Free Stuff !!!!

No – Really – Free Stuff.

We are running a competition over at BloggingTips.com, and you can be in with a chance of winning 5 fantastic prizes. All you have to do is review this website. Yes, the website you are reading right now!

How do you enter? Well, you must go to This Post over at blogging Tips, and leave a comment with your review. To be in with a chance of winning, there are 5 areas I am interested in hearing your opinion on:

Design — usability, visual appeal, readability, navigation.
Content — got an idea for a great viral post we could write?
Promotion — how would you suggest i promote the blog?
SEO — can you see areas for improvement?
Readership - how would you suggest to better improve and retain readership?

I have 5 great prizes to give away:

The Copywriters Handbook
Web Design for ROI
The New Rules of Marketing & PR
Communicate to Win
Starting & Running an Online Business for Dummies

So what are you waiting for, go over to this blog post, and write an honest review of the website your reading at the moment. The competition closes on the 6th March 2007.

Go to this website for more details http://www.bloggingtips.com/2008/02/28/free-prizes/

Popularity: 7% [?]

Every business venture starts with an idea. It may be as simple as opening a shop that features local artwork or as complex as creating a company that offers space vacations. Either way, your success depends on the strength of your idea, how well it fits your temperament, how well you can plan for success, and what resources you can bring to the effort.

Before settling and taking your first steps, consider this list of 10 questions that you absolutely, positively need to ask about your business idea before you take the big plunge.

Is This Something I Really Want to Do?

Running your own company is more than just a job. For most successful entrepreneurs, it’s a full-time passion. The people most likely to succeed are ones who truly believe in their ideas, care about the products or services that they offer, and love what they do — even when the going gets tough. Take a moment to think about what it will take to turn your idea into a business and what running that business will be like. Is your heart in it? Is it something you really care about? Is it how you want to spend your time? If you answer all the questions with an enthusiastic “Yes!” read on. If not, maybe you need to go back to brainstorming.

For more ideas on starting a business, checkout 10 Hot Ways to be an Entrepreneur.

Is This Something I’m Capable of Doing?

Thomas Edison called genius “1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.” Your idea is a stroke of inspiration, but do you have what it takes to sweat out the details and do the hard work required to turn your inspiration into reality? Beyond desire, do you have the capability? In other words, can you do it? Do you have the resources, connections, skills, and experience to turn your idea into a success story? And if you don’t have everything required to do the job well, do you have the knowledge and resources to assemble a team that does?

Check out Stefan’s post at the Small Business Blog, Reasons Why Most Businesses Fail.

Does It Tap My Personal Strengths?

Not everyone can run a high-tech business — or a local gift shop, for that matter. Your strengths and weaknesses will go to work with you every day, so take time to consider whether your idea aligns well with your personal attributes or whether it requires talents in areas where you’re a little weak. Successful entrepreneurs devote themselves to businesses that leverage their strengths and work around their weaknesses. How do your strengths and weaknesses match up to the business idea you’re considering? If the business requires plenty of personal contact, for example, are you good with people? If the business requires you to move rapidly to seize an opportunity, are you prepared for long, sometimes stressful days?

Checkout Steve’s blog post about Discovering Your Strengths.

Can I Describe It in 25 Words or Less?

If your business idea is so complex that you need a half-hour and 20 flip charts to explain it, chances are it’s too complicated. You can describe almost every great business idea in 25 words or less. Consider a few examples:

• A combination electronic organizer and wireless Internet device (8 words)
• A gift certificate that you can redeem online to contribute to the charity of your choice (16 words)
• A catering service that delivers meals based on The Zone, Atkins, or Weight Watchers diets (15 words)

As part of your evaluation, pare down your idea to its essentials and describe it as simply and concisely as you can. A simple, polished phrase can make your idea shine — or it may reveal a fatal flaw.

What’s the Closest Thing to It in the Marketplace?

As the age-old saying goes, there’s nothing new under the sun. In fact, refining or combining existing ideas generates most new business ideas. Here’s a television, there’s the Web — hey, how about WebTV? As you judge your idea, think about similar products or services already swimming in the marketplace, and then ask a tough question: How is your idea better?

Does It Meet a Need or Solve a Customer Problem?

Most customers don’t plunk down hard-earned cash because they love spending money or love buying products. Customers spend money because they believe that what they buy can solve their problems, fulfill their needs, or satisfy their desires. If your business idea doesn’t address a real problem, need, or desire, getting it off the ground will be doubly difficult, because instead of presenting your product as the best solution to existing needs, you have to create the sense of need and then present your product as the solution. That situation is a hard row to hoe.

Does It Take Advantage of a New Opportunity?

Often, business success hinges on having the right idea in the right place at the right time. The rise of the Internet — and the simultaneous passion in America for collecting — presented twin opportunities that helped turn the booming auction site eBay into a household word. And the nation’s ballooning waistline was the opportunity that Weight Watchers rode all the way to a multimillion-dollar success story. Does your business idea stand a good chance of catching a similar wave of opportunity?

What’s the Biggest Drawback or Limitation?

