People talk about the "risk" of having your own business.  I suggest to you that the real danger may lie in having a "day job".  The reason is that for most "real jobs" you have to drive.

Driving is dangerous.

This morning before daylight I left my comfy home in thee suburbs to drive into work.   Depending on traffic, I have a 20 minute to 45 minute drive.  Early in the morning, I was counting on a 20 minute drive.  I was in good shape because my first meeting was in 3 hours at 9AM.

I always use my time in the car to work or learn.  Most times I listen to books on tape or podcasts.  Other times I use a great Sony voice recorder to record draft content for this blog and other projects.

As an aside -- there are two lessons here for your internet business.  You should outsource things like transcription and you should work during your idle times.  There is no reason for me to fill my head with the junk on the morning radio DJ show or the negative junk on the news channel.  I don't need to know how many muggings there were last night.  I can always do much better that that by working on my business.

Today was really productive -- I recorded 3 blog posts on the way to work this morning.  I was really pumped, and wondering what the transcriptionist would think when I hit her with 3 new files in her dropbox.

Then, I set my voice recorder on the center console (I drive a Tahoe).  It's a great vehicle, and the accelerator never sticks.

Suddenly, I had to brake hard. I love Texas, but drivers here are idiots.   I am convinced this has something to do with the number of people that have moved to Texas from up north.

Naturally, the recorder slid of the center console right into the drink holder.

It landed in the middle of my big cup of coffee.

Then, trying frantically to rescue my $80 voice recorder and precious blog content, I spilled the entire cup of coffee on my khaki slacks.  Sure they are that fancy (and really expensive) stain-resistant microfiber stuff.  But when you dump 14 ounces of coffee on them, there is no escape.

The coffee was hot, and I was soaked down to my underpants.

No better way to start the day than with your manhood scorched, a giant coffee stain on your crotch, a ruined voice recorder, and lost data.

I started to get mad, but then I just said to myself:

"Self, this is an opportunity to have breakfast with the wife and kids,"

I turned the car around, drove through Chick Fil A, and surprised the family with breakfast.  I even got in one game of Super Mario Brothers with the big guy before leaving so I could get to my 9AM meeting across town.

What a day!

My wife is always making fun of me because, well, I am an engineering geek.  The fact that I am interested in social media, internet marketing and public speaking means that I am not a typical engineering geek, but I am still a geek.  I admit it.

Today she forwarded me one of those funny emails about engineers.  I decided I would share it with you here so you could understand a little more about me (and my wife).

I am reprinting these jokes without permission -- there was no attribution in the email that I received.  Let me know if that hurts your feelings...

Understanding Engineers – One

To the optimist, the glass is half-full.

To the pessimist, the glass is half-empty.

To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Understanding Engineers – Two

What is the difference between mechanical engineers and civil engineers?

Mechanical engineers build weapons

Civil engineers build targets.

Understanding Engineers – Three

Normal people believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.

There were some other funny ones in that email, but I decided I did not want to offend anyone.

Have a great day.

One of the things that I hear all the time is “Mark, I want to start my online business, but I need to make money right away.”  Well, the answer I always give is that it can take some time to make money online as a marketer (weeks or months – sometimes years), but you can always make money online as a Virtual Assistant almost instantly.

Last week, I was really pleased to get a very exciting announcement from one of my favorite Virtual Assistants, Loretta.  Put simply, Loretta rocks.  She was contacting me to announce her new product about how to quickly start a transcription business.  The product is called Transcription Crash Course.

Obviously, I was excited for her because she is an excellent transcriptionist and I was glad to see her launch what I knew would be an excellent product.  But I was even more excited because I know that there are people that read my blog that meet the following critical criteria:

• They have a computer and can type
• They need to make money right now (today)

So – guess what I did?  I bought a copy.  I am sure I could have gotten one for free, but one thing I learned from Lynn Terry is that in most cases if you are going to review a product, you should buy it yourself, so I did.

I was really impressed.  Here’s why.

Learn To Start A Transcription Business Today

When you purchase Transcription Crash Course, you get a sharp looking no-fluff 17 page eBook that tells you everything you need to know to get started.   Loretta covers these critical areas in the eBook:

• Stuff that you need (you already have almost everything; other stuff is free)
• Stuff that you might want (but don’t need to get started)
• Deciding to offer edited versus verbatim transcripts
• How to easily format your transcripts
• Doing your first transcript (not all that scary now)
• Setting your rates
• Finding work (easier than you think)
• Setting up your own website
• Using social media to promote your business
• etc.

In addition, Loretta includes some awesome bonus material:

• Client communication tips
• Time management tips
• Seasonal business

My Takeaway on Transcription Crash Course

So here it the bottom line.  If you need a quick way to make money on line and you can type, this could be the answer that you are looking for.  Check out Transcription Crash Course today.  Loretta is offering a 60 day money-back guarantee.  If you are serious about making some quick money online, you’ll know this program is for you after a few days.

