Just this past Tuesday night, I attended Vancouver’s Search Engine Marketing Meetup and Raquel Hirsh from Wider Funnel presented “The Six Landing Page Success Factors” (also known as landing page optimization). Landing Page optimization has been popular for the last 2 years or so for web savvy marketers, but becoming more of a “buzz word” [...]

I’ve been using the beta version Line2 app from Toktumi in conjunction with their phone system for a few months now and I have to say it rocks.

I was really excited about Google Voice, which is still a nice consumer app, but the Toktumi/Line2 combo is a real business solution. The base Toktumi virtual PBXgives me the power of a traditional PBX system (which we had an internal Asterisk system but Dillsmack threatened to quit if he had to keep maintaining it) with auto attendant, extensions, etc. plus new calling features like simulring, which rings any or all of my phones at once – office, cell, home, whatever – call handling – this person goes straight to voice mail, this person goes to office and cell, this person goes to straight to cell and home, etc. On top of that I get unlimited free calls throughout the US/Canada and some dirt cheap international rates, like $.02/min plus instant conference calls for up to 20 people all for only $14.95/month. Oh and did I mention they let me pick an 800 number, local number or transfer an existing number, pretty sweet.

If that was it I’d still love the service but what really rocks is the Line2 app and the desktop sharing. For a few extra bucks I added the unlimited desktop sharing, which means no more annoying conference calls where I’m trying to explain to my designers what I want changed on the web site design. I just share my desktop with them and use the annotation tools to show exactly what I want changed. The best part is it’s all online so no clients to download and setup, if there’s something I want to show I just point them to the Toktumi site and give them a login #, that simple. I can even record the whole thing on video. We were using another service for this, but Toktumi is better and more integrated.

The capper though is the Line2 app,which was just approved by Apple for the iPhone. There’s also a Blackberry version. Line2 adds my Toktumi number, voicemail, contact list, all onto my iPhone. So if I want to call from my “office phone” I just open up the Line2 app and dial. My Toktumi number is shown in the caller ID. Voicemails are separate from my AT&T personal voicemail but it has the same visual voicemail interface so I can listen to what I want and ignore the rest.

Probably my only complaint about the whole thing is that I really like Voxie voicemail transcription, and they don’t do that but I think they are adding it.

The whole app is really slick. In fact I liked it so much I contacted them to see if I could offer Shoemoney readers a deal on it to try it out. How’s three months free sound? Just be one of the first 50 to click here and enter this code 268057206 when you sign up. And no they won’t give you my phone number even if you say we’re friends

This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog

Toktumi – Seriously Awesome Business Applications

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Mark Hayward. You can follow him on Twitter @mark_hayward.

Do you ever feel like you want to pull your hair out over the lack of return (you feel like) you’re getting from your small business blogging and social media efforts?

Man, sometimes using social media for small business promotion can be frustrating!

In my two most recent ProBlogger guest posts I discussed, How to Go Beyond Your Small Business Blog and Create a Social Media Footprint and 10 Tips for Blogging Your Way to Small Business Success.

But you should know, I was not always a proponent of blogging or social media.

As a small business owner I completely understand your aggravation, and perhaps disappointment, with blogging.

In fact, a couple of years ago I was right there with you.

To be sure, when I pursued my dream and opened a small business in the Caribbean I lacked any semblance of a marketing plan, so I thought I would do what everyone else was doing, and turn to the Internet.

I had heard about the power of blogging and social media and using them as tools to help promote small business. Sadly, perhaps like you or someone you know, I envisioned that I would put up a few blog posts and offer some tips in forums and customers would come rushing.

In fact, for the first few months that I owned my business I thought I was doing everything right, such as, posting helpful information to my blog, visiting forums that were relevant to my niche, and even sneaking in a little bit of reputation management.

However, after about six months (what I thought was a long time) of consistent effort I felt like the return on my time and effort was just not happening.

In essence, I was done with social media and blogging!!

My Social Media Awakening

On the very day I told my wife that I was finished with this blogging, FLICKR, and YouTube stuff I found an email in my inbox that would change the course of my small business and my view towards social media forever. (I am not making this up for poetic license.)

