What is friendship? According to the dictionary a friendship is a cooperative and supportive relationship between two or more people. What does it take to be a good friend and make everlasting friendships? There are many different types of friendships that we will encounter in our lives. There are best friends, acquaintances and people we just consider friends. What truly is a friendship and what does it take to have friends that last a lifetime.

There are many factors in having a friendship, just like in a marriage. Without these factors, the relationship will not work. Friends are mostly connected because they share mutual interests. They want what is best for the other, show sympathy, honesty, don't judge, offer advice, support and listen to the other person. When we share a friendship with someone we are sharing ourselves. We are now opening a part of ourselves that we may only open to our best or closest friends.

Friendships tend to sometimes even be more deep than family. The saying we can choose our friends but we can't choose our family comes to mind quite often. When you make a connection with a person whom we enjoy talking to, confiding in and sharing our most inner thoughts we are deeply united in a way that we may never be with our family. To have a friend we must truly be a friend, what does this mean? Friendships that are selfish are not going to last, no selfish relationships do. In order to be a true friend you must be able to think about someone other than yourself.

What would your life be like without your friends? When thinking back in time to when we were younger what was it like when you had no one to play with? Did you feel left out and feel as if you were missing something? Why were friends important when we were younger? Was it possibly because we wanted to be with people our own age that shared interest in playing what we did? Was this not a connection that we didn't have with other people?

Our childhood friends that we have carried with us for many years share something with us that no one else in our lives will ever share. They share our childhood in a way that no new friendship ever could. This is not to say friends we meet when we are older are not still great friends, but those childhood friends were there and share in memories of growing up and going through all the issues we face in our younger years. Is there nothing more fun than going back in time with an old friend and remembering the things that were done together? This probably was that person who was there when you cried over your first break-up. This is also the person who didn't judge when something was done that shouldn't have been. These are the people who we entrust with secrets and they do keep them.

Those childhood relationships also were filled with sharing much more than feelings and stories. In some cases clothes and personal belongings were also shared. As grown-ups we don't usually go into our friend's closets and borrow clothes from them, yet as teenagers this is something quite common. Sharing personal items are things that we probably only will have done with our childhood friends.

Friendships would not survive without trust. Trust is one of the biggest issues that we are faced with throughout life. True friendships need trust on both sides. We must be able to fully trust this person and they must feel the same way about us. This person will be hearing our deepest feelings, listening to stories and sharing in feelings that we feel we can't tell anyone else. If we do not feel safe about what we are exposing to them we will never be secure.

We share many things throughout our lives with many different people; we have our families, our co-workers, our children and our friends. The key to making all these different types of friendships something treasured is to remember the importance of all the different types we have in our life. There will probably be no one we will be quite as united with and special as our childhood friendships. These are the ones the most history is shared with. Friends can be met at any point in your life and if you are truly a friend to them and reciprocate then they will still help fulfill our happiness. There is nothing better than sharing something happy or sad with someone we trust with all our heart. Friendships and sharing is truly the core to everything in our life and with this will come a unity of souls.

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Blogs have now overtaken static web sites in popularity. Blogs originally started as a platform for people to put down their thoughts and what they were doing at the time, a sort of public diary. Then companies started to use blogs as a means of informing their customers on product updates.

Now, blogs have become mainstream, and an essential part of internet marketing. This is because setting up a blog is so much easier than setting up a static web site. Applications like WordPress mean that knowledge of HTML is not required, and site designs and content are now easy to install, with the advent of themes and widgets.

Because blogs are more dynamic than sites, people will keep returning, if the blog is interesting enough. If the webmaster never updates his site there is no incentive for a visitor to return.

If a blog gets a steady following, they provide a great way of marketing a product, and an income from ads placed on the blog, such as AdSense and other companies' ads.

You can increase your blog traffic by joining affiliate programs and site directories, which will list your blog in a certain category. You can also put relevant comments on popular blogs, always including a link back to your own blog in your signature.

You can get people to keep coming back to your blog by having continually changing interesting or amusing content, together with a good layout and design. If you don't write your own content you can download other peoples' articles and publish them on your own blog, as long as you keep the original author's bio box intact.

The blog's layout and design are almost as important as the content. Your blog has to remain attractive enough that your blog will stand out from the millions of other blogs using free standard templates.

* Get a custom header

You will see a lot of blogs with generic designs downloaded from sites which give away free header templates.

You should personalize your own header by having distinctive graphics or logos. If you know Photoshop or Gimp you can edit the free graphics so that they become exclusive to your blog. You can also get professional looking graphics done for you if you do a search online.

* Use your own photos

People love seeing pictures. A photo of you makes the blog appear more human and friendly.

* Include RSS feeds in your blog.

These let your followers know that there is a new posting on your blog. Tutorials on how to set up RSS feeds are available everywhere on the net.

* Add audio

Audio personalizes your blog; and if it changes, it can keep your visitors coming back to your blog. Just make sure that the audio doesn't start automatically. People may be reading your blog at work and forget that they have the volume turned up. If you can't record an audio track of yourself you could try streaming radio stations, or a favourite mp3 file. Just don't make it too intrusive - you want people reading your blog, not listening to music.

If you use these tips, keep your content ever changing and relevant, and you get some traffic, you should definitely have a popular blog, one that stands out from all the others.

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Many people go into careers and jobs without thinking if this is suited for me or 5 to 10 years later they realize this is not what I expected. Many individuals spend months or even years not happy with their careers. Some may take any available job while others may follow in their parents footsteps. This may work out for some but many others never discover their true career skills and are dissatisfied with their jobs.

Careful career planning is essential in fulfilling one's job search that will give years of work enjoyment and satisfaction. If you are going to work it might as well be something you like to do and skilled at doing. Knowing what your skills are and what you are good at is the starting point in choosing the right career.You will unlikely be completely satisfied in your career unless you use the skills you enjoy and are good at.

Ask yourself some questions such as : What interests do I have? What sorts of people would I like to work with?

Don't confuse an ideal job with a job title. You might enjoy working in one place and hate working in another. Both could have the same job title but be entirely different jobs.

Let's say you were looking for a job as a sales person or a teacher, these would be job titles. The ideal job within the salesperson category could be in retail sales, real estate, manufacturing sales representatives, car sales, etc. A teacher might teach kindergarten, elementary, middle, or high school students. Or a teacher might teach adults or special need individuals how to read and write. So don't choose a job just by it's title but by the different job areas under the title that fits your interests and skills. People are more likely to stay in a career and be successful if it suits their interest and skills.

It would be wise to spend extra time thinking about what type of work you want to do. Some key factors to consider when planning a career is your skills, interests, earnings, location, work environment, kinds of people you like to work with, etc.

You may have to go back to school for more education, but don't let that hold you back from that ideal job. Education and earnings go hand in hand. The more education you have the more money you are capable of earning. Although earnings are important, liking your work is equally important.

Having a college degree is definitely a plus in career planning, but many trade, technical and other schools offer similar opportunities to individuals without a college degree.

A well trained electrician, plumber, police officer, auto mechanic, computer repair technician, tool and die maker among many others can do very well in todays economy. There are many jobs that only require one or two years of training. Many companies and organizations have on the job training while paying your salary. People in sales, small business, self employment and other job areas do quite well without a college degree, although for better positions more education is often required.

Your career will most likely change over the course of your life no matter how much career planning you do. That make's it important for you to recognize what you are good at and develop those skills throughout your life. As your interests change you may want to develop new skills.

Good career planning is very important, but it should be done in the context of what you want to do with your life.

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