Will You Add? - Internet and Businesses Online

Why the 1 Cent Auction is Killing the eBay eBook Market
*MYTH 1*Selling 1p eBooks are ideal for backend sales and website sales.Total utter rubbish! Do you honestly believe that people who pay 1p for an eBook will bother to read it? Maybe 5% will. But that means you have to sell 100 just to get 5 visitors to your website.Not only that, but buyers of 1p eBooks are freebie seekers and not willing to loosen the purse strings so to speak. If you’re selling an eBook for just ?5 on your website, can you really imagine them whipping out the plastic?The main reason people buy 1p eBooks are to build feedback points, they’re not going to take a second glance at your eBook.Instead, consider some SEO work on your site, write articles, submit to search engines, create a free viral eBook, participate in JV’s, participate in giveaway promotions, get reciprocal links, invest in an affiliate programme, sig files on forums, (do not spam) pay per click advertising, create a newsletter and the most important of them all – continue to add more content to your site.*MYTH 2*Selling 1p eBooks are ideal for building a strong, positive feedback.Nope, wrong again! eBayers aren’t stupid. They’ll see you’re selling hundreds of items for 1p and they know the feedback comments you get mean diddly squat.In addition to that, the majority of buyers aren’t going to bother leaving you feedback for a 1p purchase, especially if it’s of poor quality.Instead, invest in a few resale rights products that you can sell for ?2 - ?3 - ?4 and make a few CONSISTENT sales every day. If you just make 3 sales from one product per day and have 15 products that you’re selling, then that’s excellent profit potential and you’re building a solid, positive feedback that will be respected by eBay members.*MYTH 3*Selling 1p eBooks will make me an eBay power seller and earn me respect from the eBay community.eBay have set out certain guidelines that entitle you to power seller status.To qualify, members must:• Uphold the eBay community values, including honesty, timeliness and mutual respect• Average a minimum of ?750 in sales per month, for three consecutive months• Achieve an overall Feedback rating of 100, of which 98% or more is positive• Have been an active member for 90 days• Have an account in good financial standing• Not violate any severe policies in a 60-day period• Not violate three or more of any eBay policies in a 60-day period• Maintain a minimum of four average monthly listings f

sers. As the net became a place where revenue was considered by many to be directly related to traffic volume, sites hungry for profit began to use the system in place to deliver more and more traffic. In the past, search engines used what are known as meta tags to determine what a site was about, and therefore what types of searches it should be shown for. Meta tags are basically tags written in the head of HTML documents that contain a list of keywords relevant to the site (as determined by the webmaster), as well as a description of the site. This information was once the primary method for determining relevancy in the SERPS. Due to misuse, however, the use of meta tags has become nearly obsolete. Unfortunately, many dealer websites have not kept up with the times, and still rely on meta tags as one of the only ways they inform search engines of their content. This is usually done with a very large list of words in the "keyword" metatag. This type of optimization can be seen by examining the source code of any dealer.com, bz results, reynolds & reynolds, or cobalt site. What is even more disturbing is that the keywords in these meta tags are often the most general and therefore some of the most competitive keywords in the industry. As a poignant example, my current client's old site did not contain the words "west palm beach" or "used cars" in its keyword list. These keywords were th

