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EASY CHOCOLATE CAKE

This recipe only takes one bowl, just imagine, easy chocolate cake!

Ingredients

3/4 cup plus 2 tbsp whole-wheat pastry flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup nonfat buttermilk
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
1 large egg, lightly beaten
2 tbsp canola oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup hot strong black coffee
Confectioners' sugar, for dusting

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Coat a 9-inch round cake pan with cooking spray. Line the pan with a circle of wax paper.

2. Whisk flour, granulated sugar, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a large bowl.

3. Add buttermilk, brown sugar, egg, oil and vanilla. Beat with an electric mixer on medium speed for 2 minutes. Add hot coffee and beat to blend. Pour the batter into the prepared pan.

4. Bake the cake until a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean, 30 to 35 minutes. Cool in the pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes; remove from the pan, peel off the wax paper and let cool completely. Dust the top with confectioners’ sugar before slicing.

(Makes 12 Servings)

Calories Per Serving: 139

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Being able to sell art is not an easy task. Even those people who are already art collectors are hesitant to be the first buyers from obscure or not so well known artists. Additionally, it is way more difficult to sell to people who are not really art collectors and do not know anything about you. However, once you get to make that first sale of your masterpiece, selling again would be a lot easier than before.

Is Your Art Ugly?

As an artist, you should not start doubting yourself about your creativity and skill with your art if you are unable to sell them or only sell a couple. There are several reasons on why people who already like art do not buy pieces often. Such reasons are related to their knowledge about art, self-confidence, identity crisis of what their taste really is, and how much it matters to them what other people would say about the pieces they buy.

A lot of people in the art industry, whether they are new ones or old, usually worry of what other people would say about their purchase, or that their colleagues and friends would make fun of them. Even though a person likes a certain artwork of yours, they are probably not sure on how well done the piece is, whether it's really worth the price, or whether you as an artist is established enough in your career to warrant such prices.

Thus, your job as an artist is to help those people that admire your art feel secure and comfortable with you both, as an artist and a businessperson. As you do this, you help alleviate whatever other fears that they may have and have a higher probability that they'd buy your art.

If you don?t know where to start, then here are some tips on how you can make admirers of your art buy your piece and hopefully in time, turn them into patrons.

Tell Them: It's OK, Really

Before you even start off with your sales talking, you should be able to show people that purchasing your artworks is okay. You can try talking about other collectors that have bought your pieces, what kind of people they are and how long you have been transacting with them. Doing this would make your prospective buyer let go of the thought that you're just some bozo trying to sell him a piece of junk and get hold of his cash.

However, if you haven't had any collectors, then you should say so honestly. You should tell your prospective buyer that you are open to the possibility of selling your art to them, although you haven't really done this before.

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As you have learned, eliminating negative thoughts from your life is the cornerstone of both the power of positive thinking and the law of attraction. But how do you do that? How can you think positive thoughts and move away from the negative?

Well, it’s easy. You have to start turning your thoughts on their ears. Learn to take a negative thought and spin it into a positive one. I’m going to give you a few examples you can use to turn negative thoughts into positive.

Negative Example #1: “Why did HE get the promotion? It’s not fair!”

Positive Response: “I wish I had gotten that promotion, but I will work even harder this year, and next year I will get one.”

Negative Example #2: “I’m so tired of being poor! When will this end?”

Positive Response: “I would like to be wealthy, so I will work harder to save money, spend less, and get more done at work.”

Negative Example #3: “I give up! I’ll never get this right!”

Positive Response: “I haven’t gotten it right, yet. But if I keep trying, I surely will very soon.”

Negative Example #4: “I’m so stupid. Why did I do that?”

Positive Response: “I made a mistake and I feel bad, but I’m going to use this as a learning opportunity so I never make the same mistake again.”

As you can see from these examples, it’s easy to turn a negative statement into one that is more positive. You don’t even have to believe the positive statement when you say it. If you repeat it a few times, you will often begin to believe it.

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Traffic Strategy #4: Building Backlink Campaigns

Google measures your websites overall relevancy based on who is linking to you. It’s a way for them to quickly evaluate your website and to connect it with a specific niche market.

Backlinks also count as votes for your website, and the more votes you have, the higher ranking you’ll receive – plus, developing a solid backlink campaign can help you rank for some remarkably competitive keywords that you otherwise might not be able to secure. Plus, when you work towards developing a targeted backlink campaign, your website will not only gain higher positioning, but it will appear more frequently.

Search engines determine how relevant your website is not just by the NUMBER of back-links pointing to your website but by WHO is linking to you.

This means that not only do you want to focus on building a high number of back-links but that you also want to focus on quality back-links that are housed on authority sites.

This means that you want to do your best to develop back-links on established websites in your niche. These are sites that have been around for quite some time, have developed a following, established a community and of course, receive a significant amount of traffic each day.

There are many different ways to begin your link building campaign and while many of the traditional strategies can be time consuming, once you have developed a solid back-link structure and begin to increase your search engine positioning, you will be able to easily maintain it.

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When it comes to writing tweets, don’t spend a lot of time worrying about whether it’s creative enough, witty enough, or interesting enough.

Once you have become an active member of the twitter community, you’ll find it easier to think of entertaining and useful tweets, and will also be able to respond to ongoing discussions from those you follow and who follow you.

For now, post whatever’s on your mind. Working on a website? Post about it. Perhaps you’ve found an interesting website or news story, post about it.

The idea is to simply post enough so that you become comfortable with the twitter system, and more importantly, so that your profile page shows activity before you start inviting people to follow you.

Once you’ve posted your first tweet, it’s time to start following people on twitter, so that you can build up your twitter presence, and encourage people to follow you in return.

Don’t just sign up and blast out ads every few minutes expecting to achieve anything but annoying those on your list.

Take the time to talk to people individually by directing messages to specific people, post useful information or links to free products and resources that people in your various niche markets would appreciate.

Just like anything else you need to develop a reputation on Twitter as being someone who is interested in helping others, while developing your own Twitter presence.

A great thing about Twitter is the ability to quickly locate other people who are involved in your target market, or industry.

For example, if you are looking to find people to interview who may be experienced in specific things, you can find many people who are involved in nearly every topic and subject online.

It’s like a rolodex of the entire online business industry, and as Twitter continues to grow, more and more people are jumping on board, so expect to see Twitter evolve and change to improve their system and add more interactive, productive features that will make it even easier for use to reach out to other users. Posting subtle little updates about your current projects, websites, blogs and products is an easy way to keep people up to date on what you are doing, even people who otherwise might not know who you are, or what you do.

The way you present your updates, and the frequency in which you do it, (avoiding Twitter spamming) is critical in staying current and helping your brand become memorable, and noticed by the community.