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Beautiful Mother’s Day Cards – Heart Tissue Paper Flowers

Gianna — Sun, 02 May 2010 20:25:29 +0000

You can easily create delicate, beautiful flower cards for Mother’s Day! Use different tissue paper sizes and colors to make completely unique, custom cards!

Supplies: Sizzix Die Cutter, Hearts #38-0157, Tissue Paper, Cardstock, Glue

Step 1) Gather a selection of colored tissue papers.

Step 2) Fold tissue paper to size of cutter – form as many layers as possible – I had about 20 layers and the shapes came out clean.

Step 3) Arrange hearts on your card. Make glue dots on each layer. Rotate hearts around a center dot to form the look of a flower.

Step 4) When glue is dry, fluff and scrunch the hearts toward the center to form a 3-dimensional flower.

Step 5) Add special touches – embellish with a stem and leaves, a jewel in the center, a watercolor stem, etc.

Home Sellers, Are You Ready For The Spring Selling Season?

Gianna — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 03:25:45 +0000

It’s warming up and spring is here! Warm weather is finally near. If you happen to be selling your home, it can be a great time to make some progress. Many markets are not moving as fast as they once were, but spring is typically the time of year where more buyers are out shopping and more sellers put their homes on the market. Although inventory increases, there also tends to be an increase in buying activity. This is your opportunity to make sure your house gets noticed.

Now is the time to do spring cleaning and add a few special touches to really impress buyers. Just simplify and get started. Grab the basics (paper towels, dusting clothes, glass cleaner, all-purpose cleaner) and go through your house one room at a time. Dust every surface you can find – including picture frames, blinds, window ledges and plants. Clean all of the glass. Clean the floors. Check corners and ceilings for cobwebs and remove them. Clean carpet stains (dish soap, water and a cleaning towel work very well). Vacuum floors and furniture – move furniture when possible. Polish metal and wood. Once the room is clean, look for items that can be removed to reduce clutter. Move on to the next room and keep going. . .

Before you end this year’s spring cleaning, check the outside of your home. Make sure the entry path and front door are clean, web-free and in good repair. Clear dirt, leaves, and debris. Wash patio furniture, planter walls and concrete. Coil up hoses and/or move them out of sight. Freshen up planters – bags of small bark are a quick, inexpensive improvement. Add a few one-gallon size flowering plants to planter beds or pots for a little spring color. Before you know it, your house will be refreshed and ready for spring buyers!

Refresh For Spring

Jay — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 05:18:11 +0000

“Spring cleaning” means getting around to all of those organizational disasters that have built up throughout the year. It’s time to start fresh. Get rid of those bothersome junk piles. It’s time to store the heavy winter clothes and coats. Closets need to be cleaned and old boxes of stored junk need to be sorted and emptied.

Sometimes we save things that we think we will need later. Whether it’s a project that we’re no longer interested in finishing or a stack of old bills, these things can start to clutter your home and eat away at the storage space that you have available. Go through any boxes or piles of mail that are lying around. If it’s an unfinished project, schedule a time to finish it. If you really don’t have time, consider eliminating it.

Busy Moms tend to keep projects lying around half finished for years until their allure has vanished or the kids have outgrown the need for whatever it was. Donate half-finished projects to schools that can recycle them as craft supplies. Send old bills and statements to the shredder and get them off of your counters, tables and shelves.

Give whatever you can to charity. If you have trouble letting go of usable items, set a goal for yourself to get rid of 25% or even 50% of what you have stored. Use a garage or living room to separate items into three piles.

One is for definite keepsakes like heirloom blankets, the outfits that your children wore home from the hospital when they were born, and photo albums. The second pile should be for things that you know are still good and want to keep, but you could possibly give away or sell. The third pile should be a charity pile. Sometimes it helps to bring in a third party. Teenagers are great at telling you like it is if you have too much stuff! A good friend is also nice to have if he/she can give you honest advice. Some things you may not want to just give away, but you may be more comfortable with selling online or in a yard sale.

For example, that clarinet that you haven’t played since high school. It holds sentimental value and monetary value. You may feel the need to keep it, but in your heart you know you’ll never touch it again. Have someone take your picture with it and then concentrate on how it could be making a difference in another child’s life.

