Short Live Telecomsก Monopoly

Short Live Telecomsก Monopoly

by: Patrizia Demaria

กFree will cannot be debated, but only experienced like a colour or the taste of potatoes.ก

My question: can we really experience it?

In a world in which everybody talks of nothing else than Democracy, is our wolrd slightly democratic?

Have we really come a long way through History?

Or are we just repeating the same mistakes all over, just changing the pattern of them?

ก We go on discovering that we are this, that and other things and sometimes we have astounding experiences. We are unfinished, we are growing and changing.

Yet that future personality which we are to be in a yearกs timeis already there, only it is in the shadow.

These potentialities naturally belong to the dark side of the ego.

We are all aware of what we have been, but we are not aware of what we are going to be.ก

But do we really change and improve or we are just the same all over?

ก In point of fact what is interesting about people is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask.

It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff.

Where we differ from each other is purely accidental:in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearance, tucks of the habit and the like.

The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear.

Sooner or later one comes to the dreadful unioversal thing called Human Nature.ก

For two thousand years or more man has been subjected to a systematic effort to transform him into an ascetic animal.

He remains a pleasure seeking animal.

And some are pleasure seeking animals at any cost.

Cheating, robbing, killing is nothing that a mean to achieve it.

The biggest the Corporation, the more polithically involved, the more cheating and crooking.

Look at the Politicians of today, at the big Monopoly corporations…

When will we wake up?

They try to shut our mouths and minds with any kind of stupid fullfilling devices, but still keeping the hand ( and the profit) in it.

Once they said man built his own pleasures, now they say he has to pay for them.

They also say it takes gut to be a dreamer and a visionary, I think on the contrary it comes naturally, either you are or you are not.

Either you see reality or you see what they want you to see.

The economy of means is founded on the richness of thought.

I have just started my personal peaceful war and I am looking for people who can share my dreams.

Short live the Telecom monopoly!

http://www.worldonip.com/community

About The Author

Patrizia is an ebook publisher, her website has more than 700 free ebooks for the TK3 reader

[email protected]

This article was posted on November 28, 2003

by Patrizia Demaria

Can the Average Person Earn a Stable Income Operat

Can the Average Person Earn a Stable Income Operating an Online Business?

by: David Moore

Is a workathome business using your computer as your income tool realistic for the average person? First, let me say that I do not believe in the notion of an ขaverageข person. There is no such thing. If there were, we wouldn’t have different acumens, different personalities, and different talents. My wife has many exceptional talents. She is extremely intuitive and seems to be able to see right through anyone who is not what they appear to be. But some of the basics (I think) of comprehension have passed her by. After 33 years of marriage I only learned last week that she was unaware of the procedure of putting gas into the car without having to squeeze the lever on the nozzle and keep holding it down. She didn’t realize you could slip the lever onto a notch and the flow of gas would shut off automatically when your tank is full. And she’s always fulfilled the function putting gas into her car, or ours, when we only had one car and she was driving it.

So on this very cold day she asked if I would mind taking her car to the station down the street to fill it with gas. She told me her hands got too cold when holding down the lever and she couldn’t find her gloves. UNBELIEVABLE! How could anyone not know you don’t have to keep holding the lever down with your hand? But you know what, I’ll bet there are lots of similar functions we take for granted whose utility others do not understand. At the same time, I’m sure there are things we don’t understand, or that we do the hard way when a much simpler application is available to us.

What’s my point? If we keep thinking the same way we’ve always thought, we’ll keep getting the same results we’ve always gotten. Einstein said it best. ขThe significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.ข

Having dispelled the notion of ขaverageข let me say that yes it is true that a workathome business using your computer as your income tool is realistic for anyone who can read and write and perform the basic functions of life whether you keep holding the lever down, or you do as I do and slip the lever into the notch on the nozzle while you get back in the car and listen to ball game on the radio until the tank is full.

But regardless of your acumen, your personality, or your unique talents, to be successful with an online business you have to have three important qualities, 1) a willingness to learn, 2) patience, and 3) focus.

You can’t just jump into an online business opportunity, no matter what it is and no matter what is promised and expect to earn money without first learning something about it. So if you’re unwilling to learn don’t get started. You’ll lose money and you’ll get frustrated and angry with yourself and everyone else.

Secondly, if you expect to earn $4000 your first month in an online business you’ll be extremely disappointed. If that’s what you are promised then that’s your first clue that what you are considering is NOT a reputable business. Now if you’re internet business savvy and you can bring along contacts and methods from previous ventures then it’s a possibility. But for the vast majority of us it’s like trying to make a call on a cell phone with no battery. You can punch in all the numbers you want but you won’t get through to anyone.

This leads me to my third point, FOCUS. Depending on where you go for the statistics, as many as 97% of people who start an online workathome business drop out before they have been in the business for even six months. It takes time to learn and patience to put that learning into practice. So if you’re unwilling to stay focused, if you’d rather watch ขAmerican Idolข every night so you can get in your vote, or if you’d rather stay glued to the TV to watch your favorite team win some and lose some every night you won’t succeed. Why?

Back to the simple principle. If you keep thinking the same way you’ve always thought you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten. So making money online is really not about acumen, or personality, or talent. Anyone can succeed and realize significant monthly income through the power of FOCUS.

I was reading a passage of scripture recently from the book of Jeremiah. This is what it says. ขIf you have raced with men on foot and they have worn you out, how can you compete with horses? If you stumble in safe country, how can you manage in the thickets?ข YOU HAVE TO STAY FOCUSED!

About The Author

David Moore is a member of the Wealth Online Website system. He is a home based online business entrepreneur, but his first love is his wife Cheri and their three grown children (and one awesome grandson). Dave teaches in the Social Science Department at a University (parttime) and has served on the administrtative staff of a faithbased humanitarian aid organization. He has completed post graduate programs in both Cross Cultural Communications and Higher Education Administration. He believes strongly that the application of all selfgenerated wealth must include a provision for giving back to the commmunity, the church, and other worthy causes. If you would like more information on his online business, please visit his website at: DavidMoore.ws.

This article is not copyrighted.

