It was coming up to the birthday of my eldest son a few weeks ago. As a parent it gets harder and harder each year, as the children get more street wise, to find a present that is both acceptable to a teenage boy as well as enabling you as a loving parent to keep the coolness that every parent tries to hang on to.

After many weeks of trying to pre-empt what he would like as a gift imagine our surprise when he approached me one morning asking for a hooded bathrobe with his initials on it, just like he’d seen a pop star or other wearing some MTV programme or other. Where on earth was I going to find a hooded monogrammed kids bathrobe.

When I was a child my birthday present were usually pretty basic things, a new football or a book or something of that ilk, nothing too taxing for my parents, I don’t think they were too bothered about trying to keep any kind of coolness going, my amusement of wondering what my parents would say if I’d have asked them for a hooded kids monogrammed bathrobe did nothing to ease my worries as to where I was going to start looking.

In the back of my mind I couldn’t help but think what my son was hoping for with hooded kid’s monogrammed bathrobe; was he hoping to emulate his gangster rap heroes with his newly acquired fashion item or was he looking to achieve the appearance of a junior mafia don?

These thoughts were more of a puzzle than a concern though and would just pop into my head at random times through out the day, maybe as diversionary tactics by my brain to detract from the main issue, where would I get my hooded kids monogrammed bathrobe from?

Obviously I didn’t want to disappoint my kid so I thought I’d better take a bit of time to research what options were available to me as far as hooded kids monogrammed bathrobe go.

After much research I discovered that there was indeed quite a demand for hooded kids bathrobes, generally the ones available are of a lightweight soft cotton weave bathrobe which are used by many of the finest tropical hotels but I didn’t think that this is quite what my kid had in mind, he wanted a rough and tough looking hooded kids monogrammed bathrobe that had attitude, not something straight out of Fantasy Island.

Imagine my amazement when on my travels around the country I was thumbing through a local newspaper only to see an advertisement for a Turkish company that were in town for one week only selling bathrobes of the very finest quality in all shapes and sizes, I had to make contact with them while I could.

I found a contact number and after much confusion finely described what it exactly was that I needed, a hooded kid’s monogrammed bathrobe, and when I wanted it for.

I chose a blue bathrobe, terry interior cotton outside with gold piping and with a plush feel to it. I gave them my kid’s initials and the order was placed.

The order for the hooded kid’s monogrammed bathrobe was e mailed directly to the Turkish bathrobe manufacturers [http://designer-bathrobes.com/The_News/Latest_News/Turkish_Bathrobes] and within 3 weeks a parcel arrived on my doorstep, a week earlier than quoted.

The bathrobe was magnificent, my son’s face was a real picture on his birthday, I was the coolest Dad in town and everything was perfect.

I have to say I love the hooded kids bathrobe so much I’ve ordered myself one.

Like father like son.

You only need to have real success in a small number of traffic building areas to achieve a successful business online. It is a serious mistake to try to tackle too many things at once and find that you don’t do any of them properly or only half do them so you don’t find out if they could work.

The real problem is that there are so very many ways of making contact with people via the Internet so it is easy to be tempted into trying everything. Even if you’ve got great products and a great website you’ve got to get traffic to that site.

When I first started online, I signed up for one expensive video course which listed 17 main ways of generating traffic and went into considerable detail on most of them. The course instructor said that you should only select some of these and become an expert in them before moving on to others techniques.

Sound advice, but despite that I still tried as many as I could to find out what suited my style. Unfortunately, I didn’t even become a ‘Jack of All Trades’ because of insufficient technical knowledge. So I just kept spinning my wheels for months by trying one method and then another and then back to one I had tried before.

Finally I decided to try to define what sort of traffic I really wanted when I eventually got some experience. I tried to identify what areas I should really be concentrating on given my lack of skill in such things as video marketing, which I was told is the big one for the future. Maybe it is, but it would be a good idea to catch up with the present first if you’re a beginner online!

Obviously, having taken an ‘educated’ guess at the visitor profile I should be targeting, I was able to eliminate some of those 17 ways of generating traffic ether because they didn’t fit the profile I had thought up or because they were too difficult.

By this time, I had virtually gone full circle with traffic methods but having done so I’ve come back to good old fashioned keyword research which is the basis of so many other traffic techniques. I know this sounds elementary but it’s so easy to get confused by all the ‘novelty’ methods that experts throw at you every day.

Therefore, I recommend that you spend quality time on keyword research for your niche and then concentrate on Article Marketing and posting on Forums. The best method I’ve discovered is to use Google’s AdWords research tool which is great for finding keyword phrases that are frequently searched but which have relatively little competition according to the indicators on this site.

But in addition to Articles and Forums, advertising sites like Craigslist, USFreeAds and maybe BackPage might be good – they are only classified ads but have a huge circulation and they are easy to use. Again keywords can play a major part.

Whatever methods of traffic generation you use, you must have a good looking website so that visitors will want to see what you’ve got for them. I’ve found that as an online beginner, I didn’t know what a good website consisted of so I got a professional to build one for me.

Unfortunately, I ended up with a website that looked good but definitely wasn’t in tune with the style of the site content. Even worse, I didn’t know how to tweak it and I certainly dare not carry out any major alterations. Once again the experts had got the better of me!

In politics and diplomacy negotiators are at work every day. Some appear to have the gift, the ability to insure that they will prevails. These professional negotiators are successful because they can recognise negotiation before they become immersed in it, and are able to apply certain skills and talents. The essential skills and the ability to prepare and plan. Effective negotiators plan extensively. They assess their own position and that of their opponent. These objectives of the negotiation of said at this stage but are constantly reassessed. Effective negotiators begin any necessary research and while building up a massive detail, consider the possible strategies to test their own assumptions. Appropriate concessions are devised and their opponents are also considered.

Good negotiators think clearly under stress. They are aware of what is happening at any point in negotiation. They have the ability to take an overview of the situation. Intuition is also important, as are good negotiator can sense when an individual is comfortable with the proceedings and whether it is productive to continue. Good negotiators are able to read their opponents signals both verbal and non-verbal. Good negotiators need a sound, practical intelligence. They are flexible and can reject in effective negotiating styles and switch to those which work. They can exercise options are alternatives, even changing some of their original goals when necessary. Good negotiators use different approaches and keep trying until they arrive a workable, mutually convenient solution. They take the view that they are in the process satisfying mutual needs, and are able to explore alternatives and use the resources of both parties to find solutions negotiators articulate issues as problems rather than as demands. They make broad statements which identify problems, rather narrow statements which telegraph their own perceptions of the problem. These are some of the characteristics of good negotiators.