Dave the Jerk

When the phone is ringing every day and the bank is threatening to foreclose your home, because you are behind on payments, it is easy to believe that the banker is drooling over the possibility of foreclosing on your home. But you should know that the bank stands to lose a lot of money if they are forced to foreclose on your home. Read this article to learn the real truth about banks and foreclosures.

With what I have learned about banks and foreclosure over the last couple years, the information that I am about to share with you now, could have helped a few of my friends avoid losing their homes. Because I could not help them in their time of need, it is my hope that I could help you now, in your time of need.

I know that my initial suggestion that “banks do not want to foreclose on your home” may seem far-fetched to you now, but by the time you have read this article in full, you will recognize that you have more power over the bank than the bank would care to admit to you.

The Truth Is In The Numbers

Let us suppose for the sake of this story that you paid $100,000 for your home. And let us suppose that you put a full 20% down on that home five years ago. In this scenario, your bank loaned you $80,000 to help you purchase your home, and at best, you have probably paid $10,000 towards the principle of your home loan.

In the past year, you suddenly found your finances stretched for one reason or another. Perhaps you changed jobs, or your business contracted with the economy. Perhaps you had a financial emergency that required a lot of cash to solve, and now you find yourself struggling to catch up on the rest of your bills.

In the end, it really does not matter the reason for your current financial crisis. It will have little bearing on the outcome of this story.

This is where most people make a mistake in their understanding of the banks’ motives in threatening foreclosure. The bank is not threatening foreclosure because they want your house. The bank is threatening foreclosure, because they want to spur you to action, to fix your current financial crisis.

I know you are thinking that the bank will sell your home for its full retail value, but they won’t, because they cannot afford to hold onto your house for a long period of time. In order to sell a home for full retail price, the bank would need to commit to holding the home, perhaps for years, until that perfect buyer arrives to buy it.

If you force your bank to foreclose your home, your bank will put your house up for auction at a sheriff’s sale. PAY ATTENTION… this is important. When your bank puts your house up for auction, they will generally only get 35 to 40 cents on the dollar for your home.

The bank is currently out 70 cents on the dollar against the retail value of your home, but if forced to auction, the best the bank can expect to get out of your home is half what the bank has invested into your home!

In the scenario I have outlined here, you owe $70,000 on a $100,000 home. But if you force the bank to foreclose your home, the best the bank can hope to achieve is to get $35 to $40,000 for your home at auction. Do the math. If your bank forecloses your home, your bank will lose between $30 and $35,000, when they sell your home. Ouch!

This is the key information that you will use to stop the foreclosure of your home. As you can now recognize, your bank needs you to stay in your home, more than they desire to foreclose on your home.

Leverage

As should now be obvious, you as the homeowner have a lot of leverage over your bank. And if you play your cards just right, you will not have to lose your home.

If you find yourself behind on payments and you are looking for a way to save your home from foreclosure, you need to speak to a company like National Foreclosure Counseling Services (http://nfcscorp.com/). NFCS is a company, which can help you negotiate a repayment plan or loan modification on your behalf.

When NFCS contacts your bank on your behalf, your bank knows that you are interested in taking whatever steps are necessary to get back on the straight and narrow with them. When banks realize that you are serious about staying in your home, they have to weigh the options of negotiating a loan modification or losing an average of $30,000 when they foreclose your home.

If the bank has someone in a home that wants to stay in the home, then the bank stands a chance of retaining some of their profits on their original loan, if they are willing to renegotiate the terms of that loan. However, if the bank is forced to foreclose on the property, then chances are good that the bank will lose a lot of money.

Think about it. Your bank does not want to foreclose your home. It is in the best interests of your bank to keep you in your home, period.

National Foreclosure Counseling Services (http://nfcscorp.com/) has a proven track record (with documentation) of helping families such as yours renegotiate with their banks to help them to stay in their homes. In just the last 90 days, NFCS has helped 600 families renegotiate with their banks to avoid foreclosure.

The Most Important Step In This Process

You have the power to save your home from foreclosure, if you simply decide that you want to exercise your power of self-determination.

Who knows? You may have decided that you don’t want to try to hang on to your home for whatever reason. So long as you understand that a foreclosure will hurt your credit for at least ten years, perhaps preventing you from being able to buy another home, then by all means, it is your choice to accept foreclosure or not.

The current real estate crisis will not last forever, and housing prices will rebound eventually. Even if you see yourself upside-down in your home now, you may just find that if you hang on to your home another five or ten years, then housing prices will bounce back and you will survive the current real estate crisis without great financial loss.

But if you are like most people, you probably cannot bear the thought of losing your home and the equity you have so far built up in your home. If you desire to hang on to your home, then you alone must take that first step towards saving your home from foreclosure. You must either visit the NFCS website at (http://nfcscorp.com/), or you should call NFCS at: 1-800-824-4459.

Author’s Note: This article was originally posted at: http://cash-advance-payday-loans.org/blog/banks-do-not-want-to-foreclose/2009/01/

Editor’s Note: Also published here.

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Arlo Mooney has dedicated himself to helping people properly manage their personal finances, by helping them to understand the gravity of their personal financial decisions. With his background in economics, he strives to help people understand complex economic principles. Read more of his work at The Financial Side of Economics blog at: http://cash-advance-payday-loans.org/blog/

Read more articles written by Arlo Mooney

During this current recession, many people are postponing and canceling vacations, for fear of the future economic conditions. But many of us still need some time away from home - a break from the everyday. There is so much information that I need to share with you on this topic, so this article is being presented in two parts: “getting there by car” and “airplane travel”.

Pick A Destination That Is A Comfortable Drive Away

Before we had children, my wife and I would travel every summer to visit her distant family members, 500 miles away. We would make that drive in a day, spending about ten hours on the road, with an hour layover for lunch at the midpoint of our journey. Since having the children, we have only made that drive twice, both times staying in a hotel overnight at the halfway point of our journey. It is just really tough to expect a child to endure a ten-hour road trip.

Since those earlier experiences with the children, we have opted to keep our road trips to no more than one-day’s driving. If we want to make the trip to visit my wife’s family, we opt for either a RV rental or an airplane ride. Given the hyper energy of our children, the RV rental provided the better option, since the two hours early requirement of air travel security forces us to try to tie down the kids for long periods of time anyway.

Given where we live, five hours drive time gives us the option of about seven major metropolitans we can visit by car. Interestingly, the need to find restrooms for the children, along the main thoroughfares in our travel routes, has permitted us to discover interesting destinations that we used to overlook in our earlier travels.

When I was young, my father was a master of this kind of travel. In his job, he was a route supervisor for a major food company. In his journeys around our state and neighboring states, he was able to locate interesting destinations during his work travels. He would then document these locations and build family vacations around these off-the-beaten-track tourism destinations.

On one such vacation, we visited a sod house in the Great Plains of North America. Ironically, I remember the destination more for his silly joke, than for the house itself. He told me of a man, who had built a sod house for his family. He said he built the house, and for the longest time, his wife complained that he was only able to build a house that was dark and dank. He said that finally a door-to-door salesman arrived to sell them a solution to their problem. Then my dad asked me what the couple bought. I did not know. My dad told me that the salesman had sold them windows for their home, and then my dad laughed hysterically.

Food On The Road

My wife and I ate out yesterday for lunch, and we dropped $25 plus tip on our meal. Even in today’s higher food price environment, we can feed all three kids and ourselves for three days with the same $25, if we opt for lunch meat, cheese and bread from our ice chest.

Even if you are taking the kids to McDonald’s for a quick meal, you are likely to be out $15 per meal, at this recession-friendly restaurant.

Given the fact that your kids need to eat three meals per day, plus snacks, any travel of any length could eventually cost you a lot of money, if you choose to take every meal in a restaurant.

If you plan to stay at a hotel while on the road, see if you can find hotels that offer continental breakfasts, as that can help you to reduce your food costs by one more meal per day. Many hotel restaurants and other restaurants are offering, “Kids eat free” to get customers into the door. Seek these businesses out, to save even more money, during your travels.

Take Advantage Of Tourism And Shopping Coupons

There are a number of sources available to help people get all the discount coupons they need to help their dollar go further. Are you familiar with the discount coupon books available in your hometown? If so, it helps to remember that these are available in most every city in the nation. Here is a list of such coupon sources:

Whether you are planning the trip of a lifetime, a gap year abroad or just a holiday break, you can make a difference when you travel, not only for yourself but for the people and places you visit.

Being a responsible traveler means more than just offsetting your carbon emissions, it requires thought and preparation. Responsible travel is based on the principles of sustainability and it requires you to examine the environmental, social and economic dimensions of your trip. Thus, responsible travel is all about minimizing the impact of your travel and maximizing the benefits for local economies, environments and host communities.

Making informed choices before and during your trip is the single most important thing you can do to become a responsible traveler.

Give some serious thought to your packing list. Your hi-tech synthetic travel jacket might keep you snug, but is it also warming up the planet or exploiting the people you plan to visit? Your soap and shampoo may smell wonderful but are they biodegradable? Try and ensure your backpack contains as many ethical products as possible (i.e. environmentally-friendly, fair-trade, not tested on animals etc).

Travel lightly and leave any excess packaging at home (i.e. plastic wrapping) - your hosts shouldn’t have to deal with your rubbish.

Educate yourself about the destination you are visiting by reading guidebooks and travel articles: culture, religion, geography, politics, ecosystems and local customs.

Consider your carbon footprint when using air travel as your flight will do more damage to the environment than any other aspect of your trip. You can offset your carbon dioxide emissions through any of the following organizations: Carbon Clear; C-Change Trust; Climate Care; Future Forests; Sustainable Travel International; Tree Flights or the World Land Trust.

Use public transport, hire a bike or walk when convenient - it’s a great way to meet local people and reduce pollution.

Try to support the local economy by buying regional products instead of imported goods. Use local services and businesses which employ members of the community, it is far more enriching and is mutually beneficial.

Help preserve local wildlife and habitats by respecting rules and regulations, such as sticking to footpaths or not standing on coral. Take care not to buy trinkets and souvenirs made from local flora or fauna. By buying products made from coral, starfish, shells, fur, ivory, hides, feathers, horns, teeth or eggs, amongst other things, you may be encouraging an elicit trade in endangered wildlife.

Animals are not here to amuse us, so do not support this trend by visiting circuses, festivals and carnivals where performing animals are used.

Respect local customs, traditions and culture - a responsible traveler doesn’t go abroad to force their world-view on developing communities. Always ask before photographing local people.

Think carefully about what’s appropriate in terms of your clothes and the way you behave. You’ll earn respect and be more readily welcomed by local people.

Respect local laws and attitudes towards drugs and alcohol that vary in different countries and communities.

Try to learn some words in the local language such as please and thank you, as this will be greatly appreciated and shows a respect for the culture.

Don’t be obsessed with getting the lowest price when haggling. What does a few pence mean to you compared to the seller?

When eating out, choose small local restaurants so you will benefit individuals instead of foreign companies. Drink local beer, wine and fruit juices rather than imported brands. Take a strong water bottle and boil or purify your drinking water, rather than buying bottled water.

Always try and use local energy and water as efficiently as possible and adopt a zero-litter policy.

When traveling or trekking in sensitive places use a solar powered battery charger for cameras, ipods or global positioning systems to avoid wasting batteries.

When traveling to impoverished countries do not give out medicine to alleviate suffering unless you are medically qualified. It is better to give your unused first-aid kits to local clinics or health charities rather than ‘experiment’ on local people.

If you intend you volunteer overseas try and choose a locally run organization so all your money goes to the cause rather than paying for the marketing and administration of a volunteer-sending agency. Some foreign run agencies offer little more than glorified holidays and are often more interested in making money than helping the environment or local people. No one benefits form these placements apart from the companies that organize them.

The guidance above is for anyone looking to travel in a way that lessens their impact on the environment and provides genuine benefits for conservation and local people.

Changes in our attitudes to travel and tourism will help build the kind of world that can be enjoyed by our descendants in perpetuity.

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Stephen Knight is the webmaster of Volunteer Latin America. He is committed to helping conserve the natural environment and to improving the lives of human beings through the promotion and encouragement of volunteer work in Mexico, Central and South America. Without the commitment and financial support of volunteers, many projects would be unable to carry out their vital work. Volunteer Latin America is not only a great source of affordable voluntary work but a means to finding some of the best Spanish language schools in Latin America. http://www.volunteerlatinamerica.com

Read more articles written by Stephen Knight

Think we have a severe economic recession in the United States today, right? Or, at least, that the magnitude of the apparent severe unemployment situation that we have today, is such that you probably can’t find any significant job openings existing just about anywhere in America today, and that there simply aren’t any employer today who is making any significant hiring of new workers, right?

Well, think again!

Oh, I know. There’s this virtual avalanche of grim economic news flooding Americans even by the minute these days out of Washington, telling about growing business and industry shut downs, worker lay offs and rising unemployment. And sure, it’s real. But, this is probably the biggest job-related secret in America today, the common, conventional thinking of general joblessness in America today. Actually, the plain FACT is that there are, in fact, plenty of Federal government job hiring going on right now, and plenty of job openings available around the clock right this minute, and you’d just need the “informed tricks” that’ are required for it, and you’d be able to properly job search for and dig out those Federal job openings, then properly apply for them and get one of them.

Point is, what we actually have here in the American job market today, is a diminution, or, if you will, a shrinkage in certain types of jobs. But there is no overall shortage of jobs, no complete dry-up of employment or employment opportunities in the totality of the American economy. Particularly, there is our own Federal Government of the United States. It has large job openings right now and continues to hire new workers in large numbers all along even as we speak right now. And, will not only continue to have need for new workers, and to hire sizable numbers of them in the months ahead, but in numbers even higher and larger.

In deed, several studies by respectable labor and manpower economists and experts, including a recent report by experts (http://www.cnbc.com/id/28948055; http://news.aol.com/article/despite-layoffs-federal-work-force-is/324326?cid=9), released in January 2009 by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, have amply projected that a large number of jobs are to be created by the Federal Government in this 2009 year, and beyond. For example, this latest study estimates that, just based on a $600 billion economic stimulus package by the new Obama administration (a higher amount of some $800-900 billion is what is currently being discussed), about 244,000 newly created government jobs at Federal, state and local levels, are to be expected by that measure alone.

In deed, this is actually totally in keeping with the expected Federal government role in times of unusually hard economic times or crises such as we have today. At such times, the Federal Government is expected and anticipated to have an even higher job-creation and worker and labor hiring load than usual, for one fundamental reason, which is simply that such a role is, in fact, the natural, responsible role meant for the Federal government to play. The Federal Government just has to step in, in such a dire national economic time (the kind we seem to have right now), and play the role of a stabilizer.” In fact, the notion has become the common thinking among labor management experts and economists today, that in unusually severe economic times such as today when general employment continues to dwindle, and when major American employers (Microsoft corp., Pfizer, Caterpillar, Home Deport, and the Wall Street, to name just a few) are massively laying off workers, it becomes therefore the “natural, built-in” role of the Federal government to step in and try to pick up the employment slack by stepping up worker hiring, not lessening it.

THE CENTRAL QUESTION: Given the FACT, solidly established, that the Federal government has an abundance of job openings available, and is poised for even higher levels of new worker hiring in the near future, if you are a job seeker who is serious about securing a job with the Federal Government, what would you need to do to secure one of these Federal jobs? Essentially, what and what to do, fundamentally lies in the serious job-seeker making certain to have the vital knowledge, information and skill, to be able to properly job search for where the jobs actually are (in terms of the specific agencies of the Federal government having them, as well as their geographic locations across the country), and to uncover them; and having located those jobs, the other critical necessity is that the job-seeker has got to be able to know how exactly to properly apply for them in a way that will meet the special Federal job standards, and thereby result in his or her landing the priced Federal job.

The question, in short, will really boil down to this: which and which ones among the American jobless or those who want jobs, will be equipped enough and informed enough to be able to take proper advantage of these real, existing ‘recession proof’ Federal job openings, and therefore be able to walk away with those jobs for which they’re qualified?

GETTING FEDERAL EMPLOYMENT IN THE MIDST OF SEVERE UNEMPLOYMENT CLIMATE!?

Here, in a nutshell, are some of the major things that my own new publication, published by the Self-Helper Law Press of America, titled The Handbook of Federal Jobs: How to Job Search for, Apply for and Get Federal Job (www.GetFederalJobNow.com), provides you, as it methodologically guides the reader, in a simple, step-by-step outline, through a maze of the entire Federal job hiring process:

IN SUM: “Just arm yourself with a copy of this Handbook,” chimed Dan Benjamin, the Sales Manager of the book’s publisher, “and you’ll see yourself go quickly, from the ranks of the despairing long lasting unemployed, to the ranks of the happy newly Federally employed.”

In this ground-breaking Federal job-hunting Handbook, the Publishers of this Handbook have become even more encouraged and more emboldened by one major, new, unique development that was not earlier unanticipated but which busted lately on the American economic scene, to make an even better and more compelling case for why it’s now almost like a dire necessity of life for any serious Federal job hunter today to hurry and grab a copy of the book: the new Obama Presidency! The projected infusion of humongous sums into the economy out of the Obama economic stimulus program, some one trillion dollars or so of it, will clearly mean far more big-government programs and initiatives, and, hence, the creation of a lot more new government jobs across the board in the months ahead. And, even more so, still more new Federal government civil service jobs and new federal hires to be had!

Those are the virtually GUARANTEED new Federal job opportunities that are either already here, or are soon to come! Again, which American jobless or job-seekers would have been properly equipped, informed, and adequately prepared, to take proper advantage of these opportunities? That’s the central question! Having in hand this prime essential tool you’d need for it (a copy of The FEDERAL JOBS HANDBOOK), according to author Anosike, will assure precisely that you’d be up to that challenge - an the tremendous opportunity to become a prized Federal employee.

Previously published here.

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Benji O. Anosike, has been characterized by one analyst as “one of the keenest-eyed Federal government employment researchers and experts around.” His latest new study just released, is titled THE FEDERAL JOBS HANDBOOK: HOW TO JOB SEARCH FOR, APPLY FOR AND GET FEDERAL JOB. SUBTITLE: “America’s Biggest Job Secret: How the Federal Government is Loaded with Jobs, Where they are, and How to Get Them.” (http://www.GetFederalJobNow.com). A recognized national expert on self-help law and consumer cost-saving techniques, Dr. Anosike, holds graduate degrees in labor management economics and a Ph.D. in jurisprudence, and is the acclaimed author of some 26 books, guidebooks and manuals, including several best-sellers, on various topics of American consumer interests and savings.