[email protected]

This article was posted on April 20

by David Moore

Five Knockout Affiliate Tips

Five Knockout Affiliate Tips

by: Nicholas Dixon

Here are five ขhook em in the jawข affiliate tips that really work. Implement them and see how well they work for you.

(1) Develop a positive and realistic mindset. Do you believe that you can get rich quick or that your business will take time to grow? Those who believe in the online hype are the ones who normally lose. Think positive and know in your heart you can earn an income from your efforts.

(2) Too much information or the lack of it can be dangerous. Not using the knowledge that you have gain can stop your business from getting off the ground and not having the right information can have the same effect.

(3) Market your programs with Google Adwords. This is a powerful strategy you can use and as long as you earn more in commissions than your PPC costs, then you are getting something for nothing.

(4) Write your own ads, articles and reviews instead of the preformatted ones offered by affiliate programs. This will set you apart from all the other affiliates in the same program.

(5) Make sure your affiliate program matches the content of your website or newsletter. If you have marketing content then you should promote marketing products on that page. Think of it like matching ads to the page content like the way Adsense does. There may a few exceptions to the rule though, even Adsense does it some time.

There you go. A few tips to help you with your affiliate programs whether you are looking for your first check or to boost your current earnings. Try them all or even a couple and test and track your results. I am sure Lennox Lewis would be proud of your hooks and jabs

Copyright © Nicholas Dixon

About The Author

Nicholas Dixon

Get two internet courses, articles, a newsletter subscription plus info about a trendy island town all free at http://WWW.Oceanroc.com

[email protected]

This article was posted on February 04

by Nicholas Dixon

Running Your Online Business

Running Your Online Business

by: Jeremy Gislason

I had a very nice conversation with one of our members a while ago regarding her business. She has been in business for 11 years with her current company, which is a traditional business started long before the Internet came around.

She has been successful for those 11 years and is still doing very well. She started her online business several months ago with the same products as her traditional business. The problem was her online business was only costing her money and to date she has made no sales, but has spent over $1,500 in advertising and marketingjust for the online side of her business alone.

Here is a news flash. Business is Business! I do not care whether you are on the Internet or in a shopping mall. The same basic principles apply to both businesses.

You have a product

You need to advertise to get customers to buy your product.

You need to support your customers who buy your product from the advertising you did.

You need to build a loyal customer following, so you can maintain a profitable business.

Many people believe that because they are selling online that some of these steps can either be skipped or they need to go overboard in one area or another. Customer service on the Internet is for the most partnonexistent. Companies that tell you they will get back to you in 48 72 hours might as well tell you they are closed.

The bottom line regarding selling online, whether you have your own product or you are just going to focus on reselling affiliate programs, you will need to advertise, and you will need to take care of your clients.

There is no magic about online selling. As an example, our members purchased an ISOR membership for a reason and other people will purchase for similar reasons. We work very hard at ISORegister, Inc. to ensure our members and treated fairly. We provide tollfree phone numbers, 7days a week support, we answer our emails the same day we receive them. These are a few of the things we do that 99% of the online companies do not.

You do not have to get your own tollfree phone number or work 7 days a week. What you do have to realize is that if you are reselling an affiliate program or your own product that you are in business for yourself.

You have a choice as to how you want to run your business. You can sit back and wait for sales to happen or you can go out and make sales happen. Run your home business like you expect to be treated by other businesses. Do not spam people; do not buy a bunch of worthless hits, do not pay someone to get you posted in the top search engines.

Run your new home business just like a real company because it is a real company and you have a real opportunity to be successful or to fail. The only difference between an online business and a traditional business is location and in some cases inventory. Everything else is about the same. You have a product and you want to sell that product to people who want your product.

Think about this…Remember, building a business takes time and patience. If you are promoting affiliate programs do not sit around waiting for someone to find your affiliate page. In addition, too many people think that once they have put up their own website the traffic is just going to pour in. This is not true as anyone with a website knows but it is a reason so many people get frustrated and quit. You need to go out and promote your website or affiliate program and you need to be aggressive in your approach.

There is nothing magical about running your Internet business. This business is run the same as any traditional business and it will succeed or fail depending on what you put into it.

Read any book or bio from anyone who has ever started and run a business and you will see that everyone put a lot of time and energy into their business. Do the same and treat your own business or affiliated businesses like your own and you will do fine.

Copyright 2004 Jeremy Gislason

About The Author

Jeremy Gislason, Vice President of ISORegister, Inc. has over 15 years of offline and online business experience. ISORegister provides business and marketing solutions whether your business is 100% online or you run a traditional offline business such as a retail store, restaurant, or service.

http://www.isoregister.com/9810354341/jusco/isoregister.html

This article was posted on December 21, 2004

by Jeremy Gislason

Finding The Cheap Clicks

Finding The Cheap Clicks

by: Henry EldridgeDoyle

As anyone who uses Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising in their marketing campaign knows, getting your ad copy on the front page of a search results listing is becoming more expensive by the day. It’s a new phenomenon known as ‘keyword fatigue’, and itกs down to the overwhelming success of programs like Googleกs AdWords. As more and more advertisers realise the benefits of this form of traffic generation, so the number of people bidding for the same keywords increases, and the bid prices climb accordingly. Great news if you are a publisher taking a cut of the revenue, but not so welcome for those doing the bidding.

So are the days of 5 cents a click now just a distant memory? Not at all, there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of keyword phrases out there for minimum cost, all it takes is a little more effort to use them. To understand how this can be done, with Google AdWords in particular, it is first necessary to understand how ad positions are determined.

Googleกs PPC program, like their core search engine, places a great deal of emphasis on advertisment relevance. When a web surfer types keywords into the search box, Google wants the ad that most closely matches that phrase to be shown nearest the top of the list not just the ad bidding the highest amount of money. It mutiplies bid price by keyword relevance, and that means that by careful selection of your keywords, it is possible to be placed above competitors and pay only 1 cent more than they are (Google doesn’t necessarily charge the maxium amount you bid, only enough to put you ahead).

