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Health Savings Accounts Put You In Control Of Your Healthcare

Mike Valentine — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:59:24 +0000

By Wiley Long

As Health Savings Accounts grow in popularity, there is growing fear among those who want to nationalize healthcare that they will not be able to put the cat back in the bag. There are already over 3 million HSA owners, and by 2010, the Treasury Department estimates as many as 45 million Americans will be covered by HSA plans. They will have billions of dollars invested to cover future medical expenses, and by then it will be politically impossible to take that benefit away.

If you currently have a high-deductible health insurance plan, you can invest tax-free money in a Health Savings Account. You get to choose the type of investment – anything from savings accounts or money market funds, to a full brokerage house. If you invest wisely, you could have well over $500,000 in the account when you retire. You will be able to use that money to pay for your healthcare in whatever way you please, tax free. You can go to the best surgeons, or the least expensive doc-in-a-box. If you decide to treat a condition with acupuncture, homeopathy, or psychic healers, you can do that too. Whoever offers you the service you want with the best combination of quality and price should get your business. And since you are the one paying, it will be completely your choice. You have healthcare freedom.

If proponents of a single-payer system were to ever have their way, you would be at the mercy of a government bureaucrat when it comes to your healthcare. To see what this may look like, all one has to do is look at the state of health care in Canada, England, New Zealand, and the parts of Europe that have not yet abandoned single-payer systems.

Proponents of a single-payer system tend to point to Canada or England as countries that cover all their citizens with quality healthcare, while spending less money per person than the U.S. But if we look a little more closely, we see that these publicly financed health insurance systems are breaking down, the quality is low, and the costs can be quite high. Here’s what Canadians have to deal with if they need medical care:

Long waits. Hundreds of Canadians go to Detroit and other U.S. cities every year for procedures like CAT scans, which they can obtain treatment in a matter of days. In Canada, the wait is typically six months. Currently 876,000 Canadians are on waiting lists for medical procedures.

Difficulty in getting life-enhancing procedures done. If a Canadian is having a heart attack, they will be treated right then. But if the surgery is considered “elective” (meaning that possible death is not eminent), the wait could be months or years. Average wait for cataract removal is 18 months. Average wait for a knee replacement is one year.

Increased risk of dieing. The average Canadian waits eight weeks to see a specialist, and another nine weeks before getting treated. This is even the case with conditions that are likely to get much worse if there is any delay in treatment. For example, the median time for a mastectomy is 14 weeks, enough time for the cancer to spread to other parts of the body. In fact, 28% of those diagnosed with breast cancer in Canada die from it, while the mortality ratio in the U.S. is only 25%.

Things don’t look any better across the ocean. Each year the British National Health Service cancels 410,000 surgeries because of resource shortages. According to the London Sunday Times, there are currently over 1 million Brits awaiting elective surgery. Thomas Cook, a British travel agency, is even considering offering “sun-and-surgery” packaged trips to Indian hospitals for British citizens fed up with low standards and long waiting times for surgery.

The British and Canadian governments have the power to make healthcare “free”, but they are unable to control its costs. So the costs become longer (and potentially fatal) delays, and fewer innovations.

It’s not surprising when you think about what is happening. Universal health insurance systems always encourage over-consumption by patients, and such over-consumption always leads to financial crises. The result is inevitably broken promises about universal access and quality care. Because there are always limited resources, single-payer systems tend to overspend on primary care for the healthy, while denying more expensive specialist care to those with serious medical problems. This is because most people (voters) are healthy most of the time, and the sick and dieing are less likely to be able to organize into a political force.

What makes the United States such a great country is the “freedoms” we enjoy. Though our freedoms seem to be constantly under attack, there is still no nation in the world that has the freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of association, or the free markets that we have in the United States. As anyone who understands even a smidgen of economics knows, free markets encourage competition and innovation, which lead to lower prices and better quality.

Though the U.S. system of health care can not really be considered a “free-market”, it is certainly much more free than any single payer system. Some of the benefits we see as a result of our current healthcare system include:

- U.S. medicine produces the best outcomes for virtually every patient, from premature babies to elderly cancer patients.

- American companies are the chief source worldwide of new treatments and procedures which each year are used to save millions of lives.

- U.S. medical training and research facilities are the best in the world.

