I acheived this by applying some of the 7 ways to grow a business and, just in case you are reading this and thinking turnover is all very well, it is not just about turnover, as within this larger turnover figure, I have increased prices also (sometimes by 40-50%) to make the business more profitable also.

I am looking at putting together a business seminar on how firstly to go about buying a business and then on if you have one, how to grow it by applying the 7 ways to grow a business and will be titled ‘Success in business’.

If you are in the UK and are interested in these business seminars please post a comment on this article or email me at info@in-business.org.uk.

Good luck with your business in the present economic situation.

Positive thinking is about telling yourself you can do it and not to listen to your own internal voice of negative thoughts or to others that might tell you negative things, as you never know what their motive is to say you can’t.

Player scores free-kick from centre circle

I always encourage ‘Positive Thinking’ and will tell you ‘You Can Do It’!

So if you have a great business idea to start out then think in a positive way and go for it and as Nike say – ‘Just Do It!”‘

You can read a bit more about the power of positive thinking and how the mind can do amazing things on our site too.

Napoleon Hill talks about his meeting with Andrew Carnegie

It is worth listening to this video and making notes about how to think yourself into a better and richer life,or as Napoleon Hill put it – ‘Think and Grow Rich’!

Those with ready money have been able to pick up businesses cheaply from specialist brokers and listing agents.

Business Sale Report, a leading listing service, has seen a 30 per cent rise in the number of owners advertising in December compared with November. Director Robert Moore says in addition to sales of distressed businesses, entrepreneurs who previously held back because the market had been depressed are now selling.

‘If you have cash and are able to move quickly, it’s a good time,’ he says. ‘Any business where it is easy to see future cash flow is in demand.’

Christopher Jones of business broker Sunbelt says there are lots of buyers in the market looking for the right opportunities. ‘We’re seeing buyers coming out of the corporate world looking for cash flow,’ he says. ‘There are also strategic buyers, picking up equipment.’

Kevin Uphill, managing director of business broker Avondale, says: ‘Buyers are there. After all, where do people put their cash now?’

Buyers can also try to negotiate lower rents and cheaper loans. The Government is pressing banks to lend to small firms and buyers are even finding it possible to borrow from the vendors through deferred payments.

But alongside the festive crackers there are some real turkeys with hidden problems. ‘ There are opportunities, but you have to be pretty savvy,’ says Moore.

Buying a business that has already gone into administration is fraught with difficulties as the administrator must realise funds quickly, putting a tight deadline on deals. Buyers also have to question whether a business will withstand the departure of the owner, who is often the founder.

Uphill says: ‘ The biggest single issue is the quality of the information on smaller firms – without visibility, there are high risks. There are real opportunities but if you cannot see the risks, don’t touch it.’

Many of the potential buyers are first-timers, says Jones. But this market is also proving attractive for existing businesses that are seeking to increase their market share.

Chartered accountant Russell Bowyer, 47, from Linton, Cambridgeshire, is convinced that doing deals in a recession is a good idea and he is negotiating to invest in Deep Clean, a nationwide cleaning firm that specialises in commercial kitchens.

Bowyer has a long record of business ownership, albeit in the care and accounting sectors, and he has been looking to expand his portfolio for some time.

He believes Deep Clean fits the bill because insurers require all commercial kitchens to be cleaned. There is competition, of course, but Bowyer says: ‘There is a good market.’

Bowyer, who is a client of Sunbelt, adds: ‘There are thousands of businesses for sale and far fewer buyers.

‘Interest rates are also lower so, in theory, you can get cheap money. If you buy in a boom, there is more competition from other buyers and interest rates are higher.’

Copyright over this article belongs to The Mail on Sunday

Examples of famous people with Dyslexia include the likes of Tom Cruise and Richard Branson – two famous people with success in very different lines of work.

What is Dyslexia?

Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty that mainly affects reading and spelling and is characterised by difficulties in processing word-sounds and by weaknesses in short-term verbal memory. The effects of Dyslexia can be seen in the spoken language as well as written language.  It is estimated that around 10% of the population is affected by dyslexia to some degree and that it tends to run in families.

If you suffer from Dyslexia it will remain with you for life, but the effects of it can be minimised by adapting the way you work and as we know there are many successful entrepreneurs with this disability, it is by no means disabling!

Other successful business men with Dyslexia include William Hewlett - Co-Founder of Hewlett-Packard; Henry Ford – founder of the Ford Corporation; F.W. Woolworth – founder of Woolworths; Walt Disney – founder of Disney.

If you have Dyslexia and you are considering setting up in business you might get inspired by this video:

NBC Today Show – Successful Entrepreneurs with Dyslexia

I have found a video which partly answers the second question and probably the most important message to come across with this interview is about belief and enjoying what you do! Donald Trump is not a “The Millionaire Inside” the show was changed to suit “The Billionaire Inside“.

I always remember speaking to one of my own successful entrepreneur clients and commented to him that what he did was not a job and that it was not even work for him, but instead it was like play – he really enjoyed what he did and it was his passion and he ate slept and lived his business – hence his success.

So if you are looking to start out as an entrepreneur, then I suggest that you start a business which sells a service or product that you have a passion about. If you are already a business owner and your business does not seem like it is going anywhere, then ask yourself this question “is this my passion?” The likely answer is no if things are not going too well.

If you take time to listen to this interview with Donald Trump, maybe you might get the inspiration you need to succeed in business and you might make a change in direction that makes all the difference. The other important point to get from Donald Trump is that it is never too late to change and always worthwhile making changes to your life in order to be completely fulfilled.

