Posts Tagged ‘Practices’

A Case Study of Energy Efficient Business and Green Practices

Saturday, January 15th, 2011

DEATH to Old School Home Based Business Practices – Avoiding The Bully (Shark) Marketer

Monday, September 13th, 2010

It is exciting to make huge cash working from home. Very few really do though for numerous reasons, and this article series is devoted to revealing why few succeed, how those that do succeed accomplish their success, and what you can expect if you really want to find success working from home.
Back to the sharks. When you get your returned phone call(s), you have no thought is calling you. But be sure of one thing, they are doing it in the hope of getting paid. Nothing incorrect with getting paid, but not everyone conducts business with the same ethical standards. In fact there are way too many individuals in the industry that will tell you whatever they reckon you want to hear to get you to go forward with their business.
The process is simple – they call you – tell you how busy they are – then give you some websites to go see and a conference call to attend. Simple enough, anyone can learn to do that right? Then they insist that they are professionals, insist that you be the same and be at either of a couple of choices of “appointments” with them to get your questions answered. You agree on a time and then you are off to do your research.
So you go to that call, check out the website – everything looks so excellent, but as a habitual person you have some questions; and you should. You are about to make a choice that is vital, and your time and energy is the #1 resource you are risking, not the cash. Cash is replaceable. Your time and your emotional state and shape is not.
You are really interested so you keep your follow up appointment with what seems like your undisruptive tour guide.. You have so many questions, and you are excited. Here’s where you can be vulnerable to the seasoned qualified you are about to meet. You are about to be 3-wayed to a name that has more experience at “closing”. They intend to “close” you, which means, have you pull out your credit card or you get sent to the bank to get certified funds.
Meanwhile you are thinking you are just trying to get questions answered so you can consider your options.
The call comes as scheduled, the person that you first spar with then tells you they are new to the business (in most cases) or says that they want to show you what kind of up line support you are going to get when you join, “so if you don’t mind, I’d like to bring in John Hammerhead into the conversation. He’s a fantastic guy, a lot of fun to work with, and very successful. He’s teaching me the ins and outs of this business, and will be teaching you”.
Now in your mind a touch is a bit amiss right? The yellow caution light is flashing in your mind, and your original contact person can significance new resistance developing in you; and he/she should. You built rapport with that first person that called you. You wanted to speak with them more, and now here comes a name you don’t know. You are about to experience the home based business shark bite.
Of course John Hammerhead is very busy so as you question questions, he gives you fleeting answers, and says “don’t worry – you’ll learn all of that when you get started”. Get started you are thinking? I’m just still learning about all of this home business material, your brain shouts at you.
Then it happens, John Hammerhead goes for the “BITE” (close) – “well let’s get you started?”
If John Hammerhead has done his job, all along the way, he has painted the picture that this is simple, just follow the “SYSTEM”, and we’ll be here to help all along the way.
Meanwhile you have not had enough time to Google the company or research any other businesses. You are not ready … John Hammerhead is ready and expects you to be too because ” he’s looking for decisive people”. Who is this all about anyhow? It’s about you, your life, your goals, your dreams – not John Hammerhead.
For so many people that is the first experience, you pull out your credit card and go to the website and sign up. You just signed up for your first home based business. It will probably not be your last.
At the end of the call you are congratulated for being decisive and committed to your future, etc. Meanwhile, John Hammerhead just bit a chuck out of your checking account. And you can be guaranteed that, if you enrolled in your home business this way, then you will nearly certainly regret it at some point, and write it off as lesson 1 at some point in your not to distant future.
My first experience at learning about home business was from watching a TV commercial late at night. I went to the website, place my information in, and nearly immediately my phone rang. People from about 8 different companies called me. I connected with one particular guy that seemed trustworthy enough.
I had very specific criteria. No selling to acquaintances and family and drop ship completely from Internet ordering were the headlines. Jim the “Vitamin salesman” was not resonating with me, but I figured IF it was perfectly turnkey online, it would just be a further stream of income. After all, people buy lots of vitamins.
Jack Greatwhite just kept saying yes. I went to their call. Everyone was making all this cash, it sounded fantastic. When Jack Greatwhite called me back, he by now had Bill Thebullshark on the phone with him. I was instantly in a 2 on 1. I re-capped my criteria, and told them that if everything I heard was right I was in. They said yes again. I ordered the “IPB choice kit” for $500. They got me to go ahead and signup for the marketing system, for a year (huge mistake), but I felt these guys were being trustworthy with me.
When I got my kit, the first thing I did was read the “manual” that came with it (very scarce for me), but I wanted to see their marketing model. And there is it was, on page 3 “group of Influence”, acquaintances and family, blah, blah, blah. Right about the time I finished reading the manual, I was packing up everything to ship back, and Jack Greatwhite just happened to call. I questioned him on the “drop ship” program and then he said I needed to either sell X dollars in product first (of course by having them all shipped to my house first) for a couple of thousand dollars, or buy my way in at a higher amount.
I confronted him, and essentially politely called him a liar. He back peddled and got Bill Thebullshark back on the phone, and they settled me down a small bit. At the time I didn’t realize they were trying to get me past the 72 hour period with which I could get a refund (which they successfully did).
A week later, I called to cancel everything, question for my refund (that’s when I found out that the 10 day period started when I place my credit card in the website, not when I expected my product evaluation kit. It was now day 11. I wanted a refund on the marketing system. Of course I had clicked on an agreement that said it was non-refundable. So it was a $750 lesson and introduction into the world of the perilous shark infested waters of MLM. One year later the ancient wound was opened and salted when the company that provides that company’s marketing system started charging my credit card without my consent. After an hour or so of my time on the phone, I irrevocably got the charges reversed. Unbelievable.
Are all people in network marketing and home based business sharks and pilferers? Unquestionably not. In fact, when 4 months later I looked again after responding to what I thought was a job ad in the newspaper. I saw the sharks coming and got back in the boat quick.
This total exercise though led me to find a business that was legitimate, and I was able to do very well at. But I swore to myself on day 1 that if I ever had to resort to those tactics to make cash, I would quit the business. (which I did in February 2007).
The best advice is take your time looking, don’t let a seasoned “Networker” (shark) bully you or make you feel inadequate because you want to “reckon” about a particular business. Thinking about it is exactly what you should do along with some Serious Due Diligence (Research). How to go about this is the subject of a further article.
I was taken advantage of because at the time I was moving “away” from a situation, and everything sounded better than where I was. By the time I picked my right business, I was moving “towards” a goal, and therefore no one was able to push or bully me.
Either you or a name you know has been the victim of a GUMP (Excellent Unsuspecting Cash People) hunter in MLM or direct sales, making much of the negative view of the industry.
Some network marketing, direct sales, MLM companies or other home based business opportunities in many cases have tremendous value propositions. Most do not, and they are populated with lots of hungry sharks.

