Forms of Shadows

2007-05-22T18:11:00.000-07:00

Announcing The Launch Of Affiliate Page Pro

Well it's good news for product owners because someone has finally filled an obvious lack in the majority of affiliate programs.

Product owners with affiliate programs (especially ClickBank) have been fighting with one arm tied behind their back, when they couldn't contact their affiliates and especially when they didn't provide them with the proper promotional tools. Imagine you're a big company with hundreds of sales people but you expect them to do everything themselves and you don't/can't talk to them at all. It's RIDICULOUS!

Well Affiliate Page Pro will change all that because it makes it ridiculously easy to create an affiliate page within less than 15 minutes. And not just any affiliate page either; Affiliate Page Pro generates a professional affiliate page to...

1) Collect your affiliates contact details...

2) Automatically add them to your favorite autoresponder to follow them and send them announcements for competitions, more promotional material and general motivation.

3) Automatically embed the affiliates name and affiliate links within the promotional material so there are no more accidents such as, , being sent to the affiliates subscribers.

This software is very powerful and the best part it is so easy to use.
All you have to do is fill in a couple of fields, copy and paste your promotional material and it will automatically create an affiliate page for you to upload to your website.

Look if you have any products with an affiliate program then you need this software to create your own affiliate page in less than 15 minutes.

Check out all the details at...
http://www.espired.com/cgi-bin/lyre.cgi/action/JVM/PerClick/thru?pack_id=156286&aff_id=2190

To Your Success,

corena

2007-03-17T21:50:00.000-07:00

I just spouted off at a news site.. because they would not let me visit the community calendar... I always used.. This is what I wrote.

I used your site.. easily and was happy to go to many of your advertisers and mention how I saw your ad at wzzm13.. now I will be just as vocal when I tell them how unhappy I am that I could not get the information easy on your community calendar.. because each time I vist I am asked to my personal information and to sign-up for your newsletter.

This is so un amusing because I clear my cookies regularly and I am asked over and over for the same information.

Stop the madness.... How about you do a expo on how websites are twisting peoples arms for information before allowing them to see what is happening in their communities.

Thanks for nothing.

Corena

2006-10-03T05:54:00.000-07:00

2006-09-28T09:34:00.000-07:00

What should I do to prepare to be self-employed?

Are you preparing to take that big step and jump into working for yourself? You can take steps now that will make it easier for you and your family when you do the big plunge.
Some things you should do before quitting that day job are pretty simple. Add up how much your family is spending in a month. Then, figure out how much money that you have within easy grasp. The amount of "expendable income" or the remaining after taxes; "spend-able income" distributed for a given month in places such as in your checking, savings accounts, savings bonds, CDs (certificates of deposit), or a money market account. Then ask your self “How many months would this support me?”

Next,

Try to increase your savings so you will be able to handle several months without the income you normally make with your day job. I am not in any way saying that your business will not take off or stay as successful as it is the day you give your boss the big wave but this is advice to make the transition easier for you and your family and having back-up funds is a great idea for that unexpected expenses that might leap out at you from dark places. Ideally, you should have enough funds stored to spread over at least three months of expenses.If you don't have enough money for three months of expenses, you may want to adjust your original timeline to be able to.

Pay off your credit cards, so that you will not have those payments to make while you are adjusting to your new status as business owner. This will also give you a larger credit line, if necessary. You may even want to cancel your individual card accounts and start a business account. If you do not have credit card debt you will still want to stay away from new purchases, especially ones that would add debt, such as buying a new car or that boat you can easily afford now but might not have time to use being that you are now your own boss.

You may be surprised at how your time is will be taken up in business activities. Time management is another factor you will need to talk over with your family. Time management is an important factor in self-employment and will often become a issue with family and your sanity. Talking over the amount of time you will need and planning time away from working is very important.

Set up a financial record-keeping system and a business plan for making a constant salary (or that three months savings will dwindle quick) along with a time management plan that gives family and vacation time. If you do not plan ahead you will look back and wonder where all the money and time went!

If you have a retirement plan at work, you will want to think about where you are going to roll it into. You may be tempted to use that money on your fledgling business but take my advice Do Not. If you use money from a, IRA, 401(k) plan or some other type of retirement plan, paying income tax on all of the money will come right out of your taxes on a new business. A ten percent penalty could be assessed.
You may be surprised by the places you can find resources for small business finances.

Visiting your insurance salesman would not seem like a place to go for financial advice but they may have a package just for you. That may include a retirement fund and health insurance.

If your spouse works, there may be some ways to increase the insurance thru work to cover your lack of a health plan from an employer. You may be able to roll your retirement plan in with the employer sponsored plan already have. These are only a few tips to start you thinking about what you are going to be facing in the months ahead. If you can think of anything I missed please leave a comment!

2006-02-23T10:02:00.000-08:00

TAX DEDUCTIONS FOR THE HOME BUSINESS

Are you new and just starting out in business? Want to know what receipts to keep and what to toss? This article can highlight some of the keepers from the tossers for you. Below are a few things outlined without all the professional and confusing jargon added but of course the best way to figure it all out is go to the source or a trained accountant and ask the right questions.
Operational costs are the types of things that can be deducted and have to do with the ongoing operation of your business: renting business machines and space, heating bills, electricity and expenses for travel. Not, for example, a new car (the one you use for business). Cars are assets that add a value to your business permanently and are capitalized, not deducted. Interests on your house or office space or repair of computer equipment are deductible expenses.
If you use your personal automobile for your online business you may be able to deduct repair expenses. If you have a place in your home used only as an office you can deduct certain expenses. Many, many ways are available to use your home to help ease your tax burdens. One of the first stops you can make on your journey to find out what you should be saving receipts for is the Internal Revenue Service’s website: http://www.irs.gov/index.html

Automobile deductions are as follows. If you use an automobile in your business then you can deduct mileage. Be careful to record the date, mileage, road tolls, parking payments and the reason for your trip. You can also deduct payments from leasing and if you are buying a car on loan from a bank you can add the interest on your loan and depreciation from wear and tear or the vehicle.
While traveling in your automobile or on a commercial conveyance you can deduct your expenses too.

Travel expenses during business travel are one hundred percent deductible. That covers everything from paying for your travel tickets to tipping the stewards...Just remember. Keep all the receipts! Also remember although tipping is deductible while traveling eating out is only a 50 percent deduction.

Home Office or your workspace at home is a starting point. Deductions for your home office rules are strict. Your Office has to meet guidelines, your home office must be used totally and regularly for business and/or be your main place of business or be used to meet with clients or customers a lot during business hours; or be in a separate place that is not attached to your house or residence, like a garage or a nice shed, in which case it merely has to be used in your trade or business. Also, the home office deduction isn't constrained to a full room. Your office can be part of a room. Just how much of the space is deductible? The deduction is figured on the size of the home office as a percentage of the total house or residence. That percentage is the fraction of your home-related business expenses -- rent, mortgage, insurance, electricity, etc.-- that you can claim off of your taxes.

Office supplies you buy to run your business are a very easy deduction. Just keep the receipts, because these expenditures will offset your taxable business income.
Office supplies are covered under operating expenses.

Operating expenses are things you have to buy to run your business and maintaining your office and properties that earn you money. These expenses might include accoutrements like accountant fees, advertising/marketing costs, lawyer fees, insurance premiums, maid service, lawn/snowplowing, rentals, licensing fees, office supplies, property taxes, repair costs, paying employees, misc. supplies, telephone, garbage service, automobile mileage expenses, utilities, and more.

Magazine subscriptions that have information for your business can be taken as a full deduction. Also, software and subscriptions are an operating expensive. Allowed for tax years 2004 and 2005 off-the-shelf software bought for your business can be fully expensed in the year purchased. Before 2004 a company had to depreciate the cost of computer software over three years.

Computers, printers, telephones and scanners are tax deductible. You can take 100 percent up front or depreciate over five years.

Furniture is also a deduction for the home business. Office-furniture like filing cabinets and desks are deductible in a few ways. You can deduct 100 percent of the cost in the year of the purchase or deduct a portion of the expense over seven years, also known as depreciation.

Cost of goods sold, capital expenses, business “use” of your car, business assets, and improvements are a few things you can deduct. You can find out a lot more about what exactly you can deduct in this free IRS pdf: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p535.pdf

Types Of taxes
The type of business you run determines what taxes you have to pay and how you go about paying them. Setting up to pay taxes on a quarterly basis is sometimes a very good idea and you should find out if this is how your business should be set.

The following are the three general types of business taxes there are more but this give you the simple structure that a small business person may be most interested in.

Income tax, self-employment tax, and excise tax
All businesses must file an income tax return except partnerships they must file information return.
Self-employment tax is a social security and Medicare tax mostly for people who are ... oh guess...self employed.
Excise taxes generally are taxes assessed on you if your business does any of the following things; manufacture or sell certain products, operate certain kinds of businesses, use various kinds of equipment, facilities, or products, and receive payment for certain services. Vague I know but you can find more about these on the IRS site.

Of course I hope this helps you get started with the right questions to ask your accountant or tax preparer and good luck with your business!
~Corena

2006-02-19T08:46:00.000-08:00

Setting Goals and Meeting Them

The way life goes for most of us, we feel a little busier every day. It really does feel like time goes seems to pass quicker each day, and before we know it it feels like our goals are starting to slip away. Everyone has had the experience of thinking in a contemplative moment how exactly they ended up where they are, and it’s easy to feel discouraged and off track. One of the best things you can do to avoid this situation is to set clear and realistic goals for yourself and to stick to them.
We all have dreams and aspirations, the problem is that with all the distractions of our day to day lives it’s easy to lose track of them. As almost everyone with a career and/or family knows, minor distractions pile up, and even a time as long as a year can pass by before you know it. In order to rectify this situation, it’s important forever to set clear goals for themselves.

Here are a few tips to organizing your websites and search engine optimization.

