We’ve been told for years that American’s are overweight. I completely agree we need to eat healthier and stay fit if we’re going to win the fight against obesity—but how can people do this whenever the information provided to us is wrong. Most Americans are under the assumption that eating more makes you gain fat and eating less makes you loose fat.

For example, to gain 1 lb per week, someone with my stats who is very active would need to consume 3978 calories a day, to loose 1 lb per week, 2978 calories to maintain their current weight, and about 3478 calories to gain 1 lb per week. This is assuming your diet consists of 55% carbohydrates, 15% protein, and 30% fats. What is the problem with this assessment? It doesn’t take into account my lifestyle, genetics, eating habits, and history.

I don’t believe that calories have anything to do with weight loss or weight gain. If a calorie is the agent that causes weight gain, then why is it that somebody can eat an excess of calories that come from beans, lentils, nuts, and other “slow carbs” and not gain a single pound of fat? How come someone with a high metabolism can eat an excess of the recommended amount of calories and not gain any weight at all? Why can some people can eat triple the amount of recommended calories, and depending on the kinds of foods they eat, can actually loose weight. Why are the numbers not the same for everybody?

Calories are just energy that your body burns as fuel. Depending on the kinds of foods you eat, your DNA, and your fitness regimen, your body may take the excess fuel and store it as fat or muscle, but for a lot of people, the energy just runs its course and isn’t stored in the body at all. It’s not the calories that make you fat! I believe that loosing weight due to a reduced calorie diet is just a side-effect of consuming less of the foods that make you gain weight.

This is so unfortunate. People in this country starve themselves everyday, only to find that their weight loss is ineffective and torturous. There are plenty of foods out there that can sustain your lifestyle, make you feel good, and help you reach your perfect weight. I wouldn’t know what I would do without the occasional delicious medium-rare steak or Italian inspired pasta dishes I eat so often. Food is supposed to be enjoyed.

Everybody is different. One diet isn’t going to work for everybody, so I recommend treating your body like an experiment. Find what works for you and stick with it. Many people can loose weight simply by changing their style of food. I have a friend who switched to a Mediterranean-style diet and shredded tons of pounds. It wasn’t because of the calorie count; it was because that style of food was better for his needs.

Before low-calorie diets, it was eating too many carbohydrates. Before that, it was eating fatty goods. There have been countless diet fads throughout history. The best diet for loosing weight is not the one that works for everybody, it’s the one that works well for you. Before you follow the fads, experiment!

Resource: Check out Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes

Here are a few things I’ve done that have freed up some extra cash and given me more control over my finances:

• Removing reoccurring charges. I could not believe how many subscriptions that hit my credit card every month for $10 to $20 a pop. Everything from credit report monitoring, to music streaming services, to discount programs—removing these services have saved me almost $60 a month.
• Doing a reality check. Do you really need a home telephone service when you carry a cell phone with more than enough minutes? Removing a home telephone service can save you from $30/month (if you’re using VOIP like Vonage) to $60/month if you have a land line through a company like Verizon. I’m sure you have your reasons for keeping it. If you only use it sparingly, you’re throwing your money away.
• Ask for discounts. Cell phone companies negotiate. The first thing you should do is find out if you are eligible for a corporate discount through AT&T, Verizon, or T-Mobile. If you work for the government or a Fortune 500 company, chances are that you can save up to 25%. The second option is to call your cell phone company and let them know you’re having difficulty making your next payment. Ask them nicely what they can do for you. Many companies will lower your bill or add a discount to help out. A friend of mine got his minutes doubled for free. Anything is possible—these companies have a lot to loose if you leave.
• Do you really need that channel? Call your cable or satellite company and see how you can save. If you pay for HBO, Showtime, or Cinemax, you can save up to $15 for each channel per month by cancelling the networks you don’t need. Many companies will give you the premium channels free for 3 months, and that can save you up to $50 per month. You can also negotiate a lower monthly fee on your base service.
  
