StartUpNation’s Home-Based 100

Over at StartUpNation.com they’re gearing up for their 2008 Home-Based 100 Competition. StartUpNation is a website started by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs with tons and tons of information for starting your business. Every year they have their Home-Based 100 Competition that highlights the top 100 winners in, some serious, and some fun categories.

Wow, would I love to win this contest. The winners will receive media attention like you wouldn’t believe. An internet business could be catapulted years ahead of where it would have been in it’s lifespan. Yeah, I’d love to win this contest and they even offer the perfect category “Boomers Back In Business”.

Alas, I think we’re just a bit too new and not quite ready for prime time. However, mark my words, we’ll be ready by next year! And guaranteed, we’ll be signing up and asking you to give us votes. I was a little worried that they wouldn’t have the “Boomers Back In Business” category next year, but I checked last year’s winners and YEP, they had it last year, so I’m going to count on them to have it again next year (my fingers are crossed).

Here are the categories and it’s super simple to sign-up, so don’t hesitate. Even let me know and I’ll vote for you!

• Best Financial Performers
• Most Innovative
• Boomers Back in Business
• Greenest
• Yummiest
• Wackiest
• Grungiest
• Recession Busters
• Most Slacker Friendly
• Most Glamorous

How about you? Are you ready to sign-up? If not, will your business be ready to enter 2009 Home-Based 100 Competition? If you get started today it will.

When visiting StartUpNation check out the article located at the following link. StartUpNation has expanded to have a special area of their website dedicated the 50+ entrepreneur, it’s called “Boomers Back In Business”.  You’ll find a forum for 50+ start-up help, a special article archive and a blog all aimed at informing and guiding the new Boomer entrepreneur.

Good stuff.

http://www.startupnation.com/pages/newsroom/PR_2007_0813.asp

Brent

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Quick Tip - How To Get A Ton Of Links To Your Article

I love internet marketing as I believe I learn something new each and every day. Learning is a very important part of my life as I want to still be learning when I’m well over 100. My grandpa, who just died this year at 91 always told me he was going to live to be 100 (and almost made it) and I think much of the reason for his longevity was because he continued learning. He was taking classes to learn how to use a computer in his eighties!

Anyway, the reason for my post. I learned this fantastic tip from Michael Ullman’s blog at ImproveYourInternetMarketing.com. I met Michael in the Traffic Secrets 2.0 member forum and he’s been a great help to me. His tip explains how to get 100s of links pointing to one of the articles you’ve submitted to EzineArticles.com.

Now why would you want links to your article? The reason you’d want to do this is that if you can get a bunch of links to the article, it will have a better chance of getting ranked high. If it’s ranked high, a greater chance of people reading it and then clicking over to your site. Plus if the article is ranked high and links to your site, it helps your site to rank higher.

Here’s how it works and I’m assuming you’ve already submitted an article to EzineArticles.com. If not, I’m going to write a post about article marketing soon and you will then need to get busy submitting articles.

1. Go to EzineArticles.com and search for the name you used to publish your article (EzineArticles.com allows you to use pen names). Choose the page that has your author name-expert author. The link will look something like this: http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Author_Name
2. Right next to the header mentioning your name and your author status, you will find an “RSS icon”. Here’s what an RSS Icon looks like:
3. Now copy the url the icon points to and paste it into a text document. To do this, right click and choose “Copy Shortcut” (Internet Explorer) or “Copy Link Location” (Firefox). Then paste into a document started in Notepad, Wordpad, Word or a similar program. Save the document so you don’t lose the the url.
4. Now, submit the url to the large number of free RSS directories available on the web and you’ll have tons of links pointing to your articles within a few days.

Compliments of Michael Ullman, here’s a link to a list of RSS directories you can start with:

55 Active RSS Directories to Help Promote Your Feeds!

Stay patient, if you don’t follow what I’m talking about or you don’t know anything about article marketing, I will be writing about it soon. I work a full-time day job and only get to work on this site in my spare time, so even though it may seem slow at first, before you know it, this website will be a wealth of information.

Ciao!

Reba

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Traffic Secrets 2.0 - John Reese

Based on everything I’ve seen from John Reese, I’m convinced he’s a modern-day internet marketing genius. He has ideas about ways to reach customers that I would never think of, so buying his Traffic Secrets 2.0 course was a good buy for me. I wish I had opted to purchase his Traffic Secrets 1.0 course back when he first sold it, but back then the finances just couldn’t support the $1000 price tag. Thank goodness he decided to lower the price because if it had been priced that high again, I would have missed out again. The new $400 price tag was much reduced from his first promotion and although still expensive, it was now affordable for any serious internet marketer.

