goals Uncategorized

Thoughts on realizing your goals.

April 8, 2012 – 10:44 am

Every now and then, I go through my list of goals, add, subtract or cross off completed, It is not easy making and following through on your goals.  Here are some thoughts.

Goals keep us motivated. But sometimes, people find it too hard to achieve their goals. Maybe because they have set long-term goals before setting short-term ones, or they did not plan their goals carefully.

Goal-setting strategies are important especially for those who want to achieve long-term goals. Here are five goal-setting techniques to help you realize them.

Start with short-term goals that will lead you to long-term ones. Sometimes, people start with short-term goals unconsciously. Why unconsciously? Some of them may have considered the goals to be long-term at the time they planned them; and after achieving a goal, they realize that they are in fact, looking forward to a longer one. Some are contented with their short-term goals, but after a while will realize that they also need to attain long-term ones. Short-term goals seem to be our set off for longer ones. They will motivate the person to plan for longer goals, which will usually take some time before achieving them in full.

Make sure you really want the goal. By this, you have to ask yourself: “Do I really want this goal? Will this goal give me a better life?” Answering these questions will give you more passion to achieve your goal. Some people recall their past to find out why and how they came up with such goal.

Speak up. By this, it means you shouldn’t keep your goals to yourself only. Sharing your goals could help you get the support you may need from others. Some people are too shy to tell others about their goals for reasons like they are afraid they cannot achieve these in the end, or they lack the courage to speak up their minds. This is not a good habit because when the time comes that you really need their support, you will have a difficult time to get such support. You will then have to achieve your goals all by yourself. Also, sharing the fruits of your goals is uplifting to the mind and spirit.

Write down your goals. This strategy is more advisable for those who have a long list of goals. After writing them, it is advisable to review them because this will encourage you to achieve them.

Stay on track and don’t give up. Reviewing notes will help open your mind to see if you are on the right track. While on track, you may have to face challenges that might change your personality. A person who is overconfident might suddenly feel depressed after finding out that he is going the wrong way in achieving his goal. Thus this might lead to abandoning the goal. Never be discouraged. Facing obstacles is a test on how passionate one is to realize his goal.

Tags , | Permalink | Comment (0)
Mang Radio

Welcome back to the family

March 18, 2012 – 9:39 am

We have brought back a business that was successful for us in the late 80′s and early 90′s – Mang Radio.  In a period over the next six months our goal is to have it become a 24/7 Comedy Radio Network.  Right now, we are producing a couple of shows a week.  We plan on going to all seven days in April.  If you would like to check it out here is the link

Mang Radio – Comedy Radio

Tags , , | Permalink | Comment (0)
advertising Don MacLeod marketing

There is a difference between Marketing and Advertising

February 17, 2012 – 9:42 pm

I can’t tell you how many times I have heard between that  marketing and advertising are the same thing. Yikes.

Advertising is only a part of the bigger game called Marketing. Marketing encompasses complete conceptualization of a brand right from research to designing to advertising to sale. Advertising, on the other hand is a component of the marketing process which is nothing but conveying the message through variety of mediums to promote the product.

Advertising is one of the most important component of a marketing strategy and also the most expensive. Advertising constitutes sending the message across the public about your company, product or services. It also constitutes behind the scenes work like the process involving formation of various strategies and coming up with a right one to target the viewers. The strategy consists of planning things like placing ads, deciding what media to use, what time, frequency etc. The advertisements are generally placed via mediums like television, snail mail, newspapers, internet, emails, radio, magazines, mobile messaging, flyers, billboards etc. The most popular one is of course television although advertising on internet is becoming increasingly popular too.

Easiest way to differentiate advertising from marketing is to consider marketing as a cake and if you cut the cake, advertising as one of the pieces of that cake. The other pieces of cake are market research of the product, product designing, media planning, PR, product pricing, customer satisfaction, customer support, sales and many more. All these components or pieces of cake should work independently but collectively in achieving the bigger goal i.e. sell product and build company’s reputation in the market. Marketing is a marathon process involving many tasks that involve hours sometimes days of research. The research part of marketing takes the longest duration as it involves thoroughly understanding the behavior of people towards a product. Designing the product and developing advertising strategy is also a time consuming process. Only components that take less time are executing advertisements and sales. Marketing can also be perceived as a medium between consumers and the company.

