Custom Banner Cause Eagerness In New Customers

by Jason Green on April 14, 2010

A Custom Vinyl Banner Can Give New Businesses Much Needed Attention

An area in the town where I live is really starting to grow commercially. This is exciting, as many new national and local businesses are developing space and creating commerce and activity around our main square. We have all heard rumors about which business is going into which building, but until those custom bannersgo up confirming our guesses, no one knows for sure. fortuitously, most of the new businesses have temporary custom banners in place that say, ” Coming Soon” or similar notices. These custom vinyl banners really get people talking about the new businesses and make people eager to experience them once they open.

The restaurant, Ladles, is a great example of a good custom banner attracting the right kind of attention. For months, while they awaited the completion of their new building, a temporary vinyl banner sign hung in the window with its name and estimated date of opening. My family and I pass that building every day, and the vinyl banners teased us for months. We couldn’t wait to try it! And guess what? A lot of people felt the same way, because upon opening day, there was a line going out the door to try Ladle’s offerings – simply because the owners didn’t wait to make good use of an attention grabbing vinyl custom banner!

How Do Custom Banner Signs Keep Attention?

Ladles has been open for a few weeks now, and business is still good. The custom banners have also changed over the past few weeks, still urging people to come in and try them out. What kind of banner signs are these? Well, for starters, that “Coming Soon” banner has been changed to a “Now Open” sign. It is still a temporary custom vinyl banner sign bearing those two words, but it lets people know that they are something new to try. Also, many people may have missed the opening dates on the previous temporary custom banner, and it never hurts to remind the public of your new business.

Ladles also has a custom banner out in front of their building, with a graphic of a soup ladle and the motto, “Hot Soup For Cool People.” So catchy I remembered it without even trying! Ladles shares the building with several new businesses, so it must use vinyl banners to get noticed. Otherwise, the public might just assume the whole building was office space or even idle. Using a few different custom banners to draw attention to your new business keeps people looking and wondering – and eventually, trying you out!

Envision An Eye-Catching Custom Vinyl Banner

Remember the soup ladle on the new restaurant’s custom business sign? It’s the perfect graphic – simple, recognizable, easy to remember, and representative of the business. The coloring of Ladle’s vinyl custom bannersis also well conceived- black lettering on a light yellow background. counterpoint of colors is essential on a vinyl banner to ensure visibility, and yellow is a color known to inspire appetites.

And take their slogan, “Hot Soups For Cool People”. This slogan Ladles came up with is also a great one – relevant to the business, soups, and easy to remember with its opposite word usage – hot and cool. The phrase is also small enough to fit onto the custom banner without cluttering it up with too many words and leaving enough space for the font to be large enough for people to read from a distance. It is also very inventive in that it compliments its customers – it tells them that they are “cool.” It’s a marketing tactic that works, and Ladles has created an excellent design for a custom vinyl banner. No wonder they are always packed with customers new and returning!

Don’t Limit Your Use Of Custom Banner Signs

The owners of Ladles didn’t order just one or two vinyl banners to promote their business. They used several – both temporary and permanent – to signal that they were coming, when they were coming, what they are, and when they opened. Their clever use of multiple custom signs and effective custom business sign design made people curious about them and eager to check the business out. So when opening your own business, think about how useful custom vinyl banners are in building anticipation and excitement. Before you know it, you’ll have a line out your door too!

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Parasite Hosting For Back-Links

by Jason Green on April 11, 2010

If you are getting started on a shoe-string budget and need to build links to your site for SEO purposes parasite hosting is one good way to go. Firstly it’s free (we all like free) and it can be very effective. In this article we’ll cover just what parasite hosting is and how to take advantage of it for your SEO efforts.I want you to be confident that you can learn seo.

Parasite hosting is the fancy name coined for web sites that allow you to build blogs, web pages or even web sites for free. There are literally dozens of these sites out there and some of them have extremely high page rank, as high as 8 or 9. Now that doesn’t mean the blog or page you put up will have that page rank but it will still look good to Google and the rest of the search engines. They consider this as “being in a good neighborhood”.