Focus on not being selfish and feel good about items that you donate or sell. Once your closets are not cluttered, you can update their look. Get them nice and clean, add a coat of paint and stock your closet with some nice wood hangers. You’ll enjoy the clean look and feel of your new found space.

Selling A House – Exterior Checklist

admin — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 03:57:03 +0000

When selling a home, it is important to have curb appeal. The first impression a buyer gets of your house is the exterior – it is also the last thing a buyer sees before they leave.

Look at your home’s exterior objectively from the perspective of a person who has never been to your house before. What looks good? What needs attention?

The following is a checklist to help you get started:

Area	Tip
Lawn	User fertilzer to keep it green. Mow frequently
Driveway and Sidewalks	Repair any cracks Remove stains
Fences	Level Paint
Doors, window frames, fascia	Touch up paint
Shrubbery	Trim back to reveal homes exterior
Gutters and downspouts	Replace missing parts Clean debris
Windows	Clean inside and out

If, after reviewing your list, you find the work too daunting, hire a qualified handyman for some or all of the tasks.

Persuade Buyers To Choose Your House

admin — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 01:03:58 +0000

Buyers spend a lot of time looking at houses in pursuit of their perfect home. As a seller, you want to provide all the information they need so they will be persuaded to buy your house.

Here are some tips to help with a buyer:

Give the price, terms, square footage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms and school district. Look at real estate guides for tips on what they are advertising
Have information ready for any necessary replacements. If the roof needs to be replaced, get an estimate and provide that to potential buyers. A buyer will accept a poor roof if he knows what he is getting ahead of time. If the buyer has some uncertainty as to what he or she is getting, he’ll walk away.
Do not hide problems. Hiding problems is not only unethical, but illegal. If the buyer is informed up front about an issue, they will feel better about it. If the issue surfaces in the inspection, your buyer may walk.

Buyers feel better buying with less uncertainty. Alleviate the uncertainty and your buyer should become the future owner of your home.

Tips For Building A Content-Rich, SEO Website

admin — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 07:23:07 +0000

The first step in building a successful website, is having new, rich content. Search engines and viewers are looking for a variety of informative and interesting articles. Here are 5 tips to creating website content:

Stick to what you know – You will be able to give some insight based on your experience. What seems like common knowledge to you may be interesting to someone else.
Offer solutions without requiring purchase – Pushing a hard-sell will turn people away. Give good information and provide answers to common questions. You will earn the respect of your readers.
Build your knowledge and turn boring reports into interesting articles – Search on-line and off-line. When searching online, search keywords for your topic and use this information as a starting point. Be sure to include your keywords in your content for search engine optimization(SEO). The library is a great resource for off-line research.
Have your readers submit questions – These questions can be used to generate articles.
Let your readers create content – With enough traffic, invite your readers to create pages of interesting content.

Gaining The Trust Of Your Subscribers

Guest — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:16:27 +0000

While the rest of the world have developed many barriers and protections to keep their e-mail accounts spam-free, there are also those that subscribe to mails that promotes their products, services and their site. This is mainly because these subscribes wants to know more about what these sites are offering and can be beneficial for them. They expect to get be kept posted on what they are interested in and what are new in the market or field they have chosen.

Businesses would be so lucky to have these kinds of customers; the basic element needed to get these types of people is trust. When your customers trust you they will reward you with their loyalty. Many internet users have gone to great lengths in protecting their email accounts from spam mail. Some free-mail internet providers and internet service providers offer spam protection while there are also some internet based companies that screen your mails for you.

With an opt-in mail list, the mails you send containing your promotional materials such as newsletters, catalogs and marketing media will go through. Your intended recipient will be able to read and view what you have sent making it a successful transfer of information. To be able to be allowed to do so, you will need permission from your recipient, to get this permission; you need to be able to get their trust. With the great lack of disregard for privacy in the internet, getting the trust of an internet user you don’t personally know is a big achievement.

To build a good opt-in list you need people to trust you, for a faster and quicker build up, you need to get your opt-in subscribers to trust you quickly. The faster you build your opt-in list the faster word about your site and company gets to be spread. The bigger the scope of your opt-in list the more traffic you get spelling more profits. Its easy math if you thin about it. Getting the numbers is not that simple though, or maybe it is?

