I had the pleasure of attending the Mesh Marketing conference here in Toronto this past week. It was organized by the founders of Freshbooks and assortment of consultants and writers.

Aside from the plethora of standard “you need to be engaged in Social media” and “content is king” sessions, there were some interesting speakers from which I did pick up some golden nuggets throughout the day.  One major standout which caused plenty of buzz on Twitter and in conversations was Marcus “The Sales Lion” Sheridan’s panel on content marketing and his closing side-splittingly funny presentation on 7 Unique Content Strategies.

Marcus is no stranger to developing insanely great, relevant content to his readers. He started off in the pool business and started crushing it online when there was virtually no players from the traditionally blue-collar pool industry.

He took a very traditional approach to content creation – he wrote damn good quality content. Eventually Google took notice and rewarded his business and blog with high ranking.  And considering how early he started, he was probably the only player in town doing it until the competitors took notice.

What’s great about Marcus’s strategy is that he didn’t look at SEO as a marketing channel that he needed “to do”.  He just started blogging about what he thought would be useful to his customers.  At a certain point he started to realize what type of content was more popular than others, and he started to tailor his blogging to reflect the needs and interests of his customers.

Seem obvious? Of course it is. Sadly many, many businesses don’t do it or just don’t how.

Here are his 7 Top Content Strategies:

• Tap into the long tail. What he means by the long tail is the multi-word strings of words that searchers type to get answers to their questions.  An example of this is “where do I buy covers for hot tubs”.  These long tail keywords don’t necessarily provide tons of traffic individually, but add up several dozen long tail search terms that point to you in the #1 ranked position, and it starts to add up. 

• Your client & customer questions make excellent blog topics. Seems like a no-brainer. Chances are that more than one customer have this question – so why not address more extensively?

• Vs. and comparions. These are powerful content ideas because they are really common search terms that many content creators don’t think about. My Bluehost vs. GoDaddy post, as an example, is the most trafficked piece of content on my blog Period. I wrote it a year ago and it still ranks #1 in Google for the keyword bluehost vs. godaddy.  Nuff said. 

• Write about rewards.  In any industry there are likely numerous awards organizations that dole out this prize/trophy/plaque to recognize said leader in said category. Writing about it generates traffic.

• The Beauty of real-time. The one is huge and absolutely genius. Write about what’s happening in the news write now in your niche. There’s a reason why news spreads quickly – because news gets republished again and again in the hopes of getting eyeballs. Is there some interesting news within your industry that people might want to know about it? Write about it.

• There was a #7th content strategy, but I don’t have it in my notes. If anyone has it that attended #mm11 please help a brotha out! 

As part of my ongoing series featuring fiery entrepreneurs, today I finally have chance to showcase in detail the great Anthony Green of Take Care of Biz, a business blog for aspiring entrepreneurs. Anthony has been appearing quite frequently here as of late because well, he’s fine gent and a good friend. Is there a company that this many hasn’t run? From tutoring businesses, to web-based health supplements and now marketing consulting and blogging – Anthony has developed a wealth of experience in a very short time.. and he’s only in the his mid-20′s.

In this interview, Anthony not only talks about his background and business, but shares some lessons learned and the importance of making mistakes along the way.  He also goes into some his favorite marketing strategies. You can follow Anthony on Twitter @takecareofbiz.

What is your background, and What did you do before Take Care of Biz?

Originally, I wanted to be a writer.  However, while I was at Columbia I started taking classes at Columbia Business School – the rest was history.  Business is an art and a science and it fascinates me to no end – it’s like chess.  It takes 5 minutes to learn how to start a business, but you could never do it perfectly in 100,000 years.  I was tutoring SATs when I started my first business, so I decided to go with what I knew and start an SAT tutoring company that I’m now in the process of selling.  I’ve also started multiple other ventures in the private education system.  I also started a totally botched healthy energy pill company that crashed and burned, but taught me more valuable lessons than any MBA program ever could have taught me.  Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of small business consulting, which I couldn’t be more enthusiastic about, and I’m in the process of launching multiple entrepreneur-focused products and services that will be off the ground soon.  I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my business career, and I value my mistakes more than my successes – they teach you to be an adult, to take responsibility for yourself, to learn, and to do things better the next time around.

How would you describe your blog, Take Care of Biz?

TCOB is a blog that takes a deep look into the intricacies of all things business.  In general, the blog is meant as a resource for aspiring and current entrepreneurs – I want to provide my readers with useful, actionable information that they can use in their everyday activities.  I cover topics ranging from marketing and web design to business development and time management.  Rather than give bite-size bits of information, I prefer to really delve into the details of the topics that I cover and clear up confusion, providing people with solid advice and resources that they can put into action as soon as they read.  I’ll also be featuring interviews from entrepreneurs, discounts on B2B products and services, business book reviews, and a million other things that I think other entrepreneurs will find useful.

