Just a quick thank you to Robert Puddy from Brit Pack Live for arranging a 1st class event last weekend. I met many great people and it was great for networking !

Thanks again Robert. See you next year .

Mark Lyford

Hi All

Here is a video I made of me doing my first ever podcast !

As I said in the cast this was inspired by my hearing someone called Scott Paton speak at a seminar I attended last week called Britpack Live ! ( Thanks Scott)

Take a look here :

Until Next Time

Mark Lyford

When you thought of building your own online business, has it come across your mind about how you are going to structure it to make sure that it gets to be what is it worth for? Or you were just nonchalant about the entire plan and have just continued to forego in your plan to build your own online business. However, a good and thinking businessman is someone who is first and foremost very much concerned about how the plan will go should it come into a realization. Below are the ways on how you can structure your online business better to make it achieve the best of what it is worth of:

1. Identify very clearly what you are aiming at. In this phase, it is important that you identify your goals both on the long and short term perspective in order to determine where your business is going to. These goals will enact as your guide and the neutralizers of any possible hindrances and obstacles that you may be encountering along the way. Having these aims with you basically help you to have a better lead on how you can possibly run your online business.

2. Make a complete list of what you are to do and the various things to complete. These are the accomplishments that you need to come out after having done and performed the things-to-make-list. Make sure that you are able to accomplish one event on your business on a day to day basis.

3. Make yourself and the business organized in all aspects. More important to note here are the proper allocation of your resources ñ information, technical, skills, human. This will help you to determine what sort of things you are missing on your own online business and eventually come up with a better plan should things go out of control.

Mark Lyford

Social media is one of the latest and the newest stuff that people are very excited at engaging at these days. Thru social media, people are not only given the opportunity to voice out and express their opinions and ideas but more relevantly these social media sites allow them the chance to find and look for the same people who will have interest with what they do and think about. Social media sites have gone a long way and have been successful in conquering and dominating the net. As a matter of fact, a lot of people have engaged into social media optimization to ensure that they get the same mileage. Should the interest to get into social media has not yet succumbed into your being, then you may be losing the time. Getting into it, now, is the perfect time! Some of the best tips to get the best of social media are listed below:

1. If you are having a hard time thinking about how you want to get started with social media, starting it with doing an account on MySpace is the perfect choice. This site is offering greet ways to construct and create your own website and from that site, you can actually share and convey some of your prolific ideas and massive information thru opinions and research can be relayed. The site is one of the prime ways for you to create and build your own community virtually.

2. With the site that you created, it is best that you always show off your line of expertise and the thing that you are most knowledgeable about. It makes it fairly important to other people to socially connect with you because it gives them the opportunity to learn and acquire knowledge from you.

3. Initiate the move to invite people to get connected with you. With social media, there is no such thing as who initiated the action first. What is essential is the fact that there are people who are willing to get socially connected with you.

Mark Lyford

This is a short video I made of me demonstrating Devon Think Pro

 If you are seriously engaged on your online business and dead more serious about getting and generating more traffic on your site, then you know for a fact that traffic is the main lifeblood of any online business site. It is quite essential that a person engaged in online business understands the underlying facts about generating and building traffic on a site. Essentially, if you are on any online business, thus have a business portal site your own, you do not only deal with commerce regulations, increasing sales, promotions, and marketing, but equally, you need to deal with the elements that dictate also the life of your site ñ the search engines. To pacify the search engine, you then need to generate traffic. Below are 3 strong ways to gain mileage in the online arena:

a. Create content that does not compromise the quality of the information. Most of the times, a lot of sites suffer from malnourished content that results to a poor search engine analysis because they do not give an ample amount of time to review and re-build the content of the web. Seemingly, they do not realize the importance of article content in the generation of the traffic. It is to be remembered that in building a quality content, you need to focus on the following information traits: essence, relevance, precision, and utility.

b. Build strong sets of keywords. Apart from the content of the article that bridges traffic to your site, equally relevant aspect in building traffic is the formation of strong and quality keywords on your article. These keywords will help your site to gain more notice and recognition from the search engineís eyes. The more related and relevant keywords there are on your article, the more chances for your site to be seen by the search engine.

