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Improve Technology ROI: Focus on People
Buzzwords are great. They give us an excuse to nod our heads, act like we are paying attention, and then completely ignore issues without giving them a second thought. As long as we use buzzwords we appear (if only to ourselves) to know what's going on and we are on top of the challenge at hand. Perhaps the greatest part of working in technology is that we are never at a loss for buzzwords, or for meetings in which to use them.Three of the greatest buzzwords in the tech arena are "People, Process, and Technology". Throw in a few other favorites, such as "alignment," "change," "culture," and... well, you get the idea. While these words are more ubiquitous in a technology discussion than fish are in the sea, they are often overlooked, misunderstood, and generally ignored. This is dangerous.Looking over the landscape of a typical IT implementation we notice that the majority of activities are focused on process and technology. We spend tremendous amounts of time and effort defining business processes and specifying functional system requirements. We focus a large amount of time building and testing the technology.

turday before the final. My intuition (plus other anecdotal evidence) tells me that had I built a foundation of links outside the blogosphere prior to Bourbon, the blog would not have been hit…of course, I’ll never know. The blog reappeared in Google with its excellent search engine ranking 10 days after the Idol final, depriving me of a tremendous volume of Bo Bice web traffic for the time surrounding the final…Thanks, Google:.)

Linkmarket.net is by far the best link-trading site on the Internet. They now have more than 20,000 sites that are potential link partners. For $24.85 per year, you have unlimited ability to trade links with any site on the network. No matter what your site niche is, you should be able to find hundreds of potential trading partners and generate large numbers of inbound links quickly.

Press Releases: Online press releases are an excellent way to generate notice for your blog. I created a press release announcing the launch of the blog, and once I decided to “actively” blog Bo, I wrote a release each week recapping the show and featuring highlights from the blog. Online press releases can get thousands or even tens of thousands of reads…especially if you are writing on a “hot topic”. Many of the press rele

Networking Strategic Alliances
BNI (Business Networking International) coined the phrase “giver's gain”, which basically means that if you give referrals, leads or resources the recipients will want to repay you somehow. The problem is that as your network grows, it will become increasingly difficult to give referrals to everyone in your network.This is somewhat counterintuitive because most people would think that as they add contacts to their network it will be easier to refer the new members of your network to each other. However, if you know five accountants it is difficult to refer to all five of them equally. One way to give back to your network is to develop a number of strategic alliances.There are a few basic steps you should follow to help ensure that your new alliances are effective. First, be sure to think about what you want the alliance to accomplish. Are you simply trying to reach new potential customers? Or are you also trying to reduce your marketing costs? In general, think about the goals of the alliance. Here are some things you might want to consider.- You will get access to the networks of your partners. - You will

To be successful at Search Engine Optimization, it’s important that you continually test out new theories and ideas. Before I use new SEO techniques on a client’s website, I always test them on one of my own. In order to better understand the application of SEO to blogs, I decided to implement the following experiment:

I would create a blog for each American Idol contestant. Using a pseudonym, I would blog each candidate until they got booted off the show.
Once the final 12 candidates were decided, I would step up my posting pace. Being that this was an SEO project, I didn’t aim to provide any valuable insights into the candidates…I only planned to “blurb” news articles that mentioned each contestant.
The goal at the end of the project (besides gaining useful knowledge) was to have 1-2 “sustainable” blogs in place, while generating massive traffic the week of the final show.
Several weeks into the project, I discovered two things:

The Bo Bice Blog received considerably more traffic and better search engine rankings than the other blogs I had created. Bo Bice was the first Idol contestant in 4 years that TOTALLY ROCKED. I very much wanted him to win. So, while keeping my SEO experiment going, I decided to really “blog” about Bo Bice. In doing so, I learned many valuable lessons about creating a successful blog that can generate sustainable traffic, including many repeat visits.

Beginners Lessons:

Have a narrow focus: The quickest way to drive traffic to your blog is through excellent search engine rankings. If you blog about lots of unrelated topics, you won’t rank well for any of your key terms. Even if you don’t know much about SEO, you can still create a blog that will rank well in the search engines. Pick a narrow topic and keep your posts on topic. Choose a group of keywords relevant to your chosen topic and make sure you feature these terms prominently in your posts.

Build a base of content: Unless you already have a built-in audience, very few people are going to read your early blog posts because they will be extremely hard to find in either the blogosphere or the search engines. So, save your best content for when you’ve already developed a steady stream of web traffic. Blogging newspaper articles is a good way to build up relevant content quickly. All you need to do is subscribe to Google news alerts to get relevant articles featuring your top keywords. As your receive new articles, create a blog entry for each article, excerpt a relevant snippet (making sure to credit the source), and comment on the piece. This might not be interesting to your readers…but the objective here is to reach a point where you can start creating original, unique content that people will actually read because your blog can be easily found. For the more advanced beginners, adding an RSS feed that is focused on your targeted niche will also be of great value to your blog.

