Attitude The Marketers Most Important Trait

Writen by Lynn Harris

Attitude is a key part of each of us. A central part of our make-up, who we are as individuals. It is also a major factor whether you succeed at what you do or fail. Your attitude about life can give you many different outcomes to a situation, the choice is up to you.

For an example, let's say you just woke up on your day off with plans of doing something outside, to find an unexpected downpour of rain. You can look at the situation in different ways, each will have a different outcome. The choice is up to you.

Scenario one - You are instantly disappointed, fly off cursing thinking "my plans are ruined!" You slump into a state of depression and anger that your entire day is shot. And now everything you do and everywhere you go is affected by this course of action. Your cat rubs on your leg and you kick it off breaking the new lamp you just bought. Your dog comes up licking your hand, you slap at it and he runs under the table, knocking over the table and dumping your breakfast in the floor.

Scenario two - You wake up glad to be alive and above ground. You notice that the wind is blowing and it is raining like cats and dogs. You realize that the days plans are completely wiped out. You shrug your shoulders as you prepare to fix breakfast. Thinking, "It will be a good day to spend inside and catch up on things in here, spend time with my loving pets." You get things done inside you had put off for months and enjoyed it.

My examples my be a little extreme, but you get the point. It is human nature to "react", the emotional side of us. We can change our outcomes a lot of times if we only start thinking, instead of reacting. Think, "Is this the best reaction to this situation?" If not, try and figure out how you are going to approach it another way.

Be willing to do what it takes. If you fail at something, try another approach. Don't give up when you are faced with a downturn. Work on ways to turn it up. Be willing to help your referrals. Make yourself available as a mentor and friend.

When we take the proper attitude, success itself may even have a different definition. It may be more about being satisfied with our efforts and the way we treat others than the amount on the checks we get.

Just what is success for you?

Lynn Harris began online marketing in 1998 after wading through the hype for a year. He is now editor/webmaster of HotBizTips.com. A site and newsletter aimed at helping the new to intermediate online marketer.

http://HoBizTips.com © 2005

Internet Marketing The Two Faces Of Free

Writen by Paul White

'FREE' is the reason people are successful, and make a fortune marketing on the internet, yet 'FREE' is also the reason 90% of people fail miserably!

It is all to do with your approach to your business and your careful use of 'FREE' things.

You will never make any money placing your own ads on other people's FREE classified sites and/or FFA links, even if you have submission software.

And you will never make money with just a FREE self replicating website.

This is the point when most people give up. But you must realise that you will never become rich for FREE.

You must invest initially in a professionally designed webpage/site and place links to your programs. You will then be able to promote your own unique website, and people can click on your programs once they visit you, and see everything you are offering.

Mix up the programs you are promoting on your website. Some can be FREE, but others should have cost you something to start up. If you introduce a thousand people for example, and all of you just get a FREE self replicating website, then no one makes any money!

Once you have a good professional looking website set up, and you have a reasonable advertising budget to work with, which you know you can comfortably afford to spend each week, then you are ready to exploit the other side of FREE!

It is your customers, and potential customers, who need to be given FREE things.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that customers are sitting at their computer screens, with their mouse in one hand and their credit cards in the other, surfing the net to spend their hard earned cash on anything or everything they see.

You have to earn your customers respect to get money from them, and the best way to earn respect from a customer is to give them something for FREE.

To get them to sign up for your newsletter or ezine then offer them lots of FREEBIES.

There are now so many ezines around that they need to have a reason to subscribe to yours.

And keep them subscribing! I offer new daily FREE software and FREE E-books to all my own subscribers.

Even more important is to offer FREE things on your website to get your visitors there in the first place.

Placing an ad that reads 'Buy this amazing widget at my site...' will attract just a fraction of the visitors that an ad reading, 'View details of this amazing widget and get FREE entry into our $25,000 weekly drawing, FREE software, FREE ebooks and FREE grocery vouchers worth hundreds of dollars!....'

Yet all of these Freebies, and thousands more can be found quite easily by yourself by surfing all of the FREE sites, and collecting what you think will be suitable for your own visitors.(Just type in the word 'FREE' into any search engine for a huge list of sites.)

Also visit lotto and competition sites for suitable FREE games you can include on your site.

Also offer even more Freebies as an incentive for your customers to buy products from you. For example, 'Buy this widget from me by midnight tonight and I will also give you 10 FREE adverts in our ezine.'