But many companies often make mistake of confusing advertising with marketing. They try to ape big companies like Coke and Pepsi in advertising but they simply ignore the work that goes behind that. The classical example of this is, take the case of logo for instance. Many business owners are so hysterical about the logo of their company in their advertisements that they think that it will simply bring in the sales. But what makes a logo works is none other than the reputation of the company and the logo must have a feeling to it and should truly reflect company’s values. One should also remember that these companies spend fortunes on advertising which a new start up business can’t. Rather than spending unnecessary money on branding your product one should invest money and time in communicating to the consumers that they can address their expectations. After building reputation and growing to a big size company one can think of these lavish ideas. Educating the consumers also helps as it will give them an understanding that you know what you do and are best at doing that.

Smart marketers are aggressive in approach rather than passive. They provoke reader’s minds by prompting them to do something rather than just making them knowledgeable of the product. Smart marketers also bring home the names, addresses and contact numbers of people who are really interested in hiring your company by employing aggressive marketing. Thus having a good marketing campaign speaks a lot about the company and their products and advertising gives that finishing touch to the hard work done by the marketing people in selling a product.

Tags , , | Permalink | Comment (0)
SEO

Search Engine Optimization: Art And Science

January 15, 2012 – 9:35 pm

One of the basic components of the Internet is the search engine. A search engine, as its name implies, helps people look for pertinent websites and web pages which contain information based on the keywords that the surfers have encoded. A survey revealed that around 90% of Internet users utilize search engines in doing their Internet-related activities.

Websites are developed for the main reason of being viewed. They are portals which provide information that are intended to reach their target audience. This is the main context which explains the importance of search engines.

Being listed in search engines is one thing and being listed on the top lists of the search engines is another thing. When someone searches for a certain keyword through the search engine, the most popular websites appear first and are usually the most visited websites. There are factors that search engines consider when they rank websites according to keywords. This is the main task of search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO?

Search engine optimization consists of methods which aim at improving a website’s ranking in search engines” listings. SEO has become one of the sunshine industries that are related to the Internet. There are multiple ways on how to do search engine optimization and many companies have dealt into this business.

How do Search Engines Operate?

To be able to appreciate the beauty of the art and science of search engine optimization, one must be able to understand how search engines work. One may not be able to fully grasp the nitty-gritty details of search engine optimization operations, but he can appreciate it to a level that he realizes the importance that it plays in effectively marketing his website.

Search engines rank websites in different ways. A website can primarily be listed by a search engine as a sponsored link or a pay-per-click advertisement or as a result of organic search.

With the continuous development of search engines, many search engines have introduced paid advertising. Website owners can actually bid to be displayed on top of the website listings of search engines. The most popular example of this system is the Google Adwords system, which is displayed at the right-hand side corner of the browser when one uses the Google search engine.

A website can also be listed through organic search. Search engines use ‘spiders” and “robots” to be able to assess the contents of a website and they then relay the information to the main search engine system so that when a surfer searches for a certain topic, the websites which are organized to contain that topic appear first. Search engine optimization is aimed primarily to be able to do certain things to a website so as to achieve optimal organization to reflect a certain keyword or topic.

History of SEO

Search engine optimization can be traced back to the mid-1900s. During those times, the search engines initiated the cataloging of the contents of the Internet. Webmasters needed to submit their websites to different search engines to be able to get the attention of the engines” spiders. The spiders collected, collated and reported the information to the search engines. The engines would then arrange the websites according to topic and displayed the websites when the keyword or topic is searched by surfers.

Meta tags were used by webmasters to be recognized by the search engines. Then, abuse of meta tags became rampant, causing websites to dominate searches that are irrelevant to them. Search engines began to fight back by using more complex algorithms which took into consideration other factors such as the text that is contained within the tile, the domain name, the file names, the keyword density, the keyword proximity, and other such factors.