There are three simple ways you can trump your competitors with your keyword selection:

1. Longer phrases. There are huge numbers of people bidding on a loose term like กmortgage brokerก, but fewer people bidding on a tighter phrase like กmortgage broker in texasก. If a searcher types กmortgage broker in texasก into Google, and you have that phrase in your keyword list, your ad will be deemed more relevant than anyone just using กmortgage brokerก in their own list which means a cheaper click for you! Of course, there are fewer searches for mortgage brokers specifically in Texas than for mortgage brokers in general, so itกs necessary to build a large list of similar keyphrases targetting many locations.

2. Closer matching. Just because you might type กin car satellite radioก into Google, doesn’t mean every surfer will do the same. Somebody else searching for the same thing may well enter กsatellite radio in carก, or กradio in car satelliteก, and so on. If your ad contains every variation, it may trump a competing ad which lists only the first example. In other words, having just the keywords in your list isn’t necessarily enough having them in the same order a searcher enters them will give your ad a better relevance score.

3. The final (Google specific) method is to ensure that you wrap every keyword or keyphrase in both quotes and brackets. Again, this means that if someone enters an exact term you have listed, your ad will beat a competing ad that has the same term but without the brackets or quotes.

Clearly, building keyword lists in this way can be more time consuming than simply selecting a few generic words that describe your product or service, but free tools such as those at http://www.keywordlinker.com can make the process much quicker than doing it manually.

Cheap keyphrases are still there for the taking, the winners in PPC now will be those who put in the effort to catch them.

About The Author

Henry EldridgeDoyle is an internet marketeer, and site developer at http://www.keywordtoolkit.com.

This article was posted on September 29, 2004

by Henry EldridgeDoyle

How To Really Make Money With Datafeed Merchants.

How To Really Make Money With Datafeed Merchants.

by: Konstantin Goudkov

I am not going to describe what a product feed (or a datafeed) is. There is a lot of information out there about how to use one to build sites. Instead, I want to talk about how you can actually make more sales with datafeed sites.
The program that I manage offers a product feed, and I get a chance to see a sad picture of many good affiliates wasting their potential.
Here is my advice from the affiliate managerกs perspective.
Whenever you join (or think bout joining) a program, you need to look for two things:

Temporary or permanent opportunities
Flaws of a merchant

Here is an example of an opportunity that was created by an outside factor.
Recently, we got removed from the Yahoo index because of a penalty. I have no idea when (or if) we will get included back in, but I do know that it makes one decision much easier for our affiliates.
Judging by the numerous posts on various SEOrelated message boards, it looks like Google and Yahoo use very different algorithms to rank pages. So for any given site, you have a choice to make. You can optimize for Yahoo, for Google, or for both.
Since Yahoo and Google use different algorithms, it is going to be hard to optimize the same set of pages for both of those engines at the same time, unless you employ heavy cloaking. And the way I see it, for an affiliate, it is better to appear high on one search engine than to appear low on both of them in an attempt to optimize for different algorithms at the same time.
Imagine that you are one of our affiliates. Given the information I just told you, shouldn’t you concentrate on Yahoo for that datafeed site that is being used to promote our products?
Why spend (at least) half of your time and resources on optimizing for Google when you know that we are nowhere to be found in Yahoo?
You have to have an extremely well linked and optimized site to get ahead of the merchant for the exact productname search terms. The merchant is your biggest obstacle when it comes to the search engine traffic. So if there is a route that lets you get around that obstacle take it!
Most of our wellperforming affiliates did just that. Either intentionally or unintentionally, they ended up making much more money by appearing high in Yahoo results, while not being ranked high in Google.
So on a practical side of things, here is what you should do.
For your existing merchants, check if they are removed from the index in any of the major search engines, and if they are, then start reading and implementing SEO tips for that particular engine.
And if you are thinking about joining a program and can’t decide between several merchants, then check if any of them is not in the index of either Yahoo or Google. If you find a merchant like that drop everything else you are doing and jump on that program.
As far as theory goes, this was just a simple, but specific example of what you should look for to make your efforts pay off. There are many different opportunities to get ahead in existing programs with datafeed sites; you just have to look for them.
Now, letกs talk about flaws of merchants and how you can exploit them to make more money and help consumers at the same time.
I will give another specific example, but you should be able to apply this concept to many different programs.
Our site has one huge structural flaw: we only list products by productoriented categories.
In other words, there is no way to navigate our site by a specific occasion or by the purchasing intent of a visitor.
You can follow a path like:
widgets > wooden widgets > red wooden widgets
This setup works fine for some type of shoppers, but is a complete turnoff for others.
And the problem is that most affiliates simply mirror the catalog structure of a merchant according to their feed.
But if you structured your site to list widgets as:

widgets for birthdays
widgets for girlfriends
widgets for those who are over 50
the Independence Day widgets
etc.

then you would attract different type of shoppers. You would no longer compete with the merchant, but instead you would complement them.
A visitor who is looking for a gift for his 50something friend and has no idea that a red wooden widget would be perfect, will not travel down the path laid out by our catalog. So if he gets to our home page, we simply lose a sale. And if your datafeedbased site follows the same structure you lose as sale as well.
Also, since the visitor does not know that he really wants a red wooden widget, he we not use those keywords while searching for a present on the search engines.
But if you attracted that visitor to your site, presented him with ideas for older friendsก birthday gifts and guided him to that specific widgetกs page then we would make a sale, you would make a commission, and the visitor (turned customer) would get his present with much less searching around. Everyone wins.
Such approach takes more work than simply cloning the merchantกs site with a feed, but affiliates who actually do something to complement merchant instead competing with them make a lot more money. After all, if you create a copy of a merchantกs site you are not only competing with the merchant, you are also competing with all of their affiliates that use the same feed in the same way.
Copyright 2004 Konstantin Goudkov
Konstantin Goudkov,

[email protected]

http://www.GenericGifts.com

2500+ products in a data feed. 20% commission.

5 years cookie expiration.

About The Author

Konstantin Goudkov is an affiliate manager with www.GenericGifts.com. He specializes on visitor tracking, splitrun testing, and discovering ways to increase conversion rates for different presentation / action scenarios.

This article was posted on May 13, 2004

by Konstantin Goudkov

Creating Your Own Product: Testing Your Market And

Creating Your Own Product: Testing Your Market And Finishing The Product

by: Ronald Gibson

Now that you know what you want to write about, the next step in the process is to gauge the amount of interest there is in your upcoming product.