• Don’t pay setup fees. A friend of mine was able to convince his gym to wave $200 in setup fees, reduce his membership from $60 per month to $39 per month, and give him a month free. Setup fees usually go straight into the pockets of the person who is trying to sell you something.
  
• Saving by making small changes. My family is now saving $4,800 per year simply by choosing not to take a toll road to work every morning. Although the toll road is convenient, the extra $400 per month in our pocket makes the extra 10-15 minutes on the road worth it. Eating breakfast at home rather than eating out every morning can save $100 per month. Making coffee at home rather than enjoying Starbucks can save another $100 per month.

There are hundreds of other ways to reduce spending without resulting in a huge impact to your lifestyle. I’d love to hear ways that you’ve saved.

Coaching is such a powerful mechanism that can do wonders for your personal and professional life—especially if you’re a creative entrepreneur like me. Over the years, I’ve been so lucky to have found great mentors that have helped me achieve greatness in every opportunity I’ve sought after.

About a month ago, I started a fitness program featured in FLEX Magazine’s June edition promising an amazing athletic physique in four weeks. Six days a week, for two hours a day, I would go to the gym at noon and go through all of the exercises in my plan. I was extremely disciplined and tried my best not to cut corners or cheat in my workout—because after all, I’d only be cheating myself.

After thirty days of self-motivation and control over my diet and fitness regimen, I saw a significant increase in my strength. While I did see an increase in my appearance, nothing could compare to what I was about to experience next.

Recently, I started working with Carlos X. Hernandez, a professional fighter with over 25 years of experience in Mixed Martial Arts. He created a personalized fitness program tailored to help me reach my goals through intense athletic conditioning, cardio, and strength training. After completing my first week with Carlos, I’ve experienced many revelations and surprises about my ability to do things as a human being—things I never thought possible until now.

Here are some “ah ha” moments I’ve learned so far:

• Working with a coach accelerated my results by 400%. I experienced more gains in one week than I did an entire month of working on my own. This actually makes a lot sense if you think about it. How far are we willing to push ourselves? Your concept of “the limit” is much closer than “the limit” actually is. Too many people either give up early or lessen the burden to make things easier. Working with a trainer has allowed me to step outside of this comfort zone that’s been holding me back.
• A coach knows a hell of lot more than you do. This is a really hard thing for people to grasp, but you simply can’t know everything. When you work on your own, you learn 100% based on your mistakes. While this is very valuable, learning from someone else’s mistakes is much more lucrative and saves a ton of precious time. Think about it. Every exercise I did incorrectly was wasted time. Only about 20% of my workouts were actually useful. When working with a professional, you replace the 80% of waste with 100% of effectiveness. You can get better results in less time by cutting waste.
• Coaches teach you to be a champion. When you invest in a coach, you’re telling your subconscious that you’re going to meet your goals. It’s much more difficult to cheat because you know someone besides yourself is holding you accountable. You work a lot harder fearing the shame of someone knowing you’re not giving your best.
• Coaches help you stay in the present moment. Too many times when we start new projects, our minds get in the way of our progress. Negative thoughts impede on our ability to perform well. A lot of people don’t realize this, but positive thoughts can get in the way as well. Doing and thinking are two different things—one involves action, and the other doesn’t involve anything at all. When you work with a trainer, you are putting things into action. Pulling your mind out of a task and letting your body do the work naturally yields results. Let your trainer do the worrying, all you have to do is focus on the task at hand.

Imagine if you had a coach for everything in life. How much better would you perform? How much more money could you make? How much time would you save? How healthier could you be?

If there is any area in your life that you are unhappy about or would like to improve, find a mentor or coach to help you get where you want to be. You simply cannot do everything alone.

