Personal Finance Blog

Tips And Stories To Help You With Managing Money

Free Starbucks Gift Certificates for Writing Contest Winners

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Win over $30 in Free Starbucks Certificate

Thanksgiving is coming up and in the spirit of giving, I have created a writing contest where you can be eligible to win over $30 in free gift certificates to Starbucks.

Starbucks gift certificates make great Christmas presents!

Use your imagination to get some free gift certificates and make money!

 

  • First prize is a $20 – free gift certificate to Starbucks.
  • Second Prize is a $10 – free gift certificate to Starbucks
  • Third prize is a $5 – free gift certificate to Starbucks.

Here are the contest rules:

Write a short article about good internet business principles to follow. The article can be serious or humorous but it must have one of the following fun titles. Each of these titles has action words in them and are out of the ordinary in a lot of ways. All of these titles came from actual business management books.

All articles will be reviewed and if appropriate will be published. You may provide a link back to your website. Entries to this contest will end on November 21, in time to get these certificates to you by Thanksgiving. Winners will be announced on November 24. 

Here are the titles to choose from:

Blue Blood and Mutiny
Everything I Know About Business, I Learned at McDonalds
Fallen Giant
Falling Forward
First, Break All the Rules
Green Business Strategy
Hide a Dagger Behind a Smile
How Full is Your Bucket
How the Wise Decide
Jacked Up
Made to Stick
Mavericks at Work
Our Iceberg is Melting
Planet Google
Reality Check
See Jane Lead
Sneaker Wars
Starbucked
Stay Mad For Life
The 10 Commandments for Business Failure
The 17 Essential Qualities of a Team Player
The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leaership
The 24 Carrot Manager
The 4 Obssessions of an Extraordinary Executive
The 48 Laws of Power
The 7 Leadership Principles That Drive Breakout Success
The Fifth Discipline
The First Billion is the Hardes
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
The Necessary Revolution
The Only Three Questions That Count
The Radical Edge
The Ultimate Question
The Wolf of Wall Street
Why Work Sucks
Wikinomics
Work Less, Do More

Have fun writing and getting a little free advertising as well.

Business Community Review

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internet advertisingInternet Advertising

Scott Colley has a new website at GoodVibeBiz, that accentuates the positive aspects of business.  This website is a place where people can post a review of any business they choose. It is designed to help spread the good word about new internet businesses.

If you have a company that you would like to review, just go to his site and fill out a form where you can let people know what you think.  This benefits the business community and webmasters who would like free internet advertising. Word of mouth advertising is fantastic.

Clients submit business reviews, ask their customers to give their testimonials and everybody benefits. It’s a win, win situation.  More traffic for your website and more qualified prospects for your business.

Google likes the GoodVib Biz

GoodVib Biz has been ranked number one by Google site for search term ‘business review community.’ It is starting to get a lot of attention from prominent businesses and will continue to grow.

Internet Advertising

According to Scott Colley, Advertising in today’s market is like herding 50 cats in a field. You’re never sure what works best. This site gets people what they need in advertising –  ‘page one Google search results’ and it’s FREE, so the price is right!
 
Benefits of GoodVib Biz

Scott Colley says, When you look for the good, you tend to find it.  I really do try to live my life finding the good in people and events, so it’s been a natural extension to every aspect of my business.

Too many negative sites dominate our eyeballs on the Internet every day. Some of my clients get ‘jammed’ by one bad review from that one ‘never happy’ customer.  This site’s focus is getting folks to speak up about the good they encounter in businesses daily.

Don’t waste any time. Get over to GoodVib Biz and start listing your Internet businesses now!

Keyword Case Study for WordPress

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Keyword strategies are so important to the success of your website business that they just cannot be overlooked. Although word of mouth adverstising is golden and frankly much easier than doing keyword research, using a good keyword strategy is mandatory. This article will go over some keyword strategy insights gained from a case study done over a four month time frame.

My previous article on keyword strategies for WordPress covered blogging tips and the question of where exactly in your posts do you want to see your keywords. While that strategy is the number one strategy you should use, you also should consider what happens to your website as a whole when you start adding good content on a regular basis.

The excel chart below (please click on it to enlarge it and read it well) explains an interesting thing that happened to www.coolchecks.net as a result of posting content to the blog a regular basis.

Many hosting companies provide website owners with a way to measure their traffic through a program called the Cpanel. Cpanel lets the webmaster control a lot of things on a website, but the thing I like best is the daily reports it can give you about your website traffic.

For my four-month case study, using the Cpanel web stats, I charted the results of the traffic I received from the keyword phrase cheap checks. This phrase is important to the site because the site sells bank checks.

