How to make money without really trying

Picture this: Online video generating excitement
GTD improvements
(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- When word of a whites-only scholarship at Boston University hit the media last fall--drawing coverage from bloggers and biggies like ABC alike--Daniel Kovach smelled opportunity. His goal: to boost traffic to the website he runs, Scholarships Around the US.

So he paid a writer to crank out "The White Man's Guide to Getting a Minority Scholarship," which reveals that some schools do offer scholarships to "nonblack" students--and added it to the mix. Then Kovach planted a link to the article on recommendation site Digg, where it jumped to the coveted front page.

That, in turn, led other sites to link to the article. And Kovach landed a top search ranking on Google (Charts) for phrases like "white man scholarship."

Such timely strategies have helped Kovach turn his year-old site into a $10,000-per-month cash cow (see correction below). Not bad for a 26-year-old who works about an hour a day out of his townhouse in Raleigh, N.C.

Media outlets have, of course, always exploited offbeat events and stories to drive traffic. But today it's easier than ever to profit from a surge of interest in a particular topic. Some people simply aim for 15 minutes of Web fame and make a few hundred bucks by setting up a site around a topic, loading it with Google pay-per-click ads, and working social sites to link to it.

But others, like Kovach, are making bigger money by tapping the cultural zeitgeist to draw more people to an existing site.

Kovach's windfall is more surprising given that he started with a terrible domain name: http://www.scholarships-ar-us.org/. It's difficult to remember, and no one would ever type it directly into a browser. The domain's appeal--and the reason Kovach paid $1,000 for it--was that residual links pushed it up high in Google search results.

And that was better than starting from scratch. For $900, Kovach hired a designer to give the site a simple and authoritative look. He found freelancers on the Web to write items on topics from essay writing to sports scholarships. He mapped out what categories the site should include.

Each step of the way, Kovach milks trends big and small. He says he spends about 15 minutes a day culling education-related articles from Google News, scanning the headlines in search of anything that might help him stoke traffic.

"You have to sift through it all," he says. "No one is going to hand you pieces of trend gold." And he uses Google's Keyword Tool and Wordtracker--services that show what phrases people are searching--to figure out which parts of his site to beef up.

When Kovach discovered that people regularly search for scholarships for "twins," "tall people," and "left-handed people," he added a section about each. "There are hardly any real scholarships," Kovach explains, "but we'll give the searcher any information they want."

Sometimes all it takes is one smart move. Darren Barefoot, annoyed by a swell of media coverage about the virtual world Second Life, created a parody of it-- getafirstlife.com. (The subhead: "Your world. Sorry about that.")

Barefoot launched his site in January, submitted it to recommendation sites, and sent it to a few bloggers; it worked its way up Digg. Soon he was enjoying his own little windfall: 350,000 visitors in 30 days, and roughly $1,000 from Google ads--ironically enough, ads for the myriad businesses and services that cater to Second Life users.

"This was a fire-and-forget project," says Barefoot, a public relations exec in Vancouver, British Columbia. "But I've made enough money to make it worth my time."

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the amount of money that Kovach's website, Scholarships Around the US, pulls in. It is $10,000 per month, not per year.

[via cnn.com]

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New Movie Trailer: The Marketing Nightmare - Becoming The Most Watched Internet Marketing Video Showing The Horror Of IM And Making Money Online - 95% Of Online Internet Marketers Get Caught In The Marketing Nightmare Turning Their Work At Home Business Dream Into A Nightmare. "How To Avoid The Marketing Nightmare" Launches July 2007... Download Your FREE Report at http://www.themarketingnightm...
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Super short overview of what affiliate marketing is about - for online business people, entrepreneurs, online businesses, shoppers. Affiliate software and affiliate strategy, merchants, affiliates, and customers are the foundation for affiliate marketing. This tutorial gives a short overview of what affiliate marketing is - for beginners - and gives an easy to understand example.
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Free Email Autoresponder Software Internet Marketing Part 2

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Part 2 of this video shows you how to download a free email autoresponder software and mailing list manager. Install on your server and stop paying monthly fee. A power tool for internet email marketing followup. URL http://Autoresponder.DrQuek.com
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FreeHandAd.Com - How To Make Money Giving Away Something For Free

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Advertisers competing for the much desired attention of the college-aged set now have another opportunity to get their ads in the hands of students—and hold their interest for up to 90 minutes. FreeHand Advertising distributes free note-taking paper to students on their way to class. Each page is branded with the same type of horizontal ad you see on websites, only these are visible for at least the duration of a college lecture, and longer if students refer back to their notes (as they should).

FreeHand agents operate at 90 of the biggest college campuses in the United States, reaching up to 3,500,000 students in 32 states, including all major cities. Businesses can select which campuses they want to market to, for local or nationwide campaigns, or to a targeted demographic. Thorough post-campaign reports detail how many sheets were distributed and even include pictures of agents handing them out to students.

Ads can be used to gain visibility, offer coupons, or promote sales, grand openings or other events. Colored and recycled papers are also available, and larger images can be displayed as watermarks. With so many brands and marketers reaching out to this market, note paper is an innovative low-tech solution for grabbing their attention. And free love—giving away ad-sponsored anything—is generally appreciated by those on the receiving side, too.

[Via - Springwise] 

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Using the Competition to Boost Your SEO Performance

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When it comes to getting higher rankings in Google, the competition can seem fierce. This is true--unless you're in a niche market where it may be easier to predict or manage the outcome of specific search terms.

