Monthly Archives: April 2011

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When not to be in business

On April 26, Annie Mueller posted an article titled 10 Signs You Shouldn’t Be A Small Business Owner. It is a great list and really hits home as to why some people succeed and some should never really try. It prompted a comparison response from me in light of what the CarbonCopyPRO system has to offer. Here are the sign by sign results.

1. You can’t make decisions

Learning how to make decisions needs to start with why is there a weakness. Is it simply some better skills and tools that are needed or is there a serious deficiency? If the latter, tapes, books and seminars may not be nearly enough. Otherwise, getting some training will work wonders.

2. You won’t take responsibility

In agreeing with Annie, if you will not take responsibility, your business is dead. You are in charge and the buck stops with you. Unless you can make a decision (see problem #1) to change, just stay with your job.

3. Your only motivation is money

One of the things John Jackson is constantly talking about is discovering your why. If you don’t know why you are in business, you will not be motivated when the going gets really tough. Listen to John’s “Wake Up Calls” and he will help you find your why.

4. You swing between extremes

Getting one’s mind set geared for business is something that should be worked everyday. Take 30 minutes a day to train your mind. It will do amazing things to alleviate your swings.

5. You can’t overcome chronic disorganization

As we tell our freshmen, find a quiet spot to do your business work, whether it is sales, training calls or just reading. Calmness will reflect order. Get a schedule and stick to it. Manage yourself in time

6. You have no track record of completion

Again adjustable by mind set. I struggled for years to finish anything until I was faced with a very large, life changing moment. I chose to finish for one of the first times in my life and it has never left. No matter the struggle, you have to finish before you can grow.

7. You have no support system

Here the CarbonCopyPRO system helps in spades. From the start, you will have a team to help you contact leads, offer training, walk you throw sales calls and close deals. The leaders have incentives to help you succeed and run on your own legs, though never alone.

8. You are addicted to the familiar

When your cheese is moved, go find it. Don’t wait, just find it. If you hem over why the cheese has been moved, you will never find it again.

9. You never set your own limits

Setting goals is very important. After all, what is measured gets done. It is also important to limit yourself in both your business and personal affairs. Learning to manage yourself in time will help here as well. Discipline is very important.

10. You don’t keep your word

If you are not honest, CarbonCopyPRO is not for you. If you are looking to simply separate fools and their money, good luck to you elsewhere. Make a personal decision to change. Once you reputation is that you are not honest, it will be very difficult to overcome. Consider your word as part of your brand.

Keep striving to work on yourself and your business will become better. Who you are is as important as what you are selling. Remember, you are your brand.

Want to learn more about CarbonCopyPRO? Have a business and need marketing help? Want to have your own Internet based business? Visit for the details.

Internet Marketing, Marketing

Keeping the conversation

This post comes in support of the effort to move the blog to a new site without doing a bulk copy of every post. It was originally posted on 18 April 2011.

A search of the web will reveal all manner of ideas on what makes a blog well attended. Is your topic interesting? Do you engage the reader? Is the information timely or are you commenting on old news? Is the grammar and sentence structure correct? Does it make sense? But what does it really?

In the world of business, timing and positioning is everything. Sometimes the pioneers of an industry survive, while others are eclipsed by the late comer. At the dawn of social media, MySpace became king. Here the narcissistic could trumpet themselves to everyone. It grew rapidly and pulled the concern of some parent groups. But what of now? Sure, it still has many members, but it is nowhere close to the likes of Facebook. What happened?

MySpace was first and acquired a bit of a party town atmosphere. It was young and hip. Facebook grew from colleges only to be something that your mom or dad might want to join. That was the biggest difference. With an older, more fiscally established crowd came better demographics for advertisers. That’s positioning right there. Being able to get the correct eyeballs to see content generated more corporate interest and thereby money.

Being at the right place at the right time is an ever changing mix of know-how, luck, experience and planning. Knowing what came before, knowing what your customers want, knowing where the markets are. Those are some serious keys to success. Some of it can be gained by study, focus groups, surveys, etc, but knowing how and when to strike, that is the portion that few seem to have. Many times, it is not just striking at the right time as it is persistantly striking. Trying new ideas and approaches. Constantly adapting the tactics and motives. Finding new streams and ideas. Tenacity.

Nice ramble, but what is the bottom line? All of these ideas are correct and incorrect, simultaneously. Not all blogs are popular with all people. Keep writing. Find new ideas. Post and tweet. Advertise on other blogs. Learn to use keywords. Get your friends to tell there friends etc. Position and timing, mixed with hard work and some luck.

And if there weren’t enough clichés, keep on keeping on.

Commentary, Marketing

Take a break, worries or not

The article “Take a break, worries or not” appeared on the original blog on April 12, 2011.

The point of Richard Carlson’s focus changing book “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and It’s All Small Stuff” is to aide in getting priorities straight. Too often, it is quite easy to get so lost in the little details of life, they become fair more important than is necessary. Does it really matter if a piece of furniture is .001 inches to far to the left? Or if a child leaves half a green bean on their plate? Let the small things take care of themselves and handle the truly large stuff.

