4 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Regret Your Past Decisions

Regret is often the outcome of failure. Sometimes it is the result of a poor decision. Sometimes it’s a hard lesson learned. Regret, at its core, is an emotion. But you do not have to feel regret at all when you think of your past decisions that turned out less than stellar. You might even need to be thankful that it happened.

 

Character Building

 

Failure, poor decisions, or whatever, it all builds character. Our character is continuously changed and shaped throughout our lifetime. The only way to do that is through experience. The experiences you have, good and bad, will ultimately build your character in a better and stronger version of what you started with.

 

There’s a Reason for Everything

 

“Everything happens for a reason” is super cliché, but it’s the truth. Be it a bad relationship or a misstep on an important work or school assignment, there is a reason why it happened. Sometimes that reason is just learning a lesson (start early on a big project), or maybe that bad relationship allowed you to meet the love of your life. When regret weighs heavy, take a step back and look at the big, interlocking picture of your life.

 

Lessons Learned

 

We all have to learn lessons. That’s just a fact of life. Instead of regretting every past decision, look back at all the lessons you have learned and the wisdom you now have to move forward more prepared than when you started. Be thankful for the opportunity to learn.

 

Success Isn’t Free

 

No success is free. For every achievement you see, someone somewhere had to pay for it. So, you might as well pay for your own success. For every failure you experience in life, every regret you feel to your bones, you are that much closer to succeeding, to having paid your dues, learned your lessons, and having every tool you need in your toolbox to make your success happen.

 

Regret and success are fickle creatures. You cannot have one without the other. However, sometimes we become so caught up in the woes of remorse that we can’t see the success just over the horizon or that with every failure, we have marked off another way not to succeed. Reframing your regret will open up a new world of possibilities for your past decisions and your future self. 

 

A Successful Career Change Means Getting Uncomfortable

Most human beings cling to comfort, though science has proven that when you step outside of your comfort zone, that is where the most significant achievement takes place. If it weren't for taking uncertain steps out into a scary world, we would still be living in caves and throwing rocks at dinosaurs, waiting around for someone to discover fire. Thomas Alva Edison would never have given us the light bulb, and we probably wouldn't know that bacon goes great with everything.

 

Thinking about changing careers can be scary. 

 

Most people just stay right where they are, because they are frightened by the possibility of failure. Since they have their family to provide for, they make the justification that they shouldn't tempt fate, since moving to a new career might not turn out so well. So that person sticks with their current career even though they are not happy, years later wondering "what could have been."

 

If You Never Step Outside of Your Comfort Zone, How Do You Know What You Are Truly Capable Of?

 

Sports records fall every day because athletes keep pushing themselves. They are not happy with their current level of achievement. They want to know how good they can be, so they train and work very hard. They push themselves out of their comfort zone, their regular training regimen. They lift heavier weights, work out longer, and run faster. The result of becoming uncomfortable, training as they have never trained before, is new personal bests and sometimes world records.

 

This is because of something known as the Yerkes-Dodson Law. Dodson and Yerkes were a couple of psychologists who, in the earliest years of the 20th century, discovered that stress leads to achievement. What they found was that significant achievement did not happen until a person took small steps outside of the environment, surroundings, and behaviors where he felt most comfortable.

 

Small Steps Lead to Big Change

 

They noted that when someone was put in an entirely uncomfortable, stressful environment, performance was horrible. However, taking small steps outside of a person's comfort zone slowly began to expand the area where that person was happy and comfortable. Over time, it becomes easier and easier to take on new tasks and expose yourself to unfamiliar experiences.

 

If your job is killing you, physically or mentally, maybe you should switch careers. Don't take a giant leap, take a baby step instead. Rather than immediately moving from one career to another, why not take a part-time job in a career that interests you? Maybe you can sign up for classes or certification in some field that has captured your attention. These small steps outside of your comfort zone will eventually give you the confidence to move onto an entirely different career if your current field of employment is not working out.

 

Create Your Own Unique Measuring Stick When Changing Careers

Far and away, the most popular reason someone usually gives for wanting to change their careers is to make more money. Money is a necessity. It is what modern societies have come to agree upon as a method for determining the value of things that may or may not be similar. You need it to keep a roof over your head, provide for your family, and put food on the table.

 

The most common way of earning money is employment. You work a job for an individual or a company, and they pay you a certain amount of money for your time and efforts. Because just about everyone is familiar with the concept of money, and it is such an important aspect of our daily lives, it makes sense that this would be a motivating factor for changing jobs or careers.