You can also do a quick search on The Dowser (download the free version at http://www.keywordempire.com/keywordempire.exe) to see what types of searches folks are doing with regards to the subject you have chosen to write about. Simply type in the keywords of your subject or just type in your subject itself to see what กpopsก up. This will let you know just how many people are interested in learning more on that particular subject. And it will also give you some great information about the ratio of current websites on the subject to those people searching for it.

But thatกs not the only way to perform testing on your subject matter of choice.

Forums are a fantastic way to ask some questions about your subject and get real answers from real people. Plus itกs a wonderful way to find out how much interest there is from others about your topic. To go one step further, you could ask specific questions and incorporate those into your ebook chapters based on what responses you get.

But remember, we’re only trying to find information that can be added to, or enhance, our niche product that weกve hopefully at this point already started. Also a good tip is when writing you don’t have to necessarily write in order. Of course, keep the product in a specific order by using your chapter outline so that it has a general flow once itกs all finished and compiled. But behind the scenes while you are writing it all up, it may be easier for you to write on a certain portion of the product before another, without following a กbeginning to endก style.

The best way to create a popular กnicheก category information product is to combine that which you have knowledge of, like a personal hobby or your current career, with those terms, or keywords, that are at the top of the search engines. But you can create anything you want, whether itกs popular or not and still get people to purchase it with a little trick that many successful internet marketers, including ourselves, use. And that is…

Offer your customers a way to make money with your product!! Whether it be giving them resale rights with their purchase, offering them an exclusive joint venture partnership to become an affiliate and earn a percentage of the profits when reselling your product, or giving them several other resale rights products from within your product that enhance your product and stick with the subject matter the best you can. Giving them something that they can use to make money with will indeed get you more sales.

Remember, nothing is ever written in stone when it comes to the internet. Since things change frequently there is always a chance that something that was popular yesterday won’t be tomorrow. Keep this in mind when writing too. A quick example is that many older book titles on marketing and selfimprovement have been storming onto the ebook scene as of late with the trend of Public Domain product compilation. So if you think that your subject won’t have ANY audience, you couldn’t be more wrong!

Chances are good that someone will want to read what you have written. Even if no one has heard of you. That doesn’t matter. What does matter is that everyone has a unique way of looking at and solving certain problems. No two people see things the same. My point is that even if there are hundreds of ebooks, special reports, or articles that cover the very same topic that you have written about it won’t be filled with the exact same information. Thatกs why you see literally thousands of ebooks covering the same subject matter, but often adding the authorกs own unique spin on it.

And if you are worried about the length of your particular product, don’t be. There are more important things to be concerned with than something as trivial as length. Believe me, there are some marketers out there that sell 515 page reports that sell very well for them and for a reasonable price too. How do they do it? Because they focus on the WAY in which they have provided the information to their customers, and that they are providing good, highquality, useful information to their customers, site visitors, or newsletter subscribers. You can do the exact same thing with your products so long as you too are providing good, highquality,useful information on your subject matter of choice.

Always remember to be original with your writing. A good way to be sure you are in fact being original is to write how you speak. Don’t use a huge amount of big words you yourself don’t understand and expect your readers to! Writing how you speak will also make the task of writing a lot easier for you. Especially if you think of it as if you were creating your product for a good friend, or your significant other.

And never forget that nothing is perfect. Sure, feel free to reread, revise, and retype your product. But don’t just let it sit there and do nothing with it because you feel itกs not good enough. Get your product out there, even if there are a couple of typos or a point you forgot to cover. It doesn’t matter. What matters most is that you finished it the best you could and you weren’t afraid to get it out there to the public.

กYou don’t have to get it perfect; you just have to get it going…ก

Once you make it past creating your first product, any others you create will be a breeze. Getting started is always the hard part so cross this hurdle first!

Copyright © 2005 Ronald Gibson

About The Author

Ronald Gibson is a Web Designer and Internet Marketer. He is the Webmaster of AffiliateUtopia.com, which offers information about some of the best money making opportunities on the Web. For more information, visit: http://www.affiliateutopia.com/ and http://www.affiliateutopia.com/blog/

This article was posted on September 08

by Ronald Gibson

The Medium and the Message

The Medium and the Message

by: Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.

A debate is raging in epublishing circles: should content be encrypted and protected (the Barnes and Noble or Digital goods model) or should it be distributed freely and thus serve as a form of viral marketing (Seth Godinกs กideavirusก)? Publishers fear that freely distributed and costfree กcrackedก ebooks will cannibalize print books to oblivion.

The more paranoid point at the music industry. It failed to coopt the emerging peertopeer platforms (Napster) and to offer a viable digital assets management system with an equitable sharing of royalties. The results? A protracted legal battle and piracy run amok. กPublishersก goes this creed กare positioned to incorporate encryption and protection measures at the very inception of the digital publishing industry. They ought to learn the lesson.ก

But this view ignores a vital difference between sound and text. In music, what matter are the song or the musical piece. The medium (or carrier, or packing) is marginal and interchangeable. A CD, an audio cassette, or an MP3 player are all fine, as far as the consumer is concerned. The listener bases his or her purchasing decisions on sound quality and the faithfulness of reproduction of the listening experience (for instance, in a concert hall). This is a very narrow, rational, measurable and quantifiable criterion.

Not so with text.

Content is only one element of many of equal footing underlying the decision to purchase a specific textกcarrierก (medium). Various media encapsulating IDENTICAL text will still fare differently. Hence the failure of CDROMs and elearning. People tend to consume content in other formats or media, even if it is fully available to them or even owned by them in one specific medium. People prefer to pay to listen to live lectures rather than read freely available online transcripts. Libraries buy print journals even when they have subscribed to the full text online versions of the very same publications. And consumers overwhelmingly prefer to purchase books in print rather than their eversions.

This is partly a question of the slow demise of old habits. Ebooks have yet to develop the userfriendliness, platformindependence, portability, brows ability and many other attributes of this ingenious medium, the Gutenberg tome. But it also has to do with marketing psychology. Where text (or text equivalents, such as speech) is concerned, the medium is at least as important as the message. And this will hold true even when ebooks catch up with their print brethren technologically.

