Home Wealth Project
Extensive Research On How To Build Wealth From The Comfort Of Your Own Home.
Ranking for signal to noise ratio
May 22nd
A whisper in a quiet room is all you need. There’s so little noise, so few distractions, that the energy of the whisper is enough to make a dent.
On the other hand, it’s basically impossible to have a conversation (at any volume) in a nightclub.
Signal to noise ratio is a measurement of the relationship between the stuff you want to hear and the stuff you don’t. And here’s the thing: Twitter and email and Facebook all have a bad ratio, and it’s getting worse.
The clickthrough rates on tweets is getting closer and closer to zero. Not because there aren’t links worth clicking on, but because there’s so much junk you don’t have the attention or time to sort it all out.
Spam (and worse, spamlike messages from organizations and people that ought to treasure your attention and permission) are turning a medium (email) that used to be incredibly rich into one that’s becoming very noisy as well.
And you really can’t do much to fix these media and still use them the way you’re used to using them.
The alternative, which is well worth it, is to find new channels you can trust. An RSS feed with only bloggers who respect your time. Relentless editing of who you follow and who you listen to and what gets on the top of the pile.
Until you remove the noise, you’re going to miss a lot of signal.
View full post on Seth’s Blog
Forex Inner Secrets
May 22nd
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Can a Gas Tax Fuel Clean Energy Innovation?
May 22nd
With gas prices already reaching nearing $4 per gallon in many places, most business owners don’t relish the idea of them rising even further. Yet, some people are still calling for the government to deliberately increase them – by raising the gas tax.
Scott Burgess, senior editor of AOL Autos, recently argued that a gas tax of $1 per gallon could help the U.S. government shore up its dismal balance sheet. Burgess cites a Congressional Budget Office report that came to the conclusion that more strict fuel efficiency standards will reduce gasoline consumption enough that the U.S. government will lose billions of dollars a year in tax revenue.
Add to the mix the fact that the 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal gasoline tax has risen since 1993 and it’s no longer enough to cover the transportation infrastructure improvements it’s supposed to fund.
That said, many small business advocacy groups, including the National Federal of Independent Business, are adamantly against raising taxes that directly hit small businesses, including the gas tax. A March survey by the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council found that 72% of small business respondents said higher gas prices were already affecting their business. And stories abound in local media of businesses being pinched by surging gas prices.
(The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, somewhat surprisingly, has supported a modest increase in the gas tax in recent years order to improve U.S. infrastructure and lower the federal deficit.)
Tax and deficit issues aside, there’s another reason for business owners to think about the gas tax: Higher gas prices may help encourage clean energy innovation and support environmentally sustainable behaviors among business owners and consumers – such as the purchase and development of eco-friendlier vehicles and driving less. While it may raise business costs, it may spur business owners think about how to reduce their gas usage and be more sustainable.
Christopher Knittel, an energy economics professor at MIT, has studied how gas prices affect behaviors. He and researchers from Northwestern University found that a $1 increase in prices between 1998 and 2008 led people to buy 21% more fuel-efficient vehicles. (Not surprisingly, the CEO of General Motors has come out in support of a gas tax increase.) Knittel also found that less driving led to less local air pollution and related health problems.
So, what’s your view on raising the gas tax? Would it be a step in the right direction for the U.S.? Or is it just bad for business?
Gas Photo via Shutterstock
Can a Gas Tax Fuel Clean Energy Innovation?
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Blueprint Affiliates Network – New!!
May 22nd
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Increase Your Church Fundraising Today!
May 21st
Learn Successful Church Fundraising Techniques That You Can Utilize Confidently, Consistently, And Continuously To Raise Money For Your Church.
Increase Your Church Fundraising Today!
The endless emergency of politics
May 21st
Good governance is like great marketing–it takes the long view, and relentlessly focuses on delivering on agreed upon goals over time.
Politics, on the other hand, is more like a ping pong match, and, thanks to electronic media, it’s getting faster when we’d be better off if it slowed down.
Those that work in politics are now addicted to today’s emergency, whatever it is. It could be a world event, a faux scandal or merely something the other side said. They use it to fundraise, they use it to distribute talking points and they use it to get attention and score points on the opposition. And they use polls to keep score, daily.
