Tap Into Your Own Talent

CanadianMedsWorld.com
When I was searching for a career, my dad gave me advice I still follow today: Find what you do brilliantly, and do more of it. Over the years, I've learned that this philosophy enables you to find your niche and discover unique methods to achieve your goals.

As an entrepreneur, you often jump at any chance to expand your business. However, your business's biggest and best asset is you. It's your expertise that makes your business unique and leads to the most efficient growth opportunities.

The owner of a jewelry store frequently updated the gems she carried but was never able to dramatically increase her sales. She thought her clientele might buy a broader line of products, so she added religious statues to her store. But ultimately, her lack of familiarity with these items caused the strategy to fail.

On her second try at expansion, she decided to delve further into her core area of specialization. She bought jewelry designed and made by local artists. It paid off. Her current customers and her new artists spread the word about her updated business, and her store became a shopping destination.

Creating product extensions within your area of expertise expands your customer roster. Increase your chance of success by focusing on what you do best -- and do more of it.

1. Tap into the innate power behind what makes your business unique. Growing your business based on your inherent strengths allows you to discover dynamic expansion possibilities. Use your intuition, and ask your employees and colleagues for help on how to rework or redesign your core product to appeal to a broader market. For the jewelry store owner, it was her expertise in gems that allowed her to sell the stones in multiple ways.

2. Shift from selling to actively listening. Become relentlessly focused on broadening the appeal of your core product by engaging your customers. What new uses have they discovered that may not have occurred to you? Ask them to be direct and truthful, and keep a log of their suggestions. Tapping into this rich vein of recommendations allows you to jump-start new growth opportunities.

3. Convert the benefits customers share into product features. Use the recommendations offered by your customers to construct new uses for your core product. Regularly reinventing your product with fresh benefits keeps your customers interested and excited. It was Arm & Hammer's customers who informed the company of alternative uses for its top-selling baking soda product. The company has now expanded its core product into numerous other uses, including cleansers, deodorizers and beauty products.

4. Gain loyalty by thanking people creatively. Thanking people for sharing their ideas deepens customer loyalty. It also increases word-of-mouth advertising for your business. A sandwich shop owner who was famous for his use of cheeses decided to name his weekly specials after customers who made distinctive recommendations. They brought their friends and families into his store to see their names and pictures up on his "Say Cheese" board.

Keep your network of customers and colleagues informed of your product enhancements. Your enthusiasm will encourage them to tell others about your business. And more important, it will inspire them to share even more product-transformation ideas with you.

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How To Make Money With Extreme Bartending

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CanadianMedsWorld.com

Scott Young likes to captivate his customers, so it’s fitting that he spends so much time behind bars.

Young is the president and head instructor of www.extremebartending.com Bar Smart – The Performance Bartending Company, which he founded in 1993. He laughs when asked if he and his “extreme bartending team” are to bartending what the Chippendales are to exotic male dancing, but then realizes there are many parallels.

“We have style as we’re serving drinks,” Young, 33, said from his office in Vancouver. “We’re throwing bottle, glasses, limes and straws, basically being performers behind the bar.

“We travel all over the world to whoever hires us. We were in Denmark three weeks ago. It’s neat, because Canadians are really well-like around the world, because we’re polite.”

Young works at several bars, but mostly at the Roxy Niteclub in Vancouver, which he said is arguably the busiest club in Canada.

There are 10 Extreme Bartending instructors, including two in Toronto, one each in Winnipeg (Carl Berryman) and Kelowna, B.C., and the remainder in Vancouver. All but one of the instructors are male.

“It’s very difficult to get a high-level bartending job, because there is very little turnover in this industry,” said Young, who charges $225 for his two-day seminars.“We get people who are wanting to increase their odds of getting one of these jobs.

“We’ve sold videos to 60 different countries and we’ve got 12 new ones on the way.”

The seminars also include how to deal with problem customers and over-serving.

“Make the women feel safe in your bar and the guys will come,” Young said.

The 1988 movie Cocktail, starring Tom Cruise, had both a positive and negative impact on bartending, Young said. The movie got people excited about the industry, but bar owners didn’t want anyone like the film’s characters in their bar because they were literally leaving their profits on the floor.