1. Getting the trust of your clientele shouldn’t be so hard especially if you do have a legitimate business. Getting your customers trust should be based upon your expertise. People rely on other people who know what they are talking about. Garner all the knowledge and information about your business. Ell, frankly if you decide to go into a business most probably you have an interest in it. Like how many basketball payers become coaches, you don’t really venture into something you don’t have any interest in.

2. Show your clients that you know what you are talking about. Provide them with helpful hints and guidelines that pertain to what you are selling. Talk about how to install a roof if your into hardware products or provide articles on insurance settlements if you’re a settlement lawyer. You don’t have to be a big corporation to make use of an opt-in list. If your customers see you as someone who knows what he is doing and saying, they will trust you quickly.

3. Be true to your customers, if you want to hype up your products and services, provide guarantees. The more satisfied customers you get, the bigger probability there is that they will recommend you. Generally, people will trust someone they know, when that someone recommends you then you’re a shoo-in. They will go to your site and check it for themselves and be given a chance to experience what the other shave experienced from you, so make sure to be consistent in the service you provide.

4. Another tip in getting a customer to trust you quickly is to provide them an escape hatch. Show them that you are not there to trap them. Keep a clean list that would enable them to unsubscribe anytime they want. Elaborate your web form by providing information on how to unsubscribe from the list. Guarantee them that they can let go of the service when ever they want to. Many are wary that they may be stuck for life and would have to abandon their email accounts when they get pestered with spam.

Remember that when you get the trust of your clients don’t lose that trust. Because if you do anything with their email addresses like sell them or give them out, you will lose many members of your list as ell as potential members. The true quickest way to gain the trust of your subscribers is when you are recommended by someone they trust.

How To Profit With An Ezine

Guest — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:06:49 +0000

Ezines are electronic publications distributed by email or posted on a website. Ezines are typically focused on a certain subject matter. Ezines are just like your typical magazine format of monthly or weekly topical publications in an electronic format.

Actually Ezine came from the word FanZine which was a publication with a small subscriber base back then. FanZines were targeted publications that were usually geared towards specific topics like Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Football clubs.

Those printed publications were called ‘FanZines’, but were frequently referred to as ‘Zines’ instead.

Back to modern days, most Ezines are focused around specific topics and interest groups, just like the way the Zines once were.

Adding an ‘E’ onto the beginning of the much coveted publication name “Zines” brings us to the word Ezines. This offers a much more logical explanation of where the word “ezines” came from.

Now that we know what ezines are, lets now discuss the basics of creating and doing business with ezines.

Ezine publishing is a very important factor towards a business’ success for many reasons. Basically, it keeps you in contact with your potential customers. The relationship between your clients is formed and that is what is needed for trust and respect.

You can also profit by selling advertisements through your own ezine publication. Ezines can be used both as an advertising platform for your business as well as an income-generating endeavor.

When starting out with your ezine publication, keep in mind the basic and most important elements of a good ezine.

1. Keep your ezines clean, short, and full. Don’t add too many unrelated decorations or pictures to your ezines. Ezine page decoration sometimes makes it hard for readers to read your content.

People are more drawn to reading short ezines than those long ones that keep on making discussions that go on and on.

2. Minimal advertisement is a must. It is a good point that publishers must advertise in their ezines, but always keep it to a reasonable number of about seven or less, depending on the length of your ezines.

3. Make it personal. When creating your ezines, add your personality to it. Talk to your subscribers. Make it warm and inviting. Let them get into you as you get to know them better.

4. Put in some interactivity. Make your ezines fun as we can all use a bit of fun. Put a form in there, some survey questions, a bit of trivia, and other forms of interaction.

5. Put in quality content. If your ezines talk about something that deals with paper crafts, then make sure it provides information about how to make paper crafts. Tips, articles, links, resources, products, tools, news, etc. – these are all the things you can and should give your readers.

6. Be on time and consistent. If you posted that you will be sending out ezines once a week every Monday, then do it that way. If ever something happens that is beyond your control that might prevent this, just explain to your subscribers in your next release and they will surely understand.

7. Make it a priority to have original content. If you are not sure about articles, then just write editorials or short scripts with news updates, interesting tips, and product reviews.

