For some people, waking up early is as natural as breathing. Lucky them. But for many others, waking up early is virtually an impossible thing to do. Luckily for them, using the motivational tips below can give them a better way to start the day.

Wake up to the right environment.

Believe it or not but the way your room looks can help or hinder your ability to wake up early. A messy room will generally make you disinclined to wake up early because cleaning your room will just be one of the many worries you have to tackle for the day.

But when you wake up to a clean room, just the sight of it can be energizing and make you jump out of bed. At least you’ve got one less worry to think about!

Give yourself a good reason to wake up early.

Waking up early come with instant benefits like better health, more time to spend on the things you want to do, and greater productivity. Give yourself ten minutes to think about all the good reasons for waking up early and you might never stop writing. Now, focus on these reasons the first moment your eyes open and you’ll be up and about in no time!

Get the best sleep you can.

One common reason why people find it difficult to wake up early is simply because they didn’t have enough sleep and if they had then it wasn’t good enough.

To get the best possible sleep, the first thing you should consider changing about your night routine is your sleeping hours. How about sleeping early for a change? Can’t the things you normally like to do at midnight be postponed for the next day?

Sleep as much as you need. This is different from being a professionally idle and sleeping the whole day away just because you want to and not because your body is demanding for rest and relaxation. Motivating yourself to wake up early is easier to do when your body is not clamoring for the opposite.

Sleep effectively. A night’s slumber is more restful and peaceful when you haven’t procrastinated at work and there weren’t any problems at home you chose to sweep under the rug instead of solving them as they come. Definitely, where you sleep also matters. Try to be comfortable as you can. Change your bed, rearrange your room, or have air-conditioning if that’s what will make you sleep better.

Reward and punish.

Let’s focus on the rewards first. Remember how you used to get candies from parents or stars from teachers when you did something good? How about upgrading the reward system to motivate you to wake up early?

A reward system, however, should cut both ways. To make the system more effective, you need to set repercussions for yourself when you wake up late. You also need to be stringent in implementing the penalties. Don’t rationalize. Don’t justify. The more aware you are about the consequences of waking up late, the more motivated you’ll be not to do it again.

Get a partner.

Find someone who’s also having trouble waking up early and work together to motivate yourselves to change. Don’t think of this along the lines of misery loving company, but rather this is more of a case of two hands getting more things done. The two of you will get the results you want more quickly if you help and motivate each other. Be his personal alarm clock and vice versa!

There will always be times in your life when you have to perform tasks that you deem unpleasant for one reason or another – working with a co-worker you don’t like, going to work on Mondays, taking the garbage out, driving to meet the in-laws at the airport, having dinner with the spouse’s friends… Doing these things just siphons whatever motivation you have inside you and makes you feel sad, tired, sorry, even annoyed.  But did you know that there are also things inside you that actually make it difficult to feel excited and enthusiastic?  Get to learn the factors that make you hard to motivate:

Your mindset
Your mindset is a major factor that can make you hard to motivate.  This is because it can severely limit your understanding of the world and all experiences in general.  Your mindset can sometimes be composed of growth-inhibiting beliefs, prejudices, biases and standards.

If, for example, you believe that nothing good can come out of your staff, you’ll fail to see that there is a clerk there that actually has management potential.  If you refuse to believe that you can actually write for a famous magazine because you’re a person from a small town, you’ll miss out on an opportunity to expose your talent and reap its rewards.

Your comfort zone
We all have certain limitations in our minds.  These limits are things we decide on based on our own personal beliefs, ethics and standards.  Within these limits, we feel comfortable in and can pretty much do as we like.

Once we approach the outer edges, we begin to feel discomfort, shyness, embarrassment or annoyance.  We do not wish to go further because we do not like what we don’t know or haven’t experienced.  Because we have a fear of the unknown, we’d rather stay within our comfort zones because we feel safe there.

The problem here is that a narrow comfort zone can be a major factor that makes you hard to motivate.  Each time you are presented with a new idea or experience, you check to see if it fits into your comfort zone.  If it doesn’t, then you simply refuse, no questions asked.  This is unfortunate because many of these ideas and experiences can be good for you.  But you’ll probably never know because you don’t have the motivation to try them.

Your past experience
Did you get burned by the stove?  That’s probably why you hate to cook.  Did your former bosses fail to show appreciation for your hard work?  That’s probably one reason why you don’t feel motivated about your job.

