Coach Cards As A Great Business Idea

CanadianMedsWorld.com

http://www.coachdeck.com/

Each year, millions of people volunteer to coach youth sports, but not all of them have the time or resources to develop fun and effective training programs for their teams. CoachDeck offers a simple yet innovative solution to ensure that coaches never repeat “the same boring practice”—handy reference cards with easy-to-understand practice drills, so that even the most time-crunched coaches can easily come up with unique programs, with very little preparation.

Designed by professional coaches, each deck contains 52 color-coded drills, most of which include a “Make it a Game” feature, plus two double-sided cards on Safety, Terminology, Practice and How to Use CoachDeck. Coaches can carry the cards in their pockets and fan them out for players to randomly select drills. They make a great tool for parents who want to work with their children on athletic skills, too. CoachDeck is currently available for baseball and soccer, with plans to release a basketball version this fall. Decks can be ordered online for USD 19.95 each, with discounts for bulk orders.

While information on sports drills has long been available in books and videos, putting them on playing cards is a new approach—and one that's portable, fun and easy to use. It's an idea that easily could be duplicated or expanded on for just about any type of training, including sales and marketing, team-building for businesses, foreign languages and more.

[Via - Springwise.com] 

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Gourmet Bucks

CanadianMedsWorld.com

http://www.twosistersgourmet.com/

It's a familiar question to almost everyone: If you could do absolutely anything for a living, what would you do? For Mary Kathryn Dappen, the answer had always been catering. But "it was just a dream," she says. "I really had no intention of ever starting a catering business." And she never did. But she found a different way to combine her love of cooking with her love of entertaining--by becoming a consultant for Two Sisters Gourmet.

Dappen, 39, was attracted to Two Sisters Gourmet in particular because of the unique way the business is run. At her in-home parties, instead of simply talking about the company's gourmet food products and passing around samples, she holds interactive cooking classes in which guests prepare various dishes using Two Sisters Gourmet ingredients. "People go to home parties so they can socialize," she points out, and getting together in the kitchen allows for just that. Home parties have the added benefit of showing the guests exactly how the Two Sisters Gourmet products can be used--and that anyone is capable of using them.

Though she knew she would enjoy it, Dappen did not have big plans for her Two Sisters Gourmet business. As a stay-at-home mom, she was simply looking for a way to make ends meet when she had fewer clients from her telecommunications consulting job, and she thought the parties would be a way to earn an extra $500 a month. She hadn't considered the other side of the business, though: sponsoring new consultants. A year after becoming the company's first consultant in upstate New York, Dappen now has 61 people in her downline, which has boosted her expectations for how much she can earn. Says Dappen, "I have every intention for this to be a six-figure income for me in a year."

Now that she sees her business's great potential, she's found creative ways to attract new customers and new consultants. She wears her Two Sisters Gourmet name tag wherever she goes so people will ask her what it is, and she has helped a variety of organizations with Two Sisters Gourmet fundraisers. After her team met its sales and recruitment goals last November, the corporate office sent celebrity chef Jon Ashton to host a cooking show in Dappen's hometown of Webster, New York. The event attracted attention from TV networks and the local newspaper.

Dappen's direct-selling business has greatly exceeded her original expectations and given her a chance to have a taste of her catering dream, all while allowing her to concentrate on what she feels is most important. "I'm able to work my business around my family, not my family around my business," she says. "That's what I enjoy most."

[Via - Entrepreneur.Com] 

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Mom dips into business world

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CanadianMedsWorld.com

KINGSTON -- Christine Hanisco is always in a hurry these days.

"You're my second interview today," she says as she opens the door of the Kingston ranch home where she creates and sells "Dippy Chick" dip mixes. "I just finished a radio interview for the Start-Up Nation radio program."

Hanisco is on her fourth career. She's worked as a nail technician, then as a graphic artist for 15 years, and spent three years in real estate. In addition to the national radio interview, she has been interviewed by ABC Television for a program on mothers with home-based businesses, and will be featured in Family Circle this winter. "Things are moving really fast," she says with a smile.

But while Dippy Chick is exploding, Hanisco remains true to her original goal: Spending more time with Mack, 4 Ѕ and Angus, 1 Ѕ.

While many mom-and-pop businesses begin with mom making a product and pop saying she ought to sell it, Hanisco's story is a little different.

Though she has always cooked, she says it wasn't a "huge hobby" of hers.

She'd never given dips one thought over another until she started going to craft fairs and noticing how many people sold homemade dip mixes.

Hanisco knew it was something she could produce with a relatively small start-up cost, and she'd been looking for something to do out of her home since she became pregnant with Angus. She concocted a spinach dip and a garlic dip first, trying them on friends and family, and then branched out.

"I think I created my entire product line in one week," she recalls. Her husband remodeled part of the basement for her to create and package dips.

Surprise, surprise

While she knew dips would be easy to sell, the popularity and media attention have been a surprise for Hanisco. She knows her dips are good, but thinks the packaging has helped with sales. "Most people just sell their mixes in plain packages that say 'Dill Dip' or whatever," she said.