“There was a lot of spillage in that movie,” Young said.

He is fully aware of the serious side of his business as well, considering both the injury factor while instructing and the legal and moral responsibility.

He considers the risk in throwing bottles and suggests newbies should start out chucking the limes or straws until their eye hand coordination is dependable.

“My lawyer gets upset when I teach people to blow ten foot flames, so I don’t do that,” he laughs. He plays with fire himself but doesn’t teach those tricks.

But speaking of playing with fire, he tells a tough story of legal implications (never mentioning government officials).

“In Canadian law, both the bar and the bartender can be held responsible for letting a person drink and drive. Many people are not aware of that.” He tells a tale that was eventually overthrown in Supreme Court where a man drove drunk away from a dinner theatre and crashed, killing one passenger. The driver sued everybody and the first court proceedings found the driver 89 percent liable, the establishment 10 percent liable and the waiter one percent liable. It was a $2 million case.

“We teach with two points in mind. First, we let people know their legal responsibilities and second, I believe we have a moral responsibility. We know what happens when people drink.”

Young encourages participants in his seminars to think of customers as guests in their home and he gives tips on how to attract customers, but also how to deal with problem situations.

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11 Tips for Pay-Per-Click Success

CanadianMedsWorld.com

This list details some very important points to keep in mind when creating or managing any pay-per-click campaign. Is this all there is to know about pay-per-click advertising? Absolutely not, but for those new to PPC it should serve as good place to start. Additionally, pay-per-click veterans or at least the moderately-seasoned will want to touch upon these points now and then to brush up on their fundamentals.

1) Do your keyword homework.

Use Google's free Keyword Tool or sign up for a WordTracker account to find out which keywords are the most competitive. The more competitive the keyword, the more expensive your clicks will be. While you're finding out which keywords are too expensive you'll come across some that aren't being targeted heavily by advertisers. Take a good look at these - they may be your keys to a successful niche campaign.

2) Don't bunch your ad groups.

You should be striving to separate your ad groups by keyword. Whatever your target, separate your keyword lists into closely related groups containing the same target words and write ads geared specifically to those words. Your ads will show up higher in results based on their quality, and search terms show up bold in results - a click-through rate booster.

3) Drive home your selling point.

What's your offer? Why are you better than the others? Remember that your ads are going to display with your competitors. The difference between a user clicking your ad and clicking a competitor ad is about 100 pixels on the screen - or a millisecond of time. You need to convince them that you are the one they want. You are better. Grab them.

4) Don't send users to your home page.

This is perhaps one of the worst things you can do to your Pay-Per-Click campaign. Internet users are notoriously impatient. Send them to your home page when they were searching for a specific product or service and see how fast they leave. Don't waste your advertising budget - send them to optimized landing pages.

5) Optimize your landing pages.

Your landing pages need to drive something home immediately for your users: "you have landed in the right place." They need to know that, yes, this is what they were looking for, here it is, here is why it is better than the rest and here's the easy thing they need to do to get it. In most cases you'll need to create multiple landing pages based on your different ad groups and keywords, but look at it this way - if your users aren't landing at pages geared exactly to their search phrases they'll leave and take your advertising budget with them.

6) Don't lie in your ads.

People aren't dumb. If you promise something in your ads you had better well deliver. Otherwise you'll not only waste advertising dollars but damage your brand. Be honest, and focus on points that make you stand out from the competition. Grandiose ad text might bring in clicks, but if it isn't the truth it won't bring in conversions.

7) Your domain name counts.

In most cases you can display a domain name that you own as the "display domain" but point the ads to a page on a different domain. Why does this matter? If you own a domain name that contains the keyword text it will show up bold and increase conversions. Enter the optimized domain as the displayed domain, point the ads to your landing pages and you can expect higher CTRs in most cases.

8) Utilize negative keywords.