What prompted you to start your blog/business?

I’m a bit of a business junkie, and I read books and blogs constantly.  There’s a lot of conflicting advice out there, and I started TCOB to clear the fog and give people solid, unequivocal guidance.  When I started my first business, one of the first books I read was Guerrilla Marketing – it’s a good book if you run a small, local business, but some of the information in there is penny-wise-pound-foolish if you run a web business.  I wanted to provide people with advice that they can use no matter who they are or what they do.  It doesn’t matter if you run a pizza shop or a international web design conglomerate – the articles in my blog are meant to be put useful to everyone.

What did you need to put this website together?

A lot of research, sweat, and the right people.  I used Elance to find amazing developers and graphic designers, and I tinkered with the concept constantly for months.  My first version of the website was a disaster, but I kept making incremental improvements until I ended up with a product I was happy with.  I still think TCOB has a long, long way to go, but it’s getting better every day.  For anyone starting a new business, know this: your first version is never going to be your final version.  Get something out there, get feedback, watch your competition, and improve every day.

What is your marketing strategy for Take Care of Biz?

Getting it out there!  There are so many insanely talented writers and businesspeople out there, and I want to meet and interact with all of them.  I could write all day, so my plan is to write for and with as many people as I can, let others who need good advice know about my articles, and network like a maniac.  Human connections are the only way to build something great, so all my marketing is founded on that principle.  I want to meet other bloggers and entrepreneurs and get them involved at the same time as I involve myself in their projects.  The rest will take care of itself.

You clearly have a great sense for business and really enjoy writing. Where does your inspiration to write come from?

I was an English major at Columbia, and before then I was a creative writing major at my high school (super liberal, so we could declare “majors” by our sophomore year, and cut everything we didn’t want to study).  I love writing, but my real passion is in business.  I saw business blogging as a way to combine my two greatest passions.  All I think about is business, and I love writing, so why not write about business?  It was a perfect fit.

Most people that you talk to online have had a rough beginning, what would you say was the toughest part when you where just getting started?

A lot of people start businesses and try to do everything at once, educating themselves as they go.  I made a million mistakes in my first few businesses, but that’s the beauty of being an entrepreneur – your mistakes teach you insanely valuable lessons that you can apply to business and to your life.  To any aspiring entrepreneur, I would say this: you will make mistakes, but don’t get discouraged.  You’ll screw up left and right – I know I did.  But screwing up is good for you – as Edison once said when inventing the lightbulb, “I have not failed – I have found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”  Screwing up is tough, but you have to do it.  I used to belong to a boxing gym and, rather than tell you to keep your hands up, they’d just punch you in the head if you dropped them.  You can’t learn by hearing advice – you need to get in there, get punched in the head, and then keep your hands up in the future.

For people just getting started on their first blog (or business!), what ís the best advice you can pass on to them?

The toughest part of starting a business is defining your market.  When I started my first business, a tutoring company, I had no idea who my real customers were.  If I had a better idea of who I was trying to reach in the first place, I would have had a much easier time doing everything.  I expanded too quickly into too many arenas before I knew what my expansion was trying to accomplish in the first place.  To anyone starting a business, I would say this: figure out EXACTLY who you are trying to reach.  “Moms,” “teens,” “people who like pizza”  – these are weak definitions.  You need to get as in-depth as possible and figure out a specific human being that you’re talking to.  From there you’ll avoid a lot of mistakes.  Something like, “My customers are wealthy, 35-50 year old male care enthusiasts who live in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas” – that’s a good definition, and if you come up with that before you spend money marketing, you’ll avoid a lot of the screwups that I made.

Would you ever trade the lifestyle that you have right now for a high paying 9 to 5? why?

Not a chance in hell.  I respect the 9-5 lifestyle if it’s right for you, but it’s not right for me.  I get bored easily and I need intense challenges to stay happy and motivated.  Sometimes being an entrepreneur can suck – it’s isolating, stressful, and you need to work your ass off all the time.  But I wake up every morning before my alarm goes off and rush to my computer to get started.  You just don’t get that level of fire from most 9-5 positions.  If you’re a family man, or you value comfort over challenge, then by all means take a 9-5, relax, and enjoy your life.  But I’m not happy unless I’m doing my own thing and grinding away to get it done.

What kind of role did your College education play in your entrepreneurial ventures, and what kind of doors did it open for you?

