What Launchy Does

What does ‘Launchy’ do? Quite simply, it makes accessing just about anything on your computer very quick and very easy.  Above you’ll see a choice of appearances or ’skins’ that you can choose from.  You can have it start upon booting your computer, or you can have a desktop icon to start the application.

How It Works

A bit like a search engine scans the internet, Launchy does this with your PC.  It works very much on the same principle as Outlook 2007 search function.  All you have to do is type into the box the ‘thing’ you’re looking for, and Launchy will offer you a list of things that contain that word.

Once you click your ‘Enter’ button, or select from the list offered, Launchy will immediately open the file, folder, search engine or application that that word relates to.

And……………

The best part is, it’s totally FREE!

You can get it by clicking the image above, or you can go here.  I WOULD suggest donating a few dollars if you can, because it has been painstakingly created by an East Coast grad student (who apparently likes Ramen Noodles!).

Luke.

XHeader

A while back I was lucky enough to find the XHeader header design software for free online for creating my new website’s headers. I wasn’t expecting much from something free, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found out XHeader was more than powerful enough to create the professional looking header I wanted. XHeader impressed me with an easy to use interface, simple software layout, and professional results that made me look like I’d been using graphic design software for years. Read on for some details on why I found XHeader to be a solid addition to any blogger or web-master’s toolkit.

User Friendly Interface

One of the first things I noticed about using XHeader was the easy to use interface. XHeader provides a great visual header creation system that lets you build your header without learning any esoteric graphics software techniques. Since XHeader is designed to focus on doing one thing it is able to have a simple, straightforward interface that anyone can jump right in and use. The XHeader website offers a great tutorial for getting started, but I found that this extra help was completely unnecessary.

One major problem I’ve always had with graphics software is saving at a quality level that will load quickly without sacrificing looks. XHeader makes choosing a JPG quality level when you save extremely simple and allows you to preview the results as you go. The appealing visual interface makes it incredibly simple to just jump right in and start creating your website header.

Simple Layout

Part of XHeader’s ease of use comes from the program’s consistent and easy to understand layout. When I started XHeader, I had no trouble finding all the functions I may need to work on my header. XHeader walks you straight through choosing a header image, creating a website title, and altering both as you see fit. Everything is arranged in a logical and consistent manner that let me go directly to what I wanted to do as soon as I wanted to do it without ever touching the tutorial.

Extremely Professional  Results

I was shocked (in the best possible way) by the professional  results I was able to achieve with such a simple piece of free software. XHeader is so easy to use that until I tried it I expected the results to be lackluster, at best. I was wrong. While the interface may not be complicated, the power to create a professional header is definitely there. XHeader provides everything I needed for giving my website a solid and professional looking header, with the simplicity coming from focusing on only creating headers.

I was especially impressed with the images XHeader made available for me to use with my website. I went ahead and registered to get the 500 images package, and I wasn’t disappointed. There was a wide variety of professional looking header images available, enough to match any style of website design and content. With the image set XHeader offered, I had no problem making a professional looking header that fit in with my website.

XHeaderPro

Two days ago the company that produces XHeader released a Professional version called (wait for it) XHeaderPro.  This has a couple a enhanced features, like saving to png image type rather than just jpeg, but what is REALLY spectacular is that it comes with 5000 (that’s five THOUSAND) professional header graphics, which you can modify to suit your own website’s name.  The price?  You won’t believe it, but it’s only $47! (That’s less than 1 cent each).

Conclusion

I was impressed by XHeader,  even more impressed with XHeaderPro, and I can solidly recommend the software to anyone looking for a way to create a professional looking website or blog header without being a Photoshop pro.

XHeader gives me all the tools I need to work on my header without bogging myself down with pointless extras that would complicate the interface. XHeader is solid software, and I’m amazed it’s being offered for free.

It works seemlessly with XSitePro2 and ANY other website design software.

Luke.

I want a lot of things……………happiness (primarily), health, water, food, shelter, security, respect, love, a nice house, a nice car, a nice yacht………………………hang on………did I say yacht?

Wants

Well, I know I WANT a nicer house than my friends and colleagues, and a nicer car, and a prettier wife (I have that already!) and I want to live in a nicer neighborhood than my friends and I really want a very expensive car and a very expensive house and I want to be a member of an exclusive country club, and I want world peace and I want everybody to have as much food as they can eat, and I want everybody to be happy and I want……………

Needs

Okay, you get the point.  I WANT a lot of stuff but (and it’s a big but, riddled with cellulite and trying desperately to defy the laws of gravity………..well, it’s not THAT bad yet!) however, what I want and what I need are two very different things.

Any Country’s Government

Pick a country, any country will do……(there are about 2oo ish to choose from) and think of its government.  NO, a countries government is NOT the country, it’s just a bunch of people who managed to get elected somehow to “govern”.

These people are elected for the WRONG reasons more often than not.  They are elected for what they PROMISE they will GIVE to the voters.  The problem is, they don’t HAVE anything to give to the voters, so they have to TAKE it from somebody else.  Who?  Why, other voters of course!

Wants vs. Needs

There has been a great deal of debate over the years regarding what a government’s role should be, but one thing has always been the underpinning principle, and that is, they are responsible for organizing the protection of the people who are part of that nation.

The Problem

What you should really ask yourself is this: “what else do I vote for when I vote to elect somebody to office?”.  The answer frequently “a lot of things that I DON’T want them involved in!”.

Once they have arranged to make the nation in which you live secure from outsiders, they should make sure that people within the nation DON’T HARM ANYBODY ELSE WITHIN THAT NATION.

After that, they pretty much have nothing left to do.  The problem of course, is that they ALWAYS WANT MORE.

More power, more of your time, more of your money, more of your respect, more of your…..everything.

Why?

The reason for this is simple; they are very insecure people who want power to make themselves feel secure.  The problem with that is, insecure people can NEVER get enough power to make them feel safe.

When any nation’s government is made up of people who are like this, they will offer ANYTHING to keep and increase their power.  They will do this through coercion, threats of force, or force itself.

A nation that votes based in what some other people (the politicians) will get for them, is headed down a very dangerous path.  I hope that the country YOU live in doesn’t find this out the hard way.

In my humble opinion, no country’s government should be in the business of providing ‘wants’.

Luke.

P.S. This is what Ben Franklin had to say about it:

“They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.”

Take a look at the crudely drawn image above.  It shows a graph, along the bottom (the x axis) starting on the left are short-tail keywords (S/T) and to the right are long-tail keywords (L/T).  The Y axis going up and down shows the amount of competition for the keywords.

Short Tail Keywords

A keyword is most frequently a string of words rather than just one word.  The word HORSE would be a short tail keyword.  This would have a massive amount of competition, simply because it is far too BROAD a term.  There are so many things associated with the word horse, that competing for it is almost impossible.

Long Tail Keywords

‘Horse riding” is a longER tail keyword, but still too short for most people to compete for.  Now, if you add the name of your town, state and country such as ‘Horse riding tempe arizona usa’ you will suddenly find the competition for that keyword drop massively.

Relevance

If you look at the graph again, you’ll see a vertical like on the right.  This represents how the more specific (the longer-tail) keyword you use, the more relevant it will be to your product or service offering.

Offering something to the wrong group of people, or at the wrong time is simply a waste of time (yours AND theirs) and using long-tail keywords is the best way to avoid doing this.

Load your website with plenty of long-tail keywords that define exactly what you are offering, and you will see the amount of traffic to your site increase exponentially.

Luke.

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.” - Earnest Benn

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The Lost World

This is probably the coolest, most poignant and smartest videos I’ve ever seen.  Unlike a palindrome that reads the same backwards as it does forwards and has the same meaning, this reads the EXACT OPPOSITE backwards as it does forward and equally has the opposite meaning.

With all kinds of nasty environmental things going on in the world, including natural disasters like the earthquakes in Haiti, and with the world’s economies in chaos, it’s easy to think that this is the end of the world.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

The Facts

The fact is, there are just as many people (more actually) on the planet than there were a year ago, there is the same amount of resources that there ever was, and there is MORE intellectual power than ever BECAUSE there are more people.

The Problem?

How can this be you ask?  Think about it this way; if there’s less of everything, WHERE HAS IT ALL GONE?  Less energy?  Can’t be.  Energy is neither created are expended, it just changes form, that’s just basic physics.

More people?  yes, but the MATTER (the atoms and molecules that go to MAKE people) has not come onto the planet from outside, it’s ALWAYS been on the planet.  Humans and other animals are MADE from the same materials as what makes everything else.  When we die, out physical bodies will be re-absorbed into the planet and the molecules and atoms will go to make other “stuff”…………..decaying bodies make GREAT fertilizer.  While is sounds a bit odd, it’s factually accurate.

The REAL Problem

The real problem is that most humans including (especially?) the world’s leaders simply DON”T UNDERSTAND enough about the world and how it all works in harmony, to run it properly.  They know VERY WELL how to manipulate people into getting what THEY WANT, but they care nothing about their FLOCK, other than what they can GET FROM THEM (money, power, respect, fear etc.).

If you think this is a very cynical view of the world IT IS!  However, don’t EVER think that being a cynic is bad.  A cynic accurately believes that everybody does what they feel is BEST FOR THEMSELVES.  Hypocrites, on the other hand, SAY that they are doing things for other people when in REALITY they are only doing things that MAKE THEMSELVES FEEL GOOD.

End Of The World?

This is NOT the end of the world.  The coming 5-15 years will be very tough, but CHANGE is always tough.  That is ALL that is really happening, the world is changing.

I can’t predict exactly what will happen, nobody can.  But I am convinced that humans will emerge from the current state it’s in, healthier, mentally stronger and in a better position to do more amazing things than we can currently even dream about.

200 years ago, the thought of flying was nothing more than a dream.  In as little as 160 years, humans were on the moon, sending moving images back to us on little boxes in our houses.

Humans……….some humans………..are amazing.  BE one of them!

Luke.

What’s Wrong With Dreamweaver?

Nothing.  Nothing that is, if you can afford it!  Oh, and it has a VERY steep learning curve.  It’s not one of those programs you can just open and intuitively know what all of the terms mean.  It has improved over the years, certainly, but it has also become more complex, being able to do some truly incredible things.

What’s The Alternative?

Well, there are several, including the new Microsoft Expression.  But as you know, I like FREE stuff.  Here’s a list of some of the free ones:

Aptana Studio

Screem

Bluefish

Quanta Plus

Kompozer

Amaya

Now, these don’t all work with all operating systems, and each one looks and feels a little different, enough, perhaps, to put a person off of trying them each in turn.

Enter TRELLIAN WebPage

Trellian offers a superb FREE altrnative to Dreamweaver called WebPage.  Why do I like it more than the ones above?  Simply because it looks like, and works a lot like, Microsoft WORD (the 2007 version).

In other words, the learning curve is extremely shallow.  You really can be up and running with it the same day that you download it. This is NOT software designed for the professional web-developer who likes to change the html code, but it’s definitely one of the best if you simply want to do some WYSIWYG editing.

Why Is It Free?

Trellian is currently giving it away free of charge so that they can email you offers.  They’ll get your email when you register the product; you can always unsubscribe of course, but personally I’m not going to.  If their FREE product is as good as I’m learning it is, then I may very well try some of their paid products.

Oh, you do sometimes get a little advertisement when you open the software, but it’s not at all annoying and it DOES remind me to check-out their other offerings.

Check it out for yourself here: Trellian WebPage Download.

XSitePro

The final option I would like to discuss is XSitePro. While this is a paid product, it is, without ANY DOUBT in my mind, the best software for internet marketers.  Yes, you CAN learn Dreamweaver (which is, of course, and excellent tool for professional website designers) but Dreamweaver is anything BUT intuitive.

XSitePro is both intuitive AND full of features that Dreamweaver doesn’t have.  Features such as inserting Google Ads, Amazon products, PayPal buttons and dozens of others.

For the professional internet marketer, there simply is NO OTHER software to consider.  The support is superb, and doesn’t cost anything.  Yes FREE online support for any problems you may have.  These are REAL people (based in England) who I know will help you whenever you have a problem

Intellimon, the company that produces XSitePro, also has a fantastic new internet marketing course, called the Complete Guide to Website Building, the title of which does NOT do justice to the contents.  The course LITERALLY starts from assuming you have ZERO knowledge, and ends with you having your own website created and monetized!

If I were to recommend any ONE thing to new internet marketers, and even to wannabe internet marketers, it would be this; BUY XSitePro and BUY the Complete Guide to Website Building.

I promise you, you’ll be glad you did both for many years to come!

Luke.

Note: I think she’ll make a great politician one day!

To a large degree, the success of an internet marketer in making money online is due to how much they know about their website’s visitors.  Put simply, the more you know, you can make better informed decisions.

Piwik

Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) web analytics software program, providing you with detailed r reports on your website visitors, the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages… and so much more. Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics.

How Does Piwik Install?

It’s a PHP MySQL software program that you download and install on your own webserver. At the end of the installation process you will get a JavaScript tag, and you simply copy and paste this tag on websites you wish to track, or use an existing plugin.