IF YOU’RE A BEGINNER

The Traffic Secrets 2.0 course is very comprehensive as it gives great information and instruction on about every conceivable way to drive traffic to a website. I feel however that the information, even though it can be easily understood in theory, is just too advanced for the beginner level internet marketer. All the promotions leading up to the launch introduced it to be for all levels, even beginners. I got the feeling when watching the pre-launch videos that John was stretching a bit when he said it was good for all levels, and now that I have the course, I honestly think I was right. Don’t get me wrong, the information contained in the 12 DVD course won’t go stale, it’s great information no matter what level you’re at. However, if you’re a beginner, it’s going to be a little while before you’re able to use most of the information. First you need to learn how to build a website or set-up a blog and somehow, I just feel the “gurus” all think that everyone already knows how to do that. Believe me, you NEED this information, just not quite yet. Right now save your money a little longer or spend it on information to learn how to set-up a website and THEN purchase the course.

There’s just one caveat to my above statement, if you plan on hiring someone to set-up your site for you, go ahead and purchase Traffic Secrets 2.0 and watch all the DVDs before you start your project. You will learn information about the structure of a site that you need to know before you pay someone to do it for you. However, if you plan on going the DIY route, you will have the knowledge to make changes to anything you may have set-up incorrectly.

TIP: As long as your site is set-up on a Wordpress Blog that’s installed in the root directory of own hosting account, you won’t have any mistakes that will cost you and can’t be fixed easily. It’ll be good practice for you to learn how to do this type of set-up before worrying about driving traffic to your site and John said in his pre-launch videos that there’s no scarcity, the course will be around for you to purchase when you’re ready to purchase it.

INTERMEDIATE INTERNET MARKETERS

Intermediate level marketers are the ones that will most benefit from Traffic Secrets 2.0. I define an intermediate user as one who can set-up a website with Wordpress. One that has read or taken some courses on search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, article marketing, or some other form of internet marketing. One that has tried and failed, one that has tried and succeeded, one that has a little bit of time between the decision to do business on the internet and the moment he’s trying to make the decision to purchase this product.

For the intermediate user, this product may just be the difference in failure and success. Since your success on the internet will be determined by how many people see your website, learning how to drive traffic to it should be foremost on your agenda. John Reese covers every imaginable method for driving traffic. There’s so much information, it’s hard to figure out how you’re going to wrap your brain around it all, but then you come to CD #12 and he gives you a Master Plan. He brings it all together with a set of Blue Prints that take you step by step through everything you learned in the first 11 CDs.

I have to be honest, I was so excited to learn (be reminded) of all this info and then get a plan for using it, that I couldn’t contain myself and I immediately decided I wanted to teach other people my age, BABY BOOMERS, about it. So I set-up this site. Hmm…maybe I should have followed the blueprints?? Well… I don’t care, I’m so happy to have this outlet to teach others all the great stuff I’ve known for years and all the fantastic stuff I’m learning everyday, I just don’t care that I didn’t follow the blueprints exactly. I do, however, plan to pick them up and start ticking off the steps. And as I do that, you can watch along with me as this site grows. Isn’t it exciting?

Anyway, I highly recommend Traffic Secrets 2.0 for the intermediate user, especially if you haven’t yet made any real amount of money. And as I said above, if you’re skeptical, no big deal, watch this site grow while we’re using the info we’re learning and then, this site can be testimony as to what a great product TS 2 is.

IF YOU’RE ADVANCED

What can I say, if you consider yourself an advanced internet marketer, you may not need the Traffic Secrets 2.0 course. If you’re advanced, you will almost assuredly know the techniques taught in this course. If you’re advanced, you’re probably already making the amount of money you set out to make when you started internet marketing. Yes, if you’re advanced, you should probably just keep doing what you’re doing.

But, what if? What if there’s a technique in the course that you hadn’t considered? What if John talks about or gives a tip that could bring an extra 100 visitors to your site everyday? What if that tip brought 1000 more visitors, or 10,000 more visitors each day? What if there’s something you’re doing that’s slowing down your conversion rate and what if that’s the only thing you learned after going through all 12 CDs? Would it be worth $397 and 11 1/2 hours of your time, the time it takes to watch the CDs?

Only you can answer that for yourself, but do consider what lost opportunity might cost you. You at least owe it to yourself to take a look at his sales page and then make your decision.

