Advertising and Marketing blog

We all question our ability at times. Uncertainty plagues us. It is even more intense if the ability we are questioning relates to something we have never tried or not succeeded at in the past.

Set backs are common, but we rarely welcome them. We are inclined to respond negatively to adversity. It may be time to revisit that reflexive response.

I had an experience recently that caused me to reconsider whether a negative response to adversity is always justified when I was confronted with a life-threatening situation.

It was mid-morning on a warm and pleasant Saturday. I was in the midst of my first skydive of the day. It was my 2,123th jump since having taken up the sport fifteen years ago.

After about one minute of freefall and 5,000 above the ground, I parted ways with my fellow jumpers to get far enough away from them to open my parachute safely. I initiated opening around 3,000 feet above the earth.

My parachute opened with some twists in the lines between the parachute and me. This is not that uncommon. What was different this time was that I was not able to clear the twists.

The twists in the lines caused my parachute to take on an asymmetrical shape. Receiving asymmetrical inputs, the canopy did what it is designed to do and initiated a turn — that’s how it’s steered. The problem occurred when the turn quickly became a rapid, diving downward spiral that was spinning me a full 360 degrees about once every second. This was a problem.

I looked up to assess my canopy and saw something I don’t often see – the horizon clearly visible ABOVE the trailing edge of my canopy. This meant my canopy and I were now on roughly the same horizontal plane. In that I could see the horizon behind it, I was actually above my parachute and it was leading our fast spinning parade rapidly towards mother earth.

My first need was to acknowledge that I was not going to be able to solve this problem. This is not as easy as it seems. Having successfully completed over 2,100 jumps without having to resort to my second parachute, it was hard for me to believe I had really encountered a problem I could not solve. I had a natural inclination to assume I could fix this problem as I had all those in the past.

Sound familiar? It’s always easy to lapse into denial when confronted with a problem. Until we acknowledge the problem and our possible inability to solve it – or to use the methods we have used in the past – we don’t have a chance of making things better.

Fortunately, the urgency of this situation caused my hard-headed nature to yield much quicker than usual. That decision probably took a second or two.

The next step, having accepted the need to follow a different course than in the past, was to determine the course. Fortunately fifteen years of training and practice before every day of jumping took hold.

I looked straight down at the two handles on either side of my chest – one to release me from my malfunctioning canopy and one for deploying my reserve parachute – and realized I needed to quickly get them in my hands. I could not help but notice when I made eye contact with them, as had been ingrained in me during my First Jump Course way back in 1988, that by now the rapid spins had turned me back to earth and there beyond my toes was once again the horizon. This was bad!

Time was of the essence at this point not only because I was now rapidly progressing toward the horse pasture below me, but also because the centrifugal force I was starting to experience would soon make it impossible to get my hands to those two handles.

With my hands now securely on the handles, I was confronted with a bothersome question, “Now, which one goes first.” The wrong order could cause my reserve parachute to deploy into my spinning main parachute which would result in an incurable entanglement.

Fortunately, ingrained training once again took over and I pulled them in the right order. First the handle on the right side which released me from my spinning main parachute followed by the handle on the left side to deploy my reserve parachute.

This brought on a wonderful experience. My malfunctioning black, teal and magenta canopy was replaced with a bright, yellow never before used reserve parachute. What a lovely sight! And all this by 1,700 feet – plenty of time to spare.

Many years ago, I read a book about the challenges and responsibilities of Secret Service agents. One of the sad aspects of that profession is that agents who never have the chance to validate their years of training by responding to a threat sometimes struggle severely in retirement. They are faced with not knowing – with certainty – how they would respond when faced with the paramount challenge their career can deliver. For this reason, agents who have faced such a challenge successfully are admired within the culture of the Service.

That Saturday morning, I had the privilege of facing a similar, life-threatening and I now realize life-defining challenge. I faced what Secret Service agents call “the dragon.”

For all of us the greater dragon is not the external threat, whether it be an assassin’s bullet, the unforgiving and fast approaching earth or another challenge. The real dragon is the self-doubt we carry within us.

For those few splendid moments after landing safely, I was able to put my foot firmly on the neck of the dragon … and it felt great.

Keep this in mind the next time you are confronted with adversity. On the far side of the experiences the adversity presents, there could be a valuble gift – a renewed confidence and certainty.

(c) 2004, Jim McCormick. All rights in all media reserved.

About The Author

Jim McCormick is an MBA, former corporate Chief Operating Officer, three time skydiving World Record holder and was a member of an international expedition that skydived to the North Pole. More information is available at http://www.TakeRisks.com and 970.577.8700.

Jim@TakeRisks.com

Search Engine Marketing is very important if you want your online business to succeed. It is all about good quality high value (unique is best) content, it is what the search engines want, as it is what the searchers are looking for. This is just a quick list from the top of my head but is enough to keep you busy.

Articles: this is the most powerful way for 2006 and beyond to generate good quality one-way in bound links. Submit them to article directories and submission services, do a search on your favourite search engine for article submission services or article directories to find relevant ones for your industry. Note it is a good idea to use relevant keywords and phrases in your articles but only if they make sense.

Press Releases: another sure fire way to generate quality links from authority sites. Press releases are much more powerful that advertising as they are objective. Again if you are not familiar with writing press releases do a search in your favourite search engine for information on how to write a good press release, for example type in ‘tips for writing a good press release’. Then do a search for good press release submission services PRWeb.com is a very popular service

Add regular fresh content to the site: Your search engine marketing will only succeed if you do this – you could reuse the articles used for submissions etc But this would probably not be the best method. Although a good idea would be to write a series of articles, use a few of them or a shortened version or an abstract (still with good quality unique content of course) for submission to the directories. Make sure you tell the readers that further articles and information can be found on your website, enticing them to visit your site to read the rest of the articles.