Though Canadians might have to wait a year or two for hip replacement surgery, they can get the same operation done on their dog in less than a week. This is because veterinarians are competing for that business, finding innovative ways to deliver service more quickly and less expensively. Another example is laser eye surgery, a procedure that is rarely covered by insurance, so laser eye surgeons must compete on the basis of cost and quality. While costs for most medical procedures have been going up every year, the cost for this procedure has dropped by 80% over the past decade.

Unfortunately, U.S. healthcare policies still tend to limit competition, restrict consumer’s freedom to choose, and discourage consumers from shopping for value. Thus, there are too few choices and there has been little attention paid to price and quality of service. The answer is clearly not more government intervention, but instead letting competition and the power of the marketplace drive down prices and increase quality and access to care.

Health Savings Accounts are the Solution

There is increasing recognition that third-party health insurance payers are actually a major cause of escalating medical costs and the decline in the quality of service. The increasing adoption of HSA plans has already begun to cause greater transparency and competition in the medical marketplace. There are now physicians available by phone, medical kiosks setting up in malls, doctors that accept only cash (and who charge significantly less), and others competing directly for the consumer’s healthcare dollar.

Don’t be fooled by the politicians who advocate a single-payer system, claiming their only concern is the uninsured. If a single body (such as a government bureaucracy) controls healthcare, they control one seventh of the national economy. And everywhere in the world that central control of the economy has been tried, it has been a colossal failure.

As public policy reforms centered on individual choice continue to gain wider footholds, the result will be greater prosperity, greater choice, and a better value for all. The culture of dependence and entitlement will begin to fade, as millions of individuals demand further policy reforms that will reinstate the values of freedom and personal responsibility that helped establish this great nation.

As more consumers turn to health savings accounts, the market will respond. Innovative providers will begin to compete more on price and quality of service, and those that provide the best value will get wealthy doing so. And all consumers will benefit.

About the Author: By Wiley Long – President, HSA for America. HSA for America makes it easy to learn about and set up Health Savings Accounts.

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Top 10 Blog Writing Tips: Write a Blog You’d Want to Read

Mike Valentine — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:10:06 +0000

Top 10 Blog Writing Tips © Patsi Krakoff and Denise Wakeman

Most of the “rules” about writing for ezines and newsletters apply to writing posts for your blog, but there are some important differences. Keep these 10 tips in mind and you’ll be publishing great blog content that attracts prospects and clients in your niche market.

Write with the reader in mind. Remember WIIFM? It’s marketing jargon for What’s In It For Me? That’s what you should be keeping in mind. Your reader will read your post looking for what’s in it for them.
Make it valuable and worthwhile. Don’t waste people’s time. If you don’t have anything to say, no problem, plenty other people do. So share their articles, do an interview, review a book.
Proof-read for typos and glaring grammatical errors. You wouldn’t go out of the house with dirty hair or missing a sock, so why would you publish spelling mistakes? Respect your readers by polishing up your stuff.
Keep it short and simple, sweetie. (KISS). Most people are scanners. You may have a lot to say and think it interesting, and it may be. But people are reading online and out of time. Get to the point quickly. Publishing short posts more frequently is a better format than publishing lengthy articles every few weeks.
Keep it lively, make it snappy and snazzy. Even if you aren’t a natural born writer, you can write for your blog. Just write like you’re speaking to your friend.or to yourself! Remember though, get to the point quickly. Keep in mind the journalist’s rule of 5 W’s in the first paragraph: who, what, why, when and where.
Link often. This builds credibility and positions you as an expert in your field. People don’t have time to know what others are doing, you should tell them. Linking to other blogs and websites also helps you build a network of associates who will in turn link to your blog.
Use keywords often. This will help you stay on purpose, and the search engines will love your blog. Your rankings will go up. This is one of the reasons we have you write out your purpose statements before beginning your blog. The clearer you are about your purpose, the more consistently you will deliver messages that are on target. And the more often your keywords show up, the better your search engine results.
Write clearly (short sentences, only one concept per sentence). No double speak or jargon; no more than one idea in one sentence- don’t make your readers have to think about your meaning. Spoon feed them. Use commas and dashes liberally.
Write like you talk. It’s okay to use common expressions from speech. Examples: Go figure. Don’t even go there. Now, I ask you. Gotta love it. (And, remember the age group of your readers.)
Use a clear headline, and don’t be afraid to make bold statements (but don’t mislead people either). Make it snazzy and use key words. Example: Ex-Techno-Weenie Masters HTML Code

