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Time To Play
Copyright 2005 Deborah Carraro
Vascorp VA Services
http://www.vascorp.com/va

One of the biggest challenges faced by solo-entrepreneurs is
scheduling personal time - time away from the business. It’s
particularly challenging when you’re first starting your
business. Your natural impulse is to throw everything you
have into your business - time, money, energy - but that may
not be the wisest course of action.

Spending your entire day living, breathing (and if you spend
that much time in your business - dreaming) your business,
you’re bound to burn out - or at the very least, not be as
effective as you want to be.

Consider these tips:

Out To Lunch: Whether you work in an office or at home, you
need to take breaks and recharge your batteries. You’re not
going to be able to concentrate on closing a sale, writing a
proposal, or crunching numbers if you forgot to eat lunch
and sugar levels are scrambling your gray cells.

Post Your Business Hours: Sounds pretty obvious but
establishing work hours even if you work at home, sets
boundaries and helps you pace yourself. I’ll admit it, this
is the hardest tip for me to follow in my own business. I
love doing what I do and have a strong workaholic tendancies
and probably a slight addiction to e-mail

I’ve learned, however, that it’s crucial to set business
hours and not give in to the temptation of being available
24/7. Most days I can stick to the hours I’ve posted and
some days I can’t - the trick is learning that the to-do
list will always be there and prioritizing your projects and
deadlines.

Take A Break: Don’t be afraid to enjoy the fruits of your
labor. Take a break and make sure you not too tired to play
with the toys you’ve bought with all that money you’ve
earned. I regularly take myself offline for a few hours once
a week and just catch up on housekeeping (invoicing,
billing, writing my newsletter) and schedule time off one
day per month and spend the day singing, or writing, playing
tourist in my hometown or enjoying a day at the spa.

Why not take a mental health day now and then? In school,
you didn’t think twice about playing hookey. Now that you’re
a grown-up, why not take a day off for fishing, surfing,
shopping, or reading.

For some reason, now that you’re the Boss, it’s harder and
harder to get away and take time for yourself. Try this tip:
schedule a regular appointment with yourself. Block time off
in your calendar and don’t make that time available to
anyone else (clients, family, friends).

Remember: Set your hours and take a day off. All that work
will still be waiting for you in the morning!

——————————————————–
) 2005 Deborah Carraro
Deborah Carraro is the Founder and Owner of Vascorp VA
Services. Vascorp VA Services is the virtual support
specialty company for solo professionals and entrepreneurs.
We work late so you don’t have to! Vascorp brings you the
very best in virtual assistant services: shopping cart
integration, affiliate program management, web design,ebook
design, desktop publishing, business consulting services and
more! She publishes a monthly newsletter Vascorp VA
Advantage. To subscribe or find out more, please visit
http://www.vascorp.com/va.

How To Measure Search Engine Marketing ROI
Copyright © 2005 Charles Preston
Click Response
http://www.clickresponse.net/

According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional
Organization (SEMPO), advertisers spent $4 billion in 2004 on
search marketing programs and are expected to spend 39% more than
that this year.

Search engine marketing appears to be a great way to advertise
but is it right for you and your business? If you are not already
employing search engine marketing(SEM) for you business is there
a way to forecast the return should you decide to invest in it?
Is there a way to measure the results you are getting if you have
already invested in SEM?

The answer is mostly yes. By utilizing data discovered in
recently released research surveys and with the help of a few
free online tools you can put begin to take some of the guesswork
out of search engine marketing ROI.

By using Overtureís free keyword suggestion tool
(inventory.overture.com) you can get an idea of how many times a
keyword is getting searched each month. Another free tool to use
is called Good Keywords and can be downloaded from
www.goodkeywords.com.

Letís say for instance that you are a mortgage broker in the
Denver Colorado area and you are interested in getting more leads
for your business. You have a website and are considering search
engine marketing to bring in some new leads. You get a quote from
a search engine marketing provider who can guarantee top 10
positions among the major search engines for 6 months for your
keywords for $1,500.00.

The question now becomes is it worth it to you to spend the
$1,500.00. To figure this out we need to look at some numbers.

Berrier & Associates estimate that 65% of all traffic generated
by a search in a search engine will go to the sites listed within
the first 10 results (first page) returned for that search. By
using Overtureís keyword suggestion tool you discover that the
term ìDenver mortgage brokerî gets approximately 540 searches a
month.

Using this criteria a first page position for ìDenver mortgage
brokerî would bring you approximately 65% of 540 searches a month
= 350 visitors to your site each month. Having a compelling title
tag in your websiteís pages might even boost this visitor number
since the title tag is what appears as the clickable link in the
search results.

