WebErika’s World

“A prominent University in the U.S. identified these words as the most likely to influence people’s inclination to buy:
Discovery, Easy, Guarantee, Health, Love, Money, New, Proven, Results, Safety, Save, and You.”

Read more at Simpleology

Another year has started (Happy New Year!) and another tax day is approaching.

What fun! I’ll bet you all can’t wait!

Well, I’m marketing again, but for a worthy cause. Your own pocketbooks and your own bank accounts. We all need to know how to make sure we file our tax returns without overpaying our fair share on April 15. I came across a great read the other day and thought I would share. You can download it right here at the end of this post. Some references to past tax years are abound in the document but I emailed the creator, Wayne M. Davies, and he said he has kept it updated and that he is available for any questions you may have.

“How To Instantly Double Your Deductions” (and slash your taxes to the bone!)

This report explains the easiest ways for any small business owner (including home-based and part-time businesses) to immediately and legally pay less tax now. Self-Employed people can certainly benefit from this report too!

Find out tax secrets that most accountants and CPA’s don’t even know about:

• Commuting mileage is non-deductible, right? Not after you read how to convert commuting mileage to a legitimate business expense
• How to get a $1,000 refund for a tax return you already filed
• How to throw away your receipts and still take a deduction!
• How to let the IRS pay for your kids’ summer camp
• How to deduct your next vacation
• New tax law has turned a small biz loophole into a crater!
• What is the biggest mistake every small biz owner makes — and how to avoid it
• Why the most important business decision you probably never made is the key to paying thousands less in taxes

Learn about those tips and more by downloading this free report right now. Right click on this link and save to your computer.

I came across a great question the other day, “What is the number one rule in Marketing?”. Sent to me by another marketer, of course.

Well I have to confess, I really don’t have a clue. I’m usually pretty snappy off the line on questions like this, especially since I’ve been in marketing for so long… but I never thought about what was the number one reason.

Of course I was embarrassed when I found out the answer:

The Number 1 Rule of marketing is to…

…give people what they want.

Well duh!

How could I have been so clueless? It was easy to see that.
Give them what they want, and you get what you want.

So what DO they want???

I’m sure you’ve been reading the newspapers, and following the headlines on TV. I’ve been listening to the Senate hearings, and the financial advisers for the US commenting on the state of the economy. It’s no secret these days, more and more people are being laid off. Heck, AT&T alone is cutting 12,000 jobs and here I thought they were doing great!

Yes, with the state of the union and the international markets, it’s pretty easy to figure out what people want these days.

People want Financial Security.

They want to be a part of a business that they KNOW will make them money in ANY economy. Heck, who doesn’t want that?

BINGO! as the light bulb went off in my head… BigTicketDepot.com! The perfect program! I haven’t really marketed any products on my blog yet, preferring to keep some of my internet marketing projects under wraps, but this one is pretty cool.

Here I am, at the forefront of a fantastic business opportunity. A business that can ride the financial roller coaster, because someone always wants or needs to sell something.

BigTicketDepot.com is going to be the hottest new online classified service to arrive on the net in a LONG time. Ebay is great, don’t get me wrong, but the marketing reach we will have with BigTicketDepot will be phenominal. The teams already in BigTicketDepot.com are gearing up for an all out assault on the internet.

Yes, bottom line, people need financial stability. A way to work for themselves without having to worry about being laid off. That’s why more and more people are turning to the Internet to make money. They want to learn to be their own bosses.

You don’t hear about any Internet marketers going broke do you? There’s an endless supply of products available to market, and more being added every day.

Despite the doom and gloom we keep hearing, 2009 is going to see a massive surge of online commerce. The trends have been going up and up and up over time. Billions of dollars are spent on the internet every year, in every category. Millions of new consumers get online every year with disposable income, even in this economy.

The only question that remains is thus:

Are you ready?

Are you ready to take full advantage of what will be one of the biggest growth booms in online marketing history? You can be in it from the VERY BEGINNING!

This is going to be huge. BigTicketDepot.com is slanted to fill a great niche in the marketplace, and all we can do is hang on for the ride. Contact me or click here to find out some more information.

It’s finally over. It always seems to feel that way come Presidential Election Day here in the states. After months and months of non-stop campaigning and debating and character assassinations, we have a new president. Despite how any of us wanted it to work out, a colleague of mine summed up the result quite eloquently:

Gruss Gott wrote:

No child anywhere in the World will doubt that with hard work they can be President; if only they have democracy like America.