1. You need to start off by managing your links. This involves making sure that none of your current links are dead, and you should also check if there are any sites linking to you that you don’t know about. If your site consists of a large number of links you should make sure that they aren’t getting out of control and get rid of anything that is no longer relevant. Also make sure that your links are sufficiently labelled to reflect the page that they link to.
2. Re-order your links, putting the best ones first. And putting them into categories if you have a high number of links. If you have a links page with 25+ links it is a good idea to turn it into a directory of some sort. This can even help you in getting more links to your site in exchange for back links on the directory that you have created. Also check the sites that you link to and make sure that any back links that are due to you are still there as you don’t have much reason to keep a link if you aren’t getting the backlink that you deserve (if the back link was, indeed, negotiated when you placed the link onto your site).
3. Process link request emails. Whenever you receive requests for a link exchange, respond quickly. Not every mail you receive will be a good one, and you should make sure to check any site that wants you to link to it. If you are declining a link request let the web master know why. Perhaps you have an incite that they do not have. They may be able to fix a few things and then become excellent link partners in the future. It is common curtesy to inform the web master as to whether or not you are willing to exchange links within two or three days of receiving a request. Web masters will be even more impressed if you send them a personalized message regarding your approval or disapproval of the link exchange.
4. Check link exchange forums. This is a similar aspect to the above except that in this case it is more difficult to keep track of all of the people who can potentially request links from your site. There is a lot of spam on these sorts of things as well as many really terrible and useless sites. If you encounter such a site or forum member, inform them of your problem with what they are doing and report them to a moderator/administrator if they do not correct their behavior in a suitable manor. It is important that these kinds of forums be kept clean or a search engine may consider it a link farm more than an exchange service.
5. Finally, you should check each feature of your website, to make sure it’s still working properly. The dynamic content that you will probably include at some point must be delivered properly. Any messages that are generated on the fly must not be generated at misopportune times. The difference between a quality dynamic site and a subpar dynamic site is that in a quality dynamic site all content is delivered at the right time and everything seems static and planned out.

Take your time with your website and make sure that you do everything you can for it each day. Keep adding anything new that you find, because updating regularly will keep search engines coming back to spider more often. Updates are crucial and if you can follow the patterns here of insuring quality and precision, you will probably be able to come up with other ways that you can insure your visitors satisfaction and your increased traffic, link count, and search engine listings.

Never agree to link to someone’s site without asking for a link in exchange, unless they offer to pay you – even then, you should think twice. All your incoming and outgoing links need to be related to your site’s content for you to be ranked high in the search engines.

Basic Link Checks.

Some sites use robots.txt to stop search engines from indexing their links pages, in the mistaken belief that outbound links will count against them. To check, just retype their URL with robots.txt on the end (for example, http://www.website.com/robots.txt). If you see a page that says ‘Disallow’ and has the URL of their links page, then they’re not letting spiders index that page. Don’t exchange links with that site.

You should also check to see if the website is being ‘cloaked’, and report it to the search engines if it is. You don’t want to get involved with these people – better to have them banned and out of the way.

Does the site offering you a link have PageRank? Even if they do, you should look at how it drops between the front page and the links page. Be aware that new pages take a while to get ranked, so PR0 doesn’t necessarily mean a site that will never have any PageRank.

Take a look at how many links are on the page already. There shouldn’t be more than 20 links – if the site breaks this rule, don’t even consider it. Plenty of webmasters collect links, thinking they’re helping their rankings, but it just has the effect of making them look like link farms. Many of them don’t even involve linking to the big spam industries, like casinos and adult content. There’s no point in having a link from a site that takes links from just anyone.

2006-01-26T08:57:00.000-08:00

What is Pay Pal?

With PayPal, you can start accepting credit card payments instantly. As the world's number one online payment service, PayPal is the fastest way to open your doors to over 40 million member accounts worldwide. Best of all, it's completely free to sign up!

PayPal (PP) has a powerful integration API (Application Programmer’s Interface) but it is one of the most technical ones to be found. Unless you are using PP’s built-in cart features, or are integrating with a PayPal compatible shopping cart (of which there are many), you’re going to either have or be willing to hire someone with programming skills.

PP is owned by eBay which makes it the only publicly traded processor that I personally trust.

PP supports the sale of both physical and digital goods. It also supports recurring membership options which can provide either access to password protected areas or recurring shipments of physical or digital goods. But what’s most amazing is that it can support all of these options on one site if you want it to!

The PayPal Cart

The PP cart is integrated with the PayPal.com site so there is nothing to download or install on your own site. You simply use the PP button wizard to generate payment links for each product that you sell. The link adds the product to the cart and then gives the shopper the option to continue shopping or proceed to checkout.

The shopping cart will handle digital or physical products but is not designed to handle recurring orders or memberships.

Buy Now Buttons
Buy Now Buttons are actually HTML links that you can create to sell an individual product or service from your site or oyu can use it as a link in an e-zine article or email. Use the Button Wizard to create buttons when you need then and then paste the code wherever you want it. Buy Now buttons can support physical, digital and recurring order types.
Subscriptions and Recurring Payments
There is a Subscriptions and Recurring Payments manager that will automatically create your member’s user anme and password and will handle unsubscribe and failed payment situations without your intervention at all. You just concentrate on selling. There are some technical requirements for setting this option up, but they are not difficult and the instructions are clear.
There are also Donation links for charity solicitations, an automatic invoice wizard for service companies, and a Payment Request wizard that sends requests for payments to people who owe you money. the payment email is formatted with a return link to your PayPal account and the link is coded with the amount that you are requesting.
Understanding how PayPal Operates

PayPal is a Person-to-Person Payment Processors (P2P). That means that people can send money to each other using their PayPal Accounts. PayPal is also a third-party credit card processor, so people can also pay you using most major credit cards.

When someone pays you via PayPal the funds are held in your online account until you withdraw them. You can withdraw by direct deposit to you bank account, or via an ATM using a PayPal STM card, or you can have a check sent to you. There is no charge for direct deposit withdrawals. All other methods have a variable service charge.

PayPal can be integrated as deeply into your web site as you want it to be or you can use it with only email notifications enabled. PayPal has a very extensive Instant Payment Notification (IPN) system which would be beyond the scope of this article to get into. There are an assortment of major and minor functions and routines for integrating the transaction process and PayPal provides detailed documentation on their web site.

Most people use either PayPal’s integrated shopping cart or a third-party cart that supports PayPal.

You can get an amazing amount of information posted to your site after a transaction. Like 2CO, this information comes as an HTTP post and includes not only the standard customer contact information and product sale data, but currency exchange rates if you accept payments in multiple currencies, payment status and over 70 other fields of information. Of course, you don’t have to use them all but they’re all available if you need them.

When you signup for PayPal, you can start accepting credit card payments instantly. As the world's number one online payment service, PayPal is the fastest way to open your doors to over 40 million member accounts worldwide. Best of all, it's completely free to sign up! To sign up or learn more, click here: https://www.paypal.com/us/mrb/pal

2006-01-21T11:38:00.000-08:00

Should I use a SEO Expert?

Regardless of what type of business you have online, there is *ONE* thing that you need or you will be in trouble...You will need traffic and a steady supply of unique visitors, in other words, a fresh, steady flow of new visitors to your web sites. This flow of unique traffic online can come from billions of searches being done via the search engines. The only problem is, the search engines change on a daily basis.If you want to get tons of traffic from the search engines you basically have 2 options...1. Devote yourself full time to stay on top of all the algorithm changes -- by running thousands of your own tests to, hopefully, figure things out.OR...2. Align yourself with an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert that is doing all of that work for you so you don't have to.You may have to budget a SEO expert into your website just as you do a advertising budget unless you want to spend many hours learning the tricks and the tips from the SEO experts themselves; Through courses and seminars or you can join forums and read ebooks basically learn from the people who are really out there everyday earning the money and gaining the traffic.Advertising with search engines can gain traffic regularly but you have to spend your money in the right places (pick the correct keywords)Some of the first things you will need to know if you are going to start learning about search engine optimization is all about where your dollars are best spent. Tracking traffic sources individually (including individual keywords) is an important key to profitable traffic generation. Because if you're not tracking every traffic source individually, it is impossible for you to know which traffic sources are making you money, and which ones are losing you money.For example, let's say you run some pay-per-click ads on Google and Overture, and I also place a few ezine ads, and I also buy a few banner ads to drive traffic to your website. But you advertise the same URL for each of these traffic sources. This means all your traffic is together and you cannot tell which place sent you the most visitors.At the end of the month, you look at the information and see what you spent. Even if you make a 1000-dollar profit you might find that you are wasting have of that on the wrong advertising.Odds are, $400 out of that $1,000 return is coming from just 1 or 2 traffic sources (or even just 1 or 2 keywords) The rest of the traffic sources are actually wasting your money... and, if you knew that, you would be making a lot more profit!Traffic = Cash and when you understand that formula, you'll do whatever it takes to get more traffic. Including hiring a SEO Expert or immersing your self in the knowledge you need to gain the ability to do it yourself or spend the money in advertising for the unique visitors.Either way. Knowledge of where your visitors come from and what they are interested in is important. Spending time doing these will give you better results for your money spent and if it seems like something you want to spend time doing then maybe a SEO expert is not something you would want. Then I would suggest learning what you can about Search Engine Optimization on your own and then consulting an expert for suggestions to increase your profits. If this is not then a SEO expert is a good idea for you.But that is just my suggestion. And they are a dime a dozen... You are now about two cents indebt if you take it “wink”

2006-01-03T18:26:00.000-08:00

What Is A Blog And Why Should I Have One?

Blog is short for Web log. Web logs have technically existed since the beginning of Usenet newsgroups. Web logs are much the same as a newsgroup, with some differences. One person is in charge of a web log, as opposed to a group of members.

Many people use Blogs as personal journals. Some people use their Blogs to write about issues that are of great importance to them. Some use Blogs to record family moments and share them with their distant relatives. Many people use Blogs to build communities. People have Blogged about television personalities and movie favorites and entertaining subjects. Business owners use Blogs to make money. In fact, blogging is a business all by itself for a large number of Bloggers! If you can imagine it, it is probably being Blogged right at this moment.
With this idea we should think back over the last years of the World Wide Web. Where it is going and where it has been.
Let's go back in time and take a look at the past trends that have occurred since the Internet became a real place to spend time and to make money.
Remember trying to find anything on the Internet? Before the search engines came along? Well, Some of you may not be old enough but for those who are, they will remember what a heaven sent thing the search engines seemed to be.
First there was the pioneers of searching like Alta Vista then Yahoo and now Google coming onto the scene and taking a fast first place in the hard drive of the world. Making webmasters want to conform their pages for high ranking on these searching heavy hitters, which means more traffic and more traffic means more revenue.
Then there was the email campaign (spamming), when people discovered the use of email as a means for follow up promotions and is still being widely used today. Spamming is a tool for mass markets that has come to be the commercial of the super information highway. Subscription lists and member sites have helped people narrow down the over all blank canvassing of emails and is being used more effectively as a marketing tool.

