12 Rules for "Regifting" without Fear

I Just Read This......
12 rules for 'regifting' without fear

If you're going to do it (and it's more common than you think), please update the wrapping -- and remove the old gift card.
There are only three reasons you might be reading this column:
You think "regifting" is totally tacky, but you secretly hope there might be a polite way to get rid of that hideous scarf your Aunt Edna gave you.
You're a chronic regifter and you need some new ideas to get you through the holidays.
You've never heard of regifting. Really. You're just curious.
Welcome, one and all, to a frank discussion of a grand old holiday tradition we all practice and pretend we don't. (That includes you fibbers who picked No. 3!) Even Peggy Post, etiquette advice columnist for Good Housekeeping, admits she's done it.
"I was given two copies of a book, and I gave a copy to my mother-in-law," reports the author of the new 17th edition of "Emily Post's Etiquette." "(I) just said, 'Hey, I got two copies of this book. Would you like one?'"
The fine art of regifting
Like Post (who is the granddaughter-in-law of etiquette czarina Emily), I have no qualms about regifting when done properly. Carried out carelessly, regifting is a recipe for public humiliation and long-held grudges. Done with finesse and tact, regifting can be a happy holiday experience for all -- providing you follow these few do's and don'ts. Starting with: DO take out the previous gift card. Duh.
A dozen rules for regifters:
Don't mention it, please. While Post believes that "the best approach is to be upfront" when regifting, I have to ask: Why spoil the moment? If you tell your sister-in-law, in so many words, "I have no use for this nasty vase, so I'm giving it to you," even a person in need of a vase will hate you. I say, keep your yap shut unless there's a good reason not to.
Do update the wrapping. The next most common regifting faux pas, after leaving the previous gift card attached, is to regift in the original, now crinkled and possibly torn (hello!?) wrapping paper or box. If the phrase "Hey, it looks almost new" crosses your desperate holiday brain, remember that it's the "almost" that's a dead giveaway to the new giftee.
Don't give hand-me-downs as regifts. Novice regifters (and those who are terminally tacky) often get these two categories confused. Don't. A hand-me-down is an item you've already used that you'd like to pass along to someone who will enjoy it and use it more than you will. For example, a sweater you've removed the tags from and worn twice. You could wrap it up and give it as a "gift" only as long as another real gift is provided. A regift should be just that: a gift you've never used that you're giving away as though it were a . . . real gift!
Do keep track of who gave it to you first. In her useful article on this topic, Joyce Moseley Pierce recommends creating a stash of regifting items you can always use in a pinch. I say, OK, but keep a small notebook of who gave you what. I had a harrowing experience that involved regifting a pair of earrings to a cousin -- who had given them to me two years before. I forgot. She remembered. And she let me know about it.
Don't EVER regift these items. Certain items are a total, dead, instant giveaway that you are not only regifting, but you're too lame to put any effort into it: candles, soap, random books, mysterious CDs (unless your brother wants the hip-hop version of "Man of La Mancha"), obscure software, cheesy jewelry, scarves (do we not all own a scarf?), fruitcake, pens, cologne, boxed sets of extinct bath products (Jean Nate? No, no, no), videos or DVDs obviously acquired on a street corner, socks and any appliances or electronic gear the giftee would be puzzled to receive because they probably just got rid of it (including hot-air popcorn poppers and anything with a cassette deck in it).
Do have the courtesy to clean your regifts. I once got a rice cooker . . . with a couple of kernels of rice still clinging to it. Some hand-me-downs can be passed off as regifts if the packaging is intact, like the wine glasses you've belatedly decided to share with a loved one. Just wash the lipstick off the rim, 'kay?
Don't give partially used gift cards. As technology pushes the envelope of regifting possibilities, the chance of looking like a ninny only grows. Don't give a $25 gift card to Barnes & Noble that only has $14.56 left on it. Would you give a pie with a slice taken out of it? We hope not.
Do remember that regifts can be funny. A friend of mine said that when he was younger, he and his sister would jokingly regift the same two board games back and forth to each other. If you think a friend would get a good laugh out of, say, a regifted self-help book, go for it -- as long as you make the prank clear.
Don't give something you've owned for a while. Not only is this in violation of the hand-me-down rule above, the giftee can and will recognize that picture frame from your living room shelf. (And while you're at it, don't regift picture frames, either.)
Do regift champagne. You know the joke about fruitcake: There are only two fruitcakes made each year, and we just keep foisting them off on each other. The same is true of the 11 bottles of champagne that circulate during the holidays. But there are never hard feelings from regifting a bottle of bubbly, unless it's really cheap or given to a confirmed teetotaler. Eventually it will find a happy, champagne-guzzling home.
Don't give products from defunct companies. Someone gave to my husband and me a lovely crystal decanter from a department store that no longer exists. The decanter is a classic. It was just a little depressing to think it had been in someone's closet for that long.
Do sell your gifts on eBay. When someone first told me that rather than regift, they sell unwanted presents on eBay -- and use the proceeds to buy real gifts, I was awed. Then I realized everyone is doing it. "My father gave my brother a boxed set of Kurosawa films, which my brother promptly sold for a pretty penny on eBay," one woman told me. So THAT'S where all that stuff comes from.
Well, it's about time for you and me to start rewrapping some of last year's presents, eh? But before you go, let me add that whether you find this column cynical, shocking or brimming with useful ideas -- it's just the natural next step for an over-gifted society. Ever since the term "regifting" was introduced on "Seinfeld" in 1995 (see a snippet of the script), what was once a dirty little secret has become a way of life, and not a bad way to save money.
Of course, it's only a matter of time before someone does to regifting what eBay did with online auctions. Last year, one William Dodd obtained a patent on a new regifting technology that lets you regift something before you've even received it. (I'm not making this up!) Soon, that scarf you bought online for Jane could be virtually regifted via e-mail. ("Happy Holidays, Jane -- Vera has sent you this lovely scarf"). Then Jane will either accept it or instantly regift it.
The only hitch is that a gift, unlike fruitcake, can't circulate forever. It's like the children's game Hot Potato: When time runs out, the loser has to keep the present.

Mark is the Chief Sales Officer of SCT Product Sales.
http://www.simplyusedphones.com/sitemap.html
We have been in business 15 years, online for 8 & a Power Seller
on eBay for 4 years with annual eBay sales of $1,000,000.
Email: myoung@socaltel.com.

Word of Mouth Advertising

I just read this.....I am a marketing guy so I will always post numerous articles about marketing. Below is a another one by Dan Kennedy.

Who is the Easiest Customer?

On this strategy we're going to talk about one of the most exciting marketing strategies of all, stimulating word-of-mouth advertising. Word-of-mouth advertising is the most powerful, effective type of advertising there is but it's the only kind you can't just buy by the page or by the minute. It has to be created, stimulated and nurtured with truly creative techniques.
Most businesses take whatever word-of-mouth advertising they get but I'm here to tell you that you can exert a considerable degree of control over this type of advertising and marketing.
The reason that word-of-mouth advertising is so valuable is simple. Nothing you could ever say about you, no matter how well you say it, can have as much impact and credibility as something a disinterested third party says about you. Also there are some things you simply can't say graciously about yourself that others can say.

Artificial word-of-mouth advertising is still the most effective form of TV commercial. It's called 'Slice of Life' and you're very familiar with it. It shows a scene with one ordinary person telling a friend or associate how good a product is. Laundry soap, personal computers and hundreds of other products and services are still sold this way.

Far better though is real word-of-mouth advertising and there is a single, basic secret to stimulating a high rate of word-of-mouth advertising that I'll reveal on your next Success Marketing Strategy that you'll receive in just a couple of days. ---Dan Kennedy


Mark is the Chief Sales Officer of SCT Product Sales.
http://www.simplyusedphones.com/sitemap.html
We have been in business 15 years, online for 8 & a Power Seller
on eBay for 4 years with annual eBay sales of $1,000,000.
Email: myoung@socaltel.com.

Focus or Multiple Streams of Income

I just read this......This is really true at times I feel torn on what to do next, there is so much opportunity. This helped me, see what you think.....

Give your ideas a life of their own. If an idea is worth thinking about again, it's worth capturing what you've got so far and giving it a place to live and grow. Every time I have something I think is a really good idea, I buy an $8.95 domain from GoDaddy, set up a year of hosting for $10 at Discount Hosting, and throw together a simple web page using either PostNuke or a free template for either FrontPage or Dreamweaver. For less than $20, I have a place for my idea to start taking life, and for me to communicate my idea effectively to prospective collaborators and customers. If you're not as web-inclined, just jot down your thoughts about the subject and create a separate file folder for it, either in your computer or a manual file. Any time you have something to add, you've got the right place for it. Sooner or later, the good ideas will truly start having a life of their own, and you can say good-bye to those regrets about forgotten great ideas.