Some of the more popular and well known of these are Blooger (owned by Google), Wordpress (a PR 9) and Squidoo. Some of the others you may or may not have heard of include Wetpaint, Bravenet and Livejournal. All of these web sites will let you build free blogs or sites that you can then use to give your main web site one way back-links. To find a list of good parasite hosts just search for top free blogs or top free websites.

By putting a free blog on one of these parasite hosts you can get great SEO benefit. what you need to do is post content that is related to your market and place one or two anchor text links to your web site within that content. Remember though that to get the most bang for your buck (even though it’s free) you need to use content relevant to your niche.

If you’re reading this and have no clue what an anchor text link is don’t freek out. You will have a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor to create your free blog with. With this creating anchor text links is a breeze. Pick the text you want for your anchor link and highlight it. Next click on the chain icon on the menu bar. A window will open and you put in the URL you want to link to, simple!

You can really ramp this up and give your web site even more SEO impact by building several of these free blogs into a link wheel. What’s a link wheel you ask? It simply means linking several sites together in a chain, the last site linking to the first. This really increases the link juice you are passing on to your main site. But why stop here? Build a second link wheel that has links going to the first one. Your imagination and creativity are your only limitations.

The next thing you will want to do to really turn up the link juice is to use social bookmarking on all the free sites you create. By doing this the links going from these free sites to your main web site will give even more SEO benefit.

You now have the knowledge needed to take advantage of parasite hosting and the SEO benefit it offers. It’s up to you to take that knowledge and use it now. It’s free, it’s easy and it can really boost your listings in the SERPs. So what are you waiting for? The links are there, go get them! If you have found this information good and need more seo help follow that link.

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Can You Really Make Money from Home?

by Jason Green on April 11, 2010

The “People Search” business is huge these days.

In fact, 1/3 of all searches done online are people search related. Whether it be somebody looking for a lost relative, a friend, or a loved one, or somebody interested in doing a background check for a expected employee, tenant, or nanny, people are interested in other people.

It’s so big, in fact, that plenty of companies have entered the field to try to grab a piece of the “people search” pie.

And it’s because of that niche that Tissa Godavitarne created the ACME People Search platform. And after years of using the platform successfully on his own, he finally decided to start offering it to others to use as well back in 2008 so that they could make money from home.

So many people often ask this question. Can you really make money at home from the ACME People Search Engine?

The answer is obvious! I’ve earned over twenty thousand dollars in commissions over the last 18 months.

But here’s another important point. Although a lot of the money I’ve made over that time period has been generated using pay-per-click, I’ve recently ventured into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies that started generating profits for me without investing any advertising dollars whatsoever. So, in other words, I’m making 100% profit!

How would you like to be able to start a business where you could make a profit and not have to spend a dime in advertising costs?

It can be done.

I wrote about my recent experiences with this SEO technique on the ACME Support Forum recently. You can read about it here.

So if you are interested in attempting to start a business where you can make money from home and be your own boss then look into ACME People Search.

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Job Changes Are Not Necessarily Career Moves

by Jason Green on April 9, 2010

Are You Changing Jobs or Building a Career?

The last time you left one employer to join another, how much thought did you give to the long-term implications of the change you were about to make?  

For the past decade, it has been relatively easy for  technology professionals to move from one employer to another on a regular basis. Some in the security profession have made carefully planned career moves while others have simply made a series of job changes.   You may be thinking…. why does this topic matter?  Isn’t it enough to simply have a job and a paycheck in the middle of a recession?

Given the choice to be employed versus sitting on the sidelines, it is clearly better to be employed.  No argument here.  

When companies hire an executive security recruiter to fill a strategically important security job in their company, many factors are discussed between the employer and the security recruiter.  

For example, employers frequently bring up the topic of job changes. There is a very fine line between one security professional having too many jobs over a period of time and another security professional having just enough change in their career to show depth and breadth of skill, diversity in employment experiences and variety and growth in responsibilities.  

