Expert Blogger Marketing Tip: Grow and Evolve

Digital marketing is a highly technical and very competitive business. In digital marketing, there are always innovations and new methods of reaching your audience as we all learn what works and what doesn’t at least for today. The growth horizon is unlimited. What works tomorrow may be different, and you have to be willing to pivot, adapt and make changes as needed. Successful bloggers know this and will adjust their strategy, not at the whim of new trends, but because they keep their thumb on the pulse of their audience. If you are just starting out, you must be willing to make adjustments in your marketing strategy as you go through the phases of your business’s growth. You must explore credible ways to learn more about your audience, its needs, and the best methods to reach the audience.

So, if you are just starting out, you have a lot to learn from successful bloggers. Most successful bloggers use all kinds of tactics and many of them love to speak very proudly about these tactics. These tactics are not difficult to replicate in your own business. Be sure to start with a clear vision of your purpose and mission and a deep understanding of your prospective buyers. That done, you can consistently create and promote content with your buyer’s needs in mind. If you use Analytics and data to inform your marketing strategies and make adjustments when necessary, you’ll notice your audience grow exponentially over time. That is what successful bloggers know and do consistently, the real reason they are successful. 

How to Grow and Use Ginger

Making high-quality ginger tea starts with the plant itself. Make sure your garden has rich, loose soil with lots of shade. Next, choose an organic ginger root from a reputable grower, as this is what you will need to place into the ground. Ideally, it should be around 4 to 5 inches long with several fingers that have greenish tips.

Plant the root in early spring after the last frost has passed. Next, cut off the fingers and place them in a shallow trench no deeper than 1 inch. Once the roots are firmly placed in the ground, water them thoroughly, and leaves will emerge within a week or two. After you’ve reached this phase, continue watering, but sparingly. Overall, it may take 10 months for the plants to completely mature.

Harvesting the plants is easy, as you only need to lift them gently from the soil. If you want to replant a new batch, simply break off a part of a root that has foliage and then return it into the ground. Wash the remaining bunch thoroughly with running water, and then store them in a reusable plastic bag with the air vacuumed, and place into your refrigerator’s crisper.

How to Make Ginger Tea

Once you have your own ginger plant, you can now proceed to making fresh ginger tea. It’s quite easy to make, ensuring that it’ll be a regular fixture in your diet for years to come. To begin making your tea, you’ll only need around 2 inches of raw ginger, and 1 and a half or 2 cups of water. Afterward, follow this procedure.

Article Source: Dr Mercola at Mercola.com  

 

How to Grow Your Business Amidst Challenges

“Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you; they’re supposed to help you discover who you are.” ~ Bernice Johnson Reagan

Yes you have challenges in your business, so what? You may not be aware that everyone else is facing their own challenges one way or another. If you run a business, facing challenges is a given. You must face challenges in order to grow. When such challenges come as they must do, facing them squarely and conquering them is much better than getting confused and allowing the challenges to paralyze and overwhelm you. Facing challenges is one sure way to nurture and grow your business.

As Robert H. Schuller likes to say, “Tough times never last but, tough people do.” It is the toughness of these people that enables them to squarely face the inevitable challenges and obstacles everyone gets to face in the normal course of everyday business. That is what gives them the staying power to stay the course and to keep their businesses going. Most times, business challenges are a true test of who you really are. They enable you to understand yourself and your abilities better. When you know yourself, at all times, you get to know your capabilities as well. Knowing your capabilities is what gives you the impetus and the zeal to face challenges. It helps you to solve your business problems as they crop up. Being able to solve problems in your business is one sure way to guarantee its growth. Business growth is not without challenges, it is inspite of challenges.

Get busy right now because…. “No pains, no gains. To get the prize, you must pay the price.”

How to Grow Chili Peppers at Home

Growing chili peppers takes about six months so you should plant them by May, although starting early is recommended so the plant will ripen just in time for summer. Here's a simple step-by-step guide for growing chilies adapted from The Telegraph:

Fill a multicell seed tray with rich organic soil, firm it down and moisten with water. Place a seed in each cell, then lightly cover with soil.

Use a very fine hose to water it gently and then cover with cling film and keep in a warm area of your home. The soil should be moist but not soaked.