There is no doubting that finally ebooks will surpass print books as a medium and offer numerous options: hyperlinks within the ebook and without it to web content, reference works, etc., embedded instant shopping and ordering links, divergent, userinteractive, decision driven plotlines, interaction with other ebooks (using Bluetooth or another wireless standard), collaborative authoring, gaming and community activities, automatically or periodically updated content, ,multimedia capabilities, database, Favourites and History Maintenance (records of reading habits, shopping habits, interaction with other readers, plot related decisions and much more), automatic and embedded audio conversion and translation capabilities, full wireless piconetworking and scatternetworking capabilities and more.

The same textual content will be available in the future in various media. Ostensibly, consumers should gravitate to the featurerich and much cheaper ebook. But they won’t because the medium is as important as the text message. It is not enough to own the same content, or to gain access to the same message. Ownership of the right medium does count. Print books offer connectivity within an historical context (tradition). Ebooks are cold and impersonal, alienated and detached. The printed word offers permanence. Digital text is ephemeral (as anyone whose writings perished in the recent dot.com bloodbath or Deja takeover by Google can attest). Printed volumes are a whole sensorium, a sensual experience olfactory and tactile and visual. Ebooks are one dimensional in comparison. These are differences that cannot be overcome, not even with the advent of digital กinkก on digital กpaperก. They will keep the print book alive and publishersก revenues flowing.

People buy printed matter not merely because of its content. If this were true ebooks will have won the day. Print books are a packaged experience, the substance of life. People buy the medium as often and as much as they buy the message it encapsulates. It is impossible to compete with this mistique. Safe in this knowledge, publishers should let go and impose on ebooks กencryptionก and กprotectionก levels as rigorous as they do on the their print books. The latter are here to stay alongside the former. With the proper pricing and a modicum of trust, ebooks may even end up promoting the old and trusted print versions.

About The Author

Sam Vaknin is the author of กMalignant Self Love Narcissism Revisitedก and กAfter the Rain How the West Lost the Eastก. He is a columnist in กCentral Europe Reviewก, United Press International (UPI) and ebookweb.org and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com. Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.

His web site: http://samvak.tripod.com

This article was posted on February 2, 2002

by Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.

Removed From Google Index, Why ?

Removed From Google Index, Why ?

by: Tiberiu Bazavan

1. Google Statement

กYour page was manually removed from our index, because it did not conform with the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We will not comment on the individual reasons a page was removed and we do not offer an exhaustive list of practices that can cause removal. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text that can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index. If you think your site may fall into this category, you might try กcleaning upก the page and sending a reinclusion request to [email protected]. We do not make any guarantees about if or when we will reinclude your site.ก

SO : Firs of all No one other than Google could tell you precisely why your site was removed. And Google doesn’t do that sort of thing. The best that can be had is an analysis yielding red flags that could lead to your siteกs removal.

2. No SEO can guarantee inclusion in Google after he/she analyze the site.

3. The search engines are not terribly specific about the practices that are considered to be SE spam, however, Google offers a short list:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.

Don’t send automated queries to Google.

Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.

Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

Avoid กdoorwayก pages created just for search engines, or other กcookie cutterก approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content

Most of ‘the restก is covered by:

กAvoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether youกd feel comfortable explaining what youกve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, กDoes this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?กก

กDon’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your siteกs ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or กbad neighborhoodsก on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.ก

กGoogle may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here, (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of wellknown web sites). Itกs not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it.ก

Webmaster Guidelines | Quality

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Yahoo Search is even more restrictive in their definitions of spam and undesirables, however, concentration on detection and removal has not been receiving quite as much focus. It would be an excellent idea to be aware of and conform to Yกs restrictions, since Yahoo has no reacceptance policy. Banishment has been, in every case Iกve heard of, permanent. [http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions05.html]

4. Crosslinking / Interlinking

The latest practice apparently added to the list of undesirables is crosslinking or interlinking. Made for the SE sites are linked together in an attempt to artificially inflate PageRank.

กCrosslinking If your entire site is sitting at PR0, one possibility is a crosslinking penalty. Sometimes a webmaster who controls two or more websites will place links from every page of one website to every page of the other sites to increase the PageRank ofall the sites. If detected, this will quickly incur a penalty if not an outright ban from the Google index.ก

Whyกs My Sites PageRank Now Zero

http://www.rlrouse.com/pagerankpenalty.html

Among other indicators, factors which might prompt discovery of crosslinkage could be:

Same content verbatim

Same cookie structure

Javascript function names

Linked CSS and JS files

CSS class names

Same contact information posted on websites

Common name servers

Same/similar images and/or graphics theme

Site hosted on same IP/block

Whois information matching

Alexa contact information matching

Interlinking of domains

Common backlinks (indirect crosslinking)

Same credit card used for anything

Login from same IP to separate accounts

Residual cookies from past logins

Similar file names or linking/directory structures

Code Comments

It used to be considered relatively safe to have as many inbound links as possible. Regardless of source. Over the course of this year, that assumption has spawned link purchase, and hidden crosslinking. Nowsites must also be very careful about inbound links. The crosslinked and purchased links networks have been devalued. Sites linking to those types of networks have reported decreasing traffic, and finally,over the past month or so, a number of such sites have been completely dropped from the index.

Whether this was a manual removal or an algorithm shift can’t be determined without proprietary information from inside Google, which we already know isn’t possible. Remember Googleกs SE spam fighting philosophy: กGoogle prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize handtohand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

The crosslinking tactics alone used are consistent with those of other sites that are considered spam and may have been reported as such. If Google should target those characteristics based on spam reports for other sites, then it is not surprising that homeboundmortgage would be caught by the same adjustments to the algorithm or filters, and be dropped from the index as well.

5. Over Optimization Penalty

This summer, a new term has emerged, Over Optimization Penalty, which refers to the tweaks most SEO make to pages to กfine tuneก them to the top of their keyword categories. Page length, Keyword Density, bold, underline, italic, H1 formulas, link text, and various other small elements are manipulated until the perfect balance is struck, and the SEOกd site contains just a small bit more than the other sites in the top 10. It can be a full time job keeping a site at that level with these small changes. Google has lowered the bar, now effectively saying that high keyword densities, and many of the other SEO tweaks are evidence of too much SEO. Filters are created, and such sites drop in the rankings. Sites that have been playing too close to the edge are penalized.