Read more articles written by Benji O. Anosike

Article writing and distribution creates free one way incoming links back to your web site. Link building in this manner increases your web sites exposure, visitors and you overall search engine rankings. By using the following techniques you can dramatically improve your web site traffic in a very short period of time.

1. Create Viral Content For Your Web Site - Add your own resource box/byline to your articles and post them on your web site. You could allow your visitors to publish the articles on their web site if they also include your resource box and keep your hyperlink active. This will spread your link around the internet like a virus and increase your link popularity fast.

2. Submit your articles to free content web sites for other webmasters to reprint for publishing. When you include your resource box at the end of the article with your website URL you will not only get free advertising but you will get a link back to your site. This will increase your link popularity and cause your site to rank higher in the search engines.

3. Combine your articles into a free e-book. You can place your business ad and hyperlinks back to your site in the e-book. E-book creating software is inexpensive and easy to use. By giving your e-book away to visitors and allowing them to link to your site to give it away to their visitors will multiply your web site traffic, exposure and link popularity.

4. Create an article directory on your web site. People will visit your web site to get the free information. By allowing them to reprint your articles with the stipulation that they keep the resource box and hyperlink active you will increase your link popularity. Also allow your visitors to place a link on their web site that links back to your article directory. By providing your free “instant article directory” to their visitors you will increase your web site’s exposure and receive a percentage of their visitors as well.

5. Offer other web sites, that are relevant to your own, free content articles about your area of expertise to post on their web site. Include your link on all of your content. Your article should be related to your web site because it will bring you visitors that are interested in your product or service.

6. Use an article distribution service that distributes articles to thousands of web sites, newsletters and ezines at one time. Your article will be published on dozens of web sites almost immediately. I used this technique with an article distribution service called here.

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(c) 2006 New Hampshire Concrete Cutting and Core Drilling, All Rights Reserved

Written by: Robert Short

New Hampshire Concrete Cutting and Core Drilling provides concrete cutting and core drilling services to the contractor and homeowner in New Hampshire or NH. Visit our website at http://www.affordableconcretecutting.net for more information on concrete cutting and core drilling.

Read more articles written by Robert Short

There are dozens of good ways to send people to your website. These methods come with a wide variety of results and difficulty. Attempting various methods and studying the results has been a focus of mine. I’ll review one of my favorites for you.

Offer something FREE to your visitors.

There is a high perceived value on the part of your visitor if you can provide them with useful information. By capturing and sharing this free information, you can make somebody’s life better and easier in many regards.

It’s simply human-nature that you must constantly work to over-come a basic mis-trust on the part of your visitor. This level of mis-trust MUST be overcome before you can succeed in your efforts.

Your focus should be to find and share valuable information. Finding (and sharing) information on-line is the quickest and most effective. It doesn’t take much search time before you will be discovering subjects and information that folks want to know. This shows you the topics that are being inquired upon and which you will want to include in the information you give away.

One strategy you can employ is to share the information in the form of a multi-day mini-course that people can receive from you. Make the information package you send be of top-quality for maximum results. A little more time and attention at this point will have tremendous benefit in the value of your subscriber list. It costs much less than you might think to do this.

You will be offering to share this information in exchange for your visitor’s name and e-mail address. A ’squeeze page’ is the best tool to use for capturing this information. A squeeze-page is simply a basic website that presents your message offering the information.

Some very professional design work is available at affordable prices these days. Your own squeeze page can be up and capturing names for you in a very quick time.

If you would like to have your own squeeze page up and running, let me know. This is a great starting point in establishing your own highly-profitable list.

With care, your subscriber list can be cultivated and a long-term relationship built with the members. You can build a very rewarding and long-lasting enterprise by steadily and thoughtfully putting these concepts to work.

Like any offline business, you are providing genuine value to your customers who have grown to trust your motives and your interest in helping them. You can be paid very well in the process.

The best strategy in any relationship-selling environment is one where you give before ever trying to take. As with other strategies, here, again you are providing something of value free to the reader. This time it is in a different format and is made available to the reader using different tools and strategies. Quality in what you provide and how you provide it is essential, easy and inexpensive.

A focus on providing information to the people you wish to reach should be foremost in your mind. They will be willing to buy something from you (now or in the future) only if they first perceive that you have something they need or want. The biggest obstacle you will always face with new readers is one of NO TRUST! Providing something free is a great way to start building it. Valuable information can be found readily on the internet. You also likely have more information and knowledge of your own than you realize. There are many sources of information where you can find topics of interest to huge numbers of people.

The article should inform, educate and even enthuse the reader, but should NOT sell something. Your articles are not the place to sell some product or service. It is their job to inform and establish your credibility and TRUST! Your key marketing tool with the article publishing strategy is found in using a resource box. This is simply an area at the end describing who you are and giving your website address where they can visit and benefit by what you offer there.

I’ve seen a tremendous piece of software in action that automates the process of article-writing. This tool merges blocks of words, uses a 30,000 word thesaurus and manges data bases, as well. There is some new software out there (along with people-run businesses) that helps with article production as well as distribution.

Article writing and publishing should be part of an on-going strategy. Computers and professional service companies make this vital function much easier. If you want more information on these useful tools (or anything else in this article), just contact me.

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Casey Moher - Caseymoher@comcast.net (801) 941-3334

Mr. Moher is a Registered Pharmacist and Life-Long Marketing
and Sales Professional. You Can Get His Free Five-Day
Mini-Course on Building Targeted Website Traffic by visiting:
http://www.newtrafficmaster.com

Read more articles written by Casey Moher

Some things just need fixing. I have always loved to repair things. Some people might call me a “Gear Head” or a “Mr. Fix-it”. Well, lately I have seen a lot of things critically wrong in our neighborhoods that need some fixing. Let me explain…

All you need to do is read any daily newspaper or watch the news and you will rapidly become aware of horror stories that none of us thinks will ever directly affect us as individuals or as a family. Not true! Get that kind of thinking out of your mind. Criminals, rapists, murderers, crack heads, thieves and every other kind of crackpots are out there in higher numbers than EVER BEFORE.

As families, we all need to have a PLAN OF ACTION incorporated as a part of our daily routine for immediate use if and when something bad happens to any of us in the general happenings of our daily lives. We really need a couple of plans to fall back on if the first one doesn’t protect our loved ones and us. I have offered some plans in past articles and will continue to keep gearing you up to provide pro-active plans (rather than re-active) so you can also be a Mr./Ms. Fix-it for yourself and your families.

One of the most gut-wrenching and horrible feelings any parent can experience often happens in the blink of an eye. You turn around and your CHILD IS NOT THERE! It can happen at the park, the mall, and the zoo or anywhere in a matter of seconds. Let me first explain the problem and then some super fixes from the Mr. Fix-it Toolkit.

Some Quick Ways That Kids Go Missing

1. They can simply wander away without saying anything to anyone. They might just get distracted. However, some creep, crack head, jerk, pervert or geek might just grab them and run. This is a bad, bad, REALLY BAD scene no matter what.

2. Another child can pull your child away to show them something interesting and before you know it the crowd swallows them up. They’re short and you can lose them quickly. Rotten seeds in our population are aware of this.

3. Kids love animals, in particular small animals. Creeps and goons that may want to abduct your kids know this and exploit the children’s natural instinct that draws them to fuzzy little cute animals.

4. Cell phones, discussions with other people we are with, sales clerks, waiters, etc. all represent things that can serve as distractions to us as parents just long enough to allow awful things to happen. Always be extra alert in these everyday situations.

5. There are desperate, despicable, horrible criminal goons that will just try and swoop in and grab and run away with your child. As a parent you must be vigilant and aware that these creeps are out there in our neighborhoods, malls, parks and schoolyards.

Powerful Kid Saving Combat Methods From The “Mr. Fix-It” Toolkit

If you have been following all the latest developments in Internet marketing you will have discovered a few things. Recent trends are proving to be very lucrative for those savvy marketers who are taking advantage of these new changes.

First, video is popping up everywhere: on websites, in sales letters, in testimonials and in training manuals. Google (reluctant beacon of all things net) is making its move on video in a big way by videotizing their ads and by snatching up YouTube for a Billion and some change.

Second, if you have placed a blog and RSS feed on your own website, your stats will show you that blogging is an excellent source of traffic. RSS is a simple way to get your content on the web - including your videos and podcasts.

RSS and Blogging are propelling the social networks which are burning up the web and video is only adding fuel to the fire. YouTube and MySpace barely cracks the surface of the online community building fury that’s revving up the web. Social networking fulfils our need to be connected in a very unconnected world.

Our need to be a part of a group is universal. RSS and Blogging are the tools that make this connection possible. We can keep in touch and connected to the groups or subjects that interest us the most. We feel a part of the group. We feel connected. We feel organized. We feel important.

These social networking sites are excellent places to build good-will and trust among its users. They are also great places to market or pitch new products as many online marketers have discovered.

One has to wonder just how the new RSS powered version of Windows (Vista) will impact social networking sites like MySpace? Will it explode the already strong interest in Blogging to make it the dominant form of communication on the web? Will RSS become the dominant means of connecting all the dots?

Regardless of how all this plays out, RSS and Blogging are already an online marketer’s dream come true. Web marketers are taking full advantage of this medium within a medium, just look at the number of marketers who have started blogs such as Neil Shearing, John Reese… Marlon Sanders has even started his own MySpace site!

Can you remember a recent launch of any major Internet product within the last year or so that DIDN’T have a blog attached to it. From Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon’s “Stomping the Search Engines” to Brad Callen’s “Keyword Elite” to Joel Comm’s “Instant Adsense Templates.”

In a similar light, can you think of any major launch that did not have video as an important feature in its marketing. Joel Comm even used a video on YouTube to get his Google Adsense points across.

Why is RSS and Blogging so important to these marketers? Why have they become essential tools no online marketer can ignore? Why are they so important?

The answer is quite simple and obvious. It all relates to keywords. As you probably already know keywords are the exact words or phrases surfers type into search engines to find what they’re looking for on the web. Keywords powers the web. Keywords powers much of the online marketing on the net. All this buying and selling are connected to keywords in one way or another.

RSS and Blogging have an automatic keyword system built into its operating structure. It comes preloaded with the means to take full advantage of keywords and keyword marketing. The whole system is run by tags or categories. These tags or categories are recognized by the search engines as keywords.

So if you use a popular free blogging software like WordPress, you will have a simple way to create keyword targeted content within seconds. Targeted keyword content that can also be syndicated around the web instantly. Build a whole blog of related keyword content and you will have created a powerful online marketing system.

Marketers are taking advantage of RSS and Blogging for this reason. It is a quick and simple way of dominating a niche area and ranking high for the popular and lucrative keywords in their niche or industry. The advent of video has made these blogs and feeds much more accessible to a larger audience or marketplace.

Once these marketers have gained dominance for popular keywords in their niche, they can convert or monetize this traffic in countless ways: selling their own products, building their lists or using Google Adsense and affiliate links. For these savvy online marketers it can be a very lucrative and profitable system.

RSS and Blogging has indeed shown them the money!

Previously published here.

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The author is a full-time online marketer who operates numerous websites, including two sites on Internet marketing. For the latest web marketing tools try: Internet Marketing Tools To add RSS to your site within minutes - download this simple RSS Report and Guide. http://www.marketingtoolguide.com Copyright (c) 2006 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

Read more articles written by Titus Hoskins

What exactly is an “Exclusive Buyer’s Agent”?

A: An agent who represents only buyers, never sellers, with no risk to their buyers of dual or designated agency on any home they want to buy.

B: An agent who represents their buyers as a designated agent if they want to buy a home that is an in-house listing.

C: An agent who gets paid regardless of whether the agent finds their buyers the home they want to buy or not.

The correct answer is “It depends on who you ask”. Let’s discuss each of the scenarios above:

A: An exclusive buyer’s agent is an agent who represents only buyers, never sellers, with no risk to their buyers of dual or designated agency on any home they want to buy.

This is the definition you would find in “Don’t Risk It! A Broker’s Guide to Risk Management”, published by the National Association of Realtors in 2000: “Exclusive Buyer Representation - Also called exclusive buyer agency, this the practice of representing only buyers, never sellers. The company never lists a seller’s property and thus never has a seller as a client.”

The definition above is also the definition used by the news media in articles written for the benefit of home buyers who are looking for consumer advice in preparation for the purchase of real estate. Internationally acclaimed finance specialist Suze Orman endorses the National Association of Exclusive Buyer’s Agents in the “Finding a Buyer’s Agent” section of her popular web site, www.suzeorman.com. Consumer advice columnists Ilyce Glink and Robert Bruss recommend exclusive buyer agency as an alternative to buyer agency to consumers who want to avoid the risk of dual agency - when one broker represents both parties. Ilyce Glink advises: “If you’re trying to eliminate potential conflicts in your deal, you may want to try (exclusive buyer agency). Exclusive buyer’s agents never represent sellers. They only represent buyers, and they typically will take buyers wherever they want to go in a metro area.”. Robert Bruss differentiates between the different types of buyer agency services in his article Do Home Buyers Need Their Own Agent?: “Any real estate agent can be a buyer’s agent to help locate your home purchase. In addition, there are a few exclusive buyers’ agents who represent only home buyers, never accepting listings from home sellers.”

And June Fletcher from the Wall St. Journal.com writes:
“Exclusive buyers agents can focus on their customers and their needs in a way many sellers agents can’t. They don’t have to spend their time holding open houses, staging properties, or doing all the other marketing tasks that consume much of a listing agent’s time. They can concentrate on previewing homes, investigating comparable houses, helping the buyer understand financing options, negotiating the deal and making sure all the inspections and escrow items are done in a timely manner.

What’s more, home shoppers who use exclusive buyers agents don’t run the risk of falling in love with one of their agent’s own listings. When that happens, the agent becomes a dual agent — beholden to both the seller and the buyer, and thus, beholden to no one. Because this limits the amount of advocacy and advice the professional can give either party (for instance, a dual agent can’t tell the seller the highest price that a buyer is willing to pay), it’s illegal in some states.“: www.realestatejournal.com

B: An exclusive buyer’s agent is an agent who represents their buyers as a designated agent if they want to buy a home that is an in-house listing.

The news media is doing a great job of advising consumers to ask for an exclusive buyer’s agent in order to avoid the the conflict of interests that exists with dual and designated agency (which legally is “dual agency” in NC, since the same broker represents both parties.) But the problem is now that consumers have started asking for an exclusive buyer’s agent, listing agents are representing themselves to consumers as “exclusive buyer’s agents,” and are advising consumers they can provide exclusive buyer agency representation - even on in-house listings! The reason for this is that the NC Real Estate Commission does not recognize the definition for exclusive buyer’s agent published by NAR in 2000, and since then, picked up and popularized by the mainstream news media. As a result, many real estate agents who practice designated agency on in-house listings regularly advertise themselves to consumers as “exclusive buyer’s agents.”

C: An exclusive buyer’s agent is an agent who gets paid regardless of whether the agent finds their buyers the home they want to buy or not.

The NC Real Estate Commission allows NC real estate agents to call themselves an exclusive buyer’s agent if their buyer client signs an “Exclusive Buyer Agency Agreement.” The NC Exclusive Buyer Agency Agreement is a contract which states that the buyer’s agent gets paid no matter who finds the home, and restricts the buyer to the buyer agency services of the agent/firm with whom the buyer has the buyer agency agreement. The NC Real Estate Commission acknowledges this usage of the term is pervasive throughout the industry in NC, but does not consider it a deceptive practice because no legal definition for this term exists in NC. The following terms: “Buyer’s Agent, Seller’s Agent, Dual Agent, and Designated Agent” are all defined in the state mandated Consumer Disclosure Brochure called “Working With Real Estate Agents,” but the definition for “Exclusive Buyer’s/Seller’s Agent” is a glaring omission from the agency options that are disclosed to consumers in this brochure.

In many states including NC, “Buyer Beware” remains the adage for consumers who want an exclusive buyer’s agent to represent them in their next real estate purchase transaction. A refreshing exception is Ohio, where their state legal disclosure, “Consumer Guide to Agency Relationships,” was developed jointly by the Ohio Association of Realtors and the Ohio Division of Real Estate and Professional Licensing. Under Ohio license law, each brokerage must disclose which of five agency policy options their company practices and offers to consumers, including an option for exclusive buyer agency: “Under this policy, your brokerage only represents buyers, and does not take listings, practice subagency or dual agency.”

Real Estate industry expert and columnist Peter Miller sums up the argument best for including exclusive buyer agency as an additional agency option in the NC Consumer Disclosure Brochure: “Brokerages should always include listing brokers and buyer brokers, exclusive or not, so that individual professionals can pick the practice strategy they prefer while consumers can find the widest array of services. Exclusive buyer brokers changed the marketplace by popularizing the core concept of buyer brokerage. That’s a transition which now helps millions of purchasers get a better deal in the marketplace - and that is a significant accomplishment.”

Since no legal regulation for exclusive buyer agency exists in NC, before proceeding with a self-proclaimed “Exclusive Buyer’s Agent,” consumers are advised to question their real estate agent’s interpretation of this loaded real estate term.

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Julie P. Tuggle is broker-owner of Carolina Buyer’s Agent, an exclusive buyer agency in Charlotte, North Carolina that represents only buyers, never sellers, on the purchase of Charlotte homes with no risk to their buyer-clients of dual or designated agency representation on any home they want to buy. Julie can be reached at: juliet@charlotte-eba.com

Read more articles written by Julie P. Tuggle

With foreclosures hitting record levels, many people are having to sit down today and wonder how they should go about restoring their credit in the aftermath of a foreclosure.

I am not going to lie to you. It will not be easy, and it will take some time to work out, but it can be done.

Most people simply file bankruptcy and wait ten years for that foreclosure and bankruptcy to drop from their record. At this point in this article, it is very important to note that you just cannot wait for the for foreclosure and bankruptcy to drop off your credit report. The law says that after ten years, the credit bureau must drop those records from your credit report, but they will not do so unless requested to do so by the consumer. So when your time comes, be sure to get in touch with the credit bureaus and request for them to drop the records that will hamper your credit status.

Secured Credit Cards

One of the easiest methods available to help people rebuild their credit starts with a savings account. With as little as $300 in hand, one can go to companies such as the Bank Of America to request a savings-backed credit card.

