The pros and cons of homeschooling are many, but do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages? With total control over your child’s homeschooling needs you have the flexibility to teach your child values that cannot be taught in a public classroom. On the other hand your time will not be as free as it used to be.

The education a child can gain from a loving and concerned parent will be much greater than is possible to receive in a public school system. You don’t need a teaching credential or even a college degree, just the desire to give your child a quality education. If there are subjects that you don’t feel comfortable teaching it is possible to hire a tutor for those classes. And on the positive side your home school curriculum can incorporate other things such as your own religious and moral beliefs, something that will not be taught in a public school system. By taking control of a child’s education a parent can shape that child’s value system better than anyone else.

There are two main requirements necessary to achieve a rewarding home schooling experience for both you and your child. Obviously you must have a desire to teach your children, that is number one. If you are doing it out of duty or obligation you may soon find yourself in way over your head and wanting to get out. The second requirement is determination. You must truly want your child to succeed and be willing to put forth the time and effort it takes for your child to reach his or her potential. With these two ingredients your child may be able to realize an education that could not be achieved in a public classroom.

You, more than anyone else, want your child to reach their full potential. This is usually not possible in a crowded classroom environment. A child, to learn at their best, must have one-on-one instruction from someone who truly cares for them. And who better than you can give that to them? Public school teachers are overwhelmed by the sheer number of students they must control every day. With the many different learning styles, discipline problems, regulations that need to be followed and other factors a public school teacher cannot spend the individual time with each child that is necessary to bring out that child’s best. Home schooling can help children to blossom and bring out a child’s full potential like nothing else can.

Do you have doubts about your ability to teach? All you have to do to overcome your fear is to visit a public classroom for a day. Visit a kindergarten class or a first grade class and you will see that much of the time spent is merely controlling the children’s behavioral problems. And the lessons that are taught are usually very simple. In a one-on-one home atmosphere you will be able to progress at your own pace.

With a few home school books and lesson plans you will be able to get started very easily. Remember, you are starting your teaching experience with a very young child. And you will actually be able to learn as you go. With a little preparation it is possible to grow with your child. And the first time you see some of your instruction sink into your child’s brain you will feel satisfied that you are performing a very important task. You will surely be surprised at how effective you can be as your child’s homeschool instructor.

Public school teachers have their curriculum all laid out for them. They must follow programs and use materials that others have already approved for them. They must also move at a predetermined pace so that they can get through their study programs even if it means going forward at the expense of a child understanding what has been taught. You, on the other hand, can come up with your own homeschooling curriculum which can include religious or moral beliefs. You can take a field trip anytime you desire. You can make sure your child fully grasps a specific subject before moving forward. This will allow your child the opportunity to learn as they should be learning and at a pace they can keep up with. In a public system the slower children are often left behind.

There are negatives as well as positives however. The biggest negative to home schooling is your time. Your child will most likely receive a idn poker more rewarding education at home, but you will be devoting lots of your time to this cause. This could be a big sacrifice, especially if you are struggling financially and need to work. However, with a real desire you may be able to live without luxuries that will give you the time you need to offer your child the education they deserve. Search the internet for lesson plans, other pros and cons, christian home schooling information, home schooling requirements, home schooling books, eclectic homeschooling and other topics of interest. After researching this subject you may find that teaching your child will be even more rewarding for you than it is for your child. If you would like to develop a special bond with your child homeschooling may be the way.

You’ve written and compiled an ebook. Now you have to decide how much to charge for it. Finding the right price is essential to the success of your product. If you charge too little, people will think it’s of little value, and they won’t purchase it, or even it they do buy your book, you will have to sell thousands of copies to get to the point where you can begin to see a profit. If you price it too high when compared with your competition, you will find yourself steadily lowering the price, which will cause you all idn poker kinds of new problems in the future. For example, if you sell your ebook at first for $39.99, and later reduce it to $24.95, don’t you think the people who bought it for $39.99 are going to be PISSED?