ALT Text

Keyword in Alt text Not only does this contribute to ideal word count, it may show keyword stuffing in the ALT tags. To clean up, switch to clear text navigation.

Old Link Exchanges

Pages stored in the Internet Archive may indicate the site was once involved in some questionable link exchanges.

Duplicate Content

All duplicate pages should be eliminated. Link just one page consistently.

Now, once all these changes have been made, what to do. You can, of course, try writing [email protected]. กWe do not make any guarantees about if or when we will reinclude your site.ก

Webmaster Guidelines | Not Listed

www.google.com/webmasters/2.html

I personally know of only 4 sites that have been reincluded after manual removal. In each case, the site was crawled regularly, but was not included in the index for over six months. I don’t know the specific reason for this, of course, but I would imagine it might be some sort of a testing period. How strong is a webmasterกs resolve to walk the straight and narrow, despite lack of indexing.

So, assuming best case, you might be looking at six months or more before your sites are reincluded in the index. Once delisted, I also imagine such sites must stay squeaky clean. An SE might forgive once, but seldom twice.

6. Looking Ahead

VERY worst case, permanent exclusion from organic results on Google. Recovery basically means starting over, nearly from scratch. Plan a 1218 month Overture or AdWords campaign, originally targeting the current website. Pick more specifically targeted keyword phrase initially, to keep costs down. I realize this is a high priced keyword neighborhood. You may need to create new, perfectly targeted landing pages to lower acquisition costs.

Select a new domain name. Without reinclusion within a short period of time, the current name will continue to lose value daily.

Build a new, clean site under the new domain name. Text must be fresh, not a duplicate of the current domain. Do not duplicate site structure, filenames, or other elements that could link it to the banned name.

Gradually add organic links. Expect it to take 612 months in order to acquire 1,000 related links. Continue to link to related sites over the next 18 months. Grow the site adding one new page (250500 words) each day.

As the new site rises in the SERPs gradually switch the PPC traffic to the new site, and retire the current site completely. At any point in the process, if the current (old) site should reappear, it shouldn’t be an undue amount of work to gradually retarget the newly acquired links to the older site. Encourage natural link text by those linking to the site.

If youกre going to optimize at all, test first in a safely isolated site. Youกre not going to be able to push the optimization envelope for quite some time. The key to longterm survival and growth will need to be the กcontent is kingก model.

The only bright news in the picture is that the site isn’t being metahijacked, at least not under any of the keywords Iกve tried (your homepage META keywords list.) Google itself wouldn’t encourage such a practice, and in fact will likely be glad to deal with any such offenders under the DMCA.

Sources:

Crosslink Detection

www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/25568.htm

Crosslinking Penalty

www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/23890210.htm

Sandbox Effect

www.promodo.com/websitepromotionarticlesen/aboutgooglesearchenginepromotiontips_page1_seo60.html

Innocent Interlinking of Sites

www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/25564.htm

A Statistical and Experimental Analysis of Googleกs Florida Update

www.linksecrets.com/pub/floridareport.html

Speculation About August Changes

www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/25251.htm

If the sites were dropped due to algorithm changes, then its possible that theyกd come back after cleanup. However, their supporting network of links has, at the very least, been devalued. That alone will cause a change in PR, even if cleanup makes them eligible for reinclusion. Site owners report that in these cases, cleaned up sites have come back into the results in 23, to six months. Getting back to the top would take additional time, and new, unblemished linking.

Two schools of thought. After cleanup, resubmit the site, or allow it to be found via linkage. Though Google states that thereกs no oversubmission penalty, most webmasters tend to be leary of such submission, allowing robots to find the site via linkages. Iกve never had a problem with resubmitting URLs that have dropped out for whatever reason. I take Google at their word that itกs harmless, as long as its a manual resubmission for good reason (for example, page down when the crawler came through), not submission through a service or promotion program. One submission is enough. Either way, watch the site logs. If robots don’t show up, it could well be a case of manual deletion and permanent ban.

The site needs to be squeaky clean for the near term. The days of easy SEO are on hiatus. The oldfashioned methods (content for users, natural linking) are back. Iconocast has quite a backlog of goodwill links left. Those must be preserved and strengthened, while getting rid of harmful inbound linking.

Again, thereกs no guarantee or certainty of getting back into the Google index. Same procedures, same wait and see.

Sources:

The August Chronicles

www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/25553.htm

Denial of Google Over Optimization Penalty

www.markcarey.com/googleguysays/archives/discussdenialofgoogleoveroptimizationpenalty.html

Future of SEO

http://list.audettemedia.com/SCRIPTS/WA.EXE?A2=ind0408&L=led&D=1&T=0&H=1&O=D&F=&S=&P=266

7. Finally , Should you have questions about the information or links provided, please, feel free to ask on our SEO Forum

Best regards,

Tiberiu Bazavan , ZettWalls Media

About The Author

Tiberiu Bazavan

SEO Consultant at ZettWalls Media

zettwalls.com

[email protected]

This article was posted on January 19, 2005

by Tiberiu Bazavan

5 Strategies That Will Boost Your Business Product

5 Strategies That Will Boost Your Business Productivity Today! Part 1

by: Glen Smyth

Building a dynamic small business is a constantly evolving, increasingly demanding role.

It is very easy to get so caught up in the day to day running of our business that we neglect to take the time to look from the outside in to see what we could do to improve our profitability!

Well here are 5 Strategies that could boost your productivity overnight!

They are not rocket science…and you may have even heard some of them before, but they are 5 proven principles that you can review today to help you stay on track regarding the real issues to grow your business from here.

So why don’t you take 15 minutes…make yourself a coffee…and recharge your batteries!

1. Define your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) in one sentence

What is at the heart of your business that makes it unique and attractive for your customers? Summarise your key selling points that make your product or service a ‘must have’ for your clients.