If you're in the competitive real estate, health and beauty, or general medical supplies markets, you probably wonder how a company can get and then stay on the first page of Google's search results year after year. Top listings in search engine results pages--also known as SERPs--are considered the mother-load for search terms with significant amounts of traffic. The results are free, and if done right, you could become very successful online.

Competition is both a challenge and an opportunity in business. In SEO, your competitors can be the most valued source of data. When performing competitive research, the goals are to discover:

• How entrenched a competitor is and how hard it is to unseat them;
• The competition's SEO skills; and
• Link prospects, so you can trade links, host articles and do reviews.

Let's go through the steps for analyzing where you stand compared to the competition, using "mortgage loans," a very competitive search term, as an example. We refer to this as a tier 1 keyword, since it's the top search term within this category.

1. Determine link popularity. Go to Google, type in the tier 1 keyword and pick the top three ranked sites. Then go to marketleap.com and use the link popularity checker to see how your site compares in terms of incoming links to the top three sites from Google. Look for sites with the highest Google rankings and lowest amount of incoming links. Keep in mind that MSN records the highest number of back links--incoming links from one website to another--but also pay attention to the Yahoo! results, since it's the best linking engine to use for link review. Also, Google recently updated its Google webmaster tools and has enhanced its link tracking system. Make sure to get an account and compare the results with the others in this step. Write down all the numbers.

2. Find sites to target. Next, go back to Google and enter "allinanchor: mortgage loans." This restricts the results depending on the number of links coming into a site based on that key word phrase. This will help determine which site to target links from.

3. Review link counts. Go back to Yahoo! and enter "link:www.yourbusinessdomain.com" and review the number of results with the numbers from Marketleap in the first step. Note that Yahoo! orders the list by power, or the sites with the most links coming to them. Those sites are the most important to target and are likely to have a good page rank. At this point, you'll know how much work you have ahead of you. If it seems impossible, start by looking at the fifth step about keyword research to narrow down keyword selections and start again.

4. View source and "on page" SEO factors. Once you've found the top list to target, go to each of the sites and review the source code. That's done by selecting menu choice "View: Source" in Internet Explorer browsers and "View: Pagesource" in Firefox browsers. Make sure to review the title, description, meta and H1 tags on the sites. They should be programmed as discussed in my previous column, "10 Steps for Increasing Visibility Online." Some handy SEO tools can help you validate your work, including SearchStatus, a toolbar extension for Firefox and Mozilla, and SEO for Firefox. They can help you indicate quickly whether the competition is doing things right.

5. Perform keyword research. Use the search term suggestion tool at inventory.overture.com, which is one month behind in data results, and look for keywords and their permutations with a good search volume. Any number more than 20,000 to 30,000 is a good average. Continue looking at the tier 1-type terms until you spot an opportunity to build on. Use other tools like Google keyword tools, keyworddiscovery.com. Use the keywords you select in this step by adding pages to your site, a common SEO practice.

6. Consider conversion rates. Finally, visit the competitive sites and compare them with your own. Do they have content, flow and site structure that encourage conversion? Are the sites easy to navigate? Do they emphasize call-to-action statements like "download a white paper," "sign up for this newsletter" or "buy this product now"? Look to see if they are using long tail keywords, such as "mortgage loans for police officers in Los Angeles." If they are, then you should consider doing so, too. Misspellings in text on your page also can work, but be careful not to confuse your visitors. A little trick is to include them in a PDF or Word document. Search engines, specifically Google, spider PDF and Office documents.

Competitive research is a serious SEO exercise for gaining advantage online. Having the tools, capabilities and expertise are not enough; you also need to look at traditional media--print, radio and television--to learn what the competition is up to. Fight back with more pages, more content, improved design and source code, and more incoming links with diverse descriptions. Use tools like UrlTrends to track your progress and SpyFu to look at advertising costs, giving you an indicator of your competition's activity, spending and strategy.

Don't forget to open their spam e-mail marketing messages that you receive. You may learn something by studying that material, however painful. Also review what they send you through the regular mail and discover ways to improve your own campaigns, both offline and online.

Only an alert internet marketer with a keen eye toward the competition will win in today's online business space. Remember to use patience in the most competitive marketplaces and continue using what you've learned here.

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.

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Austin inventor racks up patents

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CanadianMedsWorld.com
SAN ANTONIO - For Scott Winters, a master inventor, distinguished engineer and director of development at IBM in Austin, inspiration can come from anywhere.

"Wherever I go now I constantly see things that I can do better or different, whether it's going to the supermarket or a football game or driving the car and coming to work," said Winters, 51.

He was sitting in the food court at an Austin mall while his family shopped when he came up with a new system for a cell phone network that he later patented. Winters modeled a directory of cellular services on the way kiosk vendors display their merchandise.
That kind of innovative thinking makes Winters one of the top patent producers at IBM. He received 25 patents last year; during his 18 years with the company, his total is 65 patents and another 40 pending.

For the 14th consecutive year, IBM topped the list of patent recipients, according to IFI Claims Patent Services, which compiles its annual report from U.S. Patent and Trademark Office data.

"Electronic technology is a hot area these days and will continue to be," said Darlene Slaughter, general manager of IFI Claims, based in Wilmington, Del.

Some electronic patents have a short lifespan, so companies are continually filing new ones on the latest innovations, she said.

IBM this week announced that it received a record 3,621 patents in 2006. The Austin campus received 640, up from 550 a year earlier. Fifty were related to Sony's PlayStation 3 video game console, on which IBM worked with Sony and Toshiba.