It’s practically impossible to get the attention or effort of people on a campaign unless you’ve got something urgent and imminent to discuss. This is no way to do serious marketing.
One side effect of the endless emergency is an insatiable need for cash. Clearly, money spent on campaigns is effective (particularly in depressing the vote for an opponent), but just as clearly, it doesn’t scale. Twice as much money is not twice as effective. When the campaign falls in love with the combination of instant reaction plus unlimited fundraising, all strategy and leadership go out the window.
The problem with getting elected using emergency tactics is that it makes it harder than ever to govern for the long term.
[Here's my post about the endless emergency of poverty].
View full post on Seth’s Blog
5 Corporations that Own Almost Everything
May 21st
Even among those pro-business, most acknowledge that corporations rule just about everything around us. Big companies supply our cars, gas, food and even our politicians. We’re not talking about hundreds of thousands of mom and pop shops. We’re not even talking about thousands of medium sized business or even hundreds of large business. Recent studies show that somewhere on the order of 147 companies have a hand in just about everything on Earth. And among these select few, there are a small handful of companies that have roughly enough money and influence to apply for membership to the UN, which would be kind of superfluous since they can buy their way to the top of just about any country they want.
General Electric
better part of the 20th century giving specialization the finger and manufacturing everything from jet engines to the myth that Joey could carry an episode of Friends.
When they began in 1876, General Electric was little more than a shed where Thomas Edison spent most of his time stealing inventions from people. Thanks to basically inventing the modern world, GE grew quickly and spent the latter half of the 20th century buying companies that opened doors into every part of the American household. As the sixth largest company in the US, listing even a fraction of the interests they control would take a while. It’s a lot faster to just say “Everything Time Warner doesn’t own on TV and everything East Asia don’t own in consumer appliances”. GE owns Hulu as well. Here is a complete list of assets.
Barclays
One of the largest… Is it even appropriate to call these businesses “banks” anymore? Barclays is a UK-based “bank” that happens to be one of the biggest banks in the world after acquiring the bloated, rotting corpse of Lehman Brothers. But so what, right? There are a dozen other banks out there, some of which control even more money than Barclays and are demonstrably more evil.
But not only does Barclays have enough in assets to buy the US military for three years, they also control one of the largest bond indexes in the world. If that last phrase doesn’t mean much to you, an important detail is that hedge funds across the world are all required to benchmark their performance against certain indexes such as the S&P 500. These funds like to buy close to these indexes to avoid catastrophic numbers in the event of a crash. What it basically boils down to is that a team of analysts and executives at Barclays decides where a good chunk of just about all the money in the world will end up invested.
Moody’s Investor Services
You may have heard of Moody’s lately when they bitch-slapped the US credit crating down to an AA- for the first time in history. While it was probably unfair and financial markets largely ignored it (thanks to this phenomenon known as “the dollar is bad but everything else is worse”), for a while bankers and investors quaked in fear at the loss of that one letter and what it would mean for world markets. That’s because Moody’s is one of the big three credit-rating agencies that grade the credit-worthiness of just about everything worth buying if you wear a three piece suit, chomp on cigars, and are deeply concerned with your sugar interests in the Orient.
But what does it matter to you? How does some stupid rating really lead to Moody’s and its credit rating pals ruling the world? Barring a crash-course in economics, the simplest way to put it is this: money is a fantasy, and the entire world market works on credit. The entire value of the stock market is based on realistic assumptions about a company’s stability and profitability, but at the end of the day it’s just a collection of what people think things are worth. This means firms and individuals are incredibly reliant on Moody’s and company to know what’s a safe investment and where they’d be taking a risk. With the simplest of reports, Moody’s can turn floodgates of capital into a mere trickle. Oh and, haha, almost forgot this part. Remember that whole economic meltdown apocalypse…thing a few years back? It would have probably not been nearly as severe if it weren’t for Moody’s bumping up the credit-ratings of junk mortgage-backed securities―making them appear to be iron-clad safe investments when, in reality, they were worth about as much as stock in Enron in 2002.