Serendipitously, on the very same day that I was supposedly done with blogging forever, I received an email from a writer for Islands Magazine and she wanted to feature the story of how I opened my business in the Caribbean.

What was so amazing you ask?

In my opinion, my initial social media and blogging efforts had finally paid off. The writer had found my business from video that I had uploaded to YouTube and then posted as part of a story on my small niche blog.

Unfortunately, I am not sure what the exact search term was that the writer used, but four key results from my initial blogging and social media goals had happened:

1. While seeking some video the writer discovered my niche blog through a Google search.
2. The niche blog led the writer to my small business website.
3. From the website the writer learned about my story.
4. The writer contacted me for the feature.

Or, stated more simply:

One $100 FLIP Camera + Niche Blog Post = $20,000 plus of FREE publicity

You have to understand, I had NO advertising budget for my business and along comes this amazing $20,000 marketing opportunity at no cost. Even better, the Islands Magazine article has led to numerous other (free) publicity opportunities for my small business, including a quarter page write up in Conde Nast Travel and mentions on various travel websites.

Yes, it was then that I became a TRUE blogging and social media convert!

Major Lessons Learned

The above experience taught me many lessons about using blogging and social media for small business marketing. The following are but a few:

• Goals – Set your goals early. My primary reason for having a niche blog and posting video, photos, and text was to ensure that I had a presence that ranked well in Google so that potential customers (and magazine writers) could find me.

• Consistent – Be patient and consistent in your small business blogging efforts. I know sometimes it is awfully hard not to compare what you are doing to others, but stay focused and committed.

• Measurement – Find out which blog posts and social media sites provide the best return for your time and effort. (When you first get started this is mostly done through trial and error.) Also, don’t look at number of visitors to your blog, look at WHO is visiting your blog and how they are finding you.

• Results – The truth of the matter is, we are all still at the infancy stage when it comes to using social media, and perhaps to a lesser extent blogging, for small business marketing. You just never know when the hard work that you are doing on a daily basis now might pay off later!

Strangely enough, with thanks to a FLIP camera and a blog post, some interesting intangibles have also arisen from the Islands Magazine article.

• The Islands Magazine article set me up as an expert in pursuing the dream of moving to the Caribbean and opening a business. On a weekly basis I receive emails from people who are seeking assistance with trying to do what I have done. Not only do I enjoy helping them, but it’s a great way to keep my business in their thoughts.

• Islands Magazine gave me a powerful backlink. According to Matt Cutts, and the most recent WordCamp talk he gave Straight from Google – What You Need to Know, when it comes to search rankings and the power of backlinks, the Google algorithm is affected by the authority and the relevancy of the site that is linking to you. Thus, a travel magazine with a PR5 linking to my travel related business site, provides me with a solid link and some added Google juice.

• Almost a year on and the Islands Magazine article is still consistently the number two or three referring site for my business, and with the current economic downturn any extra website traffic is always welcome.

As a final takeaway message, I would just like to say that even if you do not have the subscriber count of Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, or Chris Brogan … DONîT GIVE UP! Your small business blogging and social media efforts will pay off.

Mark Hayward lives in the Caribbean and built up a clientele for his small business using nothing but social media. He tries to help beginners make sense of social media and how they can use it for business promotion. You can follow him on Twitter @mark_hayward.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How a Flip Camera and My Blog Got My Business Over $20,000 of FREE Publicity

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Congratulations to RetailmeNot.com on winning our Affiliate Summit East T-Shirt charity auction. The final bid came in at just over $11,000.00.

The money will be donated to the Lincoln Nebraska People’s City Mission.

RetailMeNot.com is a coupon website (and a really good one at that) that indexes web sites and coupons for them. It then uses social features (commenting/user voting) to keep the quality very high.

I put in several websites (including my own) and it pulled up some very accurate information.

I would like to thank all of the companies who participated in my shirt charity auction. You guys are great!!!!!

And make sure you go and check out retailmenot !!!!!!!!

This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog

RetailMeNot Wins ASE Charity T-Shirt Auction For $11,100.00

Reflections On My 30th Birthday

As I type this I just turned 30 years old and if you’re reading this and it’s still Sunday July 19 where you are, make sure you wish me a happy birthday .

