Category: Lloyd’s Rants & Observations

A.D.D. The Curse or Gift Of The Entrepreneur
What have the following people got in common?
- Richard Branson
- Prince Charles
- The Osbourne clan – Ozzy, Kelly and Jack
- Billy Connelly
- Guy Ritchie
- Most Entrepreneurs I know
They have all been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder or A.D.D.

You will also find that most entrepreneurs, whether they know it or admit it or not also have ADD to varying degrees.

Although I have known for some time that I have it, I had never really done been tested. Googling ‘online ADD test’ brought up a whole lot of sites that offer free tests. Some are much more in depth than others and after trawling through them all I ended up doing 3 different tests on 3 different sites. To be fair most of them were pretty much the same questions but they all came up with the same result and, as I suspected, I have severe ADD which has got worse as I have gotten older.

It is hard for people, who don’t have ADD, to understand why I cannot clear up my desk, paint a wall properly or reorganise a cupboard. After all, they are pretty simple tasks you would think.

I am able to work out complicated formulae on spreadsheets, write database code (well I used to), did the theory and learnt to fly a light aircraft and got my certificate for chart-work and navigation at sea (that was dammed hard to do) when I was learning to scuba dive. Yet, I find it impossible to keep a diary or just one notebook, writing things down in places I am destined never to see again!

It is difficult to comprehend what makes these apparently simple tasks things so hard to do and I myself get so annoyed and frustrated at the fact that I am so forgetful and get easily distracted, ending up doing several things at once and never finishing any of them.

I go off on a tangent when I am talking and often do not end a sentence. Leaving people guessing what it was I was about to say.

When someone once described autism to me, they explained that they are unable to filter the noise around them. They hear the everything all around them at once, in one large cacophony of sound and cannot focus on one thing whereas our brains can zoom in on one person speaking in a crowd or listen to the TV when the kids are playing in the same room or we can simply ‘switch off’.

This perfectly describes someone with ADD however it is not the noise we cannot filter out it is thoughts and ideas. We play through situations in our heads, internally verbalising conversations or visualising situations that we might have and go over numerous outcomes. One idea leads to a million others and we get so excited and enthusiastic about a new project, only to have forgotten what it was the following morning.

We are prone to the shiny object syndrome as we lose interest in things so easily.

Those that know me joke about it and are used to me by now, especially my wife. How she manages to put up with me is beyond me. The lady is an angel.

Now, don’t get me wrong it is not all bad, we come up with amazing ideas, think outside of the box, solve complex problems with ease and tend to be great motivators of others around us. If we have a good team around us in our business and home then life can be great.

We go about things with an almost manic enthusiasm, driving things forward and are generally a force to be reckoned with.

Nothing gets in our way or softens our resolve in the early days. However, we get it so far and then a switch goes off inside and we are then ready to move on to the next thing.

This is when, if our project is to be a success, it is imperative to have a great team of people around us to keep the momentum going and take care of the details.

It is like a rocket taking off we love the excitement of the take off and initial launch but, once we are in orbit, we lose interest and looking for the next rocket to get into.

Over the years I have come to terms with it and do not get as frustrated as I once did and I have also developed skills and habits to overcome the problems. Not with 100% success more like 60% if I am to be honest but, I am happy with that and every day I try to improve a little more but, if I fail, I don’t beat myself up about it.

So, is it a curse or a gift. Well I think it is a bit of both. I am quite good in social situations and have done quite well in my business and personal life, although like my school report used to say, “Could do better” I think it is a gift if you have others around you that understand and can make up for your weaknesses which fortunately I do.

It also helps that I recognise that I have it and once I knew this was a great relief to me as I finally understood and was able to start looking for ways to help myself and do something about it. 🙂

I do get pi***d off at times and frustrated at the stupid mistakes and forgetfulness and my inability to create a routine and my lack of willpower. Not that I have read that being easily lead is a symptom, I feel happier blaming it on ADD then accepting responsibility or admitting I have another fault 😉

If you think that you may suffer from A.D.D then read the questions below and see how many questions you answer yes to?

