Do you need to increase your productivity and efficiency?
Would you like to know what are the favored techniques of
successful women entrepreneurs when it comes to increasing
productivity? I wanted to know, too.

Recently, I conducted an informal survey of 250 women
entrepreneurs asking them this question: "What's the number
one thing you do to boost your productivity? "

Listed in reverse order, here are the results:

5. Prioritize your daily list using the "ABCD and E" method.

A = must do.

B = should do.

C = would be nice to do.

D = delegate.

E = eliminate.

4. Delegate everything possible.

If it isn't directly making you money, it's time to
delegate it to someone else. Turn over data entry tasks,
packing and shipping, and answering non-essential emails
and calls to a competent administrative professional. Not
sure how to tell if you should turn something over? Ask
yourself, "Does this task need my direct attention, or can
it be done by someone else?" As an enterprising
entrepreneur, your job is to concentrate on what is of most
value to you and your business success, not on errands.

3. Break up projects into tasks.

If you have something on your to do list that's been there
for a long time, realize that it's probably not a task.
It's a project. To do lists are for discreet tasks. When
you put a project on your list, you'll get bogged down and
productivity will slow. Many of the women surveyed use
business strategist Brian Tracy's method for breaking up
projects into easy-to-do tasks:

+ First, list the finished result you want.

+ Next, map out each step of the project.

+ Then, put the steps into order, putting the important
steps to the front.

+ Now, delegate tasks and assign responsibilities.

+ Finally, devise a way to track the progress of the
project.

2. Give only 20% to what is urgent and a full 80% of your
attention to what is important.

As an entrepreneur, your job is to discern the difference
between what's important and what's urgent. To figure out
the difference between the two, ask yourself, "Will
focusing on this move my business forward and make me money
or will I just be putting out fires?" Dealing with the
urgent all day is draining. Dealing with what's important
is energizing. Make sure you're giving a full 80% of your
time and attention to what's important each day.

1. Focus on one thing at a time.

The #1 thing women entrepreneurs do to boost productivity
is... focus on one thing at a time. Although women are
known to be natural multi-taskers, surprisingly, those
surveyed said they were able to get more done when they
focused on one thing at a time. Starting and stopping in
the middle of things was frustrating for them and meant
that not much was completed at day's end.

What is the number one thing you consistently do to boost
your productivity? As you've just seen, among the 250 women
entrepreneurs I surveyed their answers ranged from
prioritizing their daily to do list to learning to break
projects up into smaller. Decide which of their favorite
techniques will help you the most, and start implementing
them right now. You're sure to boost productivity for
yourself and your business.

Make a video slide show of your seminar, and you create
additional income streams selling it on CDs or DVDs at your
speeches and other seminars and selling it over the web
either on CDs and DVDs or for download.

It's both simple and cheap to create a video slide show of
your seminar. Here's a recipe:

Ingredients:

An audio recording of your seminar.

Your slides for the seminar.

A digital photograph of you looking into the camera.

"Utensils":

A slide presentation program such as Open Office (Star
Office) Impress or Microsoft Powerpoint.

A video editing program such as Windows Movie Maker.

A computer with enough speed and disk memory.

Preparation:

Create a slide background for your presentation that
includes your picture in a corner. Seeing your face will
make viewing the show feel more like being present for a
live presentation.

If you expect people to watch the video over the internet
and you have slides with a great many bullet points or a
small font size split the slides up to have fewer bullet
points. Use a larger font on each. You will probably need
to make the window size smaller to allow the video file to
download quickly, and small text will be unreadable. If you
have slide animation such as bullet points sliding in, you
may need to create copies of the slide with increasing many
points showing on each one. The effects won't appear in the
sequences of slide images you load into the video editor.

Get an image file for each slide. Saving the slides as HTML
will give you a picture of each slide. (In Open
Office/Star Office, look under File>Export. )

Load the audio recording into your video editing program.

Drag the audio recording into the sound track. Edit the
audio file adjusting the volume and removing periods of
silence and extraneous material. You can do this, perhaps
better, in an audio editing program before loading it into
your video editing program.

