Forecast Fun

These days with more and more of us working from home, working on the road, and generally dealing with multiple suppliers, contractors and business partners in locations all over the world, the conference call is supplanting the face-to-face meeting. Here are some tips on getting the most out of your conference call…

Tip One: Send Out an Agenda

The key to an effective meeting is an agenda - this applies to any kind of meeting, not just a conference call. With a conference call, always make sure you have the instructions on how to access the conference call at the top of the agenda, preferably in a box or with some other text decoration to make it stand out.

Another option is to send a meeting request from within your calendar application, whether it be Microsoft Outlook or Apple’s iCal, or some other scheduling tool. The meeting request is sent as a specially formatted email, so you can add attachments just like with a regular email. Attach the agenda, and repeat the instructions on how to connect to the conference call in the body of the email.

Most conference service providers require participants to dial a special number (which may be different depending on where the user is, or it may be a national number), then enter a conference “room” number, followed by a security code or PIN. Make sure all the necessary details are included on the agenda and the meeting request.

If the conference call is a regular status update, ensure you also send out the meeting notes from the previous call, since the first item on the agenda should be chasing people up for the actions they’ve agreed to be responsible for.

Tip Two: Take Care of Housekeeping

At the beginning of the call, call off the roll and ensure everyone is on the call. Introduce any newcomers to the rest of the group and invite them to spend a couple of minutes describing themselves and their role on the call. If anyone is missing from the participants list, immediately call them (preferably on their mobile) to get them onto the call as soon as possible. If they can’t get on the call within a couple of minutes, proceed without them. Nothing detracts from a good conference call more than making everyone wait at the beginning.

Next, ensure everyone has a copy of the agenda, and that they can all hear one another OK. If you are not going to be the one taking notes, make sure everyone is clear who is. This serves two benefits: firstly, the person taking notes is going to be careful and accountable, and secondly, a single set of meeting notes will be distributed after the call. If this is not made clear, you may end up with several versions, which is both redundant and confusing.

Finally, lay out the rules for interaction on the call. Because it’s audio-only, the usual cues we use to indicate that we wish to take a turn at speaking are not present. Therefore it’s worth stating at the outset what the rules will be. These can be as simple as “Please make a note of any questions and we’ll deal with them in turn after each agenda point”, or as sophisticated as listing the order of speaking of the participants, and asking each participant only to speak at their particular time. This last is called “round table” conferencing, and is particularly effective once people are used to it. It has the dual effect of keeping all participants engaged, and speeding up the time it takes to get through each point.

Clearly it’s unrealistic to expect people to stick to the interaction rules for the duration of the call, but laying them out at the outset will help ensure things run quickly and smoothly.

Tip Three: Turn Off Speakerphone

Unless you have a majority of participants all in one room together, you should turn off speakerphone. Speakerphone and conference calls are a bad combination, unless you have a high-quality dedicated speakerphone. In order to prevent audio feedback, speakerphones automatically mute the speaker when a sufficiently loud sound is heard at the microphone. Unfortunately, few speakerphones do this particularly well, and often the speaker will mute because of its own output feeding back into the microphone. This means annoying dropouts and missed words and sentences.

Because it’s a conference call, often these dropouts can go on for some minutes before someone has the opportunity to pipe up with “We missed all that!” Needless to say, having to constantly repeat yourself can be very time consuming and irritating for all the non-speakerphone participants.

Even if you’re in the same room as someone else, it can sometimes be an improvement to use two handsets rather than use speakerphone.

Tip Four: Send Out Meeting Notes

You should ensure everyone on the conference call gets a copy of the meeting notes no later than the following morning, while the call is still fresh in everyone’s minds.

There are many helpful guides on the web for effective note-taking, but in essence:

• Don’t try to write down absolutely everything; just the items where an action needs to be taken
• Keep track of who has agreed to be responsible for each action
• Keep track of the deadlines for each action item
• Don’t forget to note the time and date of the meeting and who was present

If the conference call is a regular status update, ensure you note in the meeting notes the time and date of the next meeting. If possible, deadlines for action items should correspond to the dates of status meetings so that the notes can be quickly scanned (or even sorted) for items that need to be chased up in a given meeting.

