* Highly
Recommended *
The
Billionaire Way
I
would recommend "The Billionaire Way" program
to anyone who is contemplating a new enterprise or business
start-up, or is already in business for themselves. It enabled
me to look at my life, attributes, and habits in a refreshing
new way. I was delighted to discover that I too have a number
of the traits and qualities that many who are successful in
business possess, which I hadn't realized. I am very excited
to apply the principles that were presented in the program
to my new business ventures.
A
tremendous benefit was to be able to talk with the author of
the program, Bob Cox, about my own business strategies and
ideas. Bob spent an hour on the phone with me after I finished
the program, and his personal insights and suggestions were
very helpful and inspiring.
I
know that I will often refer back to the information provided
in "The Billionaire Way"
-
Catherine McNeil, Monte Vista, Colorado
Find
out what Catherine discovered today!
My
5 Rules for New-Job Success
By
Michael Masterson
Whether
you're entering the full-time workforce for the first time
or have years of experience, keep the following in mind when
moving into any new job:
1. Spend
the first several weeks taking everything in. Be eager and
helpful, but don't be too aggressive and don't get into arguments,
confrontations, or debates. Now is the time to learn everything
you can about your new working environment. Much of what
you need to learn will be hidden from you if you pose a threat.
2. Networking
is extremely important to your career, but - for the same
reasons stated above - you don't want to go after the powerful
and connected people in a pushy way. In the beginning weeks,
make a strong effort to make friends with everybody. Making
enemies early on - even with seemingly unimportant or impotent
people - can cause you serious problems later on.
3. Come
in early and stay late. But not too early or too late. You
want to establish a reputation as an enthusiastic employee
and a hard worker, but you don't want to seem like a goody-two-shoes,
either.
4. When
you have firmly established good relationships with everyone,
you should gradually increase your efforts - coming in earlier,
volunteering for jobs, taking on extra assignments, and starting
to set up information interviews with the movers and shakers.
5. As
you improve your performance and accomplish goals, stay humble
with your fellow workers, but make sure your boss (and your
boss's boss) knows that you are a superstar in the making.
[Ed.
Note: For more of Michael's advice on how to succeed in a new
job, get a copy of Automatic
Wealth for Grads… and Anyone Else Just Starting Out.]
Reader
Feedback: "This Bootcamp is the best thing I could have
ever done."
"I
just got back to Oregon from the Info-Marketing Bootcamp. I
met all of the ETR people, and they were just great. I met
the speakers too. I got to talk to Michael Masterson and Will
Bonner.
"This
Bootcamp is the best thing I could have ever done."
Larry
Springfield, OR
[Ed.
Note: If you weren't able to make it to Bootcamp in person
... share in the experience - and the expert information -
by ordering a complete set of Bootcamp
DVD recordings]
"Speed
provides the one genuinely modern pleasure."
-
Aldous Huxley
Are
You Too Fast for Your Customers?
By
David Cross
You
may not remember the dark old days of slow modems, acoustic
couplers, and analog telephones spliced with duct tape. But
back in the 1980s, that was how the first brave souls used
the Internet. If the Internet now is the equivalent of a Ferrari,
back then we had James Watt's earliest steam engine.
Last
week, my Internet connection felt more like oozing treacle
than greased lightning, so I called my broadband provider for
tech support. I had to wait 24 hours for the fellow to arrive
- and until then, it was just like the old days.
This
was a potentially irksome situation ... but I used my imposed
sloth wisely. For months, I'd been wanting to test our companies'
websites to see how they fared at slow speeds. Why? Well, because
our website analytics show that up to 50 percent of
our customers still use dial-up modems. And now that my connection
speed had slowed to theirs, it gave me to opportunity to experience
our websites the way they do and make sure we weren't sabotaging
our efforts to reach them.
Keep
Your Eye on the Prize
When
putting together your website and promotional e-mails, it's
easy to get caught up in the excitement of being able to use
the Internet at faster speeds. It's easy to get caught up in
advanced technology and add more images, bigger blocks of text,
video, Flash animations, and other elements. But all of these
things take eons to download if you've got a dial-up modem.
And that spells frustration for your customers who are in that
situation.