To be honest, I wish I could get my $200,000 back.  I’m a serious autodidact – I read 3-4 books a week and I’m constantly experimenting with new things.  I don’t need other people to guide or motivate my learning, and when they try to, I often resist that.  To me, the very premise of college classes is sort of ridiculous: Pay $3,500 and by the end of the class, we’ll teach you about a few books.  Why not just read the books and then spend the $3,500 on a business?

However, Columbia did teach me a few key lessons.  Firstly, it taught me the power of networking.  No one can go it alone, and if you think you can you’re cooked.  Columbia forced me to find the people that I could help at the same time that they helped me, and that is priceless.  Columbia also taught me the value of self-sufficiency.  I was kicked out of housing my freshman year for a totally ridiculous reason, and from that point on I had to pay my own rent and succeed at one of the most difficult universities in the world.  The main lesson I learned for $200,000 worth of tuition was this: if you want to succeed, you have to do it.  No one else is going to take care of you, and you shouldn’t count on them doing so.  That sounds pessimistic, but it isn’t – it’s an incredibly empowering stance.  I network like crazy and I try to make myself useful to others and attain the help of others when I need it, but at the end of the day, you are responsible for your own fate and your own successes and failures.  Expectations and blame are both useless.

Whats next for Anthony Green, and for Take Care of Biz?

I have a raging case of ADD, so I’m always working on multiple projects at a time, but I have three in particular that I’m really excited about.

The first is the development of my marketing consultancy, 8th Wonder Marketing.  I’ve been working with multiple business owners to help them develop their businesses and marketing strategies, and I’ve never had more fun in my life.  I always work over the clock because I don’t want to stop.  One client I work with was getting 2 leads a week with his website.  Now, 2 months later, he’s getting 6 leads a day.  He went from being broke and terrified to happy and relaxed, and now he’s turning down prospects who don’t match his ideal customer profile.  8th Wonder is based on the idea of Compound Interest as it applies to referrals – if you can get 1.1 referrals from every customer you work with, you’ll never need to advertise again.  I teach my clients to thrill their customers and then design systems to automate the referral process.  My website should be launching in the next couple of months, but for now I have all the clients I can handle!

The second is a book I’m writing called Don’t Screw Up.  So much business literature focuses on what you should do, but how much focuses on what you shouldn’t?  If you exercise three times a day, eat healthy, get your sleep, and take your vitamins, but you smoke 8 packs of cigarettes a day, you’re still going to die when you’re 30.  Knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing what to do, and I’ve used my own experiences and interviews with over 100 people to give people the best advice on what NOT to do.

The third is a bit of a secret – let’s just say that it’s a game changer.  I’ll keep you updated when it’s further along in the development process, but right now it’s under NDA and I can’t say a thing!

You can find Anthony’s work on the web Take Care of Biz, on Twitter at @takecareofbiz, or drop him a line and say Hi! at Info@TakeCareOf.Biz

Guest post by Anthony Green of Take Care of Biz

At the expense of being an absolutist, I’d like to share two truths about cash as it relates to entrepreneurial success:

1. If you have too much cash, you’re going to kill your motivation. There’s nothing worse for staying entrepreneurially motivated than having a big, fat wad of money sitting in your savings account.  Common wisdom tells us that if you want to become an entrepreneur, you should never take on a well-paying job that you enjoy.  You’ll never have the fire under your ass that you need to take on the exhilarating yet brutal, stressful, and never-ending lifestyle of an entrepreneur.

2. If you’re broke, you’re going to make terrible decisions. A lot of people aware of truth #1 think that the inverse of the rule must also be the truth – that having too little cash will motivate you.  That’s true.  Very true.  But the problem has nothing to do with motivation – it has to do with the quality of the decisions you make and actions you take while you’re motivated.  The myth of the “hungry entrepreneur” needs some refinement.

While I’ve only been in the business game for a relatively short time, I’ve been on both sides of the fence on numerous occasions, and I was shocked to see how quickly these truths became apparent in my everyday behavior.

When one of my companies was doing well, and there was a big cash payout, I’d become a totally lazy bum.  It’s easy to say that this won’t happen – that you’ll have that feverish, teeth-grinding intensity regardless of how bad you need the money.  Some people do.  The problem is that you probably don’t.  When you don’t need to work, and you have other options aside from work that you enjoy more, it’s pretty easy to avoid work entirely.

I’ve also had times when my rent and credit card due dates took up 80% of my thought process.  Since I’ve never made a salary before, I had no safety net – if I didn’t make money somehow, I was totally and completely screwed.  There were times when I had to get $1,300 into my bank account in 2 days, no matter what, or I’d be completely insolvent.  Pretty tough to do when you’re a 22-year-old guy with no guaranteed access to funds.  But while I worked my ass off during these periods, I made some unspeakably terrible decisions – decisions I still shake my head at on a daily basis.  Key lesson?  Desperation and starvation are NOT the same as motivation – they’re in two very different categories, and if you confuse the two, you’re in huge trouble.