When I charted the results I could see a dramatic increase in hits during the month of October, for the keyword phrase cheap checks. I had only changed a few words on the home page of this site to try to boost the rankings for cheap checks” and I posted to the web blog on a regular basis.

My monthly hits to the site with that keyword increased by 1273! So how did that translate into real progress financially? There was an increase in revenue from the site of $601.38.

keyword strategies for wordpress

Examining the results from the chart above brought me to wonder about another statistic that I could easily pull from the Cpanel. I wanted to know how many search phrases were used during each month.

The chart below will show you the total number of keyword phrases used to bring people to my site over a four-month period of time.

keyword strategies

You will notice a steady increase in keyword phrases. During October, there were 1299 keyword phrases people used to get to get to my site, while in July there were only 685. It appears that the number of keyword phrases almost doubled over four months.

There are several blogging tips you can learn from this keyword case study.

  • Adding content on a regular basis can dramatically improve website traffic.
  • The increase in traffic improves your keyword search results so you are ranked higher for the keyword you optimized for.
  • More traffic means more revenue.
  • Cpanel statistics are awesome and should be watched carefully.
  • One keyword phrase that you rank well for can affect the other keyword phrases and bootstrap them to higher search result positions.

When you are developing your website business, don’t overlook the importance of a good keyword strategy and the power that it has to improve your financial condition.

Presidential Elections – Trick or Treat?

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presidential election

Trick or Treat?

It’s hard to tell with this Presidential Election coming to a close in less than a week whether we wil have a trick or treat. Have we got all the facts to make a good decision? Will the Presidential candidates actually do what they propose when elected?

Will there be a trick or treat?

With new technology on the Internet providing instant replays of everything the candidates say and do, voters are probably more informed about this presidential election than they have ever been in the past.

Social media sites like www.capzles.com have provided voters with an incredible means of viewing and listening to all the information one could possibly want on each candidate’s past and present. www.Capzles.com allows users to upload documents, videos and photographs of whatever they choose and then the information is organized on a time line.

All of the Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates have a time-line style profile, complete with photos, videos and all their ads. You can see instant replays of the aircraft accident that John McCain was in during his younger years. You can actually see the plane skidding off the runway of the ship. You can also see pictures of him being pulled out of a Hanoi lake by the North Vietnamese after his plane was shot down. View the actual film footage of him as a prisoner, lying in a hospital bed in Vietnam.

Sarah Palin, mother, moose hunter, maverick, mayor, governor also has an impressive time line. The time line is full of short clips and photos of her career and service.

Barack Obama’s time capsule is equally impressive.  Photos from childhood through the present are interesting to look at. He has posted videos of all of his campaign speeches and one that shows the Charles Keating, Lincoln Savings and loan scandal where five U.S. Senators, including John McCain were investigated for their role in helping Charles Keating to get his charges of fraud reduced.

Joe Biden’s time capsule is rather sparse with only one photo of him.  Wonder why that happened?

So this next week when you go to vote, there should be no excuse for not being informed about which Presidential candidate you are voting for. Don’t let there be any tricks for you!

Ten Empowering Thoughts for Your Internet Business

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Last week, I listened to Brian Campbell, a successful Internet marketer, give a webinar on social media marketing. During that talk he had people think about the belief system they had and whether or not their beliefs where empowering them or limiting them. He pointed out that every action we take begins with a thought.

The audience was asked to identify thoughts that were either empowering or limiting in nature. Here are ten empowering thoughts that were selected.

  1. There is an abundance of money.
  2. People deserve to be compensated generously for the value they produce.
  3. I can spend money freely to enjoy life.
  4. I can make money very easily with very little effort.
  5. Money flows to me easily.
  6. I would like to compensate people for their value because I appreciate them.
  7. Money is to be enjoyed.
  8. You are priceless.
  9. The past is not my future.
  10. I can get many people to act on something.

It seems to be human nature to dwell on some very limiting beliefs, which guide our course of action. How often have you told yourself that there is scarcity in your life? Or lately, the economy is so bad, no one is making any money. Recognizing and replacing our limiting beliefs is crucial to our success in any field of business or any area of our lives.

Would you picture yourself as someone who could influence others to take action? And don’t think of the times you’ve asked your children to clean up their rooms.  Think of the times that you’ve recommended a great movie to your friends.

Could you become a person that could influence 100 people to take the action you want them to take?  A 100,000 or 100,000,000?  How would you do it?  What would you say? What could you write?

Mark Zuckerberg influenced over 100 million people to use his website application at www.facebook.com. He is now enjoying the billionaire status as noted in Forbes magazine, The 400 Richest People in America, 2008 edition.

Create your website business plan to get as many people as you can to take the action you would like them to take. There are approximately 6,732,600,000 people in this world to influence!  Keep empowering beliefs in the forefront of your mind as you create a successful website business plan that can move people to take action!