Have You Fallen Prey To The Multi-Level Marketing Money Myth
I suppose most people that have looked at (work from home or work at home ) business opportunities, have looked at - or tried - some MLM program at one time or another. We have seen the circles or the numbers, you know - if you get three and they get three etc. When it comes to putting the plan into action it seems that all those numbers and the promised income were really just a myth.Well, let's take a look at some real numbers and at the real myth. If you take the most Basic MLM plan that is 5 levels deep and you get just $1 per month as your share from each person below you on each of your 5 levels, the numbers can be pretty enticing. For example, let's look at the numbers with this minimal scenario of $1 from each level.Do you know, that if you recruited just 1 person a month, who used the product or service (giving you your $1 from them) and they then recruited just 1 per month who did the same, in 3 years you would be making $119,000 every MONTH. No folks, that's not myth. So I hear screams coming back… "it sure didn't / doesn't work that way for me".There is a myth out there alright. The real myth is in the minds of many ( if not most ) people who are enticed by those very real (but seemingly ever evasive) big numbers. The myth is in the way we usually extrapolate that figure in our heads. Our logic tends to go something like this: $119,000 per month in 36 months, so I'm starting from zero and that means if my income goes up by $3305 every month, at the end of 36 months my income will be at about $119,000. We usually are more realistic than that but tend to think that it migh take 3-4 months to get to the $3305 per month and then the growth should occur along that sort of a path. Well, that's logical IF the income growth were a linear progression but that IS NOT how it works.This mythical linear progression thinking would have you making $19,830 in your 6th month and almost $40,000 in your 12th month. You start in this company and you're a hard working MLM wannabee. You work long hours learning and "following their system" and really put your heart into it. After 3 months of hard work you find that you have hardly made enough to pay the phone bill let alone gas, advertising, etc. etc. You start to think that maybe you were deceived or that there is something wrong with you. You hang in there for a few more months but when you hit 6 months and you're only making $197 (and that is GROSS) you say "forget it" and want to QUIT. NO, NO, NO, DO NOT QUIT!!!!That's the shame and t

1.) Sites Made Entirely Out Of Flash

As any SEO will tell you, or nearly any web designer with the slightest knowledge about the behavior of search engine spiders, designing a site entirely in flash is a recipe for disaster. As search engines become more sophisticated, the game of search engine optimization has become more complex....indeed, the process of becoming a highly ranked site has become quite a complex task. But at the most basic level, sites designed in flash are essentially invisible to search engines. A large component of determining the relevancy of a site by a search engine spider lies in the spiderability (ability of the spider to crawl) of high quality, keyword rich content. In the car industry, there are literally thousands of keywords that can be built into a website to dramatically increase traffic. In west palm beach alone, the location of a used car dealership I am currently in the process of optimizing for, there are literally hundreds of car related keywords which can be used to pull new traffic. This means that any new content that can be built into the site, any content which contains keywords that customers may be searching for, is content that can and should be seen by the search engines. It is content that should make it onto the web. If this content is presented in flash, however, it will never be indexed, and will therefore provide absolutely no value to ranking goals of the site. The bottom line is:

2.) Duplicate Content

For those sites not built entirely in flash, an even more ominous problem is usually lurking. Duplicate content is abhorred by search engines. As many may know, a great deal of keyword rich spam sites are generated dynamically through scripts that scrape the internet for content that is likely to be searched for by the general public. With a strategy designed to create revenue through volume, huge spam networks have been created (thousands of sites have been generated) by scraping or stealing content from legitimate websites. As a result, search engines approach duplicate content through a process known as canonicalization. What this means is the the search engines look at sites containing duplicate content and make a judgment about which site best represents the content contained on all of the sites. Whichever website is chosen as the most relevant for the content it contains then becomes the only site that is given any weight by the search engines and all other sites are completely devalued...or de-listed. To illustrate how extensive this problem is, visit any dealer.com site. Then examine any non-flash content, choose a text string (perhaps a piece of text from the about us section), and enter that text into google or yahoo with quotes around it. The results are astounding. Google has crawled literally thousands of pages created by dealer.com that contain the exact same content. In fact, almost every page created by dealer.com that is in the slightest bit search engine friendly (meaning it was at the very least not built in flash), is keyword content that belongs to hundreds of pages already on the net. The bottom line is:

Many Dealer Websites do great harm to themselves by having their only spiderable content be content that exists in duplicate on the pages of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of similar sites.

Any site containing non-original content will very likely be heavily penalized in the SERPS (search engine result pages), or will be de-listed altogether.

