A few people are making thousands of dollars on the internet per day, some are making hundreds and many many more are making less than ten dollars every day.

The ocean provides you many opportunities with which to make money.  You can catch and sell all kinds of fish for consumption or for rearing, or you can even try your luck at uncovering sunken ships with their buried treasures.

The internet is just like the ocean. It provides you with many different ways to make money. So many in fact that it is almost impossible to list them all here. However they can all be contained within the four broad categories described below –

-          Affiliate marketing – this is best described as a way of earning money through selling somebody else’s products or services and collecting a commission for it

-          Selling advertising or text links – you collect a fee for selling advertising space or text links on your web site or newsletter

-          Selling physical or digital products through your web site or online market places such as ClickBank, eBay or the iTunes store

-          Writing sponsored reviews on products or services

To get started on affiliate marketing, you can go to ClickBank – the world’s largest digital product marketplace – to look for products to market. You collect a commission every time somebody purchases the product through your special affiliate link. It helps if you are a recognized authority on the niche of the product you are marketing. For example, if you are a famous golfer and you are marketing a golfing manual, your endorsement of the product will be gold. If you are interested in affiliate marketing for physical products, you can sign up with Linkshare or eBay. You can even make money through directing leads to insurance, car companies or banks through an affiliate network called Commission Junction! Some affiliate marketers make over a million dollars in sales annually.

You can sell advertisements or text links on your web site or newsletter if you have a substantial amount of visitors or subscribers. You can speak to relevant companies in your niche likely to advertise with you and cut deals with them. If you can’t get premium ad deals, at the very least, you can put up Google Adsense ads on your website to make some advertising income. But just to put things in perspective, some web entrepreneurs collect more than one thousand dollars daily through their newsletters!

If you are good at sniffing out cheap sources for hot-selling items, knowledgeable in certain areas or talented in programming, you can consider selling products through eBay or creating digital products to sell through ClickBank and the iTunes store. You will be interested to know that the top sellers in eBay and ClickBank make hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales every month while the top iPhone application makers make millions of dollars in a year.

A popular blog’s owner can make some very decent income through writing sponsored reviews on products and services. Blog owners can sign up at review networks such as Social Spark, Review Me and Sponsored Reviews to register themselves for sponsored review opportunities. Although the average review pays less than $20, some reviews actually pay above a thousand dollars! Top blog owners get paid a few thousand dollars to write a 500 word review!

I hope this article gives you a good idea on how to make money on the internet and the associated rewards.

I recently did my first guest blog post for Famous Bloggers, a really nice blog with lots of good information on SEO, blogging, making money online, etc. To my pleasant surprise the community was highly responsive. Here is the same post.

It is important to realize that picking the right key words is crucial to your SEO success.

Always remember that for search engine optimization, your end goal is to rank high in the search engines for key words most relevant and valuable to your web site. For example, if you run a pet dog business, you naturally want to rank high for key words such as ‘pet dogs’, ‘dogs for sale’, ‘pet dogs for sale’. Better yet, you can narrow down the key words to target very specific niches such as ‘chihuahua pet dogs, pet dogs for sale in Brooklyn’ etc.

Many of my clients start out being very ambitious in what they want to rank for.

For example, one of my clients ran an online T-shirt retail store and she wanted to rank for the very generic key phrase –‘t shirts’. A quick search on Google returned a whopping 118,000,000 results and many competitor web sites all having obviously invested much time and money into building their own SEO and web traffic driving efforts.

I told her to drop the idea and instead focus on a niche. She specialized in selling t-shirts that had a green theme and I suggested that we focused on keywords directly related to what she was selling. ‘Green t shirts’, ‘tree t shirts’, ‘earth day t shirts’, ‘environmental t shirts’ etc. You get the idea.

She took my advice and I started implementing the search engine optimization strategies. Before long, her web site started ranking for those keywords and the first trickle of traffic came in. She started making sales as the traffic was highly targeted and relevant customers who were specifically looking for green themed t-shirts.

Her business has since grown and she is now focusing on a range of themes, not just the green theme.