News Corp.
Before its recent issues in the UK and elsewhere for the crime of illegally tapping phones (a strange British way of spelling “being tremendous douchebags for years on end”), News Corp was one of the largest, most powerful and influential media organizations on the planet. Rupert Murdoch had a hand in just about everything that was capable of spewing some vile, acrimonious opinions. Almost everyone is familiar with Fox, but odds are you’re also aware of your favorite/least favorite News Corp outlet whether it’s The Sun in the UK or the Wall Street Journal in the US.
In a more harmless vein, News Corp also owns the National Geographic channel, has a stake in Hulu, and several years ago they made the terrible mistake of shelling out millions for MySpace. While it may be a small comfort that this multinational conglomerate may be slowly falling apart over recent scandals, unwinding the dozens of newspapers, TV stations, studios, publishers, magazines, radio, your eternal soul, internet properties, sports teams and the cameras watching you right now might take quite a while.
Monsanto
Monsanto is the second-largest producer of genetically engineered seed products and the largest producer of underhanded scum-baggery related to genetically engineered seed in the world. To quickly sum up a long and exhaustive history, Monsanto’s business model basically goes like this:
1. Invent a highly-effective herbicide
2. Invent a seed that’s immune to only that fertilizer
3. Spend millions lobbying the government to make sure this seed ends up on every farm in America and internationally
4. Make untold billions selling both the seed and the herbicide
5. Sue everyone (The company enjoys suing individual farmers and families for harvesting crops accidentally contaminated with Monsanto’s seeds)
Monsanto is a big company, for sure, but they don’t pull the strings of the world financial markets like Barclays or Goldman Sachs. They don’t build everything you use like GE. But they do control about 49% of the agricultural seed used in the United States―seeds that are almost entirely dependent on Monsanto for proper functioning and propagation. So while the rest of the companies here could wipe out your 401k, design your toaster to murder you in your sleep and inundate you with propaganda, Monsanto controls the world because it’s vice grip on US agriculture could literally starve you.
View full post on Business Pundit
How and Why I Use LinkedIn Groups to Build My Business
May 21st
As I’ve written here in the past, I think there are solid business reasons for participating in most social networks these days, but if your business sells primarily to other businesses, you must get more active on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is not the biggest or most talked about network these day, but when it comes to connecting with people who mean business and generating leads, few can compare to the power of LinkedIn. A study conducted by Hubspot earlier this year suggested that LinkedIn is “277 Percent More Effective for Lead Generation than Facebook and Twitter.”
While those numbers were taken from their user base, my experience suggests that the professional decision maker audience that prefers LinkedIn is much more prepared to participate in the kind of traditional authentic networking that leads to lasting business relationships than any other network.
The power tool on LinkedIn is Groups. For me this is the closest thing to the proven offline networking groups that exists online today. Groups can give you access to people and discussions related to an industry, topic or even geographic region. Working LinkedIn Groups effectively is a solid way to build a network and generate leads.
Back up to that last sentence and dwell on the word effectively. Effective networking is about providing value, sharing, helping and informing – it’s not about spamming, promoting and selling. Participate in the latter before you’ve earned any credibility and your efforts won’t gain any steam.
Join groups
Currently LinkedIn allows basic members to join up to 50 Groups. Find industry, topic and location specific groups that contain concentrations of people that you would like to network with and join them. Spend time looking at the level of participation and conversations. If all you find is updates with members promoting their businesses move on as this group will be of little benefit.
LinkedIn has a “groups you may like” function that suggests groups based on your current profile and connections.
Ironically, the best groups for lead generation are those that don’t tolerate blatant self-promotion.
Connect with members
Once you’ve joined a group, you have a natural common connection with each group member and LinkedIn gives you the ability to connect based on the mutual group membership. It’s a little thing, but it’s a step beyond simply saying you want to connect.
Reach out and make some connections and very simple introductions as to why you joined the group.
Look for active members and add relevant replies to a number of posts. This starts the process of some one on one conversation and, since your replies are publicly available to all group members, you can use this technique to demonstrate that you have a lot to offer.
