“Six Days To Saturday” by Sam Crowley – I Love This Guy

Sam Crowley thought he was following the “American Dream.”

An ex-stuttering college dropout, Sam worked his way up to a corner office at a Fortune 100 company.

With a six-figure salary and all the perks, he was supposed to be content… but he was secretly MISERABLE.

Sam arrived home late every night, giving his best at work while his family got leftovers.

Like so many people in the corporate world, his American Dream had turned into a nightmare!

One night, Sam’s daughter Madeline uttered 4 innocent words that stopped him in his tracks and changed the course of his family’s life forever…

Arriving home late (again), Sam went upstairs to find his 3 year-old daughter already in bed.

She asked him, “Daddy, is tomorrow Saturday?”

Saturday was the only day Sam had time to spend with his family- the only day he could be a real father.

** Every Day Is Saturday Is Born **

That night, Sam decided that someday soon, every day would be Saturday.

He realized that his ultimate goal was to be a great father for his children.

Sam managed to quit his job and start his own business that allows hi the “Ultimate Saturday Lifestyle” as an international motivational speaker and business coach.

In short order, Sam was able to…

- Go from speaking for free to getting paid $25,000 per keynote address

- Quit his job and spend more time with his 3 young daughters

- Start a motivational podcast that is now downloaded by 30,000 loyal subscribers in over 100 countries around the world

- And much, much more all based on nothing but the power of his dream!

And it’s not just Sam who is making a massive transition- just look at what his students have accomplished:

- Dustin Salisbury, a 24 year-old senior airman in the US Air Force, used Sam’s message to conquer fear and adversity while deployed in Iraq

- Brian McElroy produced his first documentary film and helped raise over $100,000 for charity with Sam’s guidance

- Dino Herbert was motivated by Sam to take action and truly live the life he wanted as a speaker, trainer, and author

** Six Days To Saturday **

While Sam was going through his own transition, and then started helping others reach their Saturday, he documented each step of the process.

He knew it would become an invaluable blueprint for anyone with a dream to make their own Saturday a reality.

The result is “Six Days To Saturday,” the first-ever audio series dedicated to helping you go from Monday to Saturday!

In six digitally mastered audio CDs (and an accompanying workbook), Sam takes you through each step of the process:

Monday - Feel The Pain And Write Your Future

Tuesday – Preparing For Success

Wednesday – The Time For Action!

Thursday - Failure Is A Verb, Not A Noun

Friday – Commitment & Persistence

Saturday - You Are A Champion!

No matter what your Saturday may be, Sam’s message is POWERFUL.

If you want to spend more time with family, make a bigger contribution to others, and bring your life to a whole new level, then Sam’s message is for you.

You can learn more about “Six Days To Saturday” and request a free copy of Sam’s powerful report “Seize Your Saturday Power!”

Go there now and make EVERY day Saturday!

Billboard Or Customer Magnet Part 2

So in my last post about business websites for local retailers I talked about whether you web site is a billboard or a customer magnet. Obviously we would all want them to be customer magnets. That is why we are in business in the first place right?

Before I go over ways to make your site a magnet lets go into some of the offline things you have to worry about when trying to get and keep customers. If you are a walk in retail establishment like a specialty store, hair salon, restaurant, and so on you have to make sure your store front is presentable to the customer. That means the signage is proper, the windows are clean, no graffiti is on the wall (oh man is there a great scourge to our businesses than graffiti? Other than outright vandalism or robbery of course) and the floors are swept and clean.

Then once inside your store you want to make the customer comfortable and happy they came to visit. You accomplish that by having good product selection, good service, and an informative and helpful staff minding the store. Now of course some of these things are problematic at times. You can’t always have a perfect presentation.

So it is no fault of yours that it is not on your front plate to make sure and have an inviting web front that interacts with the customer and invites them to stay and enjoy your business over time.  There is just so much to do.

But the key thing that needs to be done to differentiate your web presence from a billboard (which will attract some attention but it is one way) is to engage your visitor and give them something of value.

How do you do that? Well for starters you give them a reason why they would want to “Sign Up For Our Newsletter”. I see that all the time. Why would I do that? For what reason or value?