You need a long-term mindset to make strategically sound decisions.  If you’re desperate, you’re going to be thinking in the short term.  It doesn’t matter what’s going to happen 5 years from now – you need to pay the rent in four days.  So instead of doing smart things with beneficial long-term implications, you do whatever the hell you need to.  Try using a desperate one-move mindset in chess and see how well your games turn out.

So how do you walk the line?  How do you maintain motivation without making bad decisions?  I have two key pieces of advice for each.

Ways to maintain your motivation even if you have money:

1. If you have extra cash, aggressively invest it in yourself, you business, or long-term vehicles to avoid large cushions. A little while ago, I hit one of my first real business windfalls.  I could have probably kept the money in an account and hung out for a little while, but I knew that behavior would be the death of my business aspirations.  So I hired a new web developer, bought a Hubspot account, launched a new project, and tossed most of the rest in my SEP plan.  Result?  I feel like I need to get things going.  I’m still comfortable, but I don’t feel like I can take a 4-year vacation, either.  In effect, I “hid” the money from myself in the form of valuable investments.  I still feel like I need to work, but now I’m working with money saved (peace of mind), better resources, and more effective ROI.

2. WORK ON SOMETHING YOU ENJOY. This is 1,000 times more effective than any other tip, financial or otherwise.  PLEASE do not start a company that you don’t want to be working on in the first place. Have an idea for a waste-management efficiency software, but don’t care about the environment or waste-management?  Then do not start that company.  Money or not, you’ll always be motivated if you think of your business as a hobby, and you’ll always think your business is a drag if you view it as a chore.

Ways to maintain your sanity if you don’t have money:

1. Focus on making enough money to meet your basic needs before you do anything entrepreneurial. I’m not saying you need to live in the penthouse suite and use caviar to lubricate your appliances, but I am saying that you need to be able to buy food and pay your rent.  If you can’t do these things reliably, DO NOT start a company.  Absolutely awful idea.  It’s too risky and you’ll take years off your life.  Instead, get a job doing anything, make some money, and then work on your project in your spare time.  Is it as romantic as the idea of the intrepid entrepreneur, risking it all for the big payout? Nope – it’s also a lot less stupid.  Take care of your basic needs before you start gambling with business ideas.

2. Put yourself in your future shoes to see if you’re actually making a good decision. If you’re broke and running a company, you’re going to make rash, insane decisions all over the place.  Your short-term mindset will hurt you.  So just do yourself a favor and go through this exercise: pretend that, three years from now, you were looking back on what you were doing, and ask yourself, “would I be happy that I did this?”  That’s all I’m asking you to do – you’ll be blown away by how powerful this method is.  The fog of insanity you reach when you’re broke and entrepreneurial can be cleared with logical, long-term thinking exercises such as this, and they should be used. 

Everyone is different, and there are plenty of rich entrepreneurs who are still motivated and plenty of poor ones who make great decisions day in and day out.  But these trends are well established, and I’ve lived through them myself.  When it comes to personal finance and entrepreneurial activity, be like goldilocks: you don’t want too much money, and you definitely don’t want too little.

ABOVE ALL, MAKE SURE YOU ENJOY THE WORK THAT YOU’RE DOING

———————–

Anthony Green is an entrepreneur, educator, and skilled at breaking down business concepts into everyday language.  When he’s not teaching others how to master their SAT’s, you can catch up with him on his blog Take Care of Biz.

Sometimes I like to dedicate entire posts to entrepreneurs that I’ve met and admire. Sometimes interviewing them or sometimes putting up a short blurb about them and their business. These are usually my favorite types of posts – I love talking about the work of others and being inspired by the work of my peers. And as a bonus, everyone always appreciates being the subject of some special attention, even if it is just on my pint-sized blog.

I was Skyping with my friend Anthony Green the other day and we were talking about his business projects and how we could help one another out. We talked about doing some guest-posting on a variety of topics and this morning I thought – bleh, guest posting is sooo.. done. I decided just to write about him, how we met, and his new business blog Take Care Of Biz, which I should note, has the distinction of having is the most clever use of domain name (TakeCareOf.Biz) that I’ve seen seen since del.icio.us, and much easier to spell.