Try to make several posts each week. You’ll be amazed how much content you can build up in a short period of time.

Monetize your blog (if appropriate): I placed a combination of contextual and affiliate advertising on my blog. The advertising revenue on my blog was poor given the amount of traffic I generated…however, if you are blogging successfully in areas of business and technology, you could make a good deal of money from such advertising. Google AdSense is a ubiquitous way for bloggers to earn money from blogging. Once you’ve placed the AdSense javascript snippet in your blog source code, Google’s contextual ad technology will automatically choose ads relevant to your blog content and when someone clicks on the ad, you get paid.

Advanced Techniques:

“Blog and Ping”: There is a reason why news spreads so rapidly through the blogosphere. When you update your blog, depending on your blog host, a “ping” might be sent to one or more blog search engines that track the blogosphere, showing that you’ve made a new post to your blog. People who have subscribed to your blog, or people interested in your blogging topic, can be notified about your post and read it / link to it. An active course of “blogging and pinging” will help greatly in building links to your blog and generating more traffic.

Websites and software exist that will allow you to manually send pings to dozens of known blog search engines. Ping-o-matic is a website that allows you to ping 18 different blog search engines on demand. I’ve been using RSSSubmit from Dummy Software to submit all feeds to over 70 such services at the push of a button.

“Conventional” Link-Building: To maximize your blog search engine rankings, I strongly recommend building links for your blog just as if it were a website. I did not do this for the Bice blog and that oversight (probably) came back to bite me.

Google’s “Bourbon” update hit several days before the American Idol final and this blog was the only “Bourbon” casualty in my entire portfolio…vanishing from Google the Saturday before the final. My intuition (plus other anecdotal evidence) tells me that had I built a foundation of links outside the blogosphere prior to Bourbon, the blog would not have been hit…of course, I’ll never know. The blog reappeared in Google with its excellent search engine ranking 10 days after the Idol final, depriving me of a tremendous volume of Bo Bice web traffic for the time surrounding the final…Thanks, Google:.)

In Search of the Future: Google Vs. Microsoft
Since last year, the Google Phenomenon has been creeping steadily into all factions of society, from the broadsheet financial papers right down to the teenage magazine weeklies, making Larry Page and Sergey Brin household celebrities worth billions of dollars and determined to change the way everyone works, plays and interacts over the next decade. When even notoriously “anti-American corporate” French periodicals start declaring the rise of U.S. companies, you know something’s going on: only last week, Le Point featured both founders on the front cover and declared boldly inside: “L’ambition de Google parait n’avoir aucune limite” (the ambition of Google seems to recognise no boundaries).Suddenly everyone everywhere is talking about Google teaming up with Sun Microsystems, who has come obligingly out of left wing, to possibly create the most advanced new desktop software around, making a challenge to the Windows standard. And Google is laying the groundwork with numerous Beta test applications, taking on everything from academia (Google Scholar) to e-mail (Google Mail) down to internet chat and VOIP communications (Google T

y “blog” about Bo Bice. In doing so, I learned many valuable lessons about creating a successful blog that can generate sustainable traffic, including many repeat visits.

Beginners Lessons:

Try to make several posts each week. You’ll be amazed how much content you can build up in a short period of time.

Advanced Techniques:

Product Managers as a Strategic Asset
As marketing budgets have dwindled, companies have cut back on Product Management as a functioning part of their organizations. Many companies have started to view product management as a luxury, yet best in class companies understand the vital roll that a product manager plays in helping a company efficiently plan, develop and launch new products and to optimize the sale of those new products through their sales channels.Product Management plays a very critical role as a liaison between sales, who delivers the value of the product to the customers, and engineering / manufacturing who build the products that the market wants. Product Managers have typically a very strong technical background and are capable of working with engineering and operations to design, develop, specify and lead the overall development efforts for new products. Product Managers typically acts as a liaison for launching those new products, training the sales force, as well as working with Marketing Communications to develop sales presentations, data sheets, brochures, websites, and other forms of promotional materials that generate leads and demand

excerpt a relevant snippet (making sure to credit the source), and comment on the piece. This might not be interesting to your readers…but the objective here is to reach a point where you can start creating original, unique content that people will actually read because your blog can be easily found. For the more advanced beginners, adding an RSS feed that is focused on your targeted niche will also be of great value to your blog.

Try to make several posts each week. You’ll be amazed how much content you can build up in a short period of time.