If you ask this question of your visitors then spell it out what they will get in return. Don’t make the guess.

OK so if you already have a an opt in that is good, but you have to optimize it and advertise the value in it.

If you do not have an opt in form to collect customers to your business list then you MUST do it soon. Don’t get caught out on this item. You must engage your web visitors and get them to join your business as a valued partner. How do you do this? Well you give them an offer of something valuable in exchange for their information.

(more…)

Have You Ever?

I would like to break from posting part two of our “Billboard or Customer Magnet” post today so that I can talk about another item that struck me lately.

You see sometimes when you spend your life with computers and the Internet you have to deal with the issues that come with them. You see there are dangers out there to watch out for and most of the time we are way too busy to see them or to try and prevent the mayhem they can cause. Last year, at a most inopportune time one of my wqork computers had a hard drive failure and it caused me a couple weeks of frantic scrambling to recover and update things. In the end it worked out but there is no way that I would want that again. So I got on schedule to do back ups.

Yeah. And you should too! (Yeah right Kevin and I am going to floss everyday too!) I know I know it is is hard. But between hardware failure and viruses lurking and worms crawling into our systems there is much to be on the lookout for all the time.

So as good as I have been the last year keeping my anti virus up to date, de fraggin my discs, backing up my data, things still can go wrong. Last week I was digitizing hours of video for a wonderful client of mine. I had spent a whole week on this video project. The external HD I was using for the video was brand new. Good name brand too. But one day last week. Boom. It up and died on me.

Could have been a catastrophe. But it was not. I was honest with the client. I told him what happened and how it was going to set us back. He appreciated that is understanding. I got another drive and it is working fine. I am working to get the other one replaced. Fingers crossed.

But the bottom line is to not let it get you down or fall down and cry. In business you have to face the bad days as thought they are good days. Stand tall. March on to the next part of the day and leave it behind.

Billboard Or Customer Magnet?

The world of the web and small business can be a confusing and strategically difficult road to navigate. Everyone tells you to build a web site. You have to have one yesterday. But very few tell you how or what to put on it. As a result if you do some sampling of local business web sites you will find that the vast majority of them are virtual bill boards in cyberspace.

What do I mean by that? Well they give information about the business, maybe some description, hours of operation, images, but little else in the way of making a visitor into a customer.

First of all under the hood, if you will, most of them are not optimized for the right key words that local search is aimed at in their area. Most have a string of keywords all separated by hyphens that in sum total might be correct for that business. But is it realistic to think that a local plumber is going to get ranked in the search engines for the words, plumber or plumbing contractor?

But they could rank for “Oakland plumber” or “Oakland California plumber”. Or “best East Bay plumber”. Instead of competing against millions of other sites they might only be competing against a few thousand or less.

So if you land on a billboard web site, what will make you want to become a customer? Ease of navigation to find what you want to know is probably first. Second is some way to interact and feel good about the business. Now many of you shop using coupons you cut out of the paper or from coupon books. Why do you do that? To save money? Sure that is one reason but the other not so obvious is that the retailer has built a relationship of value with you by giving you something for nothing.

That is the number one thing you have to do when a visitor comes to your web site. Don’t just sell them with a bill board but give them something of value for their visit. I see so many sites that have a “Sign up for our newsletter” link or opt in box. But the big question is why would I want to do that? What do I get in return? A vague promise of some information about your business? Ugh.

As a small business you must give them something of value in exchange for their name and email. Make them a valued customer. Give them valuable information.

In my next post I will show you how that is done and how you can implement it. Or you can contact me right now to schedule a free consultation for your small business. We can do it live in person or over the web via interactive video conferencing.

Putting All The Pieces Together

As a small business owner there are so many puzzle pieces to keep track of in the course of the day, week, month. You have sales, advertising, payroll, inventory, marketing, and on and on. In order to keep everything in place and things rolling smoothly is a large and difficult task for even the best of businessmen.