Make a schedule... You'll drive yourself and the people around you crazy if you just flit back and forth from one project to another (which is all too easy a pattern to slip into). As Stephen Covey says, don't prioritize your schedule, schedule your priorities. The only way to ensure that you are really focusing on the next most important thing is to put it into your schedule - otherwise all those things that are urgent but not important will keep you from doing the things that are important but not urgent, and even sometimes the things that are important and urgent. If you want to focus, you have to give yourself time to focus, free from other distractions, and knowing in your mind that that's how you're supposed to be spending that time.
...and then break it. Circumstances change. Priorities change. And change is cheap if you make it that way. Agility and flexibility are a couple of the great advantages entrepreneurs have over larger organizations. Many opportunities come up that are time-sensitive, and if you're locked into an artificially rigid schedule, you'll miss them. The trick is to know the difference between a time-sensitive opportunity and a mere distraction. Perhaps we need a new serenity prayer for entrepreneurs: "Grant me the serenity to say no to the requests that are mere distractions, the courage to act on the ones that are truly opportunities, and the wisdom to the know the difference."


Know the difference between maintenance work and growth work. There's no such thing as truly passive income. At the very least, you have to collect your check and deposit it, right? Most "passive" income still requires a certain amount of maintenance work. Rental property has to be managed, websites have to be kept up-to-date, etc. Maintenance work has to be done on a regular basis, usually weekly or monthly, and there are detrimental consequences if you don't get it done. Growth work, on the other hand, doesn't have anyone waiting on it but you. Make sure you know how much maintenance work your various projects require so you know how much time you really have for growth projects.

Work only one growth project at a time, and work on it 'til it's working for you. This one is above all the unique key to making this paradox work that most people don't know and don't do. There is absolutely no sense in spending a few hours a week on each of several projects keeping them all inching forward little by little. The trick to both finding focus and making multiple channelsrt of income is to work on one thing at a time, and work on it until it is at the next plateau. If a project is first starting out, do whatever it takes to get it to the point that it has a life of its own. That may mean just getting it to the point that you can share it with potential collaborators or customers, or it may mean getting it to the point that it can start to generate income. Once a project has started earning revenue, let it work for you passively while you work on something else. Think about it - if you're working on four one-week projects, do you went to finish them all simultaneously at the end of four weeks? Of course not! You want to finish one the first week and let it work for you for three weeks, finish another the second week and let it work for you for two weeks, etc. Doing it this way, you get your projects working for you for six extra weeks vs. the other approach!

Mark is the Chief Sales Officer of SCT Product Sales.
http://www.simplyusedphones.com/sitemap.html
We have been in business 15 years, online for 8 & a Power Seller
on eBay for 4 years with annual eBay sales of $1,000,000.
Email: myoung@socaltel.com.

6 Suggestions for gift giving at work

I just read this......Here are six suggestions for gift-giving at work without putting people on the spot or breaking team camaraderie:

Keep it voluntary. Opting out of office gift-giving games should be free of consequences, Boggs said. "You have to be cognizant of people's feelings and the holidays they celebrate and be respectful of that. If someone doesn't want to be involved you shouldn't make them feel horrible about not being involved."

Weigh a gift to the boss carefully, since others may perceive it as inappropriate or an attempt to curry favor. "A way around that is to chip in and give a group gift," Brown-Volkman said. "If it's a department gift it has to come from the department. It's an entire group so no one's left out."

The objective is to strive always to be seen as fair, she said. "From a company standpoint it's OK for the boss or employer to give you something. But if it's the other way around, you don't know how you will be seen. The group covers you and also makes you look good."

Be mindful of income differences and financial pressures when soliciting group gifts. Let everyone in the working group sign the card, regardless of their ability to contribute to the cost of the gift, Boggs said. "You have to be careful not to be exclusive of the people who can't afford it," she said. "It turns a good thing into something potentially bad." Some in the office may be struggling to pay off student loans or credit-card debt, or may have greater family responsibilities than others. "People who live paycheck to paycheck or feel like people are pitying them or doing it for reasons other than what they're doing it for, that's when the issues come up."

Don't present a gift to someone you don't know well just because it's the holiday season. "Don't wait until that day or it may come across the wrong way," Brown-Volkman said. "It's a celebration of the great working relationship all year.

Gifts among peers are best exchanged off site and after hours to avoid anyone feeling excluded. "Go to lunch with them, have a cup of coffee in the morning with them before work starts," Boggs said. "Take it off site. Make it a nonwork issue."

What if you receive an unforeseen gift? Do you reciprocate? "I think you could," Brown-Volkman said. "It's OK for your peers. It's just when you go to the boss -- sometimes that could be construed as favoritism." Also consider power and gender differences, Boggs said. "When you have a female supervisor and a male employee or a male supervisor and a female employee, you always run the risk of things being taken out of context or taken wrong. You have to be really careful."

Merry Christmas

Mark

Mark is the Chief Sales Officer of SCT Product Sales. http://www.simplyusedphones.com/index.html.
We have been in business 15 years, online for 8 & a Power Seller
on eBay for 4 years with selling over $1,000,000 in sales from eBay annually.
Email@ myoung@socaltel.com.

eBay as a Marketing Tool

I just read this.......

eBay as a Marketing Tool??

I can hear you now…
“eBay? Why should I care about eBay? I don’t really
want to start selling crap out of my garage!”
Yes, eBay (www.eBay.com)!
And no, you’re not going to have to start an eBay
business out of your garage, unless you want to, of
course.
Too many people see eBay as just one giant, online
flea market that beginners take advantage of to get
their feet wet with making money online, which is
definitely a powerful strategy, but it’s definitely not
for everybody.
What people DON’T understand about eBay is that
it can also be a resource that potentially leads to
huge profits for their “regular” online businesses.

With so many different items and services being
sold on eBay, any business can benefit from the data
that can be gathered by researching their site.
Now, before you say, “Ahh… I don’t need to use
eBay”.

Just review their hot products for latest trends, it doesn’t matter what your
business model is you will find marketing ideas and products for
your business to sell.

Mark

http://www.simplyusedphones.com/index.html.

The Unsung Hero of the Business World

I just read this.... from Derek Gehel of the Internet Marketing Center

1) "Why the Best Internet Marketing Strategies Are Flat-out-----Useless Without This Unsung Hero of the Business World" ========================================================

Even if you master each and every one of the best Internet marketing strategies out there -- sales copywriting, search engine optimization, email marketing, and the rest -- they're notworth a dime if you forget about customer service. It's a strategy that every truly successful business knows about and pays careful attention to... because the one thing ALL successful businesses have in common is customers. Satisfied customers.

Over the next few days during the holidays I will have more comment on this subject. This is something our company thrives on have been able to go from start up to $3,000,000 in sales in less than 3 years.

Mark

http://www.simplyusedphones.com/sitemap.html

Jocks remembered for the wrong reasons

I just read this.....From Fox Sports.....

As the theme from Cheers states, we all want to go where everybody knows our name. Sometimes, though, people might recognize your name for the wrong reasons.

Professional athletes are often remembered as icons, heroes and superstars. But off-field transgressions, such as run-ins with the law or other scandals, can sully a career a la O.J. Simpson or Pete Rose.
Off-field episodes can ruin a rosy recollection just as quickly as an on-field mishap. An infamous blunder or an ill-timed mistake can overshadow a successful career and quickly morph that positive memory into a negative one.

Here's a list of 10 athletes who flubbed on the field and would like to get to a place where everybody doesn't know their name.

http://msn.foxsports.com/other/story/6168836?FSO1&ATT=HCP&GT1=8807

Mark

http://www.simplyusedphones.com/sitemap.html

The Influentials

I just read this.....The Influentials by Ed Keller and Jon Berry is similar to Malcolm Gladden's book The Tipping Point. I liked the book for the focus on the trends this group is creating and the six rules for reaching them.


THE SUMMARY IN BRIEF
Who are they? They are the most influential Americans — the ones who
tell their neighbors what to buy, which politician to support and where to
vacation. They aren’t necessarily who you expect. They aren’t the richest 10
percent or the best educated 10 percent. They aren’t the early adopters who
are always the first to try everything. They are, however, the 10 percent of
Americans most engaged in their communities — where they wield a huge
amount of influence. They’re the campaigners for open-space initiatives and
friends of the public library. They’re the Influentials. Together they are the
best marketing tool around — using word of mouth to create spirals of
influence. With word of mouth increasingly important, they’ve never been
more powerful than now. Today, a fragmented market has made it possible
for Influentials to opt-out of mass-message advertising, which means that
you must take a different route to reach them.


What You’ll Learn In This Summary
This summary will help you reach the Influentials by:
✓ Showing you who the Influentials are and where they live and work.
✓ Giving you a sense of the Influential personality so you understand
what’s important to them and why they’re so important to you.
✓ Showing you how Influentials get ideas and more importantly, how they
spread them. If you can reach an Influential, he or she can create a powerful
word of mouth influence spiral that spreads the message about your product
or service far beyond the individual.
✓ Explaining why we’re in an age of autonomy and self-reliance and what
this means to you and your products and services. You will also learn what
seven trends Influentials indicate will guide the marketing future in the next
few decades.
Finally, you will discover the six rules for reaching Influentials and getting
them on board.

Mark


http://www.simplyusedphones.com/sitemap.html

eBay as a Marketing Tool

I just read this.....from John Reese.

