How to Strip

Hey, I thought this video was a trip if you haven't yet learned how to strip. Okay there's enough corny stripping jokes in the video.



By the way you can buy your roses pre-stripped from my website.

Great Weekend Selling Roses!

Just a little more on the working hard thing. I often find at times it feels that I may be working too hard for nothing and then all of the sudden you start getting back in a flood for what you're putting out.
Like for example on the newspaper route I'm doing with my son, we have been getting great tips for Christmas. I opened my mailbox one day and saw a load of cards in the mail and I was like "Whoa, what's this?" Then I realized, it's from our paper route. it was also very encouraging for my son, which is great.
I also had a great weekend rose selling, especially Friday night. I have a lot of Christmas plush in stock that I purchased earlier Christmases that I was determined to make good use of this Christmas. I attached them to my bouquets and made up some double rose sets as described earlier and even attached to singles. Those sold very well this weekend as well as the regular roses and lighted roses.

Have a Happy Holiday,
Claire

The Luckiest Woman in Babylon

Well the book I was going to tell you about was The Richest Man in Babylon. You probably have at least heard of it. If not, I definitely recommend it to those trying to be financially successful.
My favorite chapter was "The Luckiest Man in Babylon." Well it's kind of a funny name the man who tell the story was put up for collateral on a loan that was defaulted so ended up sold into slavery. He meets a man though, named Meggido who gives some great advice about work. He says that work is his friend and he basically greets work happily as he knows that the harder he works and the better job he does will lead him to better fortune and riches. He advises him that masters like slaves who are willing to work and he would be more likely to gain his freedom this way. They are also very smart business men and they apply their work in intelligent directions.
There is much more to this story and I found it very entertaining and very inspiring to an outlook on life that will be sure to improve it.
It very much has to do with last post. So I thought i would share it.
The man is does have pretty bad luck at certain points and is forced into some horrible slavery. I don't believe slave work will much make anyone feel very good and at the point the slavery was that brutal it didn't make him feel that good either.
I think a great point to ensure while working hard is that you're working toward a good purpose and you don't feel like a driven slave about it. I think an important point and one reflected in the story is to make up your mind that you want to do it , take pleasure in your work and what you're accomplishing. I think the feeling of being forced is what has made "work" a dirty word.

Good Luck,
Claire

Something about working hard

Soon after trying that biphasic sleep experiment and failing miserably, I saw that I was in more like a "Can I handle all this work?"experiment. If you see the earlier blogs, I had gotten myself involved in a paper route because I wanted to help my shy son get a job.
What is involved in the paper route is that anywhere from 2AM to 3 AM typically, you go to the distribution center put inserts into 200 to 300 papers, put them in bags and go out and throw them on lawns or whatever was requested. Once you're familiar with what your doing, you're usually done by 5:30AM on a regular day. Sunday is a very large paper, especially this time of year, and more customers want it, so that day takes longer.
Anyway I'm already a homeschooling mom, have some web businesses and sell roses on the weekends in night clubs.
I sell the roses until 3AM about a half an hour away from where I'm doing the paper route, so I have to rush from doing that to the distribution center-work like a crazy woman, especially on a Sunday morning to get those papers ready with my son and get them all thrown by the deadline.
Then basically go to sleep at 6 or 7 AM, get up get my roses prepared and start the drill all over again.
Not only is it a lot to do but it has to all be done very fast under he circumstances. At first I thought "Wow, this is really going to drive me nuts!"
But you know after a few days of this I started feeling better, thinking clearer and found all this extra work wasn't going to kill me after all.
Now I don't think it's a great idea to fill your life up with too much to do, so you don't do any one thing well and just work for the sake of work and not accomplish much.
But think of all the backlogged things you need to do, think of the business you may be starting. What if you worked as hard as you really could to get those things done and did what it actually took to make that business or that child rearing or whatever your doing a real success.
We tend to resist work, it's all around us, the idea that we shouldn't like it and it's to be avoided and that it's something unpleasant to get over, when I doubt that anyone who has been truly successful ever operated on that idea and hadn't worked very hard to obtain that success.
So I thought it would be kind of an interesting experiment to try to purposely do very much of that thing I'm resisting having too much of: WORK. And see what happens.
Well you know at first there were a lot of ups and downs with this, but I recently added some focus to it. Be practical--work hard in specific directions. I've only recently started with that addition, so I'll be letting you know how it goes.
I have more to say on this subject though, I read an interesting book that relates to this. I'll be telling you about that tomorrow.