The Bank Of America Secured Visa Credit Card required a minimum deposit of $300 and a maximum deposit of $10,000, and it requires a $29 annual fee.

In essence, you will deposit money into a Bank Of America security deposit account, and BofA will make available to you a credit card that has a maximum limit equal to the amount of money you have in your BofA security deposit account.

You can use your BofA Secured Visa Credit Card as you use any credit card, to make purchases at stores or to get a cash advance from an ATM machine.

Keep in mind that Bank Of America will not draw money from your security deposit account to make your monthly payments. You will still be required to make the minimum monthly payment each month that you have a balance, and your security deposit account only exists to ensure that BofA will be paid in the event that you default on your secured credit card.

Although you are only required to make the minimum payment each month on your secured credit card, BofA recommends that in order to rebuild your credit more quickly, you should pay your payment in full each month.

The Bank Of America Secured Visa Credit Card is one of the most recommended secure credit cards available in the marketplace, although it is not the only one.

Another popular secured credit card is the one issued by the New Millennium Bank, which you can learn about here:
http://www.creditcardnewsroom.com/brand/new-millennium-bank/secured/black-diamond.html

Secured Bank Loans

Back in the 1980’s, I had built my credit using a process that was recommended in a book.

I started with a cash deposit of $1000 at a local bank. I then acquired a loan from that bank, secured by the savings account that I had opened there.

I took that money borrowed from the first bank, and deposited it in a second bank. From that second bank, I obtained a second loan secured by my second savings account.

With the money acquired from that second loan, I set up a savings account at a third bank, and then I left that money alone.

You can trail this process out as far as you want, but I only did it with two loans myself.

Each month, I paid my loan payment when it became due. If I was short cash that month to pay both of my bank loans, I would take money from the third savings account to make that payment. Otherwise, I would just pay the loan payments out of pocket.

For what amounted to be a few dollars interest, I managed to pay off two $1000 loans in one-year, at two different banks. At the end of the cycle, I repeated the cycle, letting my first bank keep the cash on hand, and the third bank to become a new lender.

Of course, I had managed to save some money over that first year, so when I repeated the process in the second year, I did it with $2000 instead of the original $1000.

By the end of the second year, three banks were offering me loans and many credit card companies were also looking to loan me money.

Bank Loan Advice

The trick to borrowing from a bank is to pay off your loans over the stated term of the loan. If you take a one-year loan and pay it off in a couple of months, then you will have gained no positive favor on your credit report. The reason why paying early does not always benefit the borrower, is because the bank was not able to see that loan payments can be paid “on time”.

Whatever loans you may take from a lender, you should always maintain payments for a minimum of six months, before paying off that loan. To do otherwise will not yield a positive mark on your credit report.

So long as you keep your loan running for a minimum of six months, there is no problem in paying off your loan early. Some people get ahead on their credit reports by paying double payments each month.

As recommended by some economic guru’s, you may also consider making thirteen payments a year, instead of the standard twelve payments per year. If you think about that, all you need to do is to make one payment every four weeks, as opposed to making one payment each calendar month. This works really well towards paying down your principle on a home mortgage or car loan.

Another recommendation that many guru’s suggest is to make semi-monthly payments - payments every two weeks. This is beneficial in that it reduces the overall interest you will have to pay over the life of the loan, since interest is always calculated against the amount of principle due on payment dates.

Small Loan Companies

In the small consumer loan market, there are a lot of loan choices available to the consumer.

Of course, there are the loan companies who specialize in loans that can be used to purchase furniture or consumer electronics.

There are also loan companies that specialize in loans of up to $500.

With these types of loan companies, the same rules apply as recommended above. Also with these loan companies, if you ask them to do so, they will report your positive payment history to the credit bureaus.

There are also the loan companies that specialize in what is called payday loans or cash advance loans. With these companies, you are in effect getting a loan that will come due on your next payday, hence the description - payday loans.

Payday loan companies should not be employed to build credit, as it is the most expensive type loan you can acquire. You can use it when you are meeting a cash shortage to help you get over that next hump, but you should only borrow from the cash advance company when you know for certain that you will be able to pay the loan back on your next paycheck.

Rebuilding Your Credit

Rebuilding your credit requires determination, dedication and discipline. You have to start small and work your way up the credit ladder.

I know that what I am getting ready to tell you is going to be hard to believe, but my hand on my heart honest, it is God’s honest truth.

A couple decades back, I knew a kid - I say kid, but he was in his twenties - who worked for minimum wage as a dishwasher in a restaurant.

This lowly dishwasher had better credit than I did; he even had better credit than the guy who managed the restaurant - I was friends with the restaurant’s manager. This is true… I swear.

This young man lived within his means and paid all of his bills on time, and in full, every month.

Soon, he started receiving credit card offers, which he accepted. With his credit cards, he played by the same rules. He lived within his means, and paid all of his bills in full and on time every month.

After about five years, he bought a motorcycle to help him meet his transportation needs. Of course, he made those payments on time and in full every month.

Soon, he was able to finance the purchase of a home. And as you would imagine, he always made his house payment on time and in full every month.

When I last chatted with him, he was still working as a dishwasher for a bit more than minimum wage. He owned his own transportation and his own one-bedroom house, and he had credit cards in his pocket that he could tap any time he wanted to do so that in total offered him a credit line of - get this - $120,000!

This lowly minimum wage employee had a credit line large enough to buy the best stuff money could buy, but he maintained the lifestyle that he was accustomed to living - living within his means and never spending more money that he could afford to pay back.

Now, that is discipline. He has the credit available to run out and buy a nice big screen television, yet he would not do so, because he knew his finances would not let him pay that money back quickly.

I learned a lot about credit in having known that young man. I hope that you have also learned something by knowing his story.

Editor’s Note: This article published here.

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Fred Vanhoosen writes about the payday loan / cash advance industry. To learn more about the payday loans industry, we recommend reading the following overview of the cash advance loans concept. Learn more at: http://www.fastcash4all.net/

Read more articles written by Fred Vanhoosen

A trip to London with your loved one or group of friends to see a London theatre show is one of the best ways to spend a short weekend break. The glitz and glamour of the West End, a great meal, a nice hotel, a wonderful theatre experience - what better way is there to relax and have fun?

To make your trip as enjoyable as possible, here are a few top tips on how to get the best from your trip to a London West End show.

Getting to London

The first thing you need to ensure is that you can get to London on the date you want, and that there are tickets available for the theatre on the date you wish. There would be no point in booking a train or flight only to discover the evening performance of Chicago was sold out three weeks earlier.

There are numerous ways of getting to London from all parts of the UK and London has 18 mainline train stations, 6 national and international airports, and several national bus stations. Take your pick, but bear in mind that travel pricing is more competitive now than it has ever been, so book early and chop around to ensure you get the best deal. Discounts for booking online is often a good way of saving money further.

Theatre Tickets

Booking online or by telephone is really the only way to go about this if you want to ensure you get the best theatre tickets in advance for the show of your choice.

There are numerous websites that provide this service, but make sure when you do book up, you know where you are sitting before you pay. Often the online companies are allocated seats in certain sections so you could end up with a restricted view or at the rear of the stalls without realising it. Make sure you have a map of the theatre handy and book by telephone to eliminate these problems.

Remember, www.viagogo.co.uk can sort you out with tickets for almost any West End show you desire.

Hotels

There are literally hundreds of hotels at all levels of comfort and price in and around London, so be wary you don’t end up in a hole in the ground when you thought you were booking a weekend in the lap of luxury.

Obviously, large chains like the Hilton will be able to offer you top-notch accommodation, but for those of us without limitless pots of cash, how can we ensure we book a decent hotel without too much cost?

Again, booking online through reputable agencies is advisable to ensure your booking goes through securely and you have a wide selection to choose from. Word of mouth in the hotel business is something never to be overlooked, so ask your friends before you book if there is anywhere they could recommend - hotels love nothing more than having new guests as the result of a recommendation.

Eating Out

It is said that Greater London has more eateries within its boundary than there are in the whole of the UK put together. Competition in the food industry has never been hotter and it is now possible to enjoy a wonderful meal for much less than you could ten years ago.

There are all kinds of culinary treats for you to choose from in London; everything from Japanese to Moroccan, Turkish to Greek, or Chinese to a traditional British slap-up meal - and they all want your business.

Many restaurants, particularly in and around the vicinity of the West End, offer special pre-theatre menus, where you can take advantage of the many offers they have on set meals. So treat yourself to that special meal, get dressed up and enjoy some cocktails before or after meal - or both - then enjoy your West End show fully satisfied.

Traveling in London

Getting about London is easier than most people imagine, in fact, the only people who really complain about it are the commuters who have to travel through it each rush hour.

London has around 19,000 registered taxis, making your trip to the theatre generally inexpensive given the cost that taking your own car would incur in congestion and parking charges.

By far the easiest and most convenient forms of transport in London are the Tube and bus services. Both of these are cheap and run regularly to most parts of the city centre until late at night, and both are generally quite safe for the theatre go-er to travel on. The West End itself has numerous Tube stations, all within walking distance of most of the theatres.

If you concentrate on these five tips, you can be sure that your weekend theatre trip to London will go down a treat, and you’ll want to be back to do it all again very soon.

Article previously published here.

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This article was written by Bret Robson for Viagogo.co.uk, a leading European ticket hub. Viagogo connects buyers and sellers of tickets, concert tickets, theatre tickets and more. Viagogo also guarantees all the transactions, so if you are looking for tickets online, Viagogo is the place to go!

Read more articles written by Bret Robson

Seeing the recent media coverage of the marriage of Nick Cannon and Mariah Carey’s quickie island wedding has brought out a lot of cynics. There seems to be strong undertones to a quickie celebrity marriage from a few years ago - anyone remember Ren

Effective business writing skills can help you win that million dollar contract, earn a promotion, resolve a dispute, or generate a significant increase in new business leads. Poor business writing, on the other hand, can never be undone; it can cause you to lose business to your competition and even cost you your job. Here are 11 easy ways you can improve your business writing skills:

1. Before you write a word of copy, make sure you know who your target audience is and what specific result you’d like to achieve. If it’s an important business communication, take five minutes to visualize yourself in the shoes of the recipient and imagine what this person’s world is like.

What does their typical day look like? What are their unique needs, goals, and challenges? What problem is keeping them up at night? The more thought and research you invest in understanding your target audience and how you can help them, the more powerful and effective your business writing communications will become.

2. Avoid using your company acronyms and buzzwords. While they might seem cute and clever to you, it’s very annoying to a busy executive who has a pile of documents and proposals to read. Avoid using academic language like ‘ergo,’ ‘henceforth,’ or ’so to speak,’ and as a general rule of thumb avoid use of technical jargon. Simplify big words: write use instead of utilize, send out instead of disseminate, fair instead of equitable, etc.

3. Use a strong, active voice instead of the impersonal, passive voice. “The meeting agenda could be discussed further” is passive. “Let’s discuss the meeting agenda” is active. Express confidence and decisiveness in your business communications. Instead of writing, “I intend to write a report on sales performance measures,” which comes across as weak and indecisive, write: “I’m currently writing a report on sales performance measures for completion on or before end of the second quarter.”

4. Write in a conversational tone instead of alienating your readers by being too formal and bureaucratic - unless you’re writing to a bureaucrat or someone who prefers formality. Know your audience!

Even if you are writing a marketing communications piece that will be read by several thousand potential readers, make your writing as inviting and personal as possible. You can accomplish this feat by writing to one specific person who you can visualize as an ideal customer. Pretend you are sitting down with this person in a bar and having a casual conversation. Write your piece with this one person in mind and you will positively engage thousands of readers who will feel that you are writing directly to them!

5. Replace hyperbole with solid facts and reputable testimonials. Phrases like, “We’re #1,” “We’re the leader in our field,” or “We provide the best service,” aren’t going to get you anywhere. Instead, use a fact such as stating that the President of a leading association ranked your company with the highest quality score out of 500 certified companies.

6. Convert product features into benefits. Mentioning that you provide automated billing or an automatic domain name renewal service does not engage your customer emotionally. Here’s an example of benefit oriented copy: “Our automatic domain name renewal service will provide you with the added security and comfort of knowing that your domain names will never be hijacked by your competitors while freeing up your administrative time to focus on growing your business.”

7. Don’t rely on editing all your important business documents from your computer desktop. Print out your document and read it out loud. If you encounter any awkwardness in speech it means you need to re-write your piece to make it more conversational and flow better.

By reading your document out loud, you will also be able to spot typos and errors that your computer spelling and grammar check program might not have detected. As an example, you might have written ‘echo friendly’ when you really meant ‘eco friendly.’

8. In writing a business letter or business proposal, it is vitally important to write from your customer’s perspective and what will interest them. Start off by writing about how great your customer’s company is and what specific attributes you like about the company instead of bragging about how great your company is. Too much use of “I,” “me,” or “our company” is a sure sign of ego getting in the way of business. Make sure to generously use “You” and “Your” in your business copy if you want to make more sales.

9. Business writing is very different from writing poetry or literature. Don’t meander or get carried away with flowery language. Write the most important point you want to make in the first sentence. If you are writing a sales letter, you can significantly increase sales by simply including a powerful P.S. at the end of the letter that summarizes the main point in a fresh way, creates a sense of urgency, or adds further credibility. Here’s a powerful example: “P.S. I’ve been invited to speak at your association’s annual conference this coming Friday and hope to see you there.”

10. Be clear, concise, and to the point. Don’t assume readers will know what to do. Guide them by including a specific call to action: “click on the link to get your special report” or “call me to set up a no-cost 15 minute consultation.”

11. Use word pictures to get your point across. Can you imagine the thrill and excitement of driving a rocket-fast, cobalt blue Porsche 911 Turbo as it whisks you to your desired destination? A well-written article or report can be like that Porsche and generate a ton of new business in half the time with more fun! After all, what’s more exciting, cold-calling prospects or having them call you? (If writing is a challenge, consider hiring a professional).

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Sharif Khan is a freelance business writer, copywriter, book publishing consultant, and author of the leadership bestseller, Psychology of the Hero Soul http://www.HeroSoul.com If you need help with an important writing project or ongoing assignment and would like a no-cost, no-obligation quote, call 416-417-1259 or send an email to: sharif@herosoul.com “Sharif knows how to write clear and concise copy for business. He is quick, to the point, and a pleasure to work with,” writes Carl Nanni, former VP, Kraft Canada

Read more articles written by Sharif Khan

If you were to dissect the culture of a business, and you ask various people in an organization what the real roles of each department are, you’ll find the well-known dichotomy between “front office” and “back office” operations.

Front office staff are the people who deal with customers. They might be the customer service department, the sales department, and sometimes the marketing department (depending on how involved the marketing department is in the sales cycle). Back office staff are usually the admin assistants, HR, and the killjoy of all businesses - the Finance department.

In businesses I’ve observed, Finance departments often face silent derision or disrespect. Part of it is an us-versus-them mentality that comes out of the front office staff who feel their jobs are more difficult because they deal with customers (compared to Finance, who deal with numbers).

Unfortunately, this view is supported by management at all levels that give Finance the nasty job of accounts receivable, the inputting-heavy job of accounts payable, and the dull job of budget forecasting.

But it doesn’t have to be this way! Finance departments shouldn’t be relegated to the back office in the hopes that their sharp pencils won’t poke a customer in the eye! Finance departments can and should play a far more important role in the organization. Here are some ideas:

POSSIBILITY 1: Finance should be more about business strategy than number prophecy. When the Finance department hounds the sales managers to get in their budgets and then turns them around for a final target budget for the year, their role is reduced to mere numerical interpreter. But what if Finance sat down with sales and talked to them about how their numbers connected to expected outcomes? And then, what if Finance sat down with the executives of the company and actually worked out a forecast that was tied to what the market was anticipating! Imagine a world where Finance’s numbers were more than just a spreadsheet that gets pulled out at every quarterly review.

POSSIBILITY 2: Finance should be more about opportunity. Many sales managers have some limited view into which customers are sending business. But the view isn’t always perfect. Or complete. Finance should get involved to show how a customer is really impacting the business’ bottom line. If Finance and Sales talked to each other, Sales might be shocked to discover that their biggest client is actually less valuable than expected because of the amount of work involved in keeping them as clients, or they might discover that a seemingly profitable client isn’t profitable at all because their receivables get very, very old. Imagine a world where the Finance department can relate true business impacting information to Sales to tell them which opportunities are truly the most profitable.

POSSIBILITY 3: Finance should be selling, too. When Finance gets the job of following up on accounts receivables, they can potentially do more harm than good. Finance people are highly skilled at numbers, and they might be good “people-oriented” staff, but they are rarely trained in the art of sales. However, when a Finance person, tasked with accounts receivables, gets adequate training in receivables AND customer service AND sales, their success rate at getting the receivables paid can increase, but so will their success rate at winning more business.

There are so many more opportunities, too. Businesses should be using their accounts payable list as a prospecting list. They should be temporarily swapping roles between Finance and Sales for brief “see-how-the-other-side-does-it” days to enable new appreciation and new connections. Finance should sit in on sales calls to see why Sales sometimes feels like they need to bend the rules to close the deal (and Sales should shadow the work of Finance so they know what work needs to happen at the backend if they don’t assess risk adequately during the sale).

The bottom line for businesses should not be derived from a cloistered Finance department. Instead, a business can uncover new and exciting opportunities when it makes its Finance department an integral part of the entire business.

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Heather Villa’s professional philosophy is that her role in the success of others will ultimately bring about her own success. Whether she is working from an advanced accounting or challenging marketing angle, offering guidance in development, organization, supervision, or administration, Heather makes sure that her clients get accurate answers from a professional that they can depend on. As CEO of IAC Professionals (http://www.iacprofessionals.com), Heather instituted a company-wide philosophy of professional and personal integrity, and IAC soared. Would you like to find out how Heather Villa can help drive your business toward greater success? http://www.hireheathervilla.com

Read more articles written by Heather Villa

Many women are concerned about how to approach men they are interested in meeting in today’s society. They want to be proactive, but don’t want to appear too eager or needy. So what’s the best way handle the situation?

Naturally, there is no one answer to this. What a woman should do is decide how she wants the men to perceive her. If a woman wants a man to be attracted to her, she’s going to have to present herself differently than if she just wants to be around a man in a social setting, as a “friend” instead of as a possible partner.