BONUS: After you write a post and BEFORE you hit the save button

Use this checklist to ask yourself a few questions as you are reading through for typos and grammar:

Is the topic clear to someone who only reads the headline?
Does the lead paragraph tell who and what the story is about and why the reader should care about it?
Is the angle you’ve used likely to seem newsworthy?
Would someone who knows absolutely nothing about this topic understand this post?
Is the post free of jargon?
Is it written in journalistic style and does it make an effort to be objective?
Have you peppered the headline and the post with keywords and phrases that will be attractive to search engines?
Did you remember to ask your readers a question at the end, or something to stimulate readers to comment?
Did you remember to write with the reader in mind, always keeping in mind WIIFT? (What’s in It for Them?)

Patsi Krakoff of Customized Newsletter Services, and Denise Wakeman of Next Level Partnership, have teamed up to create blogging classes and marketing services for independent professionals. You can read and subscribe to their blogs at http://www.coachezines.com, http://www.bizbooknuggets.com and http://www.biztipsblog.com

How to Find The Best Small Business Office

Mike Valentine — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:21:20 +0000

What’s the Best Office Space Model?

Office space used to refer to one thing – it was the property a company occupied to conduct business. The company leased space, paid for utilities and employee parking. Cubicles, conference rooms, and perhaps a break room with coffee makers and vending machines were provided for employees to carry out their duties. As they say in Estate Agencies, it was all about “location, location, location.”

Frequently, this commercial property was located in a building, sub-divided and leased to several different companies. As a result of modern day technologies such as the Internet, cell phones and wireless hubs, this is now not the case.

Many companies see the traditional office as part of an outdated business model that is inflexible and costly. Today, office space has multiple meanings, depending on the type of business and its requirements. Office business centers, or executive suites, are a modified version of the traditional office. A small area of furnished space is leased in a building created specifically for this purpose. It is used for appointments with clients, large meetings and individual workspace. Frequently receptionist services, utilities and a common break room are provided. This balances the need for a full service office environment with a lower overhead.

Virtual Office Space

Virtual office space relies on technology to make businesses as streamlined as needed. The virtual office has access to an assortment of space and communication services. Space services are supplied on an “as needed” basis and can provide a variety of benefits. Having the use of a physical mailing address in a professional building alleviates concerns about using a home mailing address. In many cases reception courtesies can include notary services, signing for packages and document drop-off/pick-up services. In many cases communication services include the virtual assistant who works from home, remote receptionists, who are connected remotely via the company’s virtual private network and answering services or voicemail.

The Best Office Space Model

There is no single office space model that works for all companies and business types. In today’s business environment, the option that works best for a company is the one that reduces overhead, increases efficiency and creates the best work-life balance for its employees. Constantly evolving technology requires new strategies for businesses to keep up with market changes. For some, this will continue to mean traditional brick and mortar locations with updated infrastructures. However, for many businesses, from small start-ups to larger, established firms, the virtual office environment and its many benefits out-weigh the negatives.

About the Author: The author works in the website design and multimedia industry and is based in the UK. He has successfully rented serviced office space from Flexible Offices Direct at: http://www.flexibleofficesdirect.co.uk/

How to Increase Website Pageviews

Mike Valentine — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 04:27:43 +0000

Get Your Website Visitors to Stick Around by Using These Two Strategies

A website’s home page is the most important real estate of that website. What copy you put on that home page often determines whether a visitor to the site will stick around for a few seconds to see what you have on offer – or instead immediately click away to a more “appealing” website home page.

What’s a more “appealing” website home page? One that follows these two basic but oh so important strategies:

1. On the web, less is more. 2. Tell people what’s in it for them, not what appeals to you.

Let’s look more closely at both of these strategies:

Less is more: On the web many people tend to skim copy looking for the highlights of a new site. If we don’t find something immediately that holds our attention it’s just too easy to click away.

The basic elements of this step are: – Short – and I mean short – paragraphs with a line of white space between each paragraph – Font size large enough to be read easily – Boldface subheads that provide important information by themselves – And a reduction of what you say to the most essential – leave much of the related copy for interior pages

Tell people what’s in it for them: Now this is for the actual text of your copy: You do not say how beautifully made are the hand-woven winter scarves you sell (even though this feature is something you really admire).