Blogs appeared few years back, and are similar to a forum, except that with Blogs, you can write about anything and everything. And not have other people calling the shots. When it first appeared, Blogs were thought of nothing more than just a tool for people to express their rants, feelings, emotions and so forth. Originally, blogging was a way for private individuals to write journals. Today, there are still a large number of people who use Blogs as journals – but even more uses have been found. Families use Blogs to stay in touch. People use Blogs to exchange information on specific topics. Clubs use Blogs to keep members informed…and businesses use them as well.

Smart marketers are now recognizing the use of Blogs; as another channel of business - be it branding, selling, promotion are taking the reigns and running with it.

Blogs have taken on a whole new meaning and become sophisticated in look and content to the extent that it has become a powerful way to market products and services. There are so many ways you can earn money with Blogs and get your presence felt on the net.

How can Blogging be a marketing tool? Or a money maker for that matter?

The concept of blogging for revenue is a relative new idea. Some Bloggers (that is a term for people who Blog) use affiliate programs to make quiet alot of money. You set up a Blog, include banners and text ads for affiliate programs that are related to your topic and your article content, write your Blog entries and build traffic to your site.
Finally, there was the affiliate programs distributing and selling products to customized lists and pin- pointed markets for a percentage of the profits. Many a salesman or women have made their mark in the world and on the web with this sales technique.
You can start blogging for cash with Google AdSense and gain revenue with your Blog whether it is hosted on your own server, or remotely hosted. AdSense, ads will appear and have everything to do with the topic of what you write. People that click on the ads that interest them when they visit your site and Google will pay you for each click. If you want ads on a specific topic to appear, you will need to use keyword optimization throughout the pages of your site. The name of your Blog should include specific keywords, and when you write Blog entries, you will need to use your chosen keywords as well.
Are your words worth something? Have you tried blogging?

2005-12-12T05:27:00.000-08:00

Private Label Rights and the Duplicate Content Penalty

Many people are reluctant to purchase and use private label content because they fear their site will receive the dreaded “duplicate content penalty” from Google and other search engines that will dry up their traffic. Fear of duplicate content penalties is frequent. It is also generally misplaced. There is no reason for the users of private label rights content to fear penalization via the duplicate content penalty.

In order to understand why the penalty is largely a myth, we need to examine exactly what a duplicate content penalty really does. It does not merely give “black marks” to sites that contain information similar to that offered by other sites—its real purpose is far more specific. The duplicate content penalty affixes to those sites that use the same content over and over again across the same site and to those that truly duplicate the pages of other sites in whole.
In other words, the duplicate content penalty is not handed out to those who happen to be using the same or similar articles. Its use is reserved for those who are intentionally trying to mislead search engines by repetition of the same materials over and over again on the same site. It is also used as a means to attack the site scrapers who will steal pages in full from other sites.

You can check any number of sites yourself that are featuring content that also appears elsewhere. Those sites remain indexed and listed by Google and other major search engines. For instance, consider the popular article repositories themselves. All they do is house information that appears elsewhere, yet they can easily be found via Google searches and retain high page ranking.

Despite facts to the contrary, there are those who refuse to accept the logical proposition that no duplicate content penalty could adhere due to the simple repetition of an article. These people, who may not believe that the penalty is steep, will still argue that when search engine spiders find largely duplicated content they will not index that particular page.

Even if that outlook on the duplicate content filter and penalty turned out to be correct, there would still be no reason for the owners of private rights articles to be concerned. Simple edits, the addition of an introduction or conclusion, the rewriting of a few key paragraphs or any number of other easy –to-enact techniques will allow a private rights owner to avoid any potential duplicate content impact.

In order to run afoul of the duplicate content penalties imposed by major search engines, one must be a truly egregious offender. If you practice building site after site that serve as mirror images of pre-existing sites, you will find yourself facing penalties. If you are misusing a single article by placing it in multiple locations across a single site in hopes of making the site seem content-rich and valuable, you may also encounter a penalty. You should not, however, encounter any penalty for using articles found on other sites.
Consider what would actually occur if the duplicate content penalty attached itself to incidents of republishing a preexisting article. Almost every major North American newspaper, for instance, makes use of stories provided by the Associated Press, Reuters or other similar news services. A single AP article may appear on literally thousands of newspaper sites. If using that article caused a duplicate content penalty to occur, ever newspaper site in existence would find itself crushed by a spiteful Google.

Of course, this doesn’t happen because the search engine is not preoccupied with the fact an article or other content may appear in multiple locations. One could argue, in fact, that the sharing of information and its resultant appearances on a variety of sites is one of the Internets most commonly occurring phenomena. If duplicate content penalties were designed to combat these perfectly legitimate uses of existing content, it would be a wholly misguided effort. Fortunately, that is not what happens.

If concerns about duplicate content filters and penalties have prevented you from investing in private label rights articles, it is time to rethink your position. You will not find yourself de-listed or otherwise penalized for use of private label rights articles. Additionally, if you do still believe your pages might not be indexed due to redundant content, you need only perform slight edits and revisions to the private label rights articles to avoid any possible problems. The idea of a duplicate content penalty should not prevent anyone from pursuing powerful and versatile private label rights articles.

2005-12-07T05:23:00.000-08:00

Make more income using a targeted opt-in list

Do you know one of the best moneymakers in marketing is in “the list”? It couldn’t be a more true. In whatever marketing you do, in whichever formula, the only way to make more money is to build a targeted opt-in list.
The phrase I like to remember is: collect and win.
There really isn’t anything closer to owning your own money tree than having a targeted, highly accessible mailing list. Why? Because you can send out an offer any time and immediately see turn around.
The turnaround and instant sales of list ownership are an often mentioned “secret” of marketing gurus – however, there are additional and equally powerful benefits those same gurus may not spout about as much.
The real value of the list comes down to the monetary or material worth of the loyal returning customer – in any sales area.
What causes an individual to purchase from a business time and again?
There is a mix of exercising influences, some of which include product loyalty, trust through brand identity, customer service and price.
In each case, the establishment of the ideal customer base relies on effective communication and builds a real relationship with your customers.
The super big businesses have the extravagance of communicating with their customers on a large scale and through multiple channels. The online marketer operates on a smaller scale.
Your web site draws in customers as an initial point of contact. If you don’t collect your visitors’ email addresses, you could lose them forever!
A very profitable way to establish consistent quality communication is to convert “just” visitors into loyal customers is through the opt-in list.
Collecting these mailing addresses and winning is as simple as this; You should first capture your prospects before selling them anything.
How do you collect these soon to be valued customers?
There’re two things you need:
1. A simple direct response opt-in page
2. An opt-in form for prospects to opt-in
Direct response opt-in page is the easiest and most trusty model to base your opt-in page copy is the direct response model. The objective here is to influence your visitors to pay attention immediately and take the action you want. (giving an email address)
Here are some of the most important elements that go into powerful direct response copy:
Explain or justify “The Why”: The “The Why” is the single most important element of direct response copy. Convince your target audience of the benefits of joining your opt-in list with irresistibly forceful statements and free offers. Offering tips about products or free ebooks is a great way to collect a email address to communicate with a would-be customer.

NEVER SPAM!

Once you have an email address only use it the way you promised in your opt-in page. If you mail responsibly you will gain customer trust.

If you email only solid offers that are targeted and do not spew every affilate link you have at your opt-in list you will get a high response rate and less people unsubscribing from your emails.

An offer of a free tip or gift along with your offer of something you have for sale will also keep your email address out of the bulk folders.

If you collect customer information and use it responsibly you will win. Hence the term..... COLLECT AND WIN

2005-12-05T03:52:00.000-08:00

How to Check Your Site’s Ranking.

First, go to the search engine where you want to check your site’s ranking, and enter the keywords you want to check. Your result pages will come up, and you will need to look through them until you find your website. SEO experts recommend that if you aren’t listed in at least the top 20 then you should continue to optimize, as most people won’t look any further than that. This is simply common sense. When you are determining if your rank is high enough simply think to yourself, “Would I look for this long for this page?”

You will want to do this with each search engine and directory until you have some idea of where you are. Check your website's rankings regularly, because changes to algorithms can affect them drastically and quickly. Keep in mind also that thousands of new web pages are added daily, and many of them are actively trying to get ranked ahead of you. That’s right. There are thousands of other in on the same game as you so you must keep sharp. Your competitors may be reading these same articles and using these same tricks!

If you can’t find your website in a search engine’s results, you should enter “site:” your domain name in the keyword field to see whether you are listed at all. If your URL appears with the name or description of your site then you are somewhere in the search engine’s index. If all you get back is a blank page, then you’re not in the search engine’s database at all – you need to wait longer. This trick of typing “site:www.yourdomain.com” also helps you to determine how many pages you have indexed on each particular search engine. The more pages that are indexed, the more likely somebody is to encounter your site.

It you find that your website is miles away from the top 20, don’t be discouraged – you can change that! You may need to re-evaluate your keywords, and try to find new ones that are more relevant to your site. Many search engines have human-edited rankings for the most commonly searched-for phrases, and it is often difficult to get in that list. Good content is the best way to increase your chances of getting a high ranking for a certain topic. The more popular that your page is with the masses, the more popular it will be with search engines.

Search engines are a perfect example of “the chicken or the egg.” In this case, there is an answer! Search engines attempt to deliver sites that the populous has deemed important, not the other way around. This is why it is so important that you have good, relevant content and plenty of it.

If you want to check to see if a single web page on your site has been indexed, visit the search engine and enter the complete URL, like this: http://www.yourpage.com/yourpagename.html.

If the search engine has indexed that particular page then it will come back with a description of it. If it hasn’t then you’ll see a message saying something like “Sorry, no information is available for that URL”.

On Google, if your URL has been indexed, this page will offer you to show the cached version of the page, or to find similar pages, as well as pages that link to your page or that contain your URL on the page.
You could go ahead and use these manual tracking methods, but we would recommend that you consider using online tools or downloadable software that will allow you to check these things more quickly. It can be a very tedious and time-consuming job to do by hand, especially if you have several sites to monitor.

Top25web.com is one such search engine-ranking tool. You can find out where your website ranks in Google, Inktomi and AltaVista for free. You can also analyze the results of a particular keyword search, to create a plan for improving your site’s ranking.

URL Ranker offers instant, online reports of website rankings in 17 top search engines, including Google, Yahoo, AOL Search, MSN, AllTheWeb and AltaVista, again for free. It will tell you if your site is listed in each engine, and tell you the ranking if it is.

These tools alone offer an excellent way of checking your sites rankings. Once you know where you stand, you can continue with your SEO plan, and move on to other aspects of marketing too.

2005-11-27T16:45:00.000-08:00

SEO ‘Tools of the Trade’.

