Monday, November 30th, 2009
The entire team here at the Internet Marketing Center wishes our American customers and clients (and everyone else celebrating today, of course) a very Happy Thanksgiving!
We are very thankful for you and your support. In fact, the best part of doing what we do is the opportunity to meet so many amazing people — people with big dreams and goals to pursue, and big hopes for themselves and their families.
We hope the holiday brings you time with the people you love, and the chance to give thanks for all the good things in your life right now.
Throughout the year, we’ve heard from some of you that you’ve faced challenging times because of an unsteady economy — no matter how big or small or old or new your business might be — and we know it can take a lot of effort to stay positive through the ups and downs life hands us.
But we’ve also heard from many of you that you’ve found courage in the midst of this rough patch to start working on your own online business — and that you’re feeling a lot of hope for the year ahead.
We can’t get enough of the emails and calls telling us you’ve developed new skills, learned important lessons, found great communities of folks with similar goals and and dreams… and finally, that you didn’t know what you were capable of until now!
No matter what the last year had brought you, we ‘re committed to helping you make the next year a great one — and that’s why we’re working hard to provide you with the information and tools you need to make your dreams a reality. We want to see you succeed!
Thanks to all of our readers, customers and clients for inspiring us to do what we do, every single day.
And one more time — HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
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Monday, November 30th, 2009
Thanks to everyone who entered our site review contest. We were so impressed with the level of entries that we chose not one, but THREE winners.
We’ll review these three websites and recommend improvements that will increase their traffic and bring better conversions. Look for those site reviews in upcoming issues of our Marketing Tips Report newsletter. It’s free and you can sign up for it in the blue box to the right of this post.
The lucky winners are:
Derek Seabrooke of www.electricgenesis.com
Susan Mitchell of www.tinyterriers.com
Bob Hamrin of www.greatdads.org
Congratulations to you all! And, again, thanks to everyone who entered. Watch for more site review contests in the future.
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Monday, November 30th, 2009
Nothing stays the same in search engine marketing.
Every now and the folks at Google put on their overalls and start messing around under the hood. They’ve been at it again recently, and sometime in the next couple of months we can expect the new, supercharged Google Caffeine.
These Google tweaks generally result in changes in search engine rankings. Sometimes significant changes! Will Google Caffeine change your search rankings? They’re giving you the chance to test it out.
You can test out the new Google Caffeine here. And if you’re impatient, you can see the results side by side with the with this Google Comparison Tool.
And here is a basic FAQ page.
Google is looking for feedback, so if you go to this invitation page you can tell them what you think and see what others are saying.
In typical Google fashion, they’re not revealing anything about what they’re actually changing. However here are some of the common observations we’ve gathered from various forums and blogs:
- Google Caffeine is crawling a lot more pages to get results — including pages that aren’t supposed to be crawled. So it’s returning far more results for each query.
- Google Caffeine favors fresh content. It seems to be refreshing its content much faster, so, for example, the results for breaking news stories are getting updated in real time. Updating your pages often is going to become a priority.
- Testers are saying the results are more relevant, with fewer spammy sites at the top.
Try it yourself and see if there’s any difference to your search results… then let us know by posting a comment.
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Monday, November 30th, 2009
How would you like our team of Internet Marketing Center experts to give you an in-depth critique of your web pages and show you how to fix the problem areas on your site? Wouldn’t it be great to know what elements are draining your site of potential sales and preventing you from making the kind of money online that you could be making?
All you had to do is send us an email telling us what YOU think your website’s biggest problem area is… and be sure to include your site’s URL so we can check it out for ourselves.
This contest closes on Sunday, November 15th at midnight — so make sure you enter right away!
The lucky winner will receive a detailed web page analysis valued at $500.
So… tell us: Where do you think your site most needs improvement? Is it the headline? The call to action? The copy? The buying process?
Email us at questions@marketingtips.com with the subject line “Site Review Contest” for your chance to win!
