Productivity vs. Activity
I used to watch the people at work run around all day long talking about how busy they were. They would talk about all the things they had to do, but never really accomplished anything. They were very active, but not at all productive. If they didn’t have anything to do they would get really nervous. I think most were afraid if they stopped they would realize how miserable they were.
Since employees are basically just renting out their time, I would hear things like, ‘I like to be busy because it makes the time go faster.” If you stop and think about it, you are saying that you want to speed up your time. Since you are going to die someday, maybe that is not the best approach, maybe you should find something productive and meaningful to do with the limited amount of time you have.
What are you busy doing?
| Activity | Productivity |
| hanging out on facebook | marketing on facebook |
| reading a blog | writing a blog |
| going to the gym | exercising |
| reading a book | writing a book |
| surfing the internet | building a website |
| watching television | playing with your kids |
| going to a meeting | not going to any meetings ever |
| watching sports | playing sports |
| going out to dinner | making dinner |
| working hard | working smart |
Focus on producing, it makes you feel good and creates the things that you want in life. You will get things done and achieve your goals. You will value your time and enjoy your life, instead of just trying to hurry up and get it over with.
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Building a Business Website in WordPress
After spending a year and a half designing the website for my wife’s small business, I decided to delete the whole thing.
During those 18 months, I learned quite a bit about website design, search engine optimization and lead conversion. Enough to confidently delete the website and start over with WordPress.
I had originally built the site with WebsiteTonight from Godaddy and although I was very pleased with how the site looked, there were too many advantages to converting it:
- I was able to have the blog and website all on one domain
- WordPress is the best blogging software
- The code for WordPress and frugaltheme is clean, fast and search engine friendly
- The on-page search engine optimization is built in
- I was able to install plugins to improve search rankings, such as All in one SEO Pack, Google XML sitemaps, Google Analytics for WordPress, and Yet another Related Posts
- It is easy to add new content
- Creation of categories and tags to improve search engine rankings
- Installed good-looking web 2.0 contact form for lead conversion
- Ability to interact, leave comments and subscribe to the site
The biggest obstacle is that you do not want your commercial business website to look like a blog. I decided to go with frugaltheme because it is easily customizable and has a minimalist design. I was able to create a static homepage and have the actual blog as the 4th page in. The layout is very simple including a basic description, contact form and testimonials. Take a look at how it turned out.
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photo by koka sexton
Inside the Search Engine
Wouldn’t it be great if you could go inside the search engine, find out what was determining rankings and immediately move your site to the top? Search engines like Google, MSN or Yahoo! have complicated algorithms that they run to determine the most relevant and authoritative search results. These algorithms are kept secret and are constantly evolving.
SEOENG solves the mystery of the search engines because it is a transparent search engine. It has spiders that can crawl your site on demand, but then SEOENG gives you the results of how your market ranking was determined. SEOENG gives you an inside look as to what the search engine likes or doesn’t like about your site.
The service provides detailed analysis of on-page and off-page optimization. For on-page optimization you can check your internal link structure, keyword count, duplicate content, metadata and much more. You can adjust the flow of your internal linking structure to navigate it to your most important pages. The off-page optimization results show you all of the external links that point to your site and include the details such as anchor text, nofollow, etc.
You used to have to wait until a search engine crawled your site before you could find out if what you were doing was working, and the search engines provided limited data. With SEOENG you can crawl your site on demand, and get all of the information you need to optimize your site in one report. Search engine marketing professionals and website designers can save time and money by utilizing SEOENG packages.
The actual SEOENG website contains a wealth of knowledge on search engine optimization and includes video tutorials. I suggest beginners take some time to read through it to get a better grasp of how the search engines work.
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Getting the Word Out
If you have gone to all the trouble of writing an article for your business, then you might as well get some mileage out of it. If no one reads what you write, then what is the point? You have to promote your message, drive traffic to your site and create backlinks. Here are three tools that can help you promote your content and save you time.
Ping is a free service that makes updating your social networks easy. You have your own dashboard where you can post to up to 40 different social networks at once. It takes some time to sign up for all of the networks, but once you are done it is very simple to use.
