an unusual blog
Internet Marketing
Protecting Your Business from Piercing the Corporate Veil
Feb 15th
A big concern for business owners and professionals is the threat of lawsuit. In today’s litigious environment no business or business owner is immune. When a business is sued, many plaintiffs will go after the owner’s personal assets. To protect your assets from personal liability, business owners should create a corporation or Limited Liability Company (LLC).
Incorporating or creating the LLC is a critical first step to protect the business owner’s personal assets; however it is possible that, even though the corporation is created, plaintiffs will nevertheless assert personal liability against the owners. This is when plaintiffs will seek to “pierce the corporate veil”. To avoid piercing the corporate veil, it is important to maintain corporate formalities. These formalities ensure that the corporation is not only created, but also operated and maintained properly.
Corporate formalities include preparing and observing Bylaws, holding regular Annual Minutes for shareholders and directors where directors and officers are elected and corporate actions are approved, and a Corporate Book is maintained with the up-to-date record of stockholders and capital contributions. Also, business should be conducted in the corporate name by signing corporate documents as an officer rather than in individual name, and separate bank accounts and records should be maintained that are distinguishable from individual accounts.
There is the real possibility that, if corporate formalities are not followed, a business owner will be held personally liability. Creating the corporation and observing all formalities is the only way to confidently know your personal assets are protected.
IncorpAcademy.com is a valuable source of training and tools for small business owners. Our Online Secretary, Corporate Tutor, and Business Workshops can place your business in the top 5% of businesses who are operating without fear of Piercing Your Corporate Veil. You can contact Ryan Brown ryan@incorpacademy.com for an exclusive VIP discount as a CrazyGreat! reader
Video Marketing With YouTube: Your Competition is Already Doing it!
Dec 14th
If you have a blog where you want to reach more people and share your ideas, or an online business where you want more customers; (and who doesn’t want that?) you need to create videos for your business and get them online for your customers to see!
If you aren’t doing this and your competitors are, then they are taking customers from you that don’t even know you exist. If they aren’t producing video for YouTube or their own sites then you need to make sure you get those customers they are missing.
Compete.com shows YouTube as having 85 million unique visitors July 2009! Imagine for a moment what sort of traffic you would get from a viral video with 100,000 views… 200,000 views…. 1 million views! A certain percentage of those people would visit your site and a percentage of those would sign up for your newsletter or buy something from you.
Now if my math is right, and you get 1 million views for a video and only 3% of those viewers visit your site that is 30 thousand visitors! If 3% of those signed up or bought something, that is 900 signups or sales! Sound good to you?
I know it’s very difficult to get a video with 1 million views, but take a look at YouTube and see what videos are that popular. Why are they so popular? What is so good about them? It’s not the production value, it’s not because they have celebrities or cost a large amount of money to create.
These videos are crazy popular because they are extremely funny, or cool, or amazing for some reason. The videos can be planned out, but wildly popular vidoes are not outwardly selling anything, there is no pitch. If you want a video to have a chance at going viral, you can’t be selling in the video; you must let the video sell for you!
In door-to-door sales years ago we had a saying that you should “sell the sizzle, not the steak”. What does this mean to you? If I want to sell plant food, do I talk about the chemical composition and the different nutrients that are in it? NO! I don’t want to sell the customer on the fertilizer, I sell them on the end result my product gives them: BIG tomatoes, and that’s the sizzle!
Give the viewer something in your videos for free. We are a camera repair shop and can’t make videos about how to repair every camera, but your customers are looking for something regarding your business, so find out what it is and give it to them!
Teach them something, give them information they are looking for, entertain them. [If you become an authority on your subject your customers will happily tell others about you].
You don’t need professional quality videos, but you do need to make them viewable and understandable.
- You don’t have to have an HD quality camcorder, but make sure that it is good quality and you have plenty of light!
- Make sure to have a good quality microphone. Poor audio will drive away most viewers, guaranteed.
- Use a solid backdrop, don’t show your cluttered basement or office or bedroom unless this is part of your presentation
- Write a script or at least notes regarding what you want to say
- Practice and view your results before publishing it. Ask others for opinions and feedback!
- Everyone hates the sound of their own voice; but that is how we hear you so don’t worry, you sound fine.
Keep going, things will keep getting better along the way!
Now I’m off to try and figure out what my customers are looking for regarding camera repair for their Sony, Canon and Nikon cameras and then just give it to them.