But Hanisco used her graphic arts background to create funky packaging and even funkier names. A dill dip is called "In the Dill of the Night." She started doing craft fairs, but didn't like being away from her family on weekends, and eventually switched to selling wholesale. She is now featured in 50 stores across the country, but still has booths at the Made in NH Expo and the Deerfield Fair.

The media attention began when ABC contacted her for its segment on home-based businesses. "I have no idea how they found me," she admits.

Start-Up Nation is a "community" of entrepreneurs who meet through a message board and a Web site. She had posted messages on the site, she says. "It's actually a huge community, and they have their own radio program." Ellen Parlapiano and Patricia Cobe, authors of "Mompreneurs," found her Web site. Parlapiano contacted her for the Family Circle article, which will be published in January. "That's six million readers,' Hanisco says with a smile.

Product line

Hanisco now produces 15 dip mixes, with names like Kamikaze Wasabi and Battlestar Garlic-tica. The dips are appropriate for special diets, she says. All her ingredients are natural, some are organic, and all are gluten-free, as she and the boys have celiac disease. All are vegetarian, and some can be vegan if mixed with tofu, according to her. She is working on a coconut-ginger curry.

She also makes a line of candied nuts called "Squirrel Bait," in four flavors. She is developing a line of Killer Crock crock-pot helpers.

"We'll have one where you sprinkle the mix on chicken and some cream cheese, and you come out with Alfredo sauce," she says.

Not-so-dippy chick Hanisco still does most of the work herself, relying on a part-time nanny and two friends who come in occasionally. She says she probably works 80 hours a week, but likes it that way. "I get bored very easily," Hanisco says. "I love being my own boss, wearing many hats. I hate not having something to do. I get very little sleep." She's thinking about renting a commercial space and hiring more people.

However, an off-site shop will still have space for Mack and Angus. "I'll have my husband build a special area where the kids can come and play," she says.

Her commercial facility will have a small shop in front, for her items and other local products, and a production room in back. But she doesn't want to get so big she neglects her family, the original reason for the home-based business.

Hanisco has never taken a business course. "I read a lot," she says. "When I want to learn something, I grab a book and read it, or go on-line." As her business continues to grow, she'll be doing more reading. "There's so much I want to do," she says, "and it seems slow in accomplishing it."

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CanadianMedsWorld.com

So word has it that I haven’t made many good posts lately that help people make cash. Well, I agree, so here’s how you can make some bank quickly and easily without breaking the bank too. Let’s take a quick look at Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing and see how underrated it is and how you can seriously make some cash without getting too wrapped up and hung up on the usual things that stop you from moving forward.

1- Create a site. If you don’t know how to, well, get someone to do it for you. It’s not that hard, hell, even I can do it and I am a retard when it comes to tech/design stuff. So buy a domain, get a cheap hosting account for it, toss up a WordPress blog and theme (takes the hassle out of creating a site), and you’re in business.

2- Depending on what your domain theme is, if it has one, make the site around an affiliate marketing offer. It can be a product, a service, doesn’t really matter which. Just pick something! There are no bad ideas or good ideas, everything can work in it’s own right if done correctly. If you are being a lazy bastard and need me to pick one for you, then choose a product that is cheap for the end user and serves some type of beneficial purpose. Ad networks have a billion offers, I’m sure you can find one. But try and keep out of finance/mortgage and ringtones for now, because those take lots of research, time and cash.

3- Great, you have your product picked out, now make a blog post about it. If you don’t know all that much about it, do some quick research on Wikipedia or Google. It’s also a good idea to put a banner up or a full page ad for it if you aren’t going to write a blog post about it. Either way, make sure the theme of the blog is about the product you are promoting. Maybe make the color scheme the same as the page where the user will buy something or fill out the lead.

4- So let’s assume you have your domain, host, blog with the offer all setup. Alright, so now comes traffic, the fun part! Let’s use Google Adwords and MSN AdCenter for it. Take $100 and deposit it into each of the accounts. You probably won’t use all of it, but it’s good to have it in there. With Adsense we can begin right away, but with MSN you may have to wait 24 hours or so until their slow asses get to approving the account. With both though, there are tons of free cash coupons and promo codes out there, and some on WickedFire.com that you can use and get some free cash to use.

5- Time for some keyword research. Before you start to use every keyword tool under the sun, let’s do a bit of manual work. First go and look at the advertiser’s page and pull keywords off there by hand. We want to focus on something called LONG TAIL KEYWORDS. We don’t want the one or two word keywords because they are very general, expensive, and usually being looked at for research purposes and don’t have many “buy now” people using them. A long tail keyword are those 3, 4, 5+ word keywords that really target a product. So for example, a good longtail mortgage refinance keyword I would use is “refinance los angeles california” or “bad credit refinance new york” INSTEAD of “refinance new york” or “refinance la”. You can even compare the prices, and you’ll see the longer ones may not get much traffic on it, but they are so cheap compared to the other more general ones.

