Have you read about the 10,000 hour rule, that you need to spend 10,000 hours before you can be considered an expert? It may not be true.
Some of you may have just recently discovered your passion. It’s burning in your belly and you want to get good at it quick. Well, here’s a little observation buried in the 2nd chapter of Outliers. This passage talks about results of investigating how much time it took for pianists to attain their expertise…
“In fact, by the age of twenty, the elite performers had each totaled ten thousand hours of practice. By contrast, the merely good students had totaled eight thousand hours, and the future music teachers had totaled just four thousand hours”
See that? Just 4,000 hours is all that needed for “teacher” status. Here’s some cold hard truth for you…your audience just needs a teacher. Get to this level first and you’ll attract a huge audience along the way.
That’s 4,000 hours, which you’ve probably already invested.
In case you haven’t here are some tips to get you jumpstarted:
Yesterday, I attended a breakfast meeting of an organization for small business owners to help each other by exchanging business leads. It’s a great idea and I’m thinking about joining.
My hesitation is that it meets at 7am. I’m a web developer that fits that stereotype, so I don’t do mornings. I actually had to take a nap yesterday afternoon. In the balance between business and lifestyle, I just don’t know. My wallet says yes and my body says no. I’ll let you know what I decide.
Two interesting things happened during the meeting. We did an exercise where we had to stand up and tell everyone what animal we were and how that related to our business. Sheesh. I hate that exercise. Beside the “snake in the grass” and “I’m a monkey because I throw my poop.” they were pretty boring.
What was my animal?
Why, I’m a unicorn of course! I give people magic powers.
Unicorn Barfing Rainbows
Most small business owners have paid someone to create the web site for them and all changes have to go through the web developer, who gets paid each time, to make any changes.
I figured that when I build web sites for people, using WordPress, they have the power to control their own content. My clients have been excited to have that power. It feels like magic to them, so I must be a unicorn, right?
It all made sense to me, but it was at 7am in the morning…
The second concept that I thought was valuable, even though it had a stupid name, was “power partners”. The idea is that you join with two other people who are complementary to your business. Examples were a financial adviser, a mortgage broker, and an insurance guy. I think another set was a card designer, and event planner, and a photographer.
I think there’s some value to that idea. I’m going to work on finding a couple other people who can complement, and not conflict with, my business here. You might think about other people or businesses that can work with you, so that you can help each other.
I think “power partners” is not a cool name though. I think we should call them “my homies!” instead.
What do you think we should call our “power partners”?
My advice for younger people for the longest time has always been, “Work your butt off.” As I get older I find myself amending it somewhat, to something more like, “Work your butt off doing something you love, something that matters, something that resonates. Don’t worry if you die trying- it’s better to be corpse that once had a go, than a sleepwalker who never bothered.”
Patrick Bedard wrote a magazine column that changed my life.
Patrick Bedard was an automotive writer and had a column in Car and Driver for over 40 years. He also raced cars and was in the 1984 Indianapolis 500, where he wrecked horribly. He walked away from the crash, but it caused a delay while crews cleaned up the mess and removed the pieces of his wrecked car from the track.
Other drivers were not happy with him. As you can imagine, there’s a bit of arrogance to being a race car driver and they weren’t happy that a “writer” was driving with them. I mean, who did he think he was?
After the race, another driver found him in the pits and went off on a tirade at him. “You’re just a writer! You’re not a driver! Who gave you permission to drive with us?”. He said he thought long and hard about what that guy said to him. After much thought, he realized that no one had to “give” him permission.
He wrote in his column “Permission comes from within”.
I wrote that phrase on a piece of paper and taped it to the inside of my front door, about eye level, so that every time I left my home, I would see that. It shaped how I saw life. I’d like to think it helped make me who I am today.
I’ve been running across a few posts with that common theme lately, or maybe I’m just more aware of it because I’ve been thinking about it.
Nothing bad is going to happen if you cross the red line. You’re not going to be named and shamed. You’re not going to be arrested. Naomi’s not going to say, “Well, I’m not going to let you in, but now you have to pay anyway.” It doesn’t work like that. The worst they’re going to do is say no. Most of the time, actually, you run the serious risk of getting what you want.
No one can give the permission you need to sell your art. I totally understand the need for approval – I’ve been there many times myself – but it’s a dangerous rabbit hole to go down.