Time to go,
Claire

Competition in rose selling

I have had competition from time to time on my route. I have had some pretty good success and have had a lot of experience having to overcome this sort of thing so can give you some good tips from time to time on this subject.
Here are some general rules you should start with:

• First of all it's nice to get exclusive deals with nightclubs, they may ask you to pay them, but it's worth it.(But there are always those places that don't anyone coming in there to sell.)
  
• Also I always make sure I have the highest quality best looking roses being sold, this almost always outweighs poor quality roses being sold at a lower price.
• Get there first!
• Oh, and did I say--get there first!

I have recently been having trouble with a new competitor going into one of my best places I sell at. She had been getting there first. So two things I did this week differently. I got there first and I stayed there a very long time. Now I wouldn't do this at a little dinky bar inhabited only by three alcoholics. But in this case while I had some other places on my route, I would have ideally gotten to sooner--this one was the best seller, so staying there was warranted and I got just as many sales or more sales by staying there anyway. I eventually moved on to my other places but then came back there again.
I did see that she went on to some of my other places instead--but overall this payed off. You also can't get too upset by any of it and be persistent in your own efforts. It seldom makes much difference if there is a little competition as long as you have the best roses and if you are the one that has been selling in the area the longest, that also helps quite a bit.

Later,
Claire

Why buy from an affiliate website?-Great deals..

First of all let me explain what an affiliate is. Click on that link for a more detailed explanation but it's simply someone preselling other people's products.
When asking some people what they thought about shopping on affiliate sites, they said that they would stop as soon as they were directed elsewhere. One reason was they thought that the commission the affiliate made would deter from their savings. This is not the case at all, in fact it's often the opposite. Say a shopper gets transferred to Amazon after being told about a special that they were running or some such thing, the shopper is at the same old Amazon with the same prices. Check my link and compare to when you go directly.
Don't get it mixed up with a Travel Agency type site or an Insurance Agent--they often do mark up the price. An affiliate doesn't even have the power to change the price.
Basically Amazon is paying the affiliate for advertising their website and Amazon is getting a great deal because they don't have to pay for the advertising until something is sold. If you use the link on the affiliate's site it simply tells Amazon where the referral came from.
You will most likely get much better deals and information by going through affiliate websites and here's why:

• Affiliate sites often cite the best deals available on the referred websites and the exact page to find them.
• They are not biased on any product or company but normally show good price and quality comparisons.
• You can find lots of gift ideas or information in one place often with pictures without spending hours searching.
• Many affiliate sites have great content and information on various subjects. Here's a good example.
  
• They often have coupons or promotional codes and you get to save money you never would have saved going directly to that merchant.

You probably won't find them by going to a search engine and putting in affiliate sites, but you run into them when searching for gift ideas, solutions to problems, best deals etc...

My other website

Hi, I'm back I've been working quite heavily on my gift site as the holidays are approaching.
The reason I started this website was originally to sell my roses online. Then I wanted a way to have them delivered anywhere in the country or the world for that matter.
I knew about FTD services. In case you don't know, if you call a florist and in New York and want them delivered to Chicago, that florist doesn't send their roses to Chicago. If they are connected up with FTD network, it's a set up where a florist in Chicago will deliver their roses and vice-versa.
Anyway, I don't have a shop so that doesn't work for the FTD network and I wanted to keep it simple. I'm a roseseller who sells roses in nightclubs and also a rose wholesaler, I just deal in roses and I'm a busy mom, but I wanted an online florist.
First of all I found the perfect templates and a really easy to use website builder with hosting and I could try it all free for a month. Then I found Linkshare which is a great affiliate program, you join them and then have access to a variety companies you can post products of on your website. Take a look at EasyGiftsandFlowers.com real quick just to see an example. When the person clicks on the product or link they get taken to the site where it's sold and they pay for it there. So if they want floral arrangements, weddings, funerals or any of that stuff they i provide full access to that from my site, I get a commission and I don't have to fill those orders unless they buy roses in my city. I think it's a nice arrangement, as I would have to pay someone else to provide all these services anyway. And basically doing the same thing as that florist in NY who has her orders filled in Chicago.
From there I got carried away and thought, you know candy would be nice send and diamonds are a girl's best friend and watches for the guys etc... Then I thought being that it's the holiday season, why not provide a link to Wal Mart and Amazon too.

Back soon,
Claire