If you’re looking for a physical relationship, you can approach a man in just about any manner you want. In terms of being a man, the reason they even allow a woman into their circle is to pursue her. When a man’s talking to you, you can bet that he’s thinking in terms of a physical connection, rather than anything else if he’s brought you into his circle of friends. Naturally, you also need to remember that most men aren’t thinking in terms of any kind of long-term commitment at this point.

Then again, there are women who want to be with men and simply enjoy their company. There’s nothing wrong with that, but from the very beginning, they need to be clear about their boundaries. If a man makes a pass at you, you need to cut that off immediately, and let them know that’s not going to be tolerated. If you’re there to simply socialize, make that clear from the outset and there will be a lot less hurt feelings all around.

Remember that how you dress also influences how men are going to perceive you. If you’re dressed casually and not provocatively, you’ll be treated to a lot less flirting than if you show up in a micro with stiletto heels. Despite the advances made in the way that women are treated in today’s society, some things are still going to take time to deal with, and that’s one of them.

Keep in mind that you need to make sure that you don’t set up boundaries and then cross them yourself. If you make it clear that you only want to socialize and then begin to flirt, you’re going to send out mixed signals. You might not think that anything is going on, but the men around you might get the impression that you’re available.

What about someone who isn’t self-confident?

You can just hang back for a little while and get the lay of the land. See if there’s anyone there that you can to get to know. Watch carefully to see if he’s attached to anyone else, and if he is, you can wait for him to get a drink and get one at the same time. Or else, if he’s in a group, it’s okay to go over and stand next to him. If he looks at you, give him a smile.

From there, you can ask him questions about himself. Keep an eye on how he’s answering those questions. If his answers are pretty detailed, that shows that he’s enjoying being there and talking to you. On the other hand, if he’s giving you a lot of “yes” and “no” answers, that can mean that he’s really not interested in you, and you might be better off going elsewhere.

A woman with confidence can approach men anywhere. She doesn’t need to be a supermodel or a celebrity. Instead, all she needs is having style and self-confidence, and there isn’t a man out there who won’t want you to be with him in his group.

…

Kathy Stafford, Relationship Coach, “I show singles how to get married and couples how to STAY married” Do you want more from your relationship? Go to http://www.dearkathy.com for relationship articles, advice, and programs.

Get Kathy’s new book, “Relationship Remorse: Mistakes Women Make When Shopping for a Man.” and learn the right way to find a loving and committed life-partner. Order the book at http://www.relationshipremorse.com

Copyright (c) 2007 Kathy Stafford / dearkathy.com. All rights reserved.

Read more articles written by Kathy Stafford

Sales pages, to be effective, must immediately catch the attention of even a casual web surfer. The sales message contained in the sales page needs to be both easy to read and understand. If the content-display styling is well-crafted, the sales message can be absorbed with just a rapid page scan. An interested reader will re-read the page for the details.

Sales copy provides the content which entices the reader to move deeper into the page towards the “Order Now” button.

The job of a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), is to

There are lots of articles and ebooks available on the Web about “writing” profitable sales copy. You can easily find them with a quick search. This article focuses on “styling” the sales page and its content with CSS.

There are several advantages to using CSS for display styling. One of the best reasons is that it frees the copywriter from initial concerns about page formatting. Using very basic HTML code, such as that allowed for submissions to ezinearticles, the page content can be written with any basic text editor without concern for special content formatting.

Before any CSS styling has been applied, the sales page would not convert any prospects. At this stage, the HTML document contains all of the “content” that will be used. Text and images will typically be positioned on the page in roughly the order these elements will be used in the final sales page. CSS will make everything “pop” and “sizzle” when it is applied to the page.

After the sales copy is written, important page elements (identified through HTML tags) and content (information between HTML tags) can be identified and linked to the appropriate CSS formatting code, contained in separate CSS text file, for browser display. A previous article of mine, published at ezinearticles, explains how the HTML content gets linked to the CSS file. Briefly, the HTML-CSS link is done through the HTML “link” meta tag and content is identified through class and id tag attributes and through the use of the HTML span tag.

Content-specific styling includes special text formatting, such as highlighting and quotations, and the placement of items such as images and forms within the page.

I like to display the content in roughly the middle half of the monitor display and use a line length of about 60 characters. I also like to use a large enough font size to make blocks of text easy to read.

Because the page layout is so important, I use a fixed table design for the content: the content is placed in the center of the display and is framed in by wide right and left margins and narrow top and bottom margins. If the width of the browser page is narrowed by the reader, the right and left margins will narrow equally but the content area will remain the same width, and thus the content layout remains the way it was designed (i.e., not “liquid”).

Essentially, my basic page layout consists of 4 nested “boxes:”

The HTML box includes the entire HTML document (except for the document-type declaration). The Body box contains everything visible to the reader. The Table box contains the sales page. The Main-Content box, as the name implies, includes all of the visible content of the sales page.

A sales page requires both global and content-specific CSS styling. Global styling includes such considerations as the page background, default font and line attributes, and page margins. Here is the global code I include in my CSS text file for sales pages:

body

{

font-size : 62.5%;

font-family : Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, SunSans-Regular, sans-serif;

color : black;

line-height : normal;

background-image : Specify the image URL here;

}

#main_content

{

font-size : 1.6em; /* this sets the default font size for the sales page and will display at 16px */

margin : 5%;

}

h1

{

font-size : 2.25em; /* will display at 36px */

}

h2

{

font-size : 1.5em; /* will display at 24px */

}

h3

{

font-size : 1.25em; /* will display at 20px */

}

h4

{

font-size : 1.125em; /* will display at 18px */

}

table.sales-letter

{

width : 60em;

margin-left : auto;

margin-right : auto;

table-layout : fixed;

background : #ffffff;

}

The body code above sets the default for the document’s font size to 62.5% of 16px or 10px (px = pixels). This is too small for my sales page, and I adjust it in the #main_content section. The CSS body code also sets the font color to black, the line spacing to normal, the font family to sans-serif (with Verdana as the first choice), and specifies a blue background image used for the body background.

I use the #main_content code to set the actual base font size I use for the sales page text. All other font sizes in the sales page are sized relative to this base. Unless otherwise specified, all text in the sales page will be 1.6em or 16px. I use the margin attribute to provide content spacing between the content and borders around content.

The “Hn” tags set the basic header sizes and are calculated based on the font size I specified for the #main_content. As an example, since I will be using a default font size of 16px for the sales-page content, the H1 font size would be 2.25×16px or 36px. The “Hn” tags can later be modified with additional attributes, such as color and centering.

The CSS table attributes I use place the sales page in roughly the middle half of the full-size display page (1024 x 768 pixels). The width of the table, 600px, is just right for the line length I want to use. Since the table-layout attribute is “fixed,” the table layout in the browser will be preserved at all times.

Since all of the font sizes are relative to the font size I set in the #main_content section, all sizes can be made larger or smaller by changing just the one value. For more information about the use of ems for sizing, I would suggest a visit to a blog post by Richard Rutter.

After the global formatting is applied page now has some nice-appearing structure.The content now lies between attractive borders and the content is contained on a “page” with adequate margins and on a background of choice.

Below are 12 additional tips, including the CSS code, you can use to stylize specific elements and text in your sales pages.

(1) I want my headline to be big, bold, red, and centered. Here is the CSS code I use:

h1.headline

{

line-height : 1.5;

color : #cc0000;

text-align : center;

}

(2) I use a smaller, blue, bold, and centered sub-headline.

h2.subheadline

{

line-height : 1.5;

color : #1b356e;

text-align : center;

}

(3) I use a small font size for the spider text and copyright. I position the spider text at the top of the page for the benefit of search engines.

#spidertext, #copyright

{

font-size : 1.2em;

}

(4) I use CSS code to position my photo so that it “floats” to the right and any text to the left flows around the photo.

.photo

{

float : right;

display : inline;

}

(5) If you want to center section headings and color the text red or blue, here is usable code:

h3.red

{

line-height : 1.5;

color : #cc0000;

text-align : center;

}

h4.blue

{

line-height : 1.5;

color : #1b356e;

text-align : center;

}

(6) I change the font type for quotations. Using Courier New sets the quotes apart from normal body text.

.quote

{

font-family : “Courier New”, Courier, monospace;

}

(7) I use an unnumbered list for my benefits list. The list can be customized to use a custom bullet and extra space between list elements. The CSS code to accomplish my custom list formatting is as follows:

li

{

list-style-position: inside;

list-style-image: Specify the image URL here;

list-style-type: none;

margin-bottom: 1em

}

(8) You can highlight important text with a yellow background.

.highlight

{

background-color : yellow;

}

(9) You can emphasize text by making it bold.

.bold

{

font-weight : bold;

}

.boldred

{

font-weight : bold;

color : #cc0000;

}

.boldblue

{

font-weight : bold;

color : #0000ff;

}

(10) I like to make sales-page testimonials special by framing them and using a pastel background for the text.

.testimonial

{

display : block;

margin-left : auto;

margin-right : auto;

background : #fffacc;

padding : 1em;

border : double;

border-width : thick;

border-color : #999999;

}

(11) The purchase form is a very important component of the sales page. I use a red-dashed border for the form.

.purchase-form

{

padding : 1.5em;

border : dashed;

border-width :medium;

border-color : #FF0000 ;

background : #fffac6;

}

(12) If you use an image and associate a link with it, you will want to turn off the border or you will get a distracting blue border around the image.

a img

{

border : 0;

}

After all CSS styling has been applied, the sales page now has some “snap” and “pop”. The colorful headline immediately catches the attention of even a casual web surfer. The sales message contained in the sales page is now easy to read and much easier to understand. The well-crafted content-display makes it possible for the sales message to be absorbed with just a rapid page scan. After a preliminary scan, an interested reader will more than likely re-read the page for the details.

To get a ZIP file of the HTML and CSS files mentioned in this article and that you can use for practice or for your own templates, please visit http://www.elizabethadamsdirect.com A full-color PDF of the article is also available for download.

Sample web pages showing the template sales page without CSS applied, with just global CSS applied, and with all CSS applied can be seen at http://www.elizabethadamsdirect.com/template/exhibits.html

To look at a “real” sales page that used the CSS techniques discussed in this article, you can visit http://www.elizabethadamsdirect.com/greatheadlines

…

Elizabeth Adams has been writing direct sales copy since the early 1990’s, when she employed several people to handle mailings and product fulfillment for her postcard marketing business. Elizabeth learned in direct mail how to tweak her sales copy on the run and improve her sales conversion by as much as 400% in only one mailing. She learned how to write a great headline and effective sales copy. Get “Great Headlines - Instantly” today to learn how to do for yourself what Elizabeth learned in the trenches: http://www.elizabethadamsdirect.com/greatheadlines

Read more articles written by Elizabeth Adams

During a discussion about small business marketing, one owner asked me “How do you get big?” In other words, what did he need to do with his marketing to take his business to the next level.

Great question because the marketing you do to take your business from $0 to $100,000 is very different from the marketing you do to take your business to $250,000 or $1,000,000 or $5,000,000.

Let me illustrate with a story.

In the early 1970’s shampoos and conditioners that smelled like lemon, strawberry, apple, herbs, and so on, became all the rage. As a teenager, I remember spending my hard-earned babysitting money to buy Love’s Fresh Lemon shampoo so that my hair would smell like “fresh squeezed lemons”. A small, Chicago-based company best known by hairdressers for their line of permanent wave products did something interesting. The company, Helene Curtis, created a line of shampoos and conditioners that duplicated the most popular name brand fragrances but retailed for about half the price. Then they ran very simple, inexpensive television commercials during daytime TV in which a deep, authoritative male voice would say something like: “Their shampoo smells lemon fresh; Suave shampoo smells lemon fresh. Their shampoo costs $2.50, Suave costs only $1.25. Suave does what theirs does for less. It was a simple but brilliant strategy. It launched the billion dollar Suave brand which has since expanded into just about every personal care category including baby products, skin care, and a line of products for men.

It wasn’t just the “Suave does what theirs does for less” campaign that made Suave a billion dollar brand. In the 1980’s Helene Curtis made a decision to become a major player in the personal care market and staffed their consumer products division with key people from consumer product giants such as Quaker Oats, SC Johnson, and Proctor and Gamble. These individuals had the training, experience, and know-how to create major consumer brands.

Having worked in Helene Curtis’ consumer products group for five years, I was actively involved in brand development and marketing. Here are some things I learned about marketing’s role in growing a business.

Have An Audacious Vision

The mission at Helene Curtis was to become the premier provider of personal care products on a global scale. This represented an enormous shift for an organization known, primarily, for marketing a small line of permanent wave products to beauty shops.

How big and audacious is your vision for your company? I encourage you to create a vision that is big enough to make you a little nervous but exciting enough so that you want to stretch yourself in order to realize it.

Don’t “Just Meet” Your Client’s Needs

At the most basic level, people need shampoo to keep their hair clean. And at that level, just about any shampoo will do. Hence, branding. Brands address higher level needs such as self-esteem and social belonging. Even more important, brands reinforce the customer’s sense of who they are…their self-identity. For example, people who buy brands like Suave, think of themselves as “smart consumers” because they’re buying a product that is identical in quality to the “name brands” but paying less.

Think about your customers. How well do you really understand them? Do you know what problems drive them crazy? Do you know what they aspire to? Do you know what their vision and mission is? How do your products and services help your customers deal with problems or attain their goals? To achieve your growth objectives, help your customers or clients achieve theirs.

Develop Partnerships And Strategic Alliances

My most eye-opening experience while working at Helene Curtis was learning that as important as the consumer was, the real customer, the customer upon whom the most resources, time, and manpower were spent was the RETAILER. Even fifteen years ago, most major consumer products companies were courting mass merchandisers like Wal-Mart as well as warehouse clubs.

Looking upstream and downstream at your supply chain, distributors, customers, and promoters, where are there opportunities to combine resources in ways in which the results are greater than the sum of your efforts? In particular, can you cross-sell one another’s products, do joint promotions, combine media buys, and so on to increase your and your partner’s marketing power?

Not Everyone Wants To Go To The Level: Be Willing To Part Ways

You also need to be willing to say good-bye to people, products, and activities that don’t support your growth.

The Suave brand has been around since the 1930’s. It’s signature product back then? Men’s hairdressing. The hairdressing is long gone but the brand is still there having evolved with the times. During my time at Helene Curtis, brand management was constantly scrutinizing product sales to identify poor performers which were discontinued and replaced with ones that better reflected consumer trends.

As mentioned earlier, when Helene Curtis made the decision to become a major player in the consumer market, they brought in new people, implemented new processes for investigating and introducing new products, and developed new relationships with retailers. Not everyone stayed during this expansion. Not all retailers continued to carry Helene Curtis brands. Products that had once been “stars” were discontinued, reformulated, or sold.

As you develop at your plans, assess your current marketing practices, relationships, and processes to determine which will support your growth objectives and which will not, and discontinue those that will not.

One Last Point

If you take away just one point, remember this: what you did to get today’s customers probably will not work with different or “bigger” customers, and what works for your customer today may not work for them tomorrow. You cannot grow your business by doing more of what you did to bring your business to this point. At some point your will have gotten as much return as possible on your current marketing you’ll need to upgrade and build capacity with new practices, processes, and ideas.

…

Judy Murdoch helps small business owners create low-cost, effective marketing campaigns using word-of-mouth referrals, guerrilla marketing activities, and selected strategic alliances. To download a free copy of the workbook, “Where Does it Hurt? Marketing Solutions to the problems that Drive Your Customers Crazy!” go to http://www.judymurdoch.com/workbook.htm

You can contact Judy at 303-475-2015 or judy@judymurdoch.com

Read more articles written by Judy Murdoch

Everyone I ever talk to — business owners, employees, retirees or students alike — all tell me if they could have one financial wish among all the rest…it would be to create multiple streams of passive income for life.

Loads of people talk about it. But few people really know how it’s done.

But one man I respect and admire does know. He’s the absolute worldwide ‘Master of Passive Income’ creator. He’s also probably the most famous and recognized business builder in the industry. I’m talking about legendary marketing ‘Super Consultant,’ Jay Abraham.

Jay never considered himself the “Super Expert” at passive income generation - - until four months ago. That was when famous personal achievement “guru,” Harv Eker called him up and asked Jay to create an innovative, two-hour, keynote presentation for his upcoming conference entitled “Never Work Again.”

What was the focus of this $2,000 per person, sold-out, 1,000-person event?

It was …learning as many practical, result-certain ways anyone - young, old, educated, illiterate, sophisticated or not… regardless of gender — could create for yourself not one or two, but dozens upon dozens of separate passive income streams, automatic revenue sources, windfall profit centers — each one of which pumped out “moolah” — while you weren’t there.

The concept in a nutshell was: Do something once, and then be paid for it–forever!

The reason Harv Eker called Jay up to create a breakthrough, short-course primer on mastering passive income is that Jay IS probably the preeminent expert in the world on doing it.

He became the “de facto” Master of Passive Income quite accidentally, though.

You see, over the last thirty years, as Jay experienced all kinds of different marketing strategies, profit-boosting maneuvers and business growth transactions — wildly enriching deals would frequently pop up that no one else saw the screaming possibilities in.

Oftentimes, if not mostly, these were potentially ‘monster’ passive income deals that Jay Abraham alone knew how to mine — and monetize.

And, boy, did they pay off big time for Jay and all the partners he brought into various deals he did.

A deal Jay did in 1970 paid him almost $50,000 a month — for years. All from one week’s effort on Jay’s part.

A deal Jay put together in 1982 generated just under $10 million for Jay and three partners.

A deal he did in ‘92 still pays Jay up to $50,000 a year and he has hasn’t lifted a finger to do anything on it for nearly a decade.

And today, a deal Jay did in all of 8 hours — four months ago, has been generating $400,000 a month in revenue for him ever since. Jay was in Asia last week doing a seminar and still racked up $650,000 from this passive income stream, literally while he was asleep on the other side of the world.

And in case you’re interested, all totaled, the passive income-generating deals Jay Abraham either engineered or strategized for himself, partners, clients and seminar attendees may actually exceed a half billion dollars in revenue — all wildly profitable.

Why am I telling you this?

Because the story gets more interesting — and more relevant to you. This is a red letter day for your fortune-changing future.

You see — Harv knew Jay could create passive income streams (tons of them) almost anywhere in the world - - for almost anybody, in a matter of days or weeks — without any real risk, investment or heavy effort on their part.