Other Info Provided

Piwik also offers the following information about your chosen website:

1. A graph showing last visits

2. The length of that people tend to stay on the site

3. The browser that the visitors are using

4. The country in which the visitor is located

5. The list of keywords used by the visitor to find your website

6. A list of external websites

7. Which search-engine is bringing most enquiries

8. Visits by server time

Google Analytics

Is Piwik any better than Google Analytics?  Hard to say really.  It’s a little like comparing two different fruits; you’ll usually like one more than the other, but you’ll grow accustomed to whichever one you use (or eat) more frequently.

You can see an interactive demonstration of this nice piece of server-side software HERE.

Luke.

Strange title for a post I know, but this relates DIRECTLY to your efforts at making money online as an internet marketer.  As you read this, please refer to the diagram above.

Communism VS Capitalism

As a business person, you will very likely agree with me when I say that making money is not only good, but it’s probably the best way to demonstrate your personality, because to get money you have to do it in one of fiveways:

1. Take the money

2. Wager for money

3. Invent the money

4. Persuade for money

5. Trade for money

Take

This is what thieves and politicians do.  They simply take the result of your labors, the only difference being that the politicians tell you that they’ll spend your money wisely.

Wager

You might initially think I’m talking about betting on horses or going to Las Vegas, but this is only the TINY fraction of where the BIG money is gambled.  Wall Street, the London Stock Exchange and the other 50 exchanges around the world are where TRILLIONS of dollars change hands as people gamble on whether stocks will be worth more or less each day.  When they get it right, they make lots of money.  When they get it wrong, taxpayers lose money (this is a joke………..kinda).

Invent

All world governments invent money.  When they can’t take it by force or with threats of force, and when no other country will lend them money (often in the form of goods) they will simply print it.  This, of course, can only lead to inflation, where your country’s currency is devalued because of over-supply.

Persuade

Persuasion is used by con-men, otherwise known as confidence tricksters.  They use a combination of fear, guilt and greed to get you to part with your money.  ALL confidence tricks are based on these three emotions.  All charities such as Churches use  these same emotions to get contributions, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

Trade

This is where YOU come in.  Instead of getting your money in the way that the scum above get theirs, YOU have chosen to create something of value (be it a training course, an ebook or whatever) or you spend your time looking for great products produced by other people and promote them on their behalf as an affiliate, bringing VALUE to both the product buyer and the product owner.

Communist Or Capitalist?

I struggled for many years trying to decide if was a left-wing socialist thinker, or a right-wing capitalist thinker.  Take a look at the diamond chart above.  As you can see, and what I finally realized, that it’s not about being left or right, communist or capitalist AT ALL.  It’s about being controlled (by communists OR capitalists) or NOT being controlled.  It’s about freedom to do whatever you want, so long as you don’t harm anybody else DELIBERATELY.

Think about what’s in the diagram.  I’d love to hear what you think about it.

Luke.

- George Shaw (Note from Luke: “But that’s not always a good thing!)

The National Debt

As an example of simple economics, I want to take a look at one country’s economy.  Let’s say Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia)……………….no?  Oh, you don’t care about other countries? Well, okay, how about the U.S.?  Good.

FACTS: It took over two HUNDRED years for the national debt to reach $1 trillion. The national debt is what YOU and I owe other countries because of the spending that OTHER PEOPLE have done……………….on our behalf of course! (I’m being sarcastic in case you didn’t spot it).

Then it took a mere TEN years to DOUBLE to two $ 2 trillion.

In the first nine months of 2009 an further ONE TRILLION DOLLARS was added to the deficit.

Math

It doesn’t take a genius to figure-out that getting into debt, whether as a nation or as an individual is NOT A GOOD THING TO DO.  Nor does it take a genius to figure out that there will be CONSEQUENCES to getting into debt.

You should ask yourself this question: “where is the money that the country’s leaders come from?”.  Here is the answer:

1. Taxation: this is a small source of “income” and is getting smaller all the time, as businesses go bust and individuals lose their jobs

2. Borrowing: this is a larger source of income and relies on other countries (like China) to produce goods that other countries want (like the U.S.) in exchange for dollars.

3. Print it: this is known as inflation.  Printing money with nothing to back it (precious metals, other minerals, manufacturing capability etc.) is a way of getting money without working for it.  What happens si that money currently in circulation is worth LESS because there is more supply, in effect diluting it’s purchasing power.

Deflation

We just reaching the end of the deflationary period that I’ve been writing about during 2009.  Companies have been lowering prices (such as Safeway) drastically to be able to compete with the likes of Kroger and WalMart.  This cannot continue for very much longer.

Now that 2010 is upon is, you’ll start seeing runaway inflation.  This MUST happen; it’s simply unavoidable.

You must learn to make money or provide for yourself and your family some other way.  You may WANT a Yacht a mansion and a sports-car, but you NEED water, food and shelter (in that order).

For your own sake, study what’s going on in the world and LEARN new skills. It may be the difference between survival and living on the street.  I’m SERIOUS.  If you don’t want to live in a tent-city and hope somebody else will give you food, start learning how to make your living some other way.  Do it NOW!

Luke.

Articulate

It couldn’t be a more appropriately named.  Making money as an internet marketer online has recently become a lot easier and a WHOLE lot more professional, thanks to the people behind Articulate.

Articulate software is currently the best software available for getting your training course to your customer.  I first discovered this superb suite of software while studying XSitePro’s ‘Complete Guide to Website Building’ which is the best training I have EVER seen for newbie and intermediate marketers, and it demonstrates Articulate’s software to its fullest.

The Suite

There software consists of four programs:

1. Engage

2. Encoder

3. Presenter

4. Quizmaker

What It Does

Using these four programs will make any training product you have come alive.  They add the kind of professionalism that is sorely lacking in the internet marketing industry, empowering you to interact with your customers in a way that, up until now, only face-to-face presenters could do.

I’m convinced that once you’ve tried these software programs, you’ll want to use it for everything else you create, and I won’t be at all surprised if we don’t see many copycat programs appearing soon.  This is WAY more advanced that simply creating a screen capture with Camtasia Studia (though you CAN incorporate Camtasia videos if you want to).

What is particularly good about it all is that you kind try the suite yourself FREE of charge.    Just click the image at the top of this post, or click THIS LINK.

I know you’ll be very impressed with it and your bottom like will reflect this.

Luke.

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In other words, just because the majority of people say or believe something, YOU can still be correct and THEY can still be entirely wrong. - Luke.

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I have a friend (at least, he TELLS me he’s my friend) who seems to be a good guy.  He’s always saying nice things to me, and promises me lots of good stuff, all completely FREE of charge!  Well, when I say “free”, he does actually take money from me every week, but hey, he’s a nice guy and does give me things, which I suppose kind of makes up for his stealing.

Nice Guy

When I say he’s a nice guy, some people might disagree with me, and that’s because he’s always borrowing money from lots of his other friends, but he only does that so that he can give ME stuff, so perhaps I can forgive this borrowing that he does so much.

Paying Back His Debts

He’s not great at repaying his debts though, and it took me while to figure out why he was like this.

You see, while he is a nice guy, he doesn’t actually make any money himself, but I think that’s just because he’s always doing things for me, so he doesn’t really have the time to make any of his own money.  I suppose I should just forgive him though, seeing as how he looks after me so well.

Money

When I say he doesn’t make any of his own money, that’s not strictly true, because when people won’t lend him any more money, or when there aren’t any more people to take money from without their permission, he prints some.  Some people would call that counterfeiting, but I don’t, because he’s always so good to me.

Printing More Money

Just recently he’s actually been printing a LOT more, but that’s just because he owes SOOOO many other people money that  have worked hard for, but he figures that if he can’t just print enough money, they’ll start lending him money again.

You see, he KNOWS that he should pay back his debts, and he KNOWS  that he can’t keep doing this, but he’s been getting away with it for so long now, that I think he doesn’t realize what the heck he’s doing.

But I say, so long as he has MY best interests at heart, I ‘m going to continue to let him steal from me each week and I’m not going to tell anybody else about his borrowing and money printing.

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Craig’s List

PopURL’s interface resembles Craig’s List, in that all you have on their home page is a LONG list of subjects and then sub-headings showing what people from all around the world are currently talking about, blogging about, reading about and viewing.

How Can POPurl’s Help You

While perhaps not immediately obvious, if you think about it a little, what most internet marketers need is information, particularly about WHAT OTHER PEOPLE WANT.

Many companies, such as Coca-Cola produce a product and then spend multiple millions of dollars convincing us with their television advertising, that we SHOULD want it.  As an online marketer, you have to be a approach it differently (unless that is, you have millions of dollars to spend on advertising, in which case you’re selling products online for the fun of it and you don’t really want money!).

Finding Your Niche

With the advent of the internet, just about every kind of business has found a new way to communicate AND exchange goods electronically.  You can now have a small area of expertise that just a few hundred people in every state our country are interested in, but because you can access ALL of them, the potential for business can be high enough to warrant trying to sell a product or service to them.

PopURL’s shows you immediately what people around the world are interested in.  The list consists of subjects as as movies and music, and as diverse as ‘Gadgets’ so you won’t run out of ideas to try with your next website.

Research

Once you have an idea, research will of course be critical.  It always is.  Yes, you might get lucky if you don’t research your potential market and it’s chances of success, but for the extra day or two it will take you to do the research, it really isn’t worth taking the chance of NOT doing it.

PopURL’s gives you a great STARTING POINT.  From there, it’s all up to you.

Luke.

Time Wasted At Wrong Forums

This is the problem!  Many internet marketers who could be making money online actually ruin their chances of making an online living because they spend too much of their valuable and irreplaceable time doing their marketing research on forums.

Research Your Next Website

Research is of course CRITICAL to your website’s success.  If you don’t know whether there is a market for what you are planning to offer, you are just gambling (that is, HOPING) that you have chosen the right subject matter.  You also need to know what keywords you should be targeting, and you should understand the jargon used in that particular niche.

A great place to find out all of this information is in forums.

BoardReader

While you CAN use Google, Yahoo, Ask or Bing to find forums, it would be a lot easier for you if you used BoardReader.  Like the other search engines, you only have to type-in the term you THINK you are looking for.  This dedicated search-engine will then search its index of ONLY FORUMS and come back with results that will be much more targeted to your keyword phrase.

This can save you many, MANY hours, time much better spent on marketing your site, or writing your next great ebook or video tutorial.

Try it.  I know you’ll like it.

Luke.

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Niche Marketing

Earning money online with internet marketing is done two ways; you can either have a massive organization that gets people to your website by advertising  on Television and radio, or you can find a small area of business that enough people from around the world are interested in.

As you don’t have millions of dollars to spend on advertising, you have to do the latter; this is called Niche Marketing.

How Dummies.com Can Help You

Getting ideas about what market to go into can be quite daunting, because there are hundreds of thousands of areas that you could consider, and millions of sub-niches below those.  So, what you probably need is some IDEAS about what you COULD possible consider.

If you click the image above, you will be taken to the dummies.com store.  In the left navigation panel is a list of 21 categories, from art to travel.  Here’s the good bit……….WITHIN each category is a sub-category, and you only have to click the main category once to see the sub-categories.

Researching Your Niche

While this probably won’t give you the EXACT niche that you’re looking for (though it MIGHT), it WILL demonstrate to you how they have sub-divided each main category.  All YOU have to do, is find (or create) a sub-sub-category, by copying what Dummies.com did to create their sub-categories.

Remember that the people who publish the Dummies series of books have ALREADY done most of the research for you, and the Dummies books are among the most successful series to have been published EVER!

While there is no fool-proof, guaranteed way of knowing if there is a strong market for what you are considering, this is one way to make researching your niche a little quicker and easier.

Luke.

Note: The robot in this video is Honda’s ASIMO.

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The “no-follow” attribute simply tells the search-engine spiders to stop in their tracks.  That’s it. Look at the image below:

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Backlinks

Getting links back to your website is critical if you want to rank higher in the search engine indexes, but putting out links that have the “no-follow” attribute attached to them is pointless, unless all you want is for HUMAN readers to come and look at your site (based on the content you left on somebody else’s site).

While this isn’t the prettiest diagram, it clearly shows whenever a link is instructed (by the website owner where the link is located) to “no-follow”, then what happens is that the search-engine spider/crawler (software that Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. use to find and then index web content).

In the diagram, the bug-like creature represents the “spider” software from one of the many search engines.  It looks at a web-page (not website but the web-PAGE) and will follow links FROM that page, UNLESS the website owner has made the link in that page “no-follow” links.

Why No-Follow?

The main reason website owners make many of their links “no-follow”s is that they simply don’t want parts of their site found and indexed.  Another reason they may do this is because they don’t KNOW that they’re doing it, and some programs (like some blogging platforms) are set, by default, to not follow links.

Real Link Finder

There is some great FREE software called Real Link Finder that will determine if links on a particular web page have the “no-follow” attribute or not.  You can get it HERE.

Luke.

Your back-up your C-drive regularly.  Of course you do………….NOT!  Let’s be honest here (it’s just you and me), you don’t back-up nearly as often as you should.  Yes, you might make copies of your word-processor or spreadsheet files, but what about your emails and all the SETTINGS?

