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If you were to pick out 100 people at random, statistically 8 of them would love their jobs. The rest of them, like you, hate their jobs (that is, you statistically, though if you’re one of the aforementioned 8 who love their jobs, accept both my apologies for presumption, and congratulations for finding something you love). If you love your job, then you can probably quite reading now. But if you’re sick of your job, let me give you four reasons why you should begin quitting today!

1) Your Job Lies To You To Make You Feel Safe

20 years ago, this sounded logical: Go to school, get a degree, get a job, stay there. Maybe you’ll make a few lateral moves, but slowly you’ll work your way up the corporate ladder through hard work and discipline, and you’ll come out on top, like a mouse struggling in a bucket of cream, who eventually churns it into butter and crawls out, as Christopher Walken, playing Frank Abignale, Sr., in Catch Me If You Can, boasted at his retirement party (right before his life went down the proverbial tubes).

Of course the problem here is that for most people employed today, the system isn’t working that way. Jobs are harder and harder to find, but if you do find one you are often trapped by fear into ever considering leaving to pursue something else, primarily because you have what you feel is a safe and predictable income, and you’re afraid to affect that in any small way. “I’ve got my job, and my 401k (which just became a 201k) and my benefits…” And then when it’s too late, you’ve been cut and you’ve got nothing. Don’t believe me? Ask the 30,000 non-union GM workers who got laid off with no pension/retirement/benefits/sympathy when the economy took a nose-dive (while the execs kept their bonuses and golden parachutes). Your job lies to you because it needs you to live – it feeds off of you, and so it wants you to be very uncomfortable with the prospect of ever leaving it…almost threatened.

And this leads us to the second reason you should quit your job…

2) Your Job Eats Away Your Ambition

For those looking to set up a retail website in order to sell their products, there are many things to consider. These include choosing the URL name, having a website designed, choosing the range of products and offering secure transactions. A lot of time and research should go into every aspect of building a new website, whilst remembering that it will act as an online shop. It can be difficult to break into the online market but with the right products and a great deal of persistence, you can succeed.

First of all, you will need to choose a URL and purchase the domain. This should generally be the name of your brand and if you don’t have a particular brand, you can choose a popular shopping key phrase if available. There are not too many rules when picking the domain but it should be noted that it should not be too long, as many people will be put off by the simple fact of having to type in too many words.

Secondly, you will either need to have a website designed for you or you can choose one of the many website themes that are available online. If you have certain ideas of how you would like your website to look with certain features and widgets, enlisting the help of a bespoke website designer may be the option for you. However, this can be quite expensive and a cheaper option is to look through the many pre-made website themes available with various features and colours to suit different websites.

In addition, you should make a list of all of the products you wish to sell and separate them into relevant categories. Images should be taken of all of them to display to your website visitors. It is important to have a wide range of products, if there are too little you may find that visitors will leave the site quite quickly. You should also decide which products you would like to push forward for further recognition on the homepage or their relevant category pages.

When was the last time you checked your brand’s temperature? Is it hot or not? Does it perform well and sell for you, or is it closer to a head- and/or heartache?

Here are 3 steps you can take right away to skyrocket your brand to the next level of efficiency and success…

Uncover Your “Rays of Value”

The foundation of every strong, thriving brand is total clarity about the value it brings to the table. Can you jot down 30 to 50 benefits your clients get after working with you or consuming your product? These numbers may seem high, but they’re actually high for a reason – to make you look beyond the obvious, and dig deeper. What you want to do is draw a small circle in the middle of a piece of paper, and then a larger circle around it. If you pretend the small circle is the Sun, and the bigger circle is what captures the rays of light, then you’ll soon see how the beneficial outcomes spread like wildfire.

There are five areas to consider when you’re measuring the transformational power of what you do, so imagine cutting a cake in five pieces, and connect your “Sun” with the outer circle with five lines. The words to write on the five shapes that emerge are the following: financial, personal/family, spiritual, social, health-related. Now, for each category – for each “ray of value” – start with the most general and obvious benefits and then follow their trail to all the consequences they trigger in your clients’ life. Voilà! Piece of cake, right? (Literally.)

Stand Out More

How memorable is your brand? Does it get attention in a crowded marketplace? If your answers are not anywhere near “very” and “absolutely”, it’s time to find out what makes you different from your “competition”, and then properly showcase it in your marketing, sales, PR – everywhere! Keep in mind that price and quality are NOT categories that will do much for your differentiation, though, as you don’t want to only appeal to price shoppers and quality is a given. A better use of your resources it to identify specific points of difference related to added value/bonuses, packaging, product and/or service delivery, business model, marketing, client experience, support of charitable causes, being bold enough to be controversial… you name it!