Aiming for highly searched key words may not necessarily be the smart way to go if takes forever to rank for them. The smart thing to do is to use your common sense and consider what your most possible immediate customers are likely to key into their search engines.

If you live in London and you are craving for sushi, are you more likely to key in ‘sushi in London’ or ‘sushi restaurants in London’ as opposed to ‘sushi’ and ‘sushi restaurants? I’m sure you will agree with me that the answer is the former. Better yet, if you stay on Oxford Street in London, you might just search for ‘sushi restaurant in Oxford Street London’!

It is no good struggling to rank number one for ‘sushi’ if you own a sushi restaurant along Oxford Street of London because you could have ranked number one for ‘sushi restaurant in Oxford Street London’ and gotten your customers in about 1/100th of the time!

So before you pick your key words, consider what key words or key phrases are likely to bring you the most relevant customers in the shortest time. Who needs customers from New Zealand when you sell sushi on Oxford Street London?

As consumer activities rapidly increase, web traffic is the number one concern for any online business to survive. You may have the best website, product or service, but you will still need traffic for your business to make money online.

Below is a list of 51 web traffic tips I have compiled for you to start generating traffic to your website.

Keywords

1. Research and focus on writing posts with keywords related to your niche so that people are likely to find your site through search engines

2. Include these keywords in your tags

3. Use keywords to name your image files before uploading them

4. As far as possible, include keywords into your domain name URL

5. Get a domain name that’s easy to remember (and buy other similar domain names)

6. Include keywords to your online profiles in social networking sites

Content

7. Create a lively blog

8. Deliver high quality and unique content on your website so that people would want to tell their friends and come back often

9. Keep your content fresh, relevant and useful

10. Write informative reviews of products and ebooks

11. Add “Sticky Content” such as a online software or useful resources people will keep coming back to use

SEO

12. Implement SEO strategies to drive organic traffic to your site

13. Create one-way back links to your website

14. Make your website search-engine friendly with on-site optimization techniques

15. Install the All in One SEO Pack WP Plug-in on your blog

16. Keep a blog to supplement your main site (if your main site isn’t a blog) as blogs are built to attract search engine spiders

17. Make your website accessible for all browsers (which may include mobile browsers)

Marketing

18. Write and submit useful articles on topics related to your website to article submission sites

19. Syndicate your content – Create a RSS feed and include a link on your site

20. Build a brand – Visitors would want to associate themselves with a brand that is of value to them

21. Do informative pod casts

22. Publish a lively and useful newsletter readers can subscribe to and submit them to newsletter directories

23. Create lenses at Squidoo or hubs at Hubpages on related topics to your website and link to your website from them

Community

24. Participate and contribute useful content to forums related to your niche

25. Set up a forum to complement your main site and encourage participation

26. Guest blog on other sites related to your niche

27. Encourage guest blogging on your site

28. Contribute useful comments to blogs

29. Engage in social networking and social bookmarking

30. Make it easy for visitors to bookmark or tag your blog

31. Upload and tag photos to photo sharing communities like Flickr

32. Submit your site for directory listing to main directories like Yahoo! and DMOZ.org

33. Makes useful contributions to email discussion lists

34. Contribute to Yahoo! Answers and refer visitors to your site

35. Add a catchy signature to the bottom of every email sent

36. Add a catchy signature to your profile in forums

37. Request to be a moderator to forums relating to your niche

38. Join business associations and clubs related to your niche

Viral

39. Create something of value for people to pass around (e.g. eBook, reports, etc.)

40. If you are selling a product or service, set up an affiliate program so people can sell your products for you

41. Be creative – do something funny and target traffic to your site

42. Create and run contests to induce interests

Analysis

43. Analyze and monitor activities on your website with Google Analytics

44. Through the analytics, find out what keywords and websites generate most traffic to your site and focus your attention there

Advertising and Publicity

45. Get free publicity and try advertising in offline media (http://www.magazine.org/content/Files/OnlineMedia.pdf)

46. Advertise on free classified ad sites

47. Write keyword-rich press releases

48. Position yourself as a personality or expert, or both

49. Get mentioned in newspapers and websites

50. Request to be a columnist on popular niche sites relating to your niche

Fads

51. Stay abreast and chase new happenings, fads and hot topics

Web traffic generation is not a secret but more like an art that needs to be practiced. There is no easy way out as far as web traffic generation is concerned and all the tips listed above still requires a reasonable amount of investment in time, effort, resources and patience. Not all the tips listed above will be relevant to you. Test, analyze and test again to determine which are the methods that best suit your site, niche and expertise to get the best results.