Search Engine Marketing – Bottomline Best Practices

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Your success online is frankly proportional to your search engine rankings. If your site is ranking well in the SERPs, visitors will surely follow. Let’s go over some of the steps necessary to maximize your SEM efforts.There’s a excellent deal of confusion about how necessary Page Rank is to ranking well. Page Rank is sufficient but not necessary for excellent rankings. Let me clarify. I’m not saying that Page Rank is not excellent, I’m just saying that it should not be the only thing you focus on. Note that Google calculates Page Rank as part of their very closely guarded ranking algorithms. We, as marketers, have no say in how Google assigns PR. Your site’s ability to exchange visitors into some form of measurable action is a far more vital gauge of your site’s worth than Page Rank.If you want respectable rankings, be prepared to work for them. The approach may include trial and error on your part truly know what methods do and do not work. Number one on your list of things to do is simple: Your site needs to turn traffic into action. Even if you spent a fortune on web development and design, that doesn’t mean your site will exchange your traffic. The process of converting search engine traffic into opt-ins, buyers, followers or fans is the very core of search engine marketing. This is exactly where the Clickbank Affiliate Loophole Bonus really shines. Recollect this is search engine marketing – with an accent on marketing. You’re a peddler first and foremost.First and foremost, your site design, navigation and content strategy must be based on keywords and keyphrases. What Is More, your marketing methodology is going to revolve around these same keywords and phrases. What are the core SEM best practices? To start with, we need to start building backlinks to our site. Not all backlinks are produced copy! The backlinks we need have our keywords and keyphrases as anchor text. As far as the search engines are concerned, one link is better than none. This implies you should be building links on sites and domains that may or may not have solid Page Rank. How many backlinks should you have or try to target? The market you are in holds the key. The more competitive, the more links you’ll need. The lower the competition, the fewer the links. It pretty much goes without saying that the more the merrier, but it all comes back to our anchor text and our (hopefully!) careful choice of keywords and keyphrases. Excellent search engine rankings are automatically a topic of tying your anchor text to your keywords. Get this incorrect and your site is destined for search engine oblivion.Of course the traffic you generate as a result of your link building efforts is wasted if you’re not testing. And testing is at the very heart of conversions. Guess what? We’re right back where we started – talking about conversions! A further discussion about conversions is a small bit more than we need to bite off right now. Rest assured I’ve got lots to say about that so stay tuned. I’ve some more plotted in the next small bit. Don’t worry, converting your traffic is the best part of your job!

Best Practices for Twitter

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

Writing about the top best practices for Twitter is fraught with danger because everyone has his/her own list. Thus with trepidation I will attempt to provide you with what I believe are the most vital best practices:

#1 Best Practice:

Share valuable information of yours and others with links to this information. This can be blog posts, news articles, website pages, news photos, whatever is appropriate.

#2 Best Practice:

Retweet worthwhile information tweeted by others and include links to this information. This is a fantastic best practice as long as this is not the only thing you do on Twitter. (Some people do only retweet other people’s information without ever engaging in conversations.)

#3 Best Practice:

Engage in conversations – use tweetbeep.com or other applications to know when people are tweeting about topics of interest to you and then participate in the conversation. This includes answering questions when you can do so. (For example, where’s a excellent fish restaurant in West Los Angeles? Or where can I find odd-size men’s shoes online?)