Choosing the right price for your ebook is one of the most critical parts of the marketing process. The first rule of pricing ebooks is to never underprice. Determine the highest price your audience can afford, and then if you find your book isn?t selling, you can always reduce the price. Before you take that step, make sure you are promoting your book like crazy on the Internet and on websites. The price should be aimed at bringing in profits, but you should never forget that price is one of the factors that people use in judging the value of your ebook ? before they buy it. So always start with the highest price, and then launch a mega-marketing campaign.

Pricing an ebook is particularly difficult because ebooks are a fairly new commodity. Since they are digital, the value of an ebook is as confusing as the understanding of what digital actually is to the average layperson. This means that we must look at ebooks in a different light in order to determine their actual worth in this brave, new cyber world.

Let’s look at the difference between a book in print and an ebook. A printed book is an object you can hold in your hand, store on your bookshelf, even hand down

to the next generation. It is priced on factors such as paper stock, design and production costs, and marketing.

But the fact that unites ebooks and print books is that they are composed of ideas. It is the ideas in these books that have the ability to change, or possibly transform, people’s lives.

What do you think an idea is worth when evaluated against the cost of paper and ink?

It is the IDEAS that are valuable! That is how you determine the cost of your ebook.

What should I charge for my ideas?

There are all different formulas and methods for determining the correct price for your ebook. Let’s begin with honing in on your ultimate goals.

Decide if your goal is to get wide distribution and maximum exposure. This goal is aimed at drawing customers to your business or service, or to establishing the credibility of your reputation. If this is your main goal, you should aim to keep your price on the low side. Some authors have even priced their ebooks at a profit loss to draw a high number of new customers. The key is to find a price that maximizes your profits and the number of books you sell.

This is an excellent pricing strategy if you are looking to acquire long-term customers. Long-term customers are extremely likely to buy from you again and again ? as long as the first ebook they buy is of exceptional quality and beneficial to the customer.

However, if your book contains valuable ? and more importantly NEW information, references, or techniques ? then you should aim to price it on the high end.

After you figure out your goal, you must figure out what your audience’s need is for your ebook. For example, does your book solve a particular problem? If it does, and solves it in a way that hasn’t been written about in one hundred other ebooks, you will be able to achieve high sales at a high price. If your book solves a problem or answers questions in a new and unique way, you should price your book as high as you can go. You will achieve larger profits this way, but bring in fewer customers. Just make sure the question or problem that your book solves is one that is important and relevant to the majority of your market audience. If your ideas are not common knowledge, or you are presenting a brand new technique, you will be able to sell books at a high price. Just be prepared for your competition to

undercut you on price as soon as they hear about your book.

Keep in mind that the above pricing strategy is temporary. Eventually, you will cease to sell books at this high price. So figure out in advance how long you plan to offer your ebook at this high price, and when that time is up, change your pricing strategy.

If you want to see large profits over customer draw, aim for an audience that is looking for easy solutions to their problems at a low price. If your book is

aimed at solving one particular problem rather than general advice, then you can charge more. Start at the highest price the market will bear to bring in the

largest profits, and plan to discount the book a number of times throughout the year.

Marketing Strategies

The key that unlocks the sales potential of your ebook is to find a single sentence that becomes your selling handle. This sentence states what question or problem

your book answers and the benefits your ebook can provide. Then be sure to use that sentence in every piece of sales and promotional material, and every time anyone asks you about your ebook.

Besides promoting your books assiduously online, there are several other strategies that can help you sell more books.

One is to give something away for free with your book, such as a valuable bonus item. Or bundle several ebooks under one price, which lowers the price for each ebook if they were sold separately.

An effective technique for figuring out a price is to send out a survey to your current customers. If these customers have already bought an ebook from you, ask for their opinion in terms of price. Do this by creating a sales page for the new book, but don’t include a price on that page. Instead, add a number of links to survey questions that ask pointed questions to aid you in assigning a price to your ebook.