And apart from giving away FREE ads in your ezine, also have a FREE classified ads section on your own website where people can place their ads. Again you will find them flocking to your site to do this.

So there you have the two faces of FREE, one is ugly and one is beautiful!

To ensure success just make sure that you know which face is which!

About The Author

Paul White is a 42 year old former teacher. He now helps people all around the world to become wealthy online. Whatever you are selling, visit the popular site: http://www.profitmountain.com and if you subscribe to Profit Mountain's FREE wealth building newsletter, you will also receive FREE advertising for the next 12 months! (Worth $200!) as well as loads of other things!

Look Smart Not Small Business Friendly

Writen by Lee Traupel

There is a firestorm of negative press regarding LookSmart's recent marketing stumbles via numerous discussion groups, including two of the oldest and most influential, I-Search and I-Advertising Digests. Most of the critiques center on LookSmart's inability to develop viable programs for SMB/SME ("small to medium business or enterprise"), the difficulty in managing their new pay per click "Small Business Listings" advertising program, and their overall lack of customer service responsiveness.

Many of us in the agency/marketing services world relied upon LookSmart's directory in the early days; especially as an offset to Yahoo's "my way or the highway" attitude when they became the 200 pound gorilla in the marketplace So, it's sad to say, but LookSmart appears to be morphing to just another portal with little marketing awareness of how to work effectively with the tens of millions of SMB companies that have rapidly embraced a web-centric business model. Their overall terms of services are geared for big companies and their SMB programs appear to be an afterthought at best!

One of the core issues that frustrates many small businesses is the difficulty in getting a listing that actually describes their company, products, and/or services accurately - to add insult to injury, you have to pay in some cases twice to have your listing upgraded. Apparently, LookSmart's editorial staff can't keep up with the demand, or is so pressured to maintain some internal quota their descriptions suffer accordingly.

LookSmart's new Small Business Listings program is simply not "small business friendly." It is a complex program with lots of important details buried in an FAQ and there are some "gotchas" in the small print - including being forced to wait up to 90 days for the return of the upfront deposit of $150. and paying a setup fee for a listing; but having it deactivated when you exceed the dollar amount of your "monthly click limit." I can understand their dropping the listing once you exceed your budget, but it does not seem equitable to charge $49. to setup the listing in the first place - your in essence subsidizing LookSmart's cost of doing business.

We've found inconsistencies in LookSmart's stated Privacy program versus inbound e-mail traffic we've received from them over the past 3-6 months. We've unsubscribed 3-4 times and still keep getting self-promotional marketing materials which are not of any value, other than promoting LookSmart's business. They are clearly not adhering to their stated privacy policy and to compound matters, our complaints have not been addressed via their customer service department.

So, if your an SMB company what are your alternatives to working with LookSmart? We would recommend your assessing Google's new "AdWords Select" program which is geared more for business of all sizes; but, I must warn you there is some complexity in setting up this type of program as well. But, you certainly get much more coverage with Google - their rapidly becoming the dominant search engine du jour with approximately 40% market share of all combined searches.

Inktomi's "Search Submit" program should also be assessed as an alternative to working with LookSmart and as an adjunct to an existing Search Engine or Marketing program. They have partnered with some of the same companies that LookSmart is working with, including MSN, AOL, iWon, and many others. They offer very good value for the incurred costs, charging a nominal fee $39. for the first URL and $25. for additional URLs to have your web site "crawled" (assessed or indexed) on a regular basis for one year and sharing this information with the most heavily used search engines on the web.

Finally, you may want to consider utilizing standard pay per click ("PPC") search engines to drive qualified traffic to your web site and/or looking at competitive PPC programs offered by LookSmart's competitors including Yahoo, AOL, Alta Vista and others. Overture (formerly GoTo) is the dominant market leader in the pure PPC market that can deliver a great deal of traffic. But, there are approximately 150 second tier pay per click search engines available for assessment and you should be able to leverage your marketing costs by carefully analyzing your "keyword buys" via some of these PPC search engines including Kanoodle, FindWhat, Sprinks and many others.

About The Author

Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of business development and marketing experience - he is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc., http://www.intelective.com a results-driven marketing services company providing proprietary services to clients encompassing startups to public companies. Lee@intelective.com