You see, asking for permission and waiting for approval is a carrot on a stick. Once you decide to chase it, you’re forever grasping. Every step you take is on the back of someone else’s approval and the further you go, the more of it you need.
Not a good place to be.
You don’t need permission or approval to be you and do what you do.
The Problem
Let me be honest with you. When I wrote my book, The Care and Feeding of Search Engines, A Simple Guide To SEO, I was hoping that people would read it, apply it to their web sites and become fabulously wealthy. They would be so happy with what I had to say, and they would love my advice so much, that they would pay a lot of money for my next books.
That didn’t happen.
I got a ton of feedback from people that said this is the most amazing book ever, that this is the first time that they understood SEO, that now they are in control of their SEO.
A few told me that they got the book and maybe read most of it, and they intend to get around to applying it real soon now.
Only a couple people actually ever applied the advice to their sites. The ones that did were successful.
NO ONE has told me that they tried anything in the book and it didn’t work.
The advice in the book is true, but not many people have applied it.
I've got the map. You drive.
The Fear
There’s a fear, deep inside the back of your mind, that causes you to hesitate before you do something that might fail. That fear is the obstacle to being successful. It’s the fear of failure.
In spite of that fear, you need to do what you need to do. Do it even if that voice in the back of your mind is telling you that you will fail and that you will be humiliated. Do it even if it hurts. Do it even if that voice is telling you that you are not good enough. Make a rational choice and don’t listen to the voice.
The Key To Success
The key to success is failure.
If you don’t try, you’ll never fail. The more times you try stuff, the more times you’ll fail. The more times you try stuff, the better chance that you’ll succeed. The key to success is failure.
The real message here is that you need to get off your butt and go out there and make it happen.
I don’t want to give advice or write books for people who are too afraid to do something about it. I want to be with a group of people who want to do what it takes to win, do what it takes to make things happen and achieve the goal.
Is that you?
I can give you the map, but you have to drive the car.
The math is magical: you can pile up lots of failures and still keep rolling, but you only need one juicy success to build a career.
The killer is the category called ‘neither’. If you spend your days avoiding failure by doing not much worth criticizing, you’ll never have a shot at success. Avoiding the thing that’s easy to survive keeps you from encountering the very thing you’re after.
And yet we market and work and connect and create as if just one failure might be the end of us.
I once had a sales job doing cold calls to sell advertising on phone book covers. I never made much money at it, but I learned very valuable lessons that I’ve used ever since.
I learned that I made one sale for every 3 calls. It just worked out that way.
It hit me that I shouldn’t be afraid of making the call, afraid of rejection. I should LOVE rejection because it meant that I was one step closer to a sale. More rejections equaled more sales. If I can get rejected twice, I’ll make a sale on the next one.
It got to be a game, to try to see how many rejections I got. I was happy when I got them. Store owners would be amused that I was so happy when they told me no.
Are you afraid of failure? What one thing would you do if you weren’t afraid?
As I’ve been talking with people about selling things online, I am becoming aware that there’s something holding people back that has nothing to do with web sites or SEO. It has to do with attitude.
I’ve talked to my wife about it and we have ideas, but I’m really not exactly sure what it is or how to describe it. It seems to be fear.
People are afraid of failing is my best guess.
What are you afraid of? What is holding you back? Please leave a comment and tell us your thoughts. I really want to work through the issue.
Here’s an excerpt from an article I found.
Successful people see failure as an acceptable risk.
This is one of the hardest shifts to make, but it’s the most important ones.
Habitual action-takers and bigger-game players understand that failure is part of the process, that for every stellar success there will be a their fair share of lukewarm events and more than one embarrassing flop.
Yet they keep the bigger picture in mind. They understand that the biggest failure is not to try (guaranteed zero results) and that failure gives them at least a chance of success. They also understand that there’s no such thing as a perfect person, ever. Even the greats have their black marks. In fact, the greats have plenty of them.
This is a big shift in thinking for most people who are stuck in worry mode. Successful people understand that there will be plenty of failure and potential embarrassment baked into the process, so it’s not a big scary thing. It’s just something to go through and minimize, kind of like taxes.
So yes, successful people are afraid of failure, but it’s a manageable fear because it’s built into the process. And because it’s acknowledged up front, it’s possible to compartmentalize it.
For worriers, inaction equals safety, which is nice because you don’t lose anything. For action takers, the idea of inaction is a huge loss in terms of opportunity cost. They know that if they take enough action, and they’re constantly evaluating their strategy, they’ll come out ahead.