I had a conversation leading up to my 30th birthday with a fellow 29 year old who was heading towards her 30th with a little trepidation. She had just divorced her husband, so needless to say she was experiencing significant changes in her life.

Personally I don’t look at 30 as a big deal, although there was one comment this particular girl made that caught my attention. She said as people turn 30 they usually are in one of two places – they have their “shit” together or they don’t. I told her I was about as happy as I could remember in my life as I turned 30, so her conclusion was I was one of those people who has their “shit together”. Yay for me.

It Was The Worst Of Times

It’s natural to reflect on your life as you get older, especially at milestone ages. If I look over my twenties I can certainly say it has been a wild ride, full of highs and lows.

I left my teenage years and entered my twenties while I was at university, not really enjoying my studies, not very motivated by much and just uncomfortable in my own skin.

The problem when your own self worth is low, is that you have great difficulty digging yourself out. You generally attract experiences to enhance your low self esteem because you view the world in “sad” glasses. Until you can switch the conversation going on inside your head from negative to positive, your experiences in the outside world will reflect this, further enhancing your negative belief structure.

In order to truly become confident, you need to have experiences that have a positive impact on you. There’s only so far re-framing your interpretation of events and thinking positive can take you, eventually you have to actually have the positive experiences to build your confidence.

As a result of my dogged determination to remain unhappy, I experienced many low-points. I’d have to say my time with panic attacks and anxiety during my early twenties was one of my least-favorite periods.

As always, thanks to the wonderful world of polarities that we exist in, the trauma caused by these experiences forced me to seek out answers to big questions. If I didn’t suffer the pain, I wouldn’t have gone looking for answers to certain questions either – you need the ying in order to see the contrast and thus fully experience the yang.

I won’t go into detail here, but if you want to read more about my experience with panic and the resultant search for happiness, you can read this –

The Key To Happiness

During my early twenties I had a few part time jobs and experimented with different web projects. My most successful at this time was my Magic: The Gathering card game website, which I grew to the largest site of its kind in Australia and then later sold for $13,000, the first big website deal I made.

I also started my proofreading business BetterEdit.com in my early twenties, which I would invest serious time into growing, including trips to university campuses in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Hawaii, Vancouver and Toronto to promote using posters.

From 20 to 25 years old I spent a lot of time playing with different projects and gained a lot of experience. I also began my study of Internet marketing during this time, and delved into more philosophical and spiritual studies too, as a means to figure out why the world is the way it is and what I could do to be happier in it.

I don’t look back on my first five years in my twenties as the most fun of times. Sure there were good times in there, but much of the experience was sabotaged by my attitude. I’m glad to have gone through that period for the growth it provided for me as a person, but I wouldn’t want to go back there again.

It Was The Best Of Times

A clear contrast to my first five years in my twenties, from 25 to 30 my life went from good to better to great, and thankfully, it’s still going!

It’s funny how as you get your “shit” together, people start to look at you as if you have answers to a question that has been bugging them for a long time – what to do with their life.

The answer to what to do with your life is simple – you need to experience. Your purpose is to gravitate towards activities that manifest joy for you, those around you and any person or living thing who is impacted by what you do. However, you won’t know what these things are by spending all your time wondering what to do.

Surrendering to the process of living is the only answer, but if you don’t at least commit to participating in the process, you don’t get anywhere.

I’ve read a lot of books that presented this wisdom as direct teachings from “god’s” mouth, or through the use of parables to explain ideas so you can more readily absorb them. Regardless of the source, reading about this is never enough, you need to BE it.

Creating awareness is definitely helpful, but until you experience the belief, it will remain only a truth as long as you have faith. If you really want to cement a concept you need to have lived it.

This is why the first five years of my twenties were so important. I needed to be lost in order to be capable of understanding what it feels like to find a purpose. The second five years were all about further refining and building upon the clarity I was discovering.

From 25 to today, the day after my 30th birthday, I achieved many milestones. I bought and sold websites, including selling my main business BetterEdit.com for six figures. I bought my first house, paid off the home loan within two years, traveled the world and just a few days before my 30th birthday, moved into a dream apartment in my ideal living location.