3.)Hidden Sitemaps and Links

One of the primary ways to garauntee that a site will be completely indexed (all pages will be crawled and included in the SERPS) is to include a sitemap on index pages or main pages that are sure to be crawled. A sitemap is essentially a list of links to all of the pages on the site, organized in an organized fashion. The inclusion of sitemaps is seen by many seo's as essential, and is a step many dealer website have taken in the right direction with regard to designing sites that have a chance to rank well. What they do wrong in this regard is the inclusion of sitemaps whose links are either a.) Hidden Behind Flash Movies or b.) Hidden using CSS. Hiding text behind a flash movie is fairly easy considering Flash typically floats above any site content when properly positioned, and is desirably for many designers wishing to create a seamless and immersive flash experience for their visitors. This has largely been the goal of many dealer designers such as BZ results. While often beautifully designed, the templates set up by such companies are often designed in such a way that links, sitemaps, and often keyword rich text is hidden from human eyes in an attempt to lure search engine spiders into indexing deeper pages. This type of design trick may have been a work around solution in the past, but it has become a major no-no in the SEO world. A basic rule of thumb is that search engine spiders have a great aversion to any attempts at trickery. This means that if you have hidden content on your site, whether it be links to other pages or just text, you will be penalized in the SERPS, or de-listed. Search engines see hidden content as an attempt to trick search engines into thinking a page is about something other than is being showed to that site's visitors. As you can imagine, in the eyes of a search engine, this makes such a site irrelevant to all search terms. The bottom line is:

4.)Heavy Reliance on Meta Tags

In the early days of the internet, much less sophisticated techniques were needed to deliver very high quality search results to users. As the net became a place where revenue was considered by many to be directly related to traffic volume, sites hungry for profit began to use the system in place to deliver more and more traffic. In the past, search engines used what are known as meta tags to determine what a site was about, and therefore what types of searches it should be shown for. Meta tags are basically tags written in the head of HTML documents that contain a list of keywords relevant to the site (as determined by the webmaster), as well as a description of the site. This information was once the primary method for determining relevancy in the SERPS. Due to misuse, however, the use of meta tags has become nearly obsolete. Unfortunately, many dealer websites have not kept up with the times, and still rely on meta tags as one of the only ways they inform search engines of their content. This is usually done with a very large list of words in the "keyword" metatag. This type of optimization can be seen by examining the source code of any dealer.com, bz results, reynolds & reynolds, or cobalt site. What is even more disturbing is that the keywords in these meta tags are often the most general and therefore some of the most competitive keywords in the industry. As a poignant example, my current client's old site did not contain the words "west palm beach" or "used cars" in its keyword list. These keywords were the

How To Become A Pharmacist
If you've decided to become a pharmacist, you have made a good choice, because pharmacy is t a field that offers a wide range of opportunities accompanied by good pay and opportunities for progress. How can you become a pharmacist?First of all you must have an appropriate background in science. You should study or should have studied life sciences, health and mathematics at high school. After high school it would be preferable to do a college level course in pre-pharmacy, as many pharmacy colleges require this. This will also help you get the required scores in the admission tests for entry into pharmacy colleges.The next step is to take a regular course in pharmacy form one of the many colleges in the US. A B.S. degree in pharmacy takes a total of five years and a Doctor of Pharmacy would take upwards of six years. This includes the time spent in the pre-pharmacy course work.Pharmacy schools are evaluated to make sure that the educational and professional standards of the accredited pharmacy schools are up to the mark. This is done by the American Council on Pharmaceutical Education. You can choose any one of the accredited institutions to do your pharmacy course from.Once you have your degree you need to get certified by a stateauthority. For this, you will need to pass your state's licensing examination. It does not matter which state you get licensed from, as most states recognize the licenses granted by other states. Almost all the states require licensing as a pre-requisite to practice pharmacy.Passing the licensing examination is not all. You next haveo undergo internship under a licensed pharmacist. After you complete your internship, you are qualified to practice as a pharmacist. Remember that professions like that of a pharmacist require you to be continually upgraded with the latest developments. So if you become a pharmacist, your education never really ends. You may need to attend refresher courses and keep up to date with books and journals.

e to ranking goals of the site. The bottom line is:

2.) Duplicate Content

Many Dealer Websites do great harm to themselves by having their only spiderable content be content that exists in duplicate on the pages of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of similar sites.