At some point, I think an interview would be in order, but ssshh.. he’s doesn’t know that just yet

I met Anthony through my good friend Alec Hess (Founder of Full Voice Media). I told Alec about an idea I had for an online business and he put me in touch with Anthony who I was surprised to find had a lot of experience in this area. We connected and I discovered he has incredible business drive, is insanely creative, and without a doubt gets the internet. Our idea was to build an online marketplace for Tutors and Students, where they could connect with one another and arrange for services. Having already established a successful Tutoring business in New York, My Ivey Leaguer, Anthony was the right guy to work with on this project. And let’s not forget the fact that he only graduated from college from 2009.

After many long chats, skype calls and ideas exchanged over a period of 2 months, we decided it was a venture that was too risky to pursue. Although the website project never materialized, I knew that Anthony was the type of guy I needed to keep track of.

Fast forward a couple of months later.. Anthony has shown absolutely few signs of slowing down. What started out as a free weekly newsletter featuring discounts on business services, has now morphed into the business blog “Take Care of Biz”. After a few months of creating meaningful valuable content and advice for business owners and entrepreneurs, the websites traffic has exploded and he envisions the site to be an incubator for aspiring entrepreneurs who need seed funding. All of this preliminary of course and only hints at the potential of his grand vision, which I’m all really excited about.

Meanwhile, he’s also kicking butt as Manhattan’s Best SAT Tutor. I highly recommend you check out it out. And be to swing past Take Care of Biz, where his most recent post, The Top of the Fold = Your Business’ Face, is all about website first impressions. Great read, and a fine gent!

MZ out…

I suppose when you're this big, it's fairly straighforward

Search engine optimization. Most people get it, few people understand it. Business know they need it, few businesses actually invest in it.

So what makes SEO such a mythical and often misunderstood online marketing method?

Well for starters, any acronym on the web is going to intimidate anyone except those who are tech-savvy web terms, and/or geeks. Look at RSS – it still solicits dear-in-headlights looks from people. The web could do away with a lot of these acronyms to make it more accessible.

Second, saying search engine optimization is a bit of a mouthful. And by that very nature, it sounds complicated. But it really isn’t.

Want to know what SEO really boils down to? Here it is in two words: Getting Found. And for the sake of simplicity, that’s how I’ll refer to SEO for the rest of this article.

That’s all there is to it. Search engine optimization is all about getting your web site found in search engines – Google, Yahoo, Bing, and elsewhere.

So How do you Get Found?

Really, there’s just two really importance factors that go into Getting Found.

Factor #1 – On-page and domain elements. Essentially, everything to do with your website itself.

Factor #2 – Off-page – has everything to do with everything outside your website.

Those are really the only Two factors you ever need to concern yourself with Getting Found.

Let’s look those two in closer detail:

On Page Factors

Back in the old days, Google cared solely about meta data. ie. Data that describes your site.

Titles, description tags, keywords, etc. Is this still a factor? Yes, but not as much as you might think. Google looks at something like 100 different factors in ranking your site. You could go nuts in figuring them all out.

Just stick to the basics. Because on-page factors still count and it’s what you can most control. Remember, just have relevant keywords in your body, headings, and meta information. That’s it. Things like domain age matter too – but we’re mostly concerned with things that we can control, not what we can’t.

Off Page Factors

Off page page factors are pretty simple too – it’s all about inbound links, ie. links that point to your website.

Not just any links though. Google wants to make sure that these links that point to your site are from reputable sources and are sources related to your website. A site about web design, that gets links from other sites about web design, will in turn be rewarded with better ranking in Google.

And that’s why quantity doesn’t matter as much as quality. There’s plenty of business web sites out there that outrank those with tens of thousands of backlinks. Why? Because they clearly are a site that is the best and most relevant result that Google has deemed appropriate for the keyed-in search term.

How to get backlinks? There’s no single method. Content generation is very popular now for getting backlinks, because it says to Google that information on the web exists that is relevant to your business. And it’s considered “white hat” in the sense that it’s not considered spammy. Relevant articles, press releases or blog posts can be posted in various places on the web with links embedded that lead to your site. Remember, its not always about the traffic that link gets, its about the “authority” that the site gives you when you get a link.

Another thing to remember is that Getting Found takes time, sometimes 6 months or longer (depending on how competitive your search keywords are). Most companies I work with usually do not see results until after 2-3 months of starting a campaign. This is because Getting Found is an organic approach that has to approached naturally and with small steps, taken day by day, over a period of several months to truly see results. The reasons for this are several: 1) Google has to update its index, which takes time. 2) A fast rise in search engine can getting a website flagged by Google and deindexed. Do this and kiss your traffic Goodbye.

The safest route to success is a steady, proactive and purposeful approach to getting found using the strategies outlined.

Questions? Send me email or leave a comment below.