1. I have difficulty getting organised.

2. When given a task, I usually procrastinate rather than doing it right away.

3. I work on a lot of projects, but can’t seem to complete most of them.

4. I tend to make decisions and act on them impulsively — like spending money, getting sexually involved with someone, diving into new activities, and changing plans.

5. I get bored easily.

6. No matter how much I do or how hard I try, I just can’t seem to reach my goals.

7. I often get distracted when people are talking; I just tune out or drift off.

8. I get so wrapped up in some things I do that I can hardly stop to take a break or switch to doing something else.

9. I tend to overdo things even when they’re not good for me — like compulsive shopping, drinking too much, overworking, and overeating.

10. I get frustrated easily and I get impatient when things are going too slowly.

11. My self-esteem is not as high as that of others I know.

12. I need a lot of stimulation from things like action movies and video games, new purchases, being among lively friends, driving fast or engaging in extreme sports.

13. I tend to say or do things without thinking, and sometimes that gets me into trouble.

14. I’d rather do things my own way than follow the rules and procedures of others.

15. I often find myself tapping a pencil, swinging my leg, or doing something else to work off nervous energy.

16. I can feel suddenly depressed when I’m separated from people, projects or things that I like to be involved with.

17. I cant sit still for five minutes.

18. Even though I worry a lot about dangerous things that are unlikely to happen to me, I tend to be careless and accident prone.

19. Even though I have a lot of fears, people would describe me as a risk taker.

20. I make a lot of careless mistakes.

21. I have mood swings whilst I can be happy as Larry one minute, I can be equally down the next.

22. My mind goes at 100 miles per hour and I have trouble relaxing.

23 When I am reading a book, I find that my mind has wandered and I have to go back and read the whole page again.

24. I get very excited and enthusiastic about ideas

If you answered yes to 15 of these questions, it is likely that you may have attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyper disorder (ADD ADHD).

However, you can still have ADHD even if you answered yes to fewer than 15 of these questions. This informal test is intended as a general guide only.

If you think that you may have ADD then could consult with a Doctor and ask about an ADHD test.

There are drug treatments available which can help people concentrate better in really severe cases but, if you are in adulthood and have lived with it for this long then you are probably more than capable of dealing with it without any form of medication (apart from a nice bottle of Rioja or two on occasion and the jack daniels and coke).

The medication can have really bad side effects and there are a number of techniques that you can use to help keep it under control and, in the next article, I will write about some of these techniques and tools that I use to help me keep my ADD under control and enable me to get things done.

Now, what was it I was doing before I started this post?????
Tsu – A Social Network That Actually PAYS YOU To Be Social?

A Social Network That Actually PAYS YOU To Be Social???

Facebook and Twitter are making money off of your content. Every time you upload a video, write a great post or even share a selfie, they profit — and profit BIG. Facebook reported $3.6 billion in ad revenue last quarter.

But imagine a world where every time a social network made money from your content, you got paid. Wouldn’t that be a better, more fair world?

We now live in that world

Tsu.co is the first social network that actually pays you to create content and engage with your network. In fact, they share 90% of their ad revenue with their members.

And yes, you get royalties when the people you refer earn as well.

The site looks great, too! Check out what my Tsu page looks like:

To start with we thought it sounded like a scam or a pyramid scheme. So we started researching the site.

Big name sites like MacWorld, ZDNet and ABCNews have had favourable write-ups about it.

It also has a Wikipedia page. It started in September of 2014 and reached 1 million users in 5 weeks (it took Facebook 10 months to reach that number). Now, less than one year later, it has more than 5 million members.

And that includes famous members like New York Knicks basketball star Carmelo Anthony, rapper 50 Cent, the Make-A-Wish Foundation and more!

But it’s not just famous people making money with Tsu!

