Kickstart #965: Coffee isn’t for amateurs
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Kickstart Today
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Wednesday October 1st 2008: Issue #965
Kickstart Today is published three times each week for opted-in
subscribers only. Publisher: Martin Avis. Your comments are
always welcome - to respond to anything you read here, please
click ‘Reply’
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Greetings!
With the banking crisis in full flow at the moment it was
interesting to visit our local branch of one of the worst
affected banks here in the UK this morning. Delia and I had to
sort something out in our branch of HBOS and so went there at
opening time at 9.30.
The first surprise was the queue waiting for the doors to be
unlocked. I guess people are starting to get jittery about the
safety of their savings.
An old lady in front of us calmly withdrew £50,000 from her
account and most of the other people were having large checks
written.
Here in the UK the government guarantees savers deposits against
bank failure up to £35,000, and are talking about raising that to
£50,000. But they don’t seem to understand that the real problem
is with people who have bigger amounts than that in a single
bank.
These days, many pensioners and other people will have more than
£50,000 on account and so are naturally worried that if the bank
fails they will lose a huge chunk of their hard-earned savings.
I can understand that and guess that people all over the country
are hurriedly trying to move their money around this week.
This is likely to cause difficulties in itself as floods of
deposits are going to move out of the worst hit banks and into
the welcoming arms of those who don’t look so badly off at the
moment.
This huge instability could be eliminated instantly if only our
dithering government would follow the lead of the Irish
government and remove the guarantee limit on savers deposits.
That way there would be no real reason to move money about and
the banks would be a tiny bit more stable.
By not raising the limit above £50,000 our government appears to
be saying that it isn’t as confident in the future as it would
like us to believe.
What was even more interesting in HBOS this morning was seeing
how many people were actually depositing funds. Many of them with
wads of cash! Clearly those brave souls aren’t afraid of anything
as trivial as a bank meltdown!
#~#~#
Not very long ago a coffee shop opened in my High Street. It
wasn’t part of a chain, and it had the look and feel of a greasy
spoon.
More recently a branch of Costa Coffee opened up opposite and
within a few weeks the original coffee shop had closed its doors
for good.
There is a lesson to be learned from this.
When you open a new business in a market that has some
established national (or international) brands, there seems
little point these days in looking like a poor relation.
You may only have one branch, and you may have some great unique
selling points, but in order to make people want to use you, you
have to ‘fit in’ with what the market expects.
For coffee shops at the moment, that expectation is for a calm
environment with sofas and easy chairs, newspapers to read and a
wholly baffling range of speciality coffees.
You have to invest money in shop design and signage that can
stand alongside the multi nationals.
You have to ‘feel’ like an established company.
And you have to understand the dynamic of the business.
You don’t need to be the only coffee shop in town - my sleepy
little town has a Costa Coffee and a Nero Coffee, and they both
do good business. There is room for competition even in a small
marketplace.
But there isn’t room for AMAteurs.
It AMAzing how many people fail to understand that in all kinds
of markets.
#~#~#
When designing web pages, we try to incorporate as many things
that the search engines like as possible. This is called On-Page
SEO. But the problem is that nobody knows for sure exactly what
factors the search engines actually do like. And they are not
saying!
We can ‘reverse engineer’ the search engines to some extent - my
own Keyword LSI Spy tool does a pretty good job of analyzing the
top ranking pages for any given keyword or phrase, but there is
only so far you can go because every page is different, and so
many factors can come in to play.
What we need is a means of looking at pages where only a small
amount of what is on page changes from one page to the next -
effectively allowing us to reduce the variables and find out what
the SEs really do with a small set of data.
But how do you go about finding a whole lot of pages that you can
compare against each other in Google (for example) where we know
that only a limited number of things change between them?
It is something I’ve puzzled over for a long time, but this
morning I had a brainwave.
Forgive me if this is blindingly obvious to you. It is to me NOW,
but you, like me, may not have made this connection yet, so the
technique I’m about to share may be very useful.
EzineArticles is an online article directory that has many
hundreds of thousands (millions probably) of articles. And the
great thing from our point of view is that each one is displayed
in a standard template. So, effectively, the only things that
change on the page from one article to the next are a couple of
meta tags and the article body itself.
All the other stuff on the page, particularly for articles aimed
at the same keyword, remains virtually identical.
In Google we can search for pages within a website. So by using
the search string: “acne treatment” site:ezinearticles.com (using
whatever keyword phrase we like between the quotes) we are given
a ranked list by Google of articles that they consider to match
our keyword from the EzineArticles site.
Because of the sheer size of EzineArticles, you’ll be hard
pressed to find a niche that doesn’t return a good selection. My
acne treatment example pulls up 16,500!
Now we can look at the articles that Google has selected for us
and see what, if anything, makes the ones nearer the top of the
pile stand out.
Here are a few suggestions for factors that you could check out:
* Meta Title tag
* Meta Description tag
* Meta Keyword tag
* Article word count
* Article keyword density
* Use of LSI words in the article
* Use of synonyms in the article
* Keyword density in the article title
* Keyword density in the first paragraph
* Keyword density in the last paragraph
* Keyword density in the middle paragraphs
* Average sentence length
* Average paragraph length
* Links and link anchor text
* Recency of article
* Style of article
* Use of subheadings
Unfortunately, EzineArticles have software in place to prevent
automated scraping of their content, so it isn’t possible (by me
anyway) to write a script to do this analysis in a php program,
but with some patience you can easily get some good indications
manually.
