What about you? Are you thinking of becoming an entrepreneur?

If you have the “never say die attitude”, don’t like to quit and can stomach failures and crisis, then you may have what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.

The entrepreneurs and businessmen and women who make it to the top and became successful are not familiar with fear of failure. In a Forbes study of 50 of the top entrepreneurs and business leaders some years ago, it was found out that almost all of them said that if their business had gone under, they would have started another.

To become a successful entrepreneur, you need to have the following qualities:

1 . Self driven and confident, and have the ability to inspire confidence in others.

2. Persistent, patient, and wanting to keep on trying, despite failures.

3. Flexible, able to keep on trying, and believe in the adage that “try and try until you succeed.”

4. Daring, not afraid to take a risk.

5. Independent, getting more satisfaction and fulfillment from being responsible to yourself than from getting the praises of superiors.

6. Visionary, knowing where you want your business to go and how it should get there.

So, do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur?

On the other hand, I’ve also seen people who are just average in talents, skills and abilities, but  they were able to move up the organizational ladder, e.g. becoming managers of the companies that they were working for, and presidents of civic and professional groups where they belong.

Why? Is life unfair? I don’t think so. But applying business and management principles, I have learned one important lesson in career as in life:– That if you want to get ahead, either in the company that you are working for or in the clubs and organizations in which you are a member of, being good at what you do is only half the battle. The other half is: –You must also know how to promote and market yourself.

Below are some important tips on how to promote and market yourself:

1 . Plan your career or business path. Develop short term as well as long term objectives that you can measure and evaluate on a month-to-month basis. Having a plan will guide you on what you do, step by step, instead of just mindlessly getting by and just wait and see what life and your career bring.

2.  Establish good relations with the boss. Whether in business or in professional groups, always develop and maintain good relationships with the boss. Better still, treat the boss like a client by catering to his/her needs and go out of your way to make the boss look good.

3. Become the person others can depend on. This is like going the extra mile, as taught in the Bible. Volunteer to accept additional assignments and duties that make others’ jobs easier. This will make you wanted by your peers and colleagues and they will consider you valuable to them.

4. Make yourself visible. Be seen in professional, civic, and business groups outside of your job. Offer to speak to clubs and organizations needing to know your line of work or expertise. This way your credentials will get a boost, and you will be considered an expert.

5. Package yourself. This means your language, including your non-verbal ones, like the way you move and behave, plus your clothing and appearance, projects a successful image. Be confident and act confident but in a nice and friendly way.

So, you want to get ahead in the workplace and in professional circles? It is up to you now to market yourself by implementing the above tips. The rest is all up to you.

In the business world, criticism is necessary to get things done, to achieve the company’s objectives, and to obtain growth and profit.

Criticism is not always bad. In fact, done constructively, it can produce positive changes in people, resulting to their personal and professional growth and development.

The following are easy guidelines for giving criticism that gets results:

1. Criticize in private. Don’t embarrass or humiliate the receiver or the person being criticized.

2. When you criticize, be sure that the receiver is listening and is psychologically and emotionally ready and receptive to your message. See to it that the person understand your message. As the saying goes, feedback not heeded is feedback not heard.

3. Don’t criticize a person while he is angry, and don’t communicate in anger. Wait for the receiver to get over his / her anger, and the same rule applies to you.

4. Criticize the behavior, and not the person. Focus on what was done rather than the person’s role in it.

5. Criticize while the behavior is fresh in both your minds. It will then have the higher benefit.

6. Be honest with yourself about your purpose of criticizing. If your aim is to punish or humiliate, then the receiver will realize this and will become defensive. And he or she may even hate you for it. Don’t over-criticize. Moderation is better.

7. When you criticize, avoid showing superiority. Be provisional in your approach. Always communicate hope and change for the better.

8. When criticizing, show understanding and empathy for the receiver’s situation. Be generous to a fault. This will help win the receiver’s trust and respect to you, as well as regain his/her self-esteem.

As you can see, criticism is either good or bad. It depends  on how you criticize. Keeping in mind the above guidelines when you criticize the next time around will result in positive change and growth, both for the receiver, you and to the company as well. In this instance, criticism becomes a potent tool for good, since it gets results and help achieve personal and business objectives.

     Many bloggers commit a cardinal mistake of just doing little or nothing at all to make their blogs known. They just hope that once they have already launched their sites, traffic will just follow as a matter of course.

     What many bloggers did not know is that a blog is a business and, that being so, it requires business strategy and tactics to make it successful. One of the proven business strategy is the advertising tactic – designed to promote your blog to your target readers.

     This means you must purchase an ad space or advertise in other well-known or established blogs. By this I mean blogs that have already more visitors and subscribers and high page viewers compared to your blog. By putting your ads in the popular blogs, there’s a likelihood that their many loyal readers and unique daily visitors can see and click it which will direct them to your own blog.

     Based on my experience, there are four ways to effective advertising to maximize your ads and, therefore, optimize clicks through your website to generate traffic. These are the following:

     1. Selection of the blogs where the widget is strategically located. This means when you advertise in the other blogs, you must choose a blog with a widget above the fold or at the top, either on the left or right side of the webpage.

     Do not place your ad in a blog if the widget is located down below or near the footer. Chances are, the probability that your ad will be seen by the readers is slim, as people will have to scroll down all the content before they find your ad. This is a waste of money, unless you have a lot of money to waste in such kind of low impact advertising.

     2. Better and attractive ad design. It is best to have a graphical ad. Make it attractive and eye-catching so that the readers will be curious to click it. Your ad is your blog’s brand or image. It makes a statement about you, and tell the readers what it is all about.