Google has a new Negative Keyword Tool that will allow you to find negative keywords that you should specify for your ads. Negative keywords are those that you don't want your ads to display for. For example, if you're selling "blue widgets" you don't want to display your ads to those users searching for "free blue widgets." If you don't use negative keywords you are missing out on a chance to get more targeted traffic to your landing pages, and this can really hurt your conversion rates.

9) Test, test, and test some more.

The greatest thing about internet advertising is the ability it grants you to measure your success. It's easy to create A/B split tests with Pay-Per-Click advertising. Change one word, add a comma, include a value proposition. . .just make sure you only change one thing for each split or you won't know which variable it was that made the difference! You'll find out right away that this is a great way to optimize your click-through rates - just don't forget that clicks aren't everything!

10) Don't focus too heavily on CTRs.

Getting tons of clicks isn't always the name of the game. In fact, if you aren't using proper techniques to ensure that you're getting targeted traffic and sending it to well-optimized landing pages you can blow through your advertising budget in no time flat. Remember that the success of any advertisement is getting back more than you put in. It's an investment, not a cost - so do all that you can to better your rate of return!

11) Don't pigeonhole yourself.

We all know that Google AdWords is the most popular Pay-Per-Click service out there. Your competitors know it, your users know it - even your grandma might know it. It would be foolish to ignore Google as a venue for advertising, but don't forget that there are other search engines out there who offer similar services. Yahoo!'s new Panama search system is catching on, and Microsoft's adCenter is nothing to sneeze at either. Both companies are currently offering sweet promotional deals to new Pay-Per-Click advertisers to stay competitive so take advantage and diversify!

About the Author: Mike Tekula handles SEO, SEM, usability and standards-compliance for NewSunGraphics, a Long Island, New York firm offering Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, W3C-Compliant web design using full CSS layouts and all things web design/development.

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IRS Warns of Cybersquatters

CanadianMedsWorld.com

If you're paying taxes to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service there is only one URL you need to know: IRS.gov.

That's what the U.S. tax collecting department said this week in a note on its Web site, warning taxpayers of tax season scams and reminding them that Web sites like IRS.com are not affiliated with the U.S. government.

"Taxpayers may be confused by the proliferation of Internet sites that contain some form of the Internal Revenue Service name or IRS acronym with a .com, .net, .org or other designation in the address," the IRS said in its note. "Since many of these sites also bear a striking resemblance to the real IRS site, taxpayers may be misled into thinking that the site they have accessed is indeed the official IRS government site."

The IRS's warning comes just weeks after Representative Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote the IRS, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, and the Department of the Treasury complaining that the operators of the IRS.com, IRS.net and IRS.org Web sites "may be trying to pass themselves off as official IRS websites."

All of these sites contain notices on their front pages indicating that they are not affiliated with the IRS, but that was not enough for Markey. "I am not convinced that the fine-print disclaimers at the bottom of these sites stating that they are nongovernmental provide any meaningful protection to consumers," he wrote.

Markey, who is chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, called on the government agencies to intervene and put an end to what he called a "threat to the public interest."

IRS.com is the third result that comes up in a Google.com search for the term "IRS." The site itself appears to generate revenue by referring readers to a variety of tax-related services from companies like American Express Co., Visa U.S.A. Inc., and 2nd Story Software Inc., makers of TaxACT software.

The IRS note also warned of an ongoing phishing scam, where consumers are told that they have qualified for a federal tax refund. They are then referred to fake IRS sites that ask them for information like Social Security and credit card numbers.

Security experts say they have yet to see these phishing scams in 2007, but they are expected to begin popping up around the April 15 U.S. tax filing deadline. Last year about 75 such Web sites were seen, beginning on April 12, said Robin Laudanski, team lead with the Phishing Incident Reporting and Termination Squad, a volunteer-run antiphishing group.

The IRS could do more to address the cybersquatting problem, said Enrico Schaefer, an attorney with Traverse Legal PLC who specializes in domain name disputes. "This IRS press release is of zero value," he said. "When someone ends up at IRS.org ,.net and .com they think it's affiliated with the government and they never see this. They would be much better served by simply taking control of those domains."

The IRS could do this under Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy, he said.

