'Buy Locally' Business Idea With A Web Twist

How To Start A Six Figure Online Translation Business

http://www.poptotheshops.net/

“Bought locally, ordered online and delivered to your door.” That sums up what Poptotheshops offers South Wales residents. Poptotheshops, which was launched late last year, currently serves four high street areas, who each sell between 3300 and 4500 products using the internet shopping service. 292 shoppers have registered so far, and 36 shops have signed up.

One shop actually left the system, because its owner didn’t want the ‘aggravation’ of extra work caused by extra sales. More stores will be joining soon, and Poptotheshops’ founder, Will Seward, hopes to expand beyond Wales as soon as possible.

Seward came up with the idea after being dismayed about being too busy to shop at local stores. Most local shops have shorter opening hours than the big chains like Tesco and Walmart, which can make it hard to support local retailers.

On Poptotheshops, customers can shop day or night, selecting products from the local butcher, baker, fish monger, green grocer and off-license, before checking out in one go. Similar to online shopping at supermarkets, customers can save favourite products and specify when they’d like delivery to take place. Delivery is free for customers. Poptotheshops covers its costs (and will hopefully generate a profit) by charging retailers 10-15% commission.

Besides supporting the local economy and keeping the high street alive, PTTS also sees other benefits: independent stores often offer great local products and produce that aren’t available in nationwide stores, consumers save time otherwise spent in supermarkets and helping small retailers thrive decreases the control that supermarkets have over pricing, produce and suppliers.

[Via - Springwise]

How To Make Wads Of Cash As An Online Dating CoachCoin Domino
Find a Niche for Your Business, Fill It and Win

10 Steps for Increasing Visibility Online

The Heavy Metal Dillema

Most small businesses that run a website today don't have the insider knowledge to optimize their content and overall visibility online. I personally handle internet marketing issues--SEO, PPC, e-mail marketing, copywriting--every day, and I'm always surprised to see how many businesses have no understanding of what SEO means, let alone know how to approach it.

In the vast sea of websites--from e-commerce, media and informational websites to blogs and wikis--most site owners use a basic approach to search engine optimization. They submit their site to more than 200 search engines and blast these with some domains and keywords that may be related to the site. Some go to blogs and forums--related or not--and start "fishing" for links (making random, non-intelligent forum comments and submitting links back to their site). Even worse, they'll pay companies to undertake this useless exercise.

Next, if that doesn't work, they will purchase a marketing book, apply all the techniques and sit back, hoping that something will take. Often this will be done by an IT person who has been told to optimize the company website, which isn't part of their daily routine or knowledge space.

Rather than these slapdash attempts, you need a strong, long-term commitment to SEO and must always stay on top of the search engines and their ever-changing, underlying landscape.

Google, the top search engine--and the one to optimize for--handles more than 50 percent of search traffic and utilizes more than 100 algorithms to track and manage HTML content ("on-page factors"), external profiles ("off-page factors"), link architectures, popularity and reputation, as well as PageRank calculation (a complex site voting system) and web bots. The content gathered from spidering search-friendly sites gets stored into huge databases (called the "index") on a powerful grid of network computers.

Google weighs all of these elements into an overall score, and if you have optimized well in all areas and have reviewed your competition and their strategy (I'll talk about how to do this in an upcoming article), you can and will rank well for fairly competitive key terms. You must realize, though, that the more competitive your term is, the longer it will take--but you can get there.

Here's a 10-step plan to improve site visibility and increase search-friendliness. The first five steps address parts of your website's HTML code, while the final five are more abstract. Together, they add up to a "must do" SEO list.

1. Title tag (SEO Gone Wild – microsaw.com)

• This is most important of all. If you have the title tag set up right, and it's a unique enough phrase, you could rank on page one for this alone.
• Write your keywords early in the title, and place your company name last--unless you are Coca-Cola, or have a huge brand.

2. Meta tags

• Description--. Place your page content description between the blank quotes with a call to action statement like, "Sign up here," or "Call us at 800 XXX-XXXX."
• Keywords--. Place keywords between the quotation marks after "content," separated by commas. Google ignores this, but it appears that other search engines still review it.

3. Header tags

• H1--This HTML tag should contain your core keywords, one per page.
• H2--This HTML tag should contain derivatives of the keywords.