Most of this wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t conduct one crucial experiment – I started a blog. Although it seems strange to give so much credit to one event, I guess I really need to thank my friend Ed Chalmers, because it was him who first uttered the word “blog” and suggest I investigate it.

Starting a blog was just an experiment, but it led me to discover that I was capable of writing words that people wanted to read. It also allowed me to focus on activities that helped me to grow in so many ways.

I realized I could forge a specialty by combining my experience growing a blog and studies of Internet marketing. Becoming clear on my purpose as a blogger meant that I could devote more time to what I wanted to do, sell off what I wasn’t interested in, and build a lifestyle business, which was ultimately my main goal (the freedom to choose lifestyle over work or money).

During this time I further refined my attitude and it is this that I am most grateful for. Mindset is, and always will be, the key to everything.

As humans we have freewill, which means we have the power to make the ultimate decision – how we perceive every moment and every event in our life. If you truly understand this, then nothing in your life can impact you in a way that you don’t want it to.

Living this idea is harder than stating it, but during the last five years I’ve become a lot better at it. Just as my “ugly and sad” glasses made me think in negatives, see negatives and thus experience negatives in my life, by changing the colour of my glasses, I started to think in positives, see the beauty and live the wonder, regardless of the external reality.

This switch in attitude helped every aspect of my business life too. When facing set-backs, if you just see them for what they are and then let them go so you can move on, your life is so much simpler.

Dealing with jealousy, depression and loneliness, were emotions that plagued me many times growing my business in the last ten years. By seeing them for what they are (false judgments I’d made and thus decided to see as real), letting them go and then moving back on focus towards what I wanted, has made the road to success a lot more smooth.

Business can be relatively easy when you just get out of your own way, learn some fundamentals about people and then put your head down and get stuff done. This is what I did during the last five years. I pushed myself to launch new projects, I learned what the key parts of my business are and what I should work to grow, and discovered my place in the business as it functions like a machine.

The result of this was the creation of three fantastic products, Blog Mastermind, Become A Blogger (in partnership with Gideon Shalwick, a great new friend and business partner I met in the last five years as well) and Membership Site Mastermind.

I owe a great deal of thanks to the pioneers in our industry. Without people like Jeff Walker, Mike Filsaime, Rich Schefren, John Reese, Frank Kern, Eben Pagan and countless others, who I learn a lot from by simply watching what they do, I wouldn’t have grown as an Internet marketer.

Seeing what is possible by watching others do it is incredibly powerful because it makes what might be possible become a reality. When you see someone do something and get a result, then you know that’s attainable as an outcome for you too. That’s why it’s critical to participate in your marketplace and find people you can model.

That, in many ways, is why this blog you are reading now is successful. That is very likely the reason why you have read this article up to this point. You know what is possible because I’ve done it. I’ve explained it right here in this article. You can model me, take parts of what I say and do and apply it to what you say and do.

The Journey Continues

If you go back to the very first blog post I made to this blog and read every word I have published up to today, you will take in almost five years of my life, five years that happen to be the most successful years of my life too.

The entries in this blog are reflective of the journey I’ve been on in my life, particularly my business life, which is why I named it the Entrepreneurs Journey. It’s a chronicle of what I’ve done, what I’m doing and what I’m thinking as I live it. It’s my experiences in written form.

More importantly though, this blog is a reflection of the key successes and failures I’ve had along the way. You can find the moment I learned how important it is to build an email list, the first time I used a squeeze page, how I launched my first product, my thoughts and experiments on profiting from a blog, how I bought and sold websites for profit, what I learned about the importance of my own thoughts as a key to success, my interviews with amazing people from around the world, and so much more.

Ultimately though, none of this really matters because it’s about what has been. What’s important to me, and just as important to you, is what you are doing and thinking right now and how you have changed as a person as a result of the path you have walked.

I hope as you have read any article in this blog at any point in time, if it has done nothing else, it has helped you to think and take actions that have lead you to become a better person, even if it was in just a tiny little way. I couldn’t ask for more than that.

…And of course, the journey continues, we’re not done yet!

Here’s to more adventures, success stories and even greater milestone achievements in the coming years.

Yaro Starak
Blogger

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“How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1,000 Online”
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It used to be that having a website was enough to make your company technologically savvy. This is clearly no longer the case. In the age of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, simple 1990s website simply doesn’t cut it.