I can hear you now…
“eBay? Why should I care about eBay? I don’t really
want to start selling crap out of my garage!”
Yes, eBay.....
And no, you’re not going to have to start an eBay
business out of your garage, unless you want to, of
course.
Too many people see eBay as just one giant, online
flea market that beginners take advantage of to get
their feet wet with making money online, which is
definitely a powerful strategy, but it’s definitely not
for everybody.
What people DON’T understand about eBay is that
it can also be a resource that potentially leads to
huge profits for their “regular” online businesses.
The truth is that when it comes to following the two
“Reese Rules” laid out for you above, determining
how the most successful products and services are
effectively being sold online, eBay is the ultimate
research tool.
With so many different items and services being
sold on eBay, any business can benefit from the data
that can be gathered by researching their site.
Now, before you say, “Ahh… I don’t need to use
eBay”, I want you to make me a promise and at
least check out what lies ahead within the pages of
this month’s newsletter and accompanying CDROM.
I guarantee you that regardless of your business
model, whether you create VRE sites, sell your own
infoproducts or physical products, promote affiliate
programs, sell web-based services or consulting
services, or whatever, you will discover at least a
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eBay - The Ultimate
Research Tool!
few tips that could potentially send your profits
skyrocketing.
‘What’ You Should Be Using eBay For
Keep up with what’s “Hot”
Like I mentioned earlier, you want to determine
which items are successfully being sold online, so
the first thing you can do with eBay is to pay attention
to the most popular items being sold through their
site.
What items are the hottest? What items are people
actively searching for?
By paying close attention to these products, you may
find a product that you want to add to your product
catalog or a new topic that you want to create a VRE
site for.
I’ll be discussing some resources within this issue
that will make this whole process a piece of cake.
Discover new VRE markets
If you’re setting up sites to make commissions from
AdSense or affiliate products, or even if you’re just
setting up sites to generate leads for your other web
sites, eBay is a goldmine for finding VRE markets.
Find new marketing methods
eBay marketers are very savvy, and you can learn a
lot by paying attention to how they are marketing
their items.
You may find that they use specific copy techniques
that you might want to test in your business, maybe
they’ve found a great way to incorporate audio or
video into their sales process, or what have you.
I’ve found many techniques that eBay marketers
have used that would be great strategies to test outside
of eBay, on a typical online business’ web site, within
their autoresponder sequences, on their blogs, and
so on.
Use it for driving traffic to your sites
Most people don’t know that there are a number of
great ways to generate traffic from eBay.
One of the ways that people have used to drive traffic
to their sites was by setting up their “About Me”
pages to point to their sites.
The “About Me” page is a page you can set up within
your eBay account that you can use to share various
bits of information with people who visit your listings,
including personal information about yourself, links
to favorite web sites, and so on.
Another benefit of setting up your “About Me” page
with a link to your web sites was that these links
could possibly generate traffic as a result of link
popularity with the search engines.
This was about the only way to get people to visit
your web sites because eBay’s policy has been that
you can’t directly link to a site from your eBay
listings unless that site was critical to the success of
your particular listing.
However, their policies change all the time, so you’ll
definitely want to keep up to date on their current
policies to see how you can promote your web sites
without breaking eBay’s rules.
A popular method that people are using to generate
tons of traffic for their sites with eBay these days is
by creating their own “eBay Store”.
An eBay store allows people to basically set up shop
online with their own store, and these pages within
their eBay store can get indexed by the search engines.
You can also link to your other web sites from the
pages of your eBay store, but again, check with
eBay’s policies to make sure you are properly
benefiting from every advantage you’re entitled to
in regards to driving traffic to your other web sites.
Another strategy that people have been extremely
successful with involves selling reports on eBay for
as low as a penny, and letting these reports do the
work of driving traffic to their web sites.
Of course, there are other gray areas that would
allow you to generate some dirt cheap leads from
your eBay listings that you can discover by simply
doing your own research there to see what other
marketers are doing to get people to their sites.
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Note: Later in this issue, I’ll be revealing a powerful
strategy that will allow you to pay for traffic on a
PPC basis through eBay, and get this traffic a whole
lot cheaper than it would cost you with Google
AdWords.
The best part is that eBay traffic is more qualified,
a lot of the time, because there are more buyers
prevalent on eBay than on Google, or any other
search engine where people search primarily for free
information.
Uncover profitable keywords
By using eBay for conducting your research, you
can discover keywords that may be beneficial to you
in your marketing efforts that you may have not
previously considered.
Whether you are reviewing regular eBay listings or
checking out someone’s eBay store, you should be
able to find tons of keywords that you can use for
your business.
In addition to what you see at eBay, when you access
someone’s web site by following the marketing
process that a particular marketer used in his eBay
listings or store, you may discover keyword ideas
for your business by researching that marketers
regular web site, itself.
Find partners
eBay is a great place to cultivate partners for your
online business!
Let’s say you create your own infoproducts and
you’re looking for joint venture partners to help get
the word out about your products.
If you sell an ebook on gardening, for example, you
could go to eBay and find people who are selling
gardening tools online, make contact with them, and
let them know about your ebook.
Let these people know that you will pay them $10
for any sales that they refer, showing them how they
can simply set up a little promotion of the ebook
within the email that goes out to anyone who buys
their stuff.
Another option would be for them to include a little
flyer or brochure that you could agree to create for
them that can be inserted into the packages they
send out to their customers, allowing them to earn
commissions from any sales resulting from these
backend offers.
It could be as simple as a single sheet of paper that
has a great headline, a brief description of the ebook,
a few bullet points, and even a testimonial.
You could even set each partner up with their own
domain name that redirects to their affiliate link.
The point is that you want to make your potential
partners feel like they have nothing to lose - money
or time - by allowing you to completely set them up
to start making money by promoting your product.
Keep in mind that many eBay sellers make just a
little profit per sale, so they often have to make a
large number of sales in order to earn a substantial
income.
Therefore, if you come to them with a no-brainer
offer, you could have an entire army of eBay sellers
marketing your ebook for you… and earning
themselves a nice backend commission for doing
so.
So now that you know about the power of using
eBay as a research tool for your online business,
you’re probably wondering if you’re going to have
to go to eBay and search listing after listing, and
category after category to find new ideas for products,
VRE sites, keywords, and so on, right?
Well, if I was going to create a video that takes you
through all of the various markets to conduct our
research, it would be multiple hours in length, and
you simply can’t afford to spend that much time
conducting your own research.
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eBay Tools!
Besides, by the time you accumulated all of the data
from this time intensive research, it would be
outdated. There would be new listings that will have
taken the place of these original listings, with new
items that are now the hottest sellers, and so on.
So, if it doesn’t make sense for us to spend all of
this time to conduct our research by browsing around
the listings on eBay, what should we do, you ask?
Hot Item Finder (hotitemfinder.com)
How would you like a tool that eliminates the need
to spend hours on eBay, quickly generates lists of
the hottest items on eBay, searches all of the popular
search terms within each eBay category, and provides
a list of the total number of items listed in each
category?
Well, “Hot Item Finder” is a tool that you simply
must buy if you are seriously looking to use eBay
for conducting market research for your Internet
business, and save TONS of time in the process.
I’ve created a detailed tutorial that shows you how
to use this piece of software, and you can find it on
this month’s companion CD-ROM, but I’ll do my
best to describe its functionality within this newsletter,
as well.
Once you’ve downloaded your copy of this software,
the first thing you’ll want to do is click on the “Item
Search” tab, enter a term that you want to have
searched for on eBay, and click the “Search eBay”
button.
Once the software completes its search, click on the
“Hot Item List” tab, and you’ll be presented with all
of the eBay listings that contain 20 or more bids for
that particular search phrase, representing the listings
which effectively generated a lot of interest.
The items being sold within these listings are some
of the hottest items available in those markets, and
you can use this data to develop new product or VRE
site ideas.
You’ll not only see the number of bids each listing
has received, but the software also shows how much
time is left for each listing on eBay, what the highest
bid amount is for each of the listings, as well as the
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actual title of the listing which is conveniently
hyperlinked to the actual listing on eBay.
The powerful takeaway that I want you to remember
is that when searching for topics related to your
particular business, you will not only be able to tell
which items are the most popular, but you can dissect
each of the popular listings to see what copy they
used in their titles and descriptions, to find potential
keywords you may have overlooked, to see how they
are using eBay to generate traffic to their main web
sites, and so on.
By doing one search with this tool, you could spend
an hour taking notes on the techniques and strategies
of several eBay marketers who are successfully
attracting bids for their items, and turn those notes
into an action plan to implement in your own business.
What would normally take hours to compile, you
are now able to do in a fraction of the time by using
the Hot Item Finder tool.
By clicking on the “Analysis” tab and then the
“Category Analysis” button, you can determine how
many items are listed within each category, as well
as how many items are listed in each of the
subcategories.
You can also determine what the most commonly
searched for terms are on eBay by clicking on the
“Popular Searches” button within the “Analysis”
tab.
You can even click on a particular category within
this section and find the most popular search terms
for that particular category. For example, by clicking
on coins, you may find that silver is the most popular
search term.
What this all means for you is that if you are looking
for product ideas, you can use this tool to determine
what people are actively searching for online, and
if you locate a market that shows potential, you can
decide to create your own product around that market,
a VRE site, or whatever.
Now, keep in mind that, although you can retrieve
this data for many of their categories, eBay does not
release all of their data for every category.
However, there’s plenty of data for you to be able
to develop ideas for new products, discover effective
methods for promoting your products or web sites,
and so on.
You can also discover the most popular products
within these categories by clicking on the “Popular
Products” tab and selecting the category you’re
interested in.
For example, you can discover within seconds that
“The Little Mermaid” (1999) is the most popular
product listed in the DVD category.
You can also determine which products are the most
popular on eBay overall, which at the time of this
issue’s creation, happened to also be “The Little
Mermaid” DVD.
There’s also a keyword research tool. By clicking
on the “Keyword Search” button, you can generate
a keyword list in much the same way as regular
keyword generation tools do, but whereas the results
from those tools might contain searches for
information, tutorials, and so on, the keywords
generated with this tool are more product oriented
because people on eBay search for things to buy.
It’s definitely worth running some searches with this
keyword tool to see if you can come up with
additional keywords for your other marketing
campaigns.
Another great way to determine what the hottest
products are on eBay is by clicking on the “Most
Watched” button to find out which items people are
adding to their “Watched Items” list within their
eBay accounts the most.
When a user finds an item that they are considering
placing a bid on, they have the option of adding that
item to their “Watched Items” list so they can go
back to it easily the next time they access their
account.
Finally, because this powerful piece of software has
so many functions, it’s impossible for me to
thoroughly teach you how to use it within one issue
of “The Reese Report”.
Therefore, I highly recommend that you invest in
your own copy of this software, and take the time
to learn how you can use it to quickly find new
product
ideas, VRE site ideas, and other pertinent data for
your online business.
eBay Keywords (ebaykeywords.com)
Earlier in this issue, I mentioned that I would be
sharing a powerful strategy with you that allows you
to get highly targeted PPC traffic via eBay at a
fraction of the cost of promoting via Google Adwords.
Congratulations to The Reese Report subscriber,
Scott Reichel, for recommending “adMarketplace
Keywords”, which is a service that allows you to
place PPC ads above eBay listings.
By bidding on particular keyword phrases, your ad
appears above the eBay listings whenever someone
searches for those keywords.
Unfortunately, the negative thing about this service
is that you cannot send the traffic from these ads
directly to a web site.
Although that would be the ideal strategy, what you
can do, instead, is send the traffic to your current
eBay listings or eBay store, which will then do the
job of strategically funneling that traffic to your
regular web sites.
Besides, if you’re promoting physical items in your
eBay store, using this PPC strategy should be one
of the traffic generation methods that would definitely
be worth testing.
By using the Keyword Suggestion Tool within this
program, you can not only generate a list of keywords
that you might consider using for your PPC campaign,
you can see what the maximum bid cost currently
is for each of those keywords, allowing you to quickly
decide whether it’s worth paying to have your ads
appear for certain keywords.
Also, by clicking on the “View” link for a particular
keyword, you can get a detailed look at who your
competition is for that keyword, what their ads look
like, what they’re paying to list their ads with this
service, and so on.
One thing I want you to understand is that with click
costs in the low teens for many of the search
6
terms you could be purchasing, if you are promoting
any type of physical product at all, you are absolutely
out of your mind if you haven’t set up an eBay store
that you can inexpensively send highly targeted
traffic to with this service.
Remember, you can then turn around and funnel the
traffic you receive at your eBay store to your main
web sites.
By using this technique, you may find that your eBay
ad campaigns are resulting in much higher returns
than your Google AdWords campaigns.
Now, here’s what’s truly powerful for you even if
you don’t have an eBay store or sell physical products
of any kind.
If you have an infoproduct, you can research the
various competitors for certain keyword combinations
that are related to your market, and find hundreds
of possible joint venture partners who might be
willing to promote your infoproduct to their customers
on the backend.
Just because you may not have an eBay store doesn’t
mean you can’t take full advantage of what this
service has to offer.
I hope, by now, that you realize that eBay is more
than just place to sell unwanted junk that’s been
clogging up your basement, garage, or attic for
several years.
It’s a powerful research tool that every Internet
marketer seriously needs to use in order to develop
new product ideas, web site ideas, and untapped
marketing strategies.
By using the tools mentioned above, you can create
a successful marketing game plan within a fraction
of the time that it would normally take for you to
physically search throughout the thousands of eBay
listings within your particular niche, looking for
product and marketing ideas.