Any site containing non-original content will very likely be heavily penalized in the SERPS (search engine result pages), or will be de-listed altogether.

3.)Hidden Sitemaps and Links

4.)Heavy Reliance on Meta Tags

Free Publicity for Restaurants
One of the best ways to get a restaurant free publicity is by taking advantage of events and seizing the opportunity. For example, February 5th is Television Weather Persons' Day! Bet you didn't even know such a day existed, but it does, and it can give you free publicity. How? Weather people are the forgotten people at television stations. Deliver one of your specialties at the station. There's a good chance the weather person will be so delighted with the attention, he or she will mention you on the air. Even if they don't mention you, your goodies will be shared with the others on the staff and you'll get your name out there. When you call to let them know about a newsworthy event (and you will call, won't you?), they'll know about your restaurant.Actually, it's not a bad idea to deliver goodies regularly or periodically to a television station or a radio show host. Remember, nobody ever says no to food. People love to eat, especially when it comes gratis.If your restaurant serves breakfast, or, even if you don't serve breakfast but your kitchen staff comes in early,, here's another idea. Send breakfast (juice, pastries, coffee) each morning to the host of your local Morning Drive show on radio. I guarantee after a few times he'll look forward to it and mention you on the air. Then you can start sending hot meals of pancakes, eggs,etc. He'll constantly talk about you or perhaps even have you on as a guest.If there's a special radio or television show on during the afternoon that everyone watches, send lunch. You don't have to feed the entire staff, but do send enough for the host and a couple of others.I frequently bring my restaurant chefs to a television program where they prepare food on the air. They always bring enough for the staff to devour (and I do mean devour) after the show. The hosts and staff cheer when they see us because they've come to expect good food. And it's easy for me to get the producer to agree to use my clients! You might consider trying to lure a radio program to your restaurant to actually broadcast or possibly even a television program. Years ago Sherman Billingsly made a fortune going on television from his Stork Club. He intro- duced his celebrity guests but you don't have to and you may not even have any celebs. It could be a talk show or music or morning drive, whatever. The host will have to say where he's broadcasting from and people will want to come to the restaurant during the broadcast.Of course, you will

lly thousands of pages created by dealer.com that contain the exact same content. In fact, almost every page created by dealer.com that is in the slightest bit search engine friendly (meaning it was at the very least not built in flash), is keyword content that belongs to hundreds of pages already on the net. The bottom line is:

Many Dealer Websites do great harm to themselves by having their only spiderable content be content that exists in duplicate on the pages of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of similar sites.

Any site containing non-original content will very likely be heavily penalized in the SERPS (search engine result pages), or will be de-listed altogether.

3.)Hidden Sitemaps and Links

4.)Heavy Reliance on Meta Tags

Old Habits Die Hard in the Third Age Years
I spent a lifetime in retailing and I’m still at it in retirement; albeit virtually.You know how it goes.You put up a web page and throw in some stock.Your page begets another and another and another until one day you’re looking at a site that’s got more stock than Bloomingdales.But you can’t stop…The old sourcing skills are making a comeback, sharpening their talons, and coaxing you to duck and dive, bob and weave to find still more stock at even better prices.So you build another virtual retail store and then another and another and another until you’re looking at an empire.Then you diversify.If you are upmarket, you go downmarket.Why not?There no shareholders breathing down your neck or smart ass vice presidents demanding that you pull in the reins.And so you build a bargain basement store and another and another until you’re looking at Wal-Mart.Expending your energy in this way is fun; it’s therapeutic, and if you go about matters in the right way, it doesn’t cost a thin dime apart from hosting fees – and it can be hugely profitable.In between times you are still knocking out the odd bestseller just to keep your hand in.But even now you can’t stop.You dig deep into the inner recesses of the psyche and draw down expertise that has been rusting away for eons in the vaults of the supraconscious.Ideas leap out at you from nowhere; you create courses on creative writing, starting a business, offline marketing, online marketing, maximising on retirement, and what have you.So you build more websites and more websites and more websites and now you are busier than ever you were when you thought you were working.So how am I doing with all these third age activities?I’m not hurting.Most mornings my inbox is crammed with cute little messages like ‘Invoice from Clickbank’ and ‘You have money at PayPal’ and so forth.But don’t take my word for it.Visit one of my stores and judge for yourself.You’ll find an address in the resource box…