How To Make Money With Affiliate Programs
Dec 14th
Affiliate programs can either be a way to put a little extra cash in your pocket or, hopefully, become a full time job. However, it’s not like you can put up a bunch of affiliate links and expect to start making a mint. If you want to make a full time job’s worth of money off affiliate marketing, you have to work at it full time. The great thing about affiliate marketing is that it works 24/7, but this doesn’t mean you should also put in several hours a day of your own time.
The affiliate marketers who have had the most outstanding success are normally those who have more than one site working at once. It’s much harder to make a decent amount of money if you have one affiliate site at a time. Experienced affiliate marketers will have a number of different sites running at once, all with different types of affiliate links. What this means is that each affiliate site will need new content in the form of blogs, forums, articles, and other techniques.
A key to a successful affiliate marketing program is to make the affiliate site a useful resource. Just posting a bunch of links is not going to impress many web surfers. They’ll leave and likely never come back. The trick to any web business is to keep people on site—this is true for the affiliate partner and it’s true for affiliate marketers. An affiliate site shouldn’t necessarily scream, “affiliate site.” Instead, it can be a trusted resource on a particular topic.
Useful content is the best way to make this possible. Take a site that has a number of links to sports-related businesses (apparel, equipment, tickets, books, etc.). The affiliate marketer can then set up a forum that talks about different sports teams, strategy, and so on—potentially, this forum could bring in sports fans from across the country. Blogging is another great medium for affiliate marketing. On the same site, the blogger could write reviews of new equipment or write in depth trade talk about a variety of sports. These are just a few ideas but they show how affiliate marketing can—and should—be a serious, long-term proposition.
What it comes down to is that affiliate marketing is no different than running the host site. Both are about running a business, even if an affiliate marketer has no direct product or service to sell. An affiliate marketer should set up a site that is useful and informative—a destination that people will come back to again and again. In some cases, an affiliate site might even be more informative than the partner’s website.
Only until these issues are covered can an affiliate marketer hope to make a good amount of money with affiliate marketing. Sure, you could put up links and hope for the best, but you should think about investing some time into the site if you really hope to turn a respectable profit.
An Article Marketing procedure That Will Increase Your Traffic by 200%
Nov 27th
Employ this Article Marketing technique to directly improve your traffic from anything you create by 200% or more. This is systematic, helpful, and only takes a few extra minutes for any business.
Article marketing is one of the only marketing methods that has been consistently successful in every niche online since the internet has become popular. It should be mentioned, not only does article marketing still work, it is more effective and powerful today than it has ever been in any point in history. I constantly give a demonstration again and again how you can make some simple adjustments to your article promotion techniques to massively increase your website exposure, attention, and cash flow over a reasonably short period of time,and it doesn’t matter at all what you’re promoting when you do it.
The reason why articles are so effective in promoting your business is because of several principles that govern search engine rankings. The most important reason, however, is because articles provide unique, relevant solutions to important problems for people who are researching something in the specific niche that you’re covering in your writing. So in other words, folks go to Google, Yahoo, and MSN to uncover answers to questions that they have, and if you’ve written an article purposely answering that question or solving their problem, it makes sense that Google would want that info to be seen, so in history articles have ranked enormously well in all of the search engines.
The hindrance that people commonly have in article promotion is two fold. The primary problem is that most people never create enough original content to make any kind of progressive influence on their traffic. To be noticed on the internet, you can’t just expect to do well in one individual niche and remain there, you’ve got to rank for hundreds, or even thousands of niche keyword phrases. Creating content takes time, and most people in simple terms don’t do it persistently enough to create a meaningful difference.
The subsequent problem is that once someone creates their article, they don’t market it correctly. They expect that magically no matter what they write will pop up right on the top of Google. I’m going to share with you one of my favorite tricks to boost the attention and traffic that you get to your sites, and it works quickly.
The skill is straightforward. More or less every person has a Twitter page and a Facebook webpage, and most marketers maintain some sort of YouTube channel. What most people don’t know is that you can automatically connect your YouTube channel to your Twitter account and that you can link your Twitter posts to you Facebook seamlessly. This will work for you, and it will get you noticed immediately. This is something that will even work if you’ve only got a few Twitter followers and some friends on Facebook.
