So I am sitting on a flight to Fiji at the moment and picked up the Virgin Blue Voyeur magazine. Id just like to share some of the lessons Richard Branson wrote about.

Richard Branson is a billionaire who loves to have fun. He has hundreds of businesses and is definitely someone to model. He knows how to systemise, gets teams working which enables him to step away from the business and work on other things that interest him.

First off he shares his look on the current global situation. He says billions have been lost and many people are struggling.

Though a lot of good has come out of it, people are spending more time with their family and friends, we have reconnected with life and as we have had difficult times we have realised there are people who are doing it a lot tougher than us.

People Richard Branson knows in charity actually have noticed a slight increase in donations which is great. It’s important everyone helps each other during tough times. Branson mentioned some very important business lessons.

Lesson 1: Know Every Aspect of Your Business

This is something a lot of managers forget, they don’t actually know every little thing about the business. When it comes to internet marketing, marketers usually do know their business very well as most people start to do it themselves.

Though it’s important to remember just because you know parts of the business doesn’t mean you have to do it. For example, I suck at programming I have no idea how to do it. I know how to write a scope, manage the programmer and get what I want which is what matters.

Branson said that the managers who work at Virgin Blue actually work handling bags during their training so they understand the nuts and bolts of what goes on.

Lesson 2: Take A Risk

Branson’s philosophy is to embrace new things and learn from your mistakes. Another big point he mentions is that managers should give room for their staff to fail, so long they learn from the mistake and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

You need to take risks, especially when it comes to internet marketing. The great thing about the internet is you can test quickly and it doesn’t cost much to know whether something will work or not.

Lesson 3: Hire For Attitude, Not Skill

This one is interesting because personally when outsourcing I always hire for skill and attitude is second. That being said if I don’t like their attitude I never hire them.

You can’t train attitude so attitude is the most important. You can train a smart person to do pretty much anything. Branson hires people who are positive, smart, like to have fun and take pride in what they do.

Lesson 4: Keep Teams Small

The smaller the team the better. With Virgin Records, every time a team reached 100 employees the company would open up a new branch (using the same accounts).

During this stage Virgin Records ended up with around 20 new companies. This enabled them to keep their team at a suitable size to work efficiently. If teams are too large there are too many communication problems.

Lesson 5: Offer Customers a Better Experience

It is essential for an organisation focus on their unique selling point (USP). Branson says organisations need to focus on their individual voice to stand out. That combined with giving customers a better experience is a huge key in a businesses success.

So there you have it, some priceless lessons from a billionaire businessman. Think about how this relates to your current business.

Use this information and always remember, have fun!

Ben Brandes

Do you want to be more productive? Do you want to spend less time working and more time doing the things you want to do?

Productivity is a key part of every successful person. I have studied productivity and have spoken to many multi millionaires to find out how they get so much done.

I’m going to teach you what I’ve learned and tested over the years to help improve your productivity.

Secret # 1 Create a routine

I learned this from Eben Pagan in his Wake Up Productive program. Basically create a set of habits that you do every morning. Sort of a ritual…

For me, the first thing I do when I wake up is drink some water and then do 30 minutes of exercise. Then I have breakfast, get ready and start work at 9am. See what works for you.

Id highly recommend doing exercise in the morning. It allows you to start your day out right, keeps your mind active and it keeps you in a peak state for the day.

Secret # 2 – To-do lists

To-do Lists improve productivity by at least 25%. I always do my to-do list before I go to bed, that way as soon as I start work the next day I know exactly what I need to do.

I never have to waste time thinking about what needs to be completed.

Just a tip with to-do lists… Also put the list in order. A couple questions to consider are:

• How important is it that I do this task immediately?
• Which are the tasks that must be completed as soon as possible?

I actually use basecamphq for my online to-do list. If I have a huge set of tasks to complete I will even create a daily to-do list, for each day of that week.

Secret # 3 – Set intentions

One of my coaches really drilled into me the importance of setting intentions. I dont want to go all ‘woo woo’ on you so I’ll keep this section short.

Set an intention for tasks and your day. For example, with the timer I mentioned say to yourself “I am only going to focus on this task and complete it”. That is setting an intention.

Maybe the intention for the day might be “Today I am going to remain super productive and complete everything on my to-do list.” Intentions are powerful, use them.

Secret # 4 Eliminate distractions

It’s amazing what happens when you focus on a task without any distractions. Eliminate all distractions – email, skype, put your phone on silent, even put a sign on your door to stop people coming into your office. ( I have a sign that I put on my door saying “Important work in progress, keep out”)

Eliminate all distractions, when you get distracted it actually takes about 20 minutes to get back to the same amount of focus you had before you were interrupted.