http://www.simplyusedphones.com/sitemap.html

John D. Rockefeller's Secret

I just read this.....Another great article from Bob Parsons of GoDaddy.com

The secret John D. Rockefeller used to build Standard Oil. It’s simple. Putting it to work in your business.
Here is one of the most popular articles that has ever appeared on this GoDaddys' blog. Given the timeless value of Mr. Rockerfeller's secret and the number of businesses I encounter that could benefit from putting it to work, I thought it might be worth while to re-publish it again.Everything that is watched improves.

One thing I learned early in my business career is that anything of significance that is measured and watched, improves. John D. Rockefeller knew the importance of business intelligence.Back before I started Parsons Technology I became impressed with something I read about John D. Rockefeller. In fact, I still think about it and use it to this very day. I learned that Mr. Rockefeller was one of the few people in his industry (perhaps the only one) who knew exactly how much it cost to extract, refine and deliver a barrel of oil.

In fact, he was entirely aware of all his costs. Knowing this information (and acting on it) gave him a huge competitive advantage. He knew how much he could price a barrel of oil for and still turn a profit. He was always keenly aware of each area of revenue, cost and market share, and he worked on improving in every area. As a result, he did cost saving things like manufacture his own oil barrels, have his own cartage company, and on and on.

He eventually managed his way to where he could sell a barrel of oil, with impeccable customer service, and turn a profit at a price less than what it cost his competitors to deliver the very same product. By paying close attention to the things that mattered, Mr. Rockefeller made his Standard Oil Company so successful that he became the wealthiest man in the world!

I measured everything significant at Parsons Technology. So when I started Parsons Technology, I began the habit of measuring everything that I felt was significant on a daily basis. I did this with unit sales cross referenced by the print advertising I purchased and direct mailings that I did throughout the month.


I worked to sharpen profits every day.
When I sold Parsons Technology, the company was snail mailing anywhere from 6 to 8 million offers each and every month. Because our monthly investment in printing, postage, and fulfillment systems was huge, it became imperative that we knew where we stood at all times. We developed a system that allowed us to project the success (or failure) with reasonable certainty of any mailing, after receiving just a few days of results. If the mailings appeared to be successful we planned more of them, and if the opposite was the case, we immediately cancelled anything similar we had in the works.

This allowed us to sharpen our profitability each and every day. Also because we watched and constantly worked on improving each aspect of the cost of doing direct mail, our costs were just a fraction (often less than 50%) of what it costs our competitors to do the very same thing.

While our direct mail and advertising tracking systems at Parsons Technology became very sophisticated, they were very similar to the systems I developed and used much earlier when it was just my then wife and I trying to make the company succeed.

My staff and I try to watch everything important at Go Daddy.
I use the “measure and watch everything of significance” rule at The Go Daddy Group. We prepare a detailed daily profit and loss snapshot, of the prior day’s business, for each of our operating companies and for each of our significant products. We make major business decisions daily and do so as soon as the information appears (which may be only a few hours old) to warrant key decisions. To quote an overused cliché, “We are able to turn on a dime.”

Real-time information about your business is critical.
Real-time information that actually gets used is particularly helpful when launching a new product. It’s extremely handy for finding the right advertising and positioning that maximizes any new product’s sales.

But the benefits don’t stop there.
Current information can also provide an incredibly effective early warning system that lets you know if there is a problem that needs immediate attention.Traditional financial reporting doesn’t cut it.Traditional financial reporting is done monthly. In many businesses that’s when you’ll see the only financial statements showing how the company performed. Often these monthly “financials” are produced by the accounting department sometimes a few days after the end of the month, and often times much, much later. By the time the people in charge get their hands on this information and are able to digest it, small problems have become large problems, and many an opportunity is long gone.

You need to know how you’re doing on a daily basis.
I think business, particularly in today’s age of the internet, needs to be managed on a daily basis. On an overall basis, knowing how each key part of my business did the prior day tells me where I should focus my time. I also use other statistics which I get real-time to pinpoint opportunities and problems.

Old news has little value.
As you might already guess, one of the big points I’m trying to make here is that for business information to have any real value, it has to be current, and ideally real-time. Beyond that, someone needs to be paying attention to it, thinking about it, and making an effort to improve upon it.


You can start building your business intelligence systems in small steps.
There used to be a time, before the computers and the problem solving software we use (like spreadsheets, databases, etc.) today, when knowing how your business stood on a daily basis was quite a challenge (of course that didn’t get in the way of John D. Rockefeller). With the tools we have today, there is no reason why every company doesn’t have this type of information. If you don’t have daily performance information at your company, you can’t make it appear all at once. What you can do is to implement your information systems in small steps and improve them daily.