The Reality Of Re-Installing

In reality (that thing we humans detest so much and avoid as much as possible) re-installing programs is just the proverbial “tip of the ice-berg”.  The real fun starts when we have to set-up our email accounts and all the small applets and add-ons for our various browsers and software programs.  It’s a PAIN IN THE BUTT!

Macrium Reflect

Macrium Reflect will make a back-up image (that is, an EXACT COPY) of your hard drive, or a partition OF your hard drive, so that in the event of a crash (and one of your computers one day WILL crash), you can easily restore it to it’s former state, emails, settings, add-ons, browser bookmarks and all.  Macrium offers a free version, which you can get HERE, though it is somewhat limited when compared to Acronis True Image.

Acronis True Image

Acronis’ program called True Image IS BETTER.  It’s easier to use and is extremely stable, but the difference is, Acronis charges for their program ($49 at the time of writing) but Macrium does not.  Macrium is an Italian company, so they have provided pretty good tutorials in English, whereas Acronis’ tutorials were originally in English so don’t have to be translated.

If you want a complete review of Acronis’ excellent True Image, you can read Cenay Nailor’s review HERE. Cenay is the master (or should I say “mistress”?) of technical marketing, and she knows this software inside and out.

Other Back-up Software

There are other programs available of course, and you can find them simply by doing a search online for the keyword “backup software”.  Acronis True image is definitely the winner as far as I’m concerned, and the $49 it costs is easily worth the peace of mind you get and the hassle you WON’T have WHEN your computer crashes.

Luke.

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IT Support Birmingham

UK Support, IT management, and hosted desktop services.

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Adobe Acrobat

If you don’t know what Adobe’s Acrobat software is or does, you probably won’t be interested in this, but if you DO and if you can’t afford the $499 that Adobe currently charges, then you can use some superb FREE software in conjunction with Adobe’s own free Reader and have basically the equivalent of Adobe Acrobat.

What It Does

PDFsam stands for Portable Document Format Split And Merge.  This wonderful full-featured program allows you to manipulate pdf files, allowing functionality very similar to what Adobe’s Acrobat will do.  There is even a pdf tutorial you can download so you can get using it straight away.

You can get the tutorial HERE.

There’s a basic version of the software, along with an enhanced one.  To get the enhanced one (which I recommend) you’ll need to give your name and email by registering, but the creator of the software very rarely sends emails.  He also has versions for MAC as well as PC’s. Just click on the image above and you’ll be taken to his download page.

It’s a great program and will take up about 12mb on your hard drive.  Get it while it’s still free!

Luke.

Inflation

For those of you who are new to this site, I’ve been writing a lot more lately about inflation and the world economy so that you can better prepare yourself for the coming years.  If you’re a regular reader, you know I’m convinced that there are some tough times ahead for all of us.  The reason it’s going to be bad is because of inflation.

Causes of Inflation

While the causes of inflation are now obvious to many people, for the vast majority, it’s still a mystery.  The causes are simple and are based in simple supply and demand.  The more there is of something, the less it is worth; the same applies to whatever currency you happen to trade with.  Read more HERE.

When a country’s government (any country, but Zimbabwe in Africa is a good example of a country that is suffering from their government’s over-production of Zimbabwean dollars) chooses to print money with nothing to back it other than wishful-thinking and prayer, they are actively devaluing whatever money is ALREADY IN CIRCULATION; that is, the money in YOUR BANK ACCOUNT!

The U.S. and U.K.

A similar thing is happening in the United Kingdom and the U.S. at the moment, and if you click on the graph above, you’ll be taken to a more full explanation of the process.  While none of us have the ability to do anything directly about the decisions being made and the effect they WILL have on YOUR money (regardless of where you live in the world!), you CAN do something about your OWN situation.

If you are not running your own business and are employed by somebody else, you’ll have to hope (and ASK FOR) a substantial raise to keep pace with inflation.  If you’re running your own business (online or otherwise) you’ll have to either increase prices, improve profitability (which may mean cutting costs wherever you can) or simply accept a lower standard of living than you currently enjoy.

Take Action

You can sit back and wait for your country’s government to save you, but if you choose this path, all you are really doing is putting your fate into the hands of people you don’t know, probably wouldn’t like if you DID know and even if you DID like them, CANNOT solve the problem that THEY created in the first place.

You have to take action yourself, with your OWN finances.  This is taking responsibility for yourself, something most people are loathe to do.  LEARN about making your income in other ways.  The days of working for a company for 50 years, retiring with a gold watch and living off of a company and state pension are OVER.

Take a look at some programs where you can learn how to be valuable to other people.  There are some in the sidebar to the right ————————————————————————————->

Also, look around on the internet for people who are making money themselves online, and are willing to train you.  Cenay Nailor is one of the best in the business, and her fees are very reasonable when you consider she will train you how to make your living online without the time and cost (and headache) of going to work for somebody else every day.

Don’t wait for a knight in shining armor.  BE YOUR OWN SAVIOR!

Luke.

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Optional Website Research

While it’s absolutely CLEAR that keyword research is critical, the lines are a little blurred when it comes to other kinds of research that you should consider doing when planning your next website.

As you can see from the diagram above, there are four other areas that you should consider, and whether you do them or not is sometimes a choice.

Competitive Research

This is simply checking what competition there is and to find out what they are doing right or wrong.

Traffic Research

This is simply determining if there is ENOUGH potential traffic.  Google Adwords Keyword tool is great for this.

Qualitative Research

This is finding out whether the traffic you might get is of the right kind.  Keyword phrases such as “buy XYZ” rather than simply “XYZ” will determine whether or not there is enough traffic of the right quality.

Customer Research

Without knowing what your potential customers want, there’s little point in trying to sell them anything, so go to forums to find out what they are asking for help with.

Conclusion

Research is absolutely necessary for the success of your websites, but always keep in mind that you should not OVER ANALYZE any of them, and consequently suffer from “paralysis through analysis”.

Do SOME research, then get your site going.  DOING will ALWAYS win over thinking, and while this isn’t always necessarily the best thing for the world, it’s definitely best for your internet business.

Luke.

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Website Research

As an online marketer, your objectives should ALWAYS be the first thing you should consider when planning your next website.  Your websites are, after all, your storefronts.  If you were to have a bricks-and-mortar store, you would want it not only to look good, but you’d want it in the right location; that is, where potential buyers are.

Web Traffic

Get traffic (potential customers/visitors) to your site is, of course, critical when building your site, but it’s not nearly as critical as get THE RIGHT visitors.  Just getting a flood of visitors isn’t any good if you don’t offer them the solutions they want when they arrive at your site.  So, doing research FIRST is the most important thing you can do when planning your site.  Making it look good is secondary (but still very important).

Website Planning

As you can see from the image above, it all starts with your OBJECTIVES.  If your objective is simply to get a mailing list together, then your site is going to be very different from the Wikipedia site.  So, firstly, you need to plan what TYPE of site you will need.

The four basic types are: Sales Letter, Squeeze Page, Mini-Site, Content Site.

Keyword Research

Then you MUST do your keyword research.  This can be as simple as going to Google’s Adwords Keyword tool and typing in the seed word that you THINK will be what people will search for.  You’ll then be given a list of words to use.

Other Research You Should Do

Finally, you have a choice of various types of research you can do.  Some should DEFINITELY be done, and others are optional, but this will depend upon the type of site you’ve chosen to use.

The optional research subjects are: Qualitative, Traffic, Customer and Competitive.

I’ll talk more about these in my post on Wednesday.

Luke.

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Adsense Heat Map

Okay, it doesn’t look like much, but in fact it could be the key to whether you make a few dollars regularly with your online marketing efforts or none ever.  You see Google’s Adsense program allows you to make a small percentage of what THEY make from thier advertisers.

Where On Your Website?

The problem is of course, two fold:

1. Where do I have ROOM for ads

2. Where should I PUT the ads

The first one can only be helped if you’re either prepared to change your existing site, you already have space available, or if you are PLANNING a new site.  The second is easy.  Google actually TELLS you where you should put their ads!

Google

The map above is Google’s own “Heat Map”, their way of telling you where their experience tells them that MOST people look AND CLICK.  How do they do this?  I have NO IDEA, but if you think about it, Google WANTS people to click on their ads.  Each time somebody clicks on one of their ads, whether it’s in the search results from a Google search OR from YOUR website, THEY STILL GET PAID!

This is why they WANT to give you this information, and want it to be as accurate as possible.

Google’s Heat Map

If you look at the image below, you’ll see I’ve check-marked the areas that Google suggests are best to place their Adsense ads.

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The rule, as you can see, is this: the darker the color, the “hotter” the area.  This simply means that these areas have been shown to get clicked MORE FREQUENTLY than the same ad would get clicked in OTHTER positions.

For whatever reason this works, the next time you are planning your website, think carefully about exactly WHERE you want to monetize your site with Adsense.

Luke.

Think about it this way; should you trust the people who got us into this, when they get money in these three ways:

1. Take it from others by force

2. Borrow it from other countries

3. Print it based on nothing

Become a PRODUCER rather than a consumer. It’s the only way you will survive.

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Domain Names

Choosing a domain name for your new website may sound like an easy task.  Let’s face it, making money on the internet simply isn’t as easy as most “guru’s” say it is, and choosing the right domain name for your site is part of that process.

Domai.nr

No, that’s not a miss-spelling.  Domai.nr (Domainer?) is a great site provided by those nice people at GoDaddy.  Its two  purpose’s are firstly, to make it easier for you to find an appropriate AVAILABLE domain name for your new website and secondly, to encourage you to rent your domain name from GoDaddy, because this is where you’ll be taken once you have found the domain name of your dreams.

How It Works

As you can see from the interface above, all you have to do is type in and IDEA of what you think might be a good name, and you are immediately given multiple choices, along with some suffixes (.org, .net, .com etc.).  If you don’t find ANYTHING you like, you can, of course add or remove hyphens, one of the few characters that ARE allowed in domain names.  You can see below a choice that IS available:

Clever Domain Names

I’ve noticed a distinct trend towards clever domina names, Domai.nr being a good case in point.  However, the most important point to remember is this; whenver possible, include (or have AS) your main keyword (which of course included key-PHRASE) IN your domain name.  This is probably the single most powerful way you can optimize your website for the search-engines.

Luke.

3D Pack

3D Pack.com offer a FREE way to product ebook covers, boxes, dvd/cd covers by simply uploading any images you have (which could be anything you’ve photographed or downloaded from the internet) to thier site.  Here’s what their interface looks like:

Once you’ve uploaded your images, you simply choose what kind of image you want (cd cover, ebook cover etc.) and then click the ‘Create 3d-box.  You images will then be rendered onto a template like the one below:

Output File Type

With this done, it’s simply a matter of choosing the file type that you want by clicking one of the button (above).  You can then save the file to your own computer.

eCoverSoftwarePro

There are limitations to this service of course, because it’s a free service.  However, if you want your very own desktop application, there is some excellent software called eCoverSoftwarePro.  It was originally priced at $197, and is, in my opinion, well worth it, but it is currently available for only $27!  Here’s what the interface look like:

It’s incredibly easy to use and comes with 28 templates, inclucing iPods, credit-card, ring-binders, books, cd cases boxes and combinations of cd’s with boxes.  If you want to buy yourself a late Christmas gift, this is definitely worth considering.  You can get it by HERE or by clicking the image above. It’s compatible with Windows XP or Vista only.

Luke.

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Free Header Graphics

Here is some fantastic FREE software for creating header graphics for your websites.  Consider it my Christmas gift to you………or more accurately, from the team at XSitePro.com.

Templates

XHeader comes with 50 free templates, all of them of superior quality.  You can see immediately that they have all been created by professionals.  The software allows you to tailor each template with your own text, which can, of course, be formatted to your own tastes.  You can also ad images of your own which are easily overlayed.

For example, if you want to add a photo of yourself, this is done with the click of a button, and then it can be resized and moved around until you are satisfied.

Output Images

The Images that are output can be jpeg or XSite’s own file type (XHF), and you can choose the quality you want (larger files sizes take longer to load, so you may want to make it smaller; I normally choose the ‘Very Good’ setting, which is a great compromise between super quality and fast loading).

Conclusion

This is superior software even if you had to pay for it.  NO, it’s not good like PhotoShop, but it BETTER than photoshop if all you want is some quick and high quality header graphics.

Click the image below and you’ll be taken directly to their download page:

If you send them your name and email address, they’ll even give you an additional 500 (yes 500!) additional template graphics.  This is a way to build their mailing list of course, but it’s EASILY worth it, and if you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to.

Have a great and relaxing Christmas.

Luke.

Making your money online is all about understanding the internet and the technicalities behind it, right?

WRONG!

The Psychology of Color

Take a look at the chart above.  Over the past 50 years or so, there have been many studies that have shown that, for several reasons, humans generally react to colors in approximately the same way.

Where In The World

There ARE variations in responses to different colors depending on peoples around the globe, and most of these differences are attributed to the culture in which people are raised.  Traditions based on each culture’s religion and other myths.

The Business Of Internet Marketing

While it’s quite easy to see how a people’s myths can affect how color choice can affect them, it’s rather more difficult to understand the effect that color can have in the business world.