Your background – personal, social and professional experiences – has a lot to do with how you decide things in your life.  They can also be factors that make you hard to motivate.  If these experiences are negative, they tend to make you more hesitant and unsure of yourself because they affect your self-esteem and confidence.

If, for example, you’ve only been met with rejection or ridicule in your life, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine if you don’t feel a strong need to excel or to improve yourself.  You’ll probably be thinking – ‘So what?  Nothing I ever did was good anyway.  Why would things change now?’

Unless you consciously make an effort to identify these past experiences and then refuse to let them rule your life, you will always be hard to motivate.

This is a guest post by Deanna deBara from Sugarrae.com.

Recently, I did my first guest post (ever) over at Remarkablogger. I got such great feedback on “A Beginner’s Guide to Twitter“, I decided to follow up with a guide on a site even more important to those in SEO - Sphinn, the social media site for internet marketers.

A Little History

Sphinn was launched on July 11, 2007 by Danny Sullivan as a way for people in the search marketing community to connect, network and share news stories about the industry that they thought others would find interesting.

The site follows the same structure as Digg where users submit a story and other users can vote on whether they like it or not; they can “sphinn” it for yes, and “desphinn” it for no. Once a story is “sphunn” 22 times (providing it is sphunn 22 times within 2 days of being submitted) it hits the front page of Sphinn and is immediately accessible to anyone who logs on to the home page (except for posts submitted to the Water Cooler category, which no longer have the ability to hit the main page). Stories submitted to Sphinn can also be discussed by members on the comment portion of each post.

Getting Started

You can access the articles on Sphinn without setting up a profile, but in order to leave comments or “sphinn/depshinn” anything, you need to register. On your profile, you can either use an avatar or a picture, and you can add in all your personal information like your instant messaging names (AIM, MSN), your social media profiles (Facebook, Delicious) and your forum profiles (Cre8asite, WebmasterWorld).

I’m not going to lie; I hadn’t heard of a few of these sites in my first few weeks in internet marketing. I don’t like to feel out of the loop, so I checked them out, and it was cool that something as simple as setting up my profile on Sphinn helped a newbie like me find other popular sites that will help me in the industry. After checking out those sites, I signed up for a few. Those not designed to, Sphinn also helps keeps track of all my social networking profiles for me (and sending a little link juice their way never hurts either).

Navigating Sphinn

There are different category tags on the top of the homepage, and I figured the best place to start was “Greatest Hits“. One of the first articles that caught my eye was Sphinn - The Social Networking Site Every Search Marketer Should Be Using.

It broke down in list format (I am a type A personality. I love lists.) the top 10 reasons why Sphinn is an important tool for all us search marketers out there. I also LOVED What Would Google Look Like If They Had To Optimize for Google? The article was a great combination of humor and information (which I’m always up for) and I ended up learning a lot.

The Greatest Hits (as inferred by its name) is where you will find what the community considers to be the most valuable articles on Sphinn. It’s here you’re likely to find the staples that should be in any internet marketers library.

In addition to reading what the community thought was the best, I also wanted to check out the posts that were fresh. I went to the “What’s New” page, but all those posts were REALLY new (I’m talking 1 sphinn new), and I wasn’t sure which would be the best place to start. That’s why I like that you also have the option of viewing the posts in What’s New in the order of “most sphinns so far”. The more experienced you are in internet marketing, the more you’ll be able to determine what’s good and what isn’t regardless of the number of sphinns, but for those fairly new to the industry (like myself), I figured it was a safe bet if an article had 12 or 13 sphinns, it was at least worth checking out.

For instance, I saw the article Could You Buy or Sell Social Media Profiles? It had 13 sphinns, so I clicked through to read it. It goes into the commercial value of social media and how that affects its credibility in our industry. Social media is one area of SEO that really interests me, and this article brought up some points about it that I hadn’t ever considered.

Submitting an Article to Sphinn

Once you’ve logged into Sphinn, you’ll can click on the Submit tab on the upper right hand side of the page. Type or paste your link into the News Story URL box and click “Submit News Story”. It will give you the option to choose a category. Make sure that you choose the category that is most relevant to your article. The topic title will automatically be whatever the title tag of the post is. You may want to remove any extras in the title tag (like the name of the blog) so that the title is only the title of the post, or if you think you can jazz it up, rename it altogether. While submitting your own site may be frowned upon at many social media sites, Sphinn has no problem with users submitting there own posts.