Start with the stuff that really counts.
Then as the ideas flow (and flow they will) build upon your systems. Before you know it, you’ll be in control like never before and you’ll marvel at your systems. The point is to get started. That’s how it’s always worked for me.My rule even helps me stay in shape.Measuring everything doesn’t just help with business systems.

I also use this rule to help keep me in reasonable shape. I don’t track much but I track enough to keep me working out and building physical strength. Every time I work out, I keep track of the day, how many minutes of cardio exercise I’ve done and how many calories I think I’ve burned. I also track how many push ups I do. Just seeing this information (I keep it on a spreadsheet on my laptop) let’s me know if I’ve been lagging, and when I notice that I've been falling behind, I do something about it. This simple little system works well for me. In fact, I can tell you how often I’ve worked out every week for the past three years.---Bob Parsons


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Sales Leads on Auto Pilot

I just read this......From Perry Marshall

Sales Leads on Auto Pilot
A true marketing and publicity system delivers a predictable number of quality sales leads to you every day, month after month, year after year, so your salespeople only spend time with people who already understand what you do and who have proactively asked you to help them solve their problem.
Our entire modern world is only possible because we can automate many things. If new cars were assembled by hand instead of machines, they would cost $100,000 instead of $20,000. If we used Pony Express to deliver mail, each letter you send would cost $100 instead of 37 cents.
Just as manufacturing in developed countries must be automated, similarly no sales person can effectively compete in the 21st century unless automated marketing tools are doing the most unpleasant and inefficient grunt work for him.
A finely-tuned marketing system is automated. It's like a machine used in manufacturing: If you power it up and put raw material in one end, it produces qualified results - prospects - on the other end, predictably and reliably, around the clock. Every day when you walk into the office you know it will produce new potential customer relationships for you to cultivate.
A Website Can Sell on Autopilot: 24/7/365
One of my most interesting successes was creating a web page that sold a product on the Internet. It was a four page sales letter that used those time-tested marketing formulas to move my customer from mere casual interest all the way to typing in their credit card information and ordering the product online. There was no phone number where they could call and ask for more information, and no email address. The website had to do all the work by itself.
That web page has hardly been changed in three years, and it is still successfully selling that product to one out of every twenty-five visitors. It literally runs like clockwork, a selling machine that works on autopilot. You can't do much better than that, can you? The product and the website together are like an annuity that works for me 24/7/365 and puts money in my bank account month after month with 55% gross profit - all with no maintenance and no annoying phone calls.
Wouldn't you like your business to run that way? Wouldn't you like your sales process to be a machine that runs on autopilot, constantly generating leads or sales orders whether you're awake or asleep, whether you're in the office or on the golf course?
Sales Leads on Autopilot, 24/7/365
I'm here to tell you that your business CAN run that way. Now please understand, if you sell two million dollar printing presses, nobody's going to order one from your website with their VISA card, as though it were a $12 book on Amazon.com. However, you CAN get lots of quality sales leads for that printing press, the exact same way, if you know how to do it. Make no mistake: Once you have a system like that in place, your life as a sales professional will change for the better - forever. You will NEVER go back to the old way of selling again!
When you have that kind of marketing machine working for you, you'll make more money, have less stress, experience less month-to-month variation in your sales numbers; your sales people will be more motivated, you'll attract reps and resellers and get more mind share from your sales people because they don't have to work nearly as hard to get appointments.
Autopilot: Not a Fantasy, But A Necessity
"Marketing on autopilot" is not some fantasy or theoretical ideal. It is a the cornerstone of literally thousands of businesses and it quite literally is the difference between failure and success for many people. If you look around at all the really successful people you know, they all have systems that work for them when they're playing or working on other projects. Maybe it's their stock portfolio, growing their money year after year. Maybe it's real estate income, maybe it's their employees and the businesses they own. But in any case, they're not using manual labor. If you can make the transition from manual-labor grunt work sales to marketing on autopilot, you've literally built a foundation for business success.
Do you or your sales people spend 50% of their time prospecting for new business? There are millions of sales professionals who spend most of their waking hours doing just that. It's even worse for brand new salespeople, who often spend 80-90% of their time doing prospecting and cold call grunt work.
Believe me, I've done it. And it was tragically wasteful.
What would happen to your commission checks if you could end the never-ending battle with voice mail and eliminate the time wasted getting past gatekeepers and setting up appointments? What if you spent all that time in front of qualified prospects instead? Wouldn't you double your sales and your income?
Convert that wasted prospecting and grunt work time to productive sales time. Generate a steady flow of interested prospects who call you and want you to help them, and make sure your sales people are spending 90% of their time in front of those prospects. You'll make twice as much money and cut your stress level in half!
Eliminate the Stomach Churning Misery of Cold Calls and Rejection
There are several other huge benefits to this, by the way: first, the life of your sales people dramatically changes for the better. The stomach churning rejection and constant stream of no, not interested. not today. call me in three months. you'll have to talk to the purchasing department about that. all that goes away. It's far less tempting to procrastinate when you know that everyone you call on the phone is at least somewhat interested in having your help in solving a problem. It's a lot easier to roll out of bed in the morning when you know that when you get to the office every day, you're going to have a number of hot leads on your desk that have come in via the website, email, fax machine or voice mail, people who understand what you do and are waiting for you to help them solve their problem.
Second, it's easier to attract and keep good sales people, whether they work directly for you or if they're commissioned representatives or resellers.
Now if you sell a cutting edge, high tech product, then despite the fact that it's cool and sexy, it's probably very hard to sell. The world has an overabundance of neat products that nobody feels compelled to use. This forces small, innovative companies to do backbreaking missionary work to sell that neat new product. This is the #1 reason why hi tech companies go out of business - the cost of acquiring new customers is simply too high.
Getting Those "Lazy" Distributors to Go Sell Something
Have you ever tried to get your distributors to sell a bleeding edge "missionary work" type of product? It's like nailing jello to the wall. You can't get a distributor who's making maybe 20% gross profit to stock and promote a product that nobody's eager to buy. It just doesn't make business sense for him to do so.
A lot of manufacturers think it's just because those distributors are lazy. They think, "These guys are all bozos! They just don't understand how great our product really is!" No, actually it's because they're too smart. They've fallen for that before, probably more than once, and they're not going to do it again. They work on commission; they've got car payments and a mortgage. And they don't like eating baloney sandwiches and ramen soup.
So if you have a cool, sexy, cutting edge, high tech product, and if you use my lead generation system, then you won't have any problem getting serious potential customers to raise their hands and express interest in that product.
The system will educate those prospects at very low cost before you make any significant investment in them, and you'll be certain that they're pre-disposed to buy before you get in your car and go see them.
Your Marketing System Can Protect You From Lousy Prospects
Please listen very carefully: You should not visit anybody, unless on a scale from 1 to 10, they're at least a five in terms of "likely to give you their money." Personally, I ain't even calling a customer on the phone unless they're a 5 and they've called me first. And I'm not going to actually, physically go see them unless they're a 7 or 8.
You can actually have such a wide funnel that captures so many leads and interested prospects that you then devise second, third and fourth steps in your marketing system that further separates the diamonds from the dirt. You can even make prospects jump through hoops to talk to you, if necessary.
A built in feature of a true marketing system is that it qualifies leads for you so you can determine the quality of each lead with a high degree of accuracy. Then you can actually adjust the size of the bottom of your funnel as business conditions change, and literally regulate your sales volume from one quarter to the next.
If you've got plenty of sales leads that are 4's, 5's, 6's 7's and 8's coming in every day - and the occasional 9 or 10 - then you'll find that VARs, reps, and even your own sales people are much more eager to go see those customers, because they know those customers are genuinely interested.

http://www.simplyusedphones.com/index.html

Innovative Thinking

I just read this.....From Dan Kennedy

Make a Checklist for Becoming an Innovative Thinker

When clients retain me as a marketing consultant they're actually paying for two basic things, experience and innovation. Experience can be gained in only two ways, through your own situations or by reading and hearing about other situations. Innovation though is a method of thinking. With the next couple of Successful Marketing Strategy emails you receive I want to try and help you be a more innovative thinker in approaching your own marketing situations.

The first thinking that I do when facing most marketing situations is to run through the same fundamental principles of success that govern all aspects of business. One good source of such a check list is the book 'Think and Grow Rich,' by Napoleon Hill and its thirteen principles based on commonalities discovered in over five hundred super successful business people.
Incidentally it's worth mentioning that this book is a remarkable success story in itself in the publishing industry. This book was published back in 1937 yet as recently as April of 1996 'Think and Grow Rich' appeared as number six on the non-fiction, best seller book list published in USA Today.

You're going to hard pressed to find another book other than the Bible that has stood the test of time as well. The obvious reason for this is simply that this book works. Its principles are valid.
Of course, most people think creativity and innovation is something that just happens. Somewhere an ad agency has a group of creative types in weird clothes with beards maybe smoking the funny stuff, locked away in a room, waiting for inspiration.

Actually creativity and innovation is a systematic process of checking off possibilities. To be a marketing innovator you should build yourself a checklist of basic success ideas and principles, such as those in 'Think and Grow Rich' to review each time you work on an advertising, packaging, marketing or promotion project.