 

Another reason given for switching careers is a desire to be recognized for the work that you do. You may be looking for power or fame, or simply want less stress and more free time in your life. Those are all common reasons you may be thinking about entering a new field of employment.

 

Maybe you should think again.

 

Far too often, people get caught up in traditional or conventional ways of thinking. You think a particular way because you were taught to believe that way. The clothes you wear and the food you eat are often heavily influenced by what advertisers tell you is popular or cool. If you enjoy wearing a particular shirt, pair of pants, or shoes because you like how they look and feel on you, then by all means, wear that particular item of clothing.

 

However, you should think about where your motivation comes from.

 

Do you want to buy a particular pair of shoes because they are all the rage right now? That may not be the best reason for making a purchase. What happens in a few months when some other type of shoe is the new fashion "must-have," and your current shoes are uncool? You can ask yourself the same question regarding switching careers.

 

Is the reason you are thinking about entering a new field about more money or more free time? You may believe that is exactly what you want. Ask yourself though, is it really? If you enjoy your job but money is a problem, could you sit down and work out a budget that made more sense for you? This could reveal sources of savings which would meet your financial desires, and you could keep a job you liked.

 

There is nothing wrong with using a traditional measure of success as a reason for changing careers. Just make sure that whatever yardstick you use to measure success in your life takes into account your unique personality, desires, and goals.

 

Streamline Your Expenses to Prepare for a Career Change

Swapping one career for another can be incredibly stressful. That is the best-case scenario. Sometimes, the mental fatigue and anxiety experienced when considering moving to another area of employment can lead to physical and mental health problems. The last thing you should be doing is adding to your stress.

 

This means you should have your finances in order before you decide to start upon an entirely new career path.

 

You should already have a budget that you follow religiously. If you don't, start one now. Write down every single outgoing expense and every bit of income. Look for ways to streamline your outgoings, and improve your income. If there is no way you can earn more money, just cut back on your expenses. This will account for automatic savings, which can present a nice cushion if your career change doesn't offer the immediate financial rewards you're looking for.

 

When switching careers, it is common for you to have to start out earning less money than you are now. This is not always the case, but it is much of the time. Having a year's worth of living expenses tucked away gives you the peace of mind to dedicate your mental energy to succeed in your new career. You won't be worrying at the end of the month how you are going to pay your bills.

 

You may also decide to take on a part-time job to make some extra money. 

 

If you do this, try to get employment that will teach you skills and abilities useful in your new career. A part-time job makes you money two different ways. Obviously, you get paid for your labor. Also, if you are spending a few evenings each week working, those are not nights you are out and about spending money.

 

You may have an opportunity to move into a smaller home or apartment. If this makes sense for you, by all means, do it. Cutting down on your monthly rent or mortgage is a fast way to free up some substantial money. Have a garage sale, or sell some of your possessions online. If you like gardening, start a backyard garden and sell your produce at a local farmers' market.

 

If you're serious about changing careers, you don't need a lack of money to make the situation harder than it already will be. Ask yourself some hard questions about the money you spend, and see if you can generate any new income. In just 6 and 12 months you could set aside enough money to keep your mental focus on your new career, instead of worrying about your finances.

 

How to Determine the "Big Why" Behind Your Desire to Change Careers

Human beings are excellent at adapting to new environments. We have powerful brains and capable bodies, and the way we are hardwired allows us to succeed in unfamiliar areas if we have to. This inherent ability sometimes leads us to question our current career path. You may have done this yourself. You are pretty confident that you can succeed in some other career, because your current occupation doesn't reward you financially, mentally, or in some other way that you desire.

 

You should always be looking for ways to better yourself, physically and mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Some people decide to bounce from one career to another for purely financial reasons. Your motivation may be to spend more time with your family or to retire at a younger age. If you are seriously considering changing careers, you may have a new field of employment in mind.

 

Don't leave your current career until you understand the "Big Why" behind your desire to move on.

 

Find a quiet room in your house where you feel comfortable. Don't try this practice at work. Wait until you have some free time to yourself. Take a few deep breaths and clear your thoughts. Then ask yourself this simple question, "Why do I want to change careers?"

 

Your first answer is going to be a knee-jerk reaction. It is going to be something that people traditionally leave jobs and careers for. One of the most popular reasons for seeking a new occupation is to make more money. If that was your answer to this question, that could be a very valid reason, but it is far from your deep-down desire for a career change.

 

The next step in the process is to ask yourself, "Why do I want to make more money?" You may answer that you are tired of being broke all the time, and living paycheck to paycheck. Now it is time to ask yourself, "Why am I tired of being broke all the time?" You may finally say to yourself that you hate being broke because it makes you feel like a failure, and you will never be able to travel and see the world, which has been a lifelong dream.