Another strategy is to test out prices by creating a number of duplicate sales pages with different prices on each page. Make sure your sales copy is exactly the same on every page, and includes your selling-handle sentence. Then figure out for each page the conversion ratio between visitors to your site and sales of your book. This will tell you what your optimum price is.

Ultimately, if you’ve written a book that solves a problem or presents a new technique, your book will bring in both traffic and profits. So be sure to write that selling-handle sentence that sums up what problem your book solves and what the benefits of your book will be to the customers who purchase it. And then watch your market come to you!

Based on my research, this seems to be the basic principle that website owners have been following to get passive income online:

* Get many people to come to your website

* Get them to click on your Adsense links

Sounds simple enough. Get people into your website from Google search, then link out to an Adsense Ad. Search In Adsense Out.

Practically applying it to get sufficient commendable income, however, can be quite a challenge.

The first problem is how to get many visitors to your website.

Thats where Search Engine Optimization comes in. However, this is really easier said that done. Its a bit of an artwork. You basically have to read the mind of an Internet user. What keywords would he use? Why would he visit your website? Do you have the content go get people interested enough to get to your website?

Basically, your goal is visibility. You have to be seen. You can do this using SEO or using traditional brand-building methods. Tell your friends, family and colleagues. If they have websites, politely ask if you could link with each other.

For those lucky few that are already on top of the search engines, this is not a problem. Others (including myself) would have to work hard at it. Look at FilipinoLinks.com. Its been around for a very long time and has made quite a foundation. It would not be too difficult for its owners to tweak the website for SEO.

Experts have varied opinions on what to poker online put in a website. Some say, put relevant important content with around 500-1000 words on each of your website. Some say provide simple 300 word news posts.

Another option to get clicks would be to advertise online for keywords. Adwords is an example of a tool that can allow you to do this. There will be marketing expenses in this scenario. The goal here is to get more Adsense income than Adwords Expenses which is really basic business sense. This is easier said than done, I tried it and got dismal results.

The next problem would be how to get visitors to click on Adsense links.

Well, the first thing that needs to be done is to get an Adsense account. Its pretty easy to setup. After that, you need to put the Adsense links on your website. There are people who say make it blend it when the rest of your pages. Here, on my website, you can see my Adsense Ads that seem to be part of the overall theme.

Other experts say the more noticeable the advertisements, the more they will be clicked. In this case, the Ads stand out prominently with a different, and sometimes contrasting color scheme. One tip given was actually position the Google Ad right next to an image/picture. Viewers tend to click on picture links, so more income potential income there.

What does this all mean for a Filipino Entrepreneur?

In my point of view, it means opportunities. Although I have just started experimenting on all of this myself, there seems to be a real possibility of gaining a little revenue. For example, I started this website (last January) and have,in my first month I gained US$7 from Adsense. Its not much but consider this:

* My expenses so far have been the webhosting (US$4 monthly), and domain name (US$3 for one year got it at a discount).

* If I continue getting US$7 a month, that would be, US$84 a year.

* My years hosting would be US$48

* My theoretical income for one year would be US$33.

There are other costs, of course, from writing the content for this website electricity, less time to do other things, etc I didnt include it yet. If you had pre-existing content, this wouldnt matter to you. Just upload it and you should be ready.

For example, if you had a song lyrics database, you could find a pretty reliable web developer, have him upload your database, and include AdSense. Optimize it for search and you should soon get some revenue. It will probably not be big, but enough to get you interested.

I remember on my last test with the wordtracker application, Pinoy Ako Lyrics were some of the top keywords I found. People were actually looking for lyrics of Filipino songs. Since new songs come out every month, whoever gets the lyrics out soonest would be found earlier.

If you had a database of all Philippine Lotto Results ever since it began, you could probably have a statistics analyzer custom-made from your website. It could give suggested lotto numbers based on historical info. That would be something a lot of people would go to.