8. Always proofread your content. You don’t want your ezine to look like a 10-year old child has done it.

But most importantly, Enjoy your ezine, have fun with it, be yourself, and wonderful things will start to happen. At least they did for so many success stories – they met great new people and their businesses flourished. This can all happen for you as well with your very own quality ezine!

Learn How To Submit Your Ezine Articles To Content Sites And Publishers

Guest — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:02:12 +0000

1. From your ezine publishers list, make sub-lists:

If you have an ezine publishers list, seperate the list based on the
topic of the ezine. Send only specific content to specific ezines.
For example if you write ezine articles on self improvement, don’t
send it to search engine based ezines. The more specific you choose your
ezine publishers, the more chances of getting published.

2. URLs in Your ezine articles:

Always check the urls in your ezine articles. After all, one of the
purposes of writing and submitting articles is to get some prospects. Right?

3. Offer ‘Win and Win Situation’ to the publishers:

If you are promoting your product through the ezine article, offer
the chance of inserting affiliate link for the publishers. Or provide any
free service to them or to their subscribers.

4. Automate the submission process:

Use some sort of software to automate this submission. So you don’t have
to go through each email address and send one by one.

5. Ezine publishers Instructions:

Some ezine publishers send some specific instructions like short articles,
or a link back from your web site etc. Feel free to follow them to get
more chances of publishing.

6. Ezine + Online publications:

Some ezine publishers send ezines to their subscribers and also they
publish their ezines on their web sites as archives. Tell you what…
This is a big plus point for your link popularity and also it brings you
visitors all the time.

7. How many and how often to send the ezine articles:

Give a minimum of one month gap to send a second article again to a
publisher. Ezine publishers receive many articles every day and following
these tips increase your chances of getting published -
= Well formatted article
= Clean subheadings for the articles
= Only one article per email
= Thank you note for their time
= Shouldn’t be like a sales letter
= Topic oriented and simple explanations
= No spelling errors
= No broken Urls

Techniques For Ezine Advertising

Guest — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:55:17 +0000

If done correctly, Ezines are highly effective advertising tools. One of the most important advantage ezines have is the target group of people they refer to. Of course there are rules to be followed in order to succeed in ezine advertising.

1. Write Benefits Not Features.

It may sound cynical but most people are selfish. They don’t care about your company or background but they DO care about the benefits they gain. So, instead of saying that the “A” software title contains these features, try to specify that it will save money and time in the exact amount. Be as accurate as you can on that.

2. Choose very careful the ezines you advertise.

An ezine of 150.000 subscribers may seem tempting but you should ask yourself, how the publisher got those subscribers? He bought the list, used FFA, or used similar methods? Does the publisher use contests for his subscribers in order to visit your website? If a subscriber visits your site because there is the expectation of gaining something how valuable this subscriber is for your business? Zero if you ask me.

3. Double opt-in much better than single opt-in.

Yes, if you find an ezine that builds the subscriber base with double opt-in method, it’s highly possible that you have a goldmine here. A double opt-in ezine of 2500 subscribers has more value than a single opt-in ezine of 10.000 subscriber base. With double opt-in you can be reassured that you will have no spam complains and the value of the prospects is much higher.

4. Run you ads more than once.

This is important because prospects have to see more than one time to absorb your message. One thing you can do is to run your ad 2-3 times and if the first is not successful you can modify your copy.

5. The Headline is all the money.

People have their mailbox filled with emails and spam these days. Obviously they don’t have the time to read every single email they get. So the screening process starts with the headlines. It’s a simple as that, if your headline sucks your all effort goes in vain. They will just ignore the whole message.

6. Call to action – Create urgency sense.

This is a copy-writing rule you must follow. You must use the time pressure technique to the readers in order to act now. You can use limited time discount offers. In that way you tempt the reader to visit your website which is your first aim.

7. Track your ads.

Do Not underestimate that factor. If you start to have sales, how would you know which ezines produce the results? You can’t afford to miss that. With so many tracking software and services out there is no excuse to risk your advertising budget on guessing.

8. Focus on Top-Sponsor and Solo ads.

They are the most effective. Top sponsor ads are on the top of the publication and it is the first message the reader views. Solo ads are highly effective because the reader views your message alone with nothing else tracking his or her attention. Forget the classified ads, although they are cheaper. When you read a newsletter you focus on the content or the 15-20 displayed ads?