 

That is a real "Big Why"!

 

In the beginning, you thought consciously that you only wanted to change careers to make more money. Money has very little to do with it, other than money is the vehicle which will allow you to travel and see the world. This is "why" you want to make more money. You only discovered this as your main motivating factor when you kept asking yourself "why" after each successive answer.

 

Sit down and ask yourself why you are considering moving from one career to another. 

 

Your initial answer is not going to be your true motivation or desire. After each successive answer keep asking yourself why you feel that way. Eventually, you will discover your "Big Why." This is the emotion-driven motivation that you need to never forget. Write it down on a piece of paper and carry it with you, looking at it several times a day. This will give you the focus and courage to make the career change necessary to realize your most important dreams and desires.

 

Web Hosting Companies

With thousands of web hosting companies in the market it can be difficult if not impossible to know which web site hosting companies truly provide an excellent hosting solution at an excellent price. When you have an established domain name with a good web hosting company, you can get reports on your traffic and which of your pages your customers are visiting most often, as well as many other statistics.

 

Your web host will charge you a fee for monthly service that ranges from $10 or $20 to the more expensive $50.00 per month. Plan to pay between $300 and $500 per year to your web host.

 

Always avoid free or very inexpensive web hosting services, because you may experience bouts of server downtimes and you are likely to have significant limitations in storage, number of email addresses, FTP upload etc.

 

Be sure your web host can accommodate e-commerce and storefronts, wireless capability, bogs, forums, chats, online interactive helps and anything else you want to add onto your site.

 

Estimate what your growth needs are and ensure that this web host can serve you as you grow. The last thing you want to do is change host mid way unless you absolutely have to do so.

 

Check your bandwidth capability to be sure that, if your website traffic grows rapidly, your customers will not have to wait to download or view information. Three things to look for in a web hosting company are:

 

1. Excellent Customer Support: Your hosting provider should be there for you 24/7 and give you instant access to the technicians you need to solve your problem. Ask them how long it takes for them to typically respond to your problem. A good test is to call them in the mid night to check if you get to a live, level 3 support. 

 

2. A Sound Infrastructure: Check whether they offer a multi-homed network powered by multiple bandwidth providers to ensure redundancy. Some offer a 100% guarantee on its network availability or network uptime. 

 

3. Financial Stability: If you're running very critical operations, you can't afford to be with a hosting company that may not be in business in a few months.

 

How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.    

 

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders. 

 

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

 

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

 

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

 

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

 

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices. 

 

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

 

Keyword Density

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

 

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

 

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

 

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = 0.05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

 

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

 

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

 

Simple steps to check the density:

• Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.

• Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.

• Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.

• When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.

• Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

Must-Have Features Your Web Site

Just don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles.

 

The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

 

Understanding Your Target Customer

 

If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customer, you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

 

Does your website give enough contact information? 

 

When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hours a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.

Some Other Keyword Research Tools

One need to choose those keywords that are frequently searched for and which is in high demand, but not being already used by many other websites and competitors, and thus has low competition. There are a number of keyword research tools that can help you find them.

 

Apart from the Wordtracker which was already discussed in an other article, we have some more equally important research tools like the Overture, Google AdWords Keyword and Guidebeam. 

 

Overture's keyword suggestion tool is free and much quicker to use than Wordtracker. It works more like the Wordtracker but doesn't tell you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase. For example, if you type ‘Computer’, the Overture search suggestion tool will tell you that during the last month the word ‘Computer’ was searched, say for example 459550 times at Overture.Com. Similarly, 'computer game' was searched 302210 times. Also, given one word it will tell you all relevant combinations of that word, which are based on actual searches done by people. If the word you keyed in is not a common search term then you will not get any results. It means that very few people have actually searched for that word during the last month.

 

Even Google Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaign and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends. Features of this tool include:

• Sorting the results of your desired keyword search by popularity, past performance history within the AdWords system, cost, and predicted ad position.

• Easy keyword manipulation where you can select a few keywords here and there or add them all at once.

• Searches for keywords present even in any webpage URL specified by your search. It can also expand your keyword search even further to include those pages that are linked to or from the original URL page.

• More keyword results are generated based on regularly updated usage statistics database. This helps you to get new keywords or phrases.

 

Guidebeam is an interesting resource. Type in a phrase and it will suggest a large number of related searches. The numbers generated against each phrase are Guidebeam's estimation of how relevant that phrase is.

 

These softwares are useful for researching how people search the web and then optimizing your own web pages so that more people find your web site.