Today

Today, the newly developed websites don’t need to submit to the search engines to be noticed. Spiders today are capable of tracking down websites even through links that are in the website. The use of a site map or hypertext links can help the spiders to navigate the site.

The industry of search engine optimization is a booming one. As the Internet takes people’s lives into more advanced stages, it has become more and more important terms of information dissemination, business development and communications. Having one’s website noticed by search engines is a good way to start the whole Internet journey.

Tags , | Permalink | Comments (4)
Uncategorized

How Most Entrepreneurs Securing Funding

December 4, 2011 – 11:24 am

This is a 3-minute video describing where most entrepreneurs secure funding for their companies.

Permalink | Comment (0)
backlinks internet marketing marketing

Internet Marketing Links – Backlinks To The Top

November 13, 2011 – 1:20 pm

One of the most important things you will need to do when you build up your internet business is to get a lot of highly qualified traffic to your website, in order to do that you want a high search engine ranking so you can get traffic for free. Using internet marketing links is one way to help increase your page rank to help you get more traffic.

The search engines have many things they look for when it comes to determining your rank.  The bottom line is that they want to see a site that offers a lot of quality to the website visitors.  Anyone who does searches online is basically a customer of the search engines so the search engines want to keep all their customers happy and that reflects in the rankings they’ll give a certain site. So if you want a high search engine ranking you have to have a good website that will provide visitors a lot of helpful information and the search engines will reward you by giving you a high rank.

The number of links you have coming to your site is one of the factors that the search engines will take into consideration when it comes to rank. If they see that your site has a lot of links from other sites online they will consider that almost like an ‘endorsement’ for your site. They will view it as a sign that your site is ‘legitimate’ and worthwhile and they will assume that you can offer their customers a good experience, for that they’ll reward you by giving you a high rank in the search engines results.

The amount of ‘power’ any given link will give you will vary depending on the rank that that site has. For example, a high ranking site that links to your site will give you a huge benefit in the rankings. If on the other hand, the site linking into yours doesn’t have a high rank or a lot of traffic or inbound links of it’s own,  the impact on your site will be much less.

Building links is actually pretty easy to do, there are several ways to go about it. For one thing, when you place an article in an article directory that has a high rank, they will link back to your site and give you a nice inbound link.

You can also contact another website owner and see if they’d like to exchange links. You will place a link to their website on your website, and they will place a link to your website on their website. This works well if you both have similar, not competing, websites and each have a decent amount of traffic.

Internet marketing links is one of several ways you can increase the amount of traffic to your website and it  will not cost you a penny.  By improving the ‘desirability’ of your website you are making the search engines want to reward you by giving your site a high rank.  This will provide you with a ton of free traffic and that is the one thing you  will need to make a lot of money online.

Have a profitably day.

Tags , , | Permalink | Comment (1)
Branding

The Loyalty Factor

November 6, 2011 – 7:47 pm

What exactly is a brand? It’s a question that has confounded the academics for decades and eluded the most erudite of scholars. So, coming from the trenches of the real world of branding, we’ve defined the term and given it a comprehensive meaning..

A brand consists of eight basic building blocks:

- The Name – The Logo (brand icon) – The Brand’s Colors – The Slogan and Brand Messaging – The Sound of the Brand – The Overall Look and Feel = The Brand’s Position – Packaging the Brand – The Brand Experience

A Brand is the greater sum of its parts. It is always more than just the nuts and bolts, the pieces; great brands are always the result of the whole equaling more than the sum of its parts.

Branding is about making me, the consumer or buyer, more hip, more in the “know,” more cool than anybody else. We are a generation and a nation wanting to be special. We want to be richer, more beautiful, better dressed and more effortlessly gorgeous than any other generation that we know.

We want everything to mean more. We want everything to have meaning. That’s why we flock to the reality shows. Why we love “The Apprentice” and “American Idol” and other top realistic shows. We crave authenticity in this age of fabrication and falsehood. We “just want to be real.”