4. Body

• Content--Use content that matches the keywords on your site. You should ideally have 400 to 800 words on a page.
• Bolding--Include bolded keywords that match your topic/theme on the page.
• Create a blog--Wordpressis an amazing blog that is free and can easily be optimized via plug-ins. Then, write entries twice a week.

5. Linking

• Use links and anchor text to create popularity and reputation around keywords (example: don't link to just "click here," but create a better link like, "download the digital camera white paper").
• Internal links (link to other pages on your site)
• Outbound links (you link to another authority site on your topic)
• Reciprocal links (join link exchanges and contact partners to exchange links)
• One-way links (when other sites link to your blog, press releases or articles) are typically more effective than outbound and reciprocal ones.
• For some internal links, use "rel=nofollow" in the code to avoid losing PageRank to less important pages like "about us," "contact us" and "privacy policy."

6. Domains

• If starting a new site, try to get an established URL (purchase it if you have to).
• Use keywords in an easy-to-remember domain. Google recognizes domains that have been around and establishes credibility; you can avoid the Google Sandbox (where you don't show up in the index for months, potentially).

7. Users first, then search engine

• Make sure your sites have valuable and readable content. If you've optimized for search engines only and no users stick around your website, you haven't been successful.
• Navigation, directory structures and file names should be well defined. An easy way to solve this is to use breadcrumb navigation and linked navigation, not flash or JavaScript or image-based links. Develop a flat directory structure (no more than three levels deep) and name your keywords in the file name (ex: content-management-system.htm)

8. Keyword research

• Keyword development is one of the first places to start. Two to three keywords per page is possible. Combined with the items listed in the first five steps above, you will have a high success score.
• Use tools like Yahoo! Search Marketing/Overture, Google's Keyword Tool and SEOBook keywords tool.
• Try to shoot for keywords that have higher search counts; over 20,000 searches for your keyword are good, but it all depends on your industry.

9. Competition

• Find out what the competition is doing. Type in your search term into a search engine and locate three to five of the top results. Look at these sites and see what they are doing in the HTML (on-page) and linking (off-page) areas. I'll discuss this more in a future article.
• To find out how many sites are linking to your competition, type "link:http://www.competitorname.com" into Google. Do the same in Yahoo!, and you'll see a higher count because Yahoo! is more all-inclusive.

10. Be cool.

• Don't let this business get to you; it's frustrating at times. SEO is a long-term commitment. Some weeks are great, others are not.
• It's a serious investment of time, sweat and staying the course. The best success factors I've seen: Approach content and website design in a natural way; be ethical (don't spam); and keep it real--it's a business, and nothing comes for free.

Don't forget that search/internet marketing is multi-faceted. Traditional Marketing 101 teachers would say to build a comprehensive plan for marketing. Don't just work the online factors, but create a sound strategy around offline marketing, using ideas like postcards, trade magazines ads, phone/sales work, word of mouth and additional tactics that can help create a "buzz" around your products and services. Search engine optimization applied correctly will create better visibility online, but it's just one part of your overall marketing strategy.

Jon Rognerud is a recognized authority on the subject of search engine optimization and has spent more than 15 years developing websites and marketing solutions at companies like Overture and Yahoo!. His website provides a wealth of informative articles, resources and complimentary e-mail courses on everything you'll ever need to know about SEO and search marketing.

My Secret: A PostSecret BookSnoBear Snow RVs
Bob Barker Destroys Craig Ferguson's Desk

Funny business going on online

Meow can I help you? Tech slips five meows into a help desk call.

Ever since a bootleg clip of a Saturday Night Live sketch comedy skit put YouTube on the map in December 2005, the growing consensus among Web watchers has been that short comedy clips are the "killer app" of the brave new viral video world.

So it's no surprise that websites devoted solely to comedy videos are proliferating, from amateur sites to big-budget efforts backed by entertainment heavyweights.

Among the latter: SuperDeluxe.com, a comedy broadband network launched in January by Turner Broadcasting, and FunnyOrDie.com, a partnership between Will Ferrell and Adam McKay's Gary Sanchez Productions and Sequoia Capital, venture capital firm behind YouTube and Google.

The business model is simple: Build it, make it funny enough, and the public will come. And once you get enough eyeballs, you can make money through advertising, just like regular TV networks.