Make a point to add fresh content to your site on a regular basis. For example if you are in the Overseas property industry you should add new properties, buyers guides, area guides, country guides, case studies, customer testimonials, resources (i.e. weather, travel info, car hire etc these can be affiliate links to generate additional streams of income).

Set yourself up a Blog and make regular posts to ping the search engines every time you add fresh content to your site, this will alert the search engine spiders, who will come crawling to review and index your new pages. Again if you don’t know much about Blogs, use your favourite search engine to find out how to set one up. Wordpress.com is a popular service.

Joint ventures: i.e. you email your database in return for an email to another company’s database. You know your industry; you should know who to tap up for a joint venture. Don’t simply view similar websites as competitors, this is short sighted; instead view them as opportunities and colleagues. You can swap links, exchange content (publish each other articles), email each others databases etc use your imagination, get creative, there is enough traffic for most websites to succeed. As long as your website adds value and offers good quality unique content you will succeed.

Hooks: you can offer your visitors something of value in return for them signing up to your newsletter. For example, again if you are an overseas property company Free Brochures, Buyers guide, legal or tax information

Competitions: use incentive based viral marketing i.e. enter your site visitors into a competition for every friend or colleague they tell about your site or who they get to register for your mailing list.

Optimise your web pages and articles: as this article is talking about using fresh content for your search engine marketing strategy I thought it best show you how to create an optimised page, for those of you that don’t know how.

In my experience I have found that it is important to optimise each webpage for a maximum of two phrases only.

Title

Title = phrase one | phrase two

Meta keywords

Also try to keep your Meta keywords limited to a few, use the same two phrases first as in your title although you can bulk it out with another phrase, like so;

Meta Keywords: phrase one, phrase two, phrase three

Meta Description

The Meta description must also start with your keywords but be descriptive at the same time, like so;

Meta Description: Phrase one, information for about phrase two from your company / website name

Alt tags

First 3 images on the page should contain the phrases but also describe the picture/image, like so;

Alt 1: phrase one company name logo
Alt 2: phrase two picture
Alt3: phrase one photos

Headers

It is also very important to have header tags with the keyphrase in, like so;

Start the page copy with a header tag

< H >Phrase one< /H >

Copy

The first 50 words must also contain the two phrases.

Copy

Then use another header with a phrase

phrase two

copy

< h >phrase one< h >

etc

It is recommended to have between 500 – 1300 words on the page with a keyphrase weight of 2 – 5%

The key phrases should be strategically placed in an hour glass shape in the copy, i.e. a few at the top a couple in the middle and a few at the bottom.

But don’t over do it, make the copy read naturally with all the words in context.

It is also recommended to have the keyphrases in bold and italic somewhere on the page as this tells the search engines that they are important, I usually put them in the footer like so.

Phrase one | phrase two

Links

Last but not least it is recommended to have your key phases in hyper links i.e. linking text

For example you can have anchor links to the different header tags on the page for navigation or run of site link at the bottom of the page that contain the keyphrases of the page they are linking to.

And there you have it, a quick guide on how to optimise a webpage.

Use these web page optimisation techniques for all pages, articles, and fresh content you add to your site and you can’t go wrong, you are giving the search engines what they want, easy to understand content rich pages, regularly updated.

In return the search engines will give you what you want good-targeted traffic that will convert into enquiries.

Follow this search engine marketing guide, build solid content and good links and your search engine marketing campaign should be a success. if you liked this article and want to learn more visit loudmouse.biz

Luke Fitzsimmons has been working online for 5 years and is a search engine marketing and optimisation professional. Luke currently runs the Overseas Property Webshow http://www.overseaspropertywebshow.com and looks after the internet marketing campaigns of the webshow client’s micro sites, including SEM, SEO, PPC, and email marketing. Luke’s personal site is a Search Engine Marketing Guide http://www.loudmouse.biz

If you’ve been in the copywriting realm for very long at all, you’ve heard the phrase “features vs. benefits.” It’s a fundamental copywriting principle and driving force behind much of what we, as copywriters, create. But there’s also another aspect to this equation.

What happens after customers buy your product or service? Once they’ve used what you have to offer, what will be different in their lives? What will the end results, of their buying decision, be? Getting your customers to look at the end results of their actions can be an extremely powerful persuasion tool that you’ll want to incorporate into your copy.

Let’s look at features, benefits and end results and see how all three work individually and collectively to create a targeted push to the point of purchase.

Features – The Basic Outline of Your Product or Service

Features, in copywriting, are a starting point. They provide a basic outline for what your customer needs to know. Features describe (most often) the attributes of a product or service. If we’re using the example of a cordless, telephone-answering system, some features might be:

5.8GHz FHSS

Talking caller ID

Expandable to 4 handsets

Selectable ring tones

Speakerphones

For a person who knows nothing about cordless phones with answering machines, this list might not mean much. It’s a basic blueprint of the telephone and nothing more.

Benefits – Make the Product or Service More Personal

Benefits enliven the features. Benefits make the features, and the product or service, more personal. They explain how the features will improve the customer’s life in some way. Using the features list above, see what the benefits might be. (The list below was taken from Panasonic