So, he had Jay do this universal, two-hour presentation that combined about 25 actual success stories Jay has engineered, along with a detailed explanation of exactly how Jay orchestrated each deal, combined with a candid recommendation of how members of Harv’s audience could do it for themselves, too.

Jay carefully identified simple, easy, no-cost deals they could do worth $1,000 - $5,000 a month to them — passively.

He explained ways someone with no real skill, training or capital could actually amass tens of thousands in passive revenue, monthly.

Jay even told attendees brilliant ways you can tap absolute “gushers” of windfall profits worth sometimes six figures at a pop.

His ‘Blockbuster’ presentation was a runaway success at Harv’s event. So much so that a surprisingly large portion of the attendees asked Jay to privately mentor them into the rarified ranks of Master of Passive Income.

Jay agreed because he loves a daring challenge no else can pull off. So now, Jay personally counsels, mentors, or advises on a multitude of joint venture deals with a highly motivated group of people committed to achieving substantial passive income — all without risk or capital expenditures.

Where do you come in?

Two ways.

Jay originally planned on turning his passive income knowledge into one of his $25,000 per hour high level training programs, but I persuaded him to try something audacious and never before done.

I asked Jay to let you hear all the ideas he shared with his Harv’s group,– but without asking you to pay a thing. No $2,000 price tag - you pay nothing. You see, since you’ve been a loyal e-mail subscriber of mine for a long time, I want to reward you for your loyalty.

So I went to Jay and told him my people would flock to his fortune mentoring if he first shared his two-hour presentation with them without charge. He liked my proposition and was game to test it out with three small ‘trial’ groups of our people to see what happens. But Jay decided to do something even better for me and my subscribers.

He went into a studio and recreated the presentation he originally did for Harv’s “Never Work Again” program, but - - adding nearly 20 minutes more of case studies, techniques and strategy ideas — and I’m offering you the chance to hear it — without charging you a thing.

That’s right — there’s no charge to you.

You don’t have to pay $2,000 to hear Jay’s keynote presentation. You don’t even have to leave home.

Just reply and enroll at http://store.abraham.com/c/a/reg/mopi.html?from_location=mpirsmith

But please don’t sign up unless you plan on showing up. Don’t show up unless you plan on staying until the end.

Remember, Jay is only letting a few key people hear the presentation (for gratis) — to see whether it pays off for him or not. Only 1 of every 500 people on the list can get on this limited test offer, max. So please don’t waste the chance if you won’t use it fully.

Otherwise, let someone serious about generating passive income have the place on the call.

We’ll over-fill our lines. We almost always do.

So don’t waste this experience. Make the most of it - - or, let someone else prosper instead.

The second reason you might be interested is that Jay has also decided to mentor a few hundred people on my list for a full month, for NO CHARGE — to see how you do and to get the press reporting your results, sort of like the different ‘challenges’ I did in Los Angeles and St. Louis.

Jay’s making this daring (and wildly audacious), no charge, mentoring-for-a-month proposition towards the end of the broadcast.

He can only personally work with a small group for that month, without being paid a thing — so first to sign up will get in — last won’t.

The two-hour presentation provides a wonderful education in nearly 25 ways you can generate passive income streams for yourself, without risk.

Once again, towards the end of the presentation, Jay will provide an unimaginably appealing way you can work with this brilliant man, personally, for one full month — without spending a cent.

…

If you’re tired of working for someone else — or you want more prosperity and freedom than your business or practice can provide — enroll in Jay’s two-hour introduction to mastering passive income.

The place to enroll is:
http://store.abraham.com/c/a/reg/mopi.html?from_location=mpirsmith

Read more articles written by Jay Abraham

Most webmasters are always looking for new and inventive ways to drive traffic to their website. There are many proven methods of getting the traffic to a website, but if that new increase in traffic does not convert into sales, then is it still worth the effort that you put into getting that traffic?

I had a discussion recently with a colleague about generating traffic from outside of our target market. As a result of our discussion, we decided that we certainly could utilize various markets to get a huge boost in traffic, but since this traffic would likely not result in any conversions, that there was really no point in spending the time and effort on going after that traffic.

In a previous “experiment” on one of my websites, I started using the social networking tactic to generate traffic. I bookmarked a page of my site and submitted to many of the standard sites like, www.digg.com, www.reddit.com, www.furl.net, www.spurl.net, etc.

By doing this, I was able to get a huge increase in traffic to the site for a couple of days. The problem is, that I did not get one single conversion from this new traffic. I used a catchy headline and a good description of the article that I submitted to the social networking sites, good enough to get people to come visit the page anyway. But with the lack of getting a single conversion, it really did not seem worthwhile to me to do again in the future.

Now I know that some of you might be thinking, “Well, his sales pitch must be terrible” or that “His website is poorly designed.” If this were the case, I would have no problem admitting to this, but when I compare the untargeted traffic that I received from the social book marking sites to the targeted traffic that I see from organic searches I can see a big difference in conversion rates. The targeted traffic that comes from organic searches generally results in a 5-8% conversion rate. The untargeted traffic resulted in a 0% conversion rate.

How To Talk To Prospects Who Are In Your Target Market

The above results lead me to believe that a much better use of my time would be to focus more on the targeted market and to stop wasting time on the untargeted visitors. There are many techniques that can be used to find prospects in your target market. Many of these techniques are old news to experienced webmasters.

Some of these methods include contextual marketing through programs such as AdWords, posting on relevant forums, improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the organic traffic, and submitting articles to article repositories. You can also buy paid advertising in newsletters that cater to the people who are most likely to buy your products or services. These are just a handful of the methods that a Webmaster could utilize to get in touch with his or her target market.

Each of the above listed methods has their pros and cons.

Time commitment and ongoing financial commitments are two of the cons that are mentioned on a regular basis.

The pros given with all five typically represent tightly targeted traffic, suitably primed for conversion to paying customers.

The Dick Cheney Analogy

The Dick Cheney analogy has often been used to talk about this subject. Should you use the Rifle Approach or the Shotgun Approach?

The Rifle Approach lets you pinpoint your target and to hit it with great accuracy and frequency. The Shotgun Approach is sending a number or projectiles into a flock of birds and hoping you hit something. Dick Cheney proved that the shotgun sometimes hits its mark. (tongue-in-cheek people, tongue-in-cheek.)

For example, if you are selling health related products, then a media buy in WebMD would make good sense. People browsing WebMD are already interested in health and therefore are more likely to buy your health related products. People who are browsing on Myspace are not motivated to think about their own health at the time they see your ad, so your chances of success with Myspace ads are greatly diminished.

So, if you are going to expend time and money to attract visitors to your website, shouldn’t you take care to primarily target people who are most likely to buy what you are selling?

Playing The Odds To Our Favor

Sure, a shotgun approach can sometimes hit its mark; we know that. But, if your cost for advertising or time expense is exactly the same, why aim for 1-2% when you know you can hit 5-8% doing something else?

We still mix-and-match our advertising approach. We aim most of our projectiles at the 5-8% conversion targets. We still aim a few projectiles at the 1-2% conversion prospects, because it allows us to reach people that we may not be able to reach otherwise. But, any method that we use that consistently turns 0% is taken off of our plate forever.

…

Trey Pennewell has supported the http://www.linksandtraffic.com/ search marketing and Results Based SEO Services, for a number of years. To learn about the new
WordPress plugin, which will ensure deep links for your blog
website, please visit: http://www.backlinksmagnet.com/blog/

Read more articles written by Trey Pennewell

It’s hard to pick up a newspaper today without reading another alarming headline about the impact global warming is having on our planet. This growing concern has caused a number of our clients to ask how they might be more environmentally-conscious in their home designs and renovations.

I have to be honest and tell you that it takes a lot of green to “go green,” so it often becomes a choice our clients make for ethical reasons rather than financial ones. Environmentally- friendly materials and products can bring long-term energy savings, but the initial costs of green materials may be nearly double that of traditional building supplies. Yet it is important to remember that going green can entail something as simple as lowering your thermostat setting to something as elaborate as installing a water filtration system to recycle household grey water.

Regardless of the scale of your renovation and despite the fact that the notion of going green is still relatively new, it is possible to go green in every room of your home thanks to a growing number of environmentally - conscious products, materials and installations. Demand from the commercial building sector has resulted in the growth of visionary companies, including Going to Market and Bettencourt Green Building Supplies to name just a few, which specialize in green and develop and promote several different environmentally-friendly materials and green products for the home.

At this point in time, however, many green materials have not yet made it to the consumer market and retailers do not necessarily see that green can be an incentive to their customers, so you have to look harder to find these materials - either by looking carefully at content labels or by specifically asking for them. They are out there, though, so since bathroom renovations are popular for many homeowners today, let’s take a look at the ways you can go green in the bathroom without sacrificing the luxuries consumers look for in this private getaway space:

* Floors: There are scores of rich floor surfaces available, ranging from those made of renewable bamboo and cork to carpets and tiles made from recycled materials such as rubber, glass, and plastic.

* Walls: A growing number of manufacturers are developing natural-based paints and clays as an alternative to latex and oil paints as well as mold-proof sheet rock. There are also many other environmentally-friendly wall surface materials to choose from, including translucent glass tiles, formaldehyde-free fiber panels made from agricultural waste products, and man-made stone products.

* Vanities and Counters: Thanks to commercial farming and harvesting techniques, elegant wood vanities don’t have to come at the expense of old growth forests, and soy-based glues are replacing formaldehyde adhesives in furniture plywood. Recycled lumber is available - at a price - for both cabinetry and floors. And a growing number of manufacturers are creating beautiful stone and tile counter surfaces made of recycled content - even paper.

* Plumbing Fixtures: In addition to low - flow and dual-flush toilets (which provide stronger water flow when needed), many toilets and tubs manufactured today feature porcelain that is made of up to 50 percent post-recycled content as well as super-slick surfaces that will save on frequent use of bleach cleaners. If you are doing a major plumbing make-over and remodeling several baths at the same time, look into water timers that can divert cold water to a recycling system until the warm water has reached the faucet (thus savings many gallons a day), or change your plumbing feeds altogether to a direct piping system such as PEX.

* Heating: Long-considered luxurious extras, things such as radiant floor heating and heated towel warmers are actually environmentally-friendly design choices. Unlike traditional room radiators which line (and tend to heat) the outside walls of a room, radiant floor heating warms the entire room and everything it touches, from floor tiles to tubs and shower floors. Many of our clients are surprised to learn that electric radiant heat pad floors are not exorbitantly expensive and ultimately offer more energy-efficient heating.

* Lighting: Although halogen lights are always a better choice than traditional incandescent lights, they do tend to produce a lot of heat, so look for Xenon, compact fluorescent and LED lights (which produce low voltage from tiny semiconductor chips). One of the common complaints about these lights is their color, but advances are constantly being made to make these light sources appear softer and warmer.

* Fabrics: Of course, when selecting towels and rugs, you can’t go wrong with the plush, natural content of 100 percent cotton fabrics, but bamboo spun into a soft fabric is another alternative. Also, there are a number of mold-proof hybrid fabrics that were originally designed for outdoor living that are moving inside as shower curtains and liners as well as upholstered seating for moisture-laden bathrooms.

* Proper Installation: Don’t forget about opportunities to go green with some of the mundane, but necessary, bathroom accessories including fans and vents. By installing separate and timed fan and lighting switches (including a separate fan in the shower stall), you can run only the fans that are needed and eliminate wasted electricity and heat. Also, don’t forget to insulate exterior walls properly and install double-paned windows that resist moisture and minimize heat loss.

* Choose a “Green” Contractor: Talk to your contractor about your desire to go green. Question him or her about their interest in green materials and construction techniques. In general, check your contractor’s commitment to recycling and eliminating wasted materials. Ask that old fixtures and cabinets be recycled, if possible, and that demolition debris be separated so recyclable materials can be reused.

* Repair, replace, sustain: Although most of what I have discussed to this point refers to new materials, I would be remiss if I didn’t address another important facet of going green: the value of repairing and/or refinishing existing materials to help reduce the amount of waste going into our landfills. Renovations that sustain the things we already have through facelifts and some good old-fashioned TLC are as valuable to the environment as those that involve the latest eco-friendly products. For example, floors and other hard surfaces, including cabinets and countertops, can be refinished if they are structurally sound. Energy-saving elements, such as compact fluorescent light bulbs, can be incorporated into existing fixtures rather than buying entirely new pieces. Regular maintenance on existing appliances and systems can ensure they operate at maximum efficiency and minimize energy use. When you make a commitment to use things until they are no longer operational, you can contribute as much to our environment as those who choose the latest green products.

For the truly environmentally-conscious homeowner, the opportunities to help the environment are growing every day and it is getting easier to be green.

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Kaja Gam offers interior design in New York. Recently featured on HGTV.com, Kaja is famous for designing rooms that are comfortable, functional and make a distinct statement about your personality. Sign up for Kaja’s free e-zine today at http://www.kajagamdesign.com

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That

Private label bottled water has been proven as an effective marketing promotion and brand builder but care must be taken in the quality of the design in order to avoid ruining the branding message and reducing the quality of the brand.

An important element of any private label bottled water branding effort lies in the basic design of the label. In order to create an effective label and labeling message, a professional design effort is required. Although there are many powerful software products like Adobe Photoshop on the market, understanding the basic elements of design is still required to produce a professional looking label. There is no substitute for professional design and an amateurish label design can seriously degrade a brand.

Design skill is as much an art as a science and dedicated training is required in order to produce a balanced, appealing, informative label for the private label bottled water end product. Graphic design is a major in many universities and colleges and combines course work in color, graphic arts, perspective and other skills before a degree is awarded. A well trained designer however will produce designs and labels of superior quality.

One skill that is not taught in the classroom but must be acquired through practical experience is customer relations and communication with the customer. It takes skill and experience to translate the customer concept into a graphic design and message and the ability to work with the customer controls the success of the project no matter how talented the designer. If the customer is not happy, failure is the result.

The next step in the process is the translation of the design onto a printed label, again within the design parameters of the customer. At this point preliminary customer approval is necessary. After preliminary approval the design must be applied to the label through either a flexo or digital printing process and proper quality printing equipment is required. Generally a small proof run is produced to show the customer for final approval of the label. Clear communication with the customer is required in order to gain customer approval.

Only after final customer approval can the final production run be produced. When production is completed the private label can be applied to the blank bottled water to produce the final private label promotional product.

There are many private label water companies on the market today and many of these attempt to cut corners through using amateur design techniques and low cost labels and printing. The result is almost always disappointing to the customer, production of a cheap looking label message and many times damage to the brand.

When choosing a supplier to produced a private label that carries a high quality effective message, choose a supplier with a reputation of producing a quality product. Your brand message will show the results and your return on your advertising investment will be rewarding.

…

Jon M. Stout is Chairman of the Board of Element H2O. For more information about private label bottled water and Read more articles written by Jon M. Stout

When you decided that the time was right to look for business opportunities that let you work from home online, internet marketing affiliate programs like those offered by Click Booth were likely a big draw - for good reason; they make it possible to make money fast. For those affiliate marketers who made the decision not to design their own website (at least initially) and for those who have their own professional sites alike, article marketing is an effective tool for getting the word out about the products and services that you are promoting.

Even if you only work from home online, you’ll find that article marketing can easily be fit into the activities that you perform while running your home based business. The reason that even those who believe that they “cannot write” turn to article marketing to get the word out is simple: how else can you make money online free? That’s right. When you write and submit articles to various article directories on the web, you’ll be able to reach a wider audience without having to pay for the advertising.

Of course, reaching people about the internet affiliate program products and services that you’re promoting will take a bit of finesse. While good articles always include a link to the page that you are promoting - either within the article itself or in the resource box that lets you tell readers a bit more about who you are and what you do - the goal of the article is to inform. In other words, an article isn’t a sales pitch.

Instead, the articles that you use to market and internet affiliate programs should benefit the readers. Use your articles to focus on relevant information; let the reader see that what you’re telling him or her is really to his or her advantage. If, for example, you’ve chosen to promote a Click Booth service such as satellite television, don’t focus on selling that service. Instead write an article that speaks to the frustrations that they have with their cable company overcharging for inferior service; explain what satellite TV really is and provide some history. This sort of quality content that is appealing not only to the readers but also to publishers who are looking for content to use on their blogs or websites is far more valuable than a short link ad.

You did read that correctly - publishers of ezines and other email newsletters as well as a wide variety of bloggers and webmasters scan article directories to find content that they can include on their site: this is a remarkably good thing. Each time a publisher reprints your article, all of the links that you included must be in tact and active; that means that every time your articles are used, another link to the internet affiliate program product or service you were marketing will show up online.

Article marketing helps to establish your credibility by showing that you know what you’re writing about. Article marketing draws attention when your articles provide the information that people are already looking for. Others will put your links up for you by republishing that content. And, again, it’s free advertising for your home based business.

…

Clinton Douglas IV, writes E-Business articles for people who want to achieve more online success. Learn Today, “How to Start an Online Business in less than 30 Days starting from Scratch”! Free Special Report - Limited Time! Plus, weekly newsletter from Online Empire Secrets (A $400 Value). Click ==> Small Business Ideas To get Your FREE REPORT!

http://online-empire.vasrue.com/How-To-Start-Your-Online-Business_F.html

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We’re currently living in an age where it seems as if the external is the only thing that matters to the world. Everyone wants to feel that there’s more to them than just being a piece of “eye candy.”

It’s true that there are men out there who are only interested in women for how they look on their arm, but if we’re honest and take a good look around, we find that those men are few and far between. What you need to figure out is why you’re worried if the man you’re with is only with you because of how you look. In other words, are you assuming that he’s with you only because of how you look?

Perhaps it’s a case of having little self-confidence. If it’ll make you feel better, it’s probably not even your fault. For many attractive women, it comes from a long line of always being referred to by the way they look. People have always complimented them on how pretty they are. And after a while, it becomes second nature to think of themselves that way. They’re don’t think about their worth as a person but only how good they look.

As we get older, however, we’re less concerned with how we look than with what’s inside of us

Unlike other products, a medical device presents special challenges to a white paper writer. For example, writing methods that effectively sell DVD players are ineffective for selling MRI machines to hospitals. Why? Because a medical device directly interacts with human bodies, and therefore gives rise to risks of injury. Actually, the main concern of medical device manufacturers is to mitigate the risks to patients or users while delivering the maximum benefits. All medical device manufacturers are required to comply with the medical device regulations that ensure safety and efficacy of devices. Hence, when writing for the medical technology industry, a writer enters a highly regulated world where even marketing collateral tends to be written in an academic style.