Before you start optimizing your site for search engines, there are some tools that you should arm yourself with. These tools can become your best friends when it comes to SEO, especially when you’re just starting out. The first and most important step in any search engine position campaign is recognizing which keywords you should optimize your site for, and there are several pieces of software that are useful for this, including Wordtracker, Optilink, Zeus, Agent Web Ranking, and Digital Point tools plus some great newcomers that I found by asking around.

WordTracker's keyword research service is the only one on the Internet that provides a comprehensive database of the most popular keywords in a particular industry. It can help you recognize associated keywords that you may have never thought of. One of the differences between WordTracker and other tools is that it can spot subtle differences, for example singular and plural keywords, or often-misspelled ones, and tell you which versions are more popular.

Optilink has become very popular in a short period of time because of the power it gives you over search engines. Every site that links to you boosts your ranking, especially if its content is relevant to yours. Optilink helps you to come up with strategies to improve your link structure and get a better ranking. Here are some of the things it does:

1. Analyzes the link structures of your top-ranking competitors.
2. Tells you why your competitors rank well, so you can try to copy what they’re doing.
3. Tells you what kind of rankings you can expect if you adopt similar linking strategies.
4. Helps to monitor sites you’ve exchanged links with, to ensure that they’re still linking to you.

Zeus has an excellent way of increasing the link popularity of your site -- by exchanging with other sites that are related to yours, giving you a head start on your SEO. Zeus does the work for you, identifying sites that it thinks you should try to exchange links with. If you look for the sites yourself you’ll often find it’s not worth the time, but an SEO tool like Zeus lets you do it instantly. Once you’ve got links, you can manage and maintain them automatically.

Agent Web Ranking helps you to check your sites rankings – this is good to see how your SEO efforts are working. Many people just optimize and submit, thinking the work is done, but they’re wrong. You need to continuously check your site's rankings, and Agent Web Ranking is a reliable and quick tool for doing this.

The only real problem you might have with any of this software is that search engines can change the way they display their results, breaking the tools until their authors update them. This means that most position reporting software gets outdated very quickly. It’s not that much of an issue, though, as most software is provided on a subscription basis with updates included, rather than bought only once.

If you really want to stay ahead in the SEO industry, you should try as many different tools as you can.

Digital Point tools are some of the best tools for SEO and many other needs a new Webmaster will need to rank well and get traffic. This is a list will is available on the Digital Point site and I suggest reading the threads within the Digital Point forum to get some hints from other webmasters and network. Keeping abreast of what is happening in the online community can often tip you off the big changes that are coming and will effect your website.
Google AdSense ChartsGenerate all sorts of nifty charts with your AdSense CSV data export (requires a Google AdSense account of course).
Google AdSense SandboxThis tool will show you what Google AdSense ads will be displayed for any webpage on the Internet.
Back Link Tracking ToolTrack backlink fluctuations to your web pages historically.
Coop Ad NetworkFree network of site owners to share advertising space.
DNS Zone TransferHandy little utility to quickly pull your DNS zone files from your name servers.
FileMaker Pro Web DiggerThis utility allows you to dig into your web-based FileMaker Pro databases to check their security.
FileMaker Database Server ProbeThis utility allows you to check your FileMaker database server to see what platform it's running as well as what database files are being served.
Keyword Ranking MonitorTrack historical search engine result placement data for any keyword/URL combo you choose.
Keyword Suggestion ToolQuickly see which phrases are searched upon the most (for determining the best phrases to target for your website).
PageRank Toolbar For MacA widget to show PageRank for the site you are on.
Add Search Functionality To Your WebsiteAn easy way that you can add search functionality to any website.
Free Web CounterFree tool that gives any website a free hit counter for their site.
Website To CountryFind the physical country that any website is in.
Geo VisitorsShow the physical location of the visitors to your website/blog.
Yahoo! Web Rank ToolThis tool will show you what any website's Yahoo! Web Rank is (without needing the Yahoo toolbar).
Above this list I mentioned networking within the Digital Point forum and I asked about tools within a thread. These are some of the tools that where brought to my attention:
Shoe money calls this a “lightweight serps tool”
www.shoemoney.com/serps.php I call it a great tool that has no disturbing ads and is very useful!
Awall19 added this site; it has many tools to choose from
http://tools.seobook.com/
Kenni added these tools
http://www.iwebtool.com/search_engine_optimization
Just a little networking can go along way! Thanks for the tools everyone...and I hope this help you the reader!
By paying attention to what tools others are using and learning how they work, you will have the edge in the SEO market. So get out there, and download these SEO tools of the trade and get out there!

2005-11-25T20:04:00.000-08:00

Introduction to SEO.

Over the last few years, search engine optimization (SEO) has been needed and used more and more, although it has been around for much longer than most people think. With new development tools being used to create websites that are heavy on Java, Flash and images, it’s important to have something that the search engines can read. If the content can’t be read by search engines then they can’t index it, and if your site doesn’t get indexed then it won’t be found when people search for it on Google, Yahoo, MSN, or anywhere else. This article will outline what SEO is, how it works, and some unethical SEO methods that you should avoid.

What is SEO?

SEO is a way of analyzing your site and modifying it to allow search engines to read and index it more easily. SEO is all about maintaining and building websites that get ranked highly on the major search engines.

You see, when people use a search engine, they generally don’t look beyond the top 20 or so results. If you want to make any money from your website, you need to get ranked in the top 20 out of potentially hundreds of websites.

How Does SEO Work?

Search engines maintain a huge database containing information from individual websites. Most of the information search engines collect isn’t listed on their results pages, but it is taken into consideration when it comes to deciding those results’ rankings.
It is very important that you encourage the search engines to rank your website in a high position, and you can do this through the keywords that you use on your website, as well as when you submit it. If the keywords you use in your submission tool don’t match the ones on your site then you could harm your rankings – be sure to have all the keywords you want to use on the website itself before you submit it.
Most websites don’t focus on their topic well, and so keyword lists containing 50 or more phrases per page are recommended. By focusing some of the pages of your site on keywords, you will score higher with the search engines.

Free Search Engines.

The major search engines on the Internet are still free, and it’s not hard to take advantage of this free advertising – you can do it in as little as an hour.

There are several companies that provide free SEO tools, or you can pay a professional to take care of it for you. Looking around on the web will turn up all sorts of useful resources.

What is Unethical SEO?

Unethical search engine optimization techniques can be unlawful, unscrupulous, or just in bad taste. You’d be surprised how many people use these methods. A lot of what is now called unethical SEO used to be accepted, until people went overboard and it started to have a negative affect on the web as a whole.

Keyword stuffing is when your site consists of long lists of keywords and nothing else. Don't do it. There are ways to put keywords and phrases on your site without running the risk of getting banned.

You may have seen ‘invisible text’ if you’ve been selecting the text on a page and found words that are the same color as the background. This text is often lists of keywords put there in the hope of fooling search engine spiders while hiding the words from visitors. This is considered unethical, and you shouldn’t do it.

A doorway page is a page that isn’t designed for real people to see – it’s purely for the search engines and spiders, in an attempt to trick them into indexing the website in a higher position. This is a big no-no and should be avoided.

Even though unethical SEO is tempting, and does work, you shouldn’t do it – not only is it annoying to users, but it’s likely to get you banned from the search engines sooner or later. You sites’ search engine rankings just aren’t worth the risk. Use efficient SEO techniques to get your site ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like unethical SEO.

SEO is a set of techniques used in order to attract visitors or prospective customers to your website, and the goal of a search engine is to provide high quality content to the users of the Internet. These two objectives are not in opposition, if you do SEO the way it should be done.

2005-11-25T19:59:00.000-08:00

How Search Engine Spiders Work.

There are hundreds of search engines available today, but some are far more complex than others. This article will give you an overview of how some of the most popular ones work.

Let’s start with a smaller engine: InfoSeek. They only index about 200 words of your web page, so it’s important to make sure that you have meta tags on your site, and that the most important things are listed first. The information you put in your meta tags will be used to display a description of your site, and most meta tags can contain about 200 characters of text. The keywords meta tag, however, can have up to 1,000 characters.

These simple rules are important to keep in mind for all search engines. The more important that the information is, the closer it has to be to the beginning of your meta tags or even the beginning of your site’s content. Many search engines won’t even touch your meta tags so it is important that you have the same information in your body that you have in your meta tags (although you obviously cannot simply enter lists and lists of key words as this would be detrimental to your site’s content).

The AltaVista search engine will send Scooter, its spider, to check out your entire site. Scooter can take as long as three months to spider and fully index your site – the average spider only takes 6-8 weeks. Scooter will normally spider somewhere between two and ten pages from your site each week. This means that the longer that your web site lasts, the better it will be indexed which is in example of how search engines implement Darwin’s Theory into their ideology.

Excite used to be a search powerhouse, but has now been dropped as the provider of AOL and Netscape search, so it’s less important than it once was. The algorithm it uses to determine keyword relevance is very complicated: it indexes your pages and then attempts to summarize them by selecting only the most relevant sentences. Expect to have your pages reviewed roughly once every two weeks. Keep in mind, though, that with meta tags have no meaning to Excite when it comes to rankings, even though it will use your description tags as long as the words are relevant to your pages’ content.

Let’s move on to Lycos. Lycos has fully integrated the Open Directory Project (ODP) into their mainstream results pages, and they also use search results from AllTheWeb. Lycos also runs click-throughs to their sister site HotBot. Lycos is one of the harder search engines to understand, as their submission pages say one thing but then they index your site in a completely different way. As a general rule of thumb, your site will be indexed in Lycos in due time as long as you get indexed in ODP and AllTheWeb.

Even though WebCrawler is owned by Excite, it still has its own search engine and indexer. If you happen to be listed with WebCrawler, you should try to stay listed with them, as it isn’t the easiest search engine to get listed with. Its hit-and-miss standards combined with the sporadic indexing methods makes the submission process tough, although not impossible.

The biggest player is, of course, Google, who use a page ranking system as the central basis of their index. It was once nearly impossible to manipulate this page ranking system to drive up your rankings, but people quickly figured out that the more links they could generate to their site on the rest of the net, the better Google ranked them. Google is not thought to be using context-sensitive rankings. Context-sensitive information is used at Yahoo, Looksmart and the ODP, however, and Google regularly spiders those sites when it re-indexes its own database.

MSN is another important search engine. The holy trinity of search engines at the moment is Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. These three search engines combine to provide you with the vast majority of the traffic that you will receive from search engines. MSN will generally be the first search engine to index your site and it will almost certainly list the most pages the fastest.