Try it out - and let me know if you find any surprising new
insights!
#~#~#
It looks as if I was a bit hasty in blaming my webhost for the
problems with my www.kickstartdaily.com site.
Partly, anyway.
I moved all the site to a different host, on a different server,
and the same problems were in evidence there too.
Thanks to my friend Rob O’Callaghan (a Kickstart reader and a
super-techie) I’ve learned that part of the problem is that the
PHP engine that many hosts use has been upgraded and older php
scripts have difficulties. A recent update to the Apache server
code has added to the problem.
My site is back on the old hosting platform for now, and the main
page seems to be working. But the blog is still dead as a Dodo.
One or two other pages are still non-responsive too, but we are
working on finding a solution. So please be patient if there are
any parts of my sites that you have been unsuccessfully trying to
reach lately.
#~#~#
I’m really excited that Tim Godfrey, one of the brains behind my
latest favorite product - Commission Blueprint - has booked to
come along to the London Lunch on Friday. I’m looking forward to
meeting him - and telling him to his face how much I like his and
Steve Clayton’s brainchild.
In case you missed my review of Commission Blueprint on Monday -
read it here:
http://kickstartarchive.com/2008/09/29/kickstart-964-better-late-than-never/
- the product is a very comprehensive, but easy to understand,
series of videos and PDF files that teach how Tim and Steve made
over half a million dollars in seven months by using
pay-per-click to promote ClickBank products.
Everything is covered that you need to know - from how to pick
ClickBank products to promote, to how to maximise your chance of
success, and minimise your losses with Google Adwords.
They tell you the whole process and even show you exactly what
software (most if it is free) that they use to set up and run
their campaigns.
When they do use paid-for software, they say so - and suggest
free alternatives that work almost as well.
In fact, the only difference sometimes between a paid-for program
and a free one is in the speed of use. The results are often
virtually identical.
Commission Blueprint contains everything you need to know to run
this as a professional business. They even give you highly
professional, proven templates for every kind of web page that
you’ll need.
This is a really great product and I wish that more ‘business
plan’ products were as complete and as well produced. More
importantly, I wish more of them were as easy to follow as
Commission Blueprint because this one really doesn’t leave you
guessing.
If your skill level in Internet marketing is at the top end of
beginner or better, you’ll love Commission Blueprint.
Grab a copy now and start earning with it right away. With the
speed of PPC you can literally be up and running in a couple of
hours after watching the videos.
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The Quote of the Day
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Helen Keller said:
“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement; nothing can be
done without hope.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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Who do you really believe that you are?
Deep down, in that tiny little compartment of your brain where
even you can’t deceive yourself and only the absolute truth can
be uttered, who do you REALLY believe that you are?
Are you:
scatty?
disorganized?
confused?
bored?
disconnected?
procrastinous? (I think I just made that word up!)
distracted?
uncomfortable?
messy?
unfulfilled?
Wonderful! If you can admit to yourself that you are even ONE of
those ten things there is hope for you yet!
And if you can add any other negative traits all the better.
We are inside your brain’s honest box and nobody else can see in
- so don’t hold back.
It may not be particularly pleasant to admit to these things -
especially if you have cultivated a public image that is just the
opposite, but don’t worry, I’m not about to ask you do any public
soul baring.
You see, that secret place of truth, your ‘heart of hearts’ is
like the gearbox in your car. (And don’t get clever on me and say
that your car is automatic because even automatic transmission
cars have a gearbox - it is just a different kind.) The ‘truths’
that you have sitting in your honesty box determine how fast you
can travel, whether you can cope with moving uphill, how fast you
can coast the easy routes and if you are going forwards or
backwards.
Whatever your fundamental beliefs are about the nature of your
own personality, those beliefs have no choice but to become the
reality of who you really are.
So however much you might tidy your desk each night, if your
truth box holds a belief that you are a messy person, then by the
next evening your desk will, like magic, be in chaos again.
The solution is NOT to keep tidying up, or forcing an
uncomfortable behavior pattern onto an opposite negative belief,
it is to recognize that negative belief for what it is (a product
of programming) and to begin to change it.
That’s why it is so wonderful that you could look at my short
list of negative traits and see at least one that applies to you
- now you know EXACTLY what to do to change those self-limiting
belief once and for all.
The fastest and easiest way to do that is by affirmations.
Affirmations work best when they are positive, present-tense and
benefit based.
For example, if you have honestly accepted that you are
fundamentally disorganized, you might write yourself an
affirmation like this on a 6×4 card:
“I love order. I feel excited when I see my life and my work
organized. I get a buzz from knowing that everything is in its
place and easy to find. I know that order and organization are my
fastest routes to success.”
Read that card seven times each session, at least seven times a
day. Read it inside your head. Read it out loud when you can,
imagine yourself speaking it directly into your honest-box inside
your mind.
Read it with feeling and believe it. It is YOUR affirmation …
own it. This is your new truth - the one that will set you free.
And little by little your negatively-held limiting belief WILL be
overwritten by your new, positive, wide-open-blue-sky belief.
You’ll see and feel the changes happening in your life and you
will love them.
When, on another occasion, you can look inside your honest-box
and NOT find that particular negative belief, then it is time to
move on to another one. There is no end to how positive you can
become.
And the fantastic news is that you can start right away, today.
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The Foolproof, No-Nonsense,
Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online
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*** Catch up with parts 1-26 of the Foolproof, No-Nonsense,
Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online at http://imkickstart.com
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Fascinating Facts
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Giraffes only sleep for five minutes each day.