This means that to write a successful medical device white paper, a writer needs not only good writing and marketing skills, but also a thorough knowledge of engineering and the regulatory environment. A writer should be able to grasp the complex science and technology behind the device, and translate them into persuasive writing without any hype. The paper must appeal to the logical mind of scientific readers, not so much to their emotions, which is the opposite of methods used to sell consumer goods.

A lead generation white paper for a medical device is a hybrid between an educational essay and a sales brochure. It educates and gracefully sells at the same time. The writing process starts with determining the topic, the released device, or the scientific principles and technology used (or to be used) in the device.

The next step is to identify the ideal target reader. This is crucial. The writer must clearly see who the paper’s audience will be. A medical device paper is usually written for a diverse audience of professors, doctors, medical physicists, scientists, technologists, hospital administrators and regulatory agencies. Knowing the audience sets the paper’s level of sophistication, scope, tone, structure and vocabulary.

In the case of a medical device, a white paper usually talks to two predominant groups. One includes readers with a scientific mind who are mainly interested in the device’s features and an in-depth analysis of its technology, often at the atomic level. The other group comprises administrators looking to grasp a device’s business benefits and see how it can save labor, cut costs and improve regulatory compliance. Hence, a writer is challenged to strike a balance between discussing a device’s benefits and features. In fact, it is not unusual for a writer to be pulled in opposite directions by a device’s manufacturer; engineers and scientists want a technical paper, but marketing managers want a sales document. It’s vital to get the balance right.

So how is a writer to successfully resolve this dilemma? A good starting point is to prepare an outline of the paper and discuss and approve it with the manufacturer. The writer, however, should advise these people that a lead-generating paper needs to focus on a device’s benefits, rather than just its features, or how great the company is. The outline will establish the paper’s direction, focus and final destination before the writing even begins.

Once the outline is approved, the next step is to interview subject matter experts who have an intimate knowledge of the topic. They are the design engineers, scientists and other professionals working for the medical device manufacturer. Nobody knows the device better than the people who designed and made it. For this reason, a writer must take these interviews seriously and allocate sufficient time for them. He has to polish his interviewing skills and prepare for the interviews well in advance.

Besides interviewing, a writer should also access the relevant product documentation. The law requires all medical device manufacturers to maintain a Design History File, which contains product development documents, such as product specifications, drawings, validations, operator manuals, and so on. Many questions also can be answered by simply searching the Internet. And, of course, a library or bookstore also provides valuable information.

What is a white paper’s structure? It naturally begins with the title which is a crucial part of the paper. This can make or break the paper, and must be relevant, compelling, and engaging, enticing the readers to read further. It should be simple and focus on the benefits that the device delivers.

Then comes the first page, which sets the stage. The remainder of the paper evolves from the first paragraphs. The paper can be only as good as its first page. Readers will continue reading only if the first page convinces them to do so.

The rest of the paper is divided into manageable sections. As with any writing, the process is repetitive: writing drafts, refining, editing, and re-editing many times until the paper is nearly perfect. The writer must stay focused on appealing to the target audience, and strike the right balance between the benefits and features.

Sentences and paragraphs have to be concise, with wide margins around the page. Bullets and headlines should be used generously, instead of long passages of uninterrupted text. The paper needs to be laid out so that a reader can quickly grasp the gist of it just by scanning the sub-headlines.

The end of a white paper is a call to action, which asks readers to contact the manufacturer for a meeting, demonstration, evaluation, analysis, discussion or some sort of next step(s).

A lead generation white paper is typically 5 to 12 pages long, and mostly comprises text with minimal graphics.

Also published here.

…

Alec Alpert is a business-to-business copywriter specializing in lead-generating white papers, case studies and articles for medical technology. Find out how his copy can bring you more customers at http://www.alecalpert.com

Read more articles written by Alec Alpert

Michael Fortin is considered to be one of the most sought-after copywriters on the Internet. For nearly 15 years as a response copywriter, he has a strange gift for writing comprehensively, vividly and persuasively.

His records tell us that he was involved in selling multi-million worth of products for a wide selection of customers extending to various types of industries.

Michael”(tm)s success can be accounted to his passion and experience. His burning yearning for his art helped him nurture his renowned writing skills that made him earn millions.

His life story relates that Michael did not have an easy start. Michael was born with a minor physical disability. For that, he experienced emotional mistreatments from his father, who was an alcoholic. Michael then lived his childhood isolated from his father and the society. He fought an overpowering fear of denial.

Michael learned to fight. He realized to fight his fears. And so, he dived into world of sales so he can face his fears straight out. But then, his determination was not enough to bring him to success. Being short of the skills needed in effective sales, he was bankrupted at only 21.

But his natural skill in persuasive writing led him to the discovery of the essential keys in productive copywriting. He used gripping writing techniques in his advertisements and sales letters. In this way, he has drawn eligible clients, and not he being attracted by them.

Finally, his efforts paid back and he was recognized as the leading sales maker on behalf of a Fortune 500 company. He earned the trust of numerous clients and employers worldwide, from the US, Europe, China, and Canada.

Aside from being an adored copywriter, he is also a remarkable teacher. He formerly worked as a college teacher in Sales Management, Internet Marketing, Marketing Management, and other management subjects.

Known for being an active marketing consultant, he is often hired to speak at seminars and conferences, where his charges range from $1,500 to $5,000.

Michael is also a great author. He has written quite a lot of books, such as Power Positioning and The 10 Commandments of Power Positioning.

In his desire to share his skills to individuals who want to learn how to produce effective sales copies, he launched a private website, TheCopyDoctor.com, where he demonstrates how he does his writing “live”

By now you know that there’s only one way to instantly re-launch yourself as an expert and that’s to create an information product. But when you look at the wide range of formats to choose from it can be overwhelming!

There are printed books, ebooks, CD’s, workbooks, video/DVD, online only, software, games, special reports, card decks…you name it!

I’ve studied them all (and produced products myself in several different formats) and have a clear winner when it comes to:

a) Sellability - How easy is this format to get into the hands of buyers?

b) Value - How can you maximize what you charge for your information product?

c) Credibility - What format is seen as most credible in the eyes of your market?

And the winner is (drum roll please!)…CDs and workbook combination.

Packaging your audio into a shippable combination of CDs and a printed workbook is by far the easiest product to sell, has a very high perceived value, and enjoys nearly all the same credibility as a printed book.

The difference between a printed book and an information product in terms of revenue (that’s cash in the door to you) are night and day.

For example: Most books sell for between $14 and $29 dollars. Between printing and shipping costs there isn’t much opportunity to make much money unless you sell tons of books.

But package that same information in an CD and workbook home study course and you now have a product you can sell for between $47 - $397 (or even much more). The duplication costs are minor compared to what you’re getting for your product, giving you a nice, healthy cash flow with each and every sale.

Plus, you can always offer instant access to your recordings and workbook-via audio mp3 and downloadable pdf files-to your new customer while they’re waiting for the real product to arrive in the mail.

And, with a tangible product, you have something to sell at events, trade shows, and when speaking.

Sure, there is a bit more involved with creating a shippable product versus a strictly online version, but once you get your production setup (ordering your packaging, getting your cover designed, printing, and putting everything together) you’re in business. Better yet, hire a fulfillment company (like I do) to take care of all this for you!

Nearly all of the work is in creating the content (I’ll share tips on how to make that easier in upcoming articles) so why not go the extra quarter of a mile, make your product tangible, and complete your project with something you can sell for far more than an eproduct will ever bring in?!

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Kendall SummerHawk, the “Horse Whisperer for Business” delivers smart, savvy ways entrepreneurs can turn their hectic business into a smooth-running, fun, 6-figure money-making dream. To learn more about her book, Brilliance Unbridled, and sign up for more FREE tips like these, visit her site at: http://www.kendallsummerhawk.com

Read more articles written by Kendall SummerHawk

MOLLY, THE ASSISTANT, Molly treasurer at XYZ Corp. in Miami,
opened an e-mail from a former colleague who no longer worked
for the organization. The e-mail read: “Hi Molly, there should
be a refund of $716 on my old corporate Visa card from the IP
Conference. I paid for, but did not attend, the conference and
did not turn in the charge to XYZ for reimbursement. Can you have
Visa issue a refund check to me? Thanks very much for your help.”

The e-mail was from Jerry, a former XYZ executive who had been
Molly’s boss at one time. The message seemed innocuous enough.
Jerry had legitimately charged a business conference to his
corporate credit card, but he had canceled his registration
because he left the company. Therefore, he was due a refund.

It would have been very easy for Molly to trust her former boss
and get him the refund. Instead, because something didn’t seem
quite right, she chose to check on whether XYZ had already
reimbursed Jerry for the conference.

To make this determination, Molly accessed Jerry’s corporate
credit card records online and retrieved his expense reports from
the accounts payable file room. The expense reports confirmed
that Jerry had not expensed the conference fee, but when Molly
looked at his credit card statement, she saw a couple of odd
items.

First, the most recent statement indicated that the former XYZ
executive had made four payments to his credit card in one month.
Second, the statement was two pages long, and Molly knew that
Jerry rarely traveled for business. She scanned the charges and
noted that most of them were from local vendors. In addition,
none of the items looked like business charges. The charges
included dinners at local restaurants, department and grocery
store charges, and airline tickets for Jerry and his wife that
Molly knew were for their recent vacation.

Out of curiosity, Molly queried the company’s checks online to
see if any of the payments made on Jerry’s Visa account matched
the dollar amounts of checks written by XYZ. Sure enough, she
found that all four payments made to Jerry’s credit card that
month equaled amounts on checks that the company had written to
Visa. Molly increased the scope of her search and observed that
every payment posted to Jerry’s corporate credit card over the
previous 12 months was from a check written by the company. She
also noticed that of the $88,000 in charges on Jerry’s card over
that time frame, none was for business expenses.

Molly printed copies of all of the checks and noted that,
although Visa was listed as the payee on all of them, Jerry’s
corporate credit card account number was handwritten on each
check. Molly approached the director of internal auditing as
well as Jerry’s former manager and requested an investigation
into the matter.

While working for XYZ, Jerry was in charge of making sure that
the organization paid delinquent balances on the corporate credit
cards of people who had left the company. XYZ had an arrangement
with the credit card company that it would guarantee payment for
certain employees if those employees did not pay the balances
on their accounts. Once a month, Jerry would provide accounts
payable with a list of delinquent accounts on guaranteed cards,
and accounts payable would cut the check to the credit card
company.

However, on the bottom of every check request in Jerry’s last
year of employment, he had written, “Please deliver the check to
me.” Typically, accounts payable would mail the check directly to
the credit card company, but because accounts payable knew that
Jerry maintained a relationship with the credit card company,
they adhered to his request and delivered the checks to him. When
Jerry received a check, he would write his own account number on
the check, and the bank would apply the payment to Jerry’s credit
card.

Jerry did not need to make sure that the delinquent credit card
owners listed on his spreadsheet paid their balances, because he
had fabricated the delinquency list that he provided to accounts
payable. In many cases, the employees with the so-called
delinquent balances had left the organization long before, and
they had paid their balances in full before departing.

So, where were the control breakdowns? First, Jerry had sole
authority over the credit card function. He managed the corporate
credit cards, reviewed the delinquent accounts, had access to the
employee statements, and dealt with the bank’s account managers.
No one reviewed his work. As soon as accounts payable walked the
checks down to his office, he had all he needed to perpetrate the
fraud.

The second breakdown was that the accounts payable clerk walked
the checks over to Jerry. Although not necessarily right, it is
understandable that accounts payable would not have the time to
audit Jerry’s delinquency list. After all, accounts payable was
processing more than 1,000 checks per week with a staff of six.
However, it was unacceptable for the clerk to deliver the check
directly to Jerry. The check should have gone from accounts
payable to the vendor. The vendor invoice–or delinquency data in
this case–should have contained all of the pertinent information
to allow accounts payable to appropriately route the check.

XYZ decided to report Jerry to law enforcement. Although $88,000
is not a significant amount of money for a $1 billion company,
and the legal fees and other costs might be high, the company
wanted to demonstrate to its employees that it would not tolerate
fraud and would hold perpetrators accountable. Decisive and
timely action such as this is critical to maintaining a sound
control environment.

Not everyone is as diligent as Molly. The lesson she applied is
an important one to teach operations personnel: Take the time to
check anything that doesn’t seem right. Because she spent a few
minutes performing due diligence, Molly uncovered an $88,000
fraud.

Several symptoms may have flagged the fraud. If internal auditing
had been testing the employee credit card charges, simply
identifying the top 25 corporate card users and reviewing their
charges would have flagged Jerry. Travel reimbursements of
$88,000 in one year covers a lot of travel. Testing the accounts
of the people with the most posted credits would have similarly
flagged Jerry. Also, Jerry averaged three payments a month on his
credit card over the course of a year, an unusual pattern that,
if identified, should have been investigated.

Testing the top 25 corporate credit card users and searching for
unusual patterns are the staples of any audit program that
contains tests designed to uncover fraud.

LESSONS LEARNED

Let’s say you see a woman that you’re interested in meeting. Naturally, you’re going to want to know how to best introduce yourself. In order to do that, you need to understand that women are unpredictable individuals. What one girl might find to be charming and adorable, another might find immature and offensive.

Before you make your move, notice what she looks like and how she’s reacting to whatever’s going on around her. If she’s dressed casually and seems to be a little flirtatious, there’s a good chance that playing it foolish might work with her

Dear Friend,

Do you know why most people fail at marketing anything on the Internet? Even though the products or services they are trying to sell are awesome?

Regardless of your present level of success, pause for a minute and try to find out the #1 reason for failure so you can avoid making the same marketing mistake most people make over and over. Found it? It is fairly simple: once they have caught someone’s attention, most people will start touting about how great their products or services are: “nothing that you will have ever seen…”

Generally, when you own a “brick-and-mortar” business, you get to meet face-to-face with your potential customers at least once. That’s how people get acquainted and how business relationships are established and eventually develop into long-lasting and mutually beneficial rapports.

It’s a fact, people are usually more enticed to do business with someone they feel they can trust. Believe me my friend, establishing trust on the Internet is the most difficult and challenging thing to accomplish. Why is that?

Here is the main reason: people don’t get to see each other, to feel each other, to see each other’s expressions and body language which helps to gauge the person that is in front of us and immediately determine whether we want to do business with that person or not. Don’t we say we have 15 seconds to make a good or bad impression?

If you want to be successful online, your #1 goal is to establish a trustworthy relationship with your potential customers. Instead of touting about your products or services right off the bat, you would be better off trying to know people’s needs first!

That’s were proactive networking comes into play. Proactive networking has become a necessity in today’s business world. Pro-active networking is the systematic process of establishing relationships with new people and build mutually beneficial relationships.

Once a relationship is established, it will be easier to offer your products or services to people that are in your network and trust you!

Happy pro-active networking!

All the best,

Christophe

…

Christophe Poizat is a professional dreamer, a social entrepreneur, guerrilla marketer, mentor, business coach, speaker, author with 20 years of international consulting experience who has lived on four continents; for more details, visit: http://christophepoizat.com

Christophe is also the founder and administrator of the International Network of Social Entrepreneurs, a global Web 2.0 community for Social Entrepreneurs to connect, share, collaborate and promote social entrepreneurship worldwide. For more details, visit: http://inse.collectivex.com

Read more articles written by Christophe Poizat

It is part of my job to keep an eye on orders for the various restaurants who subscribe to my online ordering service. Every so often I notice an interesting type of order.

These orders usually have four things in common:

1. They are in excess of $100.

2. They contain a large number of pizzas or subs.

3. The order is usually placed for a lunchtime pickup or delivery.

4. The customer’s address is an office or company building.

It is a good bet that these orders were for some office function. When I used to work for a large corporation, hardly a month passed when we didn’t have at least one major lunchtime event that included pizza or subs. And these were just the ones in my immediate group or department. Given the size of the company I’d be surprised if a day went by without at least one big pizza order being placed from our office. Big businesses are big pizza customers.

Typically an administrative assistant or secretary places these orders for office parties, department meetings, lunch meetings or whatever the business is doing where they feel they need to provide food.

If you want secretaries or administrative assistants to place orders with your restaurant there are two things you need to do:

First, get one of your flyers in front of her. She can’t order from you if she doesn’t know you exist. She might not live in your city or town. She might commute from a neighboring community and never pass by your restaurant. Your office flyer is your way of introducing yourself to someone who is very likely going to need to order a dozen pizzas and two dozen subs in the near future.

Second, make it easy for her to place orders. On the flyer, point out that by ordering online she can save the order as a Favorite for easy, one click re-ordering next time. She will love this because department secretaries are incredibly busy people, who do not want to spend fifteen minutes on the phone, ordering pizza and subs every time they have to plan a department lunch meeting.

Give her one click re-ordering capability and she’ll be back again and again.

And while you are at it, don’t overlook the individual office workers. Small groups often pool to buy a pizza or two as a welcome alternative to the company cafeteria or if they are just too busy to go out. In a large office environment, this happens a lot more often than the department meetings.

To get your restaurant known in the workplace, here are a few strategies you can use.

Stake out a large office building just before business hours and catch the people arriving at work with your flyer. This is by far the fastest way to get your flyers into the building. This is the most labor intensive, but probably the fastest approach.

An easier but slower strategy is to ask the entrance guard to let you leave a stack of flyers on their desk. This works best if you offer them a free pizza or sub for the favor. While this is a lot less work, it also takes longer for your flyer to make its way into the hands of potential workplace customers.

A more directed approach is to call the company and ask the operator for the numbers of the various administrative assistants. Once you have their names and office numbers you can send them flyers by mail. It might be helpful to specifically mention a department meeting special with an assortment of standard pizzas. This strategy is less work than the entrance stakeout and faster than a static stack of flyers on the reception desk, but requires some skillful phone work to identify the people you want to reach.

However you choose to reach them, business offices can be a major part of your takeout and delivery business. Like every other customer base your restaurant serves, it requires a marketing effort to make potential customers aware of your restaurant and get them to try your food.

But once they have tried it and like it, and discover how easy it is to place an order online with you, they are yours!

Editor’s Note: Also published here.