The next time you’re thinking about moving from one employer to another, ask yourself the following questions. Some questions apply to those on a CSO / CISO track while other questions are better suited to security professionals on an engineer / architect track.

Some questions apply to all technology  professionals.  

  • If I make this change, how will my skills and responsibilities change over the next 2-3 years?
  • What will my resume likely look like in 2-3 years if I make this change?
  • Is the change I’m pondering  putting me closer to my long term career  goals?
  • Will I have an opportunity to build a program or a series of programs in the new  organization?
  • Will my level of responsibility increase, stay the same or decrease if I take the new job?
  • Will I be managing  people in the new job? If so, how many people and how soon?
  •  Is the prospective new employer seroius enough about the job I’m considering to give me enough resources to be successful?  
  • Will I manage a budget in the new job?  Will I be taking on a larger or smaller budget than the one I have responsibility for now?
  • Will my technical skills broaden, stay the same or decrease if I take the new job?
  • Is there a clear path for personal growth in the new job? (Growth can be up if you’re on a CISO path and growth can be horizontal if you’re on more of a security engineer / security architect track)
  • Are there clear objectives to be met that will enable others to measure my accomplishments and clearly see my contribution to the company in the new job?
  • Will my work be visible in the new organization? 
  • Will the reporting structure in the new job allow me to be successful? 
  • Is security positioned highly enough in the new company for me to be successful?
  • Will I work for someone in the new job who can mentor me?  
     

There are more questions to be asked before moving to a new employer. Hopefully these questions will give you a basis from which to add even more questions. If you measure the new job opportunity against questions like these and if the answers you come up with are positive, you may be making a  well-planned  career move rather than a short-term job change.  

If after measuring a new job opportunity against these questions, you’re frequently not sure of the answer, you either have more work to do before making a decision or you may have enough uncertainty staring you in the face to make a decision to walk away.  

If you struggle with the questions shown above and the core reason you find yourself attracted to a new job is primarily money, more often than not you’re contemplating a job change. A job change will lead to another job change sooner than later because most job changes are not made based on sound business logic. You’ll get used to the new level of income sooner than you think.  It won’t be long before the new level of income isn’t enough.  You’ll start looking for the next financial bump.

To make career moves  versus job changes, a bit of mental exercise  is necessary. Technology  professionals who have made carefully planned-out and carefully measured career moves are the candidates who are most likely to fit into the requirements that land on the desk of a highly specialized security recruiter.

 

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Find Cheap Wholesale Sources

by Jason Green on April 4, 2010

Do you ever wonder how some sellers can make money on the rock bottom prices they sell their items for? Believe it or not, many long running sellers are not only surviving while selling at those rock-bottom prices, many are also be making more profit than others who are listing the same items at a much higher price! This is because these big-time sellers can get their goods super-cheap from the very best wholesalers, meaning they can buy more, sell more and make more profit!

How can the large retailers can sell goods so cheaply?

Because they buy their items in big bulk (and I mean big!) and as a result, they can sell their items for very competitive prices. They order huge quantities at a time, often spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a single bulk order which considerably reduces the price per unit. Large retailers have often spent years building relationships with their suppliers which means they get the best possible deals when they buy in such high volume. While you might be a few years away from being able to spend a few hundred thousand on making a bulk order, there are plenty of things you can do to help you get the best deals possible from the very best suppliers. Here are a few tips to follow when you search for new suppliers:

  • Be prepared to spend a lot of time do conducting pricing research. This is absolutely essential for all retailer sellers. Top sellers differ from other sellers in that they understand the amount of time that goes into pricing research and they get stuck in and do it! Pricing research will help you to determine whether it is possible for you to compete in a particular market.
  • Go for suppliers who offer a guarantee or warranty for all items they sell to you. This is very important for keeping your costs down and profits up, as if you end up with a few faulty items, you need to be able to return them to your supplier, rather than refund your buyer yourself. This also helps to increase your sales as it gives buyers confidence in your products and your customer service. Usually, the warranty will be between you and the supplier – meaning if the items proves to be faulty, your buyer will return it to you then you will return the item to your supplier for a refund or exchange.
  • Avoid any suppliers who charge extra fees. This will help to keep your costs per unit down and there are plenty of suppliers out there who will not charge any extra fees such as monthly memberships or charges to access their web site’s store – you wouldn’t pay a supermarket to look around at what they have to offer would you? So don’t do it with any suppliers!
  • Import your items! You can save (and make!) a lot of money by importing goods from abroad. Countries such as China and India are much cheaper to produce items in than Western countries which means you can make a lot of money when you sell them in your own country.

How do they find these amazing suppliers?

There are several ways to find the very best suppliers out there:

Call manufacturers directly – this can help you get in touch with the very best of their retail suppliers, and if you can call and say “Hi, I’m Mike. Gary from Precision Manufacturing gave me your number and told me you are the man to talk to about…”. You can find names of manufacturers by visiting Manta.com an online directory of businesses in the US, UK, Australia, Canada as well as other countries. Here you can search for manufacturers by entering the name of the product you are looking into sourcing then following the links to the contact information for the manufacturer.
Use online wholesale directories such as SaleHoo which lists over 8,000 of the best suppliers on the internet.
Go beyond the Internet. There are other ways to find great suppliers – try trade magazines and trade shows – a great way to build all-important relationships with suppliers. You can find trade shows near you by Googling ‘your state + trade fair/trade show’ or if you are really serious, you can visit the massive trade shows held in China. (I feel another post coming on…)

By using the above tips and information to find your next supplier, you’ll be profiting like an eBay PowerSeller in no time!

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Cash Making Power Sites – Pre-Review

by Jason Green on September 28, 2009

I came across the CashMakingPowerSites.com opportunity in my daily research for business opportunities to present to my readers. Honestly, I’m hesitating to purchase this system for review because I want to do some more research. I’ve read a few reviews that say it’s a great opportunity, and others that say it’s a scam. That’s why I’d like to hear from you to get your opinion. If you have used the CashMakingPowerSites system, I’d love to hear what you think of it. If not, take a look at their landing page and give us your first impression. Is CashMakingPowerSites.com a scam, or is it a great business opportunity?

I’d like you to visit their site directly to get your first impression, but here’s the high-level overview of their offer:

  • You get 5 turnkey websites that they have optimized to drive action from your visitors.
  • You basically need to do nothing except market these 5 sites.
  • They are affiliate websites where your goal is to direct visitors to a final purchase page via your ClickBank affiliate ID. (Which is free.)

The websites are:

  • PickAndClickCash.com – Has to do with Real Estate and possibly Buying Foreclosed Homes.
  • UltimateAdvertisingSolution.com – Secrets to advertising. (Get $10,000 in Ads for 1% of what everyone else pays.)
  • UltimateDiabetesSolution.com – A Cure for Diabetes?
  • UltimateCancerSolution.com – A Cure for Cancer? (Probably an herbal remedy or lifestyle change, but I’m curious.)
  • UltimateHealthyHeart.com – Secret to a healthy, strong, and powerful heart.

So take a look at their sales pitch and let us know what you think. If the reviews aren’t all negative, I’ll purchase the system and do a more thorough investigation.

Click here to visit CashMakingPowerSites.com.

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Liquidation.com Review – Video Followup

by Jason Green on September 22, 2009

Liquidation.com has received a less than warm welcome from the readers of our wholesale blog, according the comments in our previous review of Liquidation.com. Nonetheless, I’m still on the search for someone that has had a fantastic experience with them.