Mark Lyford

In the online business, there is an ardent need for the business site to achieve a certain amount of popularity in the online arena. This is due to the fact that all business sites must survive the harsh reality of battling with one another for existence in order to remain and be on top among the various competing sites there are in the market. All these are made possible with the use of the promotional marketing of the site. Site promotion is best achieved when all strategic plans and schemes are following the basic norms of marketing and how to better capture potential clients. In order to follow such, the following are being suggested:

a. Engage in article making and distribution. Articles are the best form of marketing at a seemingly lesser and far cost effective compared to the other marketing tools. With article marketing, the effectiveness of it in terms of producing and yielding positive results is anchored on the basis of how well you have developed interesting and appealing article contents and not with how big or huge the amount was in allocating for the article activity. It is also wise if you publish your articles on some article directories to gain extensive mileage.

b. To contribute far more on the creation and generation of more and more traffic on the site, thru site promotions, you can also engage in joining some forum sites and be part of it. Through the forum site, you can share your expertise and knowledge about a specific topic with the other forum members. You can also make it possible to direct these people to your own should further inquiries be made on a certain topic. Thus, giving you a much better opportunity to promote and gain certain amount of recognition and popularity.

Mark Lyford

Social media is a combination of technology and practices that individuals use to further information like opinion, commentaries, and content in the form of images, videos, audio, and images.

There are 4 ways to increase social media attention towards your website and these are:

1. Know what your business is. You need to set your objectives and goals. This way, you will know how to use social media appropriately. Knowing the line of your business will also help you in determining your target market. Since they will be your potential customers, they will often tell you even subconsciously what you need to offer to them and what social media technologies you are going to employ.

2. Make your content reusable. Normally websites that are into social media allow their content to become reusable through the utilization of embedding tools. To adapt to such idea, make sure that it will be very convenient for other websites to add you. This includes the creation of widgets and embedding them into your website or even in your content. You can also syndicate them to feeds.

3. Create engaging contents. People who are in the social media realm love contents. Grab such opportunity and add as many articles as you can every day on your website. Nevertheless, you have to ensure that theyíre interesting and great enough to pass on to other websites such as in Myspace or in Facebook. Include buttons to social bookmarking websites.

4. Promote social relationship. Social media is all about building relationships with other people. Thus, learn to listen from your readers and audience. Gather feedbacks and suggestions from them. You can create forums and community that is geared towards your organization. Most of all, keep an open mind on the changes happening in the industry.

Mark Lyford

When you have a company website, it is your goal to make yourself visible into the World Wide Web. You need to direct as much traffic as you can to your other pages and you need to rank highly in search engines, even landing in first page in search results page.

But how do you exactly do it? Here are 4 advanced SEO tips:

1. Create excellent content and stick to the basic. The essence of search engine optimization is your content. You get better ranking if you donít stuff your articles with keywords. It will also be easier for their spiders to visit your pages if they are left at their basic form, which means there are no Flash files associated with them. A good webmaster knows how to work his way through this without compromising the functionality and feel of the web design.

2. Structure your pages properly. If you arenít so familiar with HTML, then this can be complicated, but itís not really that difficult. You need to make sure that your pages are correctly coded so it will be easy for search engines to index your website. Have other programming scripts such as JavaScript in external files. Make sure that your codes are simple and clean.

3. Avoid spamming and other black hat techniques. Search engines are very strict with websites that implement unethical SEO techniques such as hidden keywords or keyword stuffing in their tags. Besides getting penalized, they may not index your website at any point.

4. Take advantage of free submissions. Big search engines such as Yahoo, Google, and MSN do have their own free submission section. It will probably take a while to see the results. Once you do, however, the rewards are phenomenal. In the meantime, you can opt to consider paid listings or PPC advertising to further improve your exposure.

Mark Lyford

By now, you understand why itís very important to optimize your websites for search engines. Getting the top spots in Google, Yahoo, and MSN means loads of traffic pointing to your website. If you know how to convert the figure to sales, then it’s massive profits for your business.

However, not all SEO techniques work. As a matter of fact, others are even considered passe. This is because algorithms change a lot. These 3 ways, though, are tried and tested:

1. Exchange articles. The objective of this process is similar to link exchange. However, as the name suggests, you swap articles. Talk to webmasters or editors of other related websites and ask them if they’re willing to publish each otherís articles. The key here is to include your website links in your articles. This means both of you will benefit from high-quality links.

2. Vary your anchor text. Google are not so keen with uniform inbound links. They are usually viewed as a product of automation. You need to spice your anchor texts a bit by making use of your company name at times or your URL once in a while. You can also come up with other variations for your keyword phrases.