Although no-one can tell you exactly when you will be indexed on any search engine, it’s best to check back at least weekly. Whatever you do, though, don’t re-submit your site more often than every two months or so – you might not get indexed at all if you do this. And of course last but not least... nothing ever stays the same. New technologies and methods are adapted everyday..so keep up on whats new. I will try to help you do that here and a comment to me on anything you find out would be great!

2005-11-18T11:00:00.000-08:00

How Search Engines Work.

Many people wonder how search engines really work. Although the details are complex, this article aims to give you some insight into the process without getting too technical. Read on...

Most search engines have three parts: a crawler, an index, and a search interface. Let's look at each part individually, to get a better understanding of them. Each part has its own role to play in the process, with all the parts working together to make searches possible.

The Crawler.

Also known as a 'spider' or 'bot', this part of the search engine wanders the web, following links and picking up information for its database. Crawlers do most of their work at times of the day when search engines are less busy, but they typically visit frequently updated pages more often. This is something to keep in mind when you're working on your pages. As you may want to perform updates locally and update them when they have been finished rather than updating bits and pieces and hoping that the search engine runs into the correct version.

Also, crawlers ignore some things: your site's code, for example. Your site's title and text - your 'content' - is the most important thing to a crawler. The fastest way to raise your site’s search engine ranking for specific key words is to implement them into your title and your content.

The Index.

Once the crawler has collected all that text, it is then stored and indexed. This allows people searching for keywords and phrases to get results relating to what they were searching for - their search results. Most sites will incorporate rating systems such as Google Page Ranks or Alexa rankings in positioning your site. These ratings are used to attempt to ensure that sites that are important receive more traffic than unimportant sites.

To see this in action, go to a search engine and type in a word. You'll see some text on the page saying something like "results 1-10 of 345,000". This means that the search engine's index contains 345,000 pages it believes are related to the word you typed. If you wanted to, you could look through all these pages to find the information you're looking for.

In order to understand rating systems more thoroughly consider your own site. When you place links on your site you generally due so in order to increase your users understanding of the content of your site. If every site in a particular field links to a particular site, this site is probably very important to that field and should, therefore, be listed highly in the lists of search engine results. Thus the basic ideology of Google Page Ranks.
Consider again, a site that receives a great deal of traffic. If a site is receiving loads and loads of traffic, it probably has some information or service that is very important to its users. Alexa ratings attempt to estimate the amount of traffic that a particular site gets and compare it to the amount of traffic that other sites get. The closer that a site is to the most trafficked site on the internet, the more likely it is to have important content if it is relevant to the search query.

The Interface.

Search engines provide a public interface for users who want to find information on the web. They can type the word or phrase they're searching for, and the interface will run an algorithm to find the pages relevant to their search and display them.

These algorithms are an important part of the SEO (search engine optimization) business, and the search engines are constantly changing them. You'll notice when the algorithms change, as the rankings of your website will change with them.
No two search engines are the same. They all work differently, with their own unique features, and they will all respond to your website in their own way. You should familiarize yourself with the most popular search engines, to better understand how each of them works.

The most popular search engines today include Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, MSN, and Ask Jeeves. There are many other search engines available, though, and you shouldn't ignore them altogether.

When you submit your website to the search engines, there's no way of knowing when they might add it to their indexes. Since each search engine has its own crawling and indexing methods, you can't be sure how long it might take. In some cases, you might see results within a week, but don't count on it - it may take several weeks or even months before you see anything.

It's not easy to get a high ranking unless you spend some time on it, and learn the proper methods. When you take the time and do some research, you'll find that it's not as confusing as you first thought. Learning the basics will enhance your experience more than you would have thought possible.

2005-11-15T09:01:00.000-08:00

How to Profit From Drop Shipping

Smart Internet marketing involves smarter business strategies - and one such strategy is drop shipping. With drop shipping, you can save your time and put it to better use making you more money.

Drop shipping is an entrepreneur's dream, offering a host of benefits. To put it simply, drop shipping allows you to sell goods online at a price of your choice without keeping any inventory. When the customer purchases the goods and makes payment for them, you will place an order for the product though your supplier, a drop shipper. Your drop shipper then charges you a wholesale price for the product and ships the product directly to the customer. You get to keep the difference between wholesale and retail price.

Drop shipping offers many unique advantages to you:

1. You don't need to keep stock or inventory.
2. You don't need to bother with packing and shipping.
3. You can make money easily by just taking orders.
4. Your profit margin could increase.

Even though drop shipping can have many advantages, however, there are some things you need to consider:

1. Any product or service you intend to sell online must be in demand.

2. The product you choose must sell in high volumes: the fact that you could sell the profit cheaply and make a good margin doesn't mean anyone is buying. Research the market for any product line you're considering. Try to determine demand for the product, how much competition there is, and what they're charging.

3. Signing up with a well-known supplier offers you many benefits. For instance, you will probably find it easier to return unsatisfactory products. Some drop suppliers will even pay the return costs in these cases. As a promotion, some suppliers will even offer you products for free if you meet their targets.

4. Target one or two products at a time -- don't be in a rush to sell lots of different ones. Maintaining a large drop shipping business is often difficult and can become unmanageable.

How do you set your drop shipping business? To get started, find a directory of legitimate drop shippers with excellent reputations. Make a list of drop shippers who are established in the business and have a proven track record. Next, take the top five from the list and look through their website for products and services. In most cases you will find that their catalogue is massive, with all sorts of things available. Above all else, you need to be sure that you can sell what you choose.

Once you've done your homework, make contact with the drop shipper, either by phone or by mail. Don't start prematurely telling them all about your project, though -- you should start by asking for additional information on the terms and conditions. You will have read every clause and sub-clause thoroughly, taking care to understand the business model you're signing up to. Terms and conditions and service policies often vary with different drop shippers -- look out for any hidden clauses that could cause you trouble in the future.

The next step is to select the best offers from the drop shippers and start negotiating for better commission rates. If you have a thriving web business with a lot of traffic, it's possible to make a case for a better commission rate. Once the terms and conditions are acceptable to both of you, you can add the products to your online store.

When you work with a drop shipper, you become a "merchant" or "trader". This usually means that you will need to register with the relevant authorities. To become a merchant you may have to register to file tax returns and get a valid license to sell your products. Such regulations vary from region to region, so you should check it out with your local authorities.

The biggest headache associated with drop shipping is product returns. Don't expect it to be anything like smooth sailing. You'll run into back orders, product returns or even refund demands, if products are defective. As the shipping isn't under your control, it's difficult to explain your customers what's going on when products are unavailable or delivered late. Your own terms and conditions, user policy and other such notices must be precise and explain everything in detail to the customers. Always aim to avoid legal hassles, but do be prepared to contest customers' claims.

2005-11-09T12:44:00.000-08:00

How to Price Shipping and Handling for Physical Goods

If you're running a business that sells physical goods and products, you will frequently need to dispatch your products all over the country - perhaps even all over the world. When you do this, you might pack the item yourself, or you might pay someone to do it. However you handle it, shipping and handling is an important aspect of your business, and the safety of the items you post rests partly on your shoulders, as badly packed items will often get damaged in transit.

Your shipping and handling charges are a determining factor in how competitive you will be in a niche market. Many established companies are well known for their efficiency in dispatching the product - customers trust them for their safe prompt delivery. Before you can emulate them, you need to come up with a fair pricing structure for shipping and handling as this is an additional cost paid by your customers. The costs of shipping in bulk are often cheaper than for a single item and you should consider giving your customers discounts for volume.

How do you calculate shipping and handling charges for your product? It's relatively easy, if you know the basics. There are two components in the price:

1) The handling cost which includes packing material, labor, storage and other related costs. While this cost is pretty easy to calculate and depends only on you, the most common mistake is to use the lowest price possible for packaging materials in the shipping calculation. The better way is to find an average cost for packaging materials and then source the cheapest. At least this way you still have some room to "sharpen your pencil" if your shipping quote is too high.

2) The shipping cost which is the charge for postage, freight or courier charges. These costs are not so straight forward and you need to research courier and freight charges to many destinations around the world. Bear in mind that not all shipping charges are fixed, and with a little effort you can easily negotiate an agreement with your shipping company.

Shipping and freight companies usually charge based on the weight and volume of items, the distance they are going to travel, and how quickly you want them to get there. Large volume or weight deliveries carry a premium price tag, while smaller and lighter ones cost less. If the destination is within your country, the shipping charges will be rather small compared to sending packages abroad. If you need urgent goods to be delivered quickly then you will need to pay higher 'priority' charges, whereas slow, 'non-priority' delivery costs much less.

When calculating shipping costs, don't calculate the cost of shipping to each country in the world, break it down into regions or by continent. If you are shipping small items like CD's use one shipping cost for local deliveries and cost for international deliveries. Find the most expensive shipping cost you are likely to incur and use that for all countries.

When your customer purchases a product, they will be charges the cost price for the product and the shipping and handling costs applicable for the delivery destination will be added at the checkout. A total is calculated and then charged to your customer at the end of the transaction.

You may want to consider offering customers a delivery priority for their shipment. For example:

Option 1. Standard shipping within 3 to 5 days (cheapest).
Option 2. Express 2-day shipping (average cost).
Option 3. Guaranteed Next Day 1-day shipping (most expensive).

Consider giving discounts on bulk orders. Customers will often insist on insurance for bulk orders and costly items and you should consider their request; not only does it makes them more comfortable, it saves you a big PR headache if the order goes missing. On all shipments include a clearly explained shipping, handling and return policy.

Always take care to prepare the proper documentation to suit the insurance, tax and customs regulations in force in your own country and in the destination country. If you are shipping to another country, make sure your product is not prohibited. If you sign up with a trustworthy shipping agent or courier most of the documentation will be handled by them, giving you peace of mind that your items will be delivered safely and quickly.

2005-11-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

A Few Simple Methods For Boosting Traffic And Increasing Profits

The life blood of any website is traffic, not traffic in the real world sense, but a large flow of internet visitors to your website. The more visitors to your website, the more money you will make. But getting a large flow of visitors is not as easy as it sounds, it doesn't just happen, you have to make it happen, and here are 3 very effective ways of doing this:

1) Write articles related to the topic of your niche product and submit them to as many article directories and ezine editors you possibly can. Writing articles serves three purposes:
i) It sets you up as an expert in your niche. If your articles appear in many newsletters and hundreds of websites, people will perceive you as an expert.
ii) At the bottom of each article there is a brief bio in which you can place a link back to your website. If people are impressed with the content of your article, they will click on the link to your website to read more.
iii) Each of your articles that are published on the internet is one more link back to your website. The more links that point back to your website the more relevant your website will appear to the search engines and the higher your page will rank.