You do say that these scarves are especially woven to trap the cold air so that a person’s neck stays warm even in very cold weather. This is what a person buying a winter scarf for protection from the cold wants to know: How well will this scarf keep out the cold?

Many business owners do not want to accept this concept; they want to list all the great features of their product. But their prospective customers don’t care about the features – these prospective customers care about the benefits to them.

To write copy that attracts potential buyers, you must switch from talking about what interests you to talking about what interests the potential buyers.

Bonus tip: Use everyday language so people can get the important information easily. You do not want to create a mental stumbling block by using “sophisticated” words that may interrupt a person’s reading.

To recap, keep your website home page copy “simple” (brief, easy to read) and targeted to what your potential customers want to hear.

About the Author: Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is an Internet business consultant whose power marketing website is http://www.MillerMosaicLLC.com . If you liked this article, you’ll love her free report on “Power Marketing’s Top 3 Internet Marketing Tips” ‘ grab your report now from http://www.CalltoActionWebsites.com

WebSite101 Tweets

Mike Valentine — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:11:00 +0000

#101 WebSite101 Tweets:
#101 WebSite101 Tweets:
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WebSite101 Tweets

Mike Valentine — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:11:00 +0000

#101 WebSite101 Tweets:
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WebSite101 Tweets

Mike Valentine — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:11:00 +0000

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Compensation for Unbiased Opinion

Mike Valentine — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:23:28 +0000

Why Is Paid Blogging So Controversial?

Blogs are widely recognized as a bastion of unadulterated thought and ideas. Readers are loyal largely because they assume the blogger’s ideas have not been compromised by commercial interests. On the surface, a sponsored conversation seems inconsistent with this ideal. Compensating a blogger to write about your company suggests the blogger must forfeit his or her unbiased position. In reality, that is completely untrue.

The problem is that most companies that use a sponsored conversation to gain market exposure execute a poorly-crafted strategy. It is tarnished from the beginning and does more harm than good for their brand.

How To Generate The Best Results From A Sponsored Blog

There are two secrets to leveraging sponsored conversations effectively. You will find both of them to be intuitive, especially when you consider the perspective of a sponsored blog’s readership. First, the connection between your company and the blogger should be transparent. Second, you must allow the blogger to speak authentically.

Transparency is critical because readers will revolt if they feel something is hidden from them due to the blogger being compensated. That creates problems on multiple fronts. Not only will a lack of transparency hurt the blogger’s influence, but it can also create a public relations nightmare for your company. Make sure that each and every sponsored conversation is disclosed as such.

The blogger’s authenticity is also critical. If he or she is unable to speak freely about your company, their credibility will suffer. Even if a post is disclosed as a sponsored conversation, readers will ignore it if they sense the blogger is not being genuine. That does your company little good. Let the blogger write authentically.

A Sponsored Conversation Melds Voice, Authority, And Marketing

The reason a sponsored conversation has such potency is because it lets you access an existing platform of trust and authority. Many bloggers attract thousands of loyal readers. These readers are influenced by the blogger’s posts because of the writer’s authentic voice. That authenticity encourages trust. If the blogger writes about your company and products, readers are likely to trust his or her ideas. They are likely to act on the blogger’s recommendations. As long as the sponsored conversation is disclosed as such, you can benefit from the blogger’s authority and influence while promoting your products through the blogger’s voice.

Measuring The ROI Of A Sponsored Conversation

The compensation you offer to bloggers and the goal of your sponsored conversation will influence how you measure each campaign’s ROI. For example, if you’re using a sponsored blog to drive traffic to your website, you can embed pixels and trackable parameters within the links. That allows you to measure the number of unique visitors and the sales they generate. If you compensate the blogger based on a cost-per-click or cost-per-sale formula, you can easily calculate the ROI of that particular sponsored conversation.

Sponsored Conversations Can Increase Your Exposure And Sales

Marketing costs are rising with no end in sight. At the same time, consumers are gravitating toward blogs that are written with an authentic voice that encourages their loyalty and trust. A sponsored conversation gives you an opportunity to tap into those powerful levers to promote your products and brand. Despite the controversy, this strategy is here to stay. Major brands are already using it to reach niche communities that would be all but impossible to reach through conventional methods. You can launch a sponsored conversation campaign and enjoy the same advantages.

