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The Brabec Bulletin
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This Sampler, which is much longer than the usual Bulletin, gives an idea of the kind and quality of information and writing that will be found in each issue. Subscribe now to receive the next issue in your Inbox. NOTICE: This SAMPLER is also available as a PDF document that sill open in Adobe Reader. Download it here, save it to your computer, and then freely share it with friends by email, or upload it to your website or blog and offer it as a free download. Your visitors will thank you for this, and so will I. Just title it "THE BRABEC BULLETIN SAMPLER." |
Internet Business Startup Tips
What Are You Giving Up for the Sake of Your Business?
Amazon's Online Payment System
Is Your Website Safe from Hackers?
Update on the BizStarz/EMI Lawsuit
Looking at Squidoo through New Lenses
HUMOR: What Time Is It on Your Cell Phone?
NOTE that this Sampler continues on Page 2
Trying to start a new Internet business? "Not going to be easy," says master Web marketer Dr. Ralph Wilson in the July 2008 issue of his Web Marketing Today ezine. "Competition on the Internet is tough! All the low-hanging fruit was picked long ago. There is no 'easy money' to be made today (except by marketers who already have an effective online sales approach). For every type of business there may be 10 or 10,000 competitors—or more. There is so much 'clutter' that it's difficult for anyone to find you unless (1) you show up high on the search engines or (2) you purchase Google AdWords ads for important keywords. However ... "
Click over to Wilsonweb.com to read the rest of this very interesting and helpful issue and to subscribe to Wilson’s ezine (must reading for serious Internet marketers). This back issue will be of particular interest to all Web marketing newbies, especially those who are thinking about trying to build a business stemming from an Internet franchise or multi-level marketing business opportunity.
And what are your sacrifices doing to your health and happiness, I must add? After I published a Bulletin on this topic, a busy designer sent this feedback:
"I don't generally respond to newsletters, but I just had to take a moment to tell you that your article, 'Deadlines Were Made to be Broken,' is one of the most important articles I've ever read.
"I succumbed to client pressure to meet impossible deadlines, got stuck in a need-to-please mode, worked on 4-5 hours' sleep seven days a week, and consistently put impossible work deadlines and client priorities above my own. Somehow I just learned to live with the insanity, as if that were some kind of normal. The result was more clients than I could handle, a serious health crisis, and eternal regrets that I worked far too often when I should have been spending downtime with my dying mother.
"I'm now starting my business back at square one, learning to manage a more sensible work load, taking better care of my health, and addressing client 'crisis' and deadlines a bit less maniacally. Reading how you've lived through some of the same angst but learned to course correct and survive has given me hope. If I hadn't decided to change the way I was working, my tombstone might have read: She wanted to please everyone."
Dear readers . . . you may not feel as though your business is deadline-oriented, but we all have a life full of deadlines of one kind or another. We may just call them something else, such as "business commitments," "family obligations," "unfilled orders," "a job that must be finished," etc. The real question I'm posing here is whether you are living and working to make YOURSELF happy . . . or to make OTHER people happy? To find some answers, be sure to read Deadlines Were Made to Be Broken, because this article could literally change your life.
Looking for an alternate shopping cart and online payment system? PromoDivaŽ Traci Vanover suggests you look at Amazon’s new Checkout by Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay.
"The two services are designed to help Web sites sell items online with the same low-friction experience offered by Amazon on its own site," says Traci. "Checkout by Amazon lets website visitors sign in to sites using an Amazon Account login and buy items using the familiar Amazon One-Click button. The service encompasses payment, promotion, shipping and sales tax calculation, and order management. Amazon Simple Pay is designed for merchants who don't need sophisticated checkout and order management capabilities, but who still want to incorporate Amazon's customer login system to sell items and collect donations."
If you have a business website, be sure to read the free PDF report Dennis Gaskill published this summer. Hacked! How My Business was Ruined by a Hacker explains how his Boogiejack.com website was hacked and filled with hidden links to porn sites and hundreds of other topics unrelated to his site’s content. As a result, the search engines began to see thousands of broken links, and his Google rankings plummeted from first and second page to practically nothing overnight, absolutely devastating his business and destroying years of work.
This is a horror story that Dennis says could happen to any website owner that doesn’t understand the danger of allowing "anonymous FTP access." Until I read this report, I hadn’t a clue about this, but was relieved to find that my web host does not use this default setting. But does yours? In his report, Dennis explains what he had to do to get his site back up and running, what safeguards he has now put into place, and what other website owners need to do as well–plus the struggle he is now having in getting Google’s search engines to once again search his newly-designed website.
For more than five years, I’ve been following the David vs. Goliath story of how Scott Smith, owner of BizStarz, has been fighting Entrepreneur Media, Inc. (EMI), publisher of Entrepreneur magazine, in the courts. EMI has put countless entrepreneurs out of business for daring to use the word "entrepreneur," claiming they literally own this word because of their trademarks and saying that no one else has the right to use it for any business purpose whatsoever.
But when they went after Scott Smith, who was then operating as EntrepreneurPR, he fought back big time. I’ve had an article on my site about this for some time, but if Smith’s latest allegations are proven true–that EMI has defrauded the Patent & Trademark Office--EMI could find itself facing millions of dollars in penalties because you just can’t lie to the PTO and get away with it. Get the details in Smith’s update, BizStarz Alleges that EMI Defrauded the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.
This summer after I finally got involved in online social networking, I spent some time exploring Squidoo, one of the many popular social networking sites that business owners are using to promote their products and services and drive traffic to their websites. While at Squidoo, I found and downloaded Seth Godin's (Squidoo's founder) eBook, Everybody’s an Expert (about something)—the Search for Meaning Online.