And don’t forget to include your site’s URL.
Good luck!
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Monday, November 30th, 2009
A Guest Post by Brian Tracy, best-selling author of The Psychology of Achievement. Our new online magazine, StartUp, features an in-depth interview with Brian on how to manage your time and get more done.
People often ask me what the difference is between a success and a failure. For me, the answer is simple. A successful person knows how to set goals and work to achieve them. An unsuccessful person doesn’t.
The payoff for setting goals and making plans is being able to choose the kind of life you want to live. So why do so few people set goals? I think that there are five basic reasons why people don’t set goals — and thereby deprive themselves of the successful life they could be leading:
Reason #1: They’re not serious
Whenever I speak with a man or woman who had achieved something remarkable, I learn that the achievement occurred after that person decided to “get serious.” Until you become completely serious and totally determined about your goals, nothing really happens.
Reason #2: They don’t get the importance of goals
Many people don’t understand the importance of goal-setting. We find that young men and women who begin setting goals very early in life invariably come from families in which the importance of goals is emphadized. The discussion that takes place around your family dinner table is one of the most powerful formative influences in your life.
If your parents didn’t had goals, didn’t talk about goals, didn’t encourage you to set goals, and didn’t talk about people outside the family circle who had goals and were moving toward a higher level of achievement, then you very likely grew up with the idea that goals are not even a part of normal existence. This is the case for most people. And for many years, it was the case for me.
Reason #3: They don’t know how
The third reason people don’t set goals is that they don’t know how to do it. One of the greatest tragedies of our educational system is that you can receive years of education in our schools and never once receive a single hour of instruction on how to set goals.
Yet we find that in certain schools where goal-setting programs had been introduced since first grade, young people become excited about goal-setting — even if the goal is only to increase the scores by 5% or 10% over the course of the semester, or to be on time every day in the course of a month. Children become so excited about achieving goals that by the third or fourth grade, they love to go to school. They get the best grades. They are seldom absent. They are excited about themselves and about their lives.
So encourage your children to set worthwhile and realistic goals from an early age.
Reason #4: Fear of Rejection
The fear of rejection is caused by destructive criticism in early childhood and is manifested, in adulthood, in the fear of criticism by others. Many people hold back from setting worthwhile goals because they had found that every time they do set a goal, somebody steps up and tells them that they can’t achieve it, or that they will lose their money or waste their time.
Because each of us is strongly influenced by the opinions of those around us, one of the first things that you must learn when you begin setting goals is to keep your goals confidential. Don’t tell anyone about them. Often, it’s the fear of criticism that, more than any other single factor, stops you from goal-setting in the first place.
So keep your goals to yourself, with one exception. Share your goals only with others who are committed to achieving goals of their own and who really want you to be successful and achieve your goals as well. Other than that, don’t tell anybody about your goals, so no one is in a position to criticize you, or to discourage you from setting your goals.
Reason #5: Fear of Failure
This is perhaps the most important reason of all… People don’t set goals because they are afraid that they might fail. In fact, the fear of failure is probably the greatest single obstacle to success in adult life.
The primary reason you fear failure is simply this: You probably do not understand the role that failure plays in achievement. The fact is that it is impossible to succeed without failing. If you wish to fulfill your potential, you had to be willing to risk failure over and over and over, because there is no way that you can ever accomplish worthwhile goals until you had fallen on your face so many times that you had eventually learned the lessons that you need for great achievement.
Setting well-defined goals enables you to channel your efforts and focus your energy toward something that’s important to you. Goal-setting gives you a target to aim at and enables you to develop the self-discipline to continue working toward your target, rather than becoming distracted and going off in other directions.
To learn more about how you can radically improve your life through goal-setting, please accept my free report, Goals!
The report breaks down my proven goal-setting process into easy steps that will help you achieve the life you want faster and more easily than you ever imagined.
To download the report, please click here now.
… Thanks to success coach Brian Tracy for a great guest post!
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