So to sum it up, successful people say “Failure is part of the game. Let’s get it out of the way because there’s some raging success waiting to happen in there somewhere.”
Victoria standing next to some ''art'' found on Jalama Beach
At one point in her life, my wife managed a large department in a huge corporation. If you know my wife, you know that she’s the sweetest, nicest, most generous, giving person you know. I mean, she’s really nice. It’s obvious that she’s nice. Nice is how you would describe her.
Now, counterbalance “she’s nice” against the image of managing a large department in a huge corporation. To survive in the huge corporate world, you need to be a cutthroat political animal, right?
I once mentioned to her that she wasn’t political. She disagreed. She said that she was VERY political. She told me that she had helped so many people and done so many nice things for so many people, because she was nice. She just wanted to help.
She also knew that if she ever needed anything, she knew the right people in the right places that would do anything for her because she helped them in the past.
Did I mention that she’s also very smart?
I read this post below and had to link. This seems to be a recurring theme among blogs that I read and friends that I have.
The people who are successful in life are the people who give. Love is the key to success.
This is not a feel good, bubble gum philosophy. Love is a very political act. You want something? Give it away and you’ll be overwhelmed with what you get back.
“How can I get more for myself?” The more in question varies: interest, customers, website traffic, subscribers, money, whatever—but it always relates to an increase in focus on the individual.
There’s nothing wrong with any of those things. I’d like more too. But motivations can be interesting predictors of success. The more that we want tends to come along when we give more, but when we give because we want to receive, it doesn’t always turn out so well.
If it sounds complicated, it’s not. Here’s the secret:
Some singers want the audience to love them. I love the audience.
-Luciano Pavarotti
I heard about this movie, Lemonade. It’s about people losing their jobs and it turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to them.
When you don’t have a day job to worry about, and you’re desperate, with a lot of free time on your hands, it’s easy to make major life changes that you always wanted to make, but were too afraid.
“I got laid off and I’m finally doing something that matters.”
– Erik Proulx
The film’s creator, Erik Proulx, is an advertisement executive who knew little about filmmaking – but knew a lot about unemployment. Looking for work after being laid off for the third time, he turned to the Web and found people who were actually thankful that they’d been fired.
“I have to get people talking about how losing their job ended up being the best thing that ever happened to them,” Proulx said. “It’s really hard to see that when you’re in the middle of it.”
Proulx was in the middle of it, right along with his family and a mortgage. Still it was his wife who convinced him to follow his newfound passion and make his movie – even though it meant draining their savings.
I'm sorry for everyone who doesn't live in Los Angeles, but this was the sunset on New Year's Day.
This is my New Year’s post, as required by the Federation of Internet Marketing Bloggers.
Looking back over the last year, it’s shocking to me to see how my goals for the business have changed. When I started out, I was a web developer, building small businesses web sites. That was working well, but it was, well, work. Find a client, sell a client, build a site, be done with it.
I was looking for more of a partnership with someone. I wanted to be able to share what I’ve learned about Internet marketing and building web sites with someone who would benefit from it. I have the tools and I needed someone who needed the tools.
Then I found Deborah at Mermaids Purse Sea Glass. She was a friend of my wife’s who needed some help on her web site. She had a product that was very cool, that people would buy if it was marketed well. At my wife’s urging, we built her a site.
I always thought that everyone was just like me and knew this Internet stuff, but it was all new and exciting stuff for Deborah. I was as excited to show her as she was excited to learn it. As I talked to her about strategies for selling her stuff on line, I realized that a lot of people want to sell their products on line, but don’t know how.
They want to avoid spending too much time or too much money on building and promoting their web site. They want avoid common mistakes. I get all of that. I can show people how to accomplish all of that. The light went on in my head.
I’ve been learning how to put together a training program, an “integrated learning environment” or ILE, so that I can easily show people how to do this stuff. The forum was the first visible part of that. Videos and audios and web pages and PDF files are coming. We’re working on the course outline right now.
The new year will see the launch of this new site. I’m still working on the details of it, but I expect it to launch at the end of February.
If you have any thoughts, suggestions, or feedback that you want to share about this idea, maybe what you’d like to see in it, please leave me a comment or send me an email with the form to the left.
Seth always seems to be in front of the people that seem to be changing the world. He brought together 70 people to share ideas on how we can turn things around, how you can turn things around and they contributed to this free ebook.