You probably went through this exercise when you first started your business…but have you need to remind yourself regularly why you are doing what you are doing!

New competitors may have emerged and you don’t have that same uniqueness that you once had.

Perhaps itกs time to reinvent yourself and get that edge over the market once again!

2. Identify Who Your Target Market Is

When you first started your business, you knew exactly who your target market was. Is this market still the same, or have they grown up…or matured in their buying habits.

Has new technology overtaken your ideas?

Just imagine if Video Rental Stores had stubbornly refused to rent DVDs because they were just a Video Store! Your market may have changed, and you may need to reassess who you are trying to reach.

Your original target market have grown older since you began and if you are still promoting your products or service to this same group their needs may be different!

3. Would you like Fries with That?

McDonalds have made an additional fortune by training every one of their sales force to ask one simple question with every order: ‘Would you like fries with that?’

I went to buy a tube to fix my daughter’s bike puncture the other day, and instead of just selling me a new tube, the smart salesman in the Bike Shop enquired quite genuinely if I had the right tools to fix it.

I didn’t but of course he did…so he cleverly added value to my shopping experience, and added extra profit to his bottom line.

What service or product can you offer to people to make their original purchase with you even more worthwhile?

4. Establish where your clients go before and after they visit you?

If you can determine this, then you can add instant profits to your business.

Just imagine if you owned a Real Estate business. Wouldn’t it make sense to have a Settlement Agent in house? And what about a Mortgage Broker? Or even a Removalist Company?

Perhaps you could rent out a large Furniture Trailer with your company name emblazoned all over it!

Ask yourself the same question and you can start incorporating other services that complement your existing business and watch the profits grow!

5. Ask your existing customers for referrals

If you are providing an excellent product or service, then your biggest fans will be your existing customers.

Why not offer them an incentive to put you in touch with people just like them who would also benefit from your services?

It doesn’t have to be anything really expensive…maybe even just a 10% discount off their next purchase from you.

I referred some friends to a Mortgage Broker a few months ago…and had forgotten all about it…until last week I received 2 movie tickets in the mail thanking me for the gesture.

A $20 investment leaves a nice impression in my mind that will probably make me think of him again when my next friend asks me if I know of a good Mortgage Broker!

Make sure you get Part Two of this article for another 5 Strategies to improve your small business success!

About The Author

Glen Smyth is the author of the popular new eBook, ‘The Small Business Success Guide’. Discover how you can build your own profitpulling small business, starting today: http://www.smallbusinesssuccessguide.com. Make sure you also sign up for the WOW! Factor Newsletter which is full of great ideas from other Small Business owners!

[email protected]

This article was posted on September 24, 2003

by Glen Smyth

Two Quick Ways to Make Your Copy of Merchantกs Dat

Two Quick Ways to Make Your Copy of Merchantกs Data Feed Different From All Other Affiliates

by: Konstantin Goudkov

Product data feeds are really popular among affiliates because they can help produce thousands of product pages quickly and easily. Such pages can be used to drive highly targeted search engine traffic looking specifically for those products. But there is a big problem.

The problem with data feeds is the fact that a lot of affiliates use the same copies of feeds in the same exact ways. Most data feed affiliates put just the product names in HTML titles, so they all end up with a bunch of similar pages that have identical titles. And since the search engines give a lot of weight to the titles of HTML pages, those affiliates end up competing with each other for the same highly specific keywords.

Luckily, this problem has a quick and dirty solution. Itกs worse than going over the feed by hand, but much better than doing nothing. What I get from affiliates is that manually modifying feed simply defeats the purpose. But being able to do it automatically can help one differentiate his site from other affiliates without losing the benefits of using data feeds.

There are two basic ways to automatically make your site a little bit different from other affiliates of the same merchant.

The first way is to add some keywords before and/or after the product name in the HTML title. For example, letกs say you pick a phrase กOn Saleก to add after the product name. So instead of กBlue Widget #MN3143ก you have in the original data feed, you would now have กBlue Widget #MN3143 On Saleก in the HTML title of that product page. You simply add that phrase to the titles of all products in the feed. That lets you specifically target people who would search for กblue widget on saleก or กmn3143 on sale.ก

You can also use some arbitrary keywords like กCheapก or กDiscountedก or กQualityก before the product name to have something like กCheap Blue Widget #MN3143.ก The keywords you pick largely depend on the merchantกs product line.

Another variation of this technique is to randomize the keywords that are displayed before and after product names in the titles. You can use a severside technology of your choice to pick a random keyword out of some predefined list and append it to the name of a product to form the title for the page. Your scripts would pick a new keyword for each request for the product page. Of course, that would only work if you are using a database, and do not generate static HTML using Webmerge or a similar program. That way, even though you don’t control the exact keyword that is displayed for any particular page, with enough product pages you can cover a wider market of people searching with different modifiers. You should be able to cover different shopper types the ones looking for bargains as well as the ones looking for quality.

The second way to make your site different from others is a bit more complex, but could yield much greater results. Instead of adding something to the product names, you can try changing the names on a large scale. As I said earlier, modifying feeds by hand would defeat the purpose of using them. But if you perform a findandreplace operation on the whole file then you can get different content without spending much additional time.

The utility you might want to use for feed modification is called sed. You can search for that name using you favorite search engine. Itกs sed the stream editor. Iกm going to skip much of the technical detail on how and why it does certain things in a certain way. Instead, I will concentrate on describing practical application of sed with product feeds.

At its core, sed takes input data, modifies it according to certain rules and outputs the result all done linebyline. It uses regular expressions and can perform extremely complex operations, by for now I just want to concentrate on simple replacements.

The good thing about sed is it can use an external file with multiple commands and execute them one after another for the entire input file (in our case, itกs a product feed). So you can replace as many words as you need. Also, once you define those commands, you can use them for many different feeds with different merchants.

Letกs go over a few examples that should illustrate the true power of this approach.

Iกll assume that the merchant we are working with sells widgets of various kinds. You looked over the feed and saw that the merchant has some porcelain widgets; red and blue, large and small. One of the synonyms for porcelain is ceramic, so first thing you would do is replace the word porcelain with ceramic in all product names and descriptions.