As some of you may or may not know, I’m huge points collector. My wallet has more points related cards than it does anything else, including cash (which is a whole other matter on its own). I only use credit cards for the points that I collect from them. In fact, I usually don’t buy anything unless I know I’m benefiting with points one way or the other – which I why I limit cash use to small purchases. The reason I’m such a point collector is because of my love of travel, and even more so I love to use points and get great deals on travel.

With the points that I accumulate every year I usually collect enough for two free flights return flights anywhere in North America. Not bad, considering all I really pay for are taxes and airport fees. Just last month, I made my largest booking on free points in 2 years and booked a trip to France for next summer.

It all comes down to this – collecting travel rewards and points makes a helleva lot of sense. And I’m not talking about Air Miles or Cash back cards that give you a few bucks off your Visa bill. I’m talking about real points that get you free flights. You’d be surprised how it easy and fast it is to collect them  – and you’d be even more surprised to find out how few people actually bother with them. Just last month, I launched a small blog dedicated to posting deals relating to travel points and rewards called Pointaholics. The goal here really is to have opportunity to indulge in my love for rewards travel while at the same time providing a free resource for others interested.

Which brings me to purpose of todays post. On a much grander scale than Pointaholics, The genius that is Chris Guillebeau has taken the concept of free points travel much further than I and today released his new product Travel Hacking Cartel. As many of you all know I’m a huge fan of Chris’s work. I was an inaugural member of his Empire Building Kit program and have reviewed a number of Unconventional Guides.

With the Travel Hacking Cartel, Chris has come up with an innovative membership site that provides up-to-date information on everything to do with traveling for free. The idea of course to democratize free travel my demystifying the process of travel hacking. Want to go anywhere, anytime? This is your chance. Yep, these are affiliate links. And as someone who’s been amateur hacker and die-hard points collector, I can safely say this something that I wholeheartedly vouch for. Chris routinely picks up a million miles a year (yes – 1 million) and literally wrote the book on travel hacking.

Anyway, on to the details. As a member, you’ll get access to:

- Regular “Deal Alerts” sent via email and Text message (when an opportunity comes up to fatten that points account, you’ll be the first to know)

- Tutorials and a Knowledge base to get you started with travel  hacking and free travel (Research shows most people have NO IDEA how to get into points travel – this is a great opportunity to learn or brush up!)

- 500 Free Frequent Flyer miles for each referral with the Refer-a-Hacker program. It’s like Groupon for travel points! (Unfortunately I don’t believe this is applicable for mile programs outside of the U.S., but that needs to be confirmed)

- $1 almost-FREE TRIAL! Yep, sign up for a buck and try it out for 2 weeks. If you’re not convinced you can easily cancel your membership with his handy one-button cancellation process. The “World’s Greatest Guarantee” says it all – if you follow the directions and spend at least 30 minutes a month travel hacking, you’ll earn enough miles for at least 1 plane ticket every quarter, or 4 plane tickets a year!! That’s a freakin’ plane ticket every 3 months.

My initial concern was that it wouldn’t be applicable to me since I don’t live in the United States. But thankfully after checking out the site, only 50% of the deals they advise on are U.S.-only deals. The rest can be used worldwide! As a bonus – the first 1000 members to sign up during the initial preboarding phase will get access to an exclusive webinar next month – “8 Ways To Travel for Free in 2011″. After the first thousand people sign up, the live webinar opportunity will be gone so check it out.

And last but not least – the price. The great thing is, you  can get access to everything for only a buck. If you like everything you see, memberships starts at $15 a month. For details, click here check out the Travel Hacking Cartel website and sign up!

The other day I was listening to a podcast from one of my favorite bloggers Pat Flynn. In this episode he came up with a list of 5 questions one should ask themselves to improve their online business, blog or website. I couldn’t help compare the topic to theme of online positioning, which I write about here on this blog. The importance of first impressions, perception, and good content are talking points that come up often, and his questions made me think about my own blog and business and how I’m perceived. Here’s a summary of the questions and some tips to implement change in areas where you might be lacking:

1. Am I leaving a good impression? When someone first visits your website are they seeing things the way you want to be represented, or are things out of place, outdated, of just plain ugly? Take a look around and see if there are ways you could improve the overall first impression of your website. Ask strangers for critiques and ask what their impressions are, not your own. If it’s not leaving a good impression, do something about it. Pat makes a great analogy – treat your website as you would treat your home.

2. Am I giving people a reason to come back? There’s an abundance of material online with how to keep people (and potential customers) coming back.  You hear it again and again, content is king – but what can be done beyond that? How do you differentiate yourself from the bazillions of content providers? Building a feeling of community and standing out from the crowd.  By inject personality into your website. Who is the person behind the website? Connect with people by telling stories. People love stories and case studies. Tell people about who you are and what you do.