There are probably other more interesting opportunities for the web-savvy Pinoy entrepreneur. As long as you get people to your website, and get them to click on an advertisement, there will be revenue.

When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, little did he realise the positive effect it would have on customer service or the negative effect it could also have!

Yes, the telephone can be a great tool in helping to provide exceptional customer service but it can also quickly destroy a customers perception of your service. What steps can you take to ensure that, whenever you or your staff use the phone, it adds something positive to the customer experience?

Here are some ideas.

Answer Promptly

Its an old tip but one usually ignored! You are sitting at your desk, deep in thought, writing your monthly report and the phone rings. Ill just finish this sentence quickly you say to yourself and before you know it, the phone has rung 10 times. The caller is unlikely to be in a good mood assuming he hasnt already hung up!

Just try and remember the last time you sat on a phone with it ringing and ringing. What pictures came into your mind while you were waiting? An image of the person you are trying to call sitting at his desk chatting or casually drinking a cup of coffee? Didnt get you in a good mood did it? So why put your customers through it?

Aim to answer your phone within 3 to 5 rings. A prompt pick-up will get the conversation off to a positive start and also avoids you having to open your conversation with an apology.

So, get to the phone as quick as you can.

Be Enthusiastic

When you answer the phone make sure your voice conveys the message, Really happy to be speaking to you! Make your voice light, bring a feeling of enthusiastic emotion to your tone and most importantly sound eager. You dont want the caller thinking that you would rather be doing something else even if you do!

Get a real upbeat feeling into your opening greeting. Say your Good morning or Good afternoon with a strong, enthusiastic tone. This will immediately lift your callers spirits and get you both off to a good start.

If you really are having a bad day (and we all get them!), and enforced enthusiasm is going to be struggle, stand up and take the call. This helps makes your voice lighter and the change in position and body language can have a positive impact. Try it out.

Listen To What They Have To Say

You may think that you listen intently to all conversations you have. Its difficult enough to do this when you are face-to-face with someone, but over the phone without eye contact, keeping your attention is even more difficult. Its too easy, especially if the caller has a habit of padding out every point he wants to make, to think about the task you were just interrupted on, or about that chat you had with one of your suppliers earlier. Before you know it, youve lost track of what the caller is on about.

Actively listening to what is being said is a skill everyone needs if they are to use the phone as a tool for great customer service. But how can you keep your attention focused on what is being said?

-> First of all, commit to yourself that you will actively listen. Without a clear commitment nothing ever happens

-> Take notes during every call, even if you dont need to. The act of having to capture the callers key points, will force you to listen. Just focus on writing down keywords, not complete sentences otherwise youll be concentrating on writing and not listening!

-> If an important statement has been made, repeat it back in your own words. This will force you to listen for the key points worth repeating

-> Ask questions. Dont go too far with a constant barrage of questions but ask just enough to keep your mind alert

Active listening is not just about making sure you pick up all the key points; its also about respecting the caller. They will feel they have been treated with importance and respect if its clear you have been listening. Relevant questions and the occasional Umm can go a long way to making the caller feel they have been listened to.

Avoid Distractions

If possible, try and remove as many distractions as you can while speaking on the phone, especially if the call is important. If your office door is open and general office noise is affecting your listening, ask the caller to hold for a moment and close the door.

If someone walks into your office while you are taking an important call, indicate for him to stay outside or come back. It can be very distracting having someone sitting at your desk while you are talking.

If you were working on your PC when the call came through, turn and face away from it. You dont want your eyes and mind wandering back to look at the document you were working on!

Respect the callers time and remove or avoid anything which may cause your mind to drift off.

Finish Strongly

When the call is coming to an end its important to finish in a strong, convincing way. Summarise what has been agreed, what actions are to be taken and by whom. Leave the caller in no doubt as to what the next step is.

Just as your opening was full of enthusiasm, so should your closing statement. A good, strong and positive, Good to talk you and speak to you soon closer will bring the call to a satisfactory end. Your customer will hang up knowing that the call was worthwhile.