• Create lists for everything and use them everyday. I use OmniFocus for Mac and iPhone to keep track my tasks for all of my projects. A simple notepad will do just fine as well. More is not better. It’s really important to remember that your goal is an empty checklist, so don’t bog it down with useless tasks that don’t provide value. Be realistic.
• Don’t multitask. This is a really hard concept to grasp, but if you think about it single tasking gets things done faster. Think of your brain as a microprocessor. It’s very fast, until you open too many programs and the system either slows down or crashes. If you’re working on task, finish it before you move on to your next task. If you feel that you need to run tasks in parallel, outsource the repetitive tasks for someone else to do.
• Limit your access to e-mail, instant messaging, and the Internet. Keep that inbox empty at all times, except for those that require action. Act on those e-mails immediately. Limit social networking websites to about 30 minutes per day.
• Do not be available at all times for everybody. Use a service like Google Voice for business use to allow you to screen calls. If you are working with a client and another client tries to get a hold of you, call them back when you’re finished. They would expect the same respect in return.
• Think 2-3 days ahead of yourself. What do you need to accomplish tomorrow, the next day, and the day after that? Don’t think too far ahead because your tasks will get overwhelming.
• Throw out long term goals. They really don’t work. It is far easier to accomplish things “in-the-moment” rather than a few months or even years from now. Remember, a goal without any action is only a dream.
• Wait until the last minute. This sounds crazy because it goes against everything you’ve ever learned, but the amount of time you spend on a project is usually equal to the amount of time you allocate to it. Studies have proven that if you put time limits and short deadlines on projects, not only is the quality significantly better, but it doesn’t cost as much to produce.
• Go for bigger projects. You can do more good on a project when it is properly funded. I often turn down projects that are full of frustration, baggage, and hassle because it takes way too much of my time. You should want to work with people that make you feel energized and happy.
• Working 80 hours a week at 50,000 per year is exactly the same as working 40 hours a week at 100,000 per year. Think of your work as hourly dollars and be fair to yourself and your client-you deserve to get paid for your time and your client will get a better product if you are compensated appropriately. It’s up to you to set these expectations.

I’d like to thank Marie Forleo, Tim Ferris, and David Allen for providing this insight to me. It has freed up a lot of my time and allowed me to do things I’m passionate about.

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t feel sorry for anyone. These companies have gone bankrupt because they didn’t prepare for an economic downturn-an event that cycles naturally in our economic system. Those who are loosing their jobs are just as responsible. The inability for a worker to be staffed on another extremely low-paying job is the result of poor life planning and lack of higher education. Those who have lost on the stock market know investing is always a huge gamble.

Belkin is an excellent example of such a company. Over the weekend, The Daily Background, uncovered a huge scandal where a development representative, Mike Bayard, was caught paying people $0.65 to write fake positive reviews on Amazon.com for a product that received horrible market feedback:

“give [it] a 100% rating (as high as possible).” It doesn’t matter if the reviewer doesn’t own the product or has never tried it- the requester has helpfully written, “Write as if you own the product and are using it.” It even goes a step further, asking the Mechanical Turk user to “Mark any other negative reviews as “not helpful” once you post yours.”

Within a few hours, Gizmoto, Slashdot, Engadget, and Digg picked up the story. Suddenly everyone was doing research, finding Bayard’s LinkedIn profile, the Google Cache history of the product, and other products that have been affected. They found Bayard lowered the price of the product to $69 as positive reviews came in. The scandal got worse as the price soured to $200 in the matter of hours. The president, Mark Reynoso, made the following statement regarding the scandal:

“Belkin has always held itself to the highest standards of corporate ethics and its employees to the highest standards of personal integrity. Similarly, we support our online user community in discussion and reviews of our products, whether the commentary is good or bad. So, it was with great surprise and dismay when we discovered that one of our employees may have posted a number of queries on the Amazon Mechanical Turk website inviting users to post positive reviews of Belkin products in exchange for payment.

Belkin does not participate in, nor does it endorse, unethical practices like this. We know that people look to online user reviews for unbiased opinions from fellow users and instances like this challenge the implicit trust that is placed in this interaction. We regard our responsibility to our user community as sacred, and we are extremely sorry that this happened.

We want to stress that this is an isolated incident and to re-instill trust with you, we have taken the following courses of action:

- We’ve acted swiftly to remove all associated postings from the Mechanical Turk system.