The formula we just used would then be applied to all the other
keywords you are targeting such as ìmortgage Denverî which gets
approximately 2,600 searches a month or ìmortgage company Denverî
with 466 searches a month. A first page placement for any of
those would yield similar results.

So letís say we just use the ìDenver mortgage brokerî key phrase
as our example with its estimated 350 visitors a month for a
first page position. You would now need to know what your website
conversion rate is. The website conversion rate is the ratio of
leads or sales you get per visitor amount. The average website
conversion rate is about 1-2% or 1-2 leads or sales for every 100
visitors according to Shop.org.

If your website conversion rate is average then you would expect
on average 2-3 good leads from your site each month for that one
first page listing. Then depending on your sales conversion rate
which is the number of sales per leads you get on average
multiplied by your average sale price you can begin to calculate
what your return might be.

So letís say as a mortgage broker you make roughly $2k on each
deal you broker and your sales conversion rate is 1 sale for
every 3 quality leads. In any given month then you could estimate
1 sale at $2k out of the 3 quality leads generated from your
website which came as a result of the 350 visitors you got from
being on the first page of Google, Yahoo or MSN for the term
ìDenver mortgage brokerî.

You paid the search engine marketing company $1,500.00 dollars
for 6 months of first page listings. From one of those first page
listings you stand to gain $2k x 6 months = $12,000.00. That
sounds like a really good return for money invested.

In closing the methodology outlined in this article to calculate
search engine marketing ROI is by no means 100% accurate due to
several factors but it is a good way to get a ìfeelî for what you
might get back for your marketing dollars. Its also a way to get
business owners to start thinking about how to better track their
e-business.

———————————————————————
Charles Preston is an Austin based SEO with over 7 years of
industry experience. Charles is also the President of Click
Response an internet marketing company focused on teaching small
businesses how to get the most out of their internet marketing.
For a free consultation or more information please visit
http://www.clickresponse.net

How to Build Massive Keyword Lists Part 2
Written by: Rob Taylor
Copyright © 2005 Megastep International, All Rights Reserved
http://www.megastep.com/

Here’s a simple keyword building technique I use to find the
maximum possible variations of a keyword phrase. I use it
predominantly for bidding on keywords at Google Adwords, however
it can also be very useful for building lists for use in search
engine optimization.

For example let’s use the phrase “horses for sale”. Here’s how
the various permutations of this keyword phrase would look. I use
the free Keyword Tumbler tool for doing this. ADDRESS:
http://www.keywordtumbler.com

horses for sale
horses sale for
for horses sale
for sale horses
sale horses for
sale for horses

As you can see there are a maximum of six possible ways a three
word phrase could be entered into a search engine.

Now you need to find out if these permutations are actually being
searched for. This is where the Wordtracker service comes into
its own. You can get a free trial over at
http://www.keywordlistbuilder.co.uk.

Go to Wordtracker now and in the “Keyword Universe” choose the
database called “Precise”.

Then in the right hand panel enter the six different keyword
combinations, and hit the “Proceed” button.

Wordtracker now tells us that out of our six combinations, two of
them appear in its database (NOTE: at the time of writing it
did). They are…

horses for sale
for sale horses

You might be thinking that you could have figured this out for
yourself. But its vital that you understand you need to stop
second-guessing markets and users behaviors based on your own
opinions and assumptions. Use these tools like Wordtracker to
actually tell you how the markets are behaving.

I have sometimes found three and four phrase permutations using
this method. Phrases that to me appeared “stupid” if entered in
the search engines… but someone, somewhere is doing it! This
why you need to do this step and NOT guess the permutations.

Also searchers sometimes enter a keyword phrase using the “space”
and the “+” sign. E.G. “1 2 3″ can be entered in as “1+2+3″ and
also “1 +2 +3″. This is great tip if you want to use your keyword
lists on Google Adwords.

So taking our example keyword phrase let’s see how many
permutations we can now generate.

horses for sale
for sale horses

horses+for+sale
for+sale+horses

horses +for +sale
for +sale +horses

Now let’s use misspellings to come up with even more keyword
combinations. A great tool for this is Misspelled Keywords
available at http://www.misspelledkeywords.co.uk.

Simply enter “horses for sale” and select from six ways to find
misspellings. Dictionary lookup, keyboard mistakes, trim
first/last character, swap character, double characters, and…
add ’s’ ending.

For this example I only selected the “dictionary lookup” and
“keyboard mistakes”. The tool returned 1360 possible misspelling
combinations. If I’d used all the selections, it would have come
back with over 8500. Just for one phrase!