Interestingly, color has a very powerful emotionally effect on people anywhere in the world and indeed in any setting.

Business Example

Imagine a corporation that has a very serious business, the business of selling pharmaceutical drugs.  Now imagine that their corporate colors (their logo, letterheads, business cards and other advertising) make you (and most other people) feel scared when you see them.  How would that affect their sales?

Or how about a funeral parlor that uses the orange and yellow to promote their image?  You might be more inclined to use another nearby company I would think.

Think About Your Colors

The next time you are thinking about revamping YOUR website, or you are creating your next one, consider carefully your color choice.  Try to make it match the FEEL of your message and your service or product.

You may find that just a simple thing like this can make ALL the difference once somebody has found your site because of the keywords you have used.  Your site will become immediately “stickier” because your visitors like it a lot more, even though they may not consciously know why.

Luke.

Intuit Website Creation Software

For a starting price of only $4.99 each month, you can choose from 2,000 templates, which are (to some degree) customizable, in that you can add images of your own and you can add your own logo and change the name of your site (obviously!).

Photo Images

They also offer a selection of 250,000 images at no additional cost, so making your site look good is made a lot easier. You can even add a map showing where you are physically located should you wish to do so.

PayPal

The software also makes it very easy for you to actually sell products, be they physical or digital, all through a very simple (dare I say it “intuitive”) interface.

Other Features

There are dozens of other features that are included, such as being able to add video and forms (should you have the need for customers to give you information).

Domain Names

You’ll be offered a choice of domain names (depending upon what’s available of course) and these are legitimate names, not the usual (or expected) yourname@intuitwebsites.com like you might expect.  And because of this, you will also have proper email address, such as support@yourdomainname.com which makes your site a lot more professional looking (and acting).

Publishing

When it comes to publishing your site, it’s a matter of clicking one button, because all of the technical stuff is already done for you.

Support

The price also includes 24 hour support via email, so you really can’t go wrong (but if you do, they are there to help you).

If you don’t have clue #1 about building a website, but you feel that your business needs one, this is definitely one of the quickest and easiest ways to get your own website.

Luke.

Twitter

The Twitter train is still gathering momentum, with thousands of new “Tweeters” all convinced that everybody else is deeply interested in what they had for breakfast.

While I am VERY skeptical about the longevity of this social medium, like the stockmarket, it is attracting thousands of people and I’m not really sure why.

TweetGlide

The latest piece of free software is called “TweetGlide” and you can see an explanatory video about it by clicking the image above. “viral exponential aspect” to your marketing efforts.  Yes, this is exactly how they are promoting it. Now, I may seem a little negative about this, but that is for two reasons:

1. I haven’t tried it for more than a few days.

2. It is staggeringly popular, and whenever something is that popular, it rarely lives up to the hype.

Their speil goes on to to say that “your message will be POTENTIALLY seen by thousands of Twitter followers”….well, DUH! That’s what Twitter is all about anyway.

What Special About TweetGlide?

TweetGlide is an application that you have to install onto your local PC/Mac, but you still have to login to your Twitter account, but this time you do it VIA the software.  You are then linked to your Twitter account through your TweetGlide browser (as seen below):

Once in your interface, you can see the following:

1. What people following you are saying

2. Their profiles

3. What people have said to you (directly or as a reply to a message  from you)

4. Your own messages

5. Direct messages sent to you in private

The interface looks really good and it DOES do what is says it will, presenting all of the relevant information that you would normally have to hunt for, within easy reach.

Customizable

Probably the best feature it has is that it allows you to customize the panels that are displayed.  You may not, for example, want to see your own “Tweets”, so you can remove that panel from view.  You are also given radio-buttons that allow you to shorten any long URL’s you may want your “dedicated followers” to see, which is a great feature.

Why Is It Free?

Like most things in life, TweetGlide is free, at a price!  There are THREE ways to use TweetGlide for marketing:

1. Personal Tweeting (free)

2.Viral Downline Tweeting

3. Premium Tweeting

Ad Credits

The TweetGlide community is all about building up “Ad Credits” whereby you can refer some of your followers (or anybody via your blog perhaps) and in so doing, build up these credits so that you can then post your own ads to promote your affiliate products (or your own if you have any of course).

Premium Service

There is, of course, the upgrade option where you can actually BUY credits so that you can display as many ads to all TweetGlide users.  This is where they make their money.  If you refer people and THEY start paying for ad credits, you will receive commissions based on their purchases.

Conclusion

This is a very legitimate offering, however, like Twitter itself, I think that this kind of social marketing has very limited potential.  I’m not even convinced that Twitter will be around in 2 years time, as it will either be dead in the water, or replaced by something else equally “fashionable”.

Luke.

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When making money online, no matter what your area of expertise is, be it blogging or affiliate marketing, you need to do SOME writing.

Most people at some time or another experience the phenomenon of ‘writer’s block’ where you sit and stare at your computer screen (what do you mean “blank piece of paper”?) for hours and NOTHING comes into your mind to write about.  Worse than that, you still feel compelled to sit there until SOMETHING happens.  It’s a horrible feeling.

Ten Solutions

As this is a nice short and sweet post today, here are ten ways that might get your mind into motion and it’s all about dialogue that you have to have with YOURSELF:

1. What do I want to know that I can ASK my online community

2. Restarting (X?) now would………..

3. What are five improvements I could make to my………….

4. If I ran the (X?) I would…………………

5. My recipe for (X?) is…………………

6. How (X?) is like (Y?)…………………

7. The first things I’d do when……………………

8. Here are five reasons that (X?) can never work

9. Why I hate……………………

10. Why I love……………..

Simple, but effective I hope you agree.  As a side note, try looking at YouTube or Daily Motion etc.  whenever you’re stuck.  Type into the search box anything remotely related to your area.  You’ll either get some ideas, or you’ll be entertained.  Either way, you can’t lose.

Luke.

Capitalism

Capitalism HAS NOT failed! It has been replaced by some monstrous creature called Fascism. The country has been heading towards Communism for many years now, with all kinds of small bailouts, often for lazy people. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for helping people whenever I can, but the decision should be made by the individual, NOT by the people running the country.

Their job is to protect us and NOTHING MORE!

Responsible

So if capitalism hasn’t failed, who IS responsible for the economic mess we are currently in? The answer is, the VERY SAME PEOPLE who are now telling us how to fix the problem, the ones who NEVER SAW IT COMING in the first place, even though they were the cause of it.

THEY are telling us that the problem was caused by greedy capitalists. There WAS greed involved for sure, but not by businessmen, who are the very people (and their fathers and grandfathers) who made it possible to live in the wealthiest society the world has ever known.

How Did They Do This?

No, instead, what happened is that because of government regulations, lenders (such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae etc.) were encouraged to lend people money when the chances were high that the borrowers would default on the loans. They were ENCOURAGED to make bad business decisions.

Then, when the housing bubble burst (which it HAD to do because houses can only ever be worth what somebody can afford and is willing to pay, the powers that be decided to print some money and give it to these lenders. Under capitalism, those companies would have simply gone out of business, because they would have been bought by EFFICIENT companies who wouldn’t make bad decisions.

Conclusion

As I write this, the economy SEEMS to be improving. IT ISN’T. While more people are losing their jobs, the economy cannot recover. The stock market gains are simply a reflection of people feeling good about things, because they believe the nonsense they’re being told.

The housing market SEEMS to be improving because more houses are being sold. There ARE more houses being sold, but this is for two reasons:

1. House prices are now HALF of what they were one year ago.
2. New buyers are being encouraged to get into debt, yet again, by tax incentives

It would appear that people cannot, or are unwilling, to learn from their mistakes, be they private individuals, or people in charge of nations.

If you missed it, you can read Part 1 here.

Luke.

In this two part article, I want to share my thoughts about our economy with a simple analogy. For over a month now the “experts” (many economists and most government officials) have been telling us that the recession is over and that we can all breath a sigh of relief.

Unemployment

How can it possibly be over, when the unemployment rate is still rising and it appears that there’s no end to the increase? The real unemployment figure is probably nearly 19% now (read the article The Depression Is NOT Over!), not the 10.2% we are being told it is.

Experts

If these “experts” are so good at their jobs, you really need to ask yourself the question “why didn’t they see this crisis coming in the first place?”

The answer is, of course, they DIDN’T see it coming, so they clearly aren’t very good at their jobs, and certainly not worth listening to now!

Analogy

As a simple analogy, if a handful of people told the world that the sun was going to be eclipsed by the moon tomorrow, but EVERY EXPERT said this was not going to happen, logically, you would believe the larger group of “experts” right? I used to think like this………when I was five years old that is. Now I’m rather older, so I rely on evidence and facts, rather than speculation and wishful thinking.

Now what if the moon did indeed eclipse the sun the following day. Would you STILL listen to, and believe, the “experts” or would you start to consider the small handful of people who foresaw the event AND told the world about it? Of COURSE you’d give that small group a little more of your attention, right?

History

History is being made before our eyes. Not the everyday boring kind of history, but world changing events that WILL affect your life and the lives of your children and grandchildren.

What is happening is one of the most massive social experiments in the history of the world. Fascism is being introduced into what was once THE bastion of Capitalism. Fascism is nothing more than State run Capitalism, which is, by the way, a bit of an oxymoron.

I say that because the very idea of a government being able to run anything efficiently is absurd, and business (capitalism) RELIES on efficiency and innovation to be profitable.

Tomorrow, I’ll finish this article by talking about Capitalism.

Luke.

You can read Part 2 here. (Published on December 7th)

Abraham Maslow

If you haven’t heard of Abraham Maslow, as an internet marketer, you really should acquaint yourself with his work.  In 1943 he published ‘A Theory Of Human Motivation’ and this has been taught to thousands of sales-people and marketers for several decades.

Hierarchy Of Needs

While there is debate amongst psychologists in regard to Maslow’s work on this subject, he certainly got the ball rolling in this field of learning, and indirectly created a new field of teaching.  Most marketers (good ones that is) now understand that to sell effectively, you must get inside the head of your prospects.

In effect, what Maslow was saying is this:

You can only consider the “higher” functions of morality (right and wrong etc.) when you have self-esteem and respect from others. Nor can you write poetry or think about the universe and your place in it (be it from a religious or philosophical viewpoint).

But you can’t get THAT until you have other needs met, such as love and sexual intimacy. And THEY can’t be met if you don’t feel secure socially with enough money coming in (whether it’s a job or your business) and your health is good enough so that you can function on a daily bases.

In turn, NONE of the above can be met if you don’t have water, food and shelter etc.

Humans

While many of these things change throughout your life, they are necessary for all “well adjusted” (not street-rat crazy) humans.  Let’s be honest, there ARE some people (many of whom are either actors, preachers or politicians……what do you mean “what’s the difference?”) who NOT “well adjusted”, but all psychology is based on what MOST humans are like, not the mad-hatters of the world.

Desperate People

Someone who understands this phenomenon well is Alexis Dawes.  Her book Desperate Buyers Only (click on the image below to read her sales page) she describes IN GREAT DETAIL exactly how to find people who are READY and EAGER to purchase a solution to their most pressing problem.

In my opinion, this is the best book in the subject written, and I say that because it SIMPLIFIES the whole process of deciding which area you should consider going into when thinking about a business.  Rather than HOPING that what you are considering doing will work, you will KNOW ahead of time if there is a big enough market out there.

It also shows you how to find products to recommend to this market, that you don’t have to buy, because you can simply RECOMMEND it and earn commissions as an affiliate for that product.

Click on the image above and take a look at Alexis’ sales letter, which is a great education in copywriting in and of itself.

Luke.

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Make Money Online

Home Business

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One of the least understood by most important aspects about making money online with a website is its appearance.  What do you typically do when you search online and land on an ugly-looking site?   Click right off in most cases, right!? And the very LAST thing you want web-surfers to do is click away from your site, because these people may one day become customers.

A Matter Of Taste

People have different tastes in many things, and the appearance of a website is no different, however, there are people who have been trained for many years to know what MOST people like.  One of the critical ingredients in their education is understanding color-choice.

Kuler

The nice people at Adobe have come up with a fantastic tool called Kuler.  Kuler offers EXPERT advice on color-choice by giving you an interactive webiste that is totally FREE of charge.  As you can see from the image above, you are offered “at a glance” color combinations that have been PROVEN to be liked by the majority of people.

Search Kuler

There is even an excellent SEARCH function.  This allows you to type in anything that comes to your mind and will bring back suggestions for color-combinations.  For example, if you type in the word “corporate”, then you will be show several “swatches” of colors that their experts KNOW are generally well liked when they are combined.

Hexadecimal

Not only will Kuler SUGGEST color schemes for you new website, it also gives you the exact Hexadecimal number for each color, so that you can easily reproduce the colors EXACTLY on your site.

This is a free tool.  Try it out and see what you think of it the next time you are about to create your next website.

Luke.

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Buy The 4 Hour Work Week.

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XSitePro

The very nice (and very, VERY professional) people who created the superb website building software XSitePro have just released a new training product called ‘Complete Guide To Website Building’.

IT IS SUPERB!!!

