Kreative Ramblings

This week’s issue of our ezine, “On the Bright Side” is ready now and will be delivered to your Inbox early any Thursday morning in time for your coffee. If you are on our mailing list!

This week’s featured topic is: “Is There A Web conference In Your Future?”

We also have a complimentary copy of “Tips and Tricks to Grammar and Proofreading” for those who click to Konceptuality.

Jewels of Life: Resources

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Autoresponders are one of the most important marketing tools that you can have if you are doing business online.

In fact, the only thing more important than the autoresponder is your opt-in list!

But all autoresponders start out without a list; the list does not exist until your autoresponder mailing list starts filling up with names and email addresses!

The easiest and fastest way to build up an email list is to give things away for free.

Some marketers will tell you that this is a waste of time; and if you already have a list of one hundred thousand people that you can market to, then it probably is. But for those who do not already have a list, this is the way to build it!

You simply pay for any advertisement to promote your freebie.

Don’t think of this as lost money, think of it as an investment in future earnings.

Give away an ezine, free reports, free ebooks, free access to private websites, or anything else you can think of. The object is to get people to sign up to receive that freebie, and to agree to receive email from you in the future!

It is a win-win situation for everyone, but you get more than anyone else in the deal. The person gets a freebie. You get their name and email address, and permission to email them in the future.

And if you do it right, you get even more than that.

The freebie you give away should also be used to promote your products or services. Even if it just has affiliate links for products or services that are related to the topic of the freebie, it is a way to generate extra revenue. Then, when you send email in the future, you can again promote your products or services.

Just be sure to include valuable information in the email as well, or you will have people dropping off of your autoresponder mailing list like flies!

Jewels of Life: Hope

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All you have to do is look around

Like a good number of journalists, the White House Chiefs of Staff and other current Congressional persons, television crews, the TV viewing public, and more, by accident I recently awaited the “first news conference” at the White House of President-Elect, Barack Obama. (Actually, I’ve often remarked how I tune in to one of the major cable news channels and frequently catch similar spontaneous briefings.)

That specific day, since they’d just announced there would be a delay of “a few minutes” or so (which I’ve learned can often go into an hour or more), rather than listen wholeheartedly to the commentators drone on, I decided to tune them out and take the time to write an article.

And this is the result!

In truth, it took a while to get to this point, though, since I spent a good part of the morning dangling from “writer’s block”. Perhaps you’ve experienced it, too. You know the feeling. When you’ve really meant to get an article written so you can add it to your article bank; but no matter how hard you try, you’re stuck because you cannot come up with a topic.

So what do you do?

What do you do when you can’t even get an idea? Or if you do get an idea, you can’t manage to put any thoughts into coherent sentences on paper?

Well, I’m here to tell you that that day I suddenly experienced a “thought shift”; what follows is the result of how the words spilled out.

1. Pay attention to your surroundings

As you can glean from the above lengthy preamble, one way to come up with ideas for articles is to look at what’s going on around you. What’s in the headlines of newspapers and magazines?

Review articles, watch television, listen to the radio. Perhaps you can evaluate the agendas of the local school meetings or your city’s council meetings. What’s happening on your favorite television program? Well, aside from the shoot ‘em ups, car chases or something with “Sex in the City”!

If someone in your networking circle or on TV mentions a topic that sounds fascinating, jump on the Internet to gather more information about that issue. What interests you? Who do you want to touch? Look for blog posts or articles at article databanks that center around your target market or your niche. When you’re in conversation with fellow employees, neighbors and friends you may even be able to grab an idea from them.

2. Write it down

Keep a notebook or recipe box, a tackle box, a table napkin–handy. It doesn’t matter what, really. But make it large enough and sturdy enough to hold your written thoughts. You may even decide to use your computer and just save all your ideas as a Word document.

3. Recycle

Dig out some of the old articles you’ve written and rewrite them from a different viewpoint. If you were the “pro” before, be the “con” now and see what happens. When an already published article catches your eye, use that for your topic, and play the Devil’s advocate with yours. Or approach the article or blog post from an entirely different angle from the original.

4. A picture is worth a thousand words

In addition to writing, typing, computing and saving your words, you might also support your thoughts with pictures cut from newspapers and magazines. So you really may want to include a section in your idea book where they will be handy when you are ready to use them.

And before long you’ll have so many ideas for articles, your big decision then will be what to write about first.