Now let’s enter these misspellings into Wordtracker’s Precise
database like we did above. The results? Wordtracker returns the
following (NOTE: at the time of writing):

horses foe sale
horses fpr sale
horses for sail
horses for slae

Which now get turned into twelve new terms:

horses foe sale
horses fpr sale
horses for sail
horses for slae

horses+foe+sale
horses+fpr+sale
horses+for+sail
horses+for+slae

horses +foe +sale
horses +fpr +sale
horses +for +sail
horses +for +slae

Finally you are going to want to join the words together, so
“horses for sale” becomes “horsesforsale”, and yes this appeared
in the Wordtracker database.

Using the method of keyword generation outlined above, what
started out as one keyword phrase, “horses for sale” has now
turned into 19 keyword phrases you can use on Google Adwords.
Phrases that are actually being used by surfers in the search
engines.

So there you have it, how to build adgroups which are TIGHTLY
focused on the keyword phrase you are wanting to bid on.

———————————————————————
Rob Taylor has been marketing online since 1996. He’s sold
anything from books, debit cards, security products to art
prints. Take advantage of his battle tested marketing strategies
that could quietly make you five figure cash profits every single
month. Free newsletter subscription at http://www.megastep.com

Making a Living by Internet Marketing
Copyright © 2005 Chris Stirling
http://www.stirls.com

All of you owners of home based businesses that are trying to
make a living working from home know the difficulties encountered
through Internet marketing and trying to get your web page
noticed in order to increase traffic and ultimately revenues.
Some people just blindly pay a lot of money for advertising, and
those who do not have an advertising budget often times do not
advertise at all. Both of these are detrimental to your business,
and it does not have to be as difficult as you are making it.

For instance, there are many ways to market your products and
services inexpensively if not free, so spending a lot of money
on it could be wasteful. If you have no money to spend, you are
asking your business to fail by not advertising. People in this
situation should be diligent about searching out all the options
for free advertising.

When it comes to advertising, there are many options online and
offline that will help you spread the word about your Web page
and your product and you will increase traffic and revenues
because of it.

First, check out offline venues for free ads like local
newspapers, television stations, radio stations and the like.
Often times these mediums are looking for new local businesses
to highlight in their business sections and/or discussions.
This is free advertisement and something you should cash in
on immediately. Also, make sure your URL is on every printed
material you use in regard to your business whether it is
stationary or free gifts. Having your URL out there will help
people remember your address and be more likely to check out
what you have to offer.

Additionally, while you are making your URL well known, make sure
your web page is professional and accommodating to consumers.
Make sure that the checkout process is easy and convenient as
well as secure. Using payment systems like Paypal might be a good
idea for you as well because it allows a variety of payment
methods in many different currencies.

Advertising online does not have to be expensive. You can trade
links with other relevant web pages, submit newsletters to online
ezines and the like with a resource box with your information,
and other ideas similar to this. Certainly, you can do banners
and other advertising, but if you do not have much of a budget
try all of the free options before you start paying money you do
not have. As you grow, your advertising budget can grow as well.

As long as you are creative and proactive in finding inexpensive
and/or free advertising your business will grow, your revenues
will grow and you will not be spending much at all on
advertising. Remember, the more people that are aware of your web
page increases traffic, referrals and ultimately purchases. Make
sure your URL is visible to as many people as possible in as many
places as possible.

———————————————————————
Chris Stirling is the owner of Stirls.com and
his internet marketing website is designed
to help other people achieve their goal of
having their own work at home business.
http://www.stirls.com

Make Your Event Memorable

I. Understanding Your Audience/Client

The DJ was wondering why there was no dancing or mingling amongst
the audience. Everyone was just standing around holding their
drinks and eating the hors d’oeuvres.

Imagine a supposedly festive company party turning out to be a dud.
Who does the company blame?

You!! The event planner!

The event planner who also happened to be an employee of the company
was in a panic. What to do?

Luckily, there were numerous employees who were requesting music
that was different from what the DJ was playing. So, he quickly goes
to his van and pulls out a crate of CDs. He starts playing music
from these CDs and instantly the mood of the party changes.

Everyone was dancing and mingling. The party flowed and the event
planner breathed easier.

What went wrong in the beginning?

The average age of the attendees was between 49-60. The event
planner had requested Top 40 music including hip hop which is geared
towards a younger age group.

The planner wanted music based upon her tastes. Even when
questioned about the people attending, there was a sense of “she
knows best”.

What every customer of every business wants to know is: What’s in it
for me? Even you, the subscribers to this newsletter, have asked
that question before signing up for this email.