But to add in growing your customer base on a regular basis can be a challenging task. As a small business most folks think of the internet as not related to their audience/customer base. The internet seems like a big wide open world wide thing and cannot bring customers from your backyard. Or the other thing that happens is a small business puts up a web site to keep up with the internet trend. And in most cases it is a billboard for the business that does nothing to bring customers to your door.

The key thing you, as a small business, need to know is that local search is growing with leaps and bounds. Customers searching for goods and services via paper books is dropping precipitously. YOUR customers are going to the web and trying to find you. But if your presence is hard to find on the web or if it only gives them basic information you will lose them.

What do the terms auto responder, opt in, SEO, Facebook, Twitter, social networking, and Bebo mean to you? Do these things register? Well if they do not please do not panic. Most offline businesses have no idea either. But I can help you.

You see after eight years of teaching and mentoring others to build and grow their businesses online I know what these things mean, how they can help your business, and I show you how to do it. I can come and help you in person with a free consultation where we take a look at your business and how you are using the web (or not using it in some cases). I will lay out simple first steps you can take to dominate the local search for your business and bring more customers to your door.

I also teach educational workshops where we expand on these topics in great detail so that you can come up to speed on customer acquisition and retention using the internet in no time. Oh and I show you how you can reduce your ad costs, and increase your ROI using the web. Most business owners like that sort of information….

Check out what this network is doing to help businesses connect locally to their customers. Drop me a line if you would like a free consult or if you would like to find out about one of my workshops.

Reputation Monitoring Dashboard – Finger on Your Marketing Pulse

One of the things you want to do when you start to build and create a reputation for your business online is to keep track of what you are doing and how deep you are making inroads to establish your brand and company identification. Now this can be an overwhelming task for the small business owner who may not even understand all the various ways that reputation is built online.

There are some expensive tools out there that can create some very impressive reports that can be delivered to clients or done internally by a company to check and see how the company ranks, where the buzz is on the net about the brand or company and so on., But these tools may be overkill for most and too expensive for others.

So how does a free method sound to you? I found a step by step walk through of how you can build a reputation monitoring dashboard for your business and it is not hard to do. This tool will give you what you need to track the pulse of your online marketing efforts with only the investment of time. Works for me.

How to Build a Reputation Monitoring Dashboard » aimClear Search Marketing Blog

Consulting Business Opens

Kevin Rockwell

After years of working as an Internet Marketer building successful web sites, coaching others to build successful web sites, and mentoring many newbies how to do this themselves, I have decided to hang out the shingle and begin to consult with local businesses showing them how to grow their business even in tough times.

I will be holding information filled seminars where local business people can learn how to implement modern marketing strategies that will mean more customers coming in the door, more return customers coming back month in and month out, and all the while saving them lots of money on their advertising budgets. We show a business how to get killer ROI on their advertising using the internet. Many businesses do not even know what their ROI is on their advertising dollars.

Well we can measure and will teach you how to do it. The results will amaze you.

I invite non profit organizations to work with me to sponsor these seminars for the very members of your organizations who need to grow their customer base. You can make money by working with me. We share the revenues from the seminar held at your club and you give a great benefit to your members. A win win for both of us. Contact me today on how you can raise funds for your non profit.

Want to know about me and what I have done for the past ten years on the internet? Take it from Google. Just do a search on my name in Google and see all the different things I have done.

Illegal SEO

Illegal SEO Techniques to Avoid

1. Link Farms

Also known as Spamexing or Spamdexing.

A link farm is a series of websites created solely for housing gratuitous links that point to a collection of websites. It can also be a network of websites interlinking with each other.

Such websites are considered illegal in the eyes of Google and major search engines because they aim to achieve high rankings for websites that haven’t earned those rankings through good content and overall quality.

As a strategy, utilizing link farms, or spamdexing a search engine is highly dangerous. Even if your website has great content, if you or your SEO consultant use this technique, your website will still get penalized or banned because the engines figure that if you did have good content you wouldn’t resort to such sneaky tactics designed to trick them.

How to Guard Against It: When an SEO professional tells you that he or she will secure incoming links for you, ask them to tell you specifically how they will do so. The correct answer is that they will target specific, pre-existing and established websites to gain an incoming link from them to you (in most cases without having to link back to them).

