Marketing Your Business Online

In order to kill procrastination you need to do a few things.  First make sure that the overall goal is something that you absolutely want to accomplish.  Make a list of undeniable reasons that you absolutely MUST achieve the goal.  Say to yourself, if I don’t accomplish the goal what will happen to me?  What kind of pain will I feel?

Most people work for others because the fear of pain is inflicted by your boss.  Your painful thought of a loss of your job, eliminates procrastination from doing the most important goals set by the boss.  In order to make yourself have the kind of drive of doing your most important goals, you need to really KNOW that there is a NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCE for not accomplishing your goal.

The other thing that can kill procrastination is to set small manageable goals that MUST be accomplished the NEXT DAY.  Take 5 minutes every evening and write down the 2-3 top goals you MUST accomplish the next day.  And do not let yourself be sidetracked by email, other people, or anything else until you accomplish at least your top 1 goal for the day.

That’s it.  Not rocket science, but a true way to Kill Procrastination.

You know that 95% of all New Years Resolutions NEVER get done.

You know that if you looked back at every past resolution you ever set for yourself, so few ever were accomplished.  Why is this the case?

• You don’t have a plan to accomplish the goal.  Almost all goals that have specific plans to achieve realistic goals by a specific time are accomplished.  Or at least they are more likely to be accomplished.
• You don’t take any risk whatsoever.  Most goals require a risk of some sort.  Either you are risking wasting some time towards achieving a goal, or you are going to risk some money to achieve it.  Either way, people are less willing to take risks even though the rewards can be immense.  Risk averse people are afraid.  Fear is a huge motivator to non-action.  It can cause procrastination and so many things that can kill dreams.
• You don’t find people to help you accomplish the goals.  Listen, it is nearly impossible to achieve a goal without the help of others.  Or else, in order to do everything alone, you will need to learn alot.  Take for instance, if you want to create a web business, not only do you need to come up with the product, run the business, but you need to know about marketing, web design, seo, etc.  Not everyone can be good at doing it all.  Or, to learn it all, could take months or years and this leads to procrastination and inaction.  Perhaps you are afraid or fearful to hire people.  This is another mistake.  You may spend $20 at a restaurant buying a high - end hamburger and fries when the same at McDonalds costs only $2.

Put a budget together and say something like:  I will spend $1000 or less to build the site, and $200 a month to market it.  And then hire the people to get it done.  This is how the professionals make significant money online.  Just because you have made the goal, doesn’t mean you have to be responsible to do all of the work.  Do you understand this concept?  The key to success is leveraging other people’s time.  You may have heard of OPM (other people’s money), but OPT (other people’s time) is more powerful.  Money is finite.  Time is infinite.

If you want to get in shape you could have one person working on your meal creation and another as a personal trainer.  You also, may try to get someone to do desk work for you so that you don’t have to do it and can focus your energies on more healthful activities: walking, biking, playing sports, etc.  Maybe you need a babysitter to cover you so you can do these activities.  Add these items to your budget and set aside the money to get these people to work for you and you to accomplish your goals.

Best wishes for your goals in 2009.

I haven’t posted anything in the past few days because I have been overwhelmed with the awesome features of Twitter. Twitter is a microblogging website. The funny thing about it is that Facebook and others actually have the microblogging built into it. But Twitter is stripped down and allows you to “follow” anybody. By following someone you are more likely to get followed, get email messages and so on. In one day I was able to be followed by over 300 people. That is incredible. Try that with Facebook!! There is nothing like this on the web.

By microblogging, I mean that you are limited to 2 lines of text. In fact, alot of people find that posting URL’s can be too long and so they use the http://tinyurl.com service.

I am working on a training video for Twitter.  This way you get my ideas on how to best utilize it.  But in the short term here are some ways you can benefit from Twitter:

1.  You get to meet alot of competitors and see what they are up to.

2.  You get to meet tons of potential clients and can let them know about anything you are doing or want to publicize to them in seconds and without paying Aweber a dime.

3.  You can meet tons of potential Joint Venture partners through this.

4.  By tweeting you actually get better at sound bytes and doing short statements.  People love soundbytes.  And each tweet is an opportunity to learn better copywriting.  You don’t have time to get long winded or to lose your focus.  Tweets are direct and to the point.

5.  Twitter is a high ranking google site and a linked post there brings in more power ranking to your website.

Tweet on and join me at http://twitter.com/ccardillo

I tell my coaching clients that making money is the easy part. The hard part is discovering what you love and developing the courage to go ahead and do it. I had this conversation with a young student the other day who really didn’t know what she wanted to do, what she loved to do and yet knew that she had talents that were yet untapped. She is definitely intelligent, hard-working, and yet she was going to school aimlessly, not knowing where that would take her.