The key with articles is to submit them everywhere, to as many different places as possible. Submitting articles manually will take days, so use a paid submission service.

2) Promote your website using pay per click search engines. Your first task is to find as many keywords and keywords phrases related to your product (that people are typing into the search engines) as possible. We're not talking about ten or twenty, but hundreds, over a thousand if you can. Next you need to create a brief classified type advertisement which has a catchy benefit laden headline.

When you have these, enter them into your pay per click search engine and decide on a maximum bid for each keyword (the amount you are prepared to pay when a person clicks on the headline for your advertisement). When a surfer enters the same keyword phrase as one of yours associated with your advertisement, your advertisement will be displayed as a "Sponsored Listing" and if the surfer clicks your ad, you get charged the bid amount and the surfer is taken to your website.

3) Get as many links as possible pointing to your website. As mentioned earlier, the more links pointing to your website, the higher it will rank in the search engines for the keywords you have optimized the page for.

There is another side to having hundreds or thousands of links pointing to your website... You also get a considerable amount of traffic from people clicking on those links. This type of traffic tends to be very targeted as people won't click on a text link unless it is of interest to them.

Other than article writing, there are two major ways of getting links back to your website:
i) You can purchase text links back to your website from other high ranking web pages. The key is to buy links on pages with a similar theme to your website.
ii) You can create a reciprocal linking directory on your website. For each link you receive from another website, you will place a return, or reciprocal link back to that website. The ultimate link directories are categorized to help surfers find interesting links and also because links of a similar theme give the page they appear on the same theme, which is important for link relevancy and search engine optimization.

2005-10-31T05:20:00.000-08:00

10 Better Ways Than"SEO" To Get Web Site Traffïc
I loved this article when I saw it. So I wanted to share it with you.

Does your web site clearly tell your prospects why they should do business with you instead of your competitors? Does it have a clear "call-to-action"? Are you set up to track your visitors and conversion rates? And lastly, do you know what a visitor is worth?
If you've done all this, you're ready to bring traffïc to your site. If you haven't, go back and do those things or you'll be wasting money.

Everyone wants "organic" or "free" traffïc, but it's a full time job to try to keep on top of the search engines changing rules. Instead, if you build a good content-rich site and do the things on this list, you'll get traffïc from these things and help your ranking at the same time.

:: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – Get traffïc in an hour with PPC. Google and Overture (now Yahoo) are the primary ones, but you might also want to consider FindWhat.com. Key to make this work: know your visitor value, bid on hundreds of keywords and phrases that are not too competitive, and track each keyword or phrase separately.

:: Distribute Your Content – write articles of value to your target market. Distribute that content for other webmasters to use on their sites as long as they keep the link back to you in a "resource box" at the end of each article. Distribute your articles through article directories, ezines, and your blog. Key to make this work: valuable content.

:: Submit Press Releases – submit electronic press releases frequently with news of interest to the media and your target market. Since press releases are news, if they get picked up, it will be quickly and you can get hundreds of links back to your site this way. Key to make this work: write 300 – 500 word releases, include a link back to you, and have them written and distributed by experts who know how to optimize each release for keywords (not typical PR firms).

:: Set Up a Blog with RSS – to be effective blogs must have frequently updated content. Base yours on information helpful to your customers, not salës pitches. Don't do it unless you can commit some ongoing time to it. Seth Godin says the keys to a successful blog are (1) Candor, (2) Urgency, (3) Timeliness, (4) Pithiness – be short & to the point, (5) Controversy. Key to make this work: make it interesting to your visitors, submit to all the blog directories, ping the search engines when you post, distribute your content with RSS (others can use on their blogs or web sites without the hassle of negotiating permission and distribution doesn't get caught in sp@m filters like email).

:: Get One-Way Incoming Links – All the above will create incoming, one-way links, but you can also buy links from other sites and from text link brokers. Don't bother with reciprocal linking, it's dead. Make sure you get links from pages with a Google page rank higher than 0. A site Google rates as 0 maybe because they are penalizing it for some reason and if you link to it, you will get hurt as a result. Key to make this work: Make sure links have your keywords in the anchor text and make sure they are text, not graphical links. Make sure they are from other relevant sites, not link farms or FFA sites. Best is links from pages without many other links.

:: Give Other Sites Your Testimonial – let them publish it on their web site as long as they link back to you. This can get you a one-way link from a site that would otherwise not give it to you. Key to make this work: keep it short and to the point.

:: Email Promotions - Advertise in Ezines, place ads in someone else's email newsletters that reach your target market. Key to make this work: track everything carefully.

:: Joint Ventures – Get promoted to your JV partner's customer database by your JV partner. John Reese sold over $1 Million of his information product in 24 hours exclusively by using joint venture promotions from his partners sending his offer to their customer lists. He paid his partners 50% commission on salës. Key to make this work: know your visitor value and have a tested and proven salës page that converts well BEFORE you contact JV prospects.

:: Get Affiliates – If selling a product, offer a commission to affiliates to sell for you. Each affiliate's link to your salës letter conversion page will bring you traffïc and a better search engine rank too. Key to make this work: Make it financially attractive to your affiliates, provide all the promotional and salës materials, give them as many tracking codes as they want so they can track each thing they do at their end, do the work for them and make it easy to sign up. Provide tested emails, banners, and other tools for them to use.

:: Buy Other Web Sites – Find web sites that already rank high on your keywords, verify their traffïc with the site owner and buy their site. Make sure to get ownership of the domain – you can let them still use their content elsewhere. Chëck deleteddomains.com to see what domains you register for a few dollars that their owners have let expire. Key to make this work: Chëck Google page rank, Alexa rank and number of back links for any site before you buy it. (One marketer I know challenged some SEO experts to see who could get ranked highest on a given term in 24 hours – he won, the techies did a lot of things, but the marketer just bought the site that was # 1.)
And lastly, the one everyone usually starts with...

:: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Lots of technical issues and you should hire an expert to do it for you. Anyone who guarantees high rankings is a fraud because no one can guarantëe Google or Yahoo will do anything and the rules change constantly. (They will guarantëe some key word like your company name, but not a competitive word that would do you any good). How your site is designed is the key to this.

The big 3 of SEO are:
Content
Relevant one-way incoming links with good Google PR
Proper site design.
Everything listed in the 10 points above helps with content and providing one-way links, so all you need to add is proper site design. Key to make this work: don't think one page site, think a site with hundreds of optimized pages all tightly themed and relevant to one target market. Make sure to get someone ethical and competent. People publishing articles on MarketingSherpa.com or SiteProNews.com are typically good.

Thank you to the Author Joseph McVoy, President, Profitable Marketing Sytems LLC, 1100 Nautilus Court, Lafayette, CO 80026 Ph: 720-890-8760, Fax: 303-604-6839 Email: joe@joemcvoy.com

2005-10-24T08:03:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Optimization Glossary.

Algorithm. A set of rules that a search engine uses to rank the pages contained within its index in response to a particular query. No search engine reveals exactly how its algorithm works, to protect itself both from competitors and from those who wish to spam the search engine.

Back links. These are links to a website from external sources, including other web pages, directories, and advertising.

Banned. When pages are removed from a search engine's index because the search engine has deemed them to be spamming, or violating one of the search engine’s other rules.

Click-through rate. How many people clicked on a link, as a percentage of the total number of people that saw the link.

Cloaking. The act of serving content to search engine spiders that is different to what normal visitors would see. Search engines will ban you if they find you doing this.

Contextual links. Contextual links are displayed on web pages when the content on the page indicates to an ad server that the page is a good match for specific keywords or phrases.

Conversion rate. The percentage of visitors to a website who buy something.

Cost per click (CPC). A system where an advertiser pays an agreed amount for each click someone makes on a link leading to their website.

Cost per mille (CPM). A system where an advertiser pays an agreed amount for the number of times an ad is seen, regardless of how many people actually click through. The ‘mille’ refers to one thousand viewings of the ad.
Crawler. A component of a search engine that gathers listings by automatically ‘crawling’ the web, following links to understand how pages are connected.

De-listing. This is when pages are removed from a search engine’s index, usually because they haven’t been updated for a long time.

Directories. A type of search engine where listings are gathered by humans, rather than by automated web crawlers.

Doorway page. A web page created in the hope of improving another page’s ranking in a search engine’s listings. Doorway pages don’t give much information to the people viewing them.

Graphical inventory. Banners and other ads that appear depending on the keywords a page contains. This includes pop-ups, browser toolbars and rich media.

Index. The collection of information a search engine has that searchers can query.

Landing page. The web page that a visitor reaches after clicking your search engine listing.

Link popularity. A count of how ‘popular’ a page is based on the number of other pages that link to it.

Link. A link is text that you can click on to go to another website, or another page on the same website.

Listings. The information that appears on a search engine's results page in response to a search.

Meta-search engine. A search engine that returns listings from two or more other search engines, instead of using its own index.

Meta tags. Tags placed in a web page’s code that pass information to search engine crawlers, browser software and some other applications.

Meta description tag. This meta tag allows pages to provide descriptions to search engines.

Meta keywords tag. Allows authors to add text to a page to help with the search engine ranking process.

Meta robots tag. Allows page authors to keep some web pages from being indexed by search engines. Similar to a robots.txt file.

Natural listings. The listings that search engines do not sell. Instead, sites appear solely because a search engine believes it is important for them to be included, regardless of payment. Note that paid inclusion listings are still treated as natural listings by many search engines.
Outbound links. Links on one website that lead to other websites.

Paid inclusion. An advertising program where pages are guaranteed to be spidered and included in a search engine's index in exchange for payment.

PPC. Pay-per-click – means the same as cost per click (CPC).

Paid listings. Listings that search engines sell to advertisers, usually through paid placement or paid inclusion programs.

Pay-for-performance. A term popularized by some search engines as a synonym for pay-per-click. It stresses to advertisers that they are only paying for ads that "perform" in terms of delivering traffic, as opposed to CPM-based ads, where ads cost money even if no-one clicks on them.

Paid placement. An advertising program where listings appear in response to particular search terms, with higher rankings typically obtained by paying more than other advertisers.

Rank. The order in which web pages are listed in search engine results.

Reciprocal link. A ‘link exchange’ in which two sites link to each other.

Results page. The page that appears after a user enters their search terms.

Robots.txt. A file used to keep web pages from being indexed by search engines.