Yesterday I met my friend Mike Langton – a veteran Ad Man who c0-founded a leading digital services consultancy.

We had a rather stimulating conversation during which Mike shared his experiences and views of how the face of advertising is changing.

We were on the topic of dealing with clients and how we managed their expectations. In a small country like Singapore, I was lucky to have found sufficient business to grow MediaFreaks from a two man team to a thirty man company today. But managing clients has always been a challenge. No matter how much my company has grown, clients always expect us to give them cheap, fast and good service.

Now here’s a nugget from the conversation we had that I would like to share in this post.

Mike told me how he deals with his clients when discussing costs. Basically he tells his client, “Cheap, fast and good. Pick two!”

I couldn’t help laughing! The concept itself is not original – but the idea of telling your client that is just hilarious.

If you come to think about it, it is really a very funny but ingenious way of telling the clients that they need to be realistic about what they want. If they want something to be cheap, then it has to be at the expense of either speed or quality. If they want something to be delivered fast, then it has to be at the expense of either price or quality. If they want something to be of high quality, then they will have to either pay more or be willing to wait longer.

To sum it up -

Good + Fast = Expensive

Good + Cheap = Slow

Fast + Cheap = Inferior

Indeed, everyone is guilty of wanting service to be cheap, fast and good. I mean, who hasn’t been a client or customer at some point and not been guilty of wanting cheap, fast and good service? Considering the fact that we all really know that these three attributes do not usually co-exist, I guess it is just human nature to try and cut the best possible deal.

So the next time you face a client who is trying really hard, tell him/her what Mike says, “Cheap, fast and good. Pick two!”.

Search Engine Optimization is dead. Or is it really?

How many times have we heard the complaint that somebody owned a fantastic website, did excellent onsite optimization, built up hundreds to thousands of relevant back links but had nothing to show for his results? He was simply not ranking anywhere on the face of any of the search engines for his targeted keywords.

Well, truth be told, this problem is not uncommon. Even I run into the same situation every now and then! In my years of running SEO campaigns for my clients, I’ve experienced this several times but the good news is – it is never a permanent situation.

So if you ever run into this situation don’t start freaking out. Here is a helpful checklist that can help you keep your sanity and persevere on your SEO path.

1. Are you being impatient? Are you expecting results within a week or even days? If you have been buying into the hype that SEO is something that can happen overnight, get re-educated. The only way you can get ranked really fast on search engines is through paying for it, or through implementing black hat SEO methods which will get you ranked and delisted so fast you won’t even know what happened. Pure white hat SEO takes time. Give it at least 2 weeks and beyond to see results.

2. Are your chosen keywords too generic? If the keywords you picked are very generic, expect to struggle to even get listed. Examples of generic keywords are ‘ice cream’, ‘hard drives’ and ‘computers’. The competition for these keywords is not only fiercely competitive, but so generic that the search engines have practically tens of millions of web sites to give attention to. You will have work extremely hard to even get listed for these keywords, then ten times harder to climb your way to the top. In the first place, you may want to consider selecting less generic keywords. For example, ‘ice cream in New York’, ‘reliable hard drives’ and ‘good computer reviews’.

3. Are your chosen keywords highly competitive? If the keywords you have chosen have a lot of competition, getting ranked will take more time than usual. Be patient and keep persevering.

4. If you are using article marketing as part of your SEO efforts, are you distributing too much duplicate content? There are debates whether having duplicate content will damage your website’s search engine reputation and cause them not to be ranked or even – gasp – delisted. Well, I believe that everything needs to be balanced and I think that – if you have too much duplicate content out there, it is likely to be part or all of the cause why your website is not ranking. You can remedy the situation by keeping the content on your website unique always and distributing re-written articles. Try to generate different versions of one article so that you can leverage on that single article.