Donald Trump on The Millionaire Inside – Erin Burnett 1

We all make mistakes and if we are smart we learn from those mistakes and move on. However, if we can learn from other people about mistakes not to make in what we are doing then even better – so if you run your own business and are already an entrepreneur or if you are considering setting up in business then I recommend you watch this video, as it has some good tips for you.

Five Biggest Mistakes That Entrepreneurs Make

I found this video and really enjoyed watching this interview with some interesting facts about Sir Richard Branson. Most of us like to know things like how much is Richard Branson worth with his businesses with the Virgin Brand employing around 55,000 people and turning over some $25 billion (£15.7 billion)!

This is a real honest and open interview with Richard Branson and quite amusing at times and shows a real insight into what he is about and I hope it will inspire the readers of my business blog! He is open about both his successes and some of his failures and how he managed to save his airline Virgin Atlantic when things got a little tough with his competitor British Airways.

Richard Branson: Life at 30,000 feet

So looking at a simple probability you are 50% more likely to become seriously rich if you live in the USA. Three of these 10 American billionaires are in the top 4 and between them are worth almost $100 billion (£63 billion), with Bill Gates worth $40 billion (£25 billion) on his own!

Gates is a Harvard University drop out and was born in 1955 to a middle class family with no silver spoon in his mouth and armed only with his intelligence and personal drive.

The Story of Bill Gates – a Rich Man

The second richest man in the world is Warren Buffett born a few years earlier than Bill Gates in 1930 – so a more senior billionaire worth some $37 billion (£23 billion). Becoming a millionaire in the early days back in 1962 is when he first became a millionaire through a number of partnerships, which in January 1962, had in excess of $7,178,500, of which over $1,025,000 belonged to Buffett.

Mr Buffett then discovered a textile manufacturing firm, Berkshire Hathaway which he began to buy via his partnerships at $7.60 per share. In 1965, when Buffett’s partnerships aggressively began purchasing Berkshire, they paid $14.86 per share while the company had working capital (current assets minus current liabilities) of $19 per share – this set the scene with him in how he was to go on and make his fortunes through business investment.

How to Build a Business Warren Buffett Would Buy: The R. C. Willey Story

I thought that this was a good video of looking at how you could think about making your own money and maybe in the future either Warren Buffett or his successor may invest in your newly found business!

I did a bit of looking at what people search on the Internet relating to “How to get rich” and top of this list is “how to get rich quick” and following in quick succession is “how to get married to a rich man” – interesting. People seem to want to get rich fast or by marrying into money without having to do the hard work and on the whole this really does not happen.

There is always a little bit of luck along the way and one could argue that Bill Gates got lucky with some of his first business deals, but I think that he would have made it either way, one way or another. I always like to see luck as when “Opportunity meets preparation” – you might be thinking others are luckier than you, but if you had prepared yourself you might start to notice opportunities all around you!

To just show how important the word “SEX” is on the Internet and that “Sex Sells” is that if you “Google” the word sex you get 743,000,000 results, however, I did some playing around with some other Google searches and was surprised to find the results shown in the table below.

I will admit that I expected the search term “Sex” to be top of this list – so I have learnt something new today – it is said that you learn something new each day!

So I then decided to do some more research and typed in the search term “internet revenue statistics” to find the highest revenue earner on the Internet and was surprised to see a website with a title “Internet Pornography Statistics – TopTenREVIEWS” of the 330,000 results was No. 1 on Google!

This was not quite what I was looking for or even expected, but might in itself be revealing about could still be the main business revenue generator on the World-Wide-Web!

As I had found this site, it was worth a look and it gave some statistics for 2006 Worldwide Pornography Revenues, where China was top of the list spending $27.4 Billion per annum on porn (representing $27.41 per capita).

However, the highest, per capita spend was in South Korea where on average each person spends $526.76 on porn making a total of $25.73 billion annual spend in total for the country! To see the full details of this report go to Internet Pornography Statistics.

Highest Internet Revenue Earner

However, this is not what I was looking for – I would like to find what is the Highest Internet Revenue Earner and whether there are other businesses on the Internet that have overtaken the “Porn Boom” from the early days of the Internet.

I think the billions of revenue earned from porn on the Internet is going to take some beating – what I also found interesting was the number of search results for “Poker” sites or online gambling – the revenue generated from online gambling is expected to be around $18 billion by 2010, which is no where near the adult industry revenues!

So if you are going to set up an online business then should you set up an adult one?

Well I say why not – Sex is one of the most natural things in life and one of the key reasons for life, i.e. pro-recreation. However, sex has and probably will always be a taboo!

So how can you earn money in the adult or porn industry?

There are many alternatives from phone sex sites to pornographic content sites that you could set up yourself – however, there are so many affiliate programs these days that all you need do is to set up an adult website or blog and form links with adult affiliate programs and link your site off to these.

What is interesting about the top porn website listed above, pornhub.com, is that you can view porn for free! So how do they make their money you might ask? One method is that on their site there is a link to a premium service, which includes HD quality and a lot more scenes that people are prepared to pay for.

As pornhub.com is the top site listed for the two main adult searches of “Sex” (215,293 per month) and “Porn” (278,910 per month), which is a total of nearly 500,000 monthly searches on those two search terms alone. To be No.1 on Google for this many searches is like winning the lottery every day!

So to conclude with this article “Sex Sells” for sure, but I am still not sure whether this is the top revenue earner for the Internet.