I rarely rave about anything……….I’m just not built that way, but I have just completed the course and all I can say is, if I had seen this course when I started marketing online, three things would definitely have happened:

1. I would have saved myself countless months of anxiety

2. I would have saved hundreds of dollars on software (FrontPage, Dreamweaver etc.)

3. I would have saved THOUSANDS of dollars (I’m not joking, I’ve spent thousands on my education, one course costing me $4000!).

Online Marketing Education

If you buy this course, which, by the way, has a money-back guarantee for a whole YEAR, you will go from being a complete Newbie internet marketer to virtual expert within one month!  Why one month?  Because it will take you that long to go through the course, it’s THAT COMPREHENSIVE!

XSitePro

The coure is based around their wonderful software XSitePro, which is easily the best (and easiest) software for creating professional websites, and it’s particularly good for internet marketers. So YES, if you buy the course, you WILL need to get their software.  IT’S WORTH TEN TIMES what they charge for it!

The Complete Guide To Website Building comprises a series of 26 video modules (one per day hence the month it will take you to complete) and is ONLY $197.  I can’t believe they are only charging this for it. I suppose they know that they’ll get sales for XSitePro because of it, so you can see that the course is HEAVILY discounted.

Whether you are an intermediate-level marketer wanting to speed up the learning curve, or a complete newbie, this course has a LOT to offer, from Pay Per Click education to Affiliate Marketing.

I urge you to take a look at their sales page right now by clicking the image below.  I promise you, their sales page does NOT exaggerate one bit, in fact, I think they are even underplaying how good the course actually is.

Luke.

IT Support Birmingham

UK support, IT management, and hosted desktop services.

What’s Causing The Recovery

The “…….green shoots of recovery……..” that are meant to be sprouting must be based on SOMETHING, right?!  I mean, things can’t just get better for no reason.

So what IS the reason?

Let’s think about it; it could be the new tele-transportation devices that have been invented and made so cheaply that everybody can travel anywhere within seconds.  Or, it might be the free energy that we have discovered how to store and transport to everybody at no cost to them.  Perhaps it’s the Time Machines that were devised recently and that are being used to go back in time and correct the financial mess that we’ve been thrown into?  How about the fact that all humans have suddenly decided to get along by agreeing on one political system and one religion?

Facetious!  Me?

Of COURSE I’m being facetious.  My point is that NOTHING has happened to create a recovery from this depression (oops! I mean “recession”) and until that time comes (and it will be a long time coming) there will BE no recovery.

After the stock-market crash of 1929, it took TWO YEARS before the Great Deprssion really started, and when it did, it lasted for a whole DECADE.  In America, it wasn’t until the U.S. joined the Second World War that the recovery actually started.  Yes, it took A WAR to get the economy growing again.

Why A War?

How could a war be good for the economy?  Simple; it created lots of NEEDS.  The needs were for new products and services to feed the war machine.  Airplanes didn’t build themselves, nor did all the other equipment needed to fight a war.

Today, we are in a similar BUT FAR WORSE situation than people 80 years ago.  We have mortgages, credit cards and lots of other things that we have borrowed money to buy.  The financial “geniuses” who have created all of these “investment instruments” (scams) have taken what we individuals have done to ourselves and made it a thousand times worse.

The End

History will show this period to be one of MASSIVE change, both politically and physically.

Like pulling off a band-aid, it’s going to hurt and it will hurt A LOT for a lot of people.  Will we survive it? As race (humans that is), we most likely will survive it.

Humans might even come out of it as better people; more educated, stronger, more understanding and more creative than ever.

The harrowing experiences that we are all about to endure will either make you or break you.  As an individual, you should start preparing NOW for these changes. You must learn new skills and learn them quickly.  There really is no point in shutting the barn door after the horse has already said “bye bye” (ever heard of Mr. Ed?).

Luke.

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What is a “Jobless Recovery”

Ever heard the joke about economists?  “If you laid all the world’s economists end to end, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion!”
The term”jobless recovery” have been bandied about recently to describe the “end of the recession”, and I’ve decided to add my ten-cents

worth.  The term was first used in the 1990’s by economists who noted that a country’s Gross Domestic Product could actually increase, even though unemployment figures were static, or were continuing to rise.

Gross Domestic Product is nothing more than a figure, denominated in that country’s currency, that quantifies how much trade was done, both WITHIN the country and WITH other countries.  So, if lots of trades are made using that country’s currency, and the trades make up an increased amount on the previous three months (a quarter), then the economy is said to be growing.  Conversely, if the figure is less than the previous quarter, the economy is said to be slowing.

Think About It

What they are saying is in effect, because of mechanization, automation and sophisticated technology, and country’s output of products and services can increase, even though fewer people are working.  This is not only true, but it is also a FACT.  It CAN happen.

Good For You?

Because of advanced technology, it’s possible for humans (in any country) to be more productive. The Industrial Revolution proved this point very well, with increased output in food production, manufactured products and speed of transportation of goods to name just a few things.

So, that makes everybody better off, right?  Erm, actually, not necessarily.  Just because more products are being produced, and more services are being offered, doesn’t mean that the people IN the country producing them are any better off.  Many times, the most productive countries have a very poor population (e.g. China, India) overall.

Tomorrow, I’ll conclude this article with what I think can REALLY get the world’s economy back on track.

Luke.

How many types of website are there?

There are BASICALLY four types of website, and each choosing which website to create depends on what you want it for and what you want it to do for you.  They are:

1. Sales letter
2. Content site
3. Mini-site (sometimes called a Micro-site)
4. Landing page

Let’s discuss each one in turn.

Sales Letter

This is basically just one long page and is designed to sell one thing.  A good example can be seen at:

Ballistic Blogging for Cash

The typical sales letter explains a problem which the reader may be experiencing, then offers a solution, demonstrating benefits and ends with a call to action.

Content Site

Content sites are basically sites full of massive amounts of information.  Blogs (like this one) and sites such as Wikepedia are excellent examples.  They are designed to keep people returning for more information, and are especially good for advertising other products,  with AdSense ads or Affiliate links.  The essence of a content sites is relationship building.

Mini-Site

Sometimes called Micro-sites, Mini-sites are also very good at selling.  They are usually between 3 and 10 pages long and describe a range of products.  Affiliate marketers use these all the time.

Landing Page

A landing page or squeeze page, is just one page usually (though some internet marketers are making them more sophisticated now) and is designed to do one thing and one thing only, and that is to build an email list.  Once a marketer has a list of names and associated email addresses, he (or she) can mail offers of their own or as an affiliate multiple times with multiple products.

There you have it; four types of website that pretty much covers everything somebody would do with a site.  I hope this clarifies things for you.

Luke.

Backlinks

As you know, a large part of success in internet marketing (and therefore making money on the internet) is getting other websites linking back to your site.  This is critical if you want to both rank well in the search engines, and therefore get more people to find your site.  It does this because the search engines (Google, Yahoo and the rest) want to provide the most RELEVANT information to their customers (the people searching) and the search engines see backlinks as votes (and we all know what happens when lots of people vote, right!?).

Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo has a great feature called Site Explorer.  By simply typing-in the full (including http://) URL into their simple interface, you will be provided with a list (see image above) of ALL of the sites that are linking back to yours.  This is invaluable information, as you can see exectly who is making your site rank better.  These links could be from articles you’ve written, or comments left on somebody else’s blog.

Spying

One of the best uses for this FREE tool, is that you can spy on other websites.  Choose a site that is ranking well (determined by Alexa and Google for example) and then you’ll know WHO to contact about getting links back to YOUR site!

This is a great tool, so don’t forget to use it on a regular basis, at least once a month.

Luke.

The Mixx Team

The Mixx company has been around for several years now, compiling and remixing content chosen by their members (you?) and making it available online.  They do this to (make money, that’s a given) provide its users with a broad range of sites that will be of interest to them and their community.

TweetMixx

TweetMixx is their first real attempt bringing Twitter into their mix (pun intended).  Their approach is to help you MANAGE both your followers and the people YOU follow on Twitter; kind of like a one-stop dashboard for all your Twitter needs.  It allows you to sift-out the “noise” of thousands of ‘Tweets’ and brings ONLY the content that YOU are interested in right into your TweetMixx interface page.

Noise

The noise I’m referring to is all the non-relevant garbage that your followers decide to barrage you with.  How, for example, can you REALLY tell what a tinyURL link will take you too unless you actually CLICK IT?  Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a little thumbnail image of the page that you’ll be taken to?  That’s what TweetMixx will do for you.

Internet Marketing

As in internet marketer trying to make a full-time income online, the last thing you need is to be bombarded with so much erroneous and non-relevant rubbish that, by the time you’ve finished going through the links from your followers (or the people you are following) you’ll have about half an hour of the day left to do your work.  That is, the work that will generate most of your money.

I think that Twitter is, to a large degree, a victim of its own success.  So many people have jumped onto the band wagon, erroneously thinking that thousands of other people actually give a hoot about the fact that you’re having a cup of coffee or are about to walk your dog, that its effects are being watered down (rather like some world currencies I could mention) to the point that Twitter is becoming ineffective for marketers.

Twitter

Who is REALLY benefiting from Twitter?  People who are already FAMOUS, that’s who.  They can now tell the world what’s going through their minds (if anything) from their cell phones.

Don’t get me wrong, you CAN use Twitter to get YOUR message out to the world, but it’s becoming harder by the day. Tweetmixx may well be your answer, at least in the short-term.  Long term, I don’t think Twitter will survive, but hey, I could be wrong.

Luke.

Article Titles

The title of your article is very important as is the sub-title and the headings, thre reason being that most people are scanners; rather than read the entire article, they are much more likely to quickly look at things that capture their attention, and words in bold (like titles), sub-headings etc. serve to draw their eyes.

Underlines

Underlines and Italic text also has a similar effect, as to numbered lists and bullet points.  These all serve to help the reader decide whether or not to read the entire text in full.

Subjects For Articles

As for WHAT to write about, here is a list (to draw your eye) of several ways in which you start your thought process:

1. What’s in your ‘Inbox’?

2. What problems do your readers have right now?

3. What outrageous thoughts have you had lately (clean ones that is!)

4. What was on the news today?

5. What free tools do you know about that your readers might not?

6. What is happening now that might affect your readers in the near future?

7. Who are your heroes and heroines?  Write about them.

8. What problems have you overcome (in your blogs subject matter) and how did you overcome them?

9. What is happening in your specific industry right now?

10. What products have you used that your readers might want to hear about?

This is not exhaustive of course.  If you have any ideas you’d like to add, please leave me a comment for others to read about.

Ways To Start Your Article

Luke.

Categories

Recessions can also be categorized.  There are four types of recession that are referred to by analysts and they are as follows: V, W, U and L.  The letters refer to pictorial representations that would be seen on a graph of activity and time.

V Type

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The V recession is one where activity drops drastically, but quickly recovers, the left arm of the V being the drop, and the right arm, the recovery. While unpleasant, they are short-lived.  Everybody on Wall street hoped that the current economic downturn would be a V type recession.

W Type

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The W recession is sometimes referred to as a “double-dipped” one, where there is a violent drop in economic activity, a strong and quick recovery and then another equally (or worse) drop but followed by a slightly slower recovery.

U Type

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The U recession is what most analysts are saying we are currently experiencing, whereby there is a sharp drop which gradually gets worse, bottoms-out and then recovers quite dramatically, back up to the levels that it enjoyed before its descent.  Therefore, market analysts who believe this think that the “recession” will be over at the end of 2010.

L Type

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The L recession really describes a depression, characterized by a steep decline in economic activity, followed by a prolonged period, sometimes several years, of little or no growth.

While it is easy to think of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (or S&P 500, or NASDAQ) as little more than reflections of what an economy is doing, they really aren’t as closely related as most people think.

A single stock price, and indeed an entire index (Dow Jones, S&P etc.) can be rising very quickly, while the economy itself is in sharp decline.  Don’t make the same mistake that so many other people make.

Just keep in mind, that while unemployment continues to worsen, there can be NO economic recovery.  For a country to truly prosper, among other things, it needs people in employment, supplying products and services to each other AND to other countries.

Luke.

The 4 Hour Work Week has been one of the most successful AND influential books written this decade.  The author, Tim Ferriss, makes his case brilliantly for a failing society of people who are convinced (or have been brainwashed from birth) that working for “works sake” is a good thing and that working hard enough WILL make you wealthy and happy.

Proven

Not only has he written a fascinating thesis on living your life differently, AND given step-by-step instructions on HOW to achieve this, but he actually LIVES this lifestyle himself.

For example, he runs several businesses from his laptop, regardless of whether he’s in the U.S., Brazil, China or any other country he has chosen to spend one of his “mini-retirements” in.

He also refuses to employ direct staff, but instead “farms-out” his more menial tasks to people in India, paying them about 10% of what the same job would cost him in the U.S.A., AND without paying for the normal benefits that American employees expect.

Life Coaching

While many people pay “experts” to tell them how to better live their lives (known as “life coaching”) the very idea of this is, if you think about it, quite absurd.