In 2001 the Government of Canada used this procedure to claim a total of 31 Web domains including Canadiancustoms.com, Thebankofcanada.com and Thegovernmentofcanada.com.

Representatives of IRS.com, IRS.org, and IRS.net could not be reached immediately for comment.

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Legal Counterfeiting 101 Or Why ATF Agents Busted Into My Home Back In The 70's

CanadianMedsWorld.com

Back in the ‘70s, I got a surprise visit from some of the baddest badasses in the U.S. government: Agents from The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (ATF).

No, I wasn’t printing sawbucks in the basement. But it seems I’d caught their attention nonetheless.

See, I had a client who was offering a premium entitled, How to Survive the Money Crash. And being the creative fellow I am, I decided that a whole-brain headline – a lead containing a dramatic visual that represented a money crash – would make my promotion impossible not to open.

To me, “crash” was the operative word. So I took a $100 bill and had an enlarged version of it silk screened it onto a piece of glass. I then grabbed my trusty 1911 Colt .45, took the glass into the back yard and fired a bullet clean through old Ben Franklin’s right eye.

Then, after photographing the shards of glass, I placed that photo on my carrier envelope along with the headline, “How to Survive the Money Crash.”

Good news: It worked like gangbusters. My prospects couldn’t resist the visceral power of the image combined with my head and deck copy.

Bad news: ATF saw it – and a few days after we dropped 100,000 copies into the mail, they came knocking on my door.

According to ATF, my envelope bordered on counterfeiting.

It didn’t matter that the C-note was shattered into a gazillion pieces. Didn’t matter that it was reproduced at only about half actual size. Didn’t even matter that it was printed in black on white 20 lb White Wove stock.

What did matter, according to the agents, was that it had something called, “Sufficient Similitude” to a real $100 bill. Seems any image you could pass off as real money … in a darkened bar … to a thoroughly inebriated patron … qualified as having this “similitude” thing.

I, of course, pointed out that, depending on the blood alcohol level of the aforementioned patron, any scrap of paper smaller than a billboard would meet those criteria. But my compelling argument rolled off the ATF guys like water off a duck.

They just shrugged -- and then cheerfully confiscated every image I’d made for silk screening … every shard of glass … every positive and negative image of that glass … the film used to burn the printing plates … the printing plates themselves … and the handful of left-over printed envelopes loitering down at the letter shop’s warehouse.

No big deal – it was a housefile mailing my client only planned to use once. And of course, being intelligent human beings, the ATF guys knew I was no counterfeiter, so nobody even mentioned “jail time.”

But it did get me to thinking … if this is how closely the U.S. government watches out for anything resembling a counterfeit bill …

… And if the consequences for real counterfeiting include decades-long dates in an 8X12 cell with an amorous and extremely lonely Bubba …

… Why in the bloody hell would anyone even entertain the thought of doing such a thing?

… Especially since turning ink and paper into green money the legal way is so amazingly profitable?

Printing Money the Legal Way for 35 Years

Over the last nine weeks, I’ve been spending my Wednesdays on the phone with a few hundred folks who have found the secret to turning pots of ink and stacks of paper into thousand-dollar bills.

We called it the “Confessions of The Info-Marketing Superstars” series – and each week, we spent an hour with a real-life expert: An entrepreneur who’s making a fortune selling newsletters, books, courses, seminars and other information products on the Internet, in direct mail and through print ads.

I delivered a ton of my own insights in the first session – and then each week for eight more weeks, I picked the fertile brains of other experts who have mastered the art of “Legal Counterfeiting” – turning drums of ink and reams of paper into green money.

We talked with top infopreneurs like Bob Bly … Michel Fortin … Dr. Martin Weiss of Weiss Research … Early to Rise president Mary Ellen Tribby … Bob Serling … Daniel Levis … Troy White and Sylvie Fortin.

See, the beauty of the information marketing business is that the price you can charge for an information product has nothing at all to do with the cost of producing your product.

The value of your product – and the price you can charge for it – are based entirely on the value of the information it contains! A report that costs you fifty cents to print and mail can easily be sold for $29 … $49 … $99.