So what should every business do to modernize their online efforts? I recently wrote an article on this topic for QuickOnlineTips. I recommend that all business owners start a company blog, get on Facebook and other social networking accounts, create Twitter accounts, and.

An excerpt from the article is below.

“It used to be that all companies needed to stay technologically relevant and to have a website. This is clearly no longer the case. As technology shifts and business is increasingly conducted online, businesses need to adapt to stay competitive. I have compiled a list of things that businesses must do and applicants they must use in order to stay technologically relevant.”

You can read the full article at Quick Online Tips

Many years ago I wrote a blog post that looked at the reality of how much money you actually make when you run your own business.

You can read the article here – Do You Want to Run Your Own Business? Read this First!

My premise back then was that most business owners don’t make a whole lot of money until they sell their business.

This situation is very similar to what an employee, who stays with the one company for many years, goes through. A business owner can make a salary level income year after year, and then one day, likely at retirement age, the business is sold and a nice lump sum of cash is returned, much like a superannuation or retirement settlement an employee receives at the end of a long career.

Obviously this situation isn’t ideal if you are an entrepreneur looking to create freedom in your life, both time and financial freedom. If you spend all day, possibly beyond normal working hours, in your business, and you’re taking home an income pretty much equivalent to a salary (plus you have many more responsibilities than an employee), you are not in a great situation.

Turning Cash Into Assets

If I look back over the last five years of my business life, there have been a handful of significant “spikes” in my income.

The spikes have occurred because of either of these events -

1. I sell a web property
2. I conduct a launch

If you go back to before I sold any websites and before I did any product launches of my own, I was in a good situation in terms of time freedom, but not ideal in terms of financial wealth.

I had web businesses that made cash flow that I didn’t have to work hard to generate, but the income was on par with the average starter salary for a university graduate. That’s not bad mind you, certainly enough spending money to have fun, but like a good entrepreneur I craved more.

At that point I didn’t have a car, I was either renting or living with my parents, and although my sites were not time-sucks, I had to look in on them at least once or twice a day.

The day I realized that an income producing website is a saleable asset, was a good day, and in a few short years after this my financial situation changed dramatically.

In the space of two years I sold several websites, bought some more, sold them for a profit and used the cash, along with what I was making from blogging, to buy a car and a home.

At exactly the same time as I was receiving the final payment for the sale of my proofreading business (my biggest one time cash injection up to that point, see here – How I Made Six Figures In One Day), I was conducting my first ever launch of the Blog Mastermind program. The end result of these two events was a huge spike in income.

I used the money I made to travel the world for eight months, returned home to Australia and within a few months had paid back my entire home loan.

I now owned my house, my car, had traveled the world and come back with more money than I had left with. I had both freedoms I was striving for – time and money.

It’s Not Easy To Get Rich

The tax year in Australia finishes at the end of June. Just a few short weeks ago as I write this article, once again some major changes happened in my life:

1. I paid tax – BIG tax
2. I purchased a second property

The tax year I just paid for was an interesting one because it covered a year where I did those major income producing things I talked about above, like selling websites, plus my business structure was very simple from a tax point of view (i.e. not good).

I wasn’t structured to get maximum tax deductions for the year, so I feared a large tax bill. Initially I wasn’t too alarmed because I had prepared for a specific amount and had kept the money aside to cover it.

Unfortunately it turned out that my tax bill ended up twice what I was expecting, plus I had a university loan that needed to be paid off because I had seriously jumped in income brackets. This led to a rather hefty tax bill, equivalent to what I would probably be earning now in a year if I went down the employee path.

It’s a good thing when your tax bill is as much as most people earn a year working a professional job, but it’s still a shock when you have to pay for it. What made things even more interesting was I had made an offer on a new apartment, which was due to settle around the same time as my tax needed to be paid.

The new property is an inner city party-pad as I like to call it. It’s located in my favorite area of my hometown, it has a huge balcony, a great kitchen, is very modern…and darn expensive!