If a professional tells you that they will build you hundreds or thousands of pages across different domains that will link to your website, do NOT work with them as this will severely cripple your website.

Also periodically search your domain name in the major search engines to see what sites are pointing to you. If you see anything out of the ordinary, such as websites whose domains are extremely long or jibberish (lots of numbers and random or inappropriate words) or pages that are simply long lists of links, approach your SEO professional about getting your site removed from these pages and how they appeared there in the first place.

2. Doorway Pages

Also known as Advertising Pages, Jump Pages, Gateway Pages, etc.

Doorway Pages are a form of landing page that is designed solely for the search engine and oftentimes isn’t even viewable to the human visitor. These pages often use a redirect script that automatically points the visitor to another page on the website without the human visitor ever seeing the doorway page. This is also known as cloaking and is clearly defined as an illegal practice by Google and other search engines.

The only time a landing page is acceptable by search engines is if it is in the form of an informative, well written article that human visitors read and enjoy, where they are not tricked into clicking or being redirected to the website’s main pages.

How to Guard Against It: Make sure you understand exactly what kind of pages are being added to your website and be sure to look at most of them. Ask your SEO professional point-blank whether any of these pages will automatically redirect to your website’s main page. If they say yes, then they are breaking the rules and are well aware of it, and we recommend you do NOT work with such an individual or company.

It doesn’t matter if they say they use a special javascript or other redirect that is “legal” or acceptable to Google. This is never the case and though Google may not know about that particular trick yet, it will find out fast enough and your site will get penalized as a result.

3. Keyword Stuffing

Also known as Keyword Spamming.

One of the original illegal SEO techniques, keyword stuffing occurs when you load a webpage full of particular keywords, either in the meta tags, other script tags, or in the content itself. This is different from optimizing the page for particular keywords because the same words are being repeated dozens or hundreds of times in no credible or informative way.

Keywords are hidden several ways, for instance some people will make the text the same color as the background so search engines see it, but no human visitors can. Others will hide keywords in script tags. Still others yet will use CSS to position keywords outside of your visible screen area, again so that no human visitors can see it – but search engines can.

Though on the surface, using such techniques might sound like an attractive idea. However, search engines can detect whether a keyword is being used properly and will penalize or ban your site for using any of the above techniques to stuff keywords into your site.

How to Guard Against It: Oftentimes, the only way you can know if your site has been stuffed with keywords is to view the source code of your website (visit your site in your favorite browser, click “View” and then “Source Code.”) A page of HTML will display. If you see the same keywords repeated hundreds of times anywhere, then your page has been stuffed and will be considered in violation of every search engine’s rules.

4. Scraper Pages or Auto-Generated Pages

Scraper pages are those comprised of search results or content automatically pulled from dozens or hundreds of websites or search engine results. This is a form of plagiarism as no part of the scraper page is original content. Most often, such sites are used to display Google Adsense Ads or other ads that pay the site owner every time a visitor clicks on it. However search engines have gotten very good at banning such sites from their results and human visitors can detect them easily as well.

Scraper sites are easy to spot as they are largely illogical. They are snippets of other webpage content, or search results, and therefore have no sensible point and do not make sense when read.

How to Guard Against It: As with other illegal techniques, it’s important to first ask your SEO professional directly whether they will employ such unethical techniques. Then you must monitor their work. Make sure you have access to your website’s hosting service so that you can view all pages that are hosted on your site’s domain. Periodically view pages at random to be sure they do not contain this or other illegal content. Also get reports of your site’s rankings and search the keywords you rank for. Click through from the search results and check the landing page’s source code and content for anything fishy or inappropriate.

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What Is SEO

What is SEO?

Search Marketing (SEM), or Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is a complex, ever changing process.

Search engines constantly change their algorithms, shuffle their indexes, merge results and share content. The only consistent thing about marketing your website to them is that what works really well today probably won’t work so well tomorrow.

That’s why you need an experienced search marketing professional who keeps two fingers on the pulse of the major search engines. If Google hiccups, we know about it. If Yahoo! gets stubborn, we’ll coax those rankings back to the first page.