In fact, an article at The New York Observer said that “one mother of four named Kimberly Hendersen began making hundreds of dollars every day when a video she posted of her signing her daughter to sleep went viral. Now, she has a record deal lined up.”

Sound more legit now?

The way Tsu works is simple: the network understands that what makes them money is ad revenue.

The more people interacting on their site and seeing the ads and clicking through, the more money they make.

(Facebook is well aware of this, too, they just don’t pay you anything for making them billions of dollars even though you’re helping them do it.)

So to encourage you to do all of your social networking on Tsu instead of Facebook or the other networks, they decided to share that revenue with their members. Here’s an infographic showing how that works:

Click on the image to enlarge it

It just makes sense. The users are the ones making the network the money, so to encourage you to create compelling content that gets the ads on the network seen, the network pays you when your content reaches more people!

This is not a new concept. There are lots of sites that pay the people who create the content based on the page views and ad revenue. This is just the first social network to do it. And with 5+ million users and growing fast, it’s on a clear path to success.

But there’s a catch!

(Don’t worry, it’s not a big catch.) The “catch” is that you can only sign up for an account through somebody else. That’s logical, given the nature of Tsu’s business model.

Tsu holds serious appeal because it actually rewards me for being an active member. It will reward you, too!

So click the link below to go to my Tsu page and create your own account. Then invite your friends, family and contacts from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, your email list — wherever — and start getting paid to keep in touch with people!

It just makes more sense. If you’re going to be active on a social network, be active on the one that pays you to do so.

Here’s the link: www.tsu.co/lloydh
The 6 Degrees of Separation – My Connection To Royalty

Putting Your Self Out There In Your Niche

It is said that everyone is only six steps or fewer away from anybody else on this planet!

It is known as the “Six Degrees Of Separation” and is a theory that was developed in 1929.

It is hypothesised that by way of introduction that any two people can be connected by a chain “a friend of a friend” statements in a maximum of 6 steps. Meaning we are never more than 6 steps away from anyone else.

The more famous the person is then the more likely it is that it will be significantly less than 6.

This a mind boggling concept when you think of it, but what use or interest is that to me and how are you connected to Roylaty?

I am glad you asked.. Let me explain.

The World is a Smaller Place

Whilst in modern days the World has billions of people in it, this theory is now more likely to be true due to the way we can now travel and communicate. Shrinking our world and making it even easier to make that connection.

If you were to compartmentalise people into groups or niches, then this number becomes even less.

Bearing that in mind, it should be relatively easy for you to become known in your particular niche, in a very short space of time. Weeks, day or even hours is possible.

This is especially true if you can stand out from the crowd and get yourself noticed.

Why is That Good For You?

If you want to make money online then you have to get known in your market place. You need to be the go to ‘Guy, ‘Gal’ or Company that people think of when they want buy your product or service.

Whilst it takes some planning, thought and effort, there has never been a better or easier time to get yourself known in a specific niche than right now!

If you are seen to be knowledgeable on your topic, over delivering content and providing huge value, going above and beyond. You don’t have to spend hours writing content, it is just as valuable to post a link to a youtube video showing someone how to setup hosting or register a domain, which takes a few minutes, as it is to spend hours helping someone change their name servers or adding WordPress theme and plugins for them.

Having a great sense of humour and making us laugh or even being controversial, saying things that people think but don’t often say or that stir up emotion one way or another.

Adding a valuable comment, critique or your two pennies worth to a blog post (rather than great post) will also get noticed and, if it is interesting and informative, you may well also get a click to your own websites or blog.

Note: Playing the controversial card can backfire and have a negative affect. There is a difference between being controversial and being insulting or rude, which might get you known, but it won’t help you in your business.

A lot of profitable niches may have a huge number of people interested or participating in these arenas but there will only be a relatively small number of very well known people in that niche.

The reason is that most people who join these clubs, groups, forums, blogs and other medium do so to learn, acquire news or information or to participate or follow in conversations and viewpoints.