     So, if your blog is about internet marketing, do not use an ad image representing a crocodile, as some bloggers do. Or if you are in a lifestyle category, your ad image must reflect something that connotes or evokes a picture of a lifestyle that you want to communicate and share to your readers, and not an image of a lizard or a lion, like the ads of some bloggers.

     If you are not getting good results (click to your blog) from your ad, then you have to change it after a week’s time of daily monitoring. Google Analytics and Alexa are two of the best traffic monitors.. Some ad designs just don’t perform. It is better to have at least 3 ads and learn which one works best for you.

     3. Use a proven ad size. An ad size with a 125×125 pixels is the industry standard, the kind that the Adgitize Ad Network, Entrecard, CMF and Project Wonderful use. You can also make a banner type, or even a size bigger or even smaller than the 125×125, but then you will have difficulty finding an ad companies within which to advertise.

     4.  Do a prior due diligence on the blogs where to put advert on. In putting your ad, you must also check first the traffic of the blog, the cost per click (CPC) or cost per thousand impressions (CPM). Select a blog with at least 100 visitors a day. CMF Ads has the stats on each blog within its members network, while Project Wonderful has also the same stats, plus the geographical data and the referring sites the visitors are coming from.

     Promoting your blog is not the same as publishing a good quality content and updating it regularly. But unless your blog has daily traffic, all your good quality posts are nothing. It is only by generating traffic to your blog by maximizing your ads in other blogs that will make your readers appreciate your good content, making them your loyal visitors and subscribers.

  BIOFUELS (ETHANOL) PRODUCTION And the T’boli Land in South Cotabato

     The National Biofuels Program of the Philippines recognizes the vital role of the sugarcane industry as the major supplier of feedstock for the production of bioethanol, the green energy or the renewable energy.

     The T’boli ancestral land consisting of 20,000 hectares of arable land with farm to market roads, rivers, and good climate in South Cotabato is good for the planting of sugarcane, as feedstock for biofuels (bioethanol) production. Sugarcane provides the highest yield of ethanol per hectare compared to other crops (with the possible exception of sweet sorghum, the worth as feedstock of which remains to be proven locally).

     The  Sugar Regulatory Administration (SRA) estimates the yield per hectare of the following feedstock:

Feedstock Yield per Hectare, tons Liters Ethanol per ton Liters Ethanol Yield per hectare/yr

Corn 2.39 370 1,768*

Cassava 7.75 180 1,395

Sweet Sorghum 50** 60 6,000*

Sugarcane 65 70 4,550

Mandated Bioethanol-Gasoline Blend

     The Biofuels Act of 2006 which was signed into law in 2007 mandates that two (2) years from the effectivity of the Act, at least 5% bioethanol shall comprise the annual total volume of gasoline sold and distributed by each and every oil company in the country, subject to the requirement that all bioethanol blended gasoline shall contain a minimum of 5% bioethanol by volume.

     Within four (2) years from the effectivity of the law; the NBB shall determine the feasibility and recommend to DOE to mandate a minimum of 10% blend of bioethanol by volume into all gasoline fuel distributed and sold by each and every oil company in the country.

Feedstock Requirement, Using Sugarcane

     A 5% minimum blend will need around 223 million liters of ethanol by 2009. With a 10% blend, 482 million liters (inclusive of consumption growth rate) will be needed by 2011 (DOE figures).

According to SRA, these volumes will need:

% Blend Liters Ethanol Sugarcane Area* MT Sugarcane**

5% minimum blend 223 million 49,000 hectares 3,186.000

10% minimum blend 482 million 106,000 hectares 6,886,000

* 4,550 liters ethanol per hectare sugarcane

** 70 liters ethanol per MT sugarcane

The Bioethanol Agro-Industry

     The minimum economic size of a bio-ethanol plant is 100,000 liters EtOH per day, running for 300 days annually.

     Such plant will require 7,000 hectares of sugarcane feedstock at the present productivity of cane farms, requiring about 1,500 tons cane per day to operate.

     This means that the T’boli land consisting of 20,000 hectares of contiguous land can support a biofuels manufacturing plant of 250,000 liters EtOH per day, which is most economical, because there is already an economies of scale.

     Adjunct facilities, i.e., those that will be appended to existing milling installations, are the most expedient way to produce ethanol and will need around 18 months of construction phase.

     Stand -Alone mill distilleries, on the other hand, will take 24-30 months to construct.

     The investors are always face with the problem of adequate cane supply, it being always  the primary issue irregardless of type of facility to be constructed.

     Reckoned on the above, and based on criteria of crop suitability, weather, displacement of other crops,  encroachment to existing canefields, plus the perceived aggressiveness of respective project proponents, the proposed bio-ethanol plants are as given below, in order of priority:

     However, this issue is not a concern in T’boli land is South Cotabato, since the 20,000 hectares of land can be utilized to the optimum to produce feedstock all year round.

According to SRA study, the indicative Investment Required (For a distillery with a capacity of 100,000 liters per day) are:

Adjunct Stand Alone

A. Industrial:

Civil Works, Land, Buildings P 140 M – P 300 M

Machinery                                   P  560 M – P 850 M

Energy System, Environmental      P  100 M -150 M

                                               Total:          P  800 M – 1,300 M

 B. Agricultural: (if not yet developed)

For 7,000 hectares                       P  700 M

 TOTAL INVESTMENTS, plant and agricultural:  P 1.50 – B P 2.00 B

     Note: T’boli land, being considered a “GREEN AREA” will require 20% – 30% more expenses agriculturally due to clearing and more extensive pre-development operations (add: P 200 M). However, the high investment cost will necessitate a sound overall environment, specifically addressing the cane supply issue, before any investment will be realized.

     In sum, the T’boli land in South Cotabato is an ideal area for the integrated biofuels (ethanol) production using sugarcane as feedstock,  to produce ethanol sugarcane fuel, or fuel ethanol made from sugarcane.