Now, I’m not saying that people can’t benefit somewhat from some good advice; most people certainly can.  However, paying somebody on a weekly/monthly basis is probably a waste of money.  After all, how long should it take to tell you that you need to get rid of some body-fat with a little exercise and eating less food, or to start your own business?

Be Your OWN Life Coach

While not exhaustive, here is what any life coach will tell you in a nutshell (but you won’t have to pay them each week; all you have to do is read this post again every week!).

1. Take one hour (or thereabouts) each week and dedicate it to improving your life.  You would have done this with a paid life coach anyway, so you may as well do it by yourself (and save some time and money traveling). Don’t EVER fill this time with ANYTHING ELSE.  Not EVER!  That hour will add up to over six 8 hour days during the course of a year.

2. Be nice!  To yourself that is.  It’s EASY to beat up on yourself for all the things you haven’t done, or think you can’t do.  FACT: most people can’t do most things. We all have to learn, and NONE of us can be good at everything.  So, give yourself a break; you’re just human, not super-human!

3. Put your life into perspective.  How does your life COMPARE to BILLIONS of others around the world?  Not so bad is it?  After all, you’re reading this, which means you have ACCESS to a computer, probably with high-speed internet, which in turn means you’re living in a country that is better off that most other countries in the world.

4. Think about what your ideal life would be like.  This can be “pie-in-the-sky” stuff if you like, but you HAVE to have something to aim for, otherwise you can’t possibly get there.

5. Write down all the changes you would make ON PAPER and keep the paper by the side of your bed so you can read it every night.  Then, choose the change you want that you think will be the easiest to achieve.

6. Write down the things you need to do to achieve your first change.  What type of books would you need to read?  Research books in that field to find out which ones are the best.  Get a library card and order the books (online is easiest).  READ THE BOOKS!

7. Write a blog or keep a diary about your progress and struggles.  Writing it down makes it REAL and creates a sense of sharing.  If you know how, blog about it; you’ll get comments from other people who may be able to help you and YOU may be able to help them!

8. Once you made your first change successfully, work on the rest of your list in order of easiness.  As you make progress in each one, your confidence will grow, making it easier to achieve the more difficult changes you want to make.

Change

Change, whether voluntary OR mandatory (like losing your job) is never easy, but it IS NECESSARY if you want to improve your life.  Change is going to happen anyway, so WELCOME it, don’t be afraid of it.

Luke.

A very quick post today to tell you about a great site where you can get FREE banners for your websites. As an internet marketer, it’s important when making money on the internet to also SAVE money by using whatever free, online services are available.

Eventually you will have to get away from the “free” mentality of course, because the really good stuff is often available only at a price, that price being compensation for the time and effort that other people have put into creating the product or service.

But when you’re starting out, FREE is a simply wonderful.

Interface

What’s more, you don’t have to have ANY old banner.  You can actually create a custom banner using a gallery of images and a series of color pickers and text choices.  The image below shows you the simple and intuitive interface:

Once you made your choices, you can preview your banner.  If you don’t like something about it, you can modify it and then preview it again until you’re happy with the result.

The Code

Finally, once you have the result that you want, you can simply use one of several choices of html code to add to your website.  Below is one that I just created:

Why Is It Free?

This is ALWAYS a good question to ask, and not just about internet marketing either!  For a start, they have lots of advertisements on their site, and you may well click on them, which will earn them money (and some are really clever, using quizzes etc. to get you involved).  Secondly, each banner embedded on your site (like the one above) will have a link in it directed to www.bannerbreak.com.  This is perfectly legitimate of course.

If you right click on any banner you create (try the one above) and then click ‘Properties’, you’ll see what I mean. This helps them with the search engines, because it creates THOUSANDS of links pointing back to them, which in turn pushed them further up the search-engine results pages (SERPS).

Have fun with it, but a word of warning; it CAN become quite addictive and be VERY time consuming.

Luke.

Twitter

A bit like Andrew Warhola (who?) in the late 1960’s, Twitter has become incredibly popular, and, like Andrew , for no APPARENT reason.  After all, Andy Warhol (his chosen “public” name) couldn’t paint and he made lousy movies.  Neither of these things stopped him becoming popular, and Twitter seems to be following the same path.

I’m being a little unfair of course.  Twitter works on the assumption that everybody following you is genuinely interested in what you have to say each day, or each hour, or every time you take a sip of coffee.  Though this patently isn’t true, it does seem to have established itself as a very unique way of marketing yourself and/or your website.

Brad Callen

Brad Callen, famous for several pieces of great software, including the excellent SEO Elite, has now created some software that will help you add Twitter followers.  What’s more, it’s FREE!

Brad realized that one of the best ways to get people to follow you, is to run competitions, and that’s exactly what his software is designed to help you do.

Competitions

Let’s face it, people like competitions.  It’s the main reason that sports events are so prevalent.  If this isn’t the reason, why would men pay to watch other SWEATY men chase a ball around a field? (You guessed it, I’m not a sports fan!).

In fact, if you were to Google “Twitter Giveaway” (without the quotes) you’ll get around 18,000,000 results.  Yes, people ARE looking for Twitter giveaways.

What The Software Will Do

Twiveaway allows you to create your campaign,then select the crtieria for the competition ( whether you have to follow the person, retweet the message etc.) and finally post a message onto Twitter.  This step will tell people about your giveawaay, once they have met the criteria on the previous step.

From that point on, the software does all the rest for you, sending a direct Twitter message to each person who responds.

Not Always Available

Brad opens the doors to this free web-based software every few months, so if you go there and it’s currently closed, you’ll have to check back each week until he opens the doors again.

If you’re into Tweeting, this could very well help your efforts.  If you’re not because you believe that Twitter will go the way of Andy Warhol, then just remember, Andy made a ton of money while he WAS popular.

Luke.

“In the simplicity of their minds, people more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have such impudence.
Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”
— Adolph Hitler

Ridiculous And Dangerous

If you think you can’t learn anything from a ridiculous looking, genocidal maniac, think again.  World leaders have known what Hitler knew centuries before Hitler wrote the words above.  There are some MASSIVE lies being told to the public all around the world right now and the perpetrators of the lies are the very people that were elected to protect and serve their respective countries.

Keep a vigilant eye out for inconsistencies.  When a person says one things and DOES another, you KNOW that person is lying.

Chairman Ben

Here are some things said by someone in the U.S. who has a very powerful job.  See if you can guess who said them:

May 17, 2007: “The effects of the troubles in the sub-prime sector on the broader
housing market will likely be limited, and we do not expect significant spillovers from the
subprime market to the rest of the economy, or to the financial system.”

July 18, 2007: “If energy prices level off as currently anticipated, overall inflation should
slow to a pace close to that of core inflation in coming quarters.”

October 15, 2007: “The banking system is healthy… Rather than becoming more crisisprone,
the financial system is likely to emerge from this episode healthier and more
stable than before.”

November 8, 2007: “We have not calculated the probability of a recession. Our
assessment is for slower growth, but positive growth going into next year. We think that
by the spring, early next year, that, as these credit problems resolve and as, we hope,
the housing market begins to find a bottom, that the broader resiliency of the economy,
which we are seeing in other areas outside of housing, will take control and will help the
economy recover to a more reasonable growth pace.”

January 10, 2008: “Thus, notwithstanding the effects of multi-billion dollar write-downs
on the earnings and share prices of some large institutions, the banking system remains
sound… The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession.”

February 27, 2008: “The central tendency of the projections is for the real GDP to grow
between 1.3 percent and 2.0 percent in 2008.”

April 2, 2008: “Monetary and fiscal politics are in train that should support a return to
growth in the second half of this year and next year.”

June 3, 2008: “We may see somewhat better economic conditions during the second
half of 2008, reflecting the effects of monetary and fiscal stimulus, reduced drag from
residential construction, further progress in the repair of financial and credit markets,
and still solid demand from abroad. This baseline forecast is consistent with our recently
released projections, which also see growth picking up further in 2009. Futures markets
continue to predict that commodity prices will level out.”

July 15, 2008: “Growth is projected to pick up gradually over the next two years as
residential construction bottoms out and begins a slow recovery and as credit conditions
gradually improve.”

September 24, 2008: “Over time, a number of factors should promote the return of our
economy to higher levels of employment and sustainable growth with price stability,
including the stimulus being provided by monetary policy, lower oil and commodity
prices, increasing stability in the mortgage and housing markets, and the natural
recuperative powers of our economy.”

Lies Or Mistakes?

Here’s my point: it DOESN’T MATTER whether this person was misleading 300 million people or if he was just wrong.  EITHER WAY, this person (and those whom he represents) cannot be trusted.

Luke.

P.S. If you haven’t guessed who is the author of the above statements, just leave a comment and I’ll tell you.

Note: George Carlin was right of course; the leaders we get are the leaders that we choose.  Maybe we should look to ourselves to blame.  Maybe we should rethink what democracy REALLY means.

As an internet marketer, you know that getting people to visit your website is paramount to your site’s success.  What a lot of people forget, however, is that once you’ve managed to get them there, KEEPING them there is of even more importance.  A new and totally FREE script called VideoStacker may well help you do this.

Customers

In a regular “real-world” business, getting somebody to become a customer is hard work.  You have to show them what service or product you have to offer and explain the benefits to them, and show them why they will be better off if they were to do business with you rather than somebody else.  Once you’ve done this, you have to live up to, and preferably exceed, your new customer’s expectations. This is making your business “sticky” to them.

Sticky Websites

A sticky website is one that people get onto and stay on for a long time.  Perfect examples of this are YouTube, FileCabi.net, Daily Motion etc.  All of these are quite addictive, because they offer excitement, education, fun, weirdness……..all the things that people want.

VideoStacker allows you to ad a widget to your website that automatically brings in videos that are related to keywords that YOU SELECT.  So, if your website is about making money online, you can use terms like “how to make money on the interet”, or “online business”.  This will them trigger the software script to bring in videos from YouTube that have these keywords in them.

As you can see from the image above, it also has an integrated search box, so your readers can search YouTube directly from within your website, AND view the videos WITHOUT LEAVING YOUR SITE.  (This is the critical part!)

Script

The software is a script that is installed directly into your server.  This means that you can have it showing the videos on more than one domain; in other words, you only have to install it once to work on multiple sites.  It creates codes for each different website using the keywords (and other parameters that you choose), and then all you have to do is paste-in the code to the area of your website where you want the widget (above) to show.

Download

If you click on the first image at the top of the page, you will be taken to their home page, where you will have to enter your name and email to get download instructions (and lots of marketing emails after that, which may or may not be useful to you).  If, however, you’d rather not get onto their list, you can click the image of the widget (above) to get a direct download of the zipped VideoStacker script.

In my opinion, well worth trying it to see if you like it.

Luke.

Michael Cheney

The best tutorial I’ve studied so far is by Michael Cheney (his website). His favorite medium for teaching is using videos and he’s done a truly excellent job with these. There are over 40 videos in total and each one gives detailed information on a specific technique for attracting more visitors to your site.

The techniques include:

1. How to get more visitors using free press releases
2. How to use social networking sites like MySpace
3. How to use a blog to attract more visitors
4. How to get OTHER people to send traffic to your site
5. How to get links from other people’s websites to your site for better search engine ranking.

The list goes on and on, and I don’t want to labor the point, be he really DOES cover everything you could want to know about attracting visitors to your site.

Affiliate Millions

Another of his excellent videos tutorials is called Affiliate Millions.  In the videos, Michael explain how to go from complete beginner to advanced affiliate salesperson within just a few month.  You can read his sales letter by clicking the image below:

His style, as usual, is relaxed and humorous. The tutorials are very easy to watch and also very entertaining. He also shows you many websites offering free services that you can use to enhance your ‘traffic-seeking’ efforts. I don’t know about you, but I LOVE free-stuff!

Once you’ve studies these, I have no doubt whatsoever that you’ll be able to make any and all of your websites attract hundreds of visitors each day and on an ongoing basis. Both courses are highly recommended for beginners, but even some pro’s can learn from them.

You can check it out yourself at this link.

Luke.

GDP Continued From Yesterday…..

The theory goes like this; if a country has lots of trades within its own borders AND with other nations, then it must be doing well financially. It is often used as an indicator of a country’s standard of living, though this isn’t always the case.

Standard Of Living

Why? Because of several factors; for example, the value of the country’s currency compared to others can help determine the standard of living enjoyed in a given country. The type of government in power (dictatorship etc.) will have a strong influence, and most importantly, products produced IN EXCESS of what it needs to survive must be considered.

Wealth

REAL wealth, whether it is individual wealth or national wealth, should only ever be measured in terms of what is available IN EXCESS of what is required to survive. When and individual can afford buy a new car every year whether he needs it or not is a sign of having something in excess of what he needs. Please note that I said “can AFFORD”. If a person has to take a loan out to pay for the new car, or a mortgage for the new house, then he cannot really afford it.

The Time Lag

One very important thing to remember is that severe economic downturns in a country (or indeed, worldwide) are ONLY called Depressions YEARS AFTER they happened. Because a country’s GDP has to drop by at least 10% over the previous year, or the decline lasts for three years or more, by definition it can ONLY be called a depression a minimum of one year after the fact, OR three years after (if the decline was less than 10%) .

