Hey working stiff! Yeah you, with the aching back from working too hard and the puffy eyes from not getting enough sleep. Do you like being used and abused? Do you like slaving away your life filling the pocket of someone else while your pockets are always empty?

Such is the plight of the employed! Remember when there was a lower class, middle class, and upper class? Now there are just the rich and the working poor. Exploitation is the name of the game for the rich. People working for them just keep getting poorer and poorer because working men and women are denied proper compensation.

Workers get paid less and less so the boss can get more and more. Massive and ever increasing profit is all that matters to the boss. Workers are not cared about at all. If a machine could replace you then you would be replaced.

Have you seen your job go overseas? It is because paying you peanuts is not cheap enough. Penny paychecks with no benefits are the best they give you, but they don’t want to give you anything. According to them, you should just be proud to be part of their team, giving excellent service so the company can keep rolling in the profits to fill the big fat pockets of the boss. Work like a dog, you lucky dog! Then die broke like a dog! It is because we get treated like animals that 95% of all Americans die broke.

It is a sad fact that workers deserve better treatment than what they are getting today. They are making the American dream possible, not for themselves, but for their boss. Consider this, when the rate of inflation goes up but your wages do not, that means you are making less money year after year. Your job is taking you down into the gutter. Soon as the job has gotten as much as it can out of you, it will toss you away like trash.

Why cater to a demeaning job that does not respect you. In order to get the respect you deserve, you need an alternative to a job. You need to take care of number one. No! Number one is not your boss like you were programmed to think! Number one is you. Putting yourself first is the best thing you can do for yourself. It also makes you unemployable!

Unemployable is good. It shows you have the self-esteem not to be pushed around and told what to do. Would you be the master of your time, your money, and your life? If so, work for yourself. Run your own business. Get the full rewards of being at the top and in control. Have the leverage of tax breaks and receiving the lion’s share of money. Invest the money and make even more money. Yes! Your own business! That is what makes people wealthy!

This article is based on the assumption that you are using a word processing program of some kind in a Windows environment. If you are not using a word processor, the principles will still apply, but they must be implemented manually.

Writing and editing are two totally different tasks. Writing is a creative process, whether the work is fiction or non-fiction. Editing is a critical process. If writers attempt to edit as they write, their creative ability is inhibited. Because each task demands a very specific focus each must be handled separately. Editing should not start until the writing task is completed.

When editing your own work, your eye and mind tend to either fill in, or correct, many errors and, as a result, they are left uncorrected in the manuscript. In order to avoid this, it helps to break any patterns used in creating the original work. If at all possible, the work to be edited should be allowed to “cool off” in a file or desk drawer for a while. The purpose of this is to break the connection between the work and the writers’ remembrance of the exact words and phrasing used. An additional technique used for breaking this connection is to reformat the work. This can be done by changing the margins, font face and font size, line spacing, etc. This should be an easy task for any word processor.

When saving your work as you edit, the product of each editing session should be saved with a different name. If your original work was called “manuscript.doc,” your first save should be called “manuscript1.doc.” This means you will always be able to go back and check your original page setup.

If the task of editing is broken down into four (4) steps it becomes less of an onerous task and the result is a much more thorough job.

Step 1:

Run your spell checker without the grammar checker. This seems like the most obvious step however the spell checker can only do part of the job. It will check every word against an internal dictionary and highlight or underline in red, those words that it doesn’t find in its dictionary. That means that if you spelled the word “too” and meant to use the world “to” your spell checker will accept either because they are both correct as far as it is concerned.

Spell checkers are normally set to NOT CHECK capitalized words or names, or words with numbers. Ignore these names on your first pass and just correct any misspelled words brought up by the spell checker.

On a second pass with the spell checker, not only verify the spelling of the proper nouns, but also make a note of the correct spelling on a separate piece of paper or in another program. The easiest way to do this is to boot up a text program and multi-task - switching between your manuscript and the text program. This will enable you to quickly verify the spelling of a proper noun throughout your work.

Step 2:

Run the grammar checker. Almost every word processing program has the ability to check grammar and will allow the user to establish both the type of work to be checked along with the specific grammar rules that are to be used during the check. You can set these parameters to fit your need, but remember that your writing style is most important. Don’t let the grammar-check program dictate what your style should be. As you go through your manuscript, make those changes, which are obvious problems, such as punctuation, run-on sentences, subject and verb agreement, etc. Don’t change your writing style to fit the grammar-checker.

Step 3:

If your manuscript includes dialog, it should be checked for problems with syntax and general usage. The best way to do this is to have someone else read the dialog, out loud, with no voice inflection. Your ear will uncover problems with dialog better than your eye. If you don’t have someone else to work with, you will do almost as well by reading the dialog out loud and recording it on some kind of recording device. When you play the dialog back, you will discover problems that your eyes overlooked.

In reviewing writing where there is no dialog, check each paragraph for focus. Is it lean and direct, or are there words that can be removed that will provide a clearer structure? Since this type of problem involves a broader discourse on writing techniques, we can only refer you to the vast number of books on writing that are available for almost every writing project.

Step 4:

Check the overall appearance of your work for uniformity. Have you used the same font face and point size throughout? Is the first line of each paragraph indented the same number of spaces? Is your line spacing consistent? Are your margins consistent? On of the beauties of a good word processor is that once you establish the rules for “page setup” and a “normal” paragraph, and use them throughout your work, you can change the appearance of your entire manuscript by simply changing the settings of either or both rules. This can be extremely helpful if you are submitting the manuscript to several organizations, each of which has different formatting requirements.