- We’re working closely with our online channel partners to ensure that any reviews that may have been placed due to these postings have been removed.

It’s also important to recognize that our retail partners had no knowledge of, or participation in, these postings.

Once again, we apologize for this occurrence, and we will work earnestly to regain the trust we have lost.

Sincerely,
Mark Reynoso
President, Belkin”

After Reynoso made his statement, the story worsened as larger blogs found more evidence of wrong doing with other Belkin products. Suddenly the LinkedIn profile, Amazon profiles, and the solicitation were scrubbed and anonymous tips came in from Belkin employees claiming they have a history of wrongdoing and scamming the public.

It isn’t shady employees and bad business practices that are hurting them, however-it’s a collection terrible products and poor customer service that is brining them down. This could have easily been prevented with suitable product testing and quality assurance. In other words, poor quality products and services are almost always the source of these corporate meltdowns.

Belkin’s solution, of course, is to terminate the parties responsible and make sure the public knows this is an isolated occurrence. It’s going to take a lot of work to repair their reputation. Many consumers, especially in this economy, are more likely to choose competitor products. Some of the damage will never be repaired.

While this issue is far from over, it should serve as a reminder that no matter how much you get away with participating in shady business practices, it always comes back to haunt you in the long run.

I was prepared with an agenda before I started the show, but it was not in any way scripted. I spent a few hours writing a clear series of pointers a few days prior to the event, so it definitely kept me from going off topic too much. This was a good and bad thing for me. A script would have been less entertaining, but a list of topics that I had to adlib at some times seemed as if I were unprepared.

Here are my tips to making a good podcast:

• Be confident. There would have been no way for me to accomplish this without really knowing the information I was about to discuss. Run each topic through your head a couple of times and make sure you’re prepared.
• Be “in the moment”. You absolutely have to create a distraction free workplace. Turn off your cell phone, IM, e-mail, and close the door.
• Be comfortable. Sit in a cozy chair, have good posture, and speak in a relaxing, resonant voice. This will keep your tone pleasurable to listen to.
• Be hydrated. Bring a bottle or two of water-not soda, coffee, or tea. This will ensure your voice sounds the same throughout the entire broadcast.

Here are a few bonus tips I’ve learned:

• Use a good sound editor, like Logic or Pro Tools.
• Use a powered condenser microphone and an audio interface. This will keep your voice sounding crisp, clean, and professional. Adjust the EQ or apply digital filters until you’re satisfied with your sound.
• Use a “pop” filter to prevent unwanted vocal sounds from showing up in your recording. These sounds include “pa”, “ta”, “da”, and many others that sound as if you are tapping the microphone.
• Breathe properly through your mouth. Never, ever, ever breathe through your nose. The proper way to breathe is immediately before you start talking. This should be a very quick sounding breath.
• Don’t record everything at once. Just like when you record music, you record the verse, then you record the chorus, then you record the bridge, etc. Podcasting can be the same way. Record topic one, pause, record topic two, pause, and so on. Edit as you see fit.

I hope these tips are able to provide a good source for you to get started with your own podcast and I look forward to sharing insightful Internet Marketing advice with you!

Website Evaluation iPhone Application

I am heavy in the development process for my latest endeavor: The iPhone App Store! I have created an amazing tool that anybody can use to get a detailed report of their website’s health. Here are some of the features were have included in our internal beta:

• Domain Info
  • Page Loading Time
  • Whois Info
  • Googlebot Last Access
  • MSNbot Last Access
  • Technorati Last Update
• Ranking
  • Full URL PageRank
  • Google PageRank (domain without www)
  • Google PageRank (domain with www)
  • Alexa Traffic Rank
  • Quantcast Rank
  • Compete Rank
  • Technorati (Blog) Rank
• Search Engine Positioning
  • Keywords
  • Google SERP Position
  • Yahoo SERP Position
  • MSN SERP Position
• Internet Directories
  • DMOZ
  • Google
  • Yahoo
  • Wikipedia
  • Archive.org
• Linking
  • Backlinks
    • Google
    • Yahoo
    • AllTheWeb
    • Altavista
    • .GOV
    • .EDU
  • Outbound Links
  • Internal Links
• Indexed Pages
  • Number of Indexed Pages On
    • Google
    • Yahoo
    • MSN
• Landing Pages Information
  • Title
  • Description
  • Keywords

I will keep you all in the loop on further developments. I can’t wait to show these screenshots!

