The beauty of Blog

If you have ever wondered how some people are making so much money online... this is how they are doing it...   Your Marketing Hub is your blog in the center of your system. Your blog is your home business base and it is where you will share valuable information and content with the world.   Connected to your blog is something called an "Opt-in" form, this is just like the one you filled in to receive this training course. This is where you will make an offer to your visitors in exchange  for their name and email address (and possibly phone number).  They will then become a lead and their information will go into your marketing list.   You need to use the social media marketing techniques to drive your followers from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to your blog. They will see your offer and some of them will join your list and become leads. Once they are on your list, you can continue to build and strengthen your relationship with them.   What do I blog about?   This is the thing that keeps most people from taking action on this plan. They don't know what to write about. Well, the good news is that you don't have to. There is a proven formula for creating quality original content on your blog, stuff that people will be very interested to read and recommend to others.   Provide Answers To Common Questions or  Offer Solutions To Common Problems: In any niche, you will find people searching for answers. One of the  best ways to find what people are searching for is to ask yourself  what you are searching for. Chances are, others are also. If you  can find solutions to common problems in your niche, write about it and share that solution. A while back, I wrote a post about an annoying problem with Facebook not properly displaying your employer links in the profile section. I figured out how to fix it  and shared it with the world. That single blog post continues to attract visitors every day to my blog. A few of them each day subscribe to my newsletter.    Another very effective method of providing great content for your blog posts is to use already proven content from other people.  One great source is Alltop.com. Alltop is a site that features all the top articles and posts from top blogs in a variety of categories.  You can simply search in your niche, find a good article, read it  (and yes, i mean actually read it), take away some of the main  points that you liked and create your own post that informs your  readers about the article and topic. Include some main points and  what you liked about it, or agreed or disagreed with.    Lee Marc - Creative Director Creative Concepts Inc. www.website.ws/creativeconceptsdotcom

The Survival of the Fittest

www.website.ws/creativeconceptsdotcom

Whether you're already an entrepreneur, or just thinking about becoming one, you are invariably motivated by one of two things, or maybe even both--passion and necessity.  Very often, entrepreneurs do what they do simply because they like it and want to do it.  And because entrepreneurs, particularly very successful ones, rarely do anything half-way, they tend to pursue their lives and their businesses with a unique intensity.  In short, they are passionate about how they live and work.

Sometimes though, entrepreneurs start a business because they have to.  Maybe it was because they were laid off from their jobs, or even worse, fired.  Perhaps their company went out of business and left them out of work, or didn't pay them enough money.  In today's economy, it's not uncommon to see whole industries collapse when their markets dry up, as we're seeing with real estate, construction, mortgage lending and automobiles.  Many of today's highly successful companies were started by entrepreneurs and bred from pure necessity, plain and simple.

Entrepreneurship carries with it many rewards--and many risks.  It is often said that when you are self-employed, you wake up unemployed every morning.  But according to Experian, one of the three biggest credit reporting agencies, self-employed entrepreneurs make about 25% more than the general population.  Of course when you really consider income differential, you also need to realize that most of the wealthiest men in America made their fortunes as entrepreneurs.  Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Donald Trump and Sam Walton are all self-made billionaire entrepreneurs.

But what about the risks?  According to Entrepreneur Magazine somewhere between 85 and 94% % of all new business fail within the first 5 years.  According to Dr. Gregory B. Murphy, associate dean and director of the MBA program for the College of Business at the University of Southern Indiana, the number of small businesses that close up shop due to severe financial distress such as bankruptcy is more on the order of 30%-40%. Regardless, this is still a huge rate of attrition.

Regardless of the risk, according to a study of entrepreneurs conducted by Master Card International, 65% of small business owners would tell a friend to start a business now, rather than wait a year.  And according to MSNBC, small businesses are responsible for over 75% of the net new jobs in the economy.