3. Am I giving people an easy way to consume my content? The easier you make it for people to consume information on your website, the easier it will be for you to make a connection with that visitor. If you give a person a chance to click somewhere else they will. Setup an RSS feed on your website so content posted to a website can be fed into an RSS Reader, or have a link that allows people to subscribe to RSS content through email. Create an eBook or a report that you can give away. Information in an eBook becomes more relevant and is considered flagship content vs. blog posts that get buried. Above all, setup an email list and have a means for your to connect with your visitors one-on-one. There is not a more powerful tool than an email list for that.

4. Is my content sharable? People inherently want to share information; it’s the social nature of the web in 2010.  But you have to make it easy for them to do so or you miss our on potential opportunities to spread your name and brand.  With simple additions of social buttons for Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon and others makes easy for people to spread information from your website, extending your influence. And make sure your giving the visitor a reason to share – if its high quality and provides value to the person, they will inevitably tell others about it. As Pat says, a recommendation from a friend is far more powerful than if you say anything to that person.

5. Why are you reading this? A slight modification on Pat’s question from his podcast which was Why am I listening to Pat?, but the message behind it is the same.  If you’re reading this, what brought you here? What makes you read this information? Think about what attracts you to people and information, and put those practices into creating content, setting up your blog, or optimizing your business.

Pat Flynn runs several businesses, has a very popular blog and is genuine nice guy. To find out more check out his blog Smart Passive Income.

Online positioning is all about building a unified and cohesive online presence across a diverse landscape of digital media channels for a clear and distinctive representation of your business, product, service or brand.

Online Positioning is making your message heard. It’s taking bullhorn and screaming at the top of your lungs, except doing it through community, video, blogging, or anything else that gets your message heard. It’s about spreading that message to many instead of one, and making your presence known to all instead of only a selected few. Online positioning involves being ubiquitous, embracing new media and finding new ways to connect with your audience. More importantly it involves making yourself heard. Not just here or there, but everywhere there’s people go online – you should be there.

Who Should Embrace Online Positioning?

Business owners, entrepreneurs, freelancers, consultants, the self-employed, the creatives, and the non-profits. If you have a voice and you want to be heard you need position yourself online in increasingly diverse ways to standout from the pack.

Why Position Yourself Online

The old internet is dead. Traditional print media is starving. The music industry has been forced to reevaluate how it reaches fans.  Positioning yourself online isn’t just about having a website anymore. It’s about taking advantage of the social nature of the internet, untapped media channels or creating entirely new ones.  There are those who have done it right and achieved wild levels of success. There are many others who haven’t lifted a finger and wonder why they aren’t moving any direction.

Taking advantage of the internet to market your business means you can:

• Establish credibility in your area of expertise
• Get a lead generation engine that will exist for the lifetime of your business
• Build a reputation and establish trust over time with customers, fans, clients
• Passion is infectious. Showing that your passionate will make people more passionate about whatever it is you do.
• Expose yourself to varied areas of digital media to build new audiences
• Network and establish new connections/friendships/partnerships
• Increased exposure means more leads, more clients/customers, and more dollars in your pocket..
• Meaningful connections with people you would not have otherwise reached
• Puts you ahead of your competition who may not be leveraging similar methods

Ideas for a few different ways to connect with your customers and strengthening your position online….

• Build up your expertise and web presence, with a blog and offer valuable and unique content relevant to your area
• Share your own content and other relevant info that might interest your audience on Twitter or Facebook.
• Create a video of yourself discussing a particular area of interest relevant to your niche.
• Leverage peers in your area by giving away quality content (written, video, music, whatever). Guest posting on other blogs is a great way to establish authority and expertise

How have you positioned yourself online, what’s worked for you specifically… and what hasn’t? Leave your comment in the space below!

It’s been almost a year since I quit my job. It’s been exactly 240 days since I invested in Chris Guillebeau’s Empire Building Kit with the intention of taking action every day towards building a lifestyle business. My original plan was to document more of the process here on my blog but I ran into the problem that many bloggers run into – I just didn’t feel I had anything substantial to write about. Now as the year comes to close I feel compelled to look back on the year and reflect on my accomplishments and do a check-in on progress. Although my goal of building an full fledged internet based hasn’t quite fully materialized yet – I am on the right path and I have made steady progress towards that goal. The wheels are definitely turning and I have the right mindset, now I just need to keep steadily building towards that goal even if it doesn’t happen this year.

As I do this review though, instead of beating myself up or overanalyzing the things I haven’t done, I want to highlight the accomplishments in 2010 that I’m proud of.