Tip Five: Keep it Brief

Studies have shown that people start to suffer a number of unpleasant side-effects after holding a telephone receiver to their ear for longer than about an hour. In any event, forty minutes is about the limit of most people’s concentration span.

If you find the call is starting to drag on beyond an hour, it’s a good idea to wrap things up and continue either later that day, or preferably the following day. If you find this is a regular occurrence, it may be an indicator that you need to revisit the agenda, or possibly split the group up into separate, more focussed groups. A particular time-waster is having engineers and businesspeople on the same conference call. A better way to handle this is to have three shorter meetings - one with just the engineers, one with the businesspeople, and one with single representatives from each group to present the results and take any feedback to the next department meeting. With practice, you can keep the length of each meeting down to around twenty minutes.

Michael Pollitt is an experienced home-business operator, with several highly successful home-based businesses, including ConferenceOne, a telephone conferencing service, and LB Broadcast Systems, a developer of closed captions software.

Teleseminars cost money for you and others to attend. One way to help bring more people into a teleseminar is to create streaming audio of your teleseminar over the Internet. Unfortunately, most methods of streaming audio over the Internet can be expensive, difficult to setup for the average user or both.

The good news is, you can now broadcast a streaming audio of your teleseminar very affordably, in a secure and private manner so you won’t find any gate crashers if you sold access to the call. Here’s how.

First, get a web conference room. Web conference rooms vary a lot from company to company but to broadcast your teleseminar you’d want to look for:

Good streaming audio quality. This is a given. While every technology is not perfect — even telephones have a lot of annoying beeps and static — many web conferencing services today have little problem with streaming audio. Often, issues with audio come from user inexperience or computer settings but this can easily be remedied with a little bit of help documentation and education.

The next biggest consideration is a room that’ll give you flexible or good number of number of seats. You’ll want this because it’s often difficult to anticipate number or attendees. You can ask people to confirm and send reminders but there will always be a certain percentage of no shows.

This will be a little challenging because most web conference rooms sell by number of seats or per minute or both. Look for flat rate options instead.

Don’t get distracted with the rest of the services like video if you’re only looking for streaming audio. These usually bog down the system because of the huge amounts of bandwidth required to transmit video. Most web conferencing systems will have video conferencing capabilities already built in. Does that mean you shouldn’t go with them even if everything else is right? No, because often you can ‘turn off’ the video or simply not use it and performance won’t be affected. The point is it shouldn’t be a major factor in your consideration unless you plan to transition to web conferencing and reduce the use of the telephone bridge.

Once you’ve nailed down the web conferencing service provider of choice, you’ll need a key piece of equipment that’ll pipe your telephone audio into the computer and vice versa. One of the best we’ve seen is the Dynametric TMP 636 or TMP 636S. Once you have this, hook it up and you’re ready to broadcast streaming audio of your teleseminar online.

Now, you may ask why go through all that trouble when you can simply look for a web conferencing service who has built in telephone and streaming audio capabilities. That’s a good question and can only be answered by you. Consider the cost for these integrated phone and streaming audio solutions? They will naturally cost more but beyond dollar amount, are there any limitations? Compare them with the cost of your existing teleconference call line, your (preferably fixed rate) web conferencing plan and the one time telephone patch.

So there you have it. One last pointer, consider how often you conduct teleseminars and the number of people attending as these are the biggest variables affecting cost. As a rule of thumb, if you don’t conduct that many teleseminars or you have less people calling in, it’ll work out better to have an integrated solution. After all, why buy a piece of equipment for streaming audio that you’ll use infrequently. Given this information, you’ll be able to easily figure out which is best for you.

Lynette Chandler helps entrepreneurs recognize and apply the power of technology and its trends to their marketing. Learn to leverage web conferencing in your business www.meetingonnow.com/web-conferencing-course.html

One of the most pivotal facets of any online business is how do I come through in the search engines. How do I have my site to rank well in Google, Microsoft’s Live or Yahoo?

One of the most essential facets in doing well in the search engines (allowing for the basic principle like great content are taken care of) is catching links to your site. You can generate this a lots of ways, some looked at positively by the search engines and some not so favorably.

One of the trusty styles, that the serps think is very well is link building with articles.

Fundamentally this requires composing a reputable article, rather about something from your area of expertise, and then publishing it to a free article directory.