All you do is associate your social networks to your YouTube webpage, and when you create a new blog post or generate a new article, you make a quick 30 second video promoting it and upload it to your YouTube channel. YouTube will automatically post your new video to Twitter and Facebook for you, without any additional work on your part. The results are fast and effective, when I started doing this it boosted my lead flow by 200% immediately after implementing it. it enlarged my traffic by two times.}
To learn the best Article Marketing Techniques that are available, you can visit David Wood’s blog to learn exactly how you can create 25,000 visitors to your website over the next 8 weeks. Plus, you’re going to get a free video training on Article Marketing that has produced thousands of testimonials all over the internet. Visit this site now: Article Marketing Secrets
Here’s a Thanksgiving Giveaway from CrazyGreat!
Nov 25th
Okay, you want an invite to a Thanksgiving Special that’s giving away products for free, well here’s your opportunity.
My friend Jason James just released the internet’s most massive giveaway ever:
Simply sign up and get the scoop.
-tons of ebooks
-tons of scripts
-tons of everything you’ve ever wanted
Where did all these goodies come from?
http://crazygreat.com/holidaygiveaway
I teamed up with Jason James who has called in some favors from a whole bunch of top online marketers and convinced them all to give you TONS of Products at no cost to you.
It is our way of saying “thank you”!
These products are worth thousands and thousands of dollars and have already made the owners thousands and thousands of dollars.
I just can’t hide the excitement. This is probably the most exciting news I’ve ever shared with you.
Go get it now!
Which Affiliate Networks to Choose?
Nov 23rd
Many people have heard bad stories about affiliate programs and affiliate networks. The stories they may have heard are probably related to illegal programs or pyramid schemes. These types of program do not have a real, worthy product, and there’s usually very little, if any, real money to be made with these types of programs. DON’T be associated with these schemes. You want to be with a program that offers high quality product that you will readily endorse. The growing number of those who have joined already and are succeeding immensely is proof enough that there are reliable and quality affiliate programs out there.
Why participate in an affiliate program?
It allows you to work part-time. It gives you the opportunity to build a generous residual income, and it makes you an owner of a small business. Affiliate programs have already created many millionaires. They are the living testimony of how hard work, continuous prospecting, motivating and training others pay off.
If ever you are deciding to join one, you must take note that you are getting into something that you are capable of working. This will be an assurance that you are capable of doing anything to come out successful.
How do you choose a good affiliate program to promote? Here are some tips you may want to look over before choosing one:
1. A program that you like and are interested in. One of the best ways of knowing if that is the kind of program you wish to promote is if you are interested in purchasing the product yourself. If that is the case, chances are, there are many others who are also interested in the same program and products.
2. Look for a program that is of high quality. For instance, look for one that is associated with many experts in that particular industry. This way, you are assured that of the standard of the program you will be joining into.
3. Join in the ones that offer real and viable products. How do you know this? Do some initial research. If possible, track down some of the members and customers to give you testimonial on the credibility of the program.
4. The program that is catering to a growing target market. This will ensure you that there will be more and continuous demands for your referrals. Make inquiries. There are forums and discussions you can participate in to get good and reliable feedbacks.
5. A program with a compensation plan that pays out a residual income and a payout of 30% or more would be a great choice. There are some programs offering this kind of compensation. Look closely for one. Do not waste your time with programs that do not reward substantially for your efforts.
6. Be aware of the minimum quotas that you must fulfill or sales target that is too hard to achieve. Some affiliate programs impose pre-requisites before you get your commissions. Just be sure that you are capable of attaining their requirements.
7. Select one that has plenty of tools and resources that can help you grow the business in the shortest possible time. Not all affiliate programs have these capacities. Make use you decide on one with lots of helpful tools you can use.
8. Check if the program has a proven system that can allow you to check your networks and compensation. Also check if they have it available online for you to check anytime and anywhere.
9. The program that is offering strong incentives for members to renew their membership each time. The affiliate program that provides continuous help and upgrades for its products have the tendency to retain its members. These things can assure the growth of your networks.
10. Be aware of the things that members are not happy about in a program. Like with the ones mentioned above, you can do your checking at discussion forums. If you know someone in that same program, there is ho harm asking if there are many downsides involved.
Make sure you have a thorough and intensive knowledge about the affiliate program and network you will be promoting. Knowing the kind of program you are getting yourself into will make you anticipate and prevent any future problems you may encounter.
Here are a few that I use on a regular basis. They are all easy to work with, and they have plenty of products and services that you can promote.