5. If you are building up back links through blog commenting, are you always submitting your keywords to the same websites? Most search engines work on the basis that they will rank a website according to the number of unique back links linking back to the website. Each link from a unique domain counts as a vote. If you are indeed using blog commenting as a SEO strategy, you should build up a large list of friendly blogs to submit your keywords to so that you have more unique back links. If you have been commenting on a small pool of blogs repeatedly, it is not going to help your ranking much if your chosen keywords are competitive.

6. Are you building your links too fast? Have you been distributing articles and submitting blog comments at the speed of light? Again, there are debates about whether building links too fast will damage your reputation with the search engine spiders. But I think it will be prudent and rational to practice patience and build your SEO links with moderation. I tend to agree that moving too fast will be more damaging than helpful in many cases through my experience.

Last weekend I watched a movie about aliens.

It was called The Fourth Kind – where the fourth kind refers to the fourth kind of alien encounter. The first kind being sighting, the second being interaction, the third being proof of alien existence (think large empty fields with strange patterns) and the fourth being an alien abduction.

The movie – starring Mila Jovovich – talks about a supposedly real event where a psychiatrist based in Nome, Alaska, discovered a chain of coincidental patterns amongst her patients leading up to her speculation that they might all have once experienced abduction by aliens. This isn’t really a movie review so I will refrain from giving details, but I would just say that The Fourth Kind unnerved me a little because it showed footages which documented actual hypnosis sessions with the patients and several shocking events – including a murder suicide.

Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot of serious posts lately so I thought I would just lighten up a bit and write something funny for a change. Inspired by The Fourth Kind, I asked 9 of my colleagues what they would do if they ever got abducted by aliens. Here are their answers.

1. Pretend to pledge alliance and say you can get more interesting human species for them to experiment on

2. Pretend you are dead then grab an alien gun from them when you can

3. Pray … really hard

4. Tell them your friend would like to come too but he needs a lift, then bring the aliens to the US military base

5. Tell them you are a dangerous bio organic weapon and demonstrate by farting.. . … a lot

6. Act really stupid so that you appear to be a bad specimen

7. Play cool and explore their world first, then steal a flying saucer and head back to earth

8. Make friends with them first, then invite them to your home for a warm “earthling” dinner (making sure you have your baseball bat ready)

9. Twitter about your experience and post some pictures on FaceBook!

How about you? What would you do if you are abducted by an alien? Join in the fun by posting your answers too

Is SEO difficult?

The short answer to this is – yes and no.

Yes because it takes lots of time and effort but no because it is really not that difficult once you learn how it works.

In one of my articles, I explained that SEO in its most basic form is a series of steps taken to make a web site search engine friendly and have it show up in the search engines. At a more advanced level, SEO can be implemented to allow the web site in question to rank high in the search engines, preferably in the first few positions.

Lots of people like to mystify SEO and make it sound like some form of supreme magic performed by wizards in secret towers. Well, the truth is – I can teach you some simple but effective SEO strategies within this article which you can be implementing within the next ten minutes.

You will notice that these strategies all involve key word link building. This is because – if you want to rank high in the search engines for any key word – you need to get lots of links to your page using the key word you want to rank for.

For example, if you want to rank in the search engines for “solar saving lamps”, then you need as many links as possible pointing to your site that contain the words “solar saving lamps” in the link text. What I mean by “link text” is the text that people click on to reach your site.

Search engines – especially Google – sees links from other sites to your site as a vote for your site to rank for the keywords found in the link text. They see it as an indication that your site is worth visiting in the eyes of the web sites that chose to link to you. So the more number of ‘votes’ you get for a particular keyword, the higher your site ranks.

Without further ado, here are some simple but effective SEO strategies you can start implementing after reading this article –

1. Comment on blogs that allow you to link back to your site using your targeted keywords in the “name” section. Look for blogs that allow this and comment intelligently on the posts. You will find plenty of blogs that will allow this as long as your comments are genuine and not slip-shod five word comments.