If you want to do business in 2010, if you want to be inspired in your own life, then you need to read this.
Now, more than ever, we need a different way of thinking, a useful way to focus and the energy to turn the game around. I hope a new ebook I’ve organized will get you started on that path. It took months, but I think you’ll find it worth the effort.
When the economy tanks, it’s natural to think of yourself first. You have a family to feed a mortgage to pay. Getting more appears to be the order of business.
It turns out that the connected economy doesn’t respect this natural instinct. Instead, we’re rewarded for being generous. Generous with our time and money but most important generous with our art.
If you make a difference, people will gravitate to you. They want to engage, to interact and to get you more involved.
In a digital world, the gift I give you almost always benefits me more than it costs.
If you make a difference, you also make a connection. You interact with people who want to be interacted with and you make changes that people respect and yearn for.
Art can’t happen without someone who seeks to make a difference. This is your art, it’s what you do. You touch people or projects and change them for the better. This year, you’ll certainly find that the more you give the more you get.
Seth Godin is a blogger and speaker. His new book, Linchpin, comes out in January.
I was working on a video project for a church. They wanted a video to show at an “appreciation” dinner, where they feed all of the volunteers that work hard all year to make things happen and do thing to help other people, both inside and outside the church.
They wanted to open with this verse. I thought it was appropriate for anyone with a small business, regardless of your religious beliefs (and yes, I know you have them.)
“God has given each of you some special abilities; be sure to use them to help each other, passing on to others God’s many kinds of blessing.”
1 Peter 4:10 (LB)
The key is to just get on the bike, and the key to getting on the bike is not the confidence in knowing you will be successful if you do x,y,z. The key to getting on the bike is to stop thinking about “there are a bunch of reasons i might fall off” and just hop on and peddle the damned thing. You can pick up a map, a tire pump, and better footwear along the way.
I read a lot of articles and ebooks about how to make money on the Internet. I can give you a lot of advice. I know a lot of stuff. We can talk and you would learn a lot from me. I have a fountain of information and I could really, really give you some great advice on how to make money on the Internet.
Or…
You could just do it yourself. The real key to making a business succeed on the Internet is to just do it.
Then, keep doing it.
The only people who fail at business are the people who quit doing it.
I got an email from a client the other day. They had hit a wall and needed help. They didn’t know what to do next. They found themselves sitting at the computer, staring at the screen, not knowing the next step, frustrated.
Every business, every website is a journey.
It’s not something that you create and then put on the shelf, waiting for the money to roll in.
What do you do when you hit the wall? We could talk about productivity and organization. I hate those words. I just want to know what to do next.
It’s time to take a deep breathe. Site back. Relax. Talk to someone. The goal is to get a plan and figure out what the next step is.
I like to make a list and prioritize it. I like to talk to my wife. Sometimes, just explaining something helps you figure out the next step. My wife is good at nodding and smiling when I explain technical stuff. Just the act of putting it into words helps me gain perspective. “Glad I could help” she says, as she wonders what that was all about.
Sometimes, you just don’t know the next thing to do, the next step to take.
If you’re at a complete loss, then just take some step, any step. If you start to move forward, you’ll soon figure out if it’s the right direction or not. If you get frustrated and stop, you will fail. If you take the wrong step, at least you know it’s the wrong step.
Just take a step, any step, and you’ll be fine.
PS – This photo was taken at dawn, as the sun peeked over the mountains behind me. This road goes to a point, overlooking Palm Springs and the entire lower desert area of Southern California. A couple hundred yards form this location, you can literally see for 100 miles. It doesn’t look like much here, but just around the corner…
An event happened to a person in my family recently. What happened to this person in my family caused other people who knew them to be concerned. I’m glad that other people care about such things. I was concerned too.
One friend posted a message on their Facebook page about this event. Some other people, mutual friends, sent me concerned email, that I had to respond to and explain, not a task I was happy to have to do.
Since I have clients and co workers on my own friends list, and those people didn’t really need to know the personal issues of relatives of mine, I was not about to post anything on my own Facebook pages.
People tend to forget that anything you post to the Internet is there forever.
Someone, somewhere, has a copy of it. It’s in some archive on some obscure web site. There is no privacy on the Internet.
If you look hard enough, you can find comments that I made on a web site in 1996.
That sucks.
If you don’t want something known, don’t tell anyone. The Internet never forgets.
