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  • It’s not A Popularity Contest

    Don’t turn your search for the perfect name or tag line into a popularity contest! Two instances of this have crossed my path recently.

    First, someone I know asked people to vote on the best title for a forthcoming book.

    That’s unwise, because what people say they like in a book title:

    * Doesn’t necessarily distinguish the book from others

    * Isn’t necessarily clear, sellable and free of negative connotations

    * Doesn’t mean those who are the best audience for the book will “get it”

    * Isn’t always easy to remember and repeat

    * May not perform well in search engines

    Second, according to The New York Times, the state of New Jersey put its prospective new tourism slogan to a vote years ago. The winning entry, “New Jersey: Come See for Yourself” received just a few more votes than “New Jersey: The Best Kept Secret.”

    Both the winning and the runner-up New Jersey slogans flunk an elementary test for the effectiveness of a tag line or slogan: It should distinguish the company, or in this case the state, from most or all others.

    Try this out yourself by plugging in names of other states besides New Jersey – most of the time, the slogan becomes no more and no less applicable. This means the slogan cannot make a strong case for the Garden State. More bluntly, it’s mainly hot air.

    The New Jersey contest had another serious flaw. To be eligible to vote on the best slogan, you had to be a New Jersey resident. While residents do have the greatest stake in improving the reputation of their state, they by definition don’t belong to the target market of the tourism slogan. To understand what would appeal most to non-New Jerseyans, don’t look to New Jerseyans en masse.

    Many will be clueless about this and get it upside-down. Outsiders are the ones who need to understand the slogan and respond.

    I’ll never forget an ad for a Great Plains software company that obviously assumed that a photo of a flat-to-the-horizon landscape without trees was an appealing image. For me, a die-hard New Englander accustomed to heavily wooded hills, this picture had the opposite effect – it filled me with horror.

    Of course, someone who lives in New Jersey or North Dakota may be perfectly capable of portraying their region appealingly to outsiders. Instead of asking any group to vote on a winning name or tag line, set up your contest so that people can submit suggestions. Then have either one person or a committee cull the entries according to a list of criteria drawn up beforehand.

    By selecting and judging rather than mass voting, you’re most likely to end up with a name or slogan that wins over your audience.

  • Essentials of Getting Traffic with ease

    Video: Brad briefly talks about the best ways to get traffic to your website.

  • Top Benefits Of Blogging For Kids

    If you have children you probably encourage them to be the best they can be. You want them to learn and grow and be happy. Helping your child create their very own blog could be a great learning experience. Your child will develop their writing and social skills with a blog. If you are wary of allowing your child to blog, here are some great reasons that might change your mind…

    1. Develop Their Writing Skills – Some children don’t like to read and write. This might change if you help them set up their own blog. Kids seem to gravitate towards technology at an early age these days. If they don’t find traditional writing enjoyable, the added touch of technology inherent in a blog might excite them. You can help them develop their writing skills by encouraging them to post regularly to their blog.

    2. Develop Technological Skills – The world we live in is becoming more and more technological everyday. Many parents feel overwhelmed themselves. You do not want your child failing behind. Having them regularly using a blog will introduce them to the internet, computers, typing and email. All of these skills are pretty much essential, especially for the next generation. There are a lot of pitfalls and dangers incorporated with these technologies so teaching your child how to avoid these early will be tremendously helpful.

    3. Develop Social Skills – Having a blog will allow your child to get more comfortable expressing his/her feelings. Responding to comments can also help them develop their social skills. Some kids are shy and might be able to express themselves more fully online. Eventually those skills can translate to the real world.

    These three reasons alone should be good enough for any parent who has thought about allowing their children to blog. You need to help them navigate the internet pitfalls, but it will all be a learning experience. Make sure you monitor your children’s online activities and blog. You also need to talk to your child and explain the dangers. Once you have done that, and considering the vast benefits, I think your child having a blog is a wonderful idea.

  • Unveil the Best Online Marketing Course

    No single course will give you all you need to make a full-time living online.

    When was the last time you picked up a course, devoured it and went on to make tons of money without reading from any other source.

    I’d reckon never because there is so much information to take in online that you can never just learn from one source.

    I recently went on vacation and made more money while on vacation than most people make a whole month at their regular 9 to 5 jobs.

    Should I write a course on how I do it? No

    If I were to write a course it would just be a compilation of all the products which I’ve purchased.

    If you want to make money online you need to figure out a few things about yourself before you invest any money in any course.

    First and foremost is to figure out if you have the motivation to leave your job and work for yourself?

    At your job, you are given orders. By working for yourself, you’ll need to be organized, disciplined and focused. Do you have those traits? If not, it might be easier just to continue working for others until you discipline yourself.

