September 28, 2002

Table of Contents

Welcome

Quote of the Week

Administration

Featured Resource - GIBSON RESEARCH

Staff Article - QUICK TAKES
Staff Article -  SUCCESS HABITS
Parting Comments

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Quote of the Week

The journey is the reward.

- Taoist saying
 

Administration

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Featured Resource

GIBSON RESEARCH

You'll find terrific free and easy to use tools here to test how secure your system really is. Check it out today!

http://grc.com/
 

Staff Article

QUICK TAKES
by: Cary Christian

It's that time again! I'm in the mood to present another installment of Quick Takes this week, so here goes.


GENERATE TRAFFIC BY HAVING A LITTLE FUN!

One of the most frequently searched terms online is "jokes" or some other term related to humor. Now why would that be of interest to you?

We tend to get so serious about managing our businesses that we sometimes lose some of our creativity. Everyone is optimizing their sites for the search engines, running pay-per-click campaigns, participating in email marketing campaigns, etc., etc., etc. Being able to do something different will give you a competitive advantage.

So if you know people are searching for jokes and humor in droves, why not give them what they want? How many different ways can you think of to turn humor into a marketing strategy? Let's try a couple:

1. Start a newsletter with your own joke of the day. Include an ad for your products in every issue. Get yourself 365 excellent jokes and load them into an autoresponder. Market your joke of the day newsletter on your site and in other marketing efforts you undertake. Then sit back and let the autoresponder advertise for you on a daily basis.

2. Find some good cartoons or a cartoon feed to place on your website and change it every day or every week. If it's good enough, you can build repeat visitors to your site with very little effort.

I'm sure you can probably think of many other ways you could use humor to assist your marketing efforts. Don't get me wrong: these visitors will NOT be very targeted unless you can tailor the humor to your business in some way.

For example, if you cater to people who like gardening, then you should look for jokes, humorous articles, cartoons, etc. that deal with gardening, farming, landscaping or something similar.

Tailoring the humor to your business may be either very simple or very difficult depending on your industry. But even if you cannot target the humor, you'll get plenty of visitors and repeat visitors very inexpensively.


A LOGICAL EXTENSION

The previous discussion of using humor to generate visitors logically leads to using other terms that are more targeted to your business and following the same techniques. For example, find heavily-searched keywords related to your business and develop a "tip of the day" related to that keyword.


WHAT HITS ARE AND ARE NOT

I'm sure you've all seen sites that brag they're getting 10,000 hits per day. You've probably been envious of those numbers and wonder how you can get your site into that category. But what numbers are they talking about when they say they're getting 10,000 hits per day?

Hits are not the same as visitors. You need to understand that in order to analyze your traffic properly. If you have a webpage that contains 20 pictures or other objects, then one visitor to this page will create 20 hits. If this page were our braggart's page that gets the 10,000 hits per day, then it is only getting 500 visitors per day. Our envy level just dropped in a major way!

Make sure you are concentrating on visitors and not hits when you're analyzing your own site statistics.


SERIALIZED CONTENT

Millions and millions of people tune in to soap operas every day and sitcoms every night. You'll hear people discussing the characters and what happened on the last show and trying to guess what might happen tomorrow or next week when the next installment airs. The good shows keep people coming back again and again.

Why not do this on your website? You know I'm a big fan of helpful content that is complementary to the products you sell. Well, why not serialize some of the content to keep people coming back for more?

Either write or get yourself some good multiple-part articles and present a new installment each week on your site. If the articles are sufficiently interesting enough, people will come back to read them.

Once the article series has run, let them do double duty! Load them into an autoresponder and let people subscribe to the series from your site, your newsletter or through some of your other advertising sources. This will give you an opportunity to include an ad for one of your products with each message.


Copyright (c) 2002

Guest Article

SUCCESS HABITS
by: Wendy Hearn

What one thing could you do today to improve your business and professional success? What difference to your life would this make if it became a habit?

Forming habits which become ingrained will yield results. I've hesitated to say the results you really want because it depends on what you're doing. Are your habits keeping you stuck or are they moving you forwards? If one of your habits is spending too much time planning and not enough time doing, then you're not likely to achieve your desired results.

To break unproductive habits but to add habits which will move you forward is one of the goals of coaching. These daily habits can be fairly small but will gradually amount to something much bigger.

Let's take the example of someone who needs to make telephone calls to further their business. A habit to break may be spending too much time thinking about each call, putting it off, or finding other things to do. The new habit to introduce may be to make 3 telephone calls a day or to identify the one daily telephone call which will have the biggest impact on your
business.

I encourage you to identify and introduce one daily habit into your business or professional life. Keep it small to start with and as your feeling of success increases, you can add to it. Your success lies with the actions you take each day.

-----------------------------------

Wendy Hearn
Personal and Professional Coach

She works with business owners, professionals, executives and
managers who are ready to enrich their lives. . . finding more
success, fun, balance, joy and time. She coaches one-to-one
with individuals and groups by telephone and email.

http://www.Business-Personal-Coaching.com
mailto:wendy@Business-Personal-Coaching.com 

Copyright 2002, Wendy Hearn. All rights reserved.

Parting Comments

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