You really cannot underrate the seriousness of link building. If there is one point that is important to the search engines, by and large, it is links. Fine, there are truck loads of other signals, like the domain name, but you are misguided if you imagine you are going to be listed well, and easily found, if you do not earn any links.

Building links with articles is easy. It is something the search engines say is okay. And, it adds value to the web, by providing valuable content that might be interesting or useful to users. The real question is what are you waiting for?

YMT is able to provide excellent vacations and bargain prices because buy so many cruises and tours that they are able to get the best prices”and pass them along to their customers. But reduced prices dont mean low quality. Every YMT vacation is carefully planned and designed to make traveling as carefree as possible for the vacationer. YMT also offers low-cost airfare aboard regularly scheduled airlines.

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INTRODUCTION

PERHAPS the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

You don’t want to hear this, you are content in your general ignorance. You have been brainwashed into thinking that your personal views are the only correct views so any dissent makes you uncomfortable, if not down right irritable. However, after the initial shock that world does not revolve around you has worn off, and you begin to see you do not get to dictate to the world how it should live and what everyone should believe, you will begin to open you mind to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, you are not right all the time.

As a long and violent abuse of power, is generally the Means of calling the right of it in question (and in Matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the Sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry) and as the King of England hath undertaken in his own Right, to support the Parliament in what he calls Theirs, and as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination, they have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both, and equally to reject the usurpations of either.

As long as “We the People…” stand aside and do nothing as fellow Americans are having their right trampled upon, as long as we watch in silence as the hammer of our might is wretched from the people, wielded to create pale reflections of what we think we are by careless, clumsy and brutal hands, as long as we stand aside and allow those who are our representatives to the world act with disdain towards the trillions of other inhabitants of this earth we must all share we are implicit co-conspirators in their tyranny, enablers of injustice both at home and abroad. We cannot sit idly by and watch our power, the people’s power, taken away and given to a group of so-called representatives with little to no clue of how the average person lives, how we survive.

In the following sheets, the author hath studiously avoided every thing which is personal among ourselves. Compliments as well as censure to individuals make no part thereof. The wise, and the worthy, need not the triumph of a pamphlet; and those whose sentiments are injudicious, or unfriendly, will cease of themselves unless too much pains are bestowed upon their conversion.

I do not seek to sway political views. My incongruity is with the powers that be on all sides. I wish to remind my fellow Americans of the things that unite us as a people. I wish to open your minds to the possibilities of all we still could be. It is this authors’ humble opinion that our political parties are necessary, both right and left, to compliment and balance one another, in order to ensure that all people are represented and all values devotedly held are worth fighting for and should be fought for.

I am just an average conservative hippie veteran living in a very blue pocket of a very red state.

Do you really want to get ahead in your life? Do you want to grow a business really large? Do you want to be powerful? Well then do what works. For instance the United States Government is big and powerful. They control every aspect of your life and your business if you own one. They never tell the truth about much of anything. An example would be the Justice Department and their bunk lawsuits. Much of the time they make stuff up, doctor the truth and file it in court. Why do they do this, it seems to be unethical? Well, because it works. You see the Justice Department has had lots of practice suing law abiding Americans and they have failed a lot and study what works. Like the Donald Trump show they have learned to slander brand names and people in the court of public opinion and trump their almighty ethics. Same as the kids as they lie, cheat and smear their fellow man on the Donald Trump “You’re Fired” series. The Government has learned this tactic to win cases.

They have learned to not tell the truth, deny any sense of responsibility, place blame on anything, which occurs. Most of the businesses they sue are sued due to discrepancies in law, the same laws they created. One agency tells you to do it one way and another agency a different way. The business owner has to decide which agency’s rules to follow in which jurisdictions and which is the least likely to get them sued. The government regulators know this, so they have an abundance of quote; “criminals” after all they created them. Then some moron, brain dead regulator with an axe to grind because they are envious of over achievers and winners, business owners, starts fabricating a story, writes it down, throws in a little profiling and files it in a court? The court obviously sides with the government after all they are the government. The government regulatory bodies use Public Relations tactics and falsely miss represents them selves so that the citizens think they are actually doing good things. The Businessman who is the pillar of his community is slandered, which cannot be done without lying. The government and mind you this is at every level from the code enforcement of a city, where we recently found the BTK-Bind, torture and kill to the Federal Regulator who lies on the stand to make a case as in the Martha Stewart case.