In the above situation, the audience wanted to know: What’s in it
for me? What music would you play that would allow me to have a
good time?

This is the key to all business success: Find out what your
customers want and solve their problem.

Research as much as you can about their wants and desires, only then
can you “Make Your Event Memorable”.

Copyright 2004. All rights reserved

Keith and Rema Smith book entertainers for all special events.
Authors of the “Discover Entertainment”, a FREE monthly newsletter.
mail to: keith@rhkentertainment.com
http://www.rhkentertainment.com

Listening Strategically

By: Robert F. Abbott

Usually, we’re most interested in communicating outwardly; getting our
messages out to others. But finding ways to hear what’s going on around
us can be just as important.

Let’s start by identifying three different types of listening we do.
The first type - informal listening - comes naturally, as in listening
to another person. I take in what you have to say, and how you say it.

A second type, competitive intelligence, is a systematic process for
monitoring sources and gathering information. That information is
aggregated, processed to bring out the important points, and
distributed to others who can use it to make decisions.

In this article, we look at a third type, a less rigorous approach to
competitive intelligence, one that falls somewhere between simple
listening and formal competitive intelligence. Call it strategic
listening, a relatively simple way to stay on top of issues that affect
your organization.

Let’s start with objectives, which we normally do when looking at
something strategically. Ask two key questions, “Why are we doing
this?” and “What will we do with the information we gather?”

The first question focuses our efforts by putting them into the context
of our overall goals. The second question, “What will we do with the
information we gather?” relates to more immediate issues. It helps us
articulate how we will use the material, and that in turn, affects the
way we see our objectives.

Next, we need a process for gathering, managing, and storing the
information we gather. What sorts of sources? How will we get them?
What will we do with the material? How will we store it?

Once we’ve listened and gathered our information, we need to manage it.
All those mounds of paper and electronic files must be boiled down into
chunks of information that others can use easily.

This part of the process might involve the selection of excerpts or it
might involve writing summaries. It might require an argument or simply
a statement of facts that allows others to draw their own conclusions.

The final step in the strategic listening chain is to provide feedback
to those who provided raw information, and to get feedback from those
who used the processed information (or intelligence) we provided.

Giving feedback to those who provided raw information could be
considered a courtesy, and a way of encouraging them to keep supplying
us. Gathering feedback from those who used the processed information
will help us determine whether or not we met the objectives that got us
started.

In summary, one important form of listening is strategic; that is,
informally gathering and processing information that helps us stay on
top of issues that affect our organizations. The four key steps in this
process are: setting objectives, developing processes, managing the
information, and gathering and getting feedback.

Robert F. Abbott writes and publishes Abbott’s Communication Letter.
Learn how you can use communication to help achieve your goals, by
reading articles or subscribing to this ad-supported newsletter. An
excellent resource for leaders and managers, at:
http://www.communication-newsletter.com

The Ultimate Free Google Ranking Tool
Copyright 2005 Torgeir Sunnarvik

The first months my website was online,I was constantly
checking the search engines to see if my site was listed
under the keywords that I was targeting. And always with
the same negative results.

The truth is that the keywords that you are targeting are
often not showing your site the first months at all on the
first 200 search listings. OK,if you try to get your site
listed for hoooohjgaagga or something like that,it could
get you a first place in no time. But who wants to target
that keyword?

In fact, I get a lot more traffic from keywords that I
haven’t thought of using as a keyword in the first place.
One tool that I have found online can easily show you the
keywords that your site is ranking well for.

You can find it at:
http://www.googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php
Here you simply enter your domain name and hit the “Analyze
Keyword” button. If you want to,you can change the
different settings on this page before you hit the button.
But I usually leave this at default.

Then on the next page you can see a detailed report on
keywords that are found on your site. You can see their
numbers and density. It shows the number of 2 Word Phrases
and 3 Word Phrases.

Step 2 Create Position Report

Now to the cool part of this tool. When you hit this
button, the tool will search Google for the keywords and
keyword phrases that it have gathered from your site. After
a few seconds it shows your position for each of them. So
now you don’t have to wonder if your site is listed in
Google.

But as I said,the first months you shouldn’t be worried if
you don’t find your site under any keyword at all. Google
use a lot of time to index new websites. I have found that
MSN are a lot faster to show my pages under the keyword
that I want.

I hope you’ll find this tool as useful as I have.

About the Author:

Torgeir Sunnarvik, Norway
mailto:webmaster@everypleasures.com
Torgeir Sunnarvik is the owner and webmaster of
http://www.everypleasures.com/
His site offer free ebooks, ebooks with reprint rights and
review of business ebooks.