After about two to four weeks, when there's a first sign of growth, move to a warm place with plenty of light — but it shouldn't be in direct sunlight. Water the plant from below to strengthen the roots, and check daily to ensure the surface is moist.

When the seedlings sprout a second set of leaves, transplant to 7-centimeter (2.75 inches) pots with moist soil and use liquid tomato for weekly feeding.

Once the plants reach 12 centimeters (4.72 inches), transplant to larger pots, and fill with soil to approximately 1 centimeter (.39 inch) from the top. You should support the plants using a cane when they reach 20 centimeters (7.87 inches).

•  When the plants reach 30 centimeters (11.8 inches), pinch out the growing tips right above the fifth set of leaves in order to encourage bushiness. Transplant to another pot if needed and make sure to check the plant daily for aphids.

•  When the flowers appear, gently dab a cotton bud into every flower to pollinate.

•  Cut off the first chilies while still green to encourage fruiting all season long (July to October). Allow the next fruit to turn red if you want a rounder flavor.

Article Source: Mercola.com 

 

Small Business Solution: Don’t Be Content with Success

 Every small business owner wants to succeed. That is because success is great and the feeling is always good. Even at that, it doesn’t mean you should be wholly satisfied once you achieve any minor goal you set for your business. Very sadly, many small businesses always fall into a holding pattern once they’ve achieved some semblance of success. When that happens, such small businesses usually fall behind the competition and slowly become irrelevant. Small Business Experts are of the view that, it is best to stay hungry and keep that fire in your belly that got you where you are. Complacency is fatal to any small business. As your business grows and expands, it helps to keep your eyes permanently on the ball. Don’t ever forget what got you started in the first place. You can’t sustain any level of success as an entrepreneur if you take your eyes off the goal because your business has got larger and larger to the level where you adopt less hands-on approach to the business.

Always bear in mind the motivation you had to grow your business when you were just getting started. As the business grows and you are likely to need some more managers and other team members to step in and help with the day-to-day business operations, you must continue to give direction to the business. Remain the undistracted pilot no matter the level of success the business has attained. You can’t afford to be complacent at any time. If you are in charge, remain in charge and be seen and felt by everyone as the person in charge.

8 Ways to Quickly Grow Your Network

 Everyone in business needs a network. Networking is one great way to meet more people and expand professional/business connections. It is about building relationships, sharing information and finding sources of support.  When it comes to meeting people, building relationships and networks many young and successful entrepreneurs readily give away some tips on how to get it done successfully. Here now are some 8 of such tips for mastering the art of meeting people beyond the boundaries of your business interests and connections:

1. Start a network

If you must grow a network, first, get involved. It is not enough to think about it, all you need to do is get started. To become influential at anything, you’ve got to dig for information. You may start by reading any and everything you can lay your hands on out there. Next is to commence networking with people in the niche you have chosen. You become ardent at it by writing about it, speaking about it, attending events on it and gradually becoming the voice of the expertise in the niche. The network grows from there.



2. Become active on Social Media

These days, nearly everyone is on social media. These media provide simple platforms for 24/7 social interactions with people around the world. Now, that’s great for networking! With social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, it is easy for you to reach many people beyond the natural niche of your products/services.  With the ease of sharing photos and information on these platforms, building a network can occur real quickly.

3. Volunteer to serve

This is one easy way to get noticed by others. By volunteering some hours of your time to serve an organization working on a cause you really care about, you get to work closely with other people with whom you can form a network. Working with others as volunteers provides you a very valuable opportunity to meet people who care about similar things but most likely work in different industries. Great opportunity to grow a network develops from there.

4. Connect with an experienced networker

Experienced networkers always have traits you can benefit from. It pays therefore to seek them out in a crowd and make their acquaintance. If in a gathering you do join in a conversation with such persons, other people may naturally be drawn into such conversations. One great way to gain valuable knowledge, meet new people and build a network thereafter.

5. Join a business organization

When you join a business organization, you can easily build relationships and networks. With business groups like Rotary International, YMCA and many others which regularly bring together business leaders from diverse markets, you get to meet many vibrant people with a lot of ideas suitable for a network. Meeting with them regularly helps to grow the network pretty quickly.

6. Use alumni networks

Many successful business leaders attest to the fact that old school Alumni chapters are a great way to stay connected and network outside your own company and niche. Because these chapters often include graduates from different majors, they provide the forums to have fun and to learn from people you don't normally interact with. It is one great way to meet new people and to build valuable networks.

7. Consult Venture Capitalists

Venture Capitalists are always business persons who are very familiar with the business environment they operate in. For that reason, consulting them for information about the business environment is a very smart thing to do. Many of them always have a wide portfolio of companies they work with. As such, they can at will connect you with entrepreneurs at different companies and ventures who you might not otherwise meet. Now that’s really great for building a network!

8. Host events

If you want to grow a network quickly, it is smart to occasionally host events rather than attend other events always. By inviting more people outside the niche of your industry to your events, you get the opportunity to meet, talk to and interact with such people. As the host of an event, you and your space are natural focal points for your guests. That attention provides the leverage for you to get to know them very well. A network naturally grows from there.

How to Amend Soil for Best Tomato Flavor

Adding compost to soil is important for a number of reasons, one of which is that it's a good source of sulfur, a compound that's often missing from soil but is not measured by standard soil fertility tests.

"Sulfur is especially important because this nutrient forms organic compounds in the plant that gives flavor to vegetables," according to Joseph Heckman, Ph.D., extension specialist in soil fertility with the Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station.

When you apply compost and therefore add carbon back into the soil, the carbon feeds mycorrhizal fungi that eventually produce glomalin, which may be even better than humic acid at retaining water. This means you naturally limit your irrigation needs and make your garden more resilient during droughts.

Adding crushed eggshells to your soil is another simple trick. Rich in calcium, adding them as a supplement to the soil around tomato plants helps to provide nutrition and moderate soil acidity.
"Tomatoes that have a handful of eggshell meal worked into the planting site are not likely to develop blossom end rot," notes expert organic gardener Barbara Pleasant.

By optimizing soil composition and nutrient application, you can — for essentially the same amount of time, effort and energy — increase your yield six to eight times.

John Kempf, an Amish farmer and the founder and CEO of Advancing Eco Agriculture, is one of the leaders in the field of high-performance agriculture. The results you can achieve when you apply the principles he teaches are truly astounding. As Kempf says:

"You have to have different expectations and you have to begin managing your crops differently. For example, when you are expecting to produce 60 to 70 pounds of tomatoes per plant, you no longer plant the plants 12 inches apart.

That doesn't work logistically. You have to begin spacing tomato plants two and a half to three feet apart. But all of a sudden, you only need three tomato plants instead of 36!"

Facts Credit: mercola.com

How to Grow Tasty Tomatoes

Once you've chosen your tomato varieties, it's time to start planting. Transplanted tomatoes do best, so either purchase transplants or start seeds indoors six to eight weeks before the last spring frost date. Tomatoes do best in full sun, so choose an area that gets plenty of daily sunlight.

The Old Farmer's Almanac recommends planting seedlings 2 feet apart and pinching off the lower branches prior to planting. "Plant the root ball deep enough so that the remaining lowest leaves are just above the surface of the soil, [then] water well to reduce shock to the roots."

You'll need to water the plants for the first few days and continue to give them about 2 inches per week throughout the summer (a rain barrel works well for this purpose). There are many other variables that may influence the final outcome of your tomatoes, including most importantly, their taste.

A tomato's flavor is the result of interplay between sugars, acids and other chemicals that give a tomato its scent.
Researchers from the University of Florida have identified more than 3,000 aroma volatiles involved in tomato flavor, including some that contribute to a tomato's perceived sweetness independent of sugar concentration.

Growing conditions and much more also contribute to tomato flavor. For instance, as noted by NPR, which spoke with tomato researcher Harry Klee at the University of Florida:

The more direct sunlight your tomatoes get, the sweeter they'll taste
Too much water can dilute tomatoes' flavor; ideally, water two to three times during hot summer months (adjusting for rainfall)

Experiments suggest that so-called "salt fertilization” or dousing plants with a one-time dose of sea water (or water with natural sea salt) improves tomato flavor (although this must be done carefully, as it may burn foliage)
Soil quality matters; in particular, soil with plenty of organic matter or compost is best.

Facts Credit: mercola.com