Ideas like definite purpose. What do we want to accomplish with this effort? Going the extra mile, how can we give the purchasers perceived value much higher than cost? And other similar ideas belong on that checklist.


Dan Kennedywww.dankennedy.com

Email me @ myoung@simplyusedphones.com

http://www.simplyusedphones.com/

Riches in Niches

I just read this in Dan Kennedy's NO B.S. Newsletter.....

Affluent gays and lesbians out-spend affluent heterosexuals in may categoires: 300% more likely to belong to upscale health clubs and/or to have personal trainers; 200 % more likely to regularly attend live theater performances; 200 % more likely to buy hardcover books-- and they buy three times as many. 250% more likely to host in-hone, formal dinner parties and 350% more likely to host cocktail parties.

You can get his newsletter free 90 day trial below. He has great practical and proven ideas, that really work in the real world situations. http://www.dankennedy.com/index.php

Mark

http://www.simplyusedphones.com/

Las Vegas-The Wynn Way

I just read this.....I am departing sligtly from this format. I will be staying for the second time at Thanksgiving. My wife and I were there last year over this holiday and were truly taken with the service and class of Steve Wynn's hotel The Wynn Hotel.
http://www.wynnlasvegas.com/wynn.html

Be sure to see Le Reve. By the creators of Cirque Du Soleil. See the story below.

An aquatic spectacular performed in a domed theater in the round, Le Rêve. A small collection of imperfect dreams, is the first of its kind in Las Vegas. Uniquely intimate and spectacularly personal, no seat is more than 40 feet from the action. The show is a completely new form of staging and artistic performance, where the theater and water are alive with a translucent energy.
"My aim with Le Rêve is to create an entirely new universe, to transport everyone into a world where the theater, performance and audience become one and the same reality," says Franco Dragone, the internationally acclaimed director, whose credits include O, Mystère and Celine Dion: A New Day.
A very special cast of artists, athletes and characters has been discovered from around the world and will bring the dreams to life nightly.

I will comment as we spend Thanksgiving in Las Vegas.........

See below what I do:
Southern Cal Telecom Product Sales Inc. cuts thru the noise of purchasing new or used telephone equipment whether it is 1 phone or a telephone system. A toll free number for live "friendly" help to make your purchase. Our 100% feed back rating on eBay is a testament. We have been in business 15 years, online for 8 & eBay for 4 years.

http://www.simplyusedphones.com/

Networking-The World's Largest Rolodex

I just read this....Actually, I read it in June of this year in Inc. Magazine, just found the article again. An idea to up the quality of your rolodex.

Looking for a supplier in Asia? Jigsa, an online marketplace that allows businesspeople to buy sell, and swap contact information, is branching inot Japan and China. The Web-based service was launched in 2004 by Jim Fowler, a sales executive at an Internet start-up in California who have become frustrated with pricey business databases filled with bad information. "Our mission is to map the entire business world,"says Fowler, who also plans to extend the English-language-only database into Scandinavia this year.

Jigsaw users pay $25 per month to access contact information for 25 business leads online, or they can elect to sway information, receiving two contacts for each accurate one they contribute. The database, which so far has gathered information on nearly three million executives at more than 300,000 companies, is self-correcting.

Users who fix inaccurate data receive two free contacts; those who enter erroneous details are docked two contacts. Niall Booth, director of inside sales at ESI International, an Arlington, Virginia, set up Jigsaw accounts for himself and 14 sales and marketing staffers. Each month they trade information on humdreds of people. "I think of it as a sniper's tool," Booth says, "Sometimes you a know a person's name and company, but you can't get through to the gatekeeper. Jigsaw gives us a direct number instead of a switchboard."

Want more articles like this one go to --->http://www.simplyusedphones.com/articles.html

NFL Negatives of the 1st Half of the Season

I just read this......Randy Hill lets it fly about the duds of the first half of the season.

Email
Randy Hill / Special to FOXSports.com Randy Hill celebrates the midway point of the NFL campaign by running through the worst storylines."

We've reached halftime and you're the coach.
For the sake of the drill, let's treat this interlude as halftime of the NFL season.
OK, so it's halftime, you're the coach and your immediate task is to impart the requisite wisdom for a second-half performance upgrade.
You'll start with a review of the first-half positives.
NFL Midseason Spectacular

No, wait. You're Vince Lombardi (right, before he passed away, smart guy). And Lombardi — based on everything you've read and heard — probably wouldn't begin his halftime lecture by emphasizing the positive.
Well, he might mention the results of Shawn Merriman's steroid test. That's a positive.

But it wouldn't take long before Vince began listing the biggest first-half disappointments. He'd have about 15 minutes, giving him time enough for about 25 issues.
If he'd been paying attention to the first eight weeks of this NFL campaign, he might zero in on the following:

The Arizona Cardinals. Yeah, they're historically rotten, but a new stadium and impressive skill-position talent goosed expectations in the desert.
Unfortunately, they've been disappointing enough for defensive end Bertrand Berry to advocate a closed-door meeting. But the "players only" designation caused more than half of the squad members to believe they weren't qualified to attend.

Back to the Cardinals. Turning down considerable loot to do naming-rights business with Pink Taco was a sound move from a public-relations standpoint. Too bad the name would seem to make sense.

Ben Roethlisberger. While some credit for his league-leading interception total goes to his awful physical fortune, Ben has been remarkably bad. If this bad play continues, securing a dinner date may force Roethlisberger to begin impersonating the joker who used the same motivation while impersonating Ben.

Terrell Owens. The first-year Dallas Cowboy used the ball as a pillow during last Sunday's loss at Washington. Too bad his hands haven't been that soft on third or fourth down.
Chad Johnson hasn't been able to back up the boasts this season. (Chris Gardner / Associated Press)

Chad Johnson. It's about time his Ocho Cinco alter ego is replaced by the more appropriate Ocho Stinko.
Let's stay with the Cincinnati Bengals, who can't blame bail or probation for the inability to achieve a breakout season.

The Miami Dolphins. Like Manuel Wright before last season, Nick Saban is giving Dolphins fans a reason to cry.

New Orleans Saints rookie Reggie Bush. I know he's a fine decoy and all-purpose threat, but Reggie has a lower per-rush average than Diet Pepsi machine. In last Sunday's victory at Tampa, Bush experienced more loss than Jared Fogle, his co-worker at Subway.

ESPN entertainer Tony Kornheiser. I expected Mr. Tony to be great instead of good on Monday Night Football. I also expected him to chatter just enough to make most of us forget Joe Theismann was in the booth.

Dallas Cowboys coach Bill Parcells. This has nothing to do with T.O. or Jerry Jones. It's the hair, Bill! Coaching legends never dye.

That alleged run defense of the Indy Colts. Their defensive front usually manages less penetration than a college radio station.

New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. It's been postulated that Belichick called off the smash-mouth dogs vs. Indy as a future-playoff gamesmanship issue. Here's an idea — run the ball and defeat the Colts in November, then end up with home-field advantage in January. Then run some more.

Chicago Bears coach Lovie Smith. Why can't football coaches be more like baseball managers? When your starting pitcher is wild high, please consider going to the bullpen for the rest of that game.

Back to the Arizona Cardinals. Rookie Matt Leinart is summoned to run for his life as the starting quarterback and not one public peep out of Brenda Warner, Kurt's wife.

The Philadelphia Eagles. They seemed even less prepared to go into New Orleans than FEMA.
Kansas City Chiefs star Larry Johnson. One week after he was face-masked into a sore neck by Cardinals corner Antrel Rolle, the K.C. superback almost did the same while seizing the hair of Pittsburgh's Troy Polamalu.

The Minnesota Vikings. This year's Vikes couldn't score on the San Francisco 49ers and may even have trouble scoring on a rented boat.

The Denver Broncos defense. They've been good enough to keep Jake Plummer in the lineup long enough to discover his confidence. Most of us wanted to watch Jay Cutler.

The Seattle Seahawks. These guys just won't conform to perfectly good curses and jinxes. They look poised to win the NFC West despite the Madden '07 Curse (Shaun Alexander), the Post-Super Bowl-Loser Curse (they're in first place) and the Chunky Soup Jinx (Matt Hasselbeck).
Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre. He's been just mediocre enough to inspire the will-he-retire talk to continue.

The Oakland Raiders. This is one of the rare times when comeuppance is too pathetic to seem funny. One more week of this and QB Andrew Walter will qualify as Ned Ryerson's stunt double if they ever make a sequel to Groundhog Day.

First-year commissioner Roger Goodell. His players still seem a little out of control. Let's see if John Walsh is hired as guest color commentator when the San Diego Chargers meet the Bengals in Cincinnati this Sunday.

Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick. Alternating great and average performances enables irritating parties on both sides of Great Vick Debate to continue believing they're right.
New York Giants players. If any of these guys had shown up five minutes early for the clue bus, they wouldn't have suggested Tom Coughlin was being out-coached.

All-time leading rusher Emmitt Smith. Just when we were about to forgive you for signing with Arizona ...

