1. You wake up excited to start each day.
2. You have tons of ideas you want to develop.
3. You have to set a buzzer to remember to eat lunch.
4. You eat your lunch and continue working on your business.
5. When your kids come home from school, you are amazed that it is the afternoon already.
6. You are continually learning about what you do. You buy books, join online programs, etc.
7. You talk about what you do to everyone who will listen.
8. Your family and friends tell you, “you look happy!”
9. You would do what you do for free! (But of course it’s more fun to make money.)

So what do you do if you don’t love what you do? I struggled with this for several years. Then I came across Leslie Householder’s course on Family, Time, and Money. It has helped me align my priorities with my goals, and my goals with my actions. This has led me to work that I truly love. Leslie’s program starts with a free ebook, The JackRabbit Factor, which was a NY Times Bestseller.

I hope you love your job. But if you don’t, check out the Family, Time, and Money course. (At least download the free ebook and read it. It’s an easy-to read story that just may enlighten you about some things in your life.)

Friday a client called me and asked if I would proofread, edit, and revise a document for him. When he told me he would email me the paper, I assumed it was in Word format. The file came as a pdf, and it was 73 pages long.

I really didn’t want to retype the whole document. I also didn’t want to install Adobe Acrobat on my computer (even though I have it). When I had the full Adobe on my computer, every time I would open a pdf to read, it would open the whole Abode Suite and took forever. (I’m sure there is some way around this, I just don’t know it.)

Read on to see what I found and why I chose this photo!!!

Anyway, I googled “pdf to word doc.” Up came several sites; some of which I went to and they weren’t what I wanted. Then I found PDFtoWord.com. Just what I wanted to do with the ‘ dot com’ behind the name. How cool was that? It was free, which was even cooler. It worked, which was the very coolest yet.

I’ve put it on my list of cool products on the link to the right, so if you ever need to convert a PDF to Word and can’t remember how, just come back to my site and click on the link. Try it. After all it’s free. Isn’t the internet wonderful?

P..S. The title of this photo is ‘converted’ It says “pamphlets and bible thumpers converting the dead to christianity.” I included it in honor of Halloween.

If you want to make money, however, then it doesn’t make sense to use a free service. With a free service you don’t have complete control of your site. Also many free programs will shut you down if you “commercialize” their site. I didn’t realize this until a friend had her site shut down. It was sad because she had put time and effort into her blog and she can no longer use it.

WordPress isn’t the only program you can use to blog, however. Before I began my blog I did some research on several programs that I could host myself. (As you’ll get to know through my blog, I am big on research. I absolutely love it! I know, I’m quirked – and yes that is a word and I like dictionaries too.)

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. Why I choose WordPress:

1. It’s free. Why pay for something when you can get a great product free?
2. It’s open source. I love open-source software. I feel it is the wave of the future. Besides the development and support benefits, I think it also helps connect us throughout the world.
3. It is easily customized. Many times you can change the placement of widgets and text with the click of a button.
4. There are thousands of free themes. You can easily change the look of your website each month if you want. You can also pay for themes for very reasonable prices.
5. There are tons of plugins. Some plugins are practical (like Aksimet for spam control). Some plugins are fun (like Quotes Collection for rotating quotes.)
6. It is the most popular blogging software program in the World. When many people talk about blogs, they are discussing WordPress.
7. You can easily switch from other platforms.WordPress supports importing information from several other blogs, so if you decide to switch to WordPress it can be easily done.

Have I convinced you yet that WordPress is the best blogging software? I hope so.