Heck. Dr. Weiss just sold truckloads of a report on uranium investing for $499 – his printing and mailing costs? Zero dollars: He delivered the report online as a PDF!

Now I ask you: Can you name another business that lets you sell a product that cost you next to nothing – or even precisely nothing -- for five hundred smackers?

Without the risk of having the ATF throw you into the hoosgow for counterfeiting?

Wait … it gets better:

What’s Better Than a 100% Profit Margin?

When you become an infopreneur, your product isn’t the only thing that costs you nothing: Thanks to the Internet, your marketing doesn’t have to cost you a penny, either!

Just make sure your sales page is search-engine friendly … swing a few ad swap, affiliate and joint venture deals with other online entrepreneurs … salt the relevant blogs and forums with links to your sales site … fire off a few volleys of online press releases … and Voila! -- the money starts rolling in.

So your product costs you nothing to manufacture or deliver …

Your marketing costs you nothing ...

… You’re pretty much left with a 100% profit margin!

And all you need to get going is the ability to 1) Produce an information product people will pay for, and 2) Create sales copy that compels prospects to buy it.

It doesn’t have to be eternal to be immortal (or profitable)

Course, most of the folks I interviewed for Confessions of the Info-Marketing Superstars sell pretty hefty products. Their books, reports, newsletters, audio and video series and other information products deliver reams of content.

And so, naturally, before they could create that content, they had to become experts of sorts on the subject at hand.

Should the challenge of becoming an expert stop you? Absolutely not: The Internet makes becoming an expert on just about anything a breeze.

Spend an hour studying the mating habits of the snail darter – or anything else, for that matter -- and you’re instantly among the top 1% of the world’s experts on the subject.

Or, if you’re even lazier than that, you could just interview the world’s top expert and sell the interview for a small fortune. Or better yet, interview a dozen or more of the world’s top experts and sell the transcripts and MP3s for a large fortune.

Still too much work for you?

Consider this …

Infopreneuring minus the “info”

Remember Crazy Dazies? Those flower stickers everyone stuck all over their notebooks, refrigerators and Volkswagen vans in the ‘70s?

The guy who invented them had an office in Palos Verdes, California – right next to mine.

He wasn’t a shrewd entrepreneur … just a graphic artist with an idea: Let folks “customize” their stuff with stickers that made a statement.

When I met this guy (Senior moment: I can’t remember his name!) he had sold approximately 22.4 bazillion stickers for a net profit of more than 18 gazillion – and he was still going strong.

His genius was that he was kind of like an info-preneur – slapping ink on paper to create products -- but he didn’t sell any information at all. An info-preneur minus the info. A “preneur,” if you like.

You know those obnoxious little smiley face stickers that demand you have a nice day? More ink on paper – and some preneur is still making a fortune on those.

Or the bumper stickers that proclaim “I heart my dog?” Ditto.

Point is …

There’s no excuse for someone with your skills
to ever want for money!

Time to stretch a little.

Maybe you got into this direct response thing to promote a particular product.

Maybe you got into it because you like the idea of being a freelance copywriter.

The fact is, once you learned what you now know about identifying consumers’ desires … about persuasion … and (hopefully) about the nuts and bolts of direct response marketing … you have a huge advantage over the vast majority of your fellow entrepreneurs.

You are uniquely equipped to make an easy six figures a year – or even millions -- by conceiving and promoting your own products.

I did it once with a little 32-page book entitled “They’re Out to Steal Your Children!” The book simply contained the most outrageous lyrics from the day’s pop music. We sold tens of thousands of dollars-worth of them by placing ads in conservative tabloids back in the day.

Bottom line: There’s simply no excuse for anyone with your skill set to be struggling. The money you need to earn is already in other people’s pockets. They’re dying to give it to you – IF you offer them something that will bring value to their lives.

Using your skills to create and promote products that cost little or nothing to produce and little or nothing to sell is a great way to go from zero to six figures a year in no time flat.

So think … what could you create and market in a couple of hours a day? What market niches will you go after? What’s the first step you’d have to take to make it happen?