Secret # 5 Dont multitask

Multi tasking is a silent productivity killer. It seems like you’re getting more done, when you compare your results from focused time on one task it’s obvious multi tasking reduces productivity over time.

Personally I loved to multi task – on my pc I had 2 monitors, heaps of windows open doing so many different things at once.

It was a hard habit to break, once I finally did I found I got more done and I was so much more focussed and clear on what I was doing.

Now that I travel the world I have a laptop, I miss the 2 monitors but the laptop allows me to do less multitasking as I only have one screen

Secret # 6 – Take breaks

I’m sure you’ve heard ‘less is more’. Take short every 1-2 hours. Eben Pagan recommends the following:

50 Minutes work, 10 minutes break x 2
30 Minute break
50 Minutes work, 10 minutes break x 2
60 minute break
50 Minutes work, 10 minutes break x 2
30 minute break.

During the breaks make sure you do something that takes your mind off work. You’’ll most likely find you come back with a fresh mind and are more focussed on your task.

Secret # 7 Use a timer/stopwatch

When you use a timer a weird thing happens. When you set time limits, Parkinson’s law begins. For those of you who dont know, Parkinsons Law is basically – however long you expect something to take, that’s how long it will usually take.

For example back in high school students are given like 3-4 weeks to complete an assignment. Most of those assignments wont be complete until the day before. Why? Because you’ve set that time frame for it to be completed. Even if you leave it to the night before it still manages to get done on time…

So set smaller time frames, I like to set my timer to 50 minutes. I then say to myself, during the next 50 minutes I will only do this task and will complete it.

I dont always complete it, but it has helped me work faster by setting timeframes and using a timer.

So there you have it! 7 secret productivity tips that I have learned from multi millionaires. Try it out, change things up, even if you only implement one of these tips it can make a huge difference in your productivity.

Use these tips, have fun with it and get more done!

Ben Brandes

There are so many blogs out there… the good news is, the majority of people dont really know how to effectively build a great blog.

In this post I go through the common mistakes so you can avoid them to help kick start your blog.

Here are 5 common mistakes bloggers experience

1. Impatience

Blogging is a long term strategy. There are millions of blogs out there, yet most of them dont make any money.

Why? Because they started a blog, didn’t get results fast enough and quit or moved onto something else.

You’ve got to be patient, good things take time. Continue writing good content, guest posting and writing quality comments on other blogs. These strategies work overtime, your blog and your readers are an asset.

If you look at the famous bloggers, it took them years to get where they are. Be patient.

2. Being Inconsistent

Have you ever been writing a heap of content on your blog consistently, then all of a sudden you stop for a few weeks and never end up writing on it again? I know plenty of others who’ve done the same and I am guilty of it too.

If you put in the effort to write consistently it’s important you stick to it for the long term. Writing every day for a month, then having a break and not writing anything for another month isn’t going to help you.

Why? Because

• Your readers come back to check your blog and realised you’ve stopped blogging so they stop visiting
• Google bots will stop coming to your site as often and will eventually lower your rankings if it’s not updated
• Shows other bloggers in your niche you’re not a serious blogger

So be consistent, I find it helps to write out a plan for the month. Outline when you will write a post, guest post, comment etc.

3. All about me

Some of the best blogs help others and provide their readers with good information. Personally I dont really enjoy reading blogs that just talk about someone’s life. Dont make your blog all about you. Your readers are the most important part of your business.

I dont mind hearing a story or two combined with some valuable content. Just try to make it all about helping your readers. It helps to reader over your post and change I’s to “You”.

Make it about your readers and providing as much value as possible.

4. Spamming

Do not visit top blogs and reply to their blog posts with rubbish comments. This usually hurts your brand more than helping it. Yes, you may get some traffic but the traffic you do get is usually people annoyed and curious to see who the spammer is…

Id recommend reading 7 Things to Avoid to Protect Your Blogs Brand when Commenting on Other Blogs for more info.

5. Spending too much time on Social Media

Social media is a great strategy for bloggers who already have a following. I wrote a post Why Social Media is a Waste of Your Time When You First Start Blogging which is definitely worth reading if you’re just starting a blog.

When starting out it’s important to be consistent, add value and build relationships with other bloggers for guest posting. You also want some sort of strategy to add value comments to their guest posts.

So now you have a heads up over most bloggers out there, avoid these top 5 mistakes bloggers make and you’re already ahead of 95% of bloggers out there.