Working with search engines is a long-term, high maintenance relationship and we’re dedicated to managing that relationship so you don’t have to, and at an investment you can feel good about.

So How Exactly Does SEO Work?

This is the million dollar question. And we can almost guarantee you that for every person you ask, you’ll get a different answer. That’s because marketing to the search engines is like any creative endeavor: cooking, painting, carpentry, etc.

If you ask five people to bake a cake, you’ll get five unique cakes each with different ingredients. Ask ten people to craft you a chair and you’ll get ten distinct pieces each with its own style.

Because the search engines change their ranking algorithms (the equations they use to analyze a website’s reputation and rankability) so often, and they each use such widely varying criteria, there are literally hundreds of ways to promote your site to the first page of search results.

However, there are certain universal guidelines regarding what central principles and elements are vital to your search marketing strategy. There are also very clear rules against certain practices that attempt to cheat or trick the search engines.

Fundamental Principles for Successful SEO

1. Content
Content will always be your key ticket to top rankings. Without it, any rankings achieved will be short-lived. For content to help your ranking, however, you need a lot of it and it has to be updated regularly. Most importantly, each page of content must target a specific keyword term.

However, if your site possesses content that is auto-generated or is poorly written, i.e. a human visitor would not find it useful and informative, the search engines will figure it out and demote your site, possibly even blacklisting you and preventing you from showing up in their results at all.

We develop well-written, keyword targeted content for your site that is updated consistently and monitored for rankability. Your business will enjoy the added benefit of an ever-growing resource library of information that your site visitors will enjoy and which will also help with your sales conversions.

Testimonials

Here are some nice words and videos from folks I have worked with over the years in my various business pursuits.

Kevin has been so great to work with.  He’s creative and thoughtful and incredibly competent, meets all deadlines: excellent in all respects. I’m very glad we’re working together.”

Joan Dark
Real Estate Professional http://www.joandarkeastbayrealestate.com/

“When I was still struggling to master online marketing I joined a program where Kevin was my mentor. He patiently taught me so much and that knowledge eventually translated into tens of thousands of dollars. I’m blown away by Kevin’s vast knowledge of what works in Internet Marketing. You couldn’t choose someone better to guide you to online success”

Janis Pettit http://SmallBusiness-BigResults.com

“When you are looking for a mentor or consultant you need someone who has the experience you need and the patience and communication skill to pass that knowledge over.

That’s exactly what you did for me. Some of the questions I asked must have seemed really naive, but you were not the least bit phased or impatient. My website has grown over the years as a result and I now have launched products of my own.

You helped me reach my specific goal with the minimum aggravation and anyone who gets to work with you has a star on their side.”
Carol A E Bentley, Author & Professional B2B Copywriter (UK).

“Over my 17 year career as a correspondent for CNN I worked with a lot of photographers, but Kevin was ALWAYS one of the best! Kevin is never just a shooter, he is a consummate journalist in the truest sense of the word. He’s smart, well-read, and has a fabulous sense of humor. (which is a huge plus on breaking news stories!)

Kevin has an incredible eye for figuring out the best shots for storytelling. A true renaissance man, Kevin was also ahead of the curve in the nineties in terms of web development and the internet. CNN San Francisco was the first bureau to have it’s own web page in the mid -nineties and Kevin helped design it! I wouldn’t hesitate to hire Kevin as a photographer OR as someone to help me with web production in my business. He has the creative drive to succeed at both!”

Rusty Dornin – former CNN correspondant – News Certified.com

“Kevin and I worked together on several projects at CNN.  He was a great addition to our teams.  His talents as a cameraman, and commitment as a journalist meant we were very successful in everything we tackled.

You cannot go wrong working with Kevin and having him on your project.”

Jim Miller – Sr. Executive Producer, Producers International Media, Inc.

“Been doing this for awhile and know a professional when I see/work with one; Kevin is mild mannered yet has a sense of urgency which is necessary in many aspects of our business, he is an amazing cameraman who can perform under pressure whether it be ‘live’ shots, eng or making an interview look beautiful . I highly recommend this gentleman .”

Philip M. Weiner , Owner , PMW Prods, Inc