    If you spend tons of money on courses and don’t have the discipline or focus to work, then no course will be valuable to you.

    If you have the discipline and the focus, you can start earning money by using the free resources available online. Just take a look at the free article directories. There’s tons of useful information to help you get started.

    There is no ‘one’ secret to making tons of money online. There are certain insiders tips and tactics to help you succeed with topics such as writing articles, submitting press releases, improving search engine placement etc, but none of those tactics will be useful to you unless you master the ability to be disciplined, focused and consistent.

    Master those and I guarantee you’ll have more success.

    If you don’t have those traits, you’ll just continue to purchase courses, software and programs to build a collection of digital waste.

    To tell you the truth, when I started off, I wasn’t sure if I had what it takes to work for myself.

    I overcame my limitations because I focused on the end result and not the process of working.

    For me it was a do or die kind of mentality which made me have success in my business.

    So stop searching for the perfect course. Someone else’s perfect course may not be what you like to do. Get specific in what you’re looking for and evaluate yourself to see if you’d actually take the necessary steps to follow through what the course teaches.

  • Making Money With Domains

    From Dubai to Chicago, telecom companies are introducing new area codes to meet the demand of new telephone numbers businesses. If only this was possible for Internet domain names – the .com addresses, like business.com,auto.com and phones.com– that are the invaluable gold mine of the Digital Age. Unfortunately, there are a limited number of .com domain names, and due to the demand supply ration which is out of whack, corporates are squabbling with one another to secure the right domains.

    Let’s face it, image is exceptionally critical to any online business and domain names have their own brand image. Short domains, one word names with the dot com after them are in extreme demand. A domain name must be memorable and easy to remember because a domain name must be able to stand alone for any corporate to have its own online identity. Customer’s today type in the most used domain names simply from memory. A great domain name means search engines simply aren’t necessary.

    Who are domainers?

    Domainers are the professionals who deal in domain names. Domainers buy, sell, and develop domain names in a manner similar to real estate investors. Domainers generate revenue via domain parking, web-site development, and resale of domain names. Domainers are also sometimes referred to as domain investors, web site developers, domain registrants and commercial registrants.

    As of December 2006 there are an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 individuals globally who make buying and selling domain names a part of their business. USA Today reported that many Domainers prefer to remain anonymous due to the highly competitive nature of their business[1]

    2. What is pay per click advertising?

    Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising technique used on websites, advertising networks, and search engines.

    Advertisers bid on “keywords” that they believe their target market (people they think would be interested in their offer) would type in the search bar when they are looking for their type of product or service. For example, if an advertiser sells red widgets, he/she would bid on the keyword “red widgets”, hoping a user would type those words in the search bar, see their ad, click on it and buy.

    These ads are called “sponsored links” or “sponsored ads” and appear next to and sometimes above the natural or organic results on the page. The advertiser pays only when the user clicks on the ad.

    While many companies exist in this space, Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, which was formerly Overture, are the largest network operators as of 2006. In the spring of 2006, MSN started beta testing their own in-house service, MSN adCenter. Arguably this advertising model may be open to abuse through click fraud, although recently Google and other search engines have implemented automated systems to guard against this.

    3. What is direct navigation?

    Direct navigation describes the method individuals use to navigate the Internet in order to arrive at specific websites. Direct navigation is a new, loosely defined term, which is generally understood to include type-in traffic and bookmarked traffic. This involves an internet user navigating to a website directly through the website address bar, bypassing any online search engines and navigating directly to the domain.

    WebSideStory has recently published a report illustrating that direct navigation traffic, converts into sales for advertisers at a rate twice that of search engines.[1] Specifically, the Q4 2005 study of internet traffic, revealed that direct navigation traffic such as browser type-in traffic, bookmarks of existing sites and visits to existing, known website domain names converts into sales for advertisers at 4.23% of total visits compared to 2.3% for product and service related searches performed via the search box at search engines such as Google and Yahoo.[1]

    Do you have skills predicting future trends? What names might be big in the next few years if a woman or a black man were elected president, if an issue other than terrorism begins to creep into the world psyche? If green becomes in or America revamps its health care system what will be the key domain names that will represent the future? What names today represent a great business opportunities for you tomorrow?

  • Promote Your Products and Services By Writing An Effective Press Realeases

    If you run your own business, then writing effective press releases is a good skill to learn as it will help you promote and sell more of your services and products. A press release is like an article, with one main difference: they have to have an element that makes them newsworthy. They will almost always have quotes from someone associated with the information being disseminated.

    After you have written a press release, it can be distributed to offline or online services that specialize in releases. You may have to pay for some of them, but there are plenty of free services available. PRWeb Direct, Free Press Release, I-Newswire and PRLog are some of the more well-known online sites that will accept your releases.