Have fun and enjoy the process

Ben Brandes

Finding authoritive blogs in your niche is very handy for a few reasons:

• You can have a look at what blog posts are popular and model them
• You can post comments that add value on their blog
• You can build a relationship with the blogger and even do a guest post for them (Tips on how to get a guest post)

There are a few ways to look for good blogs, it also helps to have the Alexa Sparky firefox plugin. Basically you can look at the Alexa rank to have some sort of gauge how much traffic the blog gets. Also what their PR is. (The higher the better).

Managing all the blogs can be difficult, I recommend using google alerts and google reader to manage the blogs you find. I wrote about it in more detail at 7 Steps To Use Google Alerts For Improving Your Blogs Content and Authority.

How to find Authoritive Blogs in Your Niche

• Searching for blogs using the delicious tag search

Basically you can search for bookmarks that people have tagged. You want to look for tags with your keyword and “blog”. In the above screen shot that is a search for a boxing blog.

Go through the list and look for ones with blue boxes with a number. That shows how many people have bookmarked it. Obviously the more the better. It is still sometimes worth looking at the blogs that dont have multiple bookmarks. It’s up to you.

• Searching for blogs using Technorati blog search

Here you can search “Blogs” or “Posts” make sure you’ve selected to search for “Blogs”. Enter your keyword and it will find blogs related to the keyword. The higher the “Auth” number is the more popular it is.

• Using Google Blog Search

Type in your keyword, I’d also recommend typing in longer tail keywords, not just your top category. Sometimes this search works great for a certain keyword, other times not so much. Give it a try.

So now you know how to find good blogs in your niche using Delicious, Technorati and Google Blog Search. When you find good blogs, look at what is popular and write similar posts with a different angle. Another good tip is to look at their blogroll to see what blogs they like.

Also when you find blogs with a lot of readers, begin building relationship with the blogger to do guest posting in the future.

Have fun with it

Ben Brandes

Guest posting can be one of the biggest traffic generators for your blog, especially in the early stages. Social media is a waste of time when you first start blogging, so it’s wise to do guest posting.

It’s much easier to land a guest post with people you already have a relationship with.

To land a guest post you need to focus on the needs of the blogger. Bloggers accept guest posts from people who provide great content and it helps a lot if you have a relationship with them.

When sending an email convey the following:

• You’ve considered their needs eg. Maybe they’re going on a holiday and you offer to write a guest post.
• Let them know you’re a regular reader of their blog
• Offer an interesting topic
• Comes across humble, confident and respectful

The Proposal

In the email you could write something like, “Id like to offer you an in depth guest post called “title”. It would cover the following points…”

Cover the main points in bullet form then attach the post to the email. It’s also important to mention how they will benefit eg. will their readers be inspired? Learn something new?

Include the blog post in a html text file

In the email never include your proposed article in a word document, you want to make it as easy as possible for the blogger – which is the post in a html text file.

A simple way to do it is to write the post on your own blog, then copy and save the html version as a text file.

Insider knowledge

Do some research on the blogger before you craft your email. Go to the About Us page, read some posts to learn more about the blogger. Tie some of the information you found into the email because it shows you actually have spent the time to find more about them and have been reading their blog for quite a while.

Blog Post Style

Certain blogs have different styles, make sure the post you write is similar to the bloggers writing style to increase your chances of acceptance.

Credibility

If you’ve done guest posts before on a well known blog definitely mention it! It shows that other bloggers have trusted you and provide proof by showing them the guest post. Make is personal eg. John Doe asked me to write a guest post on his blog (link) an www.domain.com and the readers enjoyed it.

Always provide links to other posts you’ve written so then can look into your writing a bit more.

These tips will greatly enhance your chances of landing a guest post with a blogger. There are so many people out there who dont put effort into guest posting and just get ignored by bloggers. Take the time, approach up and coming blogs in your niche, craft your email and have fun with it.

Start guest posting now!

Ben Brandes

Ever wanted to know what keywords are popular for a certain article?

Using this strategy it allows you to generate keyword lists of keywords that popular articles on Ezinearticles have been targeting.

Keyword research is an important process that should be done by all bloggers. Personally I know famous bloggers who haven’t really thought about keyword research and they have done well for themselves.

With so many more blogs coming out it’s important you do keyword research to stack the odds in your favour. You want as much traffic as possible and by targeting certain keywords which means you can receive free traffic from the search engines.