In business, these same ideals apply. Far too often, there is such a concentration on marketing (surveying customers, collecting customer data, well placed advertising), that the larger picture is lost. Is one more back link really going to matter? Does a particular print need to be one more shade of pink toward red? The larger picture is why are you in business.

Get passed the “to make money” answer and dig deeper. What really needs to be accomplished? Move the world? Make a change? Nice lofty goals, but what does that mean? Move the world to where? Make what kind of change? A change for whom?

Clear the mind and release the small things. The small goals and details. What is behind? How do business survive and thrive? Stop looking at what is special about your products. Get behind the small things. Of all the things that have impacted the world the most, what was the underlying motive?

Service.

It is by serving others first that allows one success. The greatest movers in this world, from Jesus to Gandhi, looked to serve others first. The well remembered Greek philosophers sought to teach first. Plato established the western world’s first academies. Socrates is not known for what he wrote, but what he taught others and they in turn recorded. Jesus preached that service to others was bound in God’s Law, while Gandhi pursued his non-violent revolution through service to his fellow country men.

Service not bound by expectation of reward is one of the greatest gifts one may give to another. When reward is reaped, the prize is more sweet. Serve your customers not in anticipation of a purchase, but of a grateful attitude. Those who are touched will buy. Not due to some level of coercion, but out of respectful consideration.

Internet Marketing, Marketing

To Backlink or not to Backlink

Creating backlinks was an early want to get traffic to your site and have it known around the Internet world. In a way, one could argue that Yahoo started out as a large backlink site, though organized by topic. With the advent of crawling search engines, backlinks became one of the ways to measure of a site’s popularity. Knowing this, many site owners created pages of nothing but backlinks. As search engines became smarter though, out of context links were filtered.

Various methods arose to give the search engines more reason to view the links as relavant and meaningful. Placing links inside of text such as an article or a post help provide more information to not only the human reader, but the engines as well. Link pages started to content text and keywords to give more weight to sites. Services such as 3 Way Links aide in giving sites meaningful and context reach links. With the current algorithms in use, such links help to give a site more weight and move it up the SEO ladder.

In the area of article and post writing, an idea as risen on automatically generate different versions. The idea is quite simple, though it involves some rather ingenious methods. Write three different versions of an article, upload them to Unique Article Wizard and it will generate multiple versions of your article.

Sound like good services? What about a combined one? One that delivers both strategies and more. Does such a combined service exist? Indeed. Enter LinkNetworker. Write articles or have them written for you. LinkNetworker will also post your articles to various article websites, saving you time and money.

In answer to the title, “To Backlink or not to Backlink,” if you want your site to be found and measured in your favor by search engine, then yes. Want your website to be amongst the crickets? Then do nothing and that will be the result.

**In need of help marketing your business? We can help.**

Internet Marketing, Marketing

An SEO first stop or: How a Geek Experiment took over the World

As promised, here is a repost of an article from the old blog location. It was first posted on 13 April 2011.

I quite fondly remember a time in the late-mid-90’s when Yahoo had a Standford address and was more an exercise in manually linking websites than some version of an automated spider. It was the pioneer days of Internet search engines and no one really had a clue of what was to come. Over the next few years, various ideas of how to index and search the web were being tried. Soon to arrive were the likes of AltaVista, Lycos and Ask Jeeves. To index what eventually became known as Intranets, a resourceful programmer could download Glimpse onto a Unix box, run make, install and start indexing a list of sites. A rather simple CGI form was needed to provide a user interface and away it all went.

Times have changed since those days. Yahoo left the confines of the .edu domain and became its own business. Alta Vista became a favorite of self-filtering junkies with the use of + and -, as well as finding +links. Lycos dropped off the face of the Earth and along came Google. The technology wars were eventually eclipsed when it was figured out how to monetize searching. Pay results, sidebar ads and AdWords are now the norm. Without resources to back link like mad or not having a site that is already very popular many are linking on their own, attention has to be made to key words and content.

In real estate, the saying goes that there only three rules: Location. Location. Location. For websites, content is key and traffic is King. It is more than just making sure the content serves the keywords. It is about properly choosing keywords based on how users you want search and how they will find you. The business is marketing and marketing is the business. It is really no different than the old way, just made global. In brick and mortar, just putting out your sign and placing an ad in the Sunday paper will not drive business to your door. The same ideas apply on the Internet, now they are in an electronic environment. On-line advertising follows the same rules as off. Know your audience and how they will go about finding you. Then place yourself in their path, get their attention (and not their scorn) and give them a value proposition geared to why they should purchase. Some will, some will not, so what? Sell to those who buy and chase not those who wish not.

Business

Finding a new home

In an effort to differentiate myself more and to concentrate this plug on improving the future of your business, the decision has been made to move this blog to a different domain and server. Still using WordPress, this blog will become more proficient to the business oriented reader. The old blog will still be around and some articles will make their way here, perhaps with a fresh coat of paint.

Moving forward is the name of the game and is the way a business will survive. When the cheese is moved, the smart mouse goes and finds it. No need to sit idly by and wonder where it went or dream about finding it, or worse, complain at its unfairness. Both blogs will continue, so enjoy them. And for those who want to know my other passions, visit my two beer oriented blogs on Cincinnati Craft Beer and beer in general.