At IBM, patents are rarely issued to a single person; usually three or four people share in the development of one, said Winters, who develops mentoring groups with people at different stages of their careers.

The patents awarded to Winters last year focus primarily on cell phone software. This year's submissions to the patent office, he said, all will be based on social networking.
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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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A Spartan's Guide to Business

http://eat-healthy-every-day.blogspot.com/

When the movie 300 recently debuted, making more than $70 million during its opening weekend despite having no big-name actors, Hollywood was stunned. Many people have speculated that what attracted the audience was the over-the-top violence, the naked women and the special effects.

Maybe that helped--a little. But director Zack Snyder's film about Spartans bludgeoning Persian soldiers in a fight to the finish is also a business parable.

No, seriously. If you squint a little--and you probably will during some of the beheading scenes--the story resembles what an entrepreneur often faces when competing against a big corporation. It also offers some insight into what it takes to be an effective leader, inspire employees and create a recognizable brand. And, yes, this film can be ugly, but that's sometimes the nature of the business world.

Business Lesson No. 1: Your CEO needs to be a strong leader.
King Leonidas is as resilient as they come, in both the film and the actual historical battle that took place in 480 B.C. between 300 soldiers of Sparta, Greece and the Persian army. Although Leonidas is a warrior, he treats his family and friends as equals. His wife, the queen, is a partner, and he's smart enough to solicit her advice when it comes to business matters. He also spends quality time with his six-year-old son, teaching him the business (i.e., showing the little bugger how to fight).

But when Leonidas suits up and goes to his day job--vanquishing bloodthirsty enemies with his spear and shield--he's focused on what's best for the business and his employees; in this case, the kingdom and his soldiers.

Sure, his competitor, King Xerxes, through messengers he sends to Sparta, makes some powerful arguments for combining the smaller organization with the larger corporation known as Persia. For instance, if the merger goes through, Leonidas would be allowed to live, and his employees wouldn't have to see their families enslaved or worry about getting their limbs hacked off. But while Leonidas appears to mull the offer over, he's concerned that his people's way of life (think office culture) and his freedom to make independent decisions won't be allowed to thrive.

He firmly declines the deal by spearing and then throwing a bunch of Persian yes-men into what appears to be a bottomless pit.

Leonidas next prepares to stop the growing threat of a hostile takeover. He seeks approval from some grotesque oracles (his board of directors) to take 10,000 Spartan soldiers to fight off the Persian army, but he is rebuffed. And so, like all good entrepreneurs, Leonidas finds a loophole. He informs fellow Spartan colleagues that he's taking a walk, bringing 300 of his top-flight employees as body guards, and goes off to complete his business plan--to fight the Persians at the narrow cliffs of Thermopylae and frighten the immense army into fleeing.

Business Lesson No. 2: Train your employees and foster a culture that promotes loyalty.
The Spartans had a grim but effective process for making sure their society only contained healthy children. (If you don't already know what that process was, you probably don't want to). To put it mildly, their organization only accepted the best and brightest employees, who were trained and molded into effective killing machines. It sounds gruesome, but it's handy when your business involves protecting your community from a foe that aims to crush you.

Arguably, loyalty may be the most important aspect of a successful team. At one point in the battle, Leonidas and Xerxes meet up. The Persian ruler tries to reason with his foe, asking how Leonidas can possibly defeat him when "I would kill any of my men for victory."

"I would die for any of mine," replies Leonidas, suggesting that an employee who knows he's valued is going to fight harder for the company's survival than a miserable grunt in the firm. The king has a point. His 300 men are effective at killing what must be thousands of soldiers in the first few hours of the battle. And it's not that surprising. Xerxes literally walks all over his employees; but in Leonidas' enterprise, his staff takes ownership and pride in the company and has a stake in the firm.

Business Lesson No. 3:You need to have a strong brand.
Leonidas is no fool. He knows that his 300 men and several hundred more Athenian soldiers who tag along can't completely destroy the Persian army, which outnumbers the Spartan force at least 1,000 to one. But he figures that if the Spartans live up to their reputation by ruthlessly and efficiently killing the Persians, the enemy might flee. In other words, Leonidas saw the Spartans as a brand.

Leonidas is an early marketer, fully understanding the power of words and images. When Leonidas and his men literally build a wall of corpses they know their enemy will see, it's an advertising message to the rest of the Persian soldiers that come their way: The Spartans are a company of men you don't want to encounter. They clearly hope the message will spread by word of mouth.

Later, the Spartan CEO tells his competitor, Xerxes, "The world will know that free men stood against a tyrant, that few stood against many, and before this battle was over, that even a god-king can bleed." And because Leonidas recognizes how important it is for the general public to understand the Spartans' unique brand of power and will, he sends a messenger back to Sparta to tell the tale of their fight. Leonidas appreciates that even if he and his 300 men don't win this particular battle, educating the public about the company will help the Spartan brand endure long after he is gone.

The brand, in fact, has endured so well that almost 2,500 years later Hollywood made a movie about this battle. If you haven't seen 300 yet, be sure to study these lessons and then go see them put to use in the movie. Do that and you may suck all the joy out of watching a blockbuster action movie--but you'll wind up with one heck of a business.

[via entreprenuer.com]

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(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- When word of a whites-only scholarship at Boston University hit the media last fall--drawing coverage from bloggers and biggies like ABC alike--Daniel Kovach smelled opportunity. His goal: to boost traffic to the website he runs, Scholarships Around the US.