We want to be able to trust what we buy and whom we buy from. That’s why Coke is still the number one brand in the world. The more we know about a brand, the more we trust it. The more we trust it, the more we buy it and continue to experience it. The more we experience it, the more loyal we become.

Loyalty is the currency that cannot be traded for dollars.

Tags , , | Permalink | Comment (0)
search engine optimization SEO

Keyword Search Marketing – 7 Simple Tips

October 2, 2011 – 12:18 pm

If you have decided that you are going to advertise your internet business using search engine optimization, then you need to do some keyword search marketing before you do anything else. Keywords will ultimately get you the visitors to your website that you need to be successful.

Using a keyword tool like Google Adwords Keyword Tool will give you ideas on the keywords your customers are using in their searches to find what they want. Be careful though, not all keywords are good ones. Some may be obsolete and not work for you. So choose wisely.

No matter how you are going to advertise, article marketing, PPC (pay-per-click) or search engine optimization, effective keywords are important to each one. Below are simple steps you can follow to do a keyword search.

1. Do a Google search for Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

2 When you get there, type a keyword related to whatever product or service you are offering in the search bar.

3. Type in the captcha security characters in the box provided.

4. Click “get keyword ideas”.

5. You will get a list of keyword search marketing ideas related to your product or service and info on how many searches that particular keyword gets and what your competition is, in numbers. What you are looking for when you see these numbers is a high search rate with low competition. This is a good keyword.

6. Now, open Notepad and copy and paste the good keywords you find into it. Remember, finding good keywords may take some time. It is not always as easy as it sounds. They generally do not just jump right off the page into your lap. Be patient.

7. Keep searching, do this over and over again until you have several keywords that will work for you. Then you can start putting your website together.

Oh, by the way, the domain name you purchase for your website should be one of these keywords followed by .com, .net, .org, etc. That way, when someone searches for that specific keyword, your site will be the first one they see at the top of the search results page. It is quite the feeling when you see that for the first time. Not only are you at the top of the search results page, but you will feel like you are on top of the world, also.

Take that momentum and just build on it. Try not to get discouraged if you don’t make any money right away. Just learn new and different ways to drive more and more traffic to your website. The money will come later. This is by no means a get rich quick kind of thing. This does take work. Just like anything you have that is worthwhile, you have to work for it.

Starting a new internet business can be intimidating and confusing. You can lessen the confusion and intimidation by knowing and understanding what it is your customers want and need. Keyword research marketing is the first step in that process.

Tags , , , , , | Permalink | Comments (3)
Headlines Write Headlines

Create Powerful Headline’s That Sell Products

September 4, 2011 – 3:54 pm

While there are literally hundreds of “headline formulas,” these 11 have been proven effective and will help get your creative juices flowing. I suggest you write as many headlines as possible, as it is the most critical aspect of your sales letter.

How critical?

Well, copywriter and author, David Garfinkel says that 75% of the purchasing decision is made at the headline alone.
It’s that critical!

That’s why I suggest you write as many headlines as possible before choosing 3 (or more) to test.

[1] “Give Me ________ And I’ll Give You __________
Examples:
“Give Me 30 Days And I’ll Give You A Six Figure Business!
“Give Me Five Minutes A Day And I’ll Give You A Flat, Sexy Stomach!

[2] “______ Quickly And Easily With __________
Examples:
“Write Compelling Sales Letters Quickly And Easily With This Step-by-Step System
“Create Info Products Quickly And Easily With This Revolutionary New Software

[3] “How To ________ Without __________
Examples:
“How To Get Headache Relief Without The Risks Of Dangerous Drugs
“How To Lose Weight Without Having To Starve Yourself Or Spend Hours In The Gym

[4] “Proven System __________ And Does It In __________
Examples:
“Proven System Increases Your Credit Rating And Does It In 33 Days Or Less
“Proven System Cures Migraines And Does It In Less Than A Week

[5] “Attention ________! Here’s A Quick Way To __________
Examples:
“Attention Affiliate Marketers! Here’s A Quick Way To Drive More Website Traffic
“Attention Restaurant Managers! Here’s A Quick Way To Boost Sales And Reduce Costs

[6] “Who Else Wants To _____________ Without _____________ ?
Examples:
“Who Else Wants To Speak Spanish Fluently Without Having To Go Back To School?
“Who Else Wants To Make Money From Home Without A Huge Investment Of Time Or Money?