This can be done by adding the following commands to a sed script file before running it against the feed:

s/porcelain/ceramic/g

s/Porcelain/Ceramic/g

Those commands will replace your keywords while preserving capitalization. So that a title like กBig Blue Porcelain Widgetก becomes กBig Blue Ceramic Widget.ก

To make things more interesting, letกs assume that the feed already has some ceramic widgets aside from the porcelain ones. So you do not want to end up with just one kind. Instead, you want to switch them around. Remember, your goal is to be as different from the original feed as possible.

You can achieve that with the following set of commands:

s/porcelain/MYTEMPKEYWORD/g

s/ceramic/porcelain/g

s/MYTEMPKEYWORD/ceramic/g

In the example above, I used MYTEMPKEYWORD as a placeholder. That let us make sure that we are not losing the original keywords.

What happens there is:

all กporcelainก is changed to กMYTEMPKEYWORDก

then

all กceramicก is changed to กporcelainก

then

all กMYTEMPKEYWORDก (which used to be the original porcelain) is changed to กceramicก

and then the same thing should be done for all capitalized keywords.

You can use anything in place of MYTEMPKEYWORD as long as it does not already appear in the feed. You want to use some unique keyword.

Once you are done with those keywords, you can change something like กMetallicก to กShiny Metal Finishก assuming that makes sense for a given product line.

Adding that to a command file would give you:

s/porcelain/MYTEMPKEYWORD/g

s/ceramic/porcelain/g

s/MYTEMPKEYWORD/ceramic/g

s/Porcelain/MYTEMPKEYWORD/g

s/Ceramic/Porcelain/g

s/MYTEMPKEYWORD/Ceramic/g

s/Metallic/Shiny Metal Finish/g

s/metallic/shiny metal finish/g

That would also change กBlue Metallic Widgetก to กBlue MetalLooking Finish Widget.ก

As I said earlier, you can add as many commands as you want for different words and phrases. And with enough such small changes, you will be able to reach traffic that is not already covered by your competing affiliates. While a few hundred affiliates with their data feed sites might be displayed for a keyword กblue porcelain widgetก there might be just a few (if any) covering กblue ceramic widgetก for the same merchant.

Even something like

s/TV Set/Television Set/g

along with diagonal sizes and brand names might help you stand apart from the rest of the affiliates who use the same feed. Any change is better than having the same exact content as others.

I encourage you to download a copy of sed and check it out. Once you get a hang of it, you will be able to automate the whole process. And if you are already using scripts to refresh merchantsก feeds and rebuild sites automatically, then you can plug sed in the middle and modify feeds on the fly.

Also, if you are having a hard time coming up with words to replace, you might want to check out Princetonกs WordNet. You can even download the word database and use it locally on your desktop.

About The Author

Konstantin Goudkov manages an affiliate program with a merchant that carries 2500+ gifts. If you enjoy working with companies that treat affiliates like valued partners then be sure to check us out.

You can find more information about our program at: http://www.genericgifts.com/affiliate_program.jsp

This article was posted on January 21, 2005

by Konstantin Goudkov

How to Stand Out From The Competition

How to Stand Out From The Competition

by: Julie Martin

We have all seen the numerous ขclonesข of websites out there. Each one promises ridiculous profits and each one is nearly identical. Is it possible to sell the same things these sites offer and retain your individuality? Yes!

For an example, let’s step outside and take a look at a typical minimall. These stores all look the same. Many of them sell the same items, and somehow they manage to stay afloat. How? One of the easiest ways to stand out from the competition is to offer something that customers can’t find anywhere else.

The old adage, ขthe grass is always greener on the other side,ข can apply very heavily to an EBusiness. More and more businesses pop up every day and chances are, someone else will be selling the exact same item. The only way to stand out from the competition is to research the competition.

By using popular search engines, such as www.google.com and typing in keywords similar to your own keywords, you can get a very good idea of who exactly is out there. Visit their websites, see what they offer and see if you can improve the service, offer something different or make your site more appealing. You can use Alexa, www.alexa.com, an internet ranking site, to see which one of these competitors is pulling in the most visitors. Once you have got an idea about the competition, you can start taking steps to plan your site around them.

The best way to get an edge on your competition is to offer something for free. You can do this without any cost to your business if you offer free information.

Ebooks are an excellent way to accomplish this. There are several free ebooks available on many different subjects. You can offer a free download with the purchase of your product. This means there is absolutely no expense to you, and your customer feels that they are getting more value for their dollar. In today’s economy, that can mean everything in keeping your business afloat.

When offering free information, try to tailor it to the product you are selling. For example, if your ebusiness sells plant seeds, you can offer a free ebook on planting methods and care of the plants. If you can’t find an ebook out there that is right for your product, it is very simple to create your own. All you need is an idea and you are well on your way.

You can offer other free products as well, such as screensavers, a subscription to an ezine, or coupons towards the customer’s next purchase. Your options are pretty endless when it comes to offering something for free.

The next step in standing out from the competition is seeing what they do and finding out how you can do it better. Customer service is the most important facet of running an ebusiness. If the competition doesn’t offer a tollfree number for customer questions and support, you can easily add one to your existing phone line. There are numerous answering services you can employ to handle this for you as well. You can use autoresponders to answer customer’s questions about your products almost instantly, which can give you a definite legup on the competition.

Building an online community is a fantastic way to increase your customers and keep them coming back. You can install a message board on your site very easily with little or no cost. Message boards give you a very easy way to keep in personal touch with your customers and allow them to interact with one another. Each time they come back to check for more messages, they will be visiting your site and seeing your products. It is only a matter of time before these visits convert into more sales and increased revenue for your site.

It is possible to run a successful ebusiness, even one that is identical to several others. You will need to take the time to research the competition and tailor your business accordingly. The small investment of time spent doing this will increase your returns dramatically.

About The Author

Julie Martin is the publisher of ขThe Iscaweb eZineข a weekly eZine dedicated to increasing your online profits, no matter what you are selling. Julie also uses the ขPlugInProfitข system to GREAT effect!

To subscribe to the eZine, or to learn more about the PlugInProfit system visit: http://www.iscaweb.com

This article was posted on August 16

by Julie Martin