2. Write an article and submit it to article submission sites. At the end of the articles you are allowed to include a resource box in which you can put back links to your site. If your article is interesting enough, other web masters may take it to put up on their sites. This will of course include your resource box and back links. You can further amplify this effect by rewriting your article a bit and submitting it to even more article submission sites.

3. Be a guest writer for popular web sites. Many web sites accept good articles from guest writers so that they can keep their writers entertained. The guest writers get back links to their websites and exposure in exchange.

4. Purchase text links from other web sites. Many web sites are quite happy to sell you text links if the price is right. Of course, the prices of the text links are in direct relation to the popularity of the sites. The more popular the site, the higher the price. In many cases, the Google page rank also plays a role in how much a text link costs.

5. Request relevant websites to review your product or web site and include the text links within the reviews. You will be surprised how many web sites will be willing to do this for free if you have a good product or web site.

Now remember, the only thing standing between you and SEO success will be clever keyword research, time and effort.

If you take the time to build up your links, before long, you will be seeing yourself getting ranked on the search engines. And if you want to reach the top, just keep up your efforts. Remember, you are not alone in search engine optimization implementation and the only way to reach the top is to keep your feet on the pedal!

SEO Products I Recommend

If you would like to bring your SEO to the next level and start ranking for keywords related to your niche, I would recommend that you check SEOLinkVine and 1WayLinks out. Both of them provide an easy solution for you to get back links to your site. All you have to do is to submit articles to these networks and you will be having a generous number of one way external links pointing to your site with your designated keywords.

As I’ve mentioned , having lots of external links is probably the single most important element to good SEO, so the above 2 services are absolute gold to me. I will leave you to check out their sales pages. I’ve personally seen several of my sites shoot up for their keywords in a matter of weeks thanks to SEOLinkVine and 1WayLinks.

If you can spare the cash, sign up for both (who complains about more links right?)

If you only have $47 to spare, I suggest you sign up for 1WayLinks first because it only costs $7 the first month (subsequent months at $47) and it is a more established network as compared to SEOLinkVine since it’s been around longer. But like I said, if you have the cash to spare, go for both like I do because you are going to benefit from more links.

SEO in its most basic form is a series of steps taken to make a web site search engine friendly and have it show up in the search engines. At a more advanced level, SEO can be implemented to allow the web site in question to rank high in the search engines, preferably in the first few positions.

The reason why it is desirable for a web site to rank high in the search engines is so that it will receive free organic traffic from the search engines. Such traffic is highly relevant and valuable because people who arrive from search engines are already interested in whatever they are searching for and highly likely to check the site out.

Obviously such visitors are also likely to convert to long term visitors if the web site offers good content or become customers if the web site offers a desirable product or service.

If you own a web site, it is definitely worthwhile looking into SEO for your site.

Web searches are the dominant form of finding information nowadays. The primary goal of the search engines is to bring relevant search results to users. When a user types in a search phrase, a search engine will deliver the most relevant information the user is searching for and that is why, visitors from search engines are almost always relevant visitors.

Through personal experience, I can tell you that web sites gain the highest amount of traffic through search engines if you implement search engine optimization correctly. From the statistics on all my sites, the search engines are responsible for driving 60% to 70% of all traffic to my sites!

Nobody knows for sure however how search engines rank web pages except for the search engine companies head honcho and programmers. However, it is fair to deduce that each search engine has its own unique algorithm for ranking web sites; otherwise all search engines will be showing more or less the same results.

Most experts have observed and agreed that there are some fundamentals in SEO which will affect how search engines rank a web page –

-          Whether key words are used within the URL of the page

-          Whether key words are used within the title of the page

-          Whether key words are used within the meta text description

-          Whether key words are used within the content of the page

-          Whether key words are using the <H2> tag

-          How many internal links (links from within the same site) point to the page

-          How many external links (links from outside the site) point to the page (to many experts and myself, this is the single most important element)

-          Whether the external pages linking to the page are relevant in subject matter

-          Whether key words used to link to the page are relevant

-          Whether the images used within the page have alternate text that includes the key words

The list goes on, but the above covers some of the most important aspects of search engine optimization.