In this very interesting and helpful eBook—which was written for people who are familiar with the idea of blogs or already have one—Godin makes it clear that the incredible growth of the many social networking (Web 2.0) websites can be explained by the fact that people not only like to listen to people they agree with and trust, but also like to talk about what's on their minds, what they're doing, where they've been, what products they like, on and on.
What Godin has done with Squidoo is to make it possible for anyone to set up as many one-page websites (called "lenses") on as many different topics as they wish, and then use those lenses to draw more online traffic, more revenue, more followers, more attention, more interest, more donations, or more influence.
"It’s not trivia if it means something to you," says Godin, who adds that there are 80,000 new blogs every single day. "That’s more blogs started every day than there are books published every year in the United States."
Now THAT statistic and the whole idea of "talking trivia" on the Web really got me to thinking. Only a week earlier, I had finally allowed myself to be dragged over to Twitter.com, not because I really thought I had time for twittering, but mostly to stop one of my best business buddies from nagging me about the importance of getting involved in some kind of social networking on the Web. I messed around with both Twitter and Squidoo for awhile, but eventually decided that I had better things to do with my time. The experience was quite educational, however.
It took only four days on Twitter for me to finally understand the business benefits of social networking and see how people all over the world are connecting to one another for reasons both personal and business-related. Some of the most successful online businesses are spending a lot of time to maximize their networking on such sites as Squidoo, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Godin emphasizes that everybody is an expert about something, and each of us feels passionate about many things, whether it's about our business, job or career goals, our personal relationships, family, hobbies, special causes . . . on and on. When the Web was first taking off, only a few people had the vision to see that someday millions of ordinary individuals would find they could have their own soapbox on the Web where they could talk about topics they care most about and, in return, learn what others thought about their opinions.
If you want to find experts, or if YOU are an expert on something—and it can be literally anything—and you want to be found, perhaps you need to explore your possibilities on Squidoo, and get going on Twitter, too.
It's clear that a LOT of people seem to be "time challenged." In fact, I'm beginning to think that the only people who always know what day and time it is are salaried employees who have to punch a clock, so to speak. (And there sure aren't as many of those as there used to be.) For the benefit of new readers who missed my unique three-Bulletin series in September, let me summarize.
I first wrote a regular business Bulletin on Wednesday, September 4, accidentally dating it September 11 and talking briefly about how this event had so dramatically impacted our lives. I realized my mistake while I was eating lunch, only because I was thumbing through the TV guide and had just turned on the news in time to hear Sarah Palin say, "One week from today, September 11, my son is going to Iraq."
I almost choked on my sandwich when I realized I had just moved the calendar up a whole week and made myself look stupid (not for the first time), so I quickly sent a brief correction to that message. I had the month and day right on that Bulletin, but didn't realize until a reader told me that I had not only dated the first Bulletin 2006, but had dated the correction to it as 2007. That's when I found myself collapsing in laughter and just had to write a third message of the day that included a few of the humorous responses I had received by that time. Several more soon followed, and some of them were pretty funny and well worth sharing.
Wrote Elizabeth, "I didn't notice the incorrect year, and you had me wondering, 'Wait! What happened on September 4th? Am I that removed from reality?' Whew! Before the correction, I was going to ask for the winning lottery numbers."
My old friend Sam, now retired from corporate employment but as busy as ever, wrote, "I look at the fax/copier to get the date, at the calendar to see which day of the week that date falls on, and at the TV cable box to get the time. If I'm bright enough to think of it, I get my cell phone and find all three pieces of information on its home page."
Time really does fly when you're working and enjoying what you do. Terry Kralik, Moose Country Quilts wrote, "Love your messages, Barbara. I can relate. It was noon today before I realized it, and the piece of bread I had put in the toaster at 9:00 was still there, partially toasted and dried. I had completely forgotten to eat breakfast, but was famished by noon—the 'toast' worked fine in a grilled cheese sandwich."
If truth be told, it was 2:54 before I realized I hadn't had lunch that day because I had gotten wrapped up in social networking on LinkedIn. So this Bulletin was further delayed by the need to grab some cheese and crackers as an appetizer before dinner. I have never been a clock-watcher, so if I forget to set an alarm to remind me to stop for dinner, I sometimes rely on my cat, who often hits my desk with a dinner-MEOW-alarm about 8 P.M.
"I ask my wife what day it is so often she doesn't think anything of it," writes Dennis, Boogiejack.com. "A lot of times when I write a check I'll ask the cashier something like, 'Is this the 20th?' When the cashier tells me it's the 22nd or 23rd, I just shrug and tell 'em I must have really overslept. Those of us who live outside of the usual 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday routine are special. I like to think we're timeless . . . already living in the eternal now."
"I was sooo ... delighted to know that I'm not the only time-challenged person on the planet," wrote Sylvia. "I guess you could say that we hold you to a higher standard, but I prefer just looking at it as being so human. I love that laughter is the great equalizer."
"You really made me laugh today," said Carrie, Fireside Design Studio. "I'm relieved to know there are others just like us who have no idea what day it is. I used to check the time/calendar on my computer when I needed to know. Then last year I bought a fancy-pants watch that displays the date, day of the week and time. If I put two fingers on it, I get my pulse reading, too! The funny thing is, I can look at that watch and then five minutes later need to look again as it just doesn't stick to my brain. I guess one can get away with that when one works at home. Like you, I watch the calendar more carefully if I have an appointment (or a birthday!) coming up, but otherwise the date is almost irrelevant. I can imagine a lot of people would be jealous that we have this luxury. Maybe it's both a blessing and a curse. Today it was just too funny."
For part II of this Sampler . . . Click here ===>