7 Step Keyword Formula

1. Go to Google and search for :

your-keywords site:ezinearticles.com “This article has been viewed 2000..199999″ “Article Submitted On: * *, 2009″

(Change “your-keywords”)

The above search will find popular articles from Ezine Articles that contain your keyword.

2. Open a heap of them up in separate tabs and copy the links of the articles.

3. Head over to the Google Keyword Research Tool

Make sure the results are tailored to “United States” (if not, click ‘Edit” to change it). Then choose the option to generate keywords from Website Content. Enter in the website and click “Get keyword ideas” button.

4. Go through the keywords and add the relevant keywords by clicking Add. (HINT: If a complete section is relevant click “Add all”)

5. Keep doing research on all the EzineArticle links and adding new keywords.

6. On the right hand side download the keyword list by clicking .csv (for excel)

7. For some extra research you can also use Market Samurai to gain extra data such as SEO value, Adwords CPC and much more.

Have fun with this and go get some nice keywords to target.

Ben Brandes

Every now and then there may come a point where you need to get a site indexed fast. After doing this myself and testing it many times I have found some tips and tricks to help get your site indexed faster.

Why would I want to get my site indexed in 12 hours?

• The sooner you’re ranked in the search engines the faster you start getting traffic.Which means you potentially have more traffic, more readers and more sales.

How to get your site quickly ranked in the search engines…

Step 1: Create your blog with at least 5 pages of content and internal linking. (Linking between posts)

Step 2: Create a sitemap

Creating a Sitemap for your blog is essential

Bots love sitemaps so make sure you have one. Here’s how…

1. Install and use the Wordpress plugin Google XML Sitemaps

Basically it create a sitemap automatically! So save yourself the time and go use that plugin for your sitemaps!

Step 3: Submit your blog to Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Alexa

Submitting Your blog to Google

1. Go to Google’s Add URL Page (this will let Google know about your blog so they send bots to crawl it)
Only add your blog once, usually the homepage, the bot will search the rest of your site.

2. Enter in your blogs details
In the comments section you can put in some keywords or a short description, it doesn’t really matter. I prefer a description.

3. Double check that it’s correct then click the “Add Your URL” button.

Submitting your blog to Yahoo!

1. Login to Yahoo! (If you dont have a Yahoo! account, sign up for one – it’s free)

2. Go to Yahoo!’s Site Submission Page

3. Select your submission option
For this purpose click – “Submit a Website or Webpage”

4. Enter in your blog details

5. Click the “Submit” button

Submitting your blog to Bing

If you didn’t know, Bing is a recently launched search engine to MSN search, Windows Live Search. It’s pretty much Microsoft’s new search engine.

1. Go to Bing’s URL Submission Page

2. Fill in website details

3. Click the “Submit URL” button

Submitting Your Blog to Alexa

1. Go to Alexa’s Submission Page

2. At the bottom of the page type in your URL

3. Click “Crawl My Site”

Step 4: Submit your blogs Sitemap to Google, Yahoo! and Bing

Go to the following areas:
1. Google’s Webmaster Tools
2. Yahoo’s Site Explorer
3. Bing’s Webmaster Center

When doing this step you’ll find you need to prove you own the blog. You normally do this by uploading a file or a bit of code. (follow the instructions on the site)

Step 5: Add a list of sites to ping in Wordpress dashboard (or use pinggoat.com)

Thanks to Vladimir for this ping list.

To use this list, copy and paste this list to your Settings->Writing tab in the Wordpress admin panel.

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

This will automatically ping these sites when ever you update your blog.

Step 6: Getting backlinks to your blog

A common way to do this is by doing social bookmarking, by many it is frowned upon to social bookmark your own posts. It’s entirely up to you. There are some people out there who socially bookmark their post multiple times on different accounts from the same bookmarking site – which I do not agree with.

You can use the Sociable plugin so people can easily socially bookmark a post on your blog.

Everytime someone bookmarks a post on your blog that is a backlink leading to your site. Which is why it’s beneficial to use different social bookmarking websites.

It can be very time consuming, there are sites out there that help speed the process up.

A popular bookmarking service that is free is called Social Marker basically you create a heap of accounts at social bookmarking sites, then use Social Marker to bookmark a post and it will bookmark it on all the different sites.

It saves a lot of time!

Step 7: Commenting on Top Blogs (optional)

Before doing this step I highly recommend you have a look at Effectively using the comment strategy to build your authority. It will show you how to comment effectively.

Blog commenting on popular blogs is a good strategy when done correctly. The aim to get indexed fast is to find popular blogs that are related to your blog.

You are also looking for do-follow tags on blogs that are updated regularly (min 4 times p/week).