In reality very few of them are seen to be influencers or leaders in their specific topic. very few of them do anything to stand out or get noticed.

I recently joined a closed Facebook group called the Quick Start Challenge 3.0. There are more than 1,700 people registered on the group but, there are only a handful of people making a regular contribution, by way of posting updates, commenting on other peoples blogs, helping others who are stuck with tutorials and motivating those that are struggling, and they stand out.

I have also started to notice that these same names are also on other groups and pages that I have joined. Some have reached out to me and I have also reached out to others. Building and growing my network.

They recently asked us for the names of the people whose email list we were on. I was surprised that I knew about 80% of the names mentioned.

If you are serious about making money online and grow your business then getting yourself known is key.

Whilst it can be hard to start off with, with a little perseverance and some effort, once you start to get noticed, it can explode.

By networking with people in your niche and contributing rather than observing, your peers will soon sit up and take notice and you will see a dramatic rise in your following and your business.

Ah, I nearly forgot, my connection to Royalty.

Well, it turns out that my great, great, great Grandfather worked at Buckingham Palace for many years.

He was the Chief Royal Rat Catcher.

Unfortunately, he is dead so I cannot claim that I am only one step away from Royalty today.

However, it is good to know I am connected to Angelina Jolie somewhere down the line.

So, if you want to make it online and get yourself out there, what are you waiting for, why not make a comment below and let people know that you are here and that you mean business?
Forget SEO – It Is A Total Waste Of Time

Forget SEO – It Is A Total Waste Of Time

Now, I know that this is a controversial statement but hear me out before passing judgment on my parentage or doubting my sanity..

I am NOT saying SEO is dead per se. You can, with a lot of work rank a website for long tail and low competition keywords, although getting a new site to rank for highly competitive keywords is like pushing water uphill, and is not going to happen whatever those SEO professionals tell you.

The perception that organic rankings in google is free is incorrect.

My point is that the amount of time it takes and the associated costs to get a site ranked, especially in a competitive niche, is not always worth the effort.

With paid traffic you can switch it on and off as you like and you can easily and accurately measure the ROI.

Who is Lloyd Hester and What Does He Know?

Gone are the days where you could rank a site on page one of google in a few minutes. I know, I used to do it. Try typing in “Who is the number one SEO expert” into google or “Lightning Fast Google Rankings” or click on these links to go straight there. Who is the number one SEO Expert? or just Number one SEO expert and also lightning fast google rankings NOTE: In reality, this is not that impressive if you remove the inverted commas the result disappears from the first few pages at least.

Continuous and Ongoing Changes For Marketers

What worked then does not work now. And, what works today will probably not work tomorrow.

The Guru’s have stopped selling SEO ranking tools and gone over to selling youtube ranking, Amazon sales machines and running webinars for profit!

If you are working on SEO then you are aiming at getting google to rank your site in the search engine ranking pages (SERPS).

Google’s terms state that any type of manipulation to improve rankings is a bad thing. Not up there with fox hunting or mistreating defenceless animals but they do not like it and spend their lives trying to find out how we do it and blocking it.

They really don’t like it. I imagine that their underground, protected shelter looks a lot like the CTU unit out of 24. Who knows, maybe they have their own Jack Baeur running about searching out and torturing those of us planning a Black Hat campaign on the World?

Any form of link building that is done for the purpose of improving your site’s position in the SERPS is against the mighty G rules. That’s it.

Not only that, google are continually updating their algorithms to cause us pain and giving them silly names like penguin and panda!

Now this being said, of course, there are a lot of ways to build links and I am not suggesting that you totally ignore them. However, in my humble opinion, I would forget SEO for SEO’s sake.

Content Is King – Oh Yes

Content is king and if you are producing and posting relevant, informative, educational and interesting content that provides value to your readers, you will find those people will naturally talk about it, it will get syndicated and links will grow naturally.

