Your Words Do Matter

What you dwell on and the words that come out of your mouth really do form your future.

If you dwell on lack and debt you are just going to get more of the same. This is evident all throughout the Bible.  

In the book of James chapter 3:3 “When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal.

4; Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go.

5; Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts.”

10; Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be. 11; Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring? 12; My brothers and sisters, can a fig tree bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh water.”

In other words we are what we speak...

Rad more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/you-can-take-control-of-your-future/

 

 

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Have You Got Some Serious Issues?

Don’t get snippy, I’m talking about WordPress issues.

Have you played with the code or installed a script on your WordPress blog and now it’s all screwed up?

Did it get all hinkey for no apparent reason at all? Well, if it hasn’t happened yet, just sit tight, it will.

So what happens if you pull up your WordPress blog one day and the sidebar is gone or half the page is blank?  Something like that happened the other day to me.  Fortunately I didn’t freak because I have a back-up plan for things like that.  Well, do you? 

I knew right away what my WordPress issue was.

 

Read more...

 http://thehappypreneur.com/wordpress-issues/

 

 

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Keeping Your Online Biz Super Simple

It’s easy to get caught up in the technology of building your online biz.

If you are spending way more time in the back end of your business building, setting up, figuring out the technology and not enough time out front building a list and marketing your butt off, then you aren’t making money.

OK, maybe a little, but it ain’t paying the bills.

It does take some time to get things set up, but you can’t become so wrapped up in it that you ignore the money end.   I’ll admit...

Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/keeping-your-online-biz-super-simple/

 

 

 

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Super Simple Shortcuts For WordPress

Boy that’s a mouthful of S’s!  I just wanted to take a minute to share some tools that will make using WordPress easier and more profitable.

Here’s a freebie.  It’s the  developed by my brilliant techie pal Lynette Chandler the big kahuna over at Tech Based Training.  I have to admit that almost everything she does is way over my head, but it when she talks about a new WordPress plugin because I know it’s going to make something super simple for you..

Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/super-simple-shortcuts-for-wordpress/

 

 

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Keeping The Main Thing The Main Thing

When you decided to start an online business, it was with noble intentions and the determination to succeed.  You expected there to be learning involved, but you figured that you could make it work.

Holy moley, you had no idea it was gonna be this darned hard to figure it all out! There’s just so much to learn and do.

The truth is building an online business can be overwhelming.  There are thousands of online courses out there. Which ones do you choose?  What training do you need to know?  How much technology do you need to try to learn?

Continue reading... -->

 

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Positive Affirmations – Change Your Thoughts And Speech, Change Your Life

I’ve tried positive affirmations numerous times in my life without success.

Because I didn’t stick with them,  repeat them often enough or believe they would attract what I was speaking into my life, they didn’t. Duh…

To be honest with you, it was because as a Christian, I was afraid of the Law Of Attraction.  The Law of Attraction, more specifically principles of “The Secret” suggest that we have the power.  This goes against everything I believe.  My beliefs are that my power is not mine, but comes from, to and through me from God.  He is my source of strength, power, provision, health an all else I have and will ever need.  If you believe in a Higher Power, regardless of what your name for that is, you may be able to relate.

Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/positive-affirmations-change-thoughts-speech-change-life/

 

 

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Your Online Reputation – Who’s Telling Your Dirty Little Secrets?

Are you guarding your online reputation?

News travels fast.  We all have that one family member that prides themselves on how well they can keep a secret. They promise not to tell every chance they get. In fact, they are so adamant about keeping it on the QT, they make everyone they tell promise not to tell anyone else!

They dig for the dirt and go on fact (or not) finding expeditions just so they can be the first to tell something no one else knows yet.  Come on, you know which sister or cousin I’m talking about… 

Read more..

http://thehappypreneur.com/your-online-reputation-whos-telling-your-dirty-little-secrets/

 

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com 

Relationship Marketing – The Stuff Success Is Made Of

Being self employed, working from home, making your own schedule and doing what you love are wonderful things. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of. We all want to be able to make as much money as we want, to have the income to be able to generously provide for our families, give back to the world, to be the captain of our own destiny. To leave the world a better place than we found it.

Internet success doesn’t just happen.  It takes lots of time and hard work.  Dedication. Perseverance. You have to believe it’s gonna happen. You have to decide that no matter what it takes, you will not give up.

Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/inbound-marketing-outbound-marketing/

 

 

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com  

Be More Productive And Stay Focused – A Cure For Shiny Object Syndrome

Learn to be more productive and nip Shiny Object Syndrome in the bud!

Shiny Object Syndrome or SOS for short, is a sometimes fatal virus you get from the internet. The problem is, it doesn’t infect your computer as other internet viruses do, it infects YOU!