Now the regulatory bodies are so big and mighty in the ever-growing blob of bureaucracy that a small business has no chance. The only way to beat their lies is to grow really big like they are and hire homosexual call boys as lobbyists to suck a little you know what. This way you can relieve the stress of the brain dead loser regulators who wish to attack your company because quite frankly they have nothing better in life to do. And that folks is the honest to God’s truth. You see why you should lie? If you ever tell it like it is, the blob will work real hard to stop you.

So learn from the government to get a “Head” pun intended. Stop fighting it. Go with the flow and lie, lie, lie like the government you know? I believe that the government regulators have been lying so long about their own minutia, that they would not recognize it if they found it anyway. So, why bother telling the truth, helping the consumer or even running an honest business? Just lie like they do and turn in your competitors; call them a bum, after all apparently this is as far as the human race has cum. (intended). Think on it and like it or not that’s the truth.

“Lance Winslow” - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

Health insurance usually is not a priority when budgeting for a college education. Most students are generally at an age where the need for a medical insurance plan is the very last thing they think of. Teenagers believe they will live forever and that they will never become ill.

Unluckily, this is rarely the case no matter how healthy an individual might seem. Suitable medical insurance isn’t just a luxury, it’s an absolute essential.

For individuals who are covered under their family insurance policy, in general most of them should extend to a student until they reach twenty-three. For anyone who doesn’t have coverage through a parent’s insurance, obtaining an alternative plan for affordable student health insurance has to be an essential part of preparing for a college education. What should a student look out for in a policy for college students? Deductibles: It is a minimal annual sum you have to pay before any health benefits start kicking in, comparable to an auto deductible. For example, should the deductible be $500, five hundred dollars has to be paid before getting financial benefits connected with your plan.

So what exactly does co-pay mean? When the deductible is paid, virtually all medical insurance policies require that you contribute a portion of the cost for each doctor’s visit, medication or procedure. That, put simply is a co-pay.

What does the medical insurance pay for? Numerous plans do include Health Maintenance Organization and Partnership for Prescription Assistance (PPA). This often means particular doctors may be omitted from your list of health providers or not be covered under the health insurance plan. A directory of approved health professionals are provided with virtually all insurance plans, so be sure you look at that when choosing an insurance policy. Catastrophic insurance coverage: Limits are frequent in student medical insurance policies especially with regard to terminal illness, and for most medical insurance policies for students, it’s commonly lower than a standard insurance plan.

Restrictions: Student medical insurance policies may include various limits. It is very important to read over the insurance policy carefully to find out what is and isn’t covered. Keep all of your health insurance cards on your person at all times. It is not just impossible to anticipate accidents or an illness, they’re also liable to come about at a bad time. Ensure you are acquainted with your policy, whether through your parent’s insurance or you have your own health plan.

Telecommunications is the most important physical infrastructure in the modern world. It is more important than roads because it can replace them. It is more important than office buildings because it allows for the formation of virtual offices. It is more crucial than legal and institutional systems because it surpasses national borders and undermines and subverts fossilized political structures.

Telecommunications eliminates distance and allows for the transfer of voice and other forms of information (data) virtually at the speed of light. It is the foundation for the future industries and the industries of the future: information, knowledge and intelligent data processing industries.

Telecommunications today is not limited to handsets, phone lines and telephony equipment. It incorporates computers and other media technologies. All these are an integral part of the new age of telecoms.

Telecommunications was partly responsible to the geopolitical sea changes of the last decade. It is enough to recall the role of satellite telephones in the media coverage of the televised Gulf War - or the anti Ceaucesco revolution in Romania.

These are precisely the reasons why regimes all over the world - in other words, politicians - strove to maintain unmitigated control of the PTT services in their countries and to block foreign and domestic competition. National telecommunication service providers and carriers became monopolistic monsters, operating highly inefficiently, charging exorbitant prices, employing far too many people at unreasonably high salaries and serving to boost the political fortunes of ministers and the like.