a flash movie is fairly easy considering Flash typically floats above any site content when properly positioned, and is desirably for many designers wishing to create a seamless and immersive flash experience for their visitors. This has largely been the goal of many dealer designers such as BZ results. While often beautifully designed, the templates set up by such companies are often designed in such a way that links, sitemaps, and often keyword rich text is hidden from human eyes in an attempt to lure search engine spiders into indexing deeper pages. This type of design trick may have been a work around solution in the past, but it has become a major no-no in the SEO world. A basic rule of thumb is that search engine spiders have a great aversion to any attempts at trickery. This means that if you have hidden content on your site, whether it be links to other pages or just text, you will be penalized in the SERPS, or de-listed. Search engines see hidden content as an attempt to trick search engines into thinking a page is about something other than is being showed to that site's visitors. As you can imagine, in the eyes of a search engine, this makes such a site irrelevant to all search terms. The bottom line is:

4.)Heavy Reliance on Meta Tags

Monks Make Mac Movies (Magnificently!)
Thanks to Apple, complete amateurs can make impressive video productions and share them with friends on DVDs. All that is needed is a digital video camera, a Macintosh computer with a Superdrive (one which will burn DVDs), and the iLife suite of applications which normally come with Macs, and of course, a bit of good taste and discretion. This I know from actual experience, and I’ll try to share how it can be done.In February of 2003, monks from Atma Jyoti Ashram, a small Hindu monastery in Southern California, went on a pilgrimage to India, visiting holy places throughout the country. Being lovers of India, we wished to record outstanding events from out journey so we could share them with friends and relive them ourselves through our videos and photos. We took over twenty hours of video in our two month sojourn, and when we returned, we faced the task of editing the footage to make viewing more manageable.We had a 1 Ghz iMac and iMovie–Apple’s entry level movie editing application–so we proceeded to hook our Mini-DV camera up to the Mac with a fire-wire cable and import footage using iMovie’s import feature. There was a lot of footage that was either poorly filmed, too long, or uninteresting in retrospect. That still left lots of film to work with. We began by getting an overview of what was available, and putting together a mental picture of the story we wanted to tell with the video. Then, by placing bits of video in the “timeline” of clips, the story we wanted to tell began to take shape.To learn the best way to make a video that did not have the hallmarks of amateurism, a search on Google yielded gobs of tutorials, tips, and techniques for using iMovie, and video editing in general.When the clips were arranged to our satisfaction in the timeline, we proceeded to add audio and music (using iTunes–iMovie is well integrated with this and other iLife applications) to supplement the audio on the clips so as to make for more continuity. Then we added transitions (which iMovie provides in abundance) between clips to give the video a more polished look. Then came the titles, subtitles, and effects, which began to turn what started as a mess of random footage into a cohesive, semi-professional looking (O.K., at least not totally amateurish) bit of video. Then came the agonizing step of taking an objective look at the end results and pruning out footage to make it more succinct, then tweaking features to give it the final finished look.After creating a few short features of this sort, we then used iD

Many Dealer Websites still see meta tags as a viable means of communicating a site's content, and remain for many sites the only method exposure.

The use of meta tags in SEO is, at best, a slightly useful way of optimizing a page, if the proper keywords have been chosen, and at worst, completely worthless as a tool in increasing search engine position or relevance.