What are the symptoms of SOS?

• Pain and discomfort of overwhelm
• Excessive time spent checking your email
• Long trips down rabbit holes found in your email inbox...

Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/be-more-productive-shiny-object-syndrome/

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com  

Cool WordPress Plugin – TinyMCE Advanced

In the massive WordPress Plugin world, sometimes it’s easy to go overboard.

Which plugins should you keep in your toolbox no matter what type of blog you have or how many?  One of them is the TinyMCE Advanced.  This super duper plugin is one of the best plugin finds for my WordPress blog that I’ve ever found.  It was totally frustrating to me as a new blogger to have so few options and so little control over how my posts and pages looked.  In the basic WordPress editor, there isn’t much you can do to spiff things up.   Here’s what my basic editor in “Visual” looked like:

Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/cool-wordpress-plugin/

 

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com  

Relationship Marketing – The Stuff Success Is Made Of

Being self employed, working from home, making your own schedule and doing what you love are wonderful things. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of. We all want to be able to make as much money as we want, to have the income to be able to generously provide for our families, give back to the world, to be the captain of our own destiny. To leave the world a better place than we found it.

Internet success doesn’t just happen.  It takes lots of time and hard work.  Dedication. Perseverance. You have to believe it’s gonna happen. You have to decide that no matter what it takes, you will not give up.  It can be pretty lonely sometimes.  No one else has a clue what you are doing.  They think you are playing around on Facebook all day and that you should just go out and get a real J-O-B. They wonder how long this phase is gonna last and you come to your senses. They just don’t get it. You can unwittingly allow yourself to become very isolated, hiding behind your computer screen. Alone.

Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/relationship-marketing-the-stuff-success-is-made-of/

 

With love and blessings,

 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com 

How To Drive Traffic To Your Blog

No matter where you are in your business, you need to use every strategy you know to drive traffic to your blog and opt-ins.

Getting traffic to your blog is the name of the game. If you can do it for free, more the better.  Let’s talk about how using Inbound marketing strategies can help you to drive free traffic to your blog.

 

So, what the heck is Inbound Marketing?  Here’s how Wikipedia describes it:
Inbound marketing is based on the concept of earning the attention of prospects, making yourself easy to be found and drawing customers to your website by producing content customers value.  

Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/drive-traffic-blog/

 

 

Tweetable Facts

Using Inbound marketing strategies can help you to drive free traffic to your blog.
==>Tweet this<==

Getting creative in your emails & social media can drive all kinds of free traffic to your blog.
==>Tweet this<== 

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Panicked Because You’re Not Making Money Online Yet?

Today the remnants of Hurricane Isaac have reached Illinois with much needed rain. Yesterday, I went to town to do my shopping and found chaos.  Both the grocery store and Walmart were packed.  The isles were full and so were the shopping carts. People were panicked! I guess it was the videos of New Orleans and other flooded towns the weather stations and news networks had been playing over and over the past 3 days that did it.

Well, that got me thinking about how we act when we are panicked and feeling desperate in our businesses. When I didn’t start making money in my business quickly, I began it get a little panicky. Panic soon turned into desperation. Being desperate in my business stopped me from making money.  Is this where you are in your business right now? Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/panicked-making-money-online/

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com 

A Few Good And Bad Social Media Practices

I was reading through the questions on LinkedIn the other day and thought this was an interesting Social Media practices question…

“What are the basic mistakes small businesses make with social media?”

When I got done answering the question, it occurred top me that you might want to know the answer to this one too.  So here goes…

1. Not being consistent with your message across the board. If you stay consistent on all of your social media networks – using the same or similar profile photo, your USP is the same and your about me is consistent, you will eventually become instantly recognizable and your audience will know who you are and what you do whenever and where ever they see you. That’s what you want. You are your brand and the more consistent you are the quicker you will become known as an expert in your niche.  Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/social-media-practices/

 

 

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Untitled

Taking small local businesses from offline to online is one way to create income and build your online business.

It’s hard to believe there are still so many small brick and mortar businesses that don’t have websites.

Obviously, they either don’t understand the value of taking their offline business online or they think it’s going to be too hard and technical for them. It’s up to you to show them why they need a blog or website and alleviate their fears.  With WordPress, that’s easy to do. Let’s talk about some of the reasons your potential offline to online clients should hire you to build their WordPress blogs and websites. 

1. To get and keep their business in front of potential customers.  

•  
  •  Most people use the yellow pages very rarely these days and competition is fierce. So, a blog or website could be the only way to be found by those using smart phones, computers and iPads and unless their customers live under a rock…
  • If they are not on the Internet, they are losing a huge chunk of business and their competitors are finding it! 