Andrew Wallenstein, The Hollywood Reporter's digital media editor, calls dedicated comedy websites "a trend that's gathering steam."

"When you look at how online video is consumed, it seems that quick bursts of comedy on YouTube, or even jokes you get in your e-mail, work the best," he says. "The holy grail is coming up with a one-stop dot-com shop where you can snack on comedy until you pass out."

Two of the first of these dot-com comedy shops were CollegeHumor.com, launched in 1999 by two friends from Baltimore, and Jokeroo.com, launched a year later and now featuring video clips, forums, greeting cards and photo galleries.

Other popular sites include EbaumsWorld.com, which bills itself as the world's largest independent online publisher of humor-related content, and JibJab.com's Jokebox, a virtual swap meet for comic video clips, photos and text jokes that was launched last year by JibJab Media, best known for its hit 2004 online short lampooning presidential candidates.

SuperDeluxe.com has lured pro comedians to create content. Plans call for the network to expand beyond the Internet to such platforms as cable video-on-demand, mobile phones and personal media players.

Bob Odenkirk, the comedian, writer and director who created and starred in the HBO series Mr. Show, is creating a 12-episode Internet series of shorts called Derek & Simon: The Show for Super Deluxe. The series makes its debut May 16 and follows real-life bumblers Derek Waters and Simon Helberg trying in vain to pick up girls in Los Angeles.

"There's more people watching performances and programs on the Web than ever before, and it's going to grow," Odenkirk says. "With more and people having high-speed Internet, it's just becoming a great new venue for entertainers."

Odenkirk says professional comedy series, delivered in short bits over the Internet, is the logical progression from the user-submitted pranks and candid-camera clips so popular on sites such as YouTube and Revver.

"You're going to see a lot more of these conscious pieces of performance, something that's written and there's an idea and a character … instead of just a glancing blow, an accidental laugh," he says.

One advantage the Web has over television: "There are very few restrictions on language and subject matter, although what we are doing on Derek & Simon could go on any cable network," he says.

Another contributor to Super Deluxe is Brad Neely, the Arkansas comic book artist behind Creased Comics.

Unlike television, Neely says, "you get a direct line of communication between content and audience. We know immediately what works and what doesn't. Audiences can smell from a mile away anything that seems like a formula, so you constantly have to give them something new and different."

Common Small-Business ScamsWacky Business Idea - Multiethnic Wedding Cake Figurines
How To Choose A Business To Start From Home And Start Earning Immediately

Farmer's cool invention turns profitable

Age proves no limit for maritime inventor

New Paltz — When the air conditioner caught fire three years ago, Kate Khosla thought it was time to pull the plug — literally — on her husband Ron's efforts to invent a better compressor-condensor-evaporator.

For anyone who's not a farmer, a compressor-condensor-evaporator may not sound like something you'd want to spend much time building a better one of. But Ron and Kate Khosla are farmers, and it had always bothered them that it could cost $3,000 or more to have such a huge and heavy contraption installed to create a walk-in cooler room, cool enough to store their harvest in. Their organic farm, Huguenot Street Farm, is modest, as are their profits.

Khosla's idea was simple: he thought he could build a gizmo that would allow an ordinary air conditioner to take a room's temperature down as low as 32 degrees. Not all of his prototypes blew up, but neither did any of his early models last long enough to get the job done.

The toasted air conditioner failed to stop Khosla from plugging away for another three years. Last week, you could find Khosla juggling about a dozen small boxes at the New Paltz post office, sending his patent-pending CoolBot to farmers like himself. With next to no publicity or marketing, the CoolBot is becoming a very hot item. And it's poised to go more places than the farm. He's sold about 80 units at $250 a pop and has placed material orders that will allow him to build another 500.

It's all a marvel to Khosla, who calls himself a "reluctant capitalist" who never intended to sell his invention. He'd thought initially to explain the process to other farmers and let them build their own. That idea didn't work out, but the Khoslas don't seem too broken up about it.

If enthusiasm could be measured in BTUs, Ron Khosla's would be off the charts. Yes, it's been eight years in the making — no overnight success, but, he says, once you've invented something and it's showing such promise and you start realizing who else in the world would love to have a walk-in cooler (caterers, kitchens, grocery stores, wineries) and you're already discovering economies of scale and making a good thing better, well, all you really want to do is invent something else.