Conclusion.

If you follow the 4 steps listed above, editing your own writing will be much less difficult and the result will be greatly improved.

There are many direct sales and multi-level companies around and it is difficult to choose.

As we are now in the 21st century the internet can no longer be ignored by these companies, nor can the strength of their distributorship to use this medium to increase sales.

I have recently built my entire organization using my website and an auto-responder giving details of how to sign up, all set up automatically. I have only spoken to a few people directly about the opportunity and they were people who had questions about how to submit their application forms.

Using the internet as your opening speech has to be the way of the future. It saves you as the distributor untold hours of attending meetings, doing presentations, only to get a no at the end. It is a waste of your time which is the most valuable resource any of us have.

A well structured website does this for you. It answers all the questions a prospect may have, presents the company and the opportunity and offers sign up then and there. A one stop shop.

This way, it is the prospect who is using their time to invest in their own future, not you using your time, to hopefully convince someone to join you.

It is less personal if your prospect does not want to join you. They take a good look at the site and either sign up or not. No sweat. It is easier for them to ‘reject’ it.

My prospects are given a series of emails that explains the company details a little more than the website, even though the site does a really good job of that, and then sends them the form to fill in and send back. I have a 7-10% success rate which I think is pretty good.

I would urge other MLM companies to consider allowing distributors to utilize the technology rather than keep a cloak and dagger over what the opportunity actually is. This is more frustrating to people especially as internet users and consumers are much more sophisticated to today’s marketing techniques. If I give my email address then I’m exposed to whatever sort of information they want to send me. If you ‘make’ someone give you information before you give information, I can guarantee you that today, that prospect is just going to walk away.

If you don’t have the courage or ability to explain what your opportunity is openly and in a straight forward manner up front, your trust rating goes to zero and that prospect is going to move on to the next big thing who has the courage to do so.

I don’t believe that any MLM or direct sales company can afford not to move with the times, especially those that still rely on party presentations as their sole avenue for obtaining sales.

At the very least, allow distributors to have an email party. So easily done and much more effective. Can you imagine, for a minute, if you emailed everyone on your list and told them you were having a catalogue email party, take a look at xxxxx page and send me your order, how many more orders you are likely to get rather than having to get somebody at a place, at a certain time, with peer pressure to buy? Think about it.

As more and more consumers choose to shop online for all kinds of services, it makes sense that the direct sales community move with that opportunity and tap into those potential sales.

There is a world of potential available to you on MySpace, if you are looking for a way to network, and to promote your business or your website. There are unlimited options available to you with this advertising and networking medium, because there are no costs involved with creating a profile, and from there, there are a world of possibilities.

Creating a MySpace profile for your business will bring about a lot of free exposure, opportunities for networking, and the potential for tons of growth. There is more to taking advantage of MySpace for networking than simply creating a profile and hoping that people will see it. Consider the following a primer on getting starter, an introduction to the world of MySpace marketing.

If you want your profile to stand out and to attract people to it, there are some fairly basic things that you will need to keep in mind. For example, one of the most important things is that your profile must be quick and easy to load, because nobody wants to navigate through slow-loading animations and various other unnecessary elements.

Another factor worth considering is to keep the website simple, using easy-to-read fixed backgrounds to avoid any possible visual distractions. You should also try to avoid using filler in all of the descriptions on your MySpace profile page, by including as many facts as possible in as small a space as you can. You can easily expand upon your profile by highlighting information via the blog feature.

Your profile should include as much information about your company as you feel is pertinent, so that a browser will know everything that they need to know after visiting a single time. When it comes to inviting friends, you should look for users who have interests relating to your business, or browse the friends lists of profiles which are similar to yours.

There is no harm in adding as many friends as you would like, because they still have the opportunity to accept or decline your invitation. The more friends you add to your list, the more exposure you will receive because not only will your new friends be browsing your MySpace profile, but so will their friends!

There are many ways to market your products and business without spamming users on MySpace. MySpace has a wonderful feature called ‘Bulletin’, which allows you to post messages which are broadcast to every person on your friends list. You can also do a great deal of advertising through your blog, simply by talking about the products or your business in detail.

Users can subscribe to your blog to ensure that they are remaining up to date on your business’ progress. You also have the power to leave comments on the profiles of other users, but this is one of the more spammy options because you generally should not want to leave advertisements on other people’s profiles.

The best way to advertise using your MySpace profile is simply to keep your profile up to date, broadcast news about your business using the Bulletin feature, and share details about projects and your business in general through the blog. You are guaranteed to gain a lot of network contacts and interested people simply through keeping your profile friendly, easy to read and up to date.

A popular method of advertising on MySpace has been to create dummy accounts, dressed up to look like real accounts but with the addition of a large amount of spamming. This is a very bad idea, because once MySpace administrators wise up, you will more than likely find yourself banned from the website. There is no reason to go overboard, because MySpace is all about networking, browsing profiles and meeting new people, so you are sure to make a great deal of new friends, simply by providing a profile that is worth looking at.

In conclusion, if you are not already utilizing MySpace as a networking and advertising medium, you are seriously missing out on a great deal of exposure. Create a profile for your business and your products today, and you will find the interest in your company growing exponentially in no time!