          2.  This is a great way to showcase their products and services to a broader audience. Read more... 

http://thehappypreneur.com/from-offline-to-online-how-to-create-income-by-helping-local-businesses/

 

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Use LinkedIn Groups To Drive Targeted Traffic To Your Blog [Lots and Lots of Traffic!]

Use LinkedIn Groups to drive targeted traffic to your blog or website.

It works like magic and you will see results in just a very short time!

I can say this with assurance because LinkedIn became the # 1 source of traffic to my blog in less than 2 weeks. It now drives double the traffic than any other source. In fact LinkedIn is now driving more targeted traffic to my blog than Facebook and Twitter combined! 

Up until recently, I did little to nothing on LinkedIn. 

Wow, what a dunce! Because LinkedIn seemed to stuffy and “corporate like” I chose to blow it off instead of testing it out as a good marketer should. You can bet your sweet bippie that won’t happen again. When I think about all of the prospective clients I’ve ignored… Well, if I could kick myself in the butt, I would .

My stats show that new visitors to my site have increased and they are staying longer.

Yay! Although to be fair, I switched from a landing home page to my blog being my home page about the same time, so that could have something to do with them staying longer. The jury is still out on that one. Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/uselinkedin-groups-drive-targeted-traffic-blog/

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com  

If I Hadn’t Made These 3 Mistakes When I Started My Online Business (I’d Probably Be Rolling In Money Now)

When I first started my online business, I was clueless

Silly me…

I had 25 years of business management and marketing under my belt and thought this was gonna be a walk in the park. I mean, I’ve run businesses with 50+ employees. Surely conquering the world behind a computer screen in my jammies would be a piece of cake, right?  Wrong!

I think that’s what most of us think when we start an internet business.  How hard can it be, right? After all, we’ve seen so much about average people finding overnight internet success on autopilot, while they slept.  If they can do it, so can we.

 I’m here to tell you that’s a bunch of whooie.

 It doesn’t work that way.  Nobody who’s green to building an online business just jumps right in and starts making money immediately.  It’s not realistic. You have to learn how it’s done. The process, the mechanics and the marketing. The offline world of business does not prepare you for the online world.  You have to educate yourself, learn then implement, rinse and repeat.  The one thing that offline and online have in common is that overnight success usually takes a while.

Mistake #1 -  Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/3-mistakes-when-i-started-my-online-business/

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Go Viral – Blog Posts Gone Wild!

Ever wonder how some bloggers get their posts to go viral?

Ready to take a walk on the wild side and see how they do it?

OK, first they do these 3 important things…

Use an incredible, attention grabbing headline. How do you know if it’s going to grab your readers attention? Test it on social media. Tweet and post your headline and see what kind of reaction it gets. If it gets a good response, you’ve got a winner!  A little trick I use is to peruse the magazine rack in your grocery store or Walmart and jot down headlines, then change them up for your business. These are headlines that have been thoroughly tested at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to make sure they are going to sell magazines. Why not piggyback off of tried and proven copy? Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/go-viral-blog-posts-wild/

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com 

3 Simple Tricks To Be More Productive, They’re Proven And Powerful

We could all stand to be more productive where our business is concerned. Heck even in our lives in general!

If you are not doing so well in this department, there are a few tricks to help you to be more productive and focused.  Here are a few.

Make a plan
Start with the end in mind.  Think about this… If you were planning your first cross-country trip from New York City to Butte, Montana, and you had to be there by a specific time,  how much more difficult and frustrating would it be without a GPS and map.  You just have to wing it and figure it out as you go. Without a plan, it’s just like that in your business. It’s fantastic to know where you are going and what you want your business to look like, but it’s extremely important to have a plan, a map of how you are going to make that happen on a monthly, weekly and daily basis.  If you are just shooting from the hip every day, sorry darlin’, it just ain’t gonna happen! You will be lost before you know it. Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/3-tricks-to-be-more-productive/

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com 

How to Be More Productive and Focused In Your Online Business

Learning habits to help us be more productive in online business seems to be something most of us need when first starting out.

When you work online from home, and you have a boss in another location, it’s sometimes difficult to set up a routine that will allow you to meet your employer’s expectations. You have set deadlines you must meet, or you get canned.  Period. There is accountability.  You have the works habits you need to make it happen or you don’t have a job.

However, it’s a bit more difficult to set up those important habits when working online with no one looking over your shoulder.  It’s just you and you alone.  When you are the boss of yourself, it’s pretty easy to cut yourself way too much slack.  This is the reason most internet marketers fail when building an online business. They aren’t disciplined enough to make the things happen that need to happen in order to be successful.  Then they quit and claim that you can’t make a living online, it’s all a scam, when in fact most times it’s a lack of productivity and time management. Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/be-more-productive-and-focused-your-online-business/

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Social Media Marketing – Are You Being Consistent?

