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Just like with us, if a dog eats too much and does not get enough exercise they are going to gain weight. It is very important to take care of your dog if he develops a weight problem. Just as with us, being overweight can cause a whole mess of problems with a dog. The thing is they happen faster with a dog than they do in us. The excess weight a dog has can cause extra pressure on their joints and muscles and they might develop arthritis. The extra weight can also cause heart problems with dogs and dogs can even get diabetes. Before you rush out to buy the newest diet dog food, stop and look at your dogs feeding habits.

Before you start, double check and see if you dog is overweight. You can check this without going to your vet. The best way to check is to feel your dog’s ribs with both hands. For an ideal weight dog, it is easy to feel the ribs. If you look at your dog from the side, the belly is tucked up and if you look at your dog from the top, you will see your dog with a little waist. If you dog is overweight, you are not doing to be able to feel his ribs. When you look at your dog from the side, you will not see a tucked belly and when looked at from the top, there is no waist. Growing up my family dog was a beagle and was overweight and her belly hung down to the ground almost, she was that fat. You could tell just by looking at her, we didn’t need to do the rib test at all.

While being overweight can be the symptom of other illness, chances are your dog is just being overfed. It is still a good idea to take him to the vet just to make sure. It turns out our beagle had a thyroid problem and needed medication. That was part of the problem, the other part was that she ate too darn much.

Like we said, you do not need to rush out and buy the newest diet food for your dog. There are some simple steps you can do first. For starters look at his feeding schedule. If you are still feeding him twice a day, you should cut that down to once a day especially if he is older than a year. The schedule of feedings for you dog should go as follows: A puppy gets fed three times a day from 8 weeks until about 6 months. From 6 months until a year, they should be fed twice a day. Once they hit a year, they only need to eat once a day.

Also, keep an eye at how much you are feeding him. Keep in mind the guidelines that are on the bag of the dog food. If it states to feed your dog a cup and a half a day for example, do not feed them 3 cups. Some people believe that if they are only being fed once a day then they should double up on the serving size to compensate. This is not true. When your dog is eating three times and even twice a day, they more than likely still on puppy food. Once they are being fed once a day, they are on adult food which theoretically will fill them up more than the puppy food did.

Next, make sure you exercise your dog. This is easier with some breeds than it is with others! Take your dog for walks, if you have a fenced in yard, make sure you are out there with him tossing a ball around or at least playing with him. Anything to get them moving. This not only helps with exercise for maintaining weight but it also helps some dogs relieve a lot of their pent up energy.

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Now that you’ve gotten a bit of a taste for public speaking, it is time to strategize. In order to become successful as a speaker, you will need to create a plan. You should commit it to paper, and you may even want to assign dates and goals to each aspect of your plan. Write it and treat it as seriously as you would a business plan for any other kind of business.

This plan should cover all of the competencies you will need to develop. These will fall into three areas: writing speeches, honing your speaking skills, and marketing your services.

Start by taking a close look at your current talents and skill set in each of these areas. Let’s begin by looking at writing. Are you happy with your current writing skills? Do you feel you have decent writing skills but maybe not the exact qualifications to write a speech to present your information effectively? How will you be most comfortable acquiring any writing skills you need? Would you prefer to teach yourself from books? Take a class? Hire a writing coach? Or would it be easier for you to find a ghostwriter to write all your material for you?

When pondering these questions, take into account your current situation when it comes to time and money. Hiring a ghostwriter or a writing coach might be the most effective option, but also the most expensive. You can get books on writing speeches and writing in general from the library or at a used bookstore for free or next to nothing. If you are beginning your operation on a shoestring budget, these may be the best options, at least at first.

The advantage of taking a class is that it will offer benchmarks by date. You’ll develop a sense of mastery as you progress through the term or semester. However, you can easily duplicate this for your own course of study. Peruse the list of books featured in a later chapter, choose the ones that appeal to you most, and assign yourself deadlines by which to finish reading them. Commit this goal sheet to paper and make it part of your professional speaking plan. Many of the books will feature self-directed writing assignments and you’ll want to build this into your goal sheet.

The next section of your plan should focus on the development of your speaking skills. You need to take an honest self-appraisal of your current status. If you know that you need improvement, write down the steps you will take toward this goal on your plan. You’ll find many suggestions about how to improve your presentations in chapter nine. Study these, create goals, and assign deadlines by which you will accomplish them.

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Whether you are playing in a tournament or not, you need to allow yourself plenty of time to warm-up before you start your round. A good warm-up gets you off to a great start for the rest of the day. You probably have seen athletes such as football player, baseball players, etc. warming up before every game. Golfers are not any different. Professional golfers have done their warm-up and ready to start the round with a great opening swing by the time they are standing at the tee.

Many amateur golfers have a tendency to warm-up when they leave their car in the parking lot to run into the golf shop to get signed up. For the rest of the day they will feel rushed and frazzled. Their first 5 shots will be bad which will ultimately ruin the rest of the round.

It is best to get to the course early, at least one hour before tee time. You can take care of business at the golf shop, change shoes, etc without being rushed and in a hurry. This schedule will allow you plenty of time to warm-up at a leisurely pace.

