I won’t give the same old advice about not visiting Starbucks every day. Instead, I’m sharing seven steps I personally used to save money as I moved into the role of entrepreneur.

As a home based business owner, you’ve already got a head start since you won’t be paying rent. Other ways you can save: [click to continue…]

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“Twitter is dumb.”

That’s what a friend of mine said when I told him I use Twitter, a microblogging tool.

What he doesn’t realize is that this tool is useful for marketing, staying in touch, getting ideas, and receiving breaking news. Consider it like a mini-newsletter or mini-blog that allows you to reach people in a friendly way to share what you know and getting the same in return.

Instead of writing longer posts, Twitter allows you to share a post in 140 characters. See my Twitter as an example and follow me if you like what I’m saying.

Are you wondering why Twitter matters? [click to continue…]

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DoshDosh at the Make Money Online blog wrote about 8 ways to optimize yourself in your business, in your personal life and in your living space. Essentially, he shares how to optimize yourself.

Since it’s that goal-setting time of year, I’m sharing three ways to keep your business and personal goals realistic and possible. [click to continue…]

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It’s easy to spend thousands of dollars quickly (and accidentally) with Google AdWords campaigns. I’ve heard the horror stories.

Ideally, you should hire an AdWords expert to manage your campaign. If you can’t afford that, then you can at least take three steps to improve your campaign results.

These may not be easy steps for you. Whether you find them easy will depend on your comfort with technology, your AdWords experience, and your comfort level with risking a possibly expensive mistake.

The top three problems I commonly see in AdWords campaigns are: [click to continue…]

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I joined Facebook 4-5 months ago. I committed at least one embarrassing mistake, at least one social networking crime.

I would like to help you avoid my pain.

When you join Facebook — and it’s a great networking and marketing tool, so you should — do the following. [click to continue…]

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Why is My Computer Running so Slowly?

by admin on December 28, 2007

That is the phrase I typed into Google recently after rebooting my laptop for the third time in a row.

Two weeks ago, I expressed gratitude for having such a great computer. This week, I wanted to pitch it against the wall.

Now, I’m back to thinking my PC the best thing since SEO. I’ll let you in on a few of the steps I took to increase my PC performance. I ended up saving myself about $1,000 or $2,000 since I didn’t have to buy a new computer or at least several hundred to hire a computer expert to come fix my machine. [click to continue…]

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Your Website: 3 Crucial Steps to Making Money

by admin on December 21, 2007

The fancy term for this is “internal linking strategy.” However, that’s more for the search engine optimization greeks like myself. This step-by-step explanation should help you increase your conversions over time while giving your visitors what they really want from your website.

1. Use Analytics to Discover Your Most Popular Pages: In your analytics program, find out which pages were the most popular for November. Make a list of the top five. (An excel spreadsheet works well for this task.) Do the same for October and September. If you see a certain page popping up more than once in the top five over those three months, then you know it’s probably not a fluke. Keep in mind that if you had a promotion going on for a certain URL on your site, you could end up with a “false” result for that page. Most likely, a promoted page won’t work well for this exercise.

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A Dirty Little Business Secret

by admin on December 19, 2007

In the past few months, I’ve talked to numerous prospects and have a good sense of the most important action they could take to improve their online marketing efforts.

The secret, dear readers, is in the sauce.

The sauce, dear readers, is marketing research.

Too often business owners have not done the market research. Too often someone starts a business with the idea that “I love to make hats, so I’ll start a hat business.” However, they do not think, “I’ll start
a hat business because I’ve received a lot of requests to make hats.”

See the difference?

Is your business idea a good one?

The answer lies in the market research. Do people want what you want to offer?
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The 5 Best Online Marketing Blogs Ever

by admin on December 18, 2007

When it comes to search engine optimization, I don’t think you can read too many of the good online marketing blogs.

Since search engines often change how they rank sites, it pays to keep up to date with other webmasters and online marketers and hear the news straight from the front lines.

That said, these are the blogs I turn to again and again for online marketing news, perspectives that help me increase site rankings, and even occasional entertainment.

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How to Rank in Google Part 2

by admin on December 15, 2007

This is part two of How to Rank in Google. Writing quality content is one of the most important actions to take in search engine optimization. Clients who come to me with a lot of content ready to place on their site will perform much better than clients without content.

The Beauty of Quality Content: Quality content provides relevant and valuable information to your audience and uses proper grammar. Quality content also:

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How to Rank in Google: Part 1

by admin on December 14, 2007

Recently, a colleague asked how her website could rank high in Google. She said she had her metatags in place and searched on her keywords, yet the site did not come up.
While metatags still have a certain amount of importance, the search engine optimization game has changed bit by bit to combat spam websites. If you have the time and a website with quality content, you can take a few steps to help your site increase its rank in the search engines.

Part 1
The Beauty of Backlinks: Backlinks are links that come into your site from related websites. Backlinks that come into your computer repair site from a website about fly fishing will not help your rankings. Instead, seek out links from related sites.

Search engine optimization is not a one-size-fits-all method. That’s why it’s best to work with an organization that can develop an ongoing plan tailored to your business. The following suggestions will work better for some businesses than others.

1. Blog Comments: One way to get backlinks and visitors is to leave blog comments on respected, high-traffic blogs. Your comment should be relevant to the post, and the post will ideally be relevant to your business. If the blog discusses tennis shoes and you have a tennis shoe business, it’s a good match.

2. Articles: If you like to write, you will greatly enjoy this method. If you have a lot of articles from your past newsletters collecting dust somewhere, this is a great way to use them. This strategy requires you post articles to article directories such as ezinearticles.com and include links to your website in your bio. You’ll get backlinks from the Ezine Articles site and from the sites of people reprinting your article.

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