So he paid a writer to crank out "The White Man's Guide to Getting a Minority Scholarship," which reveals that some schools do offer scholarships to "nonblack" students--and added it to the mix. Then Kovach planted a link to the article on recommendation site Digg, where it jumped to the coveted front page.

That, in turn, led other sites to link to the article. And Kovach landed a top search ranking on Google (Charts) for phrases like "white man scholarship."

Such timely strategies have helped Kovach turn his year-old site into a $10,000-per-month cash cow (see correction below). Not bad for a 26-year-old who works about an hour a day out of his townhouse in Raleigh, N.C.

Media outlets have, of course, always exploited offbeat events and stories to drive traffic. But today it's easier than ever to profit from a surge of interest in a particular topic. Some people simply aim for 15 minutes of Web fame and make a few hundred bucks by setting up a site around a topic, loading it with Google pay-per-click ads, and working social sites to link to it.

But others, like Kovach, are making bigger money by tapping the cultural zeitgeist to draw more people to an existing site.

Kovach's windfall is more surprising given that he started with a terrible domain name: http://www.scholarships-ar-us.org/. It's difficult to remember, and no one would ever type it directly into a browser. The domain's appeal--and the reason Kovach paid $1,000 for it--was that residual links pushed it up high in Google search results.

And that was better than starting from scratch. For $900, Kovach hired a designer to give the site a simple and authoritative look. He found freelancers on the Web to write items on topics from essay writing to sports scholarships. He mapped out what categories the site should include.

Each step of the way, Kovach milks trends big and small. He says he spends about 15 minutes a day culling education-related articles from Google News, scanning the headlines in search of anything that might help him stoke traffic.

"You have to sift through it all," he says. "No one is going to hand you pieces of trend gold." And he uses Google's Keyword Tool and Wordtracker--services that show what phrases people are searching--to figure out which parts of his site to beef up.

When Kovach discovered that people regularly search for scholarships for "twins," "tall people," and "left-handed people," he added a section about each. "There are hardly any real scholarships," Kovach explains, "but we'll give the searcher any information they want."

Sometimes all it takes is one smart move. Darren Barefoot, annoyed by a swell of media coverage about the virtual world Second Life, created a parody of it-- getafirstlife.com. (The subhead: "Your world. Sorry about that.")

Barefoot launched his site in January, submitted it to recommendation sites, and sent it to a few bloggers; it worked its way up Digg. Soon he was enjoying his own little windfall: 350,000 visitors in 30 days, and roughly $1,000 from Google ads--ironically enough, ads for the myriad businesses and services that cater to Second Life users.

"This was a fire-and-forget project," says Barefoot, a public relations exec in Vancouver, British Columbia. "But I've made enough money to make it worth my time."

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the amount of money that Kovach's website, Scholarships Around the US, pulls in. It is $10,000 per month, not per year.

[via cnn.com]

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A Spartan's Guide to Business

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When the movie 300 recently debuted, making more than $70 million during its opening weekend despite having no big-name actors, Hollywood was stunned. Many people have speculated that what attracted the audience was the over-the-top violence, the naked women and the special effects.

Maybe that helped--a little. But director Zack Snyder's film about Spartans bludgeoning Persian soldiers in a fight to the finish is also a business parable.

No, seriously. If you squint a little--and you probably will during some of the beheading scenes--the story resembles what an entrepreneur often faces when competing against a big corporation. It also offers some insight into what it takes to be an effective leader, inspire employees and create a recognizable brand. And, yes, this film can be ugly, but that's sometimes the nature of the business world.

Business Lesson No. 1: Your CEO needs to be a strong leader.
King Leonidas is as resilient as they come, in both the film and the actual historical battle that took place in 480 B.C. between 300 soldiers of Sparta, Greece and the Persian army. Although Leonidas is a warrior, he treats his family and friends as equals. His wife, the queen, is a partner, and he's smart enough to solicit her advice when it comes to business matters. He also spends quality time with his six-year-old son, teaching him the business (i.e., showing the little bugger how to fight).

But when Leonidas suits up and goes to his day job--vanquishing bloodthirsty enemies with his spear and shield--he's focused on what's best for the business and his employees; in this case, the kingdom and his soldiers.

Sure, his competitor, King Xerxes, through messengers he sends to Sparta, makes some powerful arguments for combining the smaller organization with the larger corporation known as Persia. For instance, if the merger goes through, Leonidas would be allowed to live, and his employees wouldn't have to see their families enslaved or worry about getting their limbs hacked off. But while Leonidas appears to mull the offer over, he's concerned that his people's way of life (think office culture) and his freedom to make independent decisions won't be allowed to thrive.

He firmly declines the deal by spearing and then throwing a bunch of Persian yes-men into what appears to be a bottomless pit.

Leonidas next prepares to stop the growing threat of a hostile takeover. He seeks approval from some grotesque oracles (his board of directors) to take 10,000 Spartan soldiers to fight off the Persian army, but he is rebuffed. And so, like all good entrepreneurs, Leonidas finds a loophole. He informs fellow Spartan colleagues that he's taking a walk, bringing 300 of his top-flight employees as body guards, and goes off to complete his business plan--to fight the Persians at the narrow cliffs of Thermopylae and frighten the immense army into fleeing.

Business Lesson No. 2: Train your employees and foster a culture that promotes loyalty.
The Spartans had a grim but effective process for making sure their society only contained healthy children. (If you don't already know what that process was, you probably don't want to). To put it mildly, their organization only accepted the best and brightest employees, who were trained and molded into effective killing machines. It sounds gruesome, but it's handy when your business involves protecting your community from a foe that aims to crush you.

