Project FED Nigeria

The key to finding time to write when your schedule is busy and you have many duties to complete is preparation and organization. Prepare ahead of time all the supplies you need and create a system of organization that will help you make the most of small windows of time and opportunity that come available. What Is a Portable Writing Kit? At its simplest, it contains four things: A tote bag to hold all of the writing materials you need, a journal, your writing outline, and a zip lock baggie of pens. This is the minimum you need to take advantage of the time you have available to you to write. I don’t recommend fussing with a laptop as it takes time to boot up and in that time you could have already been writing.  10 Tips to Getting the Most of Your Portable Writing Kit 1. Pack it up the night before and check it for all the needed supplies. 2. Keep the portable writing kit with you everywhere you go. 3. Tuck your outline into the journal right after your last entry so you can quick...

 As I discussed in yesterday’s Strategy Sunday , this week’s focus is going to be on stories. Having an effective story for the product or service or brand you are promoting is an important part of being able to help people remember who you are and connect to what you have to offer. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, I highly recommend that you go back to my Better Blog Toolkit post and get your free copy of FairyTaleMarketing . It will explain the science behind this. Why the Story Matters In writing, we have a saying, “Show, don’t tell.” Stories are a way of showing prospects what they can expect from the brand, the product, or the service. There are two kinds of stories you want to have ready: Your own story and the story of those who have experience in working with you. The Personal Connection Story The story about why you are working with the brand and promoting it, or why you developed a product or service, is an important story. As I mentioned yesterday, though, thi...

This week has been a challenging time for me and my family. Financial reserves are tapped out and we are running on fumes. Without the help we received from family, we would be homeless today. Things must change, and soon, so I brought my struggle to the Lord and sought His wisdom. I've been struggling with feelings that what I post doesn't matter and that what I'm going through isn't valuable to Him. I have been concerned that my lack of success in selling anything means that I'm not truly pursuing His will and am just wasting my efforts. What You Say Matters. What You Do Matters More. I was tempted not to worry about writing this post. That's why it's getting posted so late. I was tired. Tired of fighting a battle that never seems to end. Tired of doing work that doesn't seem to go anywhere. I told myself it didn't really matter. The Lord corrected me. He told me that what I am doing in the face of my discouragement is my witness to what it means t...

  I’ve spoken many times about the value of your time. I also gave you 3 basic and simple free tools you can start using on Time Management Tuesday. Today’s post, though, is full of far more robust tools that you can use to dig into your time and take control over how you use it. All of these tools are free to start. Some do require a small monthly payment in order to activate more advanced features. Clockify This is a truly free app that allows you to track how much time you are spending and where so that you can become more aware of how you are using  your time and budget it accordingly. RescueTime This app allows you to block distraction and automatically tracks the time you’re spending on each app you use while you’re working on your computer and will categorize your habits, which can be a useful tool for figuring out what habits you need to change in order to become more productive. BeTimeful This software allows you to browse social media without the built-...

 It’s Thanksgiving Thursday again and that means it’s time for our weekly celebration of Successes, Supporters, and Progress made on the road to transforming Project FED into a profitable venture that helps low/no-income earners make money online promoting products that support orphans in Nigeria. Celebrating Successes This week, we managed to reach out to 56 people on Facebook using our new social media sharing strategy . We sparked a whole bunch of new conversations and, more importantly, because I reached out privately to ask about the well being of people who hadn’t posted in a while, I discovered friends who were struggling and in need of prayer. Those human connections where we get a chance to make people feel truly loved and cared about are the ultimate success and the true goal of Project FED. Yes, I want to help people find freedom from financial fears and achieve financial independence while also serving the needs of those who can’t serve themselves, but the most im...

  When I was growing up as a child, I often heard my mother tell me that I couldn’t have this thing or that thing because we didn’t have the money. It was instilled into me very early on in life that dreams were the captive of money, and only if money permitted it could dreams be fulfilled. The Early Decision to Build a Business of My Own I was four the year that I decided I wanted to build a successful business. The motivation for that decision was the fact that my mother told me we couldn’t afford a Snoopy Sno Cone Maker like my friend, Erica, had gotten for Christmas. My dream was denied. I decided right then and there that I was going to one day become a successful business owner so that nobody could tell me, ever again, no to my dreams. All throughout my childhood I tried various means of getting a business going but without any guidance from people around me, I didn’t know how to do it. Everything I tried ultimately failed. The Dream of Being a Game Artist Is Born I...

  On Saturday, I spoke about systems and their value in helping to build upon what you’ve found that works and scale your efforts so you can get reliably reproduce any success and leverage it to multiply it to reach more people. Today, I’m going to talk about how to use systems to save your time so you can focus on doing more of what is most important to you. Google Calendar: Helping You to Remember Your Commitments You can spend a lot of energy trying to remember what you’ve committed to and when, or you can use a tool like Google Calendar , put it on the calendar, and let it remind you when the time arrives. That way you’re not straining your brain trying to remember it all. It makes it easier to plan your day around special events, too. It ensures that you are setting aside time for your priorities and making an effort to be there for those who matter to you. The nice thing about Google calendar is that it is a free tool. If you have a Gmail account, all you need to do i...