To find blogs it is worth while using Google Blogs

Overall there are many different ways to get your site indexed in the search engines. I highly recommend using steps 1-5. Step 6 is optional and honestly I dont always use it when indexing a site fast.

Have fun, use this information and get your blog indexed fast! If you have any extra ways of getting blogs indexed faster please let me know my commenting.

Ben Brandes

When it comes to blogging or internet marketing, forum marketing can be a great way to build your authority and drive traffic to your site.

Website forums are a great place to visit because there are heaps of forums out there specifically based around different niches (topics). Forums can be great if used correctly, if you just spam forums it can be very damaging. So I will go in to some details about finding forums and how to use them without hurting your brand.

Here are effective ways to find forums for any type of niche:

• Know what you wantYou have to know what you’re looking for before you actually start looking for it!.Otherwise, you’ll just walk through the maze of internet forums and sites, without any direction.

• Search the InternetOnce you have established your interest, start looking for specific sites that talk about your specific niche I recommend doing a google search and type in niche topic “forum”. This will find forums related to your niche, just go through a few of them. Only focus on the biggest forums as they will have the most readers.

• Test the WatersAfter you have a list of website forums to join in, start opening them and reading the past and current discussions. This way you can check what kind of topics they usually talk about and how the forum members relate to each other. Then, join in once you feel comfortable to discuss and start formulating your marketing strategy! The key is add value.

• Be an ExpertAs soon as you become a part of the website forum, set yourself up as an expert to all the topics you are promoting on your site. This is done by providing massive value in the forums by helping others and showing your expertise. Another thing worth testing is creating a really good unique article on the topic and posting it in the forum.

So from this information you can go and find some forums in your niche and start participating. There is really no harm in trying, sometimes it’ll be great other times it wont be as effective. The benefit is, it doesn’t cost any money and  your target audience is already there. You’ve got nothing to lose and more to gain. So, start joining those forum sites and increase your traffic!

Ben Brandes

Commenting on other peoples blogs can be a powerful way to build the authority of your blog and generate extra traffic from other related blogs in your niche. For more information I recommend reading 7 Things to Avoid to Protect Your Blogs Brand when Commenting on Other Blogs

Today I’m going to go through some commenting tips to help improve the chances of building your authority while building relationships with your target audience.

Why is it important?

It’s important because you could very well be actually hurting the brand of your blog rather than improving it.

Commenting correctly is simple

1. Read the whole blog post
2. Find what they missed
3. Add what they missed into a comment (nicely) to add value
4. Proof read it
5. If relevant, provide a link back to your site

The purpose of commenting is

• To build credibility to the blog owners readers
• To get noticed by the blog owner.

The more time and effort you put in to posting a valuable comment the more chance you have of being noticed.

A good mindset to do this with is, every time you find a blog post you like, ask yourself this question…

How can I add value to this blog post by adding a comment?

Key points to remember are:

• Do it nicely – you want to build a relationship with them.
• Always add value

By following these steps you wont be able to write as many comments. The great thing is each comment is well worth the read and everyone who see’s it will realise you know what you’re talking about.

This will help brand you as an authority in front of the blog owner and it’s readers. This leads to more readers to your blog and has the potential for joint ventures with other blog owners in the future.

Have fun with it, use this information wisely and get results!

Ben Brandes

Have you ever heard a story of someone who lost $100k, $200k, $500k on a business opportunity that went wrong?

Imagine if they had not blown all that money what they could be doing instead…

This brings me to my story, last week I ran a few test buying traffic from a few different new sources to see if it was profitable and after the first day it was, lets say a 2:1 ratio or $2 return for every $1 spent, so happy as can be I started looking for more sources of traffic, bigger and bolder than before thinking I had run across a gold mine so bought another ad that was over twice as expensive as the one before thinking “what a winner” happy as can be.

The next day I looked at my stats and what I saw shocked me, my winning ad had converted not 1x, not 2x but 10x WORSE than my other ad leaving me with a SERIOUS net loss of 1:5 which means $1 back for every $5 spent. NOT COOL!

I then asked myself painfully, “What did I learn?” and the answer was Test Small, Then Scale. Although this lesson completely wiped out my profits in this example which was luckily for me only in the 3 digit range it could have just as easily been in the 4,5 or even 6 digits.

I let one days positive return make me over-confident to the point where I made a stupid amature mistake.

Now learn from this and in your own future ventures take a bit size piece before eating the whole cake and you will be one step closer to your goals.

Go forth and conquer

Mike McMahon