Jewels of Life: Believe, Hope

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Or a man’s for that matter!

And neither is your Web site!

How many times have you said you’d launch your Web site just as soon as you added one more page or changed some of the wording in your “About” page?

What about the time you decided to change the “sign-up box” for your ezine? Perhaps you didn’t like its placement on your site. That decision took you 10 extra days before you could move forward.

And so the time for launch never quite seems to come because the formatting doesn’t look just right! Or you always find something else to add to one or more of your pages!

You get the picture

Could it be you’re holding yourself back because you don’t quite have the confidence to move forward?

So instead, you may sit and lament about all those “movers and shakers” around you that are creating names for themselves, that are taking steps to move their businesses up a notch or way ahead.

Your inaction is causing you to mark time; you see yourself as being left in the dust.

If you were to take a poll of those you admire and most want to be like in the same (or similar) industry as yours, what do you suppose they would say about the birth of and activity leading up to their business roll-out?

Would their responses read like yours? Procrastinate with a capital “P”? How long did it take them to get their Web site ready and up so they could be open for business?

Of course, there can be unforeseen circumstances that keep you from going live with your Web site. At the last minute your tech support may not be accessible to change some of the copy. Or perhaps you discover a hitch with you web host. Maybe you’re waiting for a check to come in. Or a family matter intervened.

Aside from situations like these over which you have little or no control, it’s really best to just go ahead and set a date to publish your Web site.

And then just do it!

Once your site is up and on the web, made alive and public, it does take a couple days or so anyway for the site to get into the “eyes” of the search engines. During that time, and all the days and weeks that follow forever after, you can take many other steps to get your Web site into the hands of your prospects and clients.

You will also want to make it a point to periodically make changes to your Web site anyway in order to keep it fresh and something the “spiders” will eagerly want to nibble on.

Continuing to “sit” on a Web site without ever launching it accomplishes two things; one, you remain on that treadmill that barely moves you forward, you really never go anywhere. And two, you are able to continue to “woe is me” how everyone around you has everything you don’t because you can’t find prospects or get clients.

Much like with anything in life, in order for things to happen you have to make them happen. Now, of course, some things are beyond our control so that’s not the focus of this little missive. However, the fact remains that some of us may let a lack of confidence keep us from not doing the things we love, of not taking the chance to land on the next stepping stone.

And in the end about all we can do is just lament about how all those others are so much better than we are.

That’s really not true.

So the first step is to launch that Web site.

One you do that, you’ll find a whole new confidence you didn’t know you had and prospects and other connections will soon follow.

After all, they can’t come to you if they don’t know you exist.

Now, take a click to Konceptuality to get a copy of our ezine, “On the Bright Side”,

Jewels of Life: Dream, Hope, Resources

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Kibbles ‘n Bits

Although this tip isn’t of the “spelling or editing” kind this time, it’s still important when crafting articles, writing our web copy and trying to market oneself, or a client, on the Internet.

As “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, so too when writing articles or trying to offer guidance to a customer, we must learn to figure out what our customer wants instead of just entering into a “I’ll help” mode that then builds a case for what we think our clients want.

It’s not about us!

It’s that “features and benefits”!

Jewels of Life: Hope

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If you are not doing keyword research then your business is suffering.

With keyword tracking you can increase traffic to your site and bring more attention to what you have to offer. Keywords help you to understand what your potential customers are searching for and one of the best places to discover that is Wordtracker.

The folks over at Wordtracker created the perfect resource to help you with your key word research. The Keyword Research Guide is a free downloadable resource that will help you in many areas.

 

Using a fictional company as its case study, experts were asked to provide real answers to the problems facing the company’s CEO. The result is an e-book packed with insight, tips, and techniques on keyword research that you can apply easily to your own website.

 

The experts share advice on why keywords matter, how to use a tool such as Wordtracker, how to adopt a healthy position with keyword research and designing an online marketing strategy.

 

Other items discussed include:
• Converting traffic using Wordtracker
• Finding keyword and you’ll find your marketplace
• Where to use keyword phrases
• In paid search, Keywords are key.

 

All of this information packed in one handy book that you can simply add to you computer files and read right from you computer. It is imperative to your business that you learn about proper use of keywords and how to research them for optimization of your site and sales.

 

The Keyword Research Guide is a perfect tool for any online business owner to glean and grow from for success.

 

Jewels of Life: Resources

 

 

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