And that's the plan at the Khoslas. Whatever money they make from the CoolBot is being earmarked for Ron's next project.

And what might that be?

He smiles and rolls his inventor's eyes conspiratorially.

"It's a secret."
How One Blogger Increased His Revenue From $300/Mo To Over $3000/Mo With Things Other Than AdSense.What is Google's Supplemental Search Result and How to Deal with It.
Creating Sales Tools That Build Your Brand

On Unsolicited Advice

The Strange Story of the "Crackpot" Mail-Order Prophet

Once you start your own business, the advice pours in from all sides: Your sister has a great idea for a marketing campaign. Your brother thinks you should get a franchise. Your father wants you to be tougher on your employees. And your mother, who's worried about you, suggests that maybe you should really be looking for a job.

Unsolicited advice doesn't just come from family members. Friends, lawyers, accountants, even strangers you meet at networking events or soccer games suddenly become experts when they learn that you own your own business.

It's a jungle out there. Of course, you could just ignore them all and go your own way. But some people have good ideas and insight. How do you know who to listen to and who to ignore?

Here's a handy guide for determining what advice to pay heed to, and who you should politely thank and say, "Could you pass the cheese plate please?"

• Experienced businesspeople in your industry: Listen hard to these folks! Novice entrepreneurs often believe they know better than those who've been around a long time. But the realities of an industry don't change quickly. You can learn a lot from those who've been in an industry. So listen closely even if you don't follow their advice to the letter.

• Customers: You'd better be listening to your customers, because they're the ones who determine whether you stay in business. It's tempting to dismiss the advice of customers because it often comes in the form of complaints. Instead, look for ways to gather as much insight and suggestions from customers in positive situations. Ask for their feedback.

• Employees: Your employees can be a rich vein of insight and advice for your company. Seek it out, listen to it carefully, and use it when you can. Create an environment where employees know their advice is welcome, valued, and given a careful hearing. Employees often know the ins and outs of some aspects of a business better than the owner.

• Investors: Your investors are, in essence, your partners, so the advice-giving and advice-taking process is a two-way street. It's part of your job to help your investors know enough about your business so that when they give you suggestions, it can be informed and well-reasoned.

• Board and advisory committee members: In most cases, people serve on your board of directors or advisory committee because you've asked them to, so their advice should be given great respect. Board members (of corporations) have legal authority, so board decisions must be followed.

• Friends and family: Your family's support is often essential for major business decisions, especially financial ones. If you're taking a home equity loan, for instance, you certainly must have your spouse's approval. In which case, they have a right to have their suggestions listened to with respect.

But on other decisions, remember, people close to you have their own motivations and their own fears coloring their advice. When your spouse suggests you'd be a lot more productive if you didn't work in the living room, he or she may just want to get your stuff out of the way.

How To Make Wads Of Cash As An Online Dating CoachMADtv - Korean Drama Parody (Part 4)
Unwanted Horse Web Site Launched

Broken iPods Riches - Don't Tell Anyone!

Zadornov funny russian comedy skazki

http://buymybrokenipod.com/

A month ago, Apple announced that it has sold over 100 million iPods worldwide. Unfortunately, they don't last forever, and tempting new models are always just around the corner. Which is where buymybrokenipod.com comes in.

The young start-up offers consumers a very simple way to sell their broken or unused iPods: after indicating which model they'd like to sell and what condition it's in, the website gives an instant price-quote. Send it in, and payment is transferred via PayPal within 24 hours after the iPod has been received.

There are alternatives: used or broken iPods could be sold on eBay, where hundreds of Apple's music players are listed for sale for parts or refurbishing. But many consumers can't be bothered with finding out how to list a product, and don't want to deal with potential customers. buymybrokenipod.com provides an effortless alternative. How they make money?

The iPods are usually sold in bulk to small businesses who fix them for a living, replacing cracked screens, expired batteries and dead hard-drives, and reselling them to consumers. Generally, iPods received by buymybrokenipod.com are in good condition.

[Via - Springwise]

The New Benefits of Web-Search QueriesComedy Football
How To Successfully Sell Imported Games Through Direct Marketing.