WHAT WILL YOU LEARN IN TRAFFIC SECRETS 2.0

Well, I’m not going to spend too much time going over what you’ll learn in TS2 because John Reese did a fabulous job covering that information on his sales page. What I will talk about is the private coaching & mastermind community for which you’ll receive a lifetime membership. I’ve been a regular in there asking questions, answering questions, exchanging information and ideas, believe me, it’s a wealth of information with lots of experienced people speaking up. It’s worth the $400 all by itself.

I will say, I don’t see much of John Reese himself, but that could be because he’s been out of the country (I follow him on Twitter, that’s how I know) but that doesn’t mean the forum isn’t of great quality, I just think that if he “hung out” in there a bit more, the quality would be even that much better. But, like I said, that may change with time, I just don’t know, I haven’t been there long enough.

SO…YOU WANT TO TAKE A LOOK AT JOHN’S SALES PAGE?

Well, all you have to do is click on any of the links in this post, and yes, every link is my affiliate link. Go ahead, take a look at what John has to say and check out his description of the content. He’s telling the truth, it’s all in the course, just as he describes.

GO TO TRAFFIC SECRETS 2.0 WEBSITE NOW!

Good luck with your future internet marketing business! And even if you choose to not purchase now or at all, please follow this blog and gather everything you can from it as it grows into a thriving community for baby boomers who want a successful online business.

GO TO TRAFFIC SECRETS 2.0 WEBSITE NOW!

Reba

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Wordpress ~ Simply A Necessity

What more can I say? Wordpress is simply the only way to run a website. Even if you don’t want a blog, you still need Wordpress for content management. I’ve been using Wordpress for years and believe me, it’s changed a lot over those years…for THE BETTER! When it comes to a content management system (affectionately referred to as CMS) you won’t find a more simple or cheaper alternative (it’s free!).

I’ll definitely be writing more about Wordpress as I think I’m going to have to do some tutorials or something but for right now I just wanted to get a post in the “Build Your Website” section of the the site to let you know where I stand and what I’ll be teaching on this site.

Also, to add to the “use Wordpress” mantra, only use Wordpress in your own hosting account, that way you own and have control of the content. There is an option to use Wordpress on a hosted site where the content is hosted by wordpress.com, don’t do it. It’s just like using a Blogger account, don’t do it. You’re at the mercy of someone else, don’t do it.

Here’s the link where you can download the most current version of Wordpress ~ and IT’S FREE!!!

http://wordpress.org/

Notice the .ORG ~ NOT .COM.

In another post I’ll give you links to two Wordpress plug-ins that are must haves.

Reba

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How to Cloak Affilate Links

Selling affiliate products is a great way to make money online and I’m sure that’s exactly what many of you do, plan to do or will figure out that’s what you need to do. I’ll cover what affiliate marketing is in another post but for now I want to make a simple post to explain what I do to hide my affiliate links.

Whenever you become an affiliate for a product or company, you will receive a specially coded link that when used by a website visitor, it will set a cookie on that visitor’s computer to tell the product owner or company that your website or you referred the visitor to them. If that visitor buys something, you will earn a commission. The link is an integral part of the process as that’s how the company paying the commissions knows to pay YOU.

For the most part, the links that are assigned are long and ugly. To top that off, some people will not use the link, they remove the code that identifies you as the affiliate. In order to “fix” that, the best way I know is to “cloak” the link. Here’s how:

So, if I were to give out the URL http://www.yoursite.com/info/revolution-theme the link would send visitors to revolutiontheme.com using your affiliate code.

There are a few things I want to mention regarding this process that may cause some mix-up. First, when you make the file in Notepad and save it, the file may save as .htaccess.txt. You will need to change the name of the file to exclude the .txt if you want it to work. Also, be sure it has a dot (.) in front of it.

Second, when you upload it to your server, it is considered a hidden file. You may need to change the settings on your FTP program to show hidden files if you want to see it in the directory.

Post any questions in the comment section.

Reba

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Does Your Website Cater To An Aging Audience?

I was reading one of my favorite blogs the other day, Copyblogger, and James Chartrand had a great article about designing your website so it caters to an aging audience. His article struck home instantly as I find myself quite often in the same situation he describes in his article.

Does your website cater to an aging society? Well, I had to ask myself the same question. James recommends a 12pt or larger font size, black or very dark gray on a white background. First thing I did was check the CSS file in the new Revolution Theme I had just purchased and installed as I thought the font size was just a bit small.

The CSS said 12px or 12 pixels. Hmm…was that the same? I thought, no way, it’s just too small. So I changed it to 12pt or 12 points. Points is a unit of measure for measuring font size. Wow, that made a huge difference! And huge in the literal sense. It was too big, certainly James didn’t want me to make all the text on my beautiful new blog 12pt, it looked like everything was typed in bold. So what was I to do?