Su.pr is from stumble upon and when you post a link to it, it automatically updates stumble upon, facebook and twitter. This helps to increase your exposure on the internet and drive traffic to your site. It also shows the amount of stumbles (impressions) the site receives, the amount of clicks you get and the number of followers on twitter. Another feature is that it gives you a suggested posting time, letting you know when to post to get the most amount of traffic. There is also a su.pr wordpress plugin that allows you to host tiny urls on your domain.
Spin Distribute is an article marketing service I have used that has helped improve my search rankings. You write an article and then go through it and put in two or three different options for words. Example: The dog went to the [store|park|house]. The spin distribute program will change out the words to create many different versions of your article. It then automatically distributes your article to hundreds of different article directories. This is a good way to quickly build a lot of links to your site and avoid duplicating content.
By using these three tools on every article for my wife’s local business, I am able to increase the online presence, build links, increase search rankings and drive traffic.
Photo by Roland
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5 Ways to Get More Referrals
The concept of the referral generation is that as the world gets more connected, referrals will account for almost all of your business. Businesses that are good at generating referrals will quickly rise to the top, while businesses who are not, will not last long. Here are five ways to effectively build a referral network in the new economy.
1. Ask - Yes, it is that simple. This is often overlooked, but if you can ask a satisfied customer if they know of anyone else that would also benefit from your service, you will be way ahead of the game.
2. Email List – Build a quality email list, use a service like AWeber so that you can stay on top of mind with your current customers and give updates on your company’s promotions and news.
3. Affiliate Network – Have a network of affiliates doing your marketing for you. By paying them a commission for referring sales you can broaden your reach and have your business marketed in ways you would have never thought of.
4. Gifts – The law of reciprocity refers to responding to a positive action with another positive action. If you are giving to your clients, they will give back to you.
5. Gimmicks – You have to have some type of edge, whether your product or service is the fastest, cheapest, best quality, most convenient, etc. Be known for what you do. People love to be able to spread the word that they know someone who can get the job done right.
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Effective Marketing
For many years advertising agencies and clients spent millions of dollars based on ratings provided by ONE service. The accuracy was always questioned. In the early days, a person at home would receive as little as a dollar to write down the program they were watching. Keep in mind the sample size was less than 5% of the existing population. The rating service was justified by saying they used a cross section of demographics and other research to get the representative sample.
A few major companies protested, but to little avail. Almost everyone went about committing millions of dollars using this method. As time went on, the rating system installed meters in the home that automatically measured what channel the home was watching even if no one was home.
The rating company upgraded to the current technology and came up with THE PEOPLE METER 25 years later still using less than 5% of the markets population. The people meter is an improvement but still has many inaccuracies.
Measuring results on the web has its challenges using terms such as HITS, UNIQUE VISITORS and many others are commonplace. The bottom line is to market effectively what you need by using the internet.
Ask the Obama campaign! Messaging and fundraising on the web won him the election.
Marketing on the Web can be effective. Results can be measured easily. Take time to learn how to market on the internet. Better yet, concentrate on running your business and hire a good consultant.
Frank is a media consultant in Treasure Island, Florida with over thirty years of television and radio management experience. Contact Frank for consulting on marketing, advertising and branding.
Local Affiliate Program
For marketing my wife’s local business, I try to take the techniques that major internet marketers use and apply them to a local campaign. Advertisers such as Amazon use affiliate networks to market their products and broaden their reach. I followed their example and launched an affiliate program to generate more leads to her business.
An affiliate marketer is someone who advertises a product or service in exchange for a commission based on number of sales or leads. These affiliate links are everywhere on the internet (even in this post). The links can be tracked so the affiliate gets credit for referring a sale or lead.
Since she is in the real estate industry, there are plenty of local professionals that have twitter and facebook accounts, email lists, blogs and websites. Affiliates can set up their own accounts and get links with a personalized tracking ID. This allows the affiliate to publish the ID on any of their websites.
This was actually pretty easy to set up through has offers. I was able to create an offer where she pays the affiliates for sales they send to her.
This is taking the idea of a local referral network and moving it online. I don’t know of anyone using the affiliate system for a local service business. It is good to be first in the market and provide an easy way for related professionals to make some extra money online.
From an SEO standpoint this also helps your rankings by adding a lot more local relevant links to your site.
You can build your own network at has offers. Amazingly, it is free unless you go over 250,000 clicks per month. If you have that many clicks on your offer, I don’t think you will mind paying for it.
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