I’d like everyone to check out this video and let us know what you think. The video portrays Liquidation.com as a great source of wholesale HDTVs. One guy bought 6 LCD TVs for $1300 and expects to resell them for $1800 each. Is this possible with the prices and selection at Liquidation.com? I would love to hear from someone that has visited one of their warehouses. As always, I’m trying to give Liquidation.com a fair review. However, all of the comments on our previous review told of horrible experiences or average experiences where the customer was able to break even. I have yet to hear a real success story, but I am optimistic. I can’t believe that a publicly traded company (Liquidity Services – LQDT) can be as terrible as everyone is saying and still be in business. According to the Better Business Bureau (BBB), Liquidity Services Inc has a B+ rating and they are BBB accredited. It looks like they have about 100 complaints per year, but most of those get resolved. If you’ve been burned by Liquidation.com, you may have some success if you file a formal complaint with the Better Business Bureau. Here’s a link to Liquidation.com’s BBB report. They show lots of customers leaving happily with their fully functional merchandise. Does this video accurately portray your experience with Liquidation.com?

If interested, Liquidation.com is having a huge open box HDTV sale.

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Top 10 Online Business Myths

by Jason Green on September 4, 2009

Doh! - Top 10 Online Business Myths

There seem to be two groups of people when talking about starting a business online. There are the people that think the internet is easy money, and you just have to come up with one interesting idea to become a billionaire. On the other hand, there are the people that think it’s too hard, or you have to be a computer geek, or there’s already too much competition. The list of 10 myths below about starting an online business isn’t meant to convince you one way or the other. It’s simply information from experience that it may not be as easy or hard as you think.

Let’s start with 5 myths that make you think it’s too hard to start an online business:

Myth #1: You Need a Professionally Designed Website

The truth is that you can find endless amounts of free or very cheap templates. For example, Smashing Magazine has a list of 100 free standards-compliant website templates. You may need to learn basic HTML, but you do not need to pay an expensive web developer to build you a custom site.

This is especially true if you’re opening an ecommerce website. With free ecommerce platforms like OSCommerce and Magento, you can basically load your products and have the platform take care of the rest.

Myth #2: It’s too Easy, So Everyone’s Already Doing It

You should find a way to bring value to the market with your individual skills, but being totally unique is not necessary. There are many millions of people online. All you need to do is stand out from the crowd a bit and you’ll be in a position to enjoy your piece of the pie.

Myth #3: You Need Funding or an Otherwise Enormous Budget

It is absolutely possible to start an online business with no money. (or at least very little) A domain costs about $10, and hosting between $50 and $100 per year. There are free alternatives to these, but you’ll be forced to advertise someone else’s services. Beyond that cost, there’s no requirement for spending a lot of money. If you’re savvy with the computer and don’t mind learning some new tricks, you can absolutely do all of the work yourself.

Myth #4: You Need to Update Your Website Every Day

At first, you’ll have a lot of updating/customizing to do. However, once your site is finished, there’s rarely a need to make daily updates. Of course, unless you’re running a blog or have daily product updates. Most websites can be launched and left alone for extended periods of time. Is it better to update your website often? Yes, but it’s not essential.

Myth #5: You Need a Huge Advertising Budget

You don’t need to spend a dime, but you will need to spend some time. If you have products with descriptions and features, your site will naturally be “picked up” by the search engines. You will need to do some advertising on your own, but it’s not necessary to shell out a bunch of money to have a banner on someone else’s site. (btw…banners are very 1995) The name of the game is search engine optimization (SEO). You’ll need to get in good with the search engines and I promise you will receive traffic. How you get in good with them is the center of an entirely separate industry known as internet marketing.
Some good SEO / Internet Marketing blogs are: SEOMoz, SEOBook, and Awesome-SEO.

And now to pull you back to reality, because everything you just learned above isn’t really that easy.

Here are the top 5 myths that make you think starting an online business is easy money:

Myth #1: Just Launch a Website and Start Collecting Your Money

This is probably the longest-running myth of starting a business online. Simply putting up a website does not mean anyone will ever see it. You may be able to get 50 or 100 visitors a month by accident if you have a decent amount of content on your site. However, you need to write quality content, offer quality products, and you’ll still need to do some advertising. You need to build links from other websites to rank higher in the search engines, and you need to optimize your site so your visitors do what you want when they get to your site.