    Using a straight forward, factual voice is the key to writing effective press releases. While most places that accept submissions won’t care all that much about how newsworthy your releases is, you should try to find an angle that is interesting so the places that republish press releases from those same sites will choose yours. In other words, you should be thinking about how interesting your releases is so more people will print it, which in turn gives your business more exposure.

    There is a basic format for most press releases. You will often need to include your personal contact information, name of your company, phone number, and so on. However, some outlets may have specific requirements for submissions, so be sure to follow those carefully if you want them to accept your press release.

    When it comes to writing effective press releases, it’s important to have a strong headline. This is what will get people to read what you wrote. In fact, you may have just written an excellent press release, but if the headline isn’t any good, then it doesn’t matter. So, you should spend a decent amount of time writing, rewriting and refining your headline. “DISCOVER HOW XYX INC. IS CREATING MORE LOCAL JOBS” gives you an idea of a captivating headline. If the service asks for a subtitle, then you could add something like, “Top Executives Excited About Income Potential” would work. After that, the rest of your release should back up and reinforce what your headline and subtitle said.

    You may have noticed that the headline was written in all capital letters, while the subtitle had the first letter of each word capitalized. This is the standard format, but again, be sure to check the formatting preferences of any service you’re using. A length of 350 to 450 words is common, and you should break it up into many small paragraphs instead of a few longer ones. The end of your press release should include an invitation for readers to get in touch with you for additional information.

    As you can see, writing effective press releases isn’t all that difficult. It may take a bit of practice to get it just right, but it’s easy enough to get started. Once you see the positive results they bring, you’ll wonder why you waited so long to use them.

  • How You Can Become a PLR Product Creator

    Since we began on creating quality PLR content, we have come across quite a few people wondering how they could create PLR products for themselves. I think this is a wonderful idea, and feel like the more people creating PLR content should mean the higher quality available to all of us.

    With that in mind, we don’t mind giving people a glimpse at the way we create our high quality products. We do a wide variety of different types of PLR so the exact process is never the same but in general we follow a process much like this:

    1. Identify a Need: The first step we take is identifying what people are looking for. There are a lot of ways to do this. We are active on some forums so we can gauge people’s interests that way. We have a social media presence so we can ask our followers and friends. We belong to online networking groups, so we can poll these groups as often as we want. Lastly, we listen to our customers — We have a forum that allows anyone to suggest a topic or idea for a product.

    2. Brainstorm: Once we have a general topic, we will sit down individually or in a team setting and brainstorm potential product ideas. At this point we will be taking a broad look at our product. We will figure out the main piece of content. It could be an eBook, an article bundle, a video bundle, audio, a system, a report or anything else. At this point we will decide on the topic and delivery format of our PLR Product.

    3. Research: We will then begin our research. All of our products are properly researched and provide the most recent of information (when they are written of course). We will usually let the member of our team with the most experience in a particular topic handle the bulk of the content. Justin is a whiz with personal development, while I like to take on the WordPress products. We also have strategic partnerships with local experts, like personal trainers, masseuses and teachers.

    3. Creatives Time: At this point we will begin creating the basic cover of the product. We do this now, because it can inspire the content creation part of the process. Also, we may need to use the images in some of the content, so best to get this out of the way. We will brainstorm a product title and heading as well as general idea for the cover. We create a flat image in Adobe Fireworks. We edit it and tweak it until we are happy. Then we export as a flat image, editable png and editable psd. We then use software to wrap this flat image in a variety of 3d images (like eBook covers)

    At this point we will also create banner ads and a mini-site, for anyone that wants to start quickly selling or giving away(as an opt-in) our product. We throw in editable images of everything as well as sometimes some additional graphics like buy now buttons.

    4: Content Creation: Now we will take our research from earlier and create our main piece of content. Like mentioned before this could be any number of formats. If the main piece was an eBook we would create the eBook in Mac Pages and then export an editable Word version, as well as a high quality PDF.

    5. Edit Main Content: Important step here – we edit the content to try and make sure it is free of errors. While this is a time consuming step we usually make sure at least two of our team members (and 99% of the time it is Justin and I) edit the product.

    6. Create Add-Ons: Here we get creative. We can now take this product from great to a must-buy by creating a bunch of high impact add-ons. Some of our most popular would be things like an autoresponder drip, posters, infographics, graphics, tweets, lists of resources and etc… We create as many as make sense for the product. We also of course edit theses as closely as the content.

    7. Complete Packaging: At this point we do another once over on the editing, we make sure that everything is included and then we zip it up and upload to our servers.

    8. Send To Members: Our members get first crack at everything we make. We post the product in our members area and then broadcast a message to everyone saying it is available for download.