…

Rudy Vener is the president and founder of Pizza Galaxy. Pizza galaxy’s services delight restaurant owners and their customers alike by making it fun and easy for a restaurant’s customers to order online and helping restaurant owners build close relationships with customers. Visit rudy’s website at http://www.pizzagalaxy.com to learn how he can help your restaurant and to read other articles, such as one on how to fuel your delivery vehicle for free.

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In a rare and almost unprecedented move - Santa Claus, Mrs. Claus, Rudolph and Arthur Honeytree (the Head Elf), after a brief, spontaneous, top secret meeting at an undisclosed location somewhere at the North Pole - released this statement.

“This kind of behavior is inexcusable and as such, I have no choice but to remove these kids from my Nice List.” Santa said. “These kids think that I’m only watching them in the weeks leading up to Christmas. But the truth is I’m watching them all year long. If you screw up in February, April or even June, I’ll know about it. You’ll be kicked out of all Santa’s special programs. You’ll be removed from my Letter from Santa program, you will not receive your Nice List Certificate… even Rudolph will dis you. Clearly we have to make an example out of these young teens. My letter from Santa program is my most popular and these kids are going to miss out.”

“The Polk County courts may have decided to treat these teens as adults, but they’re still kids as far as the North Pole is concerned.” Santa added.

As it turns out five of the eight kids barely made the Nice List last year. And one of the eight was already off the Nice List before this latest fiasco. Santa would not discuss this particular case however sighting privacy and confidentiality as well as liability reasons.

It is quite rare that Santa would issue the dreaded lifetime ban from Santa’s Nice List. There have only been a couple dozen cases where such harsh punishment has been doled out by the big guy.

The most famous being Timmy Warchickles who posted Santa’s personal cell phone number on his Myspace profile. Santa’s North Pole communications center came to a screeching halt as Santa’s phone was bombarded with more than 12 thousand people a second.

“That kid is a menace to society.” Santa said at the time.

“The Buck Stops Here!” Santa remarked. “I’m the decider! If I decide you’re not going to be on the Nice List, then you’re not going to be on the Nice List. That’s all there is to it! And, I shouldn’t even have to say this, but if you’re not on the nice list, you’re certainly not getting a Letter From Santa.”

An Elf who wished to remain anonymous added, “Essentially Santa is the highest governing power at the North Pole. The North Pole is not a democratic union. Santa rules with a white glove. What he says’ goes. The United States government has no jurisdiction at the North Pole. I’m not complaining. We wouldn’t have it any other way. We love Santa as much as all the kids do.”

Rudolph could not be reached for comment, but Mrs. Claus defended the decision saying, “We will not and can not tolerate this kind of behavior.”

“It’s really sad.” Mrs. Claus remarked. “These kids don’t realize what the long term consequences of their actions are. Once you’re off Santa’s Nice List, there are a lot of things you miss out on. These kids will not receive their personalized “Letter From Santa”; they will not get their official “Nice List Certificate”; no autographed picture of Santa, no picture of Rudolph… it’s just a shame. We know that the highlight of Christmas for most kids is receiving a letter from Santa and the nice list certificate right before Christmas. They sure do sleep better knowing their on the nice list.”

Arthur Honeytree, always the shameless self-promoter added, “These kids are really going to be missing out this year because Santa has designed a whole new letterhead for his personalized letters from Santa. Even the Nice List certificate has been completely redesigned for 2008. These kids are going to be sorry. All the other kids are going to be walking around with their letter from Santa and showing off their nice list certificate and these kids will have nothing, notta, zip. Too BAD!”

Don’t forget kids, just because it’s May or June, Santa’s still watching. And if you hope to be on Santa’s Nice List this year and you want Santa to send you a personalized letter, you’d better be good for goodness sake.

Be sure to catch the full length feature story, along with in depth interviews, coming up in “Santa’s Workshop Quarterly.”

Other features in the nest issue of “Santa’s Workshop Quarterly.”

…

Alex Russell has performed extensive research in the arena of letters from Santa, and devotes much of his time to reviewing websites that offer services for Santa letters. Alex has earned the respect of many Christmas authority websites such as http://www.PackageFromSanta.com, for his highly regarded articles on such topics as “How to Write a Letter from Santa” and “The Truth about Santa Letters.”

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Hi, this is Casey Moher.

Your internet marketing business pivots around several key ingredients that make it hum. You can find many products out there that can be great cash-generators for you.

Creating a unique product can be great, but it holds several pitfalls for the people using this approach. They have to go through a great deal of time and cash as they plan the product and its marketing.

There is a completely different approach to this that I teach in my free on-line 5-day course. This is an approach that makes all the difference in what you do.

What if you could find a product already in existence that had a track-record of sales success? What a great business approach you now have available with all the product sales statistics at your fingertips as you move through the selection process. You can pick and choose from many products which ones you really want to work with.

In the online environment, there is a huge demand for products that can give people valuable information on how to do something to make their lives better. A huge on-line warehouse is available to you for product selection.

These products are managed by a company that does the lion’s share of selling in this massive market. The producers of these information-based products actively seek to have people sell them.

Commissions up to 75% are available to you.

Again, all the ‘heavy lifting’ has been done for you. There is a huge number of products for you to pick from in your selection process. Here are the product criteria I find to be important.

Your first emphasis should be on a product that solves a problem. Additionally, focus on a product that you would like to have yourself. A product with a great sales letter will serve you better also. Look for testimonials from satisfied customers as well as popularity rankings of the product you are considering.

You should take note of the commissions available and go for 50% minimum.

Before you try to sell your product on your website, it’s a great practice to buy it and use it yourself. If you have first-hand experience with how your product helped you, your customers will have more trust in what you say.

A company that does all this can be found in one stop at: http://www.clickbank.com

Visit this website to find products together with their sales messages and descriptions. Product popularity rankings are a very valuable tool you will find at this site.

It’s a very simple matter for you to establish yourself as an affiliate. As quickly as you establish your affiliate account you are in position to benefit from each customer that visits and acts on your site. You simply register to get a user name (also known as a nickname) established with clickbank.

With that nickname you are established to get credit for all the sales of any and all products that you choose for your project. You can choose any of the list of more than 10,000 products to put on your website.

Commissions up to 75% really accelerate your earning power. Clickbank is noted for its very sellable products which means they amplify your marketing efforts.

Clickbank manages all the details and makes sure you get paid what you are owed.

You can get your own web site established for a very reasonable price these days. Get your site set up and people can go there right away and learn about your product.

…

Casey Moher - Caseymoher@comcast.net (801) 941-3334

Mr. Moher is a Registered Pharmacist and Life-Long Marketing
and Sales Professional. You Can Get His Free Five-Day
Mini-Course on Building Targeted Website Traffic by visiting:
http://www.newtrafficmaster.com

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Marketing has always been an essential element of business - both back in the day when brick and mortar stores and mail order businesses were the only options and now that the internet has become so central to so many people’s lives. Business advertising - along with many businesses as well - have gone online and become even more competitive as business owners learn more about the value of text links, banner ads and other ways of getting their message out to the world.

Online advertising, however, is not limited to text links and banner ads: there are other tools that many businesses have put to work as well. For example, a number of businesses have discovered that blogging allows them to create additional text links back to their websites and to connect a more personal voice and tone with their message, reminding readers that behind every business there are people who recognize the customers’ needs and have developed products and services to meet those needs.

Similarly, there’s a great deal of business advertising that’s found its way into forums online. From gaming communities to fitness sites, from cooking gear and kitchen supplies to crafters, a number of companies have found that there are ways of communicating with their prospective customers that are more subtle, that meet them on their level. Because that ability to communicate has done so much for business, many professionals are looking for additional ways of branding and communicating with their prospects online.

One such tool that many business owners are finding to be extremely effective includes finding sponsorship opportunities. In some cases, adding banner ads and text links to online game communities has become an ideal means of business advertising. After all, members of these communities often spend a great deal of time on the sites, doing more than just playing online games, but also contributing to site blogs, maintaining a website and participating in tournaments where there are great prizes to won.

Sponsoring those prizes - along with becoming more engaged within the communities - is a means of branding that many businesses are finding to be extremely effective. Those businesses wanting to increase their online presence with more than banner ads and text links ads find that becoming a member of these communities offers a number of benefits:

1. The chance to establish relationships with members of the community.

2. The opportunity to develop a web page within the online games community that can be used to market their websites.

3. The chance to ad banner ads and text link ads within the community to further drive traffic to their websites.

4. By donating prizes for the online games, businesses are able to get the word out about the products that they offer, and when their items are offered in site auctions, they will find that those who are playing the game to win are willing to compete to get those items.

In other words, what many find is that by focusing on business advertising and branding in communities for online games, they are able to interact with their prospective customers, establish relationships and to provide information about the products that they offer and answer any questions that others have.

Branding is all about creating relationships with your current and prospective clients; that’s why sponsoring online games contributes to establishing brand identity. Online advertising - focusing on banner ads and text link ads - when done in conjunction with sponsoring online games, helps to further motivate prospective customers to look into your company and the products and services that you have to offer. By making the information that these customers are looking for available to them, you’ll find that you are able to forge a relationship.

In business, the relationships that you have with your customers are the key to growth. Why not look into online advertising tools that are designed so that the relationship builds naturally? When you’re able to use business advertising and promotions in order to meet prospective customers where they are, you’ll find that it’s easy to get them interested in your business, your products and in learning more about what you stand for. That combination helps to ensure your success.

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T.C. Gaity writes about the Internet. Trader Auction Games (TAG City) is a portal for online gamers. Whereas most online game sites lets you stroke your ego with your winning streak, Trader Auction Games gives you the opportunity to win real prizes, when you play well. Advertising opportunities are also available for businesses who are interested in bartering products for advertising. Learn more: http://www.traderauctiongames.com

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A graphic designer’s goal is to provide you with the logos, artwork, and page designs that best fit your business, personality, industry, and target market and that convey your offerings and differentiators. The experience of reaching that goal can be extremely smooth and pleasant if you know what to expect up front, and if you understand that you do need to work with your designer rather than just letting them loose to create.

To assure that the experience you and your designer have is productive and successful, our previous article, “Finding a Graphic Designer,” offers insight, definitions, and advice on beginning the relationship. Once you’ve selected the designer with whom you feel most comfortable, follow these steps:

1. Communicate, communicate, communicate! Clarity and understanding are key to a good working relationship. Keep in mind that most designers tend to be highly visual people, so communication in words alone might be slightly difficult. Have patience, and use all of the other tips in this section, to facilitate your communication.

2. Be clear about what you want. If you’re using vague words and adjectives, or jargon, such as saying that you want your logo to look “sweet”, keep talking and explaining what you mean until you both agree upon what “sweet” actually comprises. People come from many different backgrounds and experiences, so clarity is vital.

3. Ask what information your designer needs. Without good background information, your designer really can’t create the best designs for you. You know your business best, so the input that you bring to the project is really the most expert information that’s available. The more informative your answers are, the better the designs will be.

4. Don’t be afraid to sketch if you have an idea that you find difficult to describe. Even if you can only draw stick figures, sketching is often a more direct means of communication with visual designers. Designers understand that this is not what you do, and they won’t make fun of you! In fact, the added level of communication is invaluable, bridging the gap between the designer’s visual mind and your conceptual explanation.

5. Ask questions when you’re confused, as opposed to becoming frustrated. Designers might use terms you’re not familiar with. And many creative types “jump ahead” unintentionally in their logic. Your designer doesn’t want to leave you behind and is happy to elaborate.

6. Remember to give constructive feedback. Specify what you like and don’t like about the concepts presented. The more explicit the information you provide, the better the outcome of the project. Keep in mind that the most helpful part about constructive feedback is the element of encouragement.

7. If you plan to bring your friends and clients into the design process to provide input, it’s best to let your designer know, and as early as possible. Being ambushed by the client’s friends or family at the last stage in the process or after committing to a direction is often disheartening to the designer. As artists, designers tend to fall in love (a bit!) with their designs.

8. Keep in mind who your target audience really is if you do bring friends and family into the design process. If you’re selling to businessmen from Japan but your Caucasian U.S. housewife friend doesn’t like your logo, the problem might not be with the logo. A design often won’t be as effective outside of your target market-and that might just be where your friend’s feedback is coming from.

9. If you start working with your designer, and their process isn’t working, then let them know! Many designers would be happy to modify their process to fit your needs. Just be as specific as possible about what’s not working; for example, do you need to see color earlier in the process, or see more of the full design? Let your designer know that you need additional help, or, if you know what’s wrong, how they can help!

You need to have a good working relationship with your designer, to understand and be understood well, and to constantly communicate to make sure the graphics that are produced are perfect for your business. Beginning the process with someone with whom you are comfortable, cooperating throughout the process, and communicating effectively will produce the right “professional face” to your customers.

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Erin Ferree is the owner and lead designer of elf design, a Brand Identity Design and Management Company that specializes in helping small businesses and entrepreneurs create a powerful and unique brand identity that differentiates them from their competition and helps them to connect with their target market. Our work is bold, clean and effective, and our processes are proven to get your materials completed quickly, so you can use them to get new clients right away. We create designs that are effective and contribute to your business’s bottom line by getting you noticed, reflecting your values, increasing your credibility, and ultimately, helping you to make more sales. Learn more about brand design at www.elf-design.com

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If a woman is not physically or sexually abused by her husband, people generally conclude there is no abuse. But women should give this question more serious thought. Abuse need not be verbal, physical or sexual. These types of abuse are sufficient grounds to head straight for the divorce courts because a physically or sexually abusive partner needs professional help.

Abuse is a dangerous element in a marriage. Sometimes, divorce is the only solution because a woman who is consistently abused will have nothing left of her soul. Her self-esteem disappears and she will begin to think that she deserves neither respect nor love from her husband. She will unconsciously heap the blame on herself for the unhappy marriage. Men who consciously or unconsciously verbally abuse their wives are not aware of the consequences of their deeds. Sometimes verbal abuse can be worse than physical abuse.

There is, however, another kind of abuse that can occur in a marriage and is often ignored because no physical harm is involved. We’re referring to economic abuse or more commonly known as economic domination. This type of abuse is rarely discussed in therapy circles because it takes a back seat to physical, verbal or sexual abuse.

Suffice it to say that economic domination can be just as emotionally devastating to a woman. Imagine a once vibrant woman who, when single, had a good corporate job, earned an excellent salary and had the respect of her colleagues at work. One day she meets the man of her dreams and falls in love. They get married, but little does she know that he wants her to stay home and be a full time homemaker. She becomes pregnant even if she isn’t ready to be a mother. Deep down, she feels that she is happiest when pursuing her career.

How is a woman like her who thrives in an intellectual milieu going to fare when faced with economic domination by her husband?

Economic abuse in a marriage is evident in these circumstances:

Many people who are on the dating scene turn to the online dating websites to find new friends and lovers. But that road is a hard one that can occasionally bring those with great patience - great rewards.

Beyond everything else, patience is required of anyone who is pursuing friends, lovers or mates in the real world and online. When I do the dating thing in the real world, I find several opportunities to talk to the person in whom I am interested. Then after a few meets, I pop the big question, asking for a date. Then date night comes along and it may work, and it may not, but more frequently all seems well early, only to fall apart at a later date.

Folks, online dating comes with all the same pitfalls as offline dating. You advertise yourself, you find people whom you may be interested, you try to talk it up, and then the first date comes. That first date may work and it may not.

In the end, online dating is much the same as offline dating, with a few more benefits and pitfalls thrown in to frustrate the person seeking a date.

The Differences Between The Online And Offline Experience

The biggest difference between the online and offline dating experience is a benefit that comes from it.

Benefits Of Online Dating

With online dating, you get to be introduced to people with whom you may have never had the opportunity to meet in person - usually due to different lifestyles and different locations.

With online dating, you also have the ability to sort through the profiles of hundreds or thousands of people to narrow your list to your best matches more quickly.

Shortcomings Of Online Dating

When you meet someone you like in person and you say hi, he or she will usually say hi back. For every 20 emails sent out, as few as 2 or 3 may respond back.

Some online daters have defined this as the difference between “talkers” and “doers”. Many point out that most people online only want to talk about meeting, but when it comes down to it, they will be unwilling to take the “action” step.

This actually happens in one of two ways. First is when you send out an email and no one ever responds. The second is when you actually set up a date, only to be stood up.

Let’s be honest about why this happens.

So many people have heard horror stories about people who have met strangers online, only to have the meet go horribly bad. Yes, the criminal element hangs out online as well as at the local mall.

Ladies fear the criminal predators, and the guys should fear the fake profile predators who are always working towards asking for money to be sent for a needed emergency expense.

The one time I ran into the fake profile predator, I should have known when she could not talk intelligently about her hometown. I knew the gig was up when she started professing her love after only a few conversations. And the gig was finally up, when this woman who supposedly made about three times as much money as myself needed help to pay for her babysitter in some far off state.

The trick to ensuring your safety is to always make your first date in a public place. That way, if things go badly on that first date, then you can seek assistance from other people if necessary. You can even ask the cashier to call the police out to help escort you to your car.

Unfortunately, many people go so far as to set up a date in a public place, but when the scheduled date time arrives, they simply do not show up. Many of the people who got stood up were good, honest people, but the person who stood them up will never be able to find that out, because they never met the person whom they agreed to meet for that first date.

Fear Is The Greatest Demotivator

When dating online, the opportunities are available for some great people to meet and get together, but too often, people let the fear of contact stand in the way of letting people come together. The fear of responding to an email is the greatest threat to the successful fulfillment of one’s relationship desires, but also the fear of actually meeting someone in person will prevent even people who have chatted online for a long time from coming together.

I am always amazed when I think back to my friend Lisa, who chatted with a guy online for more than one year, before the two of them met. And then they dated for several months when he moved to her hometown. They are still married eight years later. With so many things that could go wrong in the online dating experience, it is nice to know that there are success stories that we can share.

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Lance Metzger writes about relationships, offline and online dating. If you liked this article, you can read more Lance Metzger articles at this link. “No Strings Attached” simply means, “Let’s get to know one another before we start making any commitments to one another.” To explore free nsa dating, please visit the NSA Dating Site at: http://www.nsadatingsite.com/

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If you’re involved in Network Marketing or MLM - same thing, different verbiage - one of the biggest challenges you will have is driving traffic to your web site. Now this could be your product site or you business opportunity site.