I decided to go somewhere in between. In playing around with different point sizes, I found that 12px was equal to 10pt. And 10pt was too small, 12pt was too big, 11pt must be just right. It’s 10% bigger than the 10pt but doesn’t look like I’m typing everything in bold.

If your audience includes people of like age to you and me (BOOMERS!!!), don’t forget that it’s a bit harder to read a computer screen than it was a few years ago. Our eyes have probably changed a little. Keep the background as white or a very, very, pale color, and always use black for your text. Gray makes us squint and if a customer starts to squint, they might just leave.

One other thing I don’t want to overlook, there may be a few places on your site where you have a heading, logo or graphic of some sort where you’ll want to use reverse color, or white text on a dark colored background. This is fine for graphics, but never, never, never, do white text on a color background for your body text. There is also one combination that you should never use as it just does crazy things to the eyes, young and old alike, never use red on a blue background. If you don’t believe me, try it, it doesn’t work.

P.S. I checked out James’ blog, Men With Pens, and he has a Revolution Theme as well, and it looks like he never changed his CSS file to 12pt. James…are you going to practice what your preach?

Reba

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Sunday Morning Post…

No, not the newspaper, just some thoughts that I have this Sunday morning as we prepare for the day here in Texas.  There are so many things that need to be done today, church, grocery shopping, oil change on the family car, lawn work, trip to Lowes for some stuff…you get the picture.

Working 50-60 hours a week  for someone else, you wonder where am I going to find the time to make any money on the internet.  I wonder the same thing!  Can it be done?  Well that is what we are here to try to find out.   As one who enjoys the “physical demands” of working, the internet sometime seems to me to be a big “time waster” and this is one facet of internet marketing that I feel needs to be conquered.  I hope to find ways to make the internet a “time maker” as well as a “money maker” for all of us.

Now, I’m off to get some of the things on my “to do list” done.

Have a great Sunday!!

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Straight Talk For Boomers by Boomers

This is the first post of our new website and there’s so much to talk about, I don’t know where to start. But I better get in gear because you’re here for a reason and I don’t need to be hemmin’ and hawin’, huh?

Well, first things first, I’ll give you a little background on why I’m excited about what we’re doing here. Brent can make his own post.

I’ve been working on the internet for over ten years now. It started when I bought my first HTML editor, Microsoft Front Page 97 and from that point forward, I was hooked. First I built websites for other companies, but that only lasted a year or so as I wanted to build sites for ME. Brent and I owned a wholesale company that sold stuffed animals to the amusement industry and I was getting bored. This internet stuff was so much fun, I wanted to just do that!

So ever since that time I’ve been piddling around trying to make money online and have never quite gotten it right. Every time I thought I was on to something, something would change or I’d get bored because the money was slow to come and I again would quit. Well, let’s face reality, it was me and my impatience, I never had the tenacity to hang in there and just MAKE IT WORK.

Well let me tell you, this time, I’m going to MAKE IT WORK and while everyone watches right here!

I’m a member of that great generation that was born between 1946 and 1964. Yes, I’m a member of the generation that made America what it is today. According to the Wikipedia, I’m a “Trailing Edge Boomer” or “Late Boomer” since I was born in 1959. I really like the “Late Boomer” label as that’s what I am in Internet Marketing as well, I’ve been online for 10 years and still haven’t Boomed! Yes, it’s taken me 10 years to realize and understand my role as an internet marketer, yes, I’m a “Late Boomer”.

As a Baby Boomer my concerns include things like:

1. thinking about retirement that is just around the corner
2. taking care of an aging parent
3. making sure my kids graduate from college and preying they do it without too much debt
4. working all day in a workforce where young fresh minds could replace me at a moments notice
5. trying to turn my internet hobby into a full-time business
6. and the list goes on, add a comment and let’s discuss your concerns as a Boomer

And that’s why I’m here. I want to share what I learn about internet marketing with others who want to become financially independent with their own company using the internet. I’ll share what works and what doesn’t, what products are good and which ones aren’t, and I’ll give you info on the latest fads and the latest crap.

There’s so much information on the internet about internet marketing that it’s mind boggling, it’s a full-time job keeping up with it all and I hope to make it my full-time job some day soon. But what will be different about the information I give, is I will filter it from a Boomer’s perspective assessing cost, risk level, time investment to outcome ratio, and much more.

I’m looking forward to this new journey with a group of people that “see things the way I see them”.

Reba

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