Arguably, loyalty may be the most important aspect of a successful team. At one point in the battle, Leonidas and Xerxes meet up. The Persian ruler tries to reason with his foe, asking how Leonidas can possibly defeat him when "I would kill any of my men for victory."

"I would die for any of mine," replies Leonidas, suggesting that an employee who knows he's valued is going to fight harder for the company's survival than a miserable grunt in the firm. The king has a point. His 300 men are effective at killing what must be thousands of soldiers in the first few hours of the battle. And it's not that surprising. Xerxes literally walks all over his employees; but in Leonidas' enterprise, his staff takes ownership and pride in the company and has a stake in the firm.

Business Lesson No. 3:You need to have a strong brand.
Leonidas is no fool. He knows that his 300 men and several hundred more Athenian soldiers who tag along can't completely destroy the Persian army, which outnumbers the Spartan force at least 1,000 to one. But he figures that if the Spartans live up to their reputation by ruthlessly and efficiently killing the Persians, the enemy might flee. In other words, Leonidas saw the Spartans as a brand.

Leonidas is an early marketer, fully understanding the power of words and images. When Leonidas and his men literally build a wall of corpses they know their enemy will see, it's an advertising message to the rest of the Persian soldiers that come their way: The Spartans are a company of men you don't want to encounter. They clearly hope the message will spread by word of mouth.

Later, the Spartan CEO tells his competitor, Xerxes, "The world will know that free men stood against a tyrant, that few stood against many, and before this battle was over, that even a god-king can bleed." And because Leonidas recognizes how important it is for the general public to understand the Spartans' unique brand of power and will, he sends a messenger back to Sparta to tell the tale of their fight. Leonidas appreciates that even if he and his 300 men don't win this particular battle, educating the public about the company will help the Spartan brand endure long after he is gone.

The brand, in fact, has endured so well that almost 2,500 years later Hollywood made a movie about this battle. If you haven't seen 300 yet, be sure to study these lessons and then go see them put to use in the movie. Do that and you may suck all the joy out of watching a blockbuster action movie--but you'll wind up with one heck of a business.

[via entreprenuer.com]

Does Copywriting End After The First Sale Is Closed? Here Are Some Interesting Success Stories To Suggest It Keeps Right On GoinCell: A Novel
76 Smart Tech Solutions (part II)

Keeping Costs Low For an Internet Business

Chris Bliss amazing juggling routine.

Question: I will soon be setting up an e-commerce Web site for my healthful cookie business. What information can you give me about keeping costs low for a site, both start-up costs and continuing costs?

-- Carolyn Crow, Kirkland, Wash.

Answer: Hiring a Web developer to build an e-commerce site from scratch can cost at least $5,000, and often far more. But there are cheap alternatives for those willing to do much of the setup themselves -- many of which don't require much time or technical savvy.

For an e-commerce novice, an all-inclusive service may be most sensible. Yahoo Inc.'s Merchant Solutions, for instance, lets users get a domain name and choose one of 12 predesigned Web-site templates. The service then walks you through the setup, including posting product details and picking a payment processor or merchant account and a shipper. It also includes features to help the sites rank better in search results, a spokeswoman says.

There's a $50 setup fee, currently waived in an introductory offer. The service's starter plan costs $39.95 a month plus a 1.5% transaction fee on sales. That price includes Web hosting, a customer "shopping cart" and check-out functionality and technical help by phone. Payment processing costs extra.

You could save money by picking an all-inclusive service without sales-transaction fees. GoDaddy.com, owned by the Go Daddy Group, offers an e-commerce site-building and hosting service called Quick Shopping Cart, which has plans starting at $9.99 a month for sites with up to 20 product listings. The firm charges no setup or transaction fees, though payment processing is extra.

The main drawback with these services in that you don't get the design originality as you would starting from scratch, says Brian Cleveland, an Internet expert at StartupNation.com, which provides tools and advice for entrepreneurs. But many start-up sites just need to be simple and easily found through online search, with attractive photos of the product, he says.

Small businesses desiring more flexibility have other options. Sites like TemplateMonster.com sell hundreds of different Web-site templates. But you then must find a Web-hosting service, which usually costs $6 to $20 a month depending on your storage needs. You also will have to get a shopping cart and checkout system, a payment-processing system and a certificate that verifies the site's security.

You may end up spending less than you would through an all-inclusive service, but it will require more work and technical know-how.

[via startupjournal.com]

Opinion: Mac OS X 'an ideal platform' for SMBseBay Listings That Draw New and Repeat Customers
Opinion: Mac OS X 'an ideal platform' for SMBs

AdSense Superstars - Who Makes Most Money With AdSense

The Entrepreneur: Mentors Are A Must-Have

The following is a list of the Internet’s eight biggest Google AdSense publishers. The information was compiled from interviews and articles found on the Internet. Whenever possible, I list the source of the information.

I apologize in advance if I missed anyone on the list. If you make more than the people listed, please send me proof of your Google AdSense earnings and I will add you on the next time the list is updated. This is a list of individual site owners - people just like you and me. Big corporate AdSense publishers like AOL are excluded.

1: Markus Frind: PlentyOfFish.com - $300,000 per month

Markus Frind is a local Vancouverite who is turning the online dating world upside down. His site, Plentyoffish.com is the biggest free dating site on the Internet. Plentyoffish.com receives up to 500 million page views per month and make over $10,000 per day for Markus, who runs the site from home.