Search engine. A service designed to allow users to search the web, or another database of information.

Search engine marketing (SEM). Marketing a website using search engines, whether you’re improving your ranking in natural listings, purchasing paid listings or some combination of the two.

Search engine optimization (SEO). Altering a website so that it ranks higher in the search engines.

Search terms. The words a searcher enters into a search engine's search box.

Shopping search. Shopping search engines allow shoppers to search the web for products and their prices.

Spam. Any search engine marketing method that a search engine decides is detrimental to its efforts to deliver relevant search results.

Spider. See crawler.
Submission. The act of sending a URL to a search engine, for inclusion in its index.

XML feeds. A process in which information about a page is fed to the index without using a crawler, for example using RSS.

The best advice is to follow a good search engine promotion system. Keep track of when you submit your sites and how soon they’re indexed -- checking once a week is sufficient.

Ranking systems can be confusing and there are often complex factors involved, but you do not need to be an expert in the field to achieve top results. Take a chance – after all, you have nothing to lose. AND GOOD LUCK!

Many thanks to Danny Sullivan, Kevin Lee, Ikonya Nginyo, and all the other volunteers who contributed

2005-10-20T05:14:00.000-07:00

Compiled here is a list of free tools to help the freelancer stay competitive! If you would like help locating more free tools please just ask and I will do my best to help find what you need!

These are links to places to get free fonts. If anyone does not know how to add these fonts to there system …Just ask in this thread and I will put full instructions.

http://2-free.net/free-fonts/208.html
http://www.philsfonts.com/freefont.html
http://www.acidfonts.com/afonts.htm

These sites do not have adware attached to the fonts as some sites have so, enjoy!

If you know of any other free clean font sites please leave the links in my comments so I can add a long list to the side column!

CoffeeCup free html editor ;
Zip wizard image view;
ftp 3.0; DHMTL Menu builder 1.0
http://www.coffeecup.com/freestuff/

Exportizer is a tool for viewing, editing, filtering, copying, and exporting of database files (DB, DBF, TXT, CSV, ASC). It supports export to the clipboard or as XLS, RTF, XML, HTML or TXT file. You can filter and sort the records, and optionally also combine multiple records into a single line when exporting the data. The program can also be used for simple inline editing and adding of new records. Easy to use compact interface.http://www.snapfiles.com/dlnow/rdir.dll?id=108301

Naomi is an Internet content filtering program, intended for families and parents in particular. It constantly monitors all Internet connections for inappropriate materials, and immediately closes down the browser if encountered. The programs considerations include obscene or violent contents; pornography and erotism in the form of images or texts, as well as sites that popularize drugs, gambling, terrorism, hate propaganda and more. The program uses a built-in filter list (which cannot be modified) as well as heuristic scanning and semantic analysis of web pages and links. It recognizes more than 10 major languages and supports the ICRA labeling system. The interface is password protected to prevent unauthorized disabling of the filter. Naomi`s biggest strength is that it is completely fool-proof and fully automatic, with no additional configurations (other than picking a password), it supports any browser or Internet application and does not change any of your settings - on the downside, it does not offer any control over the filters. The filtering worked well during our tests.

http://www.radiant.altervista.org/setup-en.exe

This site is down for right now~~ someone hacked it..but will be up soon!

XOOPS is an extensible, OO (Object Oriented), easy to use dynamic web content management system written in PHP. XOOPS is the ideal tool for developing small to large dynamic community websites, intra company portals, corporate portals, weblogs and much more.

Read the All about XOOPS page for more details.

HERE>>> http://www.xoops.org/

StudioLine Photo (freeware) is a powerful and easy-to-use management and editing software for digital photos. Benefit from the full range of filters and effects as well as managing externally stored images, CD burning, built-in FTP, and other innovative capabilities. Get the functions of StudioLine Photo, including comprehensive image editing, management, and archiving, at no cost. Benefit from the full range of filters and effects, as well as batch processing and other innovative capabilities. Manage your photos and their descriptions in the program´s ingenious image archive.

http://www.studioline.biz/EN/

FREE Single License of Evolution - Source Control Management w/ EASY out-of-the-box Remote Access Perfect for .NET, C++, VB, ASP, and all IDE's.Offer expires soon - download your FREE Evolution single license Evaluation LicensingYou may download and use Evolution free of charge for up to 10 users for 30 days. It is fully functional with the exception that encryption is disabled. At the end of the evaluation period, you will have the option to convert your copy of Evolution to a FREE Personal Edition license with no time limitation.

DOWNLOAD AND DETAILS

HERE>>>>http://www.ionforge.com/downloads/index.html

Brazil Rio (aka "Rio") is a freely available, personal-use, non-commercial edition of SplutterFish’s award-winning Brazil r/s V1.2 renderer for 3ds max. and Autodesk VIZ. Brazil is, at it's core, a high performance production renderer that supports many advanced features like area lighting, gi, sss, and much much more. Rio is distributed by SplutterFish for multiple reasons: It allows us to have many people stress testing our software in many different environments, it serves as a way for us to share with the community and to provide an personal-educational version that can be used by students and other hobbiests, and it lets artists, who are considering purchasing the full-featured commercial version, test drive the Brazil toolkit beforehand

http://www.splutterfish.com/sf/sf_gen_page.php3?page=rio

Applications are free, no support is provided, there are no installers and uninstallers, just download zip file(s), and look at readme.txt files for installation instructions. Applications are provided "as is", use them at your own risk

Time Tracker , (390 Kb). Helps you to track time you spend with your computer. Detects mouse movement, and keyboard strokes, and, if there are none of them for certain amount of time, assumes that you are not there. You can select the period of time, and generate a report of your activity for the specified interval of time. Can be useful, if you do computer related work, and are getting paid on hourly basis. Runs on a system tray;

Mail Checker , (367 Kb.) Checks your email in specified time intervals, and if there are more than 1 messages waiting for you, changes it's icon (raises a flag). Runs on a system tray; http://www.argosoft.com/freetoys/default.aspx

A Great Place for space and shuttle images copyright free*of course check this site policies on commercial use as always. But the guidleines are not stringent.

http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/gallery/

For more free images check the links in the right column of this site!

2005-10-19T09:39:00.000-07:00

What is a virtual assistant?