America has just peacefully overthrown its existing President and replaced him with a black dude with an arabic sounding name.

Let there be no doubt that America is the greatest idea in government that the World has ever seen and that the people of America have tonight fulfilled its founders genius and shouted it to World.

Congratulations America!

Now we must earn the opportunity we’ve given ourselves.

Stop the presses! Another fabulous Google rollout. SMS text messages for free! At least for now. Read more here:

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/tips/2008/10/31/gmail_labs_adds_text_messaging_to_gchat-2.html

Excerpt:

Gmail’s latest Labs experiment adds an option to send SMS textmessages to contacts from the Google Chat sidebar, at no cost and with replies arriving as new chat lines. Like other Labs, you’ll have to enable it by heading to the Labs icon in your Gmail settings and enabling “Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat,” although the feature is apparently being rolled out gradually to users. Once enabled, you can type and choose a contact from the Chat sidebar and select “Send SMS” from the options that pop up to the right of their name, or select “Video & more” from the options dialog on a chat window. Enter a phone number, type your chat, and Google tells the recipient that they can reply like any other text. Gmail’s definitely making a play to become your all-in-one contact and messaging center, and free text messaging is a powerful tool to getting there.

I love to follow Tim Ferriss’ lifestyle and blog. Who wouldn’t? Well, perhaps I shouldn’t go overboard, some of might not be able to. I mean he is still single, no kids (the we know of) and pretty much does what he wants when he wants, where the majority of us are still tied down to a location, person or family. Anyway, before I get carried away on a tangent, when I checked out his blog today looking for some excerpts from his book, I was happy to see a great new post about implementing 4HWW in corporate environments.

Tim uses Best Buy as a corporate example and I was amazed to read how they implemented a strategy based upon the experiences of a new 24-year-old hire instead of a old, grizzled and wizened CEO. What Best Buy implemented is called ROWE or Results-Only Work Environment. Developed by Carl Ressler and co-developer Jody Thompson.

An excerpt from Tim’s interview:

In a ROWE, each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. Currently, there are two authentic ROWEs—Fortune 100 retailer Best Buy Co, Inc. and J. A. Counter & Associates, a small brokerage firm in New Richmond, WI. At both organizations, the old rules that govern a traditional work environment—core hours, “face time,” pointless meetings, etc.—have been replaced by one rule: focus only on results.

…productivity has gone through the roof…

and

On the personal side, ROWE has transformed people’s lives. We’ve heard stories about ROWE saving marriages, allowing people to be better parents (and opened the door for some to actually be parents), get in shape and give back to their community.

That’s pretty powerful stuff. I would think that adopting this way of running a business probably pads the bottom line too with saving money on training rehires and the fact that work will actually get done as opposed to “pretending” it’s getting done.

For the full text of Tim’s entry, click here.

From around the net: Get Your Blog On! There’s a Post on Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger that thought was quite interesting. He basically talked about a couple things, Emerging New Trends In Blogging and Common Traits Of Successful Bloggers.

Rowes was talking about new Bloggers getting started today, and comparing […]

Source: Internet Marketing | Steve Renner » Internet Marketing Strategy And Services

I found a really great resource today on site scalability. There’s a huge amount of information and you might want to have a few hours free to get into it. I will have to save it for another day when I have the time to read.

From the website itself:

We started High Scalability to help you build successful scalable websites. This site tries to bring together all the lore, art, science, practice, and experience of building scalable websites into one place so you can learn how to build your system with confidence. Hopefully this site will move you further and faster along the learning curve of success…

Stumbled across this service for people who write mobile web applications. From their about page:

Zong is the only web service that enables you to create and launch mobile services in 10 countries in under 10 minutes and generate revenues from each transaction.

Read more here.

… and I feel like such a heel. I just saw my cat Snoopy go up the back deck stairs so I thought he might like to come back inside. Got up to let him in the back door, and he comes trotting back down the stairs, turns the corner and he’s got a chipmunk in his mouth. <sigh>

I say to him: “I can’t let you in with that buddy. I appreciate the gesture, but it’s not coming inside.”

He meows with the thing in his mouth, with such a look on his face. We stand and stare at each other a minute. Me wishing I could let him in with it and make him happy, him thinking, “WTH? I caught this for you mom!”

So I closed the door on him and he stood there a little while longer then walked away back up the stairs to leave it on the deck instead.

<sigh>

Update: He’s come back down the stairs and decides to leave it at the back door before he comes in. Wise choice. Now I have to get rid of it before the dogs decide to eat it.