But all this is changing. The new World Trade Organization (WTO) set of agreements will force governments throughout the world to privatize their telecoms giants and to deregulate this industry. The deadline is 2003 with a few exceptions (Latvia has until 2013 to do so). There is a new realizations that telecommunications is too important an industry to be left to the devices of politicians - or to the flawed management of state organs.

A few privatization models have evolved over the last 20 years, or so.

In the more developed countries (the West, South East Asia), some countries have chosen to introduce free for all competition. This entails the sale of part or all of the state owned telecoms provider to shareholders through stock exchanges. A small part is usually also allocated to the workers and management of the company at favourable prices. Concurrently the industry is deregulated and licensing requirements are gradually abolished.

Initially, in this model, only certain services are open to competition, mainly the international calls segment and the mobile and wireless telephony (including paging).

But, ultimately, all types of services are opened to competition - both domestic or foreign.

The most extreme example is Finland, where competition is completely free, no licensing is required and 52 companies compete for the heart (and pocket) of the customers. They are all allowed to offer any kind of telecommunications service imaginable.

Still, very much the same situation is developing in Israel, Britain, Australia, Hong Kong and - with the 1996 Telecommunications Act - in the USA. This 1996 Act allows providers and carriers of international phone calls and of local phone calls (until now separated by regulation) to enter each other markets and compete. The result was a major spate of mergers and acquisitions as companies scrambled to offer combined, international and local, services.

The second alternative is to break up the national carriers into functional units, one dedicated to international calls and the other to local traffic. NTT in Japan is undergoing this surgical restructuring now. In the wake of this break-up, competition is allowed in certain services (again, mainly international calls and GSM and mobile telephony).

The other - less efficient - option is to sell minority stakes in the national carrier to investors (domestic or foreign), or, through the stock exchanges - while effectively preserving the monopoly of state owned provider. This was the case in Israel, until lately and is the case in Greece. In Israel, when the British Cables and wireless tried to gain control of Bezeq (the Israeli phone services provider) - it encountered the staunch opposition of the Israeli government, replete with threats of legal action.

Still, the benefits of privatization are enormous.

Prices drop. That is the most evident and immediately visible effect. The prices charged for international phone calls in Israel dropped by 80% in real terms with the introduction of two additional competitors. In Britain, prices went down by 25%.

There is a leap forward in the quality of service: waiting periods for new installations, second and third phone numbers, business dedicated lines, maintenance, fixing problems, times between faults, troubleshooting, hotlines, meter reading, detailed and allocated accounts and so on. The average wait for a new phone has been reduced in Israel and in Hungary, to take two notable examples, from months to days.

Naturally, overall economic efficiency is improved by cost savings and by more productive allocation of time previously spent on tackling bureaucratic hassles.

Last, but by no means least, is the marked improvement in technology, its upgrading and the introduction of novel, low cost alternatives.

In the less developed and developing countries, privatization has been achieved mainly through the introduction of foreign strategic partners - usually other telecoms firms from more developed countries. This necessitates the temporary preservation of the monopolies. No profit minded foreign investor will invest in infrastructure - and let future competitors reap the benefits. An investor wants to be assured that he will continue to rule the market and overcharge the customers for a proscribed period of time. Foreign investors like monopoly situations because this way they have a captive market and thus they can force their clients to defray their development costs through overcharging. But, this can be seen as the cost of modernization and integration into regional and global telecoms alliances. Once competition is allowed, everyone (especially the clients) will reap the benefits of modern information highways.

To my mind this thinking is flawed. The direct and indirect damages incurred by monopolies are immeasurable. Monopolies must be dismantled - and the sooner, the better. The transfer of part of a monopoly from domestic to foreign hands does not alter its economically cancerous nature. Monopolies are guilty of over or under optimal investments, of overcharging clients, of distorting the allocation of economic resources, of market rigging, corruption and other criminal activities, of providing poor service, of selecting the wrong technologies. Only the threat of competition - actual and fierce - can change all that. Even so, long after competition is introduced, monopolies seem to continue to control their markets. British Telecom still controls 72% of its markets - despite more than a decade of competition.

Despite these considerations - and due to rampant corruption and cronyism - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Yugoslavia-Serbia, Estonia, Latvia and Russia chose this path. Bulgaria and Romania will follow them next year and it seems that Macedonia might follow suit, more out of lack of choice of alternatives - than out of careful selection of them.