Weekly Podcast

I am starting a weekly podcast that can be downloaded on iTunes beginning March 9th, 2009. Our first topic will be on Google Insurance and I’m really stoked about having the opportunity to help businesses on a regular basis master their online presence.

Monthly Video Subscription via YouTube

My goal is to provide monthly website evaluations on YouTube. I believe this will be a great opportunity for company’s to get a grasp about things they are doing right, things they are doing wrong, and things they could be doing better.

Twitter Updates

On a side note, do you have a Twitter account yet? If not, sign up today and become a follower to get the scoop on more exciting marketing news.

1. Hire a copywriter. Forget the grammar and spelling mistakes, I’m talking about something much deeper. How is your copy written? Are you attracting the right kind of customer with it? Do you sound like an industry leader or do you sound like an idiot? Good copy is extremely rare. Take advantage of this.
2. Hire a photographer. Does your website contain mug shots of your executives and employees? Nothing says amateur like a point-and-shoot camera. Invest in a photo studio that tailors to your needs, a photographer that brings out the best out of you, and a stylist that makes you look fantastic. This applies to men as well as women-you should be wearing some sort of makeup in your photos.
3. Hire a talented web designer. Having an ugly website is one of the biggest turn offs for anybody. Invest in a collection of high quality stock art and consistently use it within your website and the rest of your marketing materials. Remember, websites that are entirely done in Flash are rarely usable and look very template-like.
4. Screw the “About Us” page and the “Services” page. Replace it with ultra-relevant content tailored to industry researched keywords and phrases. Include biographies, white papers, resources, tools, tips, and tricks. Make your website worth going to. Include case studies, a list of your clients, testimonials, and the advantages/disadvantages of utilizing your company’s services vs. your competition. Make this your sales engine.
5. Turn your “Contact” page into a lead module. Throughout your website, you should have opportunities to collect information about a possible lead. You may want to use a CRM tool such as Salesforce to capture leads and integrate them into your sales lifecycle. Be sure to also collect behind-the-scenes information, like IP address, country, city, state, referring website, search terms, etc. The point here is to look smart in front of your customers. Know more than they think you know about them.

You should do an evaluation of some kind once per year to investigate how other people perceive you. It may be a good idea to have a third party assist with this so you can ensure transparency. Remember, perception is everything.

Is your website optimized for screen readers? Have you tested it lately? Many webmasters don’t take into consideration design methods that allow visitors with disabilities to easily use their website.

By refraining to follow industry guidelines, they’re completely cutting off a significant portion of the population from accessing their online presence. While there are many levels of accessibility webmasters should follow, here are my top ten tips to making your website easier to use to blind and low-vision visitors:

1. Design your website completely in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Don’t simply use CSS to adjust colors, instead, use it as your design mechanism. Do not rely on the HTML code for design. Screen readers usually ignore CSS and read the HTML that is written on the page.
2. Don’t use color as your only method to describe information. If you must provide emphases to your content, use the STRONG or EM tag, and style them appropriately in CSS.
3. Include an ALT attribute within every IMG tag. This will read the description of the image instead of skipping it. This is also very helpful for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can also use the LONGDESC attribute if the description is longer than one sentence. While we’re on this topic, avoid using Image Maps if at all possible. They can be a nightmare.
4. Properly layout HTML tables so that screen readers understand the content the way it is intended to be understood. Begin by identifying the table using the CAPTION tag for the table’s title. You can use CSS to hide this caption if necessary.
5. Add the SUMMARY attribute to the TABLE tag and thoroughly describe what the table is. While we’re on the topic of tables, try to keep them as simple as possible. The more complex they are, the more difficult it is for blind people to understand them. Also, refrain for using tables to layout a webpage. Use the DIV tag and CSS properties to design page layouts instead.
6. Use the TH tag for all table headers and the TD tag for all table columns. Ensure the TH tag has an ID attribute that corresponds with the TD tag’s HEADER attribute.
7. To make things easier to understand, use the THEAD, TBODY, and TFOOT to group rows of a table. You can also use COL and COLGROUP to group columns of a table.
8. Make sure that you use a text-equivalent for anything that is not readable by a screen reader. This includes the NOSCRIPT tag for browsers that are not compatible with JavaScript, Applets, or Flash.
9. Ensure that all form elements are properly labeled with a LABEL tag and a corresponding FOR attribute for each form element’s ID attribute.
10. Use H1 – H6 tags to organize a hierarchy for your content. Properly label all paragraphs with P tags, and ensure every page has detailed TITLE and META tags. This is also an SEO must.

Here are a few bonus tips:

• Allow navigation skipping so that blind users can skip straight to the content. You can do this by creating a bookmark with an anchor tag where the content begins and linking to that bookmark. If you do not want regular users to see the navigation skipping capability, simply surround it by a DIV tag, style it “position: relative;” and align it to -1000px to the left.
• Use the TITLE attribute wherever possible, but remember that JAWS does not read the TITLE attribute by default. It has to be manually configured by holding INSERT-V, and adjusting the clickable elements setting.
• Avoid using FRAMES and IFRAMES if at all possible.
• If you do not have a copy of JAWS, try using a text based browser to navigate around. Such browsers include: Lynx, WebFormatter, and IBM Home Page Reader.
• Another workaround is to use the Mozilla Firefox screen reader emulator: Fangs. This extension creates a textual representation of a web page similar to how the page would be read by a modern screen reader.
• If you’re testing with JAWS, make sure you’re using the proper keyboard shortcuts. The number one mistake testers make is using the TAB key to navigate around a website. JAWS utilizes hundreds of possible key combinations to browse the web, so the TAB key is not always your friend.

While this article is intended for website owners using JAWS, the content is always relevant for users with Window-Eyes, EMACS Speak, Hal, MAGic, SuperNova, and ZoomText.

I was performing keyword research yesterday evening-which I always do on Sundays, I find that it’s a neutral day to work-and while doing so, I found an outstanding method to expand your keyword inventory: spy on your competition’s Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. I’ve used this method in the past for isolated situations, but I’ve never used it as part of my methodology for finding profitable niches-until now.

If you think about it, your competition would not be bidding $5-$10 per click on specific keywords if they did not see a return on investment. These words should be at the top of your list for writing content and expanding your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and PPC campaigns. Targeting these keywords first is a smart idea because they have been proven by industry competitors to be profitable.

I recommend Googling your most relevant keyword. From that, generate a list of the top 100 keywords from each advertiser on Google AdWords. Do this over a five day period to cancel out advertisers who aren’t relevant and are short term. After a week, you should have over 500 words, their average CPC, and their maximum CPC. Narrow those keywords down to the top 250 words with the highest maximum CPC and remove the keywords that haven’t yielded a significant amount of daily traffic.

This isn’t to say you should throw out traditional keyword research. Services like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker should definitely be used in conjunction with this method. The most important thing is to organize these keywords into as many groups as possible and sort them by the highest amount of searches. These groups should give you ideas for writing targeted content. The individual keywords should suggest terms that need be included within each article.

If spying on your competition is something that interests you, there are plenty of tools on that market that use the Google AdWords API to display this information. A few of these tools include: SpyFu, PPC Web Spy, and Keyword Spy. I personally subscribe to PPC Web Spy and have been very happy with the functionality and ease of use. Having the right tools will save you hours of extra work and make the mind-numbing job much more enjoyable.

** Just a clarification, when I use the phrase “spy on your competition”, it is not intended for unethical behavior. The tools I use only provide publically available information. **