According to the Alliance for Virtual Business: "Virtual Assistants (VAs) are independent entrepreneurs providing professional administrative, creative, managerial, technical, business office and/or personal support services. VAs use the most advanced means of communication, and the newest and most efficient and time saving office products and work delivery, regardless of geographic boundaries. Virtual Assistants work from their own offices, on a contractual basis, and abide by an established Code of Ethics requiring integrity, honesty and due diligence."In short, a VA can do just about anything a regular employee can do. You just won't see his or her face every day and the manner in which you send tasks to him or her will vary slightly.Instead of walking paper files into the next office, you can simply attach those same electronic files to an email and hit send. Your assistant will work on those files according to your instructions and return them, mail them, or do whatever else you request with them. What can a virtual assistant do?Research for potential clients or customers Call contractors (printers, office supplies, other) to get quotes for you, pass those quotes on to you for approval, set up the contractor and baby sit him or her for you until the job is done. Screen clients or customers for motivation or to be sure they're qualified to work with your company Process mailings to potential clients or customers Perform outbound telemarketing calls seeking clients or customers Enter your leads into your CRM program Set/cancel appointments Work with Excel spreadsheets Work with MS Word Answer incoming calls for you Return phone calls Type and send letters or contracts Make travel arrangements Call for quotes Schedule your car for service Order services on your behalf Many assistants are Jack's or Jill's of all trades, some are more specialized, but some of the tasks a virtual can do are: Accounting, Bookkeeping, Human resources, Concierge services, Collections, Sales, Marketing, Travel arrangements, Research, Word processing, Appointment setting, Meeting arrangements, Event planning, Letter preparation, Transcription, Reports, Proof reading, Manuals, Newsletters, Flyers, Mailings, Data entry, Data processing, Do(edited)ent scanning, E-mail processing, Answering phone calls, Procedure do(edited)entation, Customer support, Copyrighting, Web design Virtuals are typically a very intelligent bunch. Many are college-educated and even more have countless years of solid business experience to draw on. This comes in very handy when you're looking for ideas. How can a virtual assistant help me make more money in my business? How are other professionals using virtual assistants? Perhaps the most important thing she can do is relieve you of the mundane, time-consuming tasks that keep you from selling. As a business professional, your time needs to be spent out on the streets or on the phones and in front of clients, not with your head tucked in a filing cabinet. She can also be your telemarketer, can do follow up calls after post cards or letters have been sent (which by the way, she can also mail those post cards or letters for you). Follow up calls and outbound cold calling are essential in any business to keep touching new potential clients -- your telemarketer can also do the cold calling for you. Give her a simple script, tell her what you (edited)t done with the good leads, and unleash her on your prospect list! If the prospect appears to be a good lead, ask her to gather as much information for you as she can and send the good leads back to you for follow through.Your assistant can also take your inbound calls for you. I do not recommend using a company which utilizes a bank of people answering phones. Each and every client should be treated as the individual that they are. Each client, regardless of how big or small should be assigned just one admin. This admin is then able to get to know your clients/customers, your business, and how you like your work performed. That's how the personal touch and true human element stays intact. Sending your callers to a bank of phone operators generally doesn't foster that kind of relationship or human contact. Answering your inbound calls for you is as easy as forwarding your existing business line to y our admin. A virtual assistant can save me money because I don't need to rent office space to accommodate him or her, I don't need to buy a computer or desk for her to work at, he or she is an independent contractor so I don't need to pay FICA, health insurance, vacation time, Social Security, or other taxes and benefits. A virtual assistant can help me make more money by also acting as my marketing assistant. He or she can take inbound customer calls or make outbound telemarketing calls. He or she can search for leads so I only have to follow up with the hot ones. How can hiring a virtual assistant benefit me and my business? As a business professional, you need to constantly have new leads flowing you're your sales pipeline. A virtual assistant can help you find those leads, help you qualify them, and basically act as an extension of you. This keeps you out there selling and can ensure a constant flow of new leads. Virtuals work best when plugged into your current marketing system. If you're doing marketing campaigns that already work well, but need to do more of it to keep the leads coming, task portions (or all) of that out to your virtual. Let her do the prep work so-to-speak and free you up for the more impactful activities like closing the sale.They're the savviest of the savvy when it comes to operating on a low budget and using technology to their advantage. Their cost consciousness should extend to your business expenses as well.Most are equipped with the latest software (and lots of it), multiple phone lines, Internet, e-mail, fax machine, cel(edited)ar phone, copy machines, scanners, and a great attitude. Many even come with a cat or dog! He or she should use all of the latest technology to communicate with you and get your work done as quickly as possible. Hiring a virtual that already comes with all of the best software saves you hundreds of dollars by not having to purchase all of that software yourself.A virtual should only "clock in" when they're on your project. This means you don't pay for her time playing solitaire on the computer or while she's waiting for the next assignment. A virtual assistant can free your time to do what you're good at and what's important to your company. Whether that's making sales, following up on leads, attending speaking events, or doing the other meaty tasks your business requires. How can I trust a person I've never met in person, and never will, to keep my leads and my business confidential? VA's are as concerned with your business success as they are with their own. In fact, their success depends on your success. So, a virtual can become one of the best assistants and business partners you've ever had. Just like you, they are business owners and very interested in helping their clients.It's also a good idea to get your virtual or the company providing the virtual under strict confidentiality agreement. Make sure the broker thoroughly screens all of their contractors to ensure the best quality. Ask if they have tested for flexibility, trustworthiness, reliability, candidness, assertiveness, and whether or not they have a helping disposition. Ask the agency or broker if they stand behind their contractors. If a bad one slips through and doesn't work out, will they replace that person immediately? You should expect similar from any staffing agency you work with -- and get it in writing. How can I find a good virtual assistant? Virtually, of course! Ain't cyberspace great? That's probably the best place to go in search of your very own VA. The best option, however is to find a good virtual staffing agency. An agency will save you a lot of time by screening the virtual for you and choosing the best one to match your needs. As an added bonus, if the VA doesn't work out for you, all you need to do is make one simple phone call and the agency should be able to find another one for you quickly and without additional time wasted, or extra charges. How can I successfully screen a virtual assistant? There are several things you need to know before you start looking: What exactly do I need help with? What expertise does the VA need? How much do I have available to spend? How quickly do I need this project done? How long will I need virtual assistance? How often will I need my VA to work? What hours should he or she be available? What days of the week? Is there any specific software he or she needs to have? Is what I need accomplished so specific that I'll need to incorporate some training time? How will I pay him or her? Visa, MasterCard, Check, Paypal, wire transfer? How do I (edited)t to communicate with my VA? Phone, e-mail, snail mail, or a combination? Does my VA really need to be located in a particular time zone, country, part of the country, city? Any other particular qualities you'd like your virtual assistant to have? Just as you would screen someone who would apply to work in your office, you'll still need to spend a little time screening your virtual assistant. You'll need to tell him or her what you need and (edited)t, and what is and isn't acceptable. You'll also need to negotiate pricing and terms with the virtual.To simplify this entire process, choose a good virtual staffing agency. The agency should:1) Assign one admin to you2) Screen that admin3) Place that admin under confidentiality agreement4) Treat you like an individual5) Ask their admins to time themselves carefully so your charges are accurate6) Not round their minutes up to hours7) Keep you updated daily on tasks completedHow do I train my virtual assistant to do what I (edited)t?Training a virtual assistant should be no different than training an in-person assistant. Use the latest technologies that everyone has access to in order to facilitate training. Communicate your needs via telephone, instant messenger, and by emailing do(edited)ents for review.Ask your potential virtual or the virtual staffing agency supplying the virtual if there is a free training period. I highly recommend asking for at least two hours free time for training. Assistants do occasionally leave (or not work out), you shouldn't have to pay to retrain a new assistant each time this happens.How do I ensure quality with my virtual assistant?The best approach, if you're hiring on your own, is to get a complete history of the virtual before hiring. While this isn't always foolproof, it does help.Next, require the VA to send you a daily reporting of what is accomplished and how many hours was logged. I recommend asking for this report in a simple end-of-the-day email. Then you always know the status of your tasks and what you're spending.Carefully review everything your assistant returns to you completed until you've developed a comfort level with her work.Correct mistakes quickly and immediately when they happen. No one can learn to do things differently if they're not told that they made a mistake. When you catch an error, notify your assistant and tell her how to correct it. Don't offer to correct the mistake for her but ask her to fix it and send it back to you. How can I manage an assistant who is 100's of miles away? Well, do you mean manage or micro-manage? No successful business owner can afford to micro-manage. If you need to micro-manage, you should find someone to sit right next to you in your office. If you can refrain from micro-managing and allow your admin to think and do on her own, you'll have no problems managing her from a distance. Through proper candidate selection, proper training, clear and concise instructions, and the daily reporting I mentioned earlier, there should be no serious problems. What does it cost to have a virtual assistant? A virtual is far more cost effective than a regular employee. You may pay more per hour than a regular employee, but leave out the FICA, state unemployment taxes, Social Security, health insurance, vacation time, sick time, 401(k), profit sharing, Christmas bonus, holiday pay, and other benefits you need to offer a regular employee, and a virtual's wage comes out far lower than that of a regular employee.We recently tabulated the cost of hiring an in-house assistant for the average business. It breaks down like this: Cost (based on 1,960 productive hrs/yr) Item$13.00/hour Employee wage$ .53/hour Two weeks of vacation time$ .27/hour One week sick time$ .48/hour Health insurance$ .99/hour FICA (7.65% of wages)$ .42/hour Unemployment insurance (3.25%)$ .77/hour Desk, chair, computer, supplies$ .32/hour Holiday pay$ .06/hour Placing a help (edited)ted ad in the paper$ .10/hour Your time spent interviewing candidates$ .03/hour Profile test$ .08/hour Payroll processing$ 3.06/hour Office rent (based on $500/month rent)$20.11/hour Total cost Your $13/hour employee just became a $20/hour employee plus you have greater liabilities and you still have to manage her and replace her if she doesn't work out, thus go through that whole process again.A virtual assistant should be set up as an independent contractor Ð never an employee. You don't (edited)t to be held liable later on for her office not being ergonomically friendly or for her developing carpletunnel syndrome. If you use a virtual staffing agency, check with them first to be sure the admin they assign you is set up as a contractor or at least an employee of the agency Ð not an employee of your company. Hiring the virtual as an independent contractor is also what gets you out of paying all the taxes, health insurance, and so on.A virtual can save money in other areas as well. How much does it cost you to maintain office footage, a computer, a phone line or two, a refrigerator, a microwave, a desk, electricity, heat, air conditioning, and parking for your regular employees? With a virtual, you don't need any of those things - he or she supplies his or her own.The fee for a virtual usually depends upon the area of the country where he or she is located and their area(s) of expertise. Virtuals charge between $15 and $75 per hour. But, you only pay for the time he or she actually spends working on your tasks. Others still may agree to a flat fee based upon individual project requirements. Either way, you come out ahead.

2005-10-14T03:59:00.000-07:00

When it comes to searching for a client, writing a resume or making yourself invaluable to an employer, all of us know of our need for information and guidance. But just as most people think they do an okay job scouring the Web, the average graphic artist, Webmaster or coder rarely realizes how much strategy it takes to look beyond the obvious. The average freelancer thinks client searching is just common sense. Common sense says that employers/clients/commissions find freelancers by running an ad in the newspaper or at a well-known online employment site where job seekers congregate. When most people look for clients online, they assume the most challenging thing will be finding the clients online. This is not so.You need excellent information skills to succeed in the search for the freelance clients/commissions because in order to find that one client— the perfect one for you — you have to let them know you are the perfect one for them. Gain their attention and keep it.

Here are three Tips to help you find and keep a client/employer

Ø Tailor your cover letters for specific jobs. This means that you should have samples available for clients that are similar to what that client is looking for. You would not want to show a person looking for vector art your photography samples.
Ø Network in professional societies. Read forum posts and Blogs about people in the same field. In the non-cyber area this may mean going to seminars and joining groups. Many of these groups will give members a first shot at the prime jobs available. This is a good way to meet and be around people that are into what you are and learning how to cruise along side successful people. Sometimes you may find that they can just tell you what to avoid so that you do not need to go thru the same potholes they had.
Ø Research your potential employer's current activities and core values. If you want to be able to talk to a client/employer on their level, know about what they know. Read business articles about the business they are in. You should know what they are aiming to achieve so that you can get into step with where they are going and fit in with the plans they have set for the future. Know what their mission statement is and who the leaders of the company are; this will help you pinpoint who the decision maker is and who can truly offer you the position. These hints may not get you every job but along with spelling correctly and tenacity you may find they help a lot more then just sending out a email and waiting on a reply.

2005-10-14T03:57:00.000-07:00

Finding The Clients AND KEEPING THEM

The key to finding a client/customers is better submission skills. These seven short tips will help make the process easier and bearable, and ultimately more successful.

BIG THINGS

Spellcheck and keep at it... just keep submitting ORGANIZE From day one keep a record of contacts, places you submit for work letters/resumes/notes, people you meet, bidding sites, and contacts. A spreadsheet helps.

LEARN TO WRITE A FIRST RATE SUBMISSION

Take a hard and honest look at what you communicate and disseminate. Your bids and e-mails should yell, "You are professional and can get the job done." Remember, this is marketing. If you can't sell yourself, how the heck are you going to sell your designs/websites and services? If your work bids and e-mails generates no confidence, re-evaluste your writing skills and stategies.

FIND QUALITY LEADS

Part of client search frustration can be from releasing too many bids to worthless prospects. Avoid the urge to bid cheap at every bidding site on the block. You will achieve no results with this; only over work your self with little compensation.

HAVE A FRIEND LOOK OVER A BID OR TWO.

Try to run a few bids past a friend. If possible, ask a teacher or a business associate. Getting a fresh point of view might just open your eyes on some major flaws...or maybe strengthen some of the strong point in your wrting style. FOLLOW-UPAlways send a thank you note after a job. If, after sending a thank you note, you my get some new business if you keep your name in there mind with good responses. Let the client know you are interested in working with them again.

GET BUSY

Sitting on bottom and complaining will get you nowhere. If you are not working on a project, consider creating sample object for you portfolio or volunteering. You can gain valuable experience working on volunteer assignments or for non-profit organizations. Be sure to add your new experiences to your resume.

CONTACTS

If nothing else keep up on forums and site searches..joining group of people with similar job goals..maybe they may have some tips or a great site..or a client they can not help with their brand of expertise.. networking.

GOOD LUCK!

2005-10-07T20:49:00.000-07:00

When a thought happens I seem to follow it. Like a moth..not a butterfly. Butterflies are graceful and beautiful..I am certainly more like a moth. I am not really beautiful and my children cause alot of damage. And when I think that I have just reach my destination I get burned. Yep a moth.