Don't
let the glitter and glitz take away from what you're trying
to do. You want to keep your customers happy and satisfied
and coming back for more - and to do that, you need to know
how well they can access your website and e-mails.
Start
by finding out how many of your users are still stuck with
super-slow modems. You can get the average speeds of the people
who are accessing your websites with the excellent (and free)
Google Analytics service at google.com/analytics/. Simply drop
in a bit of code they supply and you'll start receiving results
within 24 hours.
Next,
look at your website and e-mails through those "steam
engine" customers' eyes.
One
way to do it is by opening a standard dial-up account with
an ISP and surfing the Web with it for a while. (Dial-up modems
are really cheap nowadays. The $50 or so it will cost will
be money well spent.) Or you could use one of the many available
software programs that give you an idea of how long it takes
to download a Web page from a 56k or modem connection. One
excellent free tool is available at WebPageAnalyzer.com. I
prefer this tool over others, because it tells me the total
size of all text and images on the page and reflects a truer
picture of what a website visitor experiences.
10
Ways to Speed Things Up for Your Customers
If
it takes longer than around 10 to 12 seconds to view your website
or one of your e-mails, talk to your designer/webmaster about
the following ways to speed it up:
1.
Reduce images sizes
NetMechanic.com
offers a free trial of a product that optimizes images by compressing
them, reducing the file size and retaining the quality of the
image. This task alone can be enough to speed up a Web page
by a factor of 10.
2.
Split large sections of text
Break
up longer articles into separate pages with a "Next" link
for people to read on. Make a separate print feature so they
can see and print the entire article if they wish to. Although
sites like Project Gutenberg present entire books on single
Web pages, this is generally not recommended for the average
website or for long e-mail promotions. Agora Publishing's direct-mail-style
promotions (which can extend to many screens), for example,
are generally split into separate pages.
3.
Be relevant
Include
only those elements that are essential to or supportive of
your primary goals. For example, if you want your prospective
customer to read an article on your website and sign up for
your free e-mail newsletter, don't insert a big image of your
staff Christmas party. It will distract from, not add to, the
conversion process.
4.
Table service
Reduce
the use of tables on your Web pages. Instead, use Cascading
Style Sheets.
5.
Fewer elements
Every
block of text or image becomes a separate item that has to
be sent to your website visitor. Generally, the fewer elements
on a Web page, the better.
6.
External items
If
you are including things such as stock market quotes or real-time
weather data from an external website (such as Yahoo), be aware
that this can slow down your website. Ads from an external "ad
server" can also be a problem.
7.
Specify image dimensions
Although
you don't have to specify every image's height and
width, you should. Not doing so means the visitor's Web browser
has to guess the size of the image. This adds a small amount
of time to the process of displaying the page on the screen.
8.
Cache and compress
There
are little-used tricks that your webmaster may know of called "page
caching" and "page compression." Basically,
page caching stores a copy of a frequently requested Web page
and sends that copy to the viewer when he accesses your site.
With page compression, a website is sent as a compressed file
and decompressed at the visitor's computer.
9.
Optimize multimedia
If
you must use video, sound, or Flash on your Web page, do so
judiciously. And have your Web designer compress those elements
to help reduce download times.
10.
Provide a low-graphics or text-only option
BBC
News, for example, offers two versions of its website. One
includes all images and text, while the "low-graphics" version
(which is 10 times smaller) includes mainly text, a few pictures,
and very little in the way of site design. This stripped-down
version is highly suited to anyone using a slow Internet connection
or a mobile device like a cellphone.
Timely
Advice
Within
three years, I predict that we will see another shift on the
Internet as overall speed increases and websites start to include
more multimedia components, and as new technologies like IP
television and pay-per-view downloadable movies become more
prevalent. I also think that the ability to search video files
for specific data will come of age.
But
there will still be people with slower connections - and what
all that technical progress means for them is increasing frustration
with the Internet.
So
no matter how much the technology changes, continue to optimize
your website and promotional e-mails by applying the simple
principles I described today. Never forget that your goal is
to get your customers to spend their money - not waste their
time.
[Ed.
Note: David Cross is Senior Internet Consultant to Agora Publishing
in Baltimore.]
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Is
Chocolate Your Guilty Pleasure?