Posting to snapchat (HUGE at the moment) facebook, Instagram, twitter, Pinterest and youtube can all help drive traffic to your site and if you get a lot of interaction, retweets, pins. Likes etc, then you could well get promoted into googles prized ‘first-page’ for a certain low competition keyword.

Using on-page SEO techniques are a different matter, however, if you are producing content it does not take long to optimise it properly which will give you a boost.

Adding the right h1, h2 tags, using keywords in your title and related phrases in the body text is all good and will make a positive difference.

But, if you want to drive guaranteed traffic to your site then I would suggest paying for traffic. Shock, Horror.

If you value your time then this is by far the cheapest way. Running a facebook campaign is not expensive and as long as you get a reasonable ROI then it is not a problem.

Spending all your time and effort trying to rank a website only to get it slapped down a few places, replaced, or worse still totally wiped out in a few weeks is soul destroying and whilst we can shout at google all we like, it is their ball and they can do what they like with it (well nearly)

If you are building amazon affiliate sites for example, why spend hours writing unique content and building links to it when you can put up a site quickly, run an ad campaign and get instant results. If it does well ramp it up, if not then move on the next one.

Always The Exception To The Rule

There are always exceptions to the rule and I am sure there will be plenty of people who will be quick to tell me of their SEO gymnastics and phenomenal results but, I would put a pound to a penny that there are very few of them that have ranked for a very competitive term.

It is still easy to rank for “What to do in Azerbaijan for the over the fifties” or “The best vinegar to make pickled onions” But, to rank for a term like “best mobile phone” or “top t-shirt designs” the chances are it is not going to happen.

You can even sell it to someone who has not read this post and let them try to SEO the crap out of it and see if they can rank it.

Overall, the work it takes, and the unreliability makes it a fools errand.

Of course, I do not expect everyone to agree but I have yet to see an argument that has made me change my mind.
Finishing What You Start – The New Look Design For My Blog

Do you ever get the feeling that you wished you had not started something? Well that is me at the minute.

I setup this blog many years ago but have not been updating it regularly for a long time. This is the reason that there is no dates on the posts so visitors would not know when the last time it was updated! Sneaky eh?

I designed the theme myself (and before you say it, yes I know it is not that good) I am a poor designer and used a software program called artisteer theme designer. The lazy man in me said that it was about the content not the design so it did not matter too much. Also, my money sites were far more important so I did not bother.

Joining the Quick Start Challenge has brought out the guilty bit now and I have been inspired to get this blog back on track and, as well as following my progress, I wanted to reinvigorate the blog, giving it a more modern design and feel. Something clean and brightI was thinking.

Also, one of the QSC3 group suggested I should have a responsive theme and, of course she is right.

So, I started the search for a theme but this has led to no end of problems. Already the menu has gone askew and as the theme is so old I cant get it back. Also, the new themes I did not like. Another, QSC member sent me access to a great theme called Anew but on loading it the side bars are all out.

It is apparent that this is not a simple matter of activating a new theme but totally redoing a lot of the site to get it right.

That is why I am thinking I wish I had left it alone. I have thought of outsourcing the work but in the spirit of the quick start challenge I will do it myself over the week-end.

One thing that does come to mind is that you really need to finish what you start. This is the key to success.

John Lee Dumas of Entrpreneur on fire uses the acronym F.O.C.U.S

F – Focus
O – one
C – Course
U – Until
S – Success

The thing is there is so much going on in our lives this can be tough.

The Quick Start Challenge is a prime example. It is something i really want to do but there is so much else going on in my life that I was wondering whether to get involved.

The way I have found around it is to compartmentalise things. So, I have a number of things going on and I schedule them in and then focus on that one thing until I have run out of time or completed the task. That way, I seem to get more done that trying to setup the blog. Then call some customers, then check my email, then, then etc…

This has had a massive impact on my productivity and although I do not always stick to the plan, when i do it produces great results.

So the moral of the story is. Start something and finish it before doing something else.

Wish me luck 🙂