The balance comes when you want to tell some personal stories. People will be more interesting in what you have to say when you are “transparent” and “authentic”. How much information is TMI?
You don’t want to sound like a corporation. Happy things are always fun to share. Problems you have resolved that can apply to your readers in a way that helps them to resolve their own problems are good.
Personal safety is also an issue to be aware of. My wife and I go out of town one day a week, since we can’t take vacations (long personal story that you won’t hear).
We go lovely places and take pictures with great stories. Do you really think that I should post on the Internet somewhere that we are not home from Noon to 9pm every Monday? The window on the South side of the house is really easy to shake open, so come on in and take what you want! Yeah, don’t do that.
Here’s an article that I ran across the day after my Facebook incident about almost the same thing. Go read the whole article.
How much do we share online?
One of the most common questions I get asked by those in business for themselves has to do with personal information. We all have private lives. How much, if any, of that do we share online?
Some folks using social media for business take this to the extreme…they either share nothing about themselves, keeping their interactions on tools such as Facebook all business, or they get down to the minutia of life, sharing their day to day schedules, medical problems, emotional state, and more.
I believe the most effective amount of information to share in social networking tools falls somewhere in the middle.
While we must be very clear that we are using these tools for BUSINESS, and everything we post can potentially be seen by our customers, kids, and mom, we must also remember that we are in the business of building relationships.
If you lean too far towards the extreme of being all business, you rob yourself of a powerful tool to help others connect with you: your personal life.
This recent study shows that small businesses that blog regularly get more visitors, more inbound links, the number one impact on SEO for your site, and more indexed pages in the search engine.
Since search engines have to crawl your site and try to figure out what pages exist, they spend time on sites that are updated regularly. Sites that are not updated regularly, can be indexed anytime, so they do the “hot” ones sooner.
Blogging is good. Must. Blog. Now.
HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog
If you blog, you know that it’s good for your business.
But how — and how much?
To answer to those questions, I looked at data from 1,531 HubSpot customers (mostly small- and medium-sized businesses). 795 of the businesses in my sample blogged, 736 didn’t.
The data was crystal clear: Companies that blog have far better marketing results. Specifically, the average company that blogs has:
* 55% more visitors
* 97% more inbound links
* 434% more indexed pages
Wow! This is more true than you know. I’ve been thinking about my clients recently and this thought really struck me. I really do tend to do my best work for my best clients.
The ones who nag me with phone calls and emails and complain, or who don’t know what they want, but what I did wasn’t it, or the ones who micro-manages the entire project, or the ones who never quite get around to giving me responses, they are not getting my best work. I don’t mean it that way. It just seems to work out that way.
The Art Of Being A Great Client
If you hire service vendors or partners, being a great client is money-in-the-bank. Why? There is a psychological law that comes into play here, I call it the Secret for business relationships: The Law of Reciprocity.
Simply put, people will reciprocate when they are treated well. This is not just golden rule talk, it is based on a mountain of research into our society’s norm of reciprocity. In most cases, though, we focus efforts on treating customers or clients well so they’ll reciprocate by being loyal and sampling product extensions. My point is that you should flip this around and think about the service providers you rely on to make your business sing.
If you maximize your service provider’s engagement with your business needs, good things come from it. Your expectations are met and often exceeded. You have a smooth experience. You get more than you paid for. Traditionally, we don’t trust service providers like employees, and we attempt to manage our service partners through intimidation instead of love. In my experience, when you are your service providers best client, they are your best service provider too.
I have built and worked on many ecommerce sites for larger companies in the past. I’ve slogged through enough transaction files and credit card verification protocols that I decided that I never wanted to go back. Inventory management, product categorization, and fraud. Ecommerce carries a load of issues to deal with and I just thought it was too much work.
Can’t I just blog instead?
ecommerce
But…, and there’s always a but, in order for Mermaid’s Purse to sell jewelry on the web, she needed an ecommerce system. So I set about finding one. Since I’m a WordPress fan boy, I searched to see what was available that worked with it.
WordPress
WP e-Commerce is what I found. It’s plug in that works within WP to add the product pages and create a store with a checkout process. I installed it and activated it and started to figure out how it worked.
Payment Options
Out of the box, it’s free and does a bunch of great stuff that works really well for a basic store. But, do I want a basic store? Of course not. I immediately started playing with their themes to customize the look and feel of our store. They wanted $35 for a “gold” package that added some features that we wanted like “grid view” and “multiple images”.
