A motivational speaker just might inspire you!

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When you are struggling to set up your business, or pursue a new line of work, or face challenges and difficulties in your professional or business life, motivation can be in short supply when you head to the office each morning. It’s sometimes difficult to remember the reason you wanted to do it this way, or that. All you see is the high mountain in front of you.

It’s at times like these that you need to find your inspiration again. You need to rediscover your original vision. You need to refocus on the longer term goals, and forget the day to day drudgery. On days like these, and not a few others, a motivational speaker may be your salvation in the ‘business’ and ‘career’ sense of the word! Either in book form, or in person, a date with Mark Hughes might be just the medicine the doctor ordered.

This post has been inspired and motivated by Mark Hughes!

Dogs 2007: Attractive Armchair Investing!

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Dogs of the Dow has been attractive to me for quite a while, because it is a strategy that values beaten down but still mainstream large cap U.S. companies. Right now, there are companies in there that represent sectors for the U.S. economy, e.g. for many years Philip Morris (a.k.a. Altria) was down beaten and undervalued. But it achieved a great turn around, had 5%-6% dividends for years, and finally cleared itself of its legal troubles. Result: this year achieved new highs, and made those patient investors a tidy sum in the meantime. Perhaps even a double of the stock price, plus years of dividends.

Right now, the Telecoms sector has been hugely undervalued. In the Small Dogs, I believe that they may represent good opportunities for the careful investor.

2006 Results

Not including dividends. Approx 16% Not a bad year, if you had bought all 10!

2006 Dogs of the Dow 13.74%
Dow Jones Industrial Average 3.35%
S&P 500 1.41%
Nasdaq -6.58%
Russell 2000 1.15%

So, this might be a very good strategy for those who aren’t into active trading.

Google Page Rank: Ups and downs…

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Google regularly updates its page rank every quarter or so. So naturally, any changes are anticipated widely by bloggers all over the world! But things change, and so does a PR Rank!? Did you check yours recently?

Well, I hadn’t checked my stats for a while. I checked today in the Google Toolbar, and noted that my blog had dropped from a ‘5’ to a ‘4’. Naturally, I was disappointed, because I had come to expect my ‘5’ as a kind of right. This change highlighted how dynamic PR rank actually is. In other words, bloggers need to continue working on their blogs, linking, commenting, and promoting their blog in little ways and, sometimes, in bigger ways.

Actually, my blog fell, because I actually hived off a large part of my blog in early August, but the PR ranking remained at 5, while Google’s search engines kept reporting 404’s on many pages. That issue slowly resolved itself as Google’s search engines crawled my site. Unfortunately, the site to which the majority of my blog moved has remained uncrawled for sometime, and still doesn’t show up properly. I think my recent decision to start a new URL may help this as I switch over to the new site.

I will have to get my act together and work on the promotion of my website(s)!