  Image by  kejamy  from  Pixabay   During yesterday’s post, I spoke about my struggles with communication and connection. I also shared with you that my plan for today was to talk about ways to share the good news and the importance of doing so as a marketer. My Awareness of the Problem Thursday afternoon, an old friend of mine from years back, Jana, contacted me to ask me for some help with something a friend of hers was working on building. Since it was about how to start a blog, she knew I had the expertise needed to help him. I promised to make her friend a tutorial on how to set up a brand new blogger account and that I would post that on my YouTube channel, so be watching for that. As we talked, she told me something important: She rarely sees my posts. I realized that is probably true for most of the 1500 people who follow me on Facebook. It is highly likely that they rarely see what I post. And that means that one of the main reasons I am not g...

It doesn't matter how good your product, service, business, or project happens to be if nobody knows about it. Last week’s Strategy Sunday was a lesson in defeating discouragement that led to a rush of creativity that following week. You can find out more about that by reading about our Creativity Challenge . Today’s Strategy Sunday is a lesson in being a vessel that carries good news out into the world. I Struggle with Communication and Connection Most people who read my work find this hard to believe but communicating with others is not my strength. That’s actually what led me to become a writer.  I need time to process my thoughts and to put into words the things I’m thinking and feeling in a way that doesn’t hurt others. When I’m writing, my words flow smoothly but when I’m speaking off the cuff, the words that fly out of my mouth are rarely received the way I intend them to be. I also struggle with staying connected to people. I have a tendency to be a hands-off kind of...

If you make no sales, your business won’t be successful, so sales must be the first part of your training. However, once you make that first sale, you want to continue growing that success. During this past Friday Freebies, one of the Freebies I spoke about was MailerLite, an email automation platform. That inspired me with this blog post on the value of creating systems that lead you toward success. and I'm going to do it with a story. 1.   Systems Leverage Past Success To Create More Success Let's introduce you to Betty. She loves to cook. One day she creates this brilliant dish that everyone loves. If she writes down the ingredients she used to cook that dish and the methods she used to cook it, that's called a recipe. A recipe is a system that allows her to easily create more of that dish. 2.   Systems Create Consistent Results Without a recipe for her brilliant dish, it's going to be tough for Betty to duplicate the conditions that allowed her to make that di...

It’s been 5 weeks since we started Friday Freebies, so I wanted to take this opportunity to recap all of the freebies in one post so that they would be easier to find. 5 Free Tools 1.        Get your Email from Google Create a free business email address using Google and that will allow you to use that email to login to your other accounts with one click. 2.        Get a blog from Blogger.com Google offers a free blogging platform that is automatically indexed by Google because it’s owned by them. 3.        Get a Landing Page from Hubspot Hubspot will allow you to set up a free landing page to begin collecting email addresses that you can use to promote to your supporters. 4.        Get a Pinterest Account Pinterest makes it easy to promote your Project FED products to their 459 million active users. 5.        Get your ...

Once again, and hard to believe, it is Thanksgiving Thursday. We've been in operation for a month and 6 days, and we have so many reasons to be grateful. Celebrating Our Successes We have reached over 350 viewers of this blog. For a brand new blog with no established following, we are getting the views. We are being seen. We are being read. We are being heard. It's a huge thing to step out into a public arena with a whole lot of people who are competing for the same viewers you are and grab their attention, so we are going to celebrate that success with our whole hearts. It took us 16 days to reach our first 100 viewers, and we've reached 70 in the last three days. Celebrating Our Supporters This week, our love goes out to Ms Tonya Todd, The 52 Love Podcas t Hostess with the Mostest Love, who took us onto her show and let us share with her viewers a bit of what we've received. If you haven't taken the time to check out her podcast yet, we invite you to do so today. ...

Every Wednesday, we talk about strategies for building wealth and today, we’re going to talk about creative strategies for wealth building that anyone can use to start building wealth no matter how little they have when they start. 1.    Start Where You Are Tonya Todd is an actress and an author I met a few years ago at a writers conference where I was speaking. She started a blog about the topic of Love because she wanted to get herself in the habit of engaging more with her audience. That blog was the beginning of the 52 Love Podcast : 52 lessons about love in 52 weeks. 2.    Start with What You Have When she first started, it was just a blog. Later, she upgraded to a podcast with a webcam, microphone, and computer using her blog content as the inspiration for the podcast interviews. That was enough. She set out to make a difference in her own life and the lives of others with no idea where that journey was going to take her. 3.   Connect To Community On...