The description area is a synopsis that people are going to be able to read before deciding whether to look through the entire post. Think of it as a mini advertisement - you want to let everyone know exactly how the post is going to help them and why they should read it.

At the bottom, you’ll be asked to do a simple arithmetic problem and type in your answer to prove that you are, indeed, a human. Then, all that’s left is to click preview and submit, and your post will immediately be viewable on the What’s New page

Don’t just submit the article and forget it. Feel free to send the Sphinn link to friends you think might be interested in the article. You can also post it through to Twitter, Facebook or other social networking sites. The more people you get to see the Sphinn post, the more sphinns it will get once people read the post (if they like the content).

Some Sphinn Pitfalls

While I found Sphinn to be a useful in increasing my knowledge in all things internet marketing, Sphinn does have a few issues that I hope they’ll address.

• The site can be a little “cliquey” with obvious “in jokes” that make the homepage and people being referred to only by their first name, like I should already know who they are.
• Flame wars can and do happen in the comment portion of posts on highly debated topics.
• While there is a desphinn option, since it is publicly known who desphinns an article, it is intimidating to actually desphinn something because desphinns can sometimes come with backlash.
• When Sphinn decided to prevent Water Cooler topics from hitting the homepage, it also prevented hot articles from showing in the Water Cooler category at all, even on the Water Cooler hot topics page. While I can understand why Water Cooler posts don’t make the homepage, I’d like to see the Water Cooler posts that have gone hot when I take the time to navigate to that specific page.

Benefits of Sphinn

I’m definitely still learning the industry, but it doesnt take an expert to see the benefits of using Sphinn.

For users, the benefits are being able to locate internet marketing themed posts that hopefully have some value and can add to your internet marketing knowledge. For industry writers and bloggers, one of your stories being submitted and going hot on Sphinn can bring your site exposure and traffic.

Deanna de Bara is an Account Manager at Sugarrae and contributing writer to their often controversial Internet Marketing Blog which focuses on SEO, content development and affiliate marketing. When not poring over SEO related posts and patents, Deanna can be found snowboarding in Colorado or loudly cheering on the Jets in her native New York.

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Now, I am no Peter Jones (for a start he is 17 foot tall), but I happen to think that, in these uncertain times, websites are a good option when it comes to online investment. Often a fresh pair of eyes can add value to a website in terms of development ideas or marketing activity.

So, if you have a website that you are looking to offload, then let me know… I may just make you an offer.

Here are the requirements:

1) Must be a .com or a .co.uk

2) Must have existing traffic

See… that’s it… easy eh!

Canadian Business:

Ontario accountant Brian Allward turned his love of Elvis Presley into a global memorabilia business based in the appropriately named King City. In Burnaby, B.C., new mom Sandra Wilson transformed a pair of non-slip shoes she’d sewn for her infant son Robert into a full-time business called Robeez Footwear. And my brother opened his own bookshop after Mom told him to get his darn book collection out of the house before the bedroom floor collapsed.

Businesses big and small can grow out of simple pastimes. But do hobbyists make good entrepreneurs? Can people who are passionate about Elvis, sewing or old books become excited about marketing and cash flow?

It all depends on attitude. If entrepreneurs can subordinate their love of the hobby to the needs of the business, their energy and passion can go a long way. But you have to start making decisions with your head instead of your heart.

“The easiest way to work it out is to calculate how much money you need to earn in order to profitably leave your job,” says Andrew Patricio, a partner with BizLaunch.ca, a Toronto-based training company that coaches entrepreneurs across Canada. “That will help you decide if it’s doable.”

Patricio’s formula involves totaling your business costs and personal expenses. “Divide those expenses by your profit margin and you’ll get your break-even revenues.” If you need to net $100,000 a year, for instance, and your industry’s standard profit margin is 20%, then you will need annual revenues of $500,000 ($100,000 divided by 20%) to meet your target. Are you confident you can move that much product?

If the answer is yes, you still have to decide if this is something you really want to do. “Are you going to be as much in love with this hobby as a business as you’re in love with it as a hobby?”asks Bridget Field, an information officer with Small Business BC in Vancouver. If you’re a craftsmaker who enjoys making one-off earrings or gourmet muffins, will you still be happy churning them out by the bucketful?

Photo from Dawn Endico.