The other way is by selling shares to investors in the stock exchanges - local and foreign. Poland has adopted this path after years of foot-ragging. It will sell shares of its carriers early next year. This, however, is not a solution available to small countries with an undeveloped stock exchange and low liquidity. To float the local PTT in the Macedonian Stock Exchange would be absurd. Even to attract domestic capital in sufficient quantity would be unthinkable.

Some countries avoid privatization altogether. They regard the fix of privatization as a fad, or a passing craze (which, in its more extreme forms, it is). They declare the telecommunications sector to be a matter of national strategic importance (again, to a very limited extent, it is). Slovakia has introduced a law in 1995 to actively prohibit the privatization of its PTT.

But experience disproves the Slovak stance. Admittedly, privatization does have its unpleasant side effects: redundant workers are fired by the thousands and unemployment goes up, for instance. Another result, cutely felt by every potential voter, is the radical increase in the price of local phone calls which used to be subsidized by the outlandish charges imposed on international calls. Once cross - subsidization ceases and more realistic pricing is introduced - prices shoot up.

But the price of all other services drop as sharply and there is a dramatic improvement in the quality and speed of the services provided.

The technological aspect is not to be sneered at, either.

The current infrastructure is insufficient in all Central and East European countries. It is partly incompatible with European Union standards and networks. The existing backbones will, of course, still be used but they will be gradually replaced by fibre optics and digital switchboards.

Technologies like cable TV and broadcasting networks, satellites and above all, wireless and GSM networks will serve to bridge the capacity and compatibility gaps and deficiencies. They will also reduce the dependence of new market entrants on the infrastructure and services provided by local PTTs - and this is good news.

About The Author

Sam Vaknin is the author of “Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited” and “After the Rain - How the West Lost the East”. He is a columnist in “Central Europe Review”, United Press International (UPI) and ebookweb.org and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com. Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

His web site: http://samvak.tripod.com

If you want to purchase discount spectacles on line then make sure you understand one or two essentials before you start. You can save a HUGE amount of money if you recognise how to purchase your eyeglasses wisely and it they will be perfectly safe for you to utilize so long as you become heedful of a few simple rules

Make sure that they fit you properly

If your current spectacles fit fine, then just measure them up properly and you must have perfectly fitting new eyeglasses online.

You need to know 4 measurements:

Total Width - A the Lens height - b The Lens breadth - c Nose/Bridge breadth - “D”

Of these the most important measurement is the total width (A). To ensure that your new on-line specs are a good fit for your face, you only really need your total width. Don’t worry too much if you haven’t got your lens dimensions.

Ensure that you have the correct lens prescription

There are four parameters of your eye prescription that you will need to make a note of:

1. Sphere - This refers to how short or long sighted you are. It is a measure of your lens optical power and is measured in diopters. It invariably has a addition (+) or a minus (-) symbol in front or above it.
2. Axis - this relates to the reference point which denotes the direction of the power of your lens. It only really applies if you have cylindrical lens though.. The value will be a number between 1 and 180.
3. Cylinder - This is the measure for astigmatism. Once Again, there is always a plus (+) or minus (-) sign present. There may not be a value of cylinder in your prescription.
4. Pupillary Distance (PD) - This part of your prescription helps to centre the lens within your frame on your face. Technically, PD is the measurement of the distance between the centre of your pupils.

Once you can shoot just by bending your knees, you will start with your jump shot. As you start to jump you will lift the ball to the proper position above your head and then from there you execute the exact same shooting motion as you have done before. You will need to practice, practice and practice this some more to make it smooth. Make sure that your mechanics don’t break down with this added step. Keep your motion smooth, fluid and aligned to the basket. Start short, from just a few feet away and as you get better move further away. For your jump you should be jumping relatively straight up and down however you will naturally move forward a bit.

Do not shoot out of your range! Trying to shoot from too far away too quickly will prevent you from learning proper technique with regard to how to shoot a basketball. If you have to change your technique to generate enough force to shoot the ball from a certain distance than you do not need to be shooting from that distance. Some young players should not attempt threes until they build up enough strength to maintain proper shooting motion.