Blogging. I had never written much before but yet a few months into 2010 I learned about the value of blogging and decided that I wanted to write things and get my ideas out of the world. I knew that it made smart business sense and it’s payed off. Many clients got to know me through my writing and this blog, I even made a little money through affiliate products. In my path to learning internet marketing I networked with many people including high-profile bloggers like Pat Flynn, Chris Guillebeau and Sean Ogle. In November of 2009 I would have never dreamed that I would have my own blog with over 2000 unique visitors per month. A lot of the traffic can be attributed to the Niche Site Duel that I participated in where Pat generously linked every one of my posts which resulted in floods of traffic.

Founding a sole proprietorship. I realized that as a freelance sales consultant, I was running my own business. I founded Alphabyte Communications and started treating all my work as a business.

Offering services. Through my website and blog I offered services, working as creating consultant for Full Voice Media helping companies improve their presence online in areas such as web development, social media marketing, and search engine optimization. This presented a fantastic opportunity to get my feet wet in digital media and embrace social media & blogging. In the process I learned a ton about the business of offering services online and met some really smart and talented entrepreneurs.

Internet marketing. Over the course of the past 8 months I worked on-again and off-again on several niche web properties to learn more about the craft of internet marketing. The first website project I took on was an affiliate project I documented in the niche site duel with Pat Flynn. I have since undertaken another project to launch at least another two more affiliate sites in the near future as soon as funding will allow things to happen, but for the time being the majority of my funds are tied up with travel related expenses!

So what’s next?

I may start offering some of my own specialized services in a few key areas. I also acquired some decent writing skills so I’d like to do some freelance writing, and possibly do some SEO freelance work as well. And who knows if the right opportunity comes along I’d consider that also.

A dream of mine has always been to create a product of my own to sell. I’ve been sitting on this idea for a little but it is slowly materializing – which is an eBook targeted to bloggers that I really think would resonate with a lot of people. My plan is to start testing the idea once some funding comes together in the the hopes of finding a large enough base of potential customers.

I also have some niche blog ideas that I’ve been thinking about putting down and taking action on. My favourite idea being a blog dedicated to the reward programs crowd. I’m a bit of a points junkie myself – Just yesterday, in fact, I booked two round-trip tickets to France and Barcelona on points alone. The taxes and airport fees were a bit of a hit money-wise, but it’s still a heck of a deal. The idea would be to build reward points travel community and serve as a hub for deals, promotions and strategies for acquiring and using reward points for all kinds of things.

With all this mind the reality has been that my income level this year has been the lowest it’s ever been since I began working full-time in 2005. I knew it would be tough, and it has been very hard. I possessed no illusions about the reality of quitting my job and working for myself. I’m now in a position that is much less comfortable than where I was 6 months ago. Taking this path has allowed for some comforts, but it’s created a lot of discomfort. And I suppose that’s OK – this was never supposed to be easy.

Above all, I’m going to maintain a good attitude and remember to not give up. The path to reaching to success is a rocky-as-hell road, but I’m going to learn from my mistakes and be stubbornly determined to just keep going.

To all those who have supported me and helped me out along the way – Thank you.

Well it’s not any kind of Holiday for us Canadians this week.. but that won’t stop many from filling up our gas tanks and venturing out to border cities on Black Friday weekend to score some major shopping deals.

If dealing with that kind of madness isn’t your kinda thing – it isn’t mine (I rarely head to malls unless its to accompany my girlfriend while I wait at Starbucks), there’s plenty of sales happening on the internet this coming week and if you’ve had your eye on something for awhile it could be a great time to score a great deal.

I don’t pitch products often but I thought this announcement deserved a blog post because I feel so strongly about them and they go on sale very rarely discounted, if ever.

Until Midnight on Monday customers who purchases one of Chris Guillebeau’s Unconventional Guides using the discount code “PUMPKIN” save 15% on any purchase, including the Empire Building Kit, gift certificates, and everything else.

These quick but incredibly useful guides are loaded with a ton of content ranging from ideas for combining your Art with Money, working for yourself online, learning how to be a more effective freelancer, or discovering how to be a travel hacker. If you aren’t really familiar with the guides or the Empire Building Kit no sweat – I’ve done write-ups about a few of Chris Guillebeau’s fantastic Unconventional guides here and here.

As a bonus proceeds from the guides during this period are increasing from 10% to 15% to Chris’s Charity:Water project in Ehiopia which is a really great charity and cause.

If you’ve checked out these fantastic resources before or this is your first time, now’s an excellent time to get a great deal and support a great charitable project at the same time.

Click here to visit Unconventional Guides and pick one up today!