You will want to start your warm-up by putting some shots. This will give you an idea of the speed on the green. Use a tee or a coin as your target when doing these putting shots. Putt to your target from twenty feet away and also from thirty and forty. Then you will want to do some short putts from three feet away and work up to 10 feet away. Do not putt to the hole. After putting to such a small target, the hole will look huge which will be good for your confidence. Next putt from six inches away from your target placing the target up hill from where you are putting.

Then you will want to hit some chip shots around the green. This will help you determine the firmness of the green. A ball will roll more on a firm green than it will on a soft green. The ball will also react differently on different types of rough. This will help you read the green. It will help you make choices during the round such as where to make the ball land on the putting green, and the best greenside shots to make.

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Social Networking sites are basically the community sites that we talked about earlier in this book, communities that you join and then search for people within the community with similar interests as you.

Now, some social networking sites are very small and focused, so by definition the people who join such sites are already members of a tightly focused interest group.

Such a group might be brought together by their political or religious beliefs, or it could be something such as their hobbies (they love Ford Mustangs or making cheesecake) sports or basically anything else that mankind has found it possible to be interested in!

So, in such a tightly focused group, almost all members without exception will be interested in the one common thing.

However, there are many other community sites where the only real common interest that most of the members could possibly ever have with one another is that they are all, in fact, members of the same site!

This is simply a function of the size and therefore the diversity of the sites in question, with websites like MvSpace and FaceBook having literally millions of members all over the globe. (107 and 73 million members respectively)

Such sites generally have a totally open membership, meaning that anyone can become a member, no matter what their hobbies, beliefs, or views are.

Thus, there is no general community wide commonality of beliefs or interests either.

It is therefore only natural that once you are a member, inside this online community, you can begin to create your own network of friends, those that do have similar interest and/or beliefs to those of your own.

And this is where it gets interesting for you as an Internet marketer or online business person.

Firstly, if we use MySpace as our example (simply because whatever works on MySpace also works on almost every other social networking sit, albeit sometimes after a degree of ‘finessing’), then you are looking at one of the ten biggest websites in the world.

Whatever your interests, given so many millions of members, then there will inevitably be others that have similar interests, people that you could potentially ‘bond’ with immediately.

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Social networks have become an extremely popular way for people to stay in touch with each other. If you have not been to MySpace or Facebook, it is worth a look around. While a lot of the publicity these sites have gotten is because of the teens and college students that use them, businesses have discovered they are a useful way to build their networks as well.

Some of the sites are very bare-bones, but some of them are quite elaborate. One thing most of them have in common is a place for visitors to leave comments. Many times these comments are text messages back and forth between friends, but some of the messages are small digital pictures and graphics with a prewritten message.

There are web sites that provide these e-comments free to their viewers. If you see one you like and want to share with a friend, you can copy and paste a small line of code into your friends comment box, and the e-comment will appear.

When you look at these e-comments you will notice that on every one there is a company name or web address at the bottom. Most of these graphics are clickable links that will take the viewer back to the web site of the person that created it. If your e-comment is attractive or quirky enough, social network users will start sharing it with their friends. When their friends (or their friend's visitors) see the graphic, they will click on it to see what other e-comments you have to offer.

While many businesses are using these services to build their networks, the majority of users are teens, young adults, and women. If your business is aimed toward adult men, this method may have limited success, but if you are marketing to the younger generation, you can bring a flood of traffic to your site with this method.

A similar service you can offer is free e-cards. People are always searching for cards to send to friends, family members, acquaintances, and co-workers. They are easy to use, and have maintained their popularity over the years. These cards come in several different varieties; with or without music and static or animated. Some are very simple animations; others are very elaborate Flash animations.

Once the person finds the card they like, they can fill in the message box, add the email of the person they are sending it to, and press the send button. An email is sent telling the recipient that their friend has sent them a card, and it gives them a link to click that will allow them to view the card.

The person receiving the card gets a message from a friend to enjoy and a small line telling them who sponsored the card. Because you are hosting the card service, the viewer is already at your site. You just have to give them a good reason to click the links that will take them where you want them to go.

In early 2006 job listing service CareerBuilder.com launched a program called Monk-e-mail. With the click of a mouse you could choose which chimpanzee you wanted to use with your card, then personalize that chimp with different clothing, glasses, hats, and backgrounds. Users also had the option of writing or recording their own message, and even had a text to speech functions that allowed the chimp to deliver your message. As an extra bonus, when you move your mouse around the screen, the chimp follows your movement.

Within 3 months of launching, over 14 million monk-e-mails had been sent. The kicker is that CareerBuilder spent no money in marketing this service. In the first week CareerBuilder sent out 1,500 monk-e-mails to employees and agencies, and word of mouth did the rest. Monk-e-mail was so original and quirky that the buzz quickly spread across the internet, and even maid it to the main stream media outlets.

You do not need to create a program as elaborate as monk-e-cards, but it does need to be creative and unique. If you do digital photography or graphic art, this could be a very good way to use your talent to build traffic to your site, or you could hire a freelance designer to create your cards for you. Do a search for e-cards and you will get a good idea of the types of designs people are using. As always, quality and uniqueness are an advantage.