Answer Phone and Voicemail Messages

If you are not at your desk or in the office, any recorded message you leave is just as important in creating the right impression as the actual call itself. Some people dont like leaving messages but if your phone has the capability then use it. By leaving a message at least your customer will have the opportunity to partly satisfy the reason he called. Not being able to say anything can be frustrating.

Here are some thoughts on how to record effective messages:

-> Write out the message before you record it. Dont do it off the cuff as it will probably be full of umms and pauses. It wont sound professional

-> When recording, speak slowly and carefully, making sure that the caller can understand everything you say. This is especially the case for telephone numbers where you can be reached in an emergency

-> Make the message punchy and too the point. Dont fill it with unnecessary information

-> Call your number and listen to the message. If it doesnt sound right record it again and again until it does

-> Regularly change your message to reflect what you are doing. poker online If you are going to be away on holiday, give a date when you will be back. If you are out only for the morning, tell the caller you will return their call in the afternoon. Messages which are up to date will make the caller more confident about leaving a message

If used correctly the telephone can be a great asset in building a reputation for providing exceptional customer service. Used incorrectly, it can damage your business and give another reason for your customers to go and take their business elsewhere.

It has taken me decades literally to finally pick up another C.S. Lewis book and read it. In high school I read Lewis book, That Hideous Strength and completely missed Lewis message. One decade later I read Lewis Mere Christianity and fully understood what Lewis was saying. With The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, part of C.S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia series, the gospel message is clearly made evident in an allegorical/mystical style. Lewis used the Narnia series to explain Christs love for humankind to children, who are the series principal readers.

This first novel in a series of seven books is currently a major motion picture now completing a successful run on theatre screens across the U.S. I have yet to see the movie, a Disney production, but I understand that it holds very true to Lewis storyline. I expect to see the movie before it leaves theatres later this month; it will become available on DVD this April.

Back to the story! The theme of The Lion centers around four children, the Pevensie siblings, who get caught up in a land of magic. Entering Narnia through a wardrobe [a tall cabinet that holds clothes] located in a home where they are boarding the children enter a land where it is always winter, but never Christmas. Under the spell of the White Witch, Narnia is forever in the grip of evil. The land is occupied by talking animals [beavers, for one], spirits, goblins, sprites, but no humans. That is until Lucy Pevensie shows up followed by her brother Edmund and, later, Susan and Peter.

Quite obviously the White Witch a/k/a the Queen of Narnia is most interested in humans so she resorts to all sorts of magic and trickery to lure them in. Edmund, the most impressionable of the siblings, is quickly captivated by the White Witch and then sets out to betray the others.

Without giving away the storyline, the theme of Narnia clearly reflects the captivity of this present world under Satan, but its past and future deliverance through Jesus Christ. In the form of a lion, Aslan, Lewis brings a savior to Narnia who eventually releases the land from its winter grip and vanquishes the White Witch.

For those unfamiliar with the gospel message, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe may be hard to follow. However, Lewis wrote the book in 1950 immediately after the horrors of Word War II and with the Nazi air battle for London fresh in the minds of British citizenry. Lewis may have been responding to a strong spiritual hunger of his time when he wrote the series as Narnia successfully points seekers to Aslan, much as the Bible points readers to Jesus Christ.

I am not sure if I will read the remaining six books in this series, but I am definitely interested in exploring several other writings of Lewis.

C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams were contemporaries who were a part of a group of writers and intellectuals known as The Inklings who met during the 1930s and 1940s at a public house in Oxford. idnplay Tolkien, like Lewis, used Christian allegory in many of his writings including, The Lord of the Rings, another series of books that was recently released as a major motion picture.

Clearly, the renewed interest in C.S. Lewis works is a positive step especially for a generation of children not familiar with the gospel message. Disney, for their part, is interested in developing the remaining six books of the series into individual movies. So, expect Narniamania as some have called it to continue unabated for many years to come.