Small price to pay, so I bought those. They seemed to work well. As I was working away on version 3.6.12, they released 3.7 Beta 4. I wanted to see how that would work, and it didn’t very well. I spent half a day figuring out the differences. Yeah, it was beta. What do I expect?
Sea Glass
Documentation for the whole thing is horrible on their site. I spent another $35 for a manual that one of the developers, or somebody, wrote. It consisted of a lot of tips and tricks that actually helped. Oh, except that they don’t work on the latest version.
The 3.7 upgrade changed the way a few things work, including the gold package. After some searching, they told me to re-download the gold files and put them in a different place. After following the directions, it all started to work again. The theme system is entirely different than the earlier versions.
The 3.7 does bring some cool new features and makes a lot of little things easier. It’s worth the upgrade. It does still have some bugs and the response in the forum is not exciting. I’m sure they will get around to fixing it sooner or later.
Do I recommend it? Yes, I do, with some cautions. Documentation is horrible. Don’t buy the “Bible” that they advertise. Not worth the money. Spend more time in the forums and you’ll find your answers instead. Also, wait until they get 3.7 released in final form. I think it’ll be great when it’s solid.
Pottery
It was all working pretty well, so I asked Deborah if it was OK to make it live. She said yes. I’m not confident that I understand all of the processes involved in making a purchase, nor that everything will work right, but we’ll watch it and see what happens. Customer service needs to be king here, so we’ll go out of our way to make sure that people are happy.
Deborah was so excited to see that she had a real store, live and working on the web. She can finally sell her sea glass jewelry there. Her husband had butterflies in his stomach. He said that it was like having light bulbs in the sign for a while, but now someone plugged it it and they were turned on and working.
Check out her store and buy something. If you see anything broken, let me know. If you like what you see, tell a friend. If you want your own store, I can do that for you.
I’ve been thinking for a while about what I want to do with my life, to make money. I’ve been reading all about how to make money at home in your spare time. Just buy my ebook and you’ll have it made. As I try different things, it’s been getting clearer to me what I’m really good at and how I can best fulfill people’s needs.
I’m a web developer. I build web sites. Web sites help small businesses succeed when they’re done right. There’s a whole bucket of marketing mixed in with building web sites. That part is fascinating to me. How, and why, do people buy things? As much as I love building web sites, I love building businesses more.
My wife, who is always right, said I should use a client or two as examples of what I can do for a small company, so I did. The journey of Flower Art and Mermaid’s Purse are documented below, and will continue to be documented here, as a result.
That is the beginning of my independence movement.
As I worked with Deborah on getting her business off the ground, I was really drawn to the excitement and motivation that she had. She has already sent a couple other of her friends to me to have me help with their web sites and with their businesses.
That is the beginning of my independence movement.
I want to help people who work at home, making things, following their passions, to get something up on the web to sell their stuff. I want to help them on that journey. I want to help them on their way to independence, and gain my own independence as we go. There seems to be a lot of people who would love to do something like this, but they are afraid or not sure what to do next or how to get started. Everyone has great ideas. The hard part is doing it, making it happen. I can tell you how to do the magic trick. The hard part is getting on stage and wowing the crowd.
Today is Independence Day in America. It’s also the day that I commit to helping people who make things in their homes, build that into a business, selling things on the net and getting their own independence through that process.
We may pay their taxes, but they’ll never take our freedom.
Find out how my site beat Wikipedia in Google. Even if you don't know anything about any of this web stuff, you can learn how to improve the ranking of your web site in the search engines.
This book is targeted at the very beginner, people who are not savvy about the web or the Internet. It explains it all, from the very basic, so you won't feel like you're in over your head.
The world has changed. The Internet is becoming a normal part of everyday life for a majority of people. With every new change in technology, comes the rise and fall of businesses as they try to adapt, from railroads to airplanes, from buggies to cars, from radio to TV, from vinyl records to CDs to MP3s.
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Elizabeth Dodge commented on Putting Your Keywords & Content to the Best Use | Caroline Middlebrook:
Some optional items you could include in your RESOURCE BOX:
1. Your email autoresponder: I'm not a big fan of this strategy due to the fact that spammers will text-extract your autoresponder address and add it to their spam list. Perhaps this strategy was best for the 1990's and has now run its course.
2.
I don't want to offend all the Toyota owners. 