3. Link your other webpages. Numerous SEO specialists will tell you to not only focus on your homepage alone. And they are right. It is recommended that you also submit your other pages to directories and search engines. When links are scattered all over the webpages, it means that you truly have relevant content. You will be greatly rewarded by Google by giving you a very nice place in search page results.

Search engine optimization is one of the most powerful ways to generate traffic to your site. Learning its rope can guarantee you success not only in page ranking but also in generating profits.

Mark Lyford

Sites such as Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook have gone beyond connecting friends all over the world. These social networking sites are also utilized by businesspeople to further their economic endeavors.

Nevertheless, numerous social networking users are becoming wary of their presence. Besides being viewed as annoyance, they are also considered to be ultimate spammers. How do you get past this? Here are 3 social networking secrets to gain friends and clients rather than enemies:

1. Obtain referrals. If you have friends who are already members in these social networking sites, you can ask them to refer you to their friends. This means you no longer have to work too much in establishing your credibility.

2. Make the most engaging profile for your social networking page. The key to social networking is slowly but surely. Thus, take your time in creating your profile. There are pre made layouts that you can choose from, if you are not so familiar with CSS layouts. If you have videos or audio files of your business, donít forget to include them on your page. Be specific with your About Me descriptions. Introduce your business without overloading on your sales pitch.

3. Visit other people’s profiles. Social networking sites allow you to build relationships. Thus, it is important that you drop by other user’s pages to make your presence felt. Leave comments in their pages or for their photos. Send them personal messages, thanking them for accepting you. Take note of their birthdays and keep in mind to send greetings. In fact, visit them in ordinary days. You can see that you don’t only gain a potential customer but a friend as well.

Mark Lyford

When you speak of link popularity, it doesn’t only mean linking your website to as many web pages as you can. You should also take note of relevancy, traffic, quality of your links, and these 6 steps:

1. Submit your articles in article directories. Writing informative articles and submitting them in free article directories means credibility for you and a backlink for your website. All you have to do is to include a link to your webpage in the resource box or transform one of your keywords into a hyperlink.

2. Comment on blogs. Definitely, there are a number of great blogs that are relevant to your niche. Visit them once in a while and drop interesting and useful comments. Donít forget to include your web address. You can watch your traffic increase with that. Moreover, if your blog is part of Techorati, then it will be counted as your own backlink.

3. Join forums. Search for forums that are related to your topic and add a link of your website in the signature file. Yet to increase traffic, participate in the discussion. You can offer your opinion or you can start your own thread by posting an article.

4. Syndicate your website. If you have a blog, then better make sure that you’re also providing your own XML or RSS feed. When readers believe in your content, they will include your feed into their website. Aside from back links, it means an increase in web traffic too.

5. Increase your blog roll. Look for well-established blogs and request if they can include yours in their blog links. You can benefit from their link popularity and traffic. Needless to say, be gracious enough to include their site to yours.

6. Add fresh contents. Search engine spiders will usually visit websites with fresh and keyword-rich contents to offer. So update your blog or any of your webpage with at least 1 article per day.

Mark Lyford

Ive just uploaded more pictures from the 7 Figure Code Workshop !

Regards

Mark Lyford

Hi All

I got back from Boise Idaho yesterday after attending Russell Brunsons 7 Figure Code work shop. What a fantastic event it turned out to be. Initially I went over there to meet a few specific people but met many more people than I planned to and made some great contacts.

If you ever get the chance to visit one of Russell’s event try to go , they are fabulous.

I met some great people including :

Rich Schefren
Mike Filsaime
Russell Brunson ( of course )
Simon Leung
Stu McLaren
Matt Bacak
Dr Mike
Dave Lakhani
David Frey

plus a whole bunch of other really great people, some of whom I know I will keep in touch with an hopefully develop long term relationships with .

I learnt a great deal from the speakers whilst there, and it wasnt the normal type of pitch fest you get at these events, Russell provided content rich speakers I would be happy to answer any questions about the seminar to anyone that would like to know more.

Some pics of the event :

Mark Lyford

Im here at Russell Brunsons & Figure Code Bonus Workshop on the opening day. After he journey over yesterday from the UK and a decent nights sleep I feel ready to go again

Ill be reporting on the blog during the course of the event and hopefully be posting some pictures of the event in the next day or so .

Until Later

Mark Lyford