Randy Hill is a frequent contributor to FOXSports.com.

http://www.simplyusedphones.com/articles.html

Email Marketing Tips

I just read this......In About.com,
Now in the Internet age, the email represents the new technology we must master. Take home these email management tips to effectively take control of your email communications.

6 Simple Savvy Small Business Email Tips
Collect' Em: With the low cost of email communications, email trumps more costly marketing methods such as direct mail and telephone. A study by Jupiter Research found email campaigns targeted with web analytics can produce 18 times the profits of broad mailings. Relentlessly collect customer and lead email addresses all the time. Use a contact management program to handle your growing list.

Remove Barriers: Customers want fast and easy communication from companies they want to do business with. Your website contact page should have your email address. Asking web visitors to fill in a form to send a simple mail will stop many in their tracks. Gather more customer information once you have gained the initial contact. If you are worried about being spammed, invest in a good spam protection program.

Avoid Sensitive Issues: Never handle sensitive issues by email. The chance for miscommunication can make matters worse. There are times when you need to pick up the phone or set up a face-to-face contact instead of taking the easy way out with email. When you are full of emotions, stay clear of your email.

Handle at Once: Don't fall into the trap of reading emails and thinking I'll respond later. Later never arrives and soon your inbox is full of important and unimportant mail. Scott Allen, Co-Author of "The Virtual Handshake" recommends "Most people configure their email reader to interrupt them every time an email comes in. This means you are interrupted throughout the day. Instead, we suggest keep your email reader closed most of the day. Only check email once a day."

Use the 10 Second Rule: We all lead busy, time-pressed lives. Receiving a long-winded email with one big paragraph creates a response to file for later use. Readers have a tendency to skim and miss critical details. Before you send out your email message, edit down to short sentences, add bullet points, and be concise. When someone opens your email they should be able to know within 10 seconds or less what your message is about.

It's the Law: Know the rules of using email in the business world. Be aware of the laws and regulations in your business, industry, country, and state surrounding email usage. Our world is becoming increasingly transparent and customers expect your small business to handle their data in a private and confidential manner.

Incorporating these 6 simple email tips will put you on the road to effective email management. Spend the time to master the essentials of email. Once the habit is established your small business will be email savvy.

You can always find more articles here: http://www.simplyusedphones.com/articles.html

Wow! This is Good! About the Go-To Guy

I just read this.....The article is from Perry Marshall about being the go to guy!

The Go-To Guy Gets Educated:

How Business Really Works on Planet Earth
Start with about 300 million people in the United States . Consider that half of ‘em are retired or in school or on welfare, a fourth of ‘em are taking care of the retired ones and the ones in school, you've got 75 million left. But 29 million work for the Federal Government which means there's only 46 million left to bring home the bacon.
Ah, but then there's the 15 million who work for the local government, so they're only marginally more worthwhile than the feds. We're down to 31 million now. 80% of the 31 million are either lazy, apathetic and mostly unproductive, or they're busy undoing the damage done by the dufuses every day. So in fact there's only six million people doing real, actual, productive, innovative hard work.
Those 6 million people are not only feeding 300 million, but providing them with warm homes in the winter and quality television programming. The comfort food and Seinfeld reruns keep the unproductive, roiling masses from rioting.
(Karl Marx was wrong: Religion is not the opiate of the people, television is.)
That explains why you feel like, in any room full of 20 people, you're the only one getting anything done. It's because you ARE the only one getting anything done. The rest are mostly dead weight, playing a zero sum game.
That's a fact. Get used to it. Always been that way, always will be that way. What matters is that you understand this is your role as an actually productive person in the world.
But there's still another part of this that most people don't perceive.
Of the six million people who do the actual work, one million are company presidents and big-time managers. The other 5 million are the Worker Bees.
Most company presidents and big-time managers, truth be told, are pretty productive people. They are worker-bees too. But the biggest part of their job is to keep the other worker-bees with heads down, working. Nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, ear to the ground. (Uncomfortable position, that.) The stability of the modern world rests on the loyalty and commitment of those 5 million worker-bees. They need to not look up.
I'm wicked serious. You take a company like General Motors, with hundreds of thousands of employees, all that company's real productivity and competitive edge rests on the shoulders of about 5% of them, people who take complete ownership of their jobs. They come early, stay late, skip lunch when necessary (about half the time). They know the answers to important questions. They know how things work.
They know the password to the server. They happen to have a backup copy when the hard drive crashes – yes, it's three weeks old and unfortunately not all the data is recovered. But they happened to make a backup one day… well, just in case, and… because they want to make sure the machine stays running. They were too smart to count on the IT guy. Sometimes they spend their own money and/or take personal vacation days to go get edumacated about something.
They know how many hubcaps were made on the last shift. They know Karen at the chrome supplier who can occasionally work a miracle if FEDEX loses a shipment.
They take everything about their jobs they very, very personally. Very seriously.
Everybody else is interchangeable. But not them. If all those people suddenly left, GM would be in big, big trouble. The whole company would tank and the stock market and the prognosticators wouldn't have the slightest clue why.
These people are the Go-To guys (and gals). The real ones.
Company presidents and shareholders, consciously or unconsciously, must keep the Go-To guys from ever discovering their own value, their importance, their true levels of talent. The Go-To guys must stay muzzled. Because losing a Go-To guy is very, very costly. Genuine Go-To guys are exceedingly difficult to replace.
Corporate America 's formula for getting and keeping Go-To guys:
• It's almost impossible to identify them before you hire them, and HR departments usually screen them out. It takes a Go-To guy to know a Go-To guy, and Go-To guys rarely work in HR departments.
• You find them by accident, and when you discover them, you give them more and more work to do, supplemented with dainty morsels of guilt. Every time something is amiss, like sales are a bit off this month or the excel spreadsheet forecast was done sloppily on Friday, you call him at home on Sunday afternoon and express to him how concerned you are about his performance lately. You explain that you're afraid he's not keeping the eye on the ball and you don't want this to ever happen again.
• It's vitally important that your Go-To guy have between $25,000 and $65,000 of student loans. It also helps if he has two car payments and a balloon mortgage on his house that's really a bit rich for his income. That way he's freakin' terrified of missing even one paycheck. He knows that a layoff or firing would bring certain financial doom. That fear never vacates the back of his worried mind.
• His compensation for the 55 hour work weeks, the unceasing stress, the lack of appreciation, the complete absence of opportunities to influence really important strategic decisions, the vacations interrupted by cel phone calls and impromptu meetings, is those two cars and the house that's a bit rich for his income. During your fireside chats, you counsel him that he deserves these things because he works so hard, and maybe he should even treat himself to a boat. Aunt Visa and Uncle Mastercard and Madison Avenue do their part to reinforce this, ensuring that he never has enough money to take any business risks, ever.
• Stroke his ego with things that cost the company very little. Plastic plants, corner offices, fancy titles (“Vice President of Manufacturing Technology” is a good one), and when you're together at client meetings, whisper to the client, just loud enough for Go-To guy to overhear, that Go-To Guy graduated from MIT with a 3.6 GPA. Maintain a big long list of things Go-To guy can't take to the bank, but which still make him feel proud of his accomplishments.
• You pilfer money from his 401K program and limit it to extraordinarily conservative investments (while talking about the 401K program in such delightful, embellished terms that he never visits a financial planner and considers saving up his own nest egg) so your Go-To guy will actually never have enough money to retire. He'll still be your Go-To guy when he's 83 and has a colostomy bag strapped to his leg.
• If you don't want to keep him until 83, fire him four months before his 20 year company anniversary, just before his pension vests. Oh yeah, and if you really want to stick the knife in deep, fire him on his wedding anniversary. Send him home to his sweetheart in tears and shame. It'll sweeten their weekend, the one with the steak dinner and red roses at the Radisson. Oh, and whenever you bump into him around town, tell him to be sure and tell her ‘hi' for you.
• Tell the Board Of Directors meeting that the company lost the 3½ million dollar account with Starbucks because of Go-To guy's inattention to detail and lack of maturity. Tell them you'd already been concerned about his performance for quite some time, and you solemnly accept a share of the blame for not dismissing him as soon as you saw the warning signs. This will ensure that they never suspect it was actually your fault – you hacked off their purchasing manager for trying to cut your own distributor's throat to keep some more margin. He knew right then you were a blood sucker and he nixed the deal.
Now you know why you always hated corporate politics, eh?
Don't worry, it gets worse. Watch your email in the next few days for the next installment, where I show you exactly how they extract maximum service out of you, with maximum guilt.
Can't wait? Neither can I.

The watchful become wise.
Perry Marshall

http://www.simplyusedphones.com/index.html

Get Over It!

Email Marketing Do It!

78% of online shoppers have made a purchase as the result of clicking on an email link, so it's no wonder that 54% of small businesses surveyed rated email as the top online promotion driving new and existing customers to their websites. Some of you are either skeptical or hesitant about using email as a marketing vehicle. Many of you may think email marketing is intrusive, annoying, daunting and confusing. I have three words for you; GET OVER IT. An estimated 60 billion emails are sent by Internet users daily. With this number continually growing, if you don't start to embrace this great marketing tool, your business may not live to regret it. I'm going to help you understand some of the basics of email marketing so you can begin to realize that it is not something to be afraid of, it is something you can do to help grow your business today, tomorrow, a month from now, a year?well, you get the picture.