6- So you have some general and longtail keywords. Fantastic. Now some people use misspelling tools and whatnot, which is a good idea, so go over to SEOBook.com into the tools section and use Aaron Wall’s misspelling tool. But don’t do that just yet, because that’s the last step. What you should do first is get a nice long list of longtail keywords of what you think people are using when they are in “buying mode” when searching on the engines for your product. So if the product is some kind of insole for a shoe, your keywords would be: buy shoe insole, cheap insole for shoes, doctor recommended shoe insole. Those are pretty good, and sure, they are nowhere near as robust as something like “shoe insole” or “shoe pad” but they are more likely to be in buying mode than researching mode. So your job, for the next 1-3 hours is to gather up as many of these keywords as possible. If you want to use keyword tools to do it for you, by all means, knock yourself out, but if this is your first time doing something like this, and you want to learn how to do it right, do it by hand, the old fashioned way, just until you get the swing of things. When you’re done collecting the keywords, run it through the misspelling tool, and save the end result. Make sure to also group the keywords into 5-15 keywords per group for Adwords and AdCenter. You’ll thank me later.

7- We have our keywords, the site, the domain, the product. Wonderful, now on to getting some traffic finally! Take those groups of keywords and make one primary campaign for them in AdWords and the sub-campaigns for them based on which keyword theme they are. You don’t want to put too many keywords into one group because you want to keep your ads as relevant as possible for that group of keywords that it represents. So go ahead and make your ads. I typically write out 3-4 ads in the beggining, but sometimes as little as 2. It really depends on how confident you are of the keywords. Make sure to include the keyword, or the main idea of the base keywords (meaning, if the keywords all revolve around “back pain” make sure “back pain” is in the ads). Don’t be boring with the ad copy either, try and liven it up to get the attention of the searcher that will make them want to not only click on your ad, but also buy or fill out a lead for your product. Use your domain and page/site for this. Make sure all the traffic goes to your killler blog page.

8- Once you’re done with all of the above do something very important now.. Change the keywords so they are all EXACT and PHRASE matches. You can even go as far as to create seperate ad groups if you really want to, but sometimes that’s just overkill and may also screw up your other campaigns for good keywords. The reason you don’t want to go with broad in the beginning is because you’re on a mission now. That mission is not to make money, but to get your CTR up to a nice level. You’re going to want to be doing this for a good day or so. Don’t worry, you won’t lose much money, and afterall, a lot of those clicks aren’t just going to go nowhere, they’ll be going to your blog/promo page. You still have a great chance that they will also result in a sale/lead. So no need to fret about it.

9- Wow step 9 already, look how quickly we flew through this tutorial. Granted there are a lot of details being left out, but you will learn them on your own and pick them up pretty quickly too. You have to admit, this is a hell of a lot easier than you thought it would be right? So the reason I want you to use a blog or something with content on it and not just a redirect or linking directly to the affiliate code is because Google and MSN have this algorithm called QS aka Quality Score. They say, that if a site looks like it’s not selling something exclusively, meaning, that the site’s sole purpose is to spread information rather than sales then it should not be paying as much as a commercial site that has a huge budget. Also these types of results (your site) are relevant for users and give them what they are looking for, instead of a sales page and a “buy this thing now or you will die!” approach. We want the users to buy or fill out leads, but we don’t want to give them the impression that it’s ALL we want, so maybe tack on a newsletter signup link. You can use Aweber, they are cheap and good. Also tack on a few information links on the blogroll or in the posts. To really beef up your QS, send some inbound links from other blogs, directories, sites, forums, wherever really. Just pretend you are SEO’ing it as well as using it for a PPC campaign. Within 2 weeks or less your QS should jump, your CTR should jump, and best of all, your PPC bid price will drop! In the wise words of Borat.. Wowaweewa!

10- This is not over. Just because your ROI is 2:1-3:1 or better doesn’t mean you are leaving this alone and moving onto the next thing. Your ass needs to go over everything, step by step. Keep a list. What went wrong and why? What changes did you make to it, and what type of effect did it have on the sale/lead/traffic? Ask yourselves as many questions as possible. If you can’t answer it yourself, go to the forums and ask someone there. There is an answers to almost any PPC and affiliate marketing related question on WickedFire.com somewhere, and if we don’t have it, another forum will, or ASK about it, because as great as we may seem to think we are, we can’t read your mind and see what’s going wrong. Be as detailed as possible too!

So there you have it. A blog post of value, quality and meaning. Will it make you millions? I doubt it. But be realistic, you need to try things out and learn them for yourself before you can pass judgement on it or decide it’s “too hard”, because this is not hard at all. This is easy shit compared to any job offline that you may have had to do for a paycheck. So quit sitting on your ass and reading this, and go out and do something about it! The rest is up to you boys and girls, so go make me proud and try it!

[Via Aojon.Com]

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