Drag the slide pictures into your video editing program.

Drag one slide image at a time into the video track and
adjust the duration to match the audio it covers. If you
want to have a transition such as a dissolve from one slide
to the next, make the first slide last a little past the
point of transition. The next slide will start to appear
overlapped with the end of its predecessor.

Write out the video slide show file. You'll have a lot of
choices for output format. If you plan to have people view
the videos over the web, you better go for small files,
which is to say, small image size. For a DVD, you can make
them considerably larger.

Put the video slide show file up on your web site for
download or viewing, or make DVDs or digital CDs from the
file. There are plenty of companies that will duplicate
disks, label them, put them in cases with cover and side
art, and shrink-wrap them for you.

So you've just set up an Internet marketing business and
are hoping to make money by offering people products and
programs that will help them to make money by setting up an
Internet marketing business on the Internet.

You are not the only one. In fact you are probably up
against several hundred thousand competitors in this
tightly packed and very popular marketing niche. So the
question I asked in the title to this article is especially
relevant to you. If you're website looks pretty much the
same as all the others out there, why should anybody buy
anything from you and not from some other Tom, Dick or
Harry?

And why is it that so many people set up in this niche only
to fail dismally? You may have heard that 95% of all
Internet marketers fail to make any money on the Internet.
And most of those people were trying to make money in the
highly profitable "make money on the Internet" niche.

One of the reasons why so many people fail, apart from the
fact that they are lazy, incompetent, and unwilling to
learn, is that they never do enough to differentiate their
business from all the others and make it appealing.

Just take a look at the success stories, the top Internet
marketers, the ones that you always want to buy from.
What's special about them? What do they do that all the
failures fail to do?

You probably know about some of the successful marketers
that I'm talking about. You probably know their names.
You've probably seen their photographs on the Internet. You
might even have watched one of their videos or listened to
one of their sound recordings. Perhaps you have even bought
one of their unique products. Maybe you have come back for
some more and bought an affiliate product based on one of
their recommendations. Maybe you went so far as to drop
them a line to let them know how much you have learned from
them.

If my previous paragraph struck a chord with you, then I
have some good news for you. You already have the secret to
success right there before your eyes. In that paragraph I
told you everything. Really, I should sell that paragraph
to you for a few hundred dollars so that you will
appreciate how valuable it is. But I'm not going to do
that. Instead let me just lay out the key points, which are
the things that will make a difference to your Internet
marketing business. You don't have to be a marketing
genius, you don't have to be a technical whizz kid. You can
be just plain average and still make a lot of money on the
Internet if you know what to do and start heading in the
right direction.

Obviously, I can't teach you everything in this article,
but the one thing I can do is emphasise that in a
competitive market you need to differentiate your website
and your business from all the others out there. That is
what all those people who succeed on the Internet do.

Here's how they do it. Remember, I told you all this in
that one paragraph, but I'd like to lay it out plain and
clear for you in this checklist.

1. They let you know who they are. That's why you know
their names.

2. They show you who they are. That's why you seen their
photographs or have watched their videos.

3. They develop unique products which sets them apart from
each other and the rest of the competition.

4. The products they develop are highly targeted to appeal
to their market niche.

5. They offer other products, including affiliate products
to their list of customers.

6. Many people buy affiliate products from them because
they have learned to trust them.

7. They encourage interaction with their customer base,
through blogs, e-mail, Skype and other communications media.

So if you want to make a difference for your Internet
marketing business, use this quick checklist as a quick
guide for developing your own unique presence on the
Internet. If you want to succeed, you must learn to be
different; if you want to be different you must learn to
copy from those who have already succeeded. By taking these
steps you will make a big positive difference to your
Internet marketing business, no matter what your level of
skill or experience at the moment.

A self-employed professional needs to be a public speaker.
Giving away abundant, valuable information makes you the
person people think of first when they need help.