The GreatER Depression

As I write this, the world is in a steep economic decline. In other words, there are far fewer trades going on both within any given country and between countries. While this cannot be technically referred to as a depression, there is no doubt at all that it WILL be called a depression in the years ahead.

While some people will eventually call it the GREATEST DEPRESSION, who’s to say that in another 80 years time (if humanity still exists) we won’t be led into yet ANOTHER DEPRESSION?  Historically, that’s exactly what happens.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the words used to describe a situation (economic or otherwise) are just words. What really matters is how people DEAL with that situation. They need to learn from historical events so that they can both deal with the current situation, and make sure that they teach the next generation how to prevent it from happening again. History does NOT have to “repeat itself”, BUT IT WILL!

Be Prepared!

YOU can protect yourself from this to a large degree, but you have to understand two things:

1. What to expect

2. How to prepare

Notice I didn’t say “how to REACT”.  Reaction means that it’s already TOO LATE; you would be reacting to something that has already happened.  Instead, you need to prepare yourself.  How?  Learn new skills.  Learn how to make your living INDEPENDENTLY of an employer.  Perhaps you can become a blogger and offer products that people living in a depression will want and need. Maybe you can learn to sell affiliate products on the internet.

Don’t look to the politicians to save you.  They are the ones that got us into this mess and they have no idea how to get us out.  You’ll have to protect YOURSELF!

Luke.

How to make money online

Confused? - Most People ARE!

There is a great deal of confusion over the economic terms ‘recession’ and ‘depression’. Prior to the Great Depression in the early 1930’s, ALL downturns in a given country’s economy were called a “depression”.

Depressions Didn’t Exist Until………..

In the U.S.A. during the Great Depression, the term “recession” was first used. It was used so that people could more easily understand the difference between a smaller downturn in economic activity and more a more severe one. For example, in both 1910 and 1913, the U.S. economy declined from the previous year, but, in HINDSIGHT, they were referred to as merely recessions, because of the much deeper problem of the 1930’s.

A Recession

A recession, as defined by the Business Cycle Dating Committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research, is the decline of business activity in the economy including employment, industrial production, real income, retail and wholesale sales. Some economists won’t use the term “recession” until the decline has lasted for six months (two quarters).

The U.S.A. for example, saw its worst recession between 1974 and 1975, when the “business activity” declined by about 4.9%.

A DEPRESSION

So what do economists currently label as a depression? Technically, it is when a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is 10% lower than the previous year’s GDP, OR if the GDP drops (even if it’s less than 10%) each year for three consecutive years.

Unfortunately this raises more questions than it answers. What exactly IS Gross Domestic Product?

Gross Domestic Product

The GDP is defined as “measure of a country’s economic performance and is the market value of all final goods and services made within the borders of a country in a year”. That would include ALL transactions within the country AND between that country and others. This would include every exchange involving money. The GDP is often confused with the GNP, or Gross National Product, and while they are often very similar figures, they are not the same.

Gross National Product

The GNP is the Gross National Product, which refers to the PEOPLE, who not all may be in the same physical location. E.g. GNP of all United States citizens will be somewhat different to the GDP of the Nation called the U.S.A. Put more simply, GNP refers to people, and GDP refers to a country.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about what the world is currently experiencing.

Luke.

- Milton Friedman

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Remember, we WILL have hyperinflation AFTER several months of deflation.  Inventing money backed by nothing other than ink and paper can ONLY lead to hyperinflation.

CLEARLY, THAT IS NOT THE WAY TO CREATE WEALTH.  The video is nothing more than hocus-pocus (I”ve never written that before………and I’m not TOO sure what it even means!!!).

What Is Wealth?

If I asked you to describe wealth, what would your answer be? Dictionary definitions for ‘Wealth’ are:

1. A great quantity or store of money, valuable possessions, property or other riches
2. An abundance or profusion of anything; plentiful amount
3. All things that have monetary or exchange value
4. Anything that has utility and is capable of appropriated or exchanged
5. Rich or valuable contents or produce

These dictionary definitions fit what we think of as wealth very nicely, don’t you think?

Creating Wealth

Now, what if I asked you to describe how wealth is CREATED. What would your answer be?

The fact is, MOST people never give this the slightest thought. If pressed, most people will come up with some idea about how it’s created, but typically their answers will be confused and contradictory.

So, let’s think about it for a moment. Things (boats, aeroplanes, wristwatches, jewelry, cars etc.) are made in factories around the world (okay mostly CHINA right now) but are these factories creating wealth? Or are they just creating ‘things’ which are of equal value to the money paid? If it’s of EQUAL value, then nothing has been created!

Value

To create value, you need to do something (make something or provide something) for other people that they need or want, and when they exchange something of theirs for it, they are getting MORE (not equal) than the value of their bargaining item (for now, let’s say they’re using money to trade with).

Okay, we all value things differently (which we’ll talk about in the near future) but for now, accept that you can get MORE back than the cost to you. Let’s see how this works.

A Million Dollar Car

Question: could you build a car? I don’t mean a ‘kit-car’ where it’s half done for you and you add the engine and wheels. I mean, could you locate the iron-ore, dig it up, smelt it, design the engine, build it (AND build the tools to build the car), make the seats…………….well, you get the picture. No, of course you couldn’t. Nobody can. No ONE body can. Even if you could, imagine how much it would cost you to actually do it. Millions of dollars! Multiple millions for ONE car!

But we can buy all of this fantastic technology for a $10-20k, or for a couple of thousand if you’re buying a previously used one.

Lost

So, what’s my point? Well, let’s take a far simpler scenario. Imagine you are like the survivors on a popular TV show about being LOST on a tropical island. How could you possibly become wealthy?

How about doing this:

While each of your 10 colleagues are laboring for 10 hours each day, walking up the foothills to the lake to get fresh water and hauling it back to camp in makeshift buckets, fishing for themselves or hunting (because some like meat and others like fish), YOU do this AND you work an extra 2 hours each day.

What Would YOU Do?

What do you do with this time? Firstly, you make an agreement with them. You say, “If I could save you the two hour walk up that dangerous hill to the freshwater lake each day, would each of you spend just ONE HOUR doing things for me?” (This is called ‘market research; you are determining if there is a demand for your product/service).

The Contract

Let’s say they agree. Who wouldn’t? If you could perform this ‘miracle’ you would be saving them a NET time of three hours each per day (2 hours up the hill and 2 hours back + 4 hours), during which they could do other things (laze around, party or create something useful perhaps?).

So they sensibly agree to this verbal contract and you then proceed to continue to do your own work for 10 hours (hunting, fetching water etc. looking after yourself) but you ALSO work an extra 2 hours building a really neat bamboo pipeline from the lake all the way down to the camp. (No, I don’t want to get into engineering details, it’s the principle that matters here!).

The Product/Service

Once you’ve CREATED this, after weeks of extra effort, inventiveness and toil, overcoming obstacles and fighting off savage beasts (okay, I’m getting a little carried away now), you can relax EVERY DAY (should you so wish, though being the enterprising person you are, you probably wouldn’t) because the 10 hours of work you needed to do just to survive is now being done by your 10 colleagues, each working 1 hour for you, because you have saved them EACH three hours per day!

REAL Wealth Has Been Created

THAT is how wealth is created!  You created something IN EXCESS of what you needed to survive so that you could profit from it.  A BY-PRODUCT of this, is that other people benefit from it also………..but it IS a by-product!

The poorest people in the U.S.(even in these very poor economic times) are currently enjoying a lifestyle that is FAR BETTER than a King lived 500 years ago, simply because over the centuries, other people have created wealth, which we are all benefiting from to this day.

Anybody CAN create wealth. By improving other people’s lives, you can create wealth for them AND yourself.

Luke.

A very quick post today, because Google explains its ‘Insight for Search’ tool way better than I ever could right here:

Google Insights for Search

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What Is Insights for Search?

In the proverbial “nutshell”, Insights for Search allows you to compare the amount of searches that people make.  Doesn’t their Keyword Search Tool do this?  Yes, it does, however, the Insights tool allows you to make comparisons within specific categories, time periods or regions around the world.

Interface

As with all Google products and services, the interface (above) is clean, simple and intuitive.    You simply have to select either just the search term (keyword), the location (by country) or the time range (seel image below).

There are several options including:

1. Choose a category; this feature allows you to be more specific, so you can choose from an array of about 20 topics (e.g. Arts and Humanities, Travel, Sports, Finance etc.)

2. Seasonality; this allows you to quickly determine the potential demand for your products and services by the time of year.  This is an excellent tool, especially when combined with the locations tool.  For example, when it’s summer in the Northern hemisphere, it’s Winter in the Southern Hemisphere.

3. Geographic Distribution; knowing where your audience/customer-base is located based on what they are searching for is very important to know.  If you know this information, you can better market to them.

4. Properties; this allows you to see other areas of Google’s information database.

This is definitely a tool you should acquaint yourself with.  Knowing the trends created by the media, the news being reported (even if it isn’t REALLY “news worthy”) and the searching public is information that just might transform the way you do business.

Luke.

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That is, of course, the trailer for the movie ‘The Perfect Storm’.  It’s the story of six fishermen who risk their lives…..for fish.  (Hmmmm).  Anyway, in the movie they confront a storm created by nature; the “perfect storm” describes how several things coincide to create horrific weather conditions. The storm we are currently having just a glimpse of is man-made.

Politics and Politicians

Politicians have been playing this pathetic game of controlling people with force or money for hundreds of years.  So what’s so different now?  There are several things that have culminated in the very dangerous situation the world is now in.

I’m not going to go into the religious aspects, other than to say people have varying views about how to live life and what happens after death……….and these views vary (even WITHIN a SINGLE religion) so much, that millions of people have died horribly, or lived miserably, because of these differing views.  That is NO exaggeration  Religion is NOT what my blog is about, though religion WILL play its part in what has started to happen in the world; it always does.

What Will Happen

The storm I’m referring to is the depression that we are now in; you know, the one that everybody is pretending isn’t happening. The storm has started as a FINANCIAL issue.  Both the previous world wars STARTED as financial issues.  After several months of deflation (nobody knows for sure how long the deflationary depression will last, but most likely somewhere between 12 months and two years) the storm will then follow the historical course of:

1. Hyperinflation (due to overprinting money). This means outrageously expensive food, gas, utilities etc.

2. Increased taxes (hey, they have offices to run too you know!)

3. Protests

4. Riots

5. Massive crime (already on the increase).  Most likely burglaries, muggings, auto-theft initially

6. An underground market in goods of all kinds

7. Unofficial currency trading (as currencies fail, some will seem more attractive than others)

8. Unofficial bartering (as currencies fail)

9. Civil unrest generally

What happens after this is anybody’s guess, but historically, to bring a country back together as a unified entity, politicians typically take “their” countries to war.  Who with?  Anybody will do.

Putting Out the Fire

Continually printing money to solve the financial problems is a lot like using gasoline to extinguish a fire.  The very thing that CAUSED the problem (an unsustainable lifestyle based on money that didn’t really exist because it was borrowed or printed) cannot possibly be the solution to that problem.

Don’t Shoot the Messenger!

While I am not happy about the way things WILL go (I keep telling my wife what to expect and I’ve been right every time for the past year and 8 months; really, not ONE miss yet!) please don’t stop reading my posts just because it isn’t full of all the fun fluffy stuff.  I tell you these things to prepare you, not to frighten you.

Learn New Skills

You need warning so that you can prepare yourself; you still have time to learn new skills.  You CAN learn how to make money online.  People will need advice.  Do you know what foods can be found in the countryside FREE of charge?  Do you know how to secure a house?  Do you know how to generate electricity from nothing? Do you know how to use herbs and other plants as cures for infections, headaches etc?

If you want to know how to FIND people who already have problems that they want solutions to, ‘Desperate Buyers Only’ is the best book I’ve ever read on the subject, and well worth the purchase price.

All of these skills and THOUSANDS more will be saleable online (or TRADEABLE). If you can type it or record it, you can make a pdf book or audio and offer it for sale on your blog or other website.  You can even record what is happening on your computer screen and sell that.

The world is changing RAPIDLY and nobody can stop what is about to happen.

Market Adjustment

I’m not viewing the coming storm as something that you can’t cope with, though it WILL be very, VERY unpleasant for most people.  Instead I think of it more as a market adjustment.  Like the stock market, the world is going to go through an adjustment.  It won’t be nice, but it is necessary.  Prepare yourself.  It all starts with your THINKING.

Get your thinking right and everything else will follow.

Luke.

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But It’s NOT With the Machines

The video is the last three minutes of the movie ‘The Terminator’.  Sarah Connor (in the Jeep) knows that the world is about to be taken into a horrific war; a war with the machines.  If you haven’t seen the movie………what planet have you been living on?  Okay, MOST people in the western world and just about everybody with a TV has seen the movie; it’s “a classic” as people say.

At this point in the movie, Sarah has seen and experienced things that have convinced her that the world as she knows it is about to change; and it’s about to change RADICALLY.

Our World Is Changing

Though our planet is NOT going to go to war with machines, something much nastier IS going to happen.  How do I know?  The same way that Sarah Connor knew.  I’ve seen and experienced things that many people have not.  Watch this video below and see if you can find the tiniest fault with the lady’s thinking………………..