Hope this helps …

Clayton Makepeace, www.makepeacetotalpackage.com/

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10 Things You'll Learn While Working At Home

CanadianMedsWorld.com

(For the record, this is what you want to avoid turning in to when you work from home. And no, it’s not me, but thanks…) A lot of people have emailed me over the last 7 months about my working at home. Just so everyone knows, I did have a desk job…in fact I worked in offices for 12 years until this past October, when I gave notice at my job to go out on my own. So far it has been fantastic, as I make my own hours, spend some time at the beach, meet for coffee or lunch with friends (whom also work as freelancers) in the middle of the day, etc. That all being said…sometimes it is a little claustrophobic being in my house all the time with no one to talk to but the cat. Since receiving all these emails, I figured I would put a little list together about what I have learned since I started working from home.

10. There are a lot of other people not working at 9-5 jobs as well. In fact, about half the people in my building are home all day and all night, and I never see them working. Rather I see them sitting outside having tea and heading to the beach day after day. Go figure.

9. Some days it takes a lot of effort to shower and get dressed before noon. A lot of times I will get up at my normal time (between 8 - 8:30) and head into my office, fire up the computer, and get right down to business. When I look up, it is 12:00 and I am still sitting here in my sweats with a cold cup of coffee.

8. My wife is incredibly jealous of me. She gets up, goes to work, goes to school, and sometimes does not come home until about 9pm. I try to explain to her that I am not just sitting around watching TV all day, but she doesn’t buy it. But until I stop getting paid, I guess she has no choice but to believe me.

7. Our cat talks…a lot. I always wondered what they did all day, and really, it’s not all that exciting. Sleep, eat, run around, and talk. Rinse and repeat, over and over. He is half Siamese, so I know he talks a lot, but I did not know he does it all day long.

6. Working from home you do lose a certain sense of job security, even though working in an office does not provide “real” security, either. I guess it just feels more real because you are with other people. I had no more job security at my office than I do here, but it just feels strange. You can be laid off from any job at any time, so being in control of my own clients and workload is probably MORE secure, even if it doesn’t feel like it sometimes.

5. Handling your money becomes a bigger deal when you freelance. One major source of my monthly income does take out taxes, as I am on payroll with them. But my other clients do not, and I have to be sure to monitor my accounts all year to make sure I am putting aside enough money to pay the tax bill when it comes due. Also, you have to do your own investing, as their is no company sponsored 401K to pay into anymore.

4. Health insurance is really no more expensive on your own then it is with a company. Well, if you are healthy, I suppose. With group plans at an office, you have to be accepted into the program, no matter what conditions you may already have. Private insurance can reject you for previous conditions. Luckily, my wife and I are healthy and were accepted right away. I am paying LESS to cover us privately in a PPO with Blue Cross than I was for the same coverage at my office job. Of course, if you are lucky enough to have the company pay for it, then you are even better off, but I don’t have many friends with 100% paid for health insurance.

3. Working at home saves a LOT of money. I eat out less, I buy less junk food, sodas and juice, I don’t stop on the way home from work to pick up things that I could do without, etc. We sold a car (my community is 100% walkable), which saves money on gasoline, parking and insurance. I have no more expenses here at the house then I did before, except maybe the lights and computer are on more often.

2. There ain’t that much on television from about 10am until 4pm every day, unless you enjoy Oprah, sewing shows and soap operas. Thankfully, we have Tivo.

1. Working at home has opened my eyes to a lot of opportunities that I might not have seen before. I see things online that could be improved, I have more time to work on my various online ventures, I have learned new ways to make money, and I have more time to investigate things that interest me. I can take classes during the day, I play tennis twice a week before my “old” work day would have ended, and I have the freedom to take a few days off in a row if I want to and do all my work at night. I can work every other day, strange hours, or any combination in between. Honestly, if I do ever have to go back to working in an office with set hours, I do not know how I will do it. If you can work from home at all, I would figure out a way to do it. It is totally worth it. The main thing you have to do is to force yourself to find reasons to get out of your house occasionally, or you will go stir crazy. I did at first, but I think I have found my groove.

[Via - MyTwoDollars.Com]

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