#4 Best Practice:

Do NOT make your tweets all about you. If you are sharing valuable free information, that’s one thing. But if you are promoting your own harvest and air force all the time you will get a reputation that you do not want. (You will also get an undesirable reputation if you constantly peep trivial information such as when you are going to sleep.)

Excellent significance is the motto for Twitter best practices:

The vital element in any best practices list is using excellent significance. Place yourself in the other person’s shoes and consider what you like to see in tweets and what you don’t like to see.

Here’s a slightly edited email I expected:

“I quit Twitter. To be frank, I despised it. Too many strangers wanting to be my friend. Much too much small talk. I just don’t have that kind of time … I simply can’t muster up the interest required in knowing that Bob just returned from his kitchen with a bologna sandwich.”

See what I mean? Judge your tweets by what you’d like to receive.

Just make sure you are one of those people sharing valuable information!

FYI – One bonus point to consider: Who you retweet can also be vital. Even if you reckon a particular peep is valuable, consider who it is from who will then be mentioned by username in your retweet.

If that person’s tweets are usually not valuable and therefore that person’s overall Twitter reputation is probably not that excellent, perhaps you shouldn’t retweet that person. You want to retweet from effectual Twitter participants the valuable information they share.

Bad Practices With Reciprocal Links

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Publication/Reprint Terms:

-You have consent to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as the “About the Author” footer is included. A courtesy copy of your publication would be valued.
==========

Some S.E.O.’s will tell you that reciprocal between is beneficial. Others will say that reciprocal between has outlived its course. If you choose to trade links, here are a few things to consider:

The point of obtaining back-links is to help your search engine rank. Every link to your site is like a vote for your site. If it’s a one way link, from them to you, even better! The feature of the back-link is also vital. If a high ranked site like Microsoft were to link to your site, it would be considered a very vital “vote,” and would surely outweigh back-links from many other sites. But what if your back-link isn’t real? There are website owners and directories out there who are willing and keen to trade links with you. But beware, because what they’re really trying to do is make a one way link; from your site to theirs!

The way they pull this off is by camouflaging your link, rendering it invisible to search engines. Search engines ignore JavaScript, so writing a fleeting script for your link is common. A further method is using Google’s new invention: The rel=”nofollow” attribute. Google and many other search engines have partnered with Blogging sites to combat comment spam (the practice of dumping your link in a blog to try to improve your page rank). Links posted in most blogs contain the “nofollow” attribute, directing the search engines to ignore it. Well, website owners are catching on, and it’s possible that your reciprocal link contains the same attribute.

A third way of hiding your link from search engines is by using a “re-direct” script. Instead of your link’s URL taking you frankly to your site, your link’s address is really a further file located within the same site. Once the browser reaches this page, it then reads a re-direct script and irrevocably takes you to your page. Because your link was never really a link to your site, and because search engines ignore JavaScript, your URL is never read or recognized by the web crawler, rendering your link useless for Page Rank purposes.

“But what if the re-directing page is accompanied by a text link with my URL intact,” you question?

One of two things could be possible:

1) The link legitimate and is helping your Page Rank.

2) The re-directing page with your link is included in the site’s robots.txt file. A robots.txt file instructs search engine crawlers to avoid certain site directories. It’s possible that any page where your link lives is purposely avoided by web crawlers using this method. To see if the directory where your link lives is included in the site’s robot.txt file, simply type “http://www.sample-url.com/robots.txt” into your browser’s address bar. If you see your link’s subfolder or web page listed after the word, “disallow,” then your trading partner has pulled a quick one on you.

“But why would website owners want to do disguise my link?” you question?

Two reasons:

1) A one-way link is rated higher than a reciprocal link.

2) Trading links with a website that is ranked lower than your own can hurt your page rank, but an inbound link from any site is permanently positive (as long as the site is not considered a “terrible neighborhood”).

There is software out there that can check for valid links. Get hold of it, and you can check your back-links with ease. A further (and more deadly) way is to manually check the HTML code. Even beginners can do this. Just click your browser’s “View Source” option, and select “Find” or “Search.” Penetrate your url, and the search tool will involuntarily scroll the page for your query. If found, be sure to check if it is a JavaScript link or if the rel=”nofollow” attribute is present. If not found, then it’s likely your link partner is hiding your link’s url with a re-direct script. Be sure to check the site’s robots.txt file as well to make sure your link’s page is indexed. Hopefully, you’ll find your link unscathed, helping to increase your Page Rank.

Generating back-links is not simple work. If you’ve read about S.E.O., you know that they’re elemental for search engine spot (Google in particular). But if you choose to trade links, make sure you’re getting your end of the bargain.

Online Reputation Management Blogging Best Practices- Part 2

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009


You need to commit to blogging at least once a day. Once you get the blog established, you may be able to find a name who is by now is an established blogger and willing to commit to providing content. Your blog posts do not need to be excessively long. Research shows that fleeting posts about relevant topics will help you break the ice on the conversation. An ultimate candidate for blogging is a person who is by now adept with the online environment, can consume and effectively present large …