The 6 Characteristics of Highly Creative People
By Michelle L. Casto

Thomas Moore said, ?We are all poets and artists as we
live our daily lives, whether or not we recognize our
role and whether or not we believe it.? Human beings
have an innate need to create. Even you! There is a
continuum of creativity, ranging from being slightly
creative to highly creative.
The good news is that you can learn to be more creative by observing creative
people and modeling yourself after them.
Artists, writers, and creative types seem to have
similar characteristics.
Some of the personalitytraits listed below may seem eccentric, odd, even ?
outthere?—but that is where creativity lies— in the
outreaches of our consciousness, in the depths of our
souls.
If you had the opportunity to speak to
Picasso, Walt Disney, or Jane Austen, you would
probably find out that they are ordinary people, much
like you and I. The difference is that they have
allowed more of their soul to come out and play and
have freed themselves of convention and restriction.

Creativity is essentially the art of discovery and an
act of faith. When you create something— a work of
art, book, software program, dance routine, or role
for a play, you discover parts of yourself that you
never knew existed.
Creative people have a strong need to express more of who you really are and
often have to fight for that right. The character Isabelle in the movie,
Fire and Ice, has a great outlook on
what it means to be creative, she says, ?To create, sometimes you must
rebel.?

1. Unconventional
Creative people do not feel the need to conform to
society?s standards. They often swim against the
current and flow with their own way of thinking and
living. They have original ideas that literally turn
the world upside down and right-side out.
Take for example, the 16th century Italian astronomer,
Galileo, who proved that the earth revolved around the
sun (instead of the other way around), which was
revolutionary in his time.

2. Individualistic
Creative people want to find out what the truth is,
and they have a strong need to decide for themselves
what works and what does not. Often they are ahead of
their time, and much of their work is
appreciated/acknowledged after they are dead and gone.
Many writers are famous for marching to the tune of
their own drum, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote
the book, Self-Reliance, and Robert Frost who penned,
?two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one
less-traveled.?

3. Inventive
Creative people live in the world of ideas, and don?t
always have the best interpersonal skills. Because
they are so highly intelligent, and live in the realm
of possibility, they are constantly coming up with
bright ideas. They also take notice of what is
missing in the world and/or what could be improved.
Take for instance, Thomas Edison, who invented
hundreds of things in his time, his most famous
invention being the light bulb. He saw that there was
darkness and then created light.

4. Driven
Creative people cannot ?not do something??they are
almost compulsive until they can bring their internal
vision into fruition. They have that ?fire in their
belly?—a passion to contribute to the beauty and
betterment of the world. Because of their high drive,
they can produce a lot in a relative short amount of
time.
Talk about drive—the material girl herself, Madonna,
has not let public praise or criticism stop her from
being a super star. She is a modern day Diva,
multi-talented as a singer, dancer, and actress who
has released hundreds of songs, albums, videos,
movies, books— all the while reinventing herself as
someone new.

5.Visionary
Creative people have a guiding vision in their head,
heart, and soul that they are often called to bring to
life. Who else but Michelangelo could look at a large
piece of marble and ?chip away at everything that
wasn?t David?? According to him, ?I saw an angel in
the marble and carved until I set him free.?
One of his best-known works is the immense ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel, which took him three years to
complete, where he often had to work upside down for
hours at a time. If you ever have seen any of his
work, you can easily see that it is a vision to
behold.

6. Intuitive
Creative people are very in touch with their inner
selves. They pay attention to the signs,
synchronicities, symbols around them, and make use of
that information in their work. They often act as a
channel, where ideas and inspiration come from a
higher plane. They allow the work to guide them to
where it needs to go. The work clearly originates in
their soul, not from their ego.
Talk about ideas coming from out of the blue, remember
how the scientist, Isaac Newton ?discovered? gravity?
He was sitting under a tree and an apple fell on his
head! Had he not made a connection with his intuitive
nature, he would have missed a major theory about the
world we live in!

As you read this, do you find yourself relating to
some of these traits? If so, it is time to start
creating. Getting started can often be the hardest
part, because we often limit our creativity by
listening too closely to our negative inner voice.
But so did all of these examples of creators. Even
the famous painter Vincent Van Gogh struggled with
that, but he created a remedy for that, he said, ?If
you hear a voice within you saying, you are not a
painter, then by all means, paint, and that voice will
be silenced.?
Robert Henri says, „When the artist is alive in any
person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes
an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing
creature.‰
Once you have created, you now have to put
yourself out there for all to see. This is where your
faith comes in to support you. Remember that if you
are creating from your soul, it will not matter
whether other people accept your work or not. You are
simply doing what you are called to do as a human
being, create.