Basically I told her that she could make money now. Start a business now doing something that she is good at and loves doing now. I told her that I have seen many people go through 4 years of college 2-3 years of graduate school and not know what they want to do and waste 4-7 years in the process. That is upwards to 7 years that they waste time on education, money on education and earning power. Earning power is the amount of money someone can make during their available time. Think about it. If you spend 6 hours a day in school and doing homework and you redirected that time towards creating a business or even working a day job, think about how much money that would turn into. Even a low paying job would amount to $20,000 extra. And if you have really marketable skills, that is $80,000 or more in lost revenue per year. If you multiply it out times the number of years people are in college you are talking about $100,000-$800,000 in wasted money and lost income. No wonder there are so few millionaires in this world!!!

Listen, I am not against education. I just don’t like wasted, aimless education. There are lots of short certificate programs people can complete in a matter of months that have the potential to generate significant income in a career. The Microsoft certifications, Cisco certifications and other certifications from Oracle, Citrix, VMWare, etc. could produce a minimum of 50k in income once you complete them. Not a techy? So, try the marketing certificates, global marketing, nursing certificates, paralegal certificates, etc. The idea here is to get your education done in a year or two and then focus on building your wealth.

Once you get a career you can work on enhancing your wealth with a side business such as a blogging business. You can focus more specifically on what you love. Let’s say you have a unique talent and love for planning parties such as weddings or birthdays. Build your blog around that theme. Find other bloggers that write on that content and make friends with them. Comment on their blog posts. Get into the local community and find others that share your interests. Start a club. Grow your audience. Once you get a significant list of people that read, comment and use your blog, email newsletter, etc. you can start making money.

Even before you get the list, you can start adding Google Adsense, links to affiliate programs for Clickbank, Amazon, Ebay, etc. It is just that without the traffic and a shared community of people that come to your site, none of those things will generate significant income. Next, you can start offering products. E-Books, T-Shirts, How-To Video’s etc. There are hundreds of ways to monetize any passion you may have. The idea here is to do your day job only until your business takes off and generates enough for you to live on. Most people do it as a side business. Blogging doesn’t take much to start on. For a cost of books and 1 college course you can basically pay the minimal costs for your blogging business for several years.

I strongly recommend you at least get a domain name (approx $9) http://domaindjinn.com and it can even be less $1.99 if you go with a hosting plan. With a domain name you point it at your blog from Blogger, wordpress, or wherever. If you want to host your blog then you are taking the next step which most of the best bloggers do. It has a small learning curve. But once you are up and running it is just up to you to start making some good content. Post videos, audio clips, pictures and written content up there. It is easy to do and is only getting easier. Before you know it, you will have businesses coming to you and asking if they can post ads on your site, and pay you for it.

Why is blogging profitable?

People misunderstand the profit potential of blogging and its inherent value. Blogging costs nearly nothing to do. So, they assume it doesn’t have value. It isn’t like you are manufacturing fine china, right? Wrong. The idea of blogging value is the fact that you are a publisher. Just like a newspaper, magazine, or anything else. Google makes billions each year because they publish links. Reuters makes billions each year because they have news programs which they publish. They publish and therefore advertisers want to give money so they can advertise their products on their sites.

So don’t think of blogging as a lowly job with no value. Think of yourself as a publisher of an electronic newsletter, syndicated via RSS, podcasting and perhaps other avenues. You make more as your reputation grows. And it doesn’t take long. The more valuable your information is, the more valuable your WEB PROPERTY becomes.

This brings me to my last point. Value. Most people I meet don’t value themselves properly. If I asked you how much you are worth, you may add up your car value, house value and perhaps your bank account if you have one. Another person may calculate their job salary for 10 years and add that to the above and give me a number. However, I would tell both people that they were wrong.

Your value is immeasurable. You have no limits on how much you are worth!! Let that sink in for a moment.

You are only worth what you think you are worth. If you start to realize that you are worth more than 200 trillion dollars then you start to realize the potential you have and the value you possess. If you value yourself at the value of your 5 year old Vespa and $200 left in your bank account, then you seriously need to look at your self-esteem. Your low self-worth is holding you back from your potential. You have unique talents and abilities that nobody else has. If you can harness that into something you love doing online, you will make money. I have no doubt about it.

I catch alot of flack for the name of my Web Hosting and Domain Name Registration company. However, early on when I was designing the site I wanted to come up with a name that was unique, only 3 syllables and packed a punch. I thought for awhile and kept thinking about an ancient creature called the Djinn. The djinn is what the word Genie was based on. It is a large ghostlike and magically powerful force. As a player of Magic the Gathering, I always liked the Juzam Djinn, Mahomati Djinn and all the other Djinns that MTG players liked to fill their deck with. Juzam was my favorite and is one of the most expensive cards in MTG collections. I thought he was appropriate since he didn’t cost much to play and if you got him out early you almost surely would win. He would certainly inflict pain on your competitors. So, how appropriate. My hosting services and registration services all are inexpensive and if you use it, you will likely inflict pain on your competitors.