About the Author: With 20 years in marketing, advertising and 10 years in internet marketing, Rostin Reagor Smith is on the cutting edge. Combining Social Media Optimization with more traditional SEO and SEM methods, RRS is a consulting firm specializing in enhancing clients’ online presence and managing their public relations online through traditional and Reverse SEO. http://www.RostinReagorSmith.com

Ten Ways to Use PHP on your Website

Mike Valentine — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:10:12 +0000

PHP is an open source programming language

PHP is a programming language that allows your website to go beyond a basic HTML document, and create an interactive experience. Open source means that the source code is available to someone with proper access to the site, so that they can easily make changes. When the Internet was first getting started, most of the pages on websites were basic HTML documents. Meaning that when you visited a page (about.html, for example), you downloaded all of the content of the page into your browser.

How Do I Know if I have a PHP Site?

If you are visiting a site, and you see that the page name ends with .html, this means that the page is most likely a plain old HTML page. If the page name ends in .php, then you the site is a php based site. Other dynamic programming languages include .jsp (Java Server Pages) or .asp (.NET or Active Server Pages). Occasionally you’ll see sites that end in .html that have dynamic code embedded in them, but this requires some tricks to accomplish on the server.

We have several sites that use static HTML pages and have great results. There are some pages that have dynamic content, but most of the pages are built in straight HTML. It’s great for search engine optimization, as some of those pages have been active for years. However, as the number of pages grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to update menu or navigation items, because it means you have to open each page, one at a time, and modify the contents.

Advantages of using PHP

PHP works a little differently. Instead of downloading the entire page (with the navigation, content and everything in one file), php allows you to embed programming code that isn’t displayed to the end user. This programming code allows you to tell the page, “Insert the top navigation here.” Or, “put the content for the page over there.”

PHP allows you to personalize a page, for example, or automatically detect that a user is coming into the site from a mobile device and display a different version of the site that is optimized for their Blackberry or iPhone. PHP keeps most of the code for the site “behind the scenes” so that the page that is displayed to the end user loads quickly and doesn’t require the browser to do processing work — the work is handled instead by the server.

PHP Is Ideal For Working With Databases

One of the biggest advantages of a programming language like PHP is that it allows you to easily interact with a database. If you’re unfamiliar with databases, think of a database as a souped-up form of an Excel spreadsheet. You have columns (i.e. page name, content, title) and rows. Rows typically would hold information that is organized by column headings.

PHP makes it easy to read information from a database, and then display information onto a web page. So, if you’ve ever used a site where you type in your zip code to find a store location near you, the system likely is taking your zip code, performing a database query (i.e. find all stores within 10 miles of the 80303 zip code) and display the results so that you can find your way. In order to do this, we have a geolocation database that allows us to tell the approximate distance between two zip codes.

You could do the same thing by building out a series of web pages that has each location. And while this is fine for three or four locations, as the number of locations increases, PHP allows you to automate the process.

Keep Content Organized

One of the ways we’ve been able to streamline the process of building websites is that we’ve standardized our process using our PageDirector content management system. There are many, many ways to build websites. Each designer seems to have a slightly different way of putting a site together. We are frequently asked to work on sites that other people have created, and in order to make simple changes to the content or navigation, we often have to dig around in the code to find where things are located. This takes time and isn’t very efficient. The PageDirector system, however, keeps all of the content for the site neatly organized in a database table. So that anyone can easily find the content and make changes quickly and easily. One of our clients said to me in an email to me yesterday, “It’s really efficient and a simple tool to use PageDirector. It makes my life easier being able to update the website fast.”

How Does It Work?

When someone clicks on a link to go to a page, the system pulls the right content from the database, grabs the menu items from another location, and on-the-fly creates the page for a person.

Summary

PHP is a server-based programming language that allows you to create an interactive experience for your site visitors, and keep content and other information organized within a database.

About the Author: PHP is a programming language that allows your website to go beyond a basic HTML document, and create an interactive experience. PHP allows you to create an interactive experience for your site visitors, and keep content and other information organized within a database. This article explores some of interactive applications that can be developed using PHP. http://www.customerparadigm.com/index/21/Articles_Media.php

WebSite101 Tweets

Mike Valentine — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:11:00 +0000

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