Please feel free to ask me any questions in the comments below.

As I have mentioned before, article marketing is a great way to increase your traffic, establish yourself as an expert in your field and gain publicity.  Writing and distributing articles online really can do all of that for you.

I do a lot of article marketing under about 15 different pseudonyms in 50 different niches.  For me, article marketing is a very effective way to get backlinks and direct traffic – especially since it is relatively easy to outsource.  Heck, I even once showed you how I got traffic to something as bizarre a as site about chicken coops.

Anyway, I am actually on an airplane bound for Asia at the moment, so I thought I would throw down a couple of Article Marketing tips:

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when marketing with articles:

• Write quality articles – Don’t write articles just for the sake of building incoming links.  Sure this is a great reason to write and distribute articles but you also want your article to work extra hard for you.  By writing a quality article you can get those incoming links but also get other business owners to place your articles on their websites (even more incoming links – not to mention traffic).
• Be the Expert – When writing see yourself as the expert.  You chose this field and it’s your job to communicate your knowledge with your customers.  Believe you’re the expert and let it show in your writing.  Remember if you don’t class yourself as an expert in your field it’s unlikely anyone else will do it for you.
• Write Author Bio’s that Sell – Many people may the mistake of writing the same mundane author bio “Mary Sweet is the owner of a website called maryswebsite.com and enjoys writing” – Don’t waste that valuable real estate at the end of your articles.  If you’ve written a good article the reader will look at the author bio and if intrigued will click over to learn more.

Now, I learned about article marketing from Josh Spaulding.  His ebook on article marketing ( Article Marketing Domination) was one of the first information products that I ever bought, and it is still awesome today.

To get real bang for my buck in article marketing, I personally use Automatic Article Submitter (AAS).  I think that AAS is the most cost-effective feature-packed submitter on the market, and my team uses AAS every day.  I am still offering a cool bonus if you are in the market for something to make your article marketing life easy.

So there you have it – a few tips about Article Marketing.

Hey there;

I was hanging out on Lynn Terry’s very cool private elite mastermind   forum (LearningWithLynn.com) this morning  and I ran into someone who asked for a simple explanation of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  Here is what the poster said (I deleted and changed some stuff to protect her identity since LearningWithLynn.com is a private forum):

This may sound silly to the Pros, but your help would be appreciated as I really need to understand this aspect of my business.

I have been writing blog posts to my main site and have seen a number of them go to #1 on Google in a few days. The only thing I do is focus on keywords and especially long-tail keywords as taught by Lynn.

While I'm happy that it's happening I'd like to understand more. Help, please?!

I took this question to be “please help me understand more about SEO,” and I thought you might be interested in my reply.  (Note that this discussion will probably be pretty long, which is one of the things I love about LearningWithLynn.com.) 

Like most things in life, the 80/20 rule applies.

When someone opens google.com and types "best wireless headset for pc" (without the quotes) what happens?

Google does two things (basically):

1. It get the list of all the pages (pages, not sites) that it knows about (all teh pages it has indexed) that have something to do with "best wireless headset for pc"
2. It ranks them in order of importance the best it can and show the best ones first.

Remember, Google's goal is ALWAYS to guess what will help the searcher the most and put that at the top of the list. They need to do that, because if they do a poor job finding what you are looking for, you will use Bing.com next time and Google will lose ad revenue. Simple as that.

OK -- as the page owner/author there are only 2 things you can do

1. Optimize stuff on the page (on-page SEO)
2. Optimize stuff off the page (off-page SEO)

By on-page optimization, of course, I mean making sure that you do the things that tell Google what your web page is about. By far, the most important thing is having your keywords in your HTML title tag. But, you might also want to have your keywords in the URL (or the domain name for specific highly targeted applications). You also want to have your keywords and related content in the article.

Off-page optimization, on the other hand, refers to making sure that Google knows that other people value your page.

As you probably already know, Google tries to determine if people value your page by counting the number of backlinks to your page. You can think of them as votes for your page.

People say that there are over 200 factors considered in the Google search engine algorithm. However, it’s been shown numerous times that one of the most important factors is the number of backlinks to your site.

Note that G seems to consider the anchor text of the link when trying to decide what your page is actually about (and/or how much to value the link). That means that if it sees links that say Click here for a review of the "best wireless headset for pc" -- that helps more than a link with unrelated keywords.

So, think 80/20 rule for SEO. Get links with your keywords in the anchor text, and make sure your keywords are in your title tag, URL and article.

Don't believe me about the importance of backlinks?

Check this out. Google "click here" without the quotes. What do you see?  (You can see the results here).

That's right -- acrobat reader. Why? Because there are 1.6M pages out there that say "click here" to get acrobat reader. Note that "click here" is NOWHERE on the page.

If you need help getting your web business going (or getting to the next level), come hang out with us at LearningWithLynn.com.  You’ll love it (I do).