You think a site this big would be staffed by a hundred people but the only employee that Markus has is his girlfriend, who helps to answer the emails. Markus coded Plenty of Fish all by himself. The site is lean and mean and requires only four servers to handle all that traffic.

Doubts about Makus’s Google earnings were silenced when he posted this $900,000 check from Google. According to Markus’s blog entry, the check represented two months of AdSense earnings.

2: Kevin Rose: Digg.com - $250,000 per month

Kevin Rose started Digg in December of 2004 with just $1000. Today Digg is one of the biggest news sites on the Net, with over 400,000 members and over 200 million page views per month. According to this article from Business week, Digg will make $3 million this year from a combination of Google AdSense and Federated Media ads. Unfortunately, only Mr. Rose and his accountants knows how much came from Google and how much came from Federated Media. I can try to take a guess based on the number of times I have seen a Federated Media ad vs. a Google ad on Digg but, being in Canada, it’s almost 100% Google ads.

Whatever Google’s share of Digg’s $250,000 per month in ad revenues may be, one thing is for sure, it is not small.

3: Jeremy Schoemaker - $140,000 per month

If ever anyone can be considered an Internet marketing superstar, ShoeMoney would be near the top of the list. Jeremy Schoemaker is a search engine marketer who knows how to take advantage of both Google AdSense and AdWords. In the above photo, you see him with the biggest Google AdSense check he has ever received from Google. The income was earned back in the month of August 2005. Since then Mr. Shoemaker has moved to wire transfers. No doubt, he got tired to dealing with the bank tellers when trying to deposit $100K plus checks every month.

Unlike the other Google whores on this list, ShoeMoney, as he likes to be call, does not own just one site. He makes his enormous Google checks using hundreds of sites and thousands of domains.

4: Jason Calacanis: Weblogs, Inc. - $120,000 per month

Before Jason Calacanis sold Weblogs, Inc to AOL for $25 million, he got the network of blogs making over $4,000 a day from Google AdSense. So impressive was his AdSense performance that Google used Weblogs for a case study.

Now that AOL controls Weblogs, you can bet it is making a lot more than a measly $120,000 a month.

5: David Miles Jr. & Kato Leonard - $100,000 per month

According to this Washington Post article, David Miles Jr. and Kato Leonard, claims they make $100,000 a month from their site, Freeweblayouts.net, which gives away designs that people can use on MySpace.

The only problem with the revenue figure is it is not 100% AdSense. Free Web Layouts use other advertising networks in addition to Google. However, with a claimed $100,000 per month in revenues, I am fairly confident that the AdSense portion is higher than our next Google whore.

6: Tim Carter: AskTheBuilder.com - $30,000 per month

Tim Carter is a licensed master plumber and carpenter with his own radio show. He also makes frequent television appearances. He founded AsktheBuilder.com in 1995, The primary focus has been catering to an avid following of fellow builders on the site. According to the Google case study, Mr. Carter did such a good job tweaking the Google ads on his site that it now makes $30,000 a month.

Tim’s AdSense revenues now average $1400 a day and growing. Overall, Carter is enthusiastic about AdSense: it allows him to focus on content development, and gives him built-in tools to measure ad performance and make changes to maximize revenues. “People come to me for help,” says Carter. “They get what they need from my columns and advice - and also from ads delivered by AdSense.”

7: Joel Comm - $24,000 per month

Joel Comm is get rich quick guru. He wrote the best selling e-book, What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense. The e-book, along with the website that promotes it has a screen shot of Mr. Comm AdSense earning from November 19, 2005 to December 15, 2005. Whether or not Mr. Comm still makes this much from Google is anybody’s guess.

8: Shawn Hogan – DigitalPoint.com $10,000 per month

Back in January of 2005 the New York Times had an article about AdSense, featuring Shawn Hogan, founder of DigitalPoint. The article states that Mr. Hogan makes $10,000 per month from Google AdSense using a very unique revenue sharing model.

Google pays Digital Point about $10,000 a month, depending on how many people view or click on those ads, said Shawn D. Hogan, the owner and chief technology officer of Digital Point.

Mr. Hogan said he started the revenue-sharing approach in 2004 “as kind of a marketing gimmick.”

“But everyone seemed to think it was a cool idea,” he said. “I saw a lot of other sites doing the same thing maybe six months later.”

DigitalPoint have grown a lot since that article and while Mr. Hogun would not say anything, the DigitalPoint forum members speculate that he is making at least twice that amount now.

[Via John Chow]

The Littlest Hitler - StoriesLocal entrepreneurs find a market for history, trivia
2007 Mothers of Invention Challenge

Stay at Home Mom Looking For Work Targeted by Online Thieves

IRS Warns of Cybersquatters

ST. PETERSBURG, FL -- Donna Gonzalez wants to work at home for the sake of her daughter Leah.

She recently posted her resume on websites like Career Builder.Com and quickly got a reply, "They just need people who already had bank accounts set up, so we could cash the checks for them."

According to Donna, a company called Global Healthcare Inc.,out of London, sent her a contract asking her to cash checks and wire them the money. It was supposedly quicker than doing it overseas.

Donna was promised 10-percent of the money cashed, "It looked legitimate I mean I went to paralegal school and I knew some contractual law and so the contract looked legitimate, but it wasn't evidentially."

After Donna cashed a check from a "so called" customer and wired the company more than 25-hundred dollars,she later found out the check was fake and she was the one who was stuck paying, "I was so devastated I cried so hard."