Happy Djinning

Hitwise recently ranked the percentage of searches and Google is now getting 71%, up from 63% a year earlier. What does this mean? Yahoo and MSN who had 21% and nearly 10% a year ago, are now at 17% and 5%. They are losing market share in search. Ask.com has stayed at a measly 3% with no change.

However, let’s put this into perspective. 17% of trillions of searches is still alot of traffic.

Let’s be clear. Google wants to be the best search engine on the planet. It has done alot over the years to tweak its algorithm. This has affected rankings for many sites, since they have tried to filter out the black hatters and obvious spammers with minimal content. However the search engine gurus always find a way around these hacks, although it takes more resources and time.

Google is attempting to get more pinpoint accuracy with its search and it has left out a few pieces. Video has never really ranked highly even though people view billions of videos each year. Google has started trying to rank these sites, flash enabled sites, and more. They are also trying to weight the authority sites such as blog sites with enough weight but not too much so as to unbalance the scales of ranking. Many bloggers have used the natural authority weight that google gives to Squidoo or Hubpages to great effect. Creating multitudes of these blogs with high natural weight allows these bloggers to give power rank to nearly any website they want.

So this brings me to my point. Universal search is attempting to optimize billions of unranked sites, pages and videos that don’t exist in the engines today. This is creating an avalanche of new competitors. So, for many business owners not willing or able to create hundreds of targeted blog sites, Google Pay Per Click will be the only way to really compete. Obviously this means more income to Google. It also means outrageously high advertising for google key terms. This is forcing people to look at long-tail keyword phrases. That is the hot market going forward. Targeting main key terms is no longer viable from any business perspective. The cost is too high on the PPC and the cost is too high on the resources to get there from standard SEO strategy. However, the long-tail still holds about 80% of all searches. This means that there is still a wild wild west of opportunity out there no matter what Google has done with Universal Search.

Stay tuned for more on this.

This is a very tricky situation. It is important to enlist the services of a lawyer, preferrably one with intellectual property and trademark experience. Go to http://martindale.com to find a firm nearest to you. Once you enlist an attorney, you should decide what kind of rights you want to sell and for what price. I recommend against partnering with the entity looking to rent your property. Partnerships have a way of going sour and presents a problem with collections. I would recommend a strict payment schedule with ratcheted increases each year.

Otherwise design the project yourself and do it alone. You would probably be better off doing it yourself anyway. Websites start at $500 and work up from there. However with a domain you don’t always need to have a hosting account and a website to make money with it. Stay tuned for more information on this.

The last thing I want to say about leasing or renting your domain, is that you need to maintain control over the domain name. Point the ns records to the renter’s web host, or do a forward. You can do free forwarding with domains from http://domaindjinn.com . Most domains cost less than $9 and hosting is cheap too. However, do not transfer rights of the domain or ownership to the domain to the renter. This is a sure way to lose control over your domain.

Be aware that using spam, abusive content, unlawful software worms, phishing viruses can cause you to lose your domain.  It is just a word of warning.  Be sure to read your license agreement with your domain hosting provider where you registered your domain name.  The terms of services contract has language that should be heeded by any web property owner.  The last thing you want is to lose your domain because of something that you could have avoided.  Most of the time, web owners aren’t going to do any of the above items, but it serves a good warning to check the terms and conditions periodically so that you stay compliant.

If you decide to lease out your domain to another vendor, be sure that they stay compliant under the guidelines.  You should have a clause in your agreement that says they must abide by the domain host’s terms and conditions and that these terms and conditions may change at any time.

I first want to say that I like Neil Shearing and Louis Allport and all those gurus. However this product is not worthwhile and can be a time waster.

At first it promised to be a powerful software package that identifies blogs on a keyword term that you input and allows you to autofill your name, email and web link. Of course you still need to read the blog and make a posting related to the blog. The idea here is to get links back to your website to increase traffic and google rankings.

However, the software doesn’t seem to work well in identifying enough blogs. It may find one or two. But it doesn’t identify blogs that allow you to have links or even if they have a way to post. I am not sure what engine it is using, or what is involved in the code that is causing the issue. You can keep clicking next, next and may find some viable blogs that are on topic. However I think it is easier to go to blogger or wordpress and do your search there and do the same thing.

This brings me to the point that people have to accept your blog post. They can delete it or not accept it. So, you spend alot of time reading their content and make a decent post and may not get a link out of it. I think all in all, it is a waste of time. I prefer many other methods to get one way link backs to your site. This includes PR and article marketing. Even link exchange sites are good. Creating individual blogs on topic are better because you control your own content and back links.

So, my advice is to leave this tool to someone else.