The Dos and Don'ts of Email Marketing
Don't try to email the masses using the email program on your computer. Email programs such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and others were not designed for mass emailing. Sure, they can send a message to multiple people, but if you are trying to market using email, these programs just don't have the tools and the horsepower necessary to get the job done right. First, there are no tracking capabilities with desktop email programs and if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Second, most service providers allow only 50 emails to be sent at one time. Third, sending mass email using these programs does not meet SPAM law requirements and is just plain unprofessional. Most mass emails sent this way will not even reach their destination due to strict and unforgiving SPAM filters in use today. SPAM has become such a problem that even email that you want sometimes gets caught in the filter; your unprofessional attempt has no chance! Finally, most people sending mass email using these programs don't do it correctly. They put all the email addresses in the "To:" field, which lets every recipient see everyone else's email address. Even worse, you run the risk of unscrupulous types adding these people to their lists, which leads me to my second 'don't.'

Don't add people to your list that didn't ask to be on your list.
There is a term called "Opt-in." Opt-in is the act of someone asking to be on your email list. They "opted" to be included when you send email which means they find what you have to say worth receiving and they have given you something very valuable in return for this information, their "permission" to market to them. So try not to blow it! This leads me to my final 'don't.'

Don't be annoying.
You should not abuse the privilege of someone's opt-in status. The average Internet user gets close to a hundred emails a day. If they joined your list, try and respect their time and permission. Send email when you have something worth sending and don't abuse the right, otherwise it will be taken away. Alright, on to the 'dos'!
Do segment your list. When you use a good email marketing program, you can segment your list to send the most relevant information to the people that can use it most. Doing this will increase the overall results of any email campaign instantly. For instance, Harley Davidson is one of our clients, and we handle their email marketing. They segment their list in a few different ways. For example, Do you own a Harley Davidson Motorcycle or not? If you do, what model is it? Now that they know what model motorcycle you have, they can email you when they have information related to your bike, such as specials on parts, service or gear. If you don't ride, you may not receive emails about upcoming group rides. The point is, by filtering who gets what information, you insure that people only see what is relevant to their needs, and that's how you build a good, targeted, valuable list that people look forward to and even anticipate receiving.

Do use a catchy subject line.
However, you cannot be deceptive and the information contained within the email must be relevant. For example, the title of this article, "Fail to email? plan to fail" is catchy; relevant to the information contained within, and is not deceptive in nature.

Do have a plan for emailing.
This just may be the most important aspect regarding email marketing. You would not build a birdhouse without a plan, so why market your company without one? If you are one of the opt-in recipients of Barnes & Nobles' email newsletter, you know that it comes out once per week, always on a Wednesday and after 1PM. Why Wednesday at 1:00PM you ask? Because they have a plan. Research has indicated that Mondays and Fridays are bad days to send out marketing material as people are either starting or ending their weeks. Mornings are bad for email as most people are bombarded with email first thing in the morning and adversely, end-of-the-day emails get little attention as people are tired. So, after testing multiple timeslots on Tuesdays and Thursdays, we determined that the largest percentage of people opened and read our emails at 1PM on a Wednesday.

Now, if we did not have a plan and a professional email marketing program, we would not be able to determine how to make our email marketing as effective and efficient as it could be. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of constructing proper emails. You are sending communication from your company to another. The end result of sending a poorly constructed or difficult to load and open communication will send the wrong message about your company. Each email you send leaves an impression about your company on the person reading it. Should your email be riddled with typos, marked as "junk" or "SPAM," use ridiculous colors and fonts, take too long to load or just plain poor, how do you think that reflects on you and your company?

There are many aspects to successful email marketing programs, far too many to discuss in this article. So, I'll wrap up by saying if you don't use email for marketing or do it poorly, the next email you get just may be from your local sign shop letting you know that your "Out of Business" sign is ready to be picked up.

This is from Guerrilla Marketing Newsletter.http://client.mmpulse.com/clickThru.aspx?cID=1596&uID=581260&hLink=http://www.GetAdCallsInfo.com

See our website for more.http://www.simplyusedphones.com/articles.html

More Dan Kennedy

He always has great insights, I just read this......

Successful Marketing Strategies- How To Stimulate Word Of Mouth Advertising

Hi Mark,

Just to refresh your memory, we're talking about stimulating business by using word of mouth strategies and in your previous Successful Marketing Strategy I spoke about one method to accomplish this, which is called "Slice of Life."Far better though is real word of mouth advertising and there is a single, basic secret to stimulating a high rate of word-of-mouth advertising.

I first discovered the secret from studying the Disney Companies.Word-of-mouth marketing is taught there as "find ways to do what you do so well and so uniquely that your customers cannot resist telling lots of other people about you." At the Disney Parks this principle is implemented in the forms of cleanliness and authenticity.When first time visitors to Disneyland and Disney World are surveyed and asked what sticks in their mind most about their visit the overwhelming number one answer is the cleanliness of the parks.

The number two answer is the authenticity of the environments.Disney marketing pros understand how this translates into real life. Harry and Marge go back to Dubuque and tell their friends, "You can't believe how clean the parks were." Then four more families from Dubuque pile money into motor homes and bring the money to the mouse.Because they understand this, the Disney people think of park cleanliness as marketing, not just maintenance. They use this to stimulate referrals.

Any business can also find ways to stimulate referrals, to stimulate word-of-mouth advertising, often by doing things that should be done anyway.In a retail type business excellence and creativity in the store environment and in customer service are most likely to stimulate referrals.

I know a dentist, for example, who "ten-timesed" his practice in just twenty-four months without increasing his external ad budget by even a dollar. He identified seven hundred different things to change in the office environment and in patient communications and those changes were responsible for developing a very high level of word-of-mouth advertising.Now, this brings up a vitally important theme that should be behind all your marketing efforts, which I'll reveal in just a few days in your next Success Marketing Strategy.

Dedicated To Multiplying Your 1ncome

Dan Kennedy

See the profit producing, wealth attraction resourcesat http://www.dankennedy.com/products.html************ Today's Featured Success Tool *****************Dan Kennedy has created more millionaires in more industries than anyone else on the planet...Clients pay thousands of dollars for his advice. In this special system you will be able to access the Best Of The Best of this profit producing information.For all of the details go to: http://www.DanKennedyBestOf.com or paste the link into your browser.There are 15 different special confidential reports that cover every imaginable moneymaking tool and opportunity available... And that is only a small part of this system. For all of the details go to http://www.DanKennedyBestOf.com or paste this link in your browserhttp://www.DanKennedyBestOf.com==================================PLEASE DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS EMAIL - ALL QUESTIONS/COMMENTS SHOULD BE DIRECTED TO:info@dankennedy.comor Glazer-Kennedy Inner Circle407 W. Pennsylvania Ave.Towson, MD 21204Phone: (410) 951-0147


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10 Phrases to Increase Sales with Your Ads

I just read this......Good stuff on helping convert lookers of your site to buyers.

10 Hypnotic-Like Sentences That Sell Like Crazy By Cody Moya.

Tell your readers what they are probably thinking, feeling or doing as they read your ad copy. This strategy will usually trigger their own subconscious mind to bring out these feelings or actions.You can add these sentences into any ad copy. You may have to change one or two words so it relates more to the product or service you're selling.

1. As you keep reading this ad copy, you are feeling more and more compelled to experience all the benefits of our product.

2. The more you understand just how valuable our product could be to your life, the less you think about delaying this important purchase.

3. After you read this short ad you will feel like your problems are almost completely solved, all you will have to do is order.

4. As you're skimming through this, you're beginning to think you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying out our product.

5. As you're scanning over this ad copy, you are beginning to imagine using our product and enjoying all the benefits it brings.

6. The more you keep reading our ad the more you feel it would be a waste to let this opportunity slip by.

7. The more you review our ad the more you begin to find yourself getting very excited about our product and starting to feel the urge to buy now.

8. You don't know it yet but, at the conclusion of this ad, you will feel driven to order and experience all the benefits of our product.

9. You don't realize it yet but, in a few short minutes you'll realize that you can't put off this vital purchase and then you'll be yanking out your credit card.

10. As every word you read travels from this ad to your brain, you start to understand just how much our product could benefit your life.

Next week featured article:20 Super Hot Ways To Make More Money From Your Customers
Stay tuned next Friday. You will get link to download resell right software:AUDIO GENERATOR.

Here For Your Success

Cody Moya

P.S. Check my other courses http://freeinternetmarketingcourses.com/===========================================================Article Re-print Rights InformationYou may re-print the article published in this email as long as you comply with following terms:Article must be published "as is" (unedited). Article must be published with below the author's bio paragraph (resource box) and copyright information included. URL inthe resource box should be set as hyperlinks. Article cannot be used in spam communications Bio paragraph (resource box) below:-----------------------------------------------------------ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Cody Moya writes about Business and Marketing in his Free Internet Marketing Courses. You can sign up for his Free Internet Marketing Courses and get additional information at his website: http://FreeInternetMarketingCourses.com

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