Sgt. Kevin Smith of the St. Petersburg Police Department says, he gets calls like this one at least two times a week, "It's heartbreaking because you really hate to see people out there trying to work, trying to sell something to be taken advantage of."

Sgt. Kevin Smith says websites like Career Builder.Com are safe, but people need to be more aware of who they're dealing with, "Unfortunately anybody has a right to log in and look at those resumes so you really don't know who's actually offering you a job."

He says thieves are also targeting victims through the mail and even fax machines. . Sgt. Smith says it's difficult to catch the thieves because of trying to coordinate with other countries.

He says banks don't take responsibility for these incidents, because it's the account holder who's cashing the checks, even though they're not aware they're fake.

Donna now believes if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is, "I'm really afraid to go on line anymore and even answer emails from companies." While she paid an expensive price, she hopes others learn from her experience
The Success Principles(TM): How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be"Jamaicans" - Stand Up Comedy - Cedric Newman
Adsense - Let's Get Real

6 Secrets Of One Way Inbound Links

Microbusinesses find huge benefits in outsourcing

The following is a guest post by Matthew Peschong of the Caffeine Marketing blog.

Creating an effective online presence begins with quality content. After you put your heart and soul everyday into your works online, you might start to wonder when traffic will start rolling into your website.

1. Free E-Books

2. Articles

3. Online Directories

4. Testimonials

5. Content Is King

6. Develop A Directory
Quick Query: Restaurants & Email MarketingLooking Beyond SEO
IRS may shift AMT gap burden to small biz

The Socket Seekers

How To Start Google Adsense?

Just when travelers thought they had run out of things to complain about at the airport, their fading laptops and cellphones have signaled yet another problem: a shortage of power outlets.

Airport concourses, particularly older ones, were never known for their abundance of electrical sockets. But a convergence of factors — including new wireless Internet access in terminals, stricter airport security measures and the proliferation of power-hungry gadgets — has added to the deficit of outlets. Airports are rushing to add new ones...

Read more on nytimes.com.
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How To Make $50 Profit In 20 Minutes With Traffic Arbitrage

Get FREE stuff by an one click.

Figured I’d blog about something that made me feel all warm and nice inside. I’ve been getting lots of IM’s and emails from readers and members of WickedFire about how they read what I wrote on PPC Arbitrage, and how instead of just sitting around reading, they put it into play. Not only has it been paying off, nicely too, but it’s actually helping all of these smaller and medium sized webmasters get over the hurdle of “I want to make at least $2k a month on auto-pilot”. I promise, this is not a pitch for an ebook or some killer system to wealth and riches. This is actual stuff that is working. I have never charged a dime for any of the information either, and don’t plan on it!

How much is needed to be successful at PPC Arbitrage? Not a lot. Most of the guys doing it have created their site with AdSense or YPN, which took them a few hours, which is expected with your first site/page, because you’re not used to it just yet. But even so, a few hours of making a few pages on some information topic they don’t really know all that much about, slapping the contextual ads on there, and then driving traffic to it. So, aside for the work amount, the cost is so basic too. All you need to do is just prove it to yourself that at it works before you allocate a larger budget to the project. Typically, people will invest about $100 to maybe $300 at most. It’s up to you if you want to burn through that budget in a few hours, a few days, or a month. Most people let it run for about a week, and almost everyone sees results immediately. Sure, you may have to wait on a net 30 basis to get your check, but when you compare it to anything else, it overrides it so quickly.

Just to prove how goddamn easy and quick the ROI took, a friend of mine tested a small site for some weight loss drug called Hoodia. Put up the content, slapped the ads onto it, put some links to affiliate products as well, and that was it. He had already cleared $50 in profit within the first 20 minutes. He used some Tier 2 PPC traffic, which comes pretty quickly, especially for a topic like that. The positioning of ads was very creative, but everything stayed within the rules of Adsense. Again, he wasn’t doing this as a form of making cash for himself, it was strictly as a test to prove that what I said works, and does so very well.

Here’s another example. A friend of mine who happens to own a very large ad network, obviously doesn’t need to money, but likes to dabble in all sorts of interesting and creative ways to make money, put up an information site on mortgages and loans. Very popular and expensive topic, no need to tell you guys that. Typically clicks for it will cost about $9 on Adwords for almost every major keyword on the topic. He took traffic from one of the 2nd tier engines, Searchfeed I believe, pushed some traffic to it, and now, in month 2, he’s averaging $5k a month. Not bad at all. I think his total investment was a little over $2k for both months combined!

In the second example, my friend used a practice that I mentioned a few times to other people as a way to make even more money, or maybe convert the non-clickers of your ads into clickers, because again, that’s all you want them to do. You aren’t building it to make them come back time after time for updated information, because there will be none. All you want them to do is clickthrough to the advertiser who can either supply them with better, more accurate information, or a product/service that they are already looking for. So back on topic, using different forms of contextual based advertising and maybe tossing in some affiliate links on the sides is a good way to go. This way, if the user has no interest in your ads that they can tell are from Google (which aside for people within our industry don’t really notice this stuff like we do), they may click on something else. Perhaps you should add some Adbrite ads, or maybe something like Intellitxt or Kontera. Even Chitika ads can do well if it’s targeted to something in the shopping or consumer electronics area.

My point is, just because you’re making a site for something like arbitrage, doesn’t mean it has to look like it’s a MFA page (MFA - Made For Adsense). Spruce it up a bit with more ways to make cash, things to compliment the ads in ways that may not look like blatant ads, but can still drum up lots of clicks. Alright, you may not make $1 a click from it, but I’d rather make $0.15 a click instead of zero. You’ll see, it will hike up your profit margins.