As most of you know, I live in a little town much like Hooterville on the old television show Petticoat Junction.  Just a little country store like Sam Druckers minus the pickle jar, a bank, post office and gas station.  So when I say I live in the middle of a corn field, I mean it literally. As you can imagine, there’s not much to do here but watch the corn grow.

In the summer months I like to go to yard sales on Saturdays just for something to do. I see lots of people I’ve known all my life there.  It’s funny, but it gives me a sense of community. These are people I played with as a child, went to school with, their parents,  my old teachers. It makes me realize how important living in the community I grew up in is to me as I get older. It anchors me.

Thinking about this makes me realize how different we are in these digital times. It used to be that we got our news talking to our neighbors over the backyard fence, at neighborhood cook outs, from our front porches or school and community gatherings. 

That was then…

Now, we talk on social media. Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/social-media-marketing-consistent/

 

 

With love and blessings,

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Your WordPress Blog – Is It A Virtual Yardsale?

Is your WordPress Blog one big mess?

I’m a sucker for a good yard sale.  Unless I’m in a hurry, I can’t drive past one without stopping. I guess that started back when my daughter was little. As a single mom of one child and the only provider,  there were no hand-me-downs or much of a clothing budget.  Plus, we lived in Florida…the yard sale mecca of the south! If you’ve ever spent any time there, you know what I’m talking about.  People move in and out of Florida at an alarming rate, so there are always really good yard sales, every day of the year.  Not just on Saturday’s like they have here in my little rural Illinois community.

This afternoon I headed into the big city (population 4,200) to run a couple of errands.  I noticed  several yard sales signs along the way. Well, old habits die hard and my grandson out grows his clothes as fast as he grows into them, so I decided to drive around and see what I could find.

As luck would have it, I did find a few nice articles of clothing for my lil’ guy, a rustic chair for my garden and the find of the day – a large ceramic pig wearing overalls. I’m a bit eclectic, so I just couldn’t resist! He’s such a big piggy that I could hardly carry him back to my van!

As I was driving home, I was reminded of a WordPress blog I came across this morning. Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/wordpress-blog-virtual-yardsale/

 

With love and blessings,

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Internet Success – Desperation Serves No Purpose

I’ve gotta tell you, I know first hand that being desperate impairs your chances of internet success.

When first getting started in online business, I was totally clueless.

When I was a single mom in my 30′s I was too busy raising my daughter all alone and working 2 jobs to survive to really take notice when Al Gore (smirk) invented the internet. Of course I knew of the internet, but it didn’t enter into my life until much later.  So I was at a disadvantage when I decided to give this work at home online thing a try. I knew how to use my email and surf the web a little, that was it. Oh yeah, I was pretty skilled at buying stuff on eBay too,  But that was the extent. Maybe some of you can relate? Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/internet-success-5/

 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

 

Does Your Business Blog Reflect Who You Are?

Have you ever visited a business blog and have no idea what it’s about or anything about the writer? 

Often times when I do blog reviews for clients, I discover a huge problem.
Their blog has no identity – dry and void of personality. I’m sure you’ve had this same experience from time to time when surfing around, right? 

Sometimes this happens because of PLR.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Private Label Rights is a wonderful thing and I encourage you to use it as often as makes sense for you.  The problem lies with using it “as is”.  It’s really important that you give it your personality.  That requires a bit of re-writing to make it your own.  A little tweaking so that it sounds like you goes a long way in your blog reflecting who you are. Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/business-blog-reflect/

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Blog Posts – Does How And When You Post Matter?

When writing your blog posts, do you only write when you have something to say or do you write blog posts ahead and schedule them to go out at a later time?

Let’s look at the difference…

First, let’s talk about scheduling.  As you know by now, I love WordPress.  One of the many reasons for my very public love affair is that WordPress enables me to write my blog posts in advance and automates when they are published on my blog.  I schedule them to run every Monday and Thursday to coincide with my newsletter.  This works really well for me because I can schedule several weeks out and not have to stress about deadlines.  This makes publishing my newsletter a more enjoyable experience. And because it’s not a scramble to get it done at the last minute, I can pass much of it off to my business assistant to do, giving me more time to do other things in my business.  Read More...

http://thehappypreneur.com/blog-posts/

Best WordPress Plugin For Affiliate Marketing

No More Struggling! I Found The Best Plugin for Niche and Affiliate Marketing and Wanted To Share it With You.  Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/best-wordpress-plugin/http://thehappypreneur.com/best-wordpress-plugin/

A Beginners Guide To WordPress

When I started out online, I sure could have used a Guild to WordPress, how about you? I was having a lot of fun blogging, but I had no idea what I was doing or what I needed.

http://thehappypreneur.com/beginners-guide-to-wordpress/