[7] “Learn How To ___________ Quicker Than You Ever Thought Possible!
Examples:
“Learn How To Ski Like An Expert Quicker Than You Ever Thought Possible!
“Learn How To Take Incredible Photos Quicker Than You Ever Thought Possible!

[8] “If You Can ________ Then You Can ____________
Examples:
“If You Can Listen To A CD Then You Can Speak Spanish Like A Native
“If You Can Surf The Web Then You Can Make Money Online

[9] “Discover The Secret Of _____________
Examples:
“Discover The Secret Of Living Debt Free
“Discover The Secret Of Making Money While You Sleep

[10] “Finally, A Simple Step-By-Step Method GUARANTEED To ________ !
Examples:
“Finally, A Simple Step-By-Step Method GUARANTEED To Help You Lose Weight Fast!
“Finally, A Simple Step-By-Step Method GUARANTEED To Drive Insane Amounts Of Traffic To Your Website!

[11] “WARNING: ____________
Examples:
“WARNING: Identity Theft Is On The Rise — Protect Yours In 3 Easy Steps
“WARNING: Many Debt Settlement Companies Are Ripping People Off — Get Informed And Protect Yourself Today

These 11 Headline Writing Formulas should help you come up with several solid headlines you can test. If you want more inspiration, you can see what your competitors are using simply by “Googling” your primary keywords and checking out their sites.

I like using the Headline Analyzer Tool – Click Here

Tags , , | Permalink | Comment (0)
advertising

Various Techniques of Advertising Research

August 14, 2011 – 11:25 am

In the techniques of in-depth focus group interview is informally on specific ads. The opinions of the group are analyzed for the effects of advertising. Studies in the focus groups to rent Cannes are very unreliable as different groups and even individuals of a group can have different opinions. These studies are often used to save time and money. However, the final evaluation of the ads, the results of focus groups are unreliable and not widely used.

Ultimately, we can say that, while measuring the effectiveness of ads is a high priority area for advertisers, there is no foolproof method has so far been designed. The tests are fast and affordable with defects of others. The safest methods are long, expensive and can not be conducted on a regular basis. Another big problem is the strong opposition of creative people in advertising research assessment.

However, while decision-making complex and difficult, the results of evaluation research can provide effective guidance. Of course, the advertiser should use the results of rational inquiry based on the situation. Then let the judges to end customers. Because of an ad is what advertisers and advertising agencies put in that advertisers and advertising agencies put into it, but what the consumer thinks of him and how to act accordingly.

The large amounts spent on advertising requires a systematic and objective research on the role of advertising, its effectiveness and overall contribution. This systematic and objective research is called advertising. It is also called evaluation research, evaluation of advertising, or the effectiveness of advertising. Whatever name is given, the research on the effectiveness of advertising helps to avoid costly mistakes. He predicts the relative strength of alternative strategies to increase the effectiveness of advertising in general.

Measuring advertising effectiveness in quantitative terms is very difficult. The simple reason that the human brain can not be quantified. In addition, advertising is not the only means of promotion, nor the only source of information and influence.
Evaluation of research before ads are placed in the media or pre-test may help in the development of more effective advertisements. The most important thing here is that errors or deficiencies are identified in the media before costs are incurred. However, the actual conditions of these tests was conducted under simulated conditions and with limited public representative.

Best results are achieved when the ads are placed in the media, simultaneous tests, and Evaluation after the campaign is completed, additional testing, and evaluation of the ads after the campaign is completed, other tests are performed in real situations and conditions. Two simultaneous tests and post-tests are more expensive in terms of money and time to pre-test. Too many advertisers prefer post-tests.

Advertisement: How To Advertise Your Business – Low Cost Techniques

Tags , | Permalink | Comment (0)

Next Page »

Next Page »