In this economic climate, it’s easy to feel out of control. Profits are down, clients are disappearing, and right when you need the most help, your budget is cut. But instead of throwing your hands up and blaming the state of the nation, take responsibility for your future. Ignore the bad news and take action now to make the most of your business.

Yes, profits may be down. But do you know why? Does your product or service really meet your clients’ needs? Paul Zane Pilzer says too many business owners get set in a pattern and forget to adapt to changing markets or demographics.Other business owners are simply running the business that’s convenient or economical, without ever determining if it’s the right fit for their skill set and talents.

Read more here.

Credit: Ken Blanchard | Stephen R. Covey | Jeffrey Gitomer | Harvey Mackay | Paul Zane Pilzer | Gary Vaynerchuk | Success Magazine

When we were kids, we thought we could write down everything we wanted and mail it to the North Pole, and then, magically, all our desires would appear, on schedule, under the tree in our living room, complete with pretty paper and a bow. When we grew up, we realized there wasn’t really a big roly-poly guy who fl ew around the world in a single night on a sled pulled by reindeer, squeezed down our chimney and delivered those presents. We found out a real person had to go out and sacrifice, earn the money, march through the shopping malls, wrestle the thing home, put it together, wrap it up and place it under the tree.

I think many people must still believe in Santa Claus. You cannot simply write down a list of wants on New Year’s Day, stick it in a drawer for the rest of the year and wait around for your life to change. Sorry, but it’s time to grow up and get serious. Most people know how to write down their goals, but few know how to achieve them. I would like to help you move from goal-setting, rainbow-chasing, wishing upon a star and lamp-rubbing to achieving actual results in the areas of your life in which you dedicate yourself.

Help get your start here.

Credit: Darren Hardy | Success Magazine

Ticktock. Ticktock. Ticktock. For some, that’s what the passage of time sounds like. For others, it goes more like this: Cha-ching. Cha-ching. Cha-ching.

The most productive people—from Fortune 500 CEOs to 20-something yuppies— view their time in dollars and cents. Yet many of us persist in thinking, “It’s cheaper to do it myself,” or “Why pay someone else to do something I can do?” The answer, of course, is that your time is precious and could be spent on activities that ultimately reap great rewards—financial, as well as personal.

Even if you aren’t a victim of your own misguided work ethic or thriftiness, it’s easy to get sucked into a time-wasting task—filing, doing laundry, entering data. You think that chore will just take a few minutes, but over time, all the busywork adds up.

Learn how to capitalize on time here.

Credit: Chelsea Greenwood | Success Magazine

Hi, my name is Chelsea, and I’m a listaholic. At any given time, I have multiple lists outlining chores to do, people to call, things to buy, etc. Even the fun stuff somehow makes its way into list form, from movies to watch and books to read to places to visit.

Sound familiar? If you, too, live by the list, consider this: How many of those list items ever get done—and how many of them really need to get done? Sure, it would be great to finally send in that $15 rebate or reorganize your file cabinet. But, by constantly nagging yourself about accomplishing these not-so-consequential tasks, they wind up hanging like millstones around your neck. Who needs that added anxiety?

“In the rush of our intense workdays, our instinct is to focus on ever-expanding to-do lists,” says Matthew Cornell, a personal-productivity specialist and a consultant at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “This is natural—being busy feels like being effective. But fixating on doing takes us away from two important things: doing what has the biggest impact on the bottom line (ours or our organization’s) and reexamining at a higher level what we’re doing in the first place.”

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Credit: Chelsea Greenwood | Success Magazine

Prioritization, an aspect of time management, means deciding what’s important and spending time on those priorities.

Small-business owners and entrepreneurs find prioritization particularly challenging because they are seduced by the urgent and that which is not important. They find those things that become pressing are proximate or popular and often have the appearance of importance but are really only urgent.

Take more control here.

Credit: Stephen R. Covey | Success Magazine

The day I took control of my income was the day I quit my job. Of course, my timing was perfect, as my husband had just gotten laid off the week before. Two missing incomes, one mortgage and a lot of bills. But it pushed us to talk seriously about our potential to make it on our own, to build our own business and open the doors to even more success.

We both knew it was a huge risk and put plans B, C and D into place, but we also both knew that our happiness with our careers would determine much of the happiness of our lives. I realized that I needed to take a big risk to find the success I was looking for.

Read more here.

Credit: Carmen Ulrich | Success Magazine

A LITTLE OVER 20 YEARS AGO, motivational speaker and author Willie Jolley was an award-winning jazz singer who made his living as a nightclub feature performer. One autumn evening, just after Jolley had delivered two exceptional performances in a row, the nightclub owner called him into the office and promptly let him go, citing the club’s need to cut the significant cost of a high-caliber singer like him, not to mention his backing band. Though Jolley couldn’t have realized it at the time, this bitter pill was actually the beginning of unimaginable future success.

Read the rest of this adventure here.

Credit: Liz Davis | Success Magazine

Companies are tossing their old tech like crazy lately with all the upgrading going on. But businesses need to make sure they don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater — meaning all that sensitive business data on the old hard drives.

“Never listen to the guy in the pickup who says he’ll take your old equipment away for free,” says Gina Chiarella, COO of e-waste disposal company We Recycle!, Inc. “That’s the quickest way for your data to end up on a flea market table.”

Getting rid of old technology can be hazardous, since there’s very likely sensitive data still on it. Even if you’ve erased and reformatted, computer hard drives contain loads of data you don’t want to let outside of your firewall – e-mails, contracts, planning documents, employees’ personal information, credit cards, and much more reside on these hard drives. Besides identity theft, data loss may leave you or your company liable under federal laws such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, Graham-Leach-Bliley or under state laws. Criminal penalties include fines and prison terms up to 20 years. Not to mention the civil suits that can result.

Read how to protect your data here.

Credit: Bill Pfleging | Inc. Technology

Businesses that advertise online have been thrown another loop. Just when they had search engine optimization figured out, now they can target their advertisements based on demographic information – such as location or age or gender.

Christine Churchill likes knowing exactly who will be looking at the Google-based text ads she develops.

“If you’re targeting an audience over 55, you might make the type face of the ad a little larger,” says Churchill, the president of KeyRelevance, a Dallas-based search engine marketing firm. “If it’s for women, the ad and the website [being advertised] should carry more detail, and more content, because women prefer to read more details,” she says.

Until recent years, those purchasing ads on Google AdWords, Yahoo or MSN meant writing a one-size-fits-all ad and trying to come up with the best possible keywords and optimization data for that ad to get it the best exposure. But now, the major search engines are offering more customized options for ad placement, such as demographic targeting (age, sex, or ethnicity), geographic targeting, and contextual targeting.

Read more about targeted search here.

Credit: Mary O. Foley | Inc. Technology

As we move into the winter months, and the economy is slowing coming out of its “economic winter,” one only need look around to see that one person’s recession is another’s great buying opportunity.

That is especially true if you are in planning and buying mode for your start-up.

Few times in recent memory have been as kind to buyers of all kinds of goods and services as right now–especially if you are starting a new business.

So what can you get at a great price?

Read the rest here.

Credit: Brad Sugars | Entrepreneur