I’ll bet you spotted it!  Okay, who could POSSIBLY miss it?  The lady in the video believes that a politician is going to fix all of her problems.  In her case, what was of highest priority seemed to be gasoline for her car and the mortgage payment on her house.

I’m what I like to call a “political atheist” in that I don’t follow any political party.  Why don’t I?  Don’t I have political views?  Of course I do.  Here are some of them:

“Politicians create problems that don’t exist in the first place, and then offer solutions.”  Here’s another:

“Politicians are all the same, regardless of political party.  The two party system (Democrat and Republican) is ONE monster with two heads.”

“How do I know when a politician is lying? His (or her) lips are moving!”

Note:

NO politician is going to make your life better!  They don’t want to and if they did,  they don’t know HOW to.  As scary as that is, they are the facts.  Somebody has to pay for gasoline; it has to be found, pumped from the ground, refined, transported etc.  It’s not free.  Somebody has to pay for a house; the timber has to be cut and milled, the bricks made, the pipes and electrical wires made and installed.  Houses are not free.  Somebody has to put forth EFFORT to provide these things, and those people want, need and deserve compensation.

How Politicians Create Problems

Above ALL, politicians want power.  This need for power comes from an inward feeling of inadequacy and lack of security; they feel powerless.  But even when they have lots of power, they still feel the same way, so that need to constantly grab MORE power, not unlike drug addicts needing ever more drugs to sate them.

In this quest for power to feed their “habit” they promise things that CANNOT be delivered.  They promise people EVERYTHING!  Notice I didn’t say “anything”; oh no, they promise people EVERYTHING that people want.  They lead people (like the lady in the video) to believe that they can have everything they could ever want………..just so long as you VOTE for them.

Politicians who tell the facts (they exist, but they are very rare) are always unsuccessful.  This is because people WANT to hear how great things are going to be, rather than the facts about reality.

The Storm

This is one reason why there’s a storm coming, though politician have been playing this pathetic game for hundreds of years.  So what’s so different now?  There are several things that have culminated in the horrific situation the world is now in.

I’m not going to go into the religious aspects, other than to say people have varying views about how to live life and what happens after death……….and these views vary (even WITHIN a single religion) so much, that millions of people have died horribly because of these differing views.  That is NO exaggeration  Religion is NOT what my blog is about, though religion WILL play its part in what has started to happen in the world; it always does.

The storm I’m referring to is the depression that we are now in; you know, the one that everybody is pretending isn’t happening. The storm has started as a FINANCIAL issue.  Both the previous world wars STARTED as financial issues.  The storm will then follow the historical course of:

1. Hyperinflation (due to overprinting money). This means outrageously expensive food, gas, utilities etc.

2. Increased taxes (hey, they have offices to run too you know!)

3. Protests

4. Riots

5. Massive crime (already on the increase).  Most likely burglaries, muggings, auto-theft initially

6. An underground market in goods of all kinds

7. Unofficial currency trading (as currencies fail, some will seem more attractive than others)

8. Unofficial bartering (as currencies fail)

9. Civil unrest generally

What happens after this is anybody’s guess, but historically, to bring a country back together as a unified entity, politicians typically take “their” countries to war.  Who with?  Anybody will do.

Putting Out the Fire

Continually printing money to solve the financial problems is a lot like using gasoline to extinguish a fire.  The very thing that CAUSED the problem (an unsustainable lifestyle based on money that didn’t really exist because it was borrowed or printed) cannot possibly be the solution to that problem.

Don’t Shoot the Messenger!

While I am not happy about the way things WILL go (I keep telling my wife what to expect and I’ve been right every time for the past year and 8 months; really, not ONE miss yet!) please don’t stop reading my posts just because it isn’t full of all the fun fluffy stuff.  I tell you these things to prepare you, not to frighten you.

Learn New Skills

You need warning so that you can prepare yourself; you still have time to learn new skills.  You CAN learn how to make money online.  People will need advice.  Do you know what foods can be found in the countryside FREE of charge?  Do you know how to secure a house?  Do you know how to generate electricity from nothing? Do you know how to use herbs and other plants as cures for infections, headaches etc?

All of these skills and THOUSANDS more will be saleable online (or TRADEABLE). If you can type it or record it, you can make a pdf book or audio and offer it for sale on your blog or other website.

The world is changing RAPIDLY and nobody can stop what is about to happen.

Market Adjustment

I’m not viewing the coming storm as something horrific, though it WILL be very, VERY unpleasant for most people.  Instead I think of it more as a market adjustment.  Like the stock market, the world is going to go through an adjustment.  It won’t be nice, but it is necessary.  Prepare yourself.  It all starts with your THINKING.

Get your thinking right and everything else will follow.

Luke.

- Unknown

What Are Blogs Really?

Blogs are often simply personal thoughts, written by people who would like to hear from other people who have similar ideas. They can be little more than a history of a family growing up, or of vacations that people have had. They can be about literally anything in which humans are involved, from pet care to astro-physics.

Making Money With Blogs

What are people doing to make money with blogs? Typically, they choose a subject that they are interested in (or preferably PASSIONATE about) and in which they are quite knowledgeable, and they start writing about it. Businesses, ALL business, are little more than people offering products or services (or both) to other people. When the offer is accepted, trades are made; it’s that simple.

What Can You Sell On A Blog?

But what could be sold via a blog? The honest answer is “pretty much anything”. How is this done? Typically, a good blog demonstrates the author’s expertise in a certain area. It could be horse-grooming or computer-science; whatever it is, when people find your blog, they are almost always looking to GET something.

The Offer

To actually make money blogging, you have to offer the same thing; products or services.  But, just like a retailer with a shop, you can offer OTHER PEOPLE’S PRODUCTS.  To find products related to your blog, which your readers would be interested in, you can go to Clickbank.com or Commission Junction.

Kinds Of Products

Here you’ll find an array of both digital (videos, pdf books, audio files etc.) and physical products that you can promote for a very high percent commission.  If your reader clicks a link on your blog and proceeds to buy the product, you make money.

Amazon.com

You can even display Amazon.com books and sell those if you wish, though the percentage commission is much lower.

What Are Your Readers Looking For?

Always remember that your readers typically want a SOLUTION; that is, they are looking for a solution to a problem that they currently have. It could be a medical condition they have, or it could be instructions on how to repair a vehicle. Whatever it is, they want to get something, and often it is little more than information; but very SPECIFIC information that will help them solve their problem.

New To Blogging?

Most new bloggers expect people to find their website quickly and start commenting immediately, but alas, this is not how it works. You could write a three hundred word post each day for months and not get more than a handful of visitors to our blog. Why is this? There are lots of reasons, but two come readily to mind.

Search Engines

Firstly, if you don’t really understand the subject you are writing about, you will not be using the right terminology (otherwise known as “jargon”) in your posts, so the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo will not find your posts. That’s not exactly true; the search-engines WILL find your posts, but they will index them in such a way that people SEARCHING for solutions to their problems will be typing different keywords into the search-engines, so will find OTHER people’s websites.

And……..

Secondly, if you rely totally on the likes of Google and Yahoo to find and index your blog, you are missing out of potentially thousand of readers, because you can do MANY more things to drive visitors (otherwise known as TRAFFIC in the internet marketing world) TO your site. So, instead of being passive and hoping for the best, you actively go out and look for potential readers. This article is a good example of just ONE way that you might get people to visit your blog.

Blogging can be a very satisfying thing to do in its own right, without making a living from doing it.  But if you can do something you really enjoy, AND can make money doing it, you’ve reached a point in your life that only the elite few ever achieve.

Luke.

Journaling

People have been keeping journals and diaries for centuries.  Without them, much of the world’s wisdom would have already been lost.  Why?  Because some of the greatest writers of all time have used their journals to jot down their thoughts and ideas each day.  They would then refer to these daily notes while they were writing their books and articles.

Famous Authors

Without their diaries, Sam Clemens (aka: Mark Twain), Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Shaw, Bertrand Russell and thousands more, wouldn’t have been able to produce the masterpieces that they did.  Decades later, the internet has changed the way that people keep diaries.

The Internet Has Changed Things Drastically

What has advent of the internet done to change this?  Well, in a nutshell, it has transformed what was once a very personal pastime, into a very public affair. Instead of keeping your innermost thoughts private, people can now share their thoughts, feelings and ideas with the whole world; at least, with anybody who has an internet connection and a computer with a web browser.

So what has all this to do with making money on the internet?  Well, a “blog” is a shortened term for “Web Log” and “blogging” has come to mean nothing more than simply making a log of your daily thoughts, feelings and ideas available to anyone who wants to read them; that is, and online journal.

When It Began

Several years ago, around about 1997, somebody (there is some debate as to whom the very first blogger was, but the names often mentioned are Justin Hall, Jorn Barger and Dave Winer) created some simple software that made it possible to write down their daily thoughts and publish them to the internet.  Since then, millions of people have chosen to do likewise and the number is growing by the day.

Why Is It So Popular Now?

The number has grown rapidly for several reasons, not least of which is the software itself, otherwise known as “blogging platforms”, has developed to such a degree that it is not only easy to set-up your own website as a blog, but it is also a perfect way to both FIND and COMMUNICATE with LIKE MINDED people.

Anywhere In The World

So, instead of relying on your location and fate in general, you can now actively find people who are interested in the same things that YOU are interested in, regardless of location, age, race etc.  Language IS still an issue, but with online translation tools, even that is becoming less of a problem each year.

Blogging Platform

The software currently available has many features, allowing a blog reader to search older articles (called “posts”) by name, keyword, category or date, and it also allows for readers to COMMENT on each post, so it makes for a very INTERACTIVE environment, often attracting many people from all over the world who have something to say about what the author has written.

In part 2 tomorrow, we’ll discuss how YOU can make money blogging.

Luke.

Do you blog to make your living?  Have you ever struggled to get your point across to people when you’re talking to them?  How about when you’re WRITING to them?  Yes, getting your point across to your audience can be extremely difficult.  There is help at hand though.

New Service from TechSmith

TechSmith is the company that created (and continues to improve) the excellent screen-capture software called Camtasia.  Well, the company has now made available some very nice online software called Jing.

Jing’s main purpose is to allow you to more easily give feedback, explain your ideas with images and videos of what you’re doing on your computer, share information and collaborate on projects.

Free Version

There are two version, free and paid (of course!).  The free version allows you to capture whatever is happening on your computer and the file (images and video) is saved as a link.  So, whenever you are on skype, facebook, my space, twitter etc. you can simply send your audience (even if it’s only one person) a link.  When they click the link, the file will open and show them whatever it is you recorded.

The files can be opened in Screencast.com, but you can also upload them to your own FTP server or your Flickr account (if you have one that is).  So long as people can see what you created, that’s all that really matters.

With the free version, you also get 2GB of storage space on Screencast.com.

Features

Jing has several features that make the files you create even easier to explain, such as arrows, highlights and text boxes.  You can also configure Jing to create your own embed codes so that you can use them on your blog or other websites.

Of course, Jing also integrates with Camtasia Studio and Snag It, two of TechSmith’s excellent products.   This allows you to edit the files so that you can make the videos even better AND you can also add music should you so wish.

Paid Version

Don’t panic!  The pro-version is only $15 a year.  With it, you can even record YOURSELF (if you have a working web-cam of course) so that you can become the star of your own video.  This could easily be used as an internet marketing tool for making promotional vidoes, though its main purpose (currently) is for personal interaction.

Jing Pro provides higher quality files and (in my opinion) is easily worth the few dollars per year, AND with the pro version, you have the option to upload your video DIRECTLY to YouTube.  Your videos can also be saved and uploaded to all of the other video sites, such as Daily Motion et al.

Jing works with Mac or PC, so there are no limitations there.

Here’s the link again: JING

Luke.

Fortune With 500 is an eBook about a unique way of making money online. The book itself is only $37 and it comes with full resale rights, along with the sales page for your website. When you purchase the book, you will be given a download link, which downloads an installer for an ebook reader package. The book itself is only 19 pages.

A Different Way Of Making Money

This, however, isn’t the interesting part. The system which the book describes is a VERY unusual way of making money online. Have a quick look at this site 500 words and then come back to read further. Also, have a look at this video from the author of the software, by clicking the image below.

Selling Words

Now, as you can see, the system is based on putting up a website that has a number of words on it (in this case 500 words). Each word that is colored and has a different font and size has been purchased by another website owner who WANTS TO PROMOTE HIS/HER SITE. Each word that is in Gray has yet to be purchased.

Niches

So, if a website owner has a site about the stock-market, then they would want the word ‘STOCK’. This word is then hyperlinked to the owners website about the stock-market. The cost per word varies depending upon choice of color and font-size, but is typically between $50 and $150. The word belongs to the owner for as long as the site/domain is registered to that person (forever unless you stop using your domain name).

The Math

Do the Math: Let’s say you create one of these sites and sell half of the words in the first year. That’s 250 words at say $100 each. Yep, that’s a very cool $25,000. Then, you can create another site, with a dfferent list of words, perhaps aimed more at a different market, like flying. Then, your words would be something lik