Advanced Techniques:

Sales Speaker Asks: Do You Know How Your Bread Is Buttered?
Sitting in a 70 year-old restaurant yesterday, an antique by California standards, I heard song after song from the Big Band Era, the 1940’s.My parents were fond of this music, Mom especially, because she sang in one of those roving orchestras long before I was a mere bubble in a champagne glass.The waitress, who might have been born in the place, asked me if I wanted some rye bread with my meal, and it got me to thinking about an expression from that bygone era:“Know how your bread is buttered!”This means, appreciate what and who are putting bread on your table, and most important WHY they are doing it, what purpose you’re serving for them.For salespeople, this is a keen point. We need to know what it is that we’re doing that really makes sales happen, do more of that, and cut out anything that doesn’t contribute; needless motions and activity.Especially important is dispensing with ILLUSIONS about what is working for us and what is not working.In a different restaurant the other day, I overheard a chat where one guy was trying to sell an athlete his services as an agent. The suitor

y news spreads so rapidly through the blogosphere. When you update your blog, depending on your blog host, a “ping” might be sent to one or more blog search engines that track the blogosphere, showing that you’ve made a new post to your blog. People who have subscribed to your blog, or people interested in your blogging topic, can be notified about your post and read it / link to it. An active course of “blogging and pinging” will help greatly in building links to your blog and generating more traffic.

Running Flyers VS Direct Mail
Sending out direct mail can be expensive however those businesses that do often get much more value than advertising in the newspaper. Cost wise even with a 1.5% letter opening rate versus the round waste file, direct mail still pays off big time in developing new customers and spreading word of mouth amongst future clientele.But perhaps you may not thought of another option, which works especially well. That is to hire runners to hit all the door slots of all the businesses in town. This works extremely well if your business caters to business clientele more than the average consumer.Let me tell you why I am suggesting this. You see for years we set up franchises in the mobile car wash business and we washed cars at offices and homes. But offices were better as there were more cars there and those people had money, as they all had jobs, since we were washing at work.When we went into a new town, often we would be off cycle for the next round of direct mail coupon booklets and thus we had to develop new clientele on our own. So we hired blitz team members who did sales and ran flyers. A team of four and a vehic

PRWEB and PRLeap are the two most prominent online press release bureaus. Both allow free submission of releases and both allow you to pay for better “placement”. Your press releases will also get spidered into the search engines and (sometimes) will end up in Google or Yahoo News as well. I’ve seen my Bo Bice press releases as high as #3 in Google News for a “Bo Bice” search.

Best Idea Yet

When my blog reached a consistent 500 visitors a day, I decided to actively solicit posts from Bo’s fans. Sure, most blogs give readers the ability to post comments…but I thought that if I ran the comments as actual posts, I could create a “buzz” about the blog and generate large numbers of repeat visits. I ended up getting 5-15 e-mails every day from Bo’s fans wanting their information to be posted on the blog. So long as the post met my minimum blogging criteria, I ran the submission. Traffic spiked immediately and the quality of the submissions was generally excellent.

My idea worked strategically because the readers unknowingly submitted content that was SEO’ed for the keywords that were the focus of my blog… “Bo Bice”. By running reader posts, I generated large amounts of SEO’ed content that helped generate and maintain my top search engine rankings. And, my “Blog and Ping” strategy ensured that each and every new post (several per day) was broadcast all over the Internet.

Top Search Engine Rankings Confer “Authority Status”

For most of the duration of American Idol 4, I ranked #2 -4 in Google, and #6-15 in Yahoo for “Bo Bice” and I learned such rankings conferred an enormous amount of “authority” in my chosen subject. A sampling of my e-mails I received included:

After Bo performed “Vehicle” by “The Ides of March” (the first time), an original member of the band e-mailed a message to Bo’s fans through the blog. He even asked me if I knew how to reach Bo…which I didn’t.

A CBS Early Show Producer contacted my blog to promote Bo’s appearance on the show…asking his fans to show up at their New York studios.

What’s more, I received multiple messages from the person running the AOL American Idol fan poll soliciting votes for Bo.

Results:

Currently, my Bo Bice blog is generating sustainable traffic with very little work on my part (barring any unforeseen search engine calamity). As the American Idol Concert tour rolls this summer and as Bo gets to work on his first post-Idol album, I expect the traffic to increase.

One doesn’t need to be a SEO ace to be able to create a blog that can generate a large number of visitors. Whether you wish to blog for business lead generation, ad revenue, or personal reasons, if you follow the techniques described above, you can create and sustain a well-trafficked blog by following the techniques listed above.

HTTP = HTML link (for blogs, profiles,phorums):
<a href="http://www.diggitup.net/article/58117/diggitup-How-To-Be-A-Blogging-Idol-Instead-Of-An-Idle-Blogger.html">How To Be A Blogging Idol Instead Of An Idle Blogger</a>

BB link (for phorums):
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Pricing your soaps correctly is very important, if you're going to make a profit in your soap making business. Read on to see how to do it.

What causes conflict in the workp?ace? Personality differences? Cultural differences? Role ambiguity? This article sets out an interesting perspective.

Remember the day when you made the ultimate decision to change your life? Yes, it was the day when you decided to start your own home business. Gosh, I remember the anxiety when I uploaded my very first web site, waiting for something to happen. It’s like going onto a stage and performing in front of a large crowd.

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