    9. Launch & Promote: We launch and promote our new offer in a number of ways. This is when the product is offered to the the general public.

    10. Regular Maintenance: Through this whole process we make sure we go out of our way to provide timely support. This is not bragging, this is us giving you advice if you want to sell something. If you sell a product – stand behind it.  Also, since we run a membership site there are  a ton of behind the scene duties that are just as exhaustive as the entire list above. We focused on the product creation side of things for this post, but when it comes to eCommerce that isn’t even half the battle.

  • Essentials of Getting Good Blog Content

    Video: Brad talks about blogging and what makes for good content on a blog.

  • Business Blogging 101: Promoting Your Business Through Writing

    Blogging used to be an activity reserved for writers or people with special interests or hobbies. Now, blogs have exploded and are among the most common type of site found on the web. Most active, current businesses have at least one company blog to keep their customers and prospects up to speed on the latest news, ideas, breakthrough, announcements, etc…

    This short report will cover the most critical items you need to be aware of when it comes to blog marketing for your business.

    Own Your Blog: There are so many different blogging platforms to choose from. Some are free and others are paid-for services. If you are a serious business looking to use a blog as a long term relationship building medium for you and your clients, make sure you “own” your blog. This means that you should host your own blog and have full control over it’s contents. Free blogs are ultimately controlled by the company who provides the blogging service. Treat your blog as you would any valuable company asset.

    Content is King: This saying is almost cliche these days but it remains as true as it has ever been. If you are going to use a blog to market your business, make sure that you only publish high quality content that is representative of your company and your philosophies. Outsourcing your blog writing to someone outside of your industry would not be a smart move. If you are a small business owner, you should have a direct hand in the content creation. You may not write the content yourself but you should provide input and guide the blog. You are the ultimate expert and you need to work with your team to make your blog’s content showcase your company value.

    Regular Updates: Nothing looks worse than a blog that has old content that is not even relevant anymore. If you are going to have a company blog, make sure you also have a regular blog updating schedule. It doesn’t have to be weekly but at least once a month. Make sure that the content is unique and interesting enough the pique the interest of your readers. This is your chance to build long term relationships with customers and prospects. Frequent and useful updates go a long way in this department.

    Content Variety: A blog is your opportunity to be real and interact with your audience at a more personal level. Use your blog as an opportunity to share videos, photos, interviews, interesting presentations, tutorials, demos or even sample training lessons showcasing your specialty. The more variety you build into your blog, the more likely it is that people will return for more.

    Search Engine Optimization: The very nature of blogs lends itself nicely with search engine optimization. Every time you add a new blog post, you are essentially adding a new page to your site that can be indexed in search engines. Each one of these pages can now be found by people searching for what you offer. Make sure that you have proper SEO settings in place on your blog so that you can capitalize on highly qualified prospects who are searching for information that you are qualified to provide. If you need help with SEO, give me a call 🙂

  • Is Your Website Visitor Friendly?

    Many online businesses, in their haste to get up a website as soon as possible in order to start raking in the customers and the revenue, completely forget about the importance of web design when it comes to selling online.

    It helps to think of your website as a physical store. Before you invited the customers in, you’d take care to make sure that everything was organized, the place was easy to navigate for as many people as possible, and that the store was clean. If your store is cluttered, hard to navigate, and dirty, many customers will turn around and walk right out upon seeing the place, without giving a second thought to the products inside.

    Web design is important in the same way. When you present your site it needs to be presented in a clean, clear-cut fashion that draws the customer in and invites them to explore the website more, rather than sending them running due to an onslaught of blinking graphics and clashing colors.

    The best web designs, thankfully, tend to be the more simplistic ones. Make your links obvious and your text a reasonable size with appropriate colors. Note that “appropriate colors” doesn’t necessarily mean that the website has to be in shades of white – in fact, pops of color add interest and make your website memorable – but having a yellow background with pink text is going to shock your customers in a way that you’ll likely find less than desirable.

    Also fortunately, while most of us might not be web design gurus, there are a number of people who have dedicated their lives to the art of website design and maintenance. If you are a person who struggles to put italics into your HTML documents, there’s no shame in admitting that you’re not the grandfather of code. This is one place where outsourcing can be a great idea. Yes, a look at many website design sites might make you reel with the prices they quote, but there are ways to keep the costs low when it comes to outsourcing web design.

    Consider purchasing a ready-made site and then buying customized graphics on top of that as opposed to getting a site made from scratch. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Also consider talking with students from design schools – yes, you’ll have to pay them, but they often charge much lower rates, and many students will jump at a chance to build their portfolios.

    Also remember that outsourcing your web design can be claimed on your taxes for an online business. Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish – a good web design will serve you well and pay for itself in no time when it comes to the business of successful business.