These businesses often start very small--called micro businesses--and then grow rapidly.  The US Census Bureau reports that 49% of the nation's businesses are run from home, and industry analyst the Dieringer Group places the number of Americans running businesses from home at 45.1 million.  Today, more so than ever, it is easy to start such a home-based business.  Global search engine giant Yahoo reports that well over 75% percent of adults surveyed online indicated that the Internet directly facilitated the launch of their new business.

Based on all of this, regardless of whether you are--or want to be--an entrepreneur based on passion or necessity, you also need to consider the risk versus the reward.  The potential benefits are vast and unlimited.  The major risk is that you have about a 50% chance of failure.  But you can get around that by doing some very basic things.

Leaders are not born. They are created. Anyone can become a leader in any area if they want to. (Read OUTLIERS by Malcom Gladwell) You need to set realistic expectations and manage them aggressively and then stick the bleep in there!  Success is almost entirely based on determination--having the discipline to hang in there even when you feel like quitting 1000 times.  Most entrepreneurs fail because they simply give up too soon.  Free enterprise is really about the survival of the fittest, where only the strongest survive.  The formula is simple--figure out what you what and then don't quit until you have achieved your goals. Period.

All my best,

Lee Marc

Creative Director 

www.website.ws/creativeconceptsdotcom

How to makes a blog popular?

“What makes a blog popular? What drives page views?” These are the questions that we've been trying to answer over the last few weeks. We were on a mission to dig into the data and analyze the strongest parameters that influence the flow of visitors to WordPress.com blogs.

Out of the 30+ million blogs on WordPress.com, we randomly selected a sample of almost 100,000 blogs to perform a regression analysis. Here are our findings, together with a few recommendations. We hope that this provides some new information, and kudos to you in case you’ve already incorporated these tips into your blog – the data suggests that you’re on the right track. Keep it up!

Make your blog easy to follow – It almost sounds obvious, but the simplest way to build more awareness is to make it easier to do so. Make sure that you have the follow widget as visible as possible. If your readers receive a notification every time you post, or see your post in their reader, there is a much higher chance that they will revisit your blog.

Comments, Comments, Comments – The most successful blogs, we found, created and encouraged a dialogue with their readers. The best way to make people more engaged with your writing is for you to engage back and start a conversation. In your posts, encourage people to comment. Also, make sure that you reply to people’s comments and continue the dialogue. This back and forth conversation is a significant driver of page views; holding all else equal, every additional comment can potentially drive up to 18 incremental page views! You can start by simply asking follow-up questions at the end of each post: "have you ever done X?"; "do you think Y is acceptable?". You can read some more thoughts on building a relationship with your audience in this post.

Post Frequently and Regularly – Your readers want to know that you are there for them and that you are “on it”. If you post frequently and regularly and have enabled the follow feature as we mentioned above, checking your blog could become a daily routine for your readers. Even if it’s a short post, write something new as frequently as possible, and at regular intervals. (The Daily Post can help with ideas for this.)

While these three tips were shown to be the most important drivers of page views in our analysis, you might consider other parameters, which we found as having a partially significant effect: syndicating your post to Twitter and Facebook (using Publicize), for example, could lead to additional page views.

Happy blogging!

Plan B

What is the entrepreneurial spirit? Everyone of us has the entrepreneurial spark, some just need a financial kick in the ass to ignite it into a raging fire. Since childhood, our imagination, dreams and hopes have shaped not only who we are, but what we do. More importantly they have shaped what we dream to do. Often, in adulthood, what is needed is the proverbial "financial kick in the pants" to spark the entrepreneur in all of us. Today I came across a fantastic article in the New York Times about how the current economic climate has sparked a wave of entrepreneurial energy across America. Most compelling was the statistic that over half of our current Fortune 500 companies were started in a recession, including Starbucks and Microsoft! When circumstances are most dire, the most glaring opportunities reveal themselves. It has been, and will be, the entrepreneurial spirit that lifts the global economy from our missteps.