By
Al Sears, MD
I
don't lift weights much, but I do walk to the gym across from
my office to meet with the trainers. On the back wall, their
head shots are posted, along with some personal information
about each of them that was gathered with a questionnaire.
One of the questions was "What's your favorite guilty
pleasure?" And many of them - including nearly all the
female trainers - answered "Chocolate."
This
is the time of year when it's hard not to indulge in our guilty
food pleasures - but it's a mistake to consider chocolate to
be one of them. Eating chocolate - in moderation - should not
involve any guilt.
- Harvard
researchers found that a few pieces of chocolate every month
might actually make your life both sweeter and longer. The
researchers studied the chocolate-consuming habits of more
than 7,800 people. Those who ate chocolate one to three times
a month lived longest. Those who indulged three or more times
a week died earlier. But those who ate no chocolate at all
died the earliest ... by up to a year.
- Studies
published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and Nature found
that the polyphenols in dark chocolate help reduce blood
pressure. They also protect your body against oxidative stress.
(Fruits, vegetables, tea, red wine, and cocoa beans also
contain these healthful compounds.)
- Doctors
in Finland found a link between chocolate and cholesterol.
Those who ate regular chocolate saw their HDL (good cholesterol)
levels increase by 11.4 percent. Dark chocolate was even
better, producing a rise of 13.7 percent.
Just
remember that processing strips away many of the healthy compounds
in most chocolate candy. And the candy is almost always loaded
with sugar and chemicals. You can find unadulterated chocolate
at your local nutrition store. Look for 70 percent pure cocoa.
It's a little bitter, but the chocolate flavor is strong and
satisfying.
[Ed.
Note: Dr. Sears, a practicing physician and the author of The
Doctor's Heart Cure and 12
Secrets to Virility, is a leading authority
on longevity, physical fitness, and heart health.]
It's
Good to Know: Cyber Monday
By
Suzanne Richardson
Cyber
Monday - the first Monday after Thanksgiving - is a big day
for online retailers. But it's not as big as you may think.
It's only about the twelfth-biggest online shopping/spending
day of the year.
Shop.org,
an association of online retailers, created the term "Cyber
Monday" in November of 2005 to describe the jump in online
sales on that day. As a marketing tactic, it's helped some
online stores make sales. (They've run special "Cyber
Monday" sales to draw in customers.) But next Monday won't
come close to reaching the sales numbers for what are REALLY
the busiest shopping days of the year: December 5 through 15.
(Source: Business
Week Online)
* Highly
Recommended *
Start
Making Money Today
Interested
in getting a nice little side-business going on the Internet?
Or maybe even from your living-room table?
But
you don’t have too much money, you don’t have too
much time, and you’re not exactly Bill Gates when it
comes to technology. Sound familiar?
A
lot of people are in the same boat. The good news is that ETR
has heard you. And now we’ve done something about it...
We’ve
asked our colleague Marc Charles to be on the lookout for profit
opportunities that can be run from a kitchen table, your desktop
or out on the road.
Criteria?
They’ve got to be inexpensive, easy to start, and still
have great income potential, but without a lot of red tape.
They
say when you’re first getting your feet wet with a side-business,
the most important dollar to make is the first one. Well, Marc
is an expert at taking beginning entrepreneurs and showing
you how to make that first buck. He knows, because he's done
it dozens of times for himself, his family and his friends.
If
you've been dreaming about starting your own business ... now
you can get started for about the price of 2 lattes.
And
get this - you could be making money literally just hours from
now. Imagine the feeling of finally getting a side business
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Why
not go for it?
-
Patrick Coffey
A
Word to Work Into Conversation Thanksgiving Week: Edacious
"Edacious" (ih-DAY-shus)
- from the Latin for "to eat" - relates to voracious
consumption.
Although
the word originally referred to gluttony/overeating, these
days it is usually used in that sense only in a playful or
joking manner. Example (as used by Isaac Taylor in Natural
History of Enthusiasm): "Our ... high-toned irritability,
edacious appetites, and pampered constitutions." It is
much more likely to be linked with time. That's the way the
Scottish writer/historian Thomas Carlyle used it when he wrote
about events "swallowed in the depths of edacious time."
