holder of your Internet business. These include your spouse, your web designer, and your assistants, if any.

When Amazon was struggling to make a profit for the first time, only its founder Jeff Bezos believed that his business goal could be achieved. Everybody was astounded when Jeff Bezos achieved his goal after one year from pronouncing his goal.

You can write your goal on a piece of paper and post this on the wall beside your desk. Save this goal in your hard disk. If possible make your goal the start up page when your computer boots up. Convert your goal into a screensaver. Read your goal to yourself every day as you go about your business.

Lesson Two: Motivate Yourself
You should motivate yourself every day and pass this motivation on to every one who’s involved in your business. Jeff Bezos did not lack motivation when he was struggling in his business.

To paraphrase Wallace D. Wattles who wrote the 1910 best selling book, The Science of Getting Rich, envision yourself right now as having a very successful business and do every legal and ethical way to actualize your vision. You can learn more about Wallace Wattle’s book from the this webpage: internetmarketingleaningcenter.com/inspirational/ebook.html.

Lesson Three: Adapt to Change
It is said that change is the one single permanent thing on this planet (i.e., next to taxes). Amazon changed the way it does business through the years. First it was an online book seller. Next it expanded into selling music and videos.

An an Internet entrepreneur you must also learn how to adapt to change. Change comes and goes. For example, in the early years of the Internet, people were wary of using credit cards in their online transactions.

Nowadays, the use of credit card is is like coffee in the morning. You can’t do without it.

Then there is the growing realization that blogs are not just for personal records. Blogs are here to stay - to help your business grow.

Lesson Four: Have a Business Model
Since we are on the topic of Amazon, you could use Amazon as your model. You could run your own business like Amazon during its early years.

You could be selling your single information product now. Two weeks from today you will have added another back end product. Next month you will have introduced into your product line the inventory of the affiliate programs you have joined in.

Lesson Five: Add Content to your Website
If your web site is content based, you should be adding new content every day. Casual visitors to your web site will become your regular guests when they see new content every time they come to your site. These visitors will in the end become your regular customers.

Lesson Six: Be a Generalist
A generalist is one who does a multitude of things. In computer language this is known as multi-tasking. This has been the culture at Amazon. You as the single person in your own business must be a generalist, too. This means doing and knowing everything that goes in and out of your enterprise.

You don’t know any HTML coding? This is tolerable. You must strive however to understand at least the basic formatting that goes into you site code. This way you can make small insertions into your web pages when your web designer is nursing a cold or is out of town. Or you can learn a thing or two on scripting.

By the way, you will learn a lot about succeeding in your own business from the free resources offered at googlingprofit.com.

Lesson Seven: Let Your Work Ethic Shows
Jeff Bezos was the company CEO and he and his wife were the first workers at Amazon. Their work ethic was marked with hard work and consistency, among others. These traits were handed down to their employees through the years.

To succeed and last long in your Internet business, you should work hard to put your business online in the fastest and frugal manner possible. The important thing to consider is to start up and put your small business online early and rapidly. If you have to wake up at two in the morning to do your Internet work, by all means stick to this routine.

Rick Tanzo enjoins you to contantly strive to make money on the Internet.You can get all the info you need - including articles and the latest business news - to make your profit online at http://www.googlingprofit.com