Remember, ultimately a search engine’s goal is to return relevant information to its visitors. As such, search engines have become very intelligent at figuring out whether or not content is relevant to the search term. If you focus on providing good content on your website, you are on to a good start as far as SEO is concerned.

I would strongly recommend anybody serious in running a web site to invest time into learning search engine optimization or at least look for somebody to help you with SEO. This investment will bring you many times returns when you enjoy the traffic that comes with well implemented search engine optimization strategies.

SEO Products I Recommend

If you would like to bring your SEO to the next level and start ranking for keywords related to your niche, I would recommend that you check SEOLinkVine and 1WayLinks out. Both of them provide an easy solution for you to get back links to your site. All you have to do is to submit articles to these networks and you will be having a generous number of one way external links pointing to your site with your designated keywords.

As I’ve mentioned , having lots of external links is probably the single most important element to good SEO, so the above 2 services are absolute gold to me. I will leave you to check out their sales pages. I’ve personally seen several of my sites shoot up for their keywords in a matter of weeks thanks to SEOLinkVine and 1WayLinks.

If you can spare the cash, sign up for both (who complains about more links right?)

If you only have $47 to spare, I suggest you sign up for 1WayLinks first because it only costs $7 the first month (subsequent months at $47) and it is a more established network as compared to SEOLinkVine since it’s been around longer. But like I said, if you have the cash to spare, go for both like I do because you are going to benefit from more links.

‘Please I need help in producing a cartoon series. I can write but can’t draw. How do I start?

Somebody has asked me the above question before. I thought that it was a question whose answer should be shared – and since this has something to do with my work and it makes sense to share this in the money making opportunities section -  here it is.

If you can write, but cannot draw or animate, what can you do to embark upon the path of cartoon production?

Well, believe it or not, a writer’s chances of producing a cartoon is even better than an animator’s!

Not convinced? Heard of the saying – “it’s all in the plot”?

75% of a cartoon’s success is dependent on a good concept and storyline, not how good the cast is or how good the animation is! Look at South Park! Do you call that good animation? But has the ridiculously simple flash animation stopped South Park from making families across the world roar with laughter and the producers from making obscene amounts of money? No! Yet South Park would just be a piece of crappy animation without the magic of the scripts! Incidentally, the producers are also the writers in most, if not all, of the scripts.

On the other hand, an artist is an artist is an artist. An animator is an animator is an animator. They usually just draw or animate. But please don’t get me wrong. There are some multi-talented animators and artists who can think of great concepts and ideas too. Just that the specialization is somewhat different and if you start off as a writer, you are more in tune with the top line aspects of producing a cartoon.

Now, if you are convinced you can really write, you may like to follow the steps below to embark on your journey to produce a cartoon.

1. Come up with a strong story concept and think of all the characters that would be in the story.

2. Work with an artist either through a partnership or through outsourcing to create a character bible.

3. Look around for an animation that has a history of producing their own intellectual properties (IP). There are plenty of such studios around, so all you have to do is scout around for a suitable studio that has a history of producing cartoons similar to your genre of writing.

Here, you can (a) pitch your cartoon character bible to them (b) offer to write a few sample synopsis and a sample episode for one of their ongoing cartoon series.

You would be very very very lucky if a studio options your cartoon concept and decides to produce it! It usually doesn’t happen for newbies because they don’t like to take chances with newbies, but most likely it’s because new writers just don’t have the ‘ooomph’ factor in their ideas yet.

Either way, if you are really good at your writing, it opens up the opportunity for them to consider you for a writing contract. If you fail to get an assignment, politely ask the studio for the reason. If it’s because they think you aren’t good enough, it probably means you aren’t good enough. You can go back to hone your skills some more or you can carry on trying. If more than 3 studios tell you the same thing it usually means you really aren’t good enough yet. But practice makes perfect. If you keep trying you would probably get your first assignment,

4. Once you get your first assignment, cherish it like gold! Be flexible about everything (including payment) and cherish the opportunity. Don’t do anything to destroy this silver bullet and do it like it’s your first and last chance! Nobody likes to work with people who are too straight laced and the truth is – after you carve a name for yourself in the industry – companies will scramble for your services even if you are expensive. Don’t be prima donna when you are just a newbie. In fact, my advice to you is never to be a prima donna.