In closing, I’m really glad people are using the advice I give, and not just making assumptions about it, or bashing it without trying it. I will always catch shit from people who disagree, and that’s fine, but 99% of those people who usually disagreed, never even tried it. Of all of the people who have tried it and failed, it was a minor failure and they usually go over where they failed and how, fix their mistakes, and poof, back on the horse they go, and into the ranks of success stories. So if you hit a snag, keep trying. We aren’t talking about investing a ton of cash here or something that you can lose your shirt over. It’s simple trial and error. Pick a topic, make a page/site, slap some ads onto it, spend $100 or so on some cheap 2nd tier traffic, and watch it go.

[Via Aojon.Com]

Make Millions -- From Your Living Room

Firms find niche finding internships

MILWAUKEE - Claire Richardson knew this summer would cost her money. Whether she chose to take an unpaid internship, study abroad or stay at Southern Methodist University and take summer classes, she and her parents would have to pay.

So that's why she didn't mind spending thousands of dollars to land an internship, plus housing and food, for a summer in New York.

"When you look at it you're going to be paying money wherever you are or whatever you're doing," said Richardson, a 20-year- old sophomore who will intern this summer at brokerage Smith Barney.

Hunting for an internship takes time, and as more students realize their value, competition is getting fierce. A slew of businesses have popped up to help match students with internships, charging hundreds to thousands of dollars to help them write resumes, identify potential employers and find summer housing.

About three-fourths of all college students have had internships or some type of professional work experience by the time they graduate, said Phil Gardner, director of Michigan State's Collegiate Employment Research Institute. When he started following such trends 25 years ago, only 35 percent to 40 percent of college students interned.

"It's just one of those things you have to have before employers will even consider looking at your resume," he said.

But students shouldn't pay to find an internship, he said, because most universities have career centers where students can search for free.

"A student doesn't have to do that, in my opinion," Gardner said. "It just tells me that they're not going and using their resources." Richardson said she - and her parents - didn't mind paying a company like University of Dreams to secure her internship. Because she was only in her sophomore year, she felt she faced more competition. She tried going to her career center, but most jobs were in Texas, and Richardson wanted to go to New York.

University of Dreams uses its staff's personal contacts at 500 companies to get students internships with employers they couldn't otherwise get into, said CEO Eric Lochtefeld. For interns, that's better than sending in a resume and hoping, he said.

"Does any college student really, sincerely believe that their resume will stand out or get better consideration than an actual introduction would provide?" Lochtefeld said.

In four years, the company has placed 1,800 students in companies such as Paramount Pictures or MTV Networks, both divisions of Viacom Inc. It has slots this summer for 850 students, he said.

Students pay from $6,499 to $8,999 to have the company find them an eight-week summer internship, plus housing in dorms at universities, some meals, transportation to work and activities for a summer. Financial assistance, including loans, grants and full scholarships, is available.

An admissions team reviews applications and makes an offer.

Students who are accepted pay a deposit of $500 to $1,000. Then they work with a placement agent, who finds a matching company.

They're guaranteed an internship in the field of their choice or their money back.

Most of the internships are unpaid, but University of Dreams arranges for college credit through universities. Richardson figures she'll get between one and two credits for her summer in New York.

Other companies, like Fast Track Internships, don't let the companies know they're helping students. In less than a year, the Dallas-based company has placed 20 students in fields like broadcasting, consulting and advertising, said Steve Rodems, a former powdered soap salesman who started the company with a business partner.

"We go about it the same way we would if we were back at a corporation or an advertising agency marketing a product," said Rodems, of tweaking resumes and playing up students' strengths.

Fast Track works with students to identify companies that suit the students' goals but either don't have formal internship programs or don't advertise them, so competition will be less.

The company also writes and prints 100 to 300 copies of resumes and cover letters, addresses envelopes and even buys stamps before giving them to the student to sign, stuff and mail. Rodems said students typically receive five offers.

The price: $799 if a student wants an unpaid internship and $999 if they want a paid one, because those are often more difficult to get, he said. Both come with a two-offer guarantee.

Laura Kestner, director of Career Services at Marquette University in Milwaukee, said no one should pay to find an internship. Looking for an internship helps students develop skills, she said.

"We're advocates of teaching students lifelong job-search skills, so there's no reason you should pay someone," she said.

But she is working with a firm that helps employers recruit interns, Chicago-based Brill Street and Co.

Employers tell Brill Street their needs for jobs ranging from a few weeks to 18 months, and the company finds and pays the students. Brill Street then bills the hiring company and collects a fee off that, said Nancy Lerner, who founded the company with her husband last year and was at a recent career fair at Marquette.

American Born Chinese

Web Sites Fail To Reach People With Disabilities, UN-Backed Survey Shows

Only three of 100 Web sites tested met minimum accessibility standards for disabled people.

Only three of 100 Web sites tested in what researchers call the first global Web site accessibility survey met minimum accessibility standards for disabled people.

Nomensa released the results of the United Nations commissioned study this week to coincide with the International Day of Persons With Disabilities. The British agency provides assistance with Web site design, as well as consultation and training on accessibility.

The agency used manual and automated systems to test the accessibility of leading Web sites in five sectors in 20 countries. It examined Web sites of heads of states, airlines, banks, newspapers, and retailers.

Read more on informationweek.com.