In many Network Marketing companies (if not all), you are given replicated web sites to send traffic too. However, there is one basic problem with that, and that is… they are replicated web sites. Your website looks exactly like the website of the other people participating with the same company. Your websites look alike, and its keywords are exactly the same. The only difference between your site and that of your neighbor is that you might get to brand your website with your own name. (What most companies fail to tell you is that the search engines frequently ignore replicated websites.)

The most successful Network Marketers know that a replicated web site is all fine and good, but if you want to have control over the amount of traffic you send to your product or opportunity web site, you need to have a domain of your own.

Why?

The basic cornerstone of any web site is the keywords that the search engines are going to use to index your site. If you are using a replicated web site, the keyword structure is usually very generic and not site specific - that is the reason why search engines ignore replicated websites.

In order to have a successful web site, you need to have control over your site, starting with the keywords of that site and the links that lead to your sales pages. Besides that, you might have more than one network marketing opportunity to promote, and you cannot promote other opportunities from your replicated websites.

But the trick, for the lack of a better word, is NOT to fight to rank in the search engines for the same keywords everyone else is targeting.

This would be “keyword suicide”.

Every boy and his dog are probably fighting to rank for the keywords: MLM, Network Marketing, Home based Business, and so on. Great keywords like these are all but impossible to achieve a number one listing through the organic search results (free listings in the regular search results). People who are expending their resources trying to rank for these very competitive keywords will usually go broke, before they achieve their goals or any profits.

You should understand that you don’t need the “big gun key words” to drive a huge amount of traffic to your website, and therefore to what you are promoting. Start with what is called “fringe keywords”. These are less-searched keywords that are still target-specific keywords for whatever it is that you are trying to promote.

Think about it, you can become a big fish in a little pond, if you target keyword phrases that the others have not thought of or that others did not consider worthwhile. But, if you target 100 to 200 fringe (smaller searched) keywords, which are averaging 1500 queries per day, and you multiply that by the 200 keywords your rank for, then all your targeted keywords are now getting a combined daily query of 300,000 queries a day.

By targeting lesser-searched keywords, your chances of being listed on the first page of the search engines just went up ten-fold, maybe even one-hundred-fold. Just imagine having a first page listing on 100 or 200 search engine results pages for these lesser-searched keywords; how do you think that would affect your website traffic? I will tell you from personal experience - it could be huge!

So where do you start?

Well if you are like most people, you head to http://www.Google.com, http://www.Yahoo.com or even http://www.MSN.com and start researching keywords. You punch in keywords, to see who has the first page listings and then head to those sites, and check out their keywords by viewing their source code.

Let me ask you a very important question: “Do you want to work hard, or do you want to work smart?”

Most people will choose the path of least resistance and choose to work smart, unless they simply do not know any better.

Doing keyword research is time consuming and it is hard work, so to make your job faster and more efficient; instead of going to Google, Yahoo and MSN to research keywords, you should be heading to http://www.Widow.com

I know you have probably never heard of Widow Search, but I will tell you now: if you are trying to do keyword research, you should forget about http://www.WordTracker.com and all of those other paid keyword research tools. I have found in my own experience that the keyword research tools are generally flawed and offer me only one piece of information that I cannot get from Widow. The one missing component is the estimated search traffic, but if you are targeting “fringe keywords”, then the volume of search is a really small consideration in your strategy.

Widow.com is a Meta search engine. With one click of a button, you can get the listings for your keywords from Google, Yahoo, MSN, http://www.DMOZ.org and http://www.AllTheWeb.com

Here’s how Window.com works: like most Meta search engines, Widow does not own the database; it creates what is known as a virtual database. It takes your request, in this case your keyword research request, to several other search engines and/or databases and aggregates the results into a single list and displays them according to their source.

Not only does Widow provide you information for your query from multiply search engines, it also has a Cluster Search feature. This feature is set as the default search setting; you can turn it off and just have a blended search if you prefer, but once you understand the power of a clustered search, I don’t know why anyone doing keyword research would want it turned off. You can also set the number of result views per page.

Here’s how the clustering feature is a huge time saver and its many advantages. Let’s use the keyword phrase “Network Marketing” as the phrase that you wish to do keyword research.

Currently when I type in “Network Marketing”, it is showing the top 10 results from the multiple search engines Widow accesses, but on the left hand side of the page is my Cluster Search Results. My cluster search results has provided links for the following:

Resources, Company, Multi Level, Companies and Income; there are more, but these are the top five cluster results. In addition, within each one of these results are even more results. Now many people say that all a cluster is doing is to attempt to display themes within your results. Yes, that is true and that is a good thing. Remember, the strategy I am talking about here is to find the keywords on the “fringes” of the primary keyword phrases, so themed results will allow you to uncover those fringe keywords more quickly and efficiently.

The cluster search results allows you to drill down into the set of your results and to do it all from one search engine and one search query.

Here is the other huge advantage of using a Meta search engine like Widow, over let’s say Google (the big boy on the block). Meta search engines like Widow clear away all the clutter and paid listings that are found on search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

When you think about it, all of these search results on the big three search engines are competing for space and the attention from the user, for its paid advertisers. Web crawlers are influenced by cross-linking, Google-bombing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb), and the efforts by commercial webmasters to skew the PageRank (link popularity) scores. Therefore, the result given back to you is not a true picture of the available information, because of all the influential factors that are typically associated with search, can be manipulated by commercial enterprises.

However, a Meta engine like Widow must combine the search results and average those results (votes) from the related search engines to reveal more comprehensive and accurate results. Moreover, to keep the search result as unbiased a possible, Widow does include many paid search listings.

This benefits the user by eliminating duplicate hits and grouping the most relevant results at the top of the list. You are now doing a more efficient search of the web, and you’re doing it with one search engine. Given that the Widow Search tool also incorporates Clustered Search Results and Similar Terms in its search results, the network marketer will find the task of keyword research greatly simplified and more comprehensive, than keyword-research gathered from another source. And more beneficially, Widow Search is a free service, available not only to webmasters and network marketers, but also to the general public.

So I ask you again “Do you want to work hard or work smart?”

Once you have used Widow Search as often as I have, you will finally understand that the old way is the “working hard” way and Widow Search is the “working smart” way. Check it out. I am sure that after you have used it a few times, you will agree with me on this one.

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Trey Pennewell has been ghost writing and building websites on the Internet for a number of years. Over the years, Trey has been employed by http://www.thephantomwriters.com/ To learn about the new WordPress plugin, which will enable you to receive targeted articles directly from The Phantom Writers Article Distribution Service, as they become available, please visit: http://www.backlinksmagnet.com/blog/

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You’re in for a real treat, because I am going to reveal a dozen words, which could change your life.

Why? Because Yale University researches have identified the 12 most powerful words in the human language, proven to attract attention and stir emotion within their readers.

Here they are:

A chargeback is a transaction that an Issuer returns to a
merchant bank and most often, to the merchant - as a financial
liability. In essence, it reverses a sales transaction, as
follows:

The global economic situation is clearly getting worse. The media are selling the “dark” sizzle and people are buying it [day and night. One thing that pains me even more is that people believe more in the media than they believe in themselves. It’s a sad truth of the modern economy.

I agree that the financial markets are not looking good at all, and the meltdown in the US market will continue to have a ripple effect on all other markets. What I can do not agree is that a country with a solid infrastructure and the best minds in the world can be a slave to economic conditions.

People who don’t understand economic factors will try to blame everyone else. If you want to blame, then blame the people who manage the key financial metrics. Key financial metrics are important numbers that can predict the financial future of a company or the entire stock exchange. Companies often overlook these metrics and end up with problems, and if many companies ignore the KFIs, the result can be an economic nightmare.

Similar to KFIs are key Web metrics that can predict the future of your online business and Internet presence. It is extremely important to constantly monitor these metrics and identify new trends. An expert Web analyst knows that key Web metrics can be used to turn around a mediocre Website into a sales machine. If you ignore them, then chances are your online business will soon be history.

Let’s talk about how you can use key Web metrics to profit even in a “bad economy.” The first step in identifying key metrics is to define your site goals. Goals can be anything you want to achieve from your Website i.e. - selling products or services, generating leads, providing information, or enhancing brand image.

The second step is to install a Web analytics solution on your Website. There are many free solutions such as Google Analytics, Compete, Quantcast, and paid solutions such as SiteCatalyst, Coremetrics, Webtrends etc.

Once your Website is loaded with the analytics code, the next step would be to wait a couple of days and allow the data to populate the analytics systems.

You will be able to perform some analysis just a few days after installing the analytics code but it would be better to wait a month and then perform a detailed analysis.

The first key metric you should watch out for is the bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that visit one page on your Website before exiting it. Your Website should encourage customers to spend more time on the site and navigate to internal pages.

If your bounce rate is too high (more than 50%) then you should change your Website design and navigation. Ideally, bounce rate should be less than 10%, but if you maintain a bounce rate of less than 50% you are doing a good job.

The second important metric is your goal conversion rate. You can set up the goal in most Web analytics solutions easily. This metric will tell you how many visitors it took your Website to generate a sale, lead, or new member. Your focus should always be on increasing the conversion rate.

If you are selling multiple products or services through your Website, then you can also add average order value to your arsenal of key metrics. Average order value is the total sales revenue generated by all the orders placed.

If you want to conduct in-depth analysis, I would encourage you to consider visitor recency and visitor loyalty metrics. These metrics tell you how often a visitor visits your Website and how frequently.

It can take you some time to understand the key metrics and derive solutions from them, but learning and understanding these metrics can turn your Website into a sales machine. You can easily maximize ROI and generate more sales, leads, or members with the same traffic and ad spending. Decreasing your marketing expense to cut costs in a recession will also result in decreased sales, but if you use Web analytics, your sales will increase dramatically using the same ad budget.

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Sameer Khan is web analytics and online marketing expert who specializes in maximizing roi, increasing conversion and sales of any website. Sameer’s ability to understand the key metrics and derive optimal solutions from it helps him turn any website into a
selling machine without increasing the ad spending. To find out how you can increase sales in bad economy and for more information on Sameer’s latest work, you can visit his website Key Web Metrics

Read more articles written by Sameer Khan

During the course of my work, I get to literally read or scan articles written by hundreds of authors every week - thousands every year. I have seen the best and the worst of what people have written to promote their businesses online.

Experience has taught me who will be successful with article marketing and who will fail with article marketing. I have also learned that anyone can be taught the secret to successful article marketing, but not everyone wants to accept what is being taught.

Business Lessons From Chef Gordon Ramsey

The other day, I was watching Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America. If you have never seen the show, Gordon Ramsey is a popular and successful chef, whose name and reputation is known around the world.

Restaurant owners - many of whom are chefs - contact Ramsey and ask him to visit their restaurant, in essence to help them to save their restaurant from economic failure. The most amazing thing about the process is that many of the chefs have personally asked Ramsey to come, yet when he arrives, they fight with Ramsey every step of the way - determined that Ramsey will not force them to change their ways.

On day one of his visit, Ramsey tries the food as a customer and talks to the owners of the restaurant. On day two, Ramsey observes the operation of the restaurant. On day three, he has designers come in and remake the dining room and he trains the staff to understand the changes that will take place. On day four, Ramsey uses his skill to swamp the restaurant. On night four, most restaurants will have a line out the door.

It is a process that will save most restaurants, from failure.

Whether an employee or the boss, the chef always seems to believe that he or she is smarter than Ramsey, and they tend to reject the problems that Ramsey identifies and the solutions he provides.

How Gordon Ramsey’s Advice Can Help The Online Marketer

In one episode, Gordon Ramsey said that the difference between a successful restaurant and one that fails can be summed up in one thought, “A successful restaurant is one that puts the desires of its customers, above the desires of its owner.”

In the restaurants that Ramsey visits, customers simply desire good food at a fair price. But when a restaurant is suffering from slow sales, the first corner that owners usually cut is in eliminating “fresh food” in the kitchen. By eliminating fresh food and replacing it with canned or frozen, restaurant owners find that they can save an awful lot of money, but that step often drives away even more customers from the “fine dining” experience.

The online marketer is much in the same boat as the restaurant operator.

The online marketer needs to give online consumers a good product at a fair price, but the seller must resist the temptation to cut costs in ways that will hurt the business.

How This Applies To Article Marketing

Article marketing was developed in recognition of the fact that people go online to learn. Online marketers realized that if they were willing to teach, they could use the content they created to “attract” customers to their products and services.

Somewhere over the years, the purpose of article marketing was redefined and perverted by someone with something to sell. A lot of online marketers accepted the new definition that said that the only purpose for article marketing was to build inbound links to one’s website. They said you only needed to put together enough words - 300 to 500 words - so publishers could accept your “links”.

“Attraction marketing” was set aside as the “old way of doing things”, and replaced with “link building” as the “new and improved” way of marketing a website.

I count myself lucky that I learned “article marketing”, when it was still understood as “attraction marketing”. I count myself lucky, because I remain able to “attract” hordes of traffic and considerable sales for my websites, by using article marketing the way it was originally intended.

Interestingly, the people who adopted article marketing under the “new and improved” model soon began to realize that the new kind of article marketing was not bringing the kinds of results that people were promised. So the “new and improved” model was recently “improved” again. Now the common knowledge of the “new and improved” model say that the search engines reject “duplicate” copies of articles on the Internet. To combat this, marketers are using software to rewrite an article dozens of times, so that they can put “unique computer-generated content” on each website.

I predict that the “new, new and improved” will be as unsuccessful as the “old, new and improved” model was. It is not that the search engines changed to reject “duplicate copies” of articles. Instead, the search engines started to reject articles that proved to offer no real value to readers.

Of course, this statement may generate a very important question in your mind. How does the search engines’ algorithms know which articles provide value to their readers and which ones do not?

In response, let me ask you this: How many people link to your articles on those third-party websites? See, there really is a simple method that the search engines can use to determine if a particular article has any value to its audience. The search engines can count the number of links pointing to an individual article on a third-party website, to determine if people find that article useful to the needs of the consumer.

So you have got to ask yourself, will the “new, new and improved” model of “unique computer-generated content” provide enough value to readers to attract links from third-party websites? If you answer this question honestly with a “no”, then you will have also predicted the failure of the “new, new and improved” model of article marketing, as I have.

Remember Gordon Ramsey’s Advice

“A successful restaurant is one that puts the desires of its customers, above the desires of its owner.”

It is true that article marketing done as I do it (attraction marketing) is more expensive than the “new, new and improved” model of article marketing, but it also produces better results. Just as “fresh food” will attract more diners to a restaurant, the more expensive “hand-crafted” and “polished” articles will attract more links to the article and more visitors to the author’s website.

First off, article marketing - as it was done in the early days of the Internet - will accomplish more than one goal. When done well, the article will find an audience in newsletters, which can introduce your marketing message to thousands or hundreds of thousands of prospects in a single day.

Like you, we also have goals of building links for our websites and achieving a higher search engine placement for our websites, but we consider search engine placement to be secondary to the main goal of attracting customers to our websites’ products and services.

So in order to achieve our first goal of reaching large audiences for our articles, we have to “attract” readers to our articles, by teaching our prospects something of value to them. When our article delivers value to our readers, then the article’s resource box will generally deliver prospects to our website, where the real selling takes place.

In our world, our article on a third-party website will attract links from other websites, because we put the needs and desires of our customers / readers ahead of our own needs. And after our article has been delivered to tens or hundreds of thousands of readers in various newsletters, we will also achieve our search engine goals, because most newsletter publishers will publish a copy of the article in their online archives and people will link to it.

If It Is Not Broke, Don’t Fix It

Yes we consider the search engine goals to be important to our long-range plans, but we find that we don’t have to put a “unique article” on every website to get great search placement. Because we have never embraced the “new and improved” model of article marketing, we know that the “old-fashioned way” of doing things works just fine - even today.

Consider this:

Besides being news websites, do you know what else these websites have in common?

They all buy some “news content” from the Associated Press (www.ap.org) and United Press International (www.upi.com). What that means is that all of the news outlets buy and publish the same articles from the same sources, and yet, we don’t see the search engines penalizing the news sites, do we?

If the search engines are not penalizing the corporate news websites for printing the same non-unique articles, then why should we believe that the search engines are penalizing non-unique content on your website and in your article marketing endeavors?

In Conclusion

Article marketing works well when people link to your articles - on one third-party website or a dozen third-party websites. But in order for people to want to link to your articles, the content must be top-notch. People aren’t going to link to crap articles; so computer-generated content should be avoided in the same way that fine dining restaurants should avoid buying canned foods.

By focusing on the desires of our future customers (solutions for their problems), we are able to use article marketing successfully to promote any website we want to promote. We think about what is important to our customers, and then we answer our customers’ questions. By putting ourselves into the mind of our prospects, we are able to give them the exact kind of content they want to read.

In doing so, we successfully drive traffic to our websites, AND we create excellent search engine placement for our websites. And when we say websites, we do mean more than one website. We successfully utilize article marketing for dozens of websites, so we know that what we teach can be duplicated by the masses, if only the masses are willing to accept what we teach.

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Trey Pennewell has been ghostwriting articles and building websites on the Internet for a number of years. Over the years, Trey has been employed by http://www.thephantomwriters.com/ To learn about the new WordPress plugin, which will enable you to receive targeted articles directly from The Phantom Writers Article Distribution Service, as they become available, please visit: http://www.backlinksmagnet.com/blog/

Read more articles written by Trey Pennewell

Banks are putting the squeeze on even their best long term card holders at a time when other sources of credit, such as home equity loans for example, are harder to come by. A lot of people are shocked to receive notices that their credit card rate has jumped to as high as 28% even though they

Q. By working hard and sending my child to childcare, I often feel disconnected. Is there a way to feel more connected with my child and with what goes on in the center?

A. Yes, there are many ways for parents and caregivers to work together. These ideas will make you feel better as you leave your child in someone else’s care, and they will also help your child feel better as well. Here are some suggestions:

1. Explain to your child how much you like and respect the caregivers and that you know that they take good care of him/her.

2. Build a relationship with your child’s caregivers and then explain that relationship to your child. It will help your child to feel secure if he/she knows that you know and like each other.

3. Set up a consistent communication system with your child’s caregivers. It can be a regular time each week to meet and talk or it can be a written report that you each send back and forth to each other daily. It could also be some combination of the two. This communication is very important because it allows both of you to learn more about the child than either one of you would know on your own.

During each year of childcare the focus of the partnership should be different. Here are some guidelines.

First Year