But speaking isn't enough. You need to create information
products. We used to say, "write a book," but there are
more ways to package information than that. If you hand
out free, promotional material, people will think nothing
of throwing it away. But if they pay for it, they will look
at it. If they find it valuable, they will keep it, and it
will remind them of you.

But when do you have the time to create these products?
Most of the work is already done if you record your
speeches. Here are seven ways you can use the audio
recording of your speech:

1. Sell it on CDs "back-of-the- room" at your public
speaking engagements. Some people listen to CDs during
their drive time for information, inspiration, or
motivation. A CD may be more valuable to them than a book.

2. Send it out for your CD-of-the-month club. Many people
who listen to CDs during their drive time will gladly pay
$20 a month to receive CD's. CD clubs are a good form of
"continuity income": they show an obvious benefit of
membership that arrives each month.

3. Sell the recording as a digital download. Digital
downloads have almost no cost other than processing the
credit cards.

4. Better yet, repackage them. Cut the recording into
parts, edit in a musical introduction, and use them as
podcasts. You can sell them, or give them away free as
promotions: Use them in your blog and ezine to attract
people to your web site.

5. Give the recording away as a bonus for purchasing
another product online. One way to get people to decide to
go ahead and make a purchase is to offer a collection of
premiums with high stated values.

6. Have the recording transcribed and use the material for
a book or articles. You can get an inexpensive transcript
over the web.

7. Put the recording with slides and create a digital slide
show to sell on DVDs or as a digital download. This is easy
to do, combining your slides and the recording in a free
movie editor. Unless you are a particularly dynamic speaker
slides are almost as good as seeing you, and a whole lot
cheaper than professional video production. Amateurish
video is a lot worse.

As green technology develops, the cost for energy efficient buildings is slowly coming down. The drive for energy savings in light of energy costs and environmental concerns is blossoming into a full blown industry. The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System is now the benchmark for green construction.

 

By next year, it is estimated that at least 10% of all new construction projects will be green construction under LEED certification. The current green building construction market sits at roughly $60 billion. The upcoming Waxman-Markey Bill, also known as the American Energy Act, is going to reduce the allowable energy consumption for current buildings and future construction projects. The bill would require an immediate cut of 30% in energy consumption for current constructions and then up to 50% in 5 years and finally 75% in 20 years.

 

Construction Contracts Going Forward

 

LEED certification is going to drive the green construction market as government contracts will now have energy usage clauses. Contractors will need to use the techniques set out by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) in order to stay competitive and meet proposal requirements. This change will be a significant shift in building practices that will require training and personnel with LEED certification on staff.

 

Buildings constructed under LEED guidelines use resources more efficiently and with less wasted energy than conventional structures. Certified structures also often provide a more healthy work and living environment while improving air and water quality and reducing solid waste.

 

Upfront costs for LEED certification in construction can be mitigated as the proper training programs and special material usage becomes more widespread. Reductions in building operations costs will also return that upfront cost and provide long term savings. Early studies are suggesting that an investment of 2% upfront will yield ten times that amount over the life cycle of the building. These reasons, combined with the environmental impact, are the reason why government contracts are going to begin mandating these practices.

 

Current Building Energy Usage

 

Projects to bring existing buildings into compliance are going to explode within a few short years. Less than 10% of existing corporate structures are currently undergoing renovation to meet the new standards, the other 90% will soon be following suit. In order to meet the proposed bill, a total auditing program is needed to assess opportunities to save energy in existing businesses and homes without compromising the durability and usability of the structure. Energy audit training is quickly going to become paramount in the building renovation market.

 

The Building Performance Institute (BPI) is a national organization that has established procedures for analyzing and correcting issues in building energy usage. Energy audit training programs that train personnel for their BPI certification will give contractors a lead in being able to perform green renovations and secure future contracts.

 

LEED certification and energy audit training leading to BPI certification are the tools that builders will need to utilize in the coming years to meet government regulations and be awarded government contracts. Investing in the training and certification programs now gives those who are looking forward a head start in securing a stake in the growing green construction market.