5.)Poor Keyword Research/Choices/Optimization

As was mentioned in my treatment of the use of meta tags, the majority of dealer websites fail to take into account the large variety of relevant keywords available and optimize only for the most highly competitive and least targeted terms. For sites like the one being optimized for my client, a concentration on the "long tail" is the most effective method in gaining quality traffic. What this means in terms of keyword choice and seo is that the keywords which are of most importance are not those that get the most searches and are the most competitive. What this means is that the most highly qualified keywords, and those most likely to bring in buying customers are those keywords that are on the long tail, bring in less searches, but are more relevant to our consumers. This means that choosing the key phrase "used cars in west palm beach Florida" would be much more effective in bringing customers than the term "used cars," which is arguably a very competitive phrase. Additionally, keyword optimization for a word such as jaguar would not be nearly as effective in our treatment as, say, "jaguar s type Florida." Many dealer websites ignore altogether the need to optimize both for specific key phrases, as well as specifically targeting and tailoring keywords locally. The more specific and tailored the keyword, the better. Although such terms will undoubtedly generate less traffic, they will be more highly targeted. With effort, a large list can be compiled and can be used to generate traffic that is cheaper (when used in pay-per-click campaigns) and also much more effective. The bottom line is:

Many Dealer Websites are unwisely optimizing for keyword that are too competitive and not targeted (both in terms of attracting customers who are ready to buy and in terms of attracting local clientel.)

Keywords that are not well targeted are useless. They result in high exit rates, wasted resources and WASTED MONEY.

6.)Major Design Flaws (not anticipating the customers needs)

As anyone involved in the new Web 2.0 Culture will tell you, the internet is shifting. Internet users are increasingly hungry in their search for information. They are finicky and impatient and are most concerned with finding the information they are looking for in a an efficient manner. The days of flashing lights, rotating banners, animated gifs and marquees is far behind us, and the days of flash intros and bandwidth hungry animations seems to fading away as well. To replace the old web is a return to simplicity, a return to what matters most on the internet; information. In some ways, many dealer website have taken this sentiment to heart in that they have begun to include a large wealth of information about individual cars on their sites. In fact, this was a major selling point for my client in his initial decision to outsource his website development to one of the major dealer site developers. Where Dealer websites have largely missed the boat, however, is in creating sites that are very flashy and seem good in their attempt to attract customers, but are off the mark in anticipating what their customer is truly looking for when they visit a website. Each hit a dealer site receives is an opportunity for that site to convince the customer of the trustworthiness, helpfulness, and value that can be offered by that dealership. In print and television advertising flashy advertising has worked well, but on the internet their has been a major shift. People have learned to tune out anything that tries to hard to grab their attention. Nobody clicks on those popups claiming you've won $10,000, and peoples eyes are no longer drawn or remain fixed to text that scrolls. Web users, as the philosophy of Web 2.0 emphasizes, are more drawn to well organized, simple to understand information. We skim the pages we read, switch windows quickly, and ignore content and information that is not readily at hand. I would even go as far to say that any extraneous material is not only unnecessary, but is an obstacle in helping customers to find the information that they are essentially searching for.

Additionally, many Dealers make the mistake of trying to mirror their real life presence on the internet, meaning their website become the equivalent of the typical ways dealerships have hooked customers in the past. A Dealer Website should not be giant stickers and balloons in cyberspace. While a loud looking sign and gimmicks may work well to draw in drive by customers, it doesn't work well on the internet anymore. The bottom line is:

Dealers waste their customer's time and insult their intelligence by trying to hook them on the internet the same way you hook them on their lots

The majority of web users are less impressed by flashy design an

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As recruiters, hiring managers and business owners, we need to continue to find and utilize new ways to find, attract and correspond with potential job candidates.

The conventional wisdom says that you have 3 seconds to get a visitor's attention and make the sale. But is that really true? This is a discussion based on years of website design and marketing.

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Will You Add? - Top Ten SEO Mistakes of Dealer Websites-Used Car Dealers Specifically

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