Myth #2: You Can Buy an Online Business Plan or System and Become Instantly Successful

That eBook or seminar is NOT going to be the key to your internet riches. In the decade that I’ve been doing this, I’ve seen hundreds of these offers, and even purchased quite a few. They’re just like any other business. You need to work at them and have your own plan for making them succeed. The only people making money from these systems are the ones selling them.

Myth #3: A Home-Based Online Business Will Give you More Free Time

Until your home business gets really successful, don’t plan on quitting that day job. And since you’ll be working a day job and moonlighting with your online business, you’ll have LESS free time. This may go on for 6 months, a year, or many more than that. You will need to sacrifice some free time if you want the future benefits of owning your own business. (So I guess this isn’t really a myth because you will eventually have more free time if you’re wildly successful. Unfortunately, many of us aren’t successful right away, so it may be a grind for a very long time. *It’s after midnight as I write this.)

Myth #4: You Can Get a Grant or Loan to Start Your Business

There are government grants to aid local businesses, and the Small Business Administration (SBA) does help people get loans, but you cannot expect to get much help from either of these sources. The government and SBA are interested in creating jobs. They will help you out if you expect to create X number of jobs in your region, but for a home-based business, you really need to assume everything will come out of your pocket. (See the first 5 myths if you’re scared about not having enough money.)

Myth #5: You’ll be able to Claim Everything as a Tax Deduction

This is one where you can get into big trouble if you don’t take it seriously. Business and personal expenses must be tracked separately. Now remember that I’m not a tax advisor, but if you claim your tickets to the Steeler’s football game as a business expense, you better be able to prove it was a legitimate business-related activity. You can absolutely write off parts of your house and your utilities, depending on your local tax laws, but if you start writing off personal expenses, expect a call from the tax man.

I hope this list helped you to better understand what’s really involved in starting an online or home based business. If you thought it would be too hard, I hope this inspired you to give it a try, and if you thought it would be easy, I hope you take a second look at your plan before making any crazy decisions.

There are so many more myths about starting an online business that I’d like to discuss, but let’s leave it up to you what we talk about next. Please comment with your own myths or ideas you have about working from home.

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SellWholesale.com is Popular in Pakistan!

SellWholesale.com Traffic in Pakistan

by Jason Green on August 20, 2009

I was doing a review of my site’s traffic with Google Analytics and Alexa, and was surprised to find that more than half of my traffic comes from Pakistan. ( 57% Pakistan, 27% United States, and 15% Other +/-)

This site is based in the United States, but I welcome all of my Pakistani visitors. Is there anything that I can do or offer that will help you get more out of this website? Are there any wholesale suppliers based in Pakistan that I could review? I’ll keep this short, but I was extremely surprised to find that Pakistan was a dominant source of traffic for this website. If there’s anything I can do to improve your visit, please let me know.

(The same courtesy is extended to my fellow Americans as well as anyone else on Earth that would like to leave a comment.)

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How do I cancel my DOBA.com Account?

by Jason Green on July 23, 2009

I have been frustrated more than once at the fact that DOBA.com can accept my membership via electronic means, but absolutely won’t allow me to cancel my membership with the same method.

For anyone searching for ways to cancel your DOBA membership, I give you the text from their help file:

To cancel your account, please call 1.877.321.3622 to speak to a Member Services Representative who can help you cancel your account. Member Services is available between the hours of 7 AM and 7 PM Mountain Time, Monday through Friday. Please note that, at this time, we are unable to process cancellation requests via email.

This policy is also outlined in the Terms of Use. See the Terms of Use by checking on the following link: http://www.doba.com/site/fees.html

~~~~~

Basically, you have to call during their normal business hours. They will not accept your cancellation via any other means.*

*I was able to cancel electronically several years ago by making this same argument. Unfortunately, I recently created a trial account and tried to cancel it the same way, but it was a no go this time.

DOBA might be a good way to get your wholesale business started, but be warned that it’s not as easy to cancel as it is to sign up.

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