5. Try to be involved in as many parts of the production as possible. Ask to be involved in checking out the storyboards and offering your 2 cents on how you think the camera angles should play out. Ask to see the animatics so that you can give your opinion on the pacing and also the animation. You get the idea. Don’t ask for extra fees because most studios would rather do without your help in these areas then. But you can gently request for some credits for offering your creative input. That at an early stage in your career is worth more than money! But don’t be too pushy because studios rarely want to give producer or creative credits to a newbie, no matter how good you think you may be. The idea here is to get you as much experience as possible on other parts of the production pipeline.

6. As you get more experience working on such projects, you can begin negotiating for larger roles besides being just the writer. And the best part is, you can start pitching your ideas to TV networks and studios and you can bet some good moolah that they would want to listen to what you have to say!

I hope that this blog post is useful for those who wish to try their luck at writing for or producing a cartoon animated series.

Below are a few good books I would also recommend to those interested in honing their skills to write for cartoon.

It is impossible for anyone to sail through life without facing some form of challenge or hardship at some point. I tend to feel that this is God’s way of training and testing our resolve. Humans cannot become shining diamonds without being polished. And going through challenges is the polishing process.

Whether we face our challenges with bravery or skulk away from them will determine our success or failure.

Many times when we face what seems to be a hopeless situation, our first instinct is to give up. It is in fact precisely at this moment that we need to stay calm and find a solution to salvage the situation.

If we admit defeat then we would have lost for good. If we carry on fighting then we stand a chance.

Do not forget, in every good situation there are dangers lurking. And in every bad situation there are opportunities hidden for you to find. By being complacent you will fall into the danger traps. And by persevering and keeping calm, you will find the opportunities.

As a creative entrepreneur, I have been in a situation where my company was down to just two thousand dollars after a season of bad business and we had to fire all our employees. But within a month, the situation reversed and we became stronger than ever because we persevered and found the hidden opportunities.

In situations like this, you must stay calm and empower yourself with clarity, gratitude and wisdom.

Here are 5 tips to empower you in the worst situations:

1) Practice deep breathing – Try to make it a habit to practice deep breathing throughout the day. It will relax you and give you clarity in your thoughts so that you can make the right judgment even under the most stressful circumstances.

2) Stay happy with your choices – Life is about making choices. You either go left or you go right. You either do it right or you do it wrong. You can learn only through trial and error. Stay happy with your choices, whether they are right or wrong. Don’t blame yourself or others if you make the wrong choice. Be brave and accept the outcome of your decisions. Learn from your mistakes so you will know how to make the right choice the next time. And if you make the right choice, rejoice and share your experience with somebody else so that he can benefit from it.

3) Focus on the positive – Keep thinking positively and look out for the opportunities hidden deep within the shadows of the bad situations. They are difficult to spot but if you look and think hard enough, you will not only be able to find a solution but perhaps even a route to a better situation. If you keep thinking negative thoughts you will only sink lower and lower.

4) Feel grateful – Do you show gratitude for the things you enjoy in your life? Do you feel grateful for having good relationships, good health, good food, fresh air or even just plain old sunshine? During times of distress you need to focus on the good things in your life and feel sincere gratitude to keep a positive state of mind.

5) Develop your mental awareness – Observe your thoughts. Are they positive or negative? It is best if you think positive thoughts because you can act on them with positive results. If you are thinking negative thoughts, keep them in check and don’t indulge in them. If you can do this you can harness your mental awareness, something most people can’t do.

The above tips are meant to empower you with the clarity, gratitude and wisdom you will need to come out of the worst situations a better and wiser person.

When you deal with your own pains and pleasures you become the captain of your own destiny.