Create groups
Once you get the hang of Groups you should consider creating your own topic group. This is not a company group, it’s one that is set up to discuss a topic that your prospects, customers, partners, and even competitors might find worthwhile.
A word of warning – if you want your group to grow and give you the ability to benefit by virtue of your status as the group’s manager, you have to commit the time to curate, moderate, stimulate and facilitate group participation.
You must add starter content that gets people talking. You must participate in conversations. You must promote. And above all you must not tolerate spam and self-promotion. Tell people this is you intent up front, give them one warning and kick offenders out. If you don’t set this tone from the very beginning you’ll group members won’t want to stick around.
To get the most from your group manager role create a landing page on your own website that promotes the idea behind the group and encourages visitors to join. This will deepen your connection to the group and help people better understand what the group is all about.
Lastly, use, but don’t abuse, the announcements function. As a group manager you can send direct announcements to all group members via email. This is a great way to continue to keep your group and its activity front and center.
Five notes
Once you start to get more active on LinkedIn make it a habit to reach out to five connections each week with the sole purpose of saying hi, thank you, I see you got a promotion, wonder what you’ve been working on, etc.
I’ve done this in the offline world with handwritten notes for years and the impact is dramatic and long lasting.
I can’t tell you how often this simple, personal touch has led to business – even though that was not the intent in any way.
It’s amazing how relationships bloom when you genuinely care about people.
How and Why I Use LinkedIn Groups to Build My Business is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
What Job Are You Helping Your Customers Do?
May 21st
Marketing is often described in terms of a product life cycle. The development, the launch, continued support, and finally, discontinuation all have specific marketing efforts associated with them. From social contests to reduced prices and giveaways, the emphasis is nearly always on the product or service provided. However, this does not take into account the way that customers actually search for and find products.
Consider the last time you purchased something. Every so often, aesthetics or “wow-factors” play a role in the purchase, but not usually. Most people buy something because they have a need, or job, to be done. No one goes out and buys business software because they like filling in little squares with information; they do so to keep track of where, why and how their business is operating. They don’t pony up cash for consultants because they are lonely and want someone to talk to; they do so because they require assistance with a problem.
Recognizing the impetus that ultimately draws consumers to your product or service will greatly enhance your marketing and sales success. Instead of focusing on what your product brings to the table, you can focus on the pain points that drive customers to your product. If the marketing for a product speaks directly to a customer need, they are much more likely to buy. This is extremely powerful, and we all know this to be true. For instance, when you see an ad for an accounting program, you don’t care that it was developed with the latest in programming techniques, you just want it to accurately deal with financials and help you run your business more smoothly.
So how do you figure out what needs your product speaks to? If you have been in business for a little while and have delivered a product to the market, try to spark a dialogue and ask customers why they bought the product. If you are new to the market, think about what prompted the creation of the product in the first place (products and services are often born because someone had a problem and found no viable market solution available). Then ask yourself, how often do I have the problems that the product addresses?
Remember this simple truth: consumers buy products to complete jobs that need to be accomplished.
I had the opportunity to speak with Clayton Christensen recently, Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and founder of Innosight Institute, a non-profit think tank. We chatted about two of his newest books, Disrupting Class and The Innovator’s Prescription.
“We all have jobs in our lives that we must get done. We reach out and bring products into our lives to get these jobs done,” said Christensen. “Marketing is all about asking, ‘What job is the customer trying to accomplish?’”
By shifting the focus to the job that needs to be completed, a product’s life cycle becomes insignificant. “Most marketers think there’s a concept called a product life cycle. Once you realize that the world is organized by jobs that need to be done, you understand that product life cycles don’t exist.”
Pull out your pencils because here’s your formula: Always test your approach. You could be speaking to the wrong issues. Make sure you focus on the value of your product, not the features. Customers will respond more positively, and it will be much easier to sell. Go forth and sell!
Question Photo via Shutterstock
What Job Are You Helping Your Customers Do?
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Camcorder Secrets Revealed
May 21st
Discover Everything Youll Ever Need To Know About Camcorders And More With This Definitive Enthusiasts Guide.
Camcorder Secrets Revealed