Unfortunately my favorite suburb is also a favorite for a lot of other people, so there is a big demand, pushing prices high even for apartments. Nonetheless, this purchase was all about me. I want to live in my dream location, with a great lifestyle, and although it cost me, I’m extremely happy to be moving back to the inner city (I’ve been driving in nearly every day anyway!).

I certainly have no rights to complain, I’m doing very well financially, but buying a second property, getting a home loan (again) and paying tax, showed me how difficult it is to accumulate wealth rapidly, even when you are earning well above the average.

Is It Still True?

So, the question begs to be asked? Do I still believe that you really only make big money when you sell your business?

In many ways, I do. Most of the really big success stories I know of that result in a millionaire being born, came about because the person built a great business and then sold it.

Usually while the business is developing, the owner might be wealthy on paper because of the valuation of the enterprise, but in terms of real dollar wealth, they are not taking home anything more than a salary.

The salary might be large, but as I learned recently, after you take out tax, even if you are making $100,000+ a year (which could be almost half that after tax in terms of dollars in your pocket if you live in Australia), if you don’t have any potential leverage beyond that, you’re facing a slow and steady path to wealth.

Obviously there are exceptions to this situation and many millionaires are born simply because of the business model they use and the system they have set up, but it’s not common. If you want wealth quickly, building something and selling it, is the typical path to wealth.

Of course not everything is about speed. If you take to heart the message in a book like The Richest Man In Babylon, long term wealth can be created by simply saving 10% of your income and reinvesting it at a 10% or greater return. Compounding will take care of the rest.

What Should You Do If You Want To Be Rich

I’ll end this article with a few key take-away points based on my experiences from the previous years, to help you if you’re still not as rich as you want to be…

1. Websites are assets, so even if you’re not making millions now, a website that turns over a few hundred thousand a year could make you a millionaire if you sell it.
2. Selling one web asset is great, selling more than one is even better.
3. Product launches that create income producing assets are like the best of both worlds: you make a lot of money and you still have the asset after.
4. One product launch is good, more than one is even better.
5. Make sure you see some form of leverage in the business model you go after.
6. That leverage point should not be correlated to an increase in your direct labor input if you want time freedom.
7. Investing business profits in real world assets, like property, is a good strategy, especially if your cash flow is consistent and increasing.
8. Don’t keep working a job or running a business if you don’t see an endgame you like (it’s okay if it is a stepping stone or a support tool to something bigger).

One last point I feel important to mention: Don’t forget to think beyond the big pay day.

Often we get so caught up in meeting a financial goal, that once we get there, we realize that it’s having the drive and acting on your passion to meet the goal that is actually more satisfying than getting there.

It’s about the journey, so if you don’t have a destination, you can get quite depressed. Take that to heart, because you might think it is rosier on the other side, but usually it is not. The pursuit of one’s passion provides much more ongoing satisfaction than meeting a financial goal, although it’s certainly nice to be rich too.

Yaro Starak
Creating Wealth

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Get your bonus copy of my book
“How To Start An Internet Business
& Make Your First $1,000 Online”
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Today’s free shirt was sent to us from WordStream.  They have keyword management tools for PPC and SEO.  Their website is quite confusing, but it looks like they have a lot of products to offer.  Not really sure what any of it does, but check it out.

Thanks for the free shirt! vest!

This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog

WordStream – Free Shirt Friday

It’s time for another @ProBloggerDeals giveaway – this time we’re giving away 20 Gold Passes to the Affiliate Summit East 2009 – they’re each worth $399.

This conference is one that I’ve been wanting to attend for a while now (maybe next year) but while I can’t get to this one I hope to experience it a little through you!

A Gold Pass for this summit gets you Admission to the Meet Market, Exhibit Hall, Keynote sessions on Sunday, Networking Events, access to recorded session videos, powerfpoints and more. You can see what it does and doesn’t include here.

The event is being held August 9-11 at the New York Hilton.

To enter this giveaway all you need to do is leave a comment below. I’ll choose 20 people to win randomly in one week’s time.

Please only enter if you’re absolutely able to attend this event in New York. I’d really love all 20 winners to benefit from this so if you’re not sure you can attend please skip this one.

Make sure you’re following @ProBloggerDeals on Twitter for more deals, competitions and discounts for bloggers.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Win One of 20 Gold Passes to Affiliate Summit East

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