You have to take off your rose-colored glasses and admit that even the greatest business ideas have drawbacks and limitations. Maybe your idea is very easy for would-be competitors to copy, for example. Or maybe it requires a difficult-to-achieve change in some ingrained customer behavior. Perhaps your idea requires a long R&D phase, or maybe it poses difficult marketing challenges. By thinking long and hard about the potential drawbacks of your idea, you put your business opportunity in perspective. If the pluses far outweigh the worst-case scenarios you dream up, chances are your business idea stands a pretty good chance of succeeding.

Will It Make Money — and How Fast?

Oddly enough, this simple question is the one most likely to go unasked by wannabe entrepreneurs, maybe because it’s one of the toughest questions to face up to. It goes well beyond your answer to the question of whether or not customers will be willing to pay for your product or service; this question takes you into the realm of forecasting:

• How long will it take before your business idea will generate profits?
• How long can you afford to wait?
• After the sales start rolling in, can you sustain profitability over time?

Take the time to give questions like these serious thought — sooner rather than later.

Am I Willing to Remortgage My House?

I’m not suggesting that you take out a second mortgage to fund your new business venture. But as a test of your passion and belief, ask yourself: If you had to do it, would you be willing? Even if you’re planning on persuading outside investors to take on some of the risk for you, you need that kind of personal belief as you make the pitch. And if you decide to take a bank loan instead, you have to sign on the dotted line to pledge to repay the money, absolutely, positively. One way or another, you assume financial risk when you launch a business. If you’re not willing to take on that risk, you may not be cut out for the business you’re thinking about starting.

What other questions should budding entrepreneurs ask themselves before they take the plunge into starting a new business?

I’ll leave that question for you guys to answer; do so by leaving us a comment below.

Popularity: 9% [?]

When you think of branding, you might think of logos, colors, taglines, and names relating to a given product, company, or service. Although branding encompasses those element, true branding is a far more powerful and subtle issue than you might expect.

Successful branding is about creating an emotional relationship between an individual and the representative company or product. This means that good branding creates a response in people—whether a tagline makes us feel comfortable, or a logo makes us feel energetic, or a color scheme makes us calm—these responses are the desired results of effective branding.

Branding can be achieved using a variety of techniques. Contemporary marketing theory breaks down branding into two types:

• Direct Experience. In direct experience branding, the emotional relationship is one-to-one. If you have a great burger at Ye Olde Burger Shoppe, the satisfying results of that meal relate emotionally to the product and brand.
• Indirect Messaging. The indirect method uses slogans, sponsored events, and promotions to connect people to product brands. The key to successful indirect messaging is repetition, usually in the form of TV and magazine ads, and billboards.

Websites can benefit from both forms of marketing, although websites themselves are almost always going to be a direct experience for people these days. You go to a site for a reason—to read aWeblog, purchase copies of a favorite author’s books, and so forth. You interact with the site, and your experience there creates the emotional one-to-one feeling found within direct experience marketing.

When creating a lasting relationship between an end user and a product, company, organization, or service, Web designers need to plan the direct experience to have a specific emotional result.

For example, my bank’s website provides excellent service, useful management tools, and provides me with an emotional sense of security. This kind of bonding between a site’s visitor and a product can be accomplished using a range of specific usability techniques.

But we can also draw from indirect messaging techniques to enhance our goals. All of the following things can work on the indirect level by providing repetitive images:

• Using consistent placement for logos from page to page
• Using consistent color and graphic styles

Ads on websites are considered indirect messaging, but the actual website itself is a direct experience.

• Typography
• Iconography

Combining an effective direct experience and consistent statement of brand will help you to bond your site visitors to your site, creating lasting, rewarding relationships. When you embark on your branding efforts, be sure to checkout our corporate branding mistakes post to ensure you dont make the mistakes that many others do!

Popularity: 7% [?]

Creating a feed is not enough - not if you want people to read it. You need to let people know that your feed exists and try to get them to subscribe to it. Promoting a feed is similar to promoting a Web site or an e-mail newsletter. You have to work at it a bit. Luckily, some easy-to-use tools are available to help you, and im going to show you each, and how to use them effectively.

Registering Your Feed with Directories

The number one way to let people - those outside your usual range of contacts - know that you have a feed is to register it with as many directories as possible. This concept is similar to registering your Web site with Web-site directories such as Yahoo!

Of course, you should also promote your Web site content itself. When you get people to your Web site, if they like the content, they may look for your feed so that they can keep up to date on any changes that appear on your site. Check out this article for more tips on promoting your website/feed. Online Marketing Techniques.

RSS is a relatively new technology that’s causing a lot of excitement, and many people want to get in on the act - so they start directory sites.

Some sites hope that you’ll come for the free feeds and stay to buy customized, specialized feeds or other RSS-related services.

So, you need to do the legwork and register with as many directories as you can. To get you going, checkout Kevins article, a post where he has listed the best and most valuable sites and directories to submit your blog/rss feed too.

If your feed is based on a blog, you can still register at all the RSS directories, but you should also register at blog directories. Blogging is a whole world onto itself. In fact, more blog directories exist than RSS directories. Do a Web search using the keywords blog and directory, and you’ll find what seems like millions of listings.

To reach those who aren’t as RSS savvy or as motivated to find feeds, read on, as we look at other ways to promote your feed.

Linking to Your Feed

Of course, when people do find your site, you want your website visitors to subscribe to your feed, so you need to put an RSS or XML button on your site. I recommend you stick with the universally known orange rss button.

Add a hyperlink to the button, linking to your RSS feed’s file. To add a hyperlink to a button, select the button, and use your web creation software’s hyperlink command. In the HTML code, the result looks something like the following:

<a href=”autocad_tips_newsletter.xml”><imgsrc=”images/rss_btn.gif”></a>

Now visitors can easily subscribe to your feed.

You need to make clear what the RSS feed is about. If you have a page that includes many different types of content, label the RSS button with the name of your feed. If you have a place on your site for visitors to sign up for an e-mail newsletter, that’s a good place to put your RSS link. Then people can choose which way they want to receive information from you.

Getting Auto-Discovered

Some RSS readers can automatically find RSS feeds on a Web page. This feature is called auto-discovery.

You can ensure that this auto-discovery works by using the link HTML tag and the code on any web page that contains an RSS feed. You place this code in the head section of your page, which means between the <head> and </head> tags. Here’s the code:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” href=”http://www.your_URL_here.com/feedfilename.xml”>

You can put anything you want for the title attribute, but it should relate to your feed, because some browsers display this text. If you have more than one feed on a page, create a separate link tag for each feed, giving each one a different title.

For an Atom feed, the type should be “application/atom+xml”.

Explaining Just What RSS Is

Let’s face it - not everyone knows what RSS is yet. Unless your clientele is very geeky, you need to explain it to them. Most sites don’t, but some do.

When explaining RSS, keep your explanation simple and appropriate for your audience. You don’t really need to explain the technology, just what it means for them and how they can subscribe. If you want, recommend some RSS readers to make the process painless or refer them to a browser-based reader.

Helpful text next to the RSS button can say something like “Subscribe to My RSS Feed on Widget Technology.” Here are just a few phrases that you could use:

• Get regular updates about widget technology
• Keep informed about widget technology
• Don’t miss the latest news about widget technology!

More people are finding out about RSS every day, so even if they don’t sign up right away, they may the next time they visit. Having an RSS feed shows that you’re “with it.” The implication is that if you are up to date enough to have a feed, you’re similarly up to date in your field - and that’s what your visitors want.

So evangelize a little, strut your stuff, and brag about being on the RSS bandwagon.

Telling Others All about Your Feed

To market your Web site, you do more than just register it and hope that people come. You probably proactively tell people about your site in many ways. Web-site marketing is a huge field.

Some common ways to market a Web site also apply to marketing your RSS feed. These methods are:

• Cross-link with other sites: Ask sites that link to you to add a phrase about your RSS feed. Using the phrase “RSS news feed available” may be enough.
• Send out press releases: Because RSS is new, you can send out press releases about your news feed. That’s right; the feed is news in itself.

Tip: When marketing your website or RSS feed, be sure to avoid the most common Internet Marketing Mistakes

RSS feed links in your e-mail signature

A signature is text that automatically appears at the bottom of every e-mail you send. Almost all e-mail programs let you create a signature. You can often add links to this text. Your Web-site URL should be there. Why not a link to your RSS feed as well? Think of it as an RSS button in every e-mail!

Writing articles for other sites

A great way to get links to your site is to write articles for newsletters and sites that cover your field. The way others pay you is to link to your site. You probably don’t want to substitute a link to your RSS feed for the link to your site (but then again, you may). However, other sites can also give you a byline. You can mention your RSS feed in the byline or perhaps even in your article.

Telling everyone you know

“Hey! Guess what? I have an RSS feed! Pass it on.” Wherever you go - conferences, business meetings, and so on - or whomever you talk to - friends, colleagues, and customers; let them know about your new RSS feed. They’ll probably say, “What’s an RSS feed?” and you can tell them all about it. It’s a great way to break the ice at a party.

Tip: Why not put the URL for your feed on your business card, stationery, or brochure?

Keeping Your E-mail Newsletter

If you have a successful e-mail newsletter, I don’t recommend giving it up. E-mail is still the way that most people get their news. But you should definitely mention your RSS feed in your newsletter as an alternative way to get the same information, with a link to your site’s explanation about RSS.

You can - and should - update your RSS feed when you update your Web site. If your newsletter is monthly, for example, and covers updates on your site throughout the previous month, people who subscribe to your RSS feed receive the news before your newsletter subscribers. You can plug this advantage to your readers. One of the major advantages of RSS is to notify your readers of changes as soon as they happen. By comparison, an e-mail newsletter is old news by the time you get it published.

Branding Your Feed

You probably hired a Web designer to make your Web site look beautiful, if you’re not a designer yourself. You carefully use your logo on your site, your letterhead, your PowerPoint presentations, and all your publicity materials. Why not brand your RSS feed as well?

You can probably think of more ways to publicize your feed. Remember that publicizing your feed also publicizes your website and your business. If you know of any more please feel free to comment or leave your feedback.

Popularity: 8% [?]