Get a Job by Thinking Like an Entrepreneur

The news is grim. So far over four million jobs have been lost since the start of the recession. People are being ousted from their jobs at rates comparable to the depression era with some predicting a whopping 9.4% unemployment rate for 2009.

With so many people flooding the market, competition is fierce; even for jobs that don’t pay well. Getting a job today will require a new way of thinking of things. It will require you to think like an entrepreneur.

Whether you realize it or not, you are an entrepreneur. Instead of selling candles or financial services, you are selling the knowledge and skills you have developed over the years to a business that needs them. And instead of doing contracted work for multiple clients like the average freelancer, you devote the bulk of your time serving only one client for several years.

While scary at first, this change in mindset is incredibly freeing. Why? Because it opens up avenues of opportunities that you may not have otherwise seen or pursued. Sure you can look for employment at another company in the same industry. But you can also change industries altogether simply by investing in a little education. You can even convert your knowledge and skills into a home based business, something I recommend highly.

Today I’m going to show you how to think like an entrepreneur and secure a job in this crazy economy.
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January Business Update

Let’s start the post out with what I did get accomplished in January.

The Plot Café was updated fairly regularly throughout the month thanks, in part, to reprint article directories. I would love to be able to produce original content for the site but there just is not enough time in my day at this moment. I was able to score three interviews with three wonderful fiction writers which you can read here, here and here and I have another two lined up.

I finally overhauled BloggingShed and got an original template on there.

The New BloggingShed

I felt a little bit like a fraud claiming to be a web designer and yet using a blog template designed by someone else. I’m really happy with the way it turned out. This month I’m going to work on getting The Plot Café overhauled (since yes I am using a template for that as well).

I also helped a friend set up her website. So really, I created two templates last month.

A couple of my articles on Ezinearticles were reprinted on other websites so I got a few backlinks for The Plot Cafe.

Now for the bad stuff.
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My Plan to Escape Rat Race Hell in 2009

A few days before New Year’s Eve, I wrote about two goals I wanted to achieve in the new year. One of those goals was to end 2009 working from home and bringing in a steady income of $577 per week (about $30,000 per year). I plan to do this by generating income from two websites that I own.

The first site is called BloggingShed. This site is going to be the one that brings in the majority of my income. BloggingShed is a blogger’s help site where I post tutorials for the various blogging software out there, talk about how to make money from blogging, how to market and promote your blog, discuss design and coding and make snarky comments about stuff I find on the internet.
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14 Tips for Increasing Traffic to Your Blog

You hear about this awesome new invention called blogging. You decide to give it a try. You get a free blog at Blogger or WordPress.com. You pick a template. You start cranking out posts. About a week, month or year later it finally dawns on you.

No one is reading your blog.

Don’t feel bad. About 90% of the blogs on the internet are standing shoulder to shoulder with you on this Dock of Shame. The good news is that with time, focused effort and a few of these suggestions, you can overcome your no-traffic nightmare and turn your blog into the rockin’ place to be.
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How to Write a Great Article

Many people believe that writing an effective article is a difficult task. They bite their fingernails and anguish over the fact that they cannot write like the “experts”. The truth is, with a little forethought and creativity, anyone can churn out a great article. All you need to do is ask and answer the following three questions:

What is the article’s purpose?

Before you write the first word, you need to figure out what you want the article to do. Do you want the article to educate your audience? Entertain them? Get them to buy something? When you know why you are writing the article, you can position the information in your article for maximum effect.
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How to Get Your Website Listed in the Search Engines

Search engines are the librarians of the internet world. Every day they send out their interns, called Robots, into cyberspace to forage for information. Each piece of information that is returned to the library is filed in a digital catalog. To access any piece of information in this catalog, all one needs to do is go to their library of choice (Google, Yahoo, MSN or ASK), type in a few search words and wait while the librarian (the search engine) serves up sites matching the query.

As a webmaster, you may be wondering how to get your brand new, still in the bubble wrap, website listed in these giant cyber catalogs. Well, there are two ways robots find new websites. Either by following links from other sites or from the queue of direct submissions.
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Stop Being a Google Slave

Exploring a few blogs today, I’m seeing a reoccurring theme that has to do with Google’s recent PageRank update. Google, it seems, is being aggressive in its war against paid link ads and devaluing websites who sell them.

PageRank is a sort of meter that Google uses to signify how relevant or trustworthy the content is on a particular web page/website. The theory that most website owners and web marketers work with is that when people use a search engine to look for information about a subject that they will not look past the first two pages of results. Therefore it is best to be ranked within the first one to two pages of the results. Google’s PageRank supposedly tells a website owner where their site/page ranks on the first page of results. So if your site/page rank is a 3, that means it will be listed third on the page starting from the bottom.

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How to Make a Billion Dollars in One Easy Step

People like to try and make you think that making money is this hard and complicated thing. It really isn’t and anyone who says differently is probably trying to sell you something.

In all actuality, making, say a billion dollars is quite possibly the easiest thing you could do in life. It is so easy that you can do it one step and I won’t even charge you to share with you what that step is.

How to Make a Billion Dollars

Step One

Convince one billion people to give you one dollar each. Since there are approximately 6.5 billion people in the world, finding enough people shouldn’t be that hard.

Alternatively you can convince one person to give you one billion dollars and to make life even easier for you, here is a link to a list of the world’s billionaires.

Now I know you are probably thinking that I’m having a great laugh at your expense. You would be partly right. The fact is that there is a very basic and simple business lesson to be learned from this which is that when it comes right down to it all of the financial goals you have in life depend on the willingness of others to share their money with you.

It does not matter if you are providing a product or service or if you are looking for charity, the ideology is the same. Why do you think businesses spend so much money in advertising and so much time building their reputation? In a world where people have a multitude of options literally at their fingertips, they, the businesses, are trying to convince as many people as they can to give them a dollar.

If your financial goals seem overwhelming just break it